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There are a lot of ideas that went into the design of the language. Some stayed, others were discarded, but we promise not to make Astro a complicated load of incoherent features like C++. But then C++ is a hi-perf systems language, so it has its own value.
Astro goals have been changed several times over the year, cos we don't really have a niche target like most other languages. We just want a nice language that is easy to use and fast to run. But that sounds quite generic, as a result Astro has no concentrated target market. It's in the same camp with Swift. It can be used to write any piece of software, from a website down to an operating system. Of course, you'd need a native compiler implementation of Astro to write an operating system.
As time goes on, we might find the niche we are looking for and stick to that. You are right. Astro is like a nephew to Julia. Astro borrows a good deal of Julia and Python Syntax but it also takes useful concepts from Scala, C#, CLOS, Ruby, Go, Java, etc.Infact there is a short list of where Astro borrowed certain concepts.There are a lot of ideas that went into the design of the language. Some stayed, others were discarded, but we promise not to make Astro a complicated load of incoherent features like C++.But then C++ is a hi-perf systems language, so it has its own value.Astro goals have been changed several times over the year, cos we don't really have a niche target like most other languages. We just want a nice language that is easy to use and fast to run. But that sounds quite generic, as a result Astro has no concentrated target market. It's in the same camp with Swift. It can be used to write any piece of software, from a website down to an operating system. Of course, you'd need a native compiler implementation of Astro to write an operating system.As time goes on, we might find the niche we are looking for and stick to that. 2 Likes
appcypher:
You are right. Astro is like a nephew to Julia. Astro borrows a good deal of Julia and Python Syntax but it also takes useful concepts from Scala, C#, CLOS, Ruby, Go, Java, etc.
Infact there is a short list of where Astro borrowed certain concepts.
Julia
- Multiple dispatch
- AST Macros
- REPL
- Syntax - '<:', '>:', array Indexing, macros, etc.
- Numeric types
- Math-oriented arrays
- Unicode Identifiers
CLOS
- Multiple Inheritance
Python
- Syntax - lists, loops, in, etc.
Jai
- Compile-time execution
- Syntax - generics
Ruby
- Block end punctuation
Crystal
- Sophisticated static type inference
Lua
- List/Dict implementation
- Bytecode representation
Go
- Concurrency model
- Syntax - access modifier blocks, 'func', etc.
Swift's
- Automatic Reference Counting
- Optionals (Nullables)
- Pattern matching
- Syntax - where, let, var, etc.
Scala
#- Match functions #
- Constructor types
- Infix notation
- Singletons
Java
- Anonymous types
Javascript
- Unpacking arrays
C#
- Null coalescing
C++
- Smart pointers
- Pass by value/reference
Notable Mentions
Rust, Kotlin
There are a lot of ideas that went into the design of the language. Some stayed, others were discarded, but we promise not to make Astro a complicated load of incoherent features like C++. But then C++ is a hi-perf systems language, so it has its own value.
Astro goals have been changed several times over the year, cos we don't really have a niche target like most other languages. We just want a nice language that is easy to use and fast to run. But that sounds quite generic, as a result Astro has no concentrated target market. It's in the same camp with Swift. It can be used to write any piece of software, from a website down to an operating system. Of course, you'd need a native compiler implementation of Astro to write an operating system.
As time goes on, we might find the niche we are looking for and stick to that.
Ouch! Bjarne Stroustrup wouldn't like that
Yhup. C++ seems be a bag for almost everyone: the farmer, the hunter, the carpenter, the fisherman,...
But it barely serves some of them while being great for some others.
Have you checked out D ( Ouch! Bjarne Stroustrup wouldn't like thatYhup. C++ seems be a bag for almost everyone: the farmer, the hunter, the carpenter, the fisherman,...But it barely serves some of them while being great for some others.Have you checked out D ( Home - D Programming Language ). I might give it a try soon.
Craigston:
Ouch! Bjarne Stroustrup wouldn't like that
Yhup. C++ seems be a bag for almost everyone: the farmer, the hunter, the carpenter, the fisherman,...
But it barely serves some of them while being great for some others.
Have you checked out D (Home - D Programming Language). I might give it a try soon. Yes, I'm aware of D. We added UFCS to Astro and later found out that D and some other languages use it.
And I actually don't hate C++. I just don't like how I have to keep a lot of wierdness in my brain to command the language successfully. In fact Astro's runtime is written in C++, but we had to replace the interpreter front-end with Python, because we were moving too slow with C++ version.
We probably could use D for the backend, but then D is a managed language, it won't give us the ability to explicitly manage memory resources.
Another language we are currently considering is Rust. For now tho, it's C++ for the runtime, Python for other things. Yes, I'm aware of D. We added UFCS to Astro and later found out that D and some other languages use it.And I actually don't hate C++. I just don't like how I have to keep a lot of wierdness in my brain to command the language successfully.In fact Astro's runtime is written in C++, but we had to replace the interpreter front-end with Python, because we were moving too slow with C++ version.We probably could use D for the backend, but then D is a managed language, it won't give us the ability to explicitly manage memory resources.Another language we are currently considering is Rust. For now tho, it's C++ for the runtime, Python for other things. 2 Likes
this is what i think any serious person wanting to consider the language will ask:
1) Why should i use ur language when there are other languages out there? In other words
what are the compelling objectives of the language?
It's this that are it's unique selling points.
see :
clojure - modern lisp on the jvm, fixed mutable state issues that makes multi threaded programing a pain.
python - easy to write and read.
ruby - fully oop. Make programming fun again
rust - c++ replacement, safer, system level lang etc
lua - very fast small efficient scripting language
erlang - highly fault tolerant. 99.999% uptime!
etc
Astro needs a compelling set of objective(s) to sell. I dont really get what they are.
2) What about libraries
Decent set of libraries to lure developers.
It's new but 2 needs addressing too asap. 2 Likes
asalimpo:
this is what i think any serious person wanting to consider the language will ask:
1) Why should i use ur language when there are other languages out there? In other words
what are the compelling objectives of the language?
It's this that are it's unique selling points.
see :
clojure - modern lisp on the jvm, fixed mutable state issues that makes multi threaded programing a pain.
python - easy to write and read.
ruby - fully oop. Make programming fun again
rust - c++ replacement, safer, system level lang etc
lua - very fast small efficient scripting language
erlang - highly fault tolerant. 99.999% uptime!
etc
Astro needs a compelling set of objective(s) to sell. I dont really get what they are.
2) What about libraries
Decent set of libraries to lure developers.
It's new but 2 needs addressing too asap.
1.) Astro is a modern language that took careful consideration of useful features in several languages.
- It borrowed goroutines for fast, cheap concurrent routines
- It aims to be both compiled to both machine code and bytecode
- It makes OOP a breeze with multiple dispatch and UFCS
- It is maths oriented, this can be seen in its list representation.
In short I would say Astro is a fast embeddable scripting language with modern features. This description does not really represent Astro well, as I've mention earlier on this thread, it is hard to niche Astro, as it can be used for stuffs beyond just scripts or high-level programs. That's why I put in the same camp as Swift. If you check for "the goals of Swift language" then you will know what I'm saying.
I think it is this ubiquity that makes Astro potential, it can be used to write anything from a script down to a kernel. You don't have to switch languages (Python to C) along the way. And with our plans for web assembly target, Astro will have a place in the Web.
2) Libraries (and a package manager) are obviously a planned feature. I've actually started implementing some naive algorithms myself. And for existing libraries, we plan to provide hooks that will allow calling Python and C functions directly. 1.) Astro is a modern language that took careful consideration of useful features in several languages.- It borrowed goroutines for fast, cheap concurrent routines- It aims to be both compiled to both machine code and bytecode- It makes OOP a breeze with multiple dispatch and UFCS- It is maths oriented, this can be seen in its list representation.In short I would say Astro is a fast embeddable scripting language with modern features. This description does not really represent Astro well, as I've mention earlier on this thread, it is hard to niche Astro, as it can be used for stuffs beyond just scripts or high-level programs. That's why I put in the same camp as Swift. If you check for "the goals of Swift language" then you will know what I'm saying.I think it is this ubiquity that makes Astro potential, it can be used to write anything from a script down to a kernel. You don't have to switch languages (Python to C) along the way. And with our plans for web assembly target, Astro will have a place in the Web.2) Libraries (and a package manager) are obviously a planned feature. I've actually started implementing some naive algorithms myself. And for existing libraries, we plan to provide hooks that will allow calling Python and C functions directly.
You have to explain some terms for some of us here, we could wiki or google, but leaving the page to another to look things up is bad ux. psychologically dragging. It's a reason some ppl dont click on links to blogs and essays from here.
The UFCS thing is just greek to me.
The multi dispatch too. I use java, know a little of others, played with go last 2 year so i grok goroutines. But i dont know what the multi dispatch is. Explain using something we oop coders can relate with.
On the github page, i saw no code. I wanted to download and check it out.
Just shed light on some terms that would be greek to us or most of us would be too lazy to research on - even though its just a click away! Humans can be such laazy cats!
Also you have pragmatic understanding of the concepts so you'd be better able to translate it to our understanding..
- Multiple inheritance! ok, it's suppose to be general purpose.You have to explain some terms for some of us here, we could wiki or google, but leaving the page to another to look things up is bad ux. psychologically dragging. It's a reason some ppl dont click on links to blogs and essays from here.The UFCS thing is just greek to me.The multi dispatch too. I use java, know a little of others, played with go last 2 year so i grok goroutines. But i dont know what the multi dispatch is. Explain using something we oop coders can relate with.On the github page, i saw no code. I wanted to download and check it out.Just shed light on some terms that would be greek to us or most of us would be too lazy to research on - even though its just a click away! Humans can be such laazy cats!Also you have pragmatic understanding of the concepts so you'd be better able to translate it to our understanding.. 1 Like 1 Share
From the logo.png, it looks like index starts from 1(not 0). Why?
orimion:
From the logo.png, it looks like index starts from 1(not 0). Why? Astro uses 1-based indexing. Nype feels it's more intuitive, and matches the way we work with maths.
0-based index languages, like C or Python, make you think in offsets of the index rather than the index itself.
Astro - 1 2 3 4 5
[h] [e] [l] [l] [o]
Python - 0 1 2 3 4
Astro -> list[1] = 'h' # returns the element at the actual index
Python -> list[0] = 'h' # returns the element at the offset of the index
Slicing in Astro is more intuitive as a result too.
Astro -> list[2:4] = 'ell' # returns the substrings at the actual indices
Python -> list[1:4] = 'ell' # returns the substrings starting from the offset of
# the first index, but without the offset of the last index
At the end of the day there are both pros and cons for using either methods. We chose intuitiveness. Astro uses 1-based indexing. Nype feels it's more intuitive, and matches the way we work with maths.0-based index languages, like C or Python, make you think in offsets of the index rather than the index itself.Slicing in Astro is more intuitive as a result too.At the end of the day there are both pros and cons for using either methods. We chose intuitiveness. 4 Likes
asalimpo:
The UFCS thing is just greek to me.
The multi dispatch too. I use java, know a little of others, played with go last 2 year so i grok goroutines. But i dont know what the multi dispatch is. Astro has types, they are synonymous with classes in conventional OO languages, except that you can't have functions inside of Astro types. In that sense, they are more like C structs. You only declare fields within a type.
Astro has functions and they are just like C functions.
With these, Astro is able to emphasize the separation between data (types) and operations (functions).
The OO languages you see are usually either completely class based (Java) or a mix of procedures and classes (C++, Python). Astro, however, does OO without using classes. Just types and functions.
The key to achieving this is a delicious mix of Multiple Dispatch and UFCS (Uniform Function Call Syntax)
Multiple Dispatch, simply, is the technique of calling the right function by checking the types of the arguments passed to a function. This definition is not entirely right, but for the sake of this discussion we will go with that.
func add(a = Int, b = Int)
func add(a = Float, b = Float)
If we type add(5, 9), the first function will be called. If we type add(3.5, 1.2), the second function will be called. So the appropriate function is called based on the types of the arguments. This may look like method or function overloading, but it isn't. Multiple dispatch is usually determined at run time and does more than method overloading, like using subtype polymorphism in dispatch process, etc.
With multiple dispatch you can just have only functions and apply them to objects. No need for having methods inside classes.
type Person (name)
type Employee(name, job) <: Person
func details(p = Person):
println(p.name)
You can create an instance of Person and just apply the details function to it.
let daniel = Person("Daniel Okoroha" )
details(daniel) # "Daniel Okoroha"
Because Employee is a subtype of Person, you can also apply details to instances of Employee.
let george = Employee("George Adamu", "Digital Artist" )
details(george) # "George Adamu Digital Artist"
That seems straightforward. So why do we need to define methods then? Well, some may say beacause of dot notation. details is just a function, not a method, you can't do daniel.details(). You can only do details(daniel).
Well that's where UFCS comes in. It's the unification of function syntax with dot notation syntax. Who said we can't use both, huh?
daniel.details() and details(daniel) are valid in Astro.
In essence, this means we can call a function by it's first argument.
So if we can do: play(game, at:"30fps" ). We can also do game.play( at:"30fps" )
And why is using functions only cool?
We can extend a type just by writing a new function for it, even if we inport the type from a foreign module. Methods however can only be written inside their classes.
It also zips the gap between methods and functions. Why should they be treated differently?
It also allows you to focus your attention separately. types contain the data, functions operate on the data. Data vs Operations. Why have operations (methods) inside of data (classes)?
There is a particular function in python that some people have clamored for to be implemented as method.
With Astro, you can use either. It's your choice.
len([1, 2, 3]) or [1, 2, 3].len(). Although in Astro the function is named size.
On the github page, i saw no code. I wanted to download and check it out. We have not made the interpreter's code available for obvious reasons. It's neither complete nor stable. You could get several memory leaks. That's why I tagged it near release. But we can make it available if you don't mind f**king up ur system.
- Multiple inheritance! Yes multiple inheritance. Are you afraid of it? We are not. It's the implementation that matters. Astro has types, they are synonymous with classes in conventional OO languages, except that you can't have functions inside of Astro types. In that sense, they are more like C structs. You only declare fields within a type.Astro has functions and they are just like C functions.With these, Astro is able to emphasize the separation between data (types) and operations (functions).The OO languages you see are usually either completely class based (Java) or a mix of procedures and classes (C++, Python). Astro, however, does OO without using classes. Just types and functions.The key to achieving this is a delicious mix of Multiple Dispatch and UFCS (Uniform Function Call Syntax)Multiple Dispatch, simply, is the technique of calling the right function by checking theof the arguments passed to a function. This definition is not entirely right, but for the sake of this discussion we will go with that.If we type, the first function will be called. If we type, the second function will be called. So the appropriate function is called based on the types of the arguments. This may look like method or function overloading, but it isn't. Multiple dispatch is usually determined at run time and does more than method overloading, like using subtype polymorphism in dispatch process, etc.With multiple dispatch you can just have only functions and apply them to objects. No need for having methods inside classes.You can create an instance of Person and just apply thefunction to it.Because Employee is a subtype of Person, you can also applyto instances of Employee.That seems straightforward. So why do we need to define methods then? Well, some may say beacause of dot notation. details is just a function, not a method, you can't do. You can only doWell that's where UFCS comes in. It's the unification of function syntax with dot notation syntax. Who said we can't use both, huh?andare valid in Astro.In essence, this means we can call a function by it's first argument.So if we can do:. We can also doAnd why is using functions only cool?We can extend a type just by writing a new function for it, even if we inport the type from a foreign module. Methods however can only be written inside their classes.It also zips the gap between methods and functions. Why should they be treated differently?It also allows you to focus your attention separately. types contain the, functionson the data. Data vs Operations. Why have operations (methods) inside of data (classes)?There is a particular function in python that some people have clamored for to be implemented as method.With Astro, you can use either. It's your choice.Although in Astro the function is named size.We have not made the interpreter's code available for obvious reasons. It's neither complete nor stable. You could get several memory leaks. That's why I tagged it near release. But we can make it available if you don't mind f**king up ur systemYes multiple inheritance. Are you afraid of it? We are not. It's the implementation that matters.
The multiple inheritance thing! It's considered bad design practice today. Modern languages are all single inheritance. Reduces complexity.
Maybe it's a fallout of ur c++ roots.
Actually, i think more programming languages will come out nigeria/africa in the future, because i find that as one programs, he tends to write automation scripts which are mini languages. In time, he'll want to know how
actual languages are written. So while we're late to the programming game, with time our maturity will manifest to the world.
Good one Appy. Where can I download and test run the compiler?
asalimpo:
The multiple inheritance thing! It's considered bad design practice today. Modern languages are all single inheritance. Reduces complexity.
Maybe it's a fallout of ur c++ roots.
Actually, i think more programming languages will come out nigeria/africa in the future, because i find that as one programs, he tends to write automation scripts which are mini languages. In time, he'll want to know how
actual languages are written. So while we're late to the programming game, with time our maturity will manifest to the world.
Multiple inheritance is not considered bad design practice, its implementations are.
Many with experience of multiple inheritance will tell you there's nothing wrong with the concept, just the way some languages implement it. C++ is an good example of why people hate multiple inheritance. You hardly hear the same story from people who use Python, Eiffel or CLOS.
And Multiple Inheritance is hard to implement right, so a lot of modern language designers tend to skip it altogether.
Multiple inheritance is super useful when implemented right. It makes OO even easier to reason about. Interfaces, Traits, Mixins and all the other alternatives feel like you have to do extra unintuitive work. Interfaces for example require you to implement methods every time you use it. In fact, the diamond problem still exists with Scala Traits, but the language knows how to handle it properly. In short, it's the implementation that matters.
I would like to have a WorkingStudent type that inherits from both Worker and Student and that's it. I don't care if Worker and Student both inherits from type Person, which results in a diamond problem. And I don't want to manually reimplement methods with every inheritance.
There! You need multiple Inheritance. Multiple Inheritance allows reuse of code. Multiple inheritance is not considered bad design practice, its implementations are.Many with experience of multiple inheritance will tell you there's nothing wrong with the concept, just the way some languages implement it. C++ is an good example of why people hate multiple inheritance. You hardly hear the same story from people who use Python, Eiffel or CLOS.And Multiple Inheritance is hard to implement right, so a lot of modern language designers tend to skip it altogether.Multiple inheritance is super useful when implemented right. It makes OO even easier to reason about. Interfaces, Traits, Mixins and all the other alternatives feel like you have to do extra unintuitive work. Interfaces for example require you to implement methods every time you use it. In fact, the diamond problem still exists with Scala Traits, but the language knows how to handle it properly. In short, it's the implementation that matters.I would like to have atype that inherits from bothandand that's it. I don't care ifandboth inherits from type, which results in a diamond problem. And I don't want to manually reimplement methods with every inheritance.There! You need multiple Inheritance. Multiple Inheritance allows reuse of code. 1 Like
Emmach10:
Good one Appy. Where can I download and test run the compiler? It's not available to the public yet. It's not available to the public yet.
I think those who've used multiple inheritance can vouch for it. I heard a c++ programmer who said java was rubbish (back in the day though).
But the industry is moving away from it. It was drummed into me through many java authors that multiple inheritance and goto is bad.
The problem with multiple inheritance is that one could betaking in far more than is necessary.
Inheriting and having access to all the codes in a higher heirarchy is in the least, philosophical impure.
So we're back to square one. Both approaches have major flaws.
A programmer could inherit from a class where he needs just one method, but gets exposed to
so many methods and client programmers using his code could exploit that access.
With interfaces, its cumbersome to implement unnecessary methods - but interfaces could be finetuned
such hat clients implements those that reduce boiler plates.
Anyway, since its all about where to move methods to in a parent class, can't he artificiality of enforced contracts in interfaces be solved by simple creating smarter interface objects? One in which methods that dont need to be implemented in sub classes can be made. I think java 8 has something like this. If it happens then,
the same things multiple inheritance seeks to accomplish will be achievable in single inheritance languages.
But be it as it may, with more power comes more complexity.
The 1 based indexing seems due anyway. It's one area noobs always get stumped when learning programming.
asalimpo:
I think those who've used multiple inheritance can vouch for it. I heard a c++ programmer who said java was rubbish (back in the day though).
But the industry is moving away from it. It was drummed into me through many java authors that multiple inheritance and goto is bad.
The problem with multiple inheritance is that one could betaking in far more than is necessary.
Inheriting and having access to all the codes in a higher heirarchy is in the least, philosophical impure.
So we're back to square one. Both approaches have major flaws.
A programmer could inherit from a class where he needs just one method, but gets exposed to
so many methods and client programmers using his code could exploit that access.
With interfaces, its cumbersome to implement unnecessary methods - but interfaces could be finetuned
such hat clients implements those that reduce boiler plates.
Anyway, since its all about where to move methods to in a parent class, can't he artificiality of enforced contracts in interfaces be solved by simple creating smarter interface objects? One in which methods that dont need to be implemented in sub classes can be made. I think java 8 has something like this. If it happens then,
the same things multiple inheritance seeks to accomplish will be achievable in single inheritance languages.
But be it as it may, with more power comes more complexity.
The 1 based indexing seems due anyway. It's one area noobs always get stumped when learning programming. I like your argument.
There are truly camps for and against Multiple Inheritance and it is true that modern languages are moving away from it. Language moving away from old concepts and adopting it back is nothing new tho. Multiple dispatch was implemented in Lisp but never got wide-scale adoption afterwards. Julia took the concept and polished it, which is why Astro is adopting it.
MI is already designed into the language, removing it will need thorough planning for an alternative. Maybe in the future when there is a convincing proposal for why Astro should use some other Inheritance mechanism, then MI can be replaced in Astro.
I believe you are pragmatic, so philosophical impurity can only be determined by how well a concept works in practice. Let's see how MI fairs with the language first. If it proves unusable or bad, we will consider an alternative. I like your argument.There are truly camps for and against Multiple Inheritance and it is true that modern languages are moving away from it. Language moving away from old concepts and adopting it back is nothing new tho. Multiple dispatch was implemented in Lisp but never got wide-scale adoption afterwards. Julia took the concept and polished it, which is why Astro is adopting it.MI is already designed into the language, removing it will need thorough planning for an alternative. Maybe in the future when there is a convincing proposal for why Astro should use some other Inheritance mechanism, then MI can be replaced in Astro.I believe you are pragmatic, so philosophical impurity can only be determined by how well a concept works in practice. Let's see how MI fairs with the language first. If it proves unusable or bad, we will consider an alternative. 1 Like
Hmm, this is a very interesting development, but i cant say much till we've been able to write some code for the interpreter to run, but BIG KUDOS to you guys for even attempting something like this, so how do you generate machine code, LLVM backend?
stack1:
Hmm, this is a very interesting development, but i cant say much till we've been able to write some code for the interpreter to run True. We are actively working on that.
, but BIG KUDOS to you guys for even attempting something like this, so how do you generate machine code, LLVM backend? We are working on just the interpreter now. LLVM is planned for the future. True. We are actively working on that.We are working on just the interpreter now. LLVM is planned for the future. 1 Like
My opinion is that in fields like these, they're no resources that can guide the curious and interested into learning steps of how its done. The dragon book has been criticized as being hard to read without math background. The entire process is made to look more complex than it is. Thanks to the community around it.
Mathematics for this very reason is archaic and needs an overhawl of its syntax,which is ugly and unfriendly.
I know it's a tall task but if you look at the trends of successful languages, you find that the familiar, e.g python, win market share over the unfamiliar. Just because of their syntax.
Just my rant, though.
asalimpo:
My opinion is that in fields like these, they're no resources that can guide the curious and interested into learning steps of how its done. The dragon book has been criticized as being hard to read without math background. The entire process is made to look more complex than it is. Thanks to the community around it.
Mathematics for this very reason is archaic and needs an overhawl of its syntax,which is ugly and unfriendly.
I know it's a tall task but if you look at the trends of successful languages, you find that the familiar, e.g python, win market share over the unfamiliar. Just because of their syntax.
Just my rant, though. The thing is Astro is not Python. The design goals of python are different; to be simple and expressive. Astro chooses intuitiveness and saving programmers time. Redundancy is good in some cases, in some other, Astro makes it optional.
Familiarity is also relative. Imperative guys will see Python as familiar. Functional folks will think Erlang familiar and scientific (Matlab and co.) people will find Julia syntax familiar. Astro is more in the imperative camp with a touch of functional and scientific.
We are not really competing for market share here; just ideas that can make some parts of coding intuitive and easier.
Astro syntax is not even that new. I believe polyglots should find it familiar and, with introduction to certain concepts, should be able to command the language well.
Designing a language is freaking far from easy! We wanted it to look very Pythonic in the beginning, but syntactical tradeoffs had to be made for some concepts (that are not in Python) to make sense. We can't betray intuitiveness just because we want it to look absolutely like Python. Even Nim and Crystal couldn't do that.
So maybe Astro is not for everyone looking for familiarity, but it's definitely for people looking to try out new things; new concepts that might make their coding lifes easier. The thing is Astro is not Python. The design goals of python are different; to be simple and expressive. Astro chooses intuitiveness and saving programmers time. Redundancy is good in some cases, in some other, Astro makes it optional.Familiarity is also relative. Imperative guys will see Python as familiar. Functional folks will think Erlang familiar and scientific (Matlab and co.) people will find Julia syntax familiar. Astro is more in the imperative camp with a touch of functional and scientific.We are not really competing for market share here; just ideas that can make some parts of coding intuitive and easier.Astro syntax is not even that new. I believe polyglots should find it familiar and, with introduction to certain concepts, should be able to command the language well.Designing a language is freaking far from easy! We wanted it to look very Pythonic in the beginning, but syntactical tradeoffs had to be made for some concepts (that are not in Python) to make sense. We can't betray intuitiveness just because we want it to look absolutely like Python. Even Nim and Crystal couldn't do that.So maybe Astro is not for everyone looking for familiarity, but it's definitely for people looking to try out new things; new concepts that might make their coding lifes easier. 1 Like
appcypher:
The thing is Astro is not Python. The design goals of python are different; to be simple and expressive. Astro chooses intuitiveness and saving programmers time. Redundancy is good in some cases, in some other, Astro makes it optional.
Familiarity is also relative. Imperative guys will see Python as familiar. Functional folks will think Erlang familiar and scientific (Matlab and co.) people will find Julia syntax familiar. Astro is more in the imperative camp with a touch of functional and scientific.
We are not really competing for market share here; just ideas that can make some parts of coding intuitive and easier.
Astro syntax is not even that new. I believe polyglots should find it familiar and, with introduction to certain concepts, should be able to command the language well.
Designing a language is freaking far from easy! We wanted it to look very Pythonic in the beginning, but syntactical tradeoffs had to be made for some concepts (that are not in Python) to make sense. We can't betray intuitiveness just because we want it to look absolutely like Python. Even Nim and Crystal couldn't do that.
So maybe Astro is not for everyone looking for familiarity, but it's definitely for people looking to try out new things; new concepts that might make their coding lifes easier.
I wasnt criticizing Astro's syntax in that rant. But rather the fact that some resources are not accessible to people who are interested because of some unnecessary barriers which turns off the uninitiated. I was talking about compilers and such books and stuffs. And stating my opinion on mathematics too, there have this artificial stiffness that people in the community (academics) feel have to be maintained to preserve that aura of mystery about the field. It's the same thing with the legal profession too. It was a general rant not directed at your language and syntax at all. We'd discussed that earlier b4. Actually i'm a fan of keep it ultra simple. And to do these, new concepts should be marketed in the symbols the uninitiated are already familiar with. That's y, python, presented in english-like syntax, is approachable to people new to programming.
And y maths is 'hard' because, i believe, wen thinking on a problem, the syntax could get in the way.
But's its all a philosophical rant,not a bash or critique at Astro, though i had previously critiqued it on that ground. I wasnt criticizing Astro's syntax in that rant. But rather the fact that some resources are not accessible to people who are interested because of some unnecessary barriers which turns off the uninitiated. I was talking about compilers and such books and stuffs. And stating my opinion on mathematics too, there have this artificial stiffness that people in the community (academics) feel have to be maintained to preserve that aura of mystery about the field. It's the same thing with the legal profession too. It was a general rant not directed at your language and syntax at all. We'd discussed that earlier b4. Actually i'm a fan of keep it ultra simple. And to do these, new concepts should be marketed in the symbols the uninitiated are already familiar with. That's y, python, presented in english-like syntax, is approachable to people new to programming.And y maths is 'hard' because, i believe, wen thinking on a problem, the syntax could get in the way.But's its all a philosophical rant,not a bash or critique at Astro, though i had previously critiqued it on that ground.
asalimpo:
I wasnt criticizing Astro's syntax in that rant. But rather the fact that some resources are not accessible to people who are interested because of some unnecessary barriers which turns off the uninitiated. I was talking about compilers and such books and stuffs. And stating my opinion on mathematics too, there have this artificial stiffness that people in the community (academics) feel have to be maintained to preserve that aura of mystery about the field. It's the same thing with the legal profession too. It was a general rant not directed at your language and syntax at all. We'd discussed that earlier b4. Actually i'm a fan of keep it ultra simple. And to do these, new concepts should be marketed in the symbols the uninitiated are already familiar with. That's y, python, presented in english-like syntax, is approachable to people new to programming.
And y maths is 'hard' because, i believe, wen thinking on a |
2.0 without him, which is a fair difference. If you track the key games the Latics won in the last 2 years, the wins at Anfield, the Emirates, the win over Man Utd which kept them up last season and the key cup wins against us and City, Alcaraz has been an ever present with clean sheets in most of those games.
There are other areas which opposition managers could look to exploit however. His temperament is iffy at best, with the spitting ban and a red card for trying to dry slap the vile sub human Lucas Leiva in the Copa America in recent years arguably the behaviour of a human time bomb. His career games to cards frequency of 1 card every 5 games isn’t massively prolific but is something to keep an eye on, and it does raise the issue that he has missed more games than he has been available for in recent seasons, in part due to his lengthy spell on the sidelines last season with a groin injury and the ban he received in 11/12 although in fairness his injury record over his career is ok with no serious spells on the sidelines prior to this.
In 1 v 1 situations there is also a slight question mark; last season he was dribbled past more than treble the times either Jagielka and Distin were bypassed and in 11/12 he was dribbled past more per game than any centre back in the league. Unlike fist pumping phony Heitinga however, Alcaraz teeth do bite and its unlikely you would see the Paraguayan beasted like JH was against Benteke at L4 last season.
In terms of Robles, how does he fit in?
The purchase of Robles should bring good competition for Howard and his skillset gives us different options between the sticks. Standing at 6ft.5inches (195cm to Howard’s 187cm), Robles has an enviable reach comparable with Stoke City’s towering stopper Begovic, and would give us more of a threat in the air, something we struggled this season conceded the 2nd most headed goals in the division. He is also very good at getting down quickly and recovering to make saves with either his hands or his feet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVwtMfp98Pc
Robles has already shown in some of the big games that he has the temperament to succeed and has seamlessly made the transition from playing on loan at Vallecano in la liga to the more aerial bombardment of the English game. He also has experience playing for his country from U16-U23 level.
Although his short and long range kicking completion was inferior to Howard last season – as was unsurprisingly his clean sheet record – Robles on a five year deal is one for the future, and his exciting combination of distribution and physical presence could make him a big player in years to come if not this season. The only visible flaw based on his time at Wigan was organising his defence, but given what was in front of him last season its hard to apportion blame. The fact he only had a year left on his deal means it’s unlikely there was much of a transfer fee involved in the purchase which is also a plus.
Verdict
Neither player is perhaps going to accrue us significant points this season to kick on but both are good, low cost additions to the squad who will provide more serious competition than either Heitinga or Mucha – the duo they have been brought in to replace – had to offer.
EB
With thanks to @Matt_Cheetham for some useful stats
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If you don’t love Saturdays Down South in an SEC Stadium, you’re doing it all wrong.
Tailgating, corn hole, bands, cheerleaders and thousands of rabid fans make going to games in the south much different than anywhere in the country.
So, let’s rank those top stadiums, shall we? And there are hundreds of different ways to rank stadiums. You can base it on noise, record or on anything else you feel justifies the ranking. SDS tried to account for everything.
Let’s get on it…
1. LSU’s Tiger Stadium
Capacity: 92,542
There’s nothing like Saturday night in Tiger Stadium. The nickname is Death Valley, where teams go to die, basically. It once measured on the Richter Scale in 1988 against Auburn, and the game is played in front of some of college football’s craziest fans. So, get your gumbo ready to roll, because LSU is expanding the beast to 100,000 seats. LSU is 50-7 under Les Miles at Tiger Stadium, and they have won 34 consecutive non-conference games dating back to 2002.
2. Alabama’s Bryant-Denny Stadium
Capacity: 101,821
The SEC’s second largest stadium is full of rabid Crimson Tide fans. Alabama owns a nasty 225-52-3 (.809) all-time home record. Dating back to the 1988 renovation, more than 14.2 million Alabama fans have witnessed a game in the venue. The atmosphere is electric, and Nick Saban’s 29-6 home record is just downright nasty. Urban Meyer said he knew he was officially in the SEC when he played at Bama and heard the voice of Bear Bryant.
Related: Meet the SEC West coaches’ wives
3. Florida’s Ben Hill Griffin Stadium
Capacity: 88,548
Florida has the stadium with three names – Ben Hill Griffin, Florida Field and The Swamp. You ask any player in the SEC what’s the toughest venue to play in, and the majority who have played at The Swamp will tell you Florida. The stadium goes up, not out, and the completely enclosed playing area lets fans be a major part of the game. The field of play was originally built in a shallow sinkhole, and the surface is below ground level. The crowd noise has been measured at 115 decibels. Florida fans have been known to be some of the toughest fans to play in front of.
4. Texas A&M’s Kyle Field
Capacity: 82.589
Kyle Field has an approved plan in place to become the SEC’s largest stadium with 102,500 people. But the pageantry of the 12th man fits right into the traditions of the SEC, and the Aggies always bring their A-game. Just last year, the Aggies hosted two of its largest crowds against LSU and Missouri, where 87,000-plus packed into the stadium. I mean, where else does the press box sway during pre-game? Kyle Field is the SEC’s oldest venue, having opening in 1904.
5. Georgia’s Sanford Stadium
Capacity: 92.746
‘Between the Hedges’ is really a sight to behold in the SEC. It’s not the biggest or the loudest, but it may be the sexiest stadium. Is that possible? The finely manicured hedges in the middle of a unreal campus. It’s like a scene right out of The Masters, with a crowd ready to cheer their Dawgs. The girls wear dresses, and the guys look like John Parker Wilson. Outside of Gary Pinkel, Mark Richt is the longest tenured SEC coach, and he’s registered a 63-13 career home record. If we’re talking college towns, Athens tops the list.
Related: Meet the SEC East coaches’ wives
6. Tennessee’s Neyland Stadium
Capacity: 102,455
Neyland Stadium at No. 6? This has to improve, and it will when winning returns to Knoxville. The Vols currently have the largest SEC stadium that holds 102,455 fans, but it hasn’t been full in a few years, thanks to several mediocre seasons. But few are better when the Vols host a top 10 matchup at night, and the checkerboard end zones are really something to behold. The Tennessee River and Vol Navy are a big part of the game day lore, and Neyland gets loud. The Power T is still one of the best pregame sights in the SEC.
7. Auburn’s Jordan-Hare Stadium
Capacity: 87,451
If you don’t get goose bumps when the eagle flies in the pregame air, you need to check your pulse. From the Tiger Walk to the pregame festivities, Auburn is definitely one to check out. The atmosphere lights up on game day, and Auburn really has some of the most passionate fans in the country. The stadium itself might not be that new, but the atmosphere can get out of control. Hopefully Gus Malzahn gives fans something to cheer about in 2013.
8. Arkansas’ Donald W. Reynolds Razorback Stadium
Capacity: 72,000
An underrated stadium overall, Razorback Stadium is home to some of the country’s most rabid fans. Would it get its due if the Hogs played all their home games at Razorback Stadium? With no pro team in the state, Arkansas really comes out to support ‘the’ team in the state, and it shows on game day. Just bring your earplugs, because the “Woo Pig Sooie” will rattle your tooth fillings. Planned renovations will push the capacity to around 80,000, and the facilities are top notch.
Related: Why Bret Bielema is the best new SEC head coach long-term
9. South Carolina’s Williams-Brice Stadium
Capacity: 80,250
The electricity of the ‘Cockpit’ is riveting, and one of the loudest noises in the south is the ‘loud cock’. Over the last few years, Williams-Brice has been one of the toughest venues to play day or night, and that won’t change in 2013. This stadium is on the upswing, as Carolina keeps putting out 11-win seasons. Just make sure you get there early in time for one of college football’s best team entrances.
Related: 10 inappropriate ways to prepare for SEC football 2013
10. Missouri’s Memorial Stadium
Capacity: 71,009
One thing you’ll learn about Missouri’s fan base is they’re very loyal. So, they’ll be at Faurot Field rooting on their Tigers come rain or shine. Upsets have occurred in the past – think Oklahoma 2011. And the stadium is getting SEC-ready by adding a new luxury sweet tower and a facelift to the north end zone hill. Missouri fans fit right into the SEC, but winning will further that home turf.
11. Ole Miss’ Vaught-Hemmingway Stadium
Capacity: 60,580
It’s hard not to mention anything about Ole Miss without The Grove. Yes, it’s football’s finest tailgating time, but it’s not part of Vaught-Hemingway Stadium. If Ole Miss officials can figure out how to make the stadium as attractive as the Rebel ladies, then we’re talking about moving into the top three. Until that happens, the SEC’s third oldest stadium will still be a great place to catch a football game.
12. Mississippi State’s Davis Wade Stadium
Capacity: 55,082
MSU fans are very passionate, and if you were impressed with the way they showed up in Omaha, you’ll be impressed with Davis Wade. Their cowbells are loud, and Starkville is an underrated sports town. The stadium isn’t exactly deafening, but it definitely can get loud and stay loud. Season tickets are sold out again in 2013, and that’s a massive reason why there’s a $75 million upgrade going on to add more seats.
13. Kentucky’s Commonwealth Stadium
Capacity: 67,692
Mark Stoops nearly filled every seat in the Cats’ spring game. More than 50,300 fans showed up to watch the spring fling, and they’re hoping this carries over into the fall. The low attendance numbers had to do with the dreadful play of 2012’s squad. This fan base is passionate, loud and ready to have something to cheer about. If Kentucky starts off 2-0 before hosting Louisville, look out!
Related: SEC spring football attendance
14. Vanderbilt’s Vanderbilt Stadium
Capacity: 40,350
The Commodores’ stadium may not have the passion, tradition or pageantry of your favorite stadium, and it doesn’t scare many opposing teams, fans or coaches, but it’s not like it used to be. James Franklin is changing the tradition, but it’s still tough to get fans to show up at home games. And if you haven’t noticed, Vanderbilt fans are coming alive with their recent success, and there’s plenty room for moving up this packed list. Ole Miss coming to town week one will help this year get started off right.
Photo Credit: Derick E. Hingle-USA TODAY SportsFederal Conservatives are splashing cold water on any political deal with the NDP to avert a fall election, with one senior cabinet minister deriding the party as a bunch of "hard-core left-wing ideologues." Immigration Minister Jason Kenney declared the Conservatives were not for sale to the highest bidder, "least of all the NDP."
Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff greets 7-month-old Noah Lewis, the son of one of his supporters. Holding the baby is Ignatieff’s wife, Zsuzsanna Zsohar. (Sept. 2, 2009) ( CHRIS WATTIE / REUTERS )
"It's a party of hard-core left-wing ideologues. It's not like a moderate, centre-left party. So I don't think we can see a realistic arrangement with the NDP," Kenney told Calgary radio host Dave Rutherford. Prime Minister Stephen Harper was more diplomatic, though just as pessimistic yesterday that he could strike a deal with NDP Leader Jack Layton. "If people want to work together on things that will help the economy, we're willing to do that. But we've had no indication of that from Mr. Layton," said Harper, during a stop in Sault Ste. Marie.
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All this sudden gearing-up to election readiness comes after Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff declared that Liberals would no longer be helping Harper's government stay in power. A federal election this fall would be the fourth in just over five years. Ignatieff said there's no turning back on his party's decision to no longer support the Conservatives. "Just to make it clear, we're not in negotiation here. We did that in June," Ignatieff said in Sudbury as a three-day party caucus meeting wrapped up. Harper, who admitted he was "a little bit surprised by some of these developments," now requires the support of either the Bloc Québécois or the NDP to keep his minority government alive.
And that could happen. NDP Leader Jack Layton is scheduled to react today to the growing election speculation. But his MPs have already said they might back the Conservatives if action is promised on the party's priorities, which include measures to help seniors and the unemployed and regulate credit card rates.
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Bloc Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe yesterday left the door open to supporting the government if it acts on issues important to Quebec. "We will be voting based on the interests and values of Quebec, issue by issue," Duceppe told a news conference. He cited improved benefits for the unemployed, help for the battered forestry industry, concerns about Ottawa's plan for a national securities regulator and applying a French-only language law to federal institutions in the province. "I'd be very surprised to see Mr. Harper support our positions. However, if he wants to surprise me, he can do that," he said. And all this potential deal making could be put to the test sooner than expected. While the opposition Liberals say they intend to introduce a non-confidence motion later this month or early next month, there are signs the Conservatives plan to test the resolve of the opposition parties the very week that Parliament resumes on Sept. 14. That's when the Conservatives intend to introduce a motion to implement some measures contained in the March budget, including the home renovation tax credit. That would put the Liberals in the position of having to vote against this popular rebate, although they've already promised a Liberal government would keep the tax measure. As well, the Conservatives, under pressure from the opposition to boost employment insurance, could also bring in reforms to sweeten the benefits that same week – and dare the opposition to vote against them. The June negotiation between Harper and Ignatieff produced a working group on employment insurance reform, which appears now to be defunct. Montreal MP Marlene Jennings said this week there was no sense in returning to the table because Conservatives weren't serious about presenting any substantial proposals. Election-style Liberal TV ads will hit the airwaves next week, as Ignatieff and his party rev up for a federal campaign that could start within weeks. Ignatieff has postponed a trip to China that would have removed him from the domestic political fray next week and he was talking yesterday about a platform that Canadians would see "very soon." The television ads were screened for Liberal MPs yesterday at the final day of their retreat. The series of TV spots, in English and in French, are mostly positive in tone, though the French-language ads reportedly take a few swipes at Harper and his policy reversals. For the most part, MPs said, the ads serve as an introduction to Ignatieff, his personality and his values. Several MPs described the ads as slick, well produced and hopeful in tone – a deliberate contrast to the negative ads Conservatives have been running against Ignatieff in the past months. "They're strong, they're clean, they're simple and they're all about showing Canada what we Liberals already know about Michael Ignatieff – that he's an extraordinary leader," said Justin Trudeau, MP for the Quebec riding of Papineau.
Read more about:The Last Defender is a game. A cooperative game where you, the players, must work together and communicate as a team to succeed. You will do this by gathering and sharing information, solving puzzles, and working as a group to make increasingly difficult decisions.
What ages can play?
The Last Defender is designed for adults, and is recommended for ages 15 and up. The nature of the collaboration in the game and the problem-solving skils required to be a Defender mean that this one isn't for our younger audience members.
What is the dress code?
It's Nuclear War. Wear sensible shoes.
On arrival, each player will receive a standard issue jumpsuit to be worn over their civilian clothes. We suggest dressing in comfortable clothing to more easily perform your duties as a Defender. Athletic sneakers and pants are preferred.
All Defenders must fill out the Jumpsuit Specification form before their game day.
How long is the game?
The experience lasts 90 minutes without an intermission. You should arrive at least 15 minutes before your scheduled start time.
Wait. It's not a play?
It's not a play, but it is a crazy-awesome story about mutually assured destruction. This live action game will make YOU the hero. There will not be live actors in the room, or an audience watching. Only players (that's you) and a few masked helpers to ensure a smooth experience. You will work with the folks you come with, and strangers, to solve puzzles and advance the story. You'll play inside a fully designed Defender HQ, complete with locker room, supercomputer, communications and information terminals, rec room, and more.
Do some people play and some people watch?
NOPE! Everyone who attends will step into the shoes of a Defender, and play the game. There is not an audiece watching the players. You can participate in as few or as many puzzles as you choose. (Though we'll highly recommend getting your brain working on as many as you can; the world is in crisis after all!) A max of 16 tickets are sold to each showtime, and everyone will play.
Can we buy out a whole night?
You bet! There is a max of 16 players spots at each show. A group can buy out all the tickets and bring between 8 and 16 people. Buy-outs are perfect for birthdays, corporate team building, bachelor/bachelorttes, and more. If you like, you can click through to buy tickets for the date you want, and if all 16 numbered player spots are available, simply buy them all! Learn more about Groups and Buy-Outs HERE.
Why am I being assigned a seat number when I buy tickets online?
There are not theatre seats. In fact, you'll be up and moving most of the game. You'll see the 16 numbered player spots when buying tickets online, so you can see how many spots remain for this show time. (In case you want to invite more friends!) If you wish to buy out a performance, and need help finding a show will all 16 spots available, please call us at 773-769-3832 or email boxoffice@thehousetheatre.com.
About Mobility
The Last Defender is not a performance you watch, but rather a game you play. You will need to move around the space among multiple game stations with your fellow players. For a majority of the 90 minute experience, you will choose which station to be engaged in, and how much or little you'd like to move around. Some stations have seats, and some do not. Around the room, small folding portable seats are provided (like at a museum), and you should use these as much as you like, moving them between stations, or staying put.
About Accessibility
Defender Headquarters are in the downstairs theatre in the Chopin venue, down a steep flight of stairs. It is not wheelchair accessible and there is no lift or alternate route. Once downstairs, the playing space is flat (no steps). If you feel comfortable navigating down the stairs, collapsible wheelchairs, walkers, and other assistive devices would all work well in the playing space, and you are welcome to bring them along.Clinton celebrates at a rally in New York City. (Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty)
Bernie Sanders’s weeks-long winning streak ended abruptly Tuesday night, as the upstart Democratic insurgent smacked into an immovable New York City electorate happy to hand Hillary Clinton a double-digit victory.
It’s difficult to overstate the significance of Sanders’s loss. The Brooklyn-born Vermont senator threw everything but the kitchen sink into New York, outspending every candidate on either side by a massive margin and deploying an army of paid staffers and volunteers to crisscross the state. He lost by a 15-point margin, ceding another 31 pledged delegates to Clinton and perhaps fatally damaging his ability to attract the Democratic superdelegates he must convince in order to challenge Clinton at the convention in Philadelphia. New York City went overwhelmingly for Clinton: She won 66 percent of the vote in Manhattan and nearly 70 percent in the Bronx, swept the remaining boroughs and Long Island, and even won Staten Island by a six-point margin.
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Sanders had been scheduled to campaign in Pennsylvania on Wednesday, but abruptly canceled his plans and flew to his hometown of Burlington, Vt., after the scope of Tuesday’s loss became clear, citing a need to “recharge.” His traveling press corps left stranded in the Keystone State, Sanders sent congratulations to Clinton through the local Vermont press, sounding very much like a man defeated. “We have come a long, long way,” he said. “We have a very, very strong grass-roots movement.... Activism wins elections.”
Clinton reveled in her victory during a speech in midtown Manhattan. “We’ve won every region of the country, from the North to the South to the East to the West. But this one’s personal,” she told a crowd of supporters. She later declared the Democratic contest all but over. “The race for the Democratic nomination is in the home stretch, and victory is in sight,” she said, noting that she was now the only candidate in either party to surpass 10 million primary voters.
Sanders’s defeat in New York came after weeks of acrimony in the once-cordial Democratic primary.
Sanders’s defeat in New York came after weeks of acrimony in the once-cordial Democratic primary. The two candidates spent the run-up to Tuesday trading bitter accusations and attacks, and Sanders, in particular, seemed determined to up the rancor. First, the Vermont senator called the former secretary of state “unqualified.” Then one of his surrogates lumped her in with “corporate Democratic whores” during an event in New York City. Sanders disavowed that remark, but the Clinton campaign refused to let it go, particularly after Sanders supporters pelted Clinton’s motorcade with one-dollar bills in Los Angeles. Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook cried that it was “as if they were at, shall we say, an adult entertainment venue,” in an e-mail to supporters Monday night. That same evening, the Sanders campaign accused Clinton of conspiring with the DNC to commit “serious apparent violations” of campaign-finance law.
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Clinton and her team gave as good as they got. Mook called the campaign-finance allegations “irresponsible and poisonous” and noted that they were “occurring just as Bernie’s mathematical odds of winning the nomination dwindle towards zero.” Several other prominent surrogates demanded that Sanders apologize to the families of those who died in the Sandy Hook massacre, with Connecticut governor Dannel Malloy calling the senator’s support for limited-liability laws that protect gun manufacturers “just wrong.” At a rally on Monday night, Clinton said she “couldn’t believe it when Senator Sanders said the parents of the Sandy Hook children did not deserve their day in court” and that she was “appalled” when Sanders deemed Donald Trump’s promise to “punish” women who had an abortion a “distraction.”
Some Democratic strategists said the race’s antagonistic new tone was due to the peculiarities of campaigning in New York, a very liberal state where voters expect politicians to go for the jugular and capitalize on perceived weaknesses. While Sanders focused on Clinton’s close ties to Wall Street and corporate America, she zeroed in on some of Sanders’s own liberal heresies — particularly on gun control.
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RELATED: Hillary’s Woman Problem: Most Women Don’t Like Her
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“She has to have an issue that generates interest for women over forty and African-Americans, people that have voted for her in those groupings in the past,” Hank Sheinkopf, an unaffiliated Democratic strategist in New York, told National Review at the height of last week’s campaigning. “And the heart of the issue is, Bernie’s wrong on guns in New York.”
Exit polls conducted by CBS found that Clinton won 75 percent of the African-American vote in the state. And by a 59–37 margin, Democrats who voted on Tuesday said they thought Clinton would do a better job than Sanders of handling gun policy.
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#share#Even before Tuesday night’s loss, it was difficult to envision a scenario where Sanders could beat out Clinton for the Democratic nomination. Her pledged-delegate lead of over 200 was already all but insurmountable, to say nothing of her overwhelming lead among Democratic superdelegates.
Nevertheless, the stakes were high for both campaigns going into Tuesday’s vote. Reeling from losses in eight of the last nine primaries, Clinton needed to stave off the growing chorus of “Bernie-mentum” coming from her left flank. If she couldn’t win — and win big — in her adopted home state, her standing in the party would be undermined, and doubts about her general-election viability might return with fresh vigor.
“If she were to win by less than ten [points], Democrats throughout the country would be in shock, and Republicans would be dancing in the streets,” said Sheinkopf.
Even before Tuesday night’s loss, it was difficult to envision a scenario where Sanders could beat out Clinton for the Democratic nomination.
Sanders, for his part, needed a close night in New York to prop up a campaign sagging under the weight of a crushing delegate deficit. Though the Democratic party’s proportional delegate allocation meant there was little chance for him to fundamentally alter the scoreboard, a narrow Sanders win in New York — or even a narrow loss — would’ve done more for his chances than the string of victories he achieved in several sparsely populated, majority-white caucus states over the past several weeks. By demonstrating the ability to woo a large, diverse, urban primary electorate away from its favorite daughter, Sanders could’ve improved his odds immensely in the hunt for the uncommitted superdelegates he needs to make a convincing stand against Clinton in Philadelphia.
Both campaigns sank enormous amounts of time and money into the New York race. Clinton and her husband blanketed the state, with Bill visiting multiple upstate cities a day while Clinton canvassed New York City’s subway trains and bubble-tea shops in a manner reminiscent of a mayoral candidate. Despite key upcoming primaries in Maryland and Pennsylvania — to say nothing of California, the massive delegate prize lurking farther down the line — the Clintons kept their eye on New York, venturing out of the state only a handful of times in the three weeks before Tuesday’s vote.
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RELATED: Bernie and Hillary Shouldn’t Be Allowed Near the Oval Office
Sanders was more aloof than his rival, opting for mega-rallies, including one last week in Washington Square Park that attracted 27,000 people. But his energized volunteers spread out across the state, working neighborhoods and inundating New Yorkers’ social-media feeds. The Sanders campaign also dipped liberally into its massive war chest, dropping $5.6 million on New York advertisements and outspending Clinton two-to-one.
But it wasn’t enough, and both sides seemed to recognize as much well before the results were announced Tuesday night. “I don’t think it’s gonna be close,” said New York mayor Bill de Blasio, a Clinton backer, on CNN Tuesday morning. Sanders also appeared to be steeling himself for a loss, bemoaning the “bad New York state election law” that prevented independents from voting in party primaries during an interview with CBS on Monday.
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#related#For weeks, and despite the Sanders campaign’s seemingly insurmountable obstacles, Democrats on both sides of the race have been steeling for a long primary fight. Sanders’s campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, promised as much in an appearance on MSNBC mere minutes after the race was called on Tuesday night. “The fact that [Clinton] did very well in New York doesn’t mean she’ll do well in the other states,” Weaver said, promising that Sanders would remain competitive in California and Pennsylvania, where the campaign’s “internal polls are much better than some of the public polls that are out there.”
“When we get to the convention, look — the Democrats are going to have to decide who they want to elect in terms of who’s going to be the best in November,” Weaver added. “And clearly, the polls are almost unanimous now that Bernie Sanders is a much more electable candidate in November.”
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That may be true. Clinton’s national unfavorables remain high, and some national polls show Sanders performing better than she does against Cruz or Trump in November’s general election. But in New York, and across the country, one thing seems clear — Democrats have made their decision. And it certainly isn’t Sanders.
— Brendan Bordelon is a political reporter for National Review.Read Dossier #1: Twin Peaks: Speculations Written In The Stars
Read Dossier #2: Twin Peaks: Keep Your Eye On The Doughnut
Read Dossier #3: Twin Peaks: It’s Happening Again – Time, and Time Again, Part 1
Read Dossier #3.5: Twin Peaks: It’s Happening Again – Electric Time, Part II
“Dearest Father,
You asked me recently why I maintain that I am afraid of you. As usual, I was unable to think of any answer to your question, partly for the very reason that I am afraid of you, and partly because an explanation of the grounds for this fear would mean going into far more details than I could even approximately keep in mind while talking. And if I now try to give you an answer in writing, it will still be very incomplete, because, even in writing, this fear and its consequences hamper me in relation to you and because the magnitude of the subject goes far beyond the scope of my memory and power of reasoning. […]”
-Excerpt from Franz Kafka’s Brief an den Vater
“When I got home from World War II, my Uncle Dan clapped me on the back, and he said, ‘You’re a man now.’ So I killed him. Not really, but I certainly felt like doing it.” – Kurt Vonnegut on his Uncle Dan
“And now I want to tell you about my late Uncle Alex. He was my father’s kid brother, a childless graduate of Harvard who was an honest life insurance salesman in Indianapolis. He was well-read and wise. And his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is. So I do the same now, and so do my kids and grandkids. And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.” – Kurt Vonnegut on his Uncle AlexThe Garb of Innocence: A Time of Toplessness Traditional topless dress in 19th century Sri Lanka 7th Century Sigiriya: "The royal ladies in the frescoes...displayed their breasts. The ladies in waiting wear...a firm 'breast bandage' or thanapatiya." "How was it that the Hindu-Buddhist culture in ancient Lanka underwent such changes by the 14th Century so that an upper garment for women became a feature when leaving the house?" N ot long ago an incident was reported from Peradeniya University in which a fiery feminist fresher from Colombo stood up to a typical campus male senior who tried to rag her, and sent him away with his tail between his legs. The senior male had asked the fresher why she was clad in a tight pair of denim jeans, and advised her to come next day "wearing a gauma (frock) in the traditional Sinhala manner". The reply was swift and sarcastic: "What d'you mean gauma? Gauma is not Sinhalese; it's Portuguese. Then I should wear the osariya (Kandyan saree) or perhaps redda-haetta (cloth and jacket). How come you are wearing trouser and shirt? Perhaps, you should wear a sarong or maybe an amude (span cloth) if you want to dress in the true Sinhala manner. Amidst sounds of muted laughter the senior male beat a hasty retreat". National Dress The above incident took place about a year ago and is symptomatic of the utter confusion that many people have about what constitutes the authentic national costume or true Sinhala/Tamil dress; despite the fact that it is doubtful whether such a singular mode of dress ever existed at any time in our island's history. In retrospect, this ignorance might seem natural, especially considering the clothes worn by stewardesses on cheap flights and others who are supposed to represent our national dress. An article in the most recent edition of The Thatched Patio, published by the International Centre for Ethnic Studies attempts to throw some light on this controversial subject. The writer is Dr. Mrs. Nira Wickremasinghe, a graduate of Sorbonne and Oxford, who is now a staff member of the History and Political Science Department at the Colombo University. Entitled "Some Comments On Dress In Sri Lanka", the article reveals some surprising facts, especially on women's attire in ancient Lanka. Nira details the topless tradition of Sri Lankan women according to evidence presented by historical sources. The saree and jacket combination that is today worn by women of all classes throughout the island underwent various changes. Apart from some indirect references made to dress in the Mahawamsa, there is hardly any authentic record of the manner in which women are clad in Sri Lanka before the sixth Century Sigiriya frescos. What is certain is that the rule of changelessness did not apply to women's clothing." Royal Ladies "The royal ladies in the frescoes wear pleated robes from the waist upwards, save for necklace, armlets, wristlets, ear and hair ornaments and displayed their breasts. The ladies in waiting wear waist clothes, few ornaments and a firm 'breast bandage' or thanapatiya. The Sigiriya style of clothing — Sigiriya frescoes depict women wearing the cloth gracefully draped like a dhoti tied in a knot at the front and pulled down to expose the navel — must have survived a few centuries in Ceylon". "The Sigiriya frescoes illustrate the initial absence of social taboo relating to upper class women exhibiting their breasts. Mazuri has analyzed the theme of dress and nakedness in the history of thought. In Judeo-Christian cultures nudity is closely associated with sin. Nudity began to acquire all the connotations of bodily temptation with the coming of lust and the fall from innocence. The very concept of 'flesh' came to imply sensuousness." Hindu-Buddhist society "In a Hindu-Buddhist society it is difficult to assess with precision at what point semi-nudity became taboo. The Dhammapadatha Katha relates an incident which took place in the Tenth Century when a lay devotee, Rohini, wore a blouse before Anuruddha Thera only to cover marks left by a skin disease. This indicates that it was still unusual for women to cover their body. Women's dress was then a cloth round the hip leaving the body bare from waist upwards." According to other scholars like W. T. Keble in his book Ceylon Beaten Track the Jaffna kingdom in 13th Century Ceylon was no exception to this tradition of liberal and sensible attire for men and women. Keble quotes Marco Polo, the Italian merchant, who visited the island in the late 13th Century when King Chandrabhanu, (Sendez-nax) the Javanese warrior, was ruling Jaffna. "It is governed by a King whose name is Sendeznax. The people worship idols, and are independent of every other state. Both men and women go nearly in a state of nudity (the writer has cause to envy this climatic adaptation) only wrapping a cloth round the middle part of their bodies." Nira writes that by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries it was acceptable to remain uncovered at home but when going out to wear an upper garment. At this stage the cloth was worn with a separate garment covering the breasts thrown over the shoulders, which evolved into the shawl and breastband. How was it that the Hindu-Buddhist culture in ancient Lanka underwent such changes by the 14th Century so that an upper garment for women became a feature when leaving the house? As noted earlier there was no place for prudery and Puritanism in the authentic tradition of Hinduism and Buddhism. One may speculate that it was the rise of Islam in India and the Muslim conquest of south India by the mid14th Century |
on new ground here.
On the Mario Kart thing, he's right. The original game's roster only offered one female character, Princess Peach, who was classed to race similarly to Yoshi. There were no heavier-class female racers. By Mario Kart DS, Daisy was added as medium-class. Mario Kart Wii classed Rosalina as large.
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Back to the interview, where you'll see me engage in some simplification myself, implying that it might take a female gamer to compel a game designer to add a female protagonist, which is obviously not a prerequisite. Again, I was trying to make the most of limited time and lots of worthwhile interview topics...
Kotaku: Do you have daughters? Have they asked to be able to play as girls in the game? Miyamoto: Yeah, I have a daughter, but she doesn't really ask me that very much. She loves Zelda and she always plays as Link, but she's actually never asked me why she can't play as Princess Zelda. [laughs] Kotaku: This has come up more, I think, in America, where people are talking about the idea that usually, in games, it's the girl that has to be rescued by the guy. Have you ever considered doing a game where it's the guy getting rescued by the girl? Miyamoto: So, yeah, certainly, I think there are opportunities to do it. One, I think we could do it as a parody of everything else we've done. But I think, certainly, we would want something where it would feel like the natural way for the game to play and in that case we would certainly take that approach. Miyamoto: "If we end up creating a gameplay structure where it makes sense for, whether it's a female to go rescue a male or a gay man to rescue a lesbian woman or a lesbian woman to rescue a gay man, we might take that approach." I guess, for me in particular, the structure of the gameplay always comes before the story. And so we're always looking at, when we're putting that together, what is the most natural story to take place within that structure. Pikmin is a good example of that. In Pikmin, the original structure of the gameplay was centered on all these individual little creatures moving around like ants. As a result of that, the world that you're in is kind of earthy and natural settings and the creatures you're fighting seems sort of like insects, because that's what the gameplay centers on. So, if we end up creating a gameplay structure where it makes sense for, whether it's a female to go rescue a male or a gay man to rescue a lesbian woman or a lesbian woman to rescue a gay man, we might take that approach. For us it's less about the story and more about the structure of the gameplay and what makes sense to be presenting to the consumer.
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And that was it. Note that both Miyamoto and I, perhaps to our credit, had forgotten the existence of Super Princess Peach, a Nintendo DS game that actually is about Peach rescuing Mario. She does so by using her emotions. She can cry, get angry... Miyamoto wasn't much involved in that one, I don't think!
There's certainly more to discuss here about why game creators—from the legendary to the brand-new—create the characters they create and use the scenarios they do.
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We've now heard from the man who made Princess Peach, and he seems pretty open-minded about adding more female characters to Nintendo's games. Just to placate female gamers? Only if there's a gameplay justification? There are certainly some qualifiers there that will raise some eyebrows, but in the context of Nintendo's E3 2013 games, it certainly looks like female characters are a bit more empowered in the world of Nintendo now then they have been.Murray McMurray Hatchery in Webster City, Iowa, sells about 10,000 Silkies a year, up from a few hundred 10 years ago, when the hatchery first started raising the little birds, said Bud Wood, an owner.
“The majority are sold for ornamental purposes, but there’s a big market in San Francisco, where there are Asians, and in Minneapolis, where there’s a Hmong market,” Mr. Wood said. Japanese, Cambodians and Koreans also eat the Silkie, he said.
At K. K. Live Poultry in Brooklyn’s main Chinatown, Danny Wu, the owner, said he sells, butchers and cleans 3,000 Silkies a week, up from 400 a week 10 years ago. He attributes the growth to the number of Chinese moving from China and Taiwan to New York City.
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“They make it for soup, or for the broth for Mongolian hot pot,” he said, “and sometimes they make a curry.” For chefs outside Chinatown, though, it is not the easiest dish to sell.
“It’s a scary-looking creature,” said Patricia Yeo, of Sapa in Chelsea. She said she has her staff describe it as a deeply flavored, lean, free-range chicken.
She compares the Silkie to the blue-foot chicken, the domestic version of the poulet de Bresse of France; the blue-foot costs twice as much as the Silkie, she said. And unlike the blue-foot, the Silkie is rarely roasted.
In an Asian home, most often a Silkie will be made into a deeply flavored, aromatic, amber-colored soup, simmered or steamed with ginger, ginseng, dried wolfberries and dried red dates, also known as jujubes. The broth is usually served clear, but occasionally it has bits of meat in it. (A recipe can be found at nytimes.com/dining.)
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In China, the Silkie is called wu gu ji — black-boned chicken. It has been prized for its medicinal value since the seventh or eighth century, said Yu Ying-Shih, a retired professor of Chinese and East Asian studies at Princeton University. Women who have just given birth eat it for energy. But its curative powers are not necessarily gender-specific.
When Professor Yu was a small boy growing up in Anhui, in southeastern China, he said, because he had constant headaches, he was given bowls of Silkie chicken soup to make the headache go away.
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Did the soup work?
“I don’t know,” he said, “but probably it helped.”
That same soup can be ordered a day in advance at some restaurants in Manhattan’s Chinatown, like Oriental Garden and Danny Ng’s.
Cooked in the traditional way, with ginseng, the soup has a hint of bitterness. Without ginseng, it is simply an addictive, intensely flavored broth.
Yvonne L. C. Wong, an art consultant and trustee of the China Institute, makes her variation of the soup with Virginia ham, wolfberries, dried white yam, preserved orange peel and ginger. It may be to the Chinese what chicken soup is to Jews — liquid penicillin.
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Ms. Yeo slow-cooks the chickens in curries and other braises. When she was growing up in Cambridge, England, she remembers, her grandmother visited from Kuala Lumpur and made the family the traditional Chinese soup in a clay pot.
For her black-skinned chicken slow-cooked in dark soy sauce at Sapa, Ms. Yeo braises the quartered chicken in a dark, aromatic sauce that includes onions, garlic, ginger, galangal, chilies, wolfberries, Chinese dried red dates, soy sauce and star anise.
“My secret ingredient?” she said, as she ran upstairs from the restaurant pantry to the kitchen. “Coke!” She said she substitutes it for the traditional rock sugar, because she likes Coke’s caramel flavor. She braises the chicken the night before she puts it on the menu, as a special, because it, like nearly all braised dishes, tastes better the next day.
At the Jefferson Restaurant in Greenwich Village, Simpson Wong takes an even more European turn. He cooks the Silkie leg and thigh as a confit in olive oil, seasoned with garlic and rosemary, for six hours, and does a quick sauté of the tender breast meat in a savory sauce of garlic, ginger, rice wine lees, oyster sauce and lemon balm.
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At Chow Bar in Greenwich Village, Peter Klein serves slow-cooked black chicken in red Thai coconut sauce. He also slow-cooks it, shreds the meat and mixes it with an Asian barbecue sauce. Then he stuffs it into toasted Chinese bread, along with paper-thin slices of cucumber and a sprinkle of fresh cilantro leaves.
Mr. Klein asks his staff to describe the chicken as particularly fresh and lean.
“We try not to go into great detail,” he said. “The American public is a little squeamish.”
Where to Buy
Silkie chickens can be found in the following shops:
BAYARD MEAT MARKET 57 Bayard Street, (212) 619-6206.
DELUXE FOOD MARKET 79 Elizabeth Street, (212) 925-5766.
DYNASTY SUPERMARKET 68 Elizabeth Street, (212) 966-4943. Also sells all the other ingredients needed for the soup.
K. K. LIVE POULTRY 6221 Sixth Avenue, Brooklyn, (718) 439-3838.If you have multiple Apple devices, you may need to copy items between them. If you can’t use AirDrop for some reason—for instance, because it doesn't always "just work"— there are a variety of alternatives available. Here are a few of them:
Email/Messages. First, and most convenient, you can email items to yourself. This requires nothing additional installed anyplace, and odds are good you already send and receive email in both places so you just have to send the message. In iOS 8 you can send yourself a message, and then it’ll show up for you on your other devices using the same account in Messages.
What? Doesn't your iPhone call YOU Sweetie?
ITunes. You can use iTunes File Sharing to copy things between devices. This is slightly less convenient because it requires plugging your iPhone or iPad into your Mac and making sure there’s an app that uses iTunes file sharing in order to move things back and forth. Apps from Apple generally do, so you might be in good shape. As with all things iTunes, for every person who loves it, there’s a person who hates it with the white hot intensity of a thousand suns. So. Y’know. There’s that.
DeskConnect. DeskConnect is a free iOS and Mac OS app that allows you to take virtually anything from one device and copy it to the other. Shoot video on your iPhone you want to move to your Mac for more editing? Piece of cake. Want to copy that photo out of iPhoto to your iPad? No problem. You do have to create an account, but both apps are free and easy to use. Since AirDrop between Mac OS and iOS is a more recent development, I have used DeskConnect to move files around for some time, and in a lot of case I still use it out of habit instead of AirDrop.
Bonus points if you catch the reference in my laptop's name...
Scribe. If you want to share your clipboard between devices, you can do so using Scribe. It requires Bluetooth LE to make its connection, so be sure you have the hardware for it. If you do, the iOS and Mac OS versions are both free and allow you to scoop up phone numbers, images, blocks of text. Even if you don’t have Wi-Fi or have your devices on different networks, using Bluetooth to make the connection makes it a piece of cake.
Dropbox. If you use Dropbox, you can set it up to have all your photos automatically upload to Dropbox which has the advantage of automatic backup copies, and they get synced to your computer as well. With the “Open In” extension in iOS 8, you can add many more files to Dropbox which will show up on your computer the next time Dropbox syncs. If you have your machine asleep or off a lot of the time, things won’t sync immediately (obviously), but it is another option for how to make sure you have all your stuff on all your stuff.Kids in a northern Virginia public school district unknowingly rode a school bus this week that was also carrying “explosives training materials” left behind by the CIA after it conducted exercises with local law enforcement agencies, officials acknowledged Thursday.
The materials were packed in a container and placed in the engine compartment of a bus at Briar Woods High School in Loudoun County on March 24, officials said. It was discovered nearly a week later during a maintenance check of the bus – which by then had carried dozens of kids, including elementary school students, for at least two days.
“During the exercise, explosive training material was inadvertently left by the CIA K-9 unit in one of the buses used in the exercise,” the CIA said in a statement, which also stated the materials did not pose a danger to anyone riding the bus.
After Wednesday’s discovery, local law enforcement officials and eventually the CIA were called to retrieve the materials. Both the CIA and local officials, including the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office and the Fire Marshal, which had also taken part in the exercises, declined to give a more precise description of the materials after meeting with school officials Thursday.
“The exact nature of the training material used in this exercise is not being released at the request of the CIA so as not to compromise its training techniques,” county officials said.
Officials said the material had fallen out of the container and into the engine compartment, where it went uncollected – and unnoticed - for nearly a week.
Last week was spring break in the district, but the bus was in service on Monday and Tuesday, making eight runs totaling 145 miles, and carrying 26 students attending Rock Ridge High School, Buffalo Trail Elementary School and Pinebrook Elementary School, school officials said.
After the discovery, school officials sent out an email to parents of students in the district, but the alert was short on answers and left many parents wanting a fuller explanation.
“During a routine maintenance procedure Wednesday, a Loudoun County transportation employee found an explosive training material on a school bus used in an exercise by a Federal Government agency last week,” the initial email stated. “The explosive training material was in a benign state and could not be activated through normal operation of the bus.”
One parent of a Buffalo Trail pupil, who asked not to be named, told FoxNews.com she did not understand why the CIA was conducting training on school grounds, and said she was dubious about the explanation of what was left behind.
“What are ‘explosives training materials’ anyway?” she said. “That could mean a lot of things, none of which belong on a school bus.”
CIA officials said the training was routine and part of exercises its personnel do with local law enforcement throughout the metro area.Happy Sunday!
Do you guys ever over plan your days off? Mark and I seem to do that more often than not. In between his company’s holiday party, Christmas shopping, creating Christmas gifts, visiting family, training for our next half marathon, and celebrating my grandpa’s 49th day memory thingy, we didn’t have too much time for cooking. Oh, living slowly and mindfully has been a difficult feat indeed. We just need more time in a day!
Today I forced myself to roll out of bed earlier than I wanted to so that I could peel and roast a beautiful rosy beet. I knew that with my grandpa’s 49 day celebration (a day where in my family’s culture, is the day when the spirit of the person who has passed has officially moved on from their former life and reincarnated into a new one) that I wouldn’t have very much time to play in the kitchen. If I wanted to scrounge up enough time to make this recipe, I’d have to be extremely efficient and productive every minute of the day. There was absolutely no time to get distracted by text messages, Clash Royale, or e-mails.
It helps that beets are so incredibly messy to work with that you can’t handle anything else with your hands while working with them.
Beets stain your hands and everything they touch. Sometimes our cutting boards look blood splattered. Other times they look like an exquisite, bold red painting.
After they’re sliced and roasted for several minutes in the oven, they come out looking scarlet with dark rings on them. I personally find beets so pretty. I had so much fun photographing them even thought I only had several minutes to do so.
I literally pulled these guys out of the oven, cleaned up my mess, and hopped into the car to head over to the temple.
I’m not a religious person, but it’s nice to occasionally visit this particular temple. Compared to many churches and other temples, this one is unimpressive and no one would ever think of it as a religious institution, because in many ways, it looks like a small house. But my grandpa, for the past 10 years, devoted himself to helping the monks build this temple from the ground up. Everywhere I turn and look, I see a part of him in something. From the mahogany fences that run the perimeter of the property to the thriving potted plants, he’s there, and I automatically feel so much more connected to this place and to him.
He also lives in many of the people at this temple. All of them carry treasured memories of him that they’ll occasionally share with my family: stories of his kindness, generosity, and social engagements with pure strangers. They’re stories that cause hard lumps to form in my throat and make me feel uncertain about whether or not I want to smile or cry.
Gosh, I miss that man and his laugh. Today, of all days, I missed him more than ever, especially when I ran up my street and didn’t see him in the yard with a shovel in hand asking me why I was breathing so hard. But hey, at the end of the day, I can only be grateful and proud for having such an amazing person for a grandpa.
Thank you to the beets for beating the sadness and laziness out of me. I made this hummus in the food processor when I got home from temple and then met up with Mark for a chill 8 mile run.
Making roasted beet hummus is extremely simple. It’s easier than my kale almond hummus but it’s just as tasty! While staying true to the creamy and garlicky flavors of traditional hummus, the beets give it a nice roast-y sweetness to it. There are plenty of flavors and nutrients in this hummus! Namely protein from the chickpeas and fiber, folate, potassium, and vitamin C from the beets. Yay for tasty healthy treats!
Save Print Roasted Beet Hummus Prep time: 30 mins Cook time: 3 mins Total time: 33 mins Serves: 6 Ingredients 1 roasted red beet with a tablespoon of olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste
2 cloves garlic
⅓ cup olive oil
2 Tbsp tahini (2 Tbsp roasted food processed sesame seeds with 1 Tbsp olive oil)
1 lemon
1 15 oz. can of drained garbanzo beans Instructions Roast the beets by placing the sliced beets onto a baking sheet for 30-40 minutes at 375 degrees Fahrenheit. After the beets cool, place them in a food processor and blend until they're smooth. Add the garbanzo beans, garlic, lemon, and tahini (to make the tahini you need to separately process the sesame seeds and then add the olive oil). Process everything until smooth. Taste the hummus and add salt and pepper to taste. Add the olive oil and process. 3.5.3226
I am absolutely in love with the vibrant pink and red hues of this beet hummus! Are you? I feel like I could use this hummus for painting as well as for eating, but I think I’ll stick with eating it for now.
If you’re a hummus lover and like to try out different flavors, give this recipe a shot. Right now it is definitely my bedtime. I gotta be awake, aware, and quick on my feet to keep up with the 30 something little guys tomorrow. Good night and sweet dreams. Stay happy and healthy, y’all!
Pin me! 🙂
Like this: Like Loading...OTTAWA In the two years since the 2008 parliamentary crisis, most Canadians have come to think of Gilles Duceppe as the disquieting but silent partner of the failed Liberal-NDP coalition bid. It seems he was a lot more than that. In a book released this week Duceppe casts himself as the driving force behind the Liberal-NDP coalition agreement. He credits the Bloc Québécois with providing the gist of the economic pact on which Stéphane Dion and Jack Layton agreed. And he confirms that exploratory talks aimed at preventing the Conservatives from serving a second mandate took place some time before the government’s fiscal update triggered a mega-parliamentary storm.
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According to Duceppe, Layton first sounded out the Bloc about participating in an opposition coalition designed to unseat the re-elected government three weeks before Finance Minister Jim Flaherty stood up in the House to present his update. The 2008 election took place on Oct. 14 and the Throne speech was read out on Nov. 19. The fiscal update was brought down on a week later. The Layton-Duceppe chat about a possible coalition would have taken place before the re-elected government had even reconvened Parliament. Duceppe originally told Layton that the Bloc would never take on more than a support role in a coalition scheme. After Flaherty delivered his controversial update, he says he decided it was time to follow up on his chat with the NDP.
Duceppe says he first contacted Dion and then told Layton to get in touch with the Liberal leader. Having set up a date between his two opposition colleagues, Duceppe also prodded them into endorsing his party’s spending plan. ‘’We alone had a realistic, detailed and fully costed plan,” he says about the Bloc’s package. On top of placing the Bloc’s recession-fighting prescriptions on the agenda of the future coalition government, Duceppe brags about wrestling one more major concession from his opposition partners – a concession that was more symbolic but also more specifically tailored to his sovereignist agenda. Noting that the coalition communiqué referred to Quebecers and Canadians as two distinct peoples, he says: ‘’Coming from the federal Liberals, it was a surprising development. (Former prime minister) Trudeau must have been spinning in his grave. It was pure candy. When Jacques Parizeau read that, he was delighted. He backed it (the coalition) 100 per cent.” Over the past two years, a number of coalition players have given their take on the episode. They have all tended to focus on their own role. Duceppe is no exception.
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The book – which really is just a 221-page transcript of a lengthy conversation between Duceppe and journalist Gilles Toupin—is aimed at a francophone audience. It is primari;y meant to revisit the Bloc’s 20-year tenure and provide the rationale for a permanent sovereignist presence on Parliament Hill. In the book, Duceppe argues that if the Bloc were ever to voluntarily withdraw from the federal scene, it would be admitting that the sovereignty project is dead. The coalition episode barely takes up two and a half pages and they are meant to respond to the criticism by some sovereignists that Duceppe made a pact with the devil when he shook hands with Dion – the so-called father of the clarity act—on the coalition. In Quebec the coalition was always popular and Duceppe’s role in it is largely bullet-proof. But the same is not true of the Liberals and the New Democrats elsewhere in Canada. At the time of the parliamentary crisis, Duceppe’s mere appearance at the official signing of the coalition pact provided the spark that allowed Prime Minister Stephen Harper to light a fiery public opinion fire under the Liberals. In Harperland, his just-published chronicle of the prime minister’s four-year reign, journalist Lawrence Martin reports that Harper was considering relinquishing the reins of power to the coalition without much of a fight until Duceppe appeared on live television alongside Dion and Layton. Harper has kept his guns trained on the coalition ever since and Duceppe has just added a new round of live ammunition to the Conservative rhetorical arsenal.
Read more about:"Oh, nooooooooo!"
As a Cubs fan, you no doubt remember exactly what that means, and possibly even where you were when you heard Ron Santo utter that immortal broadcast phrase on WGN Radio. (In case you need to be reminded, it was at the end of this game.)
Now, WGN's Pat Hughes has put together, in a new CD, a number of his favorite moments with Ron over the 15 years they spent together in the WGN broadcast booth. You'll hear the moment above (from 1998), the time Ron's hairpiece caught fire in the Shea Stadium press box, and Ron's speech when his number was retired at Wrigley Field in 2003. ("THIS is my Hall of Fame!")
Soon, we hope that we'll hear that Ron was elected by the new Veterans Committee and will be inducted into the Hall of Fame. Here's some info on the vote, which will take place at MLB's winter meetings in Dallas on Dec. 4 and 5.
In the meantime, this CD is a great way to reminisce. You can preview the clips and buy it at this iTunes link.If you're a fan of Sony smartphones, you'll like the fact that two more of those have become available. We're talking about the Xperia M4 Aqua and the Xperia C4.
The M4 Aqua and the M4 Aqua Dual are now to be found at retailers across Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia. The phone is generally being offered in white, black, and "coral", but there are certain markets which also get a silver version.
The Sony Xperia M4 Aqua is a midranger that boasts a similar design to the company's flagships, IP68 rating for water and dust resistance, and even a capless USB charging port.
On the other hand, the Xperia C4 (pictured above) is all about selfies. The handset has a 5 MP wide-angle front-facing camera that comes equipped with a LED flash, to ensure that it captures perfect selfies regardless of lighting conditions.
Otherwise, the C4 is a pretty capable device with its upper-midrange specs. It will be found in stores in the Asia-Pacific region this week. After that, it will slowly make its way to more places, with the global rollout expected to be complete "within the coming weeks".
Source 1 Source 2Televangelist Joel Osteen's church in Houston announced Monday that $600,000 in Sunday donations were stolen from its safe last weekend, MyFoxHouston.com reported.
The heist at Lakewood Church wasn't discovered until 8:30 a.m. Monday morning when a church employee and off-duty Harris County Sheriff's Officer noticed the break in, the report said. Investigators believe the theft occurred sometime between Sunday afternoon and Monday morning.
The donations were from services on March 8 and March 9 and included cash, checks and credit cards. Lakewood has asked anyone who attended services this weekend to pay attention to their accounts and report any suspicious activity.
"The funds were fully insured, and we are working with our insurance company to restore the stolen funds to the church," the Lakewood statement said, according to The Houston Chronicle.
Lakewood stresses this was not a data breach, but says the theft was limited to donations made in the actual services.
More On This... Canadian couple slain in apparent robbery at their home in popular Mexico retirement community
More than 40,000 people attend weekly services led by Osteen, whose televised sermons reach nearly 100 countries.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.Liberalism is premised on the idea that people are inherently good in some sense, and therefore worthy of liberty and equality in some domains. This applies to modern liberals who only care about social liberties and social equality (a.k.a social justice), classical liberals who agree with everything modern liberals say, but they additionally want economic liberty and equality as well. Anarchists can also be considered a type of liberal arguably because the only difference between them and the liberals is that anarchists don’t think there should be an agency which reserves the right to violence in all affairs (a.k.a a state) which is a form of inequality.
The reason liberalism is hard to practice is that there are contradictions between liberty and equality. As people have more liberty, they are free to prefer some people to others for various reasons. This leads to various forms of inequalities depending on the type of preference being exhibited. If the preference is by merit we have meritocracy which leads to people of merit being unequal to people without merit. If the preference is based on race it leads to racism in which some races are unequal to others in certain human endeavors. If the preference is by sexual orientation we get homophobia in which some sexual orientations are unequal to others. If the preference is by wealth we get various forms of inequality in forms of justice, political power, education, healthcare etc.
So liberals resort to various illiberal requirements like enforcement of equality of opportunity (e.g. Social justice extremism, affirmative action) and even enforcement of equality of outcome.
Liberals also end up in a purity spiral in which the more they care about minor infractions of their ideology the greater standing they have in their community. So much like Catholics who avoid condoms are more pious than Catholics who avoid murder, liberals who use preferred pronouns are purer and have a higher standing than a liberal who avoids murder.
Update: BTW this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to difficulties of liberalism. For example, many forms of liberalism believe in the ability of laws and lawmakers (a.k.a legislature) to handle all governance scenarios including the foreseen and unforeseen. However, laws cannot work when the unforeseeable happens so even liberals allow illiberal ideas like allowing one individual (a.k.a the president/dictator) to suspend the law, and rule by whim and extralegal force until normality has been restored. This is yet another contradiction that happens when people try to establish liberal governments. People show this desire for extra-legal heroes in superhero fiction in which one person acts for the good using extra-legal force.The largest independent producer of organic beer in Canada says it plans to maintain that independence by handing ownership over to its employees.
The plan, announced on Monday, will see the approximately 150 employees of Beau's All Natural Brewing Company buy the Vankleek Hill, Ont., brewery over the next 25 to 30 years.
"We very much want to stay independent and we feel that the best way to do that is to start moving ownership over to the employees," says Steve Beauchesne, chief executive officer of Beau's.
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Mr. Beauchesne, 40, says he has no plans to step away from the business in the near future. Instead, he says he wants to create a succession plan that will leave the business in good hands when he is ready to move on.
"What I don't want to do is get to the point where I'm 60 years old and have no succession plan, no exit strategy in place," he says.
He says the company's 10th anniversary seemed like a good time start.
Currently, Mr. Beauchesne, his father and his siblings own 57 per cent of the company. Early employees and initial investors, all friends and family members, own the rest.
The shares that will be put up for sale come from both the family and investors. He says it will give those early backers, who haven't been allowed to sell their shares, a chance to get a return on their investment.
Around 4 per cent to 5 per cent of the business will be offered to the employees during the first year, says Tanya Beimers, the company's chief financial officer. Employees will be able to spend up to 2 per cent of their salary on those shares.
She says that limit may vary in future years, depending on how many shares shareholders want to put up for sale.
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Just what the business will look like at the end of sale process remains unclear and depends on whether the children of Mr. Beauchesne and his siblings want to go into the business, he says.
The employee shareholders will be entitled to any dividends declared by the company's board of directors, but won't gain full voting rights. They will, however, have the right to vote any time a transaction is proposed that would change control of the company.
Employee share ownership plans are relatively uncommon in Canada, says Camille Jensen, the vice-president of ESOP Builders, a Toronto-based company that designs plans such as the one introduced by Beau's. She says they're more popular in the United States and Britain, where employee-owners gain specific tax benefits.
Unlike a worker-owned co-operative, where each worker gets a single vote, in an ESOP, voting is done by shares, Ms. Jensen says.
For business owners, it can be a way to maintain a legacy and protect their workers from layoffs in the event of an acquisition, she says. Those are key motivations for Mr. Beauchesne, who says his approach to business is shaped by his history as an "old-school punk rocker."
He says he wants to give back to his employees and ensure the brewery remains in line with his values. His beers are all certified organic and the company has received B Corporation certification, which requires companies to adhere to specific social and environmental sustainability standards. His big fear is that after he leaves, Beau's will be snapped up by a major brewery. While overall beer sales have been declining in recent years, sales of craft beer have risen. And that has large brewers looking to make acquisitions.
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In October, Toronto's Mill Street Brewery was purchased by Labatt Breweries, part of Anheuser-Busch InBev, the world's largest beer-maker. That was followed by the November purchase of Turning Point Brewery, part of a deal that also saw Labatt acquire Mike's Hard Lemonade and Okanagan Cider.
There's no lack of independent breweries, though. There are more than 500 breweries in Canada, according to the trade association Beer Canada, and about 80 are scheduled to open in Ontario this year alone. It's a massive change from 2006, the year Beau's opened, when there were 86 breweries across Canada.If you come with 100 miles of the Canadian border, the government can search your phone or laptop without cause.
In a fitting end to a terrible year for individual privacy rights, a federal judge in New York ruled that border authorities can seize and search people’s electronic devices, including smartphones and laptops.
The case, brought by the ACLU, challenged the constitutionality of a Department of Homeland Security policy dating back to 2009 that said no suspicion or warrant was required to search electronics. Searches at border crossings have long been considered exempt from Fourth Amendment protections against unlawful search and seizure.
But with more and more of our lives stored on devices, Judge Edward Korman’s suggestion that we just leave behind gadgets with private data on them when we cross an international border seems downright unrealistic.
Even more disturbing is that the “Fourth-Amendment-Free-Zone” actually extends 100 miles south of the border, into an area covering a good third of Washington state, including Bellingham, Everett, and the even the northern edges of Seattle.
So should Shoreline residents expect to see Border Patrol agents snatching laptops at the local Starbucks. Probably not — though technically they could.
But the next time you cross the border into Canada, you might want to think twice about what’s on your hard drive.
0 emailIdea #1: Match flow controlled AI
If the team is doing well and dominating the other team, then set the AI to easy. Same goes for the other way, if the team is doing very bad, set the AI to hard, vice-versa. You can also set it to medium if the match is even.
Idea #2: AI Clone
As the idea implies, the AI player would be an exact replica of the leaver using that player's stats as a blueprint for each hero that player uses. From average accuracy to damage, the AI will perform exactly or that player's average play.
We can all agree that leavers are a pain in the rear, they get pissed at the comp or can't play their favorite hero and decided to leave or try to throw the game. So why not fix it a simple or semi-simple solution. Why not use AI, it's not like they're being used that much. By having an AI player to substitute the leaver, the match doesn't have to be one-sided by favoring the other team. OK, you might say the AI player isn't contributing or is overly overpowered, well I have two ideas for that.Just need some input if this idea is bad or not.Ask anyone who progressed through middle and high school during the '80s and '90s how they kept heaps of schoolwork organized, and "Trapper Keeper' is the answer you'll hear. But Trapper Keepers were about way more than keeping stuff together; the colorful three-ring binders were an essential school supply. They exuded cool back when "cool" counted most. Traversing the halls without one could be humiliating, doubly so if you were caught carrying a knockoff. We're now decades removed from the Trapper Keeper's heyday, but that's not stopping Mead — the company responsible for carefully creating the craze — from making a shameless nostalgia play and reinventing it for today's world. Except you won't be putting Trapper folders or fistfuls of paper in this one. The Trapper Keeper is now a case for your iPad or Android tablet.
Mead has teamed up with Kensington, a longtime case and accessory maker, to bring back its instantly recognizable designs. The '80s patterns remain intact, and older users will feel as though they've just transported back to sixth grade. But that's about where this trip down memory lane ends. On the inside, these are just average, dime-a-dozen tablet cases. And worst of all, they use magnetic flaps to stay closed. There's no velcro in sight, which strikes us as nothing short of a travesty. The 2014 "Trapper Keeper" comes in two sizes: a large version will hold tablets up to 10 inches and |
destruction in mountain biking is the “palm slide”. When a rider sprawls out over the bars the heels of their hands push in to the dirt and that area of gloves can often become ragged or torn. To counter this the designers used a good sized patch of Kevlar in that area. The problem with Kevlar is that it tends to be thick, tough material that would not transmit the feel of the handlebars to the rider very well. With that in mind the material on the Ambush LW switches to a softer synthetic leather about halfway up your palm. It is still incredibly durable but you can feel your grips quite well through the more pliable material.
A closer look at the d3o pads across the knuckles and along the outer fingers.
The gloves also feature a large terrycloth thumb panel. I am huge fan of that for comfortably wiping sweat or grit off your face mid-ride. The thumb, index and middle fingers of the glove all feature a slighting raised ribbed pattern to help you keep a grip on things. Now be honest, you didn’t think you would be reading the words “slighting raised ribbed pattern” in a glove review now did you? But there it is and works like a charm to help you keep the solid hold on your brake levers in all kinds of wet and nasty conditions.
I’ve been using these gloves for about four months now and they continue to deliver. They fit well, have held up through some decent wrecks and still look great. They are easy to wash and provide that little extra bit of protection without limiting mobility or rubbing your knuckles raw. While I don’t have any “If I didn’t have d3o I would have broken my knuckles” stories, I can certainly say that pads have saved my hands from some unnecessary additional harm.
The strap tabs have been thinned out on subsequent production models. they were a bith thick and stiff on this sample pair.
As for the cons, the gloves can be a bit warm for hot weather conditions and the rubber straps/tabs that close the wrist opening are pretty thick on my samples. Race Face assures me that future iterations will have thinner tabs to promote greater flexibility and easier closure. Overall this a solid pair of gloves that should merit serious consideration from riders looking to up the protection they provide their hands while not limiting dexterity in any meaningful way.
MSRP for the Ambush LW glove is $70 CAD
Schwalbe Muddy Mary Tires
When looking for new pair of shoes for the Thunder Smurf project I came across some early photos of the Muddy Marry DH tires from Schwalbe and decided they might just fit the bill. I knew I would be running the bike at Whistler, Sun Peaks and on local shuttle trails so I need a tire that could handle a diverse range of conditions.
I settled on the Muddy Mary 2.5 for the front and the 2.35 for the back, both with the downhill double casing and wire beads. Neither tire is a lightweight with the front weighing a hefty 1444 grams (actual weight on my scale, claimed weight is 1270) while the rear tipped the scale at 1199 grams (claimed weight: 1150).
A detailed look at the front tire tread from Schawble’s Muddy Mary DH tire. It is an aggressive profile that offers up a lot of traction.
As the tires were headed for my big bike, weight wasn’t the primary concern… durability and traction were. In their defense the tires have a tall profile and an impressive volume. The front 2.5 barely fit under the brake arch of my older Marzocchi Super T Pro and often gets mistaken for a 2.7 by other riders. In my search for traction I decided to try Schawlbe’s “Glooey Gooey” competition compound on the front and their mixed Triple compound in the rear.
The rear tire’s center knobs took a beating surfing through broken shale at BC bike parks. The corner knobs are holding stready though.
Both tires stick to the trail amazingly well. Riding the steeps at Sun Peaks has never been easier for me than it is on these tires. Tons of traction made most of those runs much less sphincter-tightening than usual. The rubber has noticeably sticky feel and rebounds very slowly when you press down on it. While you might think this gives the tires a “dead’ feel I have not found that to be the case. They roll very well and just provide massive amounts of traction doing it. The larger volume of the tries also helps to insulate the bike from impacts (depending on the pressure you run) and the durability has been top notch. The Snakeskin protected sidewalls haven’t yielded to rocks or thorns yet and don’t show any visible signs of letting up any time soon.
The Muddy Mary features Schwalbe’s “Snakeskin” sidewall protection. Despite running low pressures and maching through more than few rocky sections, no flats to report yet.
So what’s the catch? Well besides the obvious answer of weight, they aren’t cheap at over $80 a piece. The rear is showing some significant wear after runs down the sharp shale at both Sun Peaks and Whistler, but that is to be expected. The front is holding up quite well and continues to provide nearly unparalleled traction. Weighing the pros and cons of these tires I think they are an excellent choice for anyone looking for a very durable platform that sports a little extra grab. If you are a on a tight budget (for dollars or grams) you might look elsewhere, but for everyone else they are an excellent choice.
The Muddy Mary is available in both Freeride (single casing, folding bead) and DH (double casing, wire bead) versions. MSRP for the Muddy Mary DH tire is $83.55 in both the U.S. and Canada.
Diverse Suspension Products Ti Rear Spring
If you have a coil sprung rear shock and you are looking to spice up your ride, few things can make you drool faster than an aftermarket titanium spring. They provide solid feel and performance, weigh less than the stock spring and let’s face it; they just flat out look cool too. So when I needed a heavier rate spring than came stock on my RockShox Vivid 5.1 shock I went looking for the mythical Ti upgrade. The immediate problem i ran in to was that most manufacturers did not make springs to fit the Vivid. It has a larger internal diameter (1.5 inches) than its competitors do so the the same spring that work for the other brands won’t fit on the Vivid.
Then a local suspension designer turned m on the Diverse Suspension Products (DSP) located in California. They did have a titanium version of Vivid spring in the weight I needed. A quick hit to the credit card and the spring arrived on my doorstep within days. Installation is a snap assuming you get all your measurements correct before you order. Simply screw off the retaining ring and swap out the new spring for the stock one. Re-tension the retaining ring and ta-dah, instant upgrade.
It just makes you all warm and fuzzy inside, doesn’t it? There is just something about the look of a Ti spring on abike that makes riders weak in the knees. Oh yeah, they work really well too.
In my case the upgrade was a no-brainer. I needed a different spring anyway and had always wanted to try Ti. The weight savings is substantial but not staggering. The stock spring on the Vivid weighed in at 408 grams and the DSP replacement came in at 273 grams (a savings of 135 grams or right around 0.3 pounds). If you are simply trying to save weight, there are certainly cheaper upgrades that will give you a greater reduction in total grams. I will wager that few of them will attract as many glances from other riders.
Looks aside, the spring performs beautifully. It provides a very smooth and controlled ride when paired with the Vivid internals. It is tough o say whether the bike sucks up bumps any better as the previous spring had the bike slightly undersprung, therefore feeling quite soft.
Diverse got their start in the motocross business so they have a lot of suspension experience to bring to their mountain bike products. They like working with titanium for springs not only because of its light weight but also because it has a lower ‘torsional modulous” than steel. Translation? It’s “springier” than steel. This allows Ti springs to be designed with a slightly larger diameter spring diameter but less coils. The titanium version will deliver the the same spring rate as its steel counterpart, albeit with less unsprung weight so the suspension responds to smaller impacts more quickly. the other notable plus is extended fatigue life. Titanium springs can last anywhere from two to six times longer than stock steel ones. If you are rider who puts a massive amounts of cycles on your suspension (Whistler Season Pass holders listen up) titanium might be worth it from that standpoint alone.
So is titanium in your future? It all depends on the value you assign to it. If you are a no-holds-barred racer or gear freak, you simply have to have one. If you a rider who values performance and durability because you use your bike a great deal, you might consider it on those grounds. If you are an average weekend warrior it will probably be pretty hard to convince yourself the benefits are worth the expense. The bottom line is they work well and look great doing it. The decision about how much value they provide is purely personal preference.
DSP’s Ti spings range in price depending on the size and application. All of them come with a lifetime warranty. My 400 pound, 2.75 inch stroke spring for the Vivid ran $239.95 U.S. For more information about pricing and availability, or to buy direct, check their website.
Like what you see? Are you Ti convert or a d3o cynic? Speak your piece on the boardsNov. 13 (UPI) -- A Florida man is fighting his condo association for the right to keep his pet, a squirrel he registered as an emotional support animal.
Ryan Boylan, who lives at Island Walk Condominiums in Clearwater Beach, said he rescued Brutis the squirrel last year in the aftermath of Hurricane Matthew.
Boylan said he found the squirrel trapped under someone's car.
"Ever since then I mean, oh my god, I can't imagine not being around her," Boylan told WFLA-TV.
Brutis came to property management's attention in April when she was chased up a tree on the property by a dog.
Boylan's condo association sent him a notice last month telling him to get rid of the squirrel or find a new place to live.
"She's just like an inside cat. She just walks around and hides pecans and hazelnuts which are her two favorites," Boylan told WFTS-TV.
Boylan registered Brutis as an emotional support animal at website RegisterMyServiceAnimal.com after obtaining a note from his doctor in July.
The doctor's note says Boylan suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from a car accident.
The condo association says Boylan failed to submit paperwork stating Brutis is an emotional support animal until the summer. The association also says Boylan never sought or received approval from the group before moving into the building.
The Office of Human Rights, which was contacted by Boylan, sent a letter to the association stating that emotional support animals are protected under the Fair Housing Act.Link and Aloy, the heroes of 2017’s two biggest and best open-world action-adventure games thus far, are both born of the world to save the world. In Breath of the Wild, Link emerges into the vastness of Hyrule from a mysterious structure, awakening from a century-long slumber during which he slowly recovered from wounds sustained in a conflict he no longer remembers. A significant part of his quest to save Hyrule involves remembering who he is, who he cares about, and what he’s fighting for. Aloy, the hero of Horizon Zero Dawn, emerges as an infant from a mysterious mountain compound. Like Link, she, too, knows not who she truly is or where she comes from, and on her journey, she investigates the purpose for which she was placed into the world.
If you were to ask me which of these games is better, I would emphatically insist that the new Zelda towers above its rival. Despite vanquishing the evil of Ganon some time ago, I continue to be drawn back to Hyrule, the most captivating realm a game has laid out for me in ages. In fact, freed now from my initial impulse to see the main quest through to its conclusion, my love for the game has only deepened. It’s extraordinary, the way this game treats your time in its world as inherently meaningful, largely doing away with the objective markers and skill upgrade systems that make so many adventure games feel much less adventurous, more controlled and transactional.
I spend hours roaming Hyrule, roaming the outer edges of its deserts and climbing its cloud-shrouded mountain peaks. So solid and substantial is this realm that I feel the earth under Link’s feet, and a connection to his pilgrimage to remember what he’s living for. Breath of the Wild’s gameplay seems to say that even if we’re alone, our lives, our actions can have meaning, as long as there is love in us, as long as we’re looking for, or fighting for, something larger than ourselves. In Breath I feel as if it is Hyrule that comes first, not Link, not the player. I make offerings to the world, leaving apples for the statues of spirits whose significance I’ve never known, and when dragons soar through the air above me in all their majestic grace, I regard with respect and awe how they have no regard for me whatsoever.
There was rarely such wonder in Horizon Zero Dawn’s world. Like so many game worlds, it bends over backwards to accommodate, guide and reward you. Where Breath of the Wild’s Hyrule is filled with surprising potential interactions of enemies and elements for you to discover, Horizon Zero Dawn denies you that pleasure. Its interactions are straightforward, predictable and explicitly laid out for you: shoot this part of that robotic dinosaur with this particular kind of arrow to do extra damage.
The beauty of its world cannot be denied, and when I saw a tallneck majestically marching atop a rocky ridge in the distance, I felt for a moment like one small person in a vast and living land, which is exactly how I want a game like this to make me feel. But Horizon undercuts the potential strength of its world at nearly every opportunity, marking spots all over its map where objectives and collectibles are located, indicating circles within which whatever it is Aloy needs in order to complete her immediate errand can be found. It’s an approach that drives us toward our next goal with laser focus, as if just being in the world, exploring it on our own and seeing what’s over the next ridge can’t be a worthy goal in and of itself.
It’s the difference between games that fully trust their worlds and games that don’t. Breath of the Wild is brilliant in this regard. Yes, a few quests have waypoints you can turn on, but they only help you find who or what you’re looking for in a small handful of cases. You must find for yourself Link’s memories of his past, and the shrines scattered around Hyrule are indicated only by their proximity, not their location, leaving you to hunt them down. It’s an approach that prevents you from simply marking your destination on the map and making a beeline for it. It requires you to contend with the world in all its beauty and frustration, and the game is better for it.
Being present in the world, feeling its mountainsides under your hands and its grassy hills under your feet, fosters an intimacy with Hyrule, and along with it, a sense of why Hyrule is worth fighting for. The relationships, however, get short shrift, even for a Zelda game. Sure, Zelda herself is present — present most noticeably in her conspicuous absence, and in Link’s memories — but the central relationship in the game is the one between you and the land itself, and it’s essential that players feel that connection for the quest to have any real meaning.
It’s Link whose limitations ultimately hold Breath of the Wild back the most.
Breath of the Wild astounds in its ability to put its world first, saying, “Here you are. How you tackle what lies ahead is almost entirely up to you.” It’s a design philosophy whose success is borne out by the fact that speedrunners can race through the game’s main quest in under 40 minutes while players like me can continue to find our time with it meaningful after over 100 hours, long after that main quest is complete. And really, it was essential that Breath of the Wild breathe new life into the franchise, because after the collective structural sameness of A Link to the Past, Ocarina of Time, The Wind Waker, Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword, the makings of a Zelda game had become calcified, the series’ adventurous heart crusted over by formulaic predictability and gatekeeping structures that offered anything but the sense of thrilling, daunting freedom I’d felt when I first played The Legend of Zelda in 1986.
But for all of Nintendo’s wonderful willingness to shatter the gameplay conventions of Zelda with a sledgehammer and remake the series anew, the company exhibits a steadfast unwillingness to significantly alter the details of the legend itself, an unwillingness that’s as frustrating as the newly liberated, reinvigorated gameplay is exhilarating. There’s always a princess in need of aid. There’s always an unspeakable evil. There’s always a male hero, born to save the land and the princess, too.
Some people respond to criticisms of Breath of the Wild‘s Zelda by pointing out that here, she holds Ganon off for 100 years. OK, but is the game actually concerned with her act of heroism? Does it honor her or celebrate her? No. Her tremendous struggle is minimized by the game, taking place offscreen, out of sight and, for most players, out of mind. She exists not to be recognized, but to recognize. Where so much of the game says that this is really about Hyrule itself, Zelda herself exists to say that this is, in the end, all about you.
The game cannot deign to honor her bravery, her sacrifice, her victory. She’s not worth it. She doesn’t get so much as an apology from the spirit of her father for all his browbeating of her before the war. His rebukes of her hang in the air forever, as if to say that maybe he was right. Maybe, if only she hadn’t been such a fuckup, if only she’d shouldered the burdens of her destiny the way he’d demanded of her, none of this would have happened.
But it’s Link whose limitations ultimately hold Breath of the Wild back the most. Forever a blank slate character, he remains one here, speaking to other characters but his voice unheard. In previous Zelda games, this has mostly worked well, but Breath of the Wild demands more of him, and he fails to give it. The game asks us to believe in the depth of the connection between Link and Zelda, one that has endured for over a hundred years. But then, when they’re finally reunited and standing face to face, she says to him, “May I ask, do you really remember me?”
He looks at her and says nothing. Even now, their battle over, Ganon finally vanquished, he can give her nothing. How daring, how powerful, how meaningful might it have been if at long last, Link became not just a real hero, but a real human being? What if he finally broke his silence and we heard him speak words of his own, giving Zelda the human response she asked for and deserved? What if his humanity was part of what he had discovered on his pilgrimage across Hyrule in search of his memories?
If his voice had rung out clear and true and he’d replied, “Oh Zelda, I’ve missed you,” I might have cried, to see this character I’ve known and inhabited for so long finally demonstrate a capacity for connection. But he doesn’t. It seems that Nintendo has decided that he can’t. He just stands there in creepy, awkward silence, and the moment the entire game has been building up to collapses, utterly deflated by Link’s inability to simply be a person.
Perhaps Link could learn a thing or two from Horizon Zero Dawn’s Aloy. Where he is silent and inscrutable, she is wonderfully expressive. Voiced by the great Ashly Burch, Aloy, like Link, is a bow-wielding hero shouldered with the burden of saving her world, but unlike Link, she is by turns assertive, proud, uncertain, insecure, grieving, and openhearted. She is warm and compassionate, principled and determined.
For all of that, Aloy is hardly a revolution. She’s another spunky, red-headed, conventionally attractive white female hero. She exists in a manufactured world that has its share of unfortunate creative decisions layered into it, not the least of which being that Aloy’s people, the Nora tribe, exhibit signifiers we associate with Native American culture as a kind of visual shorthand for “primitive.” But there is also so much about Horizon that elevates Aloy. It’s a kind of inverse Breath of the Wild. Where that game is mechanically daring yet narratively regressive, this one is mechanically predictable but narratively intriguing.
I love that Horizon is filled with the faces and voices of women, many of them women of color. As it weaves together its two stories — the story of Aloy’s life in the far future and the story of how our own culture collapses in the mid-21st century — I was struck by the reality that women, as a group, are almost never as prominent and numerous in the narratives of games as they are here. Among the Nora, there are the matriarchs, wise, experienced, and opinionated, debating what is best for the future of their people, as well as Sona, the war-chief, and her daughter Vala. When you venture out into the wider world you encounter women everywhere, as leaders and fighters, as lovers and mourners. My favorite of these characters is the machinist and inventor Petra Forgewoman. Where the queer-coded characters in Breath of the Wild are broad, insulting caricatures, Petra’s warm, low-key flirtatiousness with Aloy feels entirely human and natural.
Some of these women live and some of them die, but because they exist in such numbers, none of them feel singled out for death because of their gender. Each loss has meaning, as it should, but Horizon doesn’t sensationalize or exploit the deaths of any of its female characters simply to fuel its hero’s story arc. It shouldn’t be noteworthy or significant today to have a game world in which women make up a significant percentage of key characters, and in which those women don’t just exist for or in relation to male characters, but in fact, it still is.
Aloy must work with flesh-and-blood people to prevent a catastrophe that immediately threatens her world, but equally important to Zero Dawn’s narrative is her time with the ghosts of humanity’s past. Here, too, in the holographic memory banks of Project Zero Dawn, humanity’s last-ditch effort to preserve itself thousands of years ago, women are essential. Aloy’s genetic forebear, Dr. Elisabet Sobeck, heads up Zero Dawn, and it only makes sense that, in enlisting the greatest minds in the world to assist with the operation, she would have recruited women as well as men. These “alphas” of Project Zero Dawn, including cultural anthropologist Samina Ebadji and robotics expert Margo Shen, are brilliant women who matter not because of their objectified bodies or their availability as romantic partners, but because of their knowledge and their expertise.
Unfortunately, the tale of Project Zero Dawn’s desperate creation and its terrible final moments is clumsily told, sometimes awkwardly burdening you with numerous audio logs, as if the game expects you to stop what you’re doing and just stand around for minutes listening to them. Horizon doesn’t care enough to tell this story well. It’s implemented so poorly at times that it feels as if the game is practically begging you to brush aside most of what you might find in Aloy’s exploration of the past. And it’s a shame, because what Aloy uncovers in these ruined facilities is fascinating. These characters were written with care, and even though they now exist only as ancient holograms and voice recordings, the personalities of Sobeck, Ebadji and Shen shine across the centuries that separate their lives from Aloy’s.
What surprised and impressed me most about Horizon was its humanity, its regard for its characters, women and men, in all their diversity. When you come across a AAA game like this, one that elevates its characters, the living as well as the long-dead, and avoids with aplomb many of the conventional narrative traps that so many games fall into, you realize that you’re not at all wrong to want and to expect more from games, even when those games are mechanically focused on fighting robotic dinosaurs.
It’s Aloy at the center of Horizon, with all her own vibrant, expressive humanity, who lends the game its compassion and its concern. Where Link and, by extension, Breath of the Wild itself silently regard Zelda’s humanity with something bordering on coldness, Aloy is there with people, present in the moment with them. She reacts, sharing a look, a joke, a kind word, a quiet moment. She isn’t the chosen one, the be-all, end-all of video game protagonists who will singlehandedly save gaming forever, because that’s not how representation works. But she definitely helps, and I’m glad she’s here, because if Breath of the Wild fills me with hope and excitement for the worlds that action-adventure games may create in years to come, then Horizon Zero Dawn makes me a little more optimistic about who might populate those worlds, and the heroes who may rise to save them.Protestors hold up signs outside the Indiana House chambers at the Statehouse in Indianapolis, Wednesday, Feb. 23, 2011. Seats emptied by Democrats who have left the chamber in protest are reflected in the window. AP Photo/AJ Mast
Republican lawmakers in Indiana have given up on a controversial anti-union bill that drove Democratic legislators out of the state, but Democrats want to see other controversial bills dropped before they return, the Indianapolis Star reports.
Like Wisconsin Democrats before them, Indiana Democrats yesterday fled their state to stall a vote on a state bill that would weaken unions. But while the legislative battle rages on in Wisconsin, the Indiana labor measure known as the "right to work" bill is now effectively dead. Republicans in the state say they will move the issue to a legislative committee for review later in the year, according to the Star.
The bill in question would have prohibited union membership or fees from being a condition of employment.
Even though the bill is dead, Democrats say they'll stay out of state -- specifically, in a hotel in Urbana, Illinois -- until Republican House Speaker Brian Bosma and Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels drop 10 other bills they oppose, all relating to either labor or education. The Democrats are primarily opposed to a measure for private school vouchers, the Star reports.
Republicans say they aren't dropping those measures, however. Yesterday, Daniels conceded that Republicans should set aside the controversial "right to work bill," in spite of his support for it. Today, however, the governor told the Star that the bill to create education vouchers is "my priority."
Daniels has been taken to task by conservative pundits for his conciliatory language on the "right to work" bill.
Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post today criticized the governor for giving up on the issue without getting anything in return.
"That's bad bargaining, and rightly or wrongly will be taken as a sign of weakness by the Democrats," she wrote. "Another smart, very aggressive governor told me a short time ago, 'All of life is a negotiation. You have to convince the other guy you are more serious than he is.' Daniels, I would argue, did just the opposite."
Erick Erickson of the conservative blog Red State wrote that Daniels "decided he wanted a truce on fiscal issues just like he wants on social issues."
Erickson notes that Daniels in fact ended collective bargaining for public sector unions (the subject of debate in Wisconsin) by executive order when he entered the governor's office. However, he says that's not the point.
"The point is that with wind at Scott Walker's back in Wisconsin and Chris Christie's back in New Jersey to finally take on unions, Indiana is the next battleground for taking the fight to the unions," he wrote.Dear Mona,
In what percentage of relationships does the woman make more money than the man? And does this increase the probability of a divorce?
Joseph, 24, New Mexico
Dear Joseph,
In 38 percent of heterosexual American marriages, the woman outearns her husband. Although that’s a long way off from an even 50 percent, it’s a significant improvement on what the numbers looked like in 1987, when less than a quarter of women were the primary breadwinners in their families.
But these numbers, which come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, are sort of confusing — a lot of those women are earning more because they’re the only member of the marriage who is earning anything at all. When the BLS looked instead at marriages where both partners are in paid work, it found that only 29 percent of women earn more than their husbands.
As with most statistics though, this data neglects America’s cohabiting couples (6.5 million of them opposite-sex and an estimated 0.7 million of them same-sex) and couples who aren’t living together. Instead, the BLS focuses only on married-couple families, of which there were 36 million in 2012, the latest year of available data. But maybe that’s exactly the sort of American household you’re interested in, seeing as you also raised the question of divorce. There, too, I have some statistics.
In 2013, the University of Chicago Booth School of Business published a paper that looked at 4,000 U.S. married couples who responded to the National Survey of Families and Households. It found that when the wife was the higher earner, the chances that the couple would report being in a “happy” marriage fell by 6 percentage points. Couples in which the wife earned more were also 6 percentage points more likely to have discussed separating in the past year.
Trying to understand the causal link between female breadwinners and divorce, the authors looked at housework and child care. On average, women do more than men (that’s well known), but the researchers found that the housework gap got even larger when the woman was the primary earner. They think this finding, which is based on eight years’ worth data from the American Time Use Survey, “suggests that a ‘threatening’ wife takes on a greater share of housework so as to assuage the husband’s unease with the situation.” Ultimately though, that “second shift” becomes too tiring for the woman and places additional strain on the marriage.
There are other ways in which an income gap can lead to marital stress. Christin Munsch, then a doctoral candidate at Cornell University, analyzed data on 18- to 28-year-old couples (some were married and some were cohabiting) from the U.S. National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. She found that the more that a man is financially dependent on his female partner, the more likely he is to cheat on her. Men who are entirely dependent on their girlfriends or wives are five times more likely to cheat than men who earn the same amount as their partners. In contrast though, the more financially dependent a woman is on her male partner, the less likely she is to cheat. The trend was clear, despite that the overall numbers were low — 3.8 percent of men and 1.4 percent of women admitted to cheating on their partners in a given year between 2002 and 2007.
Women reading this may wonder whether the only men suitable for marriage are those who earn a lot more. But the research from Cornell found that men who made significantly more than their female partners were also more likely to cheat. The author noted the irony:
At one end of the spectrum, making less money than a female partner may threaten men’s gender identity by calling into question the traditional notion of men as breadwinners. At the other end of the spectrum, men who make a lot more money than their partners may be in jobs that offer more opportunities for cheating like long work hours, travel, and higher incomes that make cheating easier to conceal.
So, Joseph, if you are among the 38 percent of married couples in which the wife earns more and you’re stressed about the situation, I have to say (with the utmost respect) get over it. Your marriage depends on you not having a fragile ego.
Hope the numbers help,
Mona
Have a question you would like answered here? Send it to @MonaChalabi or dearmona@fivethirtyeight.com.7 years ago
Education Secretary Arne Duncan, pictured here in a February file photo during a visit to a D.C. charter school with the first couple, said Sunday it would be'silly' for parents to keep their kids home from school on Tuesday when the president is set to address the nation's schoolchildren.
(Photo Credit: Getty Images/File)
(CNN) - Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said Sunday that parents threatening to keep their children home Tuesday to avoid President Barack Obama's planned nationwide speech to school students were being "silly."
Appearing on the CBS program "Face the Nation," Duncan said the 18-minute speech would be posted Monday on the White House Web site so people can read it before its scheduled Internet broadcast to schoolchildren on Tuesday.
Duncan emphasized it is up to school officials whether to include the speech in the day's activities, and that the message of the speech was to encourage children to finish school.
"That's just silly," he said of anyone planning to have their kids stay home because of the speech. "They can go to school. They can not watch."
The speech is about "the president challenging young people," Duncan said in response to protests by conservatives that it would be used to force the president's political agenda on students.
Last week, conservative parents and some Republicans reacted harshly to news of the speech.
"Thinking about my kids in school having to listen to that just really upsets me," suburban Colorado mother Shanneen Barron told CNN Denver affiliate KMGH. "I'm an American. They are Americans, and I don't feel that's OK. I feel very scared to be in this country with our leadership right now."
Some school administrators have decided to show the president's speech, while others will not.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a possible contender for the GOP's 2012 presidential nomination, said Sunday that Obama's speech would disrupt an already-hectic first day of school for many students.
"I think there's concerns about the disruption," he said on CNN's "State of the Union," calling the scheduling of the speech a "little ham-fisted" by the White House. "There is also concerns about is this going to be done in an appropriate manner. I trust and hope that the White House will have a content that is not political and they're not using the public school infrastructure for that purpose."
Duncan, however, noted Obama's speech is not unprecedented. President George H.W. Bush delivered a nationally televised speech to students from a Washington D.C., school in the fall of 1991, encouraging them to say no to drugs and work hard.
Some of the controversy involved a proposed lesson plan created by the Education Department to accompany the address. An initial version of the plan recommended that students draft letters to themselves discussing "what they can do to help the president."
The letters "would be collected and redistributed at an appropriate later date by the teacher to make students accountable to their goals," the plan stated.
After pressure from conservatives, the White House distributed a revised version encouraging students to write letters about how they can "achieve their short-term and long-term education goals."
Duncan said Sunday that the passage was poorly worded.
At least one conservative backed the idea for a presidential speech to students.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told "FOX News Sunday" that Obama's speech is a good idea if the message is a positive one about completing school. Gingrich said people would be able to see for themselves by reading it on the White House Web site on Monday.
"If that's what it is, then it is good to have the president of the United States say to young people across America, 'Stay in school, study, and do your homework,'" Gingrich said.
–CNN's Rebecca Sinderbrand contributed to this story.
Updated: 4:24 p.m.Share 0 SHARES
RTÉ have confirmed this morning that popular TV host Gay Byrne is to receive counselling following the airing of an episode of The Meaning of Life.
The show’s most recent episode saw guest Stephen Fry undermine the premise of several questions posed by Byrne, answering them with characteristic charm, wit and eloquence. While the interview was largely convivial in nature, Byrne’s concept of religion and faith was challenged by someone who doesn’t ‘believe in that shite’.
“He felt a little faint after all that ‘what’s the craic with dead children God, huh?’ nonsense from Fry, so we let him have a lie down,” explained a spokesman for RTÉ, “but we can confirm he’s booked in for intensive counselling. Six months should do it”.
Byrne has famously become more questioning of his faith in recent years with The Meaning of Life providing the perfect outlet for the experienced host.
“Gay and the show are a perfect fit. He is so interested in questioning religion that Gay and ourselves ensure we only get on guests who don’t question God’s existence much at all, it’s just easier that way,” added the spokesman.
The spokesman confirmed booking Fry as a guest was a rare oversight.
The interview reached its contentious peak as Fry seemingly refused to accept the omnipotent presence of Gay Byrne, with Fry’s remarks even suggesting an incurious attitude to the Son, Father and Holy Ghost of Irish television.
Fry is thought to be the only guest on The Meaning of Life to outright reject the didactic and condescending teachings found in the Old Testament of the RTÉ TV presenters manual.Pop quiz, hotshot. A federal judge issues an order to show cause that you should be “sanctioned for repeated failure to prosecute cases” and “barred from practicing in this District.” What do you do? What do you do?
The correct answer begins with “responding,” obviously. And when you’re in trouble over “failure to prosecute,” maybe that should light a fire under you to respond thoroughly and on time.
Yeah… this guy didn’t. Instead he provided a detailed, if legally irrelevant, explanation of how he was just too busy to worry about responding on time. Think of this as “Prelude to a Benchslap”…
Two weeks ago, Judge Ronald Leighton of the Western District of Washington issued an order |
:38 IST
Venus Williams walks the ramp
Tennis star Venus Williams dominates centre courts with incredible outfits from her own brand,EleVen.
Sometimes she sports a floral dress and matches it up with purple hair, or raises a few eyebrows when she wears a skimpy, corset-like outfit.
The American, who is in Bengaluru for Champions Tennis League, chose the elegant sari, designed by Ritu Kumar, and insisted on walking the ramp to a Bollywood number.
Venus sported a vibrant yellow sari in georgette, with gold thread embroidery on the border.
The simplicity of the sari was enhanced by a red embroidered blouse.
"It is of so much interest to global fashion to see how the sari is crossing all sartorial barriers and is being worn by celebrities across the world.
"Venus chose a sari which was flattering to her skin tone. The pioneer women from the sports world add a lot of glamour to the fusion of Indian and international sensibilities," said designer Kumar said.Civil society shares those concerns and strongly opposes the legislation, with more than 130,000 people and 200 human rights organizations signing petitions against it. Yet Mexico’s lower house passed the bill after minimal debate last Thursday and the Senate could approve it this week.
Unsure how to stop the killing, Mexico’s government is returning to a well-worn strategy: brute force. The government is poised to pass a bill that would put even more power behind its armed forces in their war against organized crime, but security experts aren’t convinced it’ll change the country’s bloody course, and fear that the formal militarization of Mexico’s streets will only invite more bloodshed, illegal surveillance, and human rights abuses.
When the final body counts are tallied, 2017 will almost certainly go down as the most violent year in Mexico’s modern history, after registering 23,698 homicides from January through October.
Armed with assault rifles, he and a companion resisted fiercely, killing one marine before images of their own lifeless bodies were plastered across social media. They were the latest casualties in the seemingly endless drug war that claimed more lives than the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan last year.
“Don Chelo,” a key figure in Mexico’s powerful Jalisco New Generation Cartel, had been out of prison only 10 days when marines raided his ranch on the outskirts of Guadalajara early Monday morning.
Read more
“Don Chelo,” a key figure in Mexico’s powerful Jalisco New Generation Cartel, had been out of prison only 10 days when marines raided his ranch on the outskirts of Guadalajara early Monday morning.
Armed with assault rifles, he and a companion resisted fiercely, killing one marine before images of their own lifeless bodies were plastered across social media. They were the latest casualties in the seemingly endless drug war that claimed more lives than the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan last year.
When the final body counts are tallied, 2017 will almost certainly go down as the most violent year in Mexico’s modern history, after registering 23,698 homicides from January through October.
Unsure how to stop the killing, Mexico’s government is returning to a well-worn strategy: brute force. The government is poised to pass a bill that would put even more power behind its armed forces in their war against organized crime, but security experts aren’t convinced it’ll change the country’s bloody course, and fear that the formal militarization of Mexico’s streets will only invite more bloodshed, illegal surveillance, and human rights abuses.
Civil society shares those concerns and strongly opposes the legislation, with more than 130,000 people and 200 human rights organizations signing petitions against it. Yet Mexico’s lower house passed the bill after minimal debate last Thursday and the Senate could approve it this week.
The law employs vague language that effectively grants the president to replace ineffective police forces with soldiers for renewable one-year periods, without making public any information on their deployments. Further, it enables soldiers to gather intelligence and shut down “non-peaceful” demonstrations.
“There’ll be no accountability or transparency. All the problems we have now will continue and could even get worse.”
To its critics, the bill simply formalizes a strategy that has long been part of the problem: Mexico’s military-first approach to the drug war.
“This law legalizes what’s been happening for a long time. It removes any incentives for governors to fix their problems because they can just ask the president to send in federal forces,” said the security analyst Jorge Kawas.
“It does nothing to fix our broken police forces,” Kawas added. “There’ll be no accountability or transparency. All the problems we have now will continue and could even get worse.”
Activists hold a protest against a law that militarises crime fighting in the country outside the Senate in Mexico City, Mexico December 5, 2017. Placards read, "No to the Militarization in the Country."REUTERS/Carlos Jasso
R3D, Mexico’s Defense of Digital Rights Network, warned that the “vagueness” of the law also allows the armed forces to spy on civilians “without establishing any clear limits, democratic controls or accountability mechanisms.”
A military-first mentality
Mexico’s armed forces have been on the front line of the drug war ever since then-President Felipe Calderón deployed them in his native state of Michoacán in 2006. His successor Enrique Peña Nieto has maintained this strategy, which enjoys support from the U.S., despite its failure to bring about a reduction in the levels of violence.
More than 200,000 people have been killed and 33,000 have disappeared in the last 11 years, and October’s 2,764 murders made it the deadliest month since records began, two decades ago.
In an investigation released last month, the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) found that “the militarization of public security in Mexico has had at least three grave consequences: Violence has increased in the country while human rights violations persist, the urgency and pressure to pass reforms to strengthen the civilian police force has decreased, and accountability has been virtually nonexistent.”
WOLA and 10 other human rights groups warned last week that the law “would set a fundamentally negative precedent in Latin America.” They called on Mexico to “professionalize the civilian police and guarantee an independent and autonomous national prosecutor’s office capable of effectively investigating crimes and human rights violations.”
“You can’t substitute soldiers for police.”
Mexico leans on its armed forces in part because they’re generally considered less corruptible than its police, but the navy’s image was tainted on Friday when the national press reported that six marines recently kidnapped a businessman aboard an official navy pickup truck in Mexico City and demanded a $1 million ransom. The army has also been implicated in several high-profile massacres in recent years.
“It’s very obvious why the military don’t do police work, because in a confrontation they’re trained to eliminate enemies, not to arrest criminals,” said Catalina Pérez Correa, a law professor and public security expert. “You can’t substitute soldiers for police.”
Pérez also warned that the proposed legislation “gives a lot of power to the president, with very few checks and balances. If there are protests after the upcoming elections, this law could justify the president in deploying the army to control the demonstrations.”
A fast-approaching presidential election
Security concerns are likely to play a major role in Mexico’s July 2018 presidential election.
The early front-runner, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, put forward his own controversial proposal on Saturday. Speaking in Guerrero, a state ravaged by drug-related violence, the veteran leftist candidate said he would consider an “amnesty” for cartel leaders, with the backing of their victims.
López Obrador, a frequent critic of Donald Trump, said he would also “demand that the U.S. government carry out campaigns to reduce consumption” of illegal narcotics.
The proposed amnesty was greeted with skepticism in the Mexican press.
“This requires a lot of work in the long term, but our politicians aren’t prepared to do that because it won’t help them in the next elections.”
“To negotiate with criminals is to pact with the devil,” the security analyst Alejandro Hope wrote on Monday, noting that any pact with the cartels would be unstable, difficult to implement, and potentially counterproductive.
“There’s no way that an amnesty would guarantee peace,” added the columnist Héctor de Mauleón. “It would just be a way of preventing hundreds of thousands of Mexicans from receiving justice.”
Lamenting the lack of viable proposals from Mexico’s politicians, Pérez insisted that there’s no simple solution to the nation’s problems.
“The police and justice systems need reforming. We need a security model based on civic participation instead of bullets,” she said. “This requires a lot of work in the long term, but our politicians aren’t prepared to do that because it won’t help them in the next elections.”
________
Duncan Tucker is a freelance journalist based in MexicoAdvertisement
Are you confused by the thousands of different extensions in the Chrome Web Store? Do you find it difficult to distinguish the best apps from the time wasters? We’re here to help.
In this article, you’ll find our curated list of the best extensions for Google Chrome. They include suggestions from both our readers and our writers.
Make sure you leave your own tips and suggestions in the comments; we’ll consider them next time we update the page.
Quick Links: Privacy and Security | News and Weather | Entertainment | Productivity | Shopping | Social | Tab Management and Bookmarking
Last updated: June 8, 2017
Privacy and Security
The first step to enjoying yourself online is making sure you’re safe. Install these privacy and security extensions to protect yourself 24/7.
Do you share your computer with another user? Are you paranoid about sites tracking you and leaving cookies on your system?
Click&Clean lets you delete URLs, clear caches, remove cookies, and wipe your download and/or browsing history, all through a single button.
GetHoneyBadger [No Longer Available]
Heartbleed. Yahoo hacks. Credit card theft. There are so many online dangers you need to be aware of.
GetHoneyBadger will check stats and information of any site you visit. It will give you an insight into whether a site is suspicious by revealing which technologies the site is using.
This is a crowd-sourced tool that rates websites based on a site’s trustworthiness, vendor reliability, privacy, and child safety — helping you browse safely Browse Safely In Chrome With Web Of Trust Browse Safely In Chrome With Web Of Trust Web of Trust, or short WOT, is a community-driven service that can help you figure out which websites to trust. WOT is available as add-on for Chrome and other browsers. It indicates website and URL... Read More. At its core, it lets you avoid sites that are known to be harmful, but like all crowd-sourced software, it should be used with discretion Web Of Discretion: When Not To Trust Web Of Trust Web Of Discretion: When Not To Trust Web Of Trust Web of Trust scores a website based on criteria like trustworthiness, reliability, privacy, and safety. These scores aren't determined by Internet security experts. They're generated by normal people like you and I. Sounds like it... Read More.
Also known as ScriptNo, ScriptSafe is for advanced users only. It works in a similar way to Ghostery, but it much less exclusive. It means you’ll be alerted to almost every script on a website, and disabling them all will make lots of sites fail to load.
On the flipside, it’s easy-to-use interface will guide you, making sure you only load the scripts that are needed for the content you want to see.
This extension encrypts your web usage to HTTPS Encrypt Your Web Browsing With HTTPS Everywhere [Firefox] Encrypt Your Web Browsing With HTTPS Everywhere [Firefox] HTTPS Everywhere is one of those extensions that only Firefox makes possible. Developed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, HTTPS Everywhere automatically redirects you to the encrypted version of websites. It works on Google, Wikipedia and... Read More whenever possible to help keep your private information safe. It is part of a collaboration between the Tor Project and the Electronic Frontier Foundation – so you know it’s both trustworthy and safe.
LastPass saves and encrypts your passwords The Complete Guide to Simplifying and Securing Your Life with LastPass and Xmarks The Complete Guide to Simplifying and Securing Your Life with LastPass and Xmarks While the cloud means you can easily access your important information wherever you are, it also means that you have a lot of passwords to keep track of. That's why LastPass was created. Read More on the LastPass web server, letting you log into websites with a single click.
Google’s RSS extension will automatically place an RSS subscription button in Chrome’s omnibox Easily Subscribe to Feeds With the RSS Subscription Extension [Chrome] Easily Subscribe to Feeds With the RSS Subscription Extension [Chrome] If you regularly use Google Reader or any other feed reader, you’ve probably noticed a missing feature in Google Chrome. Most browsers offer a built-in way to detect and subscribe to RSS feeds, but Chrome... Read More whenever you visit a page that supports RSS feeds. You can add any web-based feed reader to the extension by clicking Manage option in the drop-down box, though you’ll need the appropriate URL for your reader of choice.
The aptly named Weather extension will give you both the current and upcoming weather outlook 5 Fun Ways To Check The Weather Every Day 5 Fun Ways To Check The Weather Every Day Cool Websites and Apps looks at five tools that make the weather just a bit more fun. When you have to check the weather every day, why not make it entertaining! Read More for your location. You can customize it to show personalized locations and preferred units of measurement.
Also consider: Currently
Entertainment
Whether you want to supercharge YouTube, listen to music, or find engaging content to read, we’ve got you covered with these entertainment-based apps.
Spoiler Protection
If you spend a lot of time on sites like Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook, it’s extremely difficult to avoid spoilers for popular TV shows and films. It’s even worse for sports games; you never know when someone might innocently mention the results.
Spoiler Protection covers up any mention of the shows you don’t want to hear about. All the filters are fully customizable.
A video is a video, right? What could be improved?
As it turns out — loads. Magic Actions revolutionizes the YouTube experience by adding auto HD, ad blocking, a cinema mode, mouse wheel volume control, and a whole lot more.
Torch Music
Torch Music is a music discovery tool. You can share music with friends, work on collaborative playlists via Facebook, and see trending songs in your local area.
Best of all, it’s completely free to use and works on a wide variety of devices.
With a single click of the extension button, Turn Off the Lights makes an entire page – with the exception of the video – fade to dark. It’s a neat way to solve the problem of videos embedded on light backgrounds 4 Browser Extensions To Dim The Lights & Move The Focus To Any YouTube Video 4 Browser Extensions To Dim The Lights & Move The Focus To Any YouTube Video Read More.
If you own a Chromecast dongle Google Chromecast Review and Giveaway Google Chromecast Review and Giveaway We're giving away a Google Chromecast, so read through our review, then join the competition to win! Read More, this extension will let you send media, web pages, and other content directly from your computer to your television.
Ever need to hide websites when your boss enters the room Panic Button: Quickly Hide Time-Wasting Tabs From Your Boss [Chrome] Panic Button: Quickly Hide Time-Wasting Tabs From Your Boss [Chrome] Quickly hide the useless sites you're looking at so your boss doesn't know that you're slacking off. It's called Panic Button, it works in Google Chrome and it's designed for full time workers who actually... Read More? Or perhaps when you’re trying to buy an online gift for somebody when that very person sneaks up behind you? Panic Button is the answer.It lets you hide and save all of your opened tabs with a single click – the best part is that they’ll be password protected, so only you can resume the session.
It lets you hide and save all of your opened tabs with a single click – the best part is that they’ll be password protected, so only you can resume the session.
Sometimes you get to the end of an article you’re reading, or have exhausted all the new content on one of your favorite sites, and you wish there was more. This extension helps you discover web pages similar to the page you’re currently browsing – perfect for both research and casual browsing.
StumbleUpon [No Longer Available]
A click on the StumbleUpon extension will either take you to a random page or a specific page within your field of interests. You can define your interests to help the app find content you will enjoy.
Also consider: Clock Radio
Productivity
If you can drag yourself away from YouTube and Netflix, you might actually be able to get some work done. Use these extensions to take your productivity to the next level.
Hover Free [No Longer Available]
Hover Free will enlarge thumbnails whenever you scroll your mouse over them. It is compatible with more than 100 sites.
If you’ve been using Hover Zoom, delete it and install this extension instead; Hover Zoom is now infested with trackers and spyware.
The web has too many distractions. If you’re the type of person who struggles to focus, there are various techniques you can try How a Simple Pomodoro Timer Made My Life Better How a Simple Pomodoro Timer Made My Life Better The Pomodoro Technique is one of the simpler time management life hacks. Break through distractions with the help of 25-minute chunks and a timer. It could be a life-changing routine change if it suits you. Read More. Alternatively, you can take a more draconian approach and block any site which you procrastinate on.
Block Site lets you set up filters for times and days of the week. It offers a pre-populated list of common sites, but you can also add your own.
Image-Toolbar will display a toolbar over any image you find on the web. The toolbar will let you download the image to a location of your choosing. You can also program some of its other buttons, letting you perform tasks such as opening an image in a new tab and bringing an image to the front of a page.
Speed Dial 2 is a new tab replacement page. It gives you fast access to your most visited websites, your bookmarks, and your browsing history.
The app syncs across all your devices, so you will have the same experience regardless of how you’re accessing the web.
Send from Gmail is an official Google extension, but it’s frequently overlooked.
The extension places in icon in the top-right hand corner of Chrome which, when clicked, instantly opens a floating “New Email” window. It’s the best way to quickly send emails on-the-fly without disrupting your workflow.
If you rely heavily on Google’s suite of services, this handy extension will save you a lot of time. When clicked, it will show you a pop-up menu that gives you one-click access to all your most-used Google products Black Menu: Access All Google Services Within A Single Menu [Chrome] Black Menu: Access All Google Services Within A Single Menu [Chrome] Let’s face it – Google is awesome. If you’re like me, you use it for everything: emailing, scheduling, file storage, navigation, apps, your browser (Chrome), etc. But there’s one major problem – how do you... Read More.
Pushbullet brings your PC and phone closer together Pushbullet Puts Your Android And PC On The Same Wavelength Pushbullet Puts Your Android And PC On The Same Wavelength Find out how you can keep your Android perfectly synced with your PC -- push your phone's notifications to your desktop, share files, and much more! Read More. It lets you receive alerts from your Android or iPhone directly in your browser and provides a way to easily share media and other content. You can mute unimportant apps and can also respond directly from your computer for certain apps.
Journey has one simple goal — to let you log your life 20+ Fun Ways to Start a Lifelog in 2016 20+ Fun Ways to Start a Lifelog in 2016 There are more ways than ever to start lifelogging in 2016, so we take a look at some of the best apps, services, and gadgets that can help you. Read More with diary entries. It comes with a calendar, photo and atlas view that present all your entries in a beautiful and easy-to-digest format. It syncs with Android and the web app.
Google’s official Drive shortcut means you can seamless add new content to your Google Drive account How To Use Google Drive To Capture Your Great Ideas & Never Lose Them How To Use Google Drive To Capture Your Great Ideas & Never Lose Them Move over Evernote -- here's how you can use Google Drive to keep and grow your ideas. With the Google tools at your fingertips, put them all to good use for nurturing your ideas. Read More with a single click.
This one is aimed primarily at students. It makes bibliography creation easier, letting you quickly create a properly formatted website citation for the APA, Chicago, MLA, and Harvard citation styles. It even allows you to maintain project bibliographies – perfect for not getting bogged down in citations whilst in a creative flow.
Do you want a lightweight and easy-to-use photo editor? iPiccy includes lots of web-based photo-editing tools such as auto-fix, rotate, crop, resize, and color adjustment — as well as some more advanced processing features.
You can read and re-read an important email a thousand times, but you can guarantee that as soon as you hit send you’ll find a typo. eAngel lets you send emails and documents to real humans who will then check it for syntax and typos.
Do you often find yourself struggling to find the perfect font 14 Fonts That Are Perfect for Greeting Cards & Posters 14 Fonts That Are Perfect for Greeting Cards & Posters Thinking of making your own greeting cards and posters but having trouble making them look great? A better font might be the answer -- and these are all FREE and FANTASTIC. Read More? Microsoft Word’s and Adobe Photoshop’s quickly become old. WhatFont lets you discover any web fonts by simply hovering over them.
There are lots of cool note-taking apps Evernote vs. OneNote: Which Note-Taking App Is Right for You? Evernote vs. OneNote: Which Note-Taking App Is Right for You? Evernote and OneNote are amazing note-taking apps. It's hard to pick between the two. We compared everything from interface to note organization to help you choose. What works best for you? Read More on the market, but if you’re searching for something simple, try Save Text 2.0. Just click the bookmarklet, start typing, and your notes will be automatically saved to Google Drive.
Some days you need a helping hand to keep your brain and productivity on track.
Momentum is that hand. It will replace your new tab page with a personal dashboard that includes your to-do lists, the weather, and some visual inspiration.
Boomerang is a browser add-on available for Chrome that lets you schedule emails for a point in the future Schedule Emails to Send Later with Boomerang for Gmail in Chrome Schedule Emails to Send Later with Boomerang for Gmail in Chrome Gmail is in ingenious tool for managing emails. Much of what it is lacking per default, is covered by Gmail Labs apps or browser add-ons. Boomerang is a browser add-on available for Chrome that let's... Read More, even if you’re not online. It’s perfect for automated business replies, not forgetting birthdays, and sending messages at a time when you know the recipient will be available.
How annoying is it when you right-click on a web page but the site prevents you from accessing the context menu? RightToCopy solves the problem, it lets you highlight text and copy text on pages that have disabled the features.
Do you often find yourself offline with nothing to read? Try Instapaper.
It will let you save any interesting links you stumble across then allow you to read them later on your iPhone, iPad, Android, computer, or Kindle.
If you are easily distracted and find concentration is a problem Stay Focused With StayFocusd For Google Chrome And Say Goodbye To Distractions Stay Focused With StayFocusd For Google Chrome And Say Goodbye To Distractions The Internet is a vast place, with loads of information that can often be overwhelming. It would be an understatement to say that it’s the primary resource for research and getting work done. But don’t... Read More, StayFocusd offers a solid solution. You can set yourself a time allowance for particular sites such as social networks, RSS readers or news sites, and once you’ve hit that limit accessed will be blocked.
Better History
Better History replaces Chrome’s native history tool. It adds more controls to help you find your old content quickly and more effectively. You can jump between days or hours with a single click, and easily delete visits in a set time frame.
This extension lets you quickly access the goo.gl URL shortener 3 Ways To Quickly Shorten URLs Straight From Your Browser 3 Ways To Quickly Shorten URLs Straight From Your Browser In a world of micro blogging and mega long links, URL shortening can be insanely useful. Not only can it help to simplify and save space, it can also track links and reveal how often... Read More – giving you short and portable URLs. It’s particularly useful for long, difficult URLs or for character-limited content such as Tweets.
Also consider: Time Tracker, Any.Do, Checker Plus For Gmail, timeStats, Lazarus Form Recovery
Shopping
Along with productivity and entertainment, shopping is the internet’s other great time-consuming activity. Use these extensions to find the best deals and bag yourself a bargain.
The Camelizer is the definitive price-checking extension for Chrome Shop Smart And Save Money - Check The Price History For Any Product With Camelizer [Chrome] Shop Smart And Save Money - Check The Price History For Any Product With Camelizer [Chrome] Don't pay more for a product just because of poor timing — see a history of price fluctuations before you buy anything. Camelizer is an extension for Google Chrome that shows you a chart of... Read More, including advanced features like price graphs, price alerts, and price trends for a number of popular online retailers.
Want discounts put don’t want to shop around? Install Honey. It automatically finds and tests coupon codes Honey: Saves You Money By Automatically Finding The Best Coupon Codes Online Honey: Saves You Money By Automatically Finding The Best Coupon Codes Online Read More for more than 100 online stores, and works as you checkout of a site – so you don’t need to shop through third party affiliates.
Fairly self-explanatory. This extension lets you add items to your Amazon wish-list Add Anything to Your Amazon Wish List With This Chrome Browser Addon Add Anything to Your Amazon Wish List With This Chrome Browser Addon Occasions to give and receive gifts happen throughout the year. Likewise, you have the whole year to craft your own wish list and collect gift ideas for friends and family. But do you have a... Read More from any website.
Addicted to eBay? You need this official browser add-on. It means you’ll never miss a good bargain Keep An Eye On The Best Deals With The eBay Extension For Google Chrome Keep An Eye On The Best Deals With The eBay Extension For Google Chrome While it is always advocated that you compare prices and discounts across multiple online shops, it is also true that some of the best deals can be had on eBay. After all, (with due apologies... Read More and you can monitor your existing bids without needing to be logged into the main site.
Unlike the Yahoo Currency Convertor extension, the Chrome Currency Convertor automatically changes any figures in a web page to your desired currency. It’s not only good for shopping but also reading long-form articles that quote prices and figures from around the world.
Social
These days, there are so many social media networks that it’s difficult to stay on top of them all. Download these extensions to make life a bit easier.
Are you a Reddit user? If so, you need Flatit in your life.
The extension cleans up a lot of “junk” off the web-based Reddit homepage, giving you a faster and more streamlined layout. Flatit is compatible with the Reddit Enhancement Suite (which everyone should be using).
If you’re one of the increasing numbers of people who are leaving Facebook behind and finding new ways to use Google Plus It's Not Really Dead: 7 Reasons To Start Using Google+ Today It's Not Really Dead: 7 Reasons To Start Using Google+ Today I wake up in the morning, and check what's new on Google+. Yes, really. Google is putting a lot of brawn and brains behind the social network everyone loves to hate, and it shows. Read More, you might find the ability to get notifications from the network without being on the site itself to be very useful.
If you’re a WhatsApp junkie, Instazzap is a “must-have”. You can see your unread chats in the toolbar, share web content with your contacts, and easily use emojis.
A must-have for Reddit lovers Use Reddit Like A Boss With This Combo Package Use Reddit Like A Boss With This Combo Package Today, we're going to take a look at a couple of browser extensions that will enhance your Reddit experience. One of them is an old fogey, so you might of already heard of it by... Read More. It shows you comment karma, gives you username tagging, increases your viewing options, and removes the need to click through pages thanks to ‘Never Ending Reddit’.
Once installed, Silver Bird makes it possible to access Twitter functions from a button Silver Bird Brings Twitter To Your Finger Tips [Chrome] Silver Bird Brings Twitter To Your Finger Tips [Chrome] A while ago, I checked out TweetDeck for Chrome as an in-browser solution for Twitter. TweetDeck for Chrome is exactly like the regular TweetDeck only you don’t have to leave your browser to use it.... Read More in the Chrome interface.
Also consider: Buffer, Social Fixer for Facebook, Facebook For Chrome
Tab Management and Bookmarking
Having too many tabs open at once drains your battery, eats your RAM, and ties up your CPU’s resources. Install a tab manager or bookmarking tool to eliminate the problem.
The Great Suspender will automatically freeze any tabs you’re not using, thus saving your computer’s RAM usage. They become “live” again as soon as you click on them. You can also retain tabs between browsing sessions.
Session Manager comes highly recommended from several of our readers. The extension allows you to save any tabs you’re working on when you shut your browser, then instantly reload all of them at a later time.
You can also create groups of tabs to open with a single click. For example, perhaps you have a group of sites you check every morning or your want to open all your favorite news sites at the same time.
Are you the type of person who has hundreds of tabs open at the same time? OneTab lets you keep those tabs open, but reduces memory by up to 95 percent.
TabOutliner creates a file tree on tabs on the right-hand side of the screen. Inactive tabs don’t use memory, and you drag and drop the tabs to keep yourself organized.
Pocket helps you manage a reading list of articles Pocket - The Ultimate Digital Bookmarking Service Pocket - The Ultimate Digital Bookmarking Service As Bakari previously reported, the well loved Read It Later - which enabled users to save articles to read later from a bookmarklet or various apps it was integrated with - was discontinued and replaced... Read More from the internet. The extension lets you save any article to your account with one click, and also allows for both article tagging and offline reading.
It has apps for several platforms, including Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, and Blackberry.
This spin-off of the popular Evernote is so much more than just a bookmarking tool Evernote's New Web Clipper Is The Ultimate Content Saving Tool Evernote's New Web Clipper Is The Ultimate Content Saving Tool Evernote's Web Clipper isn't new. But if you haven't heard, or perhaps didn't like the Evernote clipper in the past, this is the right time to look into it again. Read More. It not only lets you save web pages, but also random notes, audio, PDFs, and videos. You can also make and manage to-do lists and search existing notebooks.
You can make a strong argument to say OneNote’s quality has now surpassed that of Evernote The Best Evernote Alternative Is OneNote and It's Free The Best Evernote Alternative Is OneNote and It's Free The market is drenched in note-taking apps competing with Evernote. But there is only one serious Evernote alternative. Let us explain why that is OneNote. Read More. If you use the Microsoft note-taking app, this is a “must-have”. You can grab web pages, PDFs, images, videos, and more directly from the internet and save them into OneNote.
Tab Cloud lets you transfer your browsing session How to Restore Tabs in Chrome & Firefox Across Machines With TabCloud How to Restore Tabs in Chrome & Firefox Across Machines With TabCloud Read More from one computer to another. You can also see saved sessions with a built-in interface.
This replaces the normal new tab interface Get An Awesome New Tab Page For Google Chrome Get An Awesome New Tab Page For Google Chrome Awesome New Tab Page (aNTP) is a Google Chrome add-on that turns the new tab page (NTP) into a metro-like browser home screen. In addition to icons that lead to your favorite websites, this add-on... Read More with an attractive, Windows 8 style customizable tile-based interface that can provide quick access to both web apps and web pages.
SimpleUndoClose offers an easy way to restore closed tabs – just click the icon and just which pages you want to reopen.
What Chrome Extensions Do You Love?
We’ve given you an introduction to some of the best Chrome extensions out there, but given the size of the Web Store, it’s impossible to cover them all.
Thankfully, we’ve got someone who can alert us to any awesome extensions we’ve overlooked – it’s you, the reader!
So, tell us about your favorite extensions. Which Chrome extensions couldn’t you live without?
You can leave all your tips and suggestions in the comments below.Wisely, following the terrific Zygon two-parter that we've just had, Doctor Who series 9 has now veered off once more in a completely different direction. As such, Sleep No More plays with structure, story and format. It's a found footage episode, anchored by guest star Reece Shearsmith, from the pen of Mark Gatiss.
The basic setup sees the Doctor and Clara land on the Le Verrier Space Station. It would be fair to say that said Space Station has seen much better times, and the mystery here is for the Doctor to uncover just what's happened.
In doing so, Doctor Who presents its first ever found footage episode. In fact, writer Mark Gatiss argues that television hasn't really done found footage before. He clearly has fun with it, too, playing with perspectives of the characters and gradually dropping more and more clues as to just what's gone on before we arrive at Le Verrier.
It's a very disciplined episode, this, with Gatiss careful to tell the story from individual characters' point of view, and not cheating his way out of corners. Director Justin Molotnikov too keeps a tight, claustrophobic tone to what's before his camera. The trade off is it's sometimes quite tricky to work out just what's happening, and going on. But conversely, there's also something really quite magnetic about Peter Capaldi and Reece Shearsmith looking straight down the camera at you, and delivering their lines.
Sleep No More is a little scary, and very much in keeping with the horror undertones that have been found in many of the episodes this series. That said, for me, this one didn't really gel. Appreciating that found footage is novelty on the small screen, it isn't on the big one, and I wonder if I've sat through too many movies that deploy similar tactics for Sleep No More to really work for me.
I very much warmed to the boldness, and the commitment to what Gatiss and Molotnikov have tried to do here, and Reece Shearsmith is a very welcome guest star. Furthermore, Gatiss' wit shines through to punctuate the horror. But come the end credits, the final result didn't feel that satisfying to me I'm afraid. There are positives, certainly, and much to talk about when we get to the spoiler-review.
Sleep No More, though, takes an ambitious shot, but doesn't quite hit the target. That's a far better state of affairs than taking the safe route, mind...Ding, dong, Kim Jong-il is dead. Reading The New York Times obit, one little piece of the dictator's insane world stood out for us:
Short and round, he wore elevator shoes, oversize sunglasses and a bouffant hairdo — a Hollywood stereotype of the wacky post-cold-war dictator. Mr. Kim himself was fascinated by film. He orchestrated the kidnapping of an actress and a director, both of them South Koreans, in an effort to build a domestic movie industry.
Let's give you more on this story: In 1978, Shin Sang-ok, South Korea's famous director, went to Hong Kong to figure out why his ex-wife, actress Choi Eun-hee, went missing. When he arrived, North Korean agents pulled him into a car, threw a bag over his head, then shipped him to Pyongyang wrapped in plastic. (The BBC has more on this.) And so began his eight year imprisonment in North Korea, where the filmmaker had to satisfy the whims of Kim Jong-il, then a young "cinephile" who wrote On the Art of the Cinema in 1973, and The Cinema and Directing in 1987 (read the free PDF here). Shin shot eight films during his "NK period," the best-known being Pulgasari, a 1985 Godzilla-style movie that played to the tastes of the little dictator. We're adding it to the Horror section of our big collection of Free Movies Online.
In case you're wondering, Shin and his wife (they remarried while imprisoned) eventually escaped from North Korea in 1986, during a trip to Vienna. Despite that, Kim Jong-il's love of cinema didn't wane. Filmmaking still plays a big role in the manufacturing of North Korean ideology, and below we're bringing back Al Jazeera's look at the contemporary North Korea filmmaking scene:
via i09While religions of all stripes have something to offer in terms of support and advice, they also share a common detriment: they’re all really, really old. While age brings with it wisdom and experience, if religion can’t relate to modern society it runs the risk of getting left behind.
To help prevent this, several monks across Japan have been adopting new technology and trends or have tried simply reaching out to people differently, in less orthodox and more human ways.
■ Higher Tech Attainment
Walking around and looking at the masses of people with eyes looked on their smartphone it’s hard to ignore the pull of digital media. |
said.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children operates the Cyber Tip Line in partnership with the FBI and other federal authorities. If you have information call the tip line at 1-800-THE-LOST, Schwein said.Clifford Brandt Kidnapping Ring Busted as Clintons with Hollywood Celebrate Haiti Sweatshop
Update: December 9, 2012
Moscoso cousin shot dead
Jules Edouard Moscoso (57), a cousin of the two kidnapped victims of the network of Clifford Brandt was shot dead early Sunday morning December 9, 2012 in his home, 40 meters from a United Nations peacekeeping base in Léogane. Jules Edouard Moscoso, owned Dolphin, a private water company and is the cousin of Sogebank CEO, Robert Moscoso, whose two children, Nicolas and Coralie, were freed by Haiti police on October 22, 2012 after being kidnapped for a ransom of $2.5 million. It is largely suspected that this killing is not unrelated and that it’s the corrupt US cold war kleptocracy – Haitian elite mafia families – settling scores within their brutal ranks.
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Clifford Brandt Kidnapping Ring Busted as Clintons with Hollywood Celebrate Haiti Sweatshop
Oct 23, 2012 (See also, Miami Herald main culprit that criminalized the poor in Haiti as kidnappers.)
On Monday, October 22, 2012, Hollywood helped the Clintons inaugurate the US’s flagship sweatshop at Caracol, Haiti. Outside, protesting Haitians who don’t applaud are arrested and silenced.
This is the best of times for unfettered capitalism and privatization reigning supreme in Haiti above all else. There’s sweatshop industrial openings with
Hollywood good-times rolling, romantic moments for Billy and Hillary while billions in misery donation dollars are used to give the South Koreans a free factory, housing and to build cruise ship berths and hotel suites that service the privileged few. Over 400,000 quake victims remain homeless. And, in just two years, UN-imported cholera has killed over 8,000 Haitians and infected over 600,000. But it’s against the US “HOPE”Act law and International financial institutions (IFIs) dictates (that allow for subsidies and bailouts to the Korean and other businesses at this industrial park) for the Haitian government to put public funds into servicing its own people’s public needs. “Leave it to the free market and the NGO business, opine the US rulers in Haiti.”
On Monday, October 22, 2012, another dirty business enterprise was being exposed while the Clintons and their wealthy Hollywood celebrityfriends were showcasing the Caracol hoax, sharing a romantic moment -“opening Haiti,” yet again, with the sharp media propaganda tools of providing relevant “jobs and housing” for Haiti.
Clifford Brandt, son of the wealthy Fritz Brandt and a member of one of Haiti’s billionaire families, was arrested at his place of business and put in handcuffs, accused of being the mastermind behind an organized kidnapping ring in Haiti.
According to Haiti officials, Clifford Brandt admitted his involvement in several kidnappings including the October 16, 2012 kidnapping on Bourdon Road of Coralie (23) and Nicolas Moscoso (24), two members of another wealthy Haiti family. On Tuesday, Oct. 23, 2012 at 3:am, the morning after his arrest, interrogation and confession, Brandt took police to the place where the two young Moscoso adults were being held. Police freed them.
Clifford Brandt is the managing director of Mazda dealership in Delmas Haiti.
“His activity, indicated the Secretary of State for Public Security, Reginald Delva, “was to come to Haiti from his home in Miami, collect the ransom monies from his kidnapping enterprise in Haiti ”
Local Haitians call this foreign-authored organized criminal activity: Ayisyen kidnape, Blan fè pri.
In a Haiti radio public broadcast, Haiti State Secretary of Public Security, Reginald Delva, interviewed by Gary Pierre Paul for Scoop FM maintains that documents show the kidnapping network Clifford Brandt is involved with demanded U.S. $2.5 million for the release of the two Moscoso victims. This is an on-going investigation explains Mr. Delva. He says authorities found a list of folks Clifford Brandt’s kidnapping ring had “a macabre plan” to kill or kidnap for the coming Christmas season.
Oct. 23 2012 Scoop FM interview
of Reginald Delva, State Secretary of Public Security by Gary Pierre Paul
Sources confirm that this well-connected mafia ring has been in operation for some time wreaking havoc in Haiti.
Many Haiti observers question whether the weak Haiti justice system will be bought out by the Brandt family, as its one of the most prominent families in Haiti where justice is oftentimes for sale. The Brandts’ friends include some of Haiti’s most powerful neocolonial corporate enemies whose many transnational businesses they give a Haiti subcontractor face to and mostly export all accumulated capital out, impoverishing Haiti, paying little to no taxes or tariffs. (See Haiti: The soul of Africa, not for sale; 05% of Haitians own 98% of Haiti’s wealth – Disaster capitalism; Shock-Doctrine Schooling in Haiti: Neoliberalism Off the Richter Scale; 206 years since Desalin.)
The Untouchables: It will surprise no one in Haiti if this case is suddenly reduced to a rumor despite the photos of Mr. Brandt in handcuffs at the police station and HaitiState Secretary of Public Security, Reginald Delva public statements. Most likely, if the local Haiti authorities who broke this case are not serving a neo-colonial purpose, the ruling imperial hands may have them silenced, marginalized, fired or worse. Those who serve foreign interests, or are well connected enough to these authorities to buy their freedom, do not, like the criminalized Haiti poor, remain in prison.
In 2005, another wealthy Haitian businessman in Haiti was arrested in relation to a slew of kidnappings and crimes.
“According to police sources, the investigation in the disappearance of UNIBANK’s employee allowed police to uncover the existence of a huge and powerful network of crooks, linked with drug money laundering, kidnappings, and many other shady activities. The businessman Stanley Handal and the bank employee Genelus were apparently part of this network.” (An Important Businessman was Arrested in Relation to Kidnapping cases reported in Port-au-Prince.)
Besides the Stanley Handal example (whose case was dismissed), others connected to power and empire who still roam free, with complete impunity in US/UN occupied Haiti include: Accused kidnapper “Jerry Narcius” suspected to work for the UN; DEA-suspected drug trafficker Guy Philippe; the 2004 coup d’etat/US regime change paramilitary enforcers known as the Lame Timanchèt death squad assassins; kidnapper arrested linked to wealthy families working with Lame Timanchèt ; Michael Lucius, a top Haitian police officer indicted for kidnapping; the 15 police officers who were to face the bar of justice for brutal murders ; Louis Jodel Chamblain; and Emmanuel “Toto” Constant, the FRAPH head of the 1991 coup detat/US regime change paramilitary enforcers charge with thousands of murders, rapes and crimes against humanity. Toto Constant was granted a US visa and residency until finally caught and put in prison on mere bank fraud charges there.
For decades, Haiti’s worst violence has been authored, not locally, but mostly imported. (Our nasty little racist war in Haiti; Eyewitness account of the abduction of President and First Lady Aristide of Haiti by the United States Special Forces; Obama’s offered HOPE is sweatshop slavery.)
Kidnapping in Haiti began to find a footing after the UN took over and with the 2004 US kidnapping of president Aristide out of Haiti back to Africa. The powerful, connected and wealthy are the worst purveyors of violence and corruption in Haiti. (Yo se chèf zinglendo yo, epi yo di se Nèg nan Geto, se ti malere k’ap bay pwoblèm: Corruption uninterrupted in Haiti)
The international and national media which are owned by the corporate organizations mostly benefiting from the status quo, will generally criminalized the poor, disenfranchised and working masses worldwide. This is why Ezili’s HLLN continually ask this most pertinent question:
Why is there a UN, Chapter 7 peace enforcement mission in Haiti for 8 years? A country not at war, without a peace agreement to enforce and with less violence than most countries in the Western Hemisphere?” (See the UN’s own Global Study on Homicide at page 93 and Legacy of Impunity.)
The wealthy sons of Haiti’s Oligarchy, who’ve formed organized killing coup d’etat and criminal gangs known to local Haitians as, the Ninjas, have eluded the law and prison time. With their connections to power and the police, rarely have suspected members of the Ninjas spent time in prison and then not for long. Crime in Haiti is generally blamed on the poor in Site Solèy. (See transcripts at HLLN archives at “We are not Kidnappers” and Original Kreyòl Audio of Interview:We are not Kidnappers – Site Solèy speaks, May 22, 2006, Ezili Dantò Witness Project (English translation & Kreyòl audio.)
The distraction to note is that since this summer and throughout September 2012, the US-supported Martelly government has face almost daily protest demonstrations from practically all sectors of the society. This Brandt kidnapping case changes the discourse. Moves the focus from the people issues of foreign gold/oil pillage, the internationally sponsored Caracol hoax of jobs and housing for Haitians and basic discontent towards the Martelly/Lamothe government to this alluring Ninja Brandt kidnapping issue.
Bagay gwo zenglendo sa yo pa janm soti deyò konsa. La Sosyete, fòk nou konprann. Se yon jwèt pou pouvwa ant gwo volè, bagay malfektè. Yon krim vre kap itilize pou rezon pa yo, pou zafe zòt, pa zafè nachon an. Yon distraksyon. Ouvre zye nou. Veye yo.”–Ezili Dantò of HLLN, Oct. 24, 2012 on the Brandt kidnapping case.
On the street sources indicate that Clifford Brandt has bragged to having 275 Haiti police officers on his payroll and was in charge of 15 gangs.
Secretary of Public Safety, Reginald Delva, indicated that senior police officers and former police officers including former police inspector Mr. Edner Comé were actively being sought, suspected of being part this organized kidnapping ring.
Clifford Brandt’s lawyer, Calixte Delatour, interviewed by Gary Pierre Paul for Scoop FM
Brandt’s defense lawyer, Delatour Calixte, told Scoop radio that Brandt did lead police to where the two Moscoso victims were being held, but denied his client participated in a kidnapping.
Calixte told Scoop’s Gary Pierre Paul that “removing a person is not the same thing as kidnapping…There’s a difference between kidnapping and a personal feud.” Calixte, in his public radio Scoop interview, defended Brandt saying this was not a kidnapping as his client did not ask for a ransom. Calixte suggested Brandt may have organized their “removal” in a power play to settle a business dispute – that this was a settlement of scores between two wealthy families.
Calixte, when pressed, would not elaborate on the “personal feud” or as he said, “un règlement de compte” that caused the “removal” of the Moscoso victims who were found held hostage, handcuffed and blindfolded inside the abandoned residence Clifford Brandt took the police to.
In researching this case, a quick internet name search of the Moscoso kidnapped victims garnered this FB post from the day of the kidnapping:
“Ayiti Pap Peri
Sa grav net “Haiti-kidnapping: Hier soir, vers 8hrs sur la route de bourdon, une patrouille de la #PNH cagoule aurait kidnappée #Nicholas Moscoso et sa soeur #Coralie. Source: Chantal M. Elie, Journaliste”
Nicolas and Coralie Moscoso found handcuffed and blindfolded were kidnapped by fake police in black hoods and rescued by real police, also wearing black hoods. No wonder the victims kept their heads down and were so terrified to take off their blindfolds when their police rescuers appeared. (See Haiti police rescue video at 3:49).
Alterpresse reports that Brandt is the suspected mastermind of not only a kidnapping ring, but a powerful criminal syndicate practicing forgery, counterfeiting and money laundering.
During police searches conducted at Brandt’s place, police said they found police equipment, flashing lights (des gyrophares) and a set of license plates of vehicles. They were planning “attacks against public authorities…This is a solid team. They are true professionals, which speaks of big organized crime,” said Frantz Lerebours, spokesperson for the Haiti National Police (PNH) force.
More and more, this Clifford Brandt kidnapping case sounds like that other wealthy businessman kidnapping case, all over again. This time, perhaps the victims will be heard and it won’t be business as usual.
One thing is for sure, Robert Moscoso, the father of the Brandt kidnapped victims, would probably have given his entire fortune to get his children back. The business model of making decisions based on cost effectiveness priorities and making a profit at all cost, suddenly did not apply.
Similarly, the profit consideration of foreigners is not worth the loss of life, livelihood, liberty or health of any Haitian. But the US, through the Clintons unregulated capitalists at Caracol, and in general in their reconstruction plans for Haiti, are casually swapping Haiti domestic interests, lives, livelihood, liberty, health, its future and environmental safety for getting the largest possible foreign profit to export out of Haiti. (See, Haiti: Foreign Investment means Death and Repression: A Historical Perspective.)
Until civil society stops equating business interests as the same as governmental interests or the common good, it will be business as usual.
Where’s the Haitian, courageous enough to ride Galipòt – Janjak Desalin‘s fictional horse – and put a stop to the organized international crimes in Haiti? Perhaps it’s the ones, like the policemen, who risked their lives and careers to rescue the Moscoso victims. Chapo ba and kudos to them.
Here is a Kreyòl radio broadcast of the Galipòt story and where voiceless Haiti, not the Avatar crew, speak about their lives in Caracol Haiti. Haitians working at Caracol speak to LakouNewYork, say the 200gds (about $4:74 per day or 59cent per hour) is slave wage, “they’re taking my health, this is not ‘jobs for Haiti.”
Ezili Dantò of HLLN
Oct. 23, 2012
(Check this link again for updates.
Last updated Oct 25, 2012)
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Background Information
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In the photo, Haiti Oligarch, Grégory Brandt, President of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry Franco-haïtienne : “Mes enfants ont étudié à l”étranger mais ont choisi de revenir à Haïti malgré la situation. Et j”en suis très fier” – “My children studied abroad, but they chose to come back to Haiti, despite the situation. It is my greatest source of pride.” Crédits : Paolo Woods / Institute (Source: Les Nantis D”Haiti;Haiti’s 1 Percent: A look at the lives of plenty in the land of the poor.) Serving maids, gardeners and butlers for blan (foreigners). Clinton/Obama and the Haiti Oligarchs “development” for Haiti is Caribbean-style tourism where Haiti’s huddled masses are exotic backdrop, convenient bodies and props for privileged Northern tourists, Paul Farmer’s false NGO benevolence and the Caracol hoax used to fleece Haiti out of its vast oil, coast lands, $20billion in gold and mineral resources.
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“Clinton’s oversized role in Haiti only makes sense when we remember that both the left and right see Haiti through deeply racist lenses…Clinton is the co-chair of the Interim Commission for the Reconstruction of Haiti. He is the UN Special Envoy for Haiti. And he is the co-director of the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, a foundation involved in number of neoliberal economic initiatives in Haiti. Clinton justifies his involvement by saying he is “responding to the needs of Haitians.” But what needs? Which Haitians? And to what end?” (Bill Clinton Loves Haiti by Jemima Pierre, Black Agenda Report, Oct. 23, 2012)
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“”¦although the oppressed often do revolt, the object of their hostility is misplaced. They vent their fury on a political puppet, someone who masks colonial power, a despised racial or ethnic group or an apostate within their own political class. The useless battles serve as an effective mask for what Gamer calls the “patron-client” networks that are responsible for the continuity of colonial oppression. The squabbles among the oppressed, the political campaigns between candidates who each are servants of colonial power, Gamer writes, absolve the actual centers of power from addressing the conditions that cause the frustrations of the people. Inequities, political disenfranchisement and injustices are never seriously addressed.”( Colonized by Corporations )
Disaster Capitalism: 0.5 % in Haiti – Haiti’s Oligarchy – own 98% of Haiti wealth through monopolies supported by Western policymakers and corporations
Haiti: Where Has All the Money Gone? – Vijaya Ramachandran and Julie Walz
The Subcontracted Haitians – Haiti overseers
Une Bourgeoisie déracinée!
Haiti servants of colonial power:
The mercenary families
Ezili Dantò: Haïti, une invasion sous couverture humanitaire
Swapping Haiti Lives: False aid, charity, orphanages, false Caracol jobs, housing or Haiti – pretext for the fake humanitarians to steal Haiti sovereignty, land & resources
Avatar unobtainium are Haiti Riches
Unobtanium in Haiti
Oil in Haiti – Economic Reasons for the UN/US occupation
Gold Rush in Haiti – Good for whom?
Video-EziliDantò:Haïti,uneinvasionsouscouverturehumanitaire
OilinHaitiandOilRefinery-anoldnotionforFortLiberteasa
transshipmentterminalforUSsupertankers
Video:Oil-StrategicdenialofoilinHaiti
AMassiveOilMineinHaiti
Ezili Dantò’s Note: Here is a Kreyòl radio broadcast where voiceless Haiti, not the Avatar crew, speak about their lives in Caracol Haiti.
Haitians working at Caracol speak to LakouNewYork, say the 200gds is slave wage, “they’re taking my health, this is not ‘jobs for Haiti.'”
Manno, the broadcaster, points out that the minimum wage is now 300gds (as of Oct 1, 2012) not 200gds. The Caracol workers say they are only paid 200gds and not on time and it doesn’t cover their expenses whatsoever. One worker explains how she is treated like trash – like a second class citizen within the industrial park. http://lakounewyork.com/emisyon10-22-12.mp3
Also, this audio (in Kreyòl) begins with Koralen’s Galipòt. Searching for Desalin’s horse on Oct 22nd Caracol holocaust day. This Koralen performance piece asks the question “Where is the living Haitian who can ride Galipòt?” “Galipòt,” the author explains is Desalin’s horse who wanders Haiti looking for another warrior who can walk his path. http://lakounewyork.com/emisyon10-22-12.mp3
Yesterday, during the opening of the Caracol park, those Haitians who didn’t readily applaud the Martelly gov, the Clintons, Sean Penn, Richard Branson, Donna Karen Avatar crew, the opening of the Caracol mothership/Avatar Haiti were pushed out of the way, some even immediately arrested. One person who talked on this Oct 22nd broadcast about the repression was immediately arrested by the special police from FortLiberte.
Listen to:
Lakou New York Broadcast reporting on Oct 22, 2012
Another brutal October day for Haiti is celebrated by the “star-studded” Avatar crew – Sean Penn, Ben Stiller, Donna Karan, Richard Branson & the beyond-the-pale Clintons share a romantic moment. (TheAvatarMoviefroma Haitianperspective)
But this was the general mainstream media’s reporting Avatar Caracol mothership piloted by Clintons opened #Haiti again w/ sharp media propaganda http://bit.ly/Uyck9G tools= “jobs, housing for Haiti.”
Ezili Dantò of HLLN
Oct 23, 2012
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Forwarded by Ezili’s Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network
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Monday, Oct 22, 2012 marking day of brutal Haiti sorrow is celebrated by the “star-studded” Avatar crew (Sean Penn, Ben Stiller, Donna Karan, Richard Branson, led also by the beyond-the-pale Clinton capitalist vampires, giving cover for the corporate stealing of Haiti’s unobatainium -$20+billion, vast oil reserves in Northern Haiti, its coast lands and dismissing its cultural heritage: Bill and Hillary Share Romantic Moment In Haiti – (See, Haiti: Foreign Investment means Death and Repression: A Historical Perspective.)
CriminallyaccusedSae-A Helps Continue the Euro/US “New Day” for Haiti
TheAvatarMoviefroma Haitianperspective
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Brandt Cousin: Right now only rumors
Source: Defend Haiti, Oct. 24, 2012
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (defend.ht) – “As of today everything is rumors,” Cedric Brandt said about the arrest of his cousin, a businessman named Clifford. Brandt said the family is praying for his cousin and is happy that the Moscoso’s were returned to their parents.
“Some say other people are involved but nothing is confirmed…” Brandt messaged DH noting that it is an investigation that is constantly evolving.
Cedric says Clifford is a cousin, his father is Gregory Brandt who was featured on Foreign Policy magazine Haiti’s 1 Percent. But the
Cedric Brandt
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young Brandt said the relationship between the family and his cousin Clifford had become estranged.
Clifford has been cooperating with police even taking them to where the two kidnapped victims were being held.
“As a cousin today we are happy that the Moscoso parents were able to get their kids and we are praying now mostly for Clifford’s parents who are suffering a lot,” he concluded in a statement.
Police say the kidnappers requested $2.6 million for the release of Coralie, 23, and Nicolas, 24, Moscoso who were picked up on Bourdon Road. The police call it “enlevman” and defense lawyer Calixte Delatour said there exists a difference between “ènlevman” and kidnapping.
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Haïti-insécurité: Clifford Brandt arr êté pour implication dans un réseau de kidnappeur
Source: hpnhaiti.com
Oct 23, 2012
Clifford Brandt, fils d”uneriche famille haïtienne a été arr êté par la police nationale dans une affaire de kidnapping où il aurait participé à l”enlèvement de deux enfants en octobre dernier, a appris Haiti Press Network de source policière.
“Oui Clifford Brandt a été ar ête. Il est actuellement en detention à la Direction de la police judiciaire (DCPJ)”, a indiqué mardi à HPN le porte-parole de la police nationale annonçant l”ouverture d”une enqu ête.
Selon Frantz Lerebours joint au téléphone, Clifford Brandt n”a pas nié son implication dans l”enlèvement le 16 octobre dernier de Coralie et de Nicolas Moscoso, deux enfants d”un entrepreneur haïtien.
Le kidnapping a été effectué sur la route de Bourdon, a informé la police.
“Les mobiles de l”enlèvement des enfants Moscoso ne sont pas connus, mais il pourrait être fait dans le but de gagner de l”argent. De toute facon une nenqu ête criminelle est en cours”, a déclaré Frantz Lerebours peu bavard sur cette affaire.
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Haïti/ Mafia : L”homme d”affaires Clifford Brandt appréhendé pour kidnapping par la PNH.
Oct 23, 2012 08h11 | Par BZ, Source: Bonzouti.com La police nationale d”Haïti a appréhendé dans l”après-midi de ce lundi 22 Octobre Clifford Brandt, fils de l”homme d”affaires Fritz Brandt, accusé de kidnapping.
Cette arrestation a eu lieu à Delmas 02 lors d”une opération musclée entamée depuis dimanche dernier.
Deux enfants des Moscoso kidnappés depuis plusieurs jours ont été retrouvés et libérés par la PNH. Celle-ci affirme avoir retrouvé dans le fief des kidnappeurs une liste de personnalités à kidnapper au cours de la période des fins d”année.
Clifford Brandt aurait reconnu son implication dans plusieurs kidnappings dont celui des enfants Moscoso.
Sur les réseaux sociaux on félicite la PNH pour l”arrestation de ce gros bonnet de la mafia haïtienne, on craint également l”évasion de prison de Clifford Brandt.
Notons que le mafioso Clifford Brandt est le directeur de la Maison Mazda à Delmas. Il exigeait 02.5 millions de dollars américains pour la libération des deux enfants Moscoso.
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By Associated Press, Updated: Wednesday, October24, 5:54PM Source: Washington Post
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Police detectives are investigating the son of one of Haiti’s prominent families for his alleged role at the center of a kidnapping ring, authorities said Wednesday.
Police spokesman Frantz Lerebours said businessman Clifford Brandt was locked up Monday on suspicion of involvement in kidnapping two children of another family in the capital, Port-au-Prince.
Lerebours said Brandt took investigators to the place where the children were being held and police freed them.
Detectives also jailed two alleged accomplices suspected of driving a Toyota Land Cruiser to carry out the kidnapping. The two suspects were caught as they tried to cross the border into the neighboring Dominican Republic, Lerebours said.
Brandt runs a car dealership and is the son Fritz Brandt, head of a prominent Haitian family that has extensive holdings in export-import businesses.
Secretary of State for Public Security Reginald Delva told Scoop FM radio that the kidnapper demanded more than $2 million for the release of the two abducted children.
Brandt’s lawyer, Delatour Calixte, told Scoop that Brandt did lead police to where the children were being held, but denied his client participated in a kidnapping. He suggested Brandt may have organized their “removal” in a family dispute.
“Removing a person is not the same thing as kidnapping,” Calixte said. “There’s a difference between kidnapping and a personal problem…. I have to say one thing: Mr. Brandt was never involved in kidnapping.”
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October 24, 2012 21:41 GMT
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — A Haitian police spokesman says detectives are investigating the son of one of Haiti’s prominent families for his alleged role at the center of a kidnapping ring.
Haitian police spokesman Frantz Lerebours says Clifford Brandt was locked up Monday on suspicion of involvement in the recent kidnapping of the children of another family in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince.
Lerebours says Brandt took investigators to the spot where the two children were being held and police freed them.
Detectives also jailed two alleged accomplices suspected of driving a Toyota Landcruiser to carry out the kidnapping. They were caught as they tried to cross the border into the Dominican Republic.
Brandt’s lawyer says his client is innocent.
Lerebours made the disclosure to The Associated Press on Wednesday.
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Larry Downing / AFP / Getty Images From left: U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is joined by U.S. Senator Pat Leahy, and her husband, former U.S. president Bill Clinton while receiving a briefing about a new power plant during their visit to Caracol, Haiti, on Oct. 22, 2012.
In Haiti, the western hemisphere’s most underdeveloped nation, the north is one of the most neglected regions, snubbed for centuries by a political and economic elite entrenched mainly in the country’s southern capital, Port-au-Prince. But Haiti’s massive 2010 earthquake, which wrecked Port-au-Prince and killed more than 200,000 people, made domestic leaders and international donors alike realize that Haiti has to start developing away from its overpopulated, quake-vulnerable south and tap the potential of northern cities like Cap Haitien.
That strategy, part of a “build Haiti back better” vision, took a crowning if controversial step this week. On Monday, Haitian President Michel Martelly, joined by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a host of political and business luminaries that included her husband (and U.N. special envoy to Haiti) former U.S. President Bill Clinton, inaugurated the Caracol Industrial Park, a $300 million, 600-acre (246-hectare) facility near the country’s north coast, east of the seaport city of Cap Haitien. The Caracol inauguration was the first joint trip to Haiti by the Clintons since they visited the Caribbean nation shortly after they wed in the 1970s. Now they’re hoping Caracol will be the start of a more productive marriage between Haiti and the international donors and investors it so desperately needs just to build back, let alone build back better.
A mock Haitian village was erected for the occasion, as celebrities like British tycoon Richard Branson looked on beneath banners proclaiming “A New Day in Haiti.” Martelly, whom Hillary Clinton gushingly praised as the “chief dreamer and believer,” declared the modern plant and the 130,000 jobs it’s expected to create as proof that despite the usual “sad images of Haiti,” the country “is open for business, and that’s not just a slogan.”
Like Martelly, the U.S., which is leading the international effort to rebuild Haiti, has been eager to present an accomplishment of Caracol’s magnitude amidst what critics have called a slow reconstruction effort. Reassuring evidence of progress is crucial to getting the billions of dollars that international donors have pledged to Haiti”but half of which has yet to be delivered, largely because of the uncertainties on the ground”into the pipeline. “The people of this country have made real progress in a short time,” Hillary Clinton told investors after touring the park, “and we’ve reached a critical moment.”
(MORE: Haiti’s Quake, One Year Later: It’s the Rubble, Stupid!)
The Caracol park had actually been in the works since 2008. But the earthquake gave the project”a joint effort by the Haitian government, the U.S. State Department and the International Development Bank, which committed an initial $55 million for construction”a more urgent impetus. What’s more, it has become a hub for broader development in the north. Cap Haitien’s airport is undergoing an expansion, funded by Venezuela and Cuba, which allowed it to receive its first large international carrier this month. A gleaming, $30 million campus of Roi Henri Christophe University, built by the Dominican Republic, is set to enroll its first students in two weeks. A new port is planned for nearby Fort-Liberte, though it is currently on hold due to environmental and political tensions.
Caracol’s founding private investor, South Korean textile company Sae-A Trading Co. Ltd., which planted $78 million into the park, has already begun production”and the 1,000 Haitians it has so far employed sent their first order, a batch of 76,000 T-shirts for Walmart, last week. “The easiest job to create is [in] textile garment manufacturing,” says George Sassine, general director of SONAPI, Haiti’s national governing body for industrial parks and one of Caracol’s earliest backers. “It’s a very light investment, but it influences a lot of people.” Caracol “is not the panacea for Haiti’s economy,” he adds. But “we want to show this as a showcase of what can be done.” Says Josepha Gauthier, Haiti’s Works and Social Affairs Minister, agrees: “I always believe that Haiti’s development will come through its countryside” and provinces, not Port-au-Prince.
But development rarely comes without disputes, and for many Haitians and foreigners alike, Caracol is also a reminder of the pitfalls to building Haiti back better. For starters, there is concern that while Sae-A has promised to create 20,000 jobs, it has had labor troubles in other developing countries and may not be the world’s most employee-friendly enterprise. Late Monday afternoon, after rain began to fall at Caracol and Hillary Clinton had stepped into her car to leave, many workers filed out of the Sae-A factory after a shift and complained that they make only Haiti’s daily minimum wage of 200 gourdes, just under $5. Sae-A says pay will rise after six months of training.
There are also tensions between industrial developments like Caracol and the just as urgent, if not more critical, need to foster agriculture in Haiti, which imports more than half its food. Gabriel Charles, 45, had employed as many as 30 people at a time to farm corn, sweet potatoes and beans on the fertile land around the town of Caracol. “I had a hectare [2.5 acres] and that hectare took care of my family,” says Charles, who had to give it up for the park but says the compensation he received for it was inadequate. “I agree with the industrial park,” he says. “But you [also] have to take care of the peasants.” Other displaced farmers, still awaiting alternate plots of land that were promised them, are protesting what they call the park’s adverse economic effects, including the recent doubling of the price of beans, due in part to reduced harvests.
Environmental issues loom large as well: experts fear increased industry could harm Haiti’s ecologically important yet fragile northern coastline, including coral reefs. So do concerns that while developing the north is a good thing in the long run, it doesn”t solve the more immediate post-quake suffering in the south”including the nagging tragedy of hundreds of thousands of homeless Haitians still living in squalid tent camps. Critics also point out that the lure of industrial jobs in the 20th century was a cause of Port-au-Prince’s overcrowding and the proliferation of its notorious slums. They warn Martelly and international donors to avoid the same phenomenon in northern urban areas like Cap Haitien, Haiti’s second largest city.
All of which has helped stoke recent anti-government protests in the north. “We say bravo to the investments,” says Garry Denis, spokesman for the Citizen’s Initiative. But he insists that “so far foreigners and people from Port-au-Prince are the ones who are benefitting.” His group also wants Martelly to address the high cost of living and overdue municipal elections. The unrest comes at a rocky time for Martelly and Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe, whose government faces corruption allegations (they deny them) and other political crises that have hampered reconstruction. Hillary Clinton hinted at Haiti’s dysfunction in her Caracol comments. “In addition to effective government,” she said, “Haiti needs a strong justice sector, free and fair elections, housing, energy, schools, health care.”FLORHAM PARK -- Will the Jets draft a quarterback in Round 1 next week? Will they draft a quarterback, period?
General manager Mike Maccagnan obviously wouldn't answer those questions Friday during his pre-draft press conference.
But he did offer some thoughts on this year's quarterback draft class as a whole:
"It's probably, on average, like a lot of the quarterback classes from previous years. You go back and you look at certain years -- and I think '83 is one of those that comes to mind -- where there were just so many good quarterbacks who came out. I think those are kind of rare years.
"I think this year, I would probably classify it as being average compared to previous seasons. Probably not unlike the year prior [2015], and the year prior, you had two quarterbacks drafted high. And we may very well have two quarterbacks -- how the market kind of views those as the best two guys -- drafted high again this year."
Jared Goff and Carson Wentz (in some order) are considered the top two quarterbacks this year, followed by Paxton Lynch (who could go to the Jets at No. 20). Goff and Wentz (or vice versa) will surely go first and second.
After those three, you're talking about guys like Connor Cook, Christian Hackenberg, Card |
-fi blockbuster before the first "Terminator" was made. Orion Pictures via YouTube "The Terminator" went on to make $78.4 million worldwide on a reported $6.4 million budget and launch a TV series and four sequels. The most recent sequel, "Terminator Genisys," opens on July 1.
Cameron isn't doing too badly right now, but he still deeply regrets this decision.
"I wish I hadn't sold the rights for one dollar," Cameron told the Toronto Sun. "If I had a little time machine and I could only send back something the length of a tweet, it'd be — 'Don't sell.' "
Since the release of "The Terminator" in 1984, the franchise has grossed a total of $1.4 billion worldwide.
"Terminator Genisys" was made to launch a new trilogy to be completed before James Cameron regains the rights in 2019. Paramount Pictures Cameron's decision also had major consequences on the future of the franchise. Because Cameron didn't own the rights, they bounced around from company to company over the years. A new trilogy, starting with "Genisys" was launched in a hurry.
However, James Cameron gets the "Terminator" rights back in 2019.
It has been 24 years since "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," but fans could see Cameron's fingerprints on the beloved franchise again very soon.The short answer is yes, but he will likely remain silent.
The former president would stand on solid ground if he decided to file a libel suit against President Trump, however, that is very unlikely. As a member of an extremely exclusive brotherhood, a club that typically shies away from high-profile spats with its members, it is safe to assume that the ever classy “no drama” Obama would be apprehensive to break with tradition.
Past precedent aside, the former commander-in-chief is clearly preoccupied with other matters. Obama has been spotted on Broadway with his daughter, date nights with the former first lady, and the internet-breaking kite-surfing rendezvous on Richard Branson’s private island left many Americans envious of Obama’s well-deserved vacation. The last thing that seems to be on Obama’s radar is Donald Trump, but that doesn’t diminish the seriousness of the current president’s reckless accusation.
On Saturday, March 4, 2017, a frustrated President Trump turned to Twitter to vent after a seemingly endless string of bad press cycles following a well-received joint address to Congress. Allegations accusing Vice President Pence of the mishandling of official state business while governor of Indiana surfaced, as well as reports of newly confirmed Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ prior communication with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, after Sessions denied any interaction with Russia when asked during his confirmation hearing.
President Trump eventually responded to the unfavorable press with a haymaker ― proclaiming President Obama ordered Trump Towers to be wiretapped during the presidential election ― which caught journalists, White House staff, and America at-large completely off balance. Cabinet members and White House staffers alike continue to scramble to get on one accord, and it appears many in Trumpland have opted to punt all questions regarding the inexplicable Tweets.
Photo Credit: Twitter
Does Obama have a case?
Assuming Obama had the patience, and resources, to endure a lengthy legal battle, there is certainly a case to be made. According to Benjamin Zipursky, Law Professor at Fordham Law School, “to state that somebody has committed a crime when it’s false is clearly defamatory.” The issue, however, is proving that Trump knew his statement was false when he made the statement.
The Supreme Court has established two clear guidelines with respect to libel claims. The statement itself must be false, and the party making the statement must know the statement is false at the time the statement is made. Trump would presumably challenge the suit on the grounds of the second condition not being satisfied. He could argue that the intelligence presented to him suggested a link and broadly involved the previous administration.
The statement itself must be false, and the party making the statement must know the statement is false at the time the statement is made.
Oddly enough, at the time the tweets were made it appears President Trump was unaware of the longstanding federal laws preventing a sitting president from ordering a wiretap on a US citizen. With that said, there could have been a scenario that involved a surveillance operation ordered by Obama with the specific intent of monitoring a foreign subject to ensure national security. A conversation between the foreign subject and someone at Trump Tower could have been recorded. Under this pretense, the first condition ― the statement must be false ― would not be satisfied. While many Democrats may urge the former president to consider litigation, President Trump (with his team of seasoned attorneys) would likely have the case dismissed due to insufficient evidence.
President Obama may have grounds to sue, but he would probably prefer drinking a Mai Tai on the shores of Kailua Bay in Hawaii.Delhi's Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal (L), leader of Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), addresses his supporters as Delhi's Urban Development Minister and fellow AAP leader Manish Sisodia holds the speaker during a protest in New Delhi. Reuters
Kejriwal and his supporters launched a sit-in against the city police in January. Kejriwal and his supporters launched a sit-in against the city police in January.
Aam Aadmi Party has lambasted Delhi Police after a girl from Manipur was raped in Munirka, saying the incident "raises very serious questions on the safety of women in the national capital and the competence of Delhi Police in tackling in the national capital."
The party-led government in Delhi has been in confrontation with Delhi Police and the Home Ministry, under whose ambit the law and order of the national capital comes.
In a press statement, the party condemned the incident and tried to highlight the failure of law enforcement agencies in ensuring safety to women. They also raised questions on Central government's commitment in providing safe enviornment for women in the national capital.
"This shameful incident of rape again brings back the basic question - that are the people and government of Delhi helpless in dealing with issues of women safety since the central government which enjoys control over Delhi Police continues to ignore such a serious issue?," said the statement.
"The Aam Aadmi Party has consistently maintained that accountability of concerned police officials will have to be fixed so that such incidents are not repeated in future, but strangely the union home ministry and Delhi Police top brass have been resisting this demand of the AAP government purely on flimsy grounds," they added.
The party also targeted BJP, Congress for not according statehood to Delhi.
"Since the Parliament session is currently going on, the AAP would like to ask the Congress and BJP, both of whom have adequate numbers to get any bill passed in both Houses, why don't these parties get the bill for providing statehood to Delhi, which is pending in Parliament since a decade passed?
"Both, the Congress and the BJP must answer the question that why are they silent on their election promise of providing full statehood to Delhi, which will make the Police accountable for its actions to the people."
A 14-year-old girl from northeastern state of Manipur was allegedly raped by her landlord's son in Munirka area sparking off protests in the national capital, days after the death of another youth from the Northeast in an alleged racist attack.The Norwegian government has adopted a series of new obligatory IT standards for the state sector. Now it will be easier for users to get access to information material offered by the government - whether it be graphics, videos, sound or picture material - regardless of which software and computer equipment is being used.
The Norwegian government has adopted a series of new obligatory IT standards for the state sector. Now it will be easier for users to get access to information material offered by the government - whether it be graphics, videos, sound or picture material - regardless of which software and computer equipment is being used.
This is the second step in a long term effort by the Ministry of Government Administration and Reform to establish recommended and obligatory IT standards to be used by public institutions and enterprises. The new obligatory standards are included in the Reference catalogue, accessible on the government website www.regjeringen.no (in Norwegian). This catalogue already contains obligatory document formats for web publication. The purpose of the standards is e.g. to provide simpler and more effective electronic interaction within the public sector and between public institutions and the users.
- All users are supposed to have equal access to public information and services on the internet. The state should not discriminate users based on what kind of technical equipment and soft ware they are using. This decision means that the users are granted a right to watch or download multi-media material from the state in open format; that is, formats not locked to specific suppliers in the market, reform minister Heidi Grande Røys says.
In short, this is the content of the government decision:
On government operated web sites, from 1.1.2012 it will be obligatory to publish multimedia content in open formats:
- For video: Theora/Vorbis/Ogg or H.264/AAC/MP4.
- For sound: Vorbis/Ogg, MP3 or FLAC/Ogg.
- For pictures: JPEG or PNG.
- For video: Theora/Vorbis/Ogg or H.264/AAC/MP4. - For sound: Vorbis/Ogg, MP3 or FLAC/Ogg. - For pictures: JPEG or PNG. When exchanging documents as attachments to e-mail between government institutions and users, from 1.1.2011 it will be obligatory to use the document formats PDF or ODF.
Version change: From 1.1.2010 the ODF version 1.1 is to be used.
The standard for character sets ISO10646, represented by UTF8, is to be used at all new ICT projects in the government sector. From 1.1.2012, UTF8 is to be used during electronic information exchange. It will possible to make exemptions from this demand in special cases.
The UTF8 decision is an important step in enabling the public sector to handle characters in the Sami language and other languages in a correct way. At first, the obligatory demands will only be applied to the state sector. The Ministry of Government Administration and Reform is planning regulations to make the obligatory standards applicable for the municipal sector as well.Turkish born Mehmet Ozgur is an engineer by education and profession, Mehmet is also a masterly photographer. His work spans a substantial range of subject matter and technique, from the landscapes panorama to digital compositions and his amazing smoke works (seen here). Mehmet has mastered a technique where he can photograph tendrils of smoke and then combine them into recognizable shapes and figures through digital manipulation. All are executed with fine precision using differing photographic manipulation techniques to achieve the desired outcomes. Looking through his smoke works collection you will notice an enticing glow of transparencies mixed with the suggestive texture of flame – most in monochrome. His series includes Genies and bottles, surreal clocks, feather-like waterfalls, swirling swords, and misty ocean scenery.
Source: Mehmet’s full smoke works collection can be seen here.Syrian refugees should be housed at the old Point Nepean barracks, as the Kosovar refugees were in 1999, Victorian Opposition Leader Matthew Guy has suggested.
Mr Guy has again distanced himself from Prime Minister Tony Abbott, joining a chorus of political leaders, including Premier Daniel Andrews, urging the Abbott government to boost its humanitarian intake of refugees in the face of the Syrian migrant crisis.
A Kosovar refugee child on the parade ground, Point Nepean quarantine station, 1999. Credit:Emmanuel Santos/State Library of Victoria
During the war in Kosovo in 1999, the Kennett and Howard governments housed 300 Kosovo refugees at the Norris Army Barracks on the site of the old quarantine station.
That group of refugees were among the last people to inhabit the site after the Defence Department moved out.It’s not uncommon that major game projects, fueled by unwavering ambition and assembled by hundreds of talented and impassioned individuals, can fall onto challenging times. Often the pressure comes hand-in-hand with the weight of expectation; huge undertakings such as Half-Life 2, DOOM, and The Last Guardian have all been developed somewhere in the middle-distance between purgatory and hell. It’s worth noting that these projects, surprisingly often, eventually emerge as acclaimed showpieces.
Now, if insider accounts heard by GameSpot are to be believed, Mass Effect Andromeda appears to be the latest project feeling the stress. That’s not to say the game is a disaster by any stretch, nor that it will miss another milestone, but accounts of life at the studio aren’t particularly flattering: We have heard stories of dev departures, and of a plan to strip away some game features in order to meet EA’s final deadline.
To discuss these rumours, as well as talk broadly about the ambitions of the project, GameSpot met with BioWare general manager Aaryn Flynn.
GameSpot: I was surprised to see the latest Mass Effect Andromeda trailer didn't show any extended gameplay. Do you wish you could have showed more?
FLYNN: Well, every time we do one of these things we make a bunch of choices about how we're going to fit all of this in, so we definitely made a choice to show more of the characters. A lot of what we did here was meant to complement the previous trailers as well.
EA has this amazing line of game releases coming up. We come later, so we have more time to show great gameplay. But the good news is that everything we showed in that trailer is right from the game, so none of that is made by CG or anything like that. Y'know this is a Mass Effect game, so that kind of squad combat that you love, that third-person cover combat that you love, that moment-to-moment gameplay is all in there.
"There are tense moments, for sure. Any time you're trying to do something big and ambitious, you're going to have tensions." Aaryn Flynn, BioWare general manager
How big of a challenge has this project been?
Oh it's been a really big challenge. When the Mass Effect trilogy story ended, we had a lot of choices to make about how we would do another [game]. Even before that, we thought about whether we should do one at all.
Luckily, we had a lot of support from fans, and we had a lot of developers who were interested in doing another one.
A lot of the folks who worked on the original trilogy, they've gone on to start a new IP at BioWare that they are still working on. So we had to train up a new group of leads to build this project; that was a task in itself.
But now we have a new generation of developers who are trying to bring their vision of Mass Effect to life.
So this may not surprise you, but I've heard stories of a lot of tensions at the studio. I've heard about people leaving. Do you feel that's an accurate portrayal of the studio right now?
Er, passion yeah, tensions yes. There are tense moments, for sure. Any time you're trying to do something big and ambitious, you're going to have tensions and second thoughts. I think trailers like this show that, for whatever doubts our developers might have in their minds about getting this done, it's going to get done and it's going to be amazing.
I also heard that some gameplay features are now being stripped out to meet the release date.
Oh I haven't heard about any of that. We've had a couple of modest changes, but nothing radical. All of the emphasis to move towards the free-form exploration, all that's still in there and very grounded in the mechanics.
NEW IMAGES: Click on the thumbnails below to view in full-screen
This is clearly a hugely ambitious game, attempting many new things at the same time. How confident are you that you will be able to hit that "early 2017" deadline?
I'm pretty confident. We're lucky to have an amazing publisher in EA, who want us to make the best Mass Effect game we possibly can. We talk to them constantly, they're always asking questions and giving advice.
Now that we're using Frostbite, there's a lot of developers such as DICE and Visceral, who have a lot of experience with the engine. So as a community of developers, I think, EA has never been stronger.
I recognise that there's a lot of ambition with this game, and people are nervous about it for sure. The toughest thing for us to hear is that the fans are nervous, which is rather sobering, so we're eager to calm those concerns. A lot of fans hold the studio to a really high standard, and the game will mark the final say on that.
I can understand those fan concerns. I feel that, this close to release, it's a bit worrying there's no deep dive on how the game plays.
Oh okay, we could absolutely go into all that detail now. I have no concerns with that stuff.
BioWare's latest trailer suggests the lead character in Andromeda's marketing will be female
So moving on, so the Pathfinder character that was revealed at the end of the trailer appears to be a female by default this time?
Well there's a trick there, I can't get into it, but yes, that's your female protagonist.
I was just wondering if we were about to need the phrase "MenShep".
[Laughs] Yeah, it's funny actually because we have both main characters ready to view, and we we're talking about this, and we thought "actually with the first trilogy we had male as default, we should balance that out as best we can."
There's also a tricky balancing act here, you have to make Andromeda relatable to the original trilogy, whilst also giving it a clean slate. How do you tread that line?
I spend a lot of my time trying to think about that, with other members of the team, and it's invigorating working with younger developers who weren't around at the beginning of the trilogy. Sometimes they see something you don't.
Is Andromeda the start of a trilogy?
Well the first Mass Effect we specifically announced as part of a trilogy, which we didn't do this time. That was largely because we wanted more freedom to tell this story however we wanted. However, I think a lot of people right now are really enjoying what we're doing, and so that affords us a great opportunity to do more stuff.
I was there when the Mass Effect 3 ending happened, so I have a lot of therapy bills. Aaryn Flynn, BioWare general manager
Now that we have some years of distance from it, how did you feel about the Mass Effect 3 ending? The backlash, the alternate ending, bowing to fan pressure; how do you feel about all of it?
Well, I was there when the Mass Effect 3 ending happened, so I have a lot of therapy bills.
Seriously?
Oh yeah, I mean [releasing the alternate ending] was an incredibly cathartic moment for the studio. There we were, desperate to pay off a decade of work, and to have that negativity come back we thought, god, what are we doing here?
Heads were hanging like this [puts heads in hands between his knees]. It was a deeply introspective and challenging time for all of us. We carry a lot of scars from that time, and took a lot of lessons.
We all grew though it. I think everyone who went through that is a better developer because of it, and I think a lot of those people are determined to make a better Mass Effect game in a different setting. A lot of the motivation for me personally comes from that Mass Effect 3 ending.Can Canada reclaim its game? COMMENTARY
For much of the 2010 Winter Olympics, there has been a North-America-against-the-world vibe.
Canadian fans have carried "Go North America" signs to venues, cheered wildly when Americans were in medal contention and have started or joined in chants of "U-S-A! U-S-A!"
U.S. athletes have called Vancouver their "home away from home."
"I think the Americans and Canadians were rooting for each other's teams a little bit, and that's a special memory for me," said Billy Demong, the first American to win a medal in the Nordic combined.
The North American love has produced some tender moments.
That ends today when Canada and the United States face off for the gold medal in men's hockey.
Canadians, who almost seem embarrassed to show national pride, don't mess around when it comes to their national sport.
As Michael J. Fox says in a Winter Olympics commercial, "For Canadians, hockey isn't just a game, it's our game."
VANCOUVER, BC - FEBRUARY 26: Goalkeeper Ryan Miller #39 of the United States makes a save during the ice hockey men's semifinal game between the United States and Finland on day 15 of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics at Canada Hockey Place on February 26, 2010 in Vancouver, Canada. less VANCOUVER, BC - FEBRUARY 26: Goalkeeper Ryan Miller #39 of the United States makes a save during the ice hockey men's semifinal game between the United States and Finland on day 15 of the Vancouver 2010 Winter... more Photo: Harry How, Getty Images Photo: Harry How, Getty Images Image 1 of / 7 Caption Close Can Canada reclaim its game? 1 / 7 Back to Gallery
Here, every kid wants to be Sid the Kid.
"Hockey is not a sport in Canada; it's a cult, it's a religion," U.S. general manager Brian Burke said.
The North American brothers and sisters can go back to holding hands Monday.
"Canada's been looking forward to this for what, eight years, since they announced that the Olympics would be on their home soil?" U.S. goalie Ryan Miller said after Saturday's practice. "Whatever happens is going to be remembered here for a long time."
Canada entered this tournament with a decisive 10-2-3 edge on the United States in Olympic hockey games.
There is much talk about payback for the U.S. loss to Canada in the gold-medal game in Salt Lake City in 2002. Sell it all you want, but it's just not that important to most of the United States. It is everything to Canadians.
This is the most anticipated event in Canadian sports history, with Nos. 2 and 3 on the list being Canada's games against the United States and Russia earlier in these Games.
"Here's an opportunity of a lifetime and you want to make good on it," Canada coach Mike Babcock said. "That's what everyone came to these Olympics for."
Like most of the players, Babcock compared today's game to a Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals. He has coached in three of those, and says the pressure is a good thing. His players feel it.
"People are saying it's more intense, it's more emotional, but if you take away all those things, it's the same game," Sid the Kid Crosby said.
What?
Take away the intensity and the emotion, and you've got just another hockey game? Well, that we won't have today, because of where we are.
This U.S. team, the youngest in the tournament at an average age of 26 1/2, isn't stocked with unknowns like the 1980 squad. This team has 23 established NHL players.
They aren't afraid of the moment, as they showed in a 5-3 win over the Canadians in round robin play. And better yet, they have the best playing goalie in Miller, who has allowed five goals in five games (108 shots).
"For a lot of our young guys, it's a chance to make their mark in history," U.S. defenseman Brian Rafalski said. "It's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity."
With most of the pressure on their formerly friendly hosts.
Pressure can be a good thing. It didn't help Canada when the teams played last week, but after what they describe as a wake-up call, the Canadians are playing a far more physical game than they did then.
"They tried to skill us to death," U.S. forward David Backes said.
Said U.S. coach Ron Wilson: "We're not going to be retreating." He said the team relied too much on Miller in that game, but not today.
With years of anticipation building to this moment, Canada will fight if it has to.
Today's game
Who: U.S. vs. Canada
What: Gold-medal game
When: Noon
TV/Radio: Channel: 11 Channel: 3 Channel: 8 /1050Not very long after God told some at St. Joseph Abbey that the way out of financial hardship might be selling the monks’ handcrafted caskets, the state of Louisiana arrived with a different message.
It was a cease-and-desist order and came with threats of thousands of dollars in fines and possible criminal prosecution.
“Before we even sold a casket,” St. Joseph Abbot Justin Brown said in a recent interview in the picturesque abbey, which is located about an hour’s drive from New Orleans, on the other side of Lake Pontchartrain. Now a band of libertarian lawyers is hoping that the honey-colored Louisiana cypress coffins provide the vehicle for a Supreme Court review of government economic regulations.
Brown, a soft-spoken man who is only the fifth leader of a monastery that dates to 1889, said he had not known that in Louisiana only licensed funeral directors are allowed to sell “funeral merchandise.”
That means that St. Joseph Abbey must either give up the casket-selling business or become a licensed funeral establishment, which would require a layout parlor for 30 people, a display area for the coffins, the employment of a licensed funeral director and an embalming room.
“Really,” Brown said. “It’s just a big box.”
And so, after much prayer and two failed attempts to get the Louisiana legislature to change the law, the monks went to federal court.
The monks won round one in July, when U.S. District Judge Stanwood R. Duval Jr. ruled Louisiana’s restrictions unconstitutional, saying “the sole reason for these laws is the economic protection of the funeral industry.”
The Louisiana State Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors, which has argued that the law protects consumers, has appealed, and the circuit court in New Orleans will hear the case in early June.
The monks are represented by the Arlington County-based Institute for Justice, which has a knack for picking empathetic, working-class parties — hair braiders, flower arrangers, city tour guides — to personify what it says is its battle against government regulation that strangles free enterprise.
The group is on a constant watch to find the perfect case to challenge a series of economic regulation decisions nearly unbroken since the New Deal. Courts must find only that there is a “rational basis” for an act, the most accommodating standard for government action.
William H. “Chip” Mellor, president of the group, said there are three essential components to a successful suit: “outrageous facts,” “evil villains” and “sympathetic clients.”
By that measure, the institute might find it hard to top St. Joseph Abbey. Jeff Rowes, one of the lawyers in the case, said he recently gave this advice to a seminar of law students:
“The number one thing you should do as a public interest litigator is to get monks as your clients in every single case.”
‘It’s God’s idea’
Brown, 54, never really thought of going into the casket-building business, although the abbey has built caskets for years for the monks and others in southeast Louisiana.
But the monks of St. Joseph, part of the Order of Saint Benedict, must support themselves. “Ora et labora” — “prayer and work” — is the order’s motto. Money comes from contributions, the seminary that trains priests, a retreat center and small enterprises such as a gift shop that features abbey-made Monk Soap in fragrances such as Mayan Gold.
But the abbey lost a large portion of its income in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina destroyed part of the pine timberlands whose harvest had been profitable.
It was Deacon Mark Coudrain, a woodworking enthusiast asked by his father to build a casket for him, who approached Brown with the prospect of turning the abbey’s occasional coffin construction into a business.
“I really like to say it’s God’s idea that I didn’t want to do,” Coudrain said. Eventually, he decided, “there’s a need, the abbey’s the perfect place and God was saying, ‘You know, I taught you something, why don’t you use it?’ ”
So the monks prayed, voted and bought $200,000 in equipment to establish St. Joseph Woodworks.
And so for some of the 36 monks at St. Joseph — they range in age from 26 to 89 — casket-building has become part of the daily routine. Prayers and readings start at 6; breakfast is taken in silence at 7. Mass is at 11:15 and lunch at noon.
At a recent meal, the monks scattered along long wooden tables anchored by the requisite Louisiana condiments of Tabasco and Tony Chachere’s Creole Seasoning, listening to a fellow monk read from Bill O’Reilly’s “Killing Lincoln.”
There are more chores in the afternoon — some monks teach at the seminary next door — and the singing of psalms at 5:30. Dinner is at 6, the O’Reilly book replaced by a more religious text.
At the woodshop, several of the monks work with Coudrain and volunteers. Brother Elias Eichorn, the “iron monk” who recently completed the Boston Marathon and is training for a triathalon, works on lids. Brother Emmanuel Labrise, a fairly recent arrival from Pennsylvania, lines them with white cloth.
There are two versions, a monastic style with metal handles that sells for $1,500 and a traditional version with wooden rail handles for $2,000. In a nod to modernity, they can be modified for the oversized. Each is blessed and, an in attempt to create the abbey’s signature, marked with a medal of Saint Benedict.
“Noble simplicity,” Brown said. “It’s simple, but it’s not cheap.”
‘The last word in life’
The workshop was dedicated Nov. 1, 2007, and a local Catholic newspaper reported the event. The cease-and-desist letter came immediately, Brown said.
The abbot said it was difficult to know what to do. The abbey had made a huge investment, but he was reluctant to sue for the right to sell the caskets.
“Was that something monasteries should do, or should we just lay low and be quiet about it?” Brown wondered. “A lot of these funeral directors are good Catholic men.”
He decided to continue to sell caskets to those who asked for them but not to advertise. His state House representative, Scott Simon (R), looked for a compromise. “It was my first bill,” Simon said in an interview. The funeral directors association, he said, had it killed in committee.
“I learned that funeral directors have the last word in life, and in the legislature,” Simon said.
After the funeral directors board in 2010 subpoenaed Brown and Coudrain to testify about the casket sales, the men agreed to let the Institute of Justice file a federal lawsuit challenging Louisiana’s law as a violation of due process and equal protection. The abbey’s attorneys said Louisiana is the only state to enforce a ban on in-state sales.
Although robes are usually worn just around the monastery, Brown said, he donned his habit for the news conference on the courthouse steps, which featured a casket.
Representatives of the funeral directors board, the association that lobbies the legislature and several funeral directors who serve on both did not return phone calls or e-mails asking for comment on the case.
But in court pleadings, the board said the legislature had good reason for limiting in-state sales of caskets. The act protects Louisianans from “improper and overreaching sales tactics in the area of ‘at need’ casket sales,” the brief says. In some parts of the state, many burials are aboveground, and that requires “knowledgable decisions” in casket sales “mindful of Louisiana’s unique situation.”
The institute’s attorneys say that makes no sense. The state has no legal requirement that anyone be buried in a casket, and, under federal rules, funeral directors must accept a casket that a family has purchased elsewhere.
Thus, Louisianans are free to purchase a casket online from Wal-Mart or Costco, Judge Duval noted, but not from an in-state casket-maker.
Still, the Louisiana board argues, courts are simply not free to overturn economic regulation laws that have some rational basis.
And, the board said, if it has the “incidental consequence of economic protectionism, such a consequence does not render Louisiana’s statutory scheme constitutionally infirm.” To second-guess the legislature is to return to the days before the New Deal, when courts imposed their own economic judgment, the board said
The Institute for Justice’s Mellor replies that protectionism is different.
“The standard of review is so favorably tilted to the government that legitimate occupations are foreclosed — or entry into the occupations is so heavily conditioned — that they basically become cartels or monopolies protected by government edict,” he said.
Federal appeals courts have split in evaluating similar laws. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit said there was nothing unconstitutional about an Oklahoma law that protected the intrastate funeral home industry.
“While baseball may be the national pastime of the citizenry, dishing out special economic benefits to certain in-state industries remains the favored pastime of state and local governments,” it ruled.
But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit struck down a Tennessee law protecting funeral directors, saying an attempt to “privilege certain businessmen over others at the expense of consumers is not animated by a legitimate governmental purpose.”
The institute’s attorneys hope the eventual decision from the New Orleans appeals court will make the issue attractive to the Supreme Court.
If that happens, Brown said, so be it.
“I was concerned that it would disturb the peace of the monastery by getting involved in something somewhat controversial, adversarial, but it hasn’t,” he said. “If you study monastic history, there were often conflicts between monks and civil authorities.”Joe Athialy, the South Asia coordinator for the Bank Information Center, an international financial industry watchdog, recently travelled to Mundra to document the impact of Adani and other energy companies on the coastal inlet at the northwest tip of India, near the border with Pakistan. He told VICE News that Adani's development there has devastated the local fishing economy.
Australia is counting on the Indian-owned mining giant Adani to uphold those high standards. The company is responsible for building and operating Abbot Point. To gauge Adani's commitment to protecting the environment, it's worth looking at the small Indian fishing community of Mundra, where the company began.
Worse, the exported coal is expected to create new carbon emissions — an estimated 3.7 billion tons worth of greenhouse gas — that will hasten climate change and destroy the reef in the long-term. In the past 30 years, the reef has already lost half of its coral. Australia's environment minister, Greg Hunt, nevertheless approved a dredging plan for Abbot Point in late 2013, saying it will be subject to the "highest environmental standards and conditions."
Abbot Point is located about 15 miles northwest of Bowen on the coast of Queensland — right next to the Great Barrier Reef. The fragile marine habitat contains the world's largest coral reef system, and environmental activists have warned that dredging from the port construction and the resulting shipping activity will do irreparable damage to the coral and the diverse array of species that inhabit it.
The Port of Abbot Point in northeast Australia will be one of the biggest coal terminals in the world when its expansion is complete. The sprawling 15-square-mile industrial site will cost $14.4 billion to develop and ultimately be capable of exporting 60 million tons of coal per year.
Read more
The Port of Abbot Point in northeast Australia will be one of the biggest coal terminals in the world when its expansion is complete. The sprawling 15-square-mile industrial site will cost $14.4 billion to develop and ultimately be capable of exporting 60 million tons of coal per year.
Abbot Point is located about 15 miles northwest of Bowen on the coast of Queensland — right next to the Great Barrier Reef. The fragile marine habitat contains the world's largest coral reef system, and environmental activists have warned that dredging from the port construction and the resulting shipping activity will do irreparable damage to the coral and the diverse array of species that inhabit it.
Worse, the exported coal is expected to create new carbon emissions — an estimated 3.7 billion tons worth of greenhouse gas — that will hasten climate change and destroy the reef in the long-term. In the past 30 years, the reef has already lost half of its coral. Australia's environment minister, Greg Hunt, nevertheless approved a dredging plan for Abbot Point in late 2013, saying it will be subject to the "highest environmental standards and conditions."
Australia is counting on the Indian-owned mining giant Adani to uphold those high standards. The company is responsible for building and operating Abbot Point. To gauge Adani's commitment to protecting the environment, it's worth looking at the small Indian fishing community of Mundra, where the company began.
Joe Athialy, the South Asia coordinator for the Bank Information Center, an international financial industry watchdog, recently travelled to Mundra to document the impact of Adani and other energy companies on the coastal inlet at the northwest tip of India, near the border with Pakistan. He told VICE News that Adani's development there has devastated the local fishing economy.
"Before they were so busy. They were fishing at night, preparing their nets during the day, the whole family involved — even the little children — in mending the nets and drying the fish," Athialy said. "Now we are seeing them just sitting around doing nothing. There's a large number of unemployed people."
How Australia perfected solar power and then went back to coal. Read more here.
Fishermen in Mundra, India. (Photo by Joe Athialy)
Adani built its empire on the back of its development at Mundra. It erected a power station there in 2001 and was granted "special economic zone" status by the Indian government in 2003. From this base, Adani grew into a business with $8.7 billion in annual revenue by 2013. Mundra is set to become India's biggest port within the next two years, which enabled the opening of a second coal-fired power plant in 2012 owned by Tata Power.
For centuries before Adani arrived, the bay provided a livelihood for migrant fishermen from India's Muslim minority. Until recently, the fishermen harvested bountiful catches off the shores of Mundra, which is |
. And our field is rife with examples of research, the temporal
context of which is fundamentally limited in some way. Scholars of American
politics provide perhaps the clearest example of an entire sub-field that
cannot be held to apply to a period extending back beyond 1789. The sub-field
of international relations is similarly dependent in many ways upon the
existence of the modern nation-state, which we typically trace back to 1648,
and some of the most widely used only go back to 1815. Do we consider our
endeavors in these areas “history” because our studies are bound to these time
periods?
Also on this point, there seems to be a double standard when
we consider the broader implications of our research. Taking my example from
earlier, reviewers will commonly ask how the study of US foreign policy between
1900 and 1945 is relevant for today, but rarely do we consider how a study of US
foreign policy from 1945–2013 informs our understanding of the 1900–1945
period. It strikes me that this is (1) perpetually moving the goalpost, and (2)
that it may be the wrong goalpost. This may seem like an odd point, but what it
“relevant” by current standards is something that obviously changes on a
day-to-day basis, and it’s a standard that says nothing about the quality of a
paper as a piece of social science, or whether or not a paper helps us to
understand a particular question about a given set of relationships. Really,
this only represents our own innate temporal biases, but it says nothing about
how scientific a piece of research is. If the goal is truly generalizable theoretical and empirical knowledge,
in a temporal sense, then this kind of consideration should apply just as much
as thinking about how a study informs our understanding of the present. Conducting
a study with the purpose of expanding our knowledge of systematic relationships
between societal actors is not synonymous with expanding our knowledge of
systematic relationships between societal actors for the purposes of informing
our understanding of the present.
And it’s not as though we don’t attempt to deal with “unique”
time periods and cases in our current research. However, it’s often the case
that the manner in which we deal with these cases is fairly crude. For example,
we might include a dummy variable in a model to control for a time period (or characteristics
of a time period) that we believe to be unique in some way. Bipolarity during
the Cold War, for example. Similarly, we might include a dummy variable in our
model to control for states that we believe to be unique—depending on our
topic, it might be a state like Israel, Egypt, the US, or maybe a group of
states like the “Great Powers”. Sometimes we might also include an interaction
term to account for how the effect of one variable might be conditional upon
another.
But these approaches are not always appropriate methods for
dealing with the questions that we want to answer. Dummying out a particular
time period is only going to tell us whether or not a given time period or
group has a higher or lower intercept than the alternative time period or
group. This approach is also often atheoretical. For example, we might have a
belief that a time period is somehow different, but cannot fully articulate why
or how. Similarly, interaction terms with a variable capturing a particular
time period, for example, are implicitly suggesting that a given relationship
is time-bound in some way. However, these approaches don’t allow us to examine
whether or not the remaining variables in our models also have different
effects in the context of a particular time period. For example, maybe we’re
interested in whether or not both regime type and economic interests have a
different effect on conflict propensity during the Cold War as compared to
after. This, then, would suggest that maybe splitting our sample into two time
periods is the more appropriate means of addressing our question. In fact, the
notion that we would dummy out a particular time period because we suspect that
it’s “different” in some way, but don’t exactly know how, is exactly the reason
why we would want to conduct a study that is temporally bound in the first
place.
This points to another issue. I think these biases are
somewhat rooted in, and reinforced by, our relatively limited access to “good”
data. Almost every journal article contains passages wherein the authors
attempt to assert the broader relevance of their work. In the case of
international relations, it is also quite common for these articles to then
proceed to test their arguments using data that is only available for the
post-World War II period. Sometimes, these tests will use data for a single
country—often the US. Yet the arguments the authors make are often asserted as
applicable to a broader set of countries than just the US, and rarely do such
papers even address their own temporal limitations. We implicitly accept the
generalizability of papers in which the tests of broader theoretical arguments
rely on data from an incredibly narrow and often unrepresentative set of
states, but push back when a study openly acknowledges its more narrow temporal
confines. Why should we automatically assume that such studies inform our
understanding of international relations and state behavior in the 1800s?
This is understandable. Particularly in the field of
international relations, the availability of data is exponentially greater in
the post-World War II period than before. Commonly used indicators like GDP and
trade either don’t exist, are often missing, or are highly inaccurate for
earlier time periods. Accordingly, many of our studies focus on this 50–60 year
time period—not because it somehow matters more, or because we are interested
only in this particular time period, but because this is the period for which
we have access to relatively abundant data sources. But even in the post-World
War II time period some of the data we use can still be of questionable
reliability. Accordingly, when we see an article that focuses on a much earlier
time period it sticks out like a sore thumb, and reviewers will often proceed
to subject that paper to a different standard than other papers—a standard that
really has nothing to do with the execution of the paper or the soundness of
its argument.
This knee-jerk reaction against studies that are temporally
bound in some way can also have deleterious consequences for our ability to
understand the world. Finding that a particular relationship between two
variables holds only for a given time period can reveal new and interesting
questions. For example, we have evidence
that Republicans and Democrats have switched their positions on military
spending over the course of the Cold War. If we were looking for a relationship
between Republicans and higher military spending over the entirety of this time
period, we might erroneously conclude that there is no relationship.
Alternatively, the finding that this relationship is temporally bound in some
way raises new questions: Why did they switch? What caused the switch? Etc.
If our goal is to continuously develop and refine our
understanding of how the world works then we must think carefully about the
standards we set. If that standard is that we must only examine relationships
that hold for centuries at a time, then we are imposing some very serious limitations
on ourselves as researchers. These kinds of “big” systematic relationships are
clearly important, but the march of scientific progress is not marked
exclusively in these terms.
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Like this: Like Loading...By By Subir Ghosh Sep 27, 2010 in World Jerusalem - Palestinian and Israeli children not only suffer the direct physical consequences of violence, they are also being psychologically scarred by the high levels of violence they witness. Nearly the same proportion reported seeing in person other Palestinians who were injured or dead, lying on stretchers or on the ground, as a result of Israeli attacks in the last year. For Israelis, the figures were lower but still high. More than 25 percent of Israeli Jewish children of the same age reported seeing other Israelis upset or crying because someone they knew or loved had been killed by Palestinians. Nearly 10 percent reported that they had seen in person other Israelis who were injured or dead, lying on stretchers or on the ground, as a result of Palestinian attacks in the last year. What do the results signify? Explains Rowell Huesmann, director of the Research Center for Group Dynamics at ISR and principal investigator of the project, "Palestinian children are seeing extraordinary amounts of very disturbing violence in their daily lives. This exposure is deleterious and is associated with dramatic increases in post-traumatic stress symptoms and increases in aggressive behaviour directed at peers." According to Huesmann, a child's regular exposure to violence should increase the likelihood he or she will grow up to be more violent individuals because of emotional desensitisation to violence, observational learning of scripts for violence, and observational acquisition of beliefs supporting violence. "Moreover, children’s regular exposure to violence should increase the likelihood of their experiencing serious traumatic stress metal health problems as they grow up. The manifestations are recurring anxiety attacks, crying and unhappiness, sleeplessness, lack of motivation, and depression." A protest in Gaza. Palestinian children in particular are seeing extraordinary amounts of very disturbing violence in their daily lives, and the more they are exposed to violence, the more anxiety they experience and the more aggressively they behave. Francois Bouchet Children who saw the most violence experienced the highest levels of fear, anxiety, nightmares, and incapacitating thoughts, according to results from the first year of the three-year, longitudinal study of 1,500 children ages 8 to 14. More than 70 percent of Israeli Arab children who saw these things frequently had nightmares. Both Palestinian and Israeli youth who saw the most violence were significantly more likely to slap, choke, punch, beat, or threaten others of their own groups with a gun or a knife. And the after-effects are beginning to show. Fifty-one percent of youth at the lowest levels of violence exposure reported having committed at least one of those acts during the past year versus 71 percent of youth at the highest levels of violence exposure. The Israeli sample included 901 children and their parents. The Arab group consisted of 450 children: 150 8-year-olds (66 girls, 84 boys), 149 11-year-olds (69 girls, 80 boys) and 151 14-year-olds (79 girls, 72 boys) and one of their parents (68 percent were mothers). The Jewish group consisted of 451 children: 151 8-year-olds (79 girls, 72 boys), 150 11-year-olds (73 girls, 77 boys) and 150 14-year-olds (94 girls, 56 boys) and one of their parents (87 percent were mothers). The Palestinian sample is a representative sample of 600 children: 200 8-year-olds (101 girls, 99 boys), 200 11-year-olds (100 girls, 100 boys) and 200 14-year-olds (100 girls, 100 boys) and one of their parents (98 percent were mothers). A Palestinian child hurtling stones at Israeli soldiers. Palestinian children are seeing extraordinary amounts of very disturbing violence in their daily lives. This exposure is deleterious and is associated with dramatic increases in post-traumatic stress symptoms and increases in aggressive behaviour directed at peers. Eco Medicks "Palestinian children in particular are seeing extraordinary amounts of very disturbing violence in their daily lives, and the more they are exposed to violence, the more anxiety they experience and the more aggressively they behave," pointed out ISR psychologist Eric Dubow, who along with Paul Boxer of Rutgers University was a co-principal investigator. "For instance, 29 percent of 8-year-olds had seen at least one in person Palestinians upset/crying because someone they knew was killed by Israelis. Twelve percent of them had seen such disturbing events more than once. A relatively high 58 percent of 14-year-olds had seen such incidents at least once; and 26 percent reported being witness more than once. Forty percent of them had also at least once seen in person Palestinians held hostage, tortured, abused by Israelis," the researchers said. Worse still. The percentage of children who had lost friends or acquaintances due to political violence was 28 percent for 8-year-olds, 42 percent for 11-year-olds, and 38 percent for 14-year-olds. All high numbers. A lot of hard work, but do authorities concerned ever act to such research? Answered Dubow, "Studies from our Aggression Research Group have focused on exposure to violence in the media and the family, and how such exposure shapes children's thoughts about violence in their everyday lives. Some of our research has informed public policy issues including national reports and professional organisation recommendations (e.g., American Psychological Association; Surgeon General's Report) for parents to decrease children's exposure to media violence. Some of our research has been used to develop school-based intervention to decrease children's aggressive behaviour." Israeli children. For Israelis, the figures were lower but still high. More than 25 percent of Israeli Jewish children of the same age reported seeing other Israelis upset or crying because someone they knew or loved had been killed by Palestinians, and nearly 10 percent reported that they had seen in person other Israelis who were injured or dead, lying on stretchers or on the ground, as a result of Palestinian attacks in the last year. Merav "Because of the sophisticated sampling and interviewing techniques used by our collaborators—Khalil Shikaki at the Palestinian Center and Simha Landau at Hebrew University, we believe that this is the most accurate data every collected on this topic anywhere in the world," said Huesmann. "Given the accumulated scientific evidence showing that exposure to violence stimulates aggression, some of these results are not surprising," he said. "However, it is not well known that exposure to war violence committed against your own group by another group increases your aggressive behaviour toward members of your own group. What about comparative figures? The way forward? "Replied Dudow, "We have not conducted such a study of exposure to ethnic-political violence in the Middle-East in the past. But this study follows children over three years, so we will be able to track these short-term changes in exposure and resulting behavioral and psychological adjustment." Researchers from the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research (ISR) have found that nearly 50 percent of Palestinian children between the ages of 11 and 14 have seen other Palestinians upset or crying because someone they knew or loved had been killed by Israelis.Nearly the same proportion reported seeing in person other Palestinians who were injured or dead, lying on stretchers or on the ground, as a result of Israeli attacks in the last year.For Israelis, the figures were lower but still high. More than 25 percent of Israeli Jewish children of the same age reported seeing other Israelis upset or crying because someone they knew or loved had been killed by Palestinians. Nearly 10 percent reported that they had seen in person other Israelis who were injured or dead, lying on stretchers or on the ground, as a result of Palestinian attacks in the last year.What do the results signify? Explains Rowell Huesmann, director of the Research Center for Group Dynamics at ISR and principal investigator of the project, "Palestinian children are seeing extraordinary amounts of very disturbing violence in their daily lives. This exposure is deleterious and is associated with dramatic increases in post-traumatic stress symptoms and increases in aggressive behaviour directed at peers."According to Huesmann, a child's regular exposure to violence should increase the likelihood he or she will grow up to be more violent individuals because of emotional desensitisation to violence, observational learning of scripts for violence, and observational acquisition of beliefs supporting violence. "Moreover, children’s regular exposure to violence should increase the likelihood of their experiencing serious traumatic stress metal health problems as they grow up. The manifestations are recurring anxiety attacks, crying and unhappiness, sleeplessness, lack of motivation, and depression."Children who saw the most violence experienced the highest levels of fear, anxiety, nightmares, and incapacitating thoughts, according to results from the first year of the three-year, longitudinal study of 1,500 children ages 8 to 14. More than 70 percent of Israeli Arab children who saw these things frequently had nightmares.Both Palestinian and Israeli youth who saw the most violence were significantly more likely to slap, choke, punch, beat, or threaten others of their own groups with a gun or a knife. And the after-effects are beginning to show. Fifty-one percent of youth at the lowest levels of violence exposure reported having committed at least one of those acts during the past year versus 71 percent of youth at the highest levels of violence exposure.The Israeli sample included 901 children and their parents. The Arab group consisted of 450 children: 150 8-year-olds (66 girls, 84 boys), 149 11-year-olds (69 girls, 80 boys) and 151 14-year-olds (79 girls, 72 boys) and one of their parents (68 percent were mothers). The Jewish group consisted of 451 children: 151 8-year-olds (79 girls, 72 boys), 150 11-year-olds (73 girls, 77 boys) and 150 14-year-olds (94 girls, 56 boys) and one of their parents (87 percent were mothers). The Palestinian sample is a representative sample of 600 children: 200 8-year-olds (101 girls, 99 boys), 200 11-year-olds (100 girls, 100 boys) and 200 14-year-olds (100 girls, 100 boys) and one of their parents (98 percent were mothers)."Palestinian children in particular are seeing extraordinary amounts of very disturbing violence in their daily lives, and the more they are exposed to violence, the more anxiety they experience and the more aggressively they behave," pointed out ISR psychologist Eric Dubow, who along with Paul Boxer of Rutgers University was a co-principal investigator."For instance, 29 percent of 8-year-olds had seen at least one in person Palestinians upset/crying because someone they knew was killed by Israelis. Twelve percent of them had seen such disturbing events more than once. A relatively high 58 percent of 14-year-olds had seen such incidents at least once; and 26 percent reported being witness more than once. Forty percent of them had also at least once seen in person Palestinians held hostage, tortured, abused by Israelis," the researchers said.Worse still. The percentage of children who had lost friends or acquaintances due to political violence was 28 percent for 8-year-olds, 42 percent for 11-year-olds, and 38 percent for 14-year-olds. All high numbers.A lot of hard work, but do authorities concerned ever act to such research? Answered Dubow, "Studies from our Aggression Research Group have focused on exposure to violence in the media and the family, and how such exposure shapes children's thoughts about violence in their everyday lives. Some of our research has informed public policy issues including national reports and professional organisation recommendations (e.g., American Psychological Association; Surgeon General's Report) for parents to decrease children's exposure to media violence. Some of our research has been used to develop school-based intervention to decrease children's aggressive behaviour.""Because of the sophisticated sampling and interviewing techniques used by our collaborators—Khalil Shikaki at the Palestinian Center and Simha Landau at Hebrew University, we believe that this is the most accurate data every collected on this topic anywhere in the world," said Huesmann."Given the accumulated scientific evidence showing that exposure to violence stimulates aggression, some of these results are not surprising," he said. "However, it is not well known that exposure to war violence committed against your own group by another group increases your aggressive behaviour toward members of your own group.What about comparative figures? The way forward? "Replied Dudow, "We have not conducted such a study of exposure to ethnic-political violence in the Middle-East in the past. But this study follows children over three years, so we will be able to track these short-term changes in exposure and resulting behavioral and psychological adjustment." More about Palestine, Israel, Children More news from palestine israel childrenA recent summer weekend is smoldering in my memory. My favorite New York beach was checkered in rows of splayed out towels by the time I had caught the bus to the train and crossed the line where gravel turns to sand.
I was digging the sunblock from underneath my nails after a heavy slathering session when the beach's buzz level of crashing waves, music and chit chat rose in volume. The heightened voices were coming from the water's edge, where over a dozen parents and children had gathered in a tightly packed circle, their hands jammed toward the sky, gripping cellphones and snapping photos.
I continued picking my nails, assuming it was another piece of trash mistaken for an animal; a plastic straw confused for a crab leg or glass shard misidentified as a jellyfish.
The commotion continued, and curiosity got the best of me. I nonchalantly weaved between the blankets, just so happening to meander in the direction of the crowd. I leered over the hairy backs and damp towels flung around necks to see a man clutching a baby shark by its tail. He was grinning, delivering a thumbs up to his wife.
"Angle it a bit more in front-- no babe, in front of you," his wife directed. "Yeah. No, you're blocking it. In front of you."
The man jolted the shark by his tail, front and back, left and right. "Like this?"
"Yeah, that's good."
"Get a few."
The shark wiggled his torso and gaped his mouth open and shut.
A boy grabbed at the shark. "Let me hold it! I want a photo."
The man maintained a grip on the tail. The boy squirmed up next to the shark, smacked a hand on his side in a declaration of ownership, and extended his other hand gripping an iPhone to snap a selfie.
"Shouldn't you put the shark back in the water?" I asked. My voice was swallowed in the murmurs of excitement. I asked louder, "Shouldn't you put it back?"
Panic arose from the circle. "No, I didn't get a photo with it yet!" "It's my turn first!" A group of kids and adults alike began more desperately clambering for a grip of the shark.
A big man with thick muscles and deeply tanned skin won the grab-off with two hands on the animal. "Joey! Hey Joey take my picture!" he shouted to a friend.
The shark's torso stopped wiggling, and he slowly gaped his mouth once, and then let it hang open. "You guys! I think the shark is dying," I exclaimed.
A few heads turned my way, then returned back to taking photos. My cheeks began to burn as I stood in front of the man, my hands waving, blocking the cameras. "This shark is dying. You guys are literally killing this shark for a photo, can't you see that?" I asked. A sea of cameras, iPhones and iPads stared back at me. The crowd waited for me to move so they could resume their important work of proving they saw a shark. Dead or alive, it didn't matter. It'd be liked on Facebook and Instagram either way.
I clamped my shaky hand on the thick muscled man's greasy shoulder. "Let it go," I declared in a voice higher than I knew I was capable of. He turned to his friend. "You get the pic, Joey?" and upon Joey's nod, he shrugged. "Fine."
"No, wait!" Another man yelled, grabbing at the shark. "I didn't get a turn!"
"You are literally going to kill this shark for a photo!" I argued.
He looked down at the shark dangling from his hand. "It's already dead," he shrugged.
The shark's mouth lay agape, his gills slightly blowing in the sea breeze.
"Just..." I bit down hard on my tongue to force back tears worming their way out. "...Just put him back in the water. Please."
The man shrugged and dropped him in the sea. Another man waded into the water to find him, but the shark had floated out with the current.
A little girl in a polka dot bathing suit with ruffles stomped up to me, splashing her little feet through the water. She smacked her hands onto her hips. "What'd you do that for?! I don't want any shark stinking up my ocean."
I stared at her, and shook my head. "That's nature."
She blinked at me, confused by this notion, and stomped away.
This is a generation that experiences animals, nature and the great wonders of our world behind the safety of four-inch screens instead of understanding how to live among them in reality. We are teetering dangerously close to preferring satisfaction in the virtual world over the real one.
Humans no longer know how to interact with the natural world. That summer day, this disconnect came at the sacrifice of a little baby shark. I fear the consequences will be more dire in the future.
This story originally appeared on The Dodo.Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is a serious mental health condition that can cause many problems for the people that suffer from it. It is a form of extreme anxiety that manifests itself in obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors. It certainly requires diagnosis and treatment by a medical professional. But in addition to that, people with this condition may be able to use the craft of crochet to assist them in managing their symptoms.
The Four Steps of OCD Treatment
Crochet is something that comes into play in the third step of OCD treatment as outlined by Jeffrey Schwartz. Schwartz is an author and Associate Research Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA School of Medicine who has made major breakthroughs in the understanding and treatment of OCD including the development of a four-step model of treatment. The four steps are to re-label, re-attribute, re-focus and re-value to improve OCD.
In step one the patient learns to recognize when thoughts are obsessive or compulsive and labeling them as such. In step two the patient learns to re-attribute these thoughts to the OCD and not to the value of the repetitive thought itself. It is in step three where crochet can come into play because in this step the goal is to re-focus, mindfully choosing to ignore the obsessive compulsive thought and instead to engage in some other behavior. Crochet can be that behavior. This refocusing on constructive behavior is considered by some to be the most important step in self-treatment of OCD. This helps you get to step 4 in which you can re-value the thought as not having the value it felt like it did before and therefore avoid the OCD behaviors.
Crochet as a Refocusing Tool
Crochet can be particularly useful as a re-focusing tool for people who typically engage in compulsive behaviors that require the use of their hands. Compulsive hand washing, nail biting, dermatillomania (skin-picking) and trichotillomania (the pulling out of one’s own hair) are examples of behaviors that can be successfully reduced if the person is able to keep their hands busy with crochet.
One question that came to mind for me was whether the very symptoms of OCD would make it difficult for someone to complete crochet projects. After all, if you are obsessively counting or checking for errors, etc., then maybe it would be unlikely that crochet could benefit you in this particular way. However, I found an answer to this in an article about the health benefits of knitting that I think would also apply to crochet.
Gail of the blog Straight Jacket Knitting shared in an interview with Compassionate Knitter:
“As a self-taught knitter, I found that my OCD often worked to my advantage because my obsessive tendencies made me keep working through a project, when others would have thrown the knitting down in frustration. Despite having ADHD and Tourettes, both of which make it extremely difficult to focus, knitting helped calm the tics and allowed me some peace.” source
Crochet for Other Addictions
OCD is an extreme form of addiction and the same tools of distraction that can help with this condition can be even more helpful in terms of other types of addiction. In his book 7 Tools to Beat Addiction, Stanton Peele, Ph.D., J.D. identifies your individual resources as one of the seven tools required to overcome an addiction. There are many different types of resources that a person may rely on including relationships with others, work skills and accomplishments and more. One key resource he cites is “leisure activities” meaning both “hobbies and interests” and “ways of relaxing”. Crochet certainly falls into this category and therefore can be construed as a valuable resource for some people battling addiction. In this chapter he also cites the importance of recognizing and valuing your own strengths as an internal resource. If you know that you are good at certain things then you can at least imagine that you can be good at ceasing your addiction. If you feel like you are good at crochet then it can benefit you in this sense as well.
In this chapter, Peele also refers to the work of psychologist Saul Shiffman who looked at the techniques that cigarette addicts could successfully use to resist the urge to start smoking again. Three of the five behavioral techniques that he named are relaxation, selecting a distracting activity and selecting a delaying activity. These are all things that crochet can be used for. It may relax you so that you don’t feel the need to smoke or it may distract you entirely from the urge to smoke (or engage in other addictive behavior). Alternatively you may tell yourself that you are going to finish this many rows or that project before you go smoke, delaying the addictive behavior as a means of cutting back and eventually ceasing the behavior.
Identifying and using your resources is only one of the seven tools that Peele cites to beat addiction. A second important tool that relates to crochet is tool number seven, which is to pursue and accomplish goals. The idea here is that you set goals that are important to you so that you can have a bigger reason for quitting your addiction than just “it’s bad for me” or “everyone says I need to quit”. Having a bigger goal will help you to be able to actually quit the addiction instead of falling back into it after just a short period of time.
One of the types of goals that Peele names is “personal goals”, which he defines as goals “you pursue to make yourself a better person, to improve and advance your life”. One huge goal that comes to mind for me in relation crochet is to express myself in positive and creative ways. If you are struggling with an addiction, you can ask yourself if taking an action to feed that addiction (such as going to the bar) will help you to express yourself in positive and creative ways. It will not, whereas your crochet work can, and therefore perhaps you can convince yourself to skip the bar and stay home to crochet (or go to a craft group instead of the bar!)
Peele also points out that it is valuable to include goals that contribute to the community around you. He explains that when you contribute to your community, it therapeutically strengthens you as an individual because you need to be more responsible thanks to your interactions with others. Crochet can clearly be a community activity, whether you want to set a goal of teaching crochet to local schoolchildren or simply volunteer your time to crochet squares for charity. The more your goals connect you to the community, the more likely it is that you will beat your addiction. So, whether you are suffering from OCD or some other type of addiction, crochet may be a tool worth checking out.If the goal of Larry King’s last talk show on CNN was to go out with a representative sample of what the program has really been all about for the past twenty-five years, then it was truly a smashing success. Unfortunately for the viewers (thankfully I was probably one of the few under the age of 60 who was stupid enough to subject myself to it), that meant one full hour of vapid, insipid, awkward, embarrassing, cringe-worthy, decrepit, self-congratulatory, uninspired, talentless, fawning narcissism.
It was particularly appropriate that a man whose most remarkable characteristic was being able to get so very far without any discernable talent or even redeeming qualities somehow managed to host a show with perhaps the longest list of big-name guests (though what were Suzy Orman and Dr. Phil doing there?) in the history of hour-long television, and make it completely uninteresting and almost literally unwatchable.
Let’s go through some of the lowlights of Larry King’s last show.
Of the over a dozen big-name guests, by my count seven were openly “liberal” and the most “conservative” person invited on was RINO king Arnold Schwarzenegger. There were numerous instances of awkward silences and people talking over each other due to satellite audio delay. Regis Philbin tried to get Larry to sing with him to show people King’s knowledge of old tunes and, get this, Larry had no idea what Regis was doing. King had Bill Clinton on live, gave up most of the interview to Bill Maher and Ryan Seacrest, and the closest thing to “news” that came out of it was that Maher selfishly appeared to be able to guilt Clinton into agreeing to come on his show (hopefully so they can share their abundant wisdom on how ugly guys can use fame to chase skirts). Then there was the pathetic sight of the three network news anchors along with Barbara Walters uncomfortably holding up champagne glasses as if to toast Larry from New York only to realize that they had been instructed to do so (while being barred from actually drinking on live TV) at the wrong time. When Bill Maher is by far the most entertaining aspect of any show, you know there is a very big problem.
I personally believe that Larry King, with apologies to Joy Behar, Keith Olbermann and Maher, has created and represents more societal decline than any other media member and that the nation is a better place now that his show is off the airways for good (though one of the few amusing aspects of the last show was King seemingly believing, like a newly broke sugar daddy trusting his soon-to-leave mistress, that he will have some sort of career after this). The reasons for this are many.
Forget that he has been married eight times to seven women. Forget (heck, somehow Wikipedia has) that back when he was still named Larry Zeiger he was a rip-off artist who was found guilty of passing bad checks. No, Larry King’s greatest offense was that he almost single-handedly destroyed the hard news interview.
By wallowing in his own ignorance (which he would often brag about) and priding himself on purposefully not asking tough questions, King provided a safe sanctuary for any public figure that was in trouble. As long as you were famous enough and could handle the question, “So, what was that all about?” no transgression was too difficult to escape from once you got embraced by the warm and forgiving bosom of “Larry King Live.”
This had the infuriating effect of giving numerous scoundrels the ability to give the impression that they had faced media scrutiny for their indiscretions, without actually having to do so (O.J. Simpson once called in after his acquittal and King actually asked him about how he and his kids were doing). But it also had the perhaps even more insidious side effect of forcing every other interviewer to follow the same softball path.
Because the competition for big-name guests in an increasingly fragmented media world was increasing, and Larry King was always there as the safe option for anyone who needed a “get out of jail free” card, all of the other suitors had to unilaterally disarm or price themselves out of the celebrity guest hunt business. (Ironically, as a Larry King hater and a Sarah Palin defender, I have always felt that the biggest mistake of the 2008 presidential campaign when it came to the handling of Sarah Palin was not putting her on with Larry King the Monday after the convention.)
Consequently, we now live in an era where there have never been more supposed interviews with public figures, but where fewer real questions ever get asked. That is the real legacy of Larry King. That, and the fact that a man with no looks, no wit, no wisdom, no talent, and no scruples could become rich, famous, powerful and get married to numerous beautiful women. But I am convinced that King will one day be forced to pay for all of that, for surely if there was ever evidence that there is such a thing as a deal with the devil, Larry Zeiger has provided it
John Ziegler is currently a documentary filmmaker who most recently released a movie on the 2008 election called, “Media Malpractice… How Obama Got Elected and Palin Was Targeted.” He has also been in radio talk show host in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Louisville and Nashville. Ziegler has written two books and has appeared live on numerous national television shows including the Today Show, The View, Fox News Channel, CNN and MSNBC.“Identity intelligence” is a relatively new intelligence construct that refers to the analysis and use of personal information, including biometric and forensic data among others, to identify intelligence targets of interest and to deny them anonymity.
The term began to appear a few years ago and was included, for example, in a 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency briefing package. Since then it has quickly propagated throughout U.S. military and intelligence operations.
Identity intelligence (or I2) was included for the first time in published U.S. military doctrine in the October 2013 edition of Joint Publication (JP) 2-0 on Joint Intelligence, which elaborated on the concept. Identity intelligence is used, JP 2-0 said, “to discover the existence of unknown potential threat actors by connecting individuals to other persons, places, events, or materials, analyzing patterns of life, and characterizing their level of potential threats to US interests.”
(“Identity intelligence” also appeared in an undated Top Secret document that was disclosed by Edward Snowden and published in excerpted form by the New York Times on May 31, 2014.)
Most recently, an updated U.S. Department of Defense publication on special operations noted this month that “Identity intelligence products enable real-time decisions in special operations worldwide.”
The new DoD doctrine on Special Operations — Joint Publication 3-05, dated 16 July 2014 — includes further discussion of identity intelligence (I2) in the special operations context:
“I2 is the collection, analysis, exploitation, and management of identity attributes and associated technologies and processes. The identification process utilizes biometrics-enabled intelligence (BEI), forensics-enabled intelligence (FEI), information obtained through document and media exploitation (DOMEX), and combat information and intelligence to identify a person or members of a group.”
“I2 fuses identity attributes (biological, biographical, behavioral, and reputational information related to individuals) and other information and intelligence associated with those attributes collected across all intelligence disciplines….”
“USSOCOM [US Special Operations Command] exploits biometric, forensic, document and media data collections and integrates the data with all-source intelligence to locate and track unattributed identities across |
plough into ships with devastating force.
This build has been a long time coming! After the Delphinus I had always wanted to do the Valuan flagships. Not only is the Auriga my favourite but during the encounter at Esparanza there is a clear overhead shot of it and the Delphinus side by side, making scaling a doddle. Furthermore it means I have a template for the Flagship hull which most of the other flagships share so others should hopefully follow shortly.
There's a little more to be done; the saw-like armour plates on the bow are only on one side, there's some detailing on the engines, and a stand that's a little less... orange, but with it so close to completion I got a little impatient!
DoneStory highlights Kipenzi broke her neck while running the giraffe habitat
Her hourlong birth was streamed live on the Internet
(CNN) Kipenzi, a baby giraffe that captivated an Internet audience with its live birth at the Dallas Zoo a few months ago, has died.
The calf was scampering around the giraffe habitat Tuesday evening when she ran into the perimeter and broke her neck. The zoo said Kipenzi died instantly.
"This is a huge loss for our giraffe herd, our staff and our guests," Gregg Hudson, zoo president and CEO, said in a statement. "To be honest, it hurts terribly. We're crushed, and everyone here is mourning."
We are devastated to share the tragic loss of our beloved giraffe calf, Kipenzi. More details: http://t.co/p0tmdcC2Kp pic.twitter.com/pPavK6xi6V — Dallas Zoo (@DallasZoo) July 29, 2015
Her mother, Katie, visited Kipenzi before veterinarians and keepers removed her, the zoo said.
"Running is a typical behavior for giraffes of all ages, especially young ones like Kipenzi," said Harrison Edell, a senior zoo director.Would you like to take performance-enhancing drugs to boost your pro sports career? Are the drugs banned as a form of cheating? No problem. Just find a doctor willing to certify that you have a “deficit” of the performance factor in question.
That’s what seems to be happening in Major League Baseball. Three years ago, the league belatedly banned stimulants on the grounds that they unfairly aided players’ performance. At the time, 28 players had “therapeutic use exemptions” allowing them to take drugs such as Ritalin or Adderall. “Therapeutic use” means you can justifiably use the drug because you need it for a medical condition. If you didn’t have the condition, you’d just be a normal pro baseball player, and the attention-focusing benefits of Ritalin would be a form of “enhancement,” i.e., cheating.
When the league banned these drugs, an amazing thing happened. The number of players claiming and obtaining “therapeutic use” exemptions for stimulants nearly quadrupled from 28 to 103. The basis of their claims? They all had attention “deficit” disorder. Accordingly, they were entitled to attention-boosting drugs.
Among children, the prevalence of ADHD is estimated at 3 percent to 5 percent. Among adults, the rate of diagnosis is between 1 percent and 3.5 percent. But among pro baseball players, the disease seems epidemic. The league has just announced that the number of “therapeutic use” exemptions based on ADHD increased again last year from 103 to 106. That means 8 percent of major-league players have ADHD—twice the rate among children and three to eight times the rate among adults.
How can ADHD multiply fourfold in a sport in a single year? How can it become three times as prevalent in that sport as in the adult population? Is it contagious? Of course not. ADHD is a psychological diagnosis. Like post-traumatic stress disorder, which we talked about Friday, it’s open to interpretation in any given patient. Three doctors may say you don’t have it. A fourth may say you do.
In the case of PTSD, critics object that such a fuzzy diagnosis shouldn’t entitle a combat veteran to a Purple Heart. In baseball, the objection is similar: A fuzzy diagnosis of ADHD shouldn’t entitle a player to drugs that will improve his performance, and presumably his livelihood, relative to players who don’t claim a deficit and don’t take drugs.
Rob Manfred, MLB’s executive vice president, spins the latest increase in therapeutic use exemptions as a crackdown on ADHD. “We made progress this year; we granted fewer new T.U.E.’s than the prior year,” he says. That’s pretty funny. The number of exemptions increased, and it’s now three to eight times the rate in the adult population. But because the increase is smaller than it was in the previous year, with fewer “new” approvals, we’re supposed to applaud the league’s vigilance.
Manfred says it’s unfair to compare the rate of ADHD claims in baseball with the rate of diagnosis among adults generally. “We are far younger than the general population, and we have far better access to medical care,” he argues. But baseball players aren’t far younger than children, who are half as likely to obtain ADHD diagnoses. And even the rate of diagnosis among children is widely regarded as inflated.
The crucial factor, as Manfred notes, is that pro baseball players have “far better access to medical care.” Charitably, you could say this means that ADHD is underdiagnosed in children and adults and that if the rest of us had access to as many doctors as pro baseball players have, they’d discover our hidden ADHD. Uncharitably, you could say that ADHD is accurately diagnosed in adults and overdiagnosed in children so we can put them on Ritalin. And if the rest of us had access to as many doctors as pro baseball players have, we could shop around, as they do, until more of us found a doctor willing to give the diagnosis and write a prescription for attention-enhancing drugs.
If you’ve ever listened to Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion, you’re probably familiar with his fictional Lake Wobegon, Minn., where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average. But that was before the age of performance-enhancing drugs. Now it’s the other way around: In order to get the drugs that will help your child become above average, you need him to be diagnosed as below average. You need the certificate of a “deficit” disorder.
I wonder what spins Major League Baseball will come up with when more than half its players, prescriptions in hand, are officially below average.
(Now playing at the Human Nature blog: 1. The beauty of adjustable glasses. 2. Texting while driving should be regulated like drinking. 3. Is PTSD worth a Purple Heart?)Earlier this week, a teen in Fresno, California, was arrested by police after a search of his family's house, which turned up a cache of guns and ammunition. What prompted the search? The day before, the teen had posted lyrics from an Eminem track called “I'm Back.”
In the track, Eminem raps, “I take seven kids from Columbine, stand ’em all in a line / Add an AK-47, a revolver, a nine / A MAC-11 and it oughtta solve the problem of mine / And that’s a whole school of bullies shot up all at one time / I’m just like Shady and just as crazy as the world was over this whole Y2K thing.”
But confusing the matter, in a press conference, the police mistook the teen's post for lyrics from Eminem's track “Rap God,” which simply use the lines, “I take seven kids from Columbine, stand ’em all in a line / Add an AK-47, a revolver, a nine.”
Initially, the police thought that the teen's longer Instagram post used words that the teen made up himself.
“I want to read that posting to you,” Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer said in the press conference, “because part of the posting that was placed on Instagram is part of a rap song called 'Rap God' by Eminem, but you'll see that this 15-year-old student added to that post some of his own words which is what caused the concern.” The police chief later retracted his statement about the Instagram post being from “Rap God.”
However, the police maintained that the Instagram post was evidence of making terrorist threats, which is a felony, and of disrupting school activity, according to the Fresno Bee. The comments under the Instagram post added to the police's concern, they said, because another teen allegedly wrote, “Bring me with man. I got some stuff [to] settle.”
The 15-year-old San Joaquin Memorial High student then apparently replied, “Ill text you when,” and added, “I got a couple idiots’ blocks I could knock off,” Dyer said.
The school's vice principal initially contacted the police about the teen's Instagram post. The Fresno police did not respond to Ars' request for comment.
Dyer said at the press conference that the teen claimed that he did not make the posts and suggested that his computer might have been hacked. The teen also allegedly told the police that he took the Instagram post down. The police seized the teen's phone and iPad. The teen's lawyer, Linden Lindahl, also did not return Ars' request for comment.
Police officers came to the boy's house on Monday and searched it with the teen's father's consent. They found a replica AK-47 Airsoft rifle in plain sight and returned later that evening with a warrant to search the house more extensively. There, police say they found a handgun, a.357 Magnum revolver, a 12-gauge shotgun, ammunition, and a bulletproof vest stashed away in the subfloor of a closet in the father's bedroom, the Fresno Bee reports. The paper added that, “the boy’s father could also face charges for 'negligent storage' of firearms and because he has an active restraining order against him and is forbidden from owning firearms.”
On Tuesday, Both San Joaquin Memorial High and St. Anthony's Catholic School, which the teen previously attended, canceled school due to the perceived threat, and the teen was arrested. Both the schools reopened on Wednesday.
In a news conference, Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer painted a picture of a teen who was a loner and bullied. The teen's mom passed away earlier in the year from an illness and he broke up with his girlfriend recently, the police chief said.
“These are really all of the things we look for in individuals that historically have been involved in incidents like Columbine,” Dyer said in a press conference. “So we’re very fortunate that this was brought to our attention. We have every reason to believe that he was reaching out for help.…The weapons were present. The ammunition was present. Perhaps even the mindset was present to carry out those threats.”
The teen's defense attorney refuted the claims to the Fresno Bee, saying that his client was neither depressed nor bullied, and that the boy had only had a small argument with his girlfriend recently.MetLife Stadium could be the site of the first snowy Super Bowl in history. (Peter Morgan/AP) MetLife Stadium could be the site of the first snowy Super Bowl in history. (Peter Morgan/AP)
The NFL has been working on contingency plans for the first outdoor cold weather Super Bowl since it was announced that MetLife Stadium would be the site of Super Bowl XLVIII. On Wednesday, the league put on a presentation in which it tried to assuage the fears of those who anticipate a snowed-in version of America's most-watched sporting event.
"There's so many questions about the weather," Super Bowl host committee Al Kelly said, via ESPN's Jane McManus. "We want to make sure that the national audience certainly knows this region has tremendous assets and resources and knows how to get this done.
"It's nothing more than reassuring people that, despite the fact that the world's greatest is going to be here, we still know how to clear snow. We keep the markets open every day and the schools open most days, and we'll do a good job Super Bowl week as well."
MetLife CEO Brad Mayne said that his crews cleared 6.3 inches of the snow that fell last weekend in time for the 1 p.m. ET kickoff of a game between the Seattle Seahawks and New York Giants, and that the NFL will have the best possible equipment at its disposal.
Still, if the area is hit with a worst-case scenario storm at the worst possible time, the idea of moving the game to a different day has also been floated. NFL senior vice president of events Frank Supovitz said that the game could be moved to Saturday or Monday night, but that those alternate plans exist for every Super Bowl.
"I think watching NFL football in the snow is really romantic," Supovitz said. "It's great, it's exciting, and if you've ever done it, you know that. It's also a rite of passage for you as a fan to have done it at least once. And this is a Super Bowl, right? So I think it's going to be amazing. I think it would be better if it snowed a little bit during the game. I think it'll just make it more memorable."WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Transportation investigators Wednesday discovered "anomalies" in an essential control circuit of a track where a fatal crash between two Washington subway trains killed nine people.
Investigators work Tuesday at the site of the Metro train crash in Washington. more photos »
Each section of the transit system's track contains a circuit that transmits and receives signals that generate speed commands for trains, said Debbie Hersman of the National Transportation Safety Board. She said the circuits are "vital providing information to the operators and the train itself when on automatic."
Investigators found no problems in five of the six circuits on the stretch of track in the crash area. But they found "anomalies" with the sixth circuit, Hersman said.
She would not say what those anomalies were but said simulated crash tests would be conducted to try and determine what caused the deadly accident.
The findings could mean that the striking train, which was on automatic, did not know to slow down because another train was stopped on the track ahead.
Hersman said investigators walked the tracks Wednesday, finding markings on the track that indicated emergency braking had taken place.
Investigators hoped Thursday to interview the operator of the struck train, who was released from a hospital Wednesday. The driver of the striking train was killed.
The crash, the worst in the history of Washington's transit system, known as the Metro, occurred along the congested Red Line just before 5 p.m. Monday on an above-ground track section near Takoma Park, Maryland.
Both cars were on the same track, traveling in the same direction -- southward from Fort Totten Metrorail station to the Shady Grove station. The struck train had stopped behind another train undergoing service and was awaiting directions to move ahead.
The striking train was pulling some of the oldest cars in the fleet of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. On Wednesday, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said he plans to seek $3 billion for Metro transit capital improvements, some of which would likely be spent to replace some those old Series 1000 cars, purchased between 1974 and 1978.
Upon impact, the train pulling those Series 1000 cars jumped on top of the other train. All the fatalities were on the striking train, Train 112, Metro transit spokeswoman Angela Gates told CNN on Wednesday.
In the collision, the front car of the striking train was severely damaged, leaving minimal space for survivability, said Hersman. According to one report, 50 feet of the 75-foot length of that lead car were lost to the accident, leaving only one-third of the space after the crushing impact. Watch Hersman talk about previous warnings »
The NTSB recommended in 2006 that Metro transit replace or retrofit all of its Series 1000 trains, to bring them up to current safety standards.
Metro transit responded that because it was constrained by tax-advantage leases, it intended to keep the 1000 Series until the end of 2014.
"Our recommendation was not addressed, so it [the case] has been closed in an unacceptable status," Hersman said.
The NTSB has no regulatory powers and can't force implementation. Watch Hersman talk about the computer systems »
"The safety of our citizens is our highest priority and we must take every precaution that this loss of life does not occur again," said Hoyer, a Democratic congressman from Maryland.
He said he would soon introduce a final measure to authorize dedicated federal and local funding for Metro.
The Series 1000 cars comprise a quarter of Metro transit's 1,126 cars, or nearly 300 cars, Gates said.
At $3 million per car, the agency can't afford to replace them all at once, Gates said. Each car has a 40-year life and can last until fiscal year 2015, she added.
"So we've taken steps to keep them in good condition."
She said they have been phasing out the outdated cars as new cars are bought, she said. That plan hasn't gone as quickly as anticipated, however, because of an increase in ridership, Gates added.
The lead train in Monday's crash contained newer 5000-Series and 3000-Series cars. These have data recorders, which will aid the investigation a great deal if they aren't damaged, Hersman said. The recorders provide information on such things as speed, braking and emergency applications. She said there were no recorders on the rear train.
The rear train was being operated in automatic mode, which is the normal operating procedure during rush hour. Washington transit trains are being operated manually until the cause of the crash is determined, Hersman said.
She said there is no indication that any of the brakes on the rear train failed before it rear-ended the other train.
"Our investigators on scene yesterday did find some evidence of emergency brake application. They found the emergency mushroom, which is a button that was depressed in the control cab, and they also examined the wheels and the brakes, and they found that the rotors showed some bluing," Hersman said.
"That bluing is consistent with an emergency brake application," she said.
Bluing indicates the rotors have been subjected to extremely high temperatures, and this can be caused by hard stops.
All About Washington, DC • U.S. National Transportation Safety Board • Steny HoyerChina’s enemy is our enemy, says Gen Raheel ISLAMABAD: The Chief of the Army Staff (COAS), General Raheel Sharif, on Friday said that “China’s enemy is Pakistan’s enemy and we will defeat rivals jointly”. He said this on Friday evening in a grand reception hosted by the Chinese Embassy’s Armed Forces attaché Major General Qi Huajun to commemorate the 88th anniversary of the foundation of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) here at a local hotel. The army chief was the chief guest. General Raheel said: “Your enemy is our enemy. Eliminating the East Turkistan Independence Movement is its manifestation. Our cooperation for regional stability will squeeze space for states and non-state actors for stable Afghanistan.” It was the first occasion since assuming the top post of the Pakistan Army, General Raheel Sharif attended a diplomatic reception in a hotel and gave a strong message of solidarity with the PLA and CPEC. The normal security arrangements were in place. The army chief was received by Chinese Ambassador to Pakistan Sun Weidong amid thunderous applause. General Raheel Sharif and his wife were received by the Chinese diplomats and armed forces officers and their spouses. The COAS felicitated the Chinese Army on its 88th foundation anniversary and paid rich tributes to the people of China and army for their sacrifices in pursuing their dreams. He termed the ties of the two countries deep and resolute and reminded that “all weather friendship sweeter than honey, higher than Himalayas, deeper than oceans is a source of pride for us. Our friendship will further grow in these testing times.” The army chief was in full military outfit and said that recent strides and holistic concept of CPEC speak volumes. “It will see both nations progressing, further maximising dividend of our geo-strategic location.” General Raheel said that the cooperation on the CPEC will benefit the entire region. He said that the entire world looks at the CPEC through the same lens. Referring to his recent visit to Balochistan and inspection of the construction work there, he recalled that he had visited the site as the pace of work was in full gear. “I reiterate our firm resolve that any attempt to obstruct or impede this project will be thwarted at all costs.” General Raheel Sharif said that Pakistan Army and the PLA formed edifice of our strategic relations. “We will defeat nefarious designs of forces detrimental to us. The PLA is one of the best armies of the world,” the COAS added. He said that terrorism had attacked our common interests and it needs global response. “Only together can we win this war,” he emphasised. Chinese Armed Forces Attaché Major General Qi Huajun in his address of welcome thanked General Raheel Sharif for attending the reception. He spoke high of the cooperation between the two armies and paid rich tributes to the troops and officers of the Pakistan Army. The national anthems of the two countries were played on the arrival of the army chief. As a gesture of special affection, national anthem of the host country was played first. It was followed by the cake cutting ceremony and the cake was cut with the army sword jointly by the officers in uniform and the Chinese ambassador. The officers belonging to the three services turned up in a record number for the function. Former naval chiefs Admiral Asif Sandila and Fazil Janjua also attended the reception. General Raheel Sharif stayed at the reception for about 100 minutes. As soon he finished his meal, the children and women from Pakistan and Chinese community gathered around the COAS. He too mingled up with them and they got their pictures with General Raheel Sharif proudly. The COAS was forthcoming in meeting the guests — both the Pakistanis and Chinese — and met the fellow guests freely. He was shaking hands and inquiring about their well-being in a friendly manner, something that impressed the participants.
ISLAMABAD: The Chief of the Army Staff (COAS), General Raheel Sharif, on Friday said that “China’s enemy is Pakistan’s enemy and we will defeat rivals jointly”.
He said this on Friday evening in a grand reception hosted by the Chinese Embassy’s Armed Forces attaché Major General Qi Huajun to commemorate the 88th anniversary of the foundation of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) here at a local hotel. The army chief was the chief guest.
General Raheel said: “Your enemy is our enemy. Eliminating the East Turkistan Independence Movement is its manifestation. Our cooperation for regional stability will squeeze space for states and non-state actors for stable Afghanistan.”
It was the first occasion since assuming the top post of the Pakistan Army, General Raheel Sharif attended a diplomatic reception in a hotel and gave a strong message of solidarity with the PLA and CPEC.
The normal security arrangements were in place. The army chief was received by Chinese Ambassador to Pakistan Sun Weidong amid thunderous applause. General Raheel Sharif and his wife were received by the Chinese diplomats and armed forces officers and their spouses. The COAS felicitated the Chinese Army on its 88th foundation anniversary and paid rich tributes to the people of China and army for their sacrifices in pursuing their dreams.
He termed the ties of the two countries deep and resolute and reminded that “all weather friendship sweeter than honey, higher than Himalayas, deeper than oceans is a source of pride for us. Our friendship will further grow in these testing times.”
The army chief was in full military outfit and said that recent strides and holistic concept of CPEC speak volumes. “It will see both nations progressing, further maximising dividend of our geo-strategic location.”
General Raheel said that the cooperation on the CPEC will benefit the entire region. He said that the entire world looks at the CPEC through the same
lens. Referring to his recent visit to Balochistan and inspection of the construction work there, he recalled that he had visited the site as the pace of work was in full gear. “I reiterate our firm resolve that any attempt to obstruct or impede this project will be thwarted at all costs.”
General Raheel Sharif said that Pakistan Army and the PLA formed edifice of our strategic relations. “We will defeat nefarious designs of forces detrimental to us. The PLA is one of the best armies of the world,” the COAS added. He said that terrorism had attacked our common interests and it needs global response. “Only together can we win this war,” he emphasised.
Chinese Armed Forces Attaché Major General Qi Huajun in his address of welcome thanked General Raheel Sharif for attending the reception. He spoke high of the cooperation between the two armies and paid rich tributes to the troops and officers of the Pakistan Army. The national anthems of the two countries were played on the arrival of the army chief. As a gesture of special affection, national anthem of the host country was played first. It was followed by the cake cutting ceremony and the cake was cut with the army sword jointly by the officers in uniform and the Chinese ambassador.
The officers belonging to the three services turned up in a record number for the function. Former naval chiefs Admiral Asif Sandila and Fazil Janjua also attended the reception. General Raheel Sharif stayed at the reception for about 100 minutes. As soon he finished his meal, the children and women from Pakistan and Chinese community gathered around the COAS. He too mingled up with them and they got their pictures with General Raheel Sharif proudly.
The COAS was forthcoming in meeting the guests — both the Pakistanis and Chinese — and met the fellow guests freely. He was shaking hands and inquiring about their well-being in a friendly manner, something that impressed the participants.On Sunday’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos, economist Paul Krugman sat down with political consultant Mary Matalin to discuss possible solutions to the impending fiscal cliff. Matalin slammed Krugman for claiming the GOP had offered no specifics, asking him, “Are you an economist or a polemicist?”
Krugman initially said that the GOP had been too general with their fiscal cliff plan, stating, they put “numbers” on the table, but no specifics. He went on to severely criticize Republicans and opined that President Obama couldn’t be faulted for failing to negotiate, asking,
“How is the president supposed to negotiate with people who say, ‘Here are my demands, by the way, I can’t give you any specifics, just make me happy.'”
Matalin shot back, “That’s completely mendacious.” She stated that Republicans had offered “in theory and in specificity” to raise revenues and cap “various deductions” and claimed, “they have been very precise.” She again said to Krugman, “Just make your mind, do you want to talk about economy or do you want to talk about polemics?”
Watch the full clip below, via ABC:
>> Follow Anjali Sareen (@AnjaliSareen) On Twitter
Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.comRampur: Stirring a fresh controversy, Samajwadi Party leader and Uttar Pradesh Urban Development Minister Azam Khan on Thursday took a dig at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, saying that how can a person talk about daughters when he has not even given due recognition to his wife.
Continuing the personal tirade against the PM, Khan said: “The king (read Modi) brought his mother home. Once he brings his wife back, we will be thankful to him.”
He further said that the PM talks about sending minority community to Pakistan, but goes to the Islamic nation without informing us. “The king (read Modi) touches the feet of (Pakistan Prime Minister) Nawaz Sharif's mother and shakes his hand with traitors in a closed room,” reports Aaj Tak.
Taking on the PM on the beef ban issue, the SP leader said the ruler of the country should get the meat from cattle prohibited in five-star hotels, or else leave the post.
On the Kairana 'exodus' issue, the Samajwadi Party leader raised suspicion about the BJP's role. “The BJP wants Gujarat-like riots. The party, on the insistence of the RSS, has conspired big-scale riots in western Uttar Pradesh,” he alleged.
Khan was in Rampur to distribute 391 e-rickshaws.UPDATE: The casualties have been identified as Malaysian Certis Cisco officers; both remain warded in ICU with multiple severe injuries
If you’re really not into horrendous-looking accidents, best you look away now, son. This dashcam clip that’s going viral on social media should give other motorcyclists severe chills.
Here’s how it happened: A motorist was driving towards Woodlands Checkpoint along Seletar Expressway (SLE) on Monday morning (Jul 24) when he slowed down to a stop due to a car that seemed to have broken down in the middle of the first lane. No vehicle breakdown warning sign was placed at the site, but its hazard lights were flashing.
Just mere seconds after the motorist attempted to switch lanes, a motorbike slipped in from the motorist’s right side and crashed straight into the stationary car. The rider smacked right into the car’s open trunk, while the pillion was sent hurtling into the air.
The motorist’s rear dashcam caught footage of the motorbike, which didn’t seem to slow down upon approach.
According to the police, both the 24-year-old motorcyclist and the 21-year-old pillion rider were taken to Khoo Teck Puat Hospital. The Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) added that both casualties had leg injuries. Current conditions of the two men are still being ascertained.Justice secretary says he does not envisage quick rebound for UK economy, which is in 'calamitous' state
The coalition faces "political difficulty" when the real extent of spending cuts begins to hit home with the middle classes later this year, Kenneth Clarke has said.
The justice secretary's interview with the Daily Telegraph is likely to once again set him on a collision course with cabinet and party colleagues.
In contrast to the more upbeat position of the chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, Clarke also said that he does not envisage "a quick rebound" for the economy, which he described as being in a calamitous state.
"One reason we're going to get some political difficulty is that [while] the public knows we've got to do something about it, I don't think middle England has quite taken on board the scale of the problem," he told the Telegraph.
"That will emerge as the cuts start coming home this year.
"We've got to get on with it [but] it's going to be very difficult. If someone says it's not as bad as all that, I say [they] just don't realise the calamitous position we are in."
Clarke's downbeat assessment compares starkly with Osborne's utterances, and those of the Treasury, which has maintained that the return to growth will be swift despite figures last month showing that the economy had contracted in the last quarter of 2010.
"We're in for a long haul to get back to normality," said the veteran Tory.
"There are so many uncertainties internationally, and I do not see a quick rebound."
Other comments in the same interview risk re-igniting tensions with No 10 over plans to give prisoners the vote.
Clarke insisted it is inevitable that prisoners will get the vote, and gave his support to a plan that will see the enfranchisement of approximately 30,000 inmates, about a third of the prison population. He said a four-year cut-off point was more realistic than Downing Street's hopes of limiting the franchise to those serving one-year sentences.NEWS
Ahead of the International Day to End Impunity, journalists from around the world tell Index why impunity is a serious threat to free expression
Impunity is a festering sore on freedom of the press. Harassment, violence and murder of journalists are problems around the world — even in Europe, as Index’s project mapping media violations has shown. The numbers speak for themselves: of the 370 media workers murdered in connection with their job over the past ten years, 90% have been murdered without their killers being punished. Many of these crimes aren’t even investigated.
Ahead of the International Day to End Impunity, journalists from across the world told Index why impunity is such a danger to free expression and a free press.
Kostas Vaxevanis, Greek investigative journalist, HOT DOC, and 2013 Index award winner
Impunity generates corruption and its enemy is the one thing that exposes and threatens it: the freedom of the press.
The HOT DOC is currently facing 40 lawsuits mainly from ministers and politicians in an attempt to shut us down as journalists. We reveal scandals like one with the minister of justice, a former judge who committed an “error” that granted amnesty to officials who had abused public funds, and instead of answering in public as required as politicians, we are being sued. We pester the courts and despite winning lawsuits, we need more than 80,000 euro per year for court expenses.
Heather Brooke, British-American journalist and 2010 Index award winner
It is a problem that journalists around the world get threatened, intimidated and killed just for doing their job.
These crimes, like any other crime, need to be investigated. If not, it sends a message that this is okay; that the law is only for certain people. It is an implicit acceptance of this behaviour.
If we want to have a strong press, threats, intimidation and murder of journalists can’t be seen to be implicitly condoned by the state. It’s a dangerous message. It makes people frightened to ask tough questions, and if that happens, you are on the way to shutting down a robust press.
Kareem Amer, Egyptian blogger and 2007 Index award winner
I come from a country where we have a lack of justice. The executive power controls the parliament and the justice system. People feel that if they get mistreated or oppressed by those in power nothing will protect them or bring them justice.
Not only people who express their opinions suffer from a lack of justice. People from different backgrounds who have a different way of thinking and different interests also don’t trust the justice system. Those who have more power can easily avoid punishment and take revenge against victims who tried to get their rights through judiciary system.
Officially, police officers don’t have any kind of formal immunity. According to the law they can be questioned if they violate the rights of people by torturing or murdering. But, in fact, all those accused of killing protesters and torturing prisoners managed to avoid being punished, with a few exceptions.
I feel that it’s not safe to express your opinions freely in a country where people can easily avoid punishment.
I have been sentenced to four years in jail for writing two articles and publishing them on the internet, and during that time I have been through physical violence and mistreatment committed by security forces. I reported it but no one has been questioned or punished. That made me feel that there is no justice in my country and that it is easy to be humiliated and tortured and you will not get protected, since the judiciary system is practically part of the executive power and the judges do what the authorities want them to do.
Rahim Haciyev, Azerbajiani journalist and acting editor of 2014 Index award winner Azadliq
Freedom of expression is the basis of all other rights and freedoms. Free speech is something all authoritarian regimes are worried about as it threatens their existence. That is why freedom of expression is specifically targeted by authoritarian regimes. If there are no free people, there is no freedom of expression. Free speech is a precondition for journalists to be able to work in full strength and thus fulfill their functions in society. Authoritarian regimes organise permanent attacks on journalists with impunity. A free journalist armed with freedom of expression is a threat to an authoritarian regime, this is why perpetrators receive awards, not punishment for oppressing journalists’ rights. This process leads to self-censorship, and journalists stop being carriers of truthful information, which in the end affects society.
Nazeeha Saeed, award-winning Bahraini journalist, who was tortured in police custody
Impunity is a threat to free expression because journalists and people who report the facts on the ground will feel danger, and if no one gets punished for crimes against journalists or others it establishes a systematic impunity culture. Feeling insecure is something bad, it stops people from having a normal life, functioning and expressing themselves.
Endalk Chala, Ethiopian blogger and co-founder of the Zone9 blogging collective (of which six members are currently imprisoned for their writing)
Impunity is a threat for free expression on many levels. In my experience I have seen impunity when it cultivates self-censorship. Let’s take the case of Zone9 bloggers. Since their arrest there are a lot of people who tried to visit them in prison, take a picture of them, attend their trial and tweet about their hearings but all of these have invited very bad reactions from the Ethiopian police.
Some were arrested briefly, others were beaten and it has become impossible to attend the “trial” of the bloggers and journalists. No action was taken by the Ethiopian courts against the bad actions of the police even though the bloggers have contentiously reported the kinds of harassment. As a result, people have stopped tweeting, taking pictures and writing about the bloggers. Apparently, the volume of the tweets and Facebook status updates which comes from Ethiopia has dwindled significantly. People don’t want to risk harassment because of a single tweet or a picture. This self-censorship could be attributed to impunity, which is pervasive in Ethiopia.
Impunity also causes a lack of trust in the Ethiopian judicial system. I don’t trust the independence of the Ethiopian justice system. I have never seen a police man/woman or a government authority being prosecuted for their bad actions against journalists. The Ethiopian government has been prosecuting hundreds of journalists for criminal defamation, terrorism and inciting violence but not a single government person for violating journalists’ rights. This tells you a lot about the compromised justice system of the country.
Andrei Soldatov, Russian investigative journalist and co-founder and editor of Agentura.Ru
Russia is known for its traditions of self-censorship. Despite what the laws say, the rules are explained in a quiet voice in some unmarked cabinets. Sometimes the rules are even not explained, and journalists, editors and owners of media have to constantly guess what is allowed at that moment. Not everyone is allowed to ask directly, so we are all in the game about signals sent by the authorities.
Journalists are beaten and killed in Russia, and this provides plenty of room to send such signals to the journalistic community. You don’t need to explain that |
on it in 1999, according to The New York Times.
In 1998, Soros was spending money on Russian media. The Oct. 11, 1998 Times explained that ''Soros gave $10 million toward an $80 million fund he plans to create to help struggling, independent news organizations in Russia ride out the severe economic downturn in that country.''
Soros also made investments in Viacom, College Sports TV, journalism awards even backing events at the Frontline Club in London, what the Times called ''a popular way station for war correspondents.''
The charity work is almost impossible to track, but wherever the Open Society Foundations are, their involvement with journalism is not far behind. The foundation has an entire initiative devoted to the media. Its purported goal is ''to promote independent and viable media and professional, quality journalism in countries undergoing a process of democratization and building functioning media markets.'' The site lists 15 different media program coordinators in nations from Afghanistan to the Ukraine.
In one of its bigger efforts, OSI funded B-92, the Yugoslavia radio network that ''urged young Serbs to avoid the draft'' and spoke out against the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. But many operations are smaller. Journalists are chosen to study at Central European University, also funded by Soros. The foundations back the Czech newspaper Lidove Noviny or the Kabul Weekly in Afghanistan.
Soros-Funded Left-Wing Media Reach More Than 300 Million People Every Month
The global reach of the Soros media empire means it reaches millions of people. From nakedly partisan left-wing media like Think Progress, the blog for the Center for American Progress, and a TV show on MSNBC (recently canceled), to the supposedly impartial National Public Radio, Soros has impact on the flow of information worldwide.
It gives him incredible influence. Every month, reporters, writers and bloggers at the many outlets he funds easily reach more than 330 million people around the globe. The U.S. Census estimates the population of the entire United States to be just less than 310 million.
That's roughly the entire population of the United States with the population of Australia thrown in for good measure - every single month.
Just counting 13 prominent operations of the 180 media organizations he has funded equals 332 million people each month. Included in that total are big players like NPR, which received $1.8 million from Soros, as well as the little known Project Syndicate and Public News Service, both of which also claim to reach millions of readers.
And that's really just the beginning. That tally takes into account only a few of the bigger Soros-funded media operations. Many numbers simply aren't available. ''Democracy Now!'' - ''a daily TV/radio news program, hosted by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez'' - is known for its left-wing take on global news. Its vitriol ranges from attacks on Blackwater founder Erik Prince and supporters of Andrew Breitbart (whom it calls ''Electronic Brownshirts''), to claims the U.S. is opposed to Arab democracy. Just that one Soros-funded operation is heard ''on over 900 stations, pioneering the largest community media collaboration in the United States.'' But it posts no formal audience numbers. Phone calls to ''Democracy Now!'' were not returned.
But Soros wildly understates his own impact. It might be through a ''media reform'' conference with congressmen, a senator, two FCC commissioners, a Nobel laureate and numerous liberal journalists. Or it might be through a radio station in Haiti, which he also supports.
The media reform event was sponsored by a group called Free Press, which has received $1.4 million from Soros. Free Press has two major agenda items - undermining Internet freedom by pushing so-called ''net neutrality,'' and advocating for government-funded media to the tune of $35 billion a year.
Many of those attending or speaking were affiliated with Soros-funded operations.
Free Press is just one of the better funded Soros groups. They also include the Center for American Progress ($7.3 million), which operates the heavily staffed Think Progress blog. That blog ''now has 30 writers and researchers,'' according to Politico. Other well-funded operations include the investigative reporting operations at the Center for Public Integrity ($3.7 million) and Center for Investigative Reporting ($1.1 million), as well as Media Matters ($1.1 million) and the Sundance Institute ($1 million).
That's not all. ''Soros' foundations gave 34 grants from 1997 to 2010 to local NPR member stations and specific programs that have totaled nearly $3.4-million, said the foundations' [spokesperson Maria] Archuleta. Recipients included WNYC and Minnesota Public Radio,'' wrote now former NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepard.
In fact, Soros funds nearly every major left-wing media source in the United States. Forty-five of those are financed through his support of the Media Consortium. That organization ''is a network of the country's leading, progressive, independent media outlets.'' The list is predictable - everything from Alternet to the Young Turks, who have since lost their MSNBC show.
A report by the Media Consortium detailed how progressives had created an ''echo chamber'' of outlets ''in which a message pushes the larger public or the mainstream media to acknowledge, respond, and give airtime to progressive ideas because it is repeated many times.'' According to the report called ''The Big Thaw,'' ''if done well, the message within the echo chamber can become the accepted meme, impact political dynamics, shift public opinion and change public policy.''
That mindset plays out in much of what the consortium's members do. Alternet describes itself as an ''award-winning news magazine and online community that creates original journalism and amplifies the best of hundreds of other independent media sources.'' It hates Tea Parties and complains about ''hatemongering'' as the ''ugly side of Evangelical Christianity.'' Each month, the site gets 1.5 million unique visitors to its unique view of the world.
Brave New Films, also funded by the Media Consortium, is run by the same people who run Brave New Foundation. Robert Greenwald and Jim Miller produce and distribute videos attacking businesses and conservatives. The site brags about a 2008 election video ''that exposes John McCain's double talk, for instance, and received 9 million views around the world.'' Their latest effort is yet another attack on Koch Industries, attempting to halt a much-needed pipeline from the Canada to the U.S.
Then there's the Young Turks and MSNBC host Cenk Uygur. In 2010, he was welcomed to the network with a press release detailing his web impact. ''One of YouTube's Top 100 Partners, the irreverent talk show averages over 18 million views per month and has over 320 million views overall on its YouTube Channel.''
The list goes on and on. Project Syndicate calls itself ''the world's pre-eminent source of original op-ed commentaries.'' It has wide reach. ''As of May 2011, Project Syndicate membership included 462 leading newspapers in 150 countries.'' Its monthly circulation is 72,815,528. Naturally, ''support comes from the Open Society Institute,'' the primary Soros foundation.
Project Syndicate's columnist line-up, spread to 462 newspapers, is impressively left-leaning or globalist: UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, former President Jimmy Carter, former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, as well as lefty economists Jeffrey Sachs and Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz.
Public News Service describes itself as ''a member-supported news service that advocates journalism in the public interest.'' It is a ''network of state-based news services' in 33 states. It claims it reaches 'a combined national weekly audience of 24 million.'' PNS is proud of its 2010 success. ''Last year the Public News Service produced over 4,000 stories featuring public interest content that were redistributed several hundred thousand times on 6,114 radio stations, 928 print outlets, 133 TV stations and 100s of websites. Nationally, an average of 60 outlets used each story.''
Nearly 30 Soros-funded Media Operations Part of 'War on Fox'
To hear the left tell it, Fox News has a ''history of inciting Islamophobia and racial and ethic animosity'' and tries to ''race bait its viewers.'' One staffer is called a ''hit man,'' while his network is accused of ''attack politics.'' A highly questionable study is hyped by numerous outlets claiming that it ''confirms that Fox News makes you stupid.'' Fox is called simply: ''The Liars' Network.''
Sure, liberals have it in for Fox News, but that deep-seated, anti-Fox agenda isn't just an organic response from the left. It's a George Soros-funded ''echo chamber'' ''in which a message pushes the larger public or the mainstream media to acknowledge, respond, and give airtime to progressive ideas because it is repeated many times.''
The goal is ''Taking Down Fox News,'' as ''Mother Jones,'' a member of the Media Consortium, described it in a headline. That article, about another Soros-funded operation called Color of Change, explained how ''it successfully urged several advertisers, including Best Buy, Wal-Mart, and RadioShack, to pull their ads from Beck's show.'' Liberals even threw a party to celebrate Beck's departure from Fox News, ''drawing hundreds of activists, journalists and political strategists from the nation's capital,'' according to the Huffington Post.
It was all part of an organized effort against Fox. In all, nearly 30 organizations have attacked Fox News in the six months since the beginning of December, 2010.
Think Progress, the heavily Soros-funded blog for the Center for American Progress, slammed Fox more than 30 times in six months. AlterNet, an especially unhinged liberal outlet, went after the network at least 18 times in those months. It is one of 45 organizations aided by Soros' support of the Media Consortium ''a network of the country's leading, progressive, independent media outlets.''
These outlets are all part of Soros' web of media organizations that mirror his view of Fox as their enemy. That's the way he describes it in the new book, ''The Philanthropy of George Soros.'' ''Those in charge of Fox News, Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes, have done well in identifying me as their adversary,'' he wrote. ''They have done less well in the methods they used to attack me: Their lies shall not stand and their techniques shall not endure.''
That anti-Fox agenda is reflected in plans by another group in Soros' pocket to target the network specifically. Media Matters founder David Brock said his Soros-funded operation ($1.1 million) will ''focus on [News Corp. CEO Rupert] Murdoch and trying to disrupt his commercial interests.''
The left hating Fox isn't new. But the efforts of the different groups take on an amazing similarity. Take the University of Maryland study that seemed so critical of Fox News. The study itself included this nugget: ''This suggests that misinformation cannot simply be attributed to news sources, but are part of the larger information environment that includes statements by candidates, political ads and so on.'' That didn't stop any of the groups from using it against Fox News. AlterNet, Washington Monthly, Think Progress and The Nation. It quickly moved into the mainstream media from there.
That's just part of Soros' influence. In the case of Robert Greenwald, he's turned attacking Fox into a mini-industry. Greenwald is founder and president of Brave New Films, also part of the Soros-funded Media Consortium. Greenwald was also behind ''OUTFOXED: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism,'' The site for the movie that argues: ''FOX News is on a witch hunt. Fight back.'' The Brave New Films site has an entire section going after Fox called: ''When Fox Attacks.'' It claims: ''Videos from this campaign have been viewed over 8 million times.''
When Soros was criticized by Fox, multiple pieces of the Soros Empire responded. In one case, Jonathan Schell, a fellow at The Nation Institute, another part of the Media Consortium, made Fox News out to be anti-Semitic for criticizing Soros. An opinion piece titled, ''The Protocols of Rupert Murdoch,'' a reference to the infamous anti-Semitic ''Protocols of The Elders of Zion,'' blasted Glenn Beck.
Schell claimed Beck's criticism of ''the financier and philanthropist George Soros'' in effect ''recycles, almost in carbon copy, the tropes of the most virulent anti-Semitic ideologues.'' The column was distributed by another Soros-funded entity, Project Syndicate, which reaches ''462 leading newspapers in 150 countries,'' with a monthly circulation of 72,815,528.
It's that sort of cooperation that makes the Soros-funded ''echo chamber'' successful. Go on AlterNet and find articles from The Nation, a rant by Robert Greenwald or an interview by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! Or go on New America Media's site and find an article from Color Lines.
The content from the 180 media sites that Soros helps support can be linked, cited or reposted, adding to the sense that there is strong interest in any particular ''progressive idea.'' It's just one more way George Soros influences the media.
Conclusion
George Soros is one of the most influential men in the world - in finance, in charity and, yes, in the media. Yet piecing together that influence is difficult because the media are so incurious about his actions.
When journalists become convinced an outlet is conservative, as they are with Fox News, they become enraged. Stories attacking Fox litter the media landscape. But an extensive and well-funded network of liberal media outlets with deep ties to mainstream news results in almost no coverage.
That's both unbelievable and unprofessional. Any individual funding more than 180 media outlets, with ties to dozens more through secondary sources, boards and the like, is the very definition of news.
But journalists don't want to report this story. To do so would mean they would have to be honest about the nature of the profession. They would have to admit:
Reporters and editors often jump from activist liberal media outlets to mainstream organizations and back again;
Reporters and editors often jump from activist liberal media outlets to mainstream organizations and back again; Many of the new journalism start-ups celebrated by the industry from ProPublica to Huffington Post to dozens of investigative journalism operations are all part of a growing liberal news network;
Many of the new journalism start-ups celebrated by the industry from ProPublica to Huffington Post to dozens of investigative journalism operations are all part of a growing liberal news network; Prominent journalists at the top outlets in the United States are affiliated with left-wing media outlets and see nothing wrong with such ties.
The whole infrastructure of journalism - education, industry organizations and news organizations - is intertwined with liberal media outlets. Conservative media organizations have no such ties.
Any one of these points proves the argument conservatives have long made - that the mainstream media are liberal from top to bottom. Journalists know this and, as their ties to liberal news organizations show, they just don't care.
Recommendations
The Business & Media Institute has some recommendations for the media to better handle their obvious conflicts of interest when it comes to Soros:The Final Jeopardy question (10/15/2015) in the category “The Middle East” was:
With an area of 4,000 square miles, it’s the only primarily Arabic-speaking country in the Middle East that has no desert.
New champ Michael Baker won $15,201 yesterday and the singular distinction of defeating 13-day champ, Matt Jackson. Today he takes on these two players: Dana Desprois, from Arlington, VA; and Josh Silverman, from Miami, FL.
Round 1: Dana found the Jeopardy! round Daily Double in “Biographies” under the $600 clue. She was in third place with $1,600, $2,800 less than Josh in the lead. She made it a true Daily Double and and she was RIGHT.
“Neither Shaken nor Stirred” is the subtitle of Andrew Yule’s biography of this actor. show WHO IS SEAN CONNERY?
Josh finished in the lead with $5,000. Michael was second with $4,200 and Dana was last with $2,400.
Round 2: Josh found the first Daily Double in “Science & Nature” under the $1,200 clue on the 4th pick. He was in the lead with $7,400, $3,200 ahead of Michael in second place. He bet $3,000 and he was RIGHT.
A National Park near Twentynine Palms is named for this tree seen here. show WHAT IS A JOSHUA TREE?
Michael found the last Daily Double in “1965” under the $1,200 clue. In second place with $6,600, he had $8,600 less than Josh in the lead. He bet $4,000 and he was RIGHT.
On March 23 this space project launched its first mission with Gus Grissom & John Young as commander & pilot. show WHAT IS THE GEMINI?
That proved to be the last clue of the round. Josh finished in the lead with $15,200 but he no longer had a lock. Michael now had $10,600. Dana was in third place with $3,800.
Only ONE of the contestants got Final Jeopardy! right.
WHAT IS LEBANON?
Here is an excerpt from a post entitled “Lebanon is NOT a Desert” on “Simply Beirut”: “This post is a clarification for a friend… and everyone else in the USA who have been embedded with the idea that since Lebanon is in the Middle East, the topography consists of a dry, arid desert with sand dunes and camels grazing all over the place and old Bedouins dressed in white robes trailed by their four wives all dressed in black. Belly dancers and genies in a bottle. Something magical and mysterious straight out of Disney’s Aladdin. A popular misconception among Americans.” Besides explaining why Lebanon’s neighbors come there to escape the desert heat, it has some very nice photos.
Dana thought it was the United Arab Emirates. She lost her $3,000 bet and finished with $800.
Michael had the correct answer but crossed it out in favor of Bahrain. That cost him $4,601 and left him with $5,999.
Josh got it right. He bet $6,001 so he won the match with $21,201. He is the new Jeopardy! champ and a very exuberant one at that.
Josh is a graduate student and a stand-up comedian. During the chat, he said he gets a lot of his material from his own life and from the news. Alex Trebek noted that the presidential election would be a good source of material. After Josh won, Alex said his Jeopardy! experience would yield even more material.
2 years ago:: ALL of the players got this FJ in “Trademarks”IE drops below 50% of the Web browser market
Sometime in 1998 or 1999, Internet Explorer (IE) became the number one Web browser in the world. It did so thanks to Microsoft illegally bundling IE with Windows. But, while Microsoft lost the anti-trust case, instead of being broken up as it was first ruled, Microsoft only had its hands slapped and Internet Explorer's main competitor, Netscape, was destroyed. By 2004, Microsoft's IE owned 95%+ of the Web browser marker. That was then. This is now.
In that same year, Firefox started taking market-share from IE. At first IE lost ground, ironically enough, because of its de facto victory over Netscape. For years, Microsoft neglected improving IE 6, and Firefox was able to quickly establish itself as the better option. Then, when Chrome was introduced in 2008, it made the Web browser races far more competitive.
In October 2011, according to NetMarketShare, IE is barely above the 50% mark of desktop browsers with 52.63%. That only tells part of the story though.
On the smartphone/tablet market, IE is a total non-player with IE and Microsoft Pocket IE combined having only 0.17% of the market. Put the total Web browser markets together, and you'll see IE has finally dropped below the 50% mark. IE now has only 49.58% of the total market.
While Microsoft continues to try to make the best of IE's decline by focusing on IE 9's growth on Windows 7, the simple truth is that IE isn't just declining, its fall is accelerating.
On the desktop alone, IE's strong point, IE lost 1.8%. Over the last three months, IE has lost 6% of its desktop Web browser users.
Firefox, once IE's greatest rival and still the number two--for now-Web browser--can't take credit for IE's fall. Firefox, with 21.20% of the market, has been hovering around the 21% mark since February.
No, the credit for cutting IE down to size must go to Chrome, which increased its market share by 1.42% to 16.59% and Apple's Safari, which now has a 8.54% market share. Both numbers are all-time highs.
Safari's increase isn't just a matter that it's the dominant, with 62.17%, browser on smartphones and tablets. Mac OS X, where Safari is the default Web browser, has now reached 7.18%, also a new high, on the desktop according to StatCounter.
A closer look at IE's numbers reveals that much of IE's customer base, 7.49%, are using the hopelessly obsolete IE 6. Thus, the percentage of users working with current versions of IE--8 for XP and 9 for Vista and 7--is actually about 42%.
In short, IE is a dead browser walking. Not only is IE's declining on desktops, it doesn't have any presence on smartphones and tablets. Even if you buy into Windows 8 being Microsoft's savior for tablets and smartphone, Windows 8 won't show up until at least 2012.
Were I a Web developer, I wouldn't waste any more of my time building for IE. WebKit, which is the open-source, Web-browser engine behind both Chrome and Safari, is the smart choice for Web developers. The users, with the way they're abandoning IE are already speaking. The day of IE as the dominant Web browser are numbered.
Related Stories:
NetMarketShare: XP finally eroded to sub 50 percent level, Chrome closing in on Firefox
Firefox partners with The Evil Empire
Chrome could overtake Firefox by 2012
Chrome 15: The Best Browser keeps getting better (Review)
A quick look at Google's Chrome 15 Web browser (Photo Gallery)Jonny Hayes and Niall McGinn have both left Aberdeen this summer
Northern Ireland forward Niall McGinn has completed his move from Aberdeen to South Korean top-flight club Gwangju.
The 29-year-old, who joined the Scottish Premiership club from Celtic in 2012, rejected an offer to extend his stay at Pittodrie.
He has now announced on Twitter that he is looking forward to a "new chapter" and "a new, exciting challenge".
"After five great years, I am moving on, but I will always remember my Aberdeen days very fondly," he said.
"When I joined Aberdeen in 2012, I had no idea of the great times that lay ahead."
McGinn leaves Derek McInnes' side after a season in which they finished runners-up in the Premiership to Celtic and also lost to the Glasgow side in the Scottish Cup and League Cup finals.
He joins Gwangju with Nam Ki-il's side sitting bottom of the K-League Classic after 17 games of the 2017 season and admitted to the club website that he realises his new team are "in a difficult situation".
"Since I met the club president a few weeks ago in Belfast, I have been researching Asian football and Korean football in particular," he said.
"I have been very impressed with what I have discovered.
Niall McGinn posted a photograph on Twitter of himself in his new strip
"This is a new, exciting challenge for me. One that is very different to anything I have experienced in my career to date.
"I am looking forward to continuing my career at Gwangju FC. I am the first Irish player ever to have signed for a Korean club."
McGinn, who began his career with Dungannon Swifts and moved to Celtic from Derry City, said he would "always be an Aberdeen fan".
He thanked McInnes, assistant Tony Docherty and their predecessors, Craig Brown and Archie Knox, who signed him after a spell on loan to Brentford from Celtic.
"The fans at Aberdeen also deserve immense credit and thanks," he added. "They took me to their hearts and I took them to mine."
Republic of Ireland winger Jonny Hayes also left Aberdeen this summer to join Celtic, Ryan Jack joined Rangers, fellow midfielder Peter Pawlett signed for MK Dons, while defender Ash Taylor also decided to leave Pittodrie.
McInnes has already bolstered his attacking options by signing Greg Stewart on loan from Birmingham City, while attacking midfielder Ryan Christie will be farmed out to Pittodrie for a second season by Celtic.
However, a move for Preston North End's Stevie May has been complicated by the English club's loss of manager Simon Grayson to Sunderland.
Media playback is not supported on this device Highlights of Niall McGinn's Aberdeen career
Meanwhile, an attempt to sign Shaun Maloney, who is out of contract with Hull City, has also stalled after the 34-year-old revealed an injury problem.
Find all the latest football transfers on our dedicated page.Published: 22:48 +10:00, 20 July 2017 | Updated: 23:37 +10:00, 20 July 2017
A sorry, young driver who killed two Melbourne mothers in a high-speed crash is likely to face deportation after serving an eight-year jail term.
Mohamad Hassan, 21, flew through a red light at 140km/h and slammed into a car containing Bozica Nikolic, 57, and Subha Deumic, 62, at suburban Attwood in June 2016.
The Lebanese refugee was on Thursday jailed for eight years and eight months after pleading guilty to two counts of culpable driving causing death.
Mohamad Hassan has been sentenced to more than eight years in jail for killing two much-loved mothers Subha Deumic (right) and Bozica Nikolic (left) in Attwood, north-west Melbourne last year
Hassan faced the Victorian County Court on Wednesday where he pleaded guilty to two counts of culpable driving causing the deaths of the women at Attwood in June 2016 (pictured)
Victorian County Court Judge Lisa Hannan said the effects of the crash have been devastating, ripping through the lives of the Nikolic and Deumic families.
'For all, the loss haunts them. The victims have changed forever,' she said.
'It is to be hoped that time can help them heal from that which they should not have to endure.'
On the evening of the crash, Ms Nikolic and Ms Deumic were driving together in a red Toyota, and were stopped in an intersection, waiting to turn.
Hassan was speeding along Mickleham Road in his family's unregistered Mercedes-Benz at 60km/h above the signposted limit.
He flew straight through a red light and ploughed into the front driver's side of the Toyota, killing the two mothers.
Five daughters of Ms Nikolic (pictured) and Ms Deumic delivered heart-wrenching victim impact statements in court, including one account from a woman who witnessed the collision from a following car
Ms Deumic is pictured with her son Ermin, 32, before her tragic death
The judge said the tragedy was compounded by the fact the crash was 'completely avoidable'.
The light had been red for four seconds before Hassan, who claimed the windscreen was foggy, drove through it.
'You made choices. They were choices made in seconds, but they were choices,' the judge told Hassan.
'You are a young man who has made a life-altering series of mistakes.
'I accept that you are sorry for what you have done.'
Hassan's hard work as a labourer was acknowledged and Judge Hannan said he had been a diligent young man 'full of hope' before the crash.
'In less than a minute, that all changed forever,' she said, jailing him with a non-parole period of six years and two months.
Armina Deumic (pictured) had been travelling in the car behind and witnessed the crash which killed her mother and friend
Hassan grew up in a village in Lebanon and came to Australia with his family in 2015 on a dependant relative visa.
His entire family lives in Australia but the judge said Hassan is likely to fail a character test and be deported once he's served his time.
'The uncertainty of your status, and the likelihood you will be forced to leave your entire family in this country, will no doubt weigh upon you as you serve your sentence,' she said.
The many daughters and sons of Ms Nikolic and Ms Deumic read heartbreaking statements about their 'amazing' mothers in court on Wednesday.
'She will never have the chance to watch me grow into the woman she inspired me to become,' 17-year-old Adrijana Nikolic said.
The Department of Immigration makes rulings on deportations.Double exposure tutorial for the Canon 5D Mark III by Dylan and Sara Photography.
How to do multiple exposures in your camera without photoshop.
Cameras today have many extra functions that are often buried in menus and forgotten. Last year, we bought the 5D Mark III and after a few months we realized that there were some interesting features we had never played with. After figuring out that there was a way to do in-camera double exposures, we immediately started experimenting. At first it was very hit and miss. (We still hadn’t read the manual.)
Sara: One wedding day, I was sitting behind some trees with the bride while guests were being seated for the ceremony. I remembered the neat trick we had recently discovered. I took a few photos and came out with this:
Ever since we posted this image, we’ve been getting messages asking: “How do you do this!?”
Well, here we go. Here is how we do this:
Multiple Exposures: What are they?
Double exposure is a technique that originated with film photography where you would expose the same frame of film twice (or more). Film can only be exposed to light so much before it will stop recording information. So the part of the film that was darker after first exposure will be most receptive to the light from the second click. It’s typically good to underexpose both photos, because you are exposing the “film” or “sensor” to light twice.
Digital cameras that do this: 5D Mark III, EOS-1D X, EOS 6D, Most Nikon DSLRs, Fujifilm X PRO, Fujifilm X100S, Olympus OM-D E-M5, and more!
Some tips for the 5Diii – It almost feels like cheating:
Live View. Whoa. Live View makes these almost too easy. If you are using this camera and get nothing else from this other than “USE LIVE VIEW!” I’ll be happy. I only recently discovered how live view works with multiple exposures… and it is incredible. This allows you to see the base photo with the live preview overlay. Seriously amazing. (I didn’t know this for the first 6 months I took these.. no more need to memorize the base image’s framing!)
Pick your base image. You don’t have to take two consecutive images. WHAAA? Another thing I recently discovered. Canon allows you to select an image as a starting point. If you don’t have a long time to work with the subject you can just snap a few silhouettes and use them later. You can take all your base images (silhouettes or otherwise) and use them later to overlay a second image for a double exposure. As long as they are on your card (unedited RAW and from the same camera model) you can use them.
This camera allows you to save all images (2+ base images and result) in RAW form. This is neat because you can go back and look at your settings to learn what works best for you… or have useable images for more attempts.
I’m not going to go through all the menus step by step here because I go through them in the video tutorial, but I will explain a little about the options.
Func/Ctrl – Use this for most cases, it allows you to pick your base image before shooting.
ContShtng – Use if you want to do sports composites, like if you wanted to shoot someone running or doing a snowboard jump.
Multi-Exposure ctrl: (how/what is composited)
Additive: What I use. This is most similar to the way film records light. Typically need to compensate by underexposing a bit.
Average: Compensates for light and averages it out. Use this if you were taking photos of a wide shot of something moving like a car or a runner.
Bright: Meant for night time, only the bright spots of the images are composited
Dark: The darker parts of the image are combined and the brighter parts are surpressed
The Images
Now clearly you can do this with any images you want, there aren’t rules on what you have to do. However, silhouettes are really fun to start. You can blow out the sky behind the person, and the second image you take is going to fill only the dark areas of the first. Typically, you will need to shoot from a lower perspective in order to achieve this.
Sometimes I want to have more context and facial texture in the subject. If you have directional sunlight position your subject to face the light and slightly underexpose the skin tones. This way the back of their head will darken but the face will have skin texture. Make sure to place the facial line in darker parts of the second image so that you don’t blow out the skin tones and lose the whole face.
You can use anything for the second photo, I like using natural things like trees and flowers. The sky is your friend, use it to your advantage in both the base and overlay images.
Examples:
We hope to do more tutorials in the future, if you have something you’d like us to talk about.. let us know 🙂
Featured on FStoppers!
Check out our Portland wedding photography.After a poor pro day workout, many have speculated that NFL draft prospect Teddy Bridgewater’s stock is plummeting.
In the Q mock draft, Bridgewater has fallen out of the top 10.
But according to one former NFL front office executive, ex-Tampa Bay Buccaneers general manager Mark Dominik, the former Louisville quarterback’s stock has been slipping since before his pro day one month ago.
“There were things you saw on tape when you watched him,” Dominik said on ESPN’s “NFL Insiders,” where he is now an analyst. “Something that scouts internally, we talked about it in Tampa with Teddy Bridgewater last year. Is he really the premier quarterback? I like the young man, I think he’s a quality individual, he’s got character and leadership and those things. But this is a quarterback, and you’re judged by what quarterback you draft, and I think Teddy Bridgewater might not have all the pieces you’re looking for.”
Dominik’s comments are similar to those of another former GM, Phil Savage, who was with the Cleveland Browns from 2005-08.
“I think the media has Teddy Bridgewater in the top 10, but around league circles he’s more like a late first, early second-round pick,” Savage said Thursday on SiriusXM NFL Radio.
Bridgewater may be having poor workouts, but it doesn’t negate everything he has showed on tape over the last couple of seasons in Louisville. The quarterback’s smaller size also shouldn’t be sliding him down draft boards, either; he’s been the same size throughout his career.
Now is the point, however, when teams start to finalize their draft boards and narrow down their lists of players they prefer. If some teams feel he may not be a good fit in their scheme, they’ll look at other prospects.
Given what’s on film for Bridgewater, we know what type of quarterback he can be: he’s an accurate passer, trained in a pro style system, but lacks premier size and arm strength. He doesn’t necessarily project as an All-Pro, but when placed in the right system, he could be productive.NEW DELHI: Don’t play golf, do yoga to beat the stress; the Narendra Modi-led government is a hard-taskmaster so you may have to work 18-20 hours a day at times.A dozen toppers of Civil Services exam got this as a teaser for their job from PMO Minister of State Jitendra Singh on Monday. The Modi government, on coming to power, cracked the whip on bureaucracy — coming late to work was frowned upon, long lunches were out and afternoons on the golf course were disapproved.“I can say with certain amount of confidence that this is one of the best times for you to have entered the services. Because the political establishment is very favourably inclined to make the atmosphere work friendly, to make the atmosphere stress-free,” Singh told the toppers. “Of course we expect lot of (sic) hard taskmasters this government has proved to be. We expect our colleagues also to work for long hours, maybe 18-20 hours also when Parliament was in session, which was not so as earlier. But then we also started yoga so that you don’t have to go out to play golf and you can have in-house yoga,” Singh told them.He added for good measure: “We are hard task masters under PM Modi but at same time we also realise the importance of giving you a proper frame of mind and proper environment so that we can extract the best to your potential,” Singh said. “The kind of performance level expected from you is very high. Accountability is too high. You should not only be non-corrupt but also appear to be non-corrupt,” Singh advocated.He asked the toppers to be upright but not antagonise ministers. “Sometimes you realize at the end of 20 years that you have served the minister more than the public. You end up following that famous BBC serial ‘Yes Minister’. Be upright with tact – you don’t have to compromise your career. Without antagonizing your minister, you have to impose the checks and balances. You have to subtly show the right direction to the political bosses,” Singh said.He then dropped a stunning comment. “You are not the best. This may sound little bitter over this treat of sweets,” Singh said, saying PM told him the same when appointing him as a Minister. “One pearl of wisdom the PM gave me – he said aisa nahi hai ki ham sabse yogya hain. He told me I (Modi) am also new to Delhi, I have never visited Parliament. But vyavastha aise hai, humse me se kuch is zimavari ke liye aa jaate hain,” Singh said, asking the toppers |
6 Guest-star Jessica Brown-Findlay (aka Abi from Black Mirror, aka Sybil from Downton Abbey) pulls the strings in the first season finale as a wholesome religious girl whose superpower is convincing everyone to abandon their delinquent behavior in favor of celibacy, Jesus Christ, and cardigans buttoned all the way up. We're also introduced to the masked ninja-like BMX rider henceforth known as Superhoodie, who saves the gang multiple times at crucial moments. And with the aid of a seeming tragedy, we finally discover what Nathan's power is.
Season 2: Episode 3 Alisha figures out who the gang's secret ninja is and it's super sexy. Plus, the monster of the week is a crazy tattoo artist (or as Simon pronounces it, "tuh-TOO") with self-esteem and anger issues whose tattoo art is magic and who also happens to have a ridiculous weakness. The exploitation of that weakness isn't written especially well, but this is such an important episode story-wise it must be watched. Besides, it's sort of fun watching the Nathan/Simon'shipper dream teased (then dashed, unfortunately).
Season 2: Episode 7 (Christmas Special) In which the landscape is shaken up by Seth (Matthew McNulty), a hot dude with a neck tuh-too whose power is giving and taking other people's powers. Alisha of course can't wait to be rid of her (awful, victimizing) power, so she just gives it to him. Meanwhile, the rest of the gang sell theirs because they're young and stupid and 20,000 quid is a lot of money. The introduction of the possibility of exchanging powers is a major story shift that, while obviously meant to keep the characters from stagnating and introduce heightened levels of uncertainty into the plot, works without feeling desperate.
Season 3, Episode 1 With Nathan sailing off into the sunset with his new little family, the gang is crippled by the loss of its funniest, most inane life force, so of course the writers had to bring in a ringer. Welcome Rudy, his just-as-crass, slightly older replacement! Rudy has an alter-ego—literally, his power is splitting into two people: his foul-mouthed, offensive outer persona and the more sensitive, kind and weepy inner Rudy. Rudy is almost as funny as Nathan, but what he lacks in puckish charm he makes up for in loud, crass, and obviously put-on atrociousness that makes for a lovable trainwreck (once he's, you know, learned his lesson about consent—see below).
Season 3: Episode 2 This one goes out to all the old-dude politicians trying to police women's bodies: Curtis, who has taken on the only power Seth had left at the time, can now switch genders at will. This is great because Curtis is a self-centered misogynist, forever moping about his lost track-star potential, so when he decides to use his female body to compete in track again (he implies it's illegal, but I'm not exactly sure there are sports competition rules that cover shape-shifting), he gets a real lesson in what it's like to be a woman—not to mention what to even do with one when she comes back to your place. It's a rare Misfits episode that attempts to say something about social politics without doing too much damage. (See: Curtis and the racist blind-girl subplot. Or don't, since that's Season 4.)
__ Season 3: Episode 8__ This is the episode that brings all the time-travel drama full-circle again. A phony psychic has obtained real medium powers and brings back a bunch of the people the gang has killed, several of whom are not too pleased about having been murdered. Somehow they're able to walk and talk and touch like the living when summoned, and they go about finishing their business—which of course means really bad news for the gang. Again, can't spoil much, but this is by far the saddest episode of the series.
Why You Should Binge:
Misfits is the type of show that's just charming, intense, and wacky enough to keep you addicted for at least the first three seasons. It's just complex enough to keep you moving forward into each next episode, and yet just fluffy enough to have it on in the background while you're doing something else (after you've gotten through it once, that is). Like a great sitcom, its dialogue is razor-sharp and the comedic timing is embarrassingly good—embarrassing, as in, you'll laugh loud enough to wake everyone in your apartment when Rudy tries to express feelings or Nathan sensuously rubs sunscreen into his ass cheeks. Plus, it's always a good idea to binge-watch British comedies—really does wonders for the spirits.
Best Scenes:
In order to not spoil anything particularly major, here are the two best scenes in GIF form.
The Takeaway:
Only mess with the space-time continuum if you're as good at parkour as Simon.
If You liked Misfits You'll Love:
The early seasons of Heroes and maybe Alphas. Also, just pick a BBC comedy at random sometime, you likely won't be disappointed.Rising Thunder, the indie fighting game canceled in its alpha phase of development in 2016, will live on through one final build, with open-source server code, the game’s developers said today.
The build will be called Rising Thunder: Community edition and developer Radiant Entertainment is leaving it in the hands of the community to continue to play and improve.
Rising Thunder was announced in 2015; its development team has a rich pedigree in the fighting games community. Tom and Tony Cannon, who founded the Evo fighting game tournament series, founded Radiant Entertainment and were Rising Thunder’s co-directors. Seth Killian, the fighting games champion, commentator and advocate who worked for Capcom during Street Fighter 4’s development, was its producer.
However, Riot Games, maker of League of Legends, acquired Radiant Entertainment in March of 2016. Development on Rising Thunder closed shortly thereafter. Fans however, have continued to lobby for bringing the game back, leading to this afternoon’s announcement.
In a note on the Rising Thunder subreddit, Killian said Radiant Entertainment was releasing the final build with some improvements — including offline local play. Local play will be keyboard versus controller only, Killian said, “but it should be straightforward to hack in [one-player] controller support through external scripting.”
Rising Thunder was a fighting game predicated on the idea that the genre is intimidatingly complicated, so a keyboard is a viable controller. The creators sought to simplify the game’s control set to the point that users didn’t need to commit complicated move sets to memory. The combatants were robot characters who had the means to equip a loadout, pre-match, of “variants” that modified and upgraded their abilities.
Rising Thunder’s final build will be accompanied by source code for an open-source version of the game’s server so players can still play in match-made games online. Killian said the code is “a first pass at a bare-bones server that will allow you to play online with rudimentary matchmaking and limited features.”Mud-dwelling organism that lives head down in a tusklike tube found alive for first time, although its existence had been known of for centuries
About three feet long and glistening black with a pink, fleshy appendage, it looks like the entrails of an alien from a bad horror film. In fact, it is a giant shipworm.
Discovered in the mud of a shallow lagoon in the Philippines, a living creature of the species has never been described before – even though its existence has been known for more than 200 years thanks to fossils of the baseball bat-sized tubes that encase the creature.
“Although people have known [these animals] exist, they didn’t know the simplest things about them,” said Dan Distel of Northeastern University’s marine science centre and co-author of the study published in the journal PNAS. “It was a very mysterious organism.”
Distel points out that a description based on a museum specimen was made decades ago, but adds that the creature was not well preserved. “We think, among living biologists, anyway, our group are probably the only group that has seen living specimens,” he said.
With the Linnaean classification Kuphus polythalamia, the creature lives in the mud inside a long tube made of calcium carbonate secreted by the animal. The tube forms a casing for the beast, including its head. “If they want to grow, they have to open that end of that tube, so somehow dissolve or reabsorb that cap on the bottom, grow, extend the tube down further into the mud, and then they seal it off again,” said Distel.
The end of the tube, adds Distel, is Y-shaped and surrounds two siphons – water is drawn in through one, pushed through the creature’s gills, then expelled through the other.
Despite being known as a shipworm – a nod to its relatives’ diet of submerged wood – the animal is actually a type of clam. It has a modified version of two clam shells at its head, while the body stretches out behind. “Its body has been stretched out through evolution so that it no longer fits between the two shells,” said Distel.
Palaeontologists solve an ancient tentacled mystery | Susannah Lydon Read more
The team stumbled across a clue to the creatures’ whereabouts thanks to a YouTube video of a Philippine television news report. They asked academics in the region about possible locations and subsequently located a crop of the tubes in a lagoon replete with rotting wood. The location, adds Distel, remains a secret, to prevent the site being disturbed by shell collectors.
Divers collected tubes found sticking upwards around 10ft below the surface. “That tube is anywhere from maybe 75%-80% buried in the mud,” said Distel. About half a dozen were shipped to the laboratory, where the team tentatively opened one.
“It was really quite amazing,’ said Distel. “I didn’t even have any idea how to open it, but I thought: ‘Carefully.’”
The appearance of the shipworm when it slid out of the tube came as a surprise to the researchers. “That colour of the animal is sort of shocking,” Distel said. “Most bivalves are greyish, tan, pink, brown, light beige colours. This thing just has this gunmetal-black colour. It is much beefier, more muscular than any other bivalve I had ever seen.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Giant shipworm found in Philippines Photograph: Marine Science Institute/Marvin Altamia
But it isn’t just its discovery that stunned researchers: the giant shipworm is also surprising for its mode of survival. “Gigantism is usually an indication of ample nutrients,” said Distel. Other shipworms feed on submerged wood with the aid of wood-degrading bacteria that live in their gills, but the newly discovered specimen had only a tiny digestive system, while the fact that the creature was enclosed in a tube suggested it was not eating mud.
Further work revealed that the creature relies on bacteria in its gills that use hydrogen sulphide in the water as an energy source. That energy is then used to turn carbon dioxide into nutrients for the shipworm.
The discovery, Distel adds, sheds light on the evolution of symbiotic relationships between sulphur-oxidising organisms and other creatures, and backs up the possibility that sunken wood might have played a role in how such species ended up in locations such as deep sea hydrothermal vents. “To me it was almost like finding a dinosaur – something that was pretty much only known by fossils,” he said.
Simon Watt, biologist, TV presenter and president of the Ugly Animal Preservation Society, welcomed the discovery of the giant shipworm. “It might well be monstrous, but that does not mean that it isn’t marvellous,” he said, pointing out that the creature has evolved to live in an environment that is also “pretty disgusting”. “If you are down living among murky dirt, then aesthetics are surely not your number one priority,” he added.ESPN Packers reporter Rob Demovsky reviews Eddie Lacy's first day at organized team activities, where the running back showed off a slimmer physique but still has a lot of work to do. (1:11)
GREEN BAY, Wis. -- Eddie Lacy did more than just P90X after Green Bay Packers coach Mike McCarthy called him out after last season for being overweight. The running back turned to basketball and boxing as well.
In his first public practice of the offseason, Lacy put his remade body on display Tuesday during the Packers' first open organized team activity of the year.
Editor's Picks Not too fat, not too skinny: Packers' Eddie Lacy still might not be just right Eddie Lacy looked lighter in the midsection Tuesday, and he sounded pleased with the results from his work with trainer Tony Horton. But Lacy is still a 240-pound-plus running back who has -- and probably needs -- some beef behind him, Rob Demovsky writes.
"I think I look good," Lacy said after practice.
However, Lacy still might not be exactly where the Packers want him just yet.
When Lacy returned to Green Bay for the start of the offseason program in April, a source told ESPN.com at the time that Lacy had dropped 15 to 18 pounds. Although Lacy declined to discuss how much weight he has lost, a source said Tuesday that Lacy weighs "in the 240s."
If that's the case, then it means Lacy was somewhere near 260 pounds last season, when his production dropped to 758 yards after consecutive 1,100-yard seasons to start his NFL career.
In speaking to reporters for the first time since McCarthy said he "cannot play at the weight he was at [last] year," Lacy said he took McCarthy's criticism in stride.
A slimmed-down Eddie Lacy participated in organized team activity drills on Tuesday. Rob Demovsky
"At the end of the day, we're all grown men," Lacy said. "Whether he calls me out, I just have to take care of that responsibility. You don't get mad or [lash] out or anything like that. You just take it as it is what it is and make it go away.
"I feel like I handled it well, and I held up my end of the bargain," he added. "It's a process. I've got to keep going and just keep hoping for the best."
Lacy also said he changed his eating habits, but the biggest difference apparently came in his workouts, some of which were under the guidance of P90X founder Tony Horton.
"It was different," Lacy said. "Some things were harder than others. But at the end of the day, it's all about the result. Whether it's fun or not, you've just got to get it done."
It sounds like Lacy's weight-loss process might not be quite over. McCarthy categorized Lacy's condition as "so far, so good."
"Eddie will be fine," McCarthy said. "I believe he'll hit the target that we're all looking for when the lights come on."
Said quarterback Aaron Rodgers: "Eddie looks like Eddie. It's good to have him out there. He's a talented guy. He's going to be an important part of our season."The Ice Climbers are strange, unique characters who are often poorly understood by those who don’t play them. However, it is important to understand them to at least some extent since they can be very threatening, mostly on account of their extremely good punish game. I won’t attempt to concisely describe how every character should fight against them, but I will describe some attributes of ICs that many players, especially newer ones, either don’t know about or are incorrect about. Also note that throughout this article, I will describe the secondary IC as “Nana” for convenience, although two of the ICs’ costumes do feature the female IC as the lead.
Nana’s AI in General
While nobody currently has an exceptional grasp on Nana’s AI, there are many strange misconceptions about it that I hear occasionally, even from good players. For example, I have heard, on more than one occasion, that Nana acts as a level 3 computer. In actuality, Nana’s AI doesn’t correspond to any one CPU level. It’s long been known, and easily verifiable, that Nana’s behavior changes as Popo’s percentage increase, and thanks to BigVegeta, this is more precisely understood nowadays. In particular, Nana’s AI level is a function of Popo’s percentage. Many other precise details of Nana’s AI in certain situations remain unknown.
One especially important situation to understand is how Nana behaves when she is recovering. She double jumps very predictably and she can’t do belay or squall hammer on her own, so if you hit her out of her double jump and if she can’t reach the edge, she is frequently dead. Popo can often try to save her, but it is important to be aware that Nana cannot take part in a synced squall hammer or belay when she is in tumble. Hence, if she is offstage without a double jump, unable to reach an edge or surface to land on, and is in tumble, then there is no saving her, so there is no need to try to stop Popo from attempting that. Also, in the case in which Popo does save Nana with belay, be aware that she is invincible until the peak of her recovery.
Chain Grabs and Wobbling
On account of how powerful ICs’ punish game is, people have devoted more effort into understanding it, so misconceptions about chain grabs and wobbling are less common than they used to be, but they still exist, and people still make decisions that suggest they aren’t aware of certain flaws with these.
To begin with simple territory, a common chain grab ICs players of all skill levels use is Popo’s dthrow into Nana’s dair into another Popo grab. Experienced players largely are comfortable escaping this, but many beginner, intermediate, and even some good players who lack ICs practice will repeatedly lose entire stocks to this since they do not understand how to get out. Escaping this chain grab is entirely a matter of good SDI on Nana’s dair. Space animals frequently escape with SDI away on the dair followed by a spot-dodge or roll. Other characters generally do upwards SDI on the dair and double jump out.
Another very important chain grab ICs have is the simple Popo dthrow chain grab, which functions much like a worse version of Sheik’s dthrow chain grab. On the characters it works well against, it is typically inescapable except in the special case of Falcon, whose DI isn’t feasible for most people to react to. Otherwise, your best bet is often to try to condition the ICs player to expect a certain DI from you and then do something different, in which case their expectations might take priority over what they observe. Assuming the ICs player is reacting well, you need to double jump out at a high percentage or DI towards an edge. The latter is dangerous if Nana is around since ICs can convert the dthrow chain grab into a handoff once you’re near the edge. However, if you don’t DI away, it is easy for ICs to convert the next grab into a wobble, which is something I can testify has gotten me easy infinites I wouldn’t have been able to initiate if the enemy were aware of this. As is probably evident, there frequently is no good way out if the ICs player does not make errors. However, if you are able to get to a percentage at which you can escape with a double jump (holding about 128 degrees measured upwards from the horizontal ray in the direction Popo is facing is often best for this, as this will make dthrow send you approximately straight up) before you reach an edge, you do have that escape option.
Wobbling is by far the best option ICs have out of a grab, yet it is also poorly understood by many, and this sometimes inhibits players’ abilities to counteract it. While it is easy to do once it is initiated, there is subtlety in judging how to start it under various circumstances, and sometimes Popo must wait briefly before doing the first headbutt. Some ICs players, predominantly the MD/VA ones, often wait long before starting the infinite in the interest making the initiation consistent and easy. However, whether this delay is essential to make the wobble work or whether it is chosen in the interest of making it easy, it has a huge drawback: people can press buttons. Players who recognize that not every wobble can or will start exceptionally quickly often mash furiously the instant they realize they will be grabbed, and it requires very good wobble set-ups for the ICs player to handle that. See this game from the MLG Anaheim crew battle for a good illustration of how lazy wobble set-ups aren’t always fruitful.
Hitlag
There is an occasionally true notion that hitting ICs or their shields induces more hitlag in the attacker than hitting a single target does. However, this isn’t always the case, and knowing when it is and when it is not can be valuable. Conveniently, this is simple to understand. If you hit both ICs (or their shields) on the same frame, then you will experience normal hitlag. However, if you hit one target before the other, then you will experience more than the normal amount. Since Popo is frequently in front of Nana, this means it is often the case that attacks started distantly will hit Popo and then Nana, meaning it’s more dangerous than hitting a single target might be, but attacks that become active on top of both ICs are quite normal. It is relatively unusual for ICs to exploit this advantage intentionally nowadays, but it is nonetheless something that could get you CC dsmashed or grabbed when you otherwise would be safe. This property being intentionally used is something you may need to worry about more as time goes on, as well.
A Closing Remark
The Ice Climbers are not the best characters in the current metagame, nor are they particularly close to being that. They are also not a main that many people will choose in any case. However, they nonetheless have a nontrivial presence in the modern tournament scene and knowing how to beat them is important if you want consistent, large-scale success. It is no secret that many players dislike ICs, and it’s fine to have such preferences, but ICs are in the game and that is not going to change anytime soon. Some regions are quite vocal in their disdain for the Inuit duo, and hence either implicitly or explicitly discourage their use, but the practical effect of this is easy to predict: people in such a region don’t play ICs, the region gets no ICs practice, and the region never becomes good against ICs relative to their overall skill level, because getting practice against ICs is the most obvious and most important way to understand how to fight against them. Players and regions that discourage use of ICs are only hurting themselves, so if there is a devoted ICs player in your area, be thankful that you are able to get practice against this odd, but important pair of characters.70 years ago today, Axis troops invaded the Soviet Union as part of Operation Barbarossa. Despite a rapid advance in the early months of the campaign, capturing millions of Soviet soldiers and decimating the Soviet air and tank corps, the invasion would eventually stall, in the middle of a freezing Russian winter, in the suburbs of Moscow.
This invasion turned the tables of the Second World War. On a socio-political level, the breaking of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact signified Hitler’s true intentions, a final nail in the coffin of Chamberlain’s Appeasement policy, which had been based on the misguided assumption that Hitler was a rational leader who would respect things such as treaties and state sovereignty. On a tactical level, it was the death of Blitzkrieg’s perceived invincibility: the German logistics chain strained over the vast expanses of Russia and Ukraine, the superiority of German panzers was shattered by the new Soviet T-34 medium and KV-1 heavy tanks, and the two powers became locked in an Eastern-front death grip, a battle which only one side could win.
As a history buff, the Eastern Front fascinates me, a Wagnerian opera of two forces locked in death-struggle over scorched earth. The battles remain some of the largest engagements in history. Something like 70% of the German military never saw an American or Brit, as they were tied up fighting Soviets in the East.
I found out about Sergey Larenkov a while ago, and his photo-collage project is extraordinary: he takes old photographs of World War II and overlaps them with photos he’s taken of the locations today, creating this ghostly memories of the war. It’s particularly fascinating as an American: these are cities which were old when America was still a British colony, which were devastated during the war, and which were rebuilt again, anew, after the fighting had stopped. It’s a scale of warfare which has never been seen in the Western Hemisphere.
For example, Soviet generals (with Marshal Zhukov, commander of the Red Army during the Battle of Berlin, at front) on the steps of a ruined Reichstag contrasted with modern tour groups.
And Soviet infantry in front of the Imperial Hofberg Palace in Vienna.
This is one of my favorites, in how the Soviet infantry are walking in one direction, while the Russian pedestrians are walking another. The clothes, the poster of Stalin… a great contrast in how times change.
Speaking of contrast: the Soviet infantry moving to Vienna’s city-center in 1945 aren’t passing any trees, but today, there’s one tall enough to loom over them. In some of these pictures, I would have done the overlap transitions differently, but this one I really like because of it.
A T-34/85 passing under Prague’s Powder Tower, with 1945-era infantry and 2010-era pedestrians watching it.
There’s a bunch more on Larankov’s Livejournal page, from the siege of Leningrad, defense of Moscow, and more recently, a set of occupation-era Paris. Seriously good stuff, go check it out.Mariners starting pitcher Hisashi Iwakuma during a game against the A's. (Photo: Jennifer Buchanan, USA TODAY Sports)
The Los Angeles Dodgers’ winter of frustration continued Thursday night when Hishashi Iwakuma, who agreed to a three-year, $45 million contract two weeks ago, turned around and re-signed with the Seattle Mariners after the two sides failed to finalize the deal.
The Mariners, after catching wind of a snag in the negotiations involving Iwakuma’s physical, swooped in and signed Iwakuma to a one-year guaranteed contract with two option years.
“We said from the start that Kuma was a priority for us,” said Mariners GM Jerry Dipoto, who announced the deal at the Mariners’ holiday party. “Obviously, the developments from the last few days allowed us to get back in the game. It’s a credit to our ownership; to Howard Lincoln, to Kevin Mather, to our entire ownership group that we were able to get aggressive and find a way to bring Kuma back to the Mariners.
Jerry Dipoto delivers a special gift to the front office at the #Mariners holiday party: Kuma is back. pic.twitter.com/8Bo8Y93ub2 — Seattle Mariners (@Mariners) December 18, 2015
“We’re all thrilled. This is a big move for us. We feel like this really puts a finishing touch on what we think has been a very productive off-season.”
Iwakuma, 34, was 9-5 with a 3.54 ERA with 111 strikeouts in 20 starts with the Mariners last season. The Mariners 11 of his final 16 starts of the season when he went 9-4 with a 2.82 ERA.
Iwakuma has gone 47-25 with a 3.17 ERA) with 551 strikeouts in 111 games, including 97 starts. His 3.09 ERA with the Mariners ranks fourth in the American League behind teammate Felix Hernandez, David Price (2.89) of the Boston Red Sox and Chris Sale (3.05) of the Chicago White Sox.
The Mariners, who traded for Red Sox starter Wade Miley after it appeared Iwakuma was joining the Dodgers, now have a deep rotation of Hernandez, Iwakuma, Miley, Taijuan Walker, James Paxton and Nathan Karns.
The Dodgers, who lost Zack Greinke to the Arizona Diamondbacks during free agency this winter, and have watched the rival San Francisco Giants spent $220 million on two free-agent starters, are back at the drawing board. They still are seeking at least one, if not two front-line starters to help support ace Clayton Kershaw.
The Dodgers also believed they had completed a trade last week with the Cincinnati Reds for All-Star closer Aroldis Chapman, only to have the trade thwarted after discovering that he was involved in a domestic violence incident with his girlfriend, in which he shot a handgun eight times. The incident, which occurred in October, now is being investigated by Major League Baseball.
TOP OFFSEASON TRADES:Texas Ranger pulls gun on driver who flipped him off Copyright by KXAN - All rights reserved Texas Ranger Michael Smith is seen on a Round Rock PD officer's body camera as he explains the series of events. [ + - ] Video
ROUND ROCK, Texas (KXAN) -- A Texas Ranger stationed in Austin exercised "poor judgment" in an incident where he pulled over and pointed his gun at a driver who flipped him off in traffic according to the Texas Department of Public Safety.
During the incident, Round Rock police rushed to an intersection along Interstate 35 after a call for help from the driver who was on the phone with a 911 operator saying someone is trying to pull him over in an unmarked vehicle.
"It's a white pickup truck and the guys wearing a suit. And he brake checked me and I went around him on the right side, gave him the finger, and he turned all these lights and sirens on", said the motorist to the 911 dispatcher.
Moments later, before officers arrived, the man following the driver points a gun at him after they stop at the red light.
Eventually, Round Rock police show up and discovered the man who pulled the gun is Texas Ranger Michael Smith, driving an unmarked DPS pickup truck.
Copyright by KXAN - All rights reserved Texas Ranger Michael Smith
Copyright by KXAN - All rights reserved Texas Ranger Michael Smith
The driver, David Vancuran, was fuming and told officers he wanted to talk to the Ranger’s boss, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety. "I want the director of DPS down here to talk to this guy, he doesn't deserve to be doing that. And then when I ask him who he is, all I see is a gun, said Vancuran.
Ranger Smith claims Vancuran almost crashed into his truck as traffic in front of him slowed. "He goes around me real fast, shoots me the bird, then side swipes my truck", said Smith.
Ranger Smith tells the investigating officer that he only got out of his truck to talk to the driver, but had to pull out his gun after he feared for his safety. "I get out of the truck, I demand he get out. He puts the car in reverse. I draw my gun."
The state issued pickup truck is not equipped with a dash camera, so it's the Ranger's word against the driver in this incident last February.
But KXAN has also obtained evidence Ranger Smith was not exactly telling the truth about when he pulled his pistol according to a crucial part of the 911 call in which Smith is heard screaming and banging on the car.
Driver: "He's getting out of the car now. He's got his gun (expletive) drawn and he has no badge. What the (expletive)", said Vancuran
Ranger: Get out of the car!
Driver: What are you (expletive) doing?
911 Operator: You might need to get someone there, there's a guy with a gun.
Ranger: Get out of the car.
Driver: Are you (expletive) crazy?
Ranger: Get out of the (expletive) car and do it now!
Driver: Who the (expletive) are you?
Ranger: I'm a state trooper, Texas Ranger, get out of your car!
At the scene Ranger Smith, who had been promoted trooper two months prior to the incident, also backs off his claim the motorist almost crashed into him.
Round Rock Officer: "Tell me what you want done."
Ranger Smith: "I want him cited but there's nothing good to cite him for. You know, he didn't strike my vehicle. I took evasive action to miss him."
RR Officer: "Ok."
Ranger: "Did he cross the center line? I don't think he did. No."
As for the driver, who did not respond to our requests for comment, he got off without a ticket.
Round Rock Officer: "At what point did you realize that this guy was an officer?"
Driver: "When he was right next to my window with his gun in my face. And I said are you (expletive) crazy, who are you? And he said, I'm a DPS Ranger."
KXAN asked DPS to respond to Ranger Smith's actions based on what's heard on the 911 tape and the body cameras worn by responding officers.
In a written statement sent via email, the agency contradicts Smith's own version of exactly when he pulled out his gun. "While exiting the vehicle, the Ranger placed his weapon in a low, ready position, due to a perceived threat, " said the agency in a statement emailed to KXAN.
DPS also wrote: "Our employee acted inconsistent with policy, exercised poor judgement, and conducted himself in an unprofessional and discourteous manner - all of which are unacceptable...The department has taken corrective action with this employee regarding the policy infractions.
The agency also did not respond to questions about the differing versions of when Ranger Smith drew his weapon during the stop.
The Texas Department of Public Safety’s Media and Communications Office requested KXAN post the agency’s entire incident in our story online.
The traffic stop initiated by the Ranger was lawful; however, his actions failed to reflect the high standards expected of our employees. The Texas Department of Public Safety Office of Inspector General conducted a thorough and independent review of this incident. The findings concluded our employee acted inconsistent with policy, exercised poor judgement (sic), and conducted himself in an unprofessional and discourteous manner - all of which are unacceptable and fail to meet the high standards of conduct required by the department. The department has taken corrective action with this employee regarding the policy infractions. Additional background information: On February 7, a Texas Ranger attempted to stop an individual who was driving aggressively, including nearly sideswiping the Ranger’s vehicle on I-35 in the Georgetown area. The Ranger was driving an unmarked police unit and attempted to make the traffic stop by activating his emergency lights, and subsequently contacted DPS Communications to request Highway Patrol assistance. The driver ultimately pulled over on the I-35 frontage road in Round Rock. While exiting the vehicle, the Ranger placed his weapon in a low, ready position, due to a perceived threat, namely believing the car was being placed in reverse. Round Rock Police Department subsequently arrived on scene, and the driver was ultimately released with no additional enforcement action taken. The Ranger immediately reported the incident to his supervisor.
We asked DPS to clear up inconsistencies in the Ranger's statements and the agency's own statement, to which the agency replied:What's not to like about Bitcoin, every libertarian's favorite crypto-currency?
For starters, Bitcoins are as cyberpunk as William Gibson's wildest dream: a form of monetary exchange invented in 2009 by a mysterious character who called himself "Satoshi Nakamoto" but then disappeared from view after unleashing his virtual currency upon the world. Bitcoins are undeniably cool: marvelously "mined" from the ore of computer processing power and electricity; more ready for prime time than any previous experiment in purely digital money. And Bitcoins, increasingly, are a success. At a Thursday afternoon all-time-high valuation of $72 per Bitcoin, there were around $700 million worth of Bitcoins in circulation. People are using Bitcoins to buy real goods and services, to hedge against European financial calamity, and to score drugs. That's money.
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Over the years, Bitcoin has experienced ups and downs; the currency has been targeted by hackers and thieves and botnets and been victim to more than one embarrassing software glitch. But it has persevered, and this week, one can fairly say that Bitcoin came of age. On Monday, the U.S. Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) released its first "guidance" as to how "de-centralized virtual currencies" should fit into the larger regulatory regime under which currencies of all kinds are required to operate. The word "Bitcoin" is never mentioned in FinCEN's release, but that's just a technicality. Everyone in the Bitcoin community knew who the guidance was aimed at. Bitcoin is a big boy now. The State is paying attention.
But while some observers have applauded FinCEN's guidance as acknowledgment that Bitcoin isn't illegal or considered a "threat" by the government, not everyone is cheering the news. Because there's a problem here. Bitcoin isn't just an elegant way to create money using peer-to-peer networks and cryptography. Bitcoin is a currency with an ideology. From the beginning, Bitcoin was envisioned as a form of monetary exchange that didn't need third-party financial institutions or central banks or even governments to validate it or back it up. Bitcoin is the fulfillment of a libertarian dream, a currency created out of the workings of the free market, unaffiliated with any state authority, respectful and protective of user privacy and anonymity, and designed to resist inflationary pressures. By its very nature, Bitcoin is made for people who don't want other people to know what they are doing.
"Bitcoin," says financial pundit Max Keiser, "is the currency of resistance."
That's all fine and dandy, but then here comes the government with its strong suggestion that any organization that facilitates the exchange of Bitcoins into other non-virtual currencies needs to register with the proper authorities and start keeping a lot of bureaucratic paperwork. How does that fit in with the idea of "resistance"?
Not very well, as we can learn from one Redditor who chastised his fellow Bitcoin fans for celebrating the legitimacy conferred upon Bitcoin by FinCEN's guidance.
From this situation to total government tracking of money flows and zero possibility to escape their theft, it is but a small step. The tax farmers have co-opted all of you into even more total servitude. But you celebrate that. How servile. Sigh. Slave-minded idiots, nearly |
. Kelly, 28, hit.237 in 40 games from 2016-17. He cleared waivers when the Mets designated him for assignment over the offseason, but he did not pass through unclaimed when the Mets DFA'd him a second time last week, demoting Kelly to make room for reliever Paul Sewald.Tony Cartalucci – Land Destroyer
Pentagon’s Fear of Technological Progress Mirrors Global Elite’s Fear of Progress in General.
US Army General Martin Dempsey delivered an April 2012 speech at Harvard University where he addressed what he calls the “security paradox,” where he stated, “although geopolitical trends are ushering in greater levels of peace and stability worldwide, destructive technologies are available to a wider and more disparate pool of adversaries.” Dempsey related his greatest fear – that these technologies were proliferating “horizontally across advanced militaries in the world,” and “vertically, down to nonstate actors, especially insurgents, terrorist groups and even transnational organized crime.”
While in many ways such concerns are sensible, and any responsible military charged with the defense of a nation would consider and prepare for not only new technologies but adapting appropriately to socioeconomic paradigm shifts, they hardly constitute the greatest threat America faces protecting its borders. The real threat General Dempsey and the Joint Chiefs of Staff fear is the shifting balance of power and the reduction of the vast disparity that once allowed the United States and the West in general to pursue its goals beyond its borders with impunity.
Dempsey notes in his speech that nuclear weapons were a “game-changing capability that was in the hands of the United States initially.” Of course, students of history remember exactly what the US did with these weapons when the balance of power was so radically tipped in its favor – bomb Japan with atomic bombs, twice. Dempsey continues by stating that although the Russians and others began acquiring the weapons “membership was limited by the high cost of entry.”
Image: This is what happens when the balance of power tips too far in favor of any particular party. Further use of nuclear weapons on civilian populations was curtailed not because of the West’s humanitarian disposition, but because of proliferation and the danger of incurring a retaliatory attack. Even today, the prevention of states like Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons revolves around depriving them of a formidable defensive deterrence, not around any fear of an Iranian “first strike.”
….
What he fears now is that technology is advancing so quickly and that the “high cost of entry” for effective weapon systems and other forms of military technology are being lowered so significantly that even individuals may pose a significant threat of being able to “coerce” the United States. Dempsey suggests that the military be reformed to face every threat from individuals up to nation-states and everything in between, and specifically mentions “cyber and special operations forces.”
Dempsey admits subtly throughout his speech that American defense goes well beyond protecting borders and instead focuses primarily on protecting America’s “interests.” This includes focusing on entire regions of the world well-beyond America’s borders including Asia. It is exactly Dempsey’s veiled sales pitch for neo-imperialism maintained through a military reconfigured to fight 4th generation warfare against other nations that reveals the true nature of his concerns regarding technology.
The True Fear of Oligarchs
America will always be able to obtain or produce the latest military weapon systems, devise the most advanced defenses, and maintain the ultimate deterrent against unprovoked attacks. America’s only threat is what stands against its ability to meddle at will around the globe, projecting its power beyond its borders on behalf of the corporate-financier oligarchs that direct Western policy. Losing this ability threatens the parasitic monopoly-based economic system of the West and the power base of the corporate-financier oligarchs that depends on it.
Indeed, the threat technology poses to the elite goes beyond military hardware. It includes anything that challenges the West’s monopoly over power, finances, resources, manufacturing, distribution, media, and health. While the Pentagon is planning global hit squads and cyber brigades, the global oligarchs are resorting to draconian legislation such as SOPAand ACTA, using legal concepts such as “intellectual property” to maintain its monopoly by controlling the very ideas from which all innovation and progress stem from. This includes everything from media to medicine, genetic codes, and technical processes. What can’t be curtailed using the excuse of “intellectual property,” will be done through regulation regarding “environmentalism,” “health,” and “safety.”
True technical progress is being made at a break-neck pace – and just like Dempsey points out in regards to weapons, this technology is propagating both horizontally and vertically in ways never before imagined. What once required an army of workers, a capital intensive printing press, and a large physical distribution network fifty years ago can now be done by a single individual using a blog for the cost of an Internet connection, and on a scale even larger than the most prolific press barons of yesteryear.
Video: 3D printing and online “object libraries” explained. Advances in personal manufacturing will end supply chains and decentralize manufacturing, bringing digital open source concepts to the physical world.
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Already product designs reside on large online libraries (Thingiverse for example) that users with 3D printers, either home-made or commercially built, can print at will. A design made in California can be printed out by a user in Hong Kong – no shipping necessary. The designs are put online for free, and can be downloaded and printed for free – minus the cost of the plastic used to make it. And already the corporate-financier oligarchs see their empires built upon cheap trinkets shipped in from China crumbling and are already preparing an “intellectual property” war to combat it.
Printers that can output DNA, coded using software are already a reality – however impractical. In the future everything from gene-therapies and medicines, to tissue andreplacement body parts will be in the reach of an ever-expanding number of medical practitioners and hobbyists. Synthetic lifeforms and engineered bacteria will be able to output materials for energy production and construction – this coupled with personal manufacturingwill make the lengthy centralized supply chains of today’s Fortune 500 corporations obsolete.
The same nightmare that wakes General Dempsey up in the middle of the night, one involving a world that he no longer operates in with impunity, is a nightmare shared by all oligarchs throughout all of human history. From the “Old Oligarch’s” fear of the upward social mobility advances in naval technology afforded Greeks in the 300 B.C. “Athenian Constitution,” to the feudal lords during the advent of the printing press, to bankers, industrialists, and generals today, technological progress putting power into the hands of people they presume dominion over spells the end of their existence as they know it.
While Dempsey attempts to sound sensible in public by suggesting the threat comes from terrorists and rogue states, in reality he represents a system that has long-since blurred the lines between militants with new weapon systems and regular people developing and deploying “disruptive technology.” It also includes anyone threatening the current monetary paradigm, so much so that a man selling silver coins was labeled a “terrorist” by the FBI.
Which Path We Take is Up to Us
Technological progress will proceed, if the corporate-financier oligarchy has its way, at a pace they can control and monopolize. And for the first time in human history, predictions of a Malthusian catastrophe genuinely loom over us, not because of limitations on growth, but because of the global elite impeding progress for the preservation of their wealth and power – impeding the very progress needed for our continued safety, well-being, prosperity, and peace.
Technological progress will proceed, if we the people have our way, from the grassroots up, learning, understanding and spreading awareness of human ingenuity, the latest advancements, and how best to leverage them for the benefit of all mankind. We must have the resolve to develop and support local industry while cutting off the monopolists who have procured so much unwarranted power and influence through our own complicity in the first place. The current powers that be fear progress and will ensure disruptive technology never reaches our hands, even if it means economic and societal collapse. Conversely, then, we must make sure ourselves that it does reach our hands.
Remember also the lessons taught to the world at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, about what a superpower does when it has uncontested dominion over any given technology – it uses it with impunity and at will. The proliferation of powerful technology suits human nature – the fear of retribution by others who possess it puts self-governance on the use of such technology against others. The invisible hand of self-interest (and self-preservation) has proven more reliable when odds are even than any amount of governance, rules, or regulation.
Tony Cartalucci’s post first appeared on Land Destroyer Report.Ah, the ’90s. A time when the internet exploded up from its underground world of ARPANet and BBS, and became a thing everyone was expected to use. Like all new media, the net was subject to a lot of hype, and a lot of fearmongering, as non-1337s began using it for the first time.
One of the greatest results of this was that glorious cinematic moment when films began using decade-old cyberpunk tropes to explore virtual reality, hacking, cybercrime, and what being this brave new virtual world was going to do to the human heart. I have attempted to rank these monuments to a lost era, but as always, my rankings are highly subjective. By all means yell at me that Johnny Mnemonic should place higher on the list! I value your opinion nearly as highly as shirts that have been laundered. Like they do. At the Imperial Hotel… in Tokyo.
10. Mindwarp (1992)
Humans give up their autonomy for VR called “InfiniSynth, for in the grim dark of this generic, vaguely post-apocalyptic future, there is only war. Well, and cannibalism, and blood sacrifices, and Bruce Campbell. Judy Apple hates life in the future: she shares a tiny room with her mother, hooked into InfiniSynth via what appears to be a serial cable in the base of her skull. InfiniSynth is a VR system that can let her live any fantasy she wants. The machine stimulates her muscles, and “wakes” her occasionally to eat green pudding and use the bathroom. There’s a giant painting of a forest on one wall, that sort of gives the whole thing a “‘70s-basement-rec-room” vibe. Honestly, and I hate to be a downer here, but this is my idea of Eden. And Judy, with her last name invoking both damnable curiosity and the All-Holy Mr. Jobs, throws this paradise away. She wants to eat solid food, and exercise, and leave the tiny room to see what real life is like.
What a sap.
Unfortunately for the movie, her adventures IRL turn out to be generic post-apocalyptic fare, and the only memorable moments are provided by Bruce Campbell’s character Stover, after hallucinogenic leeches drive him insane. (That sentence makes this film sound far more awesome than it is.)
There is also the annoying possibility that parts of the movie are nested simulations, and several arguments with the Systems Operator, who controls everyone’s simulations, but the film doesn’t explore the “What is reality” question nearly enough to be interesting. But! There is one good thing to be said about Mindwarp: Bruce Campbell met his wife on set! He and costume designer Ida Gearon have been married since 1991, and they’re adorable together. So that’s worth it, right?
Are we in the future? 2037! But with InfiniSyth, we can be anywhere and anywhen we want to be. Which apparently isn’t good enough for precious Judy.
Can I Get A Gibson? There is no William Gibson here.
Have we received a harrowing vision of a future that has since come to pass? Weirdly, yes! As far as I can tell the creators of Mindwarp also invented the Roomba:
Is the advent of VR eroding humanity’s sense of identity? Yes and no. InfiniSynth allows people to live their dreams, but it’s all only happening in their minds… which is soon revealed to be better than “real life”.
Has the advent of virtual reality cause you to contemplate the nature of consciousness itself, humanity’s place in the universe, and perhaps the idea that being able to create a new form of reality will elevate humanity to a new, god-like status? When Stover tries to explain the Bible to Judy, who has never seen a real book, she replies that if people want to meet God, InfiniSynth will simply program it for them. Heavy, man.
1337speak: “Infinisynth: more fantastic than fantasy, more real than reality. The ultimate experience is Infinisynth. It’s all been remade for you and it’s anything you want it to be. It’s your reality. Let your dreams come true in your very own world. Hook into the happiness system. Relax, imagine, enjoy. Hook in.”
1337 or sux0rz? sux0rz
9. Brainscan (1994)
Ugh this movie. Slightly cool premise: kid sends away for an interactive CD Rom horror game called Brainscan, kid commits murder inside the game, oh shit murder might be real! Sounds fun, right? But no, the film gives you just enough depressing backstory on the kid, Michael, that the whole film becomes a tragedy instead of cheesy horror. Plus, most annoyingly for me, it seems to want to equate violent video games with real violence, and fetishizes the grungy kids who read Fangoria and watch horror movies, making the wayyyy too easy assumption that they’re emotionally-stunted, violence-addled losers. Some of us were, sure, but plenty of us turned out OK, and are still turning out OK. Dammit.
The film presents the initial stabtastic murder as though the viewer is playing a first person shooter (er, stabber?) which is a great touch. The second murder really commits to the VR aspect of the premise – Michael, panicking, records himself playing, in the hopes that he’ll prove his innocence. We cut to him waking up drenched in sweat, and then he plays the video and watches himself play the game. This is fantastic, and could have made for a commentary on virtual reality, the immersive nature of gaming, and the power of imagination. But what we see is that he simply gets up and walks out of the room, offscreen. Michael runs to his freezer and finds evidence that he killed again after he left. So, somehow, the game hypnotizes you into physically going to someone’s house and murdering them—at which point the film stops being interesting, and turns into a standard thriller.
Now why does Michael keep playing this terrible murdergame, you might ask? It’s because when he tries to quit, the game’s host, Trickster, comes out of the TV Sadako-style and demands that he keep going. I will say that T. Ryder Smith does a fantastic job as Trickster. I will also say that the actor playing Michael, Edward Furlong, seems singularly unimpressed with the terrifying punk crawling out of the game and into his bedroom. Other than that – how does Trickster come out? Is this magic or VR? Is he a demon? Are we in a supernatural movie, or a sci-fi movie, or a combination? This film never gives us the rules of its world, and all the tension just drains right out like blood from a stab wound.
Are we in the future? The film is resolutely set in the 1990s. It’s a sea of flannel, and Brainscan, as I mentioned, is a CD rom, and every teen’s room is plastered with an unlikely number of Aerosmith posters (presumably an homage to star Edward Furlong’s role in the “Livin’ On the Edge” video). However, it’s future tech enough that his phone is hooked up through his computer, which responds to voice commands. The VR itself appears to be completely mystical: he starts the game, and falls through what looks like a virtual wormhole to actually enter the game. Then he goes into a trance state while watching the TV screen, and wakes up later, full of adrenaline, remembering murdering someone in the game. The film toys with questions of reality, virtual reality, and dreaming, but it’s more invested in dumb twists than any real exploration.
Is the internet a city? Despite the fact that unlike most American teenagers in 1994, Michael has his own personal computer, there is ZERO mention of the internet.
Can I Get A Gibson? Bwahahahaha!!! No.
Have we received a harrowing vision of a future that has since come to pass? Oddly enough, haunted CD Rom murder games never really took off.
Is the advent of VR eroding humanity’s sense of identity? Michael insists he’s not a killer, but each time he goes into the game he seems to become a little more murder-friendly.
Has the advent of virtual reality cause you to contemplate the nature of consciousness itself, humanity’s place in the universe, and perhaps the idea that being able to create a new form of reality will elevate humanity to a new, god-like status? Oddly enough, Trickster never touches on that. He does say, “Real? Unreal? What’s the difference?” once, when Michael yells at him about being an IRL murderer.
1337speak: “It’s interactive dude! You’re in the game man. You’re in control!”
1337? Or sux0rz? sux0rz. So much sux0rz.
8. The Net (1995)
The Net possibly doesn’t belong on this list, but since its plot is driven by a nefarious crew of hackers, I decided to test its 1337-ness. I must say, I found it lacking in 1337. Rather than celebrating the new life the internet is offering, it plays like a made-for-TV-movie about all the potential dangers that lurk online, and trades on the idea that spending time online will make you anti-social and destroy your life—especially if you’re a woman. Sandra Bullock plays Angela Bennett, a systems analyst who works from her home in L.A., mostly finding viruses in games for a San Francisco-based company. It’s made clear that she has no social life, and rarely sees people IRL. Unfortunately, she stumbles across a piece of backdoor software that’s poised to take down the entire U.S. government! The aforementioned hackers attack: her identity is stolen, she’s framed for a series of crimes, she’s seduced by the head hacker, a handsome British man named Jack Devlin, and her ex-boyfriend is poisoned (since he’s played by Dennis Miller, who dials his usual whine straight past “11” and all the way up to Caillou, no one minds too much), and this is all possible because she doesn’t have meatspace friends to confirm her identity. Or, you know, paper records or school photos or a birth certificate at a hospital or relatives other than her mother with Alzheimers.
I can sum up what’s wrong with this movie in one scene: having declined an IRL date, Sandra Bullock orders a large garlic and anchovy pizza, (Online! In 1995! From a site called “pizza.net”!), pours herself a glass of wine, and switches one of her roughly twelve monitors from a “fish tank” screensaver to a “crackling fireplace” screensaver. At which point she settles in alone with her GIANT PIZZA and cyber chats for the rest of the night. I think this was meant to tell us that Sandra Bullock is socially awkward? And maybe in 1995 that’s what it conveyed. In 2016, however, it looks like she’s just embarked on a fantastic evening.
Are we in the future? We are trapped in 1995.
Is the internet a city? According to The Net, the internet is THE DEVIL.
Can I Get A Gibson? Yes! Sandra Bullock’s favorite cocktail is a Gibson – a schmancy old-school martini with onions instead of olives. (NB: They are delicious.)
Have we received a harrowing vision of a future that has since come to pass? Well, we received the vision of what a lot of us wanted 1995 to be, and now we have it, and it’s great. You tell me you don’t want to live in a world where you can order pizza online. Go ahead. I’m waiting.
Is the advent of VR eroding humanity’s sense of identity? The Net believes that the internet is destroying everything in our lives. Nobody tell the filmmakers about VR, they might have a collective heart attack.
Has the advent of virtual reality cause you to contemplate the nature of consciousness itself, humanity’s place in the universe, and perhaps the idea that being able to create a new form of reality will elevate humanity to a new, god-like status? Nope! The Net never gets that deep.
1337speak:
Jack Devlin: “God we’re pathetic aren’t we? We’re here on the most beautiful beach in the world, and all we’re thinking is…”
Angela Bennett: “Where can I hook up my modem.”
Angela Bennett: “Our whole world is sitting there in the computer. Our little electronic shadow – you know what, they’ve done it to me, and you know what, they’re gonna do it to you.”
Or sux0rz? sux0rz!
7. The Lawnmower Man (1992)
OK, this movie is glancingly based on a Stephen King story, but what you need to keep in mind is that Stephen King—the man who gave the world Maximum Overdrive—sued to have his name removed from this movie. Pierce Brosnan plays Dr. Larry Angelo, who believes that “virtual reality holds the key to the evolution of the human mind!” When his funding and VR chimps are taken away from him, he asks mentally-handicapped landscaper Jobey if he likes video games, and, hearing a yes, leaps right over all ethical boundaries to inject him full of drugs and plug him into a virtual reality machine. This launches poor Jobey into a series of blue and green screensavers filled with glowing neon shapes and spinning mathematical equations. Dr. Larry watches on a computer screen as Jobey’s brain seethes and crackles, apparently super stimulated by the three-dimensional Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper that is his new world.
Now since this is, at heart, a schlocky horror movie, super intelligence also = telepathy, telekinesis, and teleportation, and soon Jobey is wreaking sweet vengeance on everyone who was ever mean to him. He’a also boffing one of his landscaping clients, after she seduces him by saying, “Well, I’m looking forward to having my lawn mowed.” Eventually Jobey goes mad with power, at one point turning himself into a giant lawnmower and destroying a guy’s brain:
and, naturally, trying to become the internet itself. Coincidentally, the horrifying financial success of this film caused director Brett Leonard to go mad with power, and he decided to corner the market on VR movies by making Virtuosity. But moviegoers balked at naked virtual Russell Crowe, and thus Brett Leonard’s reign of terror was ended.
Are we in the future? I don’t think so? It’s unclear. The tech is obviously advanced from what was actually available in 1993, but there is no other indication that anything’s different.
Is the internet a city? Nope. Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper!
Can I Get a Gibson? I’m going to assume that no one involved in this has heard of William Gibson. Well, OK, the designers have, but unfortunately they were not the final authority on the film.
Have we received a harrowing vision of a future that has since come to pass? So far my near-constant use of the internet has not enabled me to squeeze toothpaste tubes with the power of my mind. So I’m saying no.
Is the advent of VR eroding humanity’s sense of identity? Dr. Larry’s wife is displeased by his daily use of VR, saying “Falling, floating, and flying? So, what’s next, fucking?” So presumably Dr. Larry used to be more involved in their relationship, but Mrs. Dr. Larry is written as such a cardboard shrew that I’m not sure the movie wants me to empathize with her.
Has the advent of virtual reality cause you to contemplate the nature of consciousness itself, humanity’s place in the universe, and perhaps the idea that being able to create a new form of reality will elevate humanity to a new, god-like status? Hmmm, let me think… “I SAW GOD! I TOUCHED GOD!”… “I AM GOD HERE”… “CYBERCHRIST”… yeah, I think maybe this film touches on this a little bit. And then there’s the film’s tagline: “God made him simple. Science made him a god.”
1337speak:
“Someone’s hacking into the mainframe from the outside…they’re in!”
“…my birth cry will be the sound of every phone on this planet ringing in unison.”
1337? Or sux0rz? It depends on the movie experience you’re looking for. Do you want to see Pierce Brosnan get cyber-crucified? Because Lawnmower Man is probably your only opportunity for that.
6. Virtuosity (1995)
This is one of those films that has several better films trapped inside of it, screaming to get out, like, I don’t know… a program that has gained sentience screaming to escape its hellish life inside a computer? At various points it attempts to be a genuinely creepy exploration of psychosis, a look at a future world where nanotechnology allows sentient computer programs to grow bodies from glass, and a commentary on society’s love for violent entertainment and reality TV. But it never commits to any of those ideas, and we end up with Mid-90s-Movie, Plot A, in which A Cop Whose Family Was Murdered becomes An Unfairly Imprisoned Man, before he morphs into The Only Renegade Cop-on-the-Edge Smart Enough to Catch The Bad Guy. And obviously The Bad Guy has to turn out to be The Bad Guy Who Killed the Cop’s Family and Taunts Him Repeatedly with That Fact, you know, to add nuance. (There’s also a dash of We’re Not So Different, You and I.) Virtuosity is only this high on the list because Denzel Washington freaking commits, and Russell Crowe is unexpectedly entertaining as a scenery-chewing villain.
So, in an attempt at summing up the plot: Dr. Darrel Lindenmeyer (played by Stephen Spinella, who originated the role of Prior Walter in Angels in America, and whom I assume ran screaming back to Broadway after this atrocity) creates a model criminal by programming the personalities of 200 different murderers into Russell Crowe, names him SID (Sadistic, Intelligent, and Dangerous), and then seems shocked (shocked!) when SID gains sentience and wants to be set loose to inflict evil on the world. Except then he totally sets him loose, which leads to SID going to a warehouse rave and orchestrating people’s screams, SID hijacking an MMA fight, and SID hacking a TV call-in show and offering to commit different types of murders according to viewers’ votes.
Are we in the future? I assume so—Denzel Washington has a synthetic arm, the cops wear militaristic uniforms, there’s nanotech, and obviously the advance AI. But all the cars and buildings seem like standard mid-90s fare.
Is the internet a city? Nope. Director Brett Leonard likes his internets bright, blocky, and, as I mentioned above, Lisa Frank-esque.
Can I get a Gibson? Nope!
Have we received a harrowing vision of a future that has since come to pass? This film kind of predicted American Idol? But with murder instead of singing.
Is the advent of VR eroding humanity’s sense of identity? SID was only programmed with the aforementioned 200 murderers’ personalities, so his entire sense of identity is shaped by that.
Has the advent of virtual reality cause you to contemplate the nature of consciousness itself, humanity’s place in the universe, and perhaps the idea that being able to create a new form of reality will elevate humanity to a new, god-like status?
Lindenmeyer: “Oh my god.”
SID 6.7: “Which god would that be? The one who created you? Or the one who created me? You see, in your world, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh, but in my world, the one who gave me life doesn’t have any balls.”
1337speak:
“I am made of everything! I am the future!”
“You’re in my world now!”
“I’m a fifty terabyte, self-evolving, neural network, double backflip off the high platform. I’m not a swan dive.”
1337? Or sux0rz? sux0rz, except for the super-1337 scene of Russell Crowe at the warehouse rave.
5. eXistenZ (1999)
eXistenZ posits a world in which a woman, with ladyparts, can be publicly declared the greatest game designer in the world, and a room full of people begin to murmur appreciatively instead of immediately attempting to dox her. That’s how we know we’re in a fantasy. More importantly, we’re in a David Cronenberg fantasy, in which there is no greater horror than the human body, which is why people play games by plugging fleshy game pods straight into their bioports—orifices at the bases of their spines that allow them to enter the virtual reality of the game. Yes, there is lubricant involved.
Ted Pikul (an especially inhuman-looking Jude Law) and game designer Allegra Goodman (Jennifer Jason Leigh) hop in and out of an extremely immersive game. OR DO THEY? Seriously, do they? Cause I’m still not sure what I watched. There are at least a few layers here, but the film does a good job of messing with your idea of which realities are reality, and which are virtual. The acting is fairly wooden, but that might be a commentary on the vice acting in video games. The reason it’s so low on the list is simply that rather than engaging with gaming culture, and really exploring some of the questions it raises about what immersive VR would do to our perception of reality, the film settles for promoting an anti-gaming stance and swerving into a shock ending that doesn’t allow for nuance.
Are we in the future? Yes! It’s a bit vague, but the gaming pods and bioports are obviously advanced, and society seems to have changed because of their popularity. Allegra mentions that no one skis in real life anymore, for instance.
Is the internet a city? The world of eXistenZ (from Antenna Research) changes as you play. You might be in a town, or a Chinese restaurant, or a trout farm, or Ian Holm’s spacious loft… the possibilities are endless.
Can I get a Gibson? No Gibsons here, just bioports. Ick.
Have we received a harrowing vision of a future that has since come to pass? Gaming is the biggest entertainment industry now, and controversies in the gaming world are shaping the culture of the internet as a whole. So, yeah, Cronenberg’s idea of a world where game designers were practically worshiped and where gaming itself was seen as the premiere human pastime, has definitely come true.
Is the advent of VR eroding humanity’s sense of identity? “I’m feeling a little disconnected from my real life. I’m kinda losing touch with the texture of it. You know what I mean? I actually think there is an element of psychosis involved here.”
Has the advent of virtual reality cause you to contemplate the nature of consciousness itself, humanity’s place in the universe, and perhaps the idea that being able to create a new form of reality will elevate humanity to a new, god-like status?:
Ted: “Free will is obviously not a big factor in this little world of ours.”
Allegra: “It’s like real life. There’s just enough to make it interesting.”
1337speak: “eXistenZ. Written like this. One word. Small ‘E’, capital ‘X’, capital ‘Z’. ‘eXistenZ’. It’s new, it’s from Antenna Research, and it’s here… right now.”
1337? Or sux0rz? I’ll say 1337 with some trepidation. It is an interesting film.
4. Johnny Mnemonic (1995)
Sometimes there’s work of art so perfect, so uniquely itself, that it’s almost as though it’s a missive from some better, purer world. Johnny Mnemonic is such a missive. You might think I’m being silly? Facetious? But nay. I love everything about this film. Let’s begin with the fact that the film opens with the words “Internet—2021”. Immediately we know that we’re in the future, but more than that—we’re in cyberspace. We have slipped the bonds of Earth and entered the beautiful future promised to us by Tron. If there’s a better way to introduce a film, I’ve never seen it. Henry Rollins plays a doctor named Spider, who screams all of his lines. Just, screams them. Ice-T has an anarchy symbol carved into his forehead, and calmly utters such bon mots as “Shit, it’s the yakuza” and “The only way left—you gotta hack your own brain.” Wait, did I mention the telepathic dolphin? BECAUSE THERE’S A TELEPATHIC DOLPHIN. Dolph Lundren stalks the streets, sneering “Jesus time!” and stabbing people with a giant crucifix! And, as in most of these films, the view of cyberspace is just, well, sweet. As you can see in the above pic, it’s laid out like a three-dimensional neon city, with bit and bytes and ram whizzing around like cars, and glowing pathways that mimic IRL highways. Here, watch Johnny hack.
So, the plot: Johnny is a courier, meaning he has an illegal storage pod in his brain that reads as an anti-dyslexia patch when he goes through scanners. He can store and carry sensitive information, and deliver it in person to ensure that no prying eyes see it. There are two problems here: first, he needed to dump part of his own memory to make room for the pod, and, more problematically, if he overloads the pod it’ll leak into his brain and kill him. This is initially presented as the primary conflict, but it soon recedes into the background as he’s doublecrossed, various yakuza attempt to decapitate him to get the info, and we learn more about Nerve Attenuation Syndrome, also known as NAS or “the black shakes”, which seems to be a side effect of living in a hyperwired world. But hey, why am I explaining all this when you could watch the best bits edited into a three-minute clip?
Of all the films on this list, I think this one might come the closest to the cyberpunk aesthetic. Jane’s mesh shirts, Johnny’s sarariman suit, the ragged, patched-together look of Ice-T and his gang of Lo-Teks going up against the slick yakuza—for all the film’s absurdity, it gets the look down perfectly. And can we take a minute to discuss Keanu Reeves’ performance?
Are we in the future? Internet, 2021!
Is the internet a city? Yes! A glorious blue and green city!
Can I Get a Gibson? He wrote this muther.
Have we received a harrowing vision of a future that has since come to pass? Let the l0s3rs lament their lack of hoverboards: I Want! A Telepathic! Dolphin! On a slightly more serious note, while Gibson’s vision of an immersive, head-mounted VR internet hasn’t come to pass, Johnny does request a Thomson Eyephone, which was a real VR rig designed by Jacob Lanier in the ’90s. It never caught on.
Is the advent of VR eroding humanity’s sense of identity? Hang on, I believe Dr. Spider would like to share an opinion: “This causes it! (smacks computer) This causes it! (smacks other computer) This causes it! (smacks a third computer) Information overload! All the electronics around you poisoning the airwaves. Technological fucking civilization. But we still have all this shit, because we can’t live without it.”
Has the advent of virtual reality cause you to contemplate the nature of consciousness itself, humanity’s place in the universe, and perhaps the idea that being able to create a new form of reality will elevate humanity to a new, god-like status? We only get a hint of it in the U.S. release of the film, but the Japanese “Director’s Cut” goes into more detail about Street Preacher’s Church of the Retransfiguration, which claims that God has sent the plague of NAS to encourage people to embrace cybernetic implants and become post-human.
1337speak:
J-Bone, on Jones: “The way the Navy got him hooked up? He cuts through hard encryption like a knife cuts through butter.”
Johnny, who has no idea they’re talking about a dolphin: “Codebreaker. Good. Can’t wait to meet him.”
1337? Or sux0rz? So deeply, wonderfully 1337.
3. Hackers (1995)
This movie is almost certainly better than you remember it being. While it isn’t exactly a realistic look at teen life in New York City, it does a decent job of showing the conflict between the hacker subculture and people who thought the internet was going to kill us all. It’s also pretty accurate in showing the hope for the internet to be a diverse wonderland where people could be free of prejudice, hatred, misogyny, the pressures of capitalism, the obsession with physical appearance… you know, all that stuff that the internet totally made a reality.
The plot is a corporate espionage/heist confection, wrapped in a fondant of teen subculture. In 1988, young Seattle-ite Dade Murphy, know by his handle “Zero Cool” crashed 1,507 different system, including the New York Stock Exchange. He was banned from computers and touchtone telephones until his 18th birthday. We cut to said birthday. ZeroCool, now going by the handle “Crash Override”, moved to New York with his mom, starts his senior year in a new school, and meets lots of new friends, who weirdly enough all turn out to be hackers. Like, full-time hackers, who occasionally show up at school, and include Phantom Phreak, Cereal |
reading in Shelvocke’s Voyages, a day or two before, that, while doubling Cape Horn, they frequently saw albatrosses in that latitude, the largest sort of sea-fowl, some extending their wings twelve or thirteen feet. ‘Suppose,’ said I, ‘you represent him as having killed one of these birds on entering the South Sea, and that the tutelary spirits of these regions take upon them to avenge the crime.’ The incident was thought fit for the purpose, and adopted accordingly. I also suggested the navigation of the ship by the dead men, but do not recollect that I had anything more to do with the scheme of the poem.[1] (Shelvocke’s book was entitled A Voyage Round the World, by Way of the Great South Sea.) Wordsworth’s remarks are self-deprecating; but at first sight it is difficult to see what else of much consequence there is to the ‘scheme of the poem’ besides his contribution – a crime that revolves around the killing of an albatross, and the consequent persecution of a wandering life in a ship of ghoulish horrors. Nevertheless, although they attempted to pursue the poem together, it was Wordsworth who soon felt himself out of the place in the enterprise: as he remembered, years later, ‘I had very little share in the composition of it, for I soon found that the style of Coleridge and myself would not assimilate’.[2] Wordsworth withdrew, while something about the story of the poem evidently captured Coleridge, and the poem grew and grew over the next few months. When it was published in the summer of 1798 in Lyrical Ballads, which gathered poems by both writers, it was by far the longest in the book.
Voyage Round the World George Shelvocke’s Voyage Round the World by way of the Great South Sea (1726) provided the source material for the shooting of the albatross in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. View images from this item (4)
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Lyrical Ballads: 1798 edition Contents page of the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads. 'The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere' was the first poem in the volume, and the longest. View images from this item (36)
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Coleridge and the Mariner What was it about the tale of the poem that caught Coleridge? The answer is partly theological: at this stage of his life, Coleridge was drawn by a roughly pantheistic vision of the world completely suffused with God’s abundant goodness, and many of his most beautiful poems of this period incorporate the thought of that lovely possibility. Nature, in ‘Frost at Midnight’, for example, is described as ‘that eternal language, which thy God / Utters who from eternity doth teach / Himself in all, and all things in himself’ (ll. 60–62). But there is a problem with this otherwise intoxicating view: much of the world seems very short of lovely. On the contrary, it is full of cruelty and arbitrary violence and acts of evil; and in his private notebooks Coleridge, who often made lists of his future projects, duly reminded himself to write one day ‘The Origin of Evil, an Epic Poem’.[3] That poem never happened; but (among other things) ‘The Ancient Mariner’ happened in its place. It is the story of someone who does something terrible for reasons unknown and pays for it: we never learn why the Mariner shot the bird, but his protracted suffering is described in agonising detail. Some kind of spiritual alleviation seems to come only when the Mariner has changed his attitude towards the creatures of the sea: the sea-snakes which seemed, in the aftermath of his crime, ‘slimy things’ (l. 121) become transformed at the poem’s turning-point into ‘happy living things’ (l. 274). Recognising a joy implicit within natural appearances appears to mark a saving transition from ‘spectral persecution’ to a progressive penance.
The Ancient Mariner illustrations by David Jones David Jones’s illustrations to ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1929) bring a lyrical quality to the story. View images from this item (10)
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Story-telling But if that moment does indeed set him on to a road to recovery, it is a long and difficult journey; and the man who delivers the poem’s clinching moral – ‘For the dear God, who loveth us, / He made and loveth all’ (ll. 649–50) – seems to reside only very imperfectly within God’s encompassing love, periodically wracked as he is with ‘anguish’ (l. 617) and doomed to an everlasting solitude of rootlessness (ll. 619). How far should we trust the Mariner? His moral seems more than a little banal. There is no doubt that he thinks of his story in terms of a crime, a punishment, and a slow redemption; but does Coleridge mean us simply to endorse his view of the matter? When he saw the first illustrations of the poem, by David Scott (later published in 1837), Coleridge noted the ‘enormous blunder’ the artist had made in picturing the mariner as ‘ancient’ at the time of the voyage: on the contrary, he ‘had told this story ten thousand times since the voyage’, said Coleridge, implying that part of the poem’s force lies in its exploration of how minds use narrative to try and make sense of their experiences.[4] For what is there, actually, to connect the shooting of the bird to the disasters that ensue, apart from the superstitious insistence of the late-medieval Catholic speaker that it should be so? When Coleridge revised the poem for publication in 1817 he added a new marginal gloss which might promise to clear things up authoritatively: ‘The curse is finally expiated’ (l. 442), it tells us. But is this Coleridge himself in the margin, or a fictional editor, merely adding another layer of interpretation to a poem about trying to make sense of things? Perhaps, this perennially fascinating poem suggests, the ‘Origin of Evil’ resides in the mind’s needy attempts to make sense of experience that is really as arbitrary as the rolling of those dice that appears to determine the Mariner’s fate (l. 192).
Revised version of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, published in Sibylline Leaves In 1817, Coleridge published a revised version of 'The Ancient Mariner' in a collection of poems entitled Sibylline Leaves. This version of the poem, which modernises some of the language and contains a marginal gloss, is the one most read today. View images from this item (5)
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The Ancient Mariner illustrations by Gustave Doré Doré’s illustrated edition of Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1877) used extreme tones of dark and light to emphasise the dramatic aspects of the work. View images from this item (10)
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Footnotes The Fenwick Notes of William Wordsworth, ed. by Jared Curtis (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1993), p.2. Quoted in The Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Derwent and Sara Coleridge (London: Edward Moxon, 1852), pp.323–4. London, British Library, Add MS 27901, f. 24v. Also in The Notebooks of S T Coleridge, ed by Kathleen Coburn et al, 5 vols. (London: Routledge and Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957–2002), i, p.174. Table Talk Recorded by Henry Nelson Coleridge (and John Taylor Coleridge), ed. by Carl Woodring, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), i, p.274.
Written by Seamus Perry
Seamus Perry is a Fellow of Balliol College and an Associate Professor in the English Faculty, University of Oxford. He is the author of books and articles about, among others, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, T S Eliot, and W H Auden.Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare developer Sledgehammer Games takes fan feedback "very seriously," studio cofounder Michael Condrey said in comments posted on Reddit. Though he says Sledgehammer is listening to what you have to say, you shouldn't expect the studio to be able to respond or even to agree, Condrey cautioned.
"Sledgehammer Games takes fan feedback very seriously. With [40 million] voices strong, there are always going to be competing viewpoints within the fan community. We also have passionate visions of the game we want to deliver," Condrey said. "Bottomline, we actively listen, even if we can't always respond or agree."
"So thanks for being here, and for helping us make the game be the best it can. Every developer on this game has one goal--to create the highest quality experience of our careers," he added. "So one favor--keep it classy and constructive. As fans, we owe it to each other and the game."
In a separate Reddit post, Condrey said the eSports community is a "valued partner" for the Call of Duty series overall. He wouldn't say anything about what Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare will offer for uber-competitive players, but teased that eSports players won't be disappointed.
"We look forward to being able to talk about our exciting [multiplayer] plans for Call of Duty Advanced Warfare. Until then, know that we are working closely with, and for, the competitive community to deliver something special this year," Condrey said. "More to come! Keep the feedback coming."
Just last week, Activision said it was "absolutely committed" to supporting eSports players for Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. So far, Activision has said nothing about the game's multiplayer component, but if the game's EXO suit super-abilities transfer over to the game's multiplayer mode, the series stands to be shaken up in a major way.A BBC expose, with graphic visuals, is quite emphatic: The US and British-led coalition forces enabled hundreds of IS jihadists escape from Raqqa after the headquarters of their self-declared Caliphate was bombarded out of recognition. This will set the cat among the pigeons.
The matter will surely come up in the British Parliament and Congressional hearings in Washington. More such mischief is surfacing.
The Defence Ministry in Moscow is already in overdrive. "The US refused to bomb a military convoy retreating from Abu Kamal (in Raqqa). The coalition's aircraft also attempted to prevent Russian Aerospace Forces from carrying out air strikes against militants." There is considerable evidence of "direct cooperation and support for ISIS terrorists by the US-led International Coalition", the Defence Ministry said.
In a separate incident "Americans peremptorily refused to conduct airstrikes on ISIS terrorists". The reason given was that the militants were agreeing to surrender as prisoners of war and were "therefore subject to the provisions of the Geneva convention". US aircraft obstructed "Russian aerospace from taking action".
Stratfor, an establishment think tank, offers almost an apology for terrorism perpetrated by returning jihadists. "Looking at recent cases involving fighters returning from Iraq and Syria, they have tended to conduct attacks against soft targets instead of making more complex attacks against harder, more significant targets. Some examples include a Jewish museum and the soft side of the airport in Brussels; a concert in Manchester in the UK; and a café, concert venue and sports stadium in Paris." Is it not too sanguine a tone on the theme of returning jihadists who destabilise Western societies?
Youth, fired by jihad, who have left their homes in the West for destinations like Syria, are unlikely to be less than hostile towards their respective societies when they return home. This hostility will erupt into acts of terrorism listed in the Stratfor brief.
The cat-and-mouse that goes on between terrorists and counter-terrorism units confronting them provides room for others to advance their rogue agendas. It is a witches brew.
This was lethal enough. What has evolved since the 9/11 wars in West Asia is a system of regularising terrorists in Company and Platoon strengths, backed by trainers, finance and weapons, as a military asset to be relocated wherever required. Sophisticated propaganda is integral to the project.
If readers have not seen Amaq, the propaganda organ of the IS, they must instantly obtain a copy online. It is a glossy publication which would put to shame some of the better magazines in the business. If IS is an underground, guerrilla outfit, living in bunkers and trenches, how does it have time, skill, printing presses to regularly churn out this professional product?
Non-GCC Arab diplomats, with access to their respective agencies, have been informing South Block that terrorists, airlifted from various theatres in Syria and Iraq, may have been relocated to war zones like Afghanistan and Rakhine state in Myanmar. India cannot consider itself exempt from this global menace.
Almost on cue appears a piece by Sara Flounders of the International Action Centre, Washington, focusing on how the Rohingyas' plight worsened in Myanmar. Hostility between the Buddhist clergy, the Myanmar military and the Rohingya Muslim in Rakhine has continued for years. What then was the need for the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), an armed resistance group, to carry on attacks on 30 Myanmar military posts on August 30? It was only then that the Myanmar military responded with a wave of brutal attacks on the Muslims driving them in the thousands over the border.
There is an intriguing twist to the tail: ARSA is headquartered in Mecca, under Ataullah abu Ammar Jununi, a Pakistani national resident in Saudi Arabia.
Why have the US and Saudi Arabia, who have supervised a three-year-long war in Yemen, rendering millions homeless and killing thousands, turned with so much sympathy to the one million Muslim Rohingyas in Rakhine? Are they driven by a desire to control a group in a poor, mineral-rich country bordering China?
Former Afghan President Hamid Karzai has in an interview to Tehran Times expressed similar fears.
According to him, IS "is the brainchild of the US and its allies which introduced this terrorist group to the world under the pretext of fighting extremism and terrorism". He warns regional powers not to allow the IS to grow in Afghanistan. He said the "number of this terrorist group is increasing by the day in Afghanistan".
The Moscow Initiative on Afghanistan enunciated by Putin last April sought regional cooperation to isolate IS and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Towards this end, the Taliban, an Afghan national entity, should be accommodated in Kabul's power apparatus. As soon as Trump saw Moscow developing a constructive theme in Kabul, he reversed his decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. He will stay come wind, come weather.(Reuters) - Officials in Florida and Virginia filed voter fraud charges against three people in apparently unrelated cases on Friday, just 11 days before American voters cast ballots in the hotly contested presidential race.
An election volunteer holds a box outside Trump Tower in the Manhattan borough of New York City, October 26, 2016. REUTERS/Mike Segar
The charges targeted a Florida woman and a Virginia man accused of filing bogus voter registration forms and a Florida woman alleged to have tampered with absentee ballots she was opening at the Miami-Dade Elections Department.
In the Iowa capital of Des Moines, county election officials referred three cases of suspected voter fraud to police earlier this week, leading to one arrest on Thursday, police said.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has charged in recent weeks that the election will be rigged in favor of Democrat Hillary Clinton, though he has shown no proof for these claims and many Republicans have called them unfounded.
Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle in Florida said that 74-year-old Gladys Coego had been working as an absentee ballot opener when a supervisor allegedly saw her changing ballots that had been left blank to support a mayoral candidate. Prosecutors said that Coego admitted to marking the ballots and was charged with two felony counts of marking or designating the ballot of another.
“The integrity of the electoral process is intact because our procedures work,” said Christina White, the county’s election supervisor, in a statement.
Tomika Curgil, 33, was charged with five felony counts of submitting false voter registration information for allegedly handing in forms filled out by fictitious voters while working on a voter-registration drive for a medical marijuana advocacy group.
A Virginia man was also charged with submitting falsified forms while working for a voter-registration campaign, state prosecutors said.
Vafalay Massaquoi, 30, was arraigned on two felony counts of forging a public record and two counts of voter registration fraud.
“There is no allegation that any illegal vote was actually cast in this case,” said Virginia Commonwealth’s Attorney Bryan Porter. “Furthermore, since the fraudulent applications involved fictitious people, had the fraud not been uncovered, the risk of actual fraudulent votes being cast was low.”
Neither Coego, Curgil nor Massaquoi could be reached for immediate comment.
Police in Des Moines on Thursday arrested a woman who was accused of voting twice - casting early-voting ballots at two locations - in one of three cases of suspected voter fraud reported by the Polk County Auditor’s Office.
Police did not disclose the political affiliation of the woman, identified as Terri Lynn Rote, 55, but the Des Moines Register newspaper reported she was a registered Republican.
A man in Texas, where early voting started on Monday, was arrested on Monday on charges of electioneering and loitering near a polling place, public records show.
The man, Brett Mauthe, had been charged for showing up to vote in a Trump hat and T-shirt with the phrase “basket of deplorables,” a reference to a comment Clinton made disparaging her rivals’ supporters, election officials told media.Researchers have found signs of fault displacement at well-known rock outcrops in Colorado that mark the end-Cretaceous asteroid impact that may have hurried the extinction of the dinosaurs. They will present their results in a poster at the 2017 Seismological Society of America's (SSA) Annual Meeting.
Norm Sleep of Stanford University and colleagues suggest that the impact, which occurred near the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico, could have generated massive seismic waves that triggered earthquakes as far away as Colorado, in the center of a tectonic plate where no previous fault had existed.
Sleep and his colleagues found evidence for the fault in two areas in Colorado's Trinidad Lakes State Park, where a layer of iridium generated by the asteroid impact clearly marks the boundary between Cretaceous and Tertiary-age rocks, at the time of the dinosaurs' extinction about 65 million years ago. At the Long's Canyon and Madrid Canyon roadcuts, "there is a fault that slipped about a meter at the time of the impact," Sleep said. "It offset the material below the impact layer but not above, but it's not something that would be obvious to the casual observer."
The researchers suggest that the Colorado earthquake may have been as large as magnitude 6. Very strong seismic waves from the impact--much larger than would be generated by a regular earthquake, Sleep said--would be necessary to trigger an earthquake in this location, in the middle of a tectonic plate with no previous faults.
The end-Cretaceous asteroid strike, however, could have generated ground velocities of a meter or two per second, Sleep said. "The ground would be moving up and down and sideways like a ship in a strong storm."
At the time of the earthquake, the area in Colorado was a swampy, delta-like environment, crossed by large braided streams that ran from the young Rocky Mountains. Sleep and his colleagues saw signs that the earthquake had diverted a small stream in the area.
This summer, the researchers will be checking in New Mexico near the Raton Basin for further signs of intraplate quakes that may have been triggered by the asteroid strike.
###The rash of terror attacks in Great Britain come as the summer travel season is beginning. That means security measures, especially at airports, will see increased work loads, and passengers longer waits.
Finding and removing the everyday items that terrorists have turned into threats is a huge challenge, WJZ’s Alex DeMetrick reports.
And between now and Labor Day, a lot of Americans will spend time coming and going by air.
Since 9/11, passenger planes have been a high priority target for terrorists, with bombs bringing down a Russian airliner in Egypt, and blowing a hole in a Somali jet last year.
“Airplanes have been the common threat that we’ve seen over the past several years,” says Ben Yelin, of the University of Maryland Center for Health and Homeland Security.
And the last line of defense is Transportation Security Administration security screening.
“A 9-volt battery,” says TSA officer Camille Morris. “A AA battery is fine. A AAA. A 9-volt battery is a huge power charge. The size of the battery that can take down a plane when attached to an explosive.”
That kind of threat prompted a ban on laptop and computer pads from airplane cabins flying from seven African and Middle Eastern countries this past spring. It could spread to domestic flights.
“The Department of Homeland Security is currently considering the possible expansion of that laptop ban,” says Lisa Farbstein, a TSA spokesperson. “No decision has been made.”
Meanwhile, things like peanut butter must go into checked bags, not carry-ons. Innocent mistakes that can slow down screening.
But for most, an abundance of caution is no mistake.
“With today’s terrorism, you can’t trust anybody,” one passenger said.
“It’s a determined enemy,” according to Farbstein. “They’re targeting transportation hubs, and so what we want to do is make sure you get to your destination safely, and go home safely.”
TSA is urging air travelers to give themselves more time during the summer. Arrive two hours before a domestic flight, and three hours before an international trip. They also ask that passengers do their part by reviewing what objects are allowed on carry ons and which must go into checked luggage.
Follow @CBSBaltimore on Twitter and like WJZ-TV | CBS Baltimore on FacebookThe 'topping out' of Detroit's new arena marks a milestone that begins the race to finish the project by fall of next year.
Buy Photo Construction workers with the final beam adorned with an American flag and an evergreen tree, before it is hoisted to the top of Little Caesars Arena on Thursday, Aug. 4, 2016. (Photo: Mandi Wright, Detroit Free Press)Buy Photo
Let's set aside for a day any controversies over Detroit's new arena to celebrate the labor of the workers in hard hats who are building it.
Thursday marked "topping out" day at the Little Caesars Arena project -- the day when those workers hoist the final structural steel beam into place on the crown of the arena's skeleton. It's a milestone that begins the race to finish the project by fall of next year.
By tradition, an evergreen tree symbolizing hope and accomplishment sat atop the beam along with an American flag. And, also by tradition, the construction workers who are building the arena got to sign the beam. Banners bedecked it honoring the iron workers who walk the high steel and the operating engineers who run the huge cranes. There were speeches and handshakes and group photos.
Fred Sullivan, a member of Ironworkers Local 25, at the topping-out ceremony Thursday August 4, 2016 for Little Caesars Arena. (Photo: John Gallagher)
One of those workers was Fred Sullivan of Inkster, a member of Ironworkers Local 25.
"I'll tell you what it means. It's a sense of accomplishment," Sullivan said at the ceremony. "A year ago, it was a big hole in the ground. Right now, you can see the results a year later. It's a sense of accomplishment."
Buy Photo Ironworkers look on as the Ilitches' Olympia Development holds the ritual "topping off" ceremony at the Little Caesars Arena site on Thursday, Aug. 4, 2016. (Photo: Mandi Wright, Detroit Free Press)
Christopher Ilitch, president and CEO of Ilitch Holdings, thanked the workers.
"It's great to be with all of our iron workers who play a critically important role in making sure that this incredible project comes to life," he said. "The precision, the skill of these guys' work is amazing. I look out my office window over there every day and see these guys crawling all over this thing to pull it together. It's amazing."
With a little over a year of construction work still ahead, Ilitch said he and his advisers haven't decided yet which event will open the new arena. "Lots of possibilities and lots of options, lots of interest," he said. The only thing penciled in for sure is the Detroit Red Wings home opener in October 2017.
Buy Photo Iron worker Tyler (Twonky) Smith, 36, of Portland, Ore., (currently living in Madison Heights during construction) signs the ceremonial beam by including the name of his son, Jack, who was born during his job in Detroit. The beam was part of the topping-off ceremony at Little Caesars Arena on Thursday, Aug. 4, 2016. (Photo: Mandi Wright, Detroit Free Press)
The Little Caesars Arena, costing more than $600 million, could host hundreds of events each year, from Red Wings hockey games to concerts, corporate meetings, weddings and other private events and civic celebrations.
► Related:Ilitches say Little Caesars Arena name a 'legacy' decision
► Timelapse video:The rise of the new Red Wings arena
Almost everything about the project has proved controversial at some point -- its location, its cost, the generous public incentives given the project, the question of how it benefits the community at large, the demolition of nearby buildings, and more. But it was easy to put aside those issues Thursday seeing the celebratory smiles and handshakes of the workers actually building the behemoth structure and staying safe in all kinds of weather against tight deadlines.
Construction work tends to be a nomadic career. Crews go from job to job and town to town. But the arena project was designed to home-grow more skilled trades here in the city, not just for this one project but as an economic base for Detroit's future.
To that end, more than 60 Detroit residents have served apprenticeships on the arena site so far, learning their trade. More than 500 men and women work on the site each day, many of them Detroit residents.
It's hard work, and those men and women deserved their chance Thursday to take a bow.
Contact John Gallagher: 313-222-5173 or gallagher@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @jgallagherfreep.
Read or Share this story: http://on.freep.com/2aTosBgKKK chapters more than doubled in 2015 — and the GOP candidates shoulder part of the blame, report finds Klan chapters grew from 72 in 2014 to 190 last year
Hate groups flourished last year — from 784 in 2014 to 892 in 2015.
The 14 percent increase was due to worsening income inequality, the rise of left-wing movements like Black Lives Matter, major advances for LGBT people and growing numbers of refugees and undocumented workers that have angered Republicans and white people, according to a report released by The Southern Poverty Law Center.
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In fact a poll showed that 73 percent of white people are angered by the news — compared to 66 percent of Latinos and 56 percent of black people.
“Such voters are nostalgic for the country they lived in 50 years ago, when non-Hispanic whites made up more than 83 percent of the population,” The report quotes New York Times’ Eduardo Porter. “Today, their share has shrunk to 62 percent as demographic change has transformed the United States into a nation where others have a shot at power.
The report also claims the GOP candidates are the blame for the raise in hate and their anti-Latino, black, LGBT and Muslim rhetoric is electrifying the radical right.
Watch our video to find out more on why Klan chapters grew from 72 in 2014 to 190 last year.Say George Washington said that "when government takes away citizens’ right to bear arms it becomes citizens’ duty to take away government’s right to govern."
Would George Washington have been an ally to modern-day gun-rights groups? A social-media meme suggests that he would have.
Around the time of Washington’s 282nd birthday, a reader sent us the meme, which includes a painting of Washington and a quote purportedly written or uttered by the nation’s first president: "When government takes away citizens’ right to bear arms it becomes citizens’ duty to take away government’s right to govern."
But are those really Washington’s words?
We contacted Edward Lengel, editor in chief of the Papers of George Washington project at the University of Virginia. He said "there is no evidence that Washington ever wrote or said these words, or any like them." Lengel cautioned that it’s impossible to prove a negative, but he added that he’s "as certain as he can be" that the quote did not originate from George Washington.
This is not the first time a similar claim has popped onto our radar screen.
In December 2012, PolitiFact Texas rated False a claim made two days after the Newtown elementary school shooting. When U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert, a Texas Republican, appeared on Fox News Sunday, he was asked why he believed ordinary Americans should be able to buy semi-automatic weapons designed for military use. Gohmert answered in part, "For the reason George Washington said a free people should be an armed people. It ensures against the tyranny of the government."
PolitiFact Texas contacted Gohmert’s office to seek details on the Washington quotation but didn’t hear back.
The closest statement they could find was one Washington made in his first State of the Union address on Jan. 8, 1790: "A free people ought not only to be armed, but disciplined."
The academic consensus is that Washington was referring to a trained militia to defend the new nation, rather than anticipating citizens seeking to head off perceived governmental tyranny.
Ron Chernow, whose Washington: A Life won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for biography, told PolitiFact Texas that Washington was "talking about national defense policy, not individuals arming themselves, and the need for national self-sufficiency in creating military supplies."
Some post-Revolutionary lawmakers did expect citizens to own firearms, but Washington does not appear to have been among them, experts said.
"The idea of resistance to tyranny being dependent on a nation of gun-wielding individuals acting at their own behest or even on local initiative would have been anathema to Washington," Lengel told PolitiFact Texas. "Indeed, during the (Revolutionary) war he very frequently lamented the crimes carried out by armed civilians or undisciplined militia against their unarmed neighbors. The solution to these crimes, as he understood it, was to increase the power of the government and the army to prevent and punish them -- not to put more guns in the hands of civilians."
Indeed, during the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, "citizens of Western Pennsylvania rose up to fight a new tax on the whiskey they produced," said Mary Thompson, research historian at Washington’s Virginia home, Mount Vernon. Washington was "concerned that success by the rebels would lead to a diminishment of the central/federal government," and directed state militias to counter the insurrection -- "citizen-soldiers," she said, "acting on behalf of the government against their fellow citizens."
Our ruling
The meme said George Washington said that "when government takes away citizens’ right to bear arms it becomes citizens’ duty to take away government’s right to govern." Experts say there’s no evidence that Washington ever said that -- and there are indications that Washington, if anything, favored the arming of trained militias rather than wide swaths of the population. We rate the claim False.A new batch of emails released on Tuesday appear to show that Hillary Clinton and her aides at the State Department sought to intervene on two occasions on behalf of donors to her philanthropic efforts and her 2008 campaign.
The emails, revealed by the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, suggest that aides sought to connect a prominent Clinton Foundation donor with a U.S. ambassador, and in another instance assisted an associate of a 2008 campaign donor in finding a position at the State Department.
The Clinton Foundation has been a tempting target for watchdogs and conservatives. The dizzying web of connections between foreign nationals, political stakeholders, prominent businesspeople and philanthropies and power make much of the Foundation’s business appear suspect by association. But the line between fair business and impropriety is often hard to find.
There is no clear evidence that the donors were ultimately rewarded with special access, but it is clear that Clinton and her aides said they would act on their behalf.
The Clinton campaign denied the emails showed any wrongdoing. “The right-wing organization behind this lawsuit has been attacking the Clintons since the 1990s and no matter how this group tries to mischaracterize these documents, the fact remains that Hillary Clinton never took action as Secretary of State because of donations to the Clinton Foundation,” said Josh Schwerin, a Clinton campaign spokesman.
About 44 of the emails were not part of the 55,000 pages of work-related emails Clinton has said she turned over to the State Department, according to Judicial Watch.
In one newly released email exchange from 2009, Clinton Foundation official Doug Band asked the State Department to assist Gilbert Chagoury, a top donor to the Foundation. “We need Gilbert chagoury to speak to the substance person re lebanon,” Band said in an email. Huma Abedin, a top Clinton aide, offered to connect Chagoury with Jeff Feltman, the U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon at the time. “Ill talk to jeff,” she replied. “This is very important,” replied Band. Chagoury has donated between $1 million and $5 million to the Clinton Foundation, according to the philanthropy’s records, and is a friend of Bill Clinton.
Feltman told the Washington Post that he was never contacted by Chagoury and “no one ever told me he was seeking me out.”
A Clinton campaign aide denied that Chougary was seeking influence at the State Department. “Mr. Chougary, who is of Lebanese descent, was simply seeking to share his insights on the upcoming Lebanese election with the right person at the Department of State for whom this information might be helpful,” said a campaign aide. “In seeking to provide information, he was not seeking action by the Department.”
Much of the correspondence has been redacted by the State Department. In early 2009, a donor to Clinton’s 2008 campaign, Lana Moresky, asked Clinton directly for help finding an associate a job at the State Department. “Dear Hillary,” she wrote. “Just wanted to let you know that [redacted] has a resume in… I was hoping you might intervene to make sure [redacted] was taken seriously and considered for a proper responsible position.” Clinton forwarded the note and asked an aide to “followup.” In the 2016 cycle, Moresky has helped Clinton raise more than $100,000 for her presidential campaign, according to a list maintained by the Clinton campaign.
In another exchange from 2009, Band appears to ask Clinton’s aides to connect a person connected to the Foundation with a position at the State Department. “Personnel has been sending him options,” Abedin replied. The Clinton campaign aide said that the person was a “young advance staffer” who was not a donor or a Foundation employee, however.
Since Hillary Clinton left the State Department, her family’s philanthropy has been the target of thousands of newspaper articles, a highly publicized book containing years of research and a documentary. The hundred of pages of emails build on what the family’s critics see as a long trail of accusations and unseemly connections between the Clinton charity and the Clinton State Department.
At another time in this election cycle, Tuesday’s revelations found in the emails might have been more damaging to Clinton. But the news was buried in a cavalcade of bad news for Donald Trump: a prominent Republican Senator said she would not vote for Donald Trump, and 50 veteran GOP officials said Trump would put the nation’s security “at risk.” At almost the same time the emails were released, Trump made a comment about gun owners that dominated cable news.
Trump, however was quick to try to shift the attention to the new email release. “BREAKING,” he wrote in a Facebook post with a link to a news article about the emails. “Crooked Hillary Clinton put the State Department up for sale, with top aides pulling strings and doing favors for fat-cat donors to the Clinton Foundation.”
Contact us at editors@time.com.There are plenty of extraordinary things to look at in the Spitalfields studio of Gilbert and George, but the first thing that catches the eye is the vast poster of David Cameron in pride of place on the back wall. It turns out contemporary art’s most famous double act are big fans.
“Cameron is lovely, and so is George Osborne,” says George earnestly. “George Osborne especially because he is very solid, honourable. I think he looks like a matinee idol, he’s glamorous.”
Gilbert chips in. “Yes, George Osborne is our favourite because he looks like a grown-up schoolboy.”
George breaks into a knowing smile. “I bet you won’t find a Cameron portrait in any of the other artists’ studios.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gilbert and George with two banners from their White Cube gallery exhibition. Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi for the Guardian
Constantly defying expectation and the norm has formed the basis of Gilbert and George’s extraordinary partnership since 1967. And while their allegiance to the prime minister might seem surprising, neither of the pair, now 71 and 73, believe politicians have the vision to effect change. As they keenly point out, it is artists and poets who have led centuries of progress – politics has always followed reluctantly behind.
It is this idea that is at the heart of their latest exhibition, Banners, which opens at the White Cube gallery from 25 November. Abandoning images for pure text, the show is a series of spray-painted slogans on large white banners. “Gilbert and George say Fuck the Planet”; “Gilbert and George say Decriminalise Sex”; “Gilbert and George say Burn That Book”; “Gilbert and George say Ban Religion” are among the controversial messages scrawled in red and black across 30 massive sheets of paper, proving that their delight in offending the liberal, art-going masses has not waned.
At home with Gilbert & George: ‘It has |
fury, which has been poured full strength into the cup of his wrath. They will be tormented with burning sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb” (Revelation 14:9-10).
Many who profess Jesus Christ and resist Antichrist will be killed by beheading: “I saw thrones on which were seated those who had been given authority to judge. And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony about Jesus and because of the word of God. They had not worshiped the beast or its image and had not received its mark on their foreheads or their hands. They came to life and reigned with Christ a thousand years” (Revelation 20:4).
Antichrist’s Mission
It must be categorically understood and remembered that Antichrist’s mission is not to destroy Israel and the world. Instead, he desperately seeks to be worshiped and adored, and to usurp the rightful place of Yeshua (Jesus) on King David’s throne during the soon-to-arrive Millennium. While much has been written about Antichrist’s global reign of terror (and justifiably so), the Great Tribulation is primarily a time when God declares a Holy War against His enemies on earth.
Israel’s False Messiah
The Hasidim (Hasidic or messianic Jews) expect Meshiach (Messiah) to arrive as a man who is elderly, Jewish, established, intelligent, respected, and a peacemaker. On the surface, at least, do these traits seem to describe Kissinger? How many Americans are aware that, even today, Kissinger is the No. 1 peace broker in the Middle East? Why does he routinely hold secret meetings with world leaders? (In The Trial of Henry Kissinger, author Christopher Hitchens describes Kissinger as a war criminal and murderer due to his covert activities in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and South America.)
Too Old?
While in his 90s, is Kissinger too old to be Israel’s false messiah? Those who make that claim simply do not understand Hasidic culture and its reverence for age. One may recall, for instance, the 1994 death of Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson (a Hasid and Lubavitcher)—at age 92—in Brooklyn, New York. Due to his long and fruitful life, many in the Hasidic community awaited Schneerson’s resurrection as the Messiah for up to several years—even though the elderly rabbi reportedly never stepped foot in the Holy Land.
Antichrist’s Political Comeback
According to Revelation 17:8: “The beast which you saw, once was, now is not, and yet will come up out of the Abyss and go to its destruction. The inhabitants of the earth whose names have not been written in the book of life from the creation of the world will be astonished when they see the beast, because it once was, now is not, and yet will come.”
The Passage cited above indicates that there will be a prolonged interruption or break in Antichrist’s political career. To be specific, after Democratic front-runner, Jimmy Carter, won the 1976 presidential election, President Ford’s staff (including Secretary of State Henry Kissinger) had to vacate the White House shortly prior to President Carter’s inauguration on January 20, 1977. Eventually, Kissinger’s tenure as a politician will likely resume under the Trump-Pence administration.
Three Notable Events
During 2016, there were at least 3 notable events which unmistakably point to Kissinger’s imminent return to public life.
They were as follows:
*On May 18 (the late John Paul’s 96th birthday), Kissinger enjoyed a lengthy and conspicuous presence on CNN. During this time, the bottom of the CNN screen read, “TRUMP, KISSINGER TO TALK FOREIGN POLICY.”
*On November 26, a commentary on CNN.com stated that President-elect Trump was considering Henry Kissinger or George Schultz to be his secretary of state.
*On December 2, an article on Bloomberg.com revealed that Kissinger has already resurrected his famous ‘shuttle diplomacy’! Unofficially, at least, he has been “shuttling” between the US and China, supposedly to alleviate trade tensions between the two nations. (Oddly, this news excerpt was removed only a few hours after being posted.)
“For the secret power of lawlessness is already at work; but the one who now holds it back will continue to do so till he is taken out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed whom the Lord Jesus will overthrow with the breath of his mouth and destroy by the splendor of his coming” (2 Thessalonians 2:7-8).
Pope John Paul II
Is it really possible that a resurrected John Paul II will be the False Prophet?
Consider the following:
*‘John Paul’ (‘Yiannis Pavlakis’) equals 666 in Greek (as noted earlier).
*’John Paul the Second’ (‘Ioannes Paulus Secundo’) equals 666 in Latin (as previously noted).
*Karol Wojtyla (future John Paul) was born on May 18, 1920, in Wadowice, Poland. On that same day, a partial solar eclipse darkened the sky over the Australia-Indian Ocean area. (Was this Lucifer’s method of artificially illuminating the side of the planet on which John Paul was born?)
*On Sept. 28, 1978, Pope John Paul I was murdered (poisoned) after serving as pope for only 33 days.
*On Oct. 6, 1979 (exactly 6 years after Kissinger betrayed Israel on Yom Kippur), John Paul became the first reigning pope to visit the White House where he was received by President Carter.
*On May 18, 1980 (John Paul’s 60th birthday), Mount St. Helens erupted in Washington state.
*On Oct. 27, 1986 (while 66 years old), John Paul attempted to unite the world’s conflicting religions during his interfaith World Day of Prayer in Assisi, Italy. He reportedly stated that all religions are equally valid and that all paths lead to God. (Six months prior to this event, the Chernobyl meltdown poisoned vast tracts of Russia, Europe, and Scandinavia on April 26, 1986.)
*On May 14, 1999 (Israel’s 51st birthday), John Paul kissed the anti-Jewish, anti-Christian Quran. (Israel was reborn on May 14, 1948. Also, it’s notable that 1999 was 66 years after Hitler rose to power in 1933.)
*On May 1, 2011, the Catholic Church beatified the late John Paul—66 years after Hitler committed suicide in Berlin on April 30, 1945.
*John Paul’s body was never buried; it rests in a mausoleum beneath the Latin basilica.
*In order for the False Prophet to effectively deceive the world’s population into worshiping Antichrist as God and taking the Mark of the Beast in the right hand or forehead, he will need enormous spiritual clout. This can only be accomplished with his own resurrection!
The Catholic Church
The heresies of the Catholic Church are well documented and include false sacraments, prayers to the saints, the veneration of images, salvation by works, and “forgiveness” of sins by a “priest.” (The Romans destroyed the second Temple in 70 AD—4 years after the Jewish uprising began in 66 AD. How can the priesthood exist without a Temple? Also, the Ark of the Covenant must rest inside the Temple’s innermost chamber, the Holy of Holies, so that sins can be truly absolved.)
In addition, the false deification of Mary curiously parallels worship of a pagan deity. (Is the Roman Catholic cult of virgin and child really intended to glorify Mary and Jesus? Or is it the disguised worship of the Phoenician moon goddess, Astarte, and her lightening-bolt-conceived son, Tammuz?)
Clearly, Roman Catholics should ask themselves the following questions:
*At the end of World War II, why did the Vatican issue fake passports to Nazi war criminals as they were fleeing from justice?
*What did Pope Paul VI mean when he announced that “the smoke of Satan has entered the sanctuary”?
*Although the Catholic Church officially condemns homosexuality, the vast majority of its pedophilia cases are homosexual in nature. Why? Also, why are the offending clergymen transferred to new parishes where they can resume the cycle of abuse? (In The Keys of This Blood, Vatican insider Malachi Martin writes, “The cultic acts of satanic pedophilia are considered by professionals to be the culmination of the fallen Archangel’s rites.” In other words, the Vatican is rife with satanism!)
*Two of the pope’s official titles are Vicarius Filii Dei (Vicar of the Son of God) and Dux Cleri (Leader of the Clergy). Why do both equal 666 in the Church’s own language, Latin?
*Which Scriptures support the Church’s notion of apostolic succession and the existence of a so-called pope?
*If the pope is truly the “Holy Father,” why can’t he perform miracle healings as did Jesus and His apostles?
*Why does the Church espouse religious pluralism while John 3:36, Acts 4:12, and John 14:6 maintain that Jesus is the only gateway to Salvation?
*Why doesn’t the Church warn its congregation about the Antichrist, False Prophet, Mark of the Beast, and Great Tribulation? Why is it seemingly allergic to the Book of Revelation?
*Why does the Bible contain 66 Books from Genesis to Revelation? Is this due to Roman Catholic canonization of Scripture? (This inquiry is not intended to lend any credibility to trash—such as the gnostic gospels, The Da Vinci Code, or the gospel of Judas.)
A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing
Recall that, while pretending to be Christian, John Paul attempted to unite Christianity with the world’s array of false religions while he was 66 years of age. Thirteen years later, the misguided (or demonically-inspired) pontiff insulted Jews and true Christians when he kissed the blasphemous Quran on Israel’s birthday.
The False Church
The Bible describes this ecumenical, apostate, and one-world church of the last days (which emanates from spiritual Babylon) as an immoral, unfaithful woman who seduces the masses with her lies and blasphemies:
“One of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and said to me, Come, I will show you the punishment of the great prostitute who sits by many waters. With her the kings of the earth committed adultery and the inhabitants of the earth were intoxicated with the wine of her adulteries. Then the angel carried me away in the Spirit into a wilderness. There I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was covered with blasphemous names and had seven heads and ten horns. The woman was dressed in purple and scarlet, and was glittering with gold, precious stones and pearls. She held a golden cup in her hand, filled with abominable things and the filth of her adulteries. The name written on her forehead was a mystery: BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF PROSTITUTES AND OF THE ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH. I saw that the woman was drunk with the blood of God’s holy people, the blood of those who bore testimony to Jesus” (Revelation 17:1-6).
(Special Note No. 1: Purple and scarlet are the predominant colors worn by Roman Catholic bishops and cardinals.)
[Special Note No. 2: As revealed in an upcoming section, UFOs and Bible Prophecy, the woman sitting on a scarlet beast is Europa or “Europe” riding Zeus (Antichrist), the bull. Therefore, John is informing his readers that the ecumenical-and-apostate church of the End-times—which is symbolized by Europa—is headquartered in Europe or the “Holy” Roman Empire.]
(Special Note No. 3: Since Antichrist is represented by Zeus, the bull, John describes him as a “beast” in the Book of Revelation.)
The Woman’s Address
As John was writing the Book of Revelation on Patmos, he encryptically disclosed the woman’s physical address as follows: “This calls for a mind with wisdom. The seven heads are the seven hills on which the woman sits” (Revelation 17:9). For millennia, Rome has been known as the ‘City of Seven Hills.’ The 7 hills of Rome are Aventino, Celio, Campidoglio, Esquilino, Palatino, Quirinale, and Viminale!
The Prostitute’s Demise
In his writings, John continues, “The beast and the ten horns you saw will hate the prostitute. They will bring her to ruin and leave her naked; they will eat her flesh and burn her with fire” (Revelation 17: 16-17).
Those who watched the excellent television documentary, Hitler and the Occult, will recall that—after his 1933 election as chancellor of Germany—Hitler murdered the astrologers and occultists who catapulted him to power so that he would not share fame, glory, or authority with anyone else.
Similarly—and for the same reasons—after Antichrist exalts himself as God in the Temple of the Most High, he (along with his inner circle of minions, the ten rulers) will hate and destroy this false, global church that had applauded and supported him as a great peacemaker during the first half of the Great Tribulation.
(Special Note: While many theologians propose that the ten horns or ten kings of Revelation 17 represent ten nations in Europe, a more tenable interpretation may be that the entire globe will be divided into ten distinct regions of hegemony—such as North America, Europe, Central America, East Asia, South America, Africa, Russia/CIS, Australia/South Pacific, India/South Asia, and the Middle East.)
A New World Order/New Age Religion
During previous centuries, the Vatican horribly and brutally persecuted Protestants and Jews for such “crimes” as owning copies of the Bible and renouncing the papacy. Since the Protestant Reformation of the 1500s became entrenched, the Church has generally been on its best behavior—but only until the mainstream and apostate Protestant denominations return to Rome. (Prime examples of Protestant-based apostasies are the ordination of female or actively-homosexual pastors, and the blessing of same-sex unions.) It’s an open secret that the Vatican is leading the rush to install a global government and a one-world religion that will be inclusive for everyone except true Christians and observant Jews!
False Religious Cult
Similar to Freemasonry in many respects, Roman Catholicism is a false religious cult that deceives its flock with a clever mix of truth and lies. While many of its beliefs and doctrines are anchored in Biblical fact, its lies are damning. Jesus informed Nicodemus that no one can enter God’s kingdom unless he (or she) has been spiritually reborn (John 3:3-6). Sadly, multitudes of Catholics risk an eternity in Hell because they falsely believe that they are saved by their good deeds and/or Church rituals, and that their sins are being forgiven by a “priest.”
The Preterist Theory
During the ongoing debate—and dialogue—about the subject of Bible prophecy, the preterists contend that the viciously anti-Christian Roman emperor, Nero, who lived from 37 AD until 68 AD, was the Antichrist and that the Antichrist prophecies were fulfilled with Nero’s suicide and when the Romans destroyed the second Temple in 70 AD. At this time, God’s Eternal Covenant with Israel was supposedly annulled and the Church is now the “new Israel.”
In order to support their hypothesis, the Roman Catholic preterists—and their Protestant cohorts of the same ilk—claim that ‘Nero Caesar’ equals 666 in Hebrew.
A closer scrutiny of the relevant facts, however, leaves a sizable margin for dissent—as explained below:
In Hebrew:
*NERO CAESAR (NRO KSR) = (200+60+100)+(6+200+50) = 616 = נרו קסר (not 666)
In their best attempt to force or “fudge” the result, the preterists add a nun or “n” (ostensibly, out of thin air) to the end of ‘Nero’—as illustrated below:
*NERON CAESAR (NRON KSR) = (200+60+100)+(50+6+200+50) = 666 = נרון קסר
What?! How is it possible for 616 to equal 666, and how can ‘Nero’ be the equivalent of ‘Neron’? (Nice try, but no cigar!)
In addition to the above, the technology to implement a cashless society and the Mark-of-the-Beast financial system had not yet been developed during Nero’s lifetime.
Also, there is no Scriptural record of Nero occupying the Temple and proclaiming himself God as required in 2 Thessalonians 2:3-4.
Finally, anyone who has a smidgen of Biblical literacy has read about God’s Eternal Covenant with Israel in the Book of Genesis: “I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you” (Genesis 17:7).
War in the Middle East
It’s possible (but not certain) that the Russian-Islamic invasion of Israel (as prophesied in Ezekiel 38 and 39) will transpire between May 14, 2018, and May 13, 2019, as Israel will be 70—or 7×10—years old during this timeframe.
Let the Russians and Muslims beware: God fulfilled His promise—miraculously and against astronomical odds—to resurrect His own nation, Israel, from the valley of dry bones (Ezekiel 37:1-14).
After God supernaturally obliterates this invading army, via the infliction of mass insanity and scores of “friendly-fire” incidents, the Israelis will need seven months to bury the bodies of the dead Russian and Islamist soldiers (Ezekiel 39:12-13).
(Special Note No. 1: While the Quran acknowledges Jesus’ virgin Birth, it denies His Deity and falsely purports that someone else died in His place on the Cross.)
(Special Note No. 2: In alignment with another of Islam’s dubious teachings is that Abraham almost sacrificed Isaac’s half brother, Ishmael, on the altar and, therefore, the Abrahamic Covenant flows through the Arabs instead of the Jews. Which was written first, the Bible or the Quran?)
(Special Note No. 3: While Muslims are correct in their assertion that Ishmael was Abraham’s firstborn son, he was also conceived outside of God’s Divine Will—as clearly recorded in Genesis 16—and was not the son who God promised to Abraham and Sarah.)
(Special Note No. 4: Veritably, Allah is not the Hebrew God of the Bible. Instead, he has always been—and remains—the pagan moon god of Mekkah and this is why the moon’s crescent is affixed to the top of a typical mosque. Also, emergency-medical vehicles which operate in predominantly-Muslim countries display the Red Crescent—instead of the Red Cross—symbol.)
(Special Note No. 5: Since Allah is not the God of the Bible, why do Muslims fraudulently claim the Old Testament as their own, especially while their religious text—the Quran— openly contradicts these Scriptures?)
(Special Note No. 6: Islam is largely devoid of the true God’s love, mercy, compassion, and patience. Instead, it places Ishmael’s animosity toward Isaac at its core or centrum.)
(Special Note No. 7: The intractable riddle of the Middle East is that Isaac will never relinquish the Holy Land—including East Jerusalem and the Temple Mount—and his envious half brother, Ishmael, will never agree to surrender it.)
As the civil war in Syria winds down—and the Shiites (including Iran and Hezbollah) gain a strategic advantage—the Middle East is approaching its first regional conflagration since the 1967 Six-Day War and the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
In the meantime—and despite stern warnings by Israel—Iran is constructing a military base in Syria with Bashar al-Assad’s tacit approval. It should be noted that Assad and Putin are staunch allies. Furthermore, Russian troops must traverse Syria and ascend the Golan Heights in order to launch a ground war against Israel.
As of late, Middle East observers have made reference to a forming ‘Shiite Crescent’ which will extend from the Mediterranean Sea and include Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. In no uncertain terms, this spells trouble for Israel.
As America’s foreign policy pivots toward Asia (and the containment of Kissinger’s progeny, modern China), its gradual withdrawal from the greater Middle East has resulted in a growing consensus among the USA’s regional allies (specifically: Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the Gulf states, and Turkey) that they are being abandoned. Needless to say, Russia and Iran are in the process of filling this consequential power vacuum.
The Russian military buildup in western Syria includes fighter jets, helicopters, tanks, armored personnel carriers, and other materiel. Also, Russia’s warships in the Caspian Sea have launched missile attacks against all rebel targets in Syria (including the supposedly-moderate Free Syrian Army which is supported by America).
In the wake of Putin’s entry into Syria to restore order and protect Russia’s naval base on Syria’s Mediterranean coast, will his forces ultimately invade Israel with the intent to seize the strategic and warm-water port of Eilat on the Red Sea?
At the time of this writing, the war in Syria involves—in one capacity or another—eight other countries: Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, Russia, Iran, Turkey, and the USA. (Also, a total of nine geographically-diverse coalition nations have launched airstrikes against ISIS and al-Qaida in Iraq and Syria.)
Repeatedly, Israel has conducted airstrikes against Iranian convoys of missiles that were en route to Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. (Iran and Hezbollah are both Shiite and closely aligned with Assad’s Alawite sect.) In addition, Israel has warned Russia that it will target any of its sophisticated, long-range missiles that are bound for Assad’s military.
(Special Note No. 1: It appears that, via Tehran and Doha, Russian missiles have reached Hezbollah, in Lebanon, effective September 2018.)
(Special Note No. 2: Since 2012, Israel has attacked Syrian and Iranian sites, that are inside Syria, at least dozens of times.)
Since the Trump administration has provided direct military aid to the Syrian rebels (and hopefully not al-Qaida or ISIS in the process), Putin may eventually contemplate retaliation by invading America’s ally, Israel. (The US and Russia are engaged in a proxy war for the first time since the 1980s in Afghanistan. Is the Cold War truly over?) Clearly, Ezekiel’s war—or the War of Gog and Magog—looms on the horizon.
UFOs and Bible Prophecy
What if, shortly after true Christians have been physically transported to the New Jerusalem in the Rapture (1 Corinthians 15:50-58), God permits demonic entities to stage a paranormal UFO landing in front of the news cameras? What if—sequentially and insidiously—a resurrected John Paul descends from the alleged spacecraft and calmly informs the earth’s inhabitants that he and Kissinger are descendants of an ancient-alien race that planted life on earth thousands or millions of years ago, and that their mission is to assist earthlings with the next phase of their planetary evolution using computer technology? If this idea seems far-fetched or preposterous, why has the viewing public been inundated with flying-saucer and UFO films since the UN’s inception in 1945?
Undoubtedly, the laughable and unscientific theory of ancient aliens or astronauts was conceived in Erich Von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods? and perpetrated in the History Channel’s recent Ancient Aliens series.
Four years after Chariots of the Gods? was originally published in 1968, Dr. Clifford Wilson wrote his rebuttal, Crash Go the Chariots. Why doesn’t the History Channel at least mention it?
Unfortunately for the ancient-alien advocates, the concept of interstellar or intergalactic space flight is incongruous with Einstein’s general and special theories of relativity—as detailed below:
General Theory. According to Einstein’s general theory, a large gravitational mass distorts the “fabric” of time-space in the same manner that a heavy bowling ball warps a trampoline (for lack of a better analogy). Since there are presumably millions of suns, planets and black holes in the universe, there is an infinite number of warps or curvatures in this invisible tapestry. For this reason, theoretical physicists postulate that if a spaceship departs a given planet on a seemingly linear or straight-line trajectory (perpendicular to its plane of departure), it may return to its planet of origin thousands or millions of years later in a net “boomerang” effect!
Special Theory. In accordance with Einstein’s special theory, no object (including a subatomic particle) with a rest mass greater than zero can achieve the speed of light: approximately 186,000 miles per second. (Since light exhibits both particle and wave properties, a particle of light—or photon—can reach this prohibitive speed. Nevertheless, a photon has a rest mass of zero.) That is to say, even if a large, heavy, and bulky spaceship could attain such an incredible velocity, it would require from dozens to millions of years (ie, light years) to reach earth.
(Special Note No. 1: As a testament to the vastness of the universe, many “stars” that are visible during a clear night do not exist; they imploded eons ago and we are now receiving their light.)
(Special Note No. 2: Those who are familiar with Einstein’s equations will recall that, in the case of an object or particle that infinitesimally approaches the speed of light, a zero appears in the denominator. Among mathematicians, this result is “undefined.”)
More recently, some science-fiction writers and astronomers have imagined Jupiter’s moon, Europa (666), and Saturn’s moon, Titan (666), to be possible bases from which aliens can explore the solar system. How can any sober scientist entertain the possibility that these two barren rocks—so incredibly distant from the sun—could support life as we know it? If either moon has an atmosphere, it would almost certainly be composed of toxic gases and/or liquids.
What are the origins of the names ‘Europa’ and ‘Titan’? In Greek mythology, Zeus—the god of the sky—incarnated himself as a bull to seduce the Phoenician princess, Europa (666), and take her to Crete. On the back of a European Currency Unit or euro, one can readily observe the image of Europa riding Zeus (Antichrist), the bull. In turn, the Titan(666)s were the elder gods of pagan Greece who were overthrown by Zeus and the Olympian gods. (Why are all planets, moons, and stars—as well as the reactor fuels uranium and plutonium—named after ancient Roman or Greek deities?)
An informative write-up in the September 22, 2013, edition of USA Today examined the feasibility of launching a manned mission to Mars from a medical or physiological standpoint. Onerously, an astronaut who makes the 500-day, round-trip voyage to the Red Planet would incur cancerous, even deadly levels of space radiation caused by high-energy particles generated by solar flares and coronal mass ejections from the sun. In addition, he would be exposed to galactic cosmic rays from exploding stars and quasars, and gamma ray bursts which occur outside of our solar system.
Considering that Mars is a mere stone’s throw from earth in terms of cosmic or universal distances, one can readily envision the irradiated and tumor-infested corpse of an extraterrestrial being that has traveled for dozens—or millions—of light years through time-space. (Of course, the History Channel’s aliens are gods or supermen who are impervious to all illnesses, are able to violate the laws of physics—including those which govern momentum and acceleration—with impunity, can transcend the speed of light, and are immortal!)
Are flying saucers or UFOs really bona-fide, nuts-and-bolts spacecraft that carry extraterrestrials from distant planets or galaxies to earth? Or are they paranormal phenomena from the spirit world whose malicious and lethal intent is to deceive mankind about its intrinsic, fundamental role in the grand design of creation?
According to 2 Thessalonians 2:11-12, in the last days God will give the unbelieving hordes over to a great delusion—that would deceive God’s elect, if it were possible—so that they will believe a lie. Although the Bible does not reveal the nature of this grandiose deception, we are free to speculate.
We certainly do know that, in the near future, tens of millions of new Christians—in every tongue, tribe, and nation—who were converted by the 144,000 Jewish witnesses (Revelation 7:3-8) during the Great Tribulation, will be despised and martyred for their unwavering faith in the Lord Jesus (Revelation 20:4).
The old dictum that “people believe what they want to believe” is as true today as ever. Around the world, those of a lost and Biblically-illiterate generation are desperately seeking reassurance that they will not have to stand before God during the Great White Throne Judgment.
Moreover, an apparent encounter with extraterrestrials from another world would eclipse all of man’s previous discoveries. Irrefutably, both God and the Devil are keenly aware that such an event would seal the hearts and minds of unregenerate souls against the truth of Scripture—until they are judged by God according to their thoughts and deeds (as their names are not written in the Lamb’s Book of Life).
The underlying reality is that anyone who would like to purchase a book about UFOs at Barnes & Noble Bookstores will locate it, appropriately, in the ‘New Age’ (formerly ‘Occult’) section—along with a litany of unsavory material on Tarot cards, witchcraft, etc.—and not on the ‘Science’ shelves.
Financial Apocalypse
According to the US Debt Clock ( www.usdebtclock.org ), America’s public debt is more than $22 trillion and growing at a rate that approaches $3 billion a day.
As a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP), these are the 2017 public (government) debts of the following nations:
*Japan = 223.8%
*Greece = 180.0%
*Italy = 131.2%
*USA = 103.8%
*France = 98.5%
*Spain = 96.7%
*UK (England, Scotland, Wales, and N. Ire.) = 90.4%
*Canada = 89.7%
*Ireland = 69.5%
*Germany = 64.1%
*Finland = 63.8%
*China = 18.6%
(Unfortunately, the statistics presented above comprise the “good” news. The bad news is that the category of unfunded liabilities—including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—alone exceeds a mind-boggling $122 trillion!!!)
Numerous reports on CNBC.com have identified several existential threats or menaces to the American and global economies. Among them are a premature hike of interest rates by the US Federal Reserve or the European Central Bank, China’s total debt crisis, the continued slowing of the global economy, massive corporate debt (especially in America and China), uncertain Brexit negotiations, and the unresolved debt crisis in Europe.
Effective March 2018, there has been considerable volatility in the financial markets due to Trump’s levying of tariffs on imported steel and aluminum. As China and Europe retaliate with tariffs on American products, the result has been a global trade war which will impede the growth of world GDP and may lead to a protracted bear market in equities. The uptick in business activity and investing, or the Trump rally, has already begun to unravel as investors fear rising inflation and interest rates, as well as the trade conflict between the world’s two largest economies, America and China.
Regarding China’s total debt (which includes government, household, and corporate borrowing), it stands at 282.0 percent of GDP. In comparison, the USA’s total debt equals 269.0 percent of GDP. How can China and Japan continue to be America’s principal bankers when they are more broke than the US? (Special Note: China and Japan hold approximately $1.15 trillion and $1.10 trillion of America’s debt, respectively. Also, a staggering $6.1 trillion of the USA’s Treasury obligations are held by foreigners.)
Meanwhile, additional write-ups on CNBC.com have exposed an unfolding banking crisis in Italy and even Germany’s two largest banking institutions, Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank, are under financial stress (due to bad shipping loans). If the news on Breitbart.com is accurate, the government in Beijing is covering up a banking debacle in China while the contagion in Europe has spread to banks in Spain and Portugal.
Inexorably, North America, Europe, China, and Japan are racing toward a financial apocalypse that will reverberate around the globe. In the aftermath of this coming meltdown and amid a sustained recession or depression, will the hungry masses gladly line up to accept the Mark? In essence, this diabolical system represents Satan’s counterfeit and temporary “salvation” in the form of food, clothing, and shelter—but at tremendous expense to one’s eternal soul.
The forces of darkness (who are in almost total control of the fashion and entertainment industries) realize that if they can dupe this terminal generation into taking ugly, grotesque markings (tattoos) or pieces of metal (body piercings) in their skin, they are merely one step away from receiving the soul-damning Mark of the Beast.
America Under Judgment
According to a fascinating and eerie commentary in the September 24-25, 2016 (weekend) edition of The Wall Street Journal, Russia and China have been carefully contemplating a nuclear first strike against America. While the United States has been downgrading its defenses, Russia and China have been rapidly building up and modernizing their respective arsenals. (Also, the two nations are engaged in a military pact against the US.) For example, Russia is employing supercomputers to perfect its missile-delivery systems and has hundreds of nuclear submarines that are awaiting attack orders. Likewise, China is constructing—and building military bases on—artificial islands in the South China Sea in order to control vital shipping lanes and, ultimately, to supplant American dominance in the Pacific region.
As a result of President Trump’s connections to Russia, and the alleged hacking by Putin’s staff to aid Trump’s election victory, the Trump presidency will likely be dogged by ongoing investigations on behalf of congressmen, investigative journalists, and special counsel Robert Mueller until 2020. (Does this scandal have the potential to become “Kremlingate” at the same magnitude as Watergate?)
Unequivocally, Trump’s earlier proposal to lift sanctions against Russia (due to its 2014 invasion of Ukraine and continued support for Russian separatists in that nation) would translate into the president’s political suicide and may lead to his impeachment.
Trump may be wise and prudent in his bid to “get along” with Putin as Russia has developed a new, state-of-the-art ICBM that became fully operational in 2018. According to a news report in The Philadelphia Trumpet, a single warhead can destroy a landmass the size of Texas! According to another write-up in the March 2, 2018, edition of USA Today, this new ICBM, named Satan 2, can cruise at low altitudes, travels at a velocity equal to 27 times the speed of sound, and is able to evade America’s antimissile defenses. Four weeks later, CNN reported—on March 30, 2018—that Russia has successfully (?) tested its Satan 2 hypersonic missile.
As the relationship between Trump and Putin sours—and the prospects for removing sanctions against Russia have been greatly diminished—God may soon enlist Russia to destroy the United States. (Under intense political pressure at home, Trump reluctantly signed into law additional sanctions which target Russia due to its purported interference in America’s 2016 presidential election. One year later, even more sanctions were imposed due to Putin’s alleged poisoning of a former Russian spy, and his daughter, with Soviet-era Novichok toxin.)
While further stoking geopolitical tensions, Trump’s April 6, 2017, cruise-missile attack against a Syrian airbase—in response to Assad’s chemical-weapons gassing of civilians (which killed 89 people, including 27 children)—destroyed at least 20 of Syria’s combat aircraft and has deepened the growing chasm between the American and Russian leaders. (During this operation, and the more recent MOAB bomb assault against ISIS in Afghanistan, the president has sent a clear message to rogue nations—such as North Korea and Iran—that their future military escapades will have definite and measurable consequences.)
For many years, Bible scholars have been warning that the USA, as we currently know it, will soon cease to exist as there is no nation that can be construed as America in Bible prophecy. Obviously, this is in stark contrast to her global presence and many operations around the world today.
Will America’s downfall be the result of a financial collapse, nuclear annihilation, or a massive cyber attack? What about the possibility of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) being detonated in the atmosphere high above the USA which, according to engineers, would “fry” the electrical grid and plunge the United States—technologically speaking—into the 1800s overnight? Only time will tell.
In The Harbinger: The Ancient Mystery that Holds the Secret of America’s Future, Rabbi Jonathan Cahn reveals—in astonishing detail—how the terrorist events of 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis closely mirrored God’s judgments against ancient Israel for its disobedience. According to Cahn, God dispenses judgments in 7-year intervals as he accurately observes that the 2008 financial meltdown occurred seven years after 9/11. Remarkably, six days after 9/11, the DJIA lost 7% of its value on Sept. 17, 2001. Exactly 7 years later (on the Hebrew calendar) and during the |
and I felt heat rising up the back of my neck. Mercifully we were interrupted by yelling.
“You ugly son of a bitch! I gave you a goddamn fifty, and you gave me back change for a twenty. I don’t fucking think so.”
Across the street and on the corner, people swirled like water circling a drain, attracted by the altercation at the pretzel cart. Bill and I plunged between parked cars and into the street. Bill held up his stick like Moses exhorting the waves, and lo and behold, all the traffic stopped.
A red-faced nat dressed in shorts, tennis shoes with calf-high socks, and a green polo shirt that strained across his belly screamed into the masked face of a joker. “You’re a goddamn crook, you fuckin’ freak.”
The small joker seemed to be shriveling beneath the barrage of words and profanity. His face might be hidden, but folds of skin sagged down his neck like wattles on a turkey, and the same dangling folds festooned his arms, visible because of his short-sleeved shirt.
“Okay, let’s all just calm down. Now what seems to be the problem?” Bill said. It’s the standard cop line, and usually presented in an all-knowing tone. Bill’s high-pitched voice rather undercut the effect. His bulk made up for it.
“I gave this guy a fifty, and he only gave me change for a twenty,” the tourist repeated, at a much lower volume.
“I didn’t,” the joker whined.
“Open your cash box,” Bill said.
I gulped. If the joker refused we’d be forced to get a warrant. But he didn’t. And I checked off lesson number one. It never hurts to ask. Cops are intimidating, people usually agree and you avoid the warrant. I could just imagine how Dr. Pretorius, my constitutional law professor at Columbia, would react to my conclusion.
There was no fifty in the cash box. I decided I needed to start acting like a cop and investigate. “How much for a pretzel?” I asked.
“Buck twenty-nine with tax. Buck sixty-seven if you want cheese. He wanted cheese.”
I looked up at Bill who was glaring at me. I took a breath to help quiet the quivering that had hit my gut and said, “Nobody pays for a dollar sixty-seven pretzel with a fifty-dollar bill.” I peered into the cash box. “And he...” I indicated the joker. “Would have cleaned out his cash if he’d tried.”
“Which is why he just pocketed my money,” the tourist blustered.
Bill looked from one to the other. Suddenly he unlimbered the cuffs and spun the joker around.
Back at the station Mr. Kuzlovsky had recovered his fifty-dollar bill, the pushcart vendor was in a cell, and I was feeling really, really stupid. After the arrest Bill had patted down the joker, and found the fifty tucked away in the drooping folds of skin around his belly. Bill was laboriously typing up a report using a one-fingered hunt and peck method, and he sensed my embarrassment. He looked up, and his expression was kind.
“Don’t worry about it, Rook. Just don’t let pity cloud your judgment. And don’t overcompensate by assuming innocence just because they’ve been afflicted and you find them disgusting.”
My new partner was turning out to be frighteningly astute. I decided not to insult us both by denying it. “I’d quibble with the word choice, but I am finding this harder than I expected,” I said. “I took an apartment down here so I could try to see the neighborhood as just a neighborhood.”
“That’s good. And now you gotta see jokers as people. Which means like most people they’re shits.”
I dropped into a chair, and shifted my nightstick and handcuffs so they weren’t digging me in the kidneys. “That’s a damn depressing attitude.”
Bill shrugged. “Just being realistic. We’re cops, which means we see the bad, not the good.” He flashed me a grin. “Cheer up. In a week you’ll assume everybody’s lying.”
“Great.” I sighed and looked away.
“What else is bothering you?” I was beginning to wonder if Bill’s power was telepathy.
“I’m worried that searching a physical deformity qualifies as a strip search. If it does we should have gotten a warrant.”
Bill stopped typing and leaned back in his chair. It creaked ominously. “You one of those annoying armchair shysters?”
I stared into that broad face and for one cowardly moment considered lying. “No, I’m an actual shyster.”
“Oh, fuck. That’s just great.” He shoved back from the desk, the wheels on his chair chattering across the floor. “Well, that probably means you can type. Be my guest.” And he stomped away toward the break room. It looked like the bonding moment was definitely over. As I settled down behind the computer I figured the word would be all over the precinct by shift change.
We were back on the street by 10:30 A.M. We broke up a fight outside Squishers Basement at 11:15. The combatants were about sixteen sheets to the wind. As I stepped back, panting and rubbing my upper arm where one of the drunks had landed an ill-aimed punch, I found myself yelling at the bartender who had come outside to observe the fight.
“What the hell time do you open? Or did you ever close? Unless you’ve got a special license you better have closed at 4:00 A.M.”
Bill slapped me on the back. “They serve ‘food.’ ” He put air quotes around the word. “Which means they can open at ten, and he makes a great hangover remedy.”
After the drunks were sent back to lockup I realized I was famished. Bill was hungry too, so we hit a local diner for burgers. I made the mistake of ordering mine with guacamole and blue cheese. For the next hour I got to listen to Bill talk about my “yuppie burger,” and I was revising my opinion of his empathy. I checked my watch. It was 1:20 and I had a headache blossoming behind my eyes.
A stir on the sidewalk again drew my attention. I was starting to distrust anything that disrupted the smooth flow of bodies through the canyons of Manhattan. There were youthful male hoots and catcalls.
An old man’s voice with a decidedly Yiddish accent quavered out, “You’re a bunch of pigs. Just pigs.”
This time I led the way toward the altercation, pushed through the crowd, and found a naked woman. She was young, and trying to cover herself with a forearm across her breasts and a hand in front of her crotch. Her arms sported some interesting Oriental ideograph tattoos along with the usual punk girl hearts and skulls. The only other thing on her body, aside from a mop of untidy jet-black hair, was a nose stud flashing in the autumn sunlight. Her cheeks were bright red with embarrassment.
A wolf whistle cut the air followed by, “Hey, baby, great ass!”
“Oh, bugger off!” she shouted back. The accent was British.
I held up a hand and said authoritatively (I hoped), “Okay, nothing to see here, move along.” The minute the words emerged I winced because right on cue some wags in the crowd delivered a one- two punch.
“What? Are you gay?”
“Like hell there isn’t.”
There was a clerk from a mask and cloak shop gawking. I shouted at him, “Bring her a cloak.” He hustled off. I turned to the girl. “Okay. What are you protesting? Fur? World hunger? The mayor?”
“Listen, Mr. Policeman—if you are a policeman, and not a park-keeper or something—I didn’t do a thing. I was just walking along, minding my own business when suddenly—” She gestured down the length of her body. “I’d like to report a robbery.”
The clerk returned with a cloak that the young woman flung around her shoulders and pulled tightly closed to a chorus of disappointed “Oooh’s” from the onlookers.
“Well, that’s a new one,” I said. I unlimbered my handcuffs.
“You’re arresting me!?” Hazel eyes flashed fury.
“Indecent exposure.”
Bill arrived, his bulk scattering the crowd like a polar bear through a seal colony. “Hold on there, Rook.”
“My clothes just—”
“Vanished. Yeah, I know,” Bill interrupted. He said to me, “Women have been losing their clothes almost daily. We figure it’s some ace perv, but we haven’t got a line on him yet. So question some of these pervs.” He raked the crowd with a jaundiced eye. Men started drifting away.
“Hey, hold it,” I yelled, but a lot of them vanished into the bustling crowds. I questioned the few I’d corralled while listening to Bill and the girl’s conversation. Now that I realized she wasn’t a criminal it had begun to penetrate that she was really cute.
“What’s your name, miss?” Bill asked.
“Abigail Baker.”
“What do you do?”
“I am an actress.”
“Look, we need you to come down to the precinct and make a statement.”
“I have no clothes.”
“We’ll give you a jumpsuit.”
“Wonderful. I’ll look like a criminal. And what do I do in the meantime?”
Bill called out to the shop owner. “Hey, Jeannie, we’re gonna borrow the cloak for a few hours, okay?”
“Clean it before you bring it back,” Jeannie called.
Abigail’s mouth formed an “O” of outrage, and she emitted a sound like a furious kitten. “I would prefer to return home.”
“And I would prefer you come to the precinct.”
*
“... it was involuntary public nudity.” We were in an interrogation room. Abigail was making an orange prison jumpsuit look almost attractive. She wore a pair of flip-flops that Sergeant Penniman had pulled out of her locker, and was sipping a Diet Coke. Bill was asking questions and I was taking notes.
She peered down her nose at me and said, “Involuntary. That’s I... N... V...”
Bill choked on a laugh. I felt the top of my ears getting warm. “I know how to spell ‘involuntary.’ I went to law school.”
“Oh, how interesting? As what?”
“As a student!”
Bill restored the peace by asking, “Okay, where do you live?” She gave an address on the southern edge of Jokertown. Bill leaned back and studied her. “They pretty much cater to students. I thought you said you were an actress?”
Abigail blushed, and took a quick sip of soda. “Well, I am... almost. I’m just finishing up a few classes at the New York School of Performing Arts. But I’m understudying a major role at the Bowery Repertory.”
“Oh, so you’re a wannabe actress,” I said.
“And you’re a failed barrister.”
“I chose to be a police officer,” I began.
“Franny, go get me a soda.” He handed me a dollar bill. “An orange. And while you’re at it ask Apsara for the victim report form.”
I left, grumbling. That girl had really gotten under my skin. I had to ask the old ram’s horn detective how to find the file room. He gave me a very tedious set of exact directions, and I headed there.
Watching too many cop dramas had given me a sense of what a file clerk should look like. An old, male, potbellied, maybe retired cop. What met me was a vision out of an Asian film. The girl looked very young, and she was flat-out gorgeous. Jet-black hair that hung past her ass, skin like honey, an amazing figure. I tried to moisten my lips, but my mouth had gone Sahara dry. “I need... I need...”
“Yes, officer?” Her voice was like bells. “What do you need?” Long lashes briefly veiled the laughter in her eyes.
“Victim’s report form.”
“All right.” I watched her go swaying away to a filing cabinet.
Her path led her past a strange little ornately carved wooden house with a gold leaf roof. I realized I’d seen similar styles in Thai restaurants. She returned with a couple of sheets of paper. “I’m Apsara Nai Chiangmai. You’re new. What’s your name?”
“Fran—” My voice squeaked. I coughed and tried again. “Francis Black.”
“Francis,” she said slowly, making my name into a song. “That’s a nice name. I like the feel of that on my tongue.” She did that thing with her lashes again, and I thought about cold showers.
“Thank you,” I muttered, and grabbed the papers and headed for the door.
“Come by anytime,” she called.
“Okay,” I gasped.
As I left I thought I heard a cranky old man’s voice saying her name in that parent tone that tells you you’ve really fucked up.
I found the soda machine, bought Bill’s orange beverage, and got myself a Coke. I didn’t open it right away. Instead I rolled the cold can across my forehead. Having regained control over my anatomy I went back into the interrogation room.
*
It wasn’t deliberate, I hadn’t planned it, but I happened to be at the front door when Abigail headed out. She was still in the jumpsuit.
“Do you need a taxi?” I had to clear my throat to get out the last word.
“You might notice that I no longer have a purse, which means I have no money, so no.”
“Uh... right... I could loan you...”
She walked past me, heading for the door. I hurried to open it for her.
“Uh... look... I’m new in town, and you’re... foreign, maybe we could have dinner... tonight...” At her expression I modified the statement. “Sometime?”
“Are you on crack? No!” The door closed behind her and I heard Sergeant Taylor (whose nickname was Wingman, I had learned) give a snort of laughter. “You gotta work on your timing, Franny,” he said.
*
2:10. Back on the street. Bill gave a warning to a panhandling joker whose gig was to offer to wash the windshields of cars waiting at stoplights. He looked like a big octopus from the waist down, and he had an interesting pitch. If the driver was polite and gave him a dollar, the joker would heave his bulk onto the roof of the car, and with a shammy in each of his nine tentacles (I don’t know why he had nine tentacles, but he did), he would proceed to wash all the windows on the car. If the driver was rude he still heaved himself onto the roof of the car, but this time he inked all the windows.
As we walked away I asked, “So, why does he just get a warning?”
“Because Arms washes the captain’s car.”
“Maseryk?” I had heard about Maseryk from Altobelli. He described him as a military flat- topped, hard-ass straight arrow. I couldn’t mesh that image with him getting free car washes from a joker.
“No, Mendelberg.”
“Ah.” The other captain of the 5th was a joker. It was beginning to look like jokers stuck together. Bill again appeared to read my mind.
“Arms is bipolar. He can’t really hold a job. Washing police cars is the only steady pay he gets.”
“Ah,” I said again. “How long does it take, acquiring this”—I gestured around—“I guess you’d call it area knowledge?”
“I’ve been in this precinct for five years, three years before that at the 13th. But I grew up in Chinatown near the 5th. I’ve got a pretty good handle on J-Town, and in Chinatown I know practically everybody.”
“That isn’t very encouraging. I’m going to be ready to retire before I get to know people.”
“Assuming you stick. You strike me as the type to end up down at One Police Plaza at headquarters.”
I watched his broad back, and resolved that wouldn’t happen. Then I realized that was probably exactly what my rabbi, Sam Altobelli, was planning. And if I really did want to follow in my dad’s footsteps and make captain I was going to have to play the political game. I followed morosely in Bill’s wake because I was back to questioning the motivations that had led to this career.
I was a Columbia law school graduate. I had passed the New York State bar. I hadn’t been law review material, I was never going to end up in a white-shoe law firm, but I had been in the top third of my class, I could have found a good job. But I wanted to make a difference. Help people.
So, become a public defender, or work for an environmental nonprofit, said that inner voice that sounded suspiciously like a cross between my mother and my college advisor.
I will, I promised them. If this doesn’t work out.
I was deep in thoughtful contemplation of my navel, watching the cracks in the sidewalk, when Bill’s radio crackled to life. “Bill, one of my pooches spotted our purse snatcher. He’s running west on Broome over near the Dumpling House.”
“Thanks, K-10, we’re on it.”
Bill took off running. I grabbed at my stick and cuffs to keep them from battering my kidney and took off after him. We came around a corner onto Broome and I heard a woman screaming. I had a fleeting glimpse of a young man clutching a large red leather handbag and running as if all the hounds of hell were on his heels.
We gave chase. Bill might be big, but I ran track in college, and the perp was motivated. We had soon pulled well ahead of Bill. The purse snatcher grabbed the corner of a brownstone and spun himself into an alley. I made the turn, and a garbage can came crashing and banging toward me, depositing its odiferous load at my feet. I slipped on a combination of rotting potato peels and plastic wrap. I managed not to face plant, but one hand and one knee dropped into the oozing garbage.
“Yuck.” I bounded up and ran on, trying to shake the garbage off my hand.
The alley ended at a chain-link fence. The purse snatcher had slung the purse over his shoulder and was swarming up the wire. I heard Bill behind me. He was roaring something, but the blood was pounding in my ears, and I couldn’t quite hear him between the slap of my feet on pavement and the shaking and chattering of the fence.
I leaped up, gripped the metal, and started to climb. The perp looked back and kicked at me. I yanked my head away just in time, and his foot just hit my shoulder. I was starting to get royally pissed. I lunged and managed to grasp the purse where it bounced on his skinny ass.
I heard Bill whistling as I yanked at the strap. The purse snatcher gave a wail of despair as he tumbled off the fence. I lost my grip and fell too... and realized we were both surrounded by a bright pink aura filled with sparks and floating stars.
“I told you to get out of the way,” Bill said.
I slammed the door of my locker and batted irritably at the stars floating in front of my face. I was now, intimately, familiar with Bill’s “power.” There were snorts of laughter from Beastie Bester and Van Tranh, aka Dr. Dildo. “How long is this going to last? And you better not say forever.”
” ‘Bout six hours.”
“Great. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
The route to the front door from the locker room took me past the file room. The incredibly sexy Asian girl giggled, and peered at me from behind the curtain of her ass-length black hair. Apsara, that was her name. I had picked up some forms from her while we were booking Abigail, and had thought I’d ask her out. Now she thought I was a dork, and that was never going to happen. Feeling incredibly sorry for myself, I proceeded to the front door and emerged onto the darkening street. Ten hours ago I had stepped through this door feeling like anything could happen.
Unfortunately that had turned out to be true.
Halfway home a heavy hand descended on my shoulder, and suddenly I was kissing the soot-stained brick wall of a building. “Okay, you’re under arrest.”
“I’m a cop,” I mumbled against the rough surface.
“What’s that, scum?”
“I’m a cop!” I shouted.
“Yeah, and I’m the pope.”
“My badge is in my left breast pocket.”
Rough hands jerked me around and dove into my pocket and emerged with my badge and ID. I was facing a hideous joker. He had bulging eyes, a unibrow that made his forehead seem even more shelflike, a bullet-shaped head that looked like one side had been smacked with an iron skillet, and all of this crowned with spiky gray hair that looked more akin to a warthog’s bristles than human hair.
Standing next to him was a strange-looking girl with shaggy brown hair pulled back in a ponytail. She had the biggest barrel chest I’d ever seen on a human, and a tiny waist that would have made Scarlett O’Hara green with envy. She wasn’t ugly just... odd. Her name tag read MICHAELSON.
“Then why you got the glow?” the bug-eyed guy asked. His name tag identified him as BRONKOWSKI. The human whippet next to him smiled, revealing small fangs.
“Bill’s my partner. We were apprehending a purse snatcher and... well, he sort of... missed.” The ugly guy guffawed and a small dimple appeared next to the girl’s mouth. “And what the hell were you arresting me for?” I added, aggrieved.
“Walking while pink,” Michaelson said, in a tolerable female imitation of Officer Friday’s flat, unemotional tone.
“You mean you just arrest people for glowing?” I gestured at the stars and the sparks.
“Tinkerbill wouldn’t have whacked ’em unless they were guilty of something.”
“Tinkerbill?” Delight over my partner’s nickname gave way to lawyerly shock. “You’re arresting people without probable cause.”
“Kid, how long have you been on the job?” asked Michaelson. Which I thought was sort of rich. She didn’t look much older than me.
“Today was my first day.”
She and Bronkowski exchanged a glance. “You’ll learn,” she said, and they let me go.
I got arrested four more times before I got home. Each time my badge, and the explanation that I was Bill’s partner, got me released. But I sensed I had left a trail of hilarity for the swing shift.
In my effort to be P.C. I had picked an apartment smack in the middle of Jokertown. It was a relatively new building erected during a liberal mayor’s efforts to gentrify the area. It was white stone, relatively modern, which meant the living room, dining nook, and kitchen were all one big room. I had a decent- sized bedroom and a full bath with a tub in addition to a shower. I set my hat on the bookcase as I came in, and straightened the photo of my father in his dress blues. “Well, Dad, I hope you weren’t watching today,” I said to that stern, chiseled face.
I was supposed to have dinner with Altobelli that night, and I knew my mother would be waiting by the phone in the house in Saratoga, wanting to hear about my first day on the job. Not wanting to be seen in public, I canceled with Altobelli, but mothers couldn’t be postponed.
I put in an order for some Thai food to be delivered, and settled into the recliner with the phone tucked under my chin. “Hi, Mom.”
“Oh, honey, I’ve been thinking about you all day. How was it?”
The five-year-old who had run to Mommy with skinned knees and bumped elbows wanted to wail out every slight. Instead I feigned cheerfulness and said, “Great. It was great.”
“Your father would be so proud.” I heard the sigh in her voice. “So, who did you arrest?”
I told her about Abigail.
“Never get involved with perps or witnesses, dear. I’m sure Sam would tell you the same.”
“Yeah.” There was a knock at my door. “Hey, Mom, my food is here. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Okay, honey, take care. Be careful.”
I slammed down the footrest of the recliner with a satisfying kick, grabbed my wallet, and headed to the door. I opened it to a joker delivery boy. This one wasn’t too weird. He just had faceted eyes like a bee, and the usual fan of angry acne across his cheeks and chin that was the hallmark of every teenage boy. The hallway smelled of cabbage rolls and coffee, but they lost out to the sharp scent of green curry and garlic beef wafting up from the bag the kid carried.
“What do I owe you?”
The kid looked at the bill. “Twenty-one fifty-three.” I dug out twenty-five, and realized I couldn’t make a habit of this.
“Thanks.” I started to shut the door, but the kid held up a hand. “Yes?”
“Uh... if you want anything like for... dessert, I can set you up. I’ve got a friend.” He was staring at the pink and sparking nimbus that surrounded me.
“It’s a good thing you kept that vague, kid, because otherwise I would have to arrest you. But it’s your lucky night. I’m tired and I’m hungry so I’ll pretend I don’t actually understand what you’re saying. But just for that...” I took my cash back out of his limp hand, pulled out the five, and gave him a one instead. “No tip.”
“Hey! What about the fifty-three cents?” he howled in outrage as I started to shut the door.
“Get it from your friend.” I slammed the door.
*
“Everyone’s a winner. Come on, mister, five’ll get you ten. Ten’ll get you twenty. Easy peasy, just pick the card.”
The singsong patter of a three-card monte hustle reached us. Bill gave a gusting sigh. “Fuckin’ Joe Twitch. Just ’cause he’s a sometime snitch he thinks he can pull this shit. Let’s go protect the rubes.”
Joe had set up between the Jokertown Dime Museum and Freakers, a spot guaranteed to get a lot of traffic. The citizens of Jokertown ignored him, but there was a crowd of tourists gathered around. None of them had ever seen a man’s hands move that fast. They were almost a blur. The man guiding those hands was short, wiry, and ugly as sin. He had faintly mottled skin, curly brown hair, and catlike green eyes that technically made him a joker. Aces and deuces were people who were outwardly unchanged, but possessed superhuman (or totally lame) powers.
The current mark had his cowboy hat pushed well back on his head, and was watching the moving cards with frowning concentration. He made his pick. It was wrong—of course—and Joe took his money. That’s when I saw the tattoos across his knuckles—FAST and FSTR.
Before another sucker could step up Bill pushed through the crowd. “Clear out, folks, you’re blocking the sidewalk.”
The crowd moved away with alacrity. Joe had the cards and money in his pocket and the table folded before I had taken two steps. Bill extended his nightstick. That plus a single word, “DON’T,” rooted Joe where he stood.
“Aww, shit, Tinkerbill, I’m just an honest businessman, making an honest buck.”
“No, Twitch, you’re a crook and hustler. I don’t want to hear you’ve moved over one block and set up again.”
“This is like fucking harassment!” His body swayed and jerked spasmodically. “I’m get a lawyer, take way to the Supreme Court!” He was talking so fast that he was dropping words, and a tiny rivulet of drool had begun to run from the corner of his mouth.
“No, Twitch, this isn’t harassment. This is harassment.” Bill pointed his nightstick at Joe Twitch and whistled.
The pink glow, stars, and sparks appeared all around Joe’s skinny body. For an instant I thought the guy was going to cry, and pity briefly twisted my gut. Now that I was close I could see dark circles under Joe’s eyes, and he looked like he’d been missing too many meals. He was also young, probably no older than me.
The moment of naked vulnerability passed, and he settled into bluster. “I’m somebody! I was on American Hero.” He was madly twitching now, popping his knuckles over and over. “You know Curveball? Babe, right? Well, her and me, we’re like this!” He crossed his fingers. “I can get her number for you.”
For one brief, wild moment I considered it, but then decided dating an ace would probably be more excitement than I needed. “No thanks.”
“And trying to bribe an officer can get you arrested,” Bill said.
“Yeah, like you’re not all on the take.”
Bill’s face tightened in anger at Twitch’s words. “Get out of here before I decide to find some reason to arrest you.”
Twitch and his table disappeared.
I spent the rest of the day occasionally thinking about the skinny joker and those desperate eyes. I was beginning to discover that sometimes certain people just get under your skin. Like the old lady whose apartment had been burgled, and she just kept crying because the perps had let her cat out. I had radioed K-10 and Tabby to be on the lookout. Quattore had been sympathetic, but Tabby had told me to shove it, he wasn’t the fuckin’ ASPCA. And now Joe Twitch.
We got back to the precinct at the end of our shift, I sat down in my chair, and the stench of cat urine rose up around me like an almost visible cloud. I felt the wet go right through the seat of my pants. Puff was laughing, his eyes glittering with malice. Tabby sauntered over. “Don’t you ever give me an order again, Franny,” he said in a low, ugly voice.
Like Joe, I didn’t know whether to fight or cry. I settled on, “It’s Frank, and I asked you for a favor.” It sounded lame even to me.
*
Wednesday afternoon I was typing up a report about a cat fight between two strippers at Freakers that had resulted in assault and property damage charges. Beastie and his partner Chey Moleka, a Cambodian immigrant who was known for sharp elbows and voracious ambition, came through with another naked girl. I assumed she was naked. Her feet and legs were bare, and she was wrapped in Beastie’s voluminous yellow raincoat. This was the sixth naked chick in three days. They all told the same story—they were just walking along, minding their own business, when suddenly their clothes disappeared. For my own satisfaction I had stayed late one night, and tried to establish some connection between the women when there had only been four of them. I hadn’t found a single point of contact.
“Where did you find her?” I asked.
“On Bowery,” Moleka replied shortly. Ever since she’d found out that my dad had been the captain of the 5th she’d gotten pretty short with me. Competition was a terrible thing—and I was planning on burying her.
And while I was daydreaming about my future victories something suddenly clicked. Frantically I rummaged through my desk and pulled out my notes on the other flashers. I tried to bring up MapQuest on the old desktop on Bill’s desk, but it hummed, clicked, and gave me the blue screen of death.
I went over to James McTate’s desk. He was new to the 5th, a detective and a joker/ace. If you just saw his face you would think he was normal, but his body was anorexic thin, and his bones seemed to be covered with skin and nothing else. He had immediately been dubbed Slim Jim. He was from Arizona, but for some inexplicable reason had decided to move to New York. When I thought about being a joker/ace in a place like Arizona, I started to understand why he’d moved.
McTate was a detective, but friendly, so I wasn’t too shy about approaching him. His partner, Tenry Fong, one of the older guys on the force, gave me a cold glance and went back to his report. Bill kept telling me that the detectives were no better than those of us in uniform, but I couldn’t shake the feeling they got the best cases, and I craved one of those shiny gold badges. Slim Jim looked up at my approach.
“Uh... could I use your computer? Just for a second,” I hastened to add. “Ours is...” I made a helpless gesture.
“Sure.” He pushed off with a foot and went wheeling out of the way. I brought up MapQuest, printed out the page, and highlighted the bus route. It ran along Park Row, then straight up the Bowery to Cooper Union and then continued up Third Avenue. Next I marked the location of the flashers in a different colored ink. Most were along the Bowery, but there had been a number of Cooper Union college girls among them.
I jumped out of my (new) chair, and yelled, “He’s riding the 103 bus. It’s somebody on the bus!”
“What are you yapping about, Franny?” Bugeye growled.
“Frank,” I said wearily, knowing it would have no effect.
I found Bill in the bathroom, and poured out my theory. He listened while finishing up. He shook off, zipped up, washed up, and said, “Let’s go talk to the sarge.”
We found Sergeant Choy down in the basement constructing a tiny machine out of paper clips and tin foil. I had been around long enough to learn her ace power. She could control any machine she had built or heavily modified.
“The rook here has a theory about the naked chicks. I think he may be on to something.”
I went through it all again to an impassive Choy. “I don’t have a car here, ma’am. I ride the bus, a lot, ma’am, and I realized all these flashing events are happening along one particular bus line. And it’s all pretty girls in their late teens and twenties, ma’am. It’s some guy on the bus, ma’am. I’m sure of it.”
Choy ran a hand through her silver-flecked black hair. “One ma’am is sufficient. It’s a good theory. Let’s test it out. Bill, you and the rook wear civvies tomorrow. We’ll put you both on the bus. I’ll contact the other precincts where that bus runs, and tell them we’re running a sting that will cross their territory. Now we just need a tasty temptation.”
“Apsara would be perfect,” I heard myself saying.
Bill and Choy exchanged amused looks. “Yes, I expect a lot of men would like to see that.” She tapped thoughtfully on the table with a bent paper clip. “If this perv is on the bus she would be hard to resist.”
“And I hear she’s not too much in the resistance department,” Bill said, then hastened to add, “Though she is a civilian... technically.”
Choy pushed back her chair. “Let’s ask her.”
*
So, the next morning I found myself riding the bus pretending to read the New York Times while I watched my fellow commuters. Apsara was happy to help, so she was set up to parade down the Bowery as the bus passed. All around her were various other officers ready to act, and Choy overseeing the operation.
I was seated at the back of the bus while Bill grooved on his iPod at the front. I focused on men seated in the window seats on the sidewalk side of the bus. I glanced ahead and saw Apsara prancing down the street carrying a shopping bag. Her long hair swayed with each swing of her hips. I forced myself back to watching the commuters instead of the girl. Good move. I saw a skinny teenage boy of maybe sixteen come slightly out of his seat. As I watched, his tongue licked nervously at his lips, and he raised his hand, brought his fingers to his lips, and blew a kiss. Apsara’s clothes vanished, and the kid leaned forward watching avidly as the bus went farting past.
I was out of my seat, grabbing the cuffs out of my pocket. “Got you!” A look of almost comical alarm crossed the kid’s face. “You are under arrest.”
Bill pulled the cord and the bus rolled to a stop.
The kid started yelling. “Don’t you touch me! I can fuck you up bad! I can make anything disappear. I could disappear your dick... or... or your eyeballs.”
Bill and I exchanged a glance. Clearly he was an ace. Clearly we didn’t know the limit of his powers. The heavyset African-American woman in the seat next to the kid handled the situation for us. She swung her incredibly large, and apparently incredibly heavy, purse into his belly. The air whoofed out of the kid, and he folded up like an origami figure. “You took the clothes off that girl? You’re a damn pervert,” she yelled. She slid out of her seat to make room for me. “You arrest his ass.”
I spun the still gasping kid around, pulled his arms behind his back, and slapped on the cuffs. Maybe he had to blow a kiss to use his power. I sure hoped so. In case he really could remove my dick. By now Bill had pushed through |
pursuant to section 202 for such month, ``(2) such person's intermediate and export sales credit pursuant to section 203 for such month, ``(3) the administration credit pursuant to section 204 for such month, ``(4) the bad debt credit pursuant to section 205 for such month, ``(5) the insurance proceeds credit pursuant to section 206 for such month, ``(6) the transitional inventory credit pursuant to section 902, and ``(7) any amount paid in excess of the amount due. ``(b) Credits Not Additive.--Only one credit allowed by chapter 2 may be taken with respect to any particular gross payment. ``SEC. 202. BUSINESS USE CONVERSION CREDIT. ``(a) In General.--For purposes of section 201, a person's business use conversion credit for any month is the aggregate of the amounts determined under subsection (b) with respect to taxable property and services-- ``(1) on which tax was imposed by section 101 (and actually paid), and ``(2) which commenced to be 95 percent or more used during such month for business purposes (within the meaning of section 102(b)). ``(b) Amount of Credit.--The amount determined under this paragraph with respect to any taxable property or service is the lesser of-- ``(1) the product of-- ``(A) the rate imposed by section 101, and ``(B) the quotient that is-- ``(i) the fair market value of the property or service when its use is converted, divided by ``(ii) the quantity that is 1 minus the tax rate imposed by section 101, or ``(2) the amount of tax paid with respect to such taxable property or service, including the amount, if any, determined in accordance with section 705 (relating to mixed use property). ``SEC. 203. INTERMEDIATE AND EXPORT SALES CREDIT. ``For purposes of section 201, a person's intermediate and export sales credit is the amount of sales tax paid on the purchase of any taxable property or service purchased for-- ``(1) a business purpose in a trade or business (as defined in section 102(b)), or ``(2) export from the United States for use or consumption outside the United States. ``SEC. 204. ADMINISTRATION CREDIT. ``(a) In General.--Every person filing a timely monthly report (with regard to extensions) in compliance with section 501 shall be entitled to a taxpayer administrative credit equal to the greater of-- ``(1) $200, or ``(2) one-quarter of 1 percent of the tax remitted. ``(b) Limitation.--The credit allowed under this section shall not exceed 20 percent of the tax due to be remitted prior to the application of any credit or credits permitted by section 201. ``SEC. 205. BAD DEBT CREDIT. ``(a) Financial Intermediation Services.--Any person who has experienced a bad debt (other than unpaid invoices within the meaning of subsection (b)) shall be entitled to a credit equal to the product of-- ``(1) the rate imposed by section 101, and ``(2) the quotient that is-- ``(A) the amount of the bad debt (as defined in section 802), divided by ``(B) the quantity that is 1 minus the rate imposed by section 101. ``(b) Unpaid Invoices.--Any person electing the accrual method pursuant to section 503 that has with respect to a transaction-- ``(1) invoiced the tax imposed by section 101, ``(2) remitted the invoiced tax, ``(3) actually delivered the taxable property or performed the taxable services invoiced, and ``(4) not been paid 180 days after date the invoice was due to be paid, shall be entitled to a credit equal to the amount of tax remitted and unpaid by the purchaser. ``(c) Subsequent Payment.--Any payment made with respect to a transaction subsequent to a section 205 credit being taken with respect to that transaction shall be subject to tax in the month the payment was received as if a tax inclusive sale of taxable property and services in the amount of the payment had been made. ``(d) Partial Payments.--Partial payments shall be treated as pro rata payments of the underlying obligation and shall be allocated proportionately-- ``(1) for fully taxable payments, between payment for the taxable property and service and tax, and ``(2) for partially taxable payments, among payment for the taxable property and service, tax and other payment. ``(e) Related Parties.--The credit provided by this section shall not be available with respect to sales made to related parties. For purposes of this section, related party means affiliated firms and family members (as defined in section 302(b)). ``SEC. 206. INSURANCE PROCEEDS CREDIT. ``(a) In General.--A person receiving a payment from an insurer by virtue of an insurance contract shall be entitled to a credit in an amount determined by subsection (b), less any amount paid to the insured by the insurer pursuant to subsection (c), if the entire premium (except that portion allocable to the investment account of the underlying policy) for the insurance contract giving rise to the insurer's obligation to make a payment to the insured was subject to the tax imposed by section 101 and said tax was paid. ``(b) Credit Amount.--The amount of the credit shall be the product of-- ``(1) the rate imposed by section 101, and ``(2) the quotient that is-- ``(A) the amount of the payment made by the insurer to the insured, divided by ``(B) the quantity that is 1 minus the rate imposed by section 101. ``(c) Administrative Option.--The credit determined in accordance with subsection (b) shall be paid by the insurer to the insured and the insurer shall be entitled to the credit in lieu of the insured, except that the insurer may elect, in a form prescribed by the Secretary, to not pay the credit and require the insured to make application for the credit. In the event of such election, the insurer shall provide to the Secretary and the insured the name and tax identification number of the insurer and of the insured and indicate the proper amount of the credit. ``(d) Coordination With Respect to Exemption.--If taxable property or services purchased by an insurer on behalf of an insured are purchased free of tax by virtue of section 2(a)(8)(C), then the credit provided by this section shall not be available with respect to that purchase. ``(e) Insurance Contract.--For purposes of subsection (a), the term insurance contract' shall include a life insurance contract, a health insurance contract, a property and casualty loss insurance contract, a general liability insurance contract, a marine insurance contract, a fire insurance contract, an accident insurance contract, a disability insurance contract, a long-term care insurance contract, and an insurance contract that provides a combination of these types of insurance. ``SEC. 207. REFUNDS. ``(a) Registered Sellers.--If a registered seller files a monthly tax report with an overpayment, then, upon application by the registered seller in a form prescribed by the sales tax administering authority, the overpayment shown on the report shall be refunded to the registered seller within 60 days of receipt of said application. In the absence of such application, the overpayment may be carried forward, without interest, by the person entitled to the credit. ``(b) Other Persons.--If a person other than a registered seller has an overpayment for any month, then, upon application by the person in a form prescribed by the sales tax administering authority, the credit balance due shall be refunded to the person within 60 days of receipt of said application. ``(c) Interest.--No interest shall be paid on any balance due from the sales tax administering authority under this subsection for any month if such balance due is paid within 60 days after the application for refund is received. Balances due not paid within 60 days after the application for refund is received shall bear interest from the date of application. Interest shall be paid at the Federal short-term rate (as defined in section 511). ``(d) Suspension of Period To Pay Refund Only if Federal or State Court Ruling.--The 60-day periods under subsections (a) and (b) shall be suspended with respect to a purported overpayment (or portion thereof) only during any period that there is in effect a preliminary, temporary, or final ruling from a Federal or State court that there is reasonable cause to believe that such overpayment may not actually be due. ``CHAPTER 3--FAMILY CONSUMPTION ALLOWANCE ``Sec. 301. Family consumption allowance. ``Sec. 302. Qualified family. ``Sec. 303. Monthly poverty level. ``Sec. 304. Rebate mechanism. ``Sec. 305. Change in family circumstances. ``SEC. 301. FAMILY CONSUMPTION ALLOWANCE. ``Each qualified family shall be eligible to receive a sales tax rebate each month. The sales tax rebate shall be in an amount equal to the product of-- ``(1) the rate of tax imposed by section 101, and ``(2) the monthly poverty level. ``SEC. 302. QUALIFIED FAMILY. ``(a) General Rule.--For purposes of this chapter, the term `qualified family' shall mean 1 or more family members sharing a common residence. All family members sharing a common residence shall be considered as part of 1 qualified family. ``(b) Family Size Determination.-- ``(1) In general.--To determine the size of a qualified family for purposes of this chapter, family members shall mean-- ``(A) an individual, ``(B) the individual's spouse, ``(C) all lineal ancestors and descendants of said individual (and such individual's spouse), ``(D) all legally adopted children of such individual (and such individual's spouse), and ``(E) all children under legal guardianship of such individual (or such individual's spouse). ``(2) Identification requirements.--In order for a person to be counted as a member of the family for purposes of determining the size of the qualified family, such person must-- ``(A) have a bona fide Social Security number; and ``(B) be a lawful resident of the United States. ``(c) Children Living Away From Home.-- ``(1) Students living away from home.--Any person who was a registered student during not fewer than 5 months in a calendar year while living away from the common residence of a qualified family but who receives over 50 percent of such person's support during a calendar year from members of the qualified family shall be included as part of the family unit whose members provided said support for purposes of this chapter. ``(2) Children of divorced or separated parents.--If a child's parents are divorced or legally separated, a child for purposes of this chapter shall be treated as part of the qualified family of the custodial parent. In cases of joint custody, the custodial parent for purposes of this chapter shall be the parent that has custody of the child for more than one-half of the time during a given calendar year. A parent entitled to be treated as the custodial parent pursuant to this paragraph may release this claim to the other parent if said release is in writing. ``(d) Annual Registration.--In order to receive the family consumption allowance provided by section 301, a qualified family must register with the sales tax administering authority in a form prescribed by the Secretary. The annual registration form shall provide-- ``(1) the name of each family member who shared the qualified family's residence on the family determination date, ``(2) the Social Security number of each family member on the family determination date who shared the qualified family's residence on the family determination date, ``(3) the family member or family members to whom the family consumption allowance should be paid, ``(4) a certification that all listed family members are lawful residents of the United States, ``(5) a certification that all family members sharing the common residence are listed, ``(6) a certification that no family members were incarcerated on the family determination date (within the meaning of subsection (l)), and ``(7) the address of the qualified family. Said registration shall be signed by all members of the qualified family that have attained the age of 21 years as of the date of filing. ``(e) Registration Not Mandatory.--Registration is not mandatory for any qualified family. ``(f) Effect of Failure To Provide Annual Registration.--Any qualified family that fails to register in accordance with this section within 30 days of the family determination date, shall cease receiving the monthly family consumption allowance in the month beginning 90 days after the family determination date. ``(g) Effect of Curing Failure To Provide Annual Registration.--Any qualified family that failed to timely make its annual registration in accordance with this section but subsequently cures its failure to register, shall be entitled to up to 6 months of lapsed sales tax rebate payments. No interest on lapsed payment amount shall be paid. ``(h) Effective Date of Annual Registrations.--Annual registrations shall take effect for the month beginning 90 days after the family registration date. ``(i) Effective Date of Revised Registrations.--A revised registration made pursuant to section 305 shall take effect for the first month beginning 60 days after the revised registration was filed. The existing registration shall remain in effect until the effective date of the revised registration. ``(j) Determination of Registration Filing Date.--An annual or revised registration shall be deemed filed when-- ``(1) deposited in the United States mail, postage prepaid, to the address of the sales tax administering authority; ``(2) delivered and accepted at the offices of the sales tax administering authority; or ``(3) provided to a designated commercial private courier service for delivery within 2 days to the sales tax administering authority at the address of the sales tax administering authority. ``(k) Proposed Registration To Be Provided.--Thirty or more days before the family registration date, the sales tax administering authority shall mail to the address shown on the most recent rebate registration or change of address notice filed pursuant to section 305(d) a proposed registration that may be simply signed by the appropriate family members if family circumstances have not changed. ``(l) Incarcerated Individuals.--An individual shall not be eligible under this chapter to be included as a member of any qualified family if that individual-- ``(1) is incarcerated in a local, State, or Federal jail, prison, mental hospital, or other institution on the family determination date, and ``(2) is scheduled to be incarcerated for 6 months or more in the 12-month period following the effective date of the annual registration or the revised registration of said qualified family. ``(m) Family Determination Date.--The family determination date is a date assigned to each family by the Secretary for purposes of determining qualified family size and other information necessary for the administration of this chapter. The Secretary shall promulgate regulations regarding the issuance of family determination dates. In the absence of any regulations, the family determination date for all families shall be October 1. The Secretary may assign family determination dates for administrative convenience. Permissible means of assigning family determination dates include a method based on the birthdates of family members. ``(n) Cross Reference.--For penalty for filing false rebate claim, see section 504(i). ``SEC. 303. MONTHLY POVERTY LEVEL. ``(a) In General.--The monthly poverty level for any particular month shall be one-twelfth of the `annual poverty level.' For purposes of this section the `annual poverty level' shall be the sum of-- ``(1) the annual level determined by the Department of Health and Human Services poverty guidelines required by sections 652 and 673(2) of the Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1981 for a particular family size, and ``(2) in case of families that include a married couple, the `annual marriage penalty elimination amount'. ``(b) Annual Marriage Penalty Elimination Amount.--The annual marriage penalty elimination amount shall be the amount that is-- ``(1) the amount that is two times the annual level determined by the Department of Health and Human Services poverty guidelines required by sections 652 and 673(2) of the Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1981 for a family of one, less ``(2) the annual level determined by the Department of Health and Human Services poverty guidelines required by sections 652 and 673(2) of the Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1981 for a family of two. ``SEC. 304. REBATE MECHANISM. ``(a) General Rule.--The Social Security Administration shall provide a monthly sales tax rebate to duly registered qualified families in an amount determined in accordance with section 301. ``(b) Persons Receiving Rebate.--The payments shall be made to the persons designated by the qualifying family in the annual or revised registration for each qualified family in effect with respect to the month for which payment is being made. Payments may only be made to persons 18 years or older. If more than 1 person is designated in a registration to receive the rebate, then the rebate payment shall be divided evenly between or among those persons designated. ``(c) When Rebates Mailed.--Rebates shall be mailed on or before the first business day of the month for which the rebate is being provided. ``(d) Smartcards and Direct Electronic Deposit Permissible.--The Social Security Administration may provide rebates in the form of smartcards that carry cash balances in their memory for use in making purchases at retail establishments or by direct electronic deposit. ``SEC. 305. CHANGE IN FAMILY CIRCUMSTANCES. ``(a) General Rule.--In the absence of the filing of a revised registration in accordance with this chapter, the common residence of the qualified family, marital status and number of persons in a qualified family on the family registration date shall govern determinations required to be made under this chapter for purposes of the following calendar year. ``(b) No Double Counting.--In no event shall any person be considered part of more than 1 qualified family. ``(c) Revised Registration Permissible.--A qualified family may file a revised registration for purposes of section 302(d) to reflect a change in family circumstances. A revised registration form shall provide-- ``(1) the name of each family member who shared the qualified family's residence on the filing date of the revised registration, ``(2) the Social Security number of each family member who shared the qualified family's residence on the filing date of the revised registration, ``(3) the family member or family members to whom the family consumption allowance should be paid, ``(4) a certification that all listed family members are lawful residents of the United States, ``(5) a certification that all family members sharing the commoner residence are listed, ``(6) a certification that no family members were incarcerated on the family determination date (within the meaning of section 302(1)), and ``(7) the address of the qualified family. Said revised registration shall be signed by all members of the qualified family that have attained the age of 21 years as of the filing date of the revised registration. ``(d) Change of Address.--A change of address for a qualified family may be filed with the sales tax administering authority at any time and shall not constitute a revised registration. ``(e) Revised Registration Not Mandatory.--Revised registrations reflecting changes in family status are not mandatory. ``CHAPTER 4--FEDERAL AND STATE COOPERATIVE TAX ADMINISTRATION ``Sec. 401. Authority for States to collect tax. ``Sec. 402. Federal administrative support for States. ``Sec. 403. Federal-State tax conferences. ``Sec. 404. Federal administration in certain States. ``Sec. 405. Interstate allocation and destination determination. ``Sec. 406. General administrative matters. ``Sec. 407. Jurisdiction. ``SEC. 401 AUTHORITY FOR STATES TO COLLECT TAX. ``(a) In General.--The tax imposed by section 101 on gross payments for the use or consumption of taxable property or services within a State shall be administered, collected, and remitted to the United States Treasury by such State if the State is an administering State. ``(b) Administering State.--For purposes of this section, the term `administering State' means any State-- ``(1) which maintains a sales tax, and ``(2) which enters into a cooperative agreement with the Secretary containing reasonable provisions governing the administration by such State of the taxes imposed by the subtitle and the remittance to the United States in a timely manner of taxes collected under this chapter. ``(c) Cooperative Agreements.--The agreement under subsection (b)(2) shall include provisions for the expeditious transfer of funds, contact officers, dispute resolution, information exchange, confidentiality, taxpayer rights, and other matters of importance. The agreement shall not contain extraneous matters. ``(d) Timely Remittance of Tax.-- ``(1) In general.--Administering States shall remit and pay over taxes collected under this subtitle on behalf of the United States (less the administration fee allowable under paragraph (2)) not later than 5 days after receipt. Interest at 150 percent of the Federal short-term rate shall be paid with respect to amounts remitted after the due date. ``(2) Administration fee.--An administering State may retain an administration fee equal to one-quarter of 1 percent of the amounts otherwise required to be remitted to the United States under this chapter by the administering State. ``(e) Limitation on Administration of Tax by United States.--The Secretary may administer the tax imposed by this subtitle in an administering State only if-- ``(1)(A) such State has failed on a regular basis to timely remit to the United States taxes collected under this chapter on behalf of the United States; or ``(B) such State has on a regular basis otherwise materially breached the agreement referred to in subsection (b)(2); ``(2) the State has failed to cure such alleged failures and breaches within a reasonable time; ``(3) the Secretary provides such State with written notice of such alleged failures and breaches; and ``(4) a District Court of the United States within such State, upon application of the Secretary, has rendered a decision-- ``(A) making findings of fact that-- ``(i) such State has failed on a regular basis to timely remit to the United States taxes collected under this chapter on behalf of the United States, or such State has on a regular basis otherwise materially breached the agreement referred to in subsection (b)(2); ``(ii) the Secretary has provided such State with written notice of such alleged failures and breaches; and ``(iii) the State has failed to cure such alleged failures and breaches within a reasonable time; and ``(B) making a determination that it is in the best interest of the citizens of the United States that the administering State's authority to administer the tax imposed by this subtitle be revoked and said tax be administered directly by the Secretary. The order of the District Court revoking the authority of an Administering State shall contain provisions governing the orderly transfer of authority to the Secretary. ``(f) Reinstitution.--A State that has had its authority revoked pursuant to subsection (e) shall not be an administering State for a period of not less than 5 years after the date of the order of revocation. For the first calendar year commencing 8 years after the date of the order of revocation, the State shall be regarded without prejudice as eligible to become an administering State. ``(g) Third State Administration Permissible.--It shall be permissible for a State to contract with an administering State to administer the State's sales tax for an agreed fee. In this case, the agreement contemplated by subsection (c) shall have both the State and the Federal Government as parties. ``(h) Investigations and Audits.--Administering States shall not conduct investigations or audits at facilities in other administering States in connection with the tax imposed by section 101 or conforming State sales tax but shall instead cooperate with other administering States using the mechanisms established by section 402, by compact or by other agreement. ``SEC. 402. FEDERAL ADMINISTRATIVE SUPPORT FOR STATES. ``(a) In General.--The Secretary shall administer a program to facilitate information sharing among States. ``(b) State Compacts.--The Secretary shall facilitate, and may be a party to a compact among States for purposes of facilitating the taxation of interstate purchases and for other purposes that may facilitate implementation of this subtitle. ``(c) Agreement With Conforming States.--The Secretary is authorized to enter into and shall enter into an agreement among conforming States enabling conforming States to collect conforming State sales tax on sales made by sellers without a particular conforming State to a destination within that particular conforming State. ``(d) Secretary's Authority.--The Secretary shall have the authority to promulgate regulations, to provide guidelines, to assist States in administering the national sales tax, to provide for uniformity in the administration of the tax and to provide guidance to the public. ``SEC. 403. FEDERAL-STATE TAX CONFERENCES. ``Not less than once annually, the Secretary shall host a conference with the sales tax administrators from the various administering States to evaluate the state of the national sales tax system, to address issues of mutual concern and to develop and consider legislative, regulatory, and administrative proposals to improve the tax system. ``SEC. 404. FEDERAL ADMINISTRATION IN CERTAIN STATES. ``The Secretary shall administer the tax imposed by this subtitle in any State or other United States jurisdiction that-- ``(1) is not an administering State, or ``(2) elected to have another State administer its tax in accordance with section 401(g). ``SEC. 405. INTERSTATE ALLOCATION AND DESTINATION DETERMINATION. ``(a) Destination Generally.--The tax imposed by this subtitle is a destination principle tax. This section shall govern for purposes of determining-- ``(1) whether the destination of taxable property and services is within or without the United States, and ``(2) which State or territory within the United States is the destination of taxable property and services. ``(b) Tangible Personal Property.--Except as provided in subsection (g) (relating to certain leases), the destination of tangible personal property shall be the State or territory in which the property was first delivered to the purchaser (including agents and authorized representatives). ``(c) Real Property.--The destination of real property, or rents or leaseholds on real property, shall be the State or territory in which the real property is located. ``(d) Other Property.--The destination of any other taxable property shall be the residence of the purchaser. ``(e) Services.-- ``(1) General rule.--The destination of services shall be the State or territory in which the use or consumption of the services occurred. Allocation of service invoices relating to more than 1 jurisdiction shall be on the basis of time or another method determined by regulation. ``(2) Telecommunications services.--The destination of telecommunications services shall be the residence of the purchaser. Telecommunications services include telephone, telegraph, beeper, radio, cable television, satellite, and computer on-line or network services. ``(3) Domestic transportation services.--For transportation services where all of the final destinations are within the United States, the destination of transportation services shall be the final destination of the trip (in the case of round or multiple trip fares, the services amount shall be equally allocated among each final destination). ``(4) International transportation services.--For transportation services where the final destination or origin of the trip is without the United States, the service amount shall be deemed 50 percent attributable to the United States destination or origin. ``(5) Electrical service.--The destination of electrical services shall be the residence of the purchaser. ``(f) Financial Intermediation Services.--The destination of financial intermediation services shall be the residence of the purchaser. ``(g) Rents Paid for the Lease of Tangible Property.-- ``(1) General rule.--Except as provided in paragraph (2), the destination of rents paid for the lease of tangible property and leaseholds on such property shall be where the property is located while in use. ``(2) Land vehicles; aircraft, water craft.--The destination of rental and lease payments on land vehicles, aircraft and water craft shall be-- ``(A) in the case of rentals and leases of a term of 1 month or less, the location where the land vehicle, aircraft, or water craft was originally delivered to the renter or lessee; and ``(B) in the case of rentals and leases of a term greater than 1 month, the residence of the renter or lessee. ``(h) Allocation Rules.--For purposes of allocating revenue-- ``(1) between or among administering States from taxes imposed by this subtitle or from State sales taxes administered by third-party administering States, or ``(2) between or among States imposing conforming State sales taxes, the revenue shall be allocated to those States that are the destination of the taxable property or service. ``(i) Federal Office of Revenue Allocation.--The Secretary shall establish an Office of Revenue Allocation to arbitrate any claims or disputes among administering States as to the destination of taxable property and services for purposes of allocating revenue between or among the States from taxes imposed by this subtitle. The determination of the Administrator of the Office of Revenue Allocation shall be subject to judicial review in any Federal court with competent jurisdiction. The standard of review shall be abuse of discretion. ``SEC. 406. GENERAL ADMINISTRATIVE MATTERS. ``(a) In General.--The Secretary and each sales tax administering authority may employ such persons as may be necessary for the administration of this subtitle and may delegate to employees the authority to conduct interviews, hearings, prescribe rules, promulgate regulations, and perform such other duties as are required by this subtitle. ``(b) Resolution of Any Inconsistent Rules and Regulations.--In the event that the Secretary and any sales tax administering authority have issued inconsistent rules or regulations, any lawful rule or regulation issued by the Secretary shall govern. ``(c) Adequate Notice To Be Provided.--Except in the case of an emergency declared by the Secretary (and not his designee), no rule or regulation issued by the Secretary with respect to any internal revenue law shall take effect before 90 days have elapsed after its publication in the Federal Register. Upon issuance, the Secretary shall provide copies of all rules or regulations issued under this title to each sales tax administering authority. ``(d) No Rules, Rulings, or Regulations With Retroactive Effect.-- No rule, ruling, or regulation issued or promulgated by the Secretary relating to any internal revenue law or by a sales tax administering authority shall apply to a period prior to its publication in the Federal Register (or State equivalent) except that a regulation may take retroactive effect to prevent abuse. ``(e) Review of Impact of Regulations, Rules, and Rulings on Small Business.-- ``(1) Submission to small business administration.--After publication of any proposed or temporary regulation by the Secretary relating to internal revenue laws, the Secretary shall submit such regulation to the Chief Counsel for Advocacy of the Small Business Administration for comment on the impact of such regulation on small businesses. Not later than the date 30 days after the date of such submission, the Chief Counsel for Advocacy of the Small Business Administration shall submit comments on such regulation to the Secretary. ``(2) Consideration of comments.--In prescribing any final regulation which supersedes a proposed or temporary regulation which had been submitted under this subsection to the Chief Counsel for Advocacy of the Small Business Administration, the Secretary shall-- ``(A) consider the comments of the Chief Counsel for Advocacy of the Small Business Administration on such proposed or temporary regulation, and ``(B) in promulgating such final regulation, include a narrative that describes the response to such comments. ``(3) Submission of certain final regulation.--In the case of promulgation by the Secretary of any final regulations (other than a temporary regulation) which do not supersede a proposed regulation, the requirements of paragraphs (1) and (2) shall apply, except that the submission under paragraph (1) shall be made at least 30 days before the date of such promulgation, and the consideration and discussion required under paragraph (2) shall be made in connection with the promulgation of such final regulation. ``(f) Small Business Regulatory Safeguards.--The Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act (Public Law 104-121; 110 Stat. 857 (`SBREFA')) and the Regulatory Flexibility Act (5 U.S.C. 601-612 (`RFA')) shall apply to regulations promulgated under this subtitle. ``SEC. 407. JURISDICTION. ``(a) State Jurisdiction.--A sales tax administering authority shall have jurisdiction over any gross payments made which have a destination (as determined in accordance with section 405) within the State of said sales tax administering authority. This grant of jurisdiction is not exclusive of any other jurisdiction that such sales tax administering authority may have. ``(b) Federal Jurisdiction.--The grant of jurisdiction in subsection (a) shall not be in derogation of Federal jurisdiction over the same matter. The Federal Government shall have the right to exercise preemptive jurisdiction over matters relating to the taxes imposed by this subtitle. ``CHAPTER 5--OTHER ADMINISTRATIVE PROVISIONS ``Sec. 501. Monthly reports and payments. ``Sec. 502. Registration. ``Sec. 503. Accounting. ``Sec. 504. Penalties. ``Sec. 505. Burden of persuasion and burden of production. ``Sec. 506. Attorneys' and accountancy fees. ``Sec. 507. Summons, examinations, audits, etc. ``Sec. 508. Records. ``Sec. 509. Tax to be separately stated and charged. ``Sec. 510. Coordination with title 11. ``Sec. 511. Applicable interest rate. ``SEC. 501. MONTHLY REPORTS AND PAYMENTS. ``(a) Tax Reports and Filing Dates.-- ``(1) In general.--On or before the 15th day of each month, each person who is-- ``(A) liable to collect and remit the tax imposed by this subtitle by reason of section 103(a), or ``(B) liable to pay tax imposed by this subtitle which is not collected pursuant to section 103(a), shall submit to the appropriate sales tax administering authority (in a form prescribed by the Secretary) a report relating to the previous calendar month. ``(2) Contents of report.--The report required under paragraph (1) shall set forth-- ``(A) the gross payments referred to in section 101, ``(B) the tax collected under chapter 4 in connection with such payments, ``(C) the amount and type of any credit claimed, and ``(D) other information reasonably required by the Secretary or the sales tax administering authority for the administration, collection, and remittance of the tax imposed by this subtitle. ``(b) Tax Payments Date.-- ``(1) General rule.--The tax imposed by this subtitle during any calendar month is due and shall be paid to the appropriate sales tax administering authority on or before the 15th day of the succeeding month. Both Federal tax imposed by this subtitle and confirming State sales tax (if any) shall be paid in 1 aggregate payment. ``(2) Cross reference.--See subsection (e) relating to remitting of separate segregated funds for sellers that are not small sellers. ``(c) Extensions for Filing Reports.-- ``(1) Automatic extensions for not more than 30 days.--On application, an extension of not more than 30 days to file reports under subsection (a) shall be automatically granted. ``(2) Other extensions.--On application, extensions of 30 to 60 days to file such reports shall be liberally granted by the sales tax administering authority for reasonable cause. Extensions greater than 60 days may be granted by the sales tax administering authority to avoid hardship. ``(3) No extension for payment of taxes.--Notwithstanding paragraphs (1) and (2), no extension shall be granted with respect to the time for paying or remitting the taxes under this subtitle. ``(d) Telephone Reporting of Violations.--The Secretary shall establish a system under which a violation of this subtitle can be brought to the attention of the sales tax administering authority for investigation through the use of a toll-free telephone number and otherwise. ``(e) Separate Segregated Accounts.-- ``(1) In general.--Any registered seller that is not a small seller shall deposit all sales taxes collected pursuant to section 103 in a particular week in a separate segregated account maintained at a bank or other financial institution within 3 business days of the end of such week. Said registered seller shall also maintain in that account sufficient funds to meet the bank or financial institution minimum balance requirements, if any, and to pay account fees and costs. ``(2) Small seller.--For purposes of this subsection, a small seller is any person that has not collected $20,000 or more of the taxes imposed by this subtitle in any of the previous 12 months. ``(3) Large sellers.--Any seller that has collected $100,000 or more of the taxes imposed by this subtitle in any of the previous 12 months is a large seller. A large seller shall remit to the sales tax administering authority the entire balance of deposited taxes in its separate segregated account on the first business day following the end of the calendar week. The Secretary may by regulation require the electronic transfer of funds due from large sellers. ``(4) Week.--For purposes of this subsection, the term `week' shall mean the 7-day period ending on a Friday. ``(f) Determination of Report Filing Date.--A report filed pursuant to subsection (a) shall be deemed filed when-- ``(1) deposited in the United States mail, postage prepaid, addressed to the sales tax administering authority, ``(2) delivered and accepted at the offices of the sales tax administering authority, ``(3) provided to a designated commercial private courier service for delivery within 2 days to the sales tax administering authority at the address of the sales tax administering authority, or ``(4) by other means permitted by the Secretary. ``(g) Security Requirements.--A large seller (within the meaning of subsection (e)(3)) shall be required to provide security in an amount equal to the greater of $100,000 or one and one-half times the seller's average monthly tax liability during the previous 6 calendar months. Security may be a cash bond, a bond from a surety company approved by the Secretary, a certificate of deposit, or a State or United States Treasury bond. A bond qualifying under this subsection must be a continuing instrument for each calendar year (or portion thereof) that the bond is in effect. The bond must remain in effect until the surety or sureties are released and discharged. Failure to provide security in accordance with this section shall result in revocation of the seller's section 502 registration. If a person who has provided security pursuant to this subsection-- ``(1) fails to pay an amount indicated in a final notice of amount due under this subtitle (within the meaning of section 605(d)), ``(2) no Taxpayer Assistance Order is in effect relating to the amount due, ``(3) either the time for filing an appeal pursuant to section 604 has passed or the appeal was denied, and ``(4) the amount due is not being litigated in any judicial forum, then the security or part of the security, as the case may be, may be forfeited in favor of the Secretary to the extent of such tax due (plus interest if any). ``(h) Rewards Program.--The Secretary is authorized to maintain a program of awards wherein individuals that assist the Secretary or sales tax administering authorities in discovering or prosecuting tax fraud may be remunerated. ``(i) Cross Reference.--For interest due on taxes remitted late, see section 6601. ``SEC. 502. REGISTRATION. ``(a) In General.--Any person liable to collect and remit taxes pursuant to section 103(a) who is engaged in a trade or business shall register as a seller with the sales tax |
a flashy officer who handled some of Brooklyn’s most notorious crimes during the crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s.” The NYPD’s Conviction Integrity Unit has said after pressure from the NY Times that they will reopen every murder case that resulted in a guilty verdict after being investigated by Detective Louis Scarcella.
According to the New York Times the newspaper “examined a dozen cases involving Mr. Scarcella and found disturbing patterns, including the detective’s reliance on the same eyewitness, a crack-addicted prostitute, for multiple murder prosecutions and his delivery of confessions from suspects who later said they had told him nothing.”
City officials like Stringer have tried to distance the stories of retired detectives like Louis Scarcella from the NYPD officers operating today saying things like, “The 1980s were a difficult time in our city’s history… and in a certain way, we are sort of unearthing the tangled history of that time period in our court system today.”
This attempt to suggest that officers no longer manufacture false evidence leading to incarceration is clearly a maneuver to purposely hide the truth from the public. Stringer knows very well the story of NYPD undercover officer Steve Anderson, for instance, who testified for two days in 2011 on the common practice of “attaching bodies” to drugs, a term he used to describe the practice of planting drugs on individuals in order to keep statistics-driven sergeants from questioning officer “productivity.”
In that case, The New York Times once again reported that detective Anderson had become “numb” to the process after four years of being on a narcotics team based in Brooklyn and Queens.
“It was something I was seeing a lot of, whether it was from supervisors or undercovers and even investigators (who are the top officer in a police division) … Seeing it so much, it’s almost like you have no emotion with it,” Anderson testified.
Apologists for the NYPD know very well about the reports that came out just this week detailing how the Brooklyn DA’s office is looking into at least half a dozen cases going back to 2007 at the 67th Precinct, where cops are accused of planting and fabricating evidence to secure convictions of innocent men.
One of the men who was almost legally lynched by these group of officers, 53-year-old Jeffery Herring, was just acquitted this past Thursday of weapons possession charges when a confidential police informant was never produced, despite a judge’s order that the witness appear in court.
In researching the case, a lawyer for Herring found other cases involving the same group of police officers with suspiciously similar stories. In the other cases, defendants also said the guns were planted, with the police saying that “officers saw the suspects storing the guns in plastic bags or handkerchiefs.”
According to the NY Times: “After the arrests, more similarities arose: The use of confidential informers was suddenly mentioned months into the proceedings, and the informers were never produced in court even after judges’ and lawyers’ requests. Judges had called some of the police version of events ‘incredible,’ and the accounts ‘extremely evasive.’”
According to most reports, over the past five years the city has spent close to half a billion dollars ($428 million) in payouts to victims of police brutality or misconduct. In most capitalist publications these millions of dollars are portrayed as a waste of tax payer money while in reality the money is a pittance compared to the compensation our unjustly treated people rightfully deserve. The real waste here needs to be counted in the billions of minutes of precious human life needlessly spent inside the
inhumane prisons of the United States.Well, that's my take on the museum, but below, I'll offer another voice, one that's even more invested in this museum than I am.
My Interview with the Curator of EPIC: The Irish Emigration Museum, Nathan Mannion
I want to offer a huge thank you to Nathan as well as the EPIC Museum's staff and administration who wholeheartedly supported me in creating this article on the Epic Museum in Dublin. I was able to catch up with Nathan, and add a strong personal touch what The Irish Emigration Museum is all about.
1. What is the primary goal or objective of EPIC? What do you hope tourists take from it?
The primary goal of our museum is to share, record and display Ireland’s stories of emigration over the last 1,500 years. We highlight how the 10 million emigrants who left this island and their descendants, grew into the vibrant global Irish diaspora community we have today.
We hope that our visitors leave EPIC with a more profound understanding of how emigration has shaped Ireland and how, in turn, the Irish have helped to shape the wider world. Our exhibition includes over 330 individual stories of emigration, drawn from all over the globe so there are usually a few memorable stories for everyone.
2. This is a fairly new museum. Why was it important that this museum came into existence?
The founding of the museum was a landmark day for the country. Before EPIC opened last year there was nowhere Irish citizens or visitors to Ireland could go to learn more about our island’s emigrant tradition, or how our 70 million strong diaspora community came into being, despite the central role emigration has played in Ireland history. That there was a need for just such a cultural attraction has been demonstrated in the overwhelmingly positive feedback we have received from our visitors during the last year.
3. What has the response been to the museum up to now? Are there any particular personal stories you can recall that highlight the impact of this museum?
As mentioned our visitors’ responses to our exhibition have been fantastic. Thanks to the consistently positive reviews we’ve received on TripAdvisor over the last 12 months we now rank among the top five museums in Ireland. From suffering and exile to opportunity and success the saga of Irish emigration is of course an emotional one and many of our visitors are quite moved during their time in the museum. Three stories stand out in my memory in particular.
The first was a visitor from the United States who runs a project which documents the stories of Ireland’s LGBTQI community abroad. After his visit he contacted me to let me know he was moved to tears to see this aspect of our emigrant heritage recognised and featured in the museum. It was the first place he had ever seen it displayed publically. This was incredibly validating for us as an institution.
The second was an Irish woman who turned out to be the grandniece of a wonderful man named Father Michael Kelly who is featured in our Belief gallery. Following our chance encounter she was able to connect me with Father Kelly directly. Now in his late 80’s he has lived in Lusaka, Zambia for over 60 years and is fondly referred to as the country’s ‘Grandfather of Education’ having taught generations of Zambian students at every level. We now correspond regularly and he often tells me he feels honoured to be included in our exhibition. Nearly 80 of the people featured in the museum are alive today and it’s immensely gratifying when they visit and you know they’re happy with how we tell their story.
Finally the third story I’d like to share is really more of a phenomena. One of our galleries explores how contemporary Irishness is celebrated globally today and includes footage from a selection of St. Patrick’s Day parades and Irish festivals held across the world. Hardly a day goes by without a visitor remarking that they’ve spotted themselves among the crowds or in the audience of one of the shows! Little did many of them know when they attended those events they would end up in a museum in Ireland!
4. As far as museums go, this is extremely technologically advanced with an emphasis on the digital. Why was that important to convey a message from the past?
EPIC is Ireland’s first fully digital museum. Each of our 20 galleries has been fitted out with the most advanced technology available; some of which has yet to be used anywhere else in the world. We intentionally chose this path rather than a more traditional museum experience because it allows us to update our content easily in real-time and expand our collections. For example, only three weeks ago we added another 7 stories to our ‘Changing the Game’ Gallery to highlight the involvement of the Irish diaspora in rugby overseas. As emigration is both historic and contemporary it’s important for us to be able to add new stories quickly.
The interactivity also aids learning, visitors aren’t overwhelmed with information but instead are free to engage with it at their own pace and take in as much (or as little) as they’d like without feeling fatigued.
Finally it’s far more fun for example to take part in an interactive quiz on infamous Irish emigrants than to read the same information on a small panel; people generally are a lot more comfortable engaging with new information when they’re enjoying it!
5. What do you think those who left on ships (and otherwise) so long ago would think if they were able to visit the museum today?
The museum covers an awful lot of history. From 6th century missionary emigration to Scotland and mainland Europe right through fifteen turbulent centuries of famine and flight, penal servitude and banishment, recession and economic migration the Irish have come overcome a lot of challenges but we’ve also left our mark around the world. If any of the historic emigrants featured in our museum were to visit I’d like to think that, just like their contemporary counterparts, they too would be pleased to be featured, if not somewhat surprised that their story is still being told in the country they left behind, centuries after their departure. I know I certainly would.
As always, dear reader, thanks very much for stopping by. I hope this was both informative and enjoyable, and that if you do decided to head to the EPIC Museum in Dublin, you'll appreciate it as much as I did. Also "as always," I'd love to hear your feedback, so please leave any questions or comments below the post, and I'll make sure I find the time to get back to you. Thanks!
If you liked the article, don't forget to pin it!Everton will have to pay a massive €50m (£45.85m, $58.8m) fee if they want to attain the services of Benfica forward Raul Jimenez.
Despite the arrivals of Wayne Rooney and Sandro Ramirez, the Toffees are still looking for an additional striker to spearhead their attack following the departure of Romelu Lukaku to Manchester United.
Manager Ronald Koeman said following Everton's 1-1 draw at Manchester City that if the club wanted to compete with other squads, that they would "need a striker in as well" along with other notable positions.
Previously linked with a loan move for Chelsea's exiled striker Diego Costa, Portuguese publication Record now reports that Everton have had a €30m (£27.5m, $35.3m) offer rejected for Jimenez.
The Portuguese champions instead believe they can receive a fee of €50m for the former Atletico Madrid striker, having previously received a similar offer from a Chinese club back in the January transfer window.
"There was a good offer economically for Benfica and for me also, but the important thing is that I decided that I want to stay in Benfica," Jimenez said after he rejected the move in January.
"I am very happy and in Europe I can continue to grow as a player, because I believe I have a promising future. What I want is football glory before money.
"The fans of Benfica always treat me very well and support me. When I go out on the street they recognise me, they tell me that I am doing very well. All of this pleases me."
In addition, Everton also face competition from Ligue 1 champions Monaco who are interested in the Mexican international. The same report claims Leonardo Jardim's side have also had a €30m bid rejected for Jimenez as they prepare for the potential departure of Kylian Mbappe.
It remains to be seen as to whether Jimenez is worth the steep price tag slapped on him by Benfica, let alone whether a European club is willing to lodge a bid as the 26-year-old has only scored 12 league goals since the start of the 2015/16 season.
The Tepeji native also notably had a disappointing spell at Atletico Madrid, scoring just once in 27 games in all competitions during the 2014/15 season. However, with options running out at this point of the transfer window, Everton may need to stump up the extra funds.Lore of the Clans: Thank You
Vampire: The Masquerade
Yesterday I sent off the last redlines to the writers for Lore of the Clans, thus closing the open development process for the book. Because of the staggered nature of open development, I’ve already gotten a few drafts back, but I’m expecting to get the majority of them in October. From there, I’ll revise, kick the drafts over to the teams working on V20 Dark Ages and Ghouls to make sure the material is connecting (or at least disconnecting in interesting and intentional ways), and then the usual editing/layout/art/book phases. There may be a Kickstarter in there somewhere, and I already have some ideas of interesting goals for that. To keep the book on track, though, I don’t anticipate any more drafts being posted online.
I did want to take a moment to thank everyone to participated. Some folks were a little more aggressive than others, and a few seemed very eager to add random numbers and spaces into the text for some reason. It was stressful, chaotic, and intense, but in the end it was worth it. Many of the conversations reaffirmed my instincts, but a few were very surprising, and helped me reassess my assumptions on some parts of the material. There was also a lot of small details from some of the more obscure books that I think will make the whole product feel much richer. Without going into a full changelog (there’s a few more rounds of revisions to go through, so I don’t want to say something’s definitely changing at this stage), I can say that every single Clan was shaped by the discussion provided, and in every chapter there was at least one noteworthy shift in the material that came directly from this process.
So, thank you for continuing to be the passionate, engaged, dynamic community that has kept this game aloft for so many years. Each open development process is a new experiment, a new way of baring our souls, but each time you’ve been collectively very positive and productive. I know Rites of the Blood was dramatically improved because of you, and I hope the same will be true of Lore of the Clans.Bonar Stewart Bain (February 4, 1923 – February 18, 2005)[2][3] was a Canadian actor and the identical twin brother of actor Conrad Bain, who starred in the television sitcom Diff'rent Strokes as Phillip Drummond and Maude as Arthur Harmon. He once played a fictional "evil" twin to Conrad ("Hank Bain") in an episode of SCTV, as well as Arthur (Conrad Bain)'s twin brother Arnold on Maude.
In popular culture [ edit ]
Bain figures in the lyrics to "Bober," a song from the Mike Keneally Band's 2004 album Dog. Keneally sings that his dog, Bober, was "half-named after Conrad Bain's brother."[4]
Filmography [ edit ]
Draw! as Poker Player (1984)
as Poker Player (1984) Running Brave as University Professor (1983)
as University Professor (1983) SCTV Network as Hank Bain (Zontar) (1981)
as Hank Bain (Zontar) (1981) Powder Heads as Dispatcher (1980)
as Dispatcher (1980) Maude as Arnold Harmon ("Vivian's Surprise") (1977)
References [ edit ]Brandon Weeden has won the starting QB job. (Jason Miller/Getty Images) Brandon Weeden has won the starting QB job. (Jason Miller/Getty Images)
After two impressive preseason outings, Brandon Weeden has won the starting quarterback job in Cleveland, multiple outlets report.
Weeden was battling with veteran Jason Campbell, who becomes the backup.
"Brandon has earned this job," head coach Rob Chuzkinski said Tuesday, per Mary Kay Cabot of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. "He's gained my complete trust. I felt like the timing was right.''
Weeden, 29, was a first-round pick by the Browns in 2012, but the regime that selected him — General Manager Tom Heckert and head coach Pat Shurmur — has since been replaced. He’s performed well in new coordinator Norv Turner’s vertical passing scheme, averaging 9.2 yards per attempt thus far. The 31-year-old Campbell started one game for the Bears last season.
Weeden struggled mightily as a rookie, throwing more interceptions (17) than touchdowns (14) while completing 57.4 percent of his passes, 27th in the NFL.
In two preseason starts with the Browns, Weeden has completed 18 of 25 passes for 229 yards and three touchdowns.
Barring injuries, five 2012 NFL Draft picks will open the 2013 season as the starting quarterback.
https://twitter.com/MaryKayCabot/status/369835304242266112Gardaí have appealed to two men who assisted the emergency services at the scene of a fatal road crash at Skibbereen in west Cork yesterday morning to contact them.
The men arrived at the scene within minutes of the crash at a roundabout on the N71 bypass at 1.45am yesterday morning.
Megan Johnston, 22, from Skibbereen died in the crash.
Two of her friends, a man and a woman, remain in a critical condition in intensive care at Cork University Hospital.
Two other men are also being treated in hospital, while another man has been released.
Gardaí are also appealing to the occupants of a Skoda Octavia car that parked at Hurley's Garage on Ilen Street moments after the crash to contact them on 023 8821 570.
They do not believe this car was connected to the crash, but say the occupants may have witnessed the crash or have important information in relation to it.There is a sense of inevitability about the impending impact of this new age of austerity. We all now expect unemployment to rise, services to be cut and individuals and families to face real hardship.
"We knew it had to come," is a common refrain. But there seems little by way of any serious attempt to mitigate the impacts and improve the resilience of our communities. These communities are today at greater risk. In the past, societies have coped with periods of crisis by drawing upon reserves of communal spirit and by using local institutions and collective activities which are particularly important in harder times. For many communities there are now no resources to draw upon.
The decline of traditional bonds and especially the demise of local clubs and societies and the links with neighbours and within families themselves is often exaggerated, but is nevertheless real for many communities. This, combined with increasing pressures from lack of job security and economic uncertainty, creates a breeding ground for blame, tension, misunderstandings and extremism.
Many community-based organisations, often funded on a shoestring and run by just a handful of dedicated staff and volunteers, provide some of the vital glue that holds communities together. Cutting off cash for grassroots groups may be an easy option but could be a false economy. Given the tendency for a blame culture to emerge in times of hardship – and we have seen the biggest rise in Far Right activity in recent years – now is not the time to lose sight of any local work which is building bridges between communities.
On a simple economic level, all the anecdotal evidence points to how crucial decisions about investments by potential employers are made on the reputation of specific towns, cities and regions. Any potential for disruption is obviously bad for business, but so is any lingering sense of malaise or bad feeling about a place.
Firms will simply avoid, or choose to move away from, areas where there are community breakdowns and that will mean greater economic divide and more investment required by government to support them.
Perhaps just as important is the way that people tend to leave poorer areas as they succeed in getting a job or finding the wherewithal to do so. People will only stay in an area if they have a sense of belonging and believe it can support and provide for them. Poorer areas are often faced by the flight of financial and human capital.
Keeping grassroots cohesion activity going will be essential as a means of seeing many communities through the economic downturn, helping groups worst hit by redundancies, and preventing individual problems becoming whole community tensions.
For cash-strapped local authorities, it is inevitable that voluntary sector groups will be targeted. We are fortunately already seeing more evidence of mainstreaming of community cohesion, where the statutory sector does consider cohesion issues as part of its day job in housing, education and other services.
But even if such a switch became universal, it would not be sufficient. Funding needs to be saved for the many fantastic schemes and committed local people working on projects like Aik Saath's community cohesion project in Slough. This scheme supports inter-cultural dialogue among young people through shared activities and residential events.
Similarly, at the Side by Side project, weekly drama sessions are used as a way of interacting, bonding and learning about identity, communication, cultural misunderstandings, belonging, home, difference and similarity. Another example of great work is at the Barton Hill Together Project in Bristol, aimed at addressing a very specific community tension in a tower block which had seen a sharp rise in new migrants. The project helps the community tackle a rise in racist behaviour, violence and arrests through events, shared festivals and play schemes organised by residents.
The most effective cohesion schemes are always those that are owned and organised by local people – those that are done by them, not to them.
• Ted Cantle, is a professor at iCoCo (the Institute of Community Cohesion), Coventry University, and wrote the government's official inquiry report into the 2001 riots in Oldham and BurnleyLow-key tour of 8-acre property comes a day after public again voiced opposition to Providence River location
PROVIDENCE, R.I. — PawSox principal owner Larry Lucchino late Wednesday afternoon walked among the weeds of the Victory Place property in the Jewelry District as he looked for options to the team's search for a new ballpark site.
Lucchino's low-key tour, in the company of his young special assistant Dan Rea, comes a day after team representatives ran into another mass of Rhode Islanders dead-set against the team's preferred site — a prime piece of land alongside the Providence River designated for a public park.
"We wanted to give it the due diligence it deserved," Lucchino said as he stood near Eddy Street on the edge of the 8-acre Victory Place site.
Lucchino decided to look at the privately-owned Victory Place site in the Jewelry District, he said, after the people who packed a Tuesday forum on the Pawtucket Red Sox ballpark plan once again brought up the site as an alternative to the team's preferred Providence River site.
About 240 people attended the forum sponsored by Leadership Rhode Island and the Harvard Business School Association of Southeastern New England — another public venue in which those opposing the stadium widely outnumbered supporters.
Besides finding a site for a new stadium, Lucchino also has had to hammer out with state officials a new public financing package to help pay for the team's proposed move from Pawtucket to Providence. Lucchino told The Journal earlier this month he has dramatically renegotiated the deal with representatives of the General Assembly and the governor's office. The details have not been made public by Lucchino or state officials.
The owner of Victory Place, the vacant Jewelry District land, made a public pitch in April for his property to be the site of a minor-league baseball park. JAG Investment Realty LLC, which owns a 7.5-acre site on Eddy Street alongside Route 95, said the property is well positioned to be an alternative site for a Triple-A ballpark if plans fall through to locate one on the I-195 land intended to be a park.
The Victory Place site, which once was home to a jewelry factory complex, already has undergone an environmental cleanup and is the subject of a tax stabilization agreement with the city.
The real-estate holding company won approval from the City Council for a tax-stabilization agreement that caps property taxes on the land at $20.6 million over 13 years. There would be no property taxes paid in the first three years.
When first approached by a Journal reporter as he walked the site Wednesday, Lucchino said the land was not under serious consideration as a ballpark location.
"Not really," he replied. "We've just heard so much about it. We're just checking it out."
Then he turned and walked away, onto the weedy lot.
After he walked off the land about 20 minutes later, Lucchino said the ownership group he leads had rejected the site because it felt the land was too far from downtown. But his tone softened as he watched commuters from the nearby hospital complex drive past the site.
Lucchino also was asked about the tax agreement and environmental work that have been completed on the Victory Place site.
"That's something I didn't know," Lucchino said.
pgrimald@providencejournal.com | @PaulEGrimaldi
panderson@providencejournal.com | @PatrickAnderso_Leaked documents show that when the province’s freshly-appointed education minister was a trustee with the city’s public school board six years ago he pushed for approval of a new headquarters despite the fact district administrators had no clear plan of how to pay for the escalating cost of what had become a $285-million deal.
Gordon Dirks made the motion to approve the 20-year lease at a 2008 meeting of the Calgary Board of Education even though an internal report obtained by the Herald shows the construction price and rental payments for the Beltline tower had jumped by nearly half in the previous 10 months.
The documents show trustees were told the “potential” sources of the money needed to make the payments — now more than $12.5 million annually — included redirecting revenues then being used to maintain and operate schools and tapping possible proceeds from future sales of surplus properties in Calgary’s volatile real estate market.
Despite the financial uncertainties that now surrounded a building that had been quietly approved in principle four years earlier, Dirks and his then colleagues — including current incumbents Lynn Ferguson and Pamela King — unanimously approved the lease.
Since staff moved into the 200,000-square-foot tower three years ago and the CBE started paying rent that keeps rising by two per cent annually, the board has also had to struggle with provincial funding that has failed to keep pace with either enrolment growth or inflation.
Students now face larger class sizes and parents must pay higher fees as the CBE tries to balance an operating budget in which the line item for its new head office represents over one per cent of total expenditures.
The 2008 report shows the go-ahead from Dirks and his fellow board members came at the urging of board bureaucrats and amid growing impatience by the private sector firms that had been chosen as much as three years earlier to help build the new headquarters.
“CBE partners in the project (manager Bentall Real Estate Services LP and construction firm Ellis Don) are feeling frustrated about the lengthy planning time that has been required,” the secret document said.
“A sense of urgency is being experienced... as it has taken several years to proceed.”
While the report said the $43.50 cost per square foot for space was in the range of market rates, a study done around the same time by commercial realtor Avison Young pegged the asking price for new construction on Beltline properties at $34 per square foot, nearly 22 per cent less than what the CBE agreed to pay.
Jack Bannon of Citicore Associates has said there were also ample signs of an impending oversupply that would cause rental rates to drop when the CBE gave the project the go ahead in early 2008 because dozens of buildings and millions of square feet were in the construction pipeline.
“This board lease is one of the worst real estate deals in Calgary’s history,” Bannon said in a subsequent report.
Neither Ferguson nor King were available for comment.
While Dirks has talked with other media outlets since his appointment Monday, his press secretary indicated the minister was too busy meeting stakeholders to speak with a Herald reporter for this story.Dog of police officer killed in İzmir attack waits for his return
Banu Şen - İZMİR
A dog cared for by police officer Fethi Sekin, who was described as a hero after preventing a larger-scale attack outside an İzmir courthouse on Jan. 5, has continued to wait at the spot where he lost his life in the assault.Sekin, who had worked in front of the courthouse for 10 years until the attack, looked after a stray dog named Zeytin near the facility. Camera footage of the attack also showed Zeytin running after Sekin during the incident.The militants allegedly sought to enter the courthouse where they presumably would have caused a greater loss of life, but they were prevented from doing so by Sekin’s actions. Sekin was killed in a subsequent clash with the militants, while a stray bullet also killed court employee Musa Can as he watched from a window.The dog has reportedly stayed in the area where Sekin was killed.Some friends of the killed officer also said he loved animals almost as much as people.Meanwhile, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan called the man’s family to express his condolences on Jan. 8.Ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) deputy chair Öznur Çalık visited the officer’s widow, Rabia Sekin, and his family in the eastern province of Elazığ. Erdoğan expressed his condolences via Çalık’s phone, saying he hoped Sekin would rest in peace.“You know, our martyrs’ place is the nearest place to our dear prophet. Thus, you will be mentioned as a martyr’s wife and your place will be near him in the eternal universe,” he said.Erdoğan also said Sekin had prevented a massacre with his sacrifice.“Our brother Fethi prevented a serious disaster in there. In fact, he also became a second Ömer. We have been saying there was not just one Ömer Halisdemir. We will walk differently to the future with this example,” he said.Halisdemir was one of the first loyalist soldiers to die during the July 15, 2016, coup attempt after killing one of the main coup plotters, Semih Terzi.Sekin’s wife also asked Erdoğan that he help look after her children.“My children lost their father, but they have another father in you. I want you to look after them,” she said.Erdoğan responded, saying the Turkish state accepted the children of fallen soldiers as a trust.“The state of the Republic of Turkey is strong to protect these trusts. Do not worry about this. We will stand by them, including in their education,” he said.Getty Images
The names include some players who have become Pro Bowlers, like Patrick Peterson, and others who aren’t even in the league anymore, like Rod Isaac. Richard Sherman knows them all.
They are the names of all the defensive backs who were chosen in the 2011 NFL draft before the Seahawks selected Richard Sherman with the 154th overall pick. Sherman said today on NFL AM that he can name every single defensive back who was chosen before his name was finally called two years ago.
“Nothing is going to change the fact that I was drafted 154, fifth round, 23rd pick. Nothing’s going to change that. Five rounds of teams just passed, passed, passed, passed. I know every single one of them. I know every DB. I know everyone who went ahead of me,” Sherman said.
Sherman said he decided as he was being snubbed to use it as motivation.
“I was like, I’m going to do whatever it takes to become a high-profile guy. I’m going to earn the respect. If they’re not going to give it like they’ve given it to all the rest of these guys, I’m just going to take it,” Sherman said.
Sherman has definitely taken it: Just two years after lasting until pick No. 154, Sherman is one of the best players in the NFL.With all the masses of column inches currently being devoted to the future of Gareth Bale it has almost gone unnoticed that Tottenham have been quietly going about the makings of a very satisfactory transfer window. Of course, just how satisfactory will be determined by whether Bale stays or goes; presumably we will learn more about Real Madrid's intentions over the coming days although as yet, while astronomical figures plus various possible player makeweights are being bandied about seemingly willy-nilly, it appears that no actual bid has been received by Spurs.
Though the general consensus is that there will inevitably be an eventual bid that's too huge to turn down, it's a big call to make for the Tottenham chairman, Daniel Levy. He knows that players such as Bale are rare treasures, and quite possibly irreplaceable even with (a reinvested) £100m. There are probably no more than a dozen players who can turn a game single-handed, conjure a goal out of nothing, produce moments of magic that make the difference. When you are in possession of one, you try to hang on to him as long as possible and Levy knows that without Bale Spurs' chances of gaining a Champions League spot are diminished.
The saga is likely to have ruined his holiday, which up to now had seemed well-deserved after a fine early foray in the transfer market. Boosted by the presence of the new technical director, Franco Baldini, one of the game's most respected operators, the club have spent more than £50m to push on from last season's fifth-placed finish.
The signing of the Brazilian international midfielder Paulinho has already provoked some very positive reviews from me in a previous blog – and since then the club have acted efficiently to add two new names to their attacking department.
This week Spurs smashed their transfer record by paying up the £26m release clause of Valencia's Spain international Roberto Soldado. There's little doubt that this is a big investment for a 28-year-old with very limited or no resale value but, considering the huge sums paid for international top forwards this summer, such a mega-deal now seems par for the course for a high-scoring striker from a top European league.
The deal also follows the current trend in which established (as well as challenging) top clubs opt for the finished product at premium prices, instead of the recent much-favoured approach of buying up-and-coming talents who are still some years away from their career peak. It's a symptom of today's demands for rapid success, with Champions League places so crucial to finances that missing out can see you fall behind your rivals.
It could be too that Spurs sense there's a big chance now to catch up with the top four; though Chelsea and, especially, Manchester City have predictably spent huge money already, Arsenal and Manchester United seem to be struggling to capture their targets and Levy hopes splashing the cash will give Spurs an extra edge over their rivals in red.
Certainly their latest signing should prosper in a side that tends to enjoy plenty of possession and control of the ball in their attacking third. Compared with the similarly aged Alvaro Negredo – who cost Manchester City £6m less but outscored the new Spurs man by one league goal last campaign – Soldado is quicker and more agile. While they're both aggressive and quick on the trigger inside the penalty area, Soldado, with his direct, relentless movement and pace can cause more damage on the break, whereas the left-footed Manchester City centre-forward offers more of a holding-up game.
Arguably not the most elegant front man, the former Valencia striker is always likely to go for power before delicate precision and, though he's sometimes criticised for his streaks of inconsistency, Spurs have signed a determined, strong-minded forward with plenty of personality.
I'm also intrigued to see what impact Spurs' other recent signing, the Belgium international Nacer Chadli, is likely to have on the Premier League. Many clubs – English as well as European – have been monitoring the 24-year-old at Twente over the past year, some leaving Enschede with glowing reports on an explosive winger with good technical ability, others remaining perplexed over Chadli's occasional tendency to drift in and out of games and slightly worrying recent injury record (he missed a quarter of each of the past two seasons through injuries).
A right-footed wide player who operates mainly on the left, the Belgian of Moroccan origins combines lightning pace – especially when finding space to stretch his long legs over 20-30 metres – with unpredictability in one-on-one situations and a finely calibrated shot on goal as his most eye-catching forte. Though ostensibly signed to be initially a squad player, the £7m Chadli is well-suited to André Villas-Boas's attacking schemes and provides the Portuguese head coach with another creative alternative going forward.
On a more surprising note, Spurs also parted company with their promising centre-back Steven Caulker, who joined Cardiff City in an £8m move. Already capped by England, the defender looked increasingly confident and dominant during his appearances under Villas-Boas last season and, with him 21 years old, one would have thought the academy product would play an important part over the years to come. The sale of Caulker (incidentally another fine capture by Cardiff) leaves the squad with just three out-and-out central defenders, which inevitably forces the club back on to the market in search of an upgraded replacement.
One such option may be the Romanian international Vlad Chiriches. According to reports in Romania, the Steaua Bucharest player – who enjoyed a fine Europa League campaign last season – is said to have been very close to joining Spurs before the £7m bid was turned down at the last minute by Steaua's incarcerated club boss, Gigi Becali. Perhaps not quite yet in the Gica Popescu category of cultured defenders, Chiriches does however stand out with his mobility, pace, strong personality on the pitch and ability to take the ball out of defence. His assurance on the ball is possibly one explanation why Villas-Boas was seemingly happy to consider a 23-year-old Romanian in the place of a homegrown talent.
Tor-Kristian Karlsen is a Norwegian football scout and executive, formerly the chief executive and sporting director at Monaco. He has previously worked as a scout for Grasshopper, Watford, Bayer Leverkusen, Hannover and Zenit St Petersburg and as sporting director for FredrikstadOnce again, Deadeye, was kind enough to again provide me with his account of the events happening currently in Greece. It seems though second rounds of demonstrations and street fighting between the police and demonstrators have erupted, sporadically in diferent areas, but the Greeks themselves are changing their aims.
We’ve almost had another execution in Athens.
A group of pupils were discussing about the upcoming demonstration, in the 18th of December, outside their school in the district of Peristeri. Someone fired two shots, wounding a 17 year old. Fortunately, he was shot at his arm and now he’s recuperating. |
a free taco every time Donald Trump Donald John TrumpREAD: Cohen testimony alleges Trump knew Stone talked with WikiLeaks about DNC emails Trump urges North Korea to denuclearize ahead of summit Venezuela's Maduro says he fears 'bad' people around Trump MORE says the word “Mexico” during Thursday night’s GOP debate.
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"The first Republican presidential debate is taking place this Thursday, August 6th … which can only mean one thing: Time to sit back and watch the best entertainment on TV this summer, Donald Trump,” the Yelp-backed food site Eat24 wrote in a blog post.
"Wondering what kind of words will come out of his mouth? Us too!” the statement continues. "We’re not very political, but after reading a few articles on TMZ, we learned that Donald Trump (#HolaDonald) really likes to talk about Mexico. That’s why Eat24 is giving away one free taco every time Trump says the word ‘Mexico' during the debate.”
In actuality, the company plans to post a $5 coupon on their Twitter feed every time Trump says “Mexico." And you don’t technically have to use it on a taco if you don’t want to — but it is highly recommended that you do.Docker is a lightweight framework for containerizing applications. Employing the Linux cgroups, Docker allows containers to be run in a virtual environment that is completely isolated from the host system and other containers, without the overhead of hardware virtualization. It’s a lot like chroot applied not only to filesystems, but also the process and memory space.
The Docker community is full of wide-eyed idealists who see the world as a place of default configurations and simple use cases using only the latest things. The Docker examples include Node.js, CouchDB, and Riak, among others. No mention of, say, Rails, despite it being one of the most popular frameworks over the past 5 years. I’ll try to fill that void.
What this tutorial covers
This blog post is an introduction to Docker for folks who use Rails. You don’t have to know anything about Docker, but you do need to know how to get a Rails app running. I’ll walk you through setting up Docker for development on a Mac, creating a Dockerfile, and running that Dockerfile on your development Docker host.
If you don’t have a Rails application, go make one. There are numerous tutorials on creating a simple Rails app. This tutorial assumes you have an existing Rails app that you want to deploy with Docker.
Setting up Docker
Setting up a development environment for Docker is pretty easy using their provided instructions—the Provisioning instructions are what you want. Some things I mention below are using those instructions on a Mac; namely, I’m using boot2docker, which automates the management of a virtual machine that acts as your Docker server.
One note: boot2docker creates a VirtualBox VM that uses NAT, but it does not map any ports to be accessible from the host machine. After issuing boot2docker init, you should run:
VBoxManage controlvm boot2docker-vm natpf1 "rails,tcp,127.0.0.1,3000,,3000"
Which will map port 3000 on your local machine to port 3000 on the Docker VM. Later, we will have our Docker container listen on port 3000 and without this mapping it will be inaccessible.
Creating a Docker file
The only thing you need to Dockerize your app is a Dockerfile. This defines how docker build will assemble the container for your app and how docker run will execute it. The beginning of the Docker file defines what base image to use:
FROM ubuntu
Like a lot of Rails developers, we use a Ruby runtime manager to ensure consistency across different developer systems. In our case, we use RVM, but a similar approach could be used for rbenv. The first thing we need to do is install RVM in our container and install the Ruby version we use:
RUN curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable RUN /bin/bash -c -l 'rvm requirements' RUN /bin/bash -c -l 'rvm install 1.9.3-p448' RUN /bin/bash -c -l 'rvm use 1.9.3-p448' RUN /bin/bash -c -l 'gem install bundler --no-ri --no-rdoc' RUN /bin/bash -c -l 'bundle config path "$HOME/bundler"'
The first command is the familiar one-line install for RVM. With it installed, we run the subsequent commands using the rvm-shell so that they have the rvm environment. After installing the Ruby that our app prefers, we install Bundler.
The last bit of setup is to pull the Rails application code into the container and install the gems that it needs:
ADD. pl-site WORKDIR pl-site RUN /bin/bash -c -l 'bundle install'
The final bit of our Dockerfile tells Docker what port to expose and how to run the Rails server:
EXPOSE 80 CMD /bin/bash -c -l 'ruby script/rails server -p 80'
The entirety of the Dockerfile looks like this:
FROM ubuntu RUN apt-get update -q RUN apt-get install -qy curl RUN curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable RUN /bin/bash -c -l 'rvm requirements' RUN /bin/bash -c -l 'rvm install 1.9.3-p448' RUN /bin/bash -c -l 'rvm use 1.9.3-p448' RUN /bin/bash -c -l 'gem install bundler --no-ri --no-rdoc' RUN /bin/bash -c -l 'bundle config path "$HOME/bundler"' ADD. pl-site WORKDIR pl-site RUN /bin/bash -c -l 'bundle install' EXPOSE 80 CMD /bin/bash -c -l 'ruby script/rails server -p 80'
Building the container
With the Dockerfile written, the container can be built with docker build :
docker build -t container_name.
This command will take a while to run and produce a lot of output as Docker assembles your container: downloading the base image, installing RVM & gems, and putting your code in place.
Running the container
With the container built, you can run it on your development docker instance:
docker run -p 3000:80 container_name
This runs the container, mapping port 3000 on your local machine to 80 on the container, where the Rails server is listening.
Stopping the container
The docker run command executes in the foreground but ignores SIGINT (i.e. ctrl+c) by default. You can stop & remove the container with this one liner:
docker rm -f `docker ps -lq`
Resetting the Docker host
Docker aggressively caches throughout the build process—each step of your Dockerfile is saved so that subsequent runs of docker build can skip parts that have completed successfully. Unfortunately the caching, like that in so many projects, can cause problems when you’re developing. Sometimes it can be fixed by clearing the cache of Docker steps with docker rm `docker ps --no-trunc -a -q`. More often than not, though, I’ve had to go a step further and blow away the Docker host altogether. Since it is a VM controlled by boot2docker, removing & recreating it is easy. I’ve settled on this one liner that I run whenever I want to really rebuild the container:
boot2docker stop && boot2docker delete && boot2docker init && \ VBoxManage controlvm boot2docker-vm natpf1 "rails,tcp,127.0.0.1,3000,,3000" \ && boot2docker start
Code
The example code used here is on GitHub. Note that there is an ultra-simple branch, echo, that makes an echo server in Docker.Attorney Alex Spiro filed a request for a subpoena during a Tuesday morning hearing in New York State Criminal Court, asking the court to review personnel, disciplinary and arrest records of the four police officers involved in the arrests. Spiro asserts that the files are relevant because the prosecution case relies heavily on the officers’ testimony.
Antic and Sefolosha were arrested outside the club 1OAK at 4 a.m. April 8. Both players have maintained their innocence, and Spiro wrote in his subpoena request that the two players were: “a) more 100 feet away from the crime scene and b) not within sight of the crime scene.”
The players were both charged with obstructing governmental administration. Antic also was charged with one count of disorderly conduct and one count of second-degree harassment, for interfering with the arrest of Sefolosha. Sefolosha was charged with one count of resisting arrest and one count of disorderly conduct.
Sefolosha suffered a broken right fibula and ligament damage, injuries that he said were caused by the police. He underwent season-ending surgery and was still in a walking boot and using a cane when he appeared in court Tuesday.
Sefolosha, who refused comment on his case, said he wasn’t sure if he’ll be healthy for the opening of the NBA season in October.
“That’s not my priority,” he said. “I’m going to come back and play when I’m ready to play.”
In the request filed Tuesday, Spiro states that the players had not committed any unlawful act when they were “approached and forcibly seized” by the police officers investigating an incident outside the club. Indiana Pacers player Chris Copeland was stabbed in the abdomen during the incident.
Spiro also said in the filing that the players’ version is backed up by video of the arrest, and by “more than half a dozen independent eyewitnesses.
“Put simply, the officers were not justified in their actions,” he wrote.
Spiro asked the court for a review of the officers’ actions in any other similar arrests for obstruction.
The officers did not appear in court Tuesday, and the prosecutor told the court that the state was not prepared to immediately proceed with the case. The judge then set the trial date for Sept. 9.
Defendants are not normally entitled to review police records, and Spiro acknowledged to the judge that the burden is high when requesting such a review. He maintained that it is justified in this case because the verdict will depend heavily on the credibility of the officers.
Spiro declined comment after Tuesday’s hearing, beyond repeating that he expects the district attorney’s office to dismiss the case.NEWARK, Del. – Entering Kildare’s Irish Pub to boisterous chants of “Chris- tine! Chris- tine!” Delaware Republican Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell, fresh from her testy televised debate with Democrat Chris Coons, slapped high fives and posed for cell phone pictures with jubilant supporters.
Moments later, after conducting an interview with this reporter, she stood on a bar chair, again to raucous applause, and declared: “What I just said on Fox News was that we shattered the glass jaw of my opponent!”
In fact, what she had just told Fox News was: “And whether it’s the NRSC, or anyone else, I hope that what we’ve done has served to shatter my opponent’s glass jaw…” Far from the triumphalism of her declaration to her supporters, what O’Donnell had said to Fox News was, in fact, an expression of her frustration with the leaders of her own Republican Party, including Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, or NRSC.
O’Donnell’s comments in her exclusive interview with Fox News followed an offhanded remark she had made in her ninety-minute exchange with Coons: “I've had to fight my party to be here on this stage to win the nomination, and to some extent I am still fighting my party.”
The first part, about having to fight her own party to secure the nomination, was clear enough: O’Donnell rocketed to nationwide fame by staging a stunning primary upset over Rep. Mike Castle, who had been the preferred candidate of the Republican Party’s top officials.
More On This... O’Donnell, Coons Face Off in Delaware Debate
But what O’Donnell meant in the second part of her statement – “and to some extent I am still fighting my party” – was more mysterious. After the debate, O’Donnell press aide Dave Yonkman was pressed for an explanation in “Spin Alley,” the anteroom at the University of Delaware where campaign operatives declared victory and fielded reporters’ questions. Yonkman downplayed the notion of a rift between his candidate and the national GOP leadership, noting that Cornyn and O’Donnell had met just last week “and those talks are underway.”
But when this reporter asked O’Donnell herself how she is fighting her own party, the Republican nominee was ready to cite chapter and verse. Tthe Democratic senatorial committee is running ads against me. The Democratic Party is running ads against me,” she said. “The Republican Party on the state level, or on the national level, neither have come in to help me close the gap in the polls. And my opponent, there’s so much to attack him on, yet the NRSC refuses to play, and that, that baffles me. Because he’s a – he’s a sitting duck. There’s a lot to go after him [on].”
Polls in the race show Coons enjoying a commanding lead over O’Donnell among likely voters. A Fox News/POR-Rasmussen survey conducted October 9 found O’Donnell trailing the Democratic nominee by sixteen percentage points. The website RealClearPolitics.com, in compiling all reliable polls, found Coons to have an average lead of 17.2 points.
Asked how she could possibly eliminate such a large polling gap with so little time left before Election Day, O’Donnell agreed that the polls “are accurate,” but contended they do not account for some segments of the population where she claimed to enjoy broad support. “Keep in mind that in the primary race, I was about this far down in the polls as well. We didn’t close that gap until the day before the primary, where then I was still at 47 percent,” she said. :Yet the next day I won by a very good margin. And I attribute that win to the same thing that I am going to attribute this win to: There’s a lot of first-time voters coming out, a lot of people who never engaged in the process before….And over these next three weeks, I believe you’ll see an increase in the polls.”
Perhaps the most damaging moment in her televised showdown with Coons, the New Castle County Executive, was when a moderator asked O’Donnell to name a recent Supreme Court ruling with which she disagreed, and O’Donnell could not do so. ““I'm very sorry,” she apologized. “Right off the top of my head, I know that there are a lot, but I'll put it up on my website, I promise you.”
Yonkman, facing reporters in “Spin Alley,” brandished a handwritten list of such rulings and said his candidate had simply been “caught off guard.” Later, however, in the interview with Fox News, O’Donnell disputed her aide’s characterization. “It wasn’t that I was caught off guard,” she said; rather the “trip-up” was the moderator’s insistence on her naming a recent Supreme Court decision. “Under [the late Chief Justice William] Rehnquist and under [current Chief Justice John] Roberts,” O’Donnell said in the interview, “we’ve had some good decisions handed down from the Supreme Court. So if you go back to recent years, back in 2005 and 2004, there was Kelo [v. City of New London (2005)], which I’m absolutely opposed to that eminent domain. The government should not have the right to confiscate someone’s private property. I’m opposed to the Ten Commandments ruling. But…there haven’t been a lot of recent decisions under this current Court, and then Rehnquist before that, that, frankly, I disagree with. And that proves what happens when you get a good constitutionalist up there.”
With her strong conservative stances on the issues, coquettish looks, and feisty one-liners, O’Donnell can sometimes appear like the “Mini-Me” version of her most famous booster, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, whose endorsement of O’Donnell helped propel her past Rep. Castle during the primary, and into the general election. Asked if Palin is her role model, O’Donnell demurred. “I don’t think that it would be accurate to say that she’s my role model. But she is a leader of all women,” O’Donnell told Fox News. “[Palin] pioneered, blazing a trail in going up against the party. She went up against the party before it was cool! She was one of the first women to step up and really challenge the party bosses and the lords of the back room and their obnoxious sense of entitlement. And she was very successful. And she paved the way for many female politicians, as did a lot of women on the Democratic side.”
O’Donnell also confided one trade secret: She guzzles Diet Rockstar, an energy drink, to stay invigorated on the campaign trail. But she also expressed amazement at “how little I’ve had to drink it.”Ben Firshman is the genius behind JSNES, a playable and fully-functioning Nintendo Entertainment System emulator written in pure JavaScript. Craig interviews Ben exclusively for SitePoint.
Craig Buckler: Hi Ben. Tell us a little about yourself and what you do.
Ben Firshman: At the moment, I’m studying Computer Science at the University of Warwick, but as far as work goes, I’m principally a Django/Python Web developer. Last year, I worked on Django for Google’s Summer of Code, and this summer I’ve been doing Django development for Global Radio in London.
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CB: Warwick’s a great university for IT! (Any guesses where Craig went?!) How long have you been developing web pages and JavaScript in particular?
BF: I first dipped my toes in Web development at quite an early age, perhaps 8 or 9, experimenting with MS Frontpage on hosting provided by my ISP. I was an inquisitive kid and needed to understand how things worked, so it was a natural progression to delve beneath the safety of a WYSIWYG editor and play around with the source. After a brief grounding in BASIC and C, I recall starting backend development in PHP during my early teens.
As far as JavaScript development goes, it’s a skill I’ve developed alongside my other work. The exception was a small chat application I wrote when Ajax was in its infancy. At the time it was quite exciting that it didn’t have to refresh an iframe to update; I wish I could find the code and put a date to it! Apart from this, I’ve only added spoonfuls of JavaScript sugar to my front-ends. JSNES was a huge learning experience for me.
CB: Where did your inspiration to develop JSNES come from?
BF: I stumbled across Matt Westcott’s JSSpeccy and it sparked my imagination. I have a tendency to get trapped by overly ambitious projects, and a JavaScript emulator was exactly one of those.
I played a NES for a brief period in my childhood, and based on some rigorous analysis of its speed in relation to the Spectrum (they are more or less the same age), I thought it would be the best choice of platform. That, and the fact there are vast numbers of emulators to gain inspiration from.
CB: Did you use any particular development tools or environment?
BF: Nothing particularly fancy: my trusty copy of TextMate and Firefox 3. Firebug proved an invaluable tool for debugging and profiling; nothing came close to its power at the time. The new version of Safari has some shiny new development tools, but they don’t quite hit the bar Firebug has set in terms of functionality.
CB: How long did it take to develop?
BF: I spent a few months last year contemplating the idea and browsing the source of various NES emulators. Once I found a suitable one to port (vNES) I had laid down the basics of a working emulator in a day or two. After all, the early stages were just a huge selective copy and paste exercise. From then on, it took 9 months of bug fixing and tweaking, culminating in the tiny fix enabling it to run at full speed on Chrome.
CB: It’s an ambitious project — were there any tough technical hurdles or browser incompatibilities to overcome?
BF: I didn’t hit any major hurdles. The original only worked in Firefox 3.5, but Safari 4 and the newer versions of Chrome solved the compatibility problems. Although the earlier versions of those browsers supported the canvas element they didn’t allow direct manipulation of pixels with the imageData object.
There were only a few subtle differences between Java and JavaScript that caused problems, such as division between two integers returning a float in JavaScript.
CB: JSNES runs almost 10x faster in Google Chrome and both the Mozilla and WebKit teams have been investigating the issues. Why do you think Chrome is so much faster?
BF: Interestingly enough, three independent problems originally caused bad performance on Chrome, Safari and Firefox.
Firefox has a complex issue to solve. Firefox’s TraceMonkey engine, as the name implies, uses a technique called tracing to compile blocks of code by attempting to work out what the possible paths of execution are. Emulators branch heavily in traceable blocks such as loops and create a huge number of possible paths that could be followed. As such, it’s impractical to trace, so it runs without any of the optimization benefits. There are a couple of bugs worth following if you are interested in the issue (Bugzilla 509986 and 516264). The problem for Chrome was less critical. For some reason, accessing the imageData object to directly manipulate pixels is very inefficient. Simply minimizing the number of accesses caused the leap in performance. Safari’s performance issue has now been fixed, but the original cause was a completely different problem. Some of the classes within the emulator had a huge number of properties (the CPU and PPU for example), which caused the dictionary structure representing it not to be cached. Accessing properties on those commonly used classes was inefficient, but this was recently fixed in WebKit (changeset 48573).
To answer the question, Chrome’s JavaScript engine (and Safari’s to an extent) is just far more efficient at running this sort of code. But it originally ran at the same speed as Firefox and Safari because it had a slower canvas element.
CB: JSNES has attracted a lot of attention. Has that been a positive or negative experience for you? Has Google thanked you for raising Chrome’s profile?!
BF: It has been quite an experience to have hundreds of thousands of eyes over my work and the response has been overwhelmingly positive. In particular, numerous people have submitted patches for improving performance. I owe great thanks to all of them!
Thankfully I haven’t received any takedown notices yet. It’s reassuring that emulators of obsolete systems are becoming widely accepted by major corporations.
Interestingly, I haven’t heard from Google. But both Mozilla and the WebKit team have been in touch to try and fix the performance problems. I suppose a cutting edge Web application running poorly in their browsers but not another is bad publicity for them.
CB: Do you have further plans for JSNES?
BF: My next huge ambition is to get sound working. That’s quite a challenge because JavaScript has no direct sound support, but I’m making headway. If it’s successful I hope it will open the doors to more interesting web audio applications.
I also attempted mouse support for Duck Hunt quite early on in development, but I could never get it working. I would love to fix it although it makes the game tragically unchallenging!
There are also a number of performance improvements in the pipeline as well as more working games as the bugs get fixed.
CB: Are you working on any other exciting projects? JSPS2 perhaps?!
BF: I have nothing specific in mind yet, but let’s just say WebGL and Web workers will take JavaScript applications to a whole new level.
CB: Many thanks for your time and informative answers, Ben. We’ll all be watching JSNES and your next projects with interest.
If you’d like to track Ben’s progress, his personal home page is http://benfirshman.com/ or you can follow him at http://twitter.com/bfirsh.
See also:By
Hitting a new low, a tagged in a grey hooded sweatshirt approached an LAPD mounted officer as they were patrolling in Venice Beach and tagged the horse. Armed with a silver ink pen popular among the loser-taggers in the area – the bandit scrawled his tag on the horse and ran (chicken shit).
Officers Coffey & Scimone (23R81), Metro Mounted, were issuing a citation, when an unknown suspect approached a Department Horse, “Charlie” and scrawled a graffiti tag on the hind quarters, “RBS.” The tag was written with a silver colored pen. The suspect fled in an unknown direction. A concerned citizen told the officers the possible suspect was a male wearing grey hooded sweatshirt and a backpack. Sergeant Heany (Metro Mounted) was notified. The graffiti washed off and did not appear to cause harm to “Charlie.”
Thanks to Kali from Facebook for the report and photos!Getty Images
The four teams that will play for the right to head to the Super Bowl were set last weekend. Now the two referees that will legislate the two conference championship games this weekend are also in place.
According to Mike Pereira of FOX Sports, Gene Steratore and Tony Corrente will be the head officials for the AFC and NFC Championship games on Sunday. Steratore will man the NFC game between the San Francisco 49ers and Seattle Seahawks. Corrente will get the AFC battle between the New England Patriots and Denver Broncos.
Steratore has not yet been assigned to work a Super Bowl in his time as a referee. Corrente was the head referee for Super Bowl XLI between the Indianapolis Colts and Chicago Bears. Corrente also worked the 2009 AFC Championship game between the New York Jets and Indianapolis Colts and the 2000 NFC Championship between the Minnesota Vikings and New York Giants.
Corrente battled throat cancer in 2011 that forced him to miss time during the season to undergo chemotherapy and radiation treatment.
Steratore and Corrente will not have their normal crews working with them this weekend. Officials for conference championship weekend are all mixed with officials that graded out strongly during the regular season. Those officials drawing conference championship assignments consist of those rating as the highest two overall percentages at each position of any not already working the Super Bowl.
As per league rules, we already know the referee for the Super Bowl will be one of the four that worked in the divisional round last week. Clete Blakeman, Terry McAulay, Carl Cheffers and Pete Morelli worked the four games last weekend and one of them will take the field in three weeks at MetLife Stadium for Super Bowl XLVIII. All officials that will staff the Super Bowl crew worked in games last week.Diabetic retinopathy, along with macular degeneration due to the aging process, are 2 of the leading eye diseases that cause blindness and vision loss worldwide. Gene therapy can now be administered as a treatment for these eye conditions.
This therapy is currently provided in the form of an injection but researchers have recently reported that a new delivery method has been discovered that would not require a needle and could effectively treat the condition topically.
Macular degeneration caused by aging and diabetic retinopathy develop in the back of the eye. A growth factor substance, vascular endothelial, stimulates blood vessel growth. Gene therapy has been used by scientists to inhibit this growth factor but up until now the delivery of the drugs has required an injection to the rear of the eye.
Not too many patients want to experience this kind of treatment and decide to opt out of it. Gang Wei along with his other colleagues worked on finding an approach that would be noninvasive.
A new delivery system for this gene was developed by the researchers using a peptide by the name of penetratin along with a synthetic polymer named poly (amidoamine). The peptide has shown good eye permeability while the polymer has already been used for delivering medicine. This complex was put together in drop form and moves rapidly from the surface of the eye to the inner lining at the back when tested on rats.
The liquid stays inside the retina for more than 8 hours at a time, which is a sufficient amount of time for the gene model to be expressed. According to the findings there is a lot of potential for treating a variety of eye diseases through gene therapy drops.
Research has been published in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interface.A man, his wife, and his live-in mistress are on trial for murdering and eating two women in the northeast Brazilian city of Garanhuns. Prosecutors say they lured the unsuspecting victims into their house by advertising a nanny job and, once they were dead, made pastries using the women’s flesh. As if that weren’t gruesome enough on its own, they later sold these “treats.”
The trio didn’t clean up too well after their culinary experiments in April 2012, however, and authorities found the women’s remains at the house, along with a 50-page manifesto by the husband entitled “Revelations of a Schizophrenic.” During the trial, Jorge Beltrao Negromonte da Silveira referred to the murders as “a horrible monstrous mistake.”
But that, of course, was plan B. The suspects initially told police that their religious sect valued “the purification of the world and the reduction of its population.” Fortunately, religious freedom doesn’t go that far in court.This Week’s Recap of Corporate Media Bullcrap
You know what really grates at me? Hypocrisy and piety. Thieves and liars are better company than hypocrites and the pious. I write this as a lead in to This Week’s Recap of Corporate Media Bullcrap. I did not have to scan the pages of the Yellow Journalism wasteland that is the New York Times too long to find this week’s topic. An article written by the ever duplicitous Paul Krugman instantly caught my eyes; the type of ivory tower “analysis” that is featured in the NY Times opinion section is a prime example of corporate media hypocrisy and the mendacity of so-called “fair arbiters” who pretend to be virtuous defenders of the public.
In all honesty, I did not even read the garbage that Krugman wrote. I know I admonish some people who jump to conclusions about the articles that I write as they make assumptions before reading the content, but in this case—after reading Krugman for a long enough time—I don’t have to read his articles to know that he is just a propagandist in a blue suit and consequently dismiss his analysis as the pile of two-faced bunk that it is. The article lead was enough for me to get nauseous before I even had my first cup of coffee. “Everybody Hates the Trump Tax Plan”, that is the title Krugman chose to lash into Trump’s tax plan and piously pretend that he is standing up for the working man and fairness.
For the record, Trump’s tax plan is an insidious sham. After eight years of the richest Americans and corporations getting all kinds of preferential treatment under Obama, Trump takes the baton to rain yet more cash at the 1%. I’m not disagreeing with Krugman in his condemnation of Trump, my ire is that this same Krugman was conspicuously silent as Obama shoveled trillions to Wall Street and the plutocrat class by way of monetary scams that should have outraged every economist on this planet. What Obama committed under his watch was the biggest larceny and wealth transfer in the history of our nation. Over $14 trillion was handed over to the same crooks who bled our economy in 2008 as Barack’s administration rewarded the thieves on Wall Street by way of Quantitative Easing, Zero Interest Rate Policy and a litany of bailouts—Obama was the First Bank president.
Given this fact, for Krugman and the rest of the corporate media hounds to now bay at the moon, frothing at the mouth, and pretend to be outraged at Trump’s tax plan and the unfairness of tilting wealth to the rich is bullcrap. What the hacks in mainstream medias have perfected in false indignation and hypocrisy that is unending. They split themselves down the line between liberal and conservative pundits and take turns feigning concern for the public while treading exclusively in their partisan swim lanes. They rarely go against their preferred politicians but go full tilt the minute the other side introduces their pernicious ideas. The truth is that both Democrats and Republicans are fleecing Americans, they just have different means to arrive at the same ends. Republicans kneecap the masses into poverty through tax policies while Democrats bleed us into dependence with their monetary policies; the prime purpose of both parties is to transfer wealth from the masses to the corporate class and the oligarchy.
Krugman, using his title of economist and leveraging his insider jargon, loves to pretend like he is above the fray as he speaks with piety about the public good. He is a charlatan and a shyster who presents half-information and commits journalistic malpractice by always presenting his analysis through a partisan lens. He is a Democrat shill who rarely speaks ill of the liberal left as he yaps his trap about the iniquities of conservative economic policies. Conveniently, Krugman looks right past the endless immoralities of Democrat economic policies that are just as malicious in bludgeoning the poor, working and middle class. In other words, Krugman is a corporate step and fetch it pet of Wall Street who uses his authority to carry the water for corporations and the uber rich.
By the way, I knew the outcry from “the left” was coming the minute that Donald Trump got elected last year. The day after the election, I said that the liberal elites, who were mum as Obama continued and enhanced Bush pugnacious policies, were going to finally find their courage now that corporate rent-boy Trump got elected. Sure enough, the same people who had been quiet as church mice as Obama bombed Syria, Libya and Yemen to the stone ages, transferred tens of trillions from the 99% to the moneyed gentry and codified the extralegal assassination of US citizens and combatants alike without nary a hearing all the sudden can’t get enough of protesting the excesses of Donald Trump. Every time I see one corporate media toady or another speak against the malfeasance of Trump’s domestic or foreign policy after cheering Obama while he was doing the very same things makes me realize that we are a nation that is led by a collection of hypocritical confidence men and pious grifters. It is for this reason that Paul Krugman earns the honors for this week’s corporate hack award. His hypocrisy is astounding and beyond that his piety is malevolent. He and his ilk give cover to the immoralities of this bankrupt two party shell game that is going on in Washington DC because they never muster the courage to say that the whole system is corrupt. Instead, they hack at the leaves of injustice and pretend to be heroic. This is my second time writing about Krugman; both times I took to the pen to highlight his duplicity and noxious high minded drivel that he presents as though he is the scion of truth (read Paper of Drivel). Goes to show; fame, education and titles do not confer virtue, wisdom and morality. #CorporateMediaBullcrap
“The only vice that cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy.” William Hazlitt
Check out the latest Ghion Cast below where I discuss the hypocrisy of our two party shell game that goes on in DC and the pugnacious piety of the political and media class that is killing our nation.
Find out about the Ghion Journal and our aim to reclaim the media from the hands of corporations and deliver it back to the people.Our children have powerful ways to nurture our strength.
Recently Matthew Salesses posted a beautiful article titled the Nature of Time and Babies. Matthew talked about the powerful impact our babies’ struggles with illness can have on us as parents.
It got me thinking back to the days when my son, who is now seven, was just a year old. I was a work-at-home dad and we did attachment parenting, sharing a family bed. I was closely attuned to his smallest waking and sleeping sounds every wonderful day of his young life. I got to the point where, even when I was asleep, I could hear the slighted catch in the flow of air in and out of him. The littlest hint of a coming sniffle. His mother and I matched his sweet baby’s breath coming and going; when his breath caught, ours did too. I can still hear his breathing change, from a room away, in a dead sleep, in the middle of the night.
Rest assured, the fears we carry for our little ones do pass. But those fears can be immobilizing terrors for first time parents. I remember one long winter’s night, when the croup cough started up for our baby at sometime after midnight. The croup comes in the middle of the night without warning. It’s a strangling cough that sounds like a goose honking. That terrible sound means the baby’s throat is closing up.
I had read about croup on askdrsears.com. I had read about a lot of frightening illnesses on Dr. Sears’ site. I remember two things the site said about croup. One was to turn on the steam in the bathroom and let your baby inhale it. The other was to ask your baby to stay calm because if they start crying they will choke more.
There was more the site said about the croup. About at what point you should call an ambulance or race through the night to the nearest emergency room for what I recall as being an injection of steroids or some such thing…
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When I heard that terrible coughing sound, I scooped up my son and carried him to the bathroom. He was so small in my arms, struggling, coughing and gasping. I turned on the hot water in the shower and closed the bathroom door, forcing myself to take measured careful steps; to banish my rising panic and give my son what he needed, calm.
Then, as the steam billowed up around us, I looked down into his wide eyes and I asked him to be calm. I told him he NEEDED to stay calm so that he would feel better. To this day, I remember him looking up into my eyes. The two of us there, hanging in the space between now and another racking cough. Time slows down. Matthew is absolutely right about that.
As you wait for the next second to arrive, you are tasked with being positive; with being calm |
said UA Media Relations will release more information between 4-4:30 p.m. on Thursday.
Follow The Crimson White's coverage at twitter.com/TheCrimsonWhite. Visit their website at cw.ua.edu.The last new episode of "I Love Lucy" was broadcast over 50 years ago, but the classic sitcom is still a cash cow for CBS.
Speaking at Goldman Sachs Communacopia Conference in New York on Thursday, CBS Chief Executive Leslie Moonves said "I Love Lucy" is still delivering about $20 million in revenue. Reruns of the show still run on a regular basis on the cable channel TV Land.
During much of the interview, Moonves stressed the value of CBS' new and old content, particularly as new platforms such as Netflix and Amazon are spending heavily for product.
"The world is a beautiful place, we're going to get paid more and more and more," Moonves said.
That said, CBS is still more conservative than other programmers when it comes to selling content to online streaming services and Moonves does not plan on changing that strategy. For example, ABC parent Walt Disney Co. recently sold the first seasons of its dramas "Revenge," "Scandal" and "Once Upon a Time" to Netflix. CBS does not sell episodes of any series currently on its air to a streaming service out of fear that it could hurt potential rerun sales down the road.Street Art
Spraycan Art
Aerosol Art
Subway Art
Its Origin –
"Graffiti" has been applied in art history to work of art to be produced by scratching a design into a surface. Graffiti is an art of writing or drawings that have been scribbled or painted, amazingly on a wall or other surface. It is done often within public view. Graffiti can also be analyzed according to the elements of lines, color, and structures that are present in the work.Graffiti basically refers to imaginary decoration applied by paint or other means to buildings, public transport or other propertyGraffiti has been found on ancient, Egyptian monuments. So, the origins of graffiti go back to the beginnings of human, societal living. Graffiti is the plural form of the Italian word grafficar. Grafficar indicates drawings, markings, patterns, scribbles, or messages that are painted, written, or carved on a wall or surface.His amazingly inspiring pieces have given him the title of the most influential graffiti artist ever. Lee painted whole cars. He showed the world what was possible in terms of artistic ability.Blade is known for the great experimental concepts of his whole case and the sheer quantity of trains he has painted. We can clearly see in his work that his inspiration truly came from within.He is known as ‘the Godfather of Graffiti’. Seen has used various mediums throughout his career, including canvas, 3D sculpture and tattoos.Revok has painted Los Angeles consistently since 1991, and as a consequence has received a lot of negative attention from the city’s Sheriff’s Department but still he continued his artistic work with full passion.It refers to the tag or signature of a surface. Refer to the simple act of applying a "tag" or signature to a surface. These tags can be calligraphic in appearance. It can be complex in contents also.There is limit of colors in this technique, no more than two or three colors. This one is larger than a "tag" and painted very rapidly.Rapid creation of complex shapes using cut outs.It became popular among New York subway graffiti artists during the 1970s. This type of graffiti art can cover an entire subway car.Often performed with a paint-roller and executed simply to cover a large area in order to stop other graffiti sprayers from painting on the same wall.It is basically marked by interlocking letters and connecting points. It can create a more complex "tag" or image.A quote which perfectly describes the graffiti art is - “Art is an evolutionary act. The shape of art and its role in society is constantly changing. At no point is art static. There are no rules.”What the developers have to say:
Why Early Access?
Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?
How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version?
A larger world with the ability to travel to new locations
Customized wands and spells
Harvesting and crafting abilities
Leveling up of spells and abilities
Goat customization
Enhanced 3D models/textures/animation
Localizing in more languages
Unbelievable goat feeding sequences and more!
What is the current state of the Early Access version?
Will the game be priced differently during and after Early Access?
How are you planning on involving the Community in your development process?
“Early Access is exciting because it gives us a chance to connect with our players and work with them to developinto the most awesome virtual reality game that it can possibly be. We want to build a strong community that will evolve with us, get involved with development, judge us a little bit, be nice to us sometimes, and have lots of fun playing.”“We will be actively updatingafter its Early Access release to pack it full of as much great stuff as we can. Our plan is to have a complete version done by the end of 2016. This deadline may change, however we will provide consistent news updates to let you know how development is progressing.”“There are lots of new features that we are working on, including:is a fully playable game where you must protect your herd of magical goats from getting snatched by goblins by blasting them with rocks. If you have goats remaining when the sun rises, you shall be victorious. You may also visit the target range and test your skills against some some terrifying tomatoes. We will be adding new features tooften.”“We greatly appreciate our early backers and are offering Capria at a reduced price while in Early Access.”“We will be checking every day for bug reports and feature requests from players, as well being very active on our discussions board. You may also send suggestions, bug reports, and cat pictures to capria@hornandivry.com After it's release, we will be consistently updating and improving. We want it to be as fun and immersive as possible and we want you to be a part of it. Without players there is no game. Now go pop some goblins!”USA prepares world to Third World War
A member of the Russian State Duma Yevgeny Fyodorov shared his vision of the current situation in the world with Pravda.Ru. He believes that the United States is preparing the grounds for starting World War III. Their plan is to combine all local conflicts together. The United States, when speaking about the fight against terrorism, in fact relies on extremism and terrorism.
Currently, the world is slipping into a complete destabilization that will inevitably end in a World War. This is precisely why many powers now are testing the ground. This is similar to the situation when the Soviet Union, fighting in Afghanistan, dealt not with the Mujahideen but with the Americans, Bin Laden and the American Stinger missiles.
This was an element of the global opposition and, in fact, a World War between the Soviet Union and the United States of America. The Soviet Union lost the war, was eliminated and enslaved.
The next part of the script is launching a global fire, unleashing a world war, uniting local conflicts into a single system of instability. For this we need to dramatically increase funding for terrorism.
We now see that the United States has dramatically increased the funding of terrorism around the world. The Americans will now act indiscriminately, that is, without consideration of whether they are giving to allies or not allies, friends or not friends.
Take, for example, the situation in Greece. Is Greece an enemy of America? But the Americans lowered its ratings and launched a European crisis.
Is Egypt an enemy of America? No. But the funding was provided, the "Orange Revolution" was organized, and now there are talks about a death sentence for the president of Egypt, who, in principle, was amicable towards the Americans. He was replaced by a more extremist oriented President, and not by accident.
That is, to implement the American idea, they will need a full rise of extremism in the world. The United States will continue with this plan. The growth and rise of extremism is part of the course towards World War III that the Americans need.Helix choices and why
In this section I will go over which helix choices you should roll with and why. The highlighted choices are my personal recommendations.This one depends on the person playing Whiskey Foxtrot. If you are experienced with using Sticky Grenade, I recommend Weighed Down as it makes the affected enemy an easier target. If not, I recommend either Shield Scrapper or Flak Off depending on if the enemy has a lot of melee characters or not.Another situational choice. If you have previously picked Flak Off I recommend Scrap Banker as it allows you to hold additional charges for your Scrap Cannon. If not, I recommend Swiss Cheese as it allows you to do 25% extra damage to enemy targets.Had this been before the 19th of september 2016, I would have recommended the ACOG scope. But since Gearbox changed said scope for the worse to the point where you have very narrow vision, making tracking targets incredibly hard, I recommend the Red Dot Sight.This is a matter of personal taste. If you are good at hitting with the Sticky Grenade, Stick 'n' Sap is not a bad option for draining the shields on an enemy target, allowing them to be finished off by your Tactical Rifle. For all other situations I would recommend either Sticky MIRV or Triple Threat as it allows you to blanket an area easily with grenades, increasing your chances of hitting a target.Health regen on killing an enemy is good. Health regen when killing an enemy is even better. Get this as clearing a minion wave becomes much easier with Sticky MIRV, allowing you to replenish a lot of health very easily. In lieu of this mutation, I recommend Speed Burst for relocating more rapidly.Napalm; the smell of victory. This upgrade is excellent for area denial and minion wave clearing. Always choose this if you can. If you lack this mutation, either of the other two will do, although Flack Back in combination with Flak Off will be helpful against melee Battleborn.Having faster reload means that you are more likely to finish off that elusive low-health enemy. Shield penetration is only useful if the enemy has full shields and very low health, an unlikely scenario.As Whiskey Foxtrot is best used at medium range, I recommend getting Long-Distance Flak to maximise your chances of hitting an enemy with your Scrap Cannon. The inherent spread from Spread Shot makes it incredibly difficult to hit an enemy at range.As Stronger Stickies doesn't affect napalm damage, I recommend Swift Stickies instead to reduce your cooldown time on the Sticky Grenade.Picking Overoverdrive gives you an additional 25 rounds with which to gun down the enemy with, being especially useful against enemies with no shields. However, should the enemy team have a Reyna or Kleese, What Shields? is an excellent alternative as you can negate their rapid shield-regenerating abilities completely.So this is a thing that happened. Coming out of commercial during the first quarter of Seahawks-49ers, “America’s Game of the Week” (#trademark #branding), Joe Buck took the occasion to shred Johnny Manziel after his first career start. From out of nowhere. Also, he did it in some kind of weird, first person faux-comedic style that just came off as kinda mean-spirited. Actually… it came off as very mean-spirited. “Off to Canton ya go!” Really? C’mon Joe, it’s not like he mooned the fans in Green Bay or anything!
Maybe Buck was a little extra spunky because he just flew in after his first golf tournament working for Fox yesterday? Maybe he has a Merrill Hoge-like hatred of Manziel we don’t know about? Hard to say where this came from, but this felt like a return to the days of Joe Buck Live… and that’s not a great thing.SOUTH HARRISON TWP. -- Following a recent death at an accident-plagued intersection, local officials are investigating options to improve safety in that area.
A motorist was killed in a two-vehicle collision at Route 45 and Monroeville Road (County Route 694) on May 21.
A motorist driving a Ford Fusion west on Monroeville shortly before 4 p.m. apparently failed to heed a stop sign and collided with a Hummer traveling south on Route 45, state police said.
A passenger in the Ford, Ayesha Jones, 24, of Washington, D.C., was transported to Inspira Medical Center Woodbury, where she was pronounced dead.
The driver of the Ford suffered non-life threatening injuries.
The driver of the Hummer reported head and rib pain.
The accident remains under investigation and no charges had been filed as of Friday, police said.
That was the second serious accident at the intersection last month.
A May 4 crash left three injured. A driver was cited for failing to heed a stop sign.
South Harrison police have investigated 38 motor vehicle accidents at this intersection since 2012, according to township Police Chief Nicholas Priore. Those crashes resulted in one fatality in 2012 and 26 injuries.
These stats don't include accidents handled by state police, including the May 21 crash.
Township officials have expressed concerns about the intersection and a state Department of Transportation official has promised to assist South Harrison in addressing the issue, Priore said. Route 45 is a state highway.
The state has requested a formal letter from township officials outlining improvements they would like to see at the intersection. That could include installation of a traffic light.
Currently, the only traffic control at the intersection comes in the form of stop signs on Monroeville Road.
This issue will be raised at the next township committee meeting.
"It is very likely there will be further discussion at the township meeting scheduled for June 14 at 7:30 p.m., as this intersection is of great concern to the honorable Mayor James McCall and other governing body officials as well as the law enforcement and fire officials who bear witness to the carnage," Priore said in a statement.
Matt Gray may be reached at mgray@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MattGraySJT. Find the South Jersey Times on Facebook.Etch A Sketch is a mechanical drawing toy invented by André Cassagnes of France and subsequently manufactured by the Ohio Art Company[1] and now owned by Spin Master of Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
An Etch A Sketch has a thick, flat gray screen in a red plastic frame. There are two white knobs on the front of the frame in the lower corners. Twisting the knobs moves a stylus that displaces aluminum powder on the back of the screen, leaving a solid line. The knobs create lineographic images. The left control moves the stylus horizontally, and the right one moves it vertically.
The Etch A Sketch was introduced near the peak of the Baby Boom on 12 July 1960 for $2.99 (equivalent to $25 in 2018).[2] It went on to sell 600,000 units[2] that year and is one of the best known toys of that era. In 1998, it was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame at The Strong, in Rochester, New York. In 2003, the Toy Industry Association named Etch A Sketch to its Century of Toys List, a roll call commemorating the 100 most memorable and most creative toys of the 20th century.[3]
Mechanics [ edit ]
horizontally, and the lettered components with those that move it vertically. The device has ten pulleys, six cables, two rails, and a stylus. Pulley 1 (single-groove) connects to pulley 2 (triple-groove) via a short infinite reciprocating cable. Pulley 2 connects to 3 (double-groove) via a longer reciprocating cable attached along its upper course to one end of the vertical rail (6), and then a third cable runs from 2 to 3, 4, and 5 (4 and 5 are single-groove) via another much longer loop of cable between 4 and 5 to the other end of the vertical rail. Likewise, A connects to B, B connects to C and attaches to the horizontal rail (F), and finally B connects to C, D, and E, attaching to F at its other end between D and E. Turning pulley 1 counterclockwise makes 2 rotate the same way, and this makes all pulleys connected to 2 (3, 4, and 5) do the same. The rail these cables connect to (6, connection points marked in red) move to the left both at ends, making the stylus move in the same direction along the other rail (F). Clockwise movement of pulley 1 has the opposite effect. Pulleys A-E operate the same as 1-5, and act on the horizontal rail (F) to slide the stylus up and down along the vertical one (6). Basic mechanism of operating a 2-dimensional plotter. The numbered components correspond to those that move the stylus, and the lettered components with those that move it. The device has ten pulleys, six cables, two rails, and a stylus. Pulley 1 (single-groove) connects to pulley 2 (triple-groove) via a short infinite reciprocating cable. Pulley 2 connects to 3 (double-groove) via a longer reciprocating cable attached along its upper course to one end of the vertical rail (6), and then a third cable runs from 2 to 3, 4, and 5 (4 and 5 are single-groove) via another much longer loop of cable between 4 and 5 to the other end of the vertical rail. Likewise, A connects to B, B connects to C and attaches to the horizontal rail (F), and finally B connects to C, D, and E, attaching to F at its other end between D and E. Turning pulley 1 counterclockwise makes 2 rotate the same way, and this makes all pulleys connected to 2 (3, 4, and 5) do the same. The rail these cables connect to (6, connection points marked in red) move to the left both at ends, making the stylus move in the same direction along the other rail (F). Clockwise movement of pulley 1 has the opposite effect. Pulleys A-E operate the same as 1-5, and act on the horizontal rail (F) to slide the stylus up and down along the vertical one (6).
The toy is a kind of plotter. The inside surface of the glass screen is coated with aluminium powder, which is then scraped off by a movable stylus, leaving a dark line on the light gray screen. The stylus is controlled by the two large knobs, one of which moves it vertically and the other horizontally. Turning both knobs simultaneously makes diagonal lines. To erase the picture, the user turns the toy upside down and shakes it. Doing this causes polystyrene beads to smooth out and re-coat the inside surface of the screen with aluminum powder. The "black" line merely exposes the darkness inside the toy. Filling in large "black" areas allows enough light through to expose parts of the interior.
History [ edit ]
The Etch A Sketch toy was invented in the late 1950s by André Cassagnes,[4][5][6] an electrician with Lincrusta Co, who named the toy L'Écran Magique (The Magic Screen).[2] In 1959, he took his drawing toy to the International Toy Fair in Nuremberg, Germany. The Ohio Art Company saw it but had no interest in the toy. When Ohio Art saw the toy a second time, they decided to take a chance on the product. L'Écran Magique was soon renamed the Etch A Sketch and became the most popular drawing toy in the business. After a complex series of negotiations, The Ohio Art Company launched the toy in the United States in time for the 1960 Christmas season with the name "Etch A Sketch". Ohio Art supported the toy with a televised advertising campaign.[7]
Originally, the toy used a plate glass screen, which was criticized by safety advocates for being easily broken and a danger to children.[8] In November 1970, Consumers Union filed a petition with the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, asking for emergency action under the 1969 Child Protection and Toy Safety Act.[9] The Food and Drug Administration responded that the toy had been redesigned, replacing the glass plate with plastic.[10]
In 1995, the Etch A Sketch toy was featured in the original Toy Story movie, in a scene where a sentient one performs a "quick draw" duel with Woody. This 12-second feature had been enough to give a significant sales boost, requiring the production line to work overtime to meet demand. By 1999, the company had again fallen into severe financial trouble from canceled orders of various products, reaching a point where the solvency of the company was in question. However, the company recovered with the prudent decision to agree to again have an Etch A Sketch appear in an animated feature film – this time in Toy Story 2. This scene featured an Etch A Sketch being used to present sketches related to the investigation of Woody's kidnapping. At 45 seconds, the scene in question was much longer than the scene in the original movie. The exposure from the highly successful Pixar movie resulted in sales of the toy increasing by 20 percent and ensured the survival of the company.[11][12]
Etch A Sketch was manufactured in Bryan, Ohio until the company moved the manufacturing plant to Shenzhen, China in 2001.[13]
In France, its country of origin, Etch A Sketch was sold under the name of "Télécran",[14] rather than L'Écran Magique.
In February 2016 the rights to the Etch A Sketch name and design were acquired by Toronto-based Spin Master Corporation.[15]
Etch A Sketch Animator [ edit ]
The Etch A Sketch Animator
The Etch A Sketch Animator (known simply as "The Animator" in Europe), debuted in 1987,[7] and featured a low-resolution dot matrix display and used two knobs for drawing, like a regular Etch A Sketch, with several buttons to manipulate the drawings. The initial price was $89.99 It had a few kilobytes of memory, capable of storing 12 frames of pictures in any combination up to 96 times. It contained a speaker, which made static-like sounds when the knobs were moved and during animations[16].
Etch A Sketch Animator 2000 [ edit ]
A Etch A Sketch Animator 2000
A cartridge for an Etch A Sketch Animator 2000
In 1988, Ohio Art made an attempt to get into the computer/entertainment market by introducing a more advanced version of the Etch A Sketch Animator known as the Etch A Sketch Animator 2000. It featured a new laptop like design instead of the classic Etch A Sketch form factor. The initial price was $139.99. It featured a bigger LCD screen with a higher resolution than the original Animator. It also featured 196 kilobytes of "powerful computer memory". Perhaps the biggest change was the removal of the knobs and the addition of "The Magic Touchpad". It was also capable of producing musical tones as opposed to the static-like tones of the original Animator. The Etch A Sketch Animator 2000 also had a cartridge slot for additional memory or game cartridges. Four cartridges were available: "Fly By", a flight simulator game, "Overdrive", a road racing game, "Putt-Nuts", a miniature golf game, and "Memory", a memory expansion cartridge. The price for one cartridge was $28.99. The Etch A Sketch Animator 2000 is capable of 22 frames of drawings and 99 frames of animation.
Etch A Sketch Color [ edit ]
Etch A Sketch Color
In 1993, Ohio launched a Color Etch A Sketch.[7] Similar to the original Etch A Sketch, it used the traditional two-knob interface to draw, but also featured six colors. It also had the ability to produce a color copy of each picture drawn
Etch A Sketch ETO - Plug and Play Drawing System / Etch A Sketch Wired [ edit ]
Etch A Sketch ETO
These are basically hand-held controllers that connect to a television-like handheld TV games and work like a regular Etch A Sketch, except on the television screen and with the addition of colors and sound effects.
Etch A Sketch art [ edit ]
There are a few practicing artists who use the Etch A Sketch to produce professional lineographic work. The artists make their work permanent by removing the aluminum powder. This is done either by drilling holes in the bottom of the toy or by removing the entire plastic backing. It is then resealed as a semi-permanent, shake-resistant piece of art.
See also [ edit ]
Magna Doodle, a somewhat similar toy using a different principle of operation.
Etch-a-sketch gaffe during the 2012 Mitt Romney presidential campaign.Russia has lost a battle to exhibit a range of wines produced in the annexed Ukrainian territory of Crimea – the Ukrainian goods had been presented as Russian at the Vinitaly international wine exhibition, which is being held in Italy’s Verona on April 9-12.
The Russian stand at the exhibition had been showing wines of Crimean producers Inkerman, Massandra, Zolotaya Balka, Solnechnaya Dolina and the Yevpatorian Wine Plant, along with Russian wines. But after complaints, the Crimean wines were removed.
The removals were prompted by an appeal from Ukrainian representatives at the exhibition to the Embassy of Ukraine in Rome and Italy’s financial police, said Oleksii Lubetskyi, the chief executive officer of UA2EU, a company that helps Ukrainian producers enter the European market.
“This is a victory, and the result of joint efforts by (Ukrainian) people and the Embassy of Ukraine in Rome,” Lubetskyi said, “An enemy or anyone else intending to offend Ukrainians needs to remember they cannot get away with it.”
A photograph uploaded by Lubetskyi to his Facebook account shows a map of Russia’s wineries presented at the exhibition that includes Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula, which Russia invaded and annexed in March 2014, and its wineries.
Crimean wine has been banned from export to the European Union since July 2014 when the EU sanctioned nine Crimean businesses, including those that produce wine.
Mariana Betsa, the spokesperson for Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, tweeted on April 10 that the Italian organizers of the wine exhibition had demanded that the Russian participants remove Crimean goods from their stand at the exhibition.
The decision to remove the wines angered some Russian officials. The Kremlin-installed Crimean leader Sergey Aksyonov told Russian news agency TASS that he had no clue why such a decision was taken, and that Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs is now actively “tackling this case.”
“I don’t know the reason behind such decision, but it seems like an act of absolute stupidity,” Aksyonov said.Were he alive today, Awlaki would be delighted at the divisions plaguing America. As Americans struggle to recover from the most divisive election campaign in living memory, political, economic, ethnic, and geographic polarization are all at record levels. Islamophobia is on the rise, with scant condemnation from politicians. Americans cannot even agree on what to call our main enemy, with endless rounds of debates over the use of terms like “radical” and “Islamic.”
Meanwhile, extremism has infected American society: Between 2008 and 2016, domestic hate groups were responsible for nearly twice as many attacks and plots within the United States as Islamists, according to a study by a group of investigative journalists. The carnage in Charlottesville, in which a far-right fanatic adopted the sort of vehicle attack pioneered by Islamic State supporters, is a grim reminder that purely domestic terrorism can be just as dangerous as attacks inspired by foreign groups.
Let me be clear: America’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies continue to do a fine job of countering terrorism. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for our political leaders, on either side of the aisle. Indeed, Congress is so divided on the issue that it has failed even to update the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, despite the fact that our enemy has evolved almost beyond recognition over the past 15 years. If another 9/11 were to happen today, there exists a serious danger that American politicians would be too busy affixing blame to this or that ethnic group, or arguing over the role played by immigration, to take measured action to deal with the threat.
Internationally, too, the United States has squandered the goodwill occasioned by 9/11. The invasion of Iraq and the abuses at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere angered many Muslims of all political persuasions and played directly into extremist narratives about an American “war on Islam.” But instead of learning from those mistakes, the United States persists in compounding them. President Trump’s state visit to Saudi Arabia to attend the Arab Islamic American Summit in May—at a time when millions of Muslim children are growing up as refugees: disaffected, poorly educated, and acutely vulnerable to extremist propaganda—would have been a good moment to reach out to ordinary Muslims worldwide with a message of understanding.
Instead, the administration chose to highlight the Kingdom’s “massive investment in America” and the additional $110 billion it was poised to spend on U.S. weapons. This message, no doubt inadvertently, chimed with Osama bin Laden’s oft-repeated claim that the United States was bent on “stealing” the wealth of the Muslim world—a claim that al-Qaeda repeated word-for-word in a statement released during the president’s visit.They’re still attacking Stephen K. Bannon and Breitbart News with lies. They’re trying to undermine President-elect Donald Trump. But their real target is: You.
You, the Breitbart News reader. You, the Donald Trump voter. And you, the American people — because they want to send a message to anyone who would dare stand up to the media, or the establishment of either party: If you dare to fight back, you will be destroyed.
You took your country back. And they will never forgive you for it.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has been forced to walk back false claims that Bannon — now the incoming White House Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor — is an antisemite. It has also dropped the false claim that Breitbart is the “premier” alt-right website.
But the ADL launched those defamatory claims and let them fester for days, while journalists busied themselves scaring the American public and slandering Breitbart readers as “white supremacists and anti-Semites.”
The bigger issue is that they cannot accept that Bannon, and Breitbart, understand the American public better than they do. They are seeking their revenge — not just against Breitbart News itself, but against our growing audience.
That is an audience of 45 million unique visitors to Breitbart.com over the past 30 days. That is an audience that likely includes many of Trump’s 61 million voters. And it is an audience that includes Democrats, too — those who demand reform within their own party.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) — the victim of Democrats’ election-rigging — tweeted before the election: “I do not believe that most of the people who are thinking about voting for Mr. Trump are racist or sexist … most are people who are hurting.”
Left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore, who warned Democrats about Trump’s appeal in the Upper Midwest, told MSNBC after the election: “They’re not racists. They twice voted for a man whose middle name is Hussein. That’s the America we live in.”
Liberal intellectual Thomas Frank laid the blame for Trump’s victory at the feet of the media, who pretended “[w]orking-class people weren’t supporting Trump. And if they were, it was only because they were botched humans. Racism was the only conceivable reason for lining up with the Republican candidate.”
Frank added: “The fourth estate came together in an unprecedented professional consensus. They chose insulting the other side over trying to understand what motivated them.”
The media have learned nothing from their defeat. They are recycling the exact same false allegations that were used against Bannon, and Trump, during the election — and which voters ignored at the polls.
On Sunday morning, CNN’s Brian Stelter, host of Reliable Sources, called for “serious media soul-searching” because viewers were “having a very hard time trusting this channel.” Yet by Sunday evening, he was claiming, falsely, that Breitbart is “a website that thrives with white nationalist rhetoric.”
They simply cannot help themselves. Blinded by hatred, they will lie about anything, and anyone, to reverse Election Day.
Hillary Clinton called Trump voters “the basket of deplorables … the racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it.” Voters answered with their ballots.
Some leftists understood the message. But the media refused to listen. They have indulged the riots in American cities. They will destroy the country to spite you.
You, the deplorables. We, the people.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. His new book, See No Evil: 19 Hard Truths the Left Can’t Handle, is available from Regnery through Amazon. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.Knockout 3.2 will include some exciting new functionality out-of-the-box to do modular development through creating components. From Knockout’s point of view, a component allows you to asynchronously combine a template and data (a view model) for rendering on the page. Components in Knockout are heavily inspired by web components, but are designed to work with Knockout and all of the browsers that it supports (all the way back to IE6).
Components allow you to combine independent modules together to create an application. For example, a view could look like:
1 2 3 4 5 <myapp -nav > < /myapp-nav> <myapp -grid params= "data: items, paging: true, sorting: true" > < /myapp-grid> <myapp -footer > < /myapp-footer>
The idea of doing modular development with Knockout is certainly not a new one. Libraries like Durandal with its compose binding and the module binding from my knockout-amd-helpers have been doing this same type of thing for a while and have helped prove that it is a successful way to build and organize Knockout functionality. Both of these libraries have focused on AMD (Asynchronous Module Definition) to provide the loading and organization of modules.
Knockout’s goal is to make this type of development possible as part of the core without being tied to any third-party library or framework. Developers will be able to componentize their code, by default, rather than only after pulling in various plugins. However, the functionality is flexible enough to support different or more advanced ideas/opinions through extensibility points. When KO 3.2 is released, developers should seriously consider factoring components heavily into their application architecture (unless already successfully using one of the other plugins mentioned).
How does it work?
By default, in version 3.2, Knockout will include:
a system for registering/defining components custom elements as an easy and clean way to render/consume a component a component binding as an alternative to custom elements that supports dynamically binding against components extensibility points for modifying or augmenting this functionality to suit individual needs/opinions
Let’s take a look at how this functionality is used:
Registering a component
The default component loader for Knockout looks for components that were registered via a ko.components.register API. This registration expects a component name along with configuration that describes how to determine the viewModel and the template. Here is a simple example of registering a component:
1 2 3 4 5 6 ko. components. register ( "simple-name", { viewModel : function ( data ) { this. name = ( data && data. name ) || "none" ; }, template : "<div data-bind=\"text: name\"></div>" });
The viewModel key
can be a function. If so, then it is used as a constructor (called with new ).
). can pass an instance property to use an object directly.
property to use an object directly. can pass a createViewModel property to call a function that can act as a factory and return an object to use as the view model (has access to the DOM element as well for special cases).
property to call a function that can act as a factory and return an object to use as the view model (has access to the DOM element as well for special cases). can pass a require key to call the require function with the supplied value. This will work with whatever provides a global require function (like require.js ). The result will again go through this resolution process.
Additionally, if the resulting object supplies a dispose function, then KO will call it whenever tearing down the component. Disposal could happen if that part of the DOM is being removed/re-rendered (by a parent template or control-flow binding) or if the component binding has its name changed dynamically.
The template key
can be a string of markup
can be an array of DOM nodes
can be an element property that supplies the id of an element to use as the template
property that supplies the id of an element to use as the template can be an element property that supplies an element directly
property that supplies an element directly can be a require property that like for viewModel will call require directly with the supplied value.
A component could choose to only specify a template, in cases where a view model is not necessary. The supplied params will be used as the data context in that case.
The component binding
With this functionality, Knockout will provide a component binding as an option for rendering a component on the page (with the other option being a custom element). The component binding syntax is fairly simple.
1 2 3 4 5 <div data-bind= "component:'my-component'" ></div> <div data-bind= "component: { name:'my-component', params: { name: 'ryan' } }" ></div> <!-- ko component:'my-component' --><!-- /ko -->
The component binding supports binding against an observable and/or observables for the name and params options. This allows for handling dynamic scenarios like rendering different components to the main content area depending on the state of the application.
Custom Elements
While the component binding is an easy way to display a component and will be necessary when dynamically binding to components (dynamically changing the component name), custom elements will likely be |
to pull back from his unfounded statement,” the spokesperson wrote. “Unfortunately, he did not.”
The notice of libel comes a week after new allegations from Ontario Provincial Police that former premier Dalton McGuinty’s chief of staff hired a staffer’s boyfriend to wipe out government hard drives that contained information about the $1.1 billion gas plant scandal.
Wynne said Tuesday that her lawyer had sent Hudak a cease-and-desist order after he alleged that Wynne was behind a plan to wipe computer hard drives in the premier’s office.
Wynne said she did not order anyone to destroy the information, but acknowledged that a tech expert who was given access to government computers had separate contracts with both the Liberal party and Liberal caucus.
However, Wynne said no members of McGuinty’s staff had access to the premier’s office once she took over.
Wynne’s press secretary told CTV Toronto’s Paul Bliss Friday that no public funding is being used for the legal action.
With files from The Canadian PressThe NASA "flying saucer" test flight Saturday was a success. The Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) test vehicle was attached to a high-altitude balloon before being released 120,000 above the Pacific Ocean. The LDSD test vehicle successfully switched over to powered flight and splashed down into the Pacific at 5:35 p.m. EDT.
The LDSD test flight began at 2:45 p.m. EDT and the vehicle launched from the U.S. Navy Pacific Missile Range Facility in Kauai, Hawaii, NASA said. The LDSD test vehicle was detached from the balloon at 5:05 p.m. EDT and splashdown occurred at 5:35 p.m. EDT. Powered flight will bring the test vehicle to a height of 180,000 feet. At that time, the LDSD test vehicle would be traveling at speeds reaching Mach 3.8, NASA said. The flying saucer test flight was delayed several times due to high winds at the launch site.
While the LDSD vehicle looks like a flying saucer, it will not be used as a flight vehicle for future missions to Mars. NASA is figuring out ways to land large payloads, such as cargo or science experiments for longer missions, safely on Mars and an LDSD vehicle could be used for that purpose.
Saturday's launch tested the flight capabilities of the LDSD vehicle as well as two landing technologies: The Supersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator (SIAD) was deployed successfully but the Supersonic Disk Sail Parachute did not, NASA said. The SIAD tube helps reduce the speed of the LDSD vehicle to around Mach 2.5.
There are two more LDSD flights which will test the landing capabilities of the vehicle.
Videos of the LDSD test flight can be viewed below.
Archived Video Of The Entire LDSD Test Flight
LDSD Test Flight Preparations
Balloon Launch
LDSD Powered Flight After Balloon Release
LDSD Landing Technologies, SIAD and ParachuteBy Kayla Darrow – @Erik_Jones’ 2015 season just got busier.
Jones announced today that he will compete full-time in next year’s NASCAR Camping World Truck Series in one of Kyle Busch Motorsports’ Toyota Tundras. He is also scheduled to run multiple Xfinity Series races for Joe Gibbs Racing.
The primary sponsor on Jones’ NCWTS ride reportedly will be AutoTrader.com. His Xfinity Series sponsors reportedly will include JGR staples GameStop, Reasor’s and Toyota.
“We’ve been working hard over the past probably three months now to get this deal done and it’s finally come together to where I’ll be in the full season next year for Kyle Busch Motorports in the Truck Series as well as Joe Gibbs Racing for some Nationwide races too,” said Jones.
“Definitely an exciting year ahead for me. It’s been a long time — I felt like it was coming, but we all worked hard for it and to finally have it come together and get to run a full season in one of the NASCAR series is pretty special for me. Happy to see it all come together and really looking forward to it.”
Jones will continue to run with Ryan “Rudy” Fugle as his crew chief. Fugle acted as the crew chief during Jones’ first Camping World Truck Series win at Phoenix International Raceway in 2013. The pair are already being deemed as a threat to the championship.
“Obviously my relationship with Rudy (Fugle, crew chief, 2015) is one of the strongest I’ve ever had with a crew member of crew chief. I’ve had a great run with Eric Phillips (crew chief, 2014) this year on the box and we’ve had a lot of success and I enjoy working with Eric,” said Jones.
“Rudy was the crew chief in 2012 and this year he’s been on the team as an engineer still. We have a great relationship and definitely looking forward to working with him again as a crew chief.”
Jones has run part-time in the Camping World Truck Series for Kyle Busch Motorsports for the past two years. In his 16 starts, Jones has racked up three wins, six top-fives and 12 top-10 finishes.
“Erik is more than ready to take the next step in his career and compete for a championship running full-time in the Truck Series next year,” said @KyleBusch, owner of Kyle Busch Motorsports.
“Towards the end of this season, he had a stretch where he was behind the wheel for five of six races on all types of tracks and each week he went out, ran up front and showcased how talented he is at such a young age.”
Jones also raced Joe Gibbs Racing’s No. 20 Toyota Camry in the Nationwide Series at both Chicagoland Speedway and Bristol Motor Speedway earlier this year. He earned a top-10 finish at both tracks.
All this experience will come in handy next year when Jones will have his first real chance to win a championship.
“This is obviously a huge step for me and my racing career in general – a step towards even having a shot at a championship really, so this is my first opportunity to go out and race for a championship in any of the three NASCAR Series, so it’s obviously one of the bigger steps I’ve taken in my career and I’m definitely looking forward to the challenge it’s going to bring.”
“Obviously it’s a new challenge, not one that I’ve had before and I’m looking forward to learning from it. I’ve got a great position at KBM and I feel like I’m in the best position I’ve been in my career. Just looking forward to it all, it’s going to be fun and I’m looking forward to chasing down a championship.”
Catch Jones in his final races of the 2014 season this weekend at Phoenix International Raceway, as he competes in the truck race on Friday and Nationwide race on Saturday.
EMAIL KAYLA AT kayla.darrow@popularspeed.com
FOLLOW KAYLA ON TWITTER: @kayla_darrow[Related to: The Fidget Spinner Is The Perfect Toy For The Trump Presidency, In Defense Of Liking Things, Open Marriage Is A Neoliberal Pathology]
That modern pathology, the Pyramid of Cheops
The final triumph of modern individualism is an afterlife ensconed in a giant stone structure, carefully segregated from any other souls, based entirely around stuff. No county churchyards here. No slow surrender to nature and the weeds. Just piles of golden goblets and jeweled necklaces, carefully guarded by snake-infested traps. And, of course the bones of dead servants, guaranteed to keep serving you in the great beyond. Of course Heaven is neoliberal. There is no alternative!
That modern pathology, heterosexual intercourse for the sole purpose of procreation
Sex can bring people together. It can cement relationships between people and families. It can pulse with celestial fire, it can shatter inner worlds, it can inspire transcendent art, it can remake souls. Of course moderns took one look at all of that and thought: you know what the only acceptable purpose of sex is? Making a smaller copy of myself.
But calling this narcissism would be missing half the picture. It’s equally related to a sort of productivity fetish, a mindset where anything that doesn’t leave a material token didn’t really happen. Enjoyed the company of your closest friends? Not real unless you put the pictures on Facebook, tagged #bestiesforever. Broadened your horizons with a trip to another culture? Not real without crushed pennies or some other gift-shop tchotchke. Met your soulmate? Not real unless you’ve got a lump of screaming flesh to show for it. This is what capitalism does – reduce experiences to souveniers, reduce relationships to commodities, demand that everything good be mediated by a material end product in order to model the laboring-for-others that workers are told is their only life purpose.
That modern pathology, Homer’s Odyssey
If Harry Potter wasn’t vapid enough for you, now we have a travelogue for the Instagram generation.
Odysseus’ only salient characteristic is being “polymetis”, Very Smart. This is enough to give him a raving fan club of front-row-kids and aspirational Ivy Leaguers, the same people who thought Hermione Granger’s straight A’s made her a symbol of an entire generation of womenhood. Odysseus proves his chops in his very first adventure, where he encounters Lotus-Eaters who convince most of his men to eat a magic fruit that leaves them drugged and listless; Odysseus nobly drags them back to the ship and forces them to keep on rowing for him.
Imagine the horrors of a world where poor galley slaves can leave behind their unpaid labor to live on a tropical beach and enjoy their lives! It is only thanks to Odysseus that this catastrophe is averted. One might think a few readers would note that a few months later, the vast majority of sailors in Odysseus’ fleet died horribly, eaten by cannibals. One might think a few readers would wonder if, really, the guy who dragged galley slaves back to their galleys only to get them killed a few months later was really such a good guy. In fact, nobody asks this question, because Odysseus is Very Smart. It’s no coincidence that the Odyssey came out in the generation of the invasion of Iraq War – if Very Smart people declare that dying horribly was the right thing to do, and then it turns out it wasn’t, at least they were benevolent technocrats with your best interests in mind.
Odysseus then goes on to have sex with various sorceresses and sea-nymphs while protesting that he doesn’t want to have sex with them and is loyal to his far-off wife. This is portrayed as clearly a difficult problem that we should empathize with. Also, his sailors get turned into pigs, eaten by sea monsters, and drowned in a giant whirlpool. This is not portrayed as clearly a difficult problem that we should empathize with. In one scene, some starving sailors eat a sacred cow belonging to the Sun God; this is portrayed as clearly justifying their deaths.
We can start to sketch a psychological picture of the sort of person who could enjoy the Odyssey. They identify with Odysseus, that’s obvious. They want to feel like they’ve suffered – after all, suffering is ennobling! – but they don’t want to actually suffer. They imagine the “suffering” of having to have sex with lots of sea nymphs they’re not super-interested in, all while their friends and subordinates are massacred all around them (but only for good reasons, like them stealing cattle, or them not being Very Smart). At the end of all of it, much like the rich kids attending the Fyre Festival, they can show up on their front doorstep and say “Oh, what suffering I have seen – and I the only survivor!”
The Odyssey is a book for rich individualist aspirational Very Smart narcissists who simultaneously want to outsource their ennobling hardships to the lower classes, and remain so contemptuous of those lower classes that they imagine them literally getting turned into swine by a sorceress, and end up having sex with that sorceress, who is unable to resist them because they are Very Smart.
I weep for the modern generation.
That modern pathology, the Aristotelian theory of virtue
You see, perfect virtue in all things approaches the mean. The traditionalist who wants to make the system more conservative is unvirtuous. And the radical who wants to make the system more progressive is exactly equally unvirtuous. The virtuous person is the liberal intellectual who considers both positions, then places himself exactly in the middle.
Anybody who seems too fiery, too deep, or too sincere is automatically wrong. You can reject both the grandparents who urge clean and sober living, and the hippies who tell you that drugs are the only way to break outside the system and achieve true consciousness, in favor of having a joint or two whenever you feel like it. You can reject both the ascetic who urges simple water, and the aesthete who urges fine wine, in favor of the bottle of Diet Coke already in your fridge.
Aristotle reduces virtue to abandoning the highs of ecstasy and the lows of misery in favor of the comfortable neoliberal plateau of watching Mad Men on TV and ordering off Amazon Echo. No wonder his message resonates so well with millennials.
That modern pathology, Catholicism
The Old Testament God demanded adherence to hundreds of rules and rained down collective punishment on entire nations for breaking them. But you are a yuppie with an hour a week for religion, tops, and consider yourself part of a different species from anyone who doesn’t go to a Starbucks at least twice a week. You get your coffee in packets from Keurig, your razors in packets from Dollar Shave Club, and your juice in packets from Juicero. If only there were some large corporation that would package religion and send it to your doorstep for one low price.
Enter Catholicism. God loves you, just for being you. He suffered and died for you two thousand years ago, granting you redemption. All you have to do to pick it up is sign on the dotted line and pay ten percent of your income.
Consider eg the ritual of confession. You eliminate your sin in a standardized dyadic interaction no harder than eliminating your muscle tension at the massage parlor, or eliminating your back pain with a chiropractor. It’s quick, impersonal, and completely tailored to your individual sinner profile.
Or consider the Eucharist. The Prozac generation has already had personal change reduced to the process of swallowing a pill, and the Catholic Church is eager to comply, reducing finitude to a DSM-V ailment curable with correctly prepared bread products. The Church is a corporation the same as Coca-Cola and McDonalds, and we already know the sacred ritual for interacting with corporations. And so our consumer culture reduces the human relationship with the Divine to literally consuming God.
And like all good corporations, you can rest assured that the whole thing is organized in a very logical top-down chain under the absolute command of an incredibly rich guy who lives in a house covered in gold. “Father, am I forgiven now?” “Um, one second, let me check with the manager in branch headquarters”. And why shouldn’t he? The word “Catholic” means “universal”; we’re so separated from our own neighbors that we’d rather our religion come in the form of Standardized Religion Product shipped in from Rome than anything which forces us to confront people near us as individuals, or trust our local communities for anything more than naming the parish church.
Let’s be honest: the recent success of Catholicism is the ultimate sign of our inability to deal with the world through anything other than a late capitalist lens of standardizaton, corporatism, and carefully-packaged pablum. It’s the perfect religion for the Age of Trump.The phone rings, and a sympathetic voice explains that the Police Association of Ontario really needs your donation to help underprivileged children.
Kind officers, little children. What could be lovelier?
Don’t reach for your credit card, Ottawa police warned on Tuesday morning.
Yup, another scam.
Except that it isn’t.
The fundraising project by the Police Association of Ontario that Ottawa police initially deemed false is, as it turns out, a real fundraiser.
Ottawa police had to retract their own statement released Tuesday morning warning that the police organization’s “Friendship Through Fishing” campaign was a fraud. Turns out that the donations are safe.
Police learned that after warning people away from the supposed scam earlier in the day.
Anyone who calls the number with a 613 area code will hear a recorded message identifying it as the police association’s office. Police originally said the message is bogus. Again, it’s not.
The “Friendship Through Fishing” program is a joint project by the Police Association of Ontario in collaboration with pro angler Bob Izumi, conservation group Fishing Forever and the Canadian Tire Corporation that “encourages youngsters to go fishing,” according to its website.
Ottawa police Sgt. Jamie Ritchie of the Organized Fraud Unit said there was a miscommunication between the department and the Police Association of Ontario that led local police to believe there was no fundraiser and that it must be a scam. But an unrelated call to the organization’s Toronto office on Tuesday revealed the fundraiser does indeed exist.
“They realized that the phone calls here in Ottawa were in fact related to one of their fundraising activities.”
However, Ottawa police Sgt. Jamie Ritchie said it still ought to serve as a reminder to be vigilant about phone solicitors.
“There aren’t many phone solicitation campaigns these days that are legit. I just don’t think there are too many charities that do that these days, but there’s certainly lots of guys that try to scam your money from different schemes on the phone.”
But, just to reiterate, the Police Association of Ontario’s fundraiser — not one of them.
With files from Tom Spears
afeibel@ottawacitizen.com
Twitter.com/adamfeibelWell www.ibtimes.co.uk/articles/291817/20120202/ron-paul-a3p-opbl The hacktivist collective Anonymous set out to take down the whitesupremacist American Third Party (A3P) in what they called “OperationBlitzkrieg” but they littlegreenfootballs.com/article/39862_Anonymous_Hacks_White In a document dump that includes private forum messages, emails,organization notes another other information the group found numerousconnections between www.care2.com/causes?s=ron+paul%2C+racism and A3P. According to the documents, www.nazi-leaks.info/, Paul himself regularly met with many A3P members, engaged in conference calls with their board of directors and engaged in a “ newsone.com/nation/casey-gane-mccalla/anonymous-reveals-clos between A3P and the Ron Paul Revolution.Other excerpts show A3P webmaster Jamie Kelso (whose email accountwas one hacked by the collective) coordinating meeting between Paul andother members of A3P such as corporate lawyer and chairman of theneo-Nazi group Paul. “I’m going to go to the Conservative PoliticalAction Conference (CPAC) with Bill Johnson,” reads an email to an A3Pmember dated January 2011. “Bill and I will be www.care2.com/causes/the-rise-of-rand-paul-and-the-mainstrea I have a teleconference call with Bill (and Ron Paul) tonight. Muchmore later. Things are starting to happen (thanks to folks like you).”In another passage, Kelso, a former Scientologist and account ownerof other German Nazi forums, wrote: “I’ll be at CPAC from Feb. 9 to Feb.12. I’ll send back reports to you from personal meetings with Ron Paul,newly-elected Senator Rand Paul and many others. It’ll be here onWhiteNewsNow, a place that is really starting to get interesting becauseof the presence of folks like you. Birds of a feather flock together,and we are really gathering some quality here.”Accusations of racism and ties to neo-Nazi interests have plaguedPaul since the 1990s and have re-surfaced during this campaign. So farPaul has issued standard denials, claiming not to have been aware of theties between his camp and the racist right and denied authorship of aseries of racist newsletters, despite confirmation from his closeststaff that Paul signed off on every detail.So what’s Paul’s explanation now?As if Rhode Island hasn't elected enough politicians who can’t manage their money or be trusted with the money of others, there are now indications that Providence City Council President Luis A. Aponte belongs on that list.
The state Board of Elections has turned over evidence that Mr. Aponte apparently used campaign money to cover personal expenses — which is illegal — to Attorney General Peter Kilmartin. Given the level of corruption afflicting the Providence City Council, Mr. Kilmartin must not be as sluggish addressing this issue as he was looking into the dubious conduct of council member Kevin Jackson, who at long last has been indicted by a grand jury on five counts, including felony embezzlement.
As an 18-year veteran of the council, Mr. Aponte surely knows the rules about handling campaign account money. But there are deeply troubling signs he ignored those rules.
As The Providence Journal reported on Sept. 30 (“Aponte repaid campaign funds following questions”), Mr. Aponte approached the elections board earlier this year to address some $48,000 in penalties that he owes for not filing campaign finance reports on time, as well as the use of $1,729 in campaign cash by his campaign manager (and former wife) for personal expenses.
But as the board’s staff looked at Mr. Aponte’s campaign reports, it found additional problems — ones that added up to another $13,942 missing from the campaign account because Mr. Aponte, apparently, had spent that money on personal needs when his own bank balance was too low. An audit by the board’s staff found, for instance, that $3,114 was missing as the result of transactions in 2010. Also missing: a $1,000 contribution from the Providence firefighters union in 2011, as well as another $9,799.
Armed with this information, the board sent its findings to Mr. Kilmartin — a move that Mr. Aponte’s lawyer criticized in one news report, saying that someone who has made a mistake and tries to correct it should not be punished. That argument is preposterous. To use campaign money for personal needs defrauds the people who supported a candidate’s effort to run for office. Removing that division also makes political contributions tantamount to direct personal bribes. It is hard to believe that Mr. Aponte does not understand this, or failed to comprehend that he was evidently breaking the law.
Mr. Aponte’s case is all the more disturbing because it reminds us of other recent Rhode Island cases. Former House Speaker Gordon Fox is in jail for bribery, filing a false tax return and using campaign money for personal needs. Councilman Jackson similarly faces charges of improper use of campaign funds.
Citizens are wise to carefully scrutinize politicians with financial troubles, which can be a red flag for corruption. They should also keep close watch on Mr. Kilmartin, a former state legislator who in recent years has demonstrated a greater interest in serving the political establishment than the public. Notably, he played a key role in hiding state police reports of an investigation at the home of a governor, and in keeping secret the details of a state investigation of the 38 Studios debacle.
In the case of councilman Jackson, Mr. Kilmartin’s office took more than two years to act on violations identified by the Board of Elections. Rhode Island does not need another delay in Mr. Aponte’s case. Rather, the public needs swift action by the attorney general in investigating and making sure an elected official is held accountable for any wrongdoing.
It is unfortunate that in a city with such great fiscal challenges, there are now two veteran members of the City Council who have shown evident difficulties handling campaign money. And that raises an obvious question: If they can’t manage their own matters, what business do they have managing the public’s?During conflicts, humanitarian bodies not only face the obvious security risks of reaching people in need, they also have to deal with the growing bureaucracy involved in getting medicines to them.
Source: Thomas Koehler/Photothek via Getty Images More than five million Palestinian refugees displaced by the Arab-Israeli conflict of 1948 have settled in refugee camps, including this camp in Beirut
In March 2013, as conflict raged in Syria, it took the UN agency responsible for the well-being of Palestinian refugees nearly six months to bring medicines to refugee camps in Damascus, as many were stuck in Beirut, Lebanon’s capital, 85 kilometres away. “The challenge of transporting medicines into Syria was truly a nightmare at the beginning of the conflict,” says Akihiro Seita, health director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).
The agency, which provides humanitarian services to more than five million Palestinian refugees displaced by the Arab-Israeli conflict of 1948, sent medicines by air and sea to Beirut, and then by road to Damascus. Sometimes medicines were held in port until the Lebanese government granted an import licence — all the while incurring costs. “Delays cost us a lot of money… and eventually it took us an extra couple of months, which is too long for us, to get the medicines to refugees in Damascus,” says Seita.
The main challenge for UNRWA in Syria is the safe delivery of medicines from outside Syria to its 14 functional health centres serving 560,000 registered Palestinian refugees —half of whom have been internally displaced since the conflict began, with a further 12% fleeing to neighbouring countries. UNRWA also uses 12 of its shelters as mini health points to make sure people have access to primary healthcare. “We almost ran out of medicines in Damascus because many medicines were stuck in Beirut,” says Seita.
The medical treatment of refugees in the 21st century is dominated by non-communicable diseases (NCDs), says Seita, such as diabetes and hypertension rather than communicable or infectious diseases. “NCDs have a high prevalence in these populations, with or without conflict, and we must not forget that,” he says. For instance, NCDs make up around 70% of deaths among Palestinian refugees.
Humanitarian bodies are seeing increased red tape around the supply of medicines in countries hosting refugees. These bodies prefer to source medicines centrally in cost-effective terms on the international markets. However, the bureaucracy around importing their medicines, as well as complying with local country requirements, is adding to the complexity of providing much needed medicines to refugees in and around conflict zones, restricting humanitarian organisations to purchasing medicines on local markets. The quality of the locally bought medicines, however, cannot always be assured, and there can be limited supplies and drug shortages.
Most widely used medicines for refugees worldwide Source: UNHCR Amoxicilin Co-trimoxazole Ciprafloxacin Oral rehydration salts Artemether + lumefantrine Ibuprofen Benzoic acid Paracetamol Gentamicin Zinc
Local market
There are many regulatory constraints associated with importing medicines into countries hosting refugees and in some countries, particularly in the Middle East, importing medicines is almost impossible.
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is unable to import its drugs into Jordan and must therefore source them from within the country. “We buy locally because it is impossible to get the import licences for our medicines quickly and at reasonable cost from the Jordanian authorities,” says Miguel Serrano, section pharmacist for the Dutch division of MSF.
MSF procures 80% of its medicines centrally for its global programmes and 20% locally. If it has to buy locally it only does so after it has obtained a positive risk-assessment of their quality.
Source: Dina Debbas A community health worker for Médecins Sans Frontières at the Aïn El Helweh refugee camp, Saida, Lebanon, preparing supplies to be distributed to health facilities inside the camp
“That volume of local purchases is getting larger over time. A lot of the countries where we cannot import are located in the Middle East. Many of our operations in the region grew following the Arab Spring,” says Serrano.
Of the 3.7 million registered Syrian refugees, the majority are in Lebanon, followed by Turkey, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt, according to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR).
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), which each year ships 1,400 megatonnes of drugs around the world from its warehouses in Geneva, also buys drugs locally in Jordan. This happens in exceptional situations when the recipient country will not allow it to import, or when ad hoc purchases are needed because there are medicines shortages, explains Stéphanie Arsac-Janvier, head pharmacist at the ICRC.
Buying locally, however, can be problematic if supplies are insecure. “We see medicine shortage problems around once to twice a month and that means we have to find therapeutic alternatives which can be risky, for quality reasons, until the distributor has replenished their stock,” says Serrano.
In the past six months, MSF has experienced repeated shortages of local anaesthetics, such as lidocaine, as well as of haloperidol, antibiotics (amoxicillin syrups for children), and povidone iodine antiseptics, according to Serrano. Haloperidol is used for some refugees who may be in an agitated mental state after departing their homes in Syria.
“We saw months of shortages. We see this when a distributor has a monopoly on a product and frequently runs out of stock, because the distributor is serving other clients. This is a major constraint,” says Serrano.
When this happens, therapeutic alternatives are sourced, but this is not always feasible since the alternative may not be on the care protocols used by MSF doctors. When haloperidol was unavailable, risperidone was sourced as an alternative drug after MSF’s pharmacists conducted an assessment of other distributors in the field.
Drugs bought locally can usually only be bought in small batches, and are more expensive than buying on international markets. “In Lebanon, when we bought medicines locally, it was often 5–10 times higher than the international prices,” says Seita.
One advantage of local procurement is that it offers faster delivery to patients. But it is difficult to ensure quality. George McGuire, chief medical logistician of the ICRC, says that if there was an absolute guarantee that there were no counterfeits, then local purchase would be the obvious, efficient way to supply to all its health programmes.
Custom made
Each country has its own regulatory framework for medicines and expects humanitarian bodies to buy medicines that are registered in that country.
For ICRC, supplying its medicines during a crisis in 2003 was relatively simpler than it is now. “We are having to customise supplies to individual countries as they have their own drug regulations. The amount of documentation needed varies country by country for the importation of medicines. This is a big challenge for us,” says Arsac-Janvier.
McGuire explains that it is a country’s privilege to have regulations. “In some cases, if you have a real emergency, you could expect more flexibility but… humanitarian organisations are guests of the country so we should also be humble and not demand that we can just roll in with our trucks,” he says.
The level of sophistication differs from country to country, too: some want to see a certificate of pharmaceutical product, or a certificate of analysis. Others may want at least 75% of the shelf-life remaining, and some want a patient information leaflet in the box.
“In ten years’ time, we probably will be obliged to buy medicines locally during a crisis as it becomes impossible to import,” says Arsac-Janvier.
If an agency were to customise for each country, it would have to stock up to five different brands of a medicine to satisfy the different requirements. This could lead to delivery delays, she adds.
The ICRC secures the quality of its medicines by procuring a lot of them in Europe. For local purchases, it relies on the results of Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) audits of manufacturers by the World Health Organization’s prequalification scheme (which deals with malaria, tuberculosis and HIV drugs) as well as by other humanitarian bodies, such as MSF and UNICEF.
UNHCR uses wholesalers, with whom it has agreements to acquire medicines for its programmes. To ensure the medicines meet the international standards of quality, there are two criteria: they need to be on the UNHCR standard essential medicines list (EML), which is a slighter shorter version of the WHO’s EML; and they need to have a certificate of GMP from the manufacturer.
Trade embargoes
Another challenge facing humanitarian groups is dealing with trade embargoes, where a pharmaceutical manufacturer does not want to supply medicines for use in certain countries in contravention of a particular embargo.
Although humanitarian trade — which involves the supply of food, medicines and medical supplies — is exempt from US trade embargoes, independent reports support allegations that access to medicines is affected, argues Beverley Snell, associate principal fellow at Australia’s Macfarlane Burnet Institute for Medical Research & Public Health, who has worked with Health Action International (Asia Pacific) on access to essential medicines.
The ICRC saw the potential effect of US trade embargoes in Libya in 2011. “Luckily for us, we had enough stock in our Geneva warehouse to supply medicines to people in need and did not have to rely on US pharmaceutical manufacturers. But potentially it could have been a problem,” say Arsac-Janvier.
Global validation scheme
A global system that assured the quality of medicines would help humanitarian organisations supply medicines. For example, WHO’s prequalification list — which at present assures the quality of a small number of drugs — could be applied to all essential drugs. “[That] would be a dream come true,” says McGuire.
“Today there is information sharing between agencies but if you want to ensure the quality of products, you have to hire a consultant to inspect a manufacturing site, which is extremely time consuming and expensive,” he explains.
McGuire says a global prequalification system would allow the sharing of resources and access to reliable data, which would help to address problems around counterfeit and substandard drugs.
“Such systems exists for HIV, TB and malaria drugs and some others,” says Seita “but for the vast majority of essential medicines, including NCD drugs, such systems don’t exist.”
But some organisations are already getting prepared for the increasingly complex nature of drug procurement in conflicts and emergencies. Over the past couple of years, the ICRC has stationed regional pharmacists in key areas around the world — Kenya, Jordan, Pakistan, Ivory Coast — to help it understand drug regulatory systems so it can better customise the procurement of medicines locally. “These pharmacists will be trained and prepared for when a crisis occurs. We want to be proactive on solutions,” says Arsac-Janvier.
Others would also like to see some flexibility on importation procedures. “There are some countries where it can take several months to import even emergency supplies,” says McGuire, although he doesn’t want to identify the countries that have caused delays. He explains that there are international conventions to ease emergency response but not everyone has signed up to them. “There are four international conventions, as well as one recommendation, which include provisions for the facilitation of the importation of relief goods, including medical supplies, during crises. However, their provisions are legally binding only for states that have ratified them, which at present represents between 26% and 49% of countries worldwide.”
The Jordanian authorities helped MSF to find local products, but were not so helpful in giving exceptions to import medicines. “They basically want MSF and other humanitarian actors to use locally marketed medicines,” says Serrano, adding that it is a profitable market for local pharmaceutical companies “if you are buying their products to mitigate ongoing emergencies”. Part of the justification for this local procurement could be the immense national costs of looking after large refugee communities in these countries, suggests Seita.
Two years on, the UNRWA has developed better ways of getting medicines into Syria. It transits medicines through the Beirut airport, which means there is no need for import or export permissions from the government, before flying them on to Damascus. It also uses the sea port in Lattakia, Syria, which is government controlled, and transports medicines to Damascus by road from there.
However, trucking medicines on from Damascus to its health points across Syria is still a major challenge, especially in conflict zones. “It is an ongoing struggle to get medicines to these sites,” says Seita.
Although all of these struggles make a difficult job worse for NGOs, Seita argues that it is important there are strong regulatory systems in place. “If countries allow us to import anything that is not good for their national health systems. It is good that these countries have a strong regulatory system and their rules are respected, otherwise how would they develop?”In the open source era, do vendor developer programs matter as much as they once did?
It doesn't matter which language or platform you develop for; developers who use proprietary tools or commercial open-source applications have a similar resource in common: membership in a vendor developer program. Whether sponsored by a large company or a small one, these programs typically include technical documentation, forums and other peer advice, and early access to new APIs or other supporting tools. Some vendors provide upgraded access on a fee basis, such as quicker turnaround on bug reports.
If you've been programming for any length of time, this isn't news to you. Most developers have at least flirted with membership in a developer program, particularly if it's free — and most do offer a lot of resources even at the cheapskate level. Web 2.0 vendors also have developer programs in which they share APIs and offer help in using them, including Google, eBay, Yahoo, Facebook, and PayPal.
While these programs aren't always perfect, they are generally appreciated simply because someone from the company can give an authoritative answer (whether or not they actually do), and you can depend on other developers sharing your concerns to congregate in the online communities. Microsoft regularly tops the satisfaction ratings for bang-for-the-buck, at least according to yearly surveys performed by Evans Data Corp.
However, as you start relying more on open source tools that are not necessarily backed by commercial vendors... do formal developer programs lose their meaning? Yes, yes, I know that open source projects can often give you the right answer very quickly, and that fixes are usually provided within a few days. However, learning to ask a question in an open source community requires a few new social skills (i.e. Don't post in an IRC community, "Can I ask a question?"—just ask!), and there is no one whose personal career rests upon making sure that your issue is resolved. Developer programs, for all their sometime faults (and I'm sure you can tell me about them), do set an expectation that (at least at the enterprise level) someone is being paid to care |
to arrive at a shared reality that is more nuanced than it was yesterday. To focus ever more tightly on the shape, weight, and function of any thing that can be named, or to find names for things that have not, in the past, been observed. Our ability to do this depends on a shared language. As Hannah Arendt wrote,
We know from experience that no one can adequately grasp the objective world in its full reality all on his own, because the world always shows and reveals itself to him from only one perspective, which corresponds to his standpoint in the world and is determined by it. If someone wants to see and experience the world as it “really” is, he can do so only by understanding it as something that is shared by many people, lies between them, separates and links them, showing itself differently to each and comprehensible only to the extent that many people can talk about it and exchange their opinions and perspectives with one another, over against one another. Only in the freedom of our speaking with one another does the world, as that about which we speak, emerge in its objectivity and visibility from all sides.
“Only in the freedom of our speaking with one another.” To preserve that freedom, we have to become guardians of our language. We have to keep it alive and working. That means being very intentional about using words. That means, for example, calling lies, “lies.” I am talking to you, National Public Radio, home to the word “misstatement,” among others. The NPR argument is that the definition of “lie” involves intent—a lie is a statement made with the intention to deceive—and NPR does not have conclusive information on Trump’s intent. The problem is, the euphemism “misstatement” clearly connotes a lack of intent—as though Trump simply took an accidental wrong step. But words exist in time: the word “misstatement” suggests a singular occurrence, thereby eliding Trump’s history of lying. The word “misstatement,” as applied to Trump, is, actually, a lie—as it is the lie that there are neutral words.
Using words to lie destroys language. Using words to cover up lies, however subtly, destroys language. Validating incomprehensible drivel with polite reaction also destroys language. This isn’t merely a question of the prestige of the writing art or the credibility of the journalistic trade: it is about the basic survival of the public sphere.
In Russia, first they came for the words of politics, value, and passion. Then they came for the words of action, the words that describe buildings, the numbers that denote dates. And then there were no words left to speak. Not that this is a Russian phenomenon. Here is what Confucius had to say on the topic:
If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.
There will come a time, and it may not be all that soon, I’m afraid, when we have to think about recovering from the damage done by the current era of American politics. I fear that there will come a time when we, individually or in groups, discard certain words because they have been robbed of their ability to mean something. I can give up “tremendous.” But it’s our job to make sure that we enter the post-Trump future with other words that still have meaning: “law,” “freedom,” “truth,” “power,” “responsibility,” “life,” “death,” “fifty-nine,” “president,” “presidential,” “unprecedented,” “lie,” “fact,” “war,” “peace,” “democracy,” “justice,” “love,” “secateurs.”
Adapted from the Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture delivered on May 7, 2017.There is a long-worded Washington Post story gaining lots of attention as the definitive article outlining the ‘vast Russian election conspiracy‘. However, anyone who walks in the deep weeds of DC propaganda constructs will immediately note the Ben Rhodes styled fingerprints of obfuscation and disingenuous nonsense.
The article is transparently presented for several aligned purposes; all of them political, including the intensely political objectives of John Brennan and James Clapper, and all of them transparently spreading the truth-sauce way too thin.
As a deep weeds walker myself, and having inoculated against the nonsensical -albeit fashionable to believe- infection, here’s my take. [All emphasis mine]
(WaPo) Early last August, an envelope with extraordinary handling restrictions arrived at the White House. Sent by courier from the CIA, it carried “eyes only” instructions that its contents be shown to just four people: President Barack Obama and three senior aides.
Ah yes, the “just four people” dispatch from CIA Director John Brennan. The small circle makes fiction much more difficult to disprove, and simultaneously stops the larger circle from refuting the entirety of the inherent false and political claims. See how that works?
Inside was an intelligence bombshell, a report drawn from sourcing deep inside the Russian government that detailed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s direct involvement in a cyber campaign to disrupt and discredit the U.S. presidential race.
Ah yes, again the innocuous and carefully chosen word “sourcing”. Notice the ambiguity, the entire article is fraught with disingenuous use of ambiguous indirectness. The more specific the claim: “Putin’s direct involvement“, the larger the need for ambiguity.
But it went further. The intelligence captured Putin’s specific instructions on the operation’s audacious objectives — defeat or at least damage the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, and help elect her opponent, Donald Trump.
The Washington Post couldn’t have it any other way could they. The underlying premise behind such a long-worded enterprise is to soothe the sentiments of fellow travelers. Forget the basic reality that all “real evidence” (insert Steele Dossier here) points to numerous ideological factions, including Russia, trying to damage candidate Donald Trump.
At that point, the outlines of the Russian assault on the U.S. election were increasingly apparent. Hackers with ties to Russian intelligence services had been rummaging through Democratic Party computer networks, as well as some Republican systems, for more than a year. In July, the FBI had opened an investigation of contacts between Russian officials and Trump associates. And on July 22, nearly 20,000 emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee were dumped online by WikiLeaks.
Ah-ha.. those damn pesky Macedonians again. Always with the Macedonians. And yes, in July the FBI, more specifically James Comey under the auspices of a counterintelligence investigation that he admitted was never briefed to congress, needed some basic premise for the political surveillance and unmasking used by the White House to monitor political opposition.
The material was so sensitive that CIA Director John Brennan kept it out of the President’s Daily Brief, concerned that even that restricted report’s distribution was too broad.
What, you mean Evelyn Farkas, a recipient amid 30+ others of the PDB wasn’t going to read this stuff? No. What’s really inherent in this paragraph is the authors need to explain how an entirely fabricated premise within the article is “news” to those who would otherwise have known. This is how you construct propaganda, by claiming those who would be in a position to refute propaganda didn’t have access to the information. See how that works?
The CIA package came with instructions that it be returned immediately after it was read. To guard against leaks, subsequent meetings in the Situation Room followed the same protocols as planning sessions for the Osama bin Laden raid.
Insert dramatic music here. This is called the build-up…
It took time for other parts of the intelligence community to endorse the CIA’s view. Only in the administration’s final weeks in office did it tell the public, in a declassified report, what officials had learned from Brennan in August — that Putin was working to elect Trump.
The other real intelligence agencies, namely the NSA (Mike Rogers), were not buying John Brennan’s bullshit. Go figure. Everyone knew Brennan was a political operative, not a CIA Director. And then the drop from the build-up: “Putin was working to elect Trump“. See how they just drop that in there?
Over that five-month interval, the Obama administration secretly debated dozens of options for deterring or punishing Russia, including cyberattacks on Russian infrastructure, the release of CIA-gathered material that might embarrass Putin and sanctions that officials said could “crater” the Russian economy.
Remember, this is written post-facto, and generally meant to provide some form of justification for the actual political surveillance behavior of the White House crew. There was no ‘there’ there to generate a response to; that’s evident by the do-nothingness they now seek to justify in hindsight while claiming there was actually a ‘there’ there.
But in the end, in late December, Obama approved a modest package combining measures that had been drawn up to punish Russia for other issues — expulsions of 35 diplomats and the closure of two Russian compounds — with economic sanctions so narrowly targeted that even those who helped design them describe their impact as largely symbolic.
Well, they had to do something to cover their surveillance asses and drum up a good story. It was only six weeks earlier the entire White House and (Brennan, Comey and Clapper) realized President Trump was winner and their posteriors were seriously at risk. Quick, time to work up a good ‘muh russia’ narrative, and, and, throw in some disingenuous sanctions or something… yeah, yeah… that’s the ticket.
In political terms, Russia’s interference was the crime of the century, an unprecedented and largely successful destabilizing attack on American democracy.
Oy vey, that paragraph reads like Ben Rhodes wrote it himself.
It was a case that took almost no time to solve, traced to the Kremlin through cyber-forensics and intelligence on Putin’s involvement. And yet, because of the divergent ways Obama and Trump have handled the matter, Moscow appears unlikely to face proportionate consequences.
“no time to solve” they say. Do you notice the contradictions inherent in the presentation of this? That’s one of them. It is also a tell-tale sign of creationary fiction.
Those closest to Obama defend the administration’s response to Russia’s meddling. They note that by August it was too late to prevent the transfer to WikiLeaks and other groups of the troves of emails that would spill out in the ensuing months. They believe that a series of warnings — including one that Obama delivered to Putin in September — prompted Moscow to abandon any plans of further aggression, such as sabotage of U.S. voting systems.
Again, when creating post-facto justifications for manufactured nonsense there’s always a need to explain why nothing claimed by the author’s build-up of fiction actually takes place in reality. “They abandoned plans”… ok, gotcha.
Denis McDonough who served as Obama’s chief of staff, said that the administration regarded Russia’s interference as an attack on the “heart of our system.” “We set out from a first-order principle that required us to defend the integrity of the vote,” McDonough said in an interview. “Importantly, we did that. It’s also important to establish what happened and what they attempted to do so as to ensure that we take the steps necessary to stop it from happening again.”
Well, there’s the first named source for this fictional storytelling. Denis “the fixer” McDonough. And with that name we also now know the circle of sourcing for this ridiculous article, needed to prop up the narrative, is definitively Ben Rhodes.
Does WaPo ever get to the part where they explain U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power’s need to unmask Trump officials in surveillance reports? Nope. Move along comrades, move along….
The post-election period has been dominated by the overlapping investigations into whether Trump associates colluded with Russia before the election and whether the president sought to obstruct the FBI probe afterward. That spectacle has obscured the magnitude of Moscow’s attempt to hijack a precious and now vulnerable-seeming American democratic process.
Or put another way. We have failed to get any traction on the “collusion” and/or “obstruction” narratives, and so therefore we find a need to fall back upon the “Russian Hacking the Election” narrative. See how that works?
Beset by allegations of hidden ties between his campaign and Russia, Trump has shown no inclination to revisit the matter and has denied any collusion or obstruction on his part. As a result, the expulsions and modest sanctions announced by Obama on Dec. 29 continue to stand as the United States’ most forceful response.
Where “allegations” would be more aptly and accurately written as “media allegations”, and because there’s no ‘there’ there only Obama’s silly faux-sanctions stand as evidence that anyone was ever buying this nonsense.
[…] The CIA breakthrough came at a stage of the presidential campaign when Trump had secured the GOP nomination but was still regarded as a distant long shot. Clinton held comfortable leads in major polls, and Obama expected that he would be transferring power to someone who had served in his Cabinet.
The CIA “breakthrough” they speak of here is the Steele Dossier. The “Trump paid hookers to pee on Russian beds” opposition research file, initially begun by candidate Jeb Bush and later passed along to fellow traveler Hillary Clinton and never trumper John McCain.
[…] The Washington Post is withholding some details of the intelligence at the request of the U.S. government.
Ah, convenient that.
In early August, Brennan John Brennan CIA director alerted senior White House officials to the Putin intelligence, making a call to deputy national security adviser Avril Haines and pulling national security adviser Susan Rice aside after a meeting before briefing Obama along with Rice, Haines and Denis McDonough in the Oval Office. (continue reading)
It’s the missing names that reveal sources. Notice the absence of Ben Rhodes from this paragraph. The fingerprints of Rhodes upon this entire article are transparent. The article continues, but it’s much more repetition of the same. There simply is no ‘there’ there, and there never will be.
Political intelligence operatives John Brennan (CIA), James Clapper (ODNI) and James Comey (FBI) weaponized intelligence as surveillance before the election, and as tools to undermine President-Elect Trump after the election.
[ To their chagrin NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers refused to join the club, and kept his focus solidly on facts; just the facts. That’s ultimately why Brennan and Clapper continued to call for Rogers to be fired. ]
Together with a willfully blind Loretta Lynch (DOJ) and Jeh Johnson (DHS) this entire ‘muh Russia’ fiasco is layers upon layers of narrative-building, justification and manufactured constructs all in an effort to avoid sunlight upon their own political endeavors, and simultaneously frame some basic premise behind the intended goal of undermining the Trump presidency.
EXCLUSIVE: Inside Obama’s secret struggle to punish Russia for Putin’s attack on American democracy https://t.co/NL03qPunPe — Washington Post (@washingtonpost) June 23, 2017
AdvertisementsIn George Orwell’s prescient novel, 1984, the slogan of the Party is
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
The idea is both simple and profound. By eradicating and reinventing history, it is possible to completely reframe reality for future generations. This is routinely done by leftwing academics searching for penumbras and emanations of the US Constitution. This kind of douchebaggery is what allowed Anthony Kennedy to flush several thousand years of human history and discover that homosexual marriage was something we had to bake cakes for or be punished. But the real motherlode of this kind of butchering of facts is found in progressive critiques of the Second Amendment.
Salon runs one of these epic falsehoods titled Sorry, NRA: The U.S. was actually founded on gun control.
Sorry, NRA: The U.S. was actually founded on gun control https://t.co/pPvNCHoHnH — Salon (@Salon) December 16, 2017
It is written, oddly enough, by a couple of fat, addled Hollywood types:
ED ASNER
Ed Asner is a television legend, well known for his role as Lou Grant on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and subsequent spin-off Lou Grant. He is the winner of seven acting Emmy Awards, and has been nominated a total of twenty times. Asner also made a name for himself as a trade unionist and a political activist. He served two terms as president of the Screen Actors Guild, from 1981-1985, during which he was an outspoken critic of former SAG President Ronald Reagan, then the US president, for his Central American policy. He lives in Los Angeles. ED. WEINBERGER
Ed. Weinberger began his career in the early 1960s with Dick Gregory and has written for such diverse comedians as Bob Hope, Richard Pryor, and Johnny Carson (for five years on “The Tonight Show”). He wrote for and produced “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”, co-created “Taxi,” “Dear John” and “The Cosby Show.” He also executive-produced and created “Amen,” “Sparks” and “Good News.” He has won three Golden Globe Awards, a Peabody, and nine Emmys. In 2000, he received The Writer’s Guild of America Lifetime Achievement Award. He lives in Los Angeles.
If you get your science from Bill Nye and your political philosophy for Neil deGrasse Tyson there is nothing wrong with getting constitutional exegesis from Ed Asner. It makes perfect sense.
What is the killer proof they provide that America was a gun-control nation before the constitution?
The question we now ask is why did Scalia come up with this odd “grammatical” theory nobody’s ever heard of, then or since, while abandoning his much-beloved Originalism — his precious methodology for interpreting the Constitution based on the Framers’ thinking at the time? Probably because Scalia didn’t want to admit what James Madison — the author of the Amendment — had in mind. Here is Madison’s first draft of the Second Amendment: “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, a well-armed and well-regulated militia being the best security of a free country; but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person.” Madison’s intent could not be more obvious: his Second Amendment refers only to state militias. If not, why include that exemption for what we now call “conscientious objectors?” When Madison’s amendment was rewritten by a joint committee from the House and Senate in 1791, the “religious” exemption was lopped off as too cumbersome in language and too complex to enforce. Thus, the Amendment as it now stands. But Madison’s original intent remains and is there hiding in plain sight for any Supreme Court Justice who takes the pains to look for it. The gun crowd and their apparatchiks ignore, as well, the very reason the Second Amendment got into the Constitution in the first place: to calm the anti-Federalists’ fears of the establishment of a standing army. The Second Amendment is, in fact, Madison’s (and the Federalists’) response to those who felt threatened that the strong central government, as proposed in the new Constitution, might disarm the state militias. And to miss that connection is to... well, miss everything.
This is a great answer to the ‘odd “grammatical” theory’
This is simply nutbaggery. Madison’s draft amendment is only intended to protect Quakers and Mennonites from being compelled to provide military service. It’s pretty simple.
Ed-squared also turn the logic of the Second Amendment upon its head. If the Founders had, indeed, harbored fear of an armed populace then they went to great lengths to hide it. Take a look at the militia laws extant in the colonies at the signing of the Constitution.
Connecticut required every male over sixteen to keep a musket, powder and shot.
Virginia declared that all free men were required to possess a musket, four pounds of lead and one pound of powder. If a free man was not financially able to afford a weapon, the county had to provide one.
New York dictated a fine of five shillings to any male, sixteen to sixty, who could not arm himself.
Similar statutes are in all colonies. The clear intent of these laws is not that they link firearms ownership to militia membership, rather they are aimed at people who don’t have firearms in order to ensure the colony has a militia. Think of these laws in the same way that you’s think of laws requiring kids to be immunized before they can go to school. The laws aren’t aimed at people who voluntarily immunize and the purpose isn’t to further public education. Rather mandatory immunizations are on the books as a way of coercing people who would not immunize voluntarily.
Then they go on to this bit of nonsense:
For example, James Madison who, as a young member of the Virginia legislature, introduced a bill for the “Preservation of Deer” which penalized persons “... who shall bear a gun out of his enclosed ground unless whilst performing military duty...”
This is simple dishonesty. By use of strategic ellipses they make it seem like it is illegal for someone to carry a weapon off their own property. If one goes to the actual text:
The plain text says if you are caught illegally taking deer, the prohibition on carrying your weapon off your property is part of the performance bond of the offender and it is only valid for a year. This, I’ll note from my own experience poaching, is a lot less than happens to you today in Virginia if you get caught spotlighting deer from your truck. It doesn’t take away a general right to carry firearms, it is clearly not a “gun control” law. It is a restraint placed upon someone convicted of a crime.
A free and an independent people are a direct threat to the progressive experiment. The only way they will achieve that goal is to lie and lie relentlessly and shamelessly until they control the past. We can’t allow that to happen.
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For some additional, comprehensive myth-busting on this subject, see this article from Caleb Howe. It was originally about the Media Matters “fact-check” of Dana Loesch’s book, but addresses some of the most-common and erroneous myths about the Second Amendments.About 40 Batchawana Bay area residents, joined by Algoma-Manitoulin MPP Michael Mantha, went on what might be called a protest walk along the trail near the white-sand beach of Batchawana Bay Provincial Park Saturday morning.
As earlier reported by SooToday.com, Batchawana Bay Provincial Park was closed over the Labour Day weekend.
That’s much earlier than the usual Thanksgiving closure in October, to the dismay of area residents who enjoy the beach and surrounding area, and business operators seeking tourists to come and eat, stay overnight and enjoy the beach in brilliant fall colours.
There was also a late opening for the Park this season, which usually opens over the Victoria Day weekend, but this year did not open until the first week of June.
The group gathered this morning outside the Park’s gate, which is held together by a small chain near a “Closed” sign.
After signing a petition asking Minister of Natural Resources Michael Gravelle to officially reopen the park until Thanksgiving, and a First Nations drum ceremony, the group took their walk.
The gate is easy to walk around, the beach and trail easily accessible on foot, but visitors have to park their vehicles on the shoulders of Highway 17 instead of inside Batchawana’s parking lot - a turn off for tourists.
Mantha told SooToday.com: “I’m here supporting the community, and I am requesting Minister Gravelle to reconsider the decision made here. This is a small community, and they need every possible venue to bring in tourism dollars, and this park is one of those venues beneficial to the economy of this area.”
The MNR has said the closure of the park over Labour Day weekend was to avoid duplication of services, pointing out there are tourist stops 10 kilometres north and south of Batchawana Bay.
This year’s opening and closing dates for Batchawana are clearly posted in MNR literature, but Mantha says those dates are unfair.
“The government has made a wrong decision, this park attracts business.”
“Just up the road from here, less than a kilometre, there’s a restaurant, a camping area, and the operators benefit from the tourists that stop here. So by saying there’s a provincial park 10 kilometres down the road is the problem - its 10 whole kilometres away.”
Retired secondary school teacher Bob Moore, who now lives year-round at Batchawana Bay, told SooToday.com: “This irks me and something has to be done. I started writing a lot of letters, through frustration.”
“The message is all around us. The fall colour is coming out, this is a prime time for people from the Sault to enjoy an accessible beach, which has been nominated as one of the top 10 beaches in Ontario, and to close the gates to cars is really ludicrous when you should be able to drive in here and use this beach.”
“All we really want, as a group of residents, is to have those gates reopened, as simple as that, until the end of the summer season, in October. The fact that the Superintendent of the Park himself (Chris Caldwell) said to keep the Park open is a duplication of services, is hard to comprehend.”
“Pancake Bay is a wonderful park, but people driving by Batchawana Bay Provincial Park, they can see exactly what they are going to get, its easily visible from the highway, whereas with Pancake, you have to drive in and explore.”
“I’m concerned about the fall tourist traffic going by, I want them to have the opportunity to get into the park, and there are local residents here who go for a walk every day, who now have to park up here on the shoulders and walk in.”
“This year, this park was added to two others, to make three day parks with a limited summer season, out of a total of 13 day parks in the province, so a very small minority of parks have a limited season, we are now a part of that minority.”
“It makes no sense.”
Mantha has written a letter to Minister of Natural Resources Micheal Gravelle requesting the reopening of Batchawana Bay Provincial Park, and is awaiting an answer.The leader of the UK opposition Jeremy Corbyn has risked creating another rift in the Labour Party by proposing that a power-sharing agreement with Argentina should be adopted in regard to the disputed Falkland Islands, reports state.
Already at odds with factions of Labour over whether to renew Britain’s nuclear deterrent Trident, Corbyn now risks the ire not only of large sections of the UK public, but also members of his own party by saying that Britain should consider a Northern Ireland-style power-sharing deal for the Falkland Islands (or ‘Malvinas,’ as Argentina refers to the tiny South Atlantic archipelago).
Read more
The Argentinian ambassador to London, Alicia Castro, said in an interview published on the diplomatic mission’s website that the Labour leader had visited the embassy in the British capital and had talked about the issue, adding that he “shares our concerns.”
Castro, who is preparing to step down as Argentina’s ambassador to the UK, described Corbyn as being “one of ours,” while the meeting was “friendly and humorous,” the Press Association reported.
“He is saying that dialogue [is] possible and that attitudes are beginning to change, that what was achieved in Northern Ireland can be achieved also here,” Castro said.
“His decisive leadership can guide the British public opinion to promote dialogue between the governments of the United Kingdom and Argentina,” she added.
While Corbyn believes that those living on the islands – the vast majority of whom are staunchly pro-British – should have a very big say in discussions regarding their future, he does not believe they should be able to completely dictate any future policy.
Dear @jeremycorbyn I know electoral politics doesn't really interest you but here's the 2013 Falklands Referendum. pic.twitter.com/7sm8vwmtGU — Bristol Red (@BristolRed) January 24, 2016
The shadow foreign secretary, Hilary Benn, has already said he is deeply against any plans to give Argentina any say in the running of the Falklands.
“The Labour Party policy remains that the people of the Falkland Islands have the right to determine their own future,” a spokesman told the Sunday Telegraph when asked if Benn would support a power-sharing deal.
Read more
“We are committed to upholding the right of the Falkland Islanders to self-determination, including by ensuring the defense of the islands. Hilary is not aware of any proposals for what you have called a ‘power-sharing deal’ in regard to the Falklands,” he added.
Corbyn suggested on January 17 that efforts be made towards a “reasonable accommodation” on the South Atlantic islands, over which Britain and Argentina fought a short war in 1982.
Corbyn told the BBC: “There has to be a discussion about how we can bring about some reasonable accommodation with Argentina.
“It seems to me ridiculous that in the 21st century we could get into some enormous conflict with Argentina about the islands just off it,” he added.
His comments brought a shark rebuke from British Prime Minister David Cameron following a meeting with Argentina’s President Mauricio Macri at the Davos Economic Forum in Switzerland on January 21.
“The prime minister was clear that our position remained the same and that the recent referendum was absolutely clear on the islanders' wish to remain British,” Cameron’s spokesman said.
the Falklands. If the Argies just pretended to be a multinational corporation Osborne would sell the islands 2 them for a fiver 2morrow — Lord Snoutintrough (@Rowland72James) January 24, 2016
Corbyn’s comments regarding the issue of the Falklands come as he is already facing a backlash from sections of his own party regarding whether to renew the Trident nuclear deterrent.
The Labour leader, who is an anti-war campaigner, believes the cost of Trident – put at £167 billion ($234 billion) over 32 years – could be better spent elsewhere, especially with the ruling Conservative government cutting spending in crucial areas such as the health service. However, opponents say that the UK cannot unilaterally disarm in an increasingly hostile world.
In April, a group of British exploration companies found oil and gas in an area north of the Falkland Islands. Two months later, an Argentinian judge ordered the authorities to seize the assets of five companies drilling for oil in the Falklands worth $156 million.
Argentine court orders seizure of Falklands/Malvinas ‘illegal’ oil drillers’ assets http://t.co/ppP7gdtZv1pic.twitter.com/YkvAw5tz51 — RT (@RT_com) June 28, 2015
Argentina has claimed the drilling is illegal, and the Argentinian embassy in London issued a statement in November 2013 that British oil executives face up to 15 years in prison and fines equivalent to 1.5 million barrels of oil, as well as the confiscation of equipment and any hydrocarbons extracted.
Britain has been looking to boost its defenses in the Falklands and London ordered a £46 million ($65 million) Giraffe mobile air defense radar system in August, fearing a possible attack from Argentina. Defence Secretary Michael Fallon also pledged to spend £180 million ($280 million) over the next 10 years on upgrading island defenses.[Update: Engadget has revived Joystiq and Massively is opening a new site called MassivelyOP]
[Oiriginal article:] AOL has finally passed down the order to drop the guillotine on their enthusiast blog network: Joystiq, Massively and the WoW Insider are all going kaput. The news originally circulated as a rumor, as reported on by sites like Gamer Headlines and Reaxxion, but was later confirmed in a blog post recently on Massively and WoW Insider.
Alex Zeibart from WoW Insider writes in the opening line…
“On Tuesday, February 3, 2015, WoW Insider operations will cease. I’m finding it difficult to say much more than that; eloquence fails at a time like this. We certainly weren’t expecting it.”
After a decade of running the once reputable blogs, AOL decided it was time to cut their losses. It’s an issue that’s becoming pervasive in the gaming space after audiences began ramping up their usage of Adblock and sites continually took a stance to demonize, attack, belittle and eventually declare their own audiences as… “dead”.
The last act of defiance by a media seemingly tired of the people who kept the lights on for them, enacted a movement under the hashtag called GamerGate, which sped up the demise for a lot of the journalists whom are now bereft of a platform to pitch their petulance at the perturbed public.
The news about the closures sent a rippling wave of dichotomous opinions surging through the core gaming community: some felt the shutdown was necessary, others… not so much.
Brianna Royce from Massively pinpoints it to the machinations of corporate contrivance, writing…
“I know more of what I know about corporate from reading tech and finance news than through my own job. We all suspected this was coming eventually a year ago when a VP whose name I don’t even know and who never read our site chose to reward our staggering, hard-won 40% year-over-year page view growth by… hacking our budget in half. There’s nothing to do in the face of that kind of logic but throw your hands in the air. It’s not about merit or lack thereof, and it’s not about journalism or gaming being dead or anything grand like that, so there’s no point in taking it personally.”
Interestingly enough, Susan Arendt from Joystiq seemed to have a different take on the situation…
Arendt became the topic matter of a recent exposé on Breitbart, where some stories about the behind-the-scenes treatment of the staff and principles for running the site were laid bare for the public to witness.
What’s more is that this is more shifting of the old guard. Whether gamers like it or not, what started before #GamerGate was sped up by #GamerGate and now we’re on the path of no return. Advertisers, politicians, lawmakers and lobbyist now see the games industry as “toxic”, according to Extra Credits’ James Portnow. If gamers continue to maintain #GamerGate and Operation Disrespectful Nod, it’s unlikely that the gatekeepers of old will stay around much longer at this rate.We were all hoping that the new support APIs included Material Design, the new theme adopted since Android 5.0 Lollipop. And it luckily happened: this new theme is included in AppCompat 21. So be aware that if you are using it for previous projects, the transition won’t be straightforward.
If you want to know more about this topic, I have another article from a talk and a more complex example in another repository on Github. Enjoy!
Anyway, in this post I want to give you the most basic tools to create an app that uses Material as its main theme, and functional from API 7. I’m not getting into details on how to take the most out of this theme (that will require some extra tutorials), but to get it prepared to work backwards, even with transitions functional in Lollipop.
One minor clarification: Lollipop transitions are not backwards compatible, so at the moment you won’t be able to see those smooth transitions in pre-21 devices.
Setting up your project
First, you will need to create a new project and set ActionBar compatibility, even if you are only supporting 14+ devices. The Material theme is included in it. Set the compile sdk version to 21. Your build.gradle should be something like this:
android { compileSdkVersion 21 buildToolsVersion "21.0.0" defaultConfig { applicationId "com.antonioleiva.materialeverywhere" minSdkVersion 14 targetSdkVersion 21 versionCode 1 versionName "1.0" }... } dependencies { compile fileTree(dir: 'libs', include: ['*.jar']) compile 'com.android.support:appcompat-v7:21.+' }
Specify the Material Theme
It’s now important that your theme extends Theme.AppCompat. Now, the AppCompat Theme includes everything you need to support Material Design in previous versions. You will see that I’m using a Base theme and overriding the final theme in values-v21. This is because I want that Lollipop uses its nice transitions.
values/themes.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <resources> <style name="AppTheme" parent="AppTheme.Base"/> <style name="AppTheme.Base" parent="Theme.AppCompat"> <item name="colorPrimary">@color/colorPrimary</item> <item name="colorPrimaryDark">@color/colorPrimary</item> <item name="android:windowNoTitle">true</item> <item name="windowActionBar">false</item> </style> </resources>
values-v21/themes.xml
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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <resources> <style name="AppTheme" parent="AppTheme.Base"> <item name="android:windowContentTransitions">true</item> <item name="android:windowAllowEnterTransitionOverlap">true</item> <item name="android:windowAllowReturnTransitionOverlap">true</item> <item name="android:windowSharedElementEnterTransition">@android:transition/move</item> <item name="android:windowSharedElementExitTransition">@android:transition/move</item> </style> </resources>
We set some primary colors and remove the ActionBar. We don’t want to show the ActionBar because there is a new substitute in the game: the Toolbar. I will talk about it a bit later.
You just need to set the theme in the AndroidManifest.xml.
<application... android:theme="@style/AppTheme">... </application>
Setting the Toolbar
The toolbar is basically what we were used to know as the ActionBar. The most important difference is that this toolbar is now part of our layout, so that we can play with it in any way we consider: animations, drawer overlay, etc.
This is basically what we need to add to our layouts. It may be interesting to create it in a separate layout and include it in the other ones:
<android.support.v7.widget.Toolbar xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" android:id="@+id/toolbar" android:layout_width="match_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:background="?attr/colorPrimaryDark"/>
So how does it change our way to work with the toolbar? Almost everything will be the same, we just need to remember to notify the Activity that |
Football? At the school where Chip Kelly honed his style, the latest innovation—practicing without helmets—is meant to ingrain safer tackling techniques into a new generation of players.
FULL STORY At the school where Chip Kelly honed his style, the latest innovation—practicing without helmets—is meant to ingrain safer tackling techniques into a new generation of players. Quick aside before I dig into this game: The NFL is on a hot streak with its schedule; there should be a back-pat for the czar of the schedule, Howard Katz, and his staff of four men who went through 500,000 computer-generated schedule options last winter and picked this one. Check out the past four weeks, including this one:
• Week 11: Seattle (6-3) at Kansas City (6-3) in the early Sunday window in a battle of hot teams … Ditto Detroit (7-2) at Arizona (8-1) and Philadelphia (7-2) at Green Bay (6-3) in the late window … New England (7-2) at Indianapolis (6-3) in a classic quarterback duel on Sunday night.
• Week 12: Early: Detroit (7-3) at New England (8-2) … Late: Arizona (9-1) at Seattle (6-4) in the start to the Seahawks’ defensive revival.
• Week 13: Two Thanksgiving gems: 8-3 Philadelphia at 8-3 Dallas, and a 2013 NFC title game rematch of 7-4 Seattle at the 7-4 Niners … The first Brady-Rodgers game, a classic at Lambeau Field … And on Sunday night, Peyton Manning and Denver in a pennant race game at Kansas City.
• Week 14: Seattle at Philly in a huge NFC home-field-impact game … And another Sunday-night gem: New England at the resurgent 8-4 Chargers.
Next week, two fortuitous Sunday decisions: San Francisco at Seattle in the late Sunday afternoon window, Dallas at Philadelphia at night. The schedule-makers hit a hot streak at the right time.
* * *
What Quinn learned from all that video:
"I didn’t just watch the coaches’ tape," he said. “I wanted to watch the TV copy too, to judge the time from whistle to snap." In other words, he put a stopwatch on the video when the play clock began, and timed the seconds until the next snap happened. “If they want to play fast, they take 12, 13 seconds. That’s pretty fast. Normally, they probably take 18, 19 seconds. Fortunately we’ve played against some teams that played pretty fast, so we’re accustomed to it."
“I see a fast-paced offense when I watch the Eagles,” Wagner says, “but I don’t see it as such a big deal. If we tackle well, and stay in gaps, we’ll be fine.”
Quinn said when the Seahawks reported to training camp, he and coach Pete Carroll had the defense playing against the no-huddle consistently, because they knew they’d have a lot of snaps against no-huddle teams this year. And this week, all week, Quinn said, they’ve practiced against the no-huddle again.
"Mark Sanchez is really good on the boots, the nakeds," Quinn said. “He doesn’t take a lot of deep shots. What fits him is getting out on the edges and making plays."
Quinn said his message to his defense this week centered around “getting cleats in the grass, early, and attacking. I will get the plays in early. Also, be great tacklers. Tackling will be at the forefront of everything we do Sunday."
That’s where Wagner and Chancellor come in. When the Seahawks are at their best, Wagner cleans up the intermediate area of the field, and Chancellor is an enforcer deep and a strong presence in the box against the run and against tight ends. The cover corners, Richard Sherman and Byron Maxwell, are left to protect the sides of the field, and free safety Earl Thomas is a classic center fielder with monster back tendencies (making plays everywhere his instincts take him).
A True Gamer The Buccaneers’ season is a lost cause, but Gerald McCoy remains a punishing force in the trenches. The defensive tackle talks about staying intense amidst all that losing.
FULL STORY The Buccaneers’ season is a lost cause, but Gerald McCoy remains a punishing force in the trenches. The defensive tackle talks about staying intense amidst all that losing. It’s amazing watching the difference in Seattle’s defense with Wagner and without him. Seattle just doesn’t have a rangy presence with speed—other than Wagner. It really showed up against San Francisco. Wagner is tremendously disciplined in gap control, vital to coaches but unknown to most fans. Time and again, Colin Kaepernick or Frank Gore ran into brick walls trying to pierce the Seattle defensive front.
"Against the Eagles," Wagner said from the team’s training complex this week, “you need to be more gap-sound. LeSean McCoy is shifty—a great cutback runner. We understand we have to be in our gaps. We will be. I think we’re one of the best teams at staying in our gaps and being disciplined. From there, we have to be physical and run down the screens and tosses. They’re really good at those."
But Wagner didn’t sound overly concerned about the Eagles’ offense. Of course, you probably wouldn’t be concerned if you hadn’t allowed a touchdown in the past eight quarters—and held the last two teams to 204 and 164 yards, respectively. Imagine holding the Kaepernick/Gore/Anquan Boldin offense to 164 yards. In four quarters.
So the Seahawks won’t fly East this weekend with much trepidation. Excitement, but no trepidation.
"I see a fast-paced offense when I watch them," said Wagner, “but I don’t see it as such a big deal, the way everyone says. If we tackle well, and stay in gaps, we’ll be fine."
I relayed this what-me-worry attitude to Quinn, and he wasn’t surprised.
"You’ve been around Pete enough to know that he doesn’t want his team intimidated by anyone or anything," said Quinn. “So that doesn’t surprise me, what Bobby thinks."
It’s what the Seattle defense thinks. That’s why this will be so much fun Sunday at 4:25 p.m. in South Philly: The Eagles are confident, with their franchise running back in gear and their passing game making enough plays at warp speed to win big games. The Seahawks are playing like they did last year (“It definitely has that feel; everyone’s healthy, everyone’s back," Wagner said). All that’s at stake? Just a couple of division titles.
Timmy Jernigan, a second-round pick out of Florida State, has played in eight games for the Ravens and has 12 tackles. (George Gojkovich/Getty Images) Timmy Jernigan, a second-round pick out of Florida State, has played in eight games for the Ravens and has 12 tackles. (George Gojkovich/Getty Images)
Player You Need To Know This Weekend
Timmy Jernigan, defensive tackle, Baltimore (number 97). A lot of pressure on Jernigan, for a rookie who turned 22 in September. With Haloti Ngata gone for the final four games of the season after a positive test for Adderall, Jernigan—who has averaged 20 snaps a game over the past six weeks—will have to come up big for Baltimore starting Sunday against Miami. The Ravens could get some needed help by moving human roadblock Terrence Cody from non-football injury to active; he seems ready to play. But look for the 6-2, 298-pound Jernigan to get the bulk of the snaps in the rotation as the Ravens try to hold the fort and win enough games to make sure Ngata will play again this season. The only way that could happen is if the Ravens make the playoffs. Jernigan has two sacks in the past three games, but he’s not the space-eating presence that makes Ngata so imposing.
About Last Night...
I know how great DeMarco Murray was Thursday night (41 touches, 228 yards) in the 41-28 victory over the woebegone Bears, but I thought his co-star, Tony Romo, was slightly more notable. Romo went 21 of 26 (he's been a 72 percent passer in the four games since suffering two broken bones in his back against Washington), and he demonstrated why Jason Garrett has shown so much faith in him since taking over as head coach. Early in the third quarter, under a big Bear rush, Romo, padded heavily, rumbled right and threw way down field for Cole Beasley. It looked like when Romo let the ball go he might have just been throwing it away. But no. This pass was perfect, right in Beasley's hands near the goal line. Beasley dove for the pylon, hit it and scored to give Dallas a two-touchdown lead. Those are the kinds of plays the Cowboys have been getting from Romo all year, and I was left to think when he made this one: Imagine if the guy was healthy? Romo has shown time and again over the past month that he has the ability to shut out the pain (or mask it with a shot) and play the position with the best in the game. With the protection Romo's been getting over the past four games—the Eagles loss the exception—the Dallas offense is going to be tough to put away if it makes it to January football.
Bose Sound Bite of the Week
A mic'd-up J.J. Watt, talking to teammates (or sometimes no one in particular) during last week's pre-game:
"All I know is, you mess with me, you got problems. That's all I know.
"What you got today 10 [DeAndre Hopkins]? Oh, I'll show you, I'll show you. Just make sure you've got a good view. Get some popcorn. Maybe some Jujubes. A slushie. Sno-Caps perhaps, maybe some Sno-Caps, I don't know. You're gonna want to be comfortable today. Watch the show! Watch the show!"
[audio mp3="https://www.si.com/sites/default/files/audio/mmqb/2014/12/jj-watt-micd-up.mp3"][/audio]
Regular Old Quotes of the Week
I
"I don’t worry about my future—haven’t participated in any of that speculation. I think I have a recessive gene for worrying about my own future."
—San Francisco coach Jim Harbaugh, on the rampant speculation that he is in the last season on the job with the 49ers.
II
"That’s the dumbest damn question I ever heard in my life. I had to laugh. That put a smile on my face."
—Arizona coach Bruce Arians, on being asked on Sirius XM NFL Radio this week if he’d thought of benching struggling quarterback Drew Stanton for rookie Logan Thomas.
What I’ll Be Watching This Weekend
Cleveland Controversy Brian Hoyer remains the Browns’ starting quarterback. Is Mike Pettine making the right decision? Andy Benoit studied the film from Week 13 to find the answer.
FULL STORY Brian Hoyer remains the Browns’ starting quarterback. Is Mike Pettine making the right decision? Andy Benoit studied the film from Week 13 to find the answer. 1. The leash on Brian Hoyer. As I wrote the other day, when Browns coach Mike Pettine was deliberating on Hoyer versus Johnny Manziel to start Sunday against the Colts, a Hoyer vote would say as much about the preparedness—or lack thereof—of Manziel. And so that’s why I don’t think three bad series by Hoyer gets him yanked by Pettine. Hoyer will get a legit chance to keep his job. By legit, I mean he’d have to be bad into the third quarter. I just get the feeling the Browns weren’t comfortable shortening the game plan and the options for the offense by playing Manziel.
2. Vengeance, sayeth the Colts, shall be ours. Three key Colts on Sunday were three bedrock players for the Browns in 2012: D’Qwell Jackson, Trent Richardson and Josh Cribbs. It’s not Wes Welker going back to New England or Peyton Manning going back to Indy, but those are three pretty big names going back to the Dawg Pound. “They gave up on me," Richardson said this week. Easy, Trent. You underperformed for the Browns, they got a first-round pick for you, and you’re still underperforming.
3. Adrian Peterson’s fate. With Peterson likely (but not certain) to be reinstated by a league appeals officer, Harold Henderson, next week, the ball would be in Minnesota’s court as to whether to activate him for the final three games of the year. We’ll hear lots about it this weekend, including whether the Vikings' coaching side is on the same page with the Vikings’ front-office.
4. The impact of Haloti Ngata’s absence. The Ravens are in a six-way tie for the sixth playoff spot in the AFC this morning, and they had perhaps the most advantageous schedule of all of those teams down the stretch (at Miami, Jacksonville, at Houston, Cleveland). But then their most impactful defensive player, Ngata, was suspended for four games Thursday for taking a banned PED, Adderall. That leads to the question: How on God’s green earth could you get popped for taking something on the banned list, knowing you’re going to be tested randomly at some point? Absolutely irresponsible.
5. The “division-leading" Falcons attempting to make a game of it at Lambeau on Monday night. The highly respected football scribe for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Bob McGinn, quoted a personnel director for an NFL team thusly on the Atlanta-Green Bay Monday nighter, which should be over right around 9:35 on the East Coast—good for normal sleep patterns for a change: “If Green Bay doesn’t torch them for 40, I’ll be shocked."
The Impending QB Market Dive RGIII has crashed, Newton is hurting and Kaepernick is struggling. With more questions than answers at the top of the upcoming draft class, Peter King ponders whether teams will back off the big investments in young quarterbacks.
FULL STORY RGIII has crashed, Newton is hurting and Kaepernick is struggling. With more questions than answers at the top of the upcoming draft class, Peter King ponders whether teams will back off the big investments in young quarterbacks. 6. The pass rush Atlanta never had will let Aaron Rodgers cook brats while he waits for receivers to get open. Kroy Biermann and Osi Umenyiora are tied for the Atlanta sack lead, with 2.5. A pass-rusher stumbles into 2.5 sacks in 12 weeks. Horrendous.
7. The Vikings, playing in temps fit for the ’70s Vikings. Jets at Vikes on Sunday at high noon on the campus of the University of Minnesota. Outdoors, of course. With a wind-chill temperature of about 23, with snow showers possible, and winds gusting up to 20 mph. “Pray for me," cornerback Captain Munnerlyn, a southern kid, told Mark Craig of the Minneapolis Star Tribune the other day. He wasn’t kidding.
8. Carolina could hand the NFC South to New Orleans. Panthers are 1-8-1 in the past 10 games (regrets, GM Dave Gettleman, about bankrupting the receiver and offensive line groups in the off-season?), and let me say one thing loudly: Don’t blame Cam. No quarterback’s playing well with a re-invented offense of mediocrity around him. No matter. Carolina will lose to the Saints at the Superdome on Sunday, Atlanta will get creamed by the Packers, and the Saints should coast to the NFC South title.
9. Pats-Chargers. Both teams were given up for dead at two different times this year—New England after the 41-7 pasting by Kansas City in Week 4 that left the Pats 2-2, and San Diego after losing 37-0 pre-bye and falling to 5-4. After 13 weeks, New England’s 9-3, the favorite to win AFC playoff home-field; the Chargers are 8-4 and the current fifth playoff seed. New England’s won seven of eight, San Diego three straight. NBC’s got a great one Sunday night. Good news for fans of footing: Qualcomm will have new turf Sunday night.
10. The Cardinals trying to stop the bleeding, with the playoffs suddenly in question. Two awful games in a row (losses to Seattle and Atlanta) make Sunday’s duel in the desert with physical Kansas City a must-win. The rest of the slate—revived St. Louis on the road, Seattle at home, at San Francisco—has nary a gimme. Arizona’s 9-3, and that’s great. But nothing is a sure thing anymore, not with the struggles of the offense and the injuries all over the D.
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[widget widget_name="SI Newsletter Widget”]Positive and Negative impact of website security to SEO ranking
Oliver Sild Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jun 1, 2017
Search engines care a lot if your website is secure and safe for your customers. I know that many people don’t understand why their website is being targeted in the first place and therefore never feel about security as anything critically important (until they get hacked), but there is more in that than just spending time and money on feeling safe.
Better Security = More Traffic & Bigger Sales!
This is basics! Moving over to secure connection (HTTPS) should already be essential. Google has officially confirmed that they boost rankings for HTTPS sites already in 2014.
Over the past few months we’ve been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algorithms. We’ve seen positive results, so we’re starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal.
Few months ago (early 2017), Firefox and Google Chrome started to call HTTP connections insecure. You can see it by yourself - all the regular HTTP pages with a login functionality are marked as “Not Secure”.
Search engines and web browsers are giving out a clear sign. Your website will have better reputation and will be positioned higher in search engine results if you take care of your visitors safety. If not.. well, it’s your own loss.
No Security = Loss in Traffic & Drop in Revenue!
There are many reasons why search engines can apply penalties (negative SEO) to your website ranking. If you don’t take care about security, you might end up with your site being wiped from search engine result or even have it completely blocked.
Honestly, this makes sense. If you don’t care about your website and you don’t care about your visitors — why should Google or any other search engine care about you?
Still don’t care? Well, get used to the SEO penalties!
Website defacements
Snapshot from defaced websites on Google search.
A major issue among websites running on outdated CMSs like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and so on. The issue with outdated software and lack of protection can make it easy for automated bots to attack your site and deface it with sometimes rude content that gets indexed by the search engines. Even if the search engine don’t apply penalty for that, your visitors definitely will!
Comment spam & general SEO spam
If you don’t have spam protection and you frequently get comment spam under your website posts, keep in mind that Google will hand out a ranking penalty (User-Generated Spam penalty) just for that. It doesn’t mean you’re a spammer — but your site users are, so it’s completely up to you to clean up spammy content people and bots post to your website.
SEO Spam is probably the most popular way for ill-intention hackers to gain financial profit by hacking your website. SEO injection (like Canadian pharma spam) can be executed because of plugin and theme vulnerabilities. If the website have been compromised by the hacker, they can create sub-pages and hide links and keywords into the source code, making it invisible for you to see, but accessible to the search-engine crawlers.
Website hacked and spreading malware
Screenshot of malware infected website.
More and more sites which get infected with malware will be detected by the search engines. Site will be added to numerous blacklists, website will be marked as dangerous and the access will be blocked by the browsers and by different antivirus vendors. It’s one of the worst case scenarios, but it’s far from being rare.
It’s not just about cleaning up your website to get the ranking back, you need to get your site removed from every blacklist and ask for search engine to re-index the whole site. Without talking about the complexity of malware cleanup, the whole process of recovering the site can take some considerable amount of time. This can literally shut down your business!
NB! To protect yourself from attacks mentioned above, SSL(HTTPS) is not enough! It’s important to keep the software updated to have all the latest security updates as soon as possible. To stay ahead, consider using a security software which applies firewall and hardens the website security settings.
So, which one do you prefer: no ranking or good ranking?
It’s all up to you! You can choose Negative SEO by closing this article and thinking: “Pfff, Why the hell would anyone hack my small website?”.
Or..
You can follow these 5 steps real quick and prevent nasty incidents with a SEO boost as a pro bono:Sen. Patrick Leahy has introduced a new version of the USA FREEDOM Act.
Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images
This piece also appeared in New America’s Weekly Wonk.
More than a year after the Snowden revelations, we’re clearly still grappling with the effects of NSA surveillance.
As Congress prepares for the August recess, Sen. Patrick Leahy has just introduced a new version of the USA FREEDOM Act, which aims to curb the NSA’s bulk collection and surveillance powers. Calls for immediate, serious reforms are growing louder by the day as new evidence continues to emerge about how much NSA surveillance is costing us—in terms of both the economy and our cybersecurity.
Intelligence and Obama administration officials have vigorously defended the NSA programs over the past year. But they have offered little hard evidence to prove the value of mass surveillance and other far-reaching NSA activity. Both the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies and the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) issued extensive reports that call into question whether the benefits of the NSA’s bulk collection program carried out under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act are enough to justify the tradeoffs. The PCLOB gave a more favorable outlook in the recent report on surveillance authorized under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act—but those findings were almost immediately called into question by a Washington Post story that revealed that nine out of 10 Internet users swept up by Section 702 surveillance are not legally targeted foreigners. And these reports don’t even begin to grapple with effects of the extensive collection taking place outside of the country under Executive Order 12333.
Meanwhile, evidence of the costs continues to pile up. This week, two new reports were published that demonstrate how surveillance reform is needed to protect fundamental rights here in the U.S. An in-depth study conducted by the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch documents how mass surveillance undermines press freedom, the right to legal counsel, and other essential elements of a healthy democracy. And a separate report from New America’s Open Technology Institute examines how the NSA’s programs are bad for the U.S. economy, American foreign policy, and the security of the Internet as a whole. (Full disclosure: I am the primary author of the second paper; Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University.)
It’s easy to get caught up in the simplistic debate that often dominates the surveillance conversation: that this is about balancing national security and individual privacy. But the binary argument over security vs. privacy ignores the other negative impacts of NSA surveillance on our national interests. The U.S. cloud computing industry—a fast-growing and American-dominated market—could lose anywhere from $22 billion to $180 billion in the next few years as companies lose customers abroad and here at home. U.S. tech companies are facing declines in overseas sales due to the backlash, while foreign governments are blaming the NSA for decisions to drop American companies from huge contracts, as we’ve witnessed with Boeing in Brazil and Verizon in Germany.
Beyond the dollars and cents, the Snowden disclosures have accelerated data localization and data protection proposals from foreign governments that are looking for greater national control over their citizens’ info. These proposals could create significant economic and technological hurdles for American businesses: It’s both more expensive and more difficult to house servers in specific countries in order to comply with data localization laws. What’s more, mandatory data localization policies can have a negative impact on Internet freedom and the protection of human rights in countries that do not have strong local protections against surveillance. In fact, the Snowden disclosures could broadly undermine the entire U.S. Internet Freedom agenda, which was a key component of American foreign policy under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Lastly, there’s growing evidence that certain NSA surveillance techniques are actually bad for cybersecurity. As the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers recently explained: “The United States might have compromised both security and privacy in a failed attempt to improve security.”
We’ve learned in the past year that the NSA has been deliberately weakening the security of the Internet, including commercial products that we rely on every day, in order to improve its own spying capabilities. The agency has apparently tried everything from secretly undermining essential encryption tools and standards to inserting backdoors into widely used computer hardware and software products, stockpiling vulnerabilities in commercial software, and building a vast network of spyware inserted onto computers and routers around the world. A former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Council, Eileen Donahoe, wrote a forceful article back in March about how the NSA’s actions threaten our national security.
When you weigh these costs against the questionable benefits of the programs, the need to rein in the NSA and restore international confidence in the U.S. becomes obvious. The USA FREEDOM Act is “historic” not because it would solve all of our problems, but rather because it would be a much-needed first step in the long road to recovery from the effects of widespread NSA surveillance.A marginal decline meant the number of EI recipients in the Calgary area fell for the first time in nearly two years in June, but the number of people receiving benefits in the city remains near a historic high.
There were 23,900 people receiving benefits in June, down by 0.6 per cent — or 140 — from May. While the drop ended a 21-month string of increases, EI rolls in the Calgary area are among the largest the Calgary region has ever seen, with June’s tally the sixth highest since January 1997, according to Statistics Canada data.
The number of EI recipients in the Calgary region peaked in July 2009, at 25,090, as Alberta was grappling with the fallout from the global financial crisis.
Compared with June 2015, the number of people receiving EI in and around Calgary was up 44.9 per cent.
Provincewide, the number of EI beneficiaries in Alberta declined slightly, dropping by 0.8 per cent in June, to 77,200. The number of recipients in the province was up 48 per cent from June 2015.
The number of EI claims was down sharply in Alberta, dropping 44.7 per cent from May, when Fort McMurray was shut down for weeks due to fire. On a seasonally adjusted basis, the number of claims in June was the lowest in eight months.
Nationally, there were 545,900 EI beneficiaries, essentially unchanged from the previous month, but up 1.5 per cent from June 2015.SILICON VALLEY (The Borowitz Report) - A new social network is about to alter the playing field of the social media world, and it's called PhoneBook.
According to its creators, who invented the network in their dorm room at Berkeley, PhoneBook is the game-changer that will leave Facebook, Twitter and even the much anticipated Google Buzz in a cloud of dust.
"With PhoneBook, you have a book that has a list of all your friends in the city, plus everyone else who lives there," says Danny Fruber, one of PhoneBook's creators.
"When you want to chat with a friend, you look them up in PhoneBook, and find their unique PhoneBook number," Fruber explains. "Then you enter that number into your phone and it connects you directly to them."
Another breakout utility of PhoneBook allows the user to arrange face-to-face meetings with his or her friends at restaurants, bars, and other "places," as Fruber calls them.
"You will be sitting right across from your friend and seeing them in 3-D," he said. "It's like Skype, only without the headset."
PhoneBook will enable friends to play many games as well, such as charades, cards, and a game Fruber believes will be a breakout: Farm.
"In Farm, you have an actual farm where you raise real crops and livestock," he says. "It's hard work, but it's more fun than Mafia, where you actually get killed."
More here.
_______
About author Andy Borowitz is a comedian and writer whose work appears in The New Yorker and The New York Times, and at his award-winning humor site, Andy Borowitz is a comedian and writer whose work appears in The New Yorker and The New York Times, and at his award-winning humor site, BorowitzReport.com. He is performing at the 92nd St. Y on April 30 at 8 PM with special guests Judy Gold, Hendrik Hertzberg, and Jonathan Alter. For tickets, go to 92y.orgA group of fishermen have discovered a bison skull, estimated to be around 5,000 years old, while fishing in downtown Cedar Rapids. The discovery was made last weekend by several teenagers near the 5-in-1 dam.
"Been fishing here since I was three and never caught anything like it," said Cody Sprague, 16, of Cedar Rapids. "It's pretty cool."
The teenagers were trying to catch minnows with a fishing net in the Cedar River when the net became snagged on the skull. One of Sprague's friend's then entered the water to remove the net, leading to the discovery of the nearly fully intact skull.
"It's a special specimen, there's no question about that," said Holmes Semken, a University of Iowa professor of paleontology. "(The skull) was buried before it weathered very much."
Semken, who's currently studying mammoth bones found in Oskaloosa earlier this year, said the bison skull is one the most intact specimens he's ever seen come from the Cedar Rapids area.
Bison roamed the spot thousands of years ago, but Semken said it's rare to come across their remains.
"I wouldn't waste my time trying to find this sort of thing," he said. "It's just not going to happen."
Cedar Rapids parks superintendent Daniel Gibbins called the discovery an "incredible" find for the area. It likely ended up in the river as a result of the 2008 flood, after spending thousands of years buried near its banks, Semken said.
Sprague said he has yet to decide what he will do with the skull. Keeping it, selling it or donating it are all possibilities, he said.How Jackal, Mira, and Glaz’s Mid-Season Buff Impacted Pick Rates – Game Analyst Dev Blog 1
Alongside the Data Peek Series, one of our Data Analysts, Geoffroy Mouret, provided his own analysis of the overall data from Season 1. This is part 1 of a 2 part series. The next blog will take a look at the impact of new operators on win rates.
Every season brings a lot of changes with the new Operators that impact the metagame over the first weeks after their release. The new Operator pick rates usually follow the same trend with two spikes at season launch with early access to Season Pass owners, and at their global release in Renown and R6 credits. After that, pick rates slowly decrease before stabilizing until the next patch.
Jackal (Top) and Mira’s (Bottom) pick rates in Y2S1 (PC – all modes and levels of play)
Not all operators are equally impacted by the arrival of DLC operators. While most of them see a small decrease in their pick rates, some suffer more from having a similar function (think Smoke and Echo for example), whereas others take advantage of that new meta.
Operators’ Pick Rates per patch (PC Ranked – Top players)
Season 5 is no exception and it created a lot of tension over the control of Mira’s Black Mirrors. Operators like Hibana and Twitch took advantage of that as their pick rate remained constant over the first half of the season, while Thermite was picked a lot less. The top 4 defenders remained the same, with Bandit having the smallest decrease and Valkyrie being hit a bit harder by Mira’s competition for intel. Further away in the meta, it’s worth noting that Caveira’s pick rate was not greatly impacted as players used her ability to stay hidden from Jackal.
With the Velvet Shell Mid-Season Reinforcements, DLC operators settled in the middle of the pack and most players went back to their previous habits. Old favorites like Ash and Jäger came back to around an 80% pick rate and Valkyrie reclaimed her place as the true queen of vision. Addressing the elephant in the room, we have Glaz who went from a 7% pick rate to almost 50%. This was an obvious consequence of his recent buff, which put him in a competitive place, but not to the point of making him a must pick.
For the latest updates, follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Join the discussion on our subreddit and Forums!Lithuania and Latvia could have joint airlines and postal companies in the future, said Lithuanian Minister of Transport and Communications Eligijus Masiulis and his Latvian counterpart Aivis Ronis in a meeting today in Klaipeda.
Eligijus Masiulis and Aivis Ronis. Klaipeda, 10.10.2012.
"Latvian and Estonian national airlines have been suffering major losses the recent years and their future looks very gloomy. A study by Lithuania's Ministry of Transport and Communication a couple of years ago showed that only a joint Baltic airline of the three countries could be successful in such small markets as the Baltic States," Masiulis said.
He suggested his counterparts from Latvia and Estonia renewing discussions on the issue and conducting new calculations to see if a joint venture would be successful, writes LETA/ELTA.
Latvia is currently looking for a strategic investor for the loss-making airBaltic airlines. Estonia has also started discussions on the future of Estonian Air as the losses of the company have been soaring.
Lithuanian and Latvian ministers also discussed opportunities to set up a joint postal service company of Lithuania and Latvia which would provide courier services. Lietuvos Pastas (Lithuanian Post) has already opened talks with Latvijas Pasts (Latvian Post).The story is good enough as far as "thrillers" go, but the writing in this book is...I don't know, tedious. It seems like about 75% of the book is filler writing, the type of writing you'd do in high school in order to make your paper longer. There are so many tedious and unnecessary details that it began to almost get funny after a while. It is very distracting from the story. Some examples: TVs are mentioned many times in the book, and every single time it mentions the brand name and the screen size. Nobody cares!
This paragraph is a good example of what is wrong with this book:
"Brain opened the box, slit the plastic cover on the cooking tray, and changed the microwave from the time, "2:35", to the desired cooking time, "5:00." He pressed, "Start".
There is absolutely no reason to include all of these extraneous details except I suspect that if they were removed the book would only be about 30 pages long.
Not a terrible effort, but when the writing style is so distracting as to cause you to forget what is going on, it's not good. It feels like the author wrote the book with a thesaurus open at all times.
The dialogue is stilted and unrealistic.
I wouldn't recommend this book as anything other than a time-killer, and even then if there are no cereal boxes or instruction manuals around.Anabrus simplex - Mormon Cricket
The Mormon cricket (Anabrus simplex) is a large insect that can grow to almost 8 cm (3 inches) in length. It lives throughout western North America in rangelands dominated by sagebrush and forbs. Despite its name, the Mormon cricket is actually a shieldbacked katydid, not a cricket. It takes its name from Mormon settlers in Utah, who encountered them while pushing westward, and for the prominent role they play in the miracle of the gulls.[1]
Although flightless, the Mormon cricket is capable of traveling up to two kilometers a day[2] in its swarming phase, during which it is a serious agricultural pest and traffic hazard.
Description [ edit ]
Mormon crickets have variable coloration. The overall color may be black, brown, red, purple or green. The "shield" (pronotum or modified prothorax that covers vestigial wings) behind the head may have colored markings. The abdomen may appear to be striped. Females have a long ovipositor, which should not be mistaken for a stinger. Both sexes have long antennae.
Mormon crickets may undergo morphological changes triggered by high population densities, similar to those seen in locusts. The most noticeable change is in coloration: solitary individuals typically have green or purple coloration, while swarming individuals are often black, brown or red.
Life cycle [ edit ]
Utah, October 2005
Mormon cricket eggs hatch mostly in the spring after they are laid, although in some areas eggs may take as many as five years to hatch. Hatching begins when soil temperatures reach 4 °C (40 °F). The nymphs pass through seven instars before reaching the adult stage, typically taking 60 to 90 days.
Breeding begins within 10 to 14 days of reaching the adult stage. The male passes to the female a large spermatophore which can be up to 27% of his body weight. The spermatophore is mostly food for the female to consume but also contains sperm to fertilize her eggs. This nuptial gift causes swarming-phase females to compete for males, a behavior not seen in solitary-phase females.
The female lays her eggs by thrusting her ovipositor deep into the soil. Each female can lay over one |
1.5% 1.6% 1.6% Absolute difference 0.1 0.3 0.3 0.2 0.3 0.2 663 1,298 1,437 874 1,455 1,154 Relative difference 0.9% 2.7% 2.7% 1.7% 2.5% 1.7% 2.15% 2.0% 3.9% 4.2% 2.4% 3.9% 3.0% 3.4% All causes of death 815.0 791.8 775.3 774.9 749.6 747.0 741.3 2,448,017 2,426,264 2,423,712 2,471,984 2,437,163 2,468,435 2,515,458 Absolute difference -23.2 -16.5 -0.4 -25.3 -2.6 -5.7 -21,753 -2,552 48,272 -34,821 31,272 47,023 Relative difference -2.8% -2.1% -0.1% -3.3% -0.3% -0.8% -1.54% -0.9% -0.1% 2.0% -1.4% 1.3% 1.9% 0.4%
TABLE 3. Selected risk and protective factors for morbidity and mortality — United States, 2005–current data year Indicator Data source 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 Desired direction Annualized % change* Nutrition, physical activity, and obesity Percentage of adults aged ≥20 yrs who are obese (age-adjusted)† NHANES 34.3% 33.7% 35.7% 34.9% Decrease Absolute difference (% point)§ -0.6 2.0 -0.8 Relative difference (% change)¶ -1.7% 5.9% -2.2% 0.6% Percentage of children and adolescents aged 2–19 yrs who are obese† NHANES 15.4% 16.8% 16.9% 16.9% Decrease Absolute difference (% point) 1.4 0.1 0 Relative difference (% change) 9.1% 0.6% 0 1.4% Percentage of adults aged ≥18 yrs who met the 2008 federal physical activity guidelines for aerobic and muscle-strengthening activities** (age-adjusted) NHIS 16.6% 16.1% 16.5% 18.2% 19.0% 20.6% 20.8% 20.6% 20.7% Increase Absolute difference (% point) -0.5 0.4 1.7 0.8 1.6 0.2 -0.2 0.1 Relative difference (% change) -3.0% 2.5% 10.3% 4.4% 8.4% 1.0% -1.0% 0.5% 3.8% Percentage of high school students who are physically active ≥60 minutes per day on all 7 days†† YRBSS 17.9% 17.1% 18.4% 28.7% 27.1% Increase Absolute difference (% point) -0.8 1.3 NA NA Relative difference (% change) -4.5% 7.6% NA NA NA Average daily intake of fruits per 1,000 calories consumed among persons aged ≥2 yrs (cup equivalents per 1,000 calories)(age-adjusted)† NHANES 0.5 0.6 0.6 Increase Absolute difference (cup equivalents) 0.1 0 Relative difference (% change) 20.0% 0 NA Average daily intake of vegetables per 1,000 calories consumed among persons aged ≥2 yrs (cup equivalents per 1,000 calories) (age-adjusted)† NHANES 0.8 0.8 0.8 Increase Absolute difference (cup equivalents) 0 0 Relative difference (% change) 0 0 NA Tobacco use Annual per capita cigarette consumption in the United States TTB 1,716 1,691 1,656 1,507 1,367 1,281 1,232 1,196 Decrease Absolute difference (no.) -25 -35 -149 -140 -86 -49 -36 Relative difference (% change) -1.5% -2.1% -9.0% -9.3% -6.3% -3.8% -2.9% -5.8% Percentage of adults aged ≥18 yrs who are current smokers (age-adjusted)§§ NSDUH 28.0% 28.0% 27.3% 26.7% 26.1% 25.8% 24.9% 25.2% Decrease Absolute difference (% point) 0 -0.7 -0.6 -0.6 -0.3 -0.9 0.3 Relative difference (% change) 0 -2.5% -2.2% -2.2% -1.1% -3.5% 1.2% -2.0% % of high school students who are current cigarette smokers YRBSS 23.0% 20.0% 19.5% 18.1% 15.7% Decrease Absolute difference (% point) -3.0 -0.5 -1.4 -2.4 Relative difference (% change) -13.0% -2.5% -7.2% -13.3% -4.2% % of children aged 3–11 yrs exposed to secondhand smoke† NHANES 50.8% 53.6% 42.0% 41.3% Decrease Absolute difference (% point) 2.8 -11.6 -0.7 Relative difference (% change) 5.5% -21.6% -1.7% -4.2%
TABLE 3. (Continued) Selected risk and protective factors for morbidity and mortality — United States, 2005–current data year Indicator Data source 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 Desired direction Annualized % change* Diseases of the heart and stroke prevention % of persons aged ≥18 yrs with high blood pressure who have it controlled (<140/90) (age-adjusted)†,¶¶ NHANES 36.5% 46.3% 45.9% 46.3% Increase Absolute difference (% point) 9.8 -0.4 0.4 Relative difference (% change) 26.8% -0.9% 0.9% 3.6% % of adults aged ≥18 yrs with elevated LDL-cholesterol who have their cholesterol controlled (age-adjusted)†,*** NHANES 22.3% 24.8% 25.4% 29.5% Increase Absolute difference (% point) 2.5 0.6 4.1 Relative difference (% change) 11.2% 2.4% 16.1% 4.4% Aspirin use among high risk adults (postevent/postdiagnosis)††† NAMCS 46.1% 47.1% 53.8% Increase Absolute difference (% point) 1.0 6.7 Relative difference (% change) 2.2% 14.2% NA No. of mg of sodium intake from food consumed among persons aged ≥2 yrs (mg per day) (age-adjusted)† NHANES 3,436 3,330 3,463 Decrease Absolute difference (no. of mg) -106 133 Relative difference (% change) -3.1% 4.0% NA Cancer detection and prevention % of adults aged 50–75 yrs receiving colorectal cancer screening according to current guidelines (age-adjusted)§§§,¶¶¶,**** BRFSS 60.9% 63.7% 65.1% Increase NA % of women aged 21–65 yrs receiving a pap test in the past 3 yrs (age-adjusted)§§§,****,†††† BRFSS 87.8% 87.4% 86.5% 83.8% Increase NA % of women aged 50–74 yrs receiving a mammography screening in the past 2 yrs (age-adjusted)§§§,**** BRFSS 81.6% 81.1% 79.7% 78.8% Increase NA % of females aged 13–15 yrs receiving ≥3 doses HPV vaccine NIS-Teen 16.6% 22.9% 28.6% 30.0% 28.1% 32.7% Increase Absolute difference (% point) 6.3 5.7 1.4 -1.9 4.6 Relative difference (% change) 38.0% 24.9% 4.9% -6.3% 16.4% 12.3% Diabetes % of adults aged ≥18 yrs with diabetes with an A1c value >9 percentage points (age-adjusted)§§§§ NHANES 17.9% 21.0% Decrease Absolute difference (% point) 3.1 Relative difference (% change) 17.3% NA No. of adults aged ≥18 yrs with diabetes who have an A1c value >9 percentage points (in thousands)§§§§ NHANES 2,300 2,600 Decrease Absolute difference (no. in 1,000s) 300 Relative difference (% change) 13.0% NA Asthma No. of hospitalizations for asthma NHDS 489,000 444,000 456,000 451,000 479,000 439,000 Decrease Absolute difference (no.) -45,000 12,000 -5,000 28,000 -40,000 Relative difference (% change) -9.2% 2.7% -1.1% 6.2% -8.4% -0.9%
TABLE 3. (Continued) Selected risk and protective factors for morbidity and mortality — United States, 2005–current data year Indicator Data source 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 Desired direction Annualized % change* Excessive alcohol use % of adults aged ≥18 yrs engaging in binge drinking during the past 30 days¶¶¶¶ NSDUH 27.1% 27.6% 27.0% 26.7% 27.1% Decrease Absolute difference (% point) 0.5 -0.6 -0.3 0.4 Relative difference (% change) 1.8% -2.2% -1.1% 1.5% -0.3% % of high school students engaging in binge drinking during the past 30 days***** YRBSS 25.5% 26.0% 24.2% 21.9% 20.8% Decrease Absolute difference (% point) 0.5 -1.8 -2.3 -1.1 Relative difference (% change) 2.0% -6.9% -9.5% -5.0% -2.9% No. of fatalities in motor-vehicle crashes with driver blood alcohol concentration ≥0.08 FARS 13,582 13,491 13,041 11,711 10,759 10,136 9,878 Decrease Absolute difference (no.) -91 -450 -1,330 -952 -623 -258 Relative difference (% change) -0.7% -3.3% -10.2% -8.1% -5.8% -2.5% -6.0% % of high school students engaging in drinking and driving in the past 30 days YRBSS 9.9% 10.5% 9.7% 8.2% 10.0% Decrease Absolute difference (% point) 0.6 -0.8 -1.5 1.8 Relative difference (% change) 6.1% -7.6% -15.5% 22.0% -1.1%
TABLE 4. Infectious disease morbidity and mortality indicators — United States, 2005–current data year Indicator Data source 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 Desired direction Annualized % change Influenza† % of children aged 6 mos–17 yrs receiving ≥1 dose of influenza vaccine per influenza season NIS 43.7% 51.0% 51.5% 56.6% Increase Absolute difference (% point)§ 7.3 0.5 5.1 Relative difference (% change)¶ 16.7% 1.0% 9.9% 8.2% % of adults aged >18 yrs receiving influenza vaccination BRFSS 40.4% 40.5% 38.8% 41.5% Increase Absolute difference (% change) 0.1 -1.7 2.7 Relative difference (% change) 0.2% -4.2% 7.0% 0.4% % of HCP receiving influenza vaccination HCP internet panel survey 63.4% 63.5% 66.9% 72.0% Increase Absolute difference (% point) 0.1 3.4 5.1 Relative difference (% change) 0.2% 5.4% 7.6% 4.4% % of pregnant women receiving influenza vaccination†† Internet panel survey of pregnant women 49.0% 47.0% 50.5% Increase Absolute difference (% point) -2.0 3.5 Relative difference (% change) -4.1% 7.4% NA Foodborne Illness Rate of Listeria infection in the population (cases per 100,000 population)§§ FoodNet 0.29 0.28 0.26 0.26 0.32 0.27 0.28 0.26 0.26 Decrease Absolute difference (rate) -0.01 -0.02 0 0.06 -0.05 0.01 -0.02 0 Relative difference (% change) -3.4% -7.1% 0% 23.1% -15.6% 3.7% -7.1% 0% -0.8% Rate of Salmonella infection in the population (cases per 100,000 population) FoodNet 14.53 14.76 14.89 16.09 15.02 17.55 16.45 16.37 15.19 Decrease Absolute difference (rate) 0.23 0.13 1.20 -1.07 2.53 -1.10 -0.08 -1.18 Relative difference (% change) 1.6% 0.9% 8.1% -6.7% 16.8% -6.3% -0.5% -7.2% 1.3% Rate of Salmonella Enteritidis (SE) infection in the population (cases per 100,000 population) FoodNet 2.45 2.45 2.36 2.97 2.64 3.53 3.00 2.59 Decrease Absolute difference (rate) 0 -0.09 0.61 -0.33 0.89 -0.53 -0.41 Relative difference (% change) 0% -3.7% 25.8% -11.1% 33.7% -15.0% -13.7% 3.0% Rate of Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC) O157 infection in the population (cases per 100,000 population) FoodNet 1.06 1.30 1.20 1.12 0.99 0.95 0.97 1.11 1.15 Decrease Absolute difference (rate) 0.24 -0.10 -0.08 -0.13 -0.04 0.02 0.14 0.04 Relative difference (% change) 22.6% -7.7% -6.7% -11.6% -4.0% 2.1% 14.4% 3.6% -1.2% Health-care–associated infections CLABSI SIR (observed compared with predicted events)¶¶ NHSN 1.00 0.85 0.68 0.59 0.56 Decrease Absolute difference (SIR no.) -0.15 -0.17 -0.09 -0.03 Relative difference (% change) -15.0% -20.0% -13.2% -5.1% -14.1% CAUTI SIR (observed compared with predicted events)¶¶ NHSN 1.00 0.94 0.93 1.03 Decrease Absolute difference (SIR no.) -0.06 -0.01 0.10 Relative difference (% change) -6.0% -1.1% 10.8% 0.8% Hospital admission and readmission attributable to SSI SIR (observed compared with predicted events)¶¶ NHSN 1.00 0.98 0.92 0.84 0.80 Decrease Absolute difference (SIR no.) -0.02 -0.16 -0.08 -0.04 Relative difference (% change) -2.0% -6.1% -8.7% -4.8% -5.8% Hospital onset of Clostridium difficile SIR (observed compared to predicted events)¶¶ NHSN 1.00 0.98 Decrease Absolute difference (SIR no.) -2.0 Relative difference (% change) -2.0% NA
TABLE 4. (Continued) Infectious disease morbidity and mortality indicators — United States, 2005–current data year Indicator Data source 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 Desired direction Annualized % change Incidence of health-care–associated invasive MRSA infections (rate per 100,000 persons) EIP/ABCs 27.08 23.75 21.76 20.06 18.74 Decrease Absolute difference (rate) -3.33 -1.99 -1.70 -1.32 Relative difference (% change) -12.3% -8.4% -7.8% -6.6% -8.7% HIV infection No. of new HIV infections in the U.S. (persons aged ≥13 yrs) NHSS 48,600 53,200 47,500 45,000 47,500 Decrease Absolute difference (no.) 4,600 -5,700 -2,500 2,500 Relative difference (% change) 9.5% -10.7% -5.3% 5.6% -2.1% Rate of HIV transmission among adolescents and adults (per 100 HIV+ persons aged ≥13 yrs) NHSS 4.6 4.9 4.3 4.0 4.2 Decrease Absolute difference (rate) 0.3 -0.6 -0.3 0.1 Relative difference (% change) 7.0% -12.2% -6.7% 3.5% -3.9% % of persons aged ≥13 yrs living with HIV who know their serostatus NHSS 80.9% 81.4% 82.7% 83.5% 84.2% Increase Absolute difference (% point) 0.5 1.3 0.8 0.7 Relative difference (% change) 0.6% 1.6% 1.0% 0.8% 1.1% Chlamydia infection Rate of Chlamydia infection in females aged 15–19 yrs (per 100,000 population)*** Nationaly Notifiable STD Surveillance 2,733.0 2,805.7 2,966.3 3,251.4 3,314.7 3,299.5 3,485.2 3,291.5 Decrease Absolute difference (rate) 72.7 160.6 285.1 63.3 -15.2 185.7 -193.7 Relative difference (% change) 2.7% 5.7% 9.6% 1.9% -0.5% 5.6% -5.6% 3.3% Rate of Chlamydia infection in women aged 20–24 yrs (per 100,000 population)*** Nationally Notifiable STD Surveillance 2,667.9 2,774.4 2,940.4 3,153.2 3,187.3 3,367.4 3,630.0 3,695.5 Decrease*** Absolute difference (rate) 106.5 166 212.8 34.1 180.1 262.6 65.5 Relative difference (% change) 4.0% 6.0% 7.2% 1.1% 5.7% 7.8% 1.8% 4.9% Hepatitis C No. of new cases of hepatitis C NNDSS 694 802 849 877 781 850 1,229 Decrease Absolute difference (no. of cases) 108 47 28 -96 69 379 Relative difference (% change) 15.6% 5.9% 3.3% -10.9% 8.8% 44.6% 6.4% No. of hepatitis C deaths††† NVSS 11,849 13,945 15,106 15,768 16,235 16,627 17,721 Decrease Absolute difference (no. of deaths) 2,096 1,161 662 497 392 1,094 Relative difference (% change) 17.7% 8.3% 4.4% 3.0% 2.4% 6.6% 6.0%Activist Post
The recent study undeniably linking genetically modified foods (GMOs) to cancer should shock the health world, especially in the United States where the overwhelming majority of grocery store food is derived from GMO-based crops.
The new peer-reviewed study to be published in the upcoming Food & Chemical Toxicology Journal in New York proves that GMO corn and world’s best-selling weedkiller, Roundup, causes increased tumors, multiple organ damage and led to premature death in rats.
“This research shows an extraordinary number of tumors developing earlier and more aggressively – particularly in female animals. I am shocked by the extreme negative health impacts,” said Dr. Michael Antoniou, molecular biologist at King’s College London School of Medicine.
Here are the experts discussing the significance of the findings of this unprecedented study:
This study comes at a time when aware consumers in California are trying to force chemical and genetic engineering companies like Monsanto to label any food that contains genetic modification. These recent findings that GMOs are clearly a health threat will likely give this campaign a boost of credibility in the face of millions of lobbying dollars being spent to oppose Prop 37.
Read other articles by Activist Post HEREAOL once sought trademark rights in “You’ve Got Mail,” but could not because AOL, like other email services, would use the phrase to inform users they had received new emails – it was not used as a trademark. Because the phrase was used to convey meaning, it was held generic and not protectable as a trademark.
12 years after the AOL case, another Internet heavyweight, Pinterest, claims, among other things, trademark rights in a term, that it uses generically, and seeks to exclude other social media startups from using the term, “PIN.”
Has “Pinterest” Become Generic?
PINTEREST, proper, probably has not become generic. But it is unclear whether they possess legitimate trademark rights in terms such as PIN IT, which Pinterest displays as a button hovering over images. When grouped together, these images form inspirational boards.
Six “Pin” Mark-Holders Gave-In to Pinterest Pressure
So far, Pinterest has had a perfect track record of deterring companies from gaining federal trademark rights in brands incorporating the PIN prefix. After Pinterest opposed 6 trademark registrations, all these end up withdrawn or abandoned by their fleeting owners. A clear win for Pinterest, which, in its streak, also recovered more than 100 domain names from a Chinese cybersquatter who had the unfortunate habit of registering variations of the pinterest domain name.
Pintrips’ Resiliency
Recently, however, Pinterest encountered less success in implementing the same tactic. A new PIN contender, Pintrips, a startup that simplifies the process of comparing flight prices online, has not been intimidated into a settlement and seems determined to fight tooth and nail with Internet’s third most popular website. Discovering Pintrips’ unusual resiliency, Pinterest filed a trademark infringement suit, alleging pretty much everything but the kitchen sink. In my opinion, their decision to go for a full-fledged suit, instead of going the usual and economical trademark opposition route, is a way to further push Pintrips toward settling.
Unflinching, Pintrips seems to be gearing up for battle.
Pinterest’s Mistakes
Although the similarity in sight and sound are obvious, Pintrips is no fool. And even if risky, their strategy may pay off.
Pinterest has made, and continues to make, many trademark blunders. To this day, Pinterest fails to use the mark in a trademark fashion. Indeed, the first three letters of their mark – PIN – is used to refer to features, instead of using their mark to indicate exclusively the source of their services. In short, Pinterest uses variation of the word PIN (a) “functionally” by using the common meaning for the PIN term and by (b) using that term as so much more than just a source-identifier.
(a) “PIN” and “PIN IT” Used Functionally
On terra firma, a pin is “a thin piece of metal or wood, used especially to hold things together;” online, Pinterest uses it to mean just that. Of course, Pinterest’s PIN IT is an online button – not an actual pin – but that is a distinction without a difference. Pinterest’s PIN IT button is its own version of a Facebook “Like,” except that on Pinterest you can easily retrieve your pins by grouping them together in different thematic boards.
Pinterest uses Pin in a context that suggest its ordinary meaning. Thus, Pinterest has no right to exclude others from doing the same. With the AOL decision as ammunition, Pintrips is on solid ground to make a generic use argument.
The AOL decision.
In 2001, while online social media was still a vague idea, AOL, sought to exclude others from using a specific phrase, “You’ve Got Mail.” AOL was probably pretty optimistic about its prospects. After all, that robotic upbeat voice is, to this day, burned in our memories.
Nonetheless, the court noted that “AOL’s use of the phrase, conditioned on whether mail is present, does not describe AOL’s e-mail service, but rather simply informs subscribers, employing common words to express their commonly used meaning, of the ordinary fact that they have new electronic mail in their mailboxes.” And went on to hold that “when words are used in a context that suggests only their common meaning, they are generic and may not be appropriated as exclusive property.”
This language clearly favors Pintrips.
(b) PIN Used As A Noun & A Verb, Not An Adjective
To preserve its trademark power, a startup should not use its mark (or a portion of it) as a noun or a verb, but only as an adjective. The reason is that by using a mark in other ways than as a mark, its propensity to be associated with a company deteriorates and, pretty soon, the mark becomes the catch-all term for the feature or the category. ASPIRIN, THERMOS, ESCALATOR, YELLOW PAGES and TRAMPOLINE were once illustrious brands and protectable trademarks until they each became generic. For most of these, the loss was brought onto themselves, because of improper use of their own trademarks.
Pinterest should have stressed the trademark significance of the “PIN” term. Instead, it did just the opposite, utilizing the PIN term all over. This kind of trademark blunder has often tipped the balance toward finding a mark generic.
Is Pintrips Biting More Than It Can Chew?
Although Pintrips has powerful ammunitions at its disposal, a legal win is a long road ahead. Before that happens, Pintrips will have to incur significant legal expenses, in the form of survey of evidence, to demonstrate genericness. Such costly evidence may be the only way to prevail because Pinterest’s trademark registrations unlock favorable presumptions. And, arguing against a registered trademarks tend to create factual disputes, which means that Pintrips is unlikely to get an early win, but would have to go through the expenses of a lengthy trial.
To make matter worse, Pintrips is, somewhat, shooting itself in the foot by arguing genericness. A Pintrips success would mean that its own PIN-based trademark would be in jeopardy. A success would also open the competitive floodgate. Indeed, if PIN is generic, any other social media startups can use it. Nothing attracts “Me Too” startups like a judicially sanctioned invitation to utilize a popular term, such as PIN.
Points To Ponder
Pintrips may be in a weaker posture than AT&T, the defendant, in the AOL case. And, importantly, because it is a young startup, probably still in the red, it may not have the war chest needed to live to see a victory. Nevertheless, with more and more frequency, we see startups treating suits as an expected cost, a by-product of disrupting industries. Aereo, Uber and Pandora are just some examples of startups successfully building such legal costs into their business models. If Pintrips does not run out of steams, it may just be the next successful disruptor on the list.According to his State of the Union address, United States President Barack Obama has solved the Russia problem. His brief passage on the subject shows he’s either blind to the dangers of the deteriorating relationship between Moscow and the West or merely too quick to take credit for a victory that is not even on the horizon.
Here’s what Obama had to say about the biggest threat to European stability since the fall of the Berlin wall 25 years ago:
“We’re upholding the principle that bigger nations can’t bully the small — by opposing Russian aggression, supporting Ukraine’s democracy and reassuring our NATO allies. Last year, as we were doing the hard work of imposing sanctions along with our allies, some suggested that Mr. Putin’s aggression was a masterful display of strategy and strength. Well, today, it is America that stands strong and united with our allies, while Russia is isolated, with its economy in tatters. That’s how America leads — not with bluster, but with persistent, steady resolve.”
Every one of these sentences is, to put it mildly, a stretch.
The U.S. has indeed disapproved of Russian aggression in Ukraine, and loudly enough for everyone to hear. But that doesn’t mean it has supported Ukraine’s democracy.
Ukraine has long asked the West for help in tracking down the money and assets amassed by its former corrupt rulers. Last year, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and U.S. Treasury even set up a task force to assist that effort. But nothing has been heard since. In the meantime, Vice-President Joe Biden’s son Hunter has been hired as the top lawyer for Burisma, Ukraine’s biggest independent natural gas producer, which is owned by former ecology minister Mykolai Zlochevsky, whom Ukrainian prosecutors seek for corruption-related crimes. Biden Senior takes regular trips to Kiev to talk up democracy and reforms and to condemn Russia, while his son’s boss is probably hiding out in Moscow like most other close allies of former president Viktor Yanukovych.
[np_storybar title=”Putin sends New Year’s message to Obama, says Russia just wants a little respect” link=”http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/12/31/putin-sends-new-years-message-to-obama-says-russia-just-wants-a-little-respect/”%5DMOSCOW — Russian President Vladimir Putin has said in a New Year’s message to U.S. President Barack Obama that Moscow is looking for equality in bilateral relations next year.
The Kremlin on Wednesday published several dozen New Year’s messages addressed to heads of states and international organizations such as the Olympic Committee and FIFA.
Putin reminded Obama of the upcoming 70th anniversary of the allied victory in World War II and said that it should serve as a reminder of “the responsibility that Russia and the United States bear for maintaining peace and international stability.” Moscow is anxious for the relations to advance but only as long as there is “equality and mutual respect.”
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The U.S. government has also offered financial help for Ukrainian democracy — $1 billion in loan guarantees last year and $1 billion in the first half of this year (and perhaps another billion at some later date). But it’s a tiny fraction of the $15 billion shortfall Ukraine faces this year, and that’s assuming the International Monetary Fund continues disbursing its $17 billion aid package as planned. The European Union has committed more funds to Ukraine: This year alone, Brussels has promised 1.8 billion euros ($2.1 billion) in loan guarantees, while Germany kicked in 500 million euros on its own.
As for reassurance to NATO allies, the U.S. has told the Baltic states that NATO would come to their rescue in the event of Russian aggression. Obama even travelled to Tallinn, Estonia, where he promised that the U.S. will defend the small countries’ territorial integrity. The Balts don’t seem particularly reassured, however. Lithuania has recently put out an emergency response manual on what citizens should do if Russia invades, which includes advice on what to do if foreign soldiers show up at your home and how to organize civil disobedience.
Obama’s description of sanctions as “hard work” on the part of the U.S. is laughable. In the first 11 months of 2014, U.S. exports to Russia actually increased to $10.22 billion from $10.18 billion from the same period the previous year. U.S. imports from Russia decreased to $21.97 billion from $25.49 billion, a change of just $3.5 billion. America’s European partners have suffered all the pain. In the first eight months of 2014, they lost $8.5 billion in exports to Russia and $7.5 billion in imports from Russia, and that was before the more serious sanctions hit.
Whether the sanctions have worked is arguable. They certainly angered Russian President Vladimir Putin and made him dole out ever more generous government support to his cronies’ businesses. (One of the insiders, Arkady Rotenberg, will now build a $3.5 billion bridge from Russia to occupied Crimea.) And sanctions have made it all but impossible for Russian entities to borrow in the West, causing Russia’s external debt to shrink to $599.5 billion from $728.9 billion at the beginning of last year. In the medium term, this might just make Russia more resilient to external shocks.
Yet sanctions have also united Russians around Putin, whose approval rating is still above 80%. At this point, 57% of Russians believe their country should ignore Western criticism, according to a Levada Center poll taken in late December, up from 38% in 2007. The share of those who believe the West is hostile toward Russia has increased to 43%, from 24% in 2007.
The sanctions certainly have not ripped the Russian economy to “tatters.” The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development says the Russian economy may shrink by 5% in 2015, but according to Piroska Nagy, EBRD’s director of country strategy and policy, “The single most important factor here is the huge drop in oil.” The U.S. has caused the oil-price drop only indirectly, in that its shale-oil producers are the target of Saudi Arabia’s price war. Russia’s losses are collateral damage.
As for Russia’s isolation, vodka is flowing at Russian state company parties at the World Economic Forum in Davos. The forum’s founder, Klaus Schwab, made a rare appearance at one to tell his “Russian friends” they were welcome in Davos. Some former Western partners will probably shun the 73-strong Russian delegation, but “isolation” is certainly not what it’s experiencing at the posh Swiss resort.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, however, won’t be seen there frowning at Russian excess. He had to fly home ahead of schedule, because fighting in eastern Ukraine has resumed in earnest, and his government says Russian troops are involved. When a cessation of hostilities was discussed in Berlin this week, no U.S. representative was there; the foreign ministers of Germany and France mediated between their Russian and Ukrainian colleagues. The search for a diplomatic solution, like the economic hardship, has fallen to America’s European allies. Despite U.S. willingness to let Russia get away with its Crimea land grab if it steps back from eastern Ukraine — hardly a strong defence of Ukraine’s territorial integrity — all U.S. diplomatic efforts have failed.
“That’s how America leads,” Obama said proudly. It’s more comforting to think he’s faking that |
note containing a crude Asian caricature and the words, "Have a nice day."
Officials said the inmates cut through the steel wall at the back of their cell, crawled down a catwalk, broke through a brick wall, cut their way into and out of a steam pipe and then sliced through the chain and lock on a manhole cover outside the prison.
It was the first escape from the maximum-security portion of the prison, which was built in 1865.
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The men may have had assistance outside the prison, perhaps meeting up with someone who helped them leave the area, investigators said.
Mr. Cuomo said investigators were confident the men obtained the tools inside the prison. Acting Corrections Commissioner Anthony Annucci said an inventory of prison tools had so far shown none missing and he was in contact with contractors who were doing or had done work at the prison.
Steven Tarsia, brother of slain sheriff's Deputy Kevin Tarsia, said that finding out his brother's killer had escaped "turns your world upside-down all over again."
He said that just the other day, he found he couldn't remember the names of the men responsible for his brother's death.
"All of a sudden, I remember them again," he said.
Tarsia said he couldn't imagine how the men could have gotten power tools and escaped without help, but "I don't know why anybody would help them."
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Staff with The Associated Press and The Canadian Pressbullfrog (Rana catesbeiana), the species which travelled on the OFO-A flight ), the species which travelled on the OFO-A flight
The Orbiting Frog Otolith (OFO) was a NASA space program which sent two bullfrogs into orbit on 9 November 1970 for the study of weightlessness. The name, derived through common use, was a functional description of the biological experiment carried by the satellite. Otolith referred to the frog's inner ear balance mechanism.
The Orbiting Frog Otolith Program was a part of the research program of NASA's Office of Advanced Research and Technology (OART). One of the goals of the OART was to study the vestibular system function in space and on Earth. The experiment was designed to study the adaptability of the otolith to sustained weightlessness, to provide information for crewed space flight. The otolith is a structure in the inner ear that is associated with equilibrium control: acceleration with respect to gravity as its primary sensory input.
The Frog Otolith Experiment (FOE) was developed by Torquato Gualtierotti of the University of Milan, Italy, when he was assigned to the Ames Research Center as a resident Research Associate sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences.[1] Originally planned in 1966 to be included on an early Apollo mission, the experiment was deferred when that mission was canceled. In late 1967 authorization was given to orbit the FOE when a supporting spacecraft could be designed. The project, part of NASA's Human Factor Systems program, was officially designated "OFO" in 1968. After a series of delays, OFO was launched into orbit on 9 November 1970.
After the successful OFO-A mission in 1970, interest in the research continued. A project called Vestibular Function Research was initiated in 1975 to fly a vestibular experiment in an Earth-orbiting spacecraft. This flight project was eventually discontinued, but a number of ground studies were conducted. The research has given rise to several very useful offshoots, including the ground-based Vestibular Research Facility located at ARC.[2]
OFO should not to be confused with similar acronyms describing the Orbiting Observatory series of spacecraft, such as Orbiting Geophysical Observatory (OGO), Orbiting Solar Observatory (OSO), and Orbiting Astronomical Observatory (OAO).
The OFO spacecraft [ edit ]
Launch of the Orbiting Frog Otolith (OFO) capsule
Diagram of Scout B launch vehicle
The OFO experiment was originally designed for flight within the Apollo Applications Program, which was established to make optimum use of hardware used in Apollo lunar missions. However, because the low acceleration levels needed for the experiment could not easily be maintained in a manned Apollo spacecraft, an unmanned satellite was later chosen as a more suitable vehicle. The satellite's design eliminated exposures to acceleration levels above 10−3g (10 mm/s²). This meant that the experimental specimens could experience an almost weightless state.
The spacecraft had a diameter of approximately 30 in (760 mm) and a length of 47 in (1,190 mm).[2] The octagonal lower section of the spacecraft housed the electronic apparatus. The upper section, which contained the experiment package, was shaped like a truncated cone. A heat shield covering this upper section protected the experiment during re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. A yo-yo de-spin assembly was located around the girth of the spacecraft. Four booms, folded against the side of the spacecraft, were located radially around the satellite. After the spacecraft separated from the launch vehicle, the yo-yo despin subsystem slowed spacecraft rotation. The four booms were then released to extend from the side of the spacecraft. The extension of the booms increased the moment of inertia of the spacecraft, permitting the acceleration level to remain below 10−3g.[2]
Orbiting Frog Otolith-A [ edit ]
The OFO-A mission was launched on November 9, 1970 (06:00 GMT) from Wallops Island launch site. The satellite carrying the OFO-A experiment remained in orbit for almost seven days. Recovery of the spacecraft was not planned. The payload was the Frog Otolith Experiment Package (FOEP).
The objective of the experiment was to investigate the effect of microgravity on the otolith, a sensory organ that responds to changes in an animal's orientation within the Earth's gravitational field.
Two American bullfrogs (Rana catesbeiana) were used as experimental subjects in the flight experiment. The bullfrog was chosen for study because its inner ear labyrinth is very similar to that of humans. Since it is an amphibian, preflight surgery could be performed above water, but it could be kept in water during the flight. The water medium served to cushion the vibration and acceleration of launch, and to facilitate gas exchange with the organisms.
Both flight frogs had electrocardiogram (ECG) electrodes implanted in their thoracic cavities and microelectrodes implanted in their vestibular nerves. The frogs were demotorized by cutting their limb nerves to prevent them from dislodging their implanted electrodes, and to reduce their metabolic rates.[3] With this lowered metabolic activity, the frogs could survive in good health without being fed for as long as one month. Immersion in water allowed the frogs to breathe through their skin. The water medium also helped to move carbon dioxide and heat away from the animals.
Hardware [ edit ]
The flight hardware unit, the FOEP, was a pressure-tight canister containing a water-filled centrifuge that housed the two frogs. The centrifuge was a cylindrical structure that rotated the frogs' heads at scheduled intervals.[3] The FOEP also contained a life support system which could maintain a regulated environment for the frogs. This system consisted of two closed loops, one containing liquid and the other containing gas. The interface between the two loops was a selectively permeable silicone rubber that acted as an artificial lung. Oxygen passed through the membrane from the gas to the liquid side, and carbon dioxide from the liquid to the gas side. The frogs were immersed in the liquid loop. A pump circulated oxygen through the gas-containing loop. Carbon dioxide entering the gas loop was removed by an absorbent and the purified oxygen returned to the pump for recirculation. A water evaporator and an electric heater maintained the water temperature at about 60 °F (15 °C). An amplifier system in the FOEP increased voltage output from the microelectrodes implanted in the animals to the level required by the telemetry apparatus.
Operations [ edit ]
A drawing of how a bullfrog fitted with electrodes was to sit inside the centrifuge of the Frog Otolith Experiment Package
Surgical preparation of the flight frogs was completed about 12 hours before launch, and the animals were sealed inside the FOEP. A backup FOEP was also prepared with similar specimens. The flight FOEP was installed in the satellite about three hours before launch.
The centrifuge was activated as soon as possible once the satellite was in orbit and stabilized at 10−3g (10 mm/s²). The centrifuge applied gravity stimuli in cycles. Each cycle lasted about 8 minutes, and consisted of the following: a 1-minute period without acceleration, an 8-second period when rotation slowly began, 14 seconds of constant 0.6 g (6 m/s²), an 8-second period when rotation slowly stopped, and a 6-minute period when aftereffects of rotation could be measured.[3] Cycles were performed every 30 minutes during the initial 3 hours in orbit, and less frequently during the rest of the flight.
The OFO experiment continued until the seventh day in orbit, at which time the onboard battery failed. Recovery of the OFO spacecraft and FOEP hardware were not required.
Results [ edit ]
The experiment was successful. Electrocardiography (ECG) indices showed the flight frogs to be in good health during the entire flight. Vestibular recordings were made as expected. Two equipment malfunctions occurred during the flight: pressure in the canister increased to 11 pounds per square inch (76 kPa), and the temperature decreased to 55 °F (13 °C) for nine hours. However, control experiments performed on the ground showed that these malfunctions had little effect on the outcome of the flight experiment.
Several vestibular response changes were noted during the early period in weightlessness. All of the observed changes reverted to normal during the last 10 to 20 hours of the flight, suggesting acclimatization.[3]
Frog Otolith Experiment Package (FOEP) [ edit ]
Orbiting Frog Otolith (OFO) with booms. Booms out increased the moment of inertia.
Frog Otolith Experiment Package
The Frog Otolith Experiment Package (FOEP) contains all apparatus necessary to assure survival of two frogs. Specimens are housed in a water-filled, self-contained centrifuge which supplies the test acceleration during orbit. Frogs are demotorized to prevent dislodging of implanted electrodes and to reduce their metabolic rate.[4]
Life Support System (LSS): The LSS maintains a regulated environment within the FOEP to assure the survival and normal functioning of two demotorized frogs. The lower bulkhead of the inner assembly structure provides mounting space for all life support equipment.
The package's dimensions were 18 in (457 mm) diameter × 18 in length, weighed 91 lb (41 kg) when loaded. Data acquisition consisted of ECG, body temperature, and vestibular activity. There was also a ground-based FOEP test unit which the FOEP could be connected preflight for ventilation and verification of environmental conditions prior to loading in the spacecraft.
Canister [ edit ]
The outer housing of the FOEP is a pressure-tight canister 181⁄ 16 inches (458.8 mm) in diameter and 18½ inches (470 mm) long. The bottom closure and removable top lid are both slightly domed to prevent implosion should pressure reversals be encountered. The inner assembly structure is fastened to a support ring approximately 6 inches from the bottom of the canister and consists of upper and lower bulkheads joined by a cylinder. Cutouts in the cylinder permit access to the centrifuge, which houses the frogs. Near the top of the canister are two electrical feed-through receptacles for the power supply and data line.
Centrifuge [ edit ]
The centrifuge is a hollow cylinder 6 inches in diameter and 13.5 inches long with both end caps in place. The cylinder is mounted perpendicular to the canister and supported by ball bearings housed in the upper and lower bulkheads. The rotational axis of the centrifuge is formed by shafts centrally located in the vertical plane at right angles to the cylinder, held in place by the ball bearings. Thin, shallow-domed end caps are bolted to each end of the centrifuge with intervening rubber gaskets to prevent leakage. In the center of each cap is a fitting which allows frog specimens to be fully instrumented and mounted directly to the end caps before insertion into the centrifuge, and immersion. The water serves as a cushion for the high accelerations and vibrations of launch and as a medium for gas exchange via the frogs' skin. The centrifuge is locked in position and not released until after the spacecraft orbit is fully stabilized. The motor which drives the centrifuge is mounted to the upper bulkhead. Signal amplifiers and an accelerometer are mounted on the centrifuge.
Neutral-buoyancy electrode [ edit ]
The micro-electrode consists of a probe of tungsten wire 50 µm in diameter, sharpened electrically to a point less than 1 µm in diameter and completely insulated to the tip. A bubble of air trapped in the polyethylene tubing which contains the probe adds buoyancy and makes the electrode the same density as the nerve in which it is implanted, thereby allowing the two to move together. A section of paraffin is used to connect the electrode to a handle which is used only during the implantation process, then removed. Nerve impulses detected by the microelectrodes are fed into a preamplifier directly attached to the frog's jaw, and passed on to a post-data amplifier for spacecraft telemetry.
Life support system (LSS) [ edit ]
Life Support System (LSS)
The life support system (LSS) of the Frog Otolith Experiment Package (FOEP) maintains a regulated environment within the FOEP to assure the survival and normal functioning of the experimental specimens. The LSS is designed to meet the physiological requirements of two demotorized frogs weighing 350 g (12 oz) each. Frogs are demotorized by cutting the limb nerves, which reduces their metabolic rate. In this condition, the frogs require no artificial respiration and can remain healthy without being fed, for as long as a month. After being installed in the centrifuge the frogs are completely immersed in water, which serves as the medium for exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide and heat through the frog's skin.[5]
The LSS primarily consists of two closed loops: one containing liquid and the other containing gas. The lower bulkhead of the inner assembly structure provides mounting space for all LSS equipment. The oxygen supply system operates through these loops and includes a 4.5 cm³ capacity oxygen bottle, a pressure reducer and regulator, an artificial lung, CO 2 absorber, and water supply. Limited control over the temperature of the frogs' environment is available by means of a water evaporator/heater.
Artificial lung [ edit ]
The interface between loops occurs at a selectively permeable membrane of silicon rubber which separates the liquid and gas. This membrane, called the lung, passes oxygen from the gas loop to the liquid loop, and CO 2 from the liquid loop to the gas loop.
Liquid loop [ edit ]
The frogs, housed in the centrifuge, are in the liquid loop. Moving from the lung to the frogs, the loop contains water and dissolved oxygen; moving from the frogs back to the lung, it contains water and free CO 2. A double layer of polyurethane foam lining the interior of the centrifuge prevents frog waste matter from fouling the water circulation system. Water is circulated through the liquid loop using a small pump and must pass through the filter before leaving the centrifuge.
Gas loop [ edit ]
The gas loop consists of a circuit in the lower bulkhead through which oxygen is circulated by a small pump. The pump delivers pure oxygen to the lung where some of it passes into the liquid loop, while the remainder becomes mixed with the CO 2 coming from the liquid loop. From the lung, the oxygen-CO 2 mixture is passed through a bed of Baralyme which absorbs the CO 2. Pure oxygen is returned from the Baralyme to the pump and recirculated. The oxygen supply is replenished by gas from the small oxygen tank.
Augmented by the thermal environment of the spacecraft, the water evaporator and 8 Watt electric heater will maintain water temperature at 60±5 °F (15.5±3 °C). The water supply for the evaporator is contained in a rubber bladder supported by a ring in the canister immediately above the lower dome. When water temperature exceeds the nominal 60 °F, a ground command actuates a timing circuit operating a valve. As a result of the ambient pressure inside the canister, water is forced from the bladder through the valve and into the evaporator. Internal heat loads are transferred through a heat exchanger to the evaporator and are dissipated in evaporating the water.
See also [ edit ]A report from WJLA on the arrest of Todd Dwight Wheeler in January 2014.
A joint bulletin released in March by the Department of Homeland Security, FBI and National Counterterrorism Center instructs firefighters and paramedics to use emergency medical treatment as an opportunity to identify violent extremists. The March 2014 bulletin obtained by Public Intelligence titled “Emergency Medical Treatment Presents Opportunity for Discovery of Violent Extremist Activities” is part of the Fire Line series distributed to firefighters, emergency medical service personnel and other first responders around the country.
The bulletin states that efforts to “gain expertise with explosive, incendiary, and chemical/biological devices may lead to injuries and emergency treatment, which may provide potential indicators of violent extremist activities to responding emergency medical service (EMS) personnel.” An initial “size-up” of the scene and “patient assessment” provide first responders with the ability to “evaluate whether an injury is a genuine accident or related to violent extremist activity.” For example, “hastily or expediently treated injuries” observed by first responders “may be an indicator of illicit activity as actors injured in nefarious activity are often not inclined to seek legitimate medical attention, or use efforts that are designed to mislead or obscure the genuine nature of the injury.” Other indicators include “shock or infection accompanying healing wounds, or corrective treatment for healed wounds” often without plausable explanation “may be signs of suspicious activity.”
To support its claims, the bulletin cites the January 2014 arrest of a Maryland man named Todd Dwight Wheeler Jr. for making and possessing explosive materials. According to the Baltimore Sun, Wheeler was arrested after one of his relatives called 911 and reported that he may be suicidal. Paramedics reportedly found Wheeler “suffering from injuries caused by ‘chemical or mechanical reactions'” including “burns to one of his limbs that paramedics determined could have come from a blast.” After speaking with Wheeler, first responders “became suspicious of his story, suspicious of his injuries and suspicious of his distinct chemical odor.” Police later searched the home with help from Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agents finding several “completed bombs”, “more than 100 pounds of chemicals, including acids, fuels, oxidizers and explosives precursors”, “components of destructive devices, including igniters and detonators”, “an automatic Ruger Mini-14 rifle, other guns and knives” as well as “manuals and books detailing explosive manufacturing and booby traps, with titles like The Poor Man’s James Bond, Booby Traps, Deadly Brew and Highly Explosive Pyrotechnic Compositions.” Under a plea agreement entered in May, Wheeler pled guilty to one count of “being a prohibited person in possession of firearms.” He faces up to ten years in prison.
Share this:UPDATE: We have a winner! https://articles.pokebattler.com/2017/12/06/ninetales-solo-contest-winner/
Attention trainers, the gauntlet has been thrown down!
Oddly enough, the relatively useless Pokemon known as Ninetales is THE hardest Tier 3 raid boss to solo. But we believe it IS possible. The first trainer to send us a video of themselves beating a Ninetales SOLO (must be solo) will win one year, or 12 months, of a free Pokebox membership at the $20 a month level. That’s right, for a whole year you could win:
Pokebox size of 1000
Gold level Monte Carlo simulation quality for your Pokebox. These are the results of 200 simulations averaged together.These results are the best currently available on Pokebattler and are very accurate.
Access to beta site where new releases are tested
Advertisement free experience. All ads are completely removed, improving performance on mobile devices in particular.
Is It Doable?
Yes! According to the world’s most accurate Pokemon Go Raid simulator at Pokebattler, if you’ve got some high level, high IV Golems, it is! (Or 6 Mewtwos, but we’re pretty sure that’s impossible right now).
Rules:
You must send us your ORIGINAL video file as an MP4, unedited. It must show the full Ninetales battle from beginning to end in a high-quality, legible format. You must be the exclusive owner of this video and it must be you playing in the battle as the trainer. *UPDATE: For you Youtube influencer/stars,,we will host the videos EXCLUSIVELY on Pokebattler’s Youtube and article site for 48 hours. Meaning the timer starts after we’ve posted it on our channels. After that you may post it on your own channels but must mention the Pokebattler.com contest in the video via super and audio, and in the comments.
You can use free video capture software like DU Recorder for Android. Apparently, you can video capture on iPhone now with iOS 11 but I don’t know how it works. Send video files to [email protected] It’s best to share via Dropbox or Google Drive.
We need the titles, IVs, movesets, and levels of all the Pokemon in the battle to be used for our analysis.
Videos not done in English may be translated.
It’s up to you if you want your real name displayed or some sort of handle. You will be asked to give a quote about your experience to add to the video and/or blog. We will share up to 3 of your social links or handles with the video post as well.
If your mons feint, you may re-enter the battle with new mons.
You are not required to catch the Ninetales but you must beat him.
By entering this contest, you give Pokebattler exclusive rights to post your video on our blog, any of our social channels including YouTube, Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter, on any partner site or in advertisements we choose to run. The video will not be monetized through Youtube (aka no ads added to the video in Youtube).
If the original video has been found to be posted elsewhere before the 48 hour time limit,or it turns out you are not the sole owner of the video, your entry will become invalid.
No cheating will be tolerated.
The Pokebox membership winnings cannot be redeemed for cash value. Cash value of winnings is $0.00.It’s the season of joy, cheer, giving, and fish (no, I haven’t just added the last one) and so as a gift to the world we’ve just released the first Beta release of Payara Server 5 in time for the holidays - download here. I know, it’s exactly what you wanted.
Read this post in Japanese
School’s Out! Welcome to the Grid
For this Beta release, we’ve pulled out Shoal and GMS – replacing the clustering functionality they provided with a Domain-wide Datagrid via Hazelcast. In simple terms, you can think of it as replacing multiple smaller clusters with one giant one. To keep things simple and not require you to faff around with multicast unless you really need or want to, we’ve also implemented a “Domain Discovery” method of clustering as a default (in Payara Server anyway, multicast is still the default for Payara Micro at the moment); instances using this clustering method will automatically connect to the DAS and join the domain-wide cluster.
We haven’t completely gutted clusters though, they’re still present in Payara Server but are now more akin to a target group than a traditional cluster – you create, configure, start, stop, target, and use them in the same way, they’re just no longer in their own little cluster.
I’m sure we’ll have a blog or similar article explaining the changes in greater detail in the future, but for now I hope that you’ll trust us in believing that this is a good thing!
Tolerance is a Virtue
This beta release marks our first public release of a build containing MicroProfile Fault Tolerance 1.0. For those who aren’t aware and didn’t get it from the name, this spec introduces some annotations that you can use to more easily implement actions that should be taken if a method fails.
We’re catching up with MicroProfile 1.2 (just in time for 1.3 to be released! Gah!), so expect to see more MicroProfile specs being implemented SoonTM.
Ssh! Be Very, Very Quiet!
Rounding out this Beta release is support for Kubernetes Secret Volumes. These can be used as a config source; every file in the directory will be treated as a property, with its value as the contents of the respective file.
Wrapping Up
This Beta release brings with it other enhancements and fixes, such as HTTP2, Single Sign On via Hazelcast, faster JSF initialisation, a couple of usability improvements to Payara Micro, as well as preparing Payara Micro for a future Arquillian container (connector). We’ll cover it all in the release notes, don’t worry!
We’re also aware that not everything is working quite right on Windows at the moment – thank you for your feedback, we’ll get it all fixed for the final release.
As we’ve mentioned before, this latest release is still a pre-release, and so we wouldn’t recommend that you use it in production. We would however like you to try it out and give us some feedback!
Download Payara Server 5 Beta 1
Happy Holidays!by
Update, with the Patriots’ win yesterday the indicator says the markets should have a down year in 2019. As I mention below, the indicator has been wrong for three years running, as investors let’s hope for a fourth year.
It’s Super Bowl time and once again my beloved Packers are not playing for the for the eighth consecutive year. They had a horrible season and lost or tied a number of games they could have (and should have) won. The good news is that I was able to attend three regular season games at football’s holy shrine, Lambeau Field and a fourth at the Los Angeles Coliseum.
Every year the Super Bowl Indicator is resurrected as a forecasting tool for the stock market.
The indicator says that a win by a team from the old pre-merger NFL is bullish for the stock market, while a win by a team from the old AFL is a bad sign for the markets. Looking at this year’s game, New England is an original AFL team while Los Angeles is an original NFL team.
How has the Super Bowl Indicator done?
In 2018 this indicator failed to predict the direction of the stock market for the third year in row. Denver won the 2016 game and the market had an up year. The Patriots won the 2017 game and it was a stellar year for the markets. The Eagles won last year and 2018 was the first down year for the S&P 500 since 2008. Overall the indicator has held true for 40 of the 52 prior Super Bowls.
Quoted in a Wall Street Journal article before the 2016 game, respected Wall Street analyst Robert Stoval said, “There is no intellectual backing for this sort of thing, except that it works.”
Some notable misses for the indicator include:
St. Louis (an old NFL team that was formerly and is now again currently the L.A. Rams) won in 2000 and the market dropped.
Baltimore (an old NFL team that was formerly the original Cleveland Browns) won in 2001 and the market dropped. Perhaps the markets were confused since the Browns became an AFC team (along with the Steelers and the Colts) as part of the 1970 merger.
The New York Giants (an old NFL team) won in 2008 and the market tanked in what was the start of the recent financial crisis.
In 1970 the Kansas City Chiefs shocked the Minnesota Vikings and the Dow Jones Average ended the year up, by less than 5 percent.
Is this a valid investment strategy?
As far as your investments, I think you’ll agree that the outcome of the game should not dictate your strategy. Rather I suggest an investment strategy that incorporates some basic blocking and tackling:
A financial plan should be the basis of your strategy. Any investment strategy that does not incorporate your goals, time horizon, and risk tolerance is flawed.
Take stock of where you are. What impact has the bull market of the past ten years had on your portfolio? Perhaps it’s time to rebalance and to rethink your ongoing asset allocation.
Costs matter. Low cost index mutual funds and ETFs can be great core holdings. Solid, well-managed active funds can also contribute to a well-diversified portfolio. In all cases make sure you are in the lowest cost share classes available to you.
View all accounts as part of a total portfolio. This means IRAs, your 401(k), taxable accounts, mutual funds, individual stocks and bonds, etc. Each individual holding should serve a purpose in terms of your overall strategy.
The Super Bowl Indicator is another fun piece of Super Bowl hype. Your investment strategy should be guided by your goals, your time horizon for the money and your tolerance for risk, not the outcome of a football game.
Not sure if your investments are right for your situation? Concerned about stock market volatility? Approaching retirement and want another opinion on where you stand? Check out my Financial Review/Second Opinion for Individuals service for detailed guidance and advice about your situation.
NEW SERVICE – Financial Coaching. Check out this new service to see if it’s right for you. Financial coaching focuses on providing education and mentoring in two areas: the financial transition to retirement or small business financial coaching.
FINANCIAL WRITING. Check out my freelance financial writing services including my ghostwriting services for financial advisors.
Please contact me with any thoughts or suggestions about anything you’ve read here at The Chicago Financial Planner. Don’t miss any future posts, please subscribe via email. Check out our resources page for links to some other great sites and some outstanding products that you might find useful.
Photo credit: FlickrThe inefficiency argument
Let us take a step back and consider the following assumptions and circumstances.
The story that we need to implement is nontrivial, a lot of the following stories will be based on this implementation and we’re dealing with a lot of complexities and unknown factors here.
Now also add to the fact that the estimation process in software engineering is very often anything but precise. Rather the contrary as soon as we need to estimate features, that have never been implemented in one form or the other previously. A single developer can quickly become a bottleneck at some point or even completely lose track, getting lost in implementation details.
We also need to add the cost of reviewing as well as having to read and understand the code, in case the next story is being implemented by another developer. Add the hidden long term cost of code quality. The latter always being better, the more programmers get to read and review.
You can solve a lot of the aforementioned problems by taking the “team programming” approach. In essence, mob or team programming consists of at least three programmers, one computer, one keyboard and a projector. There is a core team, with other programmers jumping in and out of the process, depending on what else they have on the agenda, and if it makes sense for them or the team to join the session.
We, at 25th-floor, have fully adopted this approach for the last three sprints and have been very successful with it.
The benefits and advantages became very clear when we tackled the complex stories.
Very little distractions and roadblocks, as there was always someone on the team who knew how to solve a pending problem. No need for reviews, as the team had written the code, no after discussions about implementation details and code style as everyone had been involved from start to finish.Now that you’ve figured out which headset you are going to get, you’re going to have to interface with some software. As you venture into making things for the world of VR, there are two main pieces that you’ll have to work with most likely, and those are real-time engines and modeling software.
You start with modeling software to create the things you want, and then move those things into a real-time engine to turn it into something you can experience in VR. These are going to be your tools if you’re creating purely digital environments, but also if you’re making physical items to interface with your digital experiences. I’ll talk more about creating the physical side of things in an upcoming post. For now, lets look at the software tools available.
Not just games
Before we jump into the software that is available, I’d like to mention that you’ll be hearing and seeing a lot about games and game design below. This is because, up until recently, most of the use cases for real-time engines were for games. While there were other uses before, virtual reality is really blowing this whole concept open and expanding on what real-time engines are used for. The first commercial units of the Oculus Rift haven’t shipped yet and we’re already seeing things like virtual tourism, medical training, psycho therapy, meditation, education, architectural visualization, and more.
Just keep that in mind as you move forward.
Real-time engines
Unreal Engine – Cost: Free
The Unreal Engine is very well known in the games industry. This package is incredibly versatile, allowing for creation of games from 2d hand drawn looking platformers up to cinematic almost movie like experiences. They’ve charged into virtual reality head-on and support the latest technologies natively. There is a built in marketplace where you can find and purchase assets to include in your projects and a very large community sharing tutorials and inspiration.
Most impressively, the Unreal Engine is absolutely free. You can download it now and get started creating virtual reality experiences with zero cost.
Unity 3D – Cost: Free
Over the last several years, Unity has grown from a plucky little startup to go toe to toe with the likes of the Unreal Engine. The upcoming release of the first major commercially available VR headsets has only helped level the playing field as Unity has been aggressively courting this community. You can download Unity and begin building VR environments immediately with no prior experience.
Cryengine – cost: Pay what you want
The Cryengine has long been known for its rich visual abilities, the flagship games from this engine often being used as benchmarks to determine a computer’s strength. Up till very recently, there were costs associated with this engine that kept it from the hands of many small developers. Now, it is a pay-what-you-want model which means you could download it for free just to try it out and see if you like it.
Lumberyard – cost: Free
Lumberyard was recently unveiled by Amazon. This is a recent addition to the market, and the community is just beginning to grow. On the technical side, this is a previous version of the crytech engine, but with Amazon backing it, some tweaks have been made.
Modeling Software
All of the items that are in your virtual worlds have to be created. To build these things, you model them in 3d modeling software. There are many, many, softwares available, so I’ve picked a few that are free, in order to allow you to try out the different types and see what you think.
Note that I’ve selected demo videos that show sculpting complex faces. 3D modeling software is typically very robust, but I wanted to select something that looked drastically different than CAD to help cement the difference. I’ll get more into the differences in a bit.
Blender – Cost: Free
Blender is an open source, cross platform modeling animation and rendering tool. It has grown to be incredibly robust and powerful, rivaling the industry names like Maya, Softimage, and 3DS max. The feature set included with the absolutely free product is enough to take you through the entire production pipeline of game creation. It even has its own built-in game engine, though VR support is still not as strong as you’ll see in the real-time engines above.
There is a massive community behind this package and you can find tons of tutorials all over the web.
Sculptris – Cost: Free
On the other end of the spectrum is Sculptris. This free software is very limited in functionality, but does its singular task quite well. If you find yourself encumbered by the interface of a typical modeling software, give this a try. The interface mimics sculpting a piece of clay, and it feels very natural.
Those are just two examples on opposite ends of the feature spectrum. Here are a few more pieces of software to try out.
Sketchup Make
Wings 3d
Equinox 3d
Daz studio
3D crafter
There are many more out there to find if you search around enough. These should be enough to get you started.
What about CAD software?
If you’ve been doing 3d printing or CNC milling, you’ve been messing with CAD already. Programs like Autodesk’s Fusion 360, Designspark Mechancial, TinkerCAD, and FreeCAD are intended for making accurate 3 dimensional constructions. These are usually not ideal for modeling assets for real-time engines as their focus is on physical accuracy and they don’t have many tools for optimizing for a real-time environment.
To put it simply, if you were to design something in CAD software, it would be overly complex and run poorly in a game engine.
This doesn’t mean you can’t use these tools at all. It just means that when you’re getting started, you probably should stick to non CAD systems. After you’ve figured out the tool sets you’ll find that workflows for optimization do exist for CAD software and you can harness that.
Image manipulation for textures and more
Of course modelling isn’t the only tool you’ll need. You’re also going to have to do some basic image manipulation. We can’t all afford photoshop, so check out these free pieces of software that can easily do the job.
Gimp – cost: Free
Gimp, or GNU Image Manipulation Program is a very powerful tool for image manipulation. Users jumping directly from photoshop may get frustrated with workflow and interface differences, but make no mistake, this package can get the job done. If you are doing backgrounds, UI elements, textures, or anything else, GIMP can handle it. It is cross platform too, which is nice.
Paint.net – cost:Free
Paint.net may not be as extensively powerful as GIMP, but for some people the interface is easier to understand. Being free, it can’t hurt to give it a try!
You’ll need sound
For those just getting started, many canned effects will likely keep you busy. However, if you’re wanting to |
; both combined is something I don’t even want to think about.
13. Chattery Teeth
A pair of seemingly-broken novelty teeth in the possession of a salesman slowly tear a hitchhiker to shreds when he tries to rob and kill the salesman after the latter offers him a ride. That’s way worse than a whoopee cushion.
12. Carrie
In King’s first novel, Carrie White, a telekinetic teenager with an overbearing, overly-religious mother, massacres a prom full of people after being elected queen as a joke and covered in pig’s blood. She seals the exits of the gymnasium with her mind and turns on the sprinklers, which wets the hired band’s equipment, electrocuting some and starting a fire that incinerates many more in an event that will come to be known as the Black Prom. This, one of the most famous King death scenes, proves he knew how to freak us out from the beginning.
11. The Dark Half
After writer Thad Beaumont’s evil, pulpy alter-ego George Stark takes on a life of his own and begins murdering people, only one of them can survive. After a final confrontation, Thad eventually triumphs, a feat punctuated by a flock of sparrows ripping George’s skin from his bones, and signaling the symbolic death of King’s real life alter-ego Richard Bachman. This kill gets bonus points for killing a fictional character outside of the book.
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10. The Waste Lands
In the third Dark Tower Book, the city of Lud (an alternate-dimension version of New York) is serviced by sentient AI monorails Blaine and Patricia. After years of service, Blaine goes insane, drives Patricia to suicide, then kills itself after losing a riddle contest to gunslinger Roland Deschain and his friends. And you thought the A train was bad.
9. The Raft
On a trip out to a Pennsylvania lake, four college students named Rachel, Deke, LaVerne, and Randy are terrorized by an oil-slick like creature that dissolves their flesh and bones when they touch it—in LaVerne’s case, while she’s having sex with Randy. As it happens, Randy survives in the book but gets melted in the version filmed for Creepshow 2. Lots of slow deaths are agonizing, but being melted alive is a contender for the worst.
8. The Mist (book and film)
When a mist—concealing a legion of gruesome Lovecraftian monsters—descends upon Bridgton, Maine, many of the residents are trapped in the small town’s supermarket. While seeking an escape, assistant manager Ollie Weeks is TORN IN HALF by a giant crab claw (more mantis-like in the film). This one isn’t terribly complicated, but it’s hard to beat bisection.
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7. It
In a town terrorized by the titular monster, no victim has a more off-the-wall death than Bully Patrick Hockstetter. The monster, which delights in taking on the form of its victims’ worst fears before killing them, hides in a broken refrigerator and attacks the boy as a swarm of flying leeches, sucking him dry before moving onto its next victim. I love this death because it’s not even crucial to the plot. Stephen King just wanted a badass sequence of a guy being drained by leeches in a fridge.
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6. The Cat From Hell
Despite the terrible name for this story from King’s Just After Sunset collection, this death will make your skin crawl. An unnamed hitman working for a company that tortured thousands of cats is killed by his unusual target (a demonic cat, believed to be connected to three murders) when the creature claws its way into (and out of) his body. Just think about a cat crawling around inside of you, and tell me you won’t look twice the next time one wants to sit on your lap.
5. Cell
In this strange, technophobic tale, every cellphone in the world turns its users into zombies. The survivors (including prep school teacher Charles Ardai) all share dreams of a telekinetic named the Raggedy Man. When the man turns out to be real, he makes Ardai commit suicide in one of the most painful ways imaginable, telepathically forcing him to shove a pen in his eye. The Raggedy Man could have chosen any way to kill Ardai, but he deliberately chooses one of the most painful things I can possibly imagine.
4. Maximum Overdrive
Stephen King not only wrote this story, but adapted it for the screen and directed it himself. Originally called Trucks, the (awful) expanded movie version contains the deaths of an unnamed Little League coach and his team, who are killed in potentially the greatest tag-team of all time between a vending machine that fires soda cans at the coach’s balls, scaring the kids into a steamroller that finishes the job. This death gets a lot of credit for humor, but this tandem kill is still horribly visceral as well.
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3. Dreamcatcher
The army quarantines an alien microvirus that grows worm-like aliens in humans, eventually expelling themselves through the anus and killing the host (giving them their name “shit-weasels”). Unfortunately, four friends are caught in the quarantine. Even worse, one friend—Beaver—gets the full shit weasel treatment. While there are other King deaths that are more brutal, there are few more ridiculous and humiliating than death by ass-burster.
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2. Under the Dome
This second entry isn’t one death, so much as an event. In Under the Dome, bored alien teens erect a dome around a small town. This day comes to be known as Dome Day to commemorate a cavalcade of creatively awful deaths. Casualties of Dome Day include Police Chief Howard Perkins, whose pacemaker explodes when he touches the dome; Wanda Debec, who crashes into the dome in a car twice, the first time in her own vehicle and then again in a car that tries to take her to a hospital; Myra Evans who bleeds out after her arm is severed by the dome; Nora Robichaud and Robert Roux, who break their necks after being flung from vehicles; and Claudette Sanders, who flies a plane into the dome that explodes on impact, killing her and flight instructor Chuck Thompson. This one might be cheating a little bit, but damn if it isn’t an intricate and creative way to murder almost a dozen characters.
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1. The Mangler
Laundry worker Adelle Frawley is eviscerated by an industrial laundry press that has been possessed by a powerful demon. This kill is the only one on the list that physically disturbed me when I first encountered it. I can’t possibly do it justice, so I’ll post a little bit of the story, from his Night Shift collection, below.
And Mrs Frawley, somehow, had been caught and dragged in. The steel, asbestos-jacketed pressing cylinders had been as red as barn paint, and the rising steam from the machine had carried the sickening stench of hot blood... But not even that was the worst... ‘It tried to fold everything,’U.S. stocks ended sharply higher Thursday, rallying on economic data, better-than-expected earnings and dovish comments from European Central Bank President Mario Draghi.
Draghi indicated the central bank could move next month to expand stimulus measures in the face of sluggish global growth that is exacerbating worries about persistently low inflation in the eurozone. Those remarks were enough to help the Dow Jones Industrial Average register its biggest point and percentage gain since Sept. 8.
After Draghi said the door is open to more quantitative easing, the euro EURUSD, +0.0263% moved below $1.12, consequently lifting the U.S. dollar.
Randy Frederick, managing director of trading and derivatives at Schwab Center for Financial Research, said the market’s rally might have been fueled by the idea that the Federal Reserve will be forced to keep rates lower for longer as central bankers around the world adopt a more dovish stance.
“If they are going to implement additional easing in Europe that puts that much more pressure on the Fed to not hike in December,” Frederick said.
Relatively upbeat earnings added to the sanguine market atmosphere created by McDonald’s Corp. MCD, +0.33% whose third-quarter results topped analysts’ forecasts.
Colin Cieszynski, senior market analyst at CMC Markets, said he believed stronger-than-expected earnings are helping sentiment. “On balance, earnings were a little bit better than expected,” he said.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -0.13% advanced 320.55 points, or 1.9%, to 17,489.16. McDonald’s contributed about 54 points to the gains in the blue-chips gauge.
The S&P 500 index SPX, -0.08% jumped 33.57 points, or 1.7%, to 2,052.51, with only health-care stocks falling, down 0.5%. The Nasdaq Composite Index jumped 79.93 points, or 1.7%, to 4,920.05.
Brad McMillan, chief investment officer at Commonwealth Financial Network, said fears about waning growth in China—the world’s second largest economy—are subsiding, underpinning buying appetite.
“I think that what you’re seeing is a realization that the world isn’t going to end after all,” said McMillan. Late-summer fears resulted in U.S. stock indexes experiencing their worst rout in years.
A rise in the dollar and a rally in stocks isn’t typical, especially since a stronger greenback has proved a headwind to company revenues. But the idea of more dovish actions by the Fed, which will convene for its two-day policy meeting next week, may explain the rally, Schwab’s Frederick said. Signs that the U.S. central bank may hold off on lifting rates for the first time in nearly a decade has bolstered appetite for risky assets like stocks in an ultralow interest-rate environment.
Cieszynski said he believed that markets were being coaxed higher on the expectation that central bankers like Draghi would make efforts to stem worries about slowing global growth.
“If Europe comes out with more stimulus that improves the earnings prospects for U.S. companies that do business in Europe as well,” he said.
Read ECB Live blog: Pressure mounts on Mario Draghi to provide more stimulus
Investors also were heartened by strong economic data, including an employment report that showed the four-week average of initial jobless claims fell to its lowest level in four decades, suggesting that the jobs market remains solid amid questions about global growth.
Thursday’s march higher comes on the heels of a downbeat session on Wednesday when a short seller’s allegations about improprieties at Valeant Pharmaceuticals International Inc. US:VRX weighed on the health-care sector and pressured the broader market. Health-care was still a laggard in Thursday’s trade with Valeant’s shares trading 7.4% lower, after a 19% tumble Wednesday.
Shares of Valeant traded off their lows of the session after the company said it would host an investor conference on Monday to explain its accounting practices and its relationship with specialty drug companies, which has come into question.
Other data: U.S. home prices rose to a seasonally adjusted 0.6% in July, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
The National Association of Realtors also reported a 4.7% rise in existing-home sales to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.55 million, marking the second-highest monthly level since just before the housing market collapsed in 2007.
Thursday’s earnings: Corporate news was also among Thursday’s highlights, with a long list of companies reporting earnings.
Doughnut chain Dunkin’ Brands Group Inc. DNKN, -0.26% said third-quarter adjusted earnings rose to 52 cents a share, slightly beating estimates, but its shares ended down 3.6%.
Shares of Eli Lilly & Co. LLY, +0.63% finished little changed Thursday after the drug maker raised its 2015 earnings forecast after third-quarter profit beat estimates.
Dow Chemical US:DOW ended 5.1% higher after announcing a dividend hike and a share buyback.
Sports-clothing maker Under Armour Inc. UA, -1.32% finished 5.4% lower after raising its 2015 revenue forecast.
Southwest Airlines Co. LUV, -0.50% closed 7.4% higher after posting an 83% rise in third-quarter profit.
Post-it Notes maker 3M Co. MMM, -0.57% said it was cutting some 1,500 jobs as a part of a broad restructuring, while machinery company Caterpillar CAT, -2.43% slashed its outlook after its profit tumbled 64%.
Movers & shakers: Shares of eBay Inc. EBAY, +0.11% jumped nearly 14% to lead S&P 500 gainers after the online marketplace late Wednesday reported earnings ahead of expectations.
Texas Instruments Inc. TXN, -0.85% gained 11.9% after the electronics company late Wednesday reported stronger-than-expected profit and revenue for its third quarter.
Michael Kors Holdings Ltd. US:KORS fell 0.4% before the bell after news that billionaire investor David Einhorn’s Greenlight Capital hedge fund has taken new long positions in the retailer.
GNC Holdings Inc. GNC, +6.00% saw its shares pummeled after the Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenbaum said she was suing the company, alleging that dietary supplements it sold included ingredients banned in the U.S. GNC refuted the claims in a statement.
Other markets: Asian markets closed mixed, but with the Shanghai Composite Index SHCOMP, -0.67% jumping 1.5%.
Crude oil CLZ5, -0.30% ended higher Thursday, while gold ended lower as stocks and the dollar rallied. The ICE dollar index DXY, -0.36% jumped 1.4% to 96.2930 on Draghi’s dovish comments.
Providing critical information for the U.S. trading day. Subscribe to MarketWatch's free Need to Know newsletter. Sign up here.The reason I got into technology was because I wanted some medical ebooks and references on my Nokia Symbian smartphone back when I was still studying for my PharmD degree in 2006. I tend to forget that sometimes and it's easy for me to get lost in the mobile world and its platform wars, app updates, nitty gritty OS changes, and long lists of flagship specifications. But I'm often reminded of why I loved this whole field in the first place thanks to new and fascinating uses of mobile technology in medicine. And thankfully, this is happening more and more frequently as time passes. We're now seeing more Bluetooth-connected medical equipment and more health-aimed apps and gadgets than ever before.
Take this mobile handheld ultrasound that Clarius Mobile Health is introducing. It's small and portable and it connects wirelessly with Android and iOS to transfer the scanned results back to the phone's screen where they can be viewed, manipulated, and saved. It's certainly not the first mobile-connected ultrasound I've come across: the MobiUS SP1 claims that title, but it uses a Toshiba TG01 running Windows Mobile 6.5!
The press release and Clarius' site are very thin on details, but they do claim that the connection is a "secure point-to-point wireless network" (likely an ad-hoc WiFi hotspot), that the gain and frequency settings are automated for easy use, and that the ultrasound images are high-resolution and "as good as the best traditional point-of-care systems." Here's an introductory video from the company (beware, the iPhone love is high in this one).
That isn't much, but it's enough to keep everyone interested, from private practice doctors to hospital managers with hundreds of rooms to cover, emergency medical services, healthcare providers in rural areas, and war-zone surgeons and doctors. Ultrasounds can make an incredible difference and save lives in all of these settings and with all of these practitioners.
Neither pricing nor availability has been disclosed, though Clarius did say the following:
Compact ultrasound systems for use at the bedside have become the norm in most hospitals and many private clinics. But with costs ranging from $25,000 to $70,000 for a high quality system, price has been a barrier for more widespread adoption. Pending regulatory clearance from the FDA, CE and Health Canada, Clarius Mobile Health will offer several mobile scanners for the price of a single traditional compact system.
The company is showing the scanner off at the American Institute of Ultrasound in Medicine (AIUM) conference in NYC.On December 20, Park Geun Hyung, Jin Goo, Kim Sung Kyun, Go Jun Hee, and Apink’s Jung Eun Ji attended a press conference for JTBC drama “Untouchable.”
At the event, Jung Eun Ji was asked about the recent passing of SHINee’s Jonghyun.
She replied, “I was hoping it was a false report. I was not close friends with Jonghyun sunbaenim, but tears were falling as I read the article.”
She continued, “What is scarier is that my colleagues and friends identify a lot with his final letter that was revealed yesterday. Seeing my colleagues who say they identify with the feeling of depression and that emotion gnawing away at them, I was scared as I thought, ‘What if?'”
“I may not be able to express the emotions as much as his family or members, but I think many of my colleagues will feel the same way as me. I hope that the idol and entertainment industry will grow to encourage physical and mental health so that something like this doesn’t happen again,” Jung Eun Ji concluded.
Park Geun Hyung also expressed his sadness as he shared, “I also had such thoughts when I was young. I had a similar experience.” He added, “I hope something like this doesn’t happen again and that it will become an era where we can express freely and be free individuals while taking time for ourselves.”
Source (1) (2)
If you would like to talk to someone, please don’t hesitate to seek help and reach out. Click here for a list of international hotlines that you can call, and if you can’t find your country listed, please call your local emergency number.Set 1
Bertha, Me And My Uncle, Tennessee Jed, Jack Straw, Loser, Playing In The Band, Sugaree, Beat It On Down The Line, Black Peter, Mexicali Blues, Cold Rain And Snow, Me And Bobby McGee, Comes A Time, One More Saturday Night
Set 2
Ramble On Rose, Cumberland Blues, That's It For The Other One > Deal, Sugar Magnolia, Casey Jones > Johnny B. Goode
Other artist(s): NRPS
Notes:
-- Disc change is seamless
-- Thanks to David Gans for the Dat
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comment Reviews
Reviewer: mcgrupp216 - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - March 16, 2018
Subject: Night 2, Fa71 Chi See my review posted on 10/21/71 of this excellent two-night fall '71 Chicago stand. No question, this is five-star, cowboy-psychedelic dead. - March 16, 2018Night 2, Fa71 Chi
Reviewer: deadheadnedwhite - favorite favorite favorite favorite - October 23, 2017
Subject: THIS Other One as @amishman0002 said.
this unbroken tiftoo is breathtaking.
woulda said 4 stars, but the 5 for that makes the show. so 4.7.
always grateful to be discovering new sounds here!
thanks, @archive - October 23, 2017THIS Other One
Reviewer: c-freedom - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - October 22, 2017
Subject: Had to Move Good insights into Keith's GD contribution.
unique sound mix
vocals= A+
Sing Phil Sing! - October 22, 2017Had to Move
Reviewer: JamsOnly - favorite favorite favorite favorite - October 24, 2016
Subject: Nice Spin Highlights: Black Peter, Comes A Time, The Other One - October 24, 2016Nice Spin
Reviewer: Mind Wondrin - favorite favorite favorite - July 22, 2016
Subject: Recent Circ
The previous night circulated to some extent as an FM simulcast but this night was always a mystery until it showed up here and on Dave's #3 (the 2nd set had shown up a little before). The previous night (also on DaP3, partly) is a better show but this show was ostensibly picked to put it in circ, and it does have a "newly discovered" Other One. The 2nd set is under an hour (1st sets were longer when Keith first joined). The official release removes long stretches in between. For Keith's benefit, the setlist was static for this tour.
First Set. Bertha isn't tight but the solo is amazing. Keith would find more in the songs later in the year. The rest is average '71 until Beat it On Down the Line-17 (one more than the night before) and Black Peter. Phil is great throughout this show but really good here and so is Bobby. Me and Bobby McGee was played almost every night and they had it down, but this still may be one of 71's best versions.
Second Set. A blind man takes your arm on this Comes a Time. Like most of these, it was better the night before, but the reputation of this show lies on The Other One. Phil is again terrific and there is certainly some great stuff all the way through. There's a crazy tranny into Keith's first-ever Deal. Johnny B. Goode is great (though even this is surpassed by the night before).
1st Set : C
2nd Set : C+
Overall = 3 Stars
Highlights:
Me & Bobby McGee - one of 71's best versions
The Other One - a monster of a TOO with a Cryptical too; must-hear
Johnny B. Goode - favorite Berry at the time
SOURCES: Gans apparently gave Miller this 112821 source while Dave's 3 was in the pipeline.
Dylan M - 8/6 was released part on DP35 & part on RT 1-3, so very unlikely to be a Dave's. - July 22, 2016Recent Circ
Reviewer: JasW - favorite favorite favorite favorite - January 28, 2013
Subject: Good show but Jerry too low I wouldn't call it a fatal flaw because it isn't like his guitar is inaudible, but this otherwise fine '71 show suffers from Jerry's lack of prominence in the mix. Which is a shame because he's having a truly "on" night. Hence the ding of one star. - January 28, 2013Good show but Jerry too low
Reviewer: Dylan M - - June 28, 2012
Subject: Dave's Picks Volume 3 Interesting choice...
Definitely a good show, no doubt. Masterfully executed renditions of most of that new October 71' material and the newly established Grateful Dead song repertoire that had been building most progressively since May 1970.
I think the Detroit Theater show two days later is a better performance with more jams. However there are large nasty cuts in that show from existing seeds on the archive, so I'd imagine it's not complete enough to release. I could have also seen the Hollywood Palladium August 6th show as a better choice. Maybe a little obvious but still unreleased and displaying that primal Grateful Dead circa 71' at their best.
At any rate its obvious that this show is a standout for all the boys and perhaps most importantly Freshman Keith at the piano, still learning the tricks but aggressively (and mostly successfully) playing to impress. The lacking of a long multiple song jam-segment is forgivable considering the power of the standout "That's It for the Other One" suite, displaying Keith's true inherent ability to play this sort of music, at only his third performance with the Dead.
Anyways, decide for yourself, and grab it before they pull it. This board could be cleaned up with an HDCD Multi-track remastering no doubt, as some tape his is apparent especially during the first set.
Either way, thanks for picking this one for us Dave. Next time, lets go for a baller 80's show. haha. - June 28, 2012Dave's Picks Volume 3
Reviewer: rschwz28 - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - April 14, 2012
Subject: no organ on PITB Would prefer if Keith would play piano on Playing In The Band. Would also prefer, of course, if Pigpen were present. Still, very near to their peak and one of my favorite GD eras.
And a big thanks to Charlie for keeping The Other One in one piece! - April 14, 2012no organ on PITB
Reviewer: njpg - favorite favorite favorite - September 24, 2011
Subject: Great Other One, and you can really hear some of the Garcia-Godchaux dynamics forming. All in all, a good '71 show. - September 24, 2011Great Other One,
Reviewer: mddichard07 - favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite - June 18, 2011
Subject: great night! the nights before this show have much more reviews and downloads but i feel 10/22 is easily on par with 10/19. Great "tennessee jed" and a strong second set with one of the longest "that's it for the other one" in 1971 - June 18, 2011great night!The US sanctions drive and the danger of war
1 August 2017
Moscow’s expulsion of 750 American diplomats and contractors after the US Congress passed a bill imposing economic sanctions on Russia, Iran and North Korea marks a historical watershed. The neo-colonial wars launched by the United States and its imperialist allies in the last quarter century are producing a generalized breakdown of international trade and diplomatic relations, posing the danger of war between the major nuclear-armed powers.
The overwhelming passage of the Russian sanctions bill, with which the US Congress committed Trump to blocking Russian trade with Europe, staggered the Kremlin. Hoping for improved relations under Trump, Russia did not retaliate for Obama’s expulsion of Russian diplomats last year, after Washington issued unfounded declarations that Russia “hacked” the US elections. In the half year since Trump's inauguration, however, the faction of the US ruling class demanding a confrontation with Russia has emerged as dominant in the media and state apparatus.
The bill, passed over protests from Germany and France, will also escalate tensions between Washington and its supposed NATO allies in Europe. Yesterday, US officials confirmed that the Pentagon is reviving plans, abandoned in 2015, to arm the far-right Ukrainian regime that emerged from the fascist-led coup in 2014. The aid would include anti-tank missiles and other lethal weaponry.
As a result, Moscow is planning for an extended armed stand-off with Washington, placing the military situation in Europe on a hair trigger. “We waited quite a long time for something to maybe change,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a televised address this weekend. “But all things considered, if it changes, it won’t be anytime soon.”
As it threatens Russia, Washington is simultaneously escalating its campaign against China. After Friday’s missile test by North Korea, which potentially put US cities including Los Angeles, Denver and Chicago in range of North Korean nuclear weapons, US officials confirmed that they are considering economic sanctions on China. “I am very disappointed in China. Our foolish past leaders have allowed them to make hundreds of billions of dollars a year in trade, yet they do NOTHING for us with North Korea,” Trump wrote in two Twitter posts. “We will no longer allow this to continue.”
After last week’s statement in Australia by US Admiral Scott Swift that he would follow orders from Trump to launch nuclear strikes on China, the Wall Street Journal posted a comment titled “The Regime Change Solution in North Korea,” advocating a pro-US military coup in Pyongyang.
There is a political logic to this relentless intensification of commercial, diplomatic and military tensions between the major powers. It cannot continue very long without exploding into war.
The media is attempting to downplay the danger in the face of growing popular concern. “Sanctions are often controversial,” the New York Times wrote of the Russia sanctions on July 27. “But they are a nonviolent tool—and in this case a timely and appropriate one—for making clear when another country’s behavior has crossed a line and for applying pressure that could make its leaders reconsider course.”
Who does the Times think it is kidding? In the last quarter century since the Stalinist bureaucracy dissolved the Soviet Union, sanctions were directed at countries—often allied to Russia or China—like Iraq, Yugoslavia, Iran and North Korea, each of which Washington and the NATO alliance targeted for war or regime-change. Today, however, sanctions are being directly aimed at major, nuclear-armed powers central to the world capitalist economy.
The last time Washington sought to arm the far-right Kiev regime, in 2015, Berlin and Paris cut across the US initiative and negotiated a peace deal between Moscow and Kiev. Before the talks, then-French President François Hollande warned of the danger of “total war,” that is, nuclear war, between NATO and Russia. As Washington prepares a new escalation, all-out war is doubtless again being actively discussed in chancelleries, foreign offices and military headquarters worldwide, behind the backs of the world’s people.
The election of Trump was not the cause, but a symptom of a broad collapse of the imperialist system that threatens the world with catastrophe. The US sanctions bill against Russia has overwhelming bipartisan support, led by the Democratic Party. Great-power rivalries, including between the United States and its European imperialist allies, are rooted in objective conflicts lodged in the structure of world capitalism that twice in the previous century erupted into world war.
As the major powers fight over strategic positions and trillions of dollars in trade, it is ever clearer that the contradictions of capitalism identified by the great Marxists of the 20th century as the causes of war and social revolution—the contradiction between global economy and the nation-state system, and between socialized production and private appropriation of profit—are still operative today.
The key political question is the formation of a mass, anti-war and socialist movement of the international working class. A situation in which workers allow themselves to be swept behind the contending capitalist factions can lead only to disaster. While US imperialism’s attempts to assert its rapidly-collapsing global hegemony must immediately raise the threat of war, its European imperialist rivals and the reactionary post-Soviet capitalist oligarchies in Russia and China are no less bankrupt.
Washington’s policy against Russia and China will doubtless accelerate ongoing moves by the European powers, led by Germany, to pour tens of billions of euros into their military forces and set up military machines “independent from,” that is, potentially hostile to, Washington. This imperialist policy, carried out in the profit interests of the European banks and corporations and financed by attacks on European workers, goes hand-in-hand with the rise of nationalistic and far-right political forces across the continent.
As for the Russian and Chinese oligarchies, they oscillate between attempts to work out a deal with the imperialist powers and moves to confront them militarily. This was graphically revealed by Chinese President Xi Jinping’s appearance on Sunday at a massive military parade at Zhurihe. “The world is not all at peace, and peace must be safeguarded,” Xi said, telling Chinese troops: “Always obey and follow the party. Go and fight wherever the party points.”
Should the Chinese Stalinist regime, or the Kremlin, opt for a military confrontation with Washington, this could very rapidly lead the world to a nuclear conflagration.
The most urgent task is to mobilize the sentiment against war and social inequality that is growing among the working class all over the world. As the International Committee of the Fourth International explained in its statement, “Socialism and the Fight Against War:”
* The struggle against war must be based on the working class, the great revolutionary force in society, uniting behind it all progressive elements in the population.
* The new anti-war movement must be anti-capitalist and socialist, since there can be no serious struggle against war except in the fight to end the dictatorship of finance capital and put an end to the economic system that is the fundamental cause of militarism and war.
* The new anti-war movement must therefore, of necessity, be completely and unequivocally independent of, and hostile to, all political parties and organizations of the capitalist class.
* The new anti-war movement must, above all, be international, mobilizing the vast power of the working class in a unified global struggle against imperialism.
Alex Lantier
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.By Rachel Blevins
The U.S. government’s last-minute announcement that President Trump has chosen to only release some of the remaining classified documents on the assassination of former President John F. Kennedy, has raised the question of what the government is leaving out, and why.
Two of the most notable indications can be found in the latest trove of documents that was released Thursday night. One document detailed the deposition of former CIA Director Richard Helms, who was “called for examination by Counsel for Commission on CIA Activities” on April 23, 1975. The document ends with a crucial question from commission member David Belin.
“I believe so,” Helms replied.
“Is there any information involved with the assassination of President Kennedy, which in any way shows that Lee Harvey Oswald was in some way a CIA agent…” Belin asked.
The released documents end at this point, failing to answer one of the most asked questions in the entire JFK conspiracy.
While the newly released documents indicate that the FBI had contact with suspect Lee Harvey Oswald before the shooting that killed Kennedy, this particular document does not include Helms’ answer on whether Oswald had any ties to the CIA. This raises questions about what was included in Helms’ answer that would have made the government keep it redacted for “national security” purposes.
In one document labeled “Top Secret,” the identification form claims that it includes a 33-page transcript from a hearing on July 17, 1975, with a testimony from Richard Bissell. The former CIA agent was appointed as the CIA’s Deputy Director of Plans in 1958, which reportedly gave him control over half of the CIA’s budget, and over the CIA’s Black Operations. Bissell’s chief focus was a plan to overthrow Cuba’s Fidel Castro.
The opening page of the document claims the transcript covers topics such as the attempt to overthrow Castro with the failed Bay of Pigs invasion; former CIA Director Allen Dulles and former President Eisenhower; the overthrow of Dominican Republic President Rafael Trujillo; the ZR/Rifle Project and CIA agent Arnold Silver; former CIA Director John A. McCone; Mafia boss Sam Giancana; CIA and FBI recruit Robert Maheu; and the Department of Justice.
The transcript of Bissell’s responses to questions on any of the topics listed above would be incredibly telling regarding the inner workings of the CIA and the events that led up to, and occurred after the assassination of President Kennedy. However, the document that was released consists of 3 pages, and only 1 page contains text from the transcript.
The only page of text contains questions for Bissell such as “Now, Mr. Bissell, we went over the notes in the other room, didn’t we?” to which Bissell responded, “Correct.” The topic of the page appears to be on the actions of Bill Harvey, a CIA agent who played a crucial role in Operation Mongoose, the agency’s attempt to overthrow Castro after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.With only a Christmas special left in his schedule, Peter Capaldi’s time as the enigmatic Time Lord known as the Doctor is pretty much finished. While his run may have been uneven, there’s no denying that even the worst scripts and episodes from his tenure benefited from one of the greatest acting performances ever committed to the long-running series.
Capaldi’s Doctor and his attack-eyebrows will go down in history as one of the finest actors to ever be cast in the lead role, with many an episode up for debate on a list of the ten best. What about ten specific scenes then? Ten scenes that show the talent behind this performance and the impact that it had on the mythos of the series? That’s most likely also going to spark plenty of discussion, but we think we’ve got a plenty solid list organised, from dozens upon dozens of standout performances from the grumpy granddad Doctor. Warning, I’ve saved the most spoilery for last.
No sir, all thirteen! – The Day Of The Doctor
Gallifrey on fire, the entire combined forces of the Dalek armada firing on the planet and all hope seemed to have been extinguished. Good thing the Daleks didn’t count on a baker’s dozen of Time Lords thwarting their plans at the eleventh hour, as the then current Doctor Matt Smith led all of his previous incarnations into battle in a last-ditch attempt to save his homeworld.
It’s an absolute treat from the spectacular Day Of The Doctor special to see so many Doctors briefly on the screen, but it was Capaldi who stole the show. On screen for only a few silent seconds, all viewers saw were a glimpse of eyebrows set to attack mode and a glare that could freeze hell itself over, as the once and future Doctor made his presence known.
Hello hello, rubbish robots from the dawn of time – Deep Breath
Capaldi’s first proper stint as the Doctor was somewhat slower than previous episodes featuring new actors as the Time Lord. First Breath was an episode that was a slow burn, an adventure that was boiling on the pot with Victorian London as a backdrop. A runaway T-Rex, killer robots using organic matter for spare parts and Capaldi’s angry new persona all eventually collided in a scene that established the new direction of the Doctor as he faced off against malfunction automatons that had been running a rampant murder streak in London.
Darker, ruthless and more dangerous, this version of the Doctor had one simple scene after his triumphant return that really hammered home the idea that Matt Smith’s manic pixie dream version of the TARDIS resident had regenerated into a more lethal hero who wasn’t big on second chances. Confronted by the flesh and steel of the Half-Faced Man, Doctor number 12 calmly sat at a table and offered his enemy a drink. “I’m afraid that I might have to kill you”, a threat that wasn’t empty as this Doctor only had so much mercy to spare for his enemies.
Who frowned me this face? – The Girl Who Died
Long before he was a resident in the TARDIS, Peter Capaldi had shown his face inside the Whoverse. Torchwood and Doctor Who had seen him pop up in various roles, but viewers still |
getBootstrapFile()
{
return __DIR__.'/start.php';
}
These come from vendor/laravel/framework/src/
Illuminate/Foundation/Application.php
Mcrypt
Still, this file is mostly procedural code (needed to get the application running). Let’s take a look:
if (! extension_loaded('mcrypt'))
{
echo 'Mcrypt PHP extension required.'.PHP_EOL;
exit(1);
}
This comes from vendor/laravel/framework/src/
Illuminate/Foundation/start.php
Aside from turning default error reporting off, this new bootstrap file ensures that the Mcrypt PHP module is loaded. The Mcrypt module helps Laravel to hash and encrypt various data points throughout the system. These kinds of libraries take loads of work to make well, and Laravel uses encryption and hashing a lot.
Some of the ways Laravel uses encryption are with cookies/sessions and queue messages. Some of the ways Laravel uses hashes are with password salting and authentication remember tokens. We’ll look at all of these later!
Facade Testing
Something strange happens next…
$app->instance('app', $app);
This comes from vendor/laravel/framework/src/
Illuminate/Foundation/start.php
The comment explains this as needed to facade test the application. I couldn’t find a case of this being done in the Laravel test suite, but the idea is sound.
Assuming Foo was implemented like this…
class Foo
{
public function getBar()
{
return App::make("bar");
}
}
…you could effectively test that the call to the App::make() method was made, and that the value was returned:
$app = Mockery::mock("stdClass");
$app->shouldReceive("make")->andReturn("mocked make");
App::swap($app);
$foo = new Foo();
$this->assertEquals("mocked make", $foo->getBar());
The usefulness of such a test is debatable. The example demonstrates that it can be done, not that it should be.
Following that, the following code can be found:
if (isset($unitTesting))
{
$app['env'] = $env = $testEnvironment;
}
This comes from vendor/laravel/framework/src/
Illuminate/Foundation/start.php
This is completely out of context unless we also look at the detail TestCase class, which ships with Laravel:
public function createApplication()
{
$unitTesting = true;
$testEnvironment = 'testing';
return require __DIR__.'/../../bootstrap/start.php';
}
This comes from app/tests/TestCase.php
The code (in vendor/…/start.php) is entirely for the benefit the TestCase class. It is there to set the environment of the application to testing so that the configuration files in app/config/testing will be used in addition to the global configuration files.
Facades
The code, after that, is about facades:
Facade::clearResolvedInstances();
Facade::setFacadeApplication($app);
This comes from vendor/laravel/framework/src/
Illuminate/Foundation/start.php
Facade, in Laravel, is a term used to refer to static-like classes which proxy to regular classes. We’ve already seen one of these in the form of App. The App facade invokes methods on an instance of Illuminate\Foundation\Application. It’s just shorter to type App than it is to toe the fully qualified class name.
The use of the word Facade is a highly contentious issue. I have no desire to talk about it. If you know the history of the discussion, please refrain from brining it up. If you don’t, you’re probably better off…
The methods look like this:
public static function clearResolvedInstance($name)
{
unset(static::$resolvedInstance[$name]);
}
public static function setFacadeApplication($app)
{
static::$app = $app;
}
These are from vendor/laravel/framework/src/
Illuminate/Support/Facade/Facade.php
The Facade class is the base class for all of the facades which ship with Laravel. It has a protected, static array of facade instances matched to keys of the Container.
Registering a facade is a two-step process. A service provider will add a resolver (either via the bind() method or the instance() method). A Facade class will then define a method which pulls a class instance out of the Container. We’ll see how this is done later.
The first method clears this array of resolved instances out. The second sets a reference to the Application on the Facade class…New law requires the US economic powerhouse to cut its emissions by 40% below 1990 levels by 2030
By Karl Mathiesen
California, the world’s sixth largest economy, is set to enter into law one of the most ambitious greenhouse gas reduction regimes in the developed world.
In a major coup for its backers, the extension to Senate Bill 32 passed the state’s upper house on Wednesday evening. It followed the acceptance of its sister bill in the house of assembly on Tuesday.
Together they mandate an emissions cut of 40% below 1990 levels by 2030. This would put California’s climate laws on a par with the EU, which is widely considered an industrialised world leader in terms of its ambition to combat climate change.
California emitted 353 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2013, If it were a country, it would be among the 20 worst polluters.
The bill passed by 25 votes to 13. As supporters celebrated, California’s Democrat governor Jerry Brown immediately issued a statement committing to signing the bills and taking a swipe at climate revisionists in the Republican party.
“Yesterday, big oil bought a full-page ad in the capital city’s newspaper of record to halt action on climate,” said Brown.
“Today, the assembly speaker, most Democrats and one brave Republican passed SB 32, rejecting the brazen deception of the oil lobby and their Trump-inspired allies who deny science and fight every reasonable effort to curb global warming.”
Speaking before the vote, Republican senate leader Jean Fuller said the original 2006 bill, which required the state’s emissions to fall to 1990 levels by 2020 and which today’s bill extends, had crushed employment.
“It has decreased energy security for our country by dismantling the energy infrastructure in our country and by eliminating jobs that are highly-skilled, well-paid that are very important to my county,” said Fuller.
Ceres programme director in California Ana Zacapa said: “This is a hard-won and hugely important victory for the drought-stricken state of California. Even more importantly, it sets a new precedent for climate action across the US.”
California’s new target steps far beyond the federal administration’s commitments to the Paris climate agreement. The US’ national climate target of 26–28% below 2005 in 2025 uses a different baseline, but is equivalent to 12–19% below 1990.
During the house debate Republican Assembly leader Kristin Olsen had questioned the “intellectual honesty” of prioritising climate change when people in California were dealing with daily real struggles and humanitarian crises, such as abortion which she called the “sanctioned killing of millions of babies across the globe”.
.@KristinOlsenCA on #AB197: Climate change is important. But the biggest humanitarian issue of our time? #caleg pic.twitter.com/lBktr7dO70 — CA Assembly GOP (@AssemblyGOP) August 24, 2016
But advocates say the law will encourage investment incentive in a state where renewable energy innovation is a burgeoning economic force. It will also provide a strong economic signal for the state’s cap and trade system, which suffered from lukewarm demand at its recent auction.
On Thursday, with the vote hanging in the balance, major corporations including Levi Strauss, Symantec and Mars, delivered a letter to lawmakers urging them to sign the bill.
Zacapa said the broad coalition of voices had won the day: “We know from our allies in the legislature that the voices of California businesses and investors that Ceres helped bring to the table were key to the passage of this important legislation.”The University of Tromsø - The Arctic University of Norway (Norwegian: Universitetet i Tromsø – Norges arktiske universitet; is the world's northernmost university.[2] Located in the city of Tromsø, Norway, it was established in 1968, and opened in 1972. It is one of eight universities in Norway. The University of Tromsø is the largest research and educational institution in northern Norway. The University's location makes it a natural venue for the development of studies of the region's natural environment, culture, and society.
The main focus of the University's activities is on the Auroral light research, Space science, Fishery science, Biotechnology, Linguistics, Multicultural societies, Saami culture, Telemedicine, epidemiology and a wide spectrum of Arctic research projects. The close vicinity of the Norwegian Polar Institute, the Norwegian Institute of Marine Research and the Polar Environmental Centre[3] gives Tromsø added weight and importance as an international centre for Arctic research. Research activities, however, are not limited to Arctic studies. The University researchers work within a broad range of subjects and are recognised both nationally and internationally.
On 1 January 2009, the University of Tromsø merged with Tromsø University College. On 1 August 2013, the university merged with Finnmark University College to form Universitetet i Tromsø – Norges arktiske universitet (The University of Tromsø – The Arctic University of Norway), thereby adding campuses in Alta, Hammerfest and Kirkenes.[4] On 1 January 2016, Narvik University College and Harstad University College merged with UiT - The Arctic University of Norway. As of January 2016 the university now has six campus locations in northern Norway, the main campus being Tromsø.
[5] Faculties and other units [ edit ]
The humanities district in Breivika
Faculty of Health Sciences
Department of Medical Biology
Department of Community Medicine
Department of Clinical Medicine
Department of Pharmacy
Department of Clinical Dentistry
Department of Psychology
Department of Health and Care Science
Faculty of Science and Technology
Department of Physics and Technology
Department of Geology
Department of Computer Science
Department of Engineering and Safety
Department of Chemistry
Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Faculty of Humanities, Social Sciences and Education
Department of Archaeology and Social Anthropology
Department of Philosophy
Department of History and Religious Studies
Department of Culture and Literature
Department of Education
Department of Sociology, Political Science and Community Planning
Department of Language and Linguistics
The Barents Institute
Centre for Women's and Gender
Research Centre for Peace Studies, Tromsø (CPS)
Centre for Sami Studies
Center for Advanced Study in Theoretical Linguistics
Faculty of Biosciences, Fisheries and Economics
Department of Arctic and Marine Biology
Norwegian College of Fishery Science
School of Business and Economics (HHT)
Faculty of Fine Arts
Department of Music, Dance and Drama
Academy of Contemporary Art and Creative Writing
Faculty of Law
Faculty of Sports, Tourism and Social Work
Department of Child Welfare and Social Work
The School of Sport Sciences
Department of Tourism & Northern Studies
Other units [ edit ]
Tromsø University Museum
The University Library of Tromsø
Barentsinstituttet (The Barents' Institute) is owned by the university, as of 2012.[6]
[7] Honorary doctors [ edit ]
Notable employees [ edit ]
Notable alumni [ edit ]
Monica Kristensen Solås, glaciologist, meteorologist, polar explorer and crime novelist.[10]
Logo [ edit ]
The ravens in the university's logo are Huginn and Muninn. In Norse mythology, Hugin and Munin travel the world for Odin, bringing him news and information. Huginn represents thought and Muninn memory. Ravens are an early Norse symbol, used, for example, on the raven banner.
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Coordinates:Diaspora Yatra is a campaign in India, which started last week and is scheduled to continue until March 6, to promote diaspora* and to attain self-reliance in communication technology.
“Yatra” is a Sanskrit word meaning “journey.” Diaspora Yatra, launched by the Indian Pirates with eight partner organizations, has already covered four districts in the southern Indian state of Kerala. Pirate Praveen, who recently created a one-step installer for diaspora* on Debian, is a key player in this campaign, engaging in constructive discussions about diaspora* with people from all walks of life.
In its first week, Diaspora Yatra has started becoming an investigation into what the concepts of freedom, decentralization, and privacy mean to different sections of society:
While the techie adults in Technopark, Trivandrum, where the campaign kicked off, had strong opinions about security in decentralized networks and its trade-off with privacy, the young students of Anchal West School, Kollam were more worried about keeping unwanted eyes away from their private affairs.
After being forced to think about how “free” services provided by other social networks are economically feasible for their providers, the teachers at Badhiriya Bachelor of Education Training Centre, Kannanallore were unsure whom to trust. But the kids of Mar Baselias school, Kaithakode were receptive and eager.
The working class who assembled at Government SNDP Higher Secondary School, were quicker to explore diaspora*, encryption, and related applications. So were the students of Mar Thoma college, Thiruvalla, Pathanamthitta, who also were interested in the legal issues involved in using diaspora*. The lawyers of the Bar Association, Alappuzha went a step further and talked about whether podmins should scrutinize the content published on their pods and about the jurisdiction of pods.
It cannot be mere coincidence that every kind of person has an opinion about what diaspora* should be, moments after they discover it for the first time. It is exactly the hunger for freedom and individuality which these minds seem to have that the Diaspora Yatra team intends to sate.
To keep up to date with the yatra’s progress, check the Diaspora Yatra site and follow the #diasporayatra tag within diaspora*. We’ll post again on this blog once the yatra has completed.President Obama might need to turn to the Supreme Court to get his unilateral action sparing millions of illegal immigrants from deportation back on track.
Every attempt by the Obama administration to force the launch of his immigration programs has been stymied thus far, and reading the legal tealeaves, their prospects in the lower courts don't look much better.
The White House has attempted to dismiss as a political stunt U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen's ruling last month halting Obama's issuance of work permits for millions of illegal immigrants.
In the weeks since Obama's power play was put on hold, the White House has expressed confidence that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in New Orleans would overturn Hanen's decision.
However, the White House hasn't received good legal news of late.
On Friday, that appeals court rejected the Justice Department's attempt to lift the hold on Obama's immigration programs. Though procedural, that development could bode poorly for when the court in New Orleans hears a broader appeal to the ruling, putting the brakes on a centerpiece of the president's second-term agenda.
Though publicly bullish, Obama's allies privately concede that the fate of Obama's immigration plan could rest in the hands of Supreme Court justices.
"It looks daunting," a former Obama Justice Department official told the Washington Examiner of the 5th Circuit. "You're talking about probably the most conservative federal appeals court in the nation. To a certain extent, they have to expect [the Supreme Court] to get involved at some point."
Obama has even alluded to a possible battle at the Supreme Court over the largest change to the immigration system in decades.
"The next step is to go to a higher court, the 5th Circuit. That will take a couple of months for us to file that and argue that before the 5th Circuit," he said at a recent immigration town hall. "We expect to win in the 5th Circuit, and if we don't, then we'll take it up from there."
Republicans say such a development is inevitable.
"We now have an exit sign," Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said recently on CBS's "Face the Nation." "And that is the federal court decision saying that the president's actions unilaterally are unconstitutional. And I think we've got a great argument to hand to the Supreme Court, where it will go."
In lieu of a legal breakthrough, the White House is attempting to win the PR battle surrounding Hanen's decision.
Though the administration's ability to grant contested work permits has been halted, officials are still employing "prosecutorial discretion" to determine which illegal immigrants to deport. In other words, they won't focus on people whose only crime was crossing the border illegally.
White House press secretary Josh Earnest circulated a letter Friday from 104 "legal scholars" calling the judge's ruling "deeply flawed."
And even Gov. Jerry Brown, D-Calif., in town for a meeting with White House officials on immigration, was dispatched to meet with reporters.
"President Obama has acted legally and constitutionally and also wisely," the Democratic governor declared Friday.
He then went on to rip the GOP's position on immigration, calling it "at best troglodyte, and at worst, un-Christian."
Such rhetoric, though, will have little influence over the legal process.
Barring a surprising outcome in the lower courts, the Obama administration could be forced to ask the Supreme Court to look at it.
"I don't know exactly how it will play out," said the former Justice Department official. "Obama is definitely losing right now. They're banking that if they lose the battle, they'll win the war. We'll see."This article was originally published in April 2016
Anna Stokke is an associate professor of mathematics at the University of Winnipeg, co-founder and president of the non-profit organization Archimedes Math Schools, and author of a C.D. Howe Report, "What to do about Canada's declining math scores."
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Ontario Education Minister Liz Sandals has announced a $60-million plan to improve math training in elementary schools.
The move comes in response to declining scores in standardized math tests, which showed that the portion of Grade 6 students meeting provincial standards fell to 54 per cent from 61 per cent over a five-year period. In that same period, scores in reading and writing increased, suggesting that policies specific to math education caused the decline.
The Ontario government is to be commended for addressing the problem, but it is important to consider carefully what might be contributing to the decline and how it is best corrected. For example, what resources were used over the period of decline? How has math instruction changed in recent years? Is the province using a sound curriculum? Is increased spending required to improve outcomes?
It is possible to invest money in so-called educational solutions that actually hinder math performance. This may already be happening in classrooms across Canada.
For example, it is difficult to understand why the poorly written, expensive and confusing math texts published by Pearson and Nelson are the predominant resources used in Ontario classrooms from kindergarten to Grade 8, when the much more rigorous, and less expensive, JUMP Math program is available (and is published by a Toronto-based charity).
Central to the minister's announcement is that, starting next fall, 60 minutes of daily classroom time will be devoted to math. More instructional time in mathematics is necessary, but this initiative is unlikely to have a positive impact if the extra time is not spent on evidence-based practices and if the underlying math curriculum and student resources are flawed.
Important concepts are missing or introduced too late in the Ontario curriculum.
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Memorization of the multiplication tables is optional. Fraction arithmetic, which is extremely important for later math success and requires time and practice to master, is not introduced until Grades 7 and 8. In high-performing jurisdictions elsewhere in the world, such as Singapore, and in previous Canadian curriculums, fraction arithmetic is introduced in Grades 4 and 5.
Both the curriculum and commonly used texts place too much emphasis on open-ended problems, multiple strategies and hands-on materials (such as blocks, fraction strips and algebra tiles). Rigorous student practice, which is essential to success in math, is often played down.
It is claimed that current teaching techniques – rooted in an educational philosophy often referred to as inquiry- or discovery-based instruction – help children become strong problem solvers and creative thinkers. Educational stakeholders are often presented with a false dichotomy that claims basic skills interfere with deep understanding.
There is a problem with this thinking.
Research in cognitive science points to the importance for students of mastering basic skills, such as times tables, because this frees up working memory to be used for other tasks. If the mathematical foundation is neglected, students will struggle with more complex problems.
When new learners are presented with multiple strategies and open-ended problems, working memory is overloaded, which hampers learning. This may be most harmful to struggling students, who need a great deal of structure, practice and guidance from an experienced teacher.
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A successful math student should both understand the meaning of mathematical procedures and be able to perform them quickly and efficiently – without the use of a calculator.
There is nothing wrong with introducing concepts using hands-on materials, but too often students do not move past these clunky techniques and on to using standard procedures such as column addition and long division.
The Ontario tests, run by the provincial Education Quality and Accountability Office, also raise red flags: Grade 6 students were permitted to use calculators and materials such as blocks throughout the test, confirming the province's apparent reluctance to ensure that students are fluent in basic skills. There is a clear desire to produce students who are strong problem solvers, but this requires having a well-stocked toolbox to draw from, which includes fluency with basic skills.
The Ontario government's move to improve math training in grade schools has positive aspects, but it is unlikely to have a positive effect if the problems with the curriculum and student resources are not addressed.Super Smash Bros. is a series with many fans of all creeds; some love to see their favorite Nintendo characters duke it out in iconic scenes, others like it as a way to get together with friends and have a roaring good time, and others prefer to enjoy its core fighting engine in a competitive gaming environment... And of course, some of us love all three. However, Sakurai has been very clear in the past that Super Smash Bros. isn't designed with the competitive gaming scene in mind, and it would appear that the same will always be true.
Sakurai recently spoke with a Japanese gaming magazine about the future for Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and its 3DS counterpart, and Sakurai explained that he believes going after a core competitive audience will make the game more difficult to learn for new users and ultimately shrink its fanbase over time.
Q: There are people who play very seriously, in grand finals for official tournaments, and then there are people who are just happy to see their favorite character in the game. How do you feel about that? Sakurai: If people want to play seriously 1v1, they should do that, and if people simply want to enjoy the game, they should do so. There might even be people who only like to play with their amiibo. I think it's good that there are so many different ways to enjoy this game. Q: So, then, this is good... "Mmm. Personally, I feel that if you want to play a fighting game seriously, there are other competitive fighting games that are more suited to that, and people like that could have fun playing those. If you play Smash Brothers seriously as a competitive game, the game itself has no future." If I wanted to, I'm sure I could make a more hardcore Smash Brothers game. I could make the game speed much faster, increase the number of inputs...but then, beginners would no longer be able to play the game. When the game becomes more like a sport, a tool that more strictly rewards the player with more skill, the game tapers off more, like a mountain. Just like how a mountain tapers off into its peak, that area becomes more and more narrow. Q: So only those who desire to reach the top remain. Sakurai: There are lots of games like that out there. If we made* the game to make it more spectator friendly, that would be a bad thing. Smash needs to be a game that new players can play. Some level of technical skill may be necessary, but if just try and can move your character around a bit, that's the important bit. We do show the results of the battle, but everyone just mashes A, right? To move on, to keep going. Making people feel this way is important. Editor's Note: The translator explained that Sakurai chose a strange verb here that the translator has never seen used in this context. He says the verb implies that making the game "spectator friendly" would be a "downgrade," but isn't certain. Q: I'll admit, regardless of whether I win or lose, I always think "just one more." Sakurai: I fought, I lost...these results and suffering from painful feelings is how the user base shrinks, and we want to avoid that with Smash. In that sense, Smash has many elements that are rather ambiguous and nebulous in regards to competition.
What I believe he's saying is that catering Smash only to the competitive crowd would narrow its entryway and ultimately serve to make the series wither and die.
But that doesn't mean that competitive Smash should be completely abandoned. As Smash 4 is already showing us, it can strike a fantastic balance between a party game and a competitive experience, so whether you're a six-year-old who loves Mewtwo, or you're Mew2King himself, I wouldn't worry about it straying too far from the game you love.
Source: SmashBoardsTen Days of Fun
Friday, Jan. 31
<strong>David Luning:</strong> The coolest part about being a fan of someone before they hit the big time is being able to say "I knew them when-#8230;" David Luning is on his way to the American Idol stage in Hollywood, and his career is about to totally blow up. But before that happens, you can catch his gritty Americana rock over at Twin Oaks Tavern in Penngrove for a free show. Don't miss out, because soon he could be performing for sold-out audiences. 8-10:30 p.m. 21-plus. 5745 Old Redwood Hwy., Penngrove. <a href="http://twinoakstavernpenngrove.com" target="_blank">twinoakstavernpenngrove.com</a>
Friday, Jan. 31
<strong>Pepperland:</strong> Get back, with Sonoma County's seven-piece Beatles tribute band, opening Cinnabar Theater's six-show Music Box concert series, with a performance at 8 tonight at the theater, 3333 Petaluma Blvd. N., Petaluma. $15-$22. For a full series schedule: 763-8920, <a href="http://cinnabartheater.org" target="_blank">cinnabartheater.org</a>.
Friday, Jan. 31
<strong>Pato Banton:</strong> Get ready for a night of roots rock, reggae and positive vibarations when the English-born musician with the Jamaican nickname performs at 9:30 tonight at the HopMonk Tavern, 230 Petaluma Ave., Sebastopol. Doors open at 9. Age 21 and older. $15. 829-7300, <a href="http://hopmonk.com/sebastopol" target="_blank">hopmonk.com</a>.
Saturday, Feb. 1
<strong>Stunt Dog Experience:</strong> As part of the Family Fun Series at the Wells Fargo Center for the Arts, performers and dogs will be delighting audiences with amazing tricks and athletic feats, including big air stunts, dancing canines, comedic shenanigans, and more. $16-$21. 3-4 p.m. 50 Mark West Springs Rd., Santa Rosa. <a href="http://wellsfargocenterarts.org" target="_blank">wellsfargocenterarts.org</a>
Saturday, Feb. 1
<strong>KidsWorx:</strong> This month, the Children's Museum event focuses on the day of love with Valentine's Day crafts and jewelry making. Kids can create unique gifts for those they love at the this free, interactive exhibit at Friedman's Home Improvement. 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. 4055 Santa Rosa Ave., Santa Rosa. <a href="http://cmosc.org" target="_blank">cmosc.org</a>
Saturday, Feb. 1
<strong>Mardi Gras Costume Ball:</strong> The Petaluma Lodge is hosting a night of purple, gold, and green when they celebrate Mardi Gras. The evening will feature a no-host bar, light buffet a costume contest, and live band. $20 (at door or in advance). 21-plus. 7 p.m. Hermann Sons Hall. 860 Western Ave., Petaluma. More info at (707) 778-8066 or (707) 794-7313.
Saturday, Feb. 1
<strong>Sue Monk Kidd:</strong> The author of 'The Secret Life of Bees' talks about her novel, 'The Invention of Wings,'at 7 p.m. Saturday at Copperfield's Books, 140 Kentucky St., Petaluma. The new book follows the saga of an early 19th-century Southern girl and her slave handmaid. 762-0563, <a href="http://copperfieldsbooks.com" target="_blank">copperfieldsbooks.com</a>.
Saturday, Feb. 1
<strong>Sebastopol Guitar Festival:</strong> You can hear performances by guitarists Jim Hurst and Jim Nichols, and by Guitars Without Borders, starting at 3 p.m. Saturday at the Sebastopol Community Cultural Center, 390 Morris St., Sebastopol. Festival opens at 10 a.m. with classes, films and more. 823-1511, <a href="http://seb.org" target="_blank">seb.org</a>.
Sunday, Feb. 2
<strong>Burlesque Photo Shoot:</strong> Give your honey something out-of-the-box for Valentine's Day. Burlesque instructor, Feral Fox, is giving a mini class on posing for a camera, followed by a foxy photo shoot. The result will be photographs that are too beautiful to wrap up. Email feralfox707@gmail.com for more information. $175. 2-5 p.m. 18-plus. Footloose Dance Center. 3681 Redwood Dr., Rohnert Park. <a href="http://pinupfox.eventbrite.com" target="_blank">pinupfox.eventbrite.com</a>GE Aviation is using Upskill's Skylight industrial AR platform with Google Glass to improve efficiency and avoid manufacturing maintenance errors.
Image: GE Aviation
Avoiding maintenance errors and improving efficiency are key ways to save money in a manufacturing environment, and GE Aviation recently found a way to do both by arming its mechanics with Google Glass and a smart wrench as part of a pilot program.
GE Aviation partnered with Upskill, formerly APX Labs, on a pilot program that included 15 GE Aviation mechanics at its Cincinnati manufacturing facility. Each mechanic was given Google Glass Enterprise Edition using Upskill's Skylight industrial AR platform, and a Wi-Fi enabled Atlas Copco Saltus MWR-85 TA torque wrench.
The key manufacturing point being measured was maintenance on B-nuts, which play a critical role in aircraft engine fluid lines and hoses, providing a sturdy, reliable seal if tightened and torqued properly. If they are too loose or too tight, the negative outcomes could be redoing the maintenance, cancelling a flight, or having an engine shut down during flight.
Image: GE Aviation
In the pilot, mechanics wearing Skylight on Glass received step-by-step guided instructions and images in their line of sight while they performed various maintenance tasks. As the mechanics performed tasks, when they came to a step where they needed to apply the torque wrench, Skylight alerted them through the smart glasses and then verified the correct value in real time before the mechanic could move on.
SEE: Executive's guide to the business value of VR and AR (free ebook) (TechRepublic)
"In the pilot, we captured survey data and time trials to see if there were reduced maintenance errors," explained Ted Robertson, manager of GE Aviation. The data showed that development and production assembly errors could be reduced as a result of the use of Google Glass and a smart tool. An unexpected but welcome result was discovering that productivity was improved as well, with mechanic's efficiency increasing an average of 8-12%.
The pilot wasn't intended to improve efficiency—it was looking simply for error reduction. "It was a happy-to-have but not a mandatory," Robertson said. "We were looking more at the quality of the product and reducing maintenance errors in them."
Brian Ballard, co-founder and CEO of Upskill, quickly interjected, "But we'll always take the speed improvement, too."
Normally mechanics at GE Aviation do their job following instructions in paper binders or on a computer. After they complete each task, they have to leave the engine, walk to a table or monitor, and document their work. With the smart glasses, they can see instructions in their line of sight, and then they can document each B-nut installation via a photo, so there's no need to step away from the job and jot down additional documentation to meet FAA regulations.
There was also more job satisfaction from the employees participating in the pilot. The 15 mechanics included in the study were surveyed on their impressions of the technology, and 60% of the participants said they preferred using the wearable technology compared to the traditional methods, and 85% of the mechanics said they believed the system would reduce manufacturing errors and that it was easy to use.
Image: GE Aviation
An analysis by GE Aviation shows that Skylight with Glass could save millions of dollars, so GE is exploring where else AR could be applicable across their business. The use of Google Glass with Skylight is not a single-use application; it has broad applicability within GE Aviation on any type of engine they manufacture, Ballard said.
Robertson agreed, saying, "We were initially targeting assembly, but this could be expanded to the repair and overhaul of the engines, and even wing support. Anytime a mechanic is touching an engine you can imagine them being able to use this."
The top 3 takeaways for TechRepublic readers
GE Aviation partnered with Upskill to use its Skylight industrial AR platform on Google Glass as part of a pilot program. Mechanics' efficiency improved by 8-12% with the use of Google Glass and a Wi-Fi enabled smart torque wrench, and maintenance errors were reduced. GE Aviation is considering expanding the use of Google Glass and the smart torque wrench to other manufacturing facilities around the world.
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Also see:Working Sydney: Part-time work rising fastest, with biggest jobs growth in Western Sydney
Updated
Working helps us pay the bills, buy food, pay the mortgage and live as comfortably as we can.
But how we work though has changed significantly in the past 20 years.
While there are more jobs available, for the first time in many years full-time work has fallen while there has been a spike in part-time or casual jobs.
"Part-time jobs have been growing and we're now around two-fifths of jobs are part-time jobs, and three-fifths are full-time jobs," Patrick Fensham, urban planner with SGS Economics and Planning, said.
"There's uneven growth in terms of full-time jobs, there is more casualisation, people are not being able to access the more certain and full-time employment they're seeking, and we're seeing the manifestation of that in terms of stresses around household income."
According to data from SGS, there were 2.6 million jobs in greater Sydney in 2016 — 1.9 million were full-time and about 750,000 were part-time or casual.
In the past 10 years employment in Sydney has grown by 800,000 jobs, with most of that growth occurring in western Sydney.
The industries employing the most people are professional, scientific and technical services, followed by health care and social assistance.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, a growing number of people are juggling multiple jobs to meet the pressures of Sydney's living costs and housing unaffordability.
And for those that may need to work part-time for family reasons, Mr Fensham estimates that up to half of those people would like to work more.
"People would like to have more income to pay their bills and that's an increasing problem for our cities and our country, and there is effective underemployment and people are unable to get the work scope they'd like to," he said.
Young people struggle to find work
The hardest hit in our community in terms of job security are young people, according to Professor Phillip O'Neill, director of the Centre for Western Sydney at Western Sydney University.
"Since the global financial crisis there has been virtually no recovery in young persons' full-time employment whatsoever," he said.
"If you're a young kid in Sydney and you don't have any post-school qualifications, you're obliged to take a part-time or casual job or not work at all.
"The full-time labour market for an unskilled worker has disappeared in the Sydney labour market."
For 20-year-old Tyler, working in the construction industry is only temporary work until he can find something else.
"I work to live basically, and for my indulgences," he said.
"I love my job but it's not what I really want to do."
Michelle from Penrith told ABC Radio Sydney that casualisation of the workplace did not just affect younger generations, but also discriminated against older workers.
The 43-year-old has been looking for casual retail work as she and her husband are unemployed and receive support from Centrelink.
"Young people are getting all the casual and retail jobs because they are cheaper to pay," Michelle said.
"When I worked in retail in the past, the younger people got all the shifts and I only got work if they didn't turn up.
"It's very difficult. The work that is out there and hours that are out there is the same as what I'm getting from Centrelink, so there's no point getting a job for only 10 hours a week... sometimes I think it's not worth it."
Professor O'Neill said that in an increasing culture of part-time and casual employment, workers were likely to be monitored more closely, be given fixed-term contracts and be more vulnerable to redundancy.
Concentrate on western Sydney
According to Professor O'Neill, the population in Western Sydney is predicted to grow up to 2.9 or three million by |
NSW 2779 New South Wales $115 Medium $590 $475 413% SMITHTON, TAS 7330 Tasmania $64 None $327 $263 413% OBERON, NSW 2787 New South Wales $80 Low $410 $330 413% TOLLAND, NSW 2650 New South Wales $80 High $410 $330 413% VINCENTIA, NSW 2540 New South Wales $113 Medium $574 $462 410% MULAMBIN, QLD 4703 Queensland $90 Low $458 $368 409% WINGHAM, NSW 2429 New South Wales $89 Low $451 $362 408% CAPE PATERSON, VIC 3995 Victoria $75 Low $381 $306 408% EDGEWATER, WA 6027 Western Australia $125 High $629 $505 405% WENTWORTH FALLS, NSW 2782 New South Wales $124 Medium $625 $501 405% CORIO, VIC 3214 Victoria $76 Medium $385 $309 405% DUNGOG, NSW 2420 New South Wales $102 None $513 $411 405% BUSHLAND BEACH, QLD 4818 Queensland $90 Low $454 $364 404% TAREE, NSW 2430 New South Wales $85 Low $428 $343 404% POINT VERNON, QLD 4655 Queensland $88 High $440 $353 403% BERRY, NSW 2535 New South Wales $161 Medium $807 $646 400% DUNSBOROUGH, WA 6281 Western Australia $120 Medium $600 $480 400% BAKERS CREEK, QLD 4740 Queensland $98 Low $487 $390 399% BELMONT, VIC 3216 Victoria $93 Medium $462 $370 399% SOUTH MACKAY, QLD 4740 Queensland $95 Medium $474 $379 399% CARRARA, QLD 4211 Queensland $130 High $647 $517 398% BLACKHEATH, NSW 2785 New South Wales $113 Medium $558 $446 396% MUSWELLBROOK, NSW 2333 New South Wales $58 None $289 $231 395% CAREY PARK, WA 6230 Western Australia $85 High $421 $336 395% ALLENSTOWN, QLD 4700 Queensland $81 Medium $402 $321 395% KORUMBURRA, VIC 3950 Victoria $81 None $401 $320 394% CHINCHILLA, QLD 4413 Queensland $75 Low $370 $295 393% GOOSEBERRY HILL, WA 6076 Western Australia $136 High $672 $536 393% INVERLOCH, VIC 3996 Victoria $95 Low $467 $372 392% TANILBA BAY, NSW 2319 New South Wales $98 None $478 $381 390% SOUTH ALBURY, NSW 2640 New South Wales $90 Medium $441 $351 390% ROMAINE, TAS 7320 Tasmania $93 Medium $457 $364 390% CHELTENHAM, SA 5014 South Australia $117 High $570 $453 389% ELLIMINYT, VIC 3250 Victoria $85 Low $415 $330 388% OAKDOWNS, TAS 7019 Tasmania $113 Medium $553 $440 388% MACKAY, QLD 4740 Queensland $107 Medium $520 $413 388% HERMIT PARK, QLD 4812 Queensland $93 Medium $454 $361 386% WEST MACKAY, QLD 4740 Queensland $98 Medium $474 $377 386% KAWUNGAN, QLD 4655 Queensland $88 Medium $424 $337 385% HIGHLAND PARK, QLD 4211 Queensland $117 Medium $564 $447 383% DEVONPORT, TAS 7310 Tasmania $79 Low $380 $301 383% JAN JUC, VIC 3228 Victoria $115 Medium $552 $438 382% ALBION PARK RAIL, NSW 2527 New South Wales $110 Low $530 $420 382% KATANNING, WA 6317 Western Australia $70 None $337 $267 381% KYNETON, VIC 3444 Victoria $100 Low $481 $381 381% RASMUSSEN, QLD 4815 Queensland $83 Medium $400 $317 380% TARANGANBA, QLD 4703 Queensland $105 Medium $503 $398 379% GLOUCESTER, NSW 2422 New South Wales $80 Low $383 $303 379% DAYLESFORD, VIC 3460 Victoria $95 Medium $452 $358 378% BOAMBEE EAST, NSW 2452 New South Wales $113 Low $538 $426 378% BEGA, NSW 2550 New South Wales $90 Low $430 $340 378% BUNBURY, WA 6230 Western Australia $113 Medium $537 $425 377% TREVALLYN, TAS 7250 Tasmania $88 Medium $417 $330 377% SOLDIERS POINT, NSW 2317 New South Wales $115 Low $547 $432 376% CABOOLTURE, QLD 4510 Queensland $88 Medium $416 $329 375% TEA GARDENS, NSW 2324 New South Wales $95 None $451 $356 375% IPSWICH, QLD 4305 Queensland $93 Medium $443 $350 375% CANADIAN, VIC 3350 Victoria $93 Low $439 $347 375% TRANMERE, TAS 7018 Tasmania $119 Medium $563 $444 374% ALBURY, NSW 2640 New South Wales $93 Medium $441 $348 373% LALOR, VIC 3075 Victoria $95 High $449 $354 373% BELLBIRD, NSW 2325 New South Wales $90 Low $425 $335 372% INNISFAIL, QLD 4860 Queensland $80 Medium $377 $297 371% ARARAT, VIC 3377 Victoria $75 Low $350 $276 370% BANNOCKBURN, QLD 4207 Queensland $100 Medium $468 $368 368% BUNDANOON, NSW 2578 New South Wales $120 Low $560 $440 367% YAMBA, NSW 2464 New South Wales $105 Medium $490 $385 367% ASHMONT, NSW 2650 New South Wales $73 High $342 $269 366% DJUGUN, WA 6725 Western Australia $163 Medium $757 $595 366% COFFS HARBOUR, NSW 2450 New South Wales $113 High $524 $412 366% KILLARA, VIC 3691 Victoria $95 None $441 $346 364% KILBURN, SA 5084 South Australia $109 Medium $506 $397 363% LOBETHAL, SA 5241 South Australia $91 None $422 $331 362% TORQUAY, QLD 4655 Queensland $84 Medium $387 $303 362% MURWILLUMBAH, NSW 2484 New South Wales $110 Low $508 $398 362% GOONDIWINDI, QLD 4390 Queensland $93 Low $427 $335 362% TURNERS BEACH, TAS 7315 Tasmania $93 Low $426 $334 361% BELL PARK, VIC 3215 Victoria $84 High $385 $301 360% FALCON, WA 6210 Western Australia $100 Medium $459 $359 359% KOOLEWONG, NSW 2256 New South Wales $133 High $612 $479 359% WONDUNNA, QLD 4655 Queensland $93 High $424 $332 358% BARANDUDA, VIC 3691 Victoria $96 None $441 $345 358% BOORAL, QLD 4655 Queensland $105 Medium $481 $376 358% NORTH HAVEN, NSW 2443 New South Wales $112 Low $511 $399 358% EAST BENDIGO, VIC 3550 Victoria $93 High $427 $334 358% BELLINGEN, NSW 2454 New South Wales $103 Medium $468 $366 357% EVANSTON, SA 5116 South Australia $85 Low $388 $303 356% WEST LAUNCESTON, TAS 7250 Tasmania $85 High $387 $302 355% LONG BEACH, NSW 2536 New South Wales $105 Low $477 $372 354% WOORIM, QLD 4507 Queensland $125 Low $567 $442 354% BURNETT HEADS, QLD 4670 Queensland $86 Low $390 $304 352% NORTH BOOVAL, QLD 4304 Queensland $83 High $373 $291 352% MCKAIL, WA 6330 Western Australia $105 Medium $473 $368 350% DONNYBROOK, WA 6239 Western Australia $91 None $411 $320 350% MACMASTERS BEACH, NSW 2251 New South Wales $145 Medium $652 $507 350% LAKE HAVEN, NSW 2263 New South Wales $113 Low $505 $393 349% GUYRA, NSW 2365 New South Wales $75 None $336 $261 348% TRINITY PARK, QLD 4879 Queensland $110 Medium $492 $382 347% COWES, VIC 3922 Victoria $88 Medium $391 $304 347% THURGOONA, NSW 2640 New South Wales $99 Low $441 $342 347% ALSTONVILLE, NSW 2477 New South Wales $108 Medium $480 $373 347% COOPERS PLAINS, QLD 4108 Queensland $108 Medium $480 $373 347% SANDSTONE POINT, QLD 4511 Queensland $93 Low $413 $321 346% BATEAU BAY, NSW 2261 New South Wales $125 Medium $558 $433 346% SANDY BEACH, NSW 2456 New South Wales $105 Medium $468 $363 346% WILSONTON, QLD 4350 Queensland $88 High $390 $303 346% MIDVALE, WA 6056 Western Australia $108 High $478 $371 345% CAPEL, WA 6271 Western Australia $93 Low $411 $319 344% LEMON TREE PASSAGE, NSW 2319 New South Wales $94 Medium $416 $322 344% TRINITY BEACH, QLD 4879 Queensland $113 Medium $499 $387 344% BARGARA, QLD 4670 Queensland $92 Medium $408 $316 343% WOONONA, NSW 2517 New South Wales $153 Medium $680 $527 343% COLLEGE GROVE, WA 6230 Western Australia $95 Medium $421 $326 343% GLEN IRIS, WA 6230 Western Australia $95 Low $421 $326 343% NORTH AVOCA, NSW 2260 New South Wales $158 Medium $696 $539 342% ENDEAVOUR HILLS, VIC 3802 Victoria $95 Medium $419 $324 341% EAST ALBURY, NSW 2640 New South Wales $100 Medium $441 $341 341% OORALEA, QLD 4740 Queensland $108 Medium $474 $367 341% HEATLEY, QLD 4814 Queensland $84 Medium $369 $285 341% INGLE FARM, SA 5098 South Australia $86 High $380 $294 341% JURIEN BAY, WA 6516 Western Australia $93 Low $407 $315 340% GAYNDAH, QLD 4625 Queensland $65 Low $285 $220 338% GEORGE TOWN, TAS 7253 Tasmania $63 Low $274 $212 338% DEERAGUN, QLD 4818 Queensland $85 None $372 $287 338% AUSTINMER, NSW 2515 New South Wales $175 Medium $765 $590 337% CRIB POINT, VIC 3919 Victoria $100 Low $437 $337 337% MANDURAH, WA 6210 Western Australia $98 Medium $426 $329 337% MONASH, ACT 2904 Australian Capital Territory $123 High $538 $415 337% SUMMERLAND POINT, NSW 2259 New South Wales $113 Low $491 $379 336% FLINDERS, NSW 2529 New South Wales $138 Low $600 $463 336% LAMMERMOOR, QLD 4703 Queensland $105 Medium $458 $353 336% WILSONTON HEIGHTS, QLD 4350 Queensland $90 High $390 $301 336% JUNORTOUN, VIC 3551 Victoria $113 Low $489 $377 335% ASCOT, VIC 3551 Victoria $82 Medium $356 $274 334% MUNDINGBURRA, QLD 4812 Queensland $98 Medium $422 $325 333% EATON, WA 6232 Western Australia $98 Medium $422 $325 333% BERMAGUI, NSW 2546 New South Wales $110 None $476 $366 333% BOHLE PLAINS, QLD 4817 Queensland $93 Low $400 $308 332% CONDON, QLD 4815 Queensland $93 High $400 $308 332% PORT MACQUARIE, NSW 2444 New South Wales $120 High $517 $397 331% GLEN WAVERLEY, VIC 3150 Victoria $124 High $533 $409 331% CABOOLTURE SOUTH, QLD 4510 Queensland $85 Medium $366 $281 331% CRANBROOK, QLD 4814 Queensland $88 Medium $376 $289 330% ELI WATERS, QLD 4655 Queensland $88 Medium $376 $289 330% KENNINGTON, VIC 3550 Victoria $103 Medium $440 $338 329% SHELL COVE, NSW 2529 New South Wales $140 Low $600 $460 329% TAMBORINE MOUNTAIN, QLD 4272 Queensland $130 Medium $557 $427 328% WELLINGTON, NSW 2820 New South Wales $68 Low $289 $222 328% MOUNT BARKER, WA 6324 Western Australia $68 Low $289 $222 328% BULLI, NSW 2516 New South Wales $155 Medium $663 $508 328% ROCKVILLE, QLD 4350 Queensland $91 Medium $390 $299 327% GILSTON, QLD 4211 Queensland $125 Medium $534 $409 327% RIVERSIDE, TAS 7250 Tasmania $85 Medium $363 $278 327% EAST BUNBURY, WA 6230 Western Australia $99 High $421 $322 326% EVANS HEAD, NSW 2473 New South Wales $95 Low $405 $310 326% ORANGE, NSW 2800 New South Wales $95 Medium $405 $310 326% DUDLEY PARK, WA 6210 Western Australia $100 Medium $426 $326 326% D'AGUILAR, QLD 4514 Queensland $93 Low $394 $302 326% CAMILLO, WA 6111 Western Australia $89 Medium $378 $289 326% EAST LAUNCESTON, TAS 7250 Tasmania $100 Medium $423 $324 325% GEELONG WEST, VIC 3218 Victoria $108 Medium $457 $350 325% BONNY HILLS, NSW 2445 New South Wales $113 Low $478 $366 325% BREAKWATER, VIC 3219 Victoria $90 High $382 $292 324% DROUIN, VIC 3818 Victoria $83 Low $350 $268 324% WONDAI, QLD 4606 Queensland $56 Low $238 $182 323% SOMERSET, TAS 7322 Tasmania $80 Low $338 $258 323% BELL POST HILL, VIC 3215 Victoria $91 Medium $385 $294 322% VINCENT, QLD 4814 Queensland $88 Medium $369 $282 322% KIRWAN, QLD 4817 Queensland $95 Medium $400 $305 321% JACKASS FLAT, VIC 3556 Victoria $81 High $342 $261 321% MAIDA VALE, WA 6057 Western Australia $114 High $478 $364 320% TAMBORINE, QLD 4270 Queensland $140 Medium $587 $447 319% EPSOM, VIC 3551 Victoria $85 Medium $356 $271 319% HUNTLY, VIC 3551 Victoria $85 Low $356 $271 319% NIKENBAH, QLD 4655 Queensland $90 Medium $376 $286 318% REDHEAD, NSW 2290 New South Wales $138 Low $574 $437 317% CARRUM, VIC 3197 Victoria $103 Medium $427 $325 317% BLACKS BEACH, QLD 4740 Queensland $80 Low $333 $253 316% ALFREDTON, VIC 3350 Victoria $95 Medium $395 $300 316% COPACABANA, NSW 2251 New South Wales $150 Medium $623 $473 315% PACIFIC PARADISE, QLD 4564 Queensland $113 Medium $467 $355 315% BUSSELTON, WA 6280 Western Australia $108 High $446 $339 315% BUNGALOW, QLD 4870 Queensland $95 High $392 $298 315% YORKEYS KNOB, QLD 4878 Queensland $109 Medium $451 $342 315% TUMUT, NSW 2720 New South Wales $83 None $342 $260 315% STRATHPINE, QLD 4500 Queensland $98 High $407 $309 314% GILLEN, NT 0870 Northern Territory $138 High $568 $431 313% AVOCA BEACH, NSW 2251 New South Wales $146 Medium $604 $458 313% MORAYFIELD, QLD 4506 Queensland $89 Medium $366 $277 312% COWRA, NSW 2794 New South Wales $74 Low $304 $230 312% GLENFIELD PARK, NSW 2650 New South Wales $100 High $410 $311 312% HIGH WYCOMBE, WA 6057 Western Australia $116 High $478 $362 311% BLACKBUTT, NSW 2529 New South Wales $135 Medium $555 $420 311% AUSTRALIND, WA 6233 Western Australia $100 Medium $411 $311 311% DALYELLUP, WA 6230 Western Australia $100 Medium $411 $311 311% BELCONNEN, ACT 2617 Australian Capital Territory $133 Medium $548 $415 311% PIMLICO, QLD 4812 Queensland $110 Medium $452 $342 311% ELIZABETH DOWNS, SA 5113 South Australia $65 Low $267 $202 311% HAMLYN HEIGHTS, VIC 3215 Victoria $94 High $385 $291 311% PARMELIA, WA 6167 Western Australia $94 Low $385 $291 311% BAYONET HEAD, WA 6330 Western Australia $105 Medium $430 $325 310% BOULDER, WA 6432 Western Australia $90 Low $368 $278 309% SCONE, NSW 2337 New South Wales $95 Low $388 $293 308% KYABRAM, VIC 3620 Victoria $77 None $313 $236 308% BROWN HILL, VIC 3350 Victoria $89 High $362 $273 308% YOUNG, NSW 2594 New South Wales $78 None $316 $239 308% WYNYARD, TAS 7325 Tasmania $80 Low $326 $246 308% GUNGAHLIN, ACT 2912 Australian Capital Territory $130 Medium $529 $399 307% ABERDARE, NSW 2325 New South Wales $97 Low $393 $296 307% COORANBONG, NSW 2265 New South Wales $110 Low $445 $336 306% WOODFORD, QLD 4514 Queensland $97 Low $394 $297 306% MEADOW SPRINGS, WA 6210 Western Australia $105 Medium $426 $321 306% BALCOLYN, NSW 2264 New South Wales $108 Low $436 $329 306% NEWSTEAD, TAS 7250 Tasmania $90 High $365 $275 306% COOLOONGUP, WA 6168 Western Australia $95 Medium $385 $290 305% LOWER KING, WA 6330 Western Australia $106 Medium $430 $324 305% NORTH WARD, QLD 4810 Queensland $111 Medium $450 $339 304% KALLAROO, WA 6025 Western Australia $140 Medium $566 $426 304% SOUTH LAUNCESTON, TAS 7249 Tasmania $90 High $363 $273 303% MIDLAND, WA 6056 Western Australia $108 High $433 $326 303% CROYDON, VIC 3136 Victoria $111 Medium $448 $337 303% CHRISTIES BEACH, SA 5165 South Australia $88 Medium $352 $265 302% BRAYBROOK, VIC 3019 Victoria $90 High $362 $272 302% AITKENVALE, QLD 4814 Queensland $94 Medium $376 $282 301% CLAYTON SOUTH, VIC 3169 Victoria $100 High $401 $301 301% MILLBRIDGE, WA 6232 Western Australia $105 Medium $421 $316 301% GULLIVER, QLD 4812 Queensland $85 Medium $340 $255 300% NEWTOWN, QLD 4350 Queensland $88 Medium $350 $263 300% YARRAMAN, QLD 4614 Queensland $60 None $238 $179 300% ASPENDALE, VIC 3195 Victoria $125 Medium $500 $375 300% FORDE, ACT 2914 Australian Capital Territory $140 High $558 $418 299% KINCUMBER, NSW 2251 New South Wales $125 High $498 $373 298% HOCKING, WA 6065 Western Australia $125 Medium $497 $372 298% EAST IPSWICH, QLD 4305 Queensland $81 Medium $323 $242 298% HERNE HILL, VIC 3218 Victoria $107 Medium $424 $317 298% TALLAI, QLD 4213 Queensland $153 High $606 $454 297% FRANKSTON, VIC 3199 Victoria $93 Medium $367 $275 297% LEOPOLD, VIC 3224 Victoria $93 Low $367 $275 297% HALLS HEAD, WA 6210 Western Australia $108 Medium $426 $319 296% HORSHAM, VIC 3400 Victoria $91 Low $361 $270 296% CALIFORNIA GULLY, VIC 3556 Victoria $90 High $356 $266 296% WAGGA WAGGA, NSW 2650 New South Wales $100 Medium $395 $295 295% GYMPIE, QLD 4570 Queensland $80 Medium $316 $236 295% LEDA, WA 6170 Western Australia $98 Medium $385 $288 295% GLANVILLE, SA 5015 South Australia $128 Medium $503 $376 295% WESTCOURT, QLD 4870 Queensland $100 High $392 $293 294% BEELIAR, WA 6164 Western Australia $125 Medium $492 $367 294% BRAHMA LODGE, SA 5109 South Australia $97 Medium $380 $283 293% EAST TOOWOOMBA, QLD 4350 Queensland $101 Low $398 $297 293% MYSTERTON, QLD 4812 Queensland $115 Medium $452 $337 293% FORRESTFIELD, WA 6058 Western Australia $115 Medium $452 $337 293% WOOLGOOLGA, NSW 2456 New South Wales $108 Medium $421 $314 292% LESMURDIE, WA 6076 Western Australia $125 High $489 $364 291% GOLDEN GROVE, SA 5125 South Australia $105 Medium $410 $305 290% FAULCONBRIDGE, NSW 2776 New South Wales $115 Low $449 $334 290% JONES HILL, QLD 4570 Queensland $81 Low $316 $235 290% NIAGARA PARK, NSW 2250 New South Wales $109 High $424 $315 290% MURRUMBA DOWNS, QLD 4503 Queensland $108 Medium $419 $312 290% HOLLOWAYS BEACH, QLD 4878 Queensland $107 Medium $417 $310 290% MOONAH, TAS 7009 Tasmania $86 Low $336 $250 290% PENRITH, NSW 2750 New South Wales $120 Low $467 $347 289% HAMPSTEAD GARDENS, SA 5086 South Australia $115 High $447 $332 289% KIAMA DOWNS, NSW 2533 New South Wales $121 Medium $471 $350 288% KEILOR PARK, VIC 3042 Victoria $110 High $427 $317 288% KINGS PARK, VIC 3021 Victoria $83 High $323 $240 288% LARA, VIC 3212 Victoria $99 Low $383 $284 288% NORTH HOBART, TAS 7000 Tasmania $113 Medium $436 $324 288% ELTHAM NORTH, VIC 3095 Victoria $120 Low $463 $344 287% SOUTH TOOWOOMBA, QLD 4350 Queensland $88 Low $339 $252 287% TERRIGAL, NSW 2260 New South Wales $155 Medium $600 $445 287% EUMEMMERRING, VIC 3177 Victoria $108 Medium $419 $311 287% CHERMSIDE, QLD 4032 Queensland $103 Medium $396 $294 286% HAMPTON PARK, VIC 3976 Victoria $90 Medium $347 $257 286% YASS, NSW 2582 New South Wales $103 Low $395 $293 285% QUIRINDI, NSW 2343 New South Wales $75 None $289 $214 285% HOPE VALLEY, SA 5090 South Australia $99 Medium $380 $281 285% BALGA, WA 6061 Western Australia $105 Medium $404 $299 285% CALALA, NSW 2340 New South Wales $98 Medium $375 $278 285% ASHFIELD, QLD 4670 Queensland $95 Low $365 $270 284% NORTH TOOWOOMBA, QLD 4350 Queensland $93 Medium $355 $263 284% LEONGATHA, VIC 3953 Victoria $87 Low $332 $245 283% KELMSCOTT, WA 6111 Western Australia $99 Medium $378 $279 283% BUCASIA, QLD 4750 Queensland $87 Low $333 $246 283% KALAMUNDA, WA 6076 Western Australia $125 High $478 $353 282% RAINBOW BEACH, QLD 4581 Queensland $130 Low $497 $367 282% MAWSON, ACT 2607 Australian Capital Territory $153 High $583 $431 282% DIGGERS REST, VIC 3427 Victoria $83 Low $315 $233 282% WOLLONGBAR, NSW 2477 New South Wales $107 Medium $407 $300 282% DAVOREN PARK, SA 5113 South Australia $70 Low $267 $197 281% BOURKELANDS, NSW 2650 New South Wales $108 Medium $410 $303 281% DOUGLAS, QLD 4814 Queensland $100 Medium $381 $281 281% NAMBOUR, QLD 4560 Queensland $105 Low $400 $295 281% MORISSET PARK, NSW 2264 New South Wales $110 Low $419 $309 281% MURGON, QLD 4605 Queensland $63 None $238 $176 281% EIMEO, QLD 4740 Queensland $88 Low $333 $246 281% SHOAL POINT, QLD 4750 Queensland $88 Low $333 $246 281% KOONDOOLA, WA 6064 Western Australia $106 Medium $404 $298 280% WARRAWONG, NSW 2502 New South Wales $100 Low $380 $280 280% BUNDALL, QLD 4217 Queensland $123 Medium $468 $345 279% ENCOUNTER BAY, SA 5211 South Australia $83 Medium $313 $231 279% ERSKINE, WA 6210 Western Australia $113 Medium $426 $314 279% SCARNESS, QLD 4655 Queensland $84 Medium $317 $233 279% BELDON, WA 6027 Western Australia $115 Low $435 $320 278% SVENSSON HEIGHTS, QLD 4670 Queensland $73 Medium $277 $204 278% ECHUCA, VIC 3564 Victoria $95 Medium $359 $264 278% AIRPORT WEST, VIC 3042 Victoria $99 High $373 $274 278% MILLICENT, SA 5280 South Australia $63 None $239 $176 277% ATWELL, WA 6164 Western Australia $123 Medium $462 $340 277% SLADE POINT, QLD 4740 Queensland $88 Medium $333 $245 277% PAMBULA, NSW 2549 New South Wales $107 Medium $402 $295 277% SUN VALLEY, QLD 4680 Queensland $86 Low $325 $239 277% MOUNT HELENA, WA 6082 Western Australia $125 Low $471 $346 277% HARLAXTON, QLD 4350 Queensland $85 High $320 $235 276% COOLAMON, NSW 2701 New South Wales $68 None $254 $187 276% RAILWAY ESTATE, QLD 4810 Queensland $105 High $395 $290 276% LAKE MUNMORAH, NSW 2259 New South Wales $104 Low $390 $286 276% SAN REMO, NSW 2262 New South Wales $104 Low $390 $286 276% PETRIE, QLD 4502 Queensland $103 High $385 $283 276% ASHBY, WA 6065 Western Australia $118 High $441 $324 275% MANJIMUP, WA 6258 Western Australia $80 None $300 $220 275% BORDERTOWN, SA 5268 South Australia $64 None $239 $175 275% CRESTWOOD, NSW 2620 New South Wales $130 Medium $487 $357 275% WINMALEE, NSW 2777 New South Wales $120 Low $449 $329 274% HIGHTON, VIC 3216 Victoria $114 Medium $425 $311 274% DIAMOND CREEK, VIC 3089 Victoria $125 Medium $467 $342 274% KANGAROO FLAT, VIC 3555 Victoria $85 Medium $317 $232 273% MOAMA, NSW 2731 New South Wales $103 Medium $382 $280 273% GISBORNE, VIC 3437 Victoria $116 Low $433 $317 272% VICTORIA POINT, QLD 4165 Queensland $119 Medium $442 $323 272% DERNANCOURT, SA 5075 South Australia $108 High $400 $293 272% THORNLANDS, QLD 4164 Queensland $125 Medium $465 $340 272% BLUE HAVEN, NSW 2262 New South Wales $110 Low $409 $299 272% WALKERVALE, QLD 4670 Queensland $75 Medium $277 $203 272% BOWRAL, NSW 2576 New South Wales $144 Medium $534 $390 271% BUDGEWOI, NSW 2262 New South Wales $105 Low $390 $285 271% CORAL COVE, QLD 4670 Queensland $88 Medium $325 $238 271% NARRABRI, NSW 2390 New South Wales $108 Low $399 $292 271% SINGLETON, NSW 2330 New South Wales $83 Low $309 $226 271% LAKE CATHIE, NSW 2445 New South Wales $108 Low $398 $291 270% CAMDEN PARK, SA 5038 South Australia $128 Medium $475 $347 270% RAYMOND TERRACE, NSW 2324 New South Wales $100 Low $370 $270 270% ELIMBAH, QLD 4516 Queensland $116 None $430 $314 270% FORSTER, NSW 2428 New South Wales $113 Low $416 $304 270% HEWETT, SA 5118 South Australia $105 Low $388 $283 270% WOOMBYE, QLD 4559 Queensland $108 Medium $400 $292 270% BIRMINGHAM GARDENS, NSW 2287 New South Wales $95 Medium $351 $256 269% CURRAJONG, QLD 4812 Queensland $107 High $394 $287 269% SOUTH MISSION BEACH, QLD 4852 Queensland $98 Low $360 $263 269% NELSON BAY, NSW 2315 New South Wales $113 Medium $415 $303 269% BRINSMEAD, QLD 4870 Queensland $113 Medium $415 $303 269% NAMBUCCA HEADS, NSW 2448 New South Wales $95 Low $350 $255 268% THE GAP, NT 0870 Northern Territory $157 Medium $577 $420 268% BURNSIDE, SA 5066 South Australia $127 Medium $466 $339 268% HASTINGS, VIC 3915 Victoria $95 Low $349 $254 267% KOO WEE RUP, VIC 3981 Victoria $95 None $349 $254 267% WANNIASSA, ACT 2903 Australian Capital Territory $125 Medium $459 $334 267% GRIFFITH, NSW 2680 New South Wales $89 None $328 $239 267% MISSION BEACH, QLD 4852 Queensland $100 Medium $367 $267 267% WALLSEND, NSW 2287 New South Wales $110 Medium $403 $293 266% TATTON, NSW 2650 New South Wales $112 Medium $410 $298 266% TURA BEACH, NSW 2548 New South Wales $103 High $375 $273 266% LAKE WENDOUREE, VIC 3350 Victoria $113 Medium $412 $299 266% MANIFOLD HEIGHTS, VIC 3218 Victoria $116 Medium $424 $308 266% KURUNJANG, VIC 3337 Victoria $75 Low $274 $199 265% PROSERPINE, QLD 4800 Queensland $95 None $347 $252 265% CRANBOURNE, VIC 3977 Victoria $95 Low $347 $252 265% CRANBOURNE WEST, VIC 3977 Victoria $95 Low $347 $252 265% REDLAND BAY, QLD 4165 Queensland $120 Medium $438 $318 265% BAYVIEW HEIGHTS, QLD 4868 Queensland $108 Medium $392 $285 265% GREENFIELDS, WA 6210 Western Australia $90 Medium $326 $237 264% HELENA VALLEY, WA 6056 Western Australia $131 Medium $478 $347 264% BRIDGEWATER, SA 5155 South Australia $113 Medium $409 $297 264% WALLERAWANG, NSW 2845 New South Wales $87 None $315 $228 263% BARNEY POINT, QLD 4680 Queensland $88 Low $318 $231 263% WANDAL, QLD 4700 Queensland $88 Medium $318 $231 263% HAZELWOOD PARK, SA 5066 South Australia $128 Medium $466 $338 263% TEMORA, NSW 2666 New South Wales $70 None $254 $184 263% ANNANDALE, QLD 4814 Queensland $105 High $381 $276 263% SPRINGWOOD, NSW 2777 New South Wales $124 Low $449 $325 263% CHARMHAVEN, NSW 2263 New South Wales $108 Low $390 $283 263% GLENORCHY, TAS 7010 Tasmania $88 Medium $317 $230 262% COODANUP, WA 6210 Western Australia $90 Medium $326 $236 262% COLLINSVILLE, QLD 4804 Queensland $50 None $181 $131 262% YEPPOON, QLD 4703 Queensland $105 Low $380 $275 262% DEER PARK, VIC 3023 Victoria $89 High $321 $232 262% MAYLANDS, SA 5069 South Australia $132 High $476 $344 262% LESCHENAULT, WA 6233 Western Australia $114 Low $411 $297 261% BOKARINA, QLD 4575 Queensland $138 High $496 $359 261% LYONS, ACT 2606 Australian Capital Territory $150 Medium $541 $391 261% LITHGOW, NSW 2790 New South Wales $88 Low $315 $228 260% BAYSWATER, VIC 3153 Victoria $100 Medium $360 $260 260% TINGALPA, QLD 4173 Queensland $114 Medium $409 $295 260% STOCKTON, NSW 2295 New South Wales $120 High $431 $311 259% ANGLESEA, VIC 3230 Victoria $117 Medium $419 $302 259% CRAIGIE, WA 6025 Western Australia $113 Medium $404 $292 259% |
Soccer.The MOBA genre already has colossal communities in both League of Legends and Dota 2, but what's missing is an arena where the greatest gods of mythology toss magic fireworks at each other and roast a couple thousand mortal minions. Enter Smite, Hi-Rez Studios' free-to-play god-on-god rumbler, which launches in full today after a lengthy beta period and is available for all to download on its official website.
Smite changes up the player's perspective for its tri-lane skirmishes by dropping the camera behind the shoulders of your chosen god and using WASD for movement, a more action-oriented angle echoing Hi-Rez's FPS roots from Tribes: Ascend. Playable deities come from various pantheons, such as Greece, China, and the Roman Empire. Otherwise, it's typical MOBA fare of farming minions for increasingly powerful abilities and waging a tactical tug-of-war into the enemy base.
Hi-Rez also shared a batch of stat highlights from Smite's beta period. The game had 3 million registered users and over a billion player kills. The Mage class turned out the most popular choice followed by the gank-tastic Assassin class. On the cosmetic side, one of the most popular skins was this little number for Poseidon.
Smite became Hi-Rez's full-time focus after the studio decided to relax further development on Tribes: Ascend last September, with CEO Erez Goren claiming the extra profitability a MOBA provides is what Hi-Rez needs to continue weekly updates and content additions.
Have a look at more Smite info on its official website, or head here to download the client and get playing.Information—even quirky information—can be gold. At least one product is built on this premise, and has been for years: nose hair trimmers.
Here’s what I mean: We’ve all seen the ads for nose hair clippers in the back of various magazines, and you may have noted that they can be had for an extraordinarily reasonable price.
The reason for this is that the business model is not what you think – the nose hair clippers are merely the bait to assemble a far more valuable money making commodity - data.
What you don’t know when you send in your $19.99 is that you’ve just sold your information to someone who plans to resell it, for a profit, to the compilers of marketing lists.
Why? Because this information says “This person is too embarrassed to walk into their local pharmacy and admit that they have nose hair. Given where nose hairs fall in the spectrum of the potentially embarrassing products necessitated by—frankly—being a human being, what else can we sell this person by mail?
(For the same reason, in the mid-90’s, one of the first items to get Wal-Mart’s newest security RFID tags was their most frequently-shoplifted non-prescription pharmaceutical: Preparation H.)
How can you leverage this same business model? I don’t recommend re-selling your customer’s data. What I do want you to do is begin to ask yourself: Am I looking beyond the basic information provided by my customers’ data to really understand their likes and dislikes?
If you run a business that doesn’t gather huge amounts of data, one place to look for this information is among your employees with front-line customer contact. Here’s a quick example of house this can work—and one with a great outcome.
The manager of a particular bank chain noticed that even when other tellers were free, his older customers were gravitating towards one particular window. The teller at that window happened to be the oldest employee of the branch (exactly the kind who is frequently made redundant in mergers, cost-cutting rounds, etc.)
Instead of saying, “That’s strange”, and going back to his paperwork, this manager started asking questions of both his employees and his customers. A little digging quickly established what had been common knowledge among his junior staff: older customers preferred to deal with someone their own age.
Younger tellers – not by their actions but by their mere appearance - made some older customers feel silly, rushed or old-fashioned. That bank branch now makes a point of hiring a mix of ages for their tellers, and has the highest customer satisfaction rating in the country.
Connecting seemingly disparate pieces of information also launched a very profitable chain of pubs in the UK, whose entrepreneurial team noticed the following seemingly unconnected pieces of data: first, that when families decided to go out to a pub on Friday night, husbands chose whether to go out, but wives chose where the family went.
Second, that the primary driver for wives in their choice of pubs was simple: did the pub have nice, clean ladies rooms?
Third, that the hardest pub cost to control was the bartender “over-serving” friends (or good-looking customers) when the manager wasn’t around.
Then one of the entrepreneurs who had worked in a quite high-tech garage remembered a technology for measuring exactly how much fluid got dispensed, and where, in car maintenance. He realized that this same technology could be used to measure and track vodka, gin and whisky just as easily as motor oils and brake fluid. The team applied this quirky combination of insight and imagination to start a new chain of pubs that was family-friendly, had large clean ladies rooms and gave fair portions of liquor – but no more, no matter where the manager was.
How successful were they? I learned their story when one of the entrepreneurs came to speak at London Business School. He came at his own expense, from Monaco, for the day, on his private jet.Mice. C57Bl/6 mice were purchased from Harlan and allowed to acclimatize to the animal facility environment for 2 weeks before being used for experimentation. In each experiment, all mice were littermates born and raised in the same vivarium and obtained through a single delivery. All mice were maintained on a strict 12-h light–dark cycle (lights turned on at 6 am and turned off at 6 pm) and were housed in cages containing a maximum of five animals. Numbers of animals were chosen to ensure that a minimum of two distinct cages was used per experimental group in each experiment. No statistical methods were used to predetermine sample size. Mice were taken out of experiments when wounded as a result of fighting among cage-mates. Weights were always measured at the same circadian time throughout each experiment. Other than weight and glucose measurements, investigators were blinded with regard to experimental groups. Outbred Swiss Webster germ-free mice were born in the Weizmann Institute germ-free facility and routinely monitored for sterility. For faecal transplantation experiments, 100 mg of stool was resuspended in 1 ml of PBS under anaerobic conditions, homogenized, and filtered through a 70 μm strainer. Recipient mice were gavaged with 200 μl of the filtrate.
All experiments involving weight cycling employed the following experimental paradigm:
Before dietary interventions, mice were randomized to ensure that no incidental pre-diet differences in body weight, body fat content, or microbiome composition existed between the different groups (Supplementary Fig. 1). Initial weight gain for 4 weeks (‘during obesity’ time point, 4 weeks), see also Supplementary Figs 2 and 3. Weight loss until lean control levels are reached (end-point criterion for weight loss: no statistically significant weight difference between cycling group and lean controls; ‘after obesity’ time point). Weight regain until obese control levels are reached (end-point criterion for weight gain: no statistically significant weight difference between cycling group and obese controls; ‘second obesity’ time point).
In all experiments, age-matched male mice were used. In Fig. 1h, female mice were used. Mice were 8 weeks of age at the beginning of experiments. For antibiotic treatment, mice were given a combination of vancomycin (0.5 g l−1), ampicillin (1 g l−1), neomycin (1 g l−1), and metronidazole (1 g l−1) in their drinking water27. Mice were carefully monitored for signs of dehydration upon antibiotic administration. All antibiotics were obtained from Sigma Aldrich and given for the time periods indicated in each figure. For flavonoid treatments, apigenin and naringenin (obtained from Sigma Aldrich) were dissolved in DMSO and administered daily by oral gavage at a concentration of 80 mg kg−1. Controls received vehicle gavages. Celastrol was administered daily by intraperitoneal injection of 100 μg kg−1 as previously described12. Leptin antagonist was administered daily by intraperitoneal injection of 25 mg kg−1 as previously described13.
Rodent diets are detailed in the Supplementary Information (Supplementary Tables 2 and 3). Stool samples were collected fresh and on the basis of individual mice. Fresh stool samples were collected into tubes, immediately snap-frozen in liquid nitrogen upon collection, and stored at −80 °C until DNA isolation. All experimental procedures were approved by the local IACUC.
Glucose tolerance test. Mice were fasted for 6 h and subsequently given 200 μl of a 0.2 g ml−1 glucose solution (JT Baker) by oral gavage. Blood glucose was determined at 0, 15, 30, 60, 90 and 120 min after glucose challenge (Contour blood glucose meter, Bayer).
Magnetic resonance imaging. Mice were anaesthetized with isofluorane (5% for induction, 1–2% for maintenance) mixed with oxygen (1 l min−1) and delivered through a nasal mask. Once anaesthetized, the animals were placed in a head-holder to assure reproducible positioning inside the magnet. Respiration rate was monitored and kept throughout the experimental period around 60–80 breaths per minute. MRI experiments were performed on 9.4 Tesla BioSpec Magnet 94/20 USR system (Bruker) equipped with gradient coils system capable of producing pulse gradient of up to 40 gauss cm−1 in each of the three directions. All MR images were acquired with a quadrature resonator coil (Bruker). The MRI protocol included two sets of coronal and axial multi-slices T2-weighted MR images. The T2-weighted images were acquired using the multi-slice RARE sequence (TR = 2,500 ms, TE = 35 ms, RARE factor = 8), with matrix size being 256 × 256, four averages, corresponding to an image acquisition time of 160 s per set. The first set was used to acquire 21 axial slices with 1-mm slice thickness (no gap). The field of view was selected with 4.2 × 4.2 cm2. The second set was used to acquire 17 coronal slices with 1-mm slice thickness (no gap). The field of view was selected with 7.0 × 5.0 cm2. Total fat and lean mass of mice were quantified by EchoMRI-100 (Echo Medical Systems).
Metabolic measurements. Food intake and locomotor activity were measured using the PhenoMaster system (TSE-Systems), which consists of a combination of sensitive feeding sensors for automated measurement and a photobeam-based activity monitoring system detects and records ambulatory movements, including rearing and climbing, in each cage. All parameters were measured continuously and simultaneously. Mice were trained singly housed in identical cages before data acquisition.
Triglycerides, total cholesterol and high-density lipoprotein (HDL) levels were measured in mouse serum by SpotChem EZ Chemistry Analyzer (Arkray). LDL levels were calculated using the Friedewald formula.
Concentrations of leptin (Mouse Leptin DUO set, R&D Systems) and insulin (Ultra-sensitive mouse insulin ELISA kit, Crystal Chem) in the serum were measured using ELISA according to the manufacturer’s instructions.
Taxonomic microbiota analysis. Frozen faecal samples were processed for DNA isolation using the MoBio PowerSoil kit according to the manufacturer’s instructions. 1 ng of purified faecal DNA was used for PCR amplification. Amplicons spanning the variable region 1/2 (V1/2) of the 16S rRNA gene were generated by using the following barcoded primers: forward, 5′-XXXXXXXXAGAGTTTGATCCTGGCTCAG-3′; reverse, 5′-TGCTGCCTCCCGTAGGAGT-3′, where X represents a barcode base. Amplicons spanning the variable region 3/4 (V3/4) of the 16S rRNA gene (Fig. 2h and Extended Data Fig. 5b–d) were generated by using the following primers: forward, 5′-GTGCCAGCMGCCGCGGTAA-3′; reverse 5′- GGACTACHVGGGTWTCTAAT-3′. The reactions were subsequently pooled and cleaned (PCR clean kit, Promega), and the PCR products were then sequenced on an Illumina MiSeq with 500-bp paired-end reads. The reads were then processed using the QIIME (Quantitative Insights Into Microbial Ecology, http://www.qiime.org) analysis pipeline as described28,29,30. In brief, fasta quality files and a mapping file indicating the barcode sequence corresponding to each sample were used as inputs, reads were split by samples according to the barcode, taxonomical classification was performed using the RDP-classifier, and an OTU table was created. OTU mapping was employed using the Greengenes database. Rarefaction was used to exclude samples with insufficient count of reads per sample. Sequences sharing 97% nucleotide sequence identity in the 16S region were binned into operational taxonomic units (97% ID OTUs). For beta diversity, unweighted UniFrac measurements were plotted according to the two principal coordinates based on >10,000 reads per sample. For microbial distance measurements, unweighted UniFrac distances were compared.
Classification of obesity history. Mouse obesity history was predicted using Random Forest Classification (sklearn 0.15.2) with the features being the relative abundances of 16S OTUs as outputted by QIIME. Classification was made in leave-one-out cross-validation in which each mouse was classified as negative or positive for obesity history.
Prediction of weight regain following HFD diet. Future weight gain of mice was predicted in leave-one-out cross-validation, whereby the weight regain of each mouse upon HFD exposure was predicted using a gradient-boosting regression algorithm using data of all other mice consisting of their 16S rDNA OTU data at the post-dieting nadir period, their obesity history, and their individual weight regain upon HFD exposure. Importantly, each time a mouse was left out and its weight regain was predicted, its obesity history was not given as an input to our algorithm. For each left out mouse, a classifier of obesity history was first learned and used to classify the obesity history of the left out mouse as described above. Then, training data mice with the same obesity history as the left out mouse were taken, and gradient-boosting regression (GBR, sklearn 0.15.2) was applied to learn a model that predicts their weight regain on the HFD diet. Input to this model consists of the 16S OTUs which were used within the GBR algorithm to predict weight regain.
Metagenomic analysis. Metagenomic reads containing Illumina adapters were filtered for exclusion of low-quality reads and trimmed low-quality read edges. Host DNA was detected and excluded by mapping with GEM to the mouse genome with inclusive parameters. Length-normalized RA of genes, obtained by similar mapping with GEM to a reference catalogue31, was assigned to KEGG Orthology (KO) entries32, and these were then normalized to a sum of 1. RA of KEGG modules and pathways was calculated by summation. Only samples with >100,000 metagenomics reads were considered for analysis.
Quality control of metagenomic reads and removal of host DNA. We applied Trimmomatic33 with the following parameters:
ILLUMINACLIP:<Trueseq3 adapters FASTA file>:2:30:10 LEADING:25 TRAILING:25 MINLEN:50. We removed host DNA by mapping to the mouse genome (mm10, downloaded from https://genome.ucsc.edu) and removing any mapped reads (see section below).
Mapping of metagenomic sequencing reads. Mapping was performed using the GEM mapper34with the following parameters:
-q offset-33–gem-quality-threshold 26 -m 0.1 -e 0.1–min-matched-bases 0.8–max-big-indel-length 15 -s 3 -d ‘all’ -D 1 -v -T 2 -p -E 0.3–max-extendable-matches ‘all’–max-extensions-per-match 5
With the addition of the modifier -m set to 0.05 for mapping to the mouse genome. Resulted mappings were retained as long as they had at least 50 matched bases with minimal quality of 26.
Genetic content relative abundance calculation. Reads were mapped to the integrated reference catalogue of the human gut microbiome31. For each gene in the catalogue, the fraction of reads mapped to it from each sample was counted and normalized by gene length in kilobases. Reads mapping to more than one location were split so that each location received an equal fraction of the mapped read. Mapped reads were subsequently assigned to KEGG Orthology (KO) entries using the gene annotation table available at http://meta.genomics.cn/. Relative gene abundances were then calculated by normalizing the KEGG genes of each sample to sum to 1. To calculate the abundances of KEGG pathways and modules, the relative abundance of genes in each pathway and module was summed.
Non-targeted metabolomics. Caecal samples were collected, immediately frozen in liquid nitrogen and stored at −80 °C. Sample preparation and analysis was performed by Metabolon Inc. Samples were prepared using the automated MicroLab STAR system (Hamilton). To remove protein, dissociate small molecules bound to protein or trapped in the precipitated protein matrix, and to recover chemically diverse metabolites, proteins were precipitated with methanol. The resulting extract was divided into five fractions: one for analysis by UPLC-MS/MS with positive ion mode electrospray ionization, one for analysis by UPLC-MS/MS with negative ion mode electrospray ionization, one for LC polar platform, one for analysis by GC-MS, and one sample was reserved for backup. Samples were placed briefly on a TurboVap (Zymark) to remove the organic solvent. For LC, the samples were stored overnight under nitrogen before preparation for analysis. For GC, each sample was dried under vacuum overnight before preparation for analysis.
Data extraction and compound identification. Raw data was extracted, peak-identified and QC processed using Metabolon’s hardware and software. Compounds were identified by comparison to library entries of purified standards or recurrent unknown entities.
Metabolite quantification and data normalization. Peaks were quantified using area-under-the-curve. For studies spanning multiple days, a data normalization step was performed to correct variation resulting from instrument inter-day tuning differences.
Flavonoid measurements. Apigenin and naringenin were measured by Waters TQ MS detector combined with Waters Acquity UPLC system. The chromatographic separation was carried out on a BEH C18 column (1.7 μm, 2.1 × 100 mm, Waters). The solvent flow rate was 0.3 ml min−1. The mobile phase consisted of 0.1% formic acid (FA) in 5% acetonitrile (A) and 0.1% FA in acetonitrile (B) using a gradient program described below. The autosampler was cooled to 12 °C and the column heated to 35 °C. MS detector (Waters TQ) was equipped with an ESI source used in positive mode (capillary voltage 2.5 kV). The measurement was performed in MRM mode, two MRM traces for each compound (one for quantification, and the second for identification). The cone voltages (V) and collision energies (eV) for each MRM transition, as determined by direct injection, are summarized below. Data were processed with MassLynx software with TargetLynx (version 4.1, Waters).
For sample preparation, 50 mg of stool or 100 mg food were weighed into 2-ml safe-lock Eppendorf tubes. Samples were homogenized using a beadbeater with metal balls. Three-hundred micrograms of 80% methanol in DDW were added to the samples, followed by sonication for 20 min, centrifugation, and filtering through Acrodisc PTFE 0.2 μm filters (P/N 4552T) into vials.
See Supplementary Table 4 for chromatographic conditions for flavonoid separation.
Gene expression analysis. Tissues were preserved in RNAlater solution (Ambion) and subsequently homogenized in Tri Reagent (Sigma Aldrich). RNA was purified using standard chloroform extraction. Two micrograms of total RNA was used to generate cDNA (HighCapacity cDNA Reverse Transcription kit; Applied Biosystems). Real-time PCR was performed using the following Ucp1 primers: Ucp1 forward, 5′-GGCCTCTACGACTCAGTCCA-3′; Ucp1 reverse, 5′-TAAGCCGGCTGAGATCTTGT-3′. Primers for flavanone 4-reductase and chalcone were tested using http://insilico.ehu.eus/PCR/ and validated using cultures of Lactococcus lactis and Escherichia coli.
PCR was performed using Kapa Sybr qPCR kit (Kapa Biosystems) on a Viia7 instrument (Applied Biosystems). PCR conditions were 95 °C for 20 s, followed by 40 cycles of 95 °C for 3 s and 60 °C for 30 s. Data were analysed using the method with Hprt serving as the reference housekeeping gene. Hprt cycles were assured to be insensitive to the experimental conditions.
Western blot analysis. Brown adipose tissue samples were excised and washed thoroughly with PBS, homogenized in RIPA buffer containing protease inhibitors, incubated for 20 min in 4 °C and centrifuged for 20 min, 14,000 r.p.m., at 4 °C. Samples were separated on 12% acrylamide gels and transferred onto nitrocellulose membranes. Western blot analysis was performed using anti-UCP1 (M-17) polyclonal antibody (Santa Cruz, sc-6529) and donkey anti-goat antibody (Jackson ImmunoResearch, 705-035-003). Band density was calculated using ImageJ software. See Supplementary Fig. 4 for immunoblot source data.
Adipose tissue explants. Brown adipose tissue was excised and rinsed with PBS. The tissue explants were cultured with 0, 10 or 100 μM of apigenin and naringenin for 24 h in DMEM medium containing 10% FBS, l-glutamine, penicillin, and streptomycin at 37 °C. Explants were then collected and immediately processed for qPCR and western blot analysis as described above.
Statistical analysis. Data are expressed as mean ± s.e.m. Comparisons between two groups were performed using two-tailed Mann–Whitney U-test. ANOVA was used for comparison between multiple groups. Statistical testing was performed using GraphPad Prism software. K-means clustering based on Pearson’s correlation was used to classify the temporal behaviour of OTUs, metagenomes, and metabolites in weight-cycling mice after normalization to control mice in order to account for ageing-induced changes. P values <0.05 were considered significant. *P < 0.05; **P < 0.01; ***P < 0.001; ****P < 0.0001. Exact P values for each experiment can be found in Supplementary Table 6.
Data availability. The sequencing data has been deposited at the European Nucleotide Archive database with the accession number PRJEB17697 and are available from the corresponding authors upon request.Halloween Symbols & Occult Suggestions
See also Halloween: A Seductive Bridge Between two Cultures
Yu-Gi-Oh and the spirits of Halloween | A Seductive Bridge Between Two Worlds
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"And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them. For it is shameful even to speak of those things which are done by them in secret." Ephesians 5:9-14
Halloween is not just innocent entertainment. It's symbols and practices breathes new life into the dark rituals and symbols of past civilizations. Many of its symbols are universal; they are familiar to people in many parts of the world. Yet, each cultural group sees the images from its own perspectives.
To one group, they symbolize various forms of death: physical and spiritual, scary or affirming. To another, they point to the innocuous thrills and titillations that go with what they believe to be little more than a fun, fantasy world. To a third group, they represent genuine evil -- the lures of an occult world view manipulated by Satan, who now as always masquerades as "an angel of light." In other words, the meaning depends on a person's beliefs and world view.
The symbols below include images from Aztec religious art, from Magic the Gathering cards, from a Japanese Sailor Moon comic book, from a Dungeons & Dragons manual and from ads for Halloween treats and costumes. This mix shows the global popularity of these symbols and reminds us that, while Halloween clashes with God's guidelines, it fits the world and human nature very well.
That's why the mastermind behind this spiritual war keeps using the same tactics through the centuries. Satan's main strategy has always been to tempt people to love what God hates, prompt them to pursue his enticing path, and deceive them into thinking that his "new" way is as good, or even better, than the old ways God has shown us. Since his strategies don't change, God's warning in Proverbs 14:12 is as relevant now as it was in King Solomon's days: " There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." (Proverbs 14:12)Mac Bootable Backup Software
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Mac Backup Guru has 3 main functions for creating bootable backups, and for keeping your data in synch across backups: Direct Cloning, Synchronization, and Incremental Snapshots.
All of them can handle anything from small amounts of files & data to massive amounts.
Direct Cloning: (useful for a fast bootable backup)
Make an exact duplicate of a folder or disk, fast.
Although we typically just use drag & drop for simple folder copies in the Finder, when we want to make a copy of something that is more complex, that simply won’t do. Did you ever try to copy your System folder for example? That won’t work. It will even struggle with large folders with lots of files in it, and the copies are not resumable if you have to restart them. That is fine, it is not designed for that.
If you want to make reliable and exact duplicates of anything you can throw at it, this is the way to do it. It will be happy backing up petabytes of data, or complex folder hierarchies with arcane filesystem metadata, permissions, and ACL’s set, and reproduce an exact, indistinguishable, duplicate.
Synchronization: (keeps your bootable backup in sync)
If you already have a partial backup (for example, an out-of-date previously made clone, or even just a Finder copy between two folders) you can use Synchronization to create a clone faster than creating it from scratch. The beauty of this Synchronization in this case is that by using it the result is indistinguishable from an originally-made clone, it’s as good as a brand new clone, but it only copies the files are different between the source and destination. This is the backup method typically employed by most mac backup software. This is to allow you to have, for example, a bootable external disk which you also use for storage of other miscellaneous items. Since the root will never have any items deleted from it, anything else you are storing on that external will not be affected by any Syncs to that destination disk.
Incremental Snapshots: (preserves all you file’s history while efficiently using space)
If you are working with your files and you make a mistake, you don’t want that mistake to be automatically reflected in your backups, but at the same time you do want to preserve the latest work you have done. So how can we preserve the good without also preserving the bad?
The answer to this is Snapshots. Although it would be laborious and space consuming to make a complete clone of your stuff every time a backup is made. Say you had a 500GB internal drive, and your backup disk had 700GB of space available on it, then in normal circumstances you would be able to fit about one and a half clones onto your backup disk. Not very useful.
By selecting Snapshots, this mac backup software will employ some wizardry whereby you can fit a full apparent clone of your disk which contains 500GB of data and 1 million files in as little as 3GB, instead of the usual 500GB that would usually be needed. This will appear and act as an exact clone in every way. Even if you Get Info on it using the Finder it will tell you that it’s taking up 500GB of space. But because underneath the surface it is using hardlinks (basically advanced aliases) to the last backup that it made, it’s actually only storing fresh copies of the files that have been changed since the previous time a backup was made, and the rest are hardlinks to the previous backup.
The upshot of this is that you can store around 150 copies of your startup drive with 500GB and 1 million files on it on your backup drive with 700GB free, instead of the 1.5 copies you could store with traditional backup software. The best way to use this is to set up a daily schedule to make a Snapshot of your source drive, and just leave it there. You will then have a daily timestamped backup of your data, and you can go back at any point and pull out preserved copies of any particular files that you want. You can delete older backups manually or automatically when you no longer need them, because when you do the hardlinks will automatically be redirected to the next copy of the data. Only the most recently completed Snapshot needs to remain present to be used as the basis for the next Snapshot that will get created.
If you just set it and forget it everything gets handled automatically, and all you really need to know is that for all intents and purposes the Snapshots are just like direct copies, with the only practical difference being that it is a lot faster to make them, and they take up around 200 times less space.
Can I make a backup while I’m using my system?
Yes. It will happily run in the background and still make bootable backups of your disk.
Will Mac Backup Guru run my scheduled backups even if I have quit it?
Yes. It will automatically start up in the background.
What will happen if I’m backing up to an external drive, and it is not available for when the backup is scheduled?
The mac backup software will automatically run the next time you connect the drive, right away. It will also provide you with Notifications that there is a pending backup waiting when it opens.
How can I restore a backup?
Locate the backup that you want to restore. It can be any of the above (a Clone, a Synchronized Clone, or a Snapshot). Select it, and then create a back up from that, but this time selecting the backup as the Source. If you selected a copy of your bootable backup, then by restoring it (even by a Snapshot), you will re-create a bootable startup disk.
How is this different from Time Machine?
• You can use it to make bootable external drives / USB sticks / SD cards, etc.
• It’s configurable. You can choose folders to back up (not just whole disks).
• It does not require a dedicated disk, and you have control over how the disks you back up onto are used.
• You get fine grained control over how and when backups are made
• You get 3 functions instead of just one. Time Machine uses hardlink backups, and does not let you control how long the backups are kept, nor what is backed up.
• Reliability. You can browse through your backups using the Finder, and you can see that they are there and functional. Because they behave just like anything else on your disk (and you do not have to access them using a special application), you can see that they are there and working.
• Control. You can go back through your backups in the Finder and safely delete anything you no longer want stored.
• Speed. For large backups it’s not uncommon for Time Machine to need around 8 hours to complete the backup, whereas Mac Backup Guru will do the same job in 30 minutes or less.
How can I make a bootable backup?
If a volume is copied directly to another volume, and care is taken to select the volumes themselves and not subfolders within them, it will automatically make the backup bootable. If, after creating the backup, it does not appear in System Preferences -> Startup Disk, it is worth attempting to reboot the computer and then immediately hold down the Option key. Then, before starting up, the computer will present you with a screen showing you the available volumes to boot from. With luck the newly created volume can then be selected and booted from.
What if I still can’t boot from my volume?
Most of the time the above steps will work for most people. However in some cases the new volume won’t show up as bootable. This is because some types of external disks, USB sticks, enclosures, or in some cases even cables, do not support USB booting. If your volume fails to boot try switching the USB cable and trying again if you have another one. Then after that perhaps try switching the enclosure if possible. Failing all of the above, try purchasing a reputable drive enclosure and cable, which is the fail-safe option.
Can I delete old Snapshots that were created without affecting the future Snapshots that get made?Only the most recently fully completed Snapshot needs to be preserved. It needs to be present, and not moved or renamed in order for it to be used as the base for the next Snapshot that will get created in the future. If you delete any of the older ones it will not affect anything so it’s fine to do. You can either do this manually, or you can change the number of “Recent Snapshots Kept” for the mac backup software to delete the older backups automatically. If you do this it’ll delete 2 at a time every time it runs until it has the number down to what you set.
Is there a user guide?
Yes, you can access it by clicking here. It can also be accessed from the Help menu from within the application. And if you prefer to get a more in depth feeling for it you can see the detailed product manual here.
What disk format should I use?
HFS+ is the only format suitable for a backup disk in Mac. Anything else will risk losing metadata, and be less reliable.
Is there any way to turn off the Finder integration for the Copy/Paste functions?
Due to the fact that that is implemented as a Finder Extension, it is very easy to do. Just go to System Preferences -> Extensions and uncheck the extensions (including the Mac Backup Guru enhance Copy and Paste functionality) that you don’t want.
DownloadsThe last remaining legal hurdle for the Affordable Care Act, the King v. Burwell case, isn’t as complicated as it may seem. The entire controversy boils down to this: was the Affordable Care Act designed specifically to subsidize insurance for consumers nationwide, or only consumers who enroll through state exchanges?
Absolutely everyone involved in the process knows the truth: of course the system was designed to help all American consumers, including those who bought insurance through healthcare.gov. The alternative is a little insane – the architects of the law wouldn’t have any reason to undermine the efficacy of their own system.
But the King v. Burwell lawsuit, which Republicans pretend to believe, is predicated on a genuinely ridiculous assumption: Democrats, on purpose, designed “Obamacare” in such a way as to deny help to every consumer who relied on healthcare.gov. They did this deliberately, the argument goes, in order to entice states to create their own exchange marketplaces.
It’s painfully obvious that this is absurd and that the lawsuit is a joke, and very recently, evidence has emerged that even Republicans who claim to support the case, in reality, don’t genuinely believe their own side’s argument. Consider this latest catch from Ian Millhiser:
The Affordable Care Act gives states a choice. They can either set up their own health exchanges where individuals may buy subsidized health plans, or they can elect to have the federal government set up such an exchange for them. Individuals who purchase insurance on an exchange may receive tax credits to help them pay for that insurance if they qualify on the basis of income. In his brief, which was filed in a lawsuit called King v. Burwell, [Republican Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch] claims that the law “provides that premium subsidies are available only through an exchange established by a State” – i.e. not in an exchange that is operated by the federal government.
But five years ago, before Hatch knew the King v. Burwell case was coming, he accidentally told the truth: he wrote in an op-ed that said state exchanges “are not a condition” for subsidies. The Republican senator understood reality in 2010, but is pretending to support a contradictory reality now in the hopes of tearing down the system.
It’s not just Hatch’s accidental candor. Brian Beutler today continued to expose the stupidity of the entire litigation: It’s a little tricky, but Brian shines a light on the Republicans’ 2011 effort to change the ACA’s “1099” requirement.
What we have in the form of this bill is clear evidence that everyone who voted for it (including every single Republican, save the two GOP congressmen and one GOP senator who weren’t present) understood the Affordable Care Act to provide subsidies everywhere.
Indeed, let’s keep going with this. Here |
finalist at the French Open and at Wimbledon (losing to Borg), and participated in the WCT Finals. It was during his quarterfinal match at Wimbledon that Năstase had a memorable row with umpire Jeremy Shales.[10] Shales called him "Năstase" when asking him to move to the advantage court, "like a master speaks to a naughty schoolboy."[11] (Năstase has also said Shales asked him to pick up a piece of paper that had blown onto the court, saying, "Năstase, pick up that paper."[12]) Năstase angrily replied, "You call me Mr. Năstase!". Since this incident umpires have always used a courtesy title when addressing the players directly. Mr. Nastase later became the title of his autobiography.
Năstase was still one of the 20 best players in 1978. At Wimbledon, he again reached the quarterfinals, losing to Okker after defeating Roscoe Tanner.
During the remainder of his career, Năstase steadily declined and only occasionally defeated a good player, such as Johan Kriek in the third round of the 1982 US Open. Năstase retired from the tour in October 1985 at the age of 39 after playing in the tournament in Toulouse, although he did play the challenger tournament at Dijon in June 1988.
Controversy [ edit ]
In 1977, Năstase used a'spaghetti string' (double-strung) racquet to end Guillermo Vilas's 46 match winning streak. The racquet was known for creating large amounts of top spin and unpredictable bounces. Vilas considered quitting the match in protest of the racquet.[13] A few days later, the ATP banned the use of such racquets.[14]
During the US Open in 1979, Năstase was defaulted from his match against John McEnroe. The umpire had previously docked Năstase a point in third set and then a game in the fourth for arguing and stalling. A near riot followed as the crowd disagreed with the umpire's decision, by throwing beer cans and cups on court. The match was eventually restarted with the umpire being replaced before McEnroe ran out the winner.[15][16][17][18]
In 1994 Năstase, Davis Cup captain of his country, was banned for an away match against Great Britain, following his conduct in a tie against South Africa.[19]
In 2017, while captaining his country's Fed Cup team against Great Britain, Năstase was overheard commenting about Serena Williams' unborn child and asked Britain's Fed Cup captain Anne Keothavong for her room number. Năstase had previously made unfounded comments about Williams allegedly doping. Before the Great Britain and Romania began their two-day World Group play-off,[20] Năstase had allegedly stormed in to the media centre to confront British journalists over the reporting of his comments the previous day. Năstase could only find Press Association tennis correspondent Eleanor Crook before launching into a tirade about the reporting.[21] During the second rubber he was ejected from the stadium for unsportsmanlike conduct.[22] In a statement the International Tennis Federation (ITF) additionally confirmed that Năstase had his accreditation removed and would take no further part in the tie.[23] The next day the ITF provisionally suspended Năstase under the Fed Cup Regulations for a breach of the Fed Cup Welfare Policy; meaning that he was banned from the site of any ITF event.[24] When Năstase was ejected from the stadium he met Crook again and, separated by a large number of security guards, verbally attacked her.[25] The next day, despite being banned from the venue, Năstase reappeared and went to have lunch in the onsite restaurant. He additionally sent flowers to the British team.[26] On the 21st of July 2017 he was suspended by the ITF until 2021.
Williams released a statement on social media branding the comments about her unborn child as racist, noting that it saddened her that we live in a society where these comments can be made.[27] Năstase then apologised on social media regarding the comments he made about Williams, but made comments about Konta speaking to the umpire which upset him.[28] In a further interview with the BBC, Năstase justified his comments to Konta stating that he only abused her after being ejected from the court and did so as a fan rather than a captain. Năstase additionally added that he regretted his behaviour in the incident.[29] Nastase was not invited to the French Open and Wimbledon following his suspension.[30] The Madrid Open however invited Nastase to be part of the prize giving ceremony, which was won by Simona Halep (another Romanian player). This was a move that was deemed irresponsible by the WTA who had revoked Nastase's privileges while the ITF carried out its investigation.[31][32]
Further allegations of sexism from Năstase then came to light. Pam Shriver said that Năstase would frequently in a joking manner ask if she was still a virgin. After about thirty occasions of this happening Shriver asked him to stop saying that, which he did. Dominique Monami, captain of the Belgium team, then mentioned that Năstase had abused her in the round prior to the match with Great Britain.[33] Monami later added that Năstase was abusive for two games during the Elise Mertens and Irina-Camelia Begu match.[34]
Playing style [ edit ]
Considered one of the most gifted tennis players in history[35], Ilie Năstase was noted both for his sorcery with the racket and his ability to entertain, amusing spectators with his antics and mimicry. Even during a crucial phase of a match, he was likely to do something bizarre that would entertain the crowd.[6] Nicknamed the "Bucharest Buffoon", Năstase could master all the shots, playing either baseline or serve-and-volley.[3]
One of the fastest players, he is remembered for his magnificent lobs and retrieves. Năstase could apply a discomfiting spin to his shots, being an expert at putting the ball just beyond an opponent's reach. His greatest weakness was a fragile nervous system and erratic temperament, but when he maintained his concentration during a match, he could conjure up the most devastating tennis,[6] being regarded as a tennis magician[6] or an artist creating with great originality and panache.[3]
Năstase pioneered a distinctive tennis shot, a backward, over-the-shoulder wrist-flick useful as a last resort in recovering lobs. Tennis writer Bud Collins dubbed the shot the "Bucharest Backfire" after Năstase.[36]
According to The Independent, Năstase is best remembered for being one of the best players never to win the singles title at Wimbledon, for his tantrums, and his good looks.[37]
Athletic distinctions [ edit ]
Awards and accolades [ edit ]
Political career [ edit ]
He holds the rank of Major General in the Romanian military. He entered politics in the 1990s, making an unsuccessful run for mayor of Bucharest in 1996.[40] Elected to the Romanian Senate for a Bucharest seat in 2012, he initially sat for the Conservative Party, switching to the National Union for the Progress of Romania in July 2015, after the former party ceased to exist.[41]
Personal life [ edit ]
Năstase has been married four times: his first wife was Dominique Grazia, a Belgian fashion model, whom he married at the age of 26, and with whom he has a daughter, Nathalie. They were married for ten years. His second wife was American actress Alexandra King, whom he married in 1984 and with whom he adopted two children, Nicholas and Charlotte. His third wife was Romanian fashion model Amalia Teodosescu, whom he married in 2004. They have two children, Alessia and Emma Alexandra. After they split up in 2010, he married Romanian fashion model Brigitte Sfăt in 2013.[42][43]
Maxim has placed Năstase at number 6 on its top ten "Living Sex Legends" list, as he is reputed to have slept with over 2500 women.[44] Năstase's own guess, which was at 800–900 women, was too low for the writer of his biography who wanted a larger number, to improve his reputation, as it evidently did.[45] After hearing this, his third wife, Amalia, said that she was happy to have conquered such a man. Năstase met Amalia at a Sting concert and married her in a Greek Orthodox ceremony on 5 June 2004 followed by a Civil ceremony in July of the same year. They divorced in February 2010, after six years of marriage.[46]
As he played for the Army's sports club Steaua, he was an employee of the Ministry of Defence.[citation needed]. He was granted the rank of retired Major General.[47]
On 25 May 2018, Năstase was arrested twice within a six-hour span in one day for drunk driving and riding a scooter through a red light.[48]
Career statistics [ edit ]
Singles performance timeline [ edit ]
Key W F SF QF #R RR Q# A NH
(W) Won; (F) finalist; (SF) semifinalist; (QF) quarterfinalist; (#R) rounds 4, 3, 2, 1; (RR) round-robin stage; (Q#) qualification round; (A) absent; (NH) not held. SR=strike rate (events won/competed)
Qualifying matches and Walkovers are neither official match wins nor losses.
* including 57 pre-ATP and ATP titles
pre-ATP and ATP titles ** including 749 – 287 (overall – 1036) listed by the ATP
Records [ edit ]
These records were attained in the Open Era of tennis.
Championship Years Record accomplished Player tied Masters Grand Prix 1971–1975 88.00% (22–3) match winning percentage[49] Stands alone Grand Prix Tour 1968–1985 42 five set match wins Stands alone WCT Challenge Cup 1976–1978 3 singles titles Stands alone Omaha Open 1972–1973 2 singles titles Stands alone
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]
Mr Nastase: The Autobiography. HarperCollins UK. 2005. ISBN 0-00-717839-5.
Evans, Richard I. (1978). Nastase. Henley-on-Thames: A. Ellis. ISBN 0-85628-058-5.DC COMICS PRESENTS DARK KNIGHT III: THE MASTER RACE
DC Comics is proud to present the debut issue of DARK KNIGHT III: THE MASTER RACE, one of the most ambitious projects ever from a major American comics publisher. Here are the details...
Each issue of DARK KNIGHT III: THE MASTER RACE will include:
• A 32-page standard format comic book that will measure 6.625” x 10.1875”
• A 16-page minicomic with no interior ads that will measure 5.5” x 8.375”
The minicomic will be tipped on to an insert and bound into the main comic.
After the release of each issue of DARK KNIGHT III: THE MASTER RACE, DC Entertainment will release a volume of the DARK KNIGHT III: THE MASTER RACE COLLECTOR’S EDITION that will collect the both the main story and mini-comic from latest issue of DARK KNIGHT III: THE MASTER RACE as a single 7.0625” x 10.875” title, with both stories presented at the same trim size.
After the first seven DARK KNIGHT III: THE MASTER RACE COLLECTOR’S EDITION have been published, DC Entertainment will ship a special slipcase designed to hold the entire set with the eighth COLLECTOR’S EDITION.
DKIII also will feature a dazzling array of variant covers by some of the biggest names in comics today. And, for the first time ever, DC will offer custom store variant editions to qualifying retailers. Watch for more information coming soon!
DARK KNIGHT III: THE MASTER RACE #1
Written by FRANK MILLER and BRIAN AZZARELLO
Art by ANDY KUBERT and KLAUS JANSON
Mini comic art by TBA
Cover by ANDY KUBERT and KLAUS JANSON
1:10 variant cover by KLAUS JANSON
1:25 variant cover by ANDY KUBERT and KLAUS JANSON
1:50 variant cover by TBA
1:100 variant cover by FRANK MILLER
1:500 variant cover by JIM LEE
1:5000 original sketch variant by JIM LEE
Blank variant cover
On sale NOVEMBER 25
32 pg comic: 6.375” x 10.1875”
16 page minicomic: 5.5” x 8.5”
FC, 1 of 8, $5.99 US • RATED T+
Retailers: This issue will ship with multiple covers. Please see the order form for more information.
The epic ending you never saw coming is here because you demanded it! The Dark Knight rises again to face the dawn of the master race!
DARK KNIGHT III: THE MASTER RACE #1 COLLECTOR’S EDITION
Written by FRANK MILLER and BRIAN AZZARELLO
Art by ANDY KUBERT and KLAUS JANSON
Cover by JIM LEE
On sale DECEMBER 9 • 40 pg, FC, 7.0625” x 10.875”, $12.99 US • RATED T+
This oversized paper-over-boards COLLECTOR’S EDITION features both stories from DARK KNIGHT III: THE MASTER RACE #1 at the same size!
SUPERMAN: AMERICAN ALIEN #1
Written by MAX LANDIS
Art by NICK DRAGOTTA
Cover by RYAN SOOK
1:25 Variant cover by NICK DRAGOTTA
On sale NOVEMBER 11 • 32 pg, FC, 1 of 7, $3.99 US • RATED T+
Retailers: This issue will ship with two covers. Please see the order form for details.
Hollywood screenwriter and Eisner Award nominee Max Landis (Chronicle, American Ultra, ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN) joins forces with top comics artists including Jock, Francis Manapul and Jae Lee to bring you SUPERMAN: AMERICAN ALIEN, a 7-issue miniseries chronicling the life of Clark Kent and his development into the archetypal hero he will eventually become. But these are not the stories of the iconic “Superman” as you know him, but of the soft-spoken, charming, often-funny Kansas farm-boy behind the Man of Steel. With the tone of each issue ranging from heartwarming and simple, to frighteningly gritty and violent, to sexy, sun-kissed and funny, SUPERMAN: AMERICAN ALIEN is unlike anything you’ve seen before.
In this first issue, superstar artist Nick Dragotta (East of West, Fantastic Four) illustrates the story of Jonathan and Martha Kent as they struggle to deal with their 12-year-old son’s latest quirk—he’s been floating up into the air, sometimes hundreds of feet!
BATMAN: EUROPA #1
Written by MATTEO CASALI and BRIAN AZZARELLO
Layouts by GIUSSEPPE CAMUNCOLI
Art and cover by JIM LEE
1:25 Variant cover by LEE BERMEJO
1:100 B&W Sketch variant by JIM LEE
RESOLICIT • On sale NOVEMBER 18 • 40 pg, FC, 1 of 4, $4.99 US • RATED T+
Retailers: This issue will ship with three covers. Please see the order form for more information. This issue is resolicited. All previous orders are cancelled.
Superstar artist Jim Lee returns to the Dark Knight with this premiere issue! The impossible has happened and Batman is on the verge of being taken down by an enemy he cannot defeat: a virus for which there is no cure! And the only hope for his salvation is The Joker! Who infected Batman, what does the Clown Prince of Crime know, and how will the Dark Knight get that information? Together, the enemies crisscross Europe, desperate to find answers before time runs out.
Co-conceived by Matteo Casali and Brian Azzarello, this 4-issue miniseries event will feature art by top talents over layouts by the incomparable Giuseppe Camuncoli (HELLBLAZER, Dark Wolverine), with the first issue pencilled and inked by none other than Jim Lee!
BATMAN AND ROBIN ETERNAL #5
Story by JAMES TYNION IV and SCOTT SNYDER
Script by STEVE ORLANDO
Art by SCOT EATON
Art and cover by FRANCIS MANAPUL
On sale NOVEMBER 4 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T
The new Batman weekly powers into its second month—and goes international! Batman’s greatest secret has torn the Robins apart, sending them on different missions around the world. What is the significance of the case Batman and Robin worked five years ago in Prague? What will Jason Todd and Tim Drake find on the island of vice that is Gamorra? And can Harper Row get through the wall Cassandra Cain has built around herself?
BATMAN AND ROBIN ETERNAL #6
Story by JAMES TYNION IV and SCOTT SNYDER
Script by JAMES TYNION IV
Art by TONY S. DANIEL and SANDU FLOREA
Cover by FRANCIS MANAPUL
On sale NOVEMBER 11 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T
The new Batman weekly powers into its second month—and goes international! Batman’s greatest secret has torn the Robins apart, sending them on different missions around the world. What is the significance of the case Batman and Robin worked five years ago in Prague? What will Jason Todd and Tim Drake find on the island of vice that is Gamorra? And can Harper Row get through the wall Cassandra Cain has built around herself?
BATMAN AND ROBIN ETERNAL #7
Story by JAMES TYNION IV and SCOTT SNYDER
Script by GENEVIEVE VALENTINE
Art by ALVARO MARTINEZ and RAUL FERNANDEZ
Cover by FRANCIS MANAPUL
On sale NOVEMBER 18 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T
The new Batman weekly powers into its second month—and goes international! Batman’s greatest secret has torn the Robins apart, sending them on different missions around the world. What is the significance of the case Batman and Robin worked five years ago in Prague? What will Jason Todd and Tim Drake find on the island of vice that is Gamorra? And can Harper Row get through the wall Cassandra Cain has built around herself?
BATMAN AND ROBIN ETERNAL #8
Story by JAMES TYNION IV and SCOTT SNYDER
Script by GENEVIEVE VALENTINE
Art by ALVARO MARTINEZ and RAUL FERNANDEZ
Cover by FRANCIS MANAPUL
On sale NOVEMBER 25 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T
The new Batman weekly powers into its second month—and goes international! Batman’s greatest secret has torn the Robins apart, sending them on different missions around the world. What is the significance of the case Batman and Robin worked five years ago in Prague? What will Jason Todd and Tim Drake find on the island of vice that is Gamorra? And can Harper Row get through the wall Cassandra Cain has built around herself?
JUSTICE LEAGUE #46
Written by GEOFF JOHNS
Art and cover by FRANCIS MANAPUL
LOONEY TUNES Variant cover by SCOTT WILLIAMS
On sale NOVEMBER 18 • 32 pg, FC, $3.99 US • RATED T
Retailers: This issue will ship with two covers. Please see the order form for more information.
“Darkseid War” rages on! The Justice League has become Gods! Grail discovers a truth about Wonder Woman that disturbs even her! And a shocking secret about the fate of the Anti-Monitor will force the League to seek out new and unlikely allies!
JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #6
Written by BRYAN HITCH
Art and cover by BRYAN HITCH and DANIEL HENRIQUES
Cover by BRYAN HITCH
LOONEY TUNES Variant cover by HOWARD PORTER and Warner Bros. Animation
On sale NOVEMBER 25 • 32 pg, FC, $3.99 US • RATED T
Retailers: This issue will ship with two covers. Please see the order form for details.
Bryan Hitch continues to test the World’s Greatest Heroes! It’s all-out war against the forces of Rao!
JUSTICE LEAGUE UNITED #15
Written by JEFF PARKER
Art by PAUL PELLETIER and ROB HUNTER
Cover by TONY HARRIS
On sale NOVEMBER 11 • 32 pg, FC, $3.99 US • RATED T
“Warzone” concludes with a tremendous team-up never before seen in DC Comics history as the Justice League joins forces with Sgt. Rock, Enemy Ace, the Creature Commandos and OMAC to destroy a bizarre threat that could plunge our heroes into endless war!
AQUAMAN #46
Written by CULLEN BUNN
Art by TREVOR McCARTHY
Cover by NEIL EDWARDS
LOONEY TUNES variant cover by IVAN REIS and Warner Bros. Animation
On sale NOVEMBER 25 • 32 pg, FC, $3.99 US • RATED T
Retailers: This issue will ship with two covers. Please see the order form for details.
Ocean Master returns! And nobody’s happy about that—least of all the villain himself!
BLACK CANARY #6
Written by BRENDEN FLETCHER
Art and cover by ANNIE WU
LOONEY TUNES Variant cover by
PIA GUERRA and Warner Bros. Animation
On sale NOVEMBER 18 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T
Retailers: This issue will ship with two covers. Please see the order form for details.
The secret of who assembled this pack of misfits into the band that became Black Canary is revealed—and the answer is stranger than you’d ever dream! There’s a higher purpose to dropping Ditto into Dinah’s life, but will they both survive the mission they’re meant to complete?
CONSTANTINE: THE HELLBLAZER #6
Written by MING DOYLE and JAMES TYNION IV
Art and cover by RILEY ROSSMO
On sale NOVEMBER 11 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T+
New York, New York it’s one HELL of a town! John Constantine returns beaten and broken from his English excursion to find his adopted American home in magical peril. A mysterious plot is building in the mystic underbelly of New York City—demons, imps, monsters, fairies are running rampant, and only the Hellblazer can save the Big Apple from an infernal takeover. But does he even want to?
CYBORG #5
Written by DAVID F. WALKER
Art by IVAN REIS and JOE PRADO
Cover by IVAN REIS
LOONEY TUNES variant cover by CULLY HAMNER and Warner Bros. Animation
On sale NOVEMBER 25 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T
Retailers: This issue will ship with two covers. Please see the order form for more information.
Cyborg has the technology the alien Technosapiens are after—and they’ll stop at nothing to make Victor Stone a part of their permanent collection!
DEATHSTROKE #12
Written by TONY S. DANIEL and JAMES BONNY
Art and cover by TYLER KIRKHAM
LOONEY TUNES variant cover by RYAN BENJAMIN and Warner Bros. Animation
On sale NOVEMBER 25 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T+
Retailers: This issue will ship with two covers. Please see the order form for details.
Slade continues his “Suicide Mission”! To get at Amanda Waller, he’ll go through any super-villain that gets in his way—including Catwoman! Good thing he’s getting a little help from Harley Quinn!
DC COMICS BOMBSHELLS #4
Written by MARGUERITE BENNETT
Art by BILQUIS EVELY, MIRKO ANDOLFO and MARGUERITE SAUVAGE
Cover by ANT LUCIA
On sale NOVEMBER 11 • 40 pg, FC, $3.99 US • RATED T • DIGITAL FIRST
Shipping twice in November! In a London hospital, a strange patient has a message for Dr. Harleen Quinzel…one that leads the doctor to hijack a plane out of the city! And, Supergirl and Stargirl lead a bombing raid, only to discover a terrible secret that leaves them questioning their loyalties. Plus, Batwoman arrives in Italy where she encounters Contessa Selina Digatti—a.k.a. the Catwoman!
DC COMICS BOMBSHELLS #5
Written by MARGUERITE BENNETT
Art by BILQUIS EVELY, LAURA BRAGA and MIRKA ANDOLFO
Cover by ANT LUCIA
On sale NOVEMBER 25 • 40 pg, FC, $3.99 US • RATED T • DIGITAL FIRST
Shipping twice in November! While Wonder Woman leads an American infantry division in an attack on an Axis battalion, Harley makes a none-too-graceful landing in France, where she encounters a woman with a strange affinity for plants. Plus, Supergirl and Stargirl fly home to protect their parents, only to be attacked by a fearsome forest spirit known as the Swamp Thing.
DOCTOR FATE #6
Written by PAUL LEVITZ
Art and cover by SONNY LIEW
On sale NOVEMBER 18 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T
New York City goes dark as the new Doctor Fate battles the ancient god Anubis to the death—but gods can’t die, can they?
EARTH 2: SOCIETY #6
Written by DANIEL H. WILSON
Art and cover by JORGE JIMENEZ
On sale NOVEMBER 11 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T
The heroes of Earth-2 grow closer to discovering the real dangers that lurk in their new world as the murderous Hourman is revealed.
THE FLASH #46
Written by ROBERT VENDITTI and VAN JENSEN
Art and cover by BRETT BOOTH and NORM RAPMUND
LOONEY TUNES Variant cover by FRANCIS MANAPUL and Warner Bros. Animation
On sale NOVEMBER 25 • 32 pg, FC, $3.99 US • RATED T
Retailers: This issue will ship with two covers. Please see the order form for more information.
Is the missing Heat Wave dead—or alive? The Rogues reunite to find out. But the search has gone so bad that they need to enlist the help of The Flash to find out!
GREEN ARROW #46
Written by BENJAMIN PERCY
Art and cover by PATRICK ZIRCHER
LOONEY TUNES Variant cover by KEVIN NOWLAN and Warner Bros. Animation
On sale NOVEMBER 4 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T
Retailers: This issue will ship with two covers. Please see the order form for details.
The city of Juarez has been overrun by Jefe and his Skeleton Cartel. He plans a sacrifice to honor the Day of the Dead. Can Green Arrow and Tarantula really stop an army of the darkness? Or will they simply become the first victims?
JUSTICE LEAGUE 3001 #6
Written by KEITH GIFFEN and J.M. DeMATTEIS
Art and cover by HOWARD PORTER
On sale NOVEMBER 25 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T
Evil Zeus of Injustice League 3000 has returned, and he’s created a new race of the most bizarre New Gods in DCU history! And a new threat enters U.P. space and they’re systematically eliminating any and all obstacles to their master’s conquest. Plus, the most unexpected super death in super history. No. Really. You’ll never guess.
LOBO #12
Written by CULLEN BUNN and FRANK BARBIERI
Art by ROBSON ROCHA
Cover by LEONARDO MANCO
On sale NOVEMBER 4 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T+
After falling victim to a deadly new drug that’s making its way through the black markets of the universe, Lobo begins to doubt his own sanity!
MARTIAN MANHUNTER #6
Written by ROB WILLIAMS
Art by EDDY BARROWS and EBER FERREIRA
Cover by DAN PANOSIAN
On sale NOVEMBER 18 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T+
A new female Martian warrior emerges as the mystery of our four heroes and their connection to the late J’onn J’onzz is finally revealed, and the Martian invasion reaches its deadly endgame.
MIDNIGHTER #6
Written by STEVE ORLANDO
Art and cover by ACO
On sale NOVEMBER 4 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T+
Midnighter’s always lived his life believing nothing could ever hurt him—but that was before he let someone he cared about into his world! When a mysterious enemy targets the family of the man he loves, all bets are off...
NEW SUICIDE SQUAD #14
Written by SEAN RYAN
Art by PHILIPPE BRIONES
Cover by JUAN FERREYRA
LOONEY TUNES variant cover by BILL SIENKIEWICZ and Warner Bros. Animation
On sale NOVEMBER 4 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T+
Retailers: This issue will ship with two covers. Please see the order form for details. This story was previously scheduled to appear in issue #13.
A new adventure begins! Task Force X tries to pick up the pieces after their harrowing mission against the Justice League, and more questions are raised about the enigmatic Vic Sage.
THE OMEGA MEN #6
Written by TOM KING
Art by BARNABY BAGENDA
Cover by TREVOR HUTCHISON
On sale NOVEMBER 4 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T+
Former Green Lantern Kyle Rayner and the Omega Men—captured at last! Now, these alleged terrorists are about to be processed and jailed with all the dignity and rights afforded them by benevolent Citadel law.
PREZ #6
Written by MARK RUSSELL
Art and cover by BEN CALDWELL
On sale NOVEMBER 18 • 32 pg, FC, 6 of 6, $2.99 US • RATED T
As the cat flu ravages the nation, President Ross has to ward off an angry Senate, while her transgender robot bodyguard saves her from virus rights protesters.
RED HOOD/ARSENAL #6
Written by SCOTT LOBDELL
Art by DENIS MEDRI
Cover by HOWARD PORTER
On sale NOVEMBER 11 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T
Roy and Jason have been through a lot with their new start-up business, and a therapy session to vent a few grievances seems like just what the doctor ordered. Too bad Sera Phina and her team of villains are finally assembled and ready to launch their attack!
ALL-STAR SECTION EIGHT #6
Written by GARTH ENNIS
Art by JOHN McCREA
Cover by AMANDA CONNER
On sale NOVEMBER 11 • 32 pg, FC, 6 of 6, $2.99 US • RATED T+
Sixpack travels to the ends of the earth in his search for answers, but Dogwelder has already come face-to-face with his own past. The awful truth about Section Eight begins to dawn on our ragged little band—but just when things are at their bleakest, a hero appears with exactly the solution they’re looking for. Not a minute too soon, as the long-awaited threat finally appears in Gotham City...
SECRET SIX #8
Written by GAIL SIMONE
Art and cover by DALE EAGLESHAM
On sale NOVEMBER 18 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T+
As monstrous giant beings from beyond the stars pound at the gates of reality, the Secret Six reluctantly race around the globe (with their guide, the demon ETRIGAN) as they attempt to prevent a horrifying fate for all mankind. Guest stars galore as the balance of power in the DCU rests solely in the hands of teenager Lori Zechlin, a.k.a. Black Alice!
SENSATION COMICS FEATURING WONDER WOMAN #16
Written by CAITLIN KITTREDGE and JASON BADOWER
Art by SCOTT HAMPTON and JASON BADOWER
Cover by DOUG MAHNKE and CHRISTIAN ALAMY
On sale NOVEMBER 4 • 40 pg, FC, $3.99 US • RATED T • DIGITAL FIRST
The streets of Gotham City are dangerous at night, but not for Diana of Themyscira. When she sees Echidna, Mother of Monsters, attacking a local thug, she jumps into the fray—though she never expected to take Echidna’s side. And stick around as Clark Kent’s exposé “A Day in our Lives” hits the Daily Planet!
STARFIRE #6
Written by AMANDA CONNER and JIMMY PALMIOTTI
Art EMANUELA LUPACCHINO and RAY McCARTHY
Cover by AMANDA CONNER
LOONEY TUNES Variant cover by EMANUELA LUPACCHINO and Warner Bros. Animation
On sale NOVEMBER 11 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T
Retailers: This issue will ship with two covers. Please see the order form for more information.
Starfire’s new job at the aquarium has had some ups and downs, but that’s nothing compared to the adventure that’s about to begin. And this time, it hits close to home—from a galaxy far, far away.
TEEN TITANS #14
Written by WILL PFEIFER
Art by IAN CHURCHILL
Cover by ETHAN VAN SCIVER
LOONEY TUNES Variant cover by JOE QUINONES and Warner Bros. Animation
On sale NOVEMBER 25 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T
Retailers: This issue will ship with two covers. Please see the order form for details.
Just as the team begins to determine its new direction, a mind-wiping demon steals the Titans memories! And when Red Robin goes missing, the teen heroes must save the city and also figure out if they really want their former leader to return.
TITANS HUNT #2
Written by DAN ABNETT
Art and cover by PAULO SIQUEIRA
On sale NOVEMBER 18 • 32 pg, FC, 2 of 12, $3.99 US • RATED T
“The Secret History of the Teen Titans” continues! Dick Grayson is hot on the trail of a young Atlantean named Garth—but what he doesn’t realize is that something is hunting him! Plus, Roy Harper encounters a mysterious woman named Lilith—and this run-in will leave him questioning his own past!
TELOS #2
Written by JEFF KING
Art and cover by CARLO PAGULAYAN and JASON PAZ
On sale NOVEMBER 11 • 32 pg, FC, $2.99 US • RATED T
A secret history of Convergence is revealed when Brainiac offers Telos a terrible choice: Save his people or save his planet. And now, years later, is Brainiac the only ally in Telos’s search to find his lost family? Or could he put his faith in K’Rot, Stealth, and Captain Comet instead?
WONDER WOMAN #46
Written by MEREDITH FINCH
Art and cover by DAVID FINCH
LOONEY TUNES Variant cover by TERRY DODSON, RACHEL DODSON and Warner Bros. Animation
On sale NOVEMBER 18 • 32 pg, FC, $3.99 US • RATED T
Retailers: This issue will ship with two covers. Please see the order form for more information.
Diana finds herself trapped between Donna Troy and Aegeus in a battle that will redefine the role of the Amazon queen!
ACTION COMICS #46
Written by GREG PAK and AARON KUDER
Art and cover by AARON KUDER
LOONEY TUNES Variant cover by NEIL EDWARDS and Warner Bros. Animation
On sale NOVEMBER 11 • 32 pg, FC, $3.99 US • RATED T
Retailers: This issue will ship with two covers. Please see the order form |
To act against one another then is contrary to nature; and it is acting against one another to be vexed and to turn away.
Yes, a passage that might have come from the speeches of Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, or Martin Luther King, Jr. also belongs to the philosophical traditions of ancient Rome, though in the mouth of an emperor it may not sound to us as compellingly radical.
Nowadays, several million more people have access to books, literacy, and leisure than in Marcus Aurelius’ era (and one wonders where even an emperor found the time), though few of us, it’s true, have access to a nobleman’s education. While currently under threat, the internet still provides us with a wealth of free content—and many of us are much better positioned than Epictetus was to educate ourselves about philosophical traditions, schools, and ways of thinking.
We can learn about the Stoics, for example—or get the gist, and hopefully a taste for more—with Alain de Botton’s video appetizer at the top, just one of 30 short animated videos on the philosophy YouTube channel of his School of Life.
We can cruise through a summary of Aristotle’s views on “flourishing” in the video above, narrated by the always-affable Stephen Fry as part of the BBC’s “History of Ideas” series, currently up to 48 uniquely animated videos featuring other smart-sounding celebrity narrators like Harry Shearer and Gillian Anderson.
The Macat series of philosophy explainer videos (136 in total) may lack celebrity cred, but it makes up for it with some very thorough short summaries of important works in philosophy—as well as sociology, psychology, history, politics, economics, and literature. “The essential purpose of politics is freedom,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her 1958 The Human Condition, we learn above, a work of hers that is not focused on mass murder and totalitarianism. Arendt had much more to say, and in this book, she relies on a classical distinction well known to the Greeks and Romans and all who came after them: the contrast between two kinds of life—the vita activa and vita contemplativa.
While philosophy may have become much more accessible, it has also become less “open access”—in the sense of being a public affair, taking place in city squares and actively encouraged by statesmen and ordinary loiterers alike. For all its possibilities—and we hope they can remain—the internet has never been able to recreate the Athenian ideal of the philosophical public square, if such a thing ever really existed. But projects like Wireless Philosophy—sponsored by Yale, MIT, Duke, and other elite institutions—have sought for years to introduce people from every walk of life to the kinds of ideas that Athenians supposedly threw around like frisbees in their spare time, including Plato’s notion (via his mouthpiece, Socrates) of “the good life,” which University of New Orleans professor Chris Surprenent, summarizes above. See all of Wireless Philosophy's 130 animations here.
The material is out there. We've highlighted 350 philosophical animations above, and also separately gathered 170 Free Online Philosophy Courses. And, if you’re reading this, it’s a good bet you’ve probably got a little time to spare. If it’s an old-fashioned sales pitch you need to get going, consider that for just pennies, er, minutes a day, you can become more knowledgeable about ancient Greek and Roman thought, Kantian ethics, 20th century Critical Theory, Nietzsche, critical thinking skills, Scholastic theological thought, Buddhism, Wittgenstein, Sartre, etc., etc, etc., etc. That said, however, acquiring the concentration, discipline, and will to do your own thinking about what you’ve learned, and to apply it, has never been so free and easy to come by for anyone at any time in history.
Related Content:
48 Animated Videos Explain the History of Ideas: From Aristotle to Sartre
Watch Animated Introductions to 25 Philosophers by The School of Life: From Plato to Kant and Foucault
105 Animated Philosophy Videos from Wireless Philosophy: A Project Sponsored by Yale, MIT, Duke & More
135 Free Philosophy eBooks
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagnessThere's a lot to discuss this Thanksgiving. (PeopleImages/Getty Stock Images)
Thanksgiving is about getting together with family, having turkey, watching football, ignoring the embarrassingly drunk relatives and then arguing about politics. Now that we are one year into the Trump presidency, I suspect many Thanksgiving discussions around the country will be even more robust than usual.
So much to discuss! In that spirit, I offer some conversation starters for this year's political discussions. Most of us have family members across the political spectrum, so here is a broad range of conversational tinder. Try one of these nuggets, and let the cogent, thoughtful discussion begin.
For those of you with Red State relatives, early in the day, perhaps over wine and cheese (or beer), you can offer up: "Boy that Donald Trump is real blue collar, huh? A man of the people. Does anyone know: Is he spending Thanksgiving at his Manhattan penthouse, or at one of his golf resorts?"
If there is a lull in the conversation as everyone sits down to a beautiful table, toss out a question to the extended family: "Hey, do any of you remember back when the Republicans cared about balanced budgets and fiscal responsibility? Anyone? No? I guess you're all too young."
Cartoons on the Republican Party View All 224 Images
During a commercial in the Cowboys-Chargers game, you can kill some time and inspire conversation with this thought: "Now that the game has gone to break, we should talk about what the Republicans have been able to get done in Congress this past year." Pause for effect. "Wow, that didn't take long, did it? Is the game still not back on yet?"
If you have smug Blue State relatives, there are also plenty of ways to stir the discussion. Try this comment as your liberal relatives arrive, take off their coats and immediately begin lambasting the president: "Yeah, that Trump is something. Who do you think is more likely to lose to him in 2020, Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren?"
Blue Staters are inclined to bring up how commercialized Thanksgiving has become, which leads naturally to this query: "Speaking of Black Friday, how about that 'Better Deal' Chuck Schumer is offering. Does anyone have any idea what the heck that means? Does it involve coupons?"
Here is a versatile observation that can work all day: "So, who's read Hillary's book?" Pause for the uncomfortable silence. "Are we not talking about Hillary anymore?"
Try this nugget over coffee and dessert, after an evening with much discussion of Republican moral transgressions: "Do you remember that Thanksgiving when all of you were arguing that Bill Clinton should resign?" Pause for effect. "Yeah, neither do I." (A Clinton resignation would have made Al Gore president, which would have given him a huge boost in the election against George W. Bush. So this could be beginning of a much longer discussion.)
Having stirred up spirited conversation among the adults, you might then wander over to the kids' table:
"Hey kids, do you know what the national debt is? No? Never mind. Why don't all of you go get yourselves an extra piece of pie. My generation has been eating dessert at your expense for decades. Uncle Charlie may sound crazy now, but someday when you're at the adult table – paying much higher taxes than we are and getting less – you'll understand what I'm talking about."
When one of those children throws a tantrum, acts immature or otherwise behaves boorishly, you can wisely observe, "Wow, that kid might grow up to be president someday."
I suspect you will have a spirited day.When I was eight years old, the only makeup I ever wanted to put on my face was Halloween makeup. Sure, some of my friends liked to play dress up—and I went along with it sometimes, especially if I wanted them to play Ninja Turtles with me afterward—and then we’d smear a bit of eye shadow and lipstick on, but it was never intended to be a long-term, serious project. Something we should all inherently know, after all, is that cosmetics are not intended for children; if there’s anyone in the world we need to reassure looks just perfect the way she is, it’s a child.
But Wal-Mart doesn’t seem to think so. In fact, they’ve recently hit a new low by launching an entire line of makeup called geoGirl for young girls ages 8 to 12. It’s not enough that statistics have shown that 80% of ten year old girls have dieted; we need to make sure to promote an unhealthy body image and dissatisfaction with the way we look to all young girls! No age is too young to start being a consumer, little ladies!
Ugh, Wal-Mart, just when you were beginning to impress me with your healthy food selections and organic choices, you have to go and pull a stunt like this. And you know what the worst part is? Parents are going to buy this crap up for their kids. They already buy the toy kiddie makeup (you know, the blue crayons and pink wax sticks that make your child look like a circus clown, which at least isn’t a hyper-sexualized toddler, I guess) and now they’re going to buy this, especially since Wal-Mart claims the crap is eco-friendly. I’ve seen so many mothers worry about every item that goes into their kids’ lunchboxes and then turn around and let them paint formaldehyde (nail polish), lead (lipstick), and plenty of other harmful chemicals on their faces in the same hour. What the hell do they think, that because their food is chemical-free (and it’s not 100%, of course) that they can make up for it by slathering it on their skin?
Well, now apparently they won’t have to worry, since Wal-Mart’s new 69 cosmetics made for children—including anti-aging exfoliating products, because every 8-year-old girl knows it’s the fashionable thing to look 6—are “safe cosmetics.”
Bullshit. There’s no such thing as a safe cosmetic when a little girl’s sense of self is on the line. The media, her peers, her school, and everything else on the planet is already working to destroy that from the moment she is born. She could at least use an ally in the home who won’t let her paint her face to change it.FC Bayern will be without Javi Martínez in Tuesday's Champions League Group D trip to face PSV Eindhoven. The Spanish defender pulled a thigh muscle in the first half of FCB's Bundesliga match away to FC Augsburg on Saturday and now misses the European tie in the Netherlands. Mats Hummels came on after 29 minutes of Saturday's match in place of Martínez.
Rafinha resumes team training
On the plus side, Carlo Ancelotti will in all likelihood be able to call on Rafinha for the PSV clash. The right-back resumed the squad training programme on Sunday after shaking off a groin injury that restricted him to light exercise last week. Rafinha was substituted towatds the end of last weekend's 2-0 victory over Borussia Mönchengladbach after becoming aware of the problem.Like many of us that did not quite make it to Miami for the Ultra Music Festival, we experienced it through drooling over youtube’s live feed, reading news updates and envying all the tweets happening this weekend. Ultra has grown exponentially every year and 2012 was no exception. Featuring just about everyone in the Electronic Dance Music scene, the festival took Miami by storm and the many ripples are still pass through the blogosphere.
However, this post will try to bring the experience and music into the comfort of your own home. Now, we are not saying that we will bring you sexy raver chicks dancing around you with glowsticks, but we hope these live sets from our favorite dj/producers can help you ease the pain of missing Ultra this year.
Tracklist:
01. Afrojack – Bangduck (Intro Edit) [Wall]
02. Larry Tee feat. Roxy Cottontail (Afrojack Remix) [Ultra] w/ Afrojack – Polkadots (Oliver Twizt Remix) [Wall]
03. ID (8min30sec) w/ Calvin Harris – Feel So Close [Sony] w/ Martin Solveig feat. Dragonette – Hello (Acappella) [Mixture]
04. Major Lazer feat. Vybz Kartel – Pon De Floor (Afrojack Remix) [Mad Decent] w/ Daft Punk – Aerodynamic [Virgin]
05. ID (15min)
06. Afrojack feat. Eva Simons – Take Over Control [Wall]
07. ID (26min15sec) w/ Justice vs. Simian – We Are Your Friends (Acappella) [Ed Banger]
08. Afrojack – Fatility [Wall]
09. ANSOL & Dyro – Top Of The World [Wall] w/ Rihanna feat. Calvin Harris – We Found Love (Acappella) [Sony]
10. Afrojack & Steve Aoki feat. Miss Palmer – No Beef (Vocal Mix) [Wall / Dim Mak]
11. ID
12. David Guetta feat. Usher – Without You (R3hab’s XS Remix) [F*** Me I’m Famous] w/ Shermanology Live
13. Afrojack & Shermanology – Can’t Stop Me [Wall] w/ Shermanology Live
Tracklist:
01. ID
02. The Wanted – Glad You Came (Bassjackers Remix)
03. Firebeatz – Where’s Your Head At [Spinnin]
04. Dada Life – White Noise, Red Meat (Bassjackers Remix) [Dim Mak] w/ Estelle feat. Kardinal Offishall – Freak (Acappella) [Atlantic]
05. Angger Dimas – Hey Freak! [Mixmash] w/ Estelle feat. Kardinal Offishall – Freak (Acappella) [Atlantic]
06. Drumsound & Bassline Smith – Freak (Bassjackers Remix) [New State]
07. Angger Dimas & Bassjackers – RIA [Doorn]
08. ID (28min)
Tracklist:
01. Benny Benassi vs. Marshall Jefferson – Move Your Body (2012 Version) [Ultra]
02. Avesta – Arena [Musical Freedom]
03. Felguk – Bassive [Dongle]
04. Daddy’s Groove – Power 2 The People [Test Pressing]
05. ID (20min)
06. Ferry Corsten – Check It Out (Bassjackers Remix) [Flashover]
07. Benny Benassi feat. Gary Go – Close To Me (R3hab Remix) [Ultra]
08. Benny Benassi feat. Gary Go – Cinema (Laidback Luke Remix) [Ultra]
09. Benny Benassi feat. Gary Go – Control [Ultra]
10. Congorock – Monolith [Ultra]
11. Firebeatz – Funky Shit [Spinnin]
12. ID (49min)
13. Madonna – Girl Gone Wild (Benny Benassi Remix) [Interscope]
Tracklist: TBA
Tracklist: TBA
Tracklist:
01. Martin Solveig feat. Kele – Ready 2 Go (Hardwell Remix) [Mixture] w/ Hardwell – Spaceman [Revealed]
02. Rihanna feat. Calvin Harris – We Found Love [Sony]
03. Knife Party – Tourniquet [AEI]
04. Martin Solveig & Dragonette feat. Idoling!!! – Big In Japan (Les Bros a.k.a TV Noise Remix) [Mixture] w/ Daft Punk – Technologic (Acappella) [Virgin]
05. Bingo Players – Rattle [Hysteria]
06. DJ Mehdi – Signatune (Thomas Bangalter Edit) [Ed Banger]
07. Skrillex & Wolfgang Gartner – The Devil’s Den [Owsla]
08. Gotye feat. Kimbra – Somebody That I Used To Know (The FatRat Bootleg)
09. Skrillex – Scary Monsters And Nice Sprites [Big Beat]
10. Franz Ferdinand – Do You Want To [Domino]
11. Swedish House Mafia – Greyhound [EMI]
12. Miike Snow – Devil’s Work (Alex Metric Remix) [Sony]
13. Lykke Li – I Follow Rivers (The Magician Remix) [Big Beat]
14. Arty, Matisse & Sadko – Trio [Axtone]
15. Franz Ferdinand – Do You Want To [Domino] w/ Skrillex & The Doors – Breakn’ A Sweat [Owsla]
16. Red Hot Chili Peppers – Can’t Stop [Warner]
17. Bart B More & Felix Cartal – Cascade [Boysnoize] w/ Nirvana – Smells Like Teen Spirit [Geffen] w/ Knife Party – Internet Friends [AEI]
18. Oasis – Wonderwall [Big Brother]
19. David Guetta & Afrojack – Lunar [EMI]
20. Martin Solveig – The Night Out [Mixture]
21. Fun feat. Janelle Monae – We Are Young
22. Martin Solveig feat. Dragonette – Hello [Mixture]
Tracklist:
01. R3hab & Swanky Tunes feat. Max C – Sending My Love [Wall]
02. Example – Changed The Way You Kiss Me [Ministry Of Sound] w/ Sandro Silva & Quintino – Epic [Musical Freedom]
03. Hard Rock Sofa – Quasar [Axtone] w/ Benny Benassi – Satisfaction [You] w/ Diddy, Dirty Money feat. Skylar Grey – Coming Home (Dirty South Remix) [Interscope] w/ Daft Punk – Aerodynamic [Virgin]
04. Sebastian Ingrosso & Alesso – Calling (R3hab & Swanky Tunes Remix) [Refune]
05. ID (24min)
06. Red Hot Chili Peppers – Otherside (Third Party Remix) [One More Tune]
07. Dada Life – Kick Out The Epic Motherfucker (Vocal Mix) [So Much Dada]
08. ID (40min)
09. Ivan Gough & Feenixpawl feat. Georgi Kay – In My Mind (Axwell Mix) [Axtone]
10. Swanky Tunes & Hard Rock Sofa – The Edge [Wall] w/ Fedde Le Grand – Put Your Hands Up For Detroit (Acappella) [Cr2]
Full Live set Video
Tracklist:
00. Intro w/ Madonna presenting Avicii
01. Madonna – Girl Gone Wild (Avicii Remix)
02. Lenny Kravitz – Superlove (ID Remix) (5min)
03. David Guetta & Avicii – Sunshine [EMI] w/ Florence and the Machine – Spectrum (Acappella) [Universal]
04. Avicii & Nicky Romero – Nicktim [Mixmash] w/ Justice – D.A.N.C.E. (Acappella) [Ed Banger]
05. Avicii – Fade Into Darkness [LE7ELS / Universal] w/ Florence & the Machine – You’ve Got The Love (Mark Knight Remix) [Toolroom] w/ Avicii – Fade Into Darkness (Albin Myers Remix) [Ministry Of Sound]
06. Avicii & Sebastien Drums – My Feelings For You [Work Machine] w/ Albin Myers – Hells Bells [Dim Mak]
07. Avicii – ”ID2″
08. David Guetta feat. Sia – Titanium (Alesso Remix) [F*** Me I’m Famous]
09. Avicii feat. Salem Al Fakir – Silhouettes [Le7els]
10. ID (39min)
11. Avicii – Levels [Le7els / Universal] w/ Gotye feat. Kimbra – Somebody That I Used To Know (Acappella) w/ Avicii – Levels (Vitzi’s Old School Intro Edit) [Le7els / Universal]
Full video of Fatboy Slim’s set
00. Intro
01. Fatboy Slim – Praise You [Skint]
02. His Majesty Andre – Clubs [Cheap Thrills] w/ Mark Knight & Koen Groeneveld – Put Your Hands Up (Acappella) [Toolroom]
03. ID (6min30sec) w/ Knife Party – Internet Friends (Acappella) [AEI]
04. Basement Jaxx – Where’s Your Head At [XL] w/ John Dahlback – Grunge [Mutants] w/ Knife Party – Internet Friends (Acappella) [AEI]
05. Tristan Garner & Gregori Klosman – Bounce [Xtra Life] w/ Seamus Haji & Cevin Fisher – I Love The Music (Miami Edit) [Strictly Rhythm]
06. As Tequileiras Do Funk & DJ Gasparzinho – Surra De Bunda (Sidney Samson Remix) [Samsobeats] w/ Calvin Harris feat. Kelis – Bounce [Sony]
07. Bingo Players – L’Amour [Hysteria] w/ LMFAO – I’m In Miami Bitch (Acappella)
08. 2Pac – California Love [Interscope]
09. Riva Starr & Fatboy Slim feat. Beardyman – Get Naked (Fatboy Slim vs. Futuristic Polar Bears ‘Naked Circus’ Remix) [Moshi Moshi]
10. Etta James – Something’s Got A Hold On Me [Geffen]
11. ID (31min)
12. Fatboy Slim – Star 69 [Skint] w/ Steve Angello – Rave N Roll [Size]
13. Nari & Milani – Kendo (Steve Angello ‘Size Matters’ Edit) [Size]
14. Steve Aoki & Sidney Samson – Wake Up Call [Dim Mak]
15. Seductive – Take Control (Tom Stephan Remix) [Spinnin]
16. ID w/ Fatboy Slim – Praise You [Skint]
Tracklist:
01. Hardwell – Spaceman [Revealed]
02. Bingo Players – Rattle [Hysteria]
03. Hardwell – Cobra [Revealed] w/ Nero – Promises (Acappella) [MTA]
04. ID (14min) w/ R3hab & Swanky Tunes feat. Max C – Sending My Love (Acappella) [Wall]
05. Faithless – Insomnia (Dannic Bootleg) (19min)
06. Sporty-O & Whiskey Pete – Heard Of Us (PeaceTreaty Remix) [Illeven:eleven] w/ Empire Of The Sun – Walking On A Dream (Acappella) [EMI] w/ Jay-Z & Kanye West – Niggas In Paris [Roc Nation]
07. Rene Kuppens & Dyro – Raid [Revealed]
08. Nirvana – Smells Like Teen Spirit [Geffen] w/ Tommy Trash – Cascade [PinkStar]
09. Tiësto & Hardwell – Zero 76 [Musical Freedom]
10. Red Hot Chili Peppers – By The Way [Warner] w/ Chuckie – Who Is Ready To Jump (Dada Life Remix) [Big Beat] w/ Ferry Corsten – Punk (Arty ‘Rock-N-Rolla’ Remix) [Flashover]
11. Jordy Dazz – ID (44min)
12. Tiësto – Maximal Crazy [Musical Freedom]
13. Knife Party – Internet Friends [AEI] (Hardwell Edit)
Tracklist:
01. Savoy & Heather Bright – We Are The Sun (Laidback Luke Remix)
02. Avicii vs. Nicky Romero – Nicktim
03. Swedish House Mafia – Greyhound [EMI] w/ Laidback Luke feat. Jonathan Mendelsohn – Timebomb (Acappella) [Mixmash]
04. Rihanna – Man Down [The Island Def Jam] w/ La Fuente – Bang Bang [Mixmash]
05. iSquare – Hey Sexy Lady (Laidback Luke Remix) [Interscope] w/ Laidback Luke & Steve Aoki feat. Lil Jon – Turbulence (Acappella) [Mixmash]
06. Sandro Silva & Quintino – Epic [Musical Freedom]
07. Dada Life – Kick Out The Epic Motherfucker [So Much Dada] w/ Congorock – Babylon (Steve Angello Edit) [Fool’s Gold]
08. Sato Goldschlag feat. Wynter Gordon – Hey Mr. Mister (Laidback Luke Remix)
09. Laidback Luke feat. Wynter Gordon – Speak Up [Mixmash] (Live Vocals)
10. Wynter Gordon – Dirty Talk (Laidback Luke Remix) [Big Beat] (Live Vocals)
11. ID (29min45sec)
12. MSTRKRFT feat. John Legend – Heartbreaker (Laidback Luke Remix)
13. ID (33min15sec) w/ Congorock – Monolith [Ultra]
14. The White Stripes – Seven Nation Army [XL] w/ Swedish House Mafia – One [Virgin] w/ Benny Benassi – Satisfaction [You] w/ Jay-Z & Kanye West – Niggas In Paris [Roc Nation]
15. Snap! – The Power [Anzilotti & Munzing]
16. DMX – Party Up (Up In Here) [Def Jam] w/ ID (44min)
17. Laidback Luke & Steve Aoki feat. Lil Jon – Turbulence [Dim Mak]
18. Chuckie, Laidback Luke & Martin Solveig – 1234 [White]
19. Chuckie – Who Is Ready To Jump [Big Beat] w/ Bassjackers – Mush, Mush [Musical Freedom]
20. Benny Benassi feat. Gary Go – Cinema (Laidback Luke Remix) [Ultra]
Tracklist:
01. Joe Garston – The Promise [Plasmapool]
02. Mord Fustang – We Are Now Connected [Plasmapool]
03. Mord Fustang – Welcome To The Future [Plasmapool]
04. ID (5min30sec)
05. ID (8min)
06. Mord Fustang – Milky Way [Plasmapool] w/ Calvin Harris feat. Kelis – Bounce (Acappella) [Sony]
07. Digitalism – Circles (Eric Prydz Remix) [Pryda Friends]
08. Mord Fustang – Magic Trooper [Plasmapool]
09. ID (16min30sec)
10. ID (19min)
11. ID (22min)
12. Mord Fustang – Super Fever [Plasmapool]
13. Mord Fustang – Lick The Rainbow [Plasmapool]
14. Mord Fustang – The Majestic [Plasmapool]
15. Madeon – Icarus [Popcultur]
16. Morgan Page, Sultan, Ned Shepard & BT feat. Angela McCluskey – In The Air (Mord Fustang Remix) [Nettwerk]
17. ID (42min30sec)
Tracklist:
01. Swedish House Mafia feat. John Martin – Save The World (Zedd Remix) [EMI]
02. Tristan Garner – Raven [Xtra Life] w/ Nicky Romero – Generation 303 [Musical Freedom]
03. Swedish House Mafia – One [Virgin] w/ Lil Jon – Oh What A Night (Acappella) w/ Skrillex – Scary Monsters And Nice Sprites [Big Beat] w/ ID (4min)
04. Zedd & Lucky Date feat. Ellie Goulding – ID [White]
05. Zedd – The Legend Of Zelda [Bazooka]
06. Mike Candys & Jack Holiday – One More Time [White]
07. Zedd – Shotgun [Owsla]
08. ID (17min30sec)
09. Knife Party – Internet Friends [AEI]
10. Bingo Players – Rattle [Hysteria]
11. Pendulum – Salt In The Wounds [Warner]
12. Wolfgang Gartner – Menage A Trois [Ultra]
13. Reel 2 Real feat. The Mad Stuntman – I Like To Move It (Klaas Remix) [Strictly Rhythm]
14. The Bloody Beetroots feat. Steve Aoki – Warp 1.9 [Dim Mak]
15. Afrojack & Steve Aoki – No Beef [Wall] w/ Daft Punk – Harder, Better Faster, Stronger (Acappella) [Virgin] w/ Alesso – Raise Your Head [Refune] w/ ID w/ Diddy, Dirty Money feat. Skylar Grey – Coming Home (Dirty South Remix) [Interscope]
16. Benny Benassi feat. Gary Go – Cinema [Ultra] w/ Zedd – Slam The Door [Owsla]
Tracklist:
01. Bingo Players – Cry (Just A Little) [Hysteria]
02. Bingo Players – When I Dip [Spinnin]
03. Avicii vs. Nicky Romero – Nicktim w/ Justice – D.A.N.C.E (Acappella) [Ed Banger]
04. Bingo Players – Mode [Hysteria] w/ Pitbull feat. Lil Jon – Put Ya Fucking Hands Up (Acappella)
05. Hard Rock Sofa – Quasar [Axtone] w/ Zombie Nation – Kernkraft 400 [UKW]
06. Bingo Players – L’Amour [Hysteria] w/ Benny Benassi – Satisfaction (Acappella) [You]
07. Martin Solveig – The Night Out [Mixture] w/ Stardust – Music Sounds Better With You (Acappella) [Roulé] w/ ID (21min35sec)
08. Sebastian Ingrosso & Alesso – Calling [Refune] w/ Mark Knight & Koen Koeneveld – Put Your Hands Up (Acappella) [Toolroom]
09. Kenneth G – Bazinga [Hysteria] w/ Mirock – Why Am I Doing This (Acappella) [Stealth]
10. Will.I.Am feat. Jennifer Lopez & Mick Jagger – The Hardest Ever (ID Remix) (30min)
11. Afrojack & Steve Aoki – No Beef [Wall / Dim Mak]
12. ID (35min30sec)
13. ID (38min) w/ Daft Punk – One More Time [Virgin]
14. Bingo Players – Rattle [Hysteria]
15. Ralvero – Rage [Hysteria]
16. Dada Life – Kick Out The Epic Motherfucker [So Much Dada]
17. ID (53min)
Tracklist:
01. Fedde Le Grand & Nicky Romero – Freaky [White]
02. Benny Benassi – House Music [Ultra]
03. Nicky Romero – Generation 303 [Musical Freedom]
04. Fatboy Slim – Praise You (Fedde Le Grand Bootleg) w/ ID
05. Cassius – I Love You So [Ed Banger] w/ Tiësto & Hardwell – Zero 76 [Musical Freedom]
06. Fedde Le Grand & Patric La Funk – Autosave [Flamingo]
07. Michael Calfan – Resurrection (Axwell’s Recut Club Version) [Axtone] w/ Axwell & Sebastian Ingrosso feat. Michael Feiner – Together (Acappella) [Axtone]
08. Fedde Le Grand – Metrum [Toolroom] w/ Booka Shade & M.A.N.D.Y – Body Language [Get Physical] w/ Justice vs. Simian – We Are Your Friends (Acappella) [Ed Banger]
09. ID (28min30sec)
10. Faithless – Insomnia (Fedde Le Grand Bootleg) [White]
11. Avicii – Levels (Tocadisco Bootleg) [White]
12. Coldplay – Paradise (Fedde Le Grand Remix) [Toolroom]
13. Gotye feat. Kimbra – Somebody That I Used To Know (dBerrie Bootleg)
14. Alter Ego – Rocker (Patric La Funk & Dohr & Mangold Bootleg)
15. Dada Life – Kick Out The Epic Motherfucker [So Much Dada]
16. Steve Angello – KNAS [Size] w/ Fedde Le Grand – Put Your Hands Up For Detroit (Acappella) [Cr2]
via beatmyday.comIn our Introduction to the Festool Domino piece, we discussed the tool's design and listed some examples of the public response to it. But in this piece, we wanted to do a deep-dive with an experienced designer/builder who knows, and uses, this tool intimately. Mere product hype doesn't last long in a production environment, and if the Domino lives up to it over the long term, we wanted to hear it first-hand from a fellow designer—particularly one with a deep stable of tools from a variety of brands.
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Jory Brigham is a California-based furniture designer/builder, and you may recognize him from "Framework," Spike TV's furniture design competition show. We first spotted Brigham's work in 2011, and we certainly weren't the only ones: After making a splash at that year's Dwell on Design, his pieces began steadily making the blog rounds.
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A woodworker since childhood, Brigham first hung out the shingle for Jory Brigham Designs back in 2008 and began producing furniture, built-ins, retail displays and custom woodwork for customers as far away as Florida and Australia.
The year before, Festool had come out with the Domino amid much fanfare; Brigham, often up to his ears in sawdust trying to meet orders and with no time to sit in front of a computer reading websites about woodworking, had heard of neither the company nor the tool. Then he spied the Domino on a jobsite being toted around by a fellow builder.
"I didn't even know what it was, at first," says Jory. "But as soon as I saw what it did, it made total sense. And then I was like, 'Oh man—I gotta have this.'"
He picked one up later that week. To say it then found a permanent place in his shop is an understatement; and ironically, over the years this designer/builder who had never heard of Festool subsequently amassed so many of their products—often visible in the background of shop videos he used to post to his blog—that five years later, Festool contacted him and asked if they could feature him in their marketing materials.
(Editorial Note: Brigham is not a paid employee of Festool and has no official affiliation with the company, beyond being one of many American craftsmen they have featured over the years.)
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Here's our interview with Brigham:
Core77: You mentioned that after first seeing a Domino, you had to have one. Why?
Jory Brigham: Well for what I do in furniture, there's just so many times you need to join wood together. I mean it's every day, ten times a day. So I really had an excuse to spend the money.
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What had you been using to join wood, prior to seeing the Domino?
At that point, all I had was a biscuit joiner. I was using it for glue-ups and face frames and picture frames, stuff like that. And picture frames are just such a pain to make with the 45's, so I had initially bought a biscuit joiner figuring "Hey, this'll come in handy!"
It didn't?
No. It's like this—the biscuit joiner was so bad, you try to find ways around using it. There's so much slop in it. Let's take a glue-up—you'd cut the biscuit slots and put the biscuits in there, you'd clamp it up—and it would slide on you. The biscuits gave you that false sense of safety that it would be fine. Then you take the clamps off and find out it had slipped, and it's just not all flush.
Like let's say you're joining a bunch of large stock to make a wider piece, a slab. So with the biscuits you'd glue these pieces up and one would slip up, one would slip down. You run your finger over that seam, that joint, and find it wasn't flush—so you'd have to take a belt sander to the top to get it level, then flip the piece over and sand the bottom to do the same thing. You're losing time and now you're losing material, the piece is no longer as thick as what you had planned for.
And after you got the Domino, how did that change your workflow?
Oh, man—now I don't even dry-fit it. With the Domino the glue-ups come out perfectly flush. You don't have to sand that material down to even it out. It ends up thicker and it's way less labor. You just do it, and it works, and you don't have to worry about it. You can worry about other things on the project.
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Was making that transition from one tool to the other immediate? Do you remember the very first project you used the Domino on?
Gosh, no, I don't. I remember at first, using it on material that I wasn't going to use, just to try it out and test it—you know, with any new tool you sometimes get a little leery, so you want to try it on something that you won't ruin.
How long did it take you to really get comfortable with the tool?
Probably two weeks. At first I still had that paranoia from the biscuits and I was still doing a lot of dry-fitting before a glue-up—you know, putting the Dominos in there and joining it to the next board with no glue, making sure it all fits, and then pulling it out, and then gluing it up. But as I used the Domino more and more, I started to realize that I didn't have to worry about that anymore. And at this point, today, 95 percent of the time I just glue it up without dry-fitting it first because I trust it so much.
I mean it's pretty much a no-brainer. If you hold it tight to the board, then you're good. There is no slop, so less clamping is necessary. And when the boards are |
numerical symbol 1488. (That phrase contains 14 words, while 8 refers to the eighth letter of the alphabet, H, which doubled represents “Heil Hitler.”)
Paul Ramsey, a white nationalist who produced a video titled “Is it wrong not to feel sad about the Holocaust?” and who seeks to revise historical accounts of the Holocaust, asking, “Do you mean that six million figure? You know that six million figure has been used many times before World War II, did you know that?”
2. It’s also explicitly anti-Semitic. Paul Ramsey may not feel bad about the Holocaust, but some of the Alt-Right’s most prominent podcasts mock it in their very names, Fash The Nation and The Daily Shoah. Alt-Right hub The Right Stuff, which hosts the aforementioned podcasts, created a meme whereby Jews would be identified by placing parentheses around their names, as in (((Albert Einstein))) or (((Dennis Prager))). The Right Stuff explains the origin of the “echo” demarcation as highlighting that “all Jewish surnames echo throughout history. The echoes repeat the sad tale as they communicate the emotional lessons of our great white sins, imploring us to Never Forget the 6 GoRillion [sic].” An anonymous Alt-Right developer even uploaded a Google Chrome extension called “The Coincidence Detector” to automatically insert the parentheses around Jewish-sounding names and thereby highlight the “coincidence” that so many Jews occupy positions among the global elite, which illustrates another aspect of the movement...
3. The Alt-Right is tech savvy, with roots in Silicon Valley. It comes as no surprise that a primarily online movement would comprise tech-savvy supporters active on Twitter, 4chan, Reddit, and through endlessly permuting memes. But the Alt-Right’s techie roots run deeper, as outlined in an anonymous and formidable, albeit left-wing, history of the movement’s connection to Silicon Valley that appeared online in May called “The Silicon Ideology.”
Curtis Yarvin, a computer scientist and entrepreneur whose technology work has been funded by Peter Thiel, is credited as the godfather of the Alt-Right for founding the neo-fascist philosophy that undergirds the movement under the pen name Mencius Moldbug. Before Thiel declared, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Yarvin’s political philosophy, known as neoreaction or the Dark Enlightenment and outlined on his blog Unqualified Reservations, rejected the Enlightenment, democracy, and egalitarianism, while touting the underappreciated importance of “human biodiversity,” a euphemism for race.
Yarvin’s fellow Silicon Valley neo-reactionaries, most notably the futurist Michael Anissimov, have applied his ideas more technologically, into the realm of transhumanism, the historical origins of which lie in the Nazi conception of ubermesch and eugenics. But the Alt-Right’s connection to neoreaction begins with the incipient theme of Yarvin’s philosophy, an image out of The Matrix: the red pill of reality versus the blue pill of delusion. On that point…
4. The Alt-Right loves The Matrix. Alt-Right thinkers write incessantly about the red pill and the blue pill--and also the black pill. Lots of pills. Red means reality, a rather dark place according to the Alt-Right; blue means delusion; and the black pill means “pure egoism, nihilism, and destruction...that leads to suicide, death, and decontextualized violence,” according to AlternativeRight.com. Such Nietzschean themes pervade Alt-Right writing, and Alternative Right typifies the movement’s thinkers (as well as the Nazis) when it refers to the philosopher as “one of the great visionaries,” which brings us to the movement’s tenuous relationship with Christianity.
5. The Alt-Right loves Christendom but rejects Christianity. The Alt-Right admires Christendom primarily for uniting the continent and forging white European identity. As such it also reveres European paganism, much like the Nazis did, and its synthesis within certain aspects of Christianity. But when it comes to faith, many Alt-Right thinkers describe themselves as atheists, agnostics, and lapsed Christians. AlternativeRight.com published a feature on the movement and paganism in which Alt-Right writer Stephen McNallen explains, “I am a pagan because it is the only way I can be true to who, and what, I am. I am a pagan because the best things in our civilization come from pre-Christian Europe.” He goes on to describe his aversion to Christianity because it “lacks any roots in blood or soil” and consequently can “claim the allegiance of all the human race.”
Dark imagery runs rampant, from Yarvin’s philosophy to Vox Day’s preferred title “supreme dark lord.” All reject Christian egalitarianism and universalism. Ironically one of the few Alt-Right thinkers to proclaim his Christian faith, Vox Day, explicitly rejects spiritual equality among the races as a central tenet of Alt-Right philosophy, explaining, “Human equality does not exist in any observable scientific, legal, material, intellectual, sexual, or spiritual form.” [Italics added] But despite rejecting the substance of Christianity, the movement has spawned its own satirical religion around the meme culture that has come to typify the Alt-Right online.
6. Kek, cucks, and meme-magic. The Church of Kek is a satirical religion that worships the ancient, androgynous Egyptian deity Kek: god of chaos, darkness, and “meme-magic,” which is a “metapolitical prayer and will to power,” according to one Alt-Right blogger, represented by Pepe the Frog, an Internet meme originating in Matt Furie’s web comic Boy’s Club. Confused? It actually makes more sense than you might think. Kek really is an ancient Egyptian deity of darkness represented as a frog-headed man, Alt-Right members are tech-savvy and active primarily on the Internet, and “kek” translates to “lol” in comment boards of the multiplayer videogame World of Warcraft, while Pepe the Frog epitomizes online meme humor.
Even Donald Trump has embraced this meme, retweeting an image of himself as Pepe.
If you’re still confused, you’ve inadvertently arrived at a common Alt-Right boast: the movement’s supporters often describe "playing 4-D chess" while traditional political activists play checkers, and they have a point. Cartoon frog meme gods are undeniably an esoteric way of effecting political change, as The Right Stuff describes in its blog post, “Esoteric Kekism Is A Religion Of Peace.” Even when slandering their political opponents, Alt-Righters don’t play by the rules. They replace traditional allegations of racism, sexist, this-ism, and that-ism by simply calling their opponents “cuckservatives” or “cucks.”
“Cuckold” is an ancient term for the husband of an adulteress, though in more recent times it can refer specifically to a genre of pornography in which typically a white man watches his wife have sex with a black man. There is disagreement among Alt-Right leaders over the racial connotations of “cuckservative.” Richard Spencer defines it in explicitly racist terms as “a white gentile conservative (or libertarian) who thinks he’s promoting his own interests but really isn’t,” whereas Vox Day insists the word has no racial connotation and merely means “coward.” But enough about cucks. Premises, leaders, tactics, and language aside, what is the Alt-Right’s political aim?
7. The Alt-Right wants to burn American politics to the ground. The Alt-Right most immediately opposes conservatism, as Youth for Western Civilization founder Kevin Deanna explained in his Taki’s Magazine and AlternativeRight.com piece titled “The Impossibility of Conservatism.” The Alt-Right contains a who’s-who of right-wing voices that have been “purged” from the conservative movement by William F. Buckley and National Review, like Peter Brimelow and John Derbyshire, and Alt-Right leaders like Vox Day described the movement in an interview as “the heirs to those like the John Birch Society who were read out of the conservative movement.” Steve Bannon, who refashioned the website of conservative icon Andrew Breitbart into “the platform for the Alt-Right,” has encouraged activists to “turn on the hate” and “burn this bitch down.” But while conservatism is its most immediate target, the Alt-Right seeks to destroy a far older, more central American idea referenced frequently by Ronald Reagan and dating back beyond Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy In America to John Winthrop’s “City On A Hill” sermon: America as a proposition nation.
The Alt-Right rejects American exceptionalism--the notion that America’s unique founding on a idea rather than a people gives it a special character and role in the world. In their place, the movement favors a white nationalism that sees America as a blood and soil country like every other nation. Alt-Right outlets including Vox Day (“American is not an idea”), The Right Stuff (“Ideas didn’t build America”), American Renaissance (“An artificial shell…a ‘creedal nation’”), and VDARE (“the ‘proposition nation’ myth”), to name just a few, have written at length against American exceptionalism.
So how is it possible that mainstream political voices are joining the Alt-Right’s ranks? It turns out, they’re not.
8. Even the Alt-Right’s most prominent media cheerleader doesn’t actually count himself a member. Yiannopolous himself offers the ultimate rebuttal of his Alt-Right apologetics by his refusal to identify with the movement, claiming instead in a recent Bloomberg profile that he doesn’t “care about politics” in order to evade the question--a cowardly response from the man most responsible for mainstreaming these previously fringe ideas. But whether Yiannopoulos is a valueless performance artist or playing 4-D chess, Pepe comes at a price, and the cost of the ideas he touts would be the legacy of Reagan, Lincoln, and Jefferson in exchange for the flip-side of the leftist identity politics that conservatives have so long decried.
The Alternative Right asks conservatives to trade God for racial identity, liberty for strongman statism, and the unique American idea that “all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” for a cartoon Nazi frog.Have you ever found yourself wishing you could keep your client-side code readable and more importantly debuggable even after you've combined and minified it, without impacting performance? Well now you can through the magic of source maps.
Basically it's a way to map a combined/minified file back to an unbuilt state. When you build for production, along with minifying and combining your JavaScript files, you generate a source map which holds information about your original files. When you query a certain line and column number in your generated JavaScript you can do a lookup in the source map which returns the original location. Developer tools (currently WebKit nightly builds, Google Chrome, or Firefox 23+) can parse the source map automatically and make it appear as though you're running unminified and uncombined files.
The above demo allows you to right click anywhere in the textarea containing the generated source. Select "Get original location" will query the source map by passing in the generated line and column number, and return the position in the original code. Make sure your console is open so you can see the output.
Real world
Before you view the following real world implementation of Source Maps make sure you've enabled the source maps feature in either Chrome Canary or WebKit nightly by clicking the settings cog in the dev tools panel and checking the "Enable source maps" option. See screenshot below.
Firefox 23+ has source maps enabled by default in the built in dev tools. See screenshot below.
So... That Source Map query demo is cool and all but what about a real world use case? Take a look at the special build of font dragr at dev.fontdragr.com in Chrome Canary, WebKit nightly or Firefox 23+, with source mapping enabled, and you'll notice that the JavaScript isn't compiled and you can see all the individual JavaScript files it references. This is using source mapping, but behind the scenes actually running the compiled code. Any errors, logs and breakpoints will map to the dev code for awesome debugging! So in effect it gives you the illusion that you're running a dev site in production.
Why should I care about source maps?
Right now source mapping is only working between uncompressed/combined JavaScript to compressed/uncombined JavaScript, but the future is looking bright with talks of compiled-to-JavaScript languages such as CoffeeScript and even the possibility of adding support for CSS preprocessors like SASS or LESS.
In the future we could easily use almost any language as though it were supported natively in the browser with source maps:
CoffeeScript
ECMAScript 6 and beyond
SASS/LESS and others
Pretty much any language that compiles to JavaScript
Take a look at this screencast of CoffeeScript being debugged in an experimental build of the Firefox console:
The Google Web Toolkit (GWT) has recently added support for Source Maps and Ray Cromwell of the GWT team did an awesome screencast showing source map support in action.
Another example I've put together uses Google's Traceur library which allows you to write ES6 (ECMAScript 6 or Next) and compile it to ES3 compatible code. The Traceur compiler also generates a source map. Take a look at this demo of ES6 traits and classes being used like they're supported natively in the browser, thanks to the source map. The textarea in the demo also allows you to write ES6 which will be compiled on the fly and generate a source map plus the equivalent ES3 code.
How does the source map work?
The only JavaScript compiler/minifier that has support, at the moment, for source map generation is the Closure compiler. (I'll explain how to use it later.) Once you've combined and minified your JavaScript, alongside it will exist a sourcemap file. Currently, the Closure compiler doesn't add the special comment at the end that is required to signify to a browsers dev tools that a source map is available:
//# sourceMappingURL=/path/to/file.js.map
This enables developer tools to map calls back to their location in original source files. Previously the comment pragma was //@ but due to some issues with that and IE conditional compilation comments the decision was made to change it to //#. Currently Chrome Canary, WebKit Nightly and Firefox 24+ support the new comment pragma. This syntax change also affects sourceURL.
If you don't like the idea of the weird comment you can alternatively set a special header on your compiled JavaScript file:
X-SourceMap: /path/to/file.js.map
Like the comment this will tell your source map consumer where to look for the source map associated with a JavaScript file. This header also gets around the issue of referencing source maps in languages that don't support single-line comments.
The source map file will only be downloaded if you have source maps enabled and your dev tools open. You'll also need to upload your original files so the dev tools can reference and display them when necessary.
How do I generate a source map?
Like I mentioned above you'll need to use the Closure compiler to minify, concat and generate a source map for your JavaScript files. The command is as follows:
java -jar compiler.jar \ --js script.js \ --create_source_map./script-min.js.map \ --source_map_format = V3 \ --js_output_file script-min.js
The two important command flags are --create_source_map and --source_map_format. This is required as the default version is V2 and we only want to work with V3.
The anatomy of a source map
In order to better understand a source map we'll take a small example of a source map file that would be generated by the Closure compiler and dive into more detail on how the "mappings" section works. The following example is a slight variation from the V3 spec example.
{ version : 3, file : "out.js", sourceRoot : "", sources : [ "foo.js", "bar.js" ], names : [ "src", "maps", "are", "fun" ], mappings : "AAgBC,SAAQ,CAAEA" }
Above you can see that a source map is an object literal containing lots of juicy info:
Version number that the source map is based off
The file name of the generated code (Your minifed/combined production file)
sourceRoot allows you to prepend the sources with a folder structure – this is also a space saving technique
sources contains all the file names that were combined
names contains all variable/method names that appear throughout your code.
Lastly the mappings property is where the magic happens using Base64 VLQ values. The real space saving is done here.
Base64 VLQ and keeping the source map small
Originally the source map spec had a very verbose output of all the mappings and resulted in the sourcemap being about 10 times the size of the generated code. Version two reduced that by around 50% and version three reduced it again by another 50%, so for a 133kB file you end up with a ~300kB source map. So how did they reduce the size while still maintaining the complex mappings?
VLQ (Variable Length Quantity) is used along with encoding the value into a Base64 value. The mappings property is a super big string. Within this string are semicolons (;) that represent a line number within the generated file. Within each line there are commas (,) that represent each segment within that line. Each of these segments is either 1, 4 or 5 in variable length fields. Some may appear longer but these contain continuation bits. Each segment builds upon the previous, which helps reduce the file size as each bit is relative to its previous segments.
Like I mentioned above each segment can be 1, 4 or 5 in variable length. This diagram is considered a variable length of four with one continuation bit (g). We'll break down this segment and show you how the source map works out the original location. The values shown above are purely the Base64 decoded values, there is some more processing to get their true values. Each segment usually works out five things:
Generated column
Original file this appeared in
Original line number
Original column
And if available original name.
Not every segment has a name, method name or argument, so segments throughout will switch between four and five variable length. The g value in the segment diagram above is what's called a continuation bit this allows for further optimisation in the Base64 VLQ decoding stage. A continuation bit allows you to build on a segment value so you can store big numbers without having to store a big number, a very clever space saving technique that has its roots in the midi format.
The above diagram AAgBC once processed further would return 0, 0, 32, 16, 1 – the 32 being the continuation bit that helps build the following value of 16. B purely decoded in Base64 is 1. So the important values that are used are 0, 0, 16, 1. This then lets us know that line 1 (lines are kept count by the semi colons) column 0 of the generated file maps to file 0 (array of files 0 is foo.js), line 16 at column 1.
To show how the segments get decoded I will be referencing Mozilla's Source Map JavaScript library. You can also look at the WebKit dev tools source mapping code, also written in JavaScript.
In order to properly understand how we get the value 16 from B we need to have a basic understanding of bitwise operators and how the spec works for source mapping. The preceding digit, g, gets flagged as a continuation bit by comparing the digit (32) and the VLQ_CONTINUATION_BIT (binary 100000 or 32) by using the bitwise AND (&) operator.
32 & 32 = 32 // or 100000 | | V 100000
This returns a 1 in each bit position where both have it appear. So a Base64 decoded value of 33 & 32 would return 32 as they only share the 32 bit location as you can see in the above diagram. This then increases the the bit shift value by 5 for each preceding continuation bit. In the above case its only shifted by 5 once, so left shifting 1 (B) by 5.
1 << 5 // 32 // Shift the bit by 5 spots ______ | | V V 100001 = 100000 = 32
That value is then converted from a VLQ signed value by right shifting the number (32) one spot.
32 >> 1 // 16 //or 100000 | | V 010000 = 16
So there we have it: that is how you turn 1 into 16. This may seem an over complicated process, but once the numbers start getting bigger it makes more sense.
Potential XSSI issues
The spec mentions cross site script inclusion issues that could arise from the consumption of a source map. To mitigate this it's recommended that you prepend the first line of your source map with " )]} " to deliberately invalidate JavaScript so a syntax error will be thrown. The WebKit dev tools can handle this already.
if ( response. slice ( 0, 3 ) === ")]}" ) { response = response. substring ( response. indexOf ( '
' )); }
As shown above, the first three characters are sliced to check if they match the syntax error in the spec and if so removes all characters leading up to the first new line entity (
).
sourceURL and displayName in action: Eval and anonymous functions
While not part of the source map spec the following two conventions allow you to make development much easier when working with evals and anonymous functions.
The first helper looks very similar to the //# sourceMappingURL property and is actually mentioned in the source map V3 spec. By including the following special comment in your code, which will be evaled, you can name evals so they appear as more logical names in your dev tools. Check out a simple demo using the CoffeeScript compiler: Demo: See eval() 'd code show as a script via sourceURL
//# sourceURL=sqrt.coffee
The other helper allows you to name anonymous functions by using the displayName property available on the current context of the anonymous function. Profile the following demo to see the displayName property in action.
btns [ 0 ]. addEventListener ( "click", function ( e ) { var fn = function () { console. log ( "You clicked button number: 1" ); }; fn. displayName = "Anonymous function of button 1" ; return fn (); }, false );
When profiling your code within the dev tools the displayName property will be shown rather than something like (anonymous). However displayName is pretty much dead in the water and won't be making it into Chrome. But all hope isn't lost and a much better proposal has been suggested called debugName.
As of writing the eval naming is only available in Firefox and WebKit browsers. The displayName property is only in WebKit nightlies.
Let's rally together
Currently there is very lengthy discussion on source map support being added to CoffeeScript. Go check out the issue and add your support for getting source map generation added to the CoffeeScript compiler. This will be a huge win for CoffeeScript and its devoted followers.
UglifyJS also has a source map issue you should take a look at too.
Lot's of tools generate source maps, including the coffeescript compiler. I consider this a moot point now.
The more tools available to us that can generate a source maps the better off we'll be, so go forth and ask or add source map support to your favourite open source project.
It's not perfect
One thing Source Maps doesn't cater for right now is watch expressions. The problem is that trying to inspect an argument or variable name within the current execution context won't return anything as it doesn't really exist. This would require some sort of reverse mapping to lookup the real name of the argument/variable you wish to inspect compared to the actual argument/variable name in your compiled JavaScript.
This of course is a solvable problem and with more attention on source maps we can start seeing some amazing features and better stability.
Issues
Recently jQuery 1.9 added support for source maps when served off of offical CDNs. It also pointed a peculiar bug when IE conditional compilation comments (//@cc_on) are used before jQuery loads. There has since been a commit to mitigate this by wrapping the sourceMappingURL in a multi-line comment. Lesson to be learned don't use conditional comment.
This has since been addressed with the changing of the syntax to //#.
Here's some further resources and tools you should check out:
Nick Fitzgerald has a fork of UglifyJS with source map support
Paul Irish has a handy little demo showing off source maps
Check out the WebKit changeset of when this dropped
The changeset also included a layout test which got this whole article started
Mozilla has a bug you should follow on the status of source maps in the built-in console
Conrad Irwin has written a super useful source map gem for all you Ruby users
Some further reading on eval naming and the displayName property
You can check out the Closure Compilers source for creating source maps
There are some screenshots and talk of support for GWT source maps
Source maps are a very powerful utility in a developer's tool set. It's super useful to be able to keep your web app lean but easily debuggable. It's also a very powerful learning tool for newer developers to see how experienced devs structure and write their apps without having to wade through unreadable minified code. What are you waiting for? Start generating source maps for all projects now!Congress found time amid the tenuous fiscal cliff negotiations to pass a bill that allows Facebook users the ability to share their Netflix viewing history, and it also cut a provision that would have specifically required law enforcement to obtain warrants — rather than administrative subpoenas — to access and search some private emails.
Facebook and Netflix already have arrangements that allow for users in other countries to share their viewing history, but the the Video Privacy Protection Act stopped such an arrangement from being made between the two companies in the United States.
First passed in 1988, the VPPA required video rental or streaming services to obtain written consent from their members to disclose rental or viewing history.
The updated bill — which now allows Netflix users to opt-in to automatically share their viewing history through Facebook — passed the Senate Thursday evening via voice vote.
Virginia Republican Rep. Bob Goodlatte, convinced that social media users have not over-shared enough uninteresting or irrelevant information about themselves on the Internet, hailed the bill as a welcome evolution in a statement after the bill’s passage through the House on Tuesday.
“Social media users, especially young people, do not understand why they cannot share information about their favorite movies or TV shows in the same way that they can music or books,” said Goodlatte.
He continued on to say that the bill “preserves careful protections for consumers’ privacy while modernizing the law to empower consumers to do more with their video consumption preferences, including sharing favorite TV shows or recently watched movies via social media networks in a simple way.”
Controversy erupted over the bill in November when CNET originally reported that Senate judiciary committee Chairman Patrick Leahy was looking to remove any requirements from the bill for law enforcement to obtain a warrant prior to searching through emails and other electronic communication stored online.
Leahy’s office denounced the report and aggressively denied its claims, defending the senator’s record as a proponent of consumer privacy rights. (RELATED: Grassley hits Leahy on warrantless surveillance)
It also inspired the office of committee ranking member Sen. Chuck Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, to accuse Leahy’s office of keeping Grassley in the dark about the specifics of the bill.
The uproar caused the committee to pass the bill with the privacy provision still intact, but it was removed by the full Senate on Thursday from the final version, which will be sent to President Barack Obama.
Obama is expected to promptly sign the bill, according to a recent Wired report critical of the bill.
Follow Josh on TwitterBAGHDAD — A series of bombings, beheadings and shootings rippled through Iraq on Monday, leaving at least 23 people dead, including 9 children, and intensifying concern about a spike in violence with less than two weeks until national elections.
The authorities detected no discernible pattern to the violence, with rockets exploding in Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone, car bombings aimed at government buildings, assassinations of security officers and government officials and the killings of two families in their homes in Baghdad.
The killings of the families were reminiscent of the attacks common during the height of the bloodletting between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq a few years ago.
In the largely Shiite town of Madaen, south of Baghdad, a gang of gunmen stormed a home of a family and killed all eight people there, including six children.
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“The criminals have beheaded some of the victims,” according to a brief statement from Baghdad Operations Command.Photo Credit: http://relationshipsmatternow.blogspot.com/2015/09/how-to-enjoy-unprecedented-peace-in.html
Disclaimer: Opinions expressed by website attributed with the photo credit are their own, FSS does neither claim to advocate or disagree with them explicitly.
In order to maximize peace and minimize turmoil it’s prudent to improve communication in relationships. Not only should open lines of communication be maintained through transparency, but also each partner should do their best to detect the emotional climate of the moment. For instance, there might be a topic of high priority to discuss, but it could be held for a better time to talk. Why talk about it in an emotionally charged anger or heated debate, when you can step away for a while and talk about it with more caution and finesse? It might not be natural for some to see when this should or shouldn’t be done, but it can be studied. How is the demeanor of your partner? Does he or she seem to be in control wielding their emotions or are they acting recklessly? Let your God-given discretion determine whether the issue can be handled immediately or should be deferred for later when emotional flares aren’t overly charged.
Communication should be understood in multiple ways. It’s not just the words that you convey, it’s also the way they are delivered, the body language, the tone of voice, and the intent behind them. Occasionally they are well intended but cause more harm than good. An example of this could be a short sighted understanding of what your spouse needs, and trying to deliver them in a way that doesn’t meet their expectation. At least the heart was in the right place trying to deliver, but just the same the execution failed to solve, improve, or otherwise help them. Did she try to explain that a man at her work place attempts to flirt with her in order to let him know that she needs his help. Except all the man gathered given the inflection of her tone was that she was bragging about her desirability.
Both the man and woman made mistakes. Her mistake was the delivery. She could have assured her husband that she avoided the advances and shut him down. If she didn’t do so she could have expressed her desire to improve to such ends. His mistake was misidentifying her positive tone with a desire to be pursued by another man. She needs her man to come by her and assure her that he appreciates her honesty and transparency. He needs a woman who can understand his point of view and choose her words carefully when delivering such a delicate topic of conversation. Both can do better, and if they set their minds to it by God’s grace, they will!
Miscommunication through these mistakes may lead to misunderstanding your significant other. The opposite of the open lines of communication and understanding we should desire for our relationships. If both recognize that there is a gap in the communication, or understand that there is a problem to be resolved, a mutual goal can be set to fix it. Better listening skills, less secrecy, building or restoring trust, and seeking Godly counsel together can all help combat the problem at hand. Sometimes this may include professional help, but if it isn’t pursued immediately, at least the couple in question will have arrived at the potential source for their problem.
Often times it will help to use “miscommunication” or a similar word as a trigger word in the midst of arguments. Both parties can mutually agree to drop their boxing gloves and hopefully calm their tone as they come to their senses. Leading one or both parties the opportunity to become better listeners while the other is able to elaborate more precisely on what their intentions were. No one wants to argue over the wrong facts or out of things that were taken out of context.
A soft answer turns away wrath,
But a harsh word stirs up anger.
Proverbs 15:1 (NKJV).
It’s important to also remember the biblical precept that a soft answer turns away wrath. You don’t need to join the argument if you stay calm in the face of the emotion. Eventually the other person will hopefully realize that you don’t want to escalate the tension, but prefer to tone things down. You can set the pace this way for clearer and more amicable communication immediately. This is why it’s also vital to be slow to anger, and to get rid of this emotional state as quickly as possible, to avoid making foolish choices. Don’t go to bed angry with your spouse. Make sure you get back to good terms, as much as it is within your power to do so, before bed time. Don’t let anger lead you astray to sin.
A wrathful man stirs up strife,
But he who is slow to anger allays contention.
Proverbs 15:18 (NKJV).
25 Therefore, putting away lying, “Let each one of you speak truth with his neighbor,” for we are members of one another. 26 “Be angry, and do not sin”: do not let the sun go down on your wrath, 27 nor give place to the devil.
Ephesians 4:25-27 (NKJV).
Whether the problem is based on miscommunication, lies, or other elements of mistrust – both partners need to be good forgivers to succeed in the long term. No matter how flawless we might think we are in our relationships, we are often humbled by how easily misled or distrusting we can become. Things that are often easy explanations to our spouse become lies by omission or secrets that could eat away at a dating relationship or marriage.
Knowing your spouse forgives shouldn’t be a trigger for you to take advantage of their kindness. It should however give you the confidence to come clean in regards to any potential barriers that may form against the relationship. Solving these issues will draw you closer to one another long term, and it will provide you with new information about your spouses tendencies and habits. This knowledge will help you cope with their best times, worst times, and everything in between. You’ll have more tools to battle obstacles together, and help them in the midst of their weaknesses, while ideally they understand your shortcomings more as well.
While closeness is good, sometimes distance can be healthy. Did the argument in question cause both of you to lose your temper or yell? The words cannot be taken back, and the tone was mutually undesirable, but you still have the opportunity to rebuild. Immediate expressions of sorrow may come across as disingenuous or difficult to deliver. Spend a time apart from one another for a time, hopefully a brief time, so that you can both reflect on the problem, solution, and how you can move forward from where you’re at. To be sure, this period should not last too long, so that neither spouse would fall to temptation sexually or otherwise.
5 Do not deprive one another except with consent for a time, that you may give yourselves to fasting and prayer; and come together again so that Satan does not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.
1 Corinthians 7:5 (NKJV).
The other benefit of distance is to improve the quality of time together. If you both smother each other with continuous 24/7/365 companionship it’s going to likely feel a bit heavy even for the most synergistic of couples. Both members of the couple could benefit from hobbies that they can enjoy on their own. Does he like to golf while she likes to garden? Does he enjoy playing Poker with his friends while she goes out with hers for a Spa day? These might range from cheap to luxurious, but in the end the point is to enhance the quality time that you will once again enjoy together. To be clear it doesn’t mean you should stay long apart, and this also doesn’t infer that you shouldn’t have some enjoyable hobbies together. By all means enjoy life events together too, but common sense and understanding one another will make it clear what can be solo hobbies, and which should be enjoyed together.
Preventative ways to avoid turmoil may include agreement on money management. I have heard it said more than once that money is one of the issues couples both old and young argue about the most. There needs to be a foundation of trust and stewardship in order to avoid these. How much is tithed/donated? Will you each have personal bank accounts for incidentals or will you pool all your money together? Do you come together to approve major purchases? All these sorts of questions need to be analyzed together so that you would both be prepared for these inevitable scenarios.
Some ideas to explore in order to avoid financial disagreement are as follows: Targeting tangible goals that will ease your financial future together. Finding the best ROI (Return on Investment) opportunities. A diversified portfolio of stocks, where many have a dividend, would probably be a great place to put some of your net worth. If you are older, perhaps it’d be more prudent to choose conservative growth stocks. Having less stocks all together to make sure your savings aren’t compromised in the latter years of your life as retirement draws near. These issues need to be discussed as a team, and together you can find a way to manage your assets in a fiscally responsible way that honors God.
Finally, a sharing of household duties should also be considered. If you both work 9-5 jobs, it is unfair to expect either the man or the woman to take care of all the home related work. Think of who does things more efficiently. Who does laundry best? Maybe it’s her. Who does the cleaning of the dishes and throwing out the trash easiest? Maybe it’s him. Let these divisions of internal labor be known, and nobody should feel as though they are unfairly doing the bulk of the work without adequate help. The value of someone staying at home and handling household chores is in excess of $100,000 a year if you include taking care of children, cleaning, gardening, etc… If you’re both employed, you’ll have to find others to take care of these items. If one of you is fully employed and the other takes care of the housework, keep in perspective that both are working a great deal. The one who works at home is definitely pulling their weight.Dwyane Wade and Gerald Green were back alongside their Heat teammates Saturday |
is about half the diameter of Pluto itself. So if you don’t consider Pluto a planet, the Earth and Moon win.
The Moon is so small in the sky, it’s actually difficult to photograph without a good telephoto lens.
Image credit: Phil Plait
8) The Moon is farther away from Earth than you think. As an analogy, if the Earth were a basketball, the Moon would be the size of a tennis ball 7.4 meters (24 feet) away.
9) The Earth’s atmosphere is only transparent to a narrow slice of the electromagnetic spectrum. What we call visible light (mostly!) gets through, but most flavors of infrared, ultraviolet, X-rays and gamma-rays are stopped cold. Those last few are dangerous to life as we know it, so that works out well. But it’s not a coincidence: if our air didn’t protect us, we’d have evolved differently!
10) The Earth is warming up. It’s a fact. Deal with it.
The Manicouagan impact crater in Canada, seen from space.
Image credit: NASA
11) Fewer than 200 impact craters have been cataloged on Earth. The Moon has billions. We’d have just as many, but our air and water erode them over time, erasing them. Old craters on the Earth are hundreds of millions of years old; on the Moon those would be considered young.
12) An asteroid, 2010 TK 7, shares an orbit with the Earth. It’s about 300 meters (1,000 feet) across, and never gets close enough to us to be a danger.
13) The Earth orbits the Sun on an ellipse. The shape changes slightly over time due to the influence of the other planets, but on average the closest we get to the Sun (perihelion) is about 147.1 million kilometers (91.3 million miles) and the farthest (aphelion) about 152.1 million kilometers (94.3 million miles). That difference is only about 3 percent, which by eye is very nearly a perfect circle.
Earth’s water collected into a single drop. Image credit: Jack Cook/WHOI/USGS
14) If you took all the water on Earth and collected it into a single drop, it would be just less than 1,400 kilometers (860 miles) across.
15) The Earth’s atmosphere weighs 5 quintillion kilograms, or 5,000 trillion tons! You can do this math yourself: Weight is equal to pressure times area. Atmospheric pressure on the Earth’s surface is about 1 kilogram per square centimeter. Multiply that by the number of square centimeters on the Earth’s surface and you get the weight of all that air. Hint: The area of a sphere is 4 x π x radius2. [Note: Yes, I know kilograms are a mass and not a weight. Read this before you rant in the comments, please.]
And a bonus, because it’s important:
16) The Earth is the only place in the entire Universe where we know that life exists. But that won’t be true forever.
To us, our Earth seems huge, solid, tailor-made for us, and permanent. But that is just one perspective, born of living on its surface. From a different perspective, none of those things is true. Seen from space, it looks much less unbreakable. Seen from deep space, it shrinks to nothing more than a dot, barely visible in the reflected light of the Sun. From another star, even seeing our planet at all would be a colossal task. We are, after a monumental effort spanning decades, only just now finding other planets orbiting other stars.
Are any like Earth? Almost certainly, and in fact there may be billions of planets like ours orbiting alien stars. But while they are like ours, they aren’t ours. As with any individual, our world is unique, and precious, and wonderful. Let’s keep it that way.
The Earth, a pale blue dot, seen from over 6 billion km away by the Voyager 1 spacecraft. From that distance, it was far less than a single pixel wide.
Image credit: NASA/JPL
If you liked these facts, I spent a year writing daily astronomy and space factoids which I’ve collected in my BAFacts Archive.Warren Buffett speaks onstage at the FORTUNE Most Powerful Women Summit on October 16, 2013 in Washington, DC. (Photo11: Paul Morigi, Getty Images for FORTUNE)
What traits do you need to be a great investor?
Wharton professor Jeremy Siegel's 2005 book The Future for Investors has an amazing statistic that stresses an important one: The ability to sit on your hands and do literally nothing.
The S&P 500 contains (surprise) 500 companies. But it's constantly changing. Companies get booted from the index, acquired by competitors, and go out of business. Standard & Poor's needs to replace old stocks with new ones.
Since its beginning in 1957, almost 1,000 companies have been removed from the index, and another 1,000 new companies added.
Siegel calculated how the index would have performed if, rather than replacing old companies with new ones, investors had just stuck with the original components, letting dying companies die and reinvesting proceeds from buyouts into the surviving S&P 500 companies.
It's pretty amazing.
"Those who bought the original 500 firms and never sold any of them outperformed not only the world's most famous benchmark stock index but also the performance of most money managers and actively managed equity funds," Siegel writes.
The normal S&P 500 returned 10.3% a year from its 1957 founding through Dec. 2003.
But if you stuck with the original 500 components, letting dying companies die and reinvesting proceeds from companies that were bought out into the surviving companies (there were 125 of them left by 2003), you earned 11.3% a year.
That might not sound like a big difference, but it is.
One dollar invested in the normal S&P 500 in 1957 grew to $93 by 2003. In the "survivor only" portfolio, it grew to $124.
And the normal S&P 500 index required teams of analysts at Standard and Poor's deciding what new companies to replenish the index with. The survivor's portfolio required no analysis whatsoever, by anyone. You just bought 500 companies in 1957 and let the chips fall where they may.
That could have been a fluke. Things might be different over the next 50 years.
But there's a good explanation for the results.
Siegel writes that new entrants tend to be young, fast-growing companies that are often expensive, or overvalued. That hurts future returns. The leftover companies tend to be old, slow-growing companies trading at cheap valuations. Cheap stocks typically lead to higher future returns.
"I do not deny that these new firms that have been added to the S&P 500 Index drive the creative destruction process that stimulates economic growth," he writes. "But on the whole, these new firms did not serve investors well."
Older surviving companies tend to be those likely to be around in the future, too. Their age is a sign of robustness and adaptability.
Nassim Taleb describes this in his book Antifragile:
When you see a young and an old human, you can be confident that the younger will survive the elder. With something nonperishable, say a technology, that is not the case...
For the perishable, every additional day in its life translates into a shorter additional life expectancy. For the nonperishable like technology, every additional day may imply a longer life expectancy... The robustness of an item is proportional to its life... So the longer a technology lives, the longer it can be expected to live.
This is why some of the companies with the best long-term returns aren't blowout innovative technology companies. They're insurance companies, tobacco companies, toothpaste companies, and soap companies. They'll bore you to tears, but they produce mediocre returns for so long that investments compound into fortunes.
My friend Patrick O'Shaughnessy shows this with a chart of industry returns since 1963. Boring old consumer staples did the best, by far. Exciting new technology did the worst, by far.
But the biggest takeaway here is the power of patience and inactivity.
Investing requires, more than anything, patience and discipline. But it attracts, more than anybody, the impatient and impulsive.
Siegel's data is a good example of how the insatiable thirst to buy, sell, and fiddle with a portfolio can lead to lower long-term returns. Even in what appears to be a passive portfolio like the S&P 500, analysts are constantly thinking about what stocks to get rid of and what to replace them with. It sounds smart, but it often comes at the cost of performance.
So much of successful investing relies not on your ability to buy and sell stocks better than anyone else, but your ability to hold those stocks longer than anyone else.
As Warren Buffett put it, "The stock market is designed to transfer money from the active to the patient."
Just leave it alone.
The Motley Fool is a USA TODAY content partner offering financial news, analysis and commentary designed to help people take control of their financial lives. Its content is produced independently of USA TODAY.
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Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1EB3HyNCurrent driver Rio Haryanto needs to raise funding to keep hold of his seat for the remainder of the campaign, and the Banbury-based outfit has begun evaluating potential options if it ends up having to find a replacement.
Ocon is on the shortlist along with Will Stevens, Alex Rossi and Stoffel Vandoorne, although no decision about what happens is expected to be made until later this summer.
But having taken part in several free practice outings for Renault, plus a Silverstone test for Mercedes, Ocon feels fully prepared if there is a chance to step up.
“If there is an opportunity anywhere, I would take it,” he said. “I would be ready, that’s for sure. I’ve been around for a long time now, driving quite a lot of cars, so if there is an opportunity I’d be happy to take it.”
Although the F1 calendar has no clashes with the DTM where he is racing this season, Ocon says any move up would make him reluctant to compete in both.
“For sure my goal is Formula 1,” he said. “I’m happy to be in DTM but I don’t want to stay there for too long. So if there was an opportunity in F1, I would push them [the management] to accept that.”
As well as the Manor link for this season, Ocon remains a firm favourite to secure one of the race seats at Renault next season.
The French car manufacturer is still evaluating its options for next season with both Kevin Magnussen and Jolyon Palmer's contracts up for renewal at the end of the year.
Felipe Massa and Sergio Perez have both been linked to the outfit as well, despite Force India's insistence that it has a contract with the latter.
Renault has also shown interest in Vandoorne, but the Belgian's future is entirely in the hands of McLaren, which has an option on his services.
Additional reporting by Jamie KleinThat's some good garbage. Photo via Flickr user Meaduva
Read: Montreal Is Going to Dump Two Billion Gallons of Raw Shit into the St. Lawrence River
Vancouver, a city known for its borderline self-righteous waste disposal policies, is being called out by the Philippines for essentially using the island nation as an enormous trash bin.
In 2013, the Ontario-based company Chronic Inc. sent 50 shipping containers, or 2,500 tons, of "plastic for recycling" to the Philippines, but closer inspection by that country's Bureau of Customs revealed the bins were filled with regular old trash, including rotting food and adult diapers.
The Philippines has not taken kindly to this nasty surprise, with politicians and environmentalists arguing that Canada violated international hazardous waste laws by shipping its crap overseas. To date, the pile of trash is still festering in a Manila port.
"Canada should take back its waste," Philippine Senator Loren Legarda told fellow senators at a hearing last week, while Leah Paquiz, a member of the country's House of Representatives is demanding Canada "show us the decency that we so rightfully deserve as a nation. My motherland is not a garbage bin of Canada." At a protest staged outside of the Canadian Embassy in May, one person even reportedly dressed as a garbage-filled shipping container. Now, there's a Change.org petition calling for a congressional inquiry into "imported Canadian garbage."
Chronic Inc. owner Jim Makris has said he purchased the recyclables from a Vancouver firm. But earlier this week, Malcolm Brodie, chair of Metro Vancouver's Zero Waste Committee, denied the city's involvement in the literal mess.
"It sounds like it's come from... Whitby, Ontario, where there's a company called Ontario Chronic Inc. It may have gone through the Port of Vancouver but it's not Metro Vancouver waste, for sure," he told local talk radio station CKNW.
Shipping waste to developing countries is such an issue, the United Nations banned the practice through the Basel Convention, which Canada is a part of.In an interview last year with the Toronto Star, Makris said sending garbage abroad doesn't make sense because it's more expensive than getting rid of it domestically.
At the time, Makris characterized the controversy as "the stupidest thing I've heard of in my entire life."
A spokesman for Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development told VICE there was nothing hazardous in the material shipped and that no laws exist to force Makris to recall the shipping containers.
Follow Manisha Krishnan on Twitter.LATER this summer, 1 World Trade Center will top out at 1,776 feet. New York will again be proud to have the tallest building in the United States, a new landmark in the race for height. But is that really such a good thing? From the nativity of the skyscraper in the 1860s through its early adulthood in the 1900s, this kind of “progress” was more often denounced than embraced.
The 1868 Equitable Building, considered the direct antecedent of the skyscraper in New York, was only seven stories when it went up at Broadway and Cedar Street, so no one imagined that from its elevator would flow a remaking of the city. Reviews in The Real Estate Record and Guide did say “it dwarfs all surrounding objects,” but that was praise, since height lent the building “majesty.”
By contemporary standards the Equitable Building looks like a stumpy Second Empire courthouse, and in the 1870s the new crop of elevator buildings, barely 10 stories, was not yet perceived as a trend. The Record and Guide did deride the 10-story Western Union building of 1875 as a “costly folly” that would flood the market with square footage and prove economically unsound. But these early tall buildings were considered isolated events.
In 1884 The New York Sun referred to the 9- and 10-story “sky-scraping apartment houses” of Central Park South, an early architectural application of the term, although it had been in use to describe the topmost sails of ships and a high fly in baseball.
Photo
These were buildings no taller than the Dakota, but in 1885 The New York Times urged restrictive legislation and darkly predicted that “if the streets were lined with eight-story buildings, half of the occupants would be deprived of sunlight, and their children would be etiolated like plants grown in a cellar.” You can tell it’s serious when The Times brings the kids into it.
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As tall buildings grew in numbers, architects found themselves in a difficult position. In 1894 the prominent architect George B. Post denounced the skyscraper, as it was now freely called, as an “outrage.” On the other hand the commission he received from his $2 million, 10-story New York World Building, on Park Row — well, that put outrage in a certain perspective.(CNN) Michael Brown's gunshot wounds included a shot in the hand at close range, his official autopsy shows, according to an analysis reported by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
A county official with knowledge of the investigation told CNN the autopsy document that the Post used to do its report is authentic.
The detail could lend credence to Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson's account that he and the unarmed black teenager scuffled at his patrol car before Brown was shot and killed.
Wilson told investigators that during a struggle for his pistol inside a police SUV, Brown pressed the barrel of Wilson's gun against the officer's hip, the Post-Dispatch reported, citing a source with knowledge of his statements.
The officer tried to prevent Brown from reaching the trigger, the source told the newspaper, and when he thought he had control he fired. But Brown's hand was blocking the mechanism, the Post-Dispatch reported.
JUST WATCHED Are the Ferguson leaks strategic? Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Are the Ferguson leaks strategic? 05:27
JUST WATCHED Protesters remain out in Ferguson Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Protesters remain out in Ferguson 01:03
Wilson said he fired two shots, and Brown was hit in the hand and ran. He told investigators that he fired again when Brown turned back and charged at him, according to the paper.
Earlier, a private autopsy conducted for the Brown family showed the teen had been shot at least six times, including twice in the head.
The official autopsy, as published by the Post-Dispatch, said Brown sustained six gunshot entrance wounds.
Friend gives different story
Dorian Johnson, who was walking with Brown on the street when the shooting occurred, told CNN that the officer pulled up and told them to get on a sidewalk. They told him they were almost home and would be off the street shortly.
Still in his car, the officer grabbed Brown by his neck, but he tried to pull away as the officer pulled him toward him, Johnson said.
The officer drew his weapon and fired, hitting Brown, Johnson said. A bloodied Brown took off running, but the officer followed him and fired, according to Johnson.
Brown turned around with his hands up and told the officer he was unarmed, but the officer fired and the teen hit the ground, Johnson said.
More details revealed
Brown's blood was found on the officer's uniform and inside his police car, law enforcement sources told CNN earlier this week. Those sources corroborated details first reported by The New York Times.
At least one of the wounds Brown suffered is consistent with a struggle and appeared to be fired at close range, according to a different source with first-hand knowledge of the investigation.
"That tends to support any testimony that there was some kind of scuffle in the police car," CNN legal analyst Danny Cevallos said. "And if so, that tends to support Officer Wilson's testimony and his justification for using deadly force."
But Cevallos said the details about Brown's blood on the officer's gun and on his uniform might only go so far in helping the officer's case.
"Ultimately, that officer will have to come up with justification not for firing his gun the first time, but for each and every bullet that came out of his firearm -- whether at the car or away from the car," he said.
Brown's death is the subject of two inquiries: one by a St. Louis County grand jury considering whether Wilson should be charged, and the other by federal investigators looking into whether any civil rights violations occurred.
Day of protests
Under the name Ferguson October, activists demanding justice for Brown will host a protest in the Missouri town Wednesday. Numerous other protests are also expected in cities across the country -- in Sacramento, California; San Francisco; New York City; Philadelphia; Athens, Ohio; and Greensboro, North Carolina, among others.Canadian researchers find that red wine is more effective than white at stopping cancer growth
Lung cancer is the leading killer among cancers of both men and women in the United States. And less than 17 percent of those who develop the disease survive for five years or more. Now a group of Canadian researchers are looking to wine for ways to improve those odds.
The researchers, from Brock University and McMaster University in Ontario, noted in their study, slated for print in Cancer Cell International, that in-vitro studies using cancer cells, and even some epidemiological studies, indicate that red wine possesses anti-cancer properties. Often this ability is credited to red wine being a rich source of the polyphenol resveratrol, so most studies employ synthetic forms of resveratrol. "Investigation into the effect of whole wine are limited," the authors wrote.
For this research, the team decided to measure red and white wines' impact on non small-cell carcinoma lung cancer cells. They exposed samples of lung cancer cells to Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir and Riesling. All wines were sourced from producers in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario.
They found that both red and white wines halted the spread of lung cancer, but the reds were more effective. Red wine effectively stopped the spread of cancer cells, when compared to the control group, at 2 percent concentration. For white wine, similar results didn't happen until 5 percent.
"Our results demonstrated that while both red and white wines are able to inhibit lung cancer cell growth and oncogenic potential, there is a difference in the potency of the wines as these effects were only achieved with higher doses of white wine," said Evangelia Litsa Tsiani, an associate professor of Community Health Sciences at Brock University and one of the authors. "We hypothesize that the total phenolic content, which was much higher in red wine, may be responsible."
Tsiani said the study showed that red wine does stop the growth and survival of lung cancer cells. But she cautioned that the team cannot make recommendations regarding wine consumption because these were tests on human lung cancer cells in a lab setting. "Our next step is to use doses of wine that correspond to moderate wine consumption in humans, one to two glasses per day, and examine the effect on tumor growth in mice," she said. "If we see a significant reduction in tumor growth with wine then we will have strong evidence that will justify the need of a clinical trial, a study in cancer patients."If you don’t want your personal info pored over by the US authorities, close your Facebook account – such is the reassuring advice given by the European Commission to the European Court of Justice.
Judges yesterday grilled the Commish legal service in a case that could topple the 15-year-old EU-US data-sharing agreement known as “Safe Harbour”, a streamlined process developed by the US Department of Commerce and the EU, designed to prevent accidental information disclosure or loss.
Because the US in general does not meet EU standards for data privacy, the Safe Harbour workaround was dreamed up by the Commish in 2000, with the deal creating a voluntary framework whereby companies promise to protect European citizens’ data.
In the current case, a group called Europe v Facebook, led by privacy activist and “Angry Austrian TM ” Max Schrems, alleges that Facebook violated European citizens' “fundamental rights” (defined in the European Convention on Human Rights) by transferring their personal data to the US National Security Agency (NSA).
After the Irish data protection commissioner refused to investigate, citing Safe Harbour rules, the case was referred first to the Irish High Court and now the ECJ.
The focus of Tuesday’s questioning was whether national data protection authorities should be able to suspend data transfers if needed. The Commish says no, and national regulators “are in principle not empowered” to suspend data transfers to the US.
However, Schrems was backed in his call for more independence for DPAs (data protection authorities) by national representatives from Austria, Belgium and Poland. Ireland, which is at the heart of the investigation, said it would welcome guidance on the matter.
The court also wanted to know if the European Commission could “ensure” privacy for EU citizens’ data in the US. The Commish said it was talking to the US authorities, but admitted it couldn't fully guarantee data protection.
Schrems told El Reg that he was pleased with the hearing overall: “The judges really trashed the Commission, and really attacked its position. Austria was very outspoken in saying that there was no real Safe Harbour, as was the European Parliament.”
The judges also heard from the UK and Slovenia, as well as the European Data Protection Supervisor’s office. According to the EDPS, the US needs to improve its privacy protection regime.
The EU parliament went further and again called for the Safe Harbour agreement to be suspended.
The Advocate General of the European Court of Justice will give his opinion on 24 June. ®We recently had a chance to spend a day at Epcot just exploring the Flower and Garden Festival. The following is very picturesque post on lots of neat things you can only see this time of year at Epcot.
Starting off where most people do the main entrance where thing have gotten a little quacked up:
Behind Spaceship Earth is a small but colorful scene:
Buzz Lightyear welcomes us to Mission Space, on of my favorite shots at the event:
Lightning McQueen and Mater just hanging out:
Some giant Butterflies welcome us to the Butterfly Garden:
Here’s Wilderness Mickey with a great shot of Spaceship Earth in the background:
Behind him, Chip and Dale have found a sandwich:
Phineas and Ferb on the way into World Showcase, but where’s Perry?
Minnie and Pluto playing in a garden:
Anna and Elsa continuing to cast their curse on the area formerly known as Norway:
Always love seeing what sand structure will be constructed each year, this years is for the upcoming Jungle Book movie:
Speaking of jungles and the Wild here’s some nice Lion King Characters:
We always love seeing the miniature Flower and Garden festival in the German train set:
Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs are near the trains and on their way to somewhere:
Lady and the Tramp stand outside an Italy gift shop:
Woody says howdy partner and welcome to the American Adventure:
Loved all the angles I was able to capture the Beauty and the Beast Characters in the France pavilion:
Captain Hook, Peter Pan above, and Tic Tock Croc nearby:
Winnie the Pooh and friends:
Closing out our World Showcase tour we find Bambi and a couple of his friends in Canada:
As we head back into Future World we were in the right place at the right time got a gorgeous shot of the monorail going over the waterside gardens:
To close out, what better way than with characters from a Disney Classic?!? Disney’s Fantasia:
We hope everyone enjoyed the pictures! Stay with us and check out our other updates from around the parks. The festival runs now through May 30th and features concerts on the weekends. We hope to have more photo heavy views of events and places very soon! Stay tuned to our social channels for more and be sure to subscribe to the site!“Hotmail: Free, trusted and rich email service. Get it now.”
When Hotmail launched in 1996 it grew fast. Very fast. It was one of the first free webmail providers, and they had a killer marketing idea – add a tagline at the end of every single email sent from hotmail to promote the service. Every time you sent an email you were spreading a marketing message virally.
That led to a $400 million acquisition by Microsoft and the beginning of the “viral” age on the Internet. There wasn’t a business plan put in front of a venture capitalist for years that didn’t have a slide or two on how their product would spread virally via its users.
Today Hotmail will finally kill off the tagline. “We want to start respecting the inbox” Brian Hall, Microsoft’s general manager of the Windows Live Business Group, told me yesterday. He says it’s still a great way to get new users. “But some people don’t think it’s professional,” he says.
Hall also says that Microsoft will cut back on the number of marketing messages they send to Hotmail users. In fact, if users aren’t opening those emails, Hall says they’ll stop sending them entirely. Users can also choose to have all emails stopped as well. When asked why they send them at all, he said that some users actually seem to like them and use them to discover new products and services at MicrosoftWith Windows Phone 7.5, application developers can make it so that you can pin practically any kind of content directly to your Start screen for easy access. The operating system itself offers lots of options for pinning live tiles to your start screen, too. With the iPhone, you’ve basically got two options for content on your home screen; application icons and web page icons. With Android, your options are a bit more flexibile since you can add application icons, widget applications, web page shortcuts, and contacts to any of a number of home screens.
With Windows Phone 7.5, just within the operating system, you can pin apps, contacts, contact groups, email accounts, linked email accounts (unified inboxes), email account subfolders, map locations, music artists, playlists, music albums, videos, movies, TV shows, podcasts, web pages, Excel, Word, PowerPoint documents, OneNote pages, OneNote Notebooks, SkyDrive or SharePoint Libraries, “New Note” button, and photo albums from Facebook, Windows Live, or phone storage.
Now that 3rd party developers can create options to pin practically any type of content to the start screen, there are even more options. You can pin live tiles of movies coming out that flip over to show their Rotten Tomatoe ratings. You can pin bacon cheeseburger recipies. You can pin live weather radar maps for any number of cities. You can pin ebay searches or products that you want to buy. You can pin navigation locations, frequent Foursquare checkins, What’s App conversations, dinner reservations, plane ticket boarding passes, RSS feeds, individually live updating stock quotes and even specific levels in a game.
What other types of deep-linking live-tiles do you wish you could pin to your start screen?Michigan stopped streaming the construction feed for some reason. An old stream is being displayed.
Is anyone fixing North Campus right now?
wtf?
Where's the beautiful North Campus diag they used to show at orientation? Now all we have is this muddy dump. I made this site to track construction progress real-time (and because studying for finals is boring).
but... why?
Science isn't about "why" - it's about "why not"!
- Some video game character
who made this?
I made this. I'm a human being in Ann Arbor. Before that I worked for a machine learning startup in Seoul. Before that I was a baby.
let's work on something together!
I'm always looking for cool projects, and I like to surround myself around creative people. Right now I'm looking for projects that closely merge art with technology, interactive installation works, and pretty much any medium where I don't have to get my hands dirty. Fits your description? Shoot me an email, let's grab coffee.
probably the last project before going on summer break.
view my other works here.But apart from ethnic pimps trying to get money from the government, no authentic person calls himself a "Hispanic." They're "Portuguese," "Cuban" or "Colombian"—and they don't think of themselves as "brown.”
Everybody else is from a country.
It's an insult to imagine that recent immigrants are all in a simmering rage at Trump's affront to the brown masses. Salvadorans and Guatemalans resent having to pretend they're Mexican—much less Mexican illegal immigrant rapists.
Mexico is heaving Hondurans out of their country. El Salvador and Honduras went to war over a soccer game. But we're supposed to imagine that the moment they cross the Rio Grande, they all become blood brothers.
The only people who believe in something called "Hispanics" are white liberals and the RNC. The condescending class is not happy unless they are infantilizing minorities.
Republicans B.T. (Before Trump) worked overtime to reinforce these artificial group identities as one big happy (and aggrieved) family, constantly babbling about reaching out to—as Rand Paul says—"blacks and browns.”
Has he heard of Compton? The city memorialized in the song "Straight Outta Compton," by the hip-hop group N.W.A. (modern translation: African-Americans With Attitude), is now majority Mexican.
This dramatic transformation didn't happen because "blacks and browns" came together in peace and harmony in our vibrant melting pot, but because Mexicans moved in and decided they wanted blacks out, which they accomplished with violent racist attacks and drive-by shootings.
Unlike white Americans, Mexicans are unguiltable.
Nearly 20 years ago, both black and Hispanic Americans begged Congress to do something about illegal immigration. Rich white people see illegal immigrants only as their maids. Blacks and Hispanics live in their neighborhoods.
Terry Anderson, a black radio talk show host from South Central Los Angeles, told a U.S. House subcommittee on immigration in 1999 how illegal immigration had changed his predominantly black community. (That was then; today South Central is 99 percent Mexican.) He said all anyone ever hears about is the "poor, poor immigrant," and the immigrant worker, "who works harder than the black person works and he will take the job that nobody else takes.” [Illegal Immigration Issues | Hearing Before The Subcommittee On Immigration, June 10, 1999 ]
But, Anderson said:
"You never hear that every time that illegal alien comes here, he displaces somebody else …. "You never hear about all the race-based organizations that step forth and advocate for the illegal alien. You have MALDEF, MEChA, LULAC, La Raza and others who are exclusive only to one race of people and advocate for those people only … "(You) will never hear from these people about the 17-year-old black kid in my neighborhood who went to McDonald's and was told you can't work here because you don't speak Spanish.”
In response to Anderson's claim that only Spanish-speakers could get jobs at McDonald's, Democratic congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee tried to put the onus entirely on McDonald's. Anderson wasn't having any of it.
Every time Rep. Lee tried to say the responsibility belonged to corporate America, Anderson responded with, "And to the illegal alien who takes the job. Yes, ma'am.”
Would any politician ever blame the foreign law-breakers themselves? That's a rhetorical question—the answer is "no." Until Trump.
A Latina witness, Angie Morfin from Salinas, California, told the committee that illegals were bringing "crime, gangs and an overloaded social safety net" and that "the Latino-American citizens of our community want illegals removed." She blamed Reagan's amnesty for the rise of Mexican gangs in the U.S., saying, "You gave them a right.”
Republicans obsessed with winning the "Hispanic vote" act as if these Hispanics don't exist. The only Hispanics in their circle of concern are those who broke into our country illegally.
By constantly groveling to ethnic activists, the GOP simply confirmed the idea that people should see themselves as ethnic identity groups—and ought to be bloc-voting for whichever party offers their team the most goodies.
Their argument to Hispanics was: We'll give you everything the Democrats are offering, but not as much. Paul Ryan's "opportunity society!" was not cutting it.
Democrats must go home and laugh themselves silly at the GOP's incompetence at sucking up to minorities. We buffaloed them out of talking about immigration once again!
Instead of cooing at immigrants and trying to lick their necks, Trump treats them like Americans.
They like America! They came here. And they'd like good-paying jobs without the endless competition of cheap foreign labor.
Trump's plan to stop job-killing trade deals, H-1B workers replacing American workers, and the dump of millions of low-skilled workers on the country has made him the great unifier!
The media's only move is to quadruple down on the phony "racism" charges. But to accuse Trump of "racism" because he wants to protect jobs for our own poor, working-class and native-born is like squeezing a balloon. His popularity with the employers of nannies and diversity coordinators may be in the dumps, but oh my gosh—look at what's happening at the other end! It looks like Americans want jobs!
Let Hillary produce studies showing that it's much better for African-Americans to have to compete with Mexicans. Yes, that'll work!
No one really enjoys thinking of himself as a victim. Trump sees Americans as winners and he doesn't care if you're black, white, gay or a disabled Eskimo. He'll bring back jobs for everyone—except the plutocrats outsourcing manufacturing and importing cheap labor while making the rest of us subsidize their foreign workforces.
Because of his positions on immigration, Trump has a sneaky appeal to everybody. For more on how great America is going to be under our next president, get In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome!", out this week.
COPYRIGHT 2015 ANN COULTER
DISTRIBUTED BY UNIVERSAL UCLICK
Ann Coulter is the legal correspondent for Human Events and writes a popular syndicated column for Universal Press Syndicate. She is the author of ELEVEN New York Times bestsellers—collect them here.
Her book, ¡Adios America! The Left’s Plan To Turn Our Country Into A Third World Hell Hole, was released on June 1, 2015. Her latest book is IN TRUMP WE TRUST: E Pluribus Awesome!Ford, which has been under fire for plans to spend $2.5 billion on a plant in Mexico, has agreed to invest $9 billion in its U.S. plants.
The investment pledge is part of the tentative labor agreement the automaker has reached with workers. The terms of the four-year pact were disclosed by the United Auto Workers union Monday |
our strategic deterrent’s future– in DOD as well as in DOE.”First pop of the elderberry wine has occurred and my views are mixed. This was made in 2015 and it obviously needs more time to age – I seem to make wine that need longer than some recipes suggest. The blackberry wine really hit its stride at 18 months rather than the 12 that recipes talk of. This is no worry and the best ingredient in wine making is patience. Elderberry is more like a grape so will similarly need to more like a grape so I may open another bottle at 24 months or even later.
ELDERBERRY WINE RECIPE HERE
REED ABOUT 2016 ELDERBERRY WINE HERE
Currently the elder taste is only starting to show through the tannin which is still high and will continue to mellow. With the 2016 recipe I shortened the maceration to 5 days rather than leaving the fruit on the pulp for 7. It had a noticeable difference when I racked and I may shorten this further in 2017 to only 3 days. As elder skins are thick they make up a comparatively high amount of the total fruit. These skins are high in tannin and it is extracted by the rising ethanol as fermentation occurs. Using the cold maceration process and moving the pulp towards a more aquious extraction and pressing earlier should reduce tannin content.
READ ABOUT MY COLD SOAK/MACERATION HERE
The 2016 vintage seems to have had better fruit that I could forage and a better growing season so I have a better base ingredient from the outset. Currently it is undergoing malolactic fermentation and I will stabilise this with campden and potassium sorbate so that back sweetening can occur and the flavour is complete in the bottle. The 2015 vintage was bottled totally dry to give me some ability to adjust what I was doing but back sweetening it in the glass really helped to bring the fruit flavours forward. In 2017 I may also invest in a heat pad to see if a slightly higher temperature may help maintain fruit flavours.
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rawdownloadcloneembedreportprint text 9.87 KB I'm going through the manifest file for Doomsday. I'll keep this post updated with info [code]"sound\vo\engineer_mvm_ask_ready01.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_ask_ready02.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_say_ready01.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_say_ready02.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_ask_ready01.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_ask_ready02.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_ask_ready03.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_ask_ready04.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_say_ready01.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_say_ready02.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_say_ready03.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_say_ready04.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_say_ready05.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_ask_ready01.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_say_ready01.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_ask_ready01.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_ask_ready02.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_ask_ready03.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_say_ready01.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_say_ready02.wav" [/code] Alright there's a bit too many for me to copy paste, but there seems to be a mvm/norm/vo thing for each class. looks like they've applied a filter to all the original voice files for the robots. There seems to be two categories however for the "robots". mvm/norm and mvm/mght. [code]"sound\vo\heavy_mvm_bomb_destroyed01.wav""sound\vo\heavy_mvm_bomb_upgrade01.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_bomb_upgrade02.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_class_is_dead01.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_class_is_dead02.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_class_is_dead03.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_class_is_dead04.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_class_is_dead05.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_class_is_dead06.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_class_is_dead07.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_class_is_dead08.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_bomb_see02.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_bomb_see01.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_sniper01.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_sentry_buster01.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_sentry_buster02.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_stand_alone01.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_stand_alone02.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_collect_credits04.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_collect_credits01.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_collect_credits02.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_collect_credits03.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_encourage_upgrade01.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_encourage_upgrade02.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_encourage_upgrade03.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_get_upgrade01.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_get_upgrade02.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_get_upgrade03.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_get_upgrade04.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_get_upgrade05.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_get_upgrade06.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_giant_robot04.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_giant_robot03.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_robot_sapped01.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_robot_sapped02.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_close_call01.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_close_call02.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_tank_alert01.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_tank_dead01.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_tank_deploy01.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_tank_alert02.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_tank_alert03.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_taunt01.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_taunt02.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_wave_end01.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_wave_end02.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_wave_end03.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_wave_end04.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_wave_end05.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_giant_robot02.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_giant_robot01.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_rage01.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_rage02.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_rage03.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_rage04.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_kill_rocket01.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_kill_rocket02.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_kill_rocket03.wav"[/code] Sap robot?! New engineer lines too. [code]"sound\vo\engineer_mvm_bomb_destroyed01.wav""sound\vo\engineer_mvm_bomb_destroyed02.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_bomb_upgrade01.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_bomb_upgrade02.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_class_is_dead01.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_class_is_dead02.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_class_is_dead03.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_class_is_dead04.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_class_is_dead05.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_class_is_dead06.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_class_is_dead07.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_class_is_dead08.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_class_is_dead09.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_bomb_see02.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_bomb_see03.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_bomb_see01.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_sniper01.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_sentry_buster01.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_sentry_buster02.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_stand_alone01.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_collect_credits01.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_collect_credits02.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_collect_credits03.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_encourage_upgrade01.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_get_upgrade01.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_get_upgrade02.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_giant_robot02.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_giant_robot01.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_giant_robot03.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_robot_sapped01.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_robot_sapped02.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_close_call01.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_tank_alert01.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_tank_dead01.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_tank_deploy01.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_tank_shooting01.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_taunt01.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_taunt02.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_wave_start01.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_wave_end01.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_wave_end02.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_wave_end03.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_wave_end04.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_wave_end07.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_wave_end05.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_wave_end06.wav"[/code] [code]"sound\vo\soldier_mvm_bomb_destroyed01.wav""sound\vo\soldier_mvm_bomb_destroyed02.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_bomb_upgrade01.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_bomb_upgrade02.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_bomb_upgrade03.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_class_is_dead01.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_class_is_dead02.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_class_is_dead03.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_class_is_dead04.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_class_is_dead05.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_class_is_dead06.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_class_is_dead07.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_class_is_dead08.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_class_is_dead09.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_bomb_see02.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_bomb_see03.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_bomb_see01.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_sniper01.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_sentry_buster01.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_sentry_buster02.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_stand_alone01.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_stand_alone02.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_collect_credits01.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_encourage_upgrade01.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_get_upgrade01.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_get_upgrade03.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_get_upgrade02.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_giant_robot01.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_giant_robot02.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_giant_robot03.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_giant_robot04.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_robot_sapped01.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_robot_sapped02.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_close_call01.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_tank_alert01.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_tank_alert02.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_tank_dead01.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_tank_dead02.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_tank_deploy01.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_tank_shooting01.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_tank_shooting02.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_tank_shooting03.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_taunt05.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_taunt06.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_taunt01.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_taunt02.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_taunt03.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_taunt04.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_wave_end01.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_wave_end02.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_wave_end03.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_wave_end04.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_wave_end05.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_wave_end06.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_wave_end07.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_wave_end10.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_wave_end08.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_wave_end09.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_collect_credits02.wav"[/code] NEW MEDIC VOICE LINES(We can't listen to them, but they're there being worked on! "sound\vo\medic_mvm_bomb_destroyed01.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_bomb_destroyed02.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_bomb_upgrade01.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_bomb_upgrade02.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_bomb_upgrade03.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_class_is_dead01.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_class_is_dead02.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_class_is_dead03.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_class_is_dead04.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_class_is_dead05.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_class_is_dead06.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_class_is_dead07.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_class_is_dead08.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_class_is_dead09.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_bomb_see02.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_bomb_see03.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_bomb_see01.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_sniper01.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_sentry_buster01.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_sentry_buster02.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_stand_alone01.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_collect_credits01.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_collect_credits03.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_collect_credits02.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_encourage_upgrade01.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_encourage_upgrade02.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_encourage_upgrade03.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_get_upgrade01.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_get_upgrade02.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_get_upgrade03.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_get_upgrade04.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_giant_robot01.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_giant_robot03.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_robot_sapped01.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_robot_sapped02.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_tank_alert01.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_tank_deploy01.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_tank_shooting01.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_tank_shooting02.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_tank_shooting03.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_taunt01.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_wave_end01.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_wave_end02.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_wave_end03.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_wave_end04.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_wave_end05.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_wave_end06.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_wave_end07.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_collect_credits04.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_giant_robot02.wav"
RAW Paste Data
I'm going through the manifest file for Doomsday. I'll keep this post updated with info [code]"sound\vo\engineer_mvm_ask_ready01.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_ask_ready02.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_say_ready01.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_say_ready02.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_ask_ready01.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_ask_ready02.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_ask_ready03.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_ask_ready04.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_say_ready01.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_say_ready02.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_say_ready03.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_say_ready04.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_say_ready05.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_ask_ready01.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_say_ready01.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_ask_ready01.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_ask_ready02.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_ask_ready03.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_say_ready01.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_say_ready02.wav" [/code] Alright there's a bit too many for me to copy paste, but there seems to be a mvm/norm/vo thing for each class. looks like they've applied a filter to all the original voice files for the robots. There seems to be two categories however for the "robots". mvm/norm and mvm/mght. [code]"sound\vo\heavy_mvm_bomb_destroyed01.wav""sound\vo\heavy_mvm_bomb_upgrade01.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_bomb_upgrade02.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_class_is_dead01.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_class_is_dead02.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_class_is_dead03.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_class_is_dead04.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_class_is_dead05.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_class_is_dead06.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_class_is_dead07.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_class_is_dead08.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_bomb_see02.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_bomb_see01.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_sniper01.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_sentry_buster01.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_sentry_buster02.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_stand_alone01.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_stand_alone02.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_collect_credits04.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_collect_credits01.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_collect_credits02.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_collect_credits03.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_encourage_upgrade01.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_encourage_upgrade02.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_encourage_upgrade03.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_get_upgrade01.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_get_upgrade02.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_get_upgrade03.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_get_upgrade04.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_get_upgrade05.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_get_upgrade06.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_giant_robot04.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_giant_robot03.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_robot_sapped01.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_robot_sapped02.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_close_call01.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_close_call02.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_tank_alert01.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_tank_dead01.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_tank_deploy01.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_tank_alert02.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_tank_alert03.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_taunt01.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_taunt02.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_wave_end01.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_wave_end02.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_wave_end03.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_wave_end04.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_wave_end05.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_giant_robot02.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_giant_robot01.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_rage01.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_rage02.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_rage03.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_rage04.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_kill_rocket01.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_kill_rocket02.wav" "sound\vo\heavy_mvm_kill_rocket03.wav"[/code] Sap robot?! New engineer lines too. [code]"sound\vo\engineer_mvm_bomb_destroyed01.wav""sound\vo\engineer_mvm_bomb_destroyed02.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_bomb_upgrade01.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_bomb_upgrade02.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_class_is_dead01.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_class_is_dead02.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_class_is_dead03.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_class_is_dead04.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_class_is_dead05.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_class_is_dead06.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_class_is_dead07.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_class_is_dead08.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_class_is_dead09.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_bomb_see02.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_bomb_see03.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_bomb_see01.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_sniper01.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_sentry_buster01.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_sentry_buster02.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_stand_alone01.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_collect_credits01.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_collect_credits02.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_collect_credits03.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_encourage_upgrade01.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_get_upgrade01.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_get_upgrade02.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_giant_robot02.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_giant_robot01.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_giant_robot03.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_robot_sapped01.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_robot_sapped02.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_close_call01.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_tank_alert01.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_tank_dead01.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_tank_deploy01.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_tank_shooting01.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_taunt01.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_taunt02.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_wave_start01.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_wave_end01.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_wave_end02.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_wave_end03.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_wave_end04.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_wave_end07.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_wave_end05.wav" "sound\vo\engineer_mvm_wave_end06.wav"[/code] [code]"sound\vo\soldier_mvm_bomb_destroyed01.wav""sound\vo\soldier_mvm_bomb_destroyed02.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_bomb_upgrade01.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_bomb_upgrade02.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_bomb_upgrade03.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_class_is_dead01.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_class_is_dead02.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_class_is_dead03.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_class_is_dead04.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_class_is_dead05.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_class_is_dead06.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_class_is_dead07.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_class_is_dead08.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_class_is_dead09.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_bomb_see02.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_bomb_see03.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_bomb_see01.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_sniper01.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_sentry_buster01.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_sentry_buster02.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_stand_alone01.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_stand_alone02.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_collect_credits01.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_encourage_upgrade01.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_get_upgrade01.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_get_upgrade03.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_get_upgrade02.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_giant_robot01.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_giant_robot02.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_giant_robot03.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_giant_robot04.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_robot_sapped01.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_robot_sapped02.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_close_call01.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_tank_alert01.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_tank_alert02.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_tank_dead01.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_tank_dead02.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_tank_deploy01.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_tank_shooting01.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_tank_shooting02.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_tank_shooting03.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_taunt05.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_taunt06.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_taunt01.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_taunt02.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_taunt03.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_taunt04.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_wave_end01.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_wave_end02.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_wave_end03.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_wave_end04.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_wave_end05.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_wave_end06.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_wave_end07.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_wave_end10.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_wave_end08.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_wave_end09.wav" "sound\vo\soldier_mvm_collect_credits02.wav"[/code] NEW MEDIC VOICE LINES(We can't listen to them, but they're there being worked on! "sound\vo\medic_mvm_bomb_destroyed01.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_bomb_destroyed02.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_bomb_upgrade01.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_bomb_upgrade02.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_bomb_upgrade03.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_class_is_dead01.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_class_is_dead02.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_class_is_dead03.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_class_is_dead04.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_class_is_dead05.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_class_is_dead06.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_class_is_dead07.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_class_is_dead08.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_class_is_dead09.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_bomb_see02.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_bomb_see03.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_bomb_see01.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_sniper01.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_sentry_buster01.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_sentry_buster02.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_stand_alone01.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_collect_credits01.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_collect_credits03.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_collect_credits02.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_encourage_upgrade01.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_encourage_upgrade02.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_encourage_upgrade03.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_get_upgrade01.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_get_upgrade02.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_get_upgrade03.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_get_upgrade04.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_giant_robot01.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_giant_robot03.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_robot_sapped01.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_robot_sapped02.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_tank_alert01.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_tank_deploy01.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_tank_shooting01.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_tank_shooting02.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_tank_shooting03.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_taunt01.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_wave_end01.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_wave_end02.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_wave_end03.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_wave_end04.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_wave_end05.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_wave_end06.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_wave_end07.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_collect_credits04.wav" "sound\vo\medic_mvm_giant_robot02.wav"On Carl Sagan & Feeling Hopeless About the State of the World
Reflections on the “cosmic perspective” and what to remember when feeling powerless to change the world.
I finally started watching the new Cosmos series the other day. You know, the remake of Carl Sagan’s classic 1980s science documentary-show? The one about science and the universe with Neil deGrasse Tyson as intergalactic guide? Yeah, that one.
I’m a little late to the game, I know. The showed aired way back in March, but I don’t watch a whole lot of television. However, as a big fan of Carl Sagan and of the original Cosmos, I was aflutter with science-happy when a friend of mine said he had the series on his computer and we ought to watch it.
We’ve watched the first few episodes the past couple days, and I gotta say—this shit is tremendous. The computer-generated galaxies, pulsars, black holes, supernovas, and Earth-stuffs are stunningly gorgeous. The storytelling and animation used to convey the history of science are delightful. And although deGrasse Tyson cannot and should not attempt to replicate Carl Sagan’s ineffable charm, he nonetheless has an affable gravitas about him which both endears and commands attention. Let’s be honest: he’s kind of a badass.
Cosmic Perspective
While admiring the breathtaking-yet-still-educational awesomeness of Cosmos, I couldn’t help but reflect upon what Carl Sagan called the “cosmic perspective”. Sagan had this idea that our scientific understanding of the unfathomable vastness—like, really, so huge and so old our small brains literally cannot conceive of one drop in the cosmic super-sea—of spacetime could alter our collective consciousness down here on Earth:
“Everyone one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.” Carl Sagan
Sagan’s famous ‘Pale Blue Dot‘ commentary was all about seeing Earth from the “cosmic perspective”. Gazing upon the above image, Sagan was inspired to wax lyrical about the folly of human conceit. I’ve included this speech elsewhere on Refine The Mind previously, but I’m including it again because, well, this is one of those timeless jewels of language that everyone in the world should read or listen to monthly:
“From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every |
64, PowerPC, SPARC, and Alpha. It may work on other platforms as well.
New Targets and Target Specific Improvements
AArch64
A new port has been added to support AArch64, the new 64-bit architecture from ARM. Note that this is a separate port from the existing 32-bit ARM port.
The port provides initial support for the Cortex-A53 and the Cortex-A57 processors with the command line options -mcpu=cortex-a53 and -mcpu=cortex-a57.
and. As of GCC 4.8.4 a workaround for the ARM Cortex-A53 erratum 835769 has been added and can be enabled by giving the -mfix-cortex-a53-835769 option. Alternatively it can be enabled by default by configuring GCC with the --enable-fix-cortex-a53-835769 option.
ARM
Initial support has been added for the AArch32 extensions defined in the ARMv8 architecture.
Code generation improvements for the Cortex-A7 and Cortex-A15 CPUs.
A new option, -mcpu=marvell-pj4, has been added to generate code for the Marvell PJ4 processor.
, has been added to generate code for the Marvell PJ4 processor. The compiler can now automatically generate the VFMA, VFMS, REVSH and REV16 instructions.
,, and instructions. A new vectorizer cost model for Advanced SIMD configurations to improve the auto-vectorization strategies used.
The scheduler now takes into account the number of live registers to reduce the amount of spilling that can occur. This should improve code performance in large functions. The limit can be removed by using the option -fno-sched-pressure.
. Improvements have been made to the Marvell iWMMX code generation and support for the iWMMX2 SIMD unit has been added. The option -mcpu=iwmmxt2 can be used to enable code generation for the latter.
can be used to enable code generation for the latter. A number of code generation improvements for Thumb2 to reduce code size when compiling for the M-profile processors.
The RTEMS ( arm-rtems ) port has been updated to use the EABI.
) port has been updated to use the EABI. Code generation support for the old FPA and Maverick floating-point architectures has been removed. Ports that previously relied on these features have also been removed. This includes the targets: arm*-*-linux-gnu (use arm*-*-linux-gnueabi ) arm*-*-elf (use arm*-*-eabi ) arm*-*-uclinux* (use arm*-*-uclinux*eabi ) arm*-*-ecos-elf (no alternative) arm*-*-freebsd (no alternative) arm*-wince-pe* (no alternative).
AVR
Support for the "Embedded C" fixed-point has been added. For details, see the GCC wiki and the user manual. The support is not complete.
A new print modifier %r for register operands in inline assembler is supported. It will print the raw register number without the register prefix'r ': /* Return the most significant byte of 'val', a 64-bit value. */ unsigned char msb (long long val) { unsigned char c; __asm__ ("mov %0, %r1+7" : "=r" (c) : "r" (val)); return c; } The inline assembler in this example will generate code like mov r24, 8+7 provided c is allocated to R24 and val is allocated to R8 … R15. This works because the GNU assembler accepts plain register numbers without register prefix.
for register operands in inline assembler is supported. It will print the raw register number without the register prefix'': The inline assembler in this example will generate code like provided is allocated to and is allocated to …. This works because the GNU assembler accepts plain register numbers without register prefix. Static initializers with 3-byte symbols are supported now: extern const __memx char foo; const __memx void *pfoo = &foo; This requires at least Binutils 2.23.
IA-32/x86-64
Allow -mpreferred-stack-boundary=3 for the x86-64 architecture with SSE extensions disabled. Since the x86-64 ABI requires 16 byte stack alignment, this is ABI incompatible and intended to be used in controlled environments where stack space is an important limitation. This option will lead to wrong code when functions compiled with 16 byte stack alignment (such as functions from a standard library) are called with misaligned stack. In this case, SSE instructions may lead to misaligned memory access traps. In addition, variable arguments will be handled incorrectly for 16 byte aligned objects (including x87 long double and __int128 ), leading to wrong results. You must build all modules with -mpreferred-stack-boundary=3, including any libraries. This includes the system libraries and startup modules.
for the x86-64 architecture with SSE extensions disabled. Since the x86-64 ABI requires 16 byte stack alignment, this is ABI incompatible and intended to be used in controlled environments where stack space is an important limitation. This option will lead to wrong code when functions compiled with 16 byte stack alignment (such as functions from a standard library) are called with misaligned stack. In this case, SSE instructions may lead to misaligned memory access traps. In addition, variable arguments will be handled incorrectly for 16 byte aligned objects (including x87 and ), leading to wrong results. You must build all modules with, including any libraries. This includes the system libraries and startup modules. Support for the new Intel processor codename Broadwell with RDSEED, ADCX, ADOX, PREFETCHW is available through -madx, -mprfchw, -mrdseed command-line options.
,,, is available through,, command-line options. Support for the Intel RTM and HLE intrinsics, built-in functions and code generation is available via -mrtm and -mhle.
and. Support for the Intel FXSR, XSAVE and XSAVEOPT instruction sets. Intrinsics and built-in functions are available via -mfxsr, -mxsave and -mxsaveopt respectively.
, and respectively. New -maddress-mode=[short|long] options for x32. -maddress-mode=short overrides default 64-bit addresses to 32-bit by emitting the 0x67 address-size override prefix. This is the default address mode for x32.
options for x32. overrides default 64-bit addresses to 32-bit by emitting the address-size override prefix. This is the default address mode for x32. New built-in functions to detect run-time CPU type and ISA: A built-in function __builtin_cpu_is has been added to detect if the run-time CPU is of a particular type. It returns a positive integer on a match and zero otherwise. It accepts one string literal argument, the CPU name. For example, __builtin_cpu_is("westmere") returns a positive integer if the run-time CPU is an Intel Core i7 Westmere processor. Please refer to the user manual for the list of valid CPU names recognized. A built-in function __builtin_cpu_supports has been added to detect if the run-time CPU supports a particular ISA feature. It returns a positive integer on a match and zero otherwise. It accepts one string literal argument, the ISA feature. For example, __builtin_cpu_supports("ssse3") returns a positive integer if the run-time CPU supports SSSE3 instructions. Please refer to the user manual for the list of valid ISA names recognized. Caveat: If these built-in functions are called before any static constructors are invoked, like during IFUNC initialization, then the CPU detection initialization must be explicitly run using this newly provided built-in function, __builtin_cpu_init. The initialization needs to be done only once. For example, this is how the invocation would look like inside an IFUNC initializer: static void (*some_ifunc_resolver(void))(void) { __builtin_cpu_init(); if (__builtin_cpu_is("amdfam10h")... if (__builtin_cpu_supports("popcnt")... }
Function Multiversioning Support with G++: It is now possible to create multiple function versions each targeting a specific processor and/or ISA. Function versions have the same signature but different target attributes. For example, here is a program with function versions: __attribute__ ((target ("default"))) int foo(void) { return 1; } __attribute__ ((target ("sse4.2"))) int foo(void) { return 2; } int main (void) { int (*p) = &foo; assert ((*p)() == foo()); return 0; } Please refer to this wiki for more information.
Please refer to this wiki for more information. The x86 back end has been improved to allow option -fschedule-insns to work reliably. This option can be used to schedule instructions better and leads to improved performace in certain cases.
to work reliably. This option can be used to schedule instructions better and leads to improved performace in certain cases. Windows MinGW-w64 targets ( *-w64-mingw* ) require at least r5437 from the Mingw-w64 trunk.
) require at least r5437 from the Mingw-w64 trunk. Support for new AMD family 15h processors (Steamroller core) is now available through the -march=bdver3 and -mtune=bdver3 options.
and options. Support for new AMD family 16h processors (Jaguar core) is now available through the -march=btver2 and -mtune=btver2 options.
FRV
This target now supports the -fstack-usage command-line option.
MIPS
GCC can now generate code specifically for the R4700, Broadcom XLP and MIPS 34kn processors. The associated -march options are -march=r4700, -march=xlp and -march=34kn respectively.
options are, and respectively. GCC now generates better DSP code for MIPS 74k cores thanks to further scheduling optimizations.
The MIPS port now supports the -fstack-check option.
option. GCC now passes the -mmcu and -mno-mcu options to the assembler.
and options to the assembler. Previous versions of GCC would silently accept -fpic and -fPIC for -mno-abicalls targets like mips*-elf. This combination was not intended or supported, and did not generate position-independent code. GCC 4.8 now reports an error when this combination is used.
PowerPC / PowerPC64 / RS6000
SVR4 configurations (GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD) no longer save, restore or update the VRSAVE register by default. The respective operating systems manage the VRSAVE register directly.
Large TOC support has been added for AIX through the command line option -mcmodel=large.
. Native Thread-Local Storage support has been added for AIX.
VMX (Altivec) and VSX instruction sets now are enabled implicitly when targetting processors that support those hardware features on AIX 6.1 and above.
RX
This target will now issue a warning message whenever multiple fast interrupt handlers are found in the same compilation unit. This feature can be turned off by the new -mno-warn-multiple-fast-interrupts command-line option.
S/390, System z
Support for the IBM zEnterprise zEC12 processor has been added. When using the -march=zEC12 option, the compiler will generate code making use of the following new instructions: load and trap instructions 2 new compare and trap instructions rotate and insert selected bits - without CC clobber The -mtune=zEC12 option enables zEC12 specific instruction scheduling without making use of new instructions.
option, the compiler will generate code making use of the following new instructions: The option enables zEC12 specific instruction scheduling without making use of new instructions. Register pressure sensitive instruction scheduling is enabled by default.
The ifunc function attribute is enabled by default.
function attribute is enabled by default. memcpy and memcmp invokations on big memory chunks or with run time lengths are not generated inline anymore when tuning for z10 or higher. The purpose is to make use of the IFUNC optimized versions in Glibc.
SH
The default alignment settings have been reduced to be less aggressive. This results in more compact code for optimization levels other than -Os.
. Improved support for the __atomic built-in functions: A new option -matomic-model= model selects the model for the generated atomic sequences. The following models are supported: soft-gusa Software gUSA sequences (SH3* and SH4* only). On SH4A targets this will now also partially utilize the movco.l and movli.l instructions. This is the default when the target is sh3*-*-linux* or sh4*-*-linux*. hard-llcs Hardware movco.l / movli.l sequences (SH4A only). soft-tcb Software thread control block sequences. soft-imask Software interrupt flipping sequences (privileged mode only). This is the default when the target is sh1*-*-linux* or sh2*-*-linux*. none Generates function calls to the respective __atomic built-in functions. This is the default for SH64 targets or when the target is not sh*-*-linux*. The option -msoft-atomic has been deprecated. It is now an alias for -matomic-model=soft-gusa. A new option -mtas makes the compiler generate the tas.b instruction for the __atomic_test_and_set built-in function regardless of the selected atomic model. The __sync functions in libgcc now reflect the selected atomic model when building the toolchain.
built-in functions: Added support for the mov.b and mov.w instructions with displacement addressing.
and instructions with displacement addressing. Added support for the SH2A instructions movu.b and movu.w.
and. Various improvements to code generated for integer arithmetic.
Improvements to conditional branches and code that involves the T bit. A new option -mzdcbranch tells the compiler to favor zero-displacement branches. This is enabled by default for SH4* targets.
tells the compiler to favor zero-displacement branches. This is enabled by default for SH4* targets. The pref instruction will now be emitted by the __builtin_prefetch built-in function for SH3* targets.
instruction will now be emitted by the built-in function for SH3* targets. The fmac instruction will now be emitted by the fmaf standard function and the __builtin_fmaf built-in function.
instruction will now be emitted by the standard function and the built-in function. The -mfused-madd option has been deprecated in favor of the machine-independent -ffp-contract option. Notice that the fmac instruction will now be generated by default for expressions like a * b + c. This is due to the compiler default setting -ffp-contract=fast.
option has been deprecated in favor of the machine-independent option. Notice that the instruction will now be generated by default for expressions like. This is due to the compiler default setting. Added new options -mfsrra and -mfsca to allow the compiler using the fsrra and fsca instructions on targets other than SH4A (where they are already enabled by default).
and to allow the compiler using the and instructions on targets other than SH4A (where they are already enabled by default). Added support for the __builtin_bswap32 built-in function. It is now expanded as a sequence of swap.b and swap.w instructions instead of a library function call.
built-in function. It is now expanded as a sequence of and instructions instead of a library function call. The behavior of the -mieee option has been fixed and the negative form -mno-ieee has been added to control the IEEE conformance of floating point comparisons. By default -mieee is now enabled and the option -ffinite-math-only implicitly sets -mno-ieee.
option has been fixed and the negative form has been added to control the IEEE conformance of floating point comparisons. By default is now enabled and the option implicitly sets. Added support for the built-in functions __builtin_thread_pointer and __builtin_set_thread_pointer. This assumes that GBR is used to hold the thread pointer of the current thread. Memory loads and stores relative to the address returned by __builtin_thread_pointer will now also utilize GBR based displacement address modes.
and. This assumes that is used to hold the thread pointer of the current thread. Memory loads and stores relative to the address returned by will now also utilize based displacement address modes. The -mdiv= option for targets other than SHmedia has been fixed and documented.
SPARC
Added optimized instruction scheduling for Niagara4.
TILE-Gx
Added support for the -mcmodel=MODEL command-line option. The models supported are small and large.
V850
This target now supports the E3V5 architecture via the use of the new -mv850e3v5 command-line option. It also has experimental support for the e3v5 LOOP instruction which can be enabled via the new -mloop command-line option.
XStormy16
This target now supports the -fstack-usage command-line option.
Operating Systems
OpenBSD
Support for OpenBSD/amd64 (x86_64-*-openbsd*) has been added and support for OpenBSD/i386 (i386-*-openbsd*) has been rejuvenated.
Windows (Cygwin)
Executables are now linked against shared libgcc by default. The previous default was to link statically, which can still be done by explicitly specifying -static or static-libgcc on the command line. However it is strongly advised against, as it will cause problems for any application that makes use of DLLs compiled by GCC. It should be alright for a monolithic stand-alone application that only links against the Windows DLLs, but offers little or no benefit.
GCC 4.8.1
This is the list of problem reports (PRs) from GCC's bug tracking system that are known to be fixed in the 4.8.1 release. This list might not be complete (that is, it is possible that some PRs that have been fixed are not listed here).
The C++11 <chrono> std::chrono::system_clock and std::chrono::steady_clock classes have changed ABI in GCC 4.8.1, they both are now separate (never typedefs of each other), both use std::chrono::nanoseconds resolution, on most GNU/Linux configurations std::chrono::steady_clock is now finally monotonic, and both classes are mangled differently than in the previous GCC releases. std::chrono::system_clock::now() with std::chrono::microseconds resp. std::chrono::seconds resolution is still exported for backwards compatibility with default configured libstdc++. Note that libstdc++ configured with --enable-libstdcxx-time= used to be ABI incompatible with default configured libstdc++ for those two classes and no ABI compatibility can be offered for those configurations, so any C++11 code that uses those classes and has been compiled and linked against libstdc++ configured with the non-default --enable-libstdcxx-time= configuration option needs to be recompiled.
GCC 4.8.2
This is the list of problem reports (PRs) from GCC's bug tracking system that are known to be fixed in the 4.8.2 release. This list might not be complete (that is, it is possible that some PRs that have been fixed are not listed here).
GCC 4.8.3
This is the list of problem reports (PRs) from GCC's bug tracking system that are known to be fixed in the 4.8.3 release. This list might not be complete (that is, it is possible that some PRs that have been fixed are not listed here).
Support for the new powerpc64le-linux platform has been added. It defaults to generating code that conforms to the ELFV2 ABI.
GCC 4.8.4
This is the list of problem reports (PRs) from GCC's bug tracking system that are known to be fixed in the 4.8.4 release. This list might not be complete (that is, it is possible that some PRs that have been fixed are not listed here).
GCC 4.8.5
This is the list of problem reports (PRs) from GCC's bug tracking system that are known to be fixed in the 4.8.5 release. This list might not be complete (that is, it is possible that some PRs that have been fixed are not listed here).Copyright by WTEN - All rights reserved
ALBANY, N.Y. (NEWS10) - NEWS10 ABC sat down with democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders before his Albany campaign event on Monday.
Thousands of people wrapped around the block to see Bernie Sanders at the Washington Avenue Armory. Most were already supporters who wanted to hear more from the Vermont senator.
Prior to the rally, he sat down with NEWS10 ABC reporter Heather Kovar for a one-on-one interview.
You can get a smile out of Sanders when asking about his wife, Jane, who is one of his key advisors. Sanders said he is very lucky.
"I cherish her advice," he said. "We're kinda a team."
Sanders said he's also gratified by the primary in Vermont where he received 86 percent of the vote.
"What I should tell you is that the people that know me the best, who I have served as mayor, congressman and senator, are prepared to support me, and I'm very proud of that," he said.
Sanders said one of the great crises facing America is the declining middle class, and the economic culture in the country needs to change. He's giving a speech in the Vatican on Thursday on how to create a moral economy.
"And what a moral economy is about is not cutting wages of older workers," he said. "That is not a moral economy. That is a greedy economy."
His rally motto is "A Future to Believe In." He said everybody has the right to know what is in their water.
"We have to rebuild our water systems all over America," he said. "This is the United States. 2016. Our people should not be drinking unhealthy water. That is why we are prepared to invest $1 trillion in rebuilding our water systems, our waste water plants, our roads and our bridges."
Sanders said it would be accomplished by freeing up the wealth that is controlled by the top 1/10 percent of the people. He said he would do the same with funding education and a tax on Wall Street speculation.
But even after the Sanders' rally, some supporters said they were going to head to the Times Union Center to see republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speak because they said it was just too big an opportunity to miss.Advertisement
The F2-220 2-bay NAS enclosure by TerraMaster is a sub-$200 personal backup and storage solution. It has a dual core Intel CPU, and can handle up to 16TB of storage. As it comes without any drives, the big question is: is it any good?
If you’re not sure if you need a NAS or a cloud backup, read our comparison (my preference is both — you can never have enough backups).
Specifications
The F2-220 is a two bay Network Attached Storage (NAS) solution. Each bay supports up to 8TB of storage, therefore supporting a maximum of 16TB of storage, depending on how you configure the redundant array of independent drives (RAID). If you require more than two drives, the F4-220 and F5-420 models support four and five drives. In the case of the F5-420, the processor gets a nice bump to a quad core as well.
It supports 3.5″ or 2.5″ HDD or SSD SATA drives, making it compatible with nearly every consumer drive readily available right now. Using SSDs would get very expensive, and ultra fast M.2 SSDs will not fit. The best choice is 2 x mechanical HDDs.
Inside is an Intel Celeron 2.41GHz dual core CPU, along with 2GB of RAM and a 1Gbps network interface.
Due to these specifications, the FS-220 is less NAS and more server. It can handle a vast number of general purpose server duties, including:
Websites
Databases
FTP
Email
Media
Rsync
There are two USB ports on the back; one is USB 2, the other is USB 3. These are used to backup the NAS to an external drive – something that is certainly a good idea. However, if you have a 16TB NAS, it’s not possible to purchase a standalone 16TB USB drive! This backup feature may be better suited to backing up smaller folders, or copying certain data for travel.
It would be very nice to be able to backup USB drives directly to the NAS, but you cannot.
The NAS itself is a solid piece of kit, and the brushed aluminium feels nice to the touch. It does come with warning sticker attached, which annoyingly does not peel off neatly, instead leaving a sticky mess. This is meant to be removed, as it has a “quick release” tab. It’s not the end of the world, but it is a pain.
In The Box
Inside the box you get (nearly) everything you need to get started. Alongside the NAS you get:
1 x power adaptor
1 x network cable
1 x screwdriver
Various drive screws
You get a warranty booklet and one page leaflet with a getting started website address. It would be nice to have a manual or getting started guide, however the website does a good job of guiding you through the process.
The only thing you need to add is the drives. It’s recommended to purchase two identical drives for NAS devices — not only will you optimize your RAID setup, but you will maximize your storage space.
Setup
Setup is simple enough. The TerraMaster “TNAS” desktop app needs to be installed, and once it is, it guides you through the setup. It finds the F2-220 on your network, and formats it.
It provides you with an accurate status of every step.
Once setup, it allows you to create master passwords, and perform basic tasks. It is now installed with the TerraMaster Operating System (TOS).
Performance
Performance was very good. You can expect to achieve about 500Mbps read, and 250Mbps write. This will of course depend on the speed of your drives.
One issue I ran into was with Wi-Fi devices. Using a Macbook pro connected over WIFI to the F2-220 connected to ethernet, copying took a very long time. Write speeds dropped to about 50 megabits per second. Even with a fast Wi-Fi network, upload speeds were painfully slow. Some of this is also down to computers themselves. Computers can often struggle to copy many thousands of files from one device to another.
If I were using the F2-220 as a backup device, I could live with the slow speed. For much of the work I do, I need to copy several hundred GB files to the NAS and back — something that is not practical over W-Fi. I would buy the D5-300 for my needs – a five bay USB-C version. That’s not to say the F2-220 is bad – it’s great if you use it correctly (over a wired network).
Noise
TerraMaster claim the aluminium shell and quiet fan reduce noise and heat. While the fan is very quiet, the noise of the hard drives can be a problem. They are not excessively loud, and it is possible to buy reduced noise drives.
If you will use this NAS tucked away in a corner – perhaps under the stairs or behind the TV, then it’s no problem.
I ran it on my desk and it was noticeable. The main problem was vibrations from the drives could be felt along the length of the desk.
This is only a minor inconvenience, and it’s not the fault of TerraMaster — that’s just how mechanical drives work.
After a period of inactivity, the F2-220 will enter standby mode. This stops spinning the drives, significantly reducing the noise and extending the life of the drives.
Energy Saving
The F2-220 only draws 17W when in use, and 2W in standby. For comparison, the Google Pixel uses 17W to charge, and a raspberry Pi uses between 1 and 2W (turn your Pi into a NAS).
This equates to running costs of approximately $20 per year — that’s a very respectable figure, and something that is likely to much lower if the NAS enters standby regularly. When you consider what the F2-220 can do, it’s remarkable how little energy it uses.
Software
Where the F2-220 really shines is acting as a media server for your household. Running the TerraMaster Operating System, It supports a staggering number of protocols and services. You can run it as a database or web server – although only PHP is supported right now. It can run as a plex or iTunes server, and can synchronize with Dropbox.
The TerraMaster operating system provides remote access from any devices across the network. You can enable and disable services, manage files, delete users, and much more. While I did experience some slow downs, mainly when attempting to view media though the web interface, I’m pleased to say there were no noticeable slow downs or issues when accessing media through any other methods.
You can configure Telnet/SSH:
See drive and raid status:
See software and system status:
And see access logs:
Should You Buy the TerraMaster F2-220
If you are looking for a stable, reliable, and capable NAS device, you should consider the F2-220. While the network only interface may not work for every setup, there is a variety of different models to suit different requirements.
The TerraMaster Operating System rounds off the package by offering a multitude of communications protocols and technologies, in a simple to use interface.
Our competition for a TerraMast F2-220 and 2 drives to put in it is now over – the winner is displayed below. Thanks for entering!
TerraMaster F2-220 Giveaway
Make sure you read our guide to the best backup software for Windows The Best Backup Software for Windows The Best Backup Software for Windows Your data is fragile – it only takes one small accident to lose everything. The more backups you make, the better. Here we present the best free backup software for Windows. Read More, and how to turn your NAS into a time machine backup Turn Your NAS Or Windows Share Into A Time Machine Backup Turn Your NAS Or Windows Share Into A Time Machine Backup Use your NAS, or any network share, for backing up your Mac with Time Machine. Read More.
Our verdict of the Terramaster F2-220 :
With rock solid performance and a simple setup, there’s no reason not to purchase the F2-220. The excellent energy usage figures are the icing on the cake. 9 10ViewOverlay and animations in Android
ViewOverlay is a class that we can find in Android since its version 4.3 (API version 18) that provides a transparent layer on top of a View, to which you can add visual content and that does not affect the layout hierarchy.
It always has the same size and position as its host view, allowing you to add content over that view.
Oh, and how does it work?
You just have to call the getOverlay() method from any View of your app to get its ViewOverlay, or a ViewGroupOverlay if you are calling this method from some ViewGroup object, but both of them uses the same concept.
Once you got it, you can add any View or Drawable that you want to show in this overlay calling add(Drawable drawable) method on ViewOverlay, or add(View view) on ViewGroupOverlay.
ViewOverlay API is so simple, aside from add(Drawable drawable), we can also find clear() and remove(Drawable drawable). These are the only methods that we have to use to handle the views that we move to our ViewOverlays.
Ok, but why should I use ViewOverlay?
Well, for now everything that I came up to my mind to do with this new API can be done using RelativeLayout and a bit of tricky & ugly code. But this lets us to do that things in a friendly way.
Essentially, this component is visual-only, so views attached to a ViewOverlay will not respond to any touch or tap event. ViewOverlay mechanism was conceived to be used combined with stuff like animations.
Using ViewOverlays we can animate views through other layouts in view hierarchy, even if they are not any of its parents.
So when some of these animations ends, we should have to call clear() or remove(Drawable drawable) methods, to remove the view from our ViewOverlay to keep it clean and avoid memory leaks.
Sounds cool!
Yeah, but…
This is only for API 18+, although we hope it will be backported at some support library in the near future.
Right now, there is not a single example.
We can not do anything to solve the first point, but today we have been playing with this new stuff to try to understand how it works. So…
Let’s see
We have coded a simple app with just one Activity and a simple XML that has one top-level LinearLayout and 3 inner FrameLayout, with one Button inside each of them. This is how it works.
Red section
When we press the button, it’s moved to its parent-parent layout (the main, first-level, layout) ViewGroupOverlay, so the button can be moved along all the screen, as the animation does.
Orange section
In this case, we don’t have used ViewOverlay technique. So, it’s the default behavior when we perform an animation that want to go further than its container’s size.
Green section
Finally, in this example we combine the two types of animations. First we do an alpha animation from 1f to 0f, and when it finishes, the button is added to a non-parent ViewOverlay (the orange layout), and the second animation starts through the orange section.
You can download and check our project from right here.
That’s all folks, enjoy!Juan Valoy was sentenced to one to four years in prison Wednesday as a result of a scheme to defraud immigrants in the Washington Heights area by collecting fake security deposits on unavailable apartments.
Valoy pleaded guilty to the plot — which involved distributing fliers to members of the Hispanic community and showing them apartments that were in some cases already occupied. He collected thousands of dollars in supposed application fees and security deposits, and then failed to follow through on his promises to the applicants, in some cases severing contact completely.
“Exploiting trust in order to commit theft is not capitalization—it’s a crime,” said Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance. “In this case, the defendant preyed on a community of immigrants, stealing thousands of dollars and leaving his victims broke and without a place to live.”
More than 20 complaints were filed against Valoy. [Press Release] — Tess HofmannFrank Seravalli TSN Senior Hockey Reporter Follow|Archive
So, what next?
Saturday’s lottery was heart-stopping drama, but with 54 days to kill until the NHL Draft in Buffalo, the lottery has also left us with more questions than answers.
1. Are the Maple Leafs definitely going to draft Auston Matthews with the No. 1 pick?
All signs point to that happening on June 24, but before you run out to buy your new Matthews jersey, it might not be the slam dunk, forgone conclusion everyone believes. The Maple Leafs held their scouting meetings in Chicago last week and the team’s top brass then attended the NFL Draft. It’s believed a consensus was reached on an early draft list, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it was unanimous. Maple Leafs director of European scouting Ari Vuori may have made a strong case for Toronto to select Finnish sniper Patrik Laine ahead of Matthews.
Vuori, 53, came over to the Maple Leafs last year from the Detroit Red Wings with Mike Babcock. He was instrumental in drafting Anze Kopitar in Los Angeles along with Gustav Nyquist, Tomas Tatar and Teemu Pulkkinen, among others, in Detroit. Since Matthews played in Switzerland this season, European scouts like Vuori have been able to make a better comparison to Laine than any normal year with him in their backyard. Matthews is No. 1 on TSN and NHL Central Scouting’s lists and was dominant in the better European league, but many European scouts have maintained since the World Junior championship (and not just because of his recent playoff hot streak) that Laine is the best player available. Vuori may well be in that group.
Director of Player Personnel Mark Hunter, Lou Lamoriello and Brendan Shanahan will have the final say and it’s believed Toronto’s long-standing positional need will break any perceived tie between Matthews and Laine. After all, the Maple Leafs have only drafted two true No. 1 centres (Darryl Sittler and Vincent Damphousse) in franchise history.
Shanahan would not say Saturday night that the Maple Leafs will absolutely draft Matthews, only that Toronto’s scouts are “very pleased with tonight’s results.” Short of any misdirection, that would seem to be Matthews. But the Maple Leafs will absolutely use the upcoming World Championship to drill down on their pick.
“We knew we were going to get a good player, one through four,” Shanahan said. “Having the ability to pick first, we’re obviously going to pick whoever we think is best.”
2. What does winning the Draft Lottery do for Toronto’s plan to pursue Steven Stamkos?
Shanahan said he didn’t believe holding the No. 1 overall pick will change Toronto’s summer plans for free agency, but it couldn’t have hurt. Matthews is not Connor McDavid, but the impact McDavid has had on the image and perception of the franchise over the last year is astounding. Matthews would add a certain cache, or tangible belief that the rebuild is one step further down the line.
“We still all recognize it was only the end of Year 1 - we have a long way to go,” Shanahan said Saturday. “I really don’t think it has any impact - whether you pick one or you pick four - what you intend to do in free agency.
Seravalli: Leafs were incredibly lucky to win lottery Frank Seravalli, TSN Senior Hockey Reporter joins GameDay to give an insider account of how lucky the Leafs really were to win the lottery, discuss the many great players that Leafs could pick besides Auston Matthews, and give a quick update on the second round of the NHL playoffs.
“We’ll know as we get closer to free agency who is available and who fits into our plans and our vision for us to get better.”
The key phrase in that quote was, “who is available.” It’s also not a foregone conclusion, with Tampa Bay seemingly making another deep run, that Steven Stamkos will be leaving the Lightning. But if he does hit the market, the Maple Leafs will most definitely be making a big pitch to bring him home. Matthews is just one piece of the puzzle - a positive reinforcement that signing a long-term deal would not mean long-term pain for Stamkos.
3. What kind of offers can the Maple Leafs expect to receive for the No. 1 pick?
To be abund |
my students study and dissect the plans for five cities, including the historic plans for one. In all, ten plans. These are the documents that cities routinely hire consultants to write, often compelled to do so by state statute.
It seems its good municipal management to have a city plan. Mayors and city councils are somehow more informed as to how to meet the future with ten and twenty year plans in file drawers. Whether the citizens of a city might be the better for these exercises is open to question but planning is certainly good for the firms of urban planners and architects who prepare them.
Critical analysis by my students revealed several remarkable features. First, none of the plans ever spoke of what the city’s population might be at the end of the planning period! The singular measure of whether a city is succeeding or not, namely how many people chose to live there or have jobs to keep them in a particular place, is unexamined. So, too, is the question of what the profile of persons in poverty will be by the target year. Given that the ratio of poor residents who subsist on transfer payments to persons in families that are self supporting is among the most important measures of what a city’s economy looks like and will look like it is hard to imagine how anyone can try to better a city’s future, the stated ambition of all plans, without trying to prescribe what the poverty ratio might be. Finally, not one of the plans discussed the cost of running the city, certainly not the size of the public payroll and the associated benefit costs, including in most cities, the unfunded costs of pensions for retired and current public servants.
Instead, plans discuss and advance a set of what appear to be measures of city health that are clearly more faddish than practical. Thus, every contemporary plan speaks of how neighborhoods are the strength of any city, which while seemingly uncontestable, is largely not true. Neighbor health is derivative of city health. The city celebrates itself, through the words of its consultants, for its commitment to diversity going forward. Plans speak of why it’s to be desirable for a city to have upwards of twenty languages spoken in its schools (where its students commonly are already doing poorly on basic English competency tests). Of course, environmental sustainability seems a required discussion in which cities seem to fall over themselves making sure that DPW trucks, buses, police cars are enviro-friendly even as the decay of the streets they roll on, if mentioned at all, are absorbed in the umbrella phrase “infrastructure investment.” More words are devoted to the “clean” energy required for air-conditioning and heating schools than whether the schools are or aren’t educating the city’s youngest citizens effectively.
Some plans had references to international markets but the references are not to where the city’s industries must compete with their goods but to grocery stores that sell ingredients for burgeoning foreign resident populations. Above all, every plan discusses the important of new buildings for fire stations, community centers, schools, or government offices. (Remember, architects do a lot of city planning. To a man with a hammer every problem is a nail.)
None of the plans spoke of the changing nature of the economy. None set a goal of full employment or even mentioned unemployment. Poverty was a missing word. What discussion existed regarding economics was confined to making a specific kind of neighborhood, often called an arts district, to provide propinquity for the city’s “creative” population. If a link to the economy is mentioned it usually is a passing reference to new and small businesses that would grow up if, again, the physical environment was engineered in a specific way. The likely center of this new economy is the arts district!
To read a set of plans leads one to the inescapable conclusion that the practice of city planning has escaped reality. Its highly stylized form, apparently reflective of a settled professional culture, is first and foremost a political document disguised as a physical plan for a specific locale. Alexander Garvin captures the cynical nature of it all in his new book “The Planning Game.” Having been a professional planner and a real estate developer, his book is about politics and the importance of “playing” well so that new buildings get built. There is no discussion of the city’s economy. The index entry under “economics” takes the reader in every case to a discussion of the financing of projects. The book rests on the fallacy common to all contemporary urban planning, namely, that the built environment will make the economy happen. Just as with international development strategy, the artifacts of a successful economy are presumed necessary conditions precedent to a successful economy emerging.
In fact, the “build it and an economy will come” fallacy is but one flaw of contemporary urban planning. The much larger problem is that the typical plan is really a “retro-static” document, at least for cities not experiencing economic growth. It sets an implicit idealized state in the past usually the city’s high water mark in population. Detroit remains hopeful that someday 2.3 million people will live there once again. President Obama and countless others before him have declared such goals. Why not plan accordingly, even if the formal plan never mentions a credible strategy to reestablish an economy that would require and support 2.3 million people?
If planning is to be helpful it must see cities first as the economic communities that they were at their beginning. No city ever came to exist but for two forces, security and commerce. American cities were presumed secure – as modern communities they were and are the creatures of business. No community, ancient or modern, survives without commerce. Those cities that no longer produce sufficient commerce to sustain themselves become dependent on others outside, in a modern democracy, to provide for their care they rely on transfer payments. The cost is local control of their destiny.
Cities that are essentially supplicants to higher levels of government have one of two paths for planning. One is to become yet more proficient at supplication; in a bad national economy this path spells further decline. The other is to imagine rebuilding an economy that achieves scale growth. Planners never speak to the economic possibilities because apparently they don’t know how economic growth actually happens.
Going forward we need “proto-dynamic” plans for cities. They would sketch out an economic path leading to self-sustenance where the city produces more than it consumes in terms of the larger economy. This is the only path that will allow a city to anticipate any substantial growth and the capacity to eliminate poverty for those who live there. To form such a goal a city has to think of how it can generate sufficient industry to provide jobs for its unemployed. This must be the first order objective and it eludes planners because they have no idea of how the complexities of dynamic economies actually are sparked to life.
The urban plans of the future have to combine the capacity first to encourage a city’s entire population, not just college students – an error commonly made in today’s over emphasized reliance on “creatives” – to take up the possibility of innovating and making new companies that meet unforeseen demands in world markets beyond the city. Scale production, not small shop keeping or running art galleries, is the only path to growth and urban futures that hold the potential to restore communities which means reducing poverty. But, of course, this, like the capitalism that holds this promise, appears just too messy for planners who, in the end, see the growth of government and its control over all aspects of the built environment as the pathway to the cities of tomorrow, which in their documents look troublingly nostalgic for the towns that once were.Video Helps Acquit Student In First Occupy Wall Street Trial
Enlarge this image toggle caption Spencer Platt/Getty Images Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Alexander Arbuckle, the defendant in the first Occupy Wall Street case to go to trial, has been found not guilty after video of the incident he was involved in showed him breaking no laws. The Village Voice reports:
"The protesters, including Arbuckle, were in the street blocking traffic, Officer Elisheba Vera testified. The police, on the sidewalk, had to move in to make arrests to allow blocked traffic to move. But there was a problem with the police account: it bore no resemblance to photographs and videos taken that night."
In an ironic twist, Arbuckle was actually working on a New York University photojournalism project aimed at defending police officers working at Occupy protests when he was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct.
"I felt the police had been treated unfairly on [sic] the media," he said to the Village Voice. "All the focus was on the conflict and the worst instances of brutality and aggression, where most of the police I met down there were really professional and restrained."
Occupy videographer and indefatigable live-streamer Tim Pool's clip was used as evidence along with the NYPD's own video footage in the trial. The video shows protesters clearly using the sidewalk like they were asked to. (Watch the arrest around minute 35 of Pool's video.)
"What's happening is very similar to what happened in 2004 with the Republican National Convention," Arbuckle's lawyer told the Voice. "It's just a symptom of how the NYPD treats dissent. But what has changed is that there is more prevalence of video. It really makes our job a lot easier to have that video."
Pool, who has used an iPhone, solar-powered backpack and even a drone to stream Occupy protests, has been central to the movement's emphasis on transparency and constantly capturing the movement using new media tools. The Nation profiled the visibility efforts in March:Westover Winery was a small, family-owned, award-winning producer based in California’s Castro Valley. The company drew on a groundbreaking family history of winemaking. Several generations ago, in 1881, an aunt of owner William Westover Smyth had become the first documented woman winemaker in the state.
Despite its size, Westover impressively “produce[d] the greatest variety of ports in the United States,” along with sparkling wines and several varietals. They were also a sustainable producer, recycling the great majority (90 percent) of their waste.
Earlier this summer, Westover took home a gold medal and best-in-show award at the Alameda County Wine Competition. But as the summer drew to a close, so too did Westover Winery.
California regulators fined the winemaker $115,000 recently for relying on volunteer workers. The San Jose Mercury News reported Smyth's plight thusly: “the state squeezed him like a late-summer grape.”
And just like that, Westover Winery was out of business.
Westover explained that wineries often use volunteers—if you’ve ever taken part in a grape stomp, then you and your feet have volunteered for a winery—and that he didn’t know doing so was illegal.
But to California regulators, ignorance of a stupid and pointless law is no excuse.
In the midst of this terrible news, there’s also some good news from the world of beer, wine, and spirits that’s worth sharing.
There are the success stories, of which the growth of craft beer tops the list. According to 2013 data crunched by the Brewers Association, which represents craft beer brewers across the country, the outlook for craft beer is bright and getting brighter.
While overall beer sales declined nearly two percent in 2013, craft beer sales were up by more than seventeen percent. Craft beer sales constituted nearly eight percent of the total domestic beer market in 2014. They accounted for more than $14 billion of the $100 billion beer market last year. That represented a twenty-percent growth in beer sales.
Craft beer breweries continue to grow. The town of Saline, Mich., for example, recently approved plans for a new craft brewery there.
And then there are the regulatory victories. Last month, for example, the Richmond, Virginia, city commission repealed a ban that prevented liquor stores and bars from opening on election day. A dry town in New Jersey relaxed its ban, meaning restaurants will now be able to offer wine on their menus. Meanwhile, a town in Alberta, Canada, is moving to reconsider its 100-year-old ban on the sale of liquor.
Elsewhere, Utah regulators are backing off threats to restrict permits for events put on by for-profit companies that serve alcohol. The move comes after the regulators had adopted a new, stricter interpretation of existing rules that nearly derailed a planned Oktoberfest celebration at Snowbird Ski Resort.
And voters are having their say. A special election in Pontotoc, Mississippi, earlier this month saw voters lift the ban on beer sales there. And in November, voters in several Tennessee counties will have the opportunity to repeal a Prohibition-era law that prohibits the sale of wine in grocery stores.
As the case of Westover Winery makes clear, the news surrounding beer, wine, and spirits isn’t all roses. Even the opportunities and victories I describe above are sometimes deeply flawed. The dry New Jersey town still prohibits liquor and beer. Voters in the dry Mississippi town approved beer sales but rejected liquor sales. And while polls show Tennessee voters support ending the wine ban, the outcome won’t be certain until a November vote.
On beer, wine, and liquor issues, the country appears to be creeping toward saner policies. Success stories, deregulation, and voter-led changes are all signs of this trend. But for some—like Westover Winery—change hasn’t come fast enough.The reasons are momentum, government policy, and land availability.
American society is invested in the infrastructure of suburbia. Putting aside new development, most places don't have the concentrated development to support viable mass transit (if they have any at all), so if you live there already, you need a car. Everyone has a car, so the infrastructure of the community needs to support that, from roads to parking lots.
It's hard to ignore the fact that in the United States, there's still a lot of land available for development. The Economist somewhat flippantly described the US as having "unlimited land" in a leader a few weeks back. It's hardly unlimited, but if you want to develop land, it's there to be had.
As for why we don't change this, there are a lot of reasons, but the explanatory ones have mostly to do with government policy. Contra the idea that suburbia was a phenomenon of the market, federal and local policies have driven the growth of suburbia for the better part of the last century. Just follow the money for housing and transportation.
From the 1930's (with the creation of the FHA), the federal government has been in the business of subsidizing home purchases, incentivizing people to buy rather than rent. Early FHA policies were limited to new development and in some cases actually excluded housing in racially mixed neighborhoods. Both of those policies led to new suburban development.
As of about 10 years ago, the US federal government spent ~85% of its transportation budget on highways. The highway funds are paid through an autonomous funding mechanism, making it difficult to dismantle.
Claims about things like the quality of schools are based on earlier policies. The quality of public schools is usually related to revenue base. So school funding will follow incomes further out from cities. I recall, too, that early 20th Century laws in the US diminished cities' ability to annex the developing territories around them, thus halting the growth of their income bases to pay for such things.
There are cultural reasons that people want their own home, but government subsidies reinforce the desire to own a home. If you value owning a home over where you live, then you buy where you can afford (counterbalancing issues like transportation cost and quality of life are rarely considered in this calculus, if you're wondering).
See Laws of the Landscape by Pietro Nivola for more on the policy details.These photos and videos provide a detailed look at this project’s development.
Appearance and function match the final product, but is made with different manufacturing methods.
Looks like the final product, but is not functional.
Demonstrates the functionality of the final product, but looks different.
A prototype is a preliminary model of something. Projects that offer physical products need to show backers documentation of a working prototype. This gallery features photos, videos, and other visual documentation that will give backers a sense of what’s been accomplished so far and what’s left to do. Though the development process can vary for each project, these are the stages we typically see:
What am I (Potentially) Pledging For?
A marble Trump shaped rock (bougie, just like fancy face himself) with an accompanying book of activities you can do with your new pet rock.
Why?
Might as well have something useful from Trump. This is a "smart" & "amazing" piece for your home or office.
How?
We're dun gonna cut some rock and mail it to you.
Where?
In Toronto, Canada.
When?
First rocks will go out May 2016.
If This Trump Rock Could Talk:
"Mike Tyson endorsed me. You know, all the tough guys endorse me. I like that. OK? - Trump Rock
"I'm like a really smart person" - Trump Rock
"We need to build a wall on the Mexican border..." - Trump Rock
"This is worth a tremendous amount" - Trump Rock
"We need somebody who can take the brand of the United States and make it great again" - Trump Rock
"This is terrific" - Trump Rock
"it's is gonna be huge!" - Trump Rock
"We need toughness now. We need toughness" - Trump RockThis time last year, the Philadelphia Union were in the middle of a four-game losing streak that would bring the team to a record of one win, three draws, and seven losses.
Fast forward 363 days and the Union now sit atop the Eastern Conference table with four wins, three losses, zero draws and 12 out of 21 possible points.
It's a remarkable turnaround for Jim Curtin's team, which handled New York City with relative ease on Saturday afternoon. C.J. Sapong scored his fourth goal of the season, and Chris Pontius added his third, as the Union ran out to a 2-0 win in front of nearly 18,000 fans at Talen Energy Stadium.
Home is where the points are
Three wins, zero losses, seven goals scored, and one conceded – that's the Union's home form in 2016.
Saturday's win was the fifth straight at Talen Energy Stadium, which is a club-record streak.
Last year, the Union had the second-worst home record in the Eastern Conference and only managed seven wins in 17 games, good enough for 24 points when you add in three draws.
In 2014, the club went 6-3-8 at home (W-L-D), and only secured 26 out of 51 possible points.
Already in 2016 you have a team that's taken nine out of nine possible points. The +6 goal differential at home is in the top 20 percent in the league and the overall goal differential of +3 is tied for first in the east.
No Pirlo, no real difference
Patrick Vieira's post-game press conference provided some head-scratching moments.
Absent from the gameday 18 was Italian veteran Andrea Pirlo, who, according to his coach, was not injured. Vieira said that the decision to drop Pirlo was “his decision” and had nothing to do with a tight schedule that features three games in seven days.
Vieira's team managed 13 shots to the Union's 11, but only put one on frame. David Villa was responsible for ten of those 13 efforts.
New York won a lopsided possession battle and had six chances from corners, though the Union didn't concede any dangerous free kick opportunities.
Vieira discussed the performance in a weird exchange with a reporter, though it was not contentious.
Reporter: "You said you were angry about not going back to New York with something out of this game. Did you feel like you deserved at least a point?
Vieira: "Of course. We deserved to take something back."
Reporter: "Yes, but you also said that you gave away goals on simple mistakes. So how can you feel that you deserve something when you're making these types of mistakes?"
Vieira: "Yes, it is mistakes that we shouldn't have made, but on the other side, we created more than we conceded - much, much more. That's why there's a lot of frustration and anger, because we should take something home, because of the number of chances we created, (compared) to the number of chances we conceded. I think when you analyze the game, you can see that we controlled the game, and we were, by far, the better team today.
Reporter: "I guess we're seeing different games."
Vieira: "We're seeing different games?"
Reporter: "To me, it seemed like it's the one thing you didn't do. I only saw one chance on goal the second half, even though you were down two to nothing. It was like the players weren't even trying to create those opportunities they needed to create to bring the game back. So how can you say that? I just don't understand."
Vieira: "I respectfully understand your view, but like you said, we have a different view of the game."
Reporter: "Right, because Philly really didn't have to do much in the second half. They had the game under control, so of course they can let you come into the play more. Do you feel like it was not about them letting you (back into the game), or that you were dominating them?"
Vieira: "I personally believe that we dominated the game. I personally believe that we created enough chances to score the goals. But yes, at the same time, Philadelphia did well, but I think that we weren't ruthless enough in front of the goal around the last 20 or 30 yards to put the ball in the back of the net, and we gave those two goals away. Philly didn't really create them, we gave it to them. I believe it was our lack of ruthlessness and it's a part of the game we need to improve."
Grades
Starting XI: Blake, Fabinho, Marquez, Yaro, Rosenberry; Carroll, Nogueira; Le Toux, Barnetta, Pontius; Sapong
C.J. Sapong: A
(sound of a phone ringing)
“C.J.? Hi, this is Jurgen Klinsmann. Do you have a moment to speak?”
Sebastien Le Toux: B
He put in a classic, hard-working Le Toux shift and was rewarded for it with an assist on Sapong's goal.
Tranquillo Barnetta: A-
Showed immense presence inside the box to take that ball and chip it over a defender, when most players would have fired it first-time into traffic.
The assist showed the type of veteran quality that's been missing on prior Union teams, and he'll only improve in the #10 role as he edges closer to 90-minute fitness.
Chris Pontius: A-
He occupied perfect position on his goal, and only had to tap home from close range.
Give him extra credit for coming back into the game and getting that tally after taking an elbow to the face and being forced to the sideline. It looked like Pontius would have had to come off if the training staff couldn't stop the bleeding below his right eye.
Aside from that 10 minute scenario, the winger was relatively quiet, though he did have a really nice headed effort in the early stages of the game that just missed the far post.
Vince Nogueira: B
He wasn't as fluid as he was in the Seattle game, but Nogueira had another good day shuttling the ball back and forth and setting the tempo when the Union had the ball.
Brian Carroll: C+
On his 350th MLS appearance, Carroll was a bit slow to get into the game.
Early on, Villa had a couple of dangerous looks on goal from the pocket of space just in front of the center backs. Later, Carroll adjusted, snuffed out a couple of good looks for the Spanish veteran, and settled into his typically efficient game.
Fabinho: C
Maybe he was unlucky to pick up the first half caution because he was covering for a blown Richie Marquez tackle.
Fabi will miss the next game due to yellow card accumulation.
Richie Marquez: B
He might have saved a goal when he went to ground in the 62nd minute to block a close-range Stiven Mendoza shot. Earlier, he missed on a tackle that allowed Khiry Shelton to the endline and forced a clumsy foul from Fabinho.
For the most part, though, he was better than he was in Seattle and put out the fires around him.
Josh Yaro: B
Yaro got better as the game wore on.
Similar to Marquez, he made the plays he needed to make and had the athleticism to keep up with Mendoza, Shelton, or whomever trended to his side of the field.
The only real issue with Yaro and Marquez came in the first 30 minutes of the game when Villa was hovering around the 20-yard mark with too much time to turn and shoot.
Keegan Rosenberry: C+
He had a really nice look in the 11th minute, rising to meet a corner kick that Josh Saunders ended up parrying away.
Later, he got beat on a backdoor pass that Mendoza squared for Villa, only to see a shot clank off the crossbar.
Similar to past games, Rosenberry was solid going forward, but a little bit unsteady in defense.
Andre Blake: B+
He watched David Villa hit two shots over the bar, then clank that third effort off the woodwork.
Otherwise, he commanded his box and make the necessary saves with no real issues.
Substitutes
45' Ray Gaddis: B+
He was asked to spell Fabinho at left back against both Shelton and Mendoza, who switched sides a couple of times during the course of the game.
Gaddis didn't make a single mistake in his 45 minutes on the field.
64' Ilsinho: C
He wasn't very effective coming off the bench in a game where the Union was clearly content to see out a two-goal lead.
80' Warren Creavalle: N/A
A late defensive sub, Creavalle helped to close it out.
Referee: Juan Carlos Rivero: B
The yellow to Fabinho was probably fair, since the foul broke up a threatening New York attack. Otherwise, he probably didn't have to caution Mikey Lopez for his early foul on Barnetta.
Union crowd: A
Finally, this looked like a good Union crowd. The Sons of Ben tifo was excellent, the attendance was near-capacity, and it looked like a proper crowd for a proper team.Say what you will about the Trumps, they’ve always been a real nuclear family – albeit in a Three Mile Island kind of way. But rather like the Kardashian clan, there appears to be a near-limitless supply of lesser models to be rolled out as needed. If one Trump unit is malfunctioning, another can debut a nude lip shade or a “real news show” to draw the spotlight away.
The latest to be given her own spin-off product is presidential daughter-in-law Lara Trump. If you have trouble keeping your dead-eyed Trump consorts in order, be advised that Lara is married to Eric Trump, currently a sort of Adam Carrington analogue in that no one can summon the energy to care too much about him given how much else there is to watch. But things being what they are with the franchise plotting, Eric could easily become a Jeff or even a Steven at a later date.
For now, Eric still spends his days explaining away various misunderstandings that dog the family, such as why $1.2m of money raised by the Eric Trump Foundation and intended for childhood cancer research was apparently paid to his father’s company, to put on a golf tournament. Just a few weeks ago, you might recall, Eric declared that this kind of attack stemmed from the fact that “morality is just gone”. And on that we can all surely concur.
So that’s Eric. But far more exciting developments are afoot in the career of his wife, who has just beaten an undisclosed – but doubtless huge – field of external candidates to the job of being the president’s good news bear. I paraphrase slightly: but this week saw the debut of a Facebook news show presented by the president’s daughter-in-law, and designed to bring you the real news of the Trump administration. Which is all good news. The economy is booming. The president had a great time meeting some veterans.
When I say “news show”, what I am describing is a single camera tightly focused on Lara, who delivers a monologue straight to it. Hey, it was good enough for Ed Murrow. And I found much to enjoy in Lara’s delivery, which feels as if it was honed after a mean acting coach once said to her: “Hey – if you’re so happy, you should maybe tell your Restylane?” Either way, what she lacks in facial flexibility she more than makes up for in the vocal: a sort of hyper-perky QVC saleswoman patter that feels as if it might tip over into a gurgle of teary laughter at any minute. Indeed, one section introduced with the words “Also this week the president got to meet with ICE …” finds her almost struggling to keep a lid on her joy levels.
For all this, however, Lara does look like someone who has been forced to film a Real Housewives cocktail party fight scene for 12 hours back-to-back. As the video wore on, I couldn’t help but wonder whether she was an entirely free agent in all of this. If you’re reading, Lara, are you at liberty to come and go from your place of broadcast? If not, do you understand that in future broadcasts you could arrange your highlights to send coded distress signals?
Assuming all is well in Washington’s little corner of Pyongyang, however, it feels distinctly likely that Lara will soon be scooping exclusive interviews with the president himself. Inevitably, there will be moments he refuses to appear even to her – a bit like when former Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson was no-speaks with MUTV, a channel widely assumed to be broadcasting from a position at least 18 inches up his colon. But if things remain on track, I hope that the Trump presidency will soon create its own version of the Peabody Awards, at which I expect Lara to sweep the board.
As for other Trump-o-tainment news, the Hollywood Reporter has just revealed that a few years ago, President Trump was nearly cast as the US president in Sharknado 3. According to producers, he immediately said an informal yes to the offer, and talks were sufficiently advanced that a contract had been drawn up and sent to Trump’s lawyer, Michael D Cohen. Then the stalling began, with the Sharknado guys eventually informed: “Donald’s thinking about making a legitimate run for the presidency, so we’ll get back to you.” They never did, so mogul and Dallas mavericks owner Mark Cuban was cast instead – only for Cohen to reportedly lose his rag and demand: “How DARE you? Donald really wanted to do this.”
I mean, I know jaw-dropping vignettes evoking Where We Are Now are hardly in short supply, but the latter at least makes this week’s Top Ten. It’s the timeworn fork in the road, isn’t it? Either you’re cast as the US president in a movie deliberately conceived as the ultimate cinematic schlock joke. Or, you know, you get elected actual US president. Choices, choices …A tool developed in the artificial intelligence laboratory summarises diverse opinions found on the internet. An open arms trade, homosexual rights, government surveillance or the death penalty: ObViz analyses what is written on the topic and then clearly lays out the arguments from different sources.
“I lost some of my savings in the 2008 financial crisis,” said Claudiu Musat, a postdoctoral student at the artificial intelligence laboratory. “I was then surprised to see that several economists had predicted it. Although I thought I had read everything, I hadn’t seen their articles.”
This unfortunate experience sparked the researcher’s interest in computerised opinion research. Seven years on, he has come up with ObViz – opinion-based visualisation – a tool for researching and summarising controversies. Several versions of the tool will soon be available: a browser extension, a participatory website and a widget offered to content publishers.
Structured summary
“It is difficult to find rational debates on the internet when it comes to topics like vaccination and animal testing, because the discussions are dominated by activists,” said Musat. This is where the semi-automated analysis done by ObViz comes in, helping whoever wants to form an opinion. ObViz analyses texts from multiple sources, determines the topics, and searches for arguments on both sides of the issue. It then summarises them in a structured way.
“Structuring the debate also means learning something about it. Otherwise, in the jungle of arguments, it’s usually the first one that makes the biggest impression,” said Musat. On the ObViz website, a little character named ObVee serves as the mascot, presenting both sides of various issues along with a summary that allows the user to clearly grasp the key points in a debate.
User-driven
For now, ObViz only exists in the form of a participatory website called ObVee. “It presents analyses of articles that users can approve or correct. They can decide if an argument is not relevant or label it either for or against,” said Musat. Thanks to this human feedback, the website learns how to detect certain sentence structures. This allows it in turn to improve the accuracy of its analyses, which are for now provided only in English.
Financing for the project is planned through crowdfunding. Supporters will receive a browser extension, which they’ll be able to use on any web page. The analysis tool will detect the various arguments in the text on the page and classify them as either for or against the issue in question.
Musat has also gotten in touch with a number of publishers, which means his innovation could soon find its way to news websites. If so, ObVee could be used to suggest other articles on either side of the same topic. By referring readers to archived articles, ObViz will extend their shelf life.
On partner websites, the arguments and the summary of opinions will help readers fully grasp the content, and this certainly represents added value for the publishers. "We carried out two studies that clearly showed that our interface enhances user participation by 50%," says Musat. Beyond a summarised presentation of the news, ObVee will interact with users, encouraging them to give their opinion or to use the arguments in their comments on social media. Once active in the debate, the reader is more likely to return to the website.
Whom to trust?
ObViz also resolves a common problem on the web: the credibility of sources. The argument-detection process highlights a user’s or website’s sources, which are an indication of credibility. The same is true on the participatory website where, by virtue of their comments, users construct for themselves a profile showing their areas of knowledge.Israel’s Hearing Day is gaining prominence across the country and this year the vice-mayor of one of Israel’s cities announced all his city schools would start teaching sign language.
Last week a conference was held in honor of national “Hearing Day” in the Loewenstein Rehabilitation Center in the city of Raanana, Israel. A world-renown institution for medical rehabilitation, the center hosted deaf children, adults, staff and visitors from all over the country.
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The purpose of the conference was to raise awareness of professional rehabilitation among the deaf and hard-of-hearing society on one hand and to raise general awareness of difficulties faced by deaf people in everyday life.
In her speech, Vice Mayor of Raanana, Ronit Weintraub made an announcement: “I hereby declare that the city of Raanana will be promoting the subject of teaching sign language in the city schools. I believe that all of us will gain from it another important way of communication”.
The conference was accompanied with translation to sign language and included a unique dance performance by hard-of-hearing students of the center. There was also a screening of the movie “One On One,” which tells the story of Peretz Rivkin, former captain of the Israeli Deaf Basketball team.
Across Israel “Hearing Day” also included free hearing tests and lectures regarding hearing damages, accessibility problems and solutions.
“This is the second year we’re successfully marking Hearing Day,” said Ami Megadasi, the center director. “We’ve been developing the hearing disabilities field for twenty years in Israel and I believe today we can at last properly answer the needs of this population. The students here are diagnosed and get individual guidance and help in finding jobs. I am more than happy to say that the percentage of integration of the hard-of-hearing society in workplaces stands today at more than 80 percent”.
Photo by Axel BührmannLife is too short for a full-time job. Too short, and too precious.
Time unwatched is its own treasure, gracious host to conversations that drift and swoop, afternoons that stretch into evenings, dinners that slur into a last coffee.
And, if you’re like me, and can spend entire winters watching tongues of fire flicker in an open fireplace, as Bill Watterson said, “there’s never enough time to do all the nothing you want.”
But you don’t have to listen to me, part-time mountain dweller and full-time maverick. Here’s Carlos Slim, the world’s second richest man: “We should be working only 3 days a week.” It is time, he says, for a radical overhaul of our working lives. We need more time to relax, for quality of life.
In his book, Critical Path, polymath and futurist Buckminster Fuller anticipated that rising productivity would make part-time work an option for all of mankind. We haven’t got there yet, but it is an option for most readers of Quartz, I’d warrant. Appropriately, I only found time to read Bucky when my wife and I decided to honeymoon for a year in our stone cottage in the Kumaon. One autumn morning, when the sun glistened off dewdrops, and the Himalayas towered in their snow-white clarity, my wife offered a prayer to the grace bestowed on us. “Do we need to go back?”
We didn’t, and spent six incredibly rich years in our garden in the forest, watching the peaches grow, and our son toddle, rocking him to sleep with Dave Matthews or vintage Stones, serenading the moonlight with candles and home-made peach wine.
When we returned to Delhi, to send our son to school, I knew I could never go back to full-time work. I was too consumed by the love of life and family to chain myself to the clock of a daily routine. I needed the freedom to spend the day in a couch reading a book, or taking the sun in the park. I needed to have time to listen when a friend wanted to talk. I needed to be home when my son came back from school.
Modern life is not structured for such eccentricity. Early feelers made it clear I needed to occupy a desk, administer an office, sit in long meetings, work late hours. “Sure |
want is 'negative option,' " Piotr Orlov said, referencing the idea of hooking people with a good deal and then roping them into a contract. (Orlov is a contributing editor for NPR music and former Columbia House director of A&R and marketing between 1996 and 1999.)
"You had a contract that was over a short period of time — two, three or four years — you had to buy a number of titles under regular prices," he said. "And these regular prices put CD store prices to shame. Like $19.99 [instead of] $11.99. It was an enormous markup."
Orlov also said Columbia House signed multimillion-dollar contracts with companies such as Sony, Warner Music and others that allowed it to obtain the raw materials and produce its own CDs.
"[Columbia House] was partially owned by major music distributors. [It] would get the music parts — the art and the master tape — and manufacture it themselves."
Columbia House, however, wasn't the only one cashing in. Because the CDs came in the mail and customers could pay with cash or check, Orlov said the subscription process lent itself to what he called "low-grade mail fraud."
"People would fill out a real address with fake names and get 12 free CDs," he said. "The punch line to this joke is that everybody who worked at Columbia House had done this too [earlier in life]. It really was like an inside joke."
For another NPR music denizen, Stephen Thompson, Columbia House also represented more than mere music.
"For generations of people, Columbia House was a huge rite of passage — your first foray into maybe wrecking your credit rating, or at least running afoul of an authority beyond your hometown. I was never a member myself, because my parents filled my head with horror stories, but I always look back on Columbia House as, like, Baby's First Mail Fraud," he said.
Its business model wasn't perfect, Orlov said, but Columbia House was valuable in its time.
"What it did do was serve a purpose. If you didn't have a record store, this was the closest you got to having a good music selection. It put in front of you the ability to buy CDs and send them to your house even if you lived in [the middle of nowhere]."
The FEI statement said the decline was "driven by the advent of digital media and resulting declines in the recorded music business and the home-entertainment segment of the film business." While streaming services such as Netflix and Spotify surely cut into Columbia House's profits, Orlov said the main reason for the company's downfall is something else entirely.
"No one cares about owning CDs anymore," he said.Emo Night LA (formerly Taking Back Tuesday) hosted the official after party to Chain Fest, a festival dedicated to the 20th anniversary of the beloved all-ages venue, Chain Reaction in Anaheim.
Emo Night LA gained a passionate and dedicated fan base over the past two years from their monthly “Emo Nite” events at The Echo/Echoplex in Echo Park, CA. The popularity in “Emo Nite” has let Emo Night LA take their show all across the country.
Emo Night LA, with the help of the surprise DJs (including members of Dance Gavin Dance), spun the crowd’s favorite emo hits from the 2000s, the 90s, and today.
The collective quite literally “shut down” Chain Fest by taking the party from the end of Coheed and Cambria’s set, all the way to 2 a.m.
In addition, this was Emo Night LA’s first time hosting the event at The Observatory Orange County. Also, this event was 18+, a drastic change from their usual 21+ events.
The people at Emo Night sure kn0w how to have a good time (as seen in the pictures above) and helped Chain Fest end with a bang.
–
Post and photos by Matthew Saunders (Shots By Matt)
Did you attend the Chain Fest Emo Nite After Party? Comment below.
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AdvertisementsThe Weinstein Co. was expected to finance half of the $160 million Robert De Niro drama from David O. Russell as well as the $75 million 'The Romanoffs' from Matt Weiner, sources say, but the streamer has not seen a cent.
Several Amazon Studios executives — male and female, from various departments — have expressed concern about the company's involvement on two expensive and high-profile Weinstein Co. series amid a relentless series of revelations about Harvey Weinstein's conduct toward women.
The two series in question are The Romanoffs, an anthology series from Mad Men creator Matt Weiner, and an untitled drama from David O. Russell starring Robert De Niro and Julianne Moore.
Asked for comment, Craig Berman, vp communications at Amazon Entertainment, said Tuesday in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, "We are reviewing our options for the projects we have with The Weinstein Co."
In a Tuesday morning meeting presided over by head of television business affairs Dan Scharf, sources say, executives said they believed Amazon should be proactive and move quickly to extricate both shows from The Weinstein Co. without harming the projects or talent relationships. Sources tell THR that The Weinstein Co. has not put up any money for either of the shows, despite the company having committed to co-finance both.
While the $75 million Weiner anthology is in production and is said to be going smoothly, the Russell series is said to have already cost Amazon $40 million with only a handful of scripts turned in. Amazon Studios head Roy Price brought The Weinstein Co. into the Russell project to co-finance but from the start, Weinstein was contractually excluded from creative input. A source says Weiner's reps have conveyed to Amazon that the showrunner expects the Weinstein name to be eliminated from the series. Weiner did not respond to requests for comment.
The Romanoffs, an eight-episode individual episodic anthology, has already begun casting and had drawn a collection of Mad Men stars including Christina Hendricks and John Slattery. Production on the first few episodes has been completed and a planned hiatus to accommodate Weiner's forthcoming book tour is rapidly approaching. The plan as it stands now is for Weiner to complete work on the series after his tour ends.
As for the untitled Russell drama, sources say some in the Tuesday meeting advocated scrapping its two-season order, to which the streaming giant is said to have committed $160 million. (The price tag for the series was so high that other outlets declined even to hear the pitch.) Sources stress that the Russell project remains the top priority for Price, who has come under fire recently for the company's inability to produce a breakout hit a la Game of Thrones. De Niro is said to have secured $750,000 per episode for the series, which is still casting. Weinstein, sources say, convinced Price that he could control the notoriously temperamental Russell.
The news comes as The Weinstein Co. fired co-founder Weinstein following allegations of decades-long sexual harassment in the wake of a blistering New York Times story. On Tuesday, The New Yorker's exposé included rape allegations against Weinstein.
In the wake of the scandal, TWC execs informed TV networks that they could remove Weinstein's name from upcoming episodes. That starts Wednesday with Lifetime's Project Runway, which TWC produces. Apple, meanwhile, has already scrapped a planned four-show deal with TWC that was to have included miniseries revolving around Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, Prince and Frank Sinatra.
Meanwhile, TWC's upcoming TV slate includes Paramount Network's Waco miniseries and Taylor Sheridan drama Yellowstone — both of which will help the Viacom cable network rebrand from Spike in January. Waco is said to have already completed production, while the Kevin Costner starrer Yellowstone is about half-done. Also half-completed is a Trayvon Martin docuseries from TWC and Weinstein's former adviser, Lisa Bloom.The Georgia police lieutenant who said cops "only kill black people" during a traffic stop, will be fired, the police chief said Thursday.
"I have known Lt. (Greg) Abbott for years and perceived him as honorable, but he's made a mistake," Cobb County Police Chief Mike Register said, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "I don't know what is in his heart, but I know what came out of his mouth. We recommend that he be terminated and we are moving forward on that."
During a DUI stop last month, Abbott was recorded on dash-cam video telling the driver, "Remember, we only kill black people."
The officer's statement was in response to the driver telling the lieutenant she was afraid to move her hands because she had "just seen way too many videos of cops…"
GEORGIA POLICE OFFICER AT DUI STOP: 'WE ONLY KILL BLACK PEOPLE'
"But you're not black," Abbott said to the driver. "Remember, we only shoot black people. Yeah. We only kill black people, right? All the videos you've seen, have you seen the black people get killed?"
The dash-cam video was timestamped July 10, 2016, but it was brought to light on Wednesday after Channel 2 Action News obtained the dash-cam video and submitted an open-records request and the police chief and his command staff looked into it.
Register, who was not police chief during the time of the video, said Abbott's comments were "inappropriate" for a cop to say.
"I wish Lt. Abbott well. But I think that was very inappropriate for any police officer to say that, but especially one of our leaders in the department," the chief reportedly said.
Abbott was on the force for 28 years.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.In a chilling case of human barbarism, the body of a poor 21 years old boy was recovered from a lake in Honnavar town of Karnataka. It was reported that body which was recovered on Friday contained signs of extreme torture like being burnt, mutilated and castrated.
As per media reports, the boy named Paresh Mesta was most likely trying to escape stone pelting that erupted after a fight between a motorbike and an auto rickshaw driver turned into communal violence. Paresh went missing on Wednesday night.
After his body was recovered, police claimed that the boy had accidentally drowned in the lake while escaping the mob. This has been rubbished by his family members who stated that he was an expert swimmer and belonged to the fishermen community. The mutilation of his body too was cited as reason for this not being a death due to drowning.
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On Friday, hundreds including union minister and BJP leader Anantkumar Hegde thronged to join Paresh’s funeral procession:
“A complaint has been filed that five people – Imtiaz, Azad, Amir, Salim and Asif – were involved in Paresh’s murder,” Honnavar BJP president Subraya Nayak said.
The postmortem of the body was conducted in the government hospital in Honnavar, and the reasons behind the death was yet to be ascertained, the Times of India report claims, but the SP of that area dubbed it as a ‘normal death’.
Many were shocked by this incident and people registered their protest on Twitter:
Body found castrated, mutilated, and charred with boiling oil but Karnataka police think it’s a normal death: https://t.co/xUK7hOtNxe | Normal where, Somme in 1916?! — Jaideep A. Prabhu (@orsoraggiante) December 11, 2017
Who killed Paresh Mesta? Karnataka CM wont be ordering a SIT probe into this m sure. Hindu lives don’t matterhttps://t.co/jEof07DiUE — Ashu?? (@muglikar_) December 11, 2017
Paresh Mesta’s body was castrated, burnt and his head was mutilated with a sword Now read this article by Deccan Chronicle and count the number of times words like BJP, Hindutva & Saffron are used. Interestingly, there are minimal discussions on Culprits. Say Hi to Secularism pic.twitter.com/Z7Ji6qcFQ1 — Rahul Raj (@bhak_sala) December 11, 2017
A few called for the organisation of a protest march:
Can we gather together for Paresh Mesta on this weekend in Pune — Petyr Baelish (@doubtinggaurav) December 11, 2017
People in Mumbai, if there is a silent placard rally organized in Mumbai for Paresh Mesta, how many would be willing to participate and urge Karnataka government to do justice. Ideally, people in Bangalore organizing it will be better https://t.co/S89nTbNoz1 — Vishakha Joshi (@VishakhaJ18) December 11, 2017
Recently the nation witnessed another brutal murder where a Muslim man was burnt to death over allegations that he committed love jihad with the accused’s sister. This incident resulted in a tremendous outrage, which also included Asaduddin Owaisi questioning PM Modi’s silence over this matter. The same section of commentariat and ‘activists’ has been found to be silent over this issue.
Latest reports suggest that there have been some violent protests in the Uttara Kannada district of Karnataka over the allegations of murder being covered up by the state police.
Share This Post and Support:When learning StarCraft, what's more important? Mechanics? Strategical knowledge? These issues have been discussed to death, but there is one general consensus by now: In order to improve, you need to become mechanically flawless.
Developing a Practice Routine [ edit ]
Starting in 2008 foreigners have gone to Korea again, starting with the acquisition of IdrA by first eSTRO, then CJ Entus, Tasteless as the commentator for GOM events, later Artosis as another shoutcaster and finally NonY as a recruit for eSTRO.
The general doctrine about progamer practice was confirmed when foreigners made it back to Korea. Artosis writes about how he learned his TvZ BO:
The anti 3-Hatch Mutalisk build order given... is an exact build order used by one of the best Terrans in the world. Every pro Terran knows this build and practices the hell out of it. Their training partner Zergs in the mean time do the same 3 hatchery mutalisk build over and over. By doing basically the same game OVER AND OVER AND OVER you will memorize it quite well and see the holes in your game. This basic play is the result of countless hours of progamers playing each other and finding the most robust and powerful builds and styles.
As you master this build order in TvZ you will have to learn how to adapt to various things different zergs do. That is the last thing you really need to learn. Because if you know this build inside out and can macro it control it know your timings and everything like that then you are just going to roll people over who do lesser builds.
[...]
The point of this: Mechanics are more important than any other aspect of the game currently. The game is getting more and more mapped out. You need to be able to follow that map.[1]
This view is by now the general consensus about how to improve.
Basic Steps for Improvement [ edit ]
This is an excerpt from "How to get better", a forum post[2] by the former professional Legionnaire. The wording has been retained for the most part, only minor edits have been made.
For D level players there is not much you need to think about. Just do the basics well. Steps 1-4 are the most important for all beginners.
Load up a replay of yourself. Click on the Nexus/CC (harder with Z - but click on Hatchery and watch the Larvae / minerals) and just watch the Probe production. The Nexus should never stop building. It should always have 1 queued. Particularly early to mid game. If you need to ask 'when do I stop building them' you aren't at the stage in skill to ever stop! Hotkey buildings. more importantly, hotkey Production buildings. and learn the unit production keys. Watch your mineral count. If it gets high, utilize step 1 and 2! Scout. Scouting provides information, and information provides counters to builds. So many people build things just for the sake of doing it. Why waste lots of money building something you don't need, when you can build something you do need?
For beginners, just learn the 2-3 most common strategies that your opposition race uses. And scout for it. If you see 1 fact or 2, your basic build should switch over to a better counter. etc. The counter doesn't need to be 'huge' it just needs to take advantage of what you've learned. If you see a 2nd upgrade going at a fact, you can expect Vulture/mines soon! Get Goons! etc. etc.
When you get an advantage, expand. Learn early game builds. Late game doesn't matter, early game is where it counts. This used to mean a lot more until everyone became replay whores, but the point still stands. Macro well. this is all hotkeys, mineral expenditure, and expanding.
Later on you will learn things like:
Scouting also involves knowing when the army is moving out. Then utilize the terrain to attack them.
Does it favor you to wait for them to move into open ground to attack, or move to high ground and keep them on the low ground.
Expand to areas that help this, an expansion in a certain location might take longer to get up and running, but for them to attack it is a lot harder.
Expand to other mains! Especially when they have ramps. You can build a few gates up there, then for the entire game you can do flanking attacks, while purely defending all game. (Defensive fights almost always has an advantage - of course you can do defensive attacking as well...). No one is going to attack up ramps against an army half its size, while letting the other half army flank them (or attack a now undefended base). Thus you can macro and abuse the terrain!
Maybe more advanced thinking like -
Is their starting position in the corner of the map (think 3 player maps like longinus with spots are in top left corner, mid right and bottom left.) Top left can only be 'attacked' from 1/4 of the total map area, while mid right can be attacked by 1/2. Thus if they are midright, harass is so much more powerful.
What does your opponent know? What can you make him think? If he has a bigger army but you have more of the map, you may need to buy time, keep your army outside his base to make him scared, if he moves out (think PvT) keep attacking/retreating, sieging tanks takes a long time, and you can buy 2 lots of production cycles from your bases just by not even doing anything but making them think you are attacking.
Buying time. One of my favorites. You may have sneaky expansions, but you have less units as a result. You know that if the game lasts just a bit longer you will have the same/more units while having more bases. But they are about to attack. So the key is to harass.
You see them get ready to move out. (i.e. they start building Vultures after massing Tanks, then you know in the next minute they will attack.) or if they start to move. Have a shuttle with a reaver waiting out of their vision, use it to attack when they move out. Or attack their expansion with some units. They will stop their attack and focus on defense, buying you time. The important thing with these attacks is NOT to lose your 'attacking force' easily - remember, you are buying time, if they are about to be killed, run them to the corner. A few more seconds of them chasing your last 2 goons to the edge of the map and then having to retrace their steps can be critical. This is why I liked Reaver drops so much, you kill a few units, run it away, then as they get ready to move out again, you drop it back in. You can hold them up for minutes. The object is not to do critical damage (unless the opportunity arises) so you shouldn't do risky 'do or die' attacks on the mineral line defended by anti air stuff etc. If you can only attack a crappy building, then attack it! He will still be just as scared as if you have gone after the mineral line. (buying time is also for waiting for an upgrade to kick in etc.)
Do the map starting locations favor certain builds? Some have more open chokes, forcing them to do different openings. Thus you have better openings to take advantage of it.
If you do steps 1 to 4, and keep doing it, you will become a C rank player. Even for good players. Load up a rep of yourself and do step 1, I bet you don't do it perfect, I know I didn't.
Another bit of advice. Never be afraid to lose. Try and go out of your comfort zone whenever you can. Losing if utilized correctly is a lesson to be learned. I know its a good ego trip to win 80% of the time vs your friends or to be the best player in a clan or channel. But you aren't learning anything that can make yourself better.
These are all quite general thinking tips for improvement and can be applied across other games... sc2 comes to mind.
Resources to Improve your Understanding of StarCraft [ edit ]
Know where to find games [ edit ]
One of the most important things about practice is being able to find game in a friendly and constructive environment. In recent times, this has been offered by the iccup Server. The server has an inbuilt feature of offering LAN latency settings, therefore allowing for better control.
Summary [ edit ]
Overall, work on your basic mechanics. Once those are done, you can start doing fancy stuff and adding more exquisite move to your builds. Being fast is not about being able to move your hands. It is about knowing what to do in every given situation and about building good habits. One of the biggest reasons why Korean progamers are so much faster than foreigners is because they know just what they are going to do.[1]In this age of nameless, faceless pontification, many have been targets of the world’s basement-dwelling spreaders of gossip and hate. At least, people tend to think of them as basement-dwellers, so dark and filthy are their anonymous words. But who knows, really, where and who they really are? Few ever find out.
Former Maple Leafs GM Brian Burke has launched a defamation lawuit over anonymous bloggers spreading lies. ( RICHARD LAUTENS / TORONTO STAR FILE PHOTO )
Brian Burke’s mission to unmask 18 anonymous commentators who he alleges defamed him underscores a point many are learning the hard way as cyber-libel cases become increasingly common: What is written online, even anonymously, can come back to bite the authors. “This will be a very public reminder to people that you can get sued for what you publish on the Internet,” said Ryder Gilliland, a Toronto libel lawyer. Burke, former general manager of the Maple Leafs, launched a civil suit Friday against “poonerman,” “sir psycho sexy,” “KaBoomin8” and 15 other anonymous bloggers and online commentators who allegedly “spread lies over the Internet” after he was fired earlier this year.
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A notice of civil claim filed in B.C. Supreme Court alleges the unknown defendants defamed Burke by falsely suggesting he had an extramarital affair with Sportsnet anchor Hazel Mae and that he fathered her child. It seeks an injunction against the defendants from publishing further “defamatory statements” as well as damages, interest and costs. The claim has not been proven in court and no statement of defence has been filed. Burke’s move made the rumour far more public than it was before the lawsuit, but allowed him to categorically deny it. The drawbacks of engaging in a public legal battle deter many from taking action against cyber defamers, lawyers say. “Oftentimes when someone who’s a victim of defamation comes to see me I have to tell them the best advice is probably not to do anything at all because the impending lawsuit is going to receive more publicity and attract more attention to the original defamatory comments than just leaving them alone,” said Michael Smith, a Toronto lawyer who practises defamation law.
That didn’t deter Burke, who said in a statement Friday that he felt it was “time to stop people who post comments on the Internet from thinking they can fabricate wild stories with impunity.” Burke’s next step is to apply for court orders compelling web hosts or Internet service providers to hand over information that would help identify the defendants, which is something that judges in Canada are generally willing to do, depending on the strength of the case.
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“Mechanisms to unmask are well-established,” said Roger McConchie, a Vancouver-based defamation lawyer. But it is likely to be an arduous process. David Potts, a Toronto lawyer and cyber-libel expert, says engaging in an online defamation suit is like guerrilla warfare. “You don’t know your enemies. It can be spread over different jurisdictions. You can play what’s called digital Whac-A-Mole with them — in other words you knock ‘em down from one website and then they move to another,” Potts says. “You have to be concerned that every action you take does not evoke a much worse counter reaction.” A statement issued by Mae’s lawyer Saturday said she is still considering her legal options. “Hazel Mae fully supports the lawsuit brought forth by Mr. Burke and feels strongly that people should be held accountable for writing and spreading malicious lies over the Internet,” the statement said. At least one of the 18 named in Burke’s lawsuit responded late Friday, anonymously, to the allegations. “Brian Burke is suing me,” read an update from the Twitter user @THEzbrad. “I think he’s just angry that ‘his’ Toronto team finally made the playoffs. Sorry Burkey.” “THEzbrad” is one of the defendants named in the civil claim. In a blog post connected to the Twitter account, a writer described the lawsuit as “ridiculous” and said it targeted comments from “a post that was written on this blog.” The alleged defamatory post has been removed, but an archived Google page shows that the author characterized the Burke-Mae story as “speculation” and “rumours.” “Burke obviously did not appreciate these few comments,” the blogger wrote, “but the fact that he is going to attempt to sue online commentators is pretty hilarious.” With files from Jessica McDiarmidPortland is "legally obligated" to keep buying parking meters from a company snared in a bribery scandal, the city's top attorney has decided, even though the company blocked city investigators from digging into facts from its internal investigation.
The decision marks the latest and perhaps final turn in a years-long saga that sent a bribe-taking city employee to prison yet ultimately kept Portland in business with the same Swedish meter-maker. Hundreds of parking meters will now be installed in Northwest Portland beginning Feb. 2, a decision made after Cale Group threatened to hold the city in breach of contract.
Nearly 150 pages of newly released records show city investigators battled with Cale over access to key company records about its investigation. They also show the city's investigators received "very limited access" and were "prevented" from being able to independently confirm "the extent of the investigation or the facts uncovered."
Cale announced last year that it found no criminal wrongdoing in allegations that Portland's former parking manager, Ellis K. McCoy, manipulated a multimillion-dollar contract in 2006. A federal judge last year sentenced McCoy to two years in prison for accepting bribes, including nearly $60,000 from George Levey, an independent distributor of Cale machines.
But attempts to evaluate Cale's investigation were thwarted, according to Stoll Berne, an outside law firm hired by the city. Stoll Berne reported several problems that forced investigators to essentially take the word of Cale's lawyers:
Cale repeatedly cited attorney-client privilege and refused to release many documents requested by Portland investigators, including a final report with findings from Cale's internal investigation. That significantly affected Stoll Berne's conclusions.
Without an open record of facts obtained by Cale's inquiry, Portland's investigators found it impossible to conclude whether Cale conducted its inquiry in good faith.
Additionally, Stoll Berne found that one member of a special committee formed by Cale to oversee the inquiry, and one of the law firms used by Cale to conduct its investigation, had financial ties to the company.
And yet, despite those concerns, city officials now say they believe Cale conducted a thorough investigation.
The city reached that conclusion in December after Cale provided city attorneys confidential access to company emails and documents tied to its investigation, and after Cale promised to investigate new allegations if any surface. City attorneys did not report that they ever reviewed the final report, although details were verbally shared with city officials earlier in the year.
Commissioner Steve Novick, who oversees the Portland Bureau of Transportation, called the investigation "extensive" and said officials ultimately found no reason to cut ties with Cale.
"I think that it's time for us to move past 2006 and install some parking meters in 2016," Novick told The Oregonian/OregonLive on Tuesday.
Rumors of corruption in Portland's parking contract began in 2005 but didn't explode until the FBI raided McCoy's city office in 2011. Sweden-based Cale Group said it didn't know about any wrongdoing and forced Levey from his Florida distributorship, forming a new subsidiary, Cale America, to secure U.S. business.
In 2013, Novick bowed to public pressure and decided to cancel the city's 2006 contract with Cale in favor of competitive bids. In 2015, Cale America won an $11.9 million contract to sell up to 1,000 new machines and provide monthly support for Portland's existing meters.
But in May 2015, federal prosecutors released emails that linked the scandal back to Cale America.
A decade earlier, Levey forwarded emails to several Cale executives -- including Edward Olender, who in 2015 was Cale America's president -- showing that McCoy leaked and edited Portland's confidential bid documents to benefit the Cale brand.
Those revelations prompted Cale's 2015 investigation. The company in August said it found no evidence of criminal action but demoted Olender for a "serious lapse in judgment" because he didn't blow the whistle on contract manipulation. Cale fired two other executives, identified in court filings as Ryan Bonardi and Justin Levey, George Levey's son.
Portland hired Stoll Berne last summer to determine if Cale's investigation was reasonable. Stoll Berne soon learned that wouldn't be easy.
"Our ability to cross-check the diligence and adversarial nature of the investigation was substantially limited by the Special Committee's refusal to allow us to review original witness interview notes, documents, emails and other source materials," Stoll Berne wrote in an October 2015 report.
"Thus, we mostly had to rely on the representations of the Special Committee's outside counsel regarding the extent of its investigation," continued Stoll Berne, which the city paid nearly $30,000. "As a result, we cannot independently verify many of the representations made to us."
Cable Huston, a law firm that represented Cale in the investigation, told the city in November that it would not release records covered by attorney-client privilege for fear of jeopardizing a civil lawsuit against George Levey.
Two weeks later, Cable Huston threatened Portland that it owed Cale more than $2 million for meters delivered under the city's 2015 contract that city officials refused to install.
Stoll Berne, in its October report, noted that Cable Huston was not fully independent of Cale because it continued to represent the company in the suit against Levey.
Stoll Berne also found that one of the three members of Cale's committee had previously worked as chief executive of Cale's parent company and remained a shareholder.
"Some could ask whether his role might be biased by ensuring the continued success of the Cale entities in the United States," Stoll Berne wrote.
With the standoff unresolved, three city representatives met with Cale's lawyers Dec. 21, spending 21/2 hours poring over records to help both sides to move forward.
On Christmas Eve, City Attorney Tracy Reeve told Novick the city had no legal ground to end its contract.
"To me, the fact that they let two people go and reassigned another shows that they took this seriously," Novick said Tuesday, emphasizing that there is no evidence of any impropriety tied to the city's 2015 contract with Cale.
City officials now plan to install about 360 parking meters in Northwest Portland. Annual revenue should run from $2 million to $4 million for the city.
Levey, who last year pleaded guilty to his role in the bribery scheme, is set to be sentenced Feb. 10.
-- Brad Schmidt
Lynne Palombo contributed to this report.
503-294-7628
@cityhallwatchLittle things sometimes make a big difference when it comes to travel safety. Like a strategically placed zipper.
Consider what happened to Aaron McHugh, who was recently exploring Glasgow, Scotland, after the last leg of a sea kayaking trip with his brother. “We were not familiar with where sketchy parts of the city might be,” he remembers. But halfway through a 14-mile, self-guided tour, the duo found themselves in Springburn, a neighborhood with a reputation for drug crime. McHugh suddenly felt vulnerable. He clutched his credit cards, passport and cash and quickened his pace, hoping to make it to a safer area without incident.
That’s a familiar feeling to a lot of travelers, who are too often unprepared for threats to their safety. Just ask the professionals. In a recent survey of corporate travel managers — the executives who oversee companies’ travel departments — safety was ranked the top priority. The study, by European travel safety consultant BCD Travel, ranked security higher than efficiency, satisfaction and environmental and social impact.
Fortunately, McHugh, a podcaster who lives in Colorado Springs, had prepared by dressing the part. He wore a pair of pickpocket-deterrent pants developed by a company called Bluff Works ($93). His cards and important paperwork were shielded in a zippered internal pocket.
“That pocket gives me a lot more security and comfort than a pair of jeans or any other pant I own,” he says. As a decoy, he carried a messenger bag over his shoulder that he says screamed “Take me!” The Bluffs were his camouflage.
He made it through Springburn without incident.
I’ll be the first to admit it: Zippers don’t make for exciting reading. But isn’t that the point? From inconspicuous pants to ties that make your checked bag harder to break into, the gadgets that can keep you safer on the road are completely unremarkable — until you need them. If you’re traveling somewhere for adventure this summer, you’ll want to pack these accessories.
Adam Rapp, who owns a boutique travel apparel company called Clothing Arts, agrees that small features can spell the difference between being a lucky tourist and a hapless victim. In 2006, on a trip to Xian, China, he was targeted by a team of pickpockets, who took him for an easy mark.
“Luckily, we noticed something was happening just in time to watch them disappear into the crowded mass of people behind of us,” he says. “That was when I looked down at the wide-open pockets on my chinos and thought, ‘Why not combine the security of money-belts and a great pair of travel pants?’ ”
The result is Clothing Arts’ pickpocket-proof travel pants ($99-$109), which have a hidden passport and money pocket that gives you the option of layering two and even three levels of security between your wallet and the world.
Bob Nielsen, a college professor from West Lafayette, Ind., says the pants were worth the purchase price. On a recent trip to France, he had tucked his wallet and passport into the left cargo pocket of his Clothing Arts pants, sealing it with the snap and buttons.
“As we were boarding a train at a small station one stop beyond the main station at Nice, I felt a small tug at the left pocket,” Nielsen remembers. “I instinctively slapped at the hand as I turned around to see a young woman and her male companion looking at me as if to say, ‘How dare you foil our attempt to pick your pocket!’ ”
Zippers in your travel clothes may protect your belongings, but they can do the opposite when it comes to your luggage. Spend a little time online, and you’ll probably see the video in which a security expert shows how to break into a checked bag with an ordinary pen. It’s true: The oversize zippers, in the hands of an airline luggage handler, are remarkably easy to penetrate.
That’s the idea behind the GripAzip ($35) a combination business-card holder and security device, compatible with TSA locks, that you attach to the handle of your carry-on bag to “deadbolt” your zipper. A determined thief can still use a pen to access your belongings, but he can no longer reseal the bag and hide the crime. That, GripAzip argues, is a strong deterrent to ground handlers who might want to steal from your checked luggage or to hotel employees who want to rifle through your possessions.
Of course, the best solution is not to carry valuables on your person or in your checked luggage. That’s a worthy goal, but it’s not always possible. Tools such as pickpocket-proof clothing and the GripAzip can deter thieves, but they can’t guarantee your valuables will stay safe.
Unfortunately, no one can do that.
Elliott is a consumer advocate, journalist and co-founder of the advocacy group Travelers United. E-mail him at chris@elliott.org.
More from Travel:
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Caribbean GuideProject sets cost of California Native Grassland Restoration at $225,000 per acre!
Photos and text by Craig Dremann, The Reveg Edge, Box 361,
Redwood City, CA 94064 - (650) 325-7333
The history of the UC Davis/Caltrans grant project shown on this website, starting on Feb. 11, 2003, in Yolo County at the I-505, Road 14 exit test plot site in the Sacramento Valley, California:
(Just across the Interstate, there's a second native plant test plot, planted by |
% guessed, hence the funny shape in the middle panel). Here is my interpretation of these results:
In areas with slightly lower white populations, people can vastly under-predict the % of the white population. Over-predicting the white population is rare.
Conversely, people frequently over-predict the prevalence of non-whites, particularly the black population in their neighborhoods. (Here I've only shown black and asian populations, because they were the best sampled in parameter space.)
Broadly, the trend is actually pretty good. Despite the systematic results, the answers to roughly follow the 1-to-1 line, indicating that people have some sense of reality. If they were wildly guessing, or completely out of touch, these would just be random scatter plots!
3. Results by Age, Gender, and Race
Next I want to show some histograms indicating how close to the actual demographic composition people got, and break them up by sub-groups of respondents. The goal here is to answer the secondary question: which group of people get closest to the actual racial demographics?
First, how well does everyone together do?
>
4. Studying the Respondents
I once had a very smart teacher who said
people can't reliably differentiate better than 10% by eye. It seems he was right, and that people understand racial demographics overall to about 10%. This study raised in my mind as many questions as it answered, which I found entertaining. I'd love to redo this study with a (much) larger sample, and more controls.
If you'd like to contribute to the survey I have put it up online again! I once had a very smart teacher who saidIt seems he was right, and that people understand racial demographics overall to about 10%. This study raised in my mind as many questions as it answered, which I found entertaining. I'd love to redo this study with a (much) larger sample, and more controls.
Last year I conducted a short online survey to (attempt to) answer a simple question:This was prompted by overhearing a great many generalizations about the racial composition of Seattle, and the UW in particular. The survey was straight forward: simply provide your guesses for the % of each race in your neighborhood, as well as a few details about yourself (age, gender, race, and most importantly ZIP code in the USA). The ZIP code was used to compare the user-estimated %'s to data from the US 2010 census.I'd like to share a bit of what I learned... I used Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, and a link on my own sidebar to advertise the survey. The survey stayed open about 2 weeks, and gathered 757 respondents. After removing nonsense answers I had 748. Pretty good!(For comparison: my other notable survey was on the frequency of washing trousers, which received 833 hits in only 5 days)Respondents were 63% male, 82% white, and largely from big cities. This is a byproduct of where I cultivated my test subjects from. Ithe notion presented by one snarky commentator, that such a sample makes my results "worthless". Instead, I think this is a useful preliminary look at something I've not seen investigated (though I'm not a social psychologist or geographer, but would love to chat with some if you know of any who are interested in developing this with me!)Previously I showed some of the initial results of the survey (with only 380 respondents), which suggested that people tend to exaggerate minority demographics, but overall got the trend correct. Here is the correlation between perception and reality...The histogram above shows the distribution of "total % incorrect", which is simply the geometric distance from the "line of reality". In other words, find the difference between % guessed and % actual for each race, square the differences, add them, and take the square root. The point:I found this very encouraging!Next, I compared young (age < 25yrs) to "old" (age25). I chose these bins because they had roughly equal numbers of respondents. These two distributions look basically identical.Then we compare male versus female. Again these two distributions look basically identical...Finally, white versus non-white respondents. Yet again, these two distributions look basically identical, though the signal to noise is worse here.I'm not claiming anything robust with these numbers, and haven't run any kind of population comparison tests (e.g. K-S test). These are just a handful of ways to cut this sample up, but unfortunately (or fortunately perhaps from a social standpoint)Further study is definitely needed.Finally, and most amusingly, about 32% of respondents provided me their email address. I included this as an optional response box, hoping to mostly attract some people to read my blog. I made no prediction on how many people would actually provide it! Therebe existing research on the expected return of such optional questions...For laughs, here's some (non-robust) statistics on who provided me their email: 35% of females versus 30% of males, 339% of whites versus 28% of non-whites. Lastly, the average population surrounding respondents who provided their email was on average 10% larger than those who did not! In other words,Again, the significance of this final result is highly dubious. It leaves us with the most common answer in science: we need more data.After breaking the news about her first post-grad, post-mattress artwork, a video that shows two people—one of whom is Sulkowicz—engaged in sexual activity, some of which alludes to rape (see Emma Sulkowicz Breaks New Ground with Troubling Video Performance), artnet News caught up with Emma Sulkowicz to discuss the video. The recent Columbia graduate, who took the Internet by storm with her year-long performance art project Mattress Performance: Carry That Weight, was partly inspired by her new relationship to the media.
You made the film [Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol] over winter break, a few months ago, correct?
Yes.
And how did the idea to make it come about?
I honestly am going to hold off on that question, because I don’t want to color the way people read this piece yet. You can try asking me later, but I’m very cautious of what I say right now.
I was told by the director of the film, Ted Lawson, that you aren’t interested in making a big deal about the video’s release. Can you speak to that sentiment a little bit?
I am interested in what the public does with it, which begins with the way they deal with it from the moment it’s disseminated.
So it’s attempting to also make a statement about social media and the way things go viral?
Yeah, definitely.
Has it been weird to receive all this media buzz over the past year?
It’s been terrifying. Yeah, I am definitely just responding in the way that I know how. And I think that’s definitely one of the things that inspired me to make this work. Just, my new relationship to the media.
Was there a specific point during Mattress Performance that you realized ‘Wow, this is becoming really big’?
I had no idea it would get noticed by anyone when I first made it. I figured that the only people helping me would be, like, people who thought that I was just some idiot girl trying to carry a mattress by herself. So, that ended up not being the case at all. Basically, from day two I was shocked at what was happening to me.
One of the things that really struck me about the text accompanying the video is when you write “You might be wondering why I’ve made myself this vulnerable…I want to change the world.” Is it that thinking that made you want to become an artist?
I don’t know that it’s why I want to be an artist, but it’s why I’m forced to be an artist. It’s more that being an artist is the only way I know how.
Do you think that making yourself vulnerable is what it takes to change the world these days?
Yes.
It’s brave, and I understand why you don’t want people to view it as any kind of follow-up to Mattress Performance, but the thing that connects the two works even more than subject matter is your level of openness and willingness to put yourself there.
I think that’s what makes a good performance art piece, right? They’re two separate performance art pieces, but I’m trying to make them both as good as I can. And I think that with performance art, that’s part of what makes it good…making yourself vulnerable. But they are completely different pieces.
You’ve met Marina Abramović, correct? Can you share a little bit about what meeting her was like?
She’s a hoot. She’s hilarious. We obviously met before this piece came out. We met during the winter, I think, during Mattress Performance. And she was hilarious and she kept saying ‘you need to make sure you finish Mattress Performance,’ and I was like, ‘of course I’m finishing Mattress Performance.’ And then we were sitting next to each other at dinner and she just kept nudging me and saying ‘tell me about the next piece, tell me about the next piece,’ and I was like, ‘I can’t tell you about the next piece, it’s a secret!’ It was funny. And then the next time we hung out…I’m working on another piece, which should be done within a week or so…so she helped me get the materials for that piece, to get set up in a way. I needed to know some people who could do some things and she helped with that.
So can you tell us anything else about the next piece?
No.
Are you concerned at all about being stigmatized or pigeon-holed by Mattress Performance?
Yeah, I mean, when people call me “Mattress Girl” I find that really infuriating. It’s like, okay great, so you think that I’ll never progress beyond that point. That I’ll be a “Mattress Girl” rather than a living, breathing person who has the ability to change.
Does it concern you that the subject matter of this video might feed into those stereotypes?
I guess I hope people are smart enough to realize that they are different works, and should be treated separately.
Follow artnet News on Facebook:You know the ins and outs of Brittana’s relationship, you’ve seen Rachel Berry experience the ups and downs of following her dream and you’ve heard every high and low note of Kurt Hummel’s singing voice. But we bet you didn’t know that one of the cast members is deaf in one ear or that two of the cast members dated in real life – no we’re not talking about Lea and Cory!
Consider yourself a true Gleek? Think you know Glee like the back of your hand? Think again. We dug deep and found some interesting facts about everyone’s’ favourite musical show. Enjoy…
1. Mark Salling auditioned for Glee five times before being cast as Puck.
2. Lea Michele got a tattoo of the words “If You Say So”. These were Cory Monteith’s last words to her.
3. Harry Shum Jr. was Heather Morris’ teacher when she attended Hip Hop dance classes.
4. Chris Colfer practices the art of Sai, a traditional Okinawan weapon and he’s a pro!
5. Jenna Ushkowitz began her professional career as a model when she was 3-years-old.
6. Becca Tobin owns a fashion blog called June Moss.
7. Chord Overstreet thinks Amber Riley is the best singer he has ever heard and we totally agree.
8. Lea Michele and Matthew Morrison dated before the days of Glee!
9. Kevin McHale was almost cast as McLovin in the movie Superbad.
10. According to IMDB, “Quinn Fabray was not cast until the night before filming began.”
11. Dot-Marie Jones is a 15-time world and 6-time national arm-wrestling champion.
12. Naya Rivera was once engaged to rapper, Big Sean.
13. Jane Lynch is actually deaf in her right ear.
14. At 17-years-old, Amber Riley auditioned for American Idol but she didn’t make the cut.
15. But in 2013, she ended up winning Dancing With the Stars!
16. When Lea Michele was 8-years-old, she landed a role in a Broadway production of Les Misérables.
17. Before acting, Cory Monteith worked as a Wal-Mart greeter, taxi driver, telemarketer and construction worker.
18. Jenna Ushkowitz and The Vampire Diaries star Michael Trevino dated for three years. They broke up in 2014.
19. Lea Michele and Jenna Ushkowitz have been friends in real life since they were 8 years old.
20. Unlike her character, Brittany, Heather Morris graduated with a 4.0 GPA.
There you have it folks…
If you’re a dedicated Glee fan, take a look at these awesome Glee gifts that will have you singing for joy.It’s that time of year again! Spring has finally sprung, and the Seoul Pen Show is afoot. Well, actually, it has already happened. This past weekend, the Penhood Seoul Pen Show 2017 was held in the Gangnam area, setting it apart from previous years where the venue was closer to Dongguk University. That wasn’t the only departure from previous years, however. This year’s pen show had a set schedule of classes and lectures on topics of interest to the pen community. Here is a translation of the schedule they posted on their website of the days events:
10:30 “Freesia” Penhood fountain pen ink sale (first come first serve) 11:00 – 12:40 Pen Show Lectures (11:00) Notes on vintage pens (11:30) Methods for proper writing (12:00) Domestic (Korean) fountain pens (12:30) Pencil hand-sharpening techniques 1:00 – 3:00 Auction 3:00 Final sales of “Freesia” Penhood fountain pen ink (first come first serve) 3:30 – 5:10 Pen Show Lectures (3:30) How to use eBay (4:00) One point handwriting fix (4:30) “Is this normal?” (5:00) Q&A 5:15 Pen Show Bingo!
Unfortunately, I was unable to attend all of the events throughout the day, but I was able to arrive for many of the programs after lunch. This year, the room the pen show was held in was a bit larger to accommodate new tables including a paper-making station and a calligraphy station. When I arrived, it seemed like there were fewer patrons than previous years I attended, but it may be the timing of my arrival as people were finishing their lunch break. There were fewer pens on display, but I saw a lot of familiar faces and everyone seemed to be having a good time. The fact that the venue was quite a bit further out than the previous years may have also contributed to the final attendance numbers.
That being said, the lectures seemed to draw a lot of interest and there were a lot of young faces in the crowd. The paper-making booth seemed to be drawing a lot of attention as well. I arrived just in time to acquire one of the final bottles of this year’s Penhood fountain pen ink, “Freesia.” It’s a sort of greenish, yellow color and I look forward to making a full review of it. Patrons even received a handful of freesia flowers in keeping with the theme.
There is a lot going on in my life at the moment, but I am happy that I was able to make it out to the Seoul Pen Show 2017. I’ll be coming back to making pen and ink reviews in the near future, so stay tuned!
14 Reddit 21 Pinterest 0 Tumblr 0Huawei, a leading smartphone manufacturer, just released their annual Global Connectivity Index. And the numbers are looking bleak for us. Pakistan ranks last in a list comprising of 50 countries.
The Global Connectivity Index (GCI) is considered as a barometer of ICT development in the world. It measures the intensity with which countries are adopting ICT and the state of investments to better the existing technology infrastructure in different countries. Huawei has published the GCI three years in a row now in their efforts to work closely with industries around the world to promote connectivity.
According to the GCI 2016, investing in digital infrastructure correlates to GDP gains because it increases economic efficiency and productivity. The 50 countries assessed by GCI 2016 account for 90 percent of global GDP and 78 percent of the world’s population. The report splits countries into 3 categories: Starters are beginning their digital journey and do not have an infrastructure strong enough to support their GDP. They score between 20 – 34. Adopters experience the greatest GDP gains with a score between 35 – 55. Frontrunners are well-established economies with a more deep interest in Cloud Computing, Big Data and IoT.
The numbers on the list have improved from last year with a 5% increase in average national connectivity. Twelve countries improved their position while four experienced a drop. The top three spots were taken by the USA, Singapore and Sweden. Pakistan currently sits on the last 50th spot lower than Bangladesh (49) and India (44). We were ranked 128/144 in 2015 and 133/148 in 2014. Despite the fact of growing number of 3G/4G connectors, Internet penetration still remains low. This is probably due to the fact that 3G mobile network and 4G spectrum were introduced very late in Pakistan.
However, steps are being taken to change that. Our government and large mobile service providers are understanding the power of Internet connectivity. This is the very subject of the Pakistan 2025 – One Nation, One Vision report which was also adopted by a local teleco in their report on realizing digital Pakistan.
The GCI only proves the very crucial role digital connectivity plays in economic dynamism and its close relation with enhancing a nation’s GDP. To drive further GDP gains, countries need to move up the technology stack by investing in new technologies and ensuring they are adopted by governments, industry, and people.
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RelatedA large group of noted whistleblowers--including Daniel Ellsberg, the leaker of the Pentagon Papers--has written an open letter asking that the "transparency award" given to President Obama by five open government organizations in March be rescinded.
In the letter, published in the UK Guardian, the group of 50 individuals and watchdog organizations called the Obama administration's record on secrecy and surveillance "a disgrace."
The group claims that petitioners have filed more Freedom of Information Act requests made during Obama's first term--with fewer responses--than have been logged in previous years; that the administration has squashed "legal inquiries into secret illegalities more often than any predecessor" and "amassed the worst record in U.S. history for persecuting, prosecuting and jailing government whistleblowers and truth-tellers," including WikiLeaks suspect Bradley Manning. The letter also notes that the White House has refused to make its visitor logs public, while overseeing a 15 percent spike last year in budgetary outlays for classifying secrets. The Obama administration has spent $10 billion in enforcing secrecy protocols, the letter notes--the first time any White House has eclipsed that mark."Obama's department of justice is twisting the 1917 Espionage Act to press criminal charges in five alleged instances of national security leaks," the letter reads, "more such prosecutions than have occurred in all previous administrations combined."
The president "has set a powerful and chilling example for potential whistleblowers through the abuse and torture of Bradley Manning."
And:
President Obama has initiated a secret assassination programme, has publicly announced that he has given himself the power to include Americans on the list of people to be assassinated, and has attempted to assassinate at least one, Anwar al-Awlaki.
President Obama has maintained the power to secretly kidnap, imprison, rendition, or torture, and he has formalised the power to lawlessly imprison in an executive order. This also means the power to secretly imprison. There are some 1,700 prisoners outside the rule of law in Bagram alone.
The Obama administration is also busy going after reporters to discover their sources and convening grand juries in order to target journalists and news publishers.
One such case—the subpoena of author and former New York Times reporter James Risen involving a CIA leak—is still pending.
"Ironically—and quite likely in response to growing public criticism regarding the Obama administration's lack of transparency—heads of the five organizations gave their award to Obama in a closed, undisclosed meeting at the White House," the letter adds. "If the ceremony had been open to the press, it is likely that reporters would have questioned the organizations' proffered justification for the award, in contrast to the current reality."
(Then-candidate Barack Obama exits a car at Midway Airport in Chicago, Monday, Oct. 20, 2008: Alex Brandon/AP)Here is the latest creation from our line of fully functioning clocks with vinyl decals! This design includes a vintage style "Pocket Watch" decal that you simply apply to your wall, then mount the clockworks to the center on your wall, and VOILA! Part pop art and totally practical, this kit makes a fab gift!
Kit includes:
*Functioning quartz clockwork(black only)
*Hour and minute hand(black only)
*Mounting case and hardware(black only)
*1 vintage pocket watch decal made of high quality vinyl(choose any one color from chart)
*Vinyl Applicator
Minute Hand Size- 9.5" from the center
"Pocket Watch" Decal Size-23" across, 33" tall
"Chain Decal" Size 23" across, 24" tall (We can flip the chain to flow in the opposite direction upon request)
(clockwork requires 1 AA battery, not included)
Simple to assemble!
*Apply vinyl decal to wall
*Attach clockworks to wall with included hardware
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Your Choice of Color and Surface Finish: Please note your selection in the “Message to Buyer” field when you check out. ( if none is noted than item will be shipped as pictured in Matte Finish.)
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MATTE VINYL DECALS
Removable Decals, Indoor application will last average 3 years. Best option for renters as removal will not damage walls nor leave a sticky residue.
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All of our Vinyl Decals are high quality and waterproof. They are also meant for a one time use and application. Please note if decals are exposed to extreme weather conditions, life span may vary. Optimal application temperature: above 50 degrees.
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* Visit our website for a step by step instructional video on how to apply your art! www.pillboxdesigns.com
*Easy to remove later, just apply low heat from a hairdryer and slowly pull back at 180 degree angle.
Shipping
All designs are carefully cut, weeded and packaged with love by hand by us. Due to the high demands of our retail, wholesale and online stores, please note that our prep and shipping frequency has changed. From the time you make payment and choose your color (if applicable), it can take up to 7-10 days to produce your item before it is shipped. If you need a faster shipment, please convo us BEFORE you order so we may see what options we can offer for your design. We ship USPS 2 – 3 days Priority Mail with in the U.S. and Global 6 – 10 days Priority Mail.
Returns
If you are not satisfied with your order return the unused graphics within 30 for a full refund, minus the shipping cost.New Speaker asks for bi-partisanship in new legislative session
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – Rep. John Diehl ascended to the post of Speaker of the House today with a speech largely pleading for a less partisan approach to the day-to-day politics of Missouri’s Capitol.
In a speech that touched on education, economic growth, fiscal discipline and events in Ferguson, Diehl decided to forgo laying out strict and certain specifics on legislation and instead sought to paint a broad picture of a chamber that largely agreed on small, good-government issues.
“So much of our work here, after all, is carried along by consensus,” Diehl said. “By far most bills that pass this House receive a substantial, bipartisan majority. They don’t involve Republican issues, strictly speaking, or Democratic issues. Often they just come down to the basics of good government – constitutional functions and practical, attentive service to the diverse districts that we represent.”
Of course, Diehl didn’t hesitate to note that Republicans were sent to the chamber in an overwhelming and historic majority.
“The voters of Missouri sent an unmistakable message in November, delivered in person today by at least 117 of us,” Diehl said. “This session and beyond, I will add my voice and my vote to the decisive majority that the voters have given us. I come to this position as a frank believer in certain principles of government, starting with a preference for individual freedom over the power of the state. I am skeptical of an ever-expanding public sector because I put my faith in the private sector and private enterprise – which is, and will always be, the true source of prosperity for our people.”
Diehl, R-Town and Country, is a detail-oriented pragmatist with few axes to grind and little history of fiery, partisan rhetoric on the floor of the House or in interviews with the press. Even Diehl’s nods toward the controversial events in Ferguson and a potential investigation into Gov. Jay Nixon and the National Guard were subtle and lacking in froth.
Diehl enters the year with a massive majority well over the two-thirds margin required to overturn a gubernatorial veto. But with such a large caucus comes a diverse group of members, both rural and urban, and on opposite sides of any number of hot-button issues like labor and education.
Such size creates potential dissention in the ranks and infighting that can bruise a party, and Diehl’s speech serves as a clear indication that he believes such bickering won’t be necessary in an environment where everyone agrees to be courteous.
“But if six years around this capitol have taught me anything, it’s that a little good will and trust can go a long way,” Diehl said. “We can disagree without being disagreeable.”
OPENING REMARKS:
Members of the House, guests and friends: Welcome, all of you, to the 2015 legislative session. For the ninety-eighth time, a new General Assembly has convened. I thank all my colleagues, and the people of Missouri, for the privilege of holding this gavel and allowing me to serve you in this office. Let me also thank the members of my family who are here today to support me, and who have stood beside me throughout my time as a public servant.
In our ranks this afternoon, we count 32 new members from all walks of life. If you are like me, every day you walk in the Chamber, you will be inspired and in awe of its historic and timeless beauty. There’s no experience quite like your first day as an elected legislator, and we congratulate each of you on your arrival.
At our best, this House can be an impressive sight, and I hope this session will find us often at our best. As your new Speaker, I pledge to do all that I can to keep business moving along in the right direction, and in the right spirit befitting of this majestic setting.
When the two parties extend respect and courtesy to one another, that can be a victory all by itself in politics. To the surprise of some, many of us are actually friends in this chamber, no matter which side of the aisle we’re seated on.
There’s never a disagreement that can’t be handled in a friendly, fair-minded way. That’s not the same as pretending we don’t have disagreements – of course we do. But if six years around this capitol have taught me anything, it’s that a little good will and trust can go a long way. We can disagree without being disagreeable.
So much of our work here, after all, is carried along by consensus. By far most bills that pass this House receive a substantial, bipartisan majority. They don’t involve Republican issues, strictly speaking, or Democratic issues. Often they just come down to the basics of good government – constitutional functions and practical, attentive service to the diverse districts that we represent. When those fundamentals are the focus, we can hardly go wrong.
As for the broad direction of policy in this session, it seems to me that this has been set by the people themselves. The voters of Missouri sent an unmistakable message in November, delivered in person today by at least 117 of us.
This session and beyond, I will add my voice and my vote to the decisive majority that the voters have given us. I come to this position as a frank believer in certain principles of government, starting with a preference for individual freedom over the power of the state. I am skeptical of an ever-expanding public sector because I put my faith in the private sector and private enterprise – which is, and will always be, the true source of prosperity for our people.
In any state, there’s always a temptation for government to go beyond its proper limits, intruding on the rights and responsibilities of the citizen. We’ve been warned about this by, among others, Ronald Reagan. “Government,” he said, “cannot be clergyman, teacher, and parent. Government is our servant, beholden to us.” That’s a timeless piece of wisdom, and if we keep it in mind, then we will always do right by the citizens of this state.
In this legislature, let’s avoid repeating mistakes that we’ve seen play out at the federal level. Whether it’s overregulation of the economy or the practice of living off borrowed money, these policies do not serve our country well, and they won’t work any better in Missouri.
There is an ongoing competition among the states – for investment, development, and jobs – and these days it’s getting serious and it is too often a battle we lose. Like any competition, it requires discipline, above all spending discipline. Problems cannot be solved just by throwing more money at them and declaring Mission Accomplished. We must be good stewards of taxpayer dollars and insist our monies are spent in a more effective and transparent manner.
By standing together in support of the families and businesses of Missouri, we will rein in the ever-expanding government bureaucracy and foster the freedom of workers and innovators to do what they do best.
Together, we will provide the kind of opportunities that will encourage and foster economic growth and job creation.
Together, we will challenge our educational institutions to put students first and to graduate students at all levels who are ready to compete in a 21st century economy.
And together, we will work to ensure the doors of opportunity are open to everyone who wants to, and is willing to, put in the hard work and sacrifice necessary to succeed.
As this state moves forward, we want everyone to feel empowered to achieve their dreams – no matter their age, their region, or their race. We want everyone to have their chance at a quality functional education, their opportunity to get ahead, their equal opportunity to participate in the economy of our state.
No one in this room needs any reminder of how things can look when that kind of hope is missing. The national attention our state received last year isn’t what anyone would have wished for. But the story and narrative which is missing about Missouri is the goodness and character of our people. We live here. We see it every day.
We saw it again during those nights in late November when some of our bravest and finest Missourians against great odds risked life and limb to protect the innocent and keep the peace in the midst of the growing chaos. Among those many dedicated civil servants were the men and women of the Ferguson Fire Department, the Metro North Fire Protection District, as well as fire departments from Pattonville, Maryland Heights, Florissant and throughout the St. Louis and surrounding areas.
These men and women endured the violence and danger of that night as they worked to keep the people safe by fighting the many fires that were set. They showed an unwavering commitment to their duties even as they were at times forced to drop their hose lines to take cover from the hundreds of gun shots fired and the debris that was being thrown at them. In the face of great danger, these men and women came together to work tirelessly as one and their selfless actions saved countless lives, homes and businesses.
For their courage and commitment to service we are forever in their debt, and we are reminded of the respect we have for all of our fearless firefighters, emergency personnel, and police officers who save lives and defend our communities.
I ask all of you to please join me in honoring these brave men and women who have joined us here today in the gallery.
And today, let me make this pledge to all of our public servants that this body will do its best to get answers to what happened that night, and as speaker I will do everything in my power to make sure it does not happen again.
You know a place best when you love it, as every one of us loves Missouri. We wouldn’t have sought these offices, campaigning on all our different ideas, if we were complacent … if we thought that our state needed no improvement. This is a time of change and aspiration in Missouri, and a clear sense of purpose is always welcome in this old capitol. Our agendas may vary, but our aspirations for Missouri are the same. So as we turn to our official business, let’s gather up all of that conviction, all of that creative energy. And let us achieve real things, and make a real difference for the people who sent us here.
I might add that one way to serve the people is to keep listening to them. All wisdom does not begin and end in this House or in government. And as we in this legislature set standards and rules for others to follow, let the highest standards be the ones we apply to ourselves. We should do the right thing because it is the right thing to do and not for personal gain or self promotion.
Do not take this time for granted, because this privilege that you and I enjoy – it’s not forever. It will not be long before we leave this Chamber, clear out our offices, and that will be that. And trust me… that time comes quickly. What better moment to think about that last day than now, here on this first day? We all want it said of us that we used our time well … stayed true to our principles … worked with one another … and that we brought only credit to the Missouri General Assembly.
For this session, at least, all of that is a story yet to be written, but it begins right now. And if I might add just a thought to the chaplain’s fine words: May we do our work with excellence and honor. And may the good spirit of this day still be with us when that work is done.
Colleagues and friends, I thank all of you for the privilege of serving as your speaker.Congress party workers owing allegiance to state Youth Congress president Vishwajeet Kadam created a ruckus at an event organised by state secretary Shehzad Poonawalla and his brother, Tehseen, in Pune on Tuesday.
The Poonawallas are relatives of Robert Vadra, the son-in-law of Congress president Sonia Gandhi. Tehseen had recently married Vadra’s cousin, Monica.
The event, titled ‘Social Media and Political Communication’, was organised at the Congress Bhavan with senior party leader Shashi Tharoor as the main speaker.
Supporters of state Youth Congress president Vishwajeet Kadam were annoyed over their leader being sidelined at the event. (HT Photo)
The protesters, who were reportedly annoyed by how Kadam was reportedly sidelined at the programme, began shouting slogans against the Poonawalla brothers. Later, they complained to Tharoor that the local party unit and senior leaders were not taken into confidence while the programme was being organised.
Sources said the workers stopped Poonawalla from speaking, shouting aloud that “just being somebody’s relative” doesn’t make him their leader.
Though senior Congress leaders asked the protesters to stop sloganeering, they refused to back down. The commotion died down only after Tharoor got up and began addressing the gathering.
First Published: May 18, 2016 17:23 ISTBleeding Cool owner Avatar Press continues to publish the comics of Alan Moore, Garth Ennis, Si Spurrier, Max Brooks, Kieron Gillen and Christos Gage through August. And this month that includes postcards featuring Alan Moore, taken as part of the Cinema Purgatorio promotional process by Mitch Jenkins.
CINEMA PURGATORIO #4
$5.99
Cover: Kevin O’Neill
Writers: Alan Moore, Garth Ennis, Max Brooks, Kieron Gillen, Christos Gage
Artists: Kevin O’Neill, Raulo Caceres, Michael DiPascale, Ignacio Calero, Gabriel Andrade
MR, B&W, 48 pages, ongoing monthly, no ads
Sitting in the theater of Alan Moore’s imagination you begin to notice some rather disturbing things. The floors are wet and the seats are tacky and have a noticeable smell of rot. A female usher walks down the aisle dragging a limp leg and shining a muted yellow beam filled with dust and debris into your eyes as she passes. You catch glimpses of seedy characters and acts happening around you. But the lights have gone down and the show is beginning. Enjoy a front row seat to the biggest names in comics delivering their finest works, all in luscious black& white. This issue continues Cinema Purgatorio by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill, A More Perfect Union by Max Brooks and Michael DiPascale, Code Pru by Garth Ennis and Raulo Caceres, Modded by Kieron Gillen and Ignacio Calero, and
The Vast by Christos Gage and Gabriel Andrade. Each story has its own cover by the series artist and there is also an Ancient Tome Premium edition limited to 1000 copies.
CINEMA PURGATORIO #1 DELUXE HARDCOVER EDITION
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Cover: Kevin O’Neill
Writers: Alan Moore, Garth Ennis, Max Brooks, Kieron Gillen, Christos Gage
Artists: Kevin O’Neill, Raulo Caceres, Michael DiPascale, Ignacio Calero, Gabriel Andrade
MR, B&W, 64 pages
Very few copies remain of the red-hot Deluxe Hardcover of #1, available in Previews for the first time! Don’t miss out on this exclusive Kevin O’Neill cover! Copies have been selling for upwards of $100 on eBay |
the 4D Movie Theater and features an integrated web browser, a multi-player audience and a chat room. You can watch YouTube videos, surf the web and play browser games in the Internet Cinema. You can do this alone or together with other CINEVEO users. You can meet other CINEVEO users in the integrated chat room to talk, share links to YouTube videos and watch them together. SPECIAL FEATURES Just the screen and you in empty space | CINEVEO's ULTRA - 3D™ Mode The Void features a distraction free environment in pitch black darkness. The Void v3.0 is the only cinema theme that currently supports viewing 3D movies in CINEVEO's ULTRA - 3D™ Mode. © 2017 by Mindprobe. All Rights Reserved!
VR Developer - www.mindprobe.io Contact Us | Facebook | Terms & PrivacyImage caption Oxford University experts have verified the nest is Britain's biggest ever
A 6ft-high wasp nest has been discovered in the attic of a Southampton pub.
Pest controller Sean Whelan was called in to deal with the 6ft by 5ft (1.8m by 1.5m) nest which housed a total of about 500,000 wasps.
Mr Whelan said after exterminating the insects, the nest had to remain where it was because it was too big to remove from the attic.
Oxford University experts have verified the nest is Britain's biggest ever.
They said they thought it was also the largest found across the world in the past 50 years.
The pub which housed the nest has asked to remain anonymous.
'Bit scary'
Mr Whelan told BBC Radio Solent: "The wasps will never go back in it, so we will just leave it to disintegrate.
"There were actually eight wasps nests in the loft but I actually did not spot [the biggest one] until I killed off the first, second, third...
"I had been staring at it for quite some time but I did not recognise it because it was very big. It was a bit scary [but] it was mesmerizing and very challenging."
"I think it has been a very mild spring and obviously summer has been quite dry - that's helped," Mr Whelan added.
"The experts feel [the nest] has lasted through the winter from last year [and] that is why it is so big."
The nest is 15 times bigger than the UK average and nearly as big as a Smart car, which is slightly longer at 8ft 10in by 5ft 1in (2.69m by 1.54m).
Nationally, pest control experts revealed on Wednesday that the number of calls to remove wasp nests more than trebled last month.
The increase has been blamed on the warm weather and household nests going untreated last year as people have been cutting back their spending during the recession.Syria's main armed opposition group, the Free Syrian Army (FSA), is losing fighters and capabilities to Jabhat al-Nusra, an Islamist organisation with links to al-Qaida that is emerging as the best-equipped, financed and motivated force fighting Bashar al-Assad's regime.
Evidence of the growing strength of al-Nusra, gathered from Guardian interviews with FSA commanders across Syria, underlines the dilemma for the US, Britain and other governments as they ponder the question of arming anti-Assad rebels.
John Kerry, the US secretary of state, said that if negotiations went ahead between the Syrian government and the opposition – as the US and Russia proposed on Tuesday – "then hopefully [arming the Syrian rebels] would not be necessary".
The agreement between Washington and Moscow creates a problem for the UK and France, which have proposed lifting or amending the EU arms embargo on Syria to help anti-Assad forces. The Foreign Office welcomed the agreement as a "potential step forward" but insisted: "Assad and his close associates have lost all legitimacy. They have no place in the future of Syria." Opposition leaders were sceptical about prospects for talks if Assad remained in power.
Illustrating their plight, FSA commanders say that entire units have gone over to al-Nusra while others have lost a quarter or more of their strength to them recently.
"Fighters feel proud to join al-Nusra because that means power and influence," said Abu Ahmed, a former teacher from Deir Hafer who now commands an FSA brigade in the countryside near Aleppo. "Al-Nusra fighters rarely withdraw for shortage of ammunition or fighters and they leave their target only after liberating it," he added. "They compete to carry out martyrdom [suicide] operations."
Abu Ahmed and others say the FSA has lost fighters to al-Nusra in Aleppo, Hama, Idlib and Deir al-Zor and the Damascus region. Ala'a al-Basha, commander of the Sayyida Aisha brigade, warned the FSA chief of staff, General Salim Idriss, about the issue last month. Basha said 3,000 FSA men have joined al-Nusra in the last few months, mainly because of a lack of weapons and ammunition. FSA fighters in the Banias area were threatening to leave because they did not have the firepower to stop the massacre in Bayda, he said.
The FSA's Ahrar al-Shimal brigade joined al-Nusra en masse while the Sufiyan al-Thawri brigade in Idlib lost 65 of its fighters to al-Nusra a few months ago for lack of weapons. According to one estimate the FSA has lost a quarter of all its fighters.
Al-Nusra has members serving undercover with FSA units so they can spot potential recruits, according to Abu Hassan of the FSA's al-Tawhid Lions brigade.
Ideology is another powerful factor. "Fighters are heading to al-Nusra because of its Islamic doctrine, sincerity, good funding and advanced weapons," said Abu Islam of the FSA's al-Tawhid brigade in Aleppo. "My colleague who was fighting with the FSA's Ahrar Suriya asked me: 'I'm fighting with Ahrar Suriya brigade, but I want to know if I get killed in a battle, am I going to be considered as a martyr or not?' It did not take him long to quit FSA and join al-Nusra. He asked for a sniper rifle and got one immediately."
FSA commanders say they have suffered from the sporadic nature of arms supplies. FSA fighter Adham al-Bazi told the Guardian from Hama: "Our main problem is that what we get from abroad is like a tap. Sometimes it's turned on, which means weapons are coming and we are advancing, then, all of a sudden, the tap dries up, and we stop fighting or even pull out of our positions."
The US, which has outlawed al-Nusra as a terrorist group, has hesitated to arm the FSA, while the western and Gulf-backed Syrian Opposition Coalition has tried to assuage concerns by promising strict control over weapons. "We are ready to make lists of the weapons and write down the serial numbers," Idriss told NPR at the weekend. "The FSA is very well organised and when we distribute weapons and ammunition we know exactly to which hands they are going."
Syria's government has capitalised successfully on US and European divisions over the weapons embargo by emphasising the "jihadi narrative" – as it has since the start of largely peaceful protests in March 2011. Assad himself claimed in a recent interview: "There is no FSA, only al-Qaida." Syrian state media has played up the recent pledge of loyalty by Jabhat al-Nusra to al-Qaida in Iraq.
Western governments say they are aware of the al-Nusra problem, which is being monitored by intelligence agencies, but they are uncertain about its extent.
"It is clear that fighters are moving from one group to another as one becomes more successful," said a diplomat who follows Syria closely. "But it's very area-specific. You can't talk about a general trend in which [Jabhat al-Nusra] has more momentum than others. It is true that some say JAN is cleaner and better than other groups, but there are as many stories about it being bad." Critics point to punishments meted out by Sharia courts and its use of suicide bombings.
The FSA's shortage of weapons and other resources compared with Jabhat al-Nusra is a recurrent theme. The loss of Khirbet Ghazaleh, a key junction near Dera'a in southern Syria, was blamed on Wednesday on a lack of weapons its defenders had hoped would be delivered from Jordan.
"If you join al-Nusra, there is always a gun for you but many of the FSA brigades can't even provide bullets for their fighters," complained Abu Tamim, an FSA man who joined Jabhat al-Nusra in Idlib province. "My nephew is in Egypt, he wants to come to Syria to fight but he doesn't have enough money. Al-Nusra told him: 'Come and we will even pay your flight tickets.' He is coming to fight with al-Nusra because he does not have any other way."
Jabhat al-Nusra is winning support in Deir al-Zor, according to Abu Hudaifa, another FSA defector. "They are protecting people and helping them financially. Al-Nusra is in control of most of the oil wells in the city." The Jabhat al-Nusra media, with songs about jihad and martyrdom, is extremely influential.
Abu Zeid used to command the FSA's Syria Mujahideen brigade in the Damascus region and led all its 420 fighters to al-Nusra. "Since we joined I and my men are getting everything we need to keep us fighting to liberate Syria and to cover our families' expenses, though fighting with al-Nusra is governed by very strict rules issued by the operations command or foreign fighters," he said. "There is no freedom at all but you do get everything you want.
"No one should blame us for joining al-Nusra. Blame the west if Syria is going to become a haven for al-Qaida and extremists. The west left Assad's gangs to slaughter us. They never bothered to support the FSA. They disappointed ordinary Syrian protesters who just wanted their freedom and to have Syria for all Syrians."Early life stressors and religiosity are both linked to an unhealthy obsession with sexual behaviors, according to research published in the journal Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity.
The study of 802 adults examined if sexually compulsive behaviors were linked to early life stressors, attachment styles, frequency of religious service attendance, and age.
The study found that attachment anxiety was positively related to sexually compulsive behaviors, but attachment avoidance was not. Those who experienced early life stressors (such as abuse, bullying, familial separation, and health concerns) were more likely to report engaging in sexually compulsive behaviors. Younger adults were more likely to report more sexually compulsive behaviors than older adults.
Religiosity also showed a weak link to sexually compulsive behaviors. The more frequently an individual attended a religious service, the more likely they were to report engaging in sexually compulsive behaviors.
PsyPost interviewed the study’s corresponding author, Dixie Meyer of Saint Louis University. Read his responses below:
PsyPost: Why were you interested in this topic?
Meyer: My interest in the topic grew out of the struggles I saw clients facing in therapy. As a therapist, I counseled clients struggling with their sexual behaviors. In this subset of clientele, many individuals reported feeling sexually addicted. As I worked with this population common themes emerged: a history of early life traumas, difficulty connecting with others, and the conflicting role of religion in understanding their sexuality.
What should the average person take away from your study?
It could be that individuals with early life traumas may not feel secure in their relationships or may not feel interpersonally connected. Sexual behaviors may be used as a coping mechanism to alleviate the unwanted mental health distress experienced more frequently with those individuals who faced early life traumas. Perhaps, sexual behaviors creates a sense of intimacy.
Are there any major caveats? What questions still need to be addressed?
Sampling bias is a concern with this study. The sample largely identified as Christian. I’m not sure how the role of understanding sexuality by religious affiliation plays a role in sexual behaviors. We found an increase in religious attendance was associated with more sexually compulsive behaviors, but we do not understand the cause and effect relationship or whether other research would support this finding.
It could be that interpretation of religious beliefs leads individuals to feel guilty about engaging in sexual behaviors or perhaps individuals attend church because they want to change their behaviors. More research is needed to clarify the roles and influences of interpersonal relationships, religion, trauma, and sexually compulsive behaviors.
Is there anything else you would like to add?
Social scientists are becoming more concerned with the replication of research. As many well-known research studies have failed to show consistent findings, any implications of this research should not be made until these findings have been replicated.
Acknowledging that concern, I think the research may speak to how healthy relationships across the lifespan can help individuals, when they experience trauma, to reduce any adverse reactions and experiences later in life.
The study, “Sexually Compulsive Behaviors: Implications for Attachment, Early Life Stressors, and Religiosity“, was also co-authored by Darla Timberlake, Dixie Meyer, Sarah Hitchings, Ashley Oakley, Lauri Stoltzfus, Sharon Aguirre, and Amanda Plumb.• Zebo broke foot in defeat by England in Dublin • Ireland No10 Jonny Sexton likely to be out for two weeks
The Ireland wing Simon Zebo will miss the rest of the Six Nations after breaking a bone in his foot in Sunday's 12-6 Six Nations home defeat by England.
Zebo will undergo an operation on Monday to repair the damage incurred in the 10th minute of a brutal Test in Dublin and has been ruled out for up to 10 weeks.
The prognosis on Jonathan Sexton's hamstring injury was less grave with the Ireland coach Declan Kidney estimating a two-week absence for the Leinster fly-half, who was replaced by Ronan O'Gara after half an hour.
The flanker Sean O'Brien (tight hamstring), the lock Mike McCarthy (knee ligament strain), the centre Brian O'Driscoll (twisted ankle) and the lock Donnacha Ryan (back) also sustained injuries, but have yet to be ruled out against Scotland in two weeks' time.
"Simon will have surgery tomorrow. Jonny will have a scan either later tonight or tomorrow," Kidney said. "It looks like a couple of weeks for Jonny, but it would be wrong to try and second guess the outcome. We'll know more by Tuesday.
"It's been an attritional couple of games and we had a few injuries leading into the tournament but that's the way it goes."Over the summer, we drove up to Eau Claire, Wisconsin to begin recording our very first full-length album at April Base Studios. We spent a week working with Beau Sorenson (Bob Mould, Yellow Ostrich, Death Cab for Cutie) where we essentially recorded a live album- all the songs were tracked with the four of us in a room and the main vocal added post-take. We weren't planning on this being the method of recording, but as soon as we got to April Base we were overwhelmingly inspired to go about making an album as pure and seamless as we could and ended up bringing 12 songs back with us to Chicago. We decided to call the album"Voir Dire" (Old French, pronounced vwah-dear), after Andrew spent a grueling day at the DuPage County Courthouse for jury duty and learned that the term was used by lawyers as the process to find a jury of American citizens who would vow to "see the truth".
A few months later, we recorded some overdubs and finished main vocals and backing vocals with Stephen Shirk at Shirk Studios in Chicago. Now, we are blessed to have those 12 songs completely recorded. Everything we want to say, we said. Everything we wanted to play, we played. It was an intensely challenging but wonderfully rewarding experience.
Yet, the journey isn't over. As many of you know, it is very financially ambitious to record and release a full album independently without the help of a record label, investor, or bank loan. Unfortunately, we are about to enter the second half of the full-length album process with extremely limited resources. As musicians and artists, we haven't the personal capital needed to finish the record. This Kickstarter campaign and your donation will help fund the following much needed endeavors:
-Mixing the album
-Mastering the album
-Reproducing/pressing the album
-Publicizing/promoting the album
With our levels and rewards of contribution, we wanted to keep it as serious and music & art focused as possible. We want to gift you things that are very thoughtful and important to us. It is such a generous and kind gesture to donate to something like this and we feel you should obtain something as unique as possible. As you can see from the tiers, Andrew Pelletier and Shelby Pollard both have literature that will be self-published and released exclusively through this campaign. Andrew is currently almost finished with a novella that comes as the narrative companion piece with Voir Dire and Shelby will be releasing a book of prose poetry!*
Thank you so very much for taking the time on this page to read, listen, and watch a little bit of who we are. We want to be as transparent as possible with you. Any questions you have, please don't hesitate to ask. Thank you for your interest in Voir Dire and Minor Characters. We appreciate you so much and cannot wait to share this music with you. We are so excited that you are part of the story.
Love always,
Minor Characters
*All backers will receive their packages PRIOR to the actual release of the full album!*
View the video in HD: https://vimeo.com/81946239Getty Images
With the Super Bowl done, the curtain has officially fallen on the 2013 season and the 2014 offseason is underway for all 32 teams.
One of the first decisions of the offseason will come in Minnesota this week. Ben Goessling of ESPN.com points out that quarterback Matt Cassel has until Friday to decide whether or not to void his contract with the Vikings for the 2014 season. If Cassel does void it, he will become a free agent. If not, the Vikings will have until the seventh day of the new league year in March to either pay Cassel a $500,000 roster bonus or let him go.
Cassel is set to make $3.7 million in total salary next season, which is the same he made in 2013 to back up Christian Ponder. Cassel wound up doing more than that as the quarterbacks shuffled through three different starters, however, and could be in position to start for at least part of next season as well if the Vikings draft a quarterback.
He could have the same opportunity somewhere else and there’s a possibility he could find an even better chance to start, although it might not come with the same salary that he stands to make with the Vikings in 2014. Cassell has a few days to weigh those considerations before letting the Vikings know if they have to do the same.Here he is, the reason I started this all in the first place. I completely redesigned him from the earlier re-concept. After a very LONG 3-4 months, blood, sweat, and tears, I managed to pry this design from my brain and make it a reality. This troublemaker is the hero, the main character of the story, and I had to get him right. I have other characters at the moment I haven't done, but he's essentially the last character for me to tackle in this phase of concepts. Compared to the others, I gave him the white glove treatment in post-production quality. From the two images, you can see that he likes to have fun and drink, but is also a bit wreckless in his fighting style (beginning of story). He's a natural fighter, but is full of flaws, and has a lot to learn about himself and what matters in life.BIO (for now):
Arlo is the oldest sibling of the Cashmere family. He’s impressionable, ambitious, a jokester (especially when drunk), but ultimately strives for the greater good. While his younger brother Enzo was too young to remember his father’s death, Arlo remembers it quite well. He was forced to grow up fast, helping take care of his mother and younger brother. He grew up hearing stories about his father’s heroics, and the life he lived. Arlo knew he wanted to fulfill his father’s legacy, but also felt pressure from his brother Enzo to join him in a business venture. With guidance from his mentor Archer Sullivan, Arlo eventually joined the service. However, his mother’s distaste for the military due to her husband’s death, and his brother losing a business partner, Arlo’s relationship with his family has been damaged as a result.The audio tape revealing the truth behind the CIA assassination of JFK was released after E. Howard Hunt’s deathbed confession. Hunt was a former CIA agent involved in multiple operations, including Watergate. In the audio tape, he admitted that he was approached to be a member of the CIA assassination team to Kill JFK.
This event has gone completely unnoticed because mainstream media refuses to report on this damning evidence of government corruption.
Saint John Hunt, the son of Howard, aired as a guest on the nationally-acclaimed “Coast to Coast” radio station to discuss the shocking audio tape. Hunt told radio host George Noory that his father actually mailed him the audio tape in January of 2004.
His father gave instructions that the cassette tape not be listened to until his death, for fear of his own life and the lives of his family and friends.
The radio station shared four minutes of the cassette tape that reveals much of the damning evidence.
In the audio tape, Howard Hunt reveals countless people directly and indirectly tied to the CIA operation that killed Kennedy. Furthermore, Howard described himself as a “bench warmer” to the operation, involved just enough to know about what was going on without taking part.
The tape makes it glaringly obvious that Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was heavily involved in the operation, and played a critical part in the cover-up. Lyndon Johnson was often described by his peers as “maniacally urgent” in his desire to one day become president.
News agencies and reporters were there on the scene that fateful day. They captured this iconic photo that shows Lyndon and Ms. Kennedy behaving oddly calm and collected after having witnessed the brutal execution of their close friend and spouse.
Saint John also told reporters about AJ Weberman, a journalist who lived in New York in the early 70s. On top of being a journalist and writer, Weberman was also the founder of the Youth International Party.
Weberman was in Dallas on that fateful day. Furthermore, Weberman was one of the first reporters to write on the 3 men arrested in Dealy Plaza. The pictures he captured of the men show that Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis were indeed there in Dallas. Not only that, they were at Dealy Plaza.
The mainstream media quickly hid this and labeled the three men as “hobos and tramps.” They were released just hours later and the entire operation was completely veiled in a mask of media lies. The government was clearly behind everything, as there’s literally no way those men should have been let free.
Chauncey Holt later confessed to being the third man involved in the operation. The entire thing was masterfully planned and allowed the government to get rid of JFK, who was well known for his anti-socialist and anti-establishment views.
Just minutes before he died, Howard Hunt admitted that he felt “deeply conflicted and deeply remorseful” that he never blew the whistle on what happened.
Kenny promised to “shatter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter the remnants into the wind.” He was not a man of only words though. He took action and almost every internal agency within the government grew infuriated.
JFK stood for what was right, and in the end, he paid a dear price.
Further Reading:3
Often, a medium firm mattress is more comfortable as it allows your shoulders and hips to sink in slightly. If you have lower back pain, you may want to consider a firmer mattress with a padded cover for support.
Check your existing mattress to make sure it does not sag at all or cause you any discomfort. If so, it may be time to invest in a new mattress. Though you can use boards underneath the mattress to help with the sagging, this is a temporary fix and you will eventually need to buy a new mattress to get a good night’s sleep.
When you are sleeping on your back, it is essential that your mattress provides good full-body support, including lower back support. In a mattress, support is provided through the coils or inner springs. Different mattresses will have different arrangements and numbers of coils. As well, the padding of the mattress can come in different thicknesses, from seven to 18 inches deep. You should always try a mattress before buying it to ensure it is comfortable and supportive for your body.Posted on November 18, 2011 at 10:53 pm
by Carolyn Yeager
Myklos Grüner will finally get his day in court!
This writer spoke on the telephone with Grüner in Sweden in September 2010, at which time he assured her he would challenge Wiesel’s identity in a court in Budapest the following January. We know how court dates can be postponed, and even cancelled, but Grüner has proved himself to be a persevering man, and though a year late, it now seems he will indeed present his evidence in court. However, the defendant will not be the highly protected Elie Wiesel himself, but Hungarian rabbi Slomó Köves, who invited Wiesel to Hungary in 2009 while “knowing that (he) is not a genuine Holocaust survivor” but “stole the identity of an inmate,” according to Grüner.
In a news story written by Stefan J. Bos for the BosNewsLife service, dated Friday, Nov. 18, Grüner (pictured right) is reported to have said, “It’s better to sue Wiesel directly, but that is impossible. After 26 years of research, the Hungarian court provides the first opportunity to present my case, which I hope to do by suing the rabbi.” Grüner explained, “Elie Wiesel, who lives in the United States, is a very hard man to get. The whole world is protecting him, from [U.S. President] Barack Obama to [German Chancellor] Angela Merkel. They are all scared the truth will come out, because of prestige and money. I am also pressuring the German Bundestag to show me archives about Wiesel’s past. ”Grüner is quoted by Stefan Bos in a private interview on Friday as saying, “I don’t seek financial compensation, but I want [Köves] to tell the world who his friend Elie Wiesel really is. Wiesel was never born in Hungary or Romania as he claims and was not in a concentration camp. He doesn’t even speak Hungarian.” (I don’t know what evidence Grüner has that Wiesel was not born in Hungary or Romania, but I will surely be pleased if he has some.) Köves denies the accusations against Wiesel. “I was with him two days and Wiesel spoke with me in Hungarian. He also addressed parliament in Hungarian. These allegations are of an elderly man with some kind of complex,” he told BosNewsLife. Köves also told Bos he had not been invited yet for the January 24 court hearing. The 82-year old Grüner has said he is angry at Köves for accusing him of “falsifying history,” and comparing him to American academic Norman Finkelstein who wrote ‘The Holocaust Industry.
Elie Wiesel with Slomo Köves (center) in Budapest in 2009.
It’s possible this could deteriorate into a circus, but one hopes not. Grüner views the court case in Budapest as a giant leap in a long, painful, personal journey, according to the BosNewsLife story. As a 15-year-old boy in Auschwitz whose father had died, he “befriended Lázár Wiesel, who was among those protecting him. In January 1945, as the Russian army was coming, the inmates were transferred from a satellite camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau to Buchenwald in Germany.” The satellite camp was Monowitz, or Auschwitz III, for workers at the IG Farben plant.
Grüner exaggerates the length of time it took the Auschwitz inmates to get to Buchenwald, but he indeed was on that march. (The march itself was only one day, after that they went by train.) Grüner, as well as Lazar and Abram Wiesel, were registered at Buchenwald, but the man we know as Elie Wiesel never was. This is proved by the documents held at Buchenwald. Grüner states in the Bos article that Abram Wiesel, Lazar’s older brother, died on the way, but this is not as he described it in his book Stolen Identity, nor according to Buchenwald records which record Abram Wiesel’s death on Feb. 2, 1945 in Barracks 57.
Miklos Grüner, like most holocaust survivors, has memory problems and embellishes his facts … however, he was there and he is in the famous photograph (far left, lower bunk) while Elie Wiesel is not the man at the far right (upper bunk) that he claims is himself. This has been proven on this website Elie Wiesel Cons The World, most recently and thoroughly here.
According to Bos, Grüner still says that when he was invited to meet Nobel Prize winner Wiesel in 1986, he thought he would be meeting his old friend. Instead it was a man who Grüner claims he never saw before. “Wiesel refused to show me his tattoo. It was a very short meeting.” Grüner said he “doesn’t mind that Wiesel earns 25,000 dollars” for a 45 minute speech.” But I don’t want him to make money on the deaths of my family members and the millions of others who perished in the Holocaust,” he said, his voice trembling. “I want to leave this world knowing that I have told the next generation the truth…I even want a dialogue with Anti-Semites and the Catholic Church, for I later painted as an artist.”
Swedish newspaper article from 1986 of Grüner-Wiesel meeting. Grüner, on left, greets Wiesel, right, in a friendly fashion but is inwardly wondering who he is!
It is our hope that Mr. Grüner succeeds in having his day in court and that he will be able to make his case. It appears that at least the BozNewsLife news service will cover it, and that is good news for us. We know what he is up against, but still we hope.It's been a week for notable auction cars in the days before Christmas, what with an NSX driven by Senna and theused by the McRaes being sold now or soon. But this McLaren F1 GTR Longtail is surely something else again.
It will be sold by Gooding & Co at its Scottsdale auction in January. They were the same auction house that sold the roadgoing F1 earlier this year for $8.47m, making the $5-$7m estimate attached to this car look like pocket money. Nearly.
The Fina liveried (doesn't it still look great?) chassis 21R was driven by JJ Lehto and Steve Soper in the 1997 FIA GT Championship. It won at Hockenheim and Helsinki but this particular car didn't race at Le Mans. It comes from a private collection and has been restored by McLaren. Prepped and ready to go for the 2014 track day season then...
See here for a video from the 1997 GT series. Keep a look out for Soper in this GTR about 40 seconds in.
[Source: The Supercar Kids, Gooding & Co]Pachyderm hit with bullet in shoulder by unknown shooter while in enclosure.
An Asian elephant with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey similar to this one was injured in a drive-by shooting in Tupelo, Miss., on Tuesday, April 9, 2013. (Photo: Alex Brandon, AP) Story Highlights Security guard was able to provide some details of shooting, but "leads are pretty slim," according to police
The circus flew in its own veterinarian to tend to the injured elephant
Elephant is expected to make full recovery
TUPELO, Miss. — An elephant with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus was injured in an early morning drive-by shooting Tuesday but is expected to make a full recovery.
The elephant, one of several performing with the traveling circus, was in an enclosure outside the BancorpSouth Arena when it was hit by a bullet in the shoulder, said the arena's marketing director, Kevan Kirkpatrick.
"We have had the circus once a year since 1995," Kirkpatrick said. "Absolutely this is the first elephant shooting we had."
A security guard on the scene was able to provide some information to the Tupelo Police Department, which is investigating, but "leads are pretty slim," said Tupelo Police Capt. Rusty Haynes. "We're dealing with a victim that can't talk."
The department has been in touch with state and federal wildlife authorities and, because the Asian elephant is an endangered species, the crime will be pursued as a federal offense under the Endangered Species Act, Haynes said.
In addition, he said, federal government might provide reward money for information leading to the conviction of the responsible person or persons. PETA also is offering a reward of $5,000 to help nab the shooter, said PETA spokesman David Perle, who criticized the circus's handling of elephants.
Circus staff and a local large-animal veterinarian immediately calmed the large pachyderm after it was shot and provided it medicine. Within 20 minutes, the animal was walking around the pen and eating carrots, Kirkpatrick said.
Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus flew in its own veterinarian to follow-up on the 39-year-old female elephant's health. Company spokeswoman Melinda Hartline said "Carol" will be taken to Springfield, Mo., where she'll remain under veterinarian care for several weeks.
She is expected to make a full recovery, Hartline said. And the circus will go on as scheduled, with shows set to start Thursday and run through the weekend.
In the meantime, city officials have placed an "elephant-sized card" in the lobby of the Convention & Visitors Bureau for Carol that the public is invited to sign. It also will collect donated items for the local animal shelter in Carol's honor.
"Tupelo is widely known for being an extremely safe community for its citizens and visitors," said Mayor Jack Reed Jr. in a statement. "We are shocked and infuriated at this senseless crime against an innocent animal."
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/XBdunQMike Brown’s Abusive, Vile & Misogynistic Rap Music and Tweets Discovered
“Gentle Giant” Mike Brown from Ferguson, Missouri recorded several raps before his death.
The Riverfront Times posted the collection.
You can listen for yourself—-
“Jennings StationsRoads Free$tyle” by Big Mike and Luh Vee K are filled with misogynistic lyrics.
…My favorite part is when that body hits the ground.
I soak em up like I’m ringing out a sponge Every time I call you bitch. There b cum.
And when she cum I b cumin all over her tongue
I beat that pussy up and then be on the run (Come on bitch!)
I roll flat blunts that look just like my thumb …My niggas from the area we don’t play…
Masturbating off my voice on my laptop.
Mother f*ckers would have never far I made it in the rap game…
Lyrics from Lights Out Big’Mike K-Loc Luh A
Lights out. Lights out.
I knock your ass out.
Lights out.
Lights out… …It’s lights out bitch.
I do the hit and I’m gonnna make it hurt.
…And count my money while my bitch suck me like a Slurpee.
Even the far left The Riverfront Times could not sugar-coat the filth in Brown’s recordings. The RFT reported:
While Brown has been described as a “gentle giant” and “a big teddy bear,” his tracks are filled with the usual guns-and-money bluster one might expect from a trap-rap artist.
But thats not all.
Got News uncovered several misogynistic and abusive tweets Mike Brown sent to his girlfriend, Fatty.
Tweets from Michael Brown’s Twitter account between himself and his on again, off again girlfriend, @Shady_May, paint a tragic portrait of his final days.
Brown called May his “fatty” repeatedly. I wanna kick it with my fatty ⇨@Shady_May⇦ ⇧ツ — IvPlay With Society (@LoveRHateMe_) June 27, 2013 But she betrayed him. @Shady_May ok So you fucked me and a week or two later u on twitter kissin another nigga so u aint a hoe or should I call you a thot? — IvPlay With Society (@LoveRHateMe_) August 6, 2014 Brown insulted May’s weight. These chubby hoes ain't loyal — IvPlay With Society (@LoveRHateMe_) July 3, 2014
There’s much more at Got News.
You’ll never read this in the mainstream media.
It doesn’t fit their narrative.
Some propagandists on the left want you to believe Mike Brown was a “gentle giant” who rapped about God and Christianity.
Now you know the truth.The first 2017 issue of Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump magazine is revealing on Monday that the Koro Teacher Quest anime series will start streaming on December 23. This adaptation of Jō Aoto and Kizuku Watanabe's Koro-sensei Q! (Koro Teacher Quest!) manga will run on the dTV, UULA, and other services.
Watanabe and Aoto began the Koro-sensei Q! manga, which is a spinoff of Yusei Matsui's Assassination Classroom manga, in Shueisha's Saikyō Jump magazine in October 2015. In Koro-sensei Q!, Koro-sensei is a demon king in a world of swords and sorcery. Shueisha published the manga's first compiled volume on July 4.
An anime based on the Koro Teacher Quest manga (pictured at left) is already screening with the Ansatsu Kyōshitsu: 365-Nichi no Jikan (Assassination Classroom The |
alien waves.
► Utilize an array of powerups, from forcefields to nuclear devices, to give you the advantage.
► Unlock 48 Achievements and compete in online highscore lists powered by Scoreloop.
► Enjoy a complete soundtrack of industrial rock and high quality positional sound effects.
► Experience dynamic lighting, shadowing and weather effects.
► Flip your phone to flip the display - have your controls where you want them regardless of whether you are left or right handed.
► Runs smoothly even on budget phones.
The app was not found in the store. :-( Go to store Google websearch
Live Wallpapers
Android Theme Launcher Live Wallpaper
This is the craziest live wallpaper you'll see this week, or maybe ever. Whether it's so good that it's bad will be up to you to decide.
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This is an adorable Android Theme launcher. Each android have a unique movement on the rack and it is programmable to launch an application. There is an unique sound as well when you click on the mini Android.
After installing the Livewallpaper, you could set the application you want associated with it during the first launch. You may change the association from the configuration page by selecting the wallpaper editor. There are many more setting like transition, resize, color, visibility, rotation etc to customize the livewallpaper. To do so enter the livewallpaper setting/configuration page to find out more.
The app was not found in the store. :-( Go to store Google websearch
Glow Kaleidscope Live Wallpaper
From the GO Wallpaper Dev Team.
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Glow Kaleidscope live Wallpaper can generate thousands of symmetrical patterns with colorful glow lights. Patterns never repeat I promise.
Key Features:
♥ Thousands of symmetrical patterns. Never repeat.
♥ Colorful glow lights.
♥ Hight render and battery performance.
♥ Totally free
GO Weather Animate WallpaperHD
From the GO Dev Team.
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A new wallpaper theme designed for GO Weather, Animated Wallpaper (HD).
This is not a standalone app, you need to download latest amazing GO Weather v1.6.2 (or above) in order to apply this theme;You can check GO Weather out by searching "GO Weather" in google market.
The app was not found in the store. :-( Go to store Google websearch
Know A Worthy New App? Let Us Know!
If you have an application in mind for the next issue of the roundup, feel free to send us an email and let us know.
Important: there are 2 requirements in order for the app to be considered, listed below.
the app's launch date has to be between Monday and Sunday this week
it has to be original, ground-breaking, well-reviewed, interesting, fun, etc - the cream of the crop
Now, if and only if the above requirements have been satisfied, fire up an email to this address: [email protected].
1 sponsored placement per week is available (your app would be featured at the top and marked as sponsored) - please contact us for details.How To Use Fear Before It Uses You
Great article by Tony Robbins and the strategies to help you maximize your potential. You have to take massive action and effectively execute.
Fear of failure, fear of rejection, fear that we’re just not enough — fear is a common current that runs through all of our lives. And if we let it, fear can keep us locked up in the prison of the comfortable and predictable.
But there is also a way that fear can serve a valuable purpose, helping us break through the frustration to achieve the life we truly desire. That’s right — if you allow it to, fear can become your ultimate motivator.
In your mind, if you have no choice but to succeed — if achieving your goal is an absolute must — then nothing else matters. Sacrifices won’t even be a question. Excuses go out the window. You’ll do whatever it takes to make it happen. Period.
This is how some of the most successful people leverage fear in their lives. Rather than allowing fear to creep in and suck the life right out of their dreams, the know that the real fear is the price they will pay if they don’t give their goals and visions every ounce of energy and focus they have. They know the real fear is living a life where they have settled or compromised on what they really wanted.
How do you adopt that mindset and perspective? How do you live a life where fear becomes your ally, not your enemy?
Here are 5 tips to stop letting fear control your happiness and to start leveraging fear to your advantage:
1. DETERMINE IF YOUR GOAL IS A “MUST”
Ask yourself what it will cost you if you do not push past your fear. This will help you discover whether or not achieving a specific goal is a “must” and not just a “should.”
Sound confusing? Try imagining yourself when you are 80 years old, nearing the end of your life. You are sitting in your rocking chair, reflecting on how you lived your life. Now, look back on your life as if you had not achieved the goal you are after at this moment in your life. How has this affected the course of your life? What are your regrets? What do you wish you had made more time for? What do you wish you had tried? Is there sadness and regret? Are you wondering, “what if…?”
2. RECOGNIZE THE EXCUSES
It’s easy to push our hopes, desires and dreams aside. We make excuses: there’s just not enough time, I don’t have the money or the resources, I have a family, I’m just too busy. And we start to hide behind those excuses. Because they’re comforting. They’re safe. But excuses will also bring you back to exactly where you started. So remember that the next time an excuse floats into your mind. By becoming more cognizant of your brain’s proclivity for using excuses so you won’t be held accountable, the better you will become at dismissing them.
3. ADOPT A GROWTH MINDSET
People often give up on what they want because they believe that reaching their goal is beyond their abilities. But the most successful people foster a growth mindset. They don’t think of their abilities as fixed, but rather as flexible. And when faced with a setback, they try harder. They adopt a new strategy. They keep seeking a solution.
4. PAIN BRINGS VALUABLE INSIGHT
The most painful experiences can help refine what you want, and what you don’t want in life. Failure, disappointment, dead-ends — these can all be used as a means of reflecting and saying, “this didn’t work. It wasn’t the right fit. So what do I really want?” Remember, we are built to adapt. So embrace this strength and use each experience as a tool to help you learn more about yourself and what you really must have in life.
5. KNOW THAT FAILURE IS INEVITABLE
You will fail. It’s just part of the process. Any successful person will tell you that. But failure offers insights and inherently corrects the faulty ways of approaching a problem. There is no teacher as impactful as the sting of failure. And no lesson in resilience better than the burn of rejection. But if you use these experiences as unique information, and adjust your strategy and approach the next time around, you will have an advantage that no one else does.
Source: https://www.tonyrobbins.com/mind-meaning/how-to-use-fear/All images by Jonathan Bielaski. Used with permission
Environmental portraits are a very involved type of portraiture that is a very slow and methodical process requiring interviews and understanding of who the person is. In the end, it requires the photographer to deliver a product that tells something specific about who the subject is.
Jonathan Bielaski has been doing this for years, and knew that he wanted to be a photographer from a very young age. He is based in Toronto, Canada and some of his clients include, Maple Leafs Sports and Entertainment (Toronto Maple Leafs, Toronto Raptors and TFC), Sports Illustrated, Billboard Magazine, T+D Magazine, Bard Valley Dates, California Peach and Pear Growers, Home Depot, Lucas Oil, Hydro One, Ontario Pork, Dairy Farmers of Ontario, University of Waterloo, Sheridan, Laurier and the list goes on.
With a portfolio like that, we talked to him about the involving process of showing personality in a portrait.
Phoblographer:: Tell us about how you got into photography.
JB: I got into photography naturally; my dad was a master print maker and my mom a graphic designer. I was surrounded by images 24/7. They both tried to raise me to do something other than the arts but it was just part of me, I knew I wanted to create images at a very young age. By the time I was in high school I was assisting on commercial jobs and had a studio to start taking my own images. From there lots of hard work and persistence led to where I am now.
Phoblographer: What first attracted you to shooting portraits then environmental portraits?
JB: When I started out in photography I did not enjoy making portraits and was attracted to still life photography, I now know that it was my attraction to lighting and with shooting these types of images I could master light and its effects. But something was missing–when I was photographing custom motorcycles and custom made products the story about the makers became a huge interest to me. Who they were and where they lived or worked fascinated me. I wanted to capture them in their workspace. People have a story as well as their space, together they complete a visual story and you can capture who they are and what they do in a signal frame.
PB: Environmental portrait photography often is a process involving an interview, getting to know the person a bit, and then applying creativity to the scene. Do you have certain questions that you always ask before shooting?
JB: With making any portrait I do–I like to sit down with the subject and learn about them: what they do, where they come from and where they want to go. I ask them to take me though a typical day, show me some of there favorite places and tools. I really try to get to know them. Sometimes this is done on the same day of the shoot and sometimes it is done beforehand, but the best thing that I have learned to do is listen. By listening, you learn and find the small details that makes them who they are.
Phoblographer: To you, what makes for the perfect environmental portrait?
JB: To me a perfect environmental portrait is a portrait that tells a story, you are learning something about the person in the portrait with out the use of words. The background and foreground are just as important as the person in telling the story but they are the supporting cast and the person is the lead roll. On their own they could make good images but together they make a great image.
“…the best thing that I have learned to do is listen. By listening, you learn and find the small details that makes them who they are.”
Phoblographer: These people obviously aren’t professional models; so posing them can be tough sometimes. How do you work with these folks to make them look their best?
JB: During my shoots we are always having a conversation and I try to make them forget about the camera. This is a huge help. If they are talking about something they love it comes through. You need to know how to relate to them so research anything and everything about them and what they do. As well have a plan, making test shots and knowing your gear in and out, so you don’t have to worry about it on set and you can focus on them. During my shoots most of my subjects are only on set for about 20-30 mins per shot, we pre-light with stand-ins and only shoot them until we have what I want. 20-30 frames per view is about normal. This makes them very comfortable and also very happy.
Phoblographer: Tell us about the gear that you use.
JB: All my images are created on location so having the right gear, and gear that you trust, on site is essential. PhaseOne cameras and Elinchrom lights are the mainstay. They have traveled with me all over the world and have never let me down. The PhaseOne cameras have unbelievable image quality and I love the files they produce as most of my shots have little to no retouching this system can make it happen for me. As for the Elinchrom lighting everything must be battery operated as we are on location and don’t want cords on the floor or trying to find an outlet all the time. So, I trust the Quadra Systems paired with their softboxes and modifiers it is a great portable system.
Other systems I have been using lately are the Fuji X-series of cameras with small strobes. This makes a great portable system when I do not have my equipment truck with me or the need for the higher resolution of the PhaseOne systems. With both systems, the image quality is amazing and both have their limitations so you need to know when to use what gear. One piece of equipment recently acquired was my Inovativ Scout 37 cart, I would not buy any other cart after having this one it is amazing!!!
Phoblographer: Every photographer has a situation where they’ve felt that a certain task or project was incredibly difficult to accomplish. What was yours?
JB: Every shoot has its difficulties and knowing when you need help is one of the best things you can learn. When I was starting out I thought I could do everything myself but soon realized that pulling together a team of specialists is the best way to overcome your difficulties and shortcomings. Creating images is only one part of the equation of running a commercial studio, the business side is just as if not more important then the images himself, so mentor with leaders of business and never never stop learning.
“The fact that everyday is different and that I rarely do things twice is what keeps me so motivated in my career. Everyday I meet new people, learn their stories, connect and have the opportunity to create something that is beautiful for them. There could be nothing more rewarding then that.”What most people don’t realize is that 6,000 satellites have been launched into Earth’s orbit since the Soviet Union sent Sputnik 1 into space back in 1957. These man-made satellites have served various purposes, such as means of communication, navigation, and exploration. Estimates suggest that around 3,600 so far have remained in orbit, out of which far fewer are still operational. Once these satellites fulfill their purpose and reach life expectancy, they become nothing more than a space debris.
It is very easy to spot some of them, orbiting in the skies, including the largest one of all, the International Space Station. However, none of them match the Black Knight, a highly mysterious and much-debated satellite, in the power of storytelling.
While some argue the Black Knight has been in orbit for some five decades already, others say it is less time than that–and there are those who argue it was there 13,000 years ago. Its purpose and origin have remained well hidden, although there are claims it has already beamed signals to the Earth. Who gave this object its ominous name adds to the spine-tingling nature of the enigma, and it is uncertain who was the first to discover it, either.
Unsurprisingly, conspiracy theorists have come to the table. As they explain it, the Black Knight’s origin is linked to extra-terrestrials. The scientific and academic community dismiss all such talk. So how to explain the buzz surrounding the Black Knight?
The root of the story begins with Nikola Tesla, who supposedly had heard sounds from space back in 1899. He deemed the sounds were possibly from intelligent life not on Earth, perhaps inhabitants of Mars. Decades later, in 1968, astronomers confirmed that he indeed heard radio signals, but they came via other natural objects in space.
Tesla never claimed he heard signals coming from a satellite orbiting the Earth, but there are those who still believe he was listening to transmissions from an orbiting satellite, one that was none other than the Black Knight.
In 1954, some newspapers, including The San Francisco Examiner and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, published certain opinions, made by Donald Edward Keyhoe, a former Marine Corps naval aviator and famed UFO researcher. Keyhoe continually published stories in various magazines such as Weird Tales, Flying Aces, The Saturday Evening Post and Reader’s Digest.
Published in the newspapers was Keyhoe’s belief that extra-terrestrials had visited the Earth. He also wrote a couple of books in which he stated that the U.S. Air Force detected two satellites orbiting the Earth in 1954, when in fact, no such technology existed.
On the other hand, the mid-1950s were times when science fiction was moving towards its peak in popularity.
Keyhoe’s books were rivaled by those written by H.G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, and Issac Asimov. Along with a range of movies and television shows, these stories fueled the public imagination about space travel and possible alien life encounters. Skeptics decided that much of what Keyhoe wrote was to help the promotion of his own books.
However, in 1960, during the Cold War, Time Magazine further claimed the U.S. Navy was aware of a satellite that had an unusual orbit. Initially, the magazine claimed it was a Soviet spy, but later it stated concern that a U.S. satellite broke out of orbit.
Over the years, reports of the Black Knight satellite have accumulated, but according to many, they are the result of unverified stories, overzealous reporters, and over-interpreted photographs. As NASA astronaut Jerry Ross says, the object and all the speculations about it are simply the results of a mistake.
Furthermore, senior education support officer Martina Redpath of the Armagh Planetarium in Norther Ireland doubts that the Black Knight is anything but a “jumble of completely unrelated stories.” Redpath had also claimed that many of the related reports on the matter are “unusual science observation” that have nurtured the myth of the Black Knight.
A possible explanation to the mystery can be found in December 1998, when a space shuttle mission was conducted at the International Space Station (ISS). During the mission, which involved spacewalks, Colonel Ross and Dr. James Newman were attempting to install thermal blankets to make adjustments that would reduce heat loss and save energy at the ISS. As the blankets were fastened to Col. Ross’ spacesuit, one of them was lost. Once he had realized it was gone, it was already far away from the astronauts and they were unable to retrieve it.
As NASA explains, debris regardless of its size escapes the stations at missions that require a spacewalk. Such was the case in December 1998, when a few more items had ended up as space debris. Usually, the majority of those objects are officially cataloged by the US SSN (Space Surveillance Network) too.
Therefore, the object photographed during the mission in 1998 known as STS-88, widely claimed to be the Black Knight satellite, is, according to the space journalist James Oberg, probably the thermal blanket that has been reported lost during the extravehicular activity conducted by Col. Ross and Dr. Newman.
Related story from us: In 1952, a German scientist predicted the name “Elon” would be associated with the colonization of Mars
In an interview given in 2014, Col. Ross has also stated that “conspiracy theories are fun for those working on them, but a waste of valuable brain power,” in the context of all the surrounding Black Knight theories.
Will these statements put an end to the intrigue of the Black Knight? The answer is: probably not.Hear the radio version of this story.
Workers at GM’s Spring Hill manufacturing plant received some good news Wednesday morning: The company is investing nearly $800 million at the site. They were told this secures their jobs and leads to hundreds of new hires.
Governor Bill Haslam attended the announcement, where he confirmed that the mysterious $30 million business incentive that was passed with next year's state budget will be helping to fund the plant. The state should receive a strong return on its investment, he said, because local hires are the priority for the new project.
Mike Herron was also pleased with the announcement. He's the chairman of the local United Auto Workers Union and has worked at the Spring Hill plant since it opened under Saturn in 1990.
"It’s a very significant day for the workers," says Herron. "It gives them a peace of mind that they’ll be able to go ahead and work at this location for the foreseeable future."
The $790 million investment will help support current Cadillac XT5 SUV production, along with funding a new high-efficiency V8 engine line.
"It takes a lot of employees to do that, and we’re hiring off the street right now," Herron says.
And he means it: Herron says GM will not be relocating employees from other plants, as they have done before. The plan instead is to hire 792 Tennesseans to fill those new positions.
Herron says the big announcement comes at a rare slow moment for the plant: Recent earthquakes in Japan have stopped supply, causing brief closures at a number of GM facilities. But Spring Hill should be up and running again in the next two weeks, with preparations for the new engine program beginning immediately.[Editor's Note: There is NO SUCH THING as an incurable disease or undefeatable pathogenic organism (or pathogenic 'entity' such as prions), including every 'weapons grade' bioengineered bug created by the satanic globalists and their minions. Every substance in Nature and every organism in the universe possesses a resonant frequency'signature'. For readers unfamiliar with the curative possibilities of electro-medicine, know that exposing an organism to its resonant frequency will cause it to self-destruct. It's a law of physics that can't be avoided or out-smarted by the NWO plotters.
Bear in mind that those of the Nazi mentality have historically and regularly employed a psychological tactic of intimidation in which they attempt to impress the public with an image of invincibility and unstoppable prowess. If you've seen the news reels from Nazi Germany of the 1930's, you know that Hitler used image promoters like Leni Rifenstahl, to project the notion that the Nazi'storm' troopers were impossible to resist. The use of tactics and concepts like "Blitzkrieg" also was intended for psychological intimidation. Remember Herr Rumsfeld's'shock and awe' predictions prior to the Iraq invasion? It turned out to be much more hype than reality (not that the murderous bombardment that did take place can be minimized for its Iraqi victims), but at the time, his statements projected an image of unstoppable and overwhelming power for those naive enough to believe him.. Please remember that the current crop of American Nazis are just as defeatable-in every category of resistance- as their earlier incarnations of the 1930's. Read the Daily Reports from Don Croft and the Adventures of Don & Carol Croft if you want to see some first hand examples of how it's done...Ken ]
By Dr. Leonard Horowitz
http://educate-yourself.org/cn/naziflu28dec04.shtml
December 28, 2004
Forward courtesy of Stan Cayer <stan@opal-essence.com >
The Case Of The Strange Cold Everybody Has Been Getting and Chemtrails- and the Black Arts Nation....
Fall 2004
The Nazi Flu Interview With Dr. Leonard Horowitz
Redden: I'd like to begin this interview by asking you about the flu. Many of my friends are sick, and I've read a number of news stories which say that people are sick around the world. So many people are sick that hospital emergency rooms are swamped and doctors are postponing surgeries. But at the same time, the mainstream media is not referring to this outbreak as an epidemic. So let me ask you, is there a flu epidemic underway or not?
Horowitz: There has been for quite some time, but the authorities are suppressing the news about it. It's only been recently that the mainstream media has acknowledged that hospital emergency rooms are filled with patients with this bizarre upper respiratory infection that doesn't quite seem to be a virus, a flu that the flu vaccines were ineffective against, that was a surprise and a complete mystery to the Centers for Disease Control authorities.
That's all hogwash, bogus nonsense. The fact of the matter is, we have seen this type of an epidemic since the end of 1998 and the beginning of 1999. People have been hacking and coughing with this bizarre illness that does not seem to follow any logical viral or bacterial onset and transition period. It was something that did not cause a high fever.
If it was a bacterial or viral infection, it would have caused a fever in these people. It didn't. It was something that lasted weeks, if not months. They had sinus congestion, sinus drainage, they had a cough, they had fatigue, general malaise, they felt they were not quite right.
Redden: Then is it fair to call this the flu, or is it something else?
Horowitz: I think it's only fair to call it flu-like. It is pathognomonic of, not a bacterial or viral infection, it is pathognomonic of a fungus or a fungus related to a flu. And that's exactly what has been developed and patented by the Armed Forces Research Institute of Pathology.
We've reprinted the patent report in the new book, Healing Codes for the Biological Apocalypse. We show you the report on the "pathogenic mycoplasma." That's a quote, "pathogenic mycoplasma." And if you know anything about mycoplasmas, myco indicates fungal, but yet mycoplasma is not really a fungus, it's not really a bacteria, it's not really a virus. It's sort of like a pseudo all of them. It has no cell wall, it goes deep into the cell nuclei thereby making it very difficult to mount an immune response against.
Redden: And it's man-made...
Horowitz: It's man-made. It can be used as a biological weapon. It was developed as an AIDS vaccine-related organism. It was extracted from AIDS patients. It is responsible for virtually all of the symptoms which AIDS patients suffer from. The AIDS virus is at best a co-factor, and not even such a strong co-factor as to bring on all of the symptoms of AIDS.
This particular organism, the micoplasma, is associated with this upper respiratory flu-like illness. And it's also associated in its pathogenic process with a whole variety of other symptoms that mimic AIDS.
Redden: And that's what you think is causing this epidemic?
Horowitz: That's only one of the factors. The patent report lays it out. Like how you can use a factor like that to cause chronic upper respiratory infections just like what is going on. I mean, virtually identical to what's going on. It's patented by the Armed Forces Research Institute of Pathology.
Redden: How did it get out of the lab and into the general population?
Horowitz: There's only speculation and the most likely thesis that I'm looking at is through contaminated vaccines, contaminated blood supplies. I don't know any other suitable mode of transmitting that kind of infectious agent.
Redden: What about the current controversy over chemtrails - the theory that airplanes are spraying the population with some kind of chemical or biological weapon. As I understand it, a number of researchers believe that many of the contrails in the skies these days are not the normal contrails formed by high-flying jets, but are actually trails of chemical or biological agents which spread out and then fall on the earth. Could this mycoplasma be transmitted to the population through chemtrails?
Horowitz: I don't relate it to the chemtrails. I don't believe that this particular organism could be suitably spread that way. But I believe the chemtrails are responsible for a chemical intoxication of the public, which would then cause a general immune suppression, low grade to high grade, depending on exposure. An immune dysfunction, which would then allow people to become susceptible to opportunistic infections, such as this micoplasma and other opportunistic infections.
Redden: So you believe that high-flying planes are, in fact, spraying something on the population that the theory is real?
Horowitz: There's no question that it's real. There's no doubt about that. I first began to investigate chemtrails when some were sprayed over my home in Northern Idaho. I took pictures of them, and then contacted the Environmental Protection Agency of the state. When I contacted their directors, they were clueless and referred me to the Air Force.
They then got me in touch with Centers for Disease Control Toxicology, and after about a week I received a letter from one of their chief toxicologists saying, indeed there was some amount of ethylene dibromide in the jet fuel. Now, ethylene dibromide is a known human chemical carcinogen that was removed from unleaded gasoline because of its cancer-causing effects. Now suddenly it has appeared in the jet fuel that apparently high-altitude military aircraft are emitting.
Redden: Why has ethylene dibromide been added to jet fuel?
Horowitz: When you examine who owns the fuel, who are the fuel company directors, suddenly you enter into the realm of the Rockefeller family and the royal families, Standard Oil and British Petroleum. And what are their other agendas? Suddenly now you see their documents, showing that they have funded, historically, eugenics, racial hygiene, genocide, depopulation, family planning, maternal and child health where they make and deliver vaccines, and contaminated blood supplies.
These are the banksters, the same people who run the blood banking as well as the money banking industries. In both Emerging Viruses and Healing Codes, I reference a great book by Dr. John Coleman, who worked as a British Secret Service agent at the highest levels. And he articulated very clearly who was running those companies.
It all goes back, ultimately, to the highest level of the royal family. The Bush family, Rothschild family, the Rockefeller money, and the entire Rockefeller establishment is based on Rothschild money and royal families. So you begin to then, at least, put forward a possible theory, that if you can't explain it rationally and any other way, I think you've got to begin to consider conspiracy theories. And once you eliminate the negative label that you've placed on conspiracy theories per se, because that's been demonized, as has the terms holistic medicine, holistic health.
Redden: Naturopathic
Horowitz: Naturopathy. I mean these labels get placed and as soon as they do, you know, it begins to wave red flags and people avoid those things. But, you know, when you really just define a conspiracy as is defined in Websters, as two or more people getting together behind closed doors covertly and planning something unethical, immoral, illegal and then carrying it out, that's a conspiracy. So that's now what you're looking at, at the highest levels.
You're looking at decision-makers who have, for whatever reasons, decided to put this toxic waste into jet fuels for human exposure, what ultimately's going to be human exposure. And it just so happens that these same people have put a lot of money into reducing world populations. So now you ask yourself, when it comes to testing human subjects like American citizens unwittingly, unwillingly, who sprays toxins out of airplanes over San Francisco, kills people that way, who sprays biologicals on the Pennsylvania turnpike that induce death?
Who has done that historically, as clearly articulated in the Frank Church congressional hearings of 1975, has been Central Intelligence Agency biological weapons contracting firms, such as Litton Bionetics, such as the Army Corp of Engineers when they were developing and utilizing these various biologicals. And this is all done under black operations, covert operations, where they get funding and congressional people are never informed really where this money is going. It's the black budget.
Redden: As I understand it, this is not just an American epidemic, but it's gone across Europe.
Horowitz: That's right. And so have the chemtrails. I've got colleagues over there, I've got colleagues in the Bahamas, Bermuda, Toronto, British Columbia all reporting the same bizarre seeding of the atmosphere. It's horrible. What is going on is just despicable.
Redden: One reason I'm interested in this subject is, I personally know three people who had the exact same thing happen to them. First they came down with flu-like symptoms which didn't go away. Then they went to the doctor, and the doctor said their flu had developed into a bacterial infection and we can give you antibiotics for that. Then they were all given a brand new antibiotic they had never taken before, and they all had serious allergic reactions.
Horowitz: Right. Isn't that fascinating?
Redden: What happened to them?
Horowitz: OK, that's a great question. I'm glad you asked that because I should have mentioned it before. What you're looking at with this upper respiratory infection is that it is a multi-factorial illness. It's associated with a variety of chemical and biological co-factors. Just like with AIDS, it's not the AIDS virus that ultimately kills, it's co-factor microbes such as the Mycoplasma. What you have could be described as an ideal Russian biological cocktail. And I suppose it's called Russia biological cocktail because the Americans likely invented it.
What they determined would be the best biological chemical warfare approach was a combination of chemicals and biologicals, so that it would be very difficult to diagnose and then treat the illnesses. Moreover, it would be very difficult to trace where they came from. If you've got, say, ethylene dibromide coming out of the jet fuels that is causing immune suppression and weakening your immune system, and then you've got a mycoplasma microbe or a fungus that causes an upper respiratory illness, suddenly you develop a secondary bacterial infection.
Now you get hit with antibiotics, and the antibiotics cause your body chemistry to go acidic, so now you get rashes and other things, your liver gets full of toxins and comes out through your skin in rashes and they get hyperallergenic reactions associated with the other chemicals. So all of a sudden now, you realize that you've got a human being who is completely out of balance and infected by two, three or four microbial co-factors as well as intoxicated by a variety of different chemicals.
Redden: A point of clarification. Are You saying that the fungus is working with the chemtrails and the antibiotic to make people sick?
Horowitz: Exactly. And you've got somebody who's going to be chronically ill. And in the contemporary warfare arena, where experts in biological chemical warfare convene and discuss the ways that are ideal to conduct warfare today, to really take an enemy out, you don't want to kill the people. You want to produce people who are chronically ill and become dependent on the state and totally sap the resources of the country.
And then you can move in further with your military-medical-industrial complex, your international medical-pharmaceutical cartel. And then you sell these beleaguered and defeated countries all of the pharmaceuticals and chemicals that they need to maintain any semblance of healthy function.
Redden: So you've got a work force that can work, but they're too tired after they finish working to...
Horowitz: That's exactly it. They're completely depleted. They can't put together a military; you create a dependence and thereby you weaken the population, and weakened populations are easy to control. So you've got population control, and you make vast fortunes doing it, versus just blowing up a nuclear weapon and devastating the infrastructure that you own. You and your colleagues own that infrastructure. You want to get rid of the people. You don't want to get rid of infrastructure.
What I'm relating to you now is not speculation. If you were to read the top experts analysis of military warfare, such as what is articulated in The Report From Iron Mountain, which even the authorities, they say that this is a hoax, a satire, but, you know, there's nothing funny about it. The propaganda, the spin that they put on it is that the document is a satire. But when you read it, there's nothing funny about it.
Redden: You mentioned the Rockefellers. You think the Rockefeller family is one of the major players in this conspiracy?
Horowitz: Oh, absolutely. One of the major players in world genocide, world population reduction. That's no mystery anymore. I mean, you even have some mainstream publishing companies, such as St. Martin's Press, writing the most horrific exposes of the Rockefeller family. You have Oxford University Press, publishing, for example, Christopher Simpson's work, called The Science of Coercion, where he proves that virtually the entire scientific and particularly health science agenda was laid out by the Rockefeller family.
In the 1920's, the federal government was giving very little money for public health. Where the huge investment in public health in the United States came from was the Rockefeller financial coffers, you know. They were behind it all. And so, already by the 30's, the early 1930's, who was responsible for the primary viral research investments, public health looking at cancer, who created the cancer industry in the 1920's, was the Rockefellers, all the Rockefeller money.
And if you didn't go along with that particular money making population controlling agenda as a health scientist or health professional you were traditionally demoted, defunded, ostracized. And then if you kept it up, you were persecuted and then jailed. I know many, many people who have gone through
that.Did Attorney General Eric Holder lie under oath about his involvement in the phone monitoring of reporters? It sure looks like it. Holder was asked last week by Democratic Rep. Hank Johnson about his involvement with prosecuting the press and he claimed he had no involvement. Last night, NBC News reported Holder personally signed off on the secret monitoring of Fox News Reporter James Rosen. In that case, Rosen was named as a "co-conspirator" and treated as a criminal for trying to obtain information from a source. More from Gateway Pundit:
First of all you’ve got a long way to go to try to prosecute the press for publication of material. This has not fared well in American history… In regard to potential prosecution of the press for the disclosure of material. This is not something I’ve ever been involved in, heard of, or would think would be wise policy.Hundreds of thousands of Obamacare sign-ups are about to lose coverage if they don’t cough up more information about their citizenship and immigration status.
Obamacare administrator the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced Tuesday that the agency sent letters notifying 310,000 customers who have failed to fix errors in their citizenship or immigration data that their coverage will be terminated Sept. 30 if they don’t submit proof by Sept. 5.
The customers are part of close to |
ing internal debate over Turkey’s policy on Syria and other Arab Spring countries is starting to boil up once more, as fears grow of blowback from Ankara’s support for Syrian rebels increasingly dominated by Islamist factions.
“The problem is not only for Turkey, the problem is for the region”, Davutoglu told Reuters on Tuesday.
“Syria is becoming a risk for all European countries as well, because of the presence of these terrorist groups based on the power vacuum and because of the totalitarian and autocratic nature of the regime,” he said.
“This is a threat to all of us.”
The foreign minister said recent so-called Geneva II negotiations between Syria’s government and rebels had failed because Damascus ignored the basic premise of the talks - a U.N.-backed communiqué issued in Geneva in June 2012 - calling for a transitional government based on mutual consent.
“They didn’t want to talk (about?)a transitional governing body,” Davutoglu said, “they wanted to focus on the threat of terrorism, which in fact was created by them.”
This, he said, was a failure of an international community that had not faced up to the gravity of the crisis in Syria and of its leadership’s war crimes.
He suggested Russia bore special responsibility by blocking effective action in the U.N. Security Council and by continuing to supply it with heavy weapons, actions that had emboldened Assad.
Davutoglu said he and Erdogan spoke recently to Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at the Sochi winter Olympic Games.
“Everybody says the only solution is a political solution,” he said, “but we have to be sincere and objective. Those who are supporting the regime by arms, heavy arms, they are on the side of a military option,” he said.
“We must cooperate, all of us, in order to create a suitable security atmosphere... That means working together to prevent any terrorist presence,” he said. All foreign fighters must leave, including Hebzollah and Iran’s proxy Shi’ite militia which are fighting alongside Assad’s forces.
WAR CRIMES
A post-Assad Syria should have a new national army composed of moderate elements of the opposition and the Free Syrian Army, Davutoglu said, stressing Syria’s sectarian and ethnic mix - Sunnis, Alawites, Christians, Kurds - must be represented.
Unlike other uprisings that toppled leaders in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen, the revolt in Syria had struggled to remove Assad because of the country’s complex religious mix and Assad’s strategic alliances with Iran and Russia, he said.
Davutoglu said Assad had managed to survive because he had not been told by world powers where to stop.
“Some people claim Bashar is successful, because he continued to stay in power... This is not a success, because he has all the power, he has an army, he has airports, he has SCUD missiles, he has chemical weapons and he used everything.”
Asked if Turkey, along with other members of the international community, had underestimated Assad’s staying power in the early stages in the conflict, Davutoglu said Turkey had worked hard to negotiate with Assad for 10 months in 2011 precisely because it had feared a protracted crisis.
“If we thought that Bashar al-Assad would fall soon, we wouldn’t have worked so hard, we were scared of this scenario and wanted to prevent it,” he said, adding the powerlessness of the international community had been a greater surprise.
“I wouldn’t have imagined that the U.N. Security Council would be dysfunctional for three years despite all these crimes against humanity. That I didn’t expect. But the rest, the methods, what the Assad regime did, was foreseeable?,” he said.
Russia has shielded Assad from Western and Arab pressure since the conflict began in March 2011, using its veto power to block U.N. Security Council resolutions and insisting that his exit from power cannot be a precondition for peace talks.
Moscow helped Syrian government negotiators resist discussion of a transitional governing body for Syria at the Geneva talks earlier this month by suggesting it endorsed their demands that tackling “terrorism” top the agenda.
The Syrian government’s efforts to make that a priority were “completely justified” because Syria “is increasingly becoming a magnet for jihadists and Islamic radicals of all stripes,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said on Monday.
Moscow has accused sponsors of the rebels of pushing for “regime change”.
The conflict has drawn thousands of foreign fighters into Syria to fight either for the mostly Sunni Muslim rebels or for Assad, whose Alawite sect is an offshoot of Shi’ite Islam.
The fighting has killed more than 140,000 people - more than 7,000 of them children - according to the Britain-based, pro-opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, and is destabilising the country’s neighbours.
FOREIGN JIHADIS
Davutoglu said the Assad government and al Qaeda-affiliated groups had been collaborating over the past seven months, the authorities pounding moderate rebel Free Syrian Army posts by air while Islamist groups attacked them on the ground.
He called for international cooperation to stop the flow of foreign fighters into Syria and denied suggestions that Turkey, which is hosting more than 700,000 Syrian refugees, was letting foreign fighters cross its porous border into Syria.
Turkey's Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu addresses the media in Ankara in this June 13, 2013 file photo. REUTERS/Umit Bektas/Files
“Turkey has been working very hard to welcome Syrian refugees, but at the same time was taking all measures to prevent the presence of terrorist groups, but for this there is a need of joint effort,” he said. He had raised the issue repeatedly with U.S., European, Russian and other counterparts.
“We told them, if you know who are radicals who want to come to Turkey to go to Syria, stop them coming to Turkey,” he said, calling for “real intelligence cooperation”.
“If they are being allowed by their countries of origin to come, how can we prevent them from coming inside Turkey, this will not be legal. Last year we received 36 million tourists...We cannot stop tourism in Turkey.”People who consume cannabis are more likely to be knowledgeable about the substance’s health effects than are those who abstain from it, according to survey data reported online in the International Journal of Public Health Policy.
Researchers at the University of Zurich in Switzerland assessed the health literacy of some 12,000 male subjects. Investigators reported that those subjects who consumed cannabis, alcohol, and tobacco “searched for information about substances significantly more often via the Internet than abstainers.” These subjects also “reported better knowledge of risks associated with substance use and a marginally better ability to understand health information than abstainers,” the authors found.
In particular, subjects who reported consuming cannabis weekly were four times more likely to search for health-related information as compared those who abstained, the study found.
Researchers concluded, “Substance users appear to be more informed and knowledgeable about the risks of substance use than non-users.”
Read the abstract of the study, “Health literacy and substance use in young Swiss men,” here.
Article republished from NORMLThe Burnside Fountain is a non-functioning drinking fountain at the southeast corner of Worcester Common in Worcester, Massachusetts. It consists of two parts, a pink granite basin, and a bronze statue of a young boy riding a sea turtle. The basin was designed by architect Henry Bacon, who later designed the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., and the figure was created by sculptor Charles Y. Harvey. Harvey committed suicide before finishing the sculpture, and Sherry Fry completed the bronze. The Burnside Fountain was commissioned in 1905 by the city of Worcester after Harriet F. Burnside bequeathed US $5,000 to create a fountain to provide fresh water for people, horses and dogs, in the memory of her father, a prominent lawyer. The fountain was installed in 1912 in Central Square, then moved in 1969 to its current location on Worcester Common. In 1970 the statue was stolen, and was re-installed two years later. An attempted theft occurred in 2004.
The bronze is officially named Boy with a Turtle but is known to locals as Turtle Boy. Turtle Boy has become an unofficial mascot for Worcester, much in the same way the Manneken Pis is for Brussels. The Burnside Fountain's popularity is derived mostly from viewers' incorrect interpretation of the statue. Over its 100-year existence, it has been referenced in stories and songs, as well as having a music contest and a microbrew named after it.
Description [ edit ]
The Burnside Fountain is 12 feet (3.7 m) wide, 5 feet (1.5 m) tall, and consists of two parts, the basin and the sculpture.[1] The pink granite basin is rectangular and has four large bowls, two on either end, carved into its top. These bowls were originally designed as water troughs for horses, and a smaller, lower, bowl located on the rear of the fountain was designed for dogs.[1]
The bronze sculpture sits on a circular base in the middle of the basin.[1] The sculpture is officially known as Boy with a Turtle,[1] as its figure is of a young boy, in the nude, riding a sea turtle.[1] In 1986 the Worcester municipal parks and recreation department described the statue with the sentence, "The boy holding the turtle, his hair flying, a sly smile on his face, is charming and disarming."[2]
Background [ edit ]
Samuel Burnside was a prominent lawyer in Worcester who studied law at Dartmouth College in the early 1800s.[3] Burnside had three daughters, Sophia, Harriet, and Elizabeth, who went on to be called by Frederick Clifton Pierce "the most notable figures in the life of Worcester."[3] The notability of the three daughters was due in part to the prestige and wealth Samuel Burnside had accrued as Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas.[3] Both before and after Samuel Burnside's death on July 25, 1850, his three daughters were known for charitable works, having donated public gardens and a library to the city of Worcester. One daughter's most well-known donation to the city came in the form of a bequest in her will. In 1904, Harriet Burnside died and left $5,000 in her will to the city of Worcester to build a fountain as a memorial to her father.[4]
History [ edit ]
When Burnside bequeathed the money for the fountain, she asked that it be designed for use as a drinking trough for horses and also for dogs. The commission was originally intended for Daniel Chester French, but, according to a paper by Zelotes W. Coombs, French turned down the commission due to "pressure of other engagements, however... he did supervise the work."[4] French assigned the design of the basin to Henry Bacon, who would later work with French on the Lincoln Memorial. The sculpture was assigned to Charles Y. Harvey, a graduate of the American Academy in Rome,[3] who had worked with Augustus Saint-Gaudens on the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial in Boston.[5]
Charles Y. Harvey began work on Boy with Turtle at his studio in New York City, believing that this work was going to be his masterpiece.[5] Almost immediately he began second guessing his design and feeling that it was inadequate. This negativity was a trait that he had shown many times in the past.[6] Roughly a week after beginning the sculpture, Harvey began hearing voices commanding him to kill himself. A paper about restoring the sculpture written at Worcester Polytechnic Institute claims the voices he was hearing were coming from the partially carved sculpture itself.[3] These voices set the date of Saturday January 27, 1912 for Harvey to kill himself. On that date he laid down his tools, headed to Bronx Park with two razors, and slit his own throat along the west bank of the Bronx River.[6]
Boy with a Turtle showing its bright green showing its bright green patina, surface corrosion, and rust staining.
After Harvey's death, Sherry Fry, a fellow American Academy graduate, was invited to finish the work according to the original designs Harvey had laid out.[3] Fry completed the sculpture, and it was delivered along with the basin to Worcester in 1912. There had been much discussion about where to install the fountain. Central Square, just off the Worcester Common was chosen with only slight opposition from "market gardeners who had been using the east end of the Common for their summer outdoor market."[7] When it was installed in Central Square, There was no dedication ceremony or unveiling for the fountain. A news article on October 11, 1912 stated that Worcester Mayor Philip O’Connell, "believes it will be well to have the fountain placed in use without ceremony.”[7] This lack of a ceremony is presumably due to Harvey's suicide and the desire to not celebrate such an act.[7]
By 1912, the use of horse and buggy had fallen out of fashion, and the Burnside Fountain saw little use in its intended purpose.[2] By 1939 citizens of Worcester were already calling for the fountain to be moved to a more suitable place where it could be of more use.[3] It took until 1969 for the Burnside Fountain to be moved from Central Square. It was relocated to the Worcester Common and turned to face Salem Square.[8] One year later, in May 1970, the statue was ripped from its pedestal and stolen. It was returned later that same year, but it took until 1972 for the boy and turtle to be placed back on top of the basin.[8] Another apparent theft attempt happened in 2004 when the bronze sculpture was toppled off its pedestal and left dangling off the basin. The city was quick to fix the statue this time, with it being righted and reattached within days.[3]
In 2010, the Burnside Fountain was named one of WAAF's "Hill-Man's 25 Greatest Places in Massachusetts."[9] That same year, it was also nominated for "Worst Public Art in New England" by a regional Art blog.[10] Around this same time a small group of volunteers began the "Turtle Boy Urban Gardeners," a group dedicated to keeping the plantings around the Burnside Fountain presentable.[11]
For the last few decades the Burnside Fountain has been in disrepair. A 1986 inventory of public memorials in Worcester, compiled by the municipal parks and recreation department, listed the fountains problems as "chipped stone, water system, bronze surface corrosion, rust staining, litter,"[12] and the Smithsonian Art Inventories Catalog surveyed the fountain in September 1994 and listed its condition as "treatment urgent."[1] With the one-hundredth anniversary of the Burnside Fountain coming in 2012, there has been renewed interest in restoring the fountain. Restoration estimates run between USD $40,000 to $60,000, which is more than the city is willing to spend.[8] Probably because of this, there are no official plans to restore the fountain, as of June 2012.
Turtle Boy wearing a winter scarf wearing a winter scarf
The statue that sits atop the Burnside Fountain is now commonly referred to as Turtle Boy.[8] In the tradition of the Manneken Pis in Brussels, Turtle Boy has become an unofficial mascot for Worcester.[8] Much of the local popularity of the statue is due to bawdy insinuations about how the boy and the turtle are portrayed.[2] Anonymous members of the Worcester community sometimes dress the statue in festive clothes for holidays,[8] local bands write crowd-pleasing songs about it,[13] and the statue has even graced postcards of the city.[14]
The popularity of Turtle Boy began around the time it was installed in Central Square. In 1916 the Burnside Fountain's boy and turtle appeared in The Cloud Bird, a children's book by Margaret C. Getchell in which each chapter was about a Worcester landmark.[2] In the eighth chapter, "The Adventurer in Armor," a small girl finds a young, Peter Pan-like faun who had agreed to hold back the turtle. They later go on an adventure upon the turtle's back, but return at the end of the day.[2] By the late 2000s "Turtle Boy" was a common term used to align events and objects with Worcester. A local music contest was named the "Turtle Boy Music Awards,"[15] and the Wormtown Brewing Company in Worcester began selling a "Turtle Boy Blueberry Ale."[16]
Kristina Wilson, associate professor in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at Worcester's Clark University, asked people on campus what they thought of Turtle Boy. One person replied "Oh, that's Worcester's monument to bestiality."[8] Wilson said the sculpture is intended to portray "innocence, joy, and rebirth," and that historically Charles Y. Harvey came from an artistic tradition in which "the human figure is the apex of beauty, and how well you can capture that is the demonstration of your artistic talents." Regarding the artistic merit of the work, Wilson said: "It's unfortunate, because it really does look like something untoward is going on."[8]
Mostly because of the ambiguity in what the Burnside Fountain is depicting, Turtle Boy pops up occasionally in social media. The sculpture also appeared on comedian Daniel Tosh's Tosh.0 blog.[17]
See also [ edit ]This is what the people say
"Wore Faraday's for a sparring match, and it was like they weren't even there." -Alex, Mixed Martial Arts Coach (San Jose, CA)
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Love, Faraday's FamHe's one of the world’s best-known opera stars and has refused to let his blindness hold him back.
Now these pictures prove that Andrea Bocelli is determined his lack of sight would not even prevent him going on a bicycle ride.
The 52-year-old tenor was guided by his fiancee Veronica Berti, 28, who placed a reassuring hand on his shoulder as they rode around the idyllic coastal town of Forte dei Marmi in Tuscany, Italy.
Brave: Andrea Bocelli has refused to let his blindness hold him back
Despite his disability, Bocelli clearly did not feel the need for a helmet on the relaxed shopping trip last week. He cycled beside his partner for 20 minutes before stopping off at a Gucci shop to meet up with his 13-year-old son Matteo.
The Tuscan-born star was diagnosed at birth with the eye disease congenital glaucoma. Then, at the age of 12 he lost his sight completely when he was accidentally hit on the head during a football match and suffered a brain haemorrhage.
But he battled his blindness to become the biggest-selling solo artist in the history of classical music.
In tandem: Veronica gently guides Bocelli as they cycle through the streets of Forte dei Marmi
‘I was a daredevil. I loved danger and doing crazy things,’ he once said. ‘Even when I lost my sight I was exactly the same. I loved riding bikes and horses.
Maestro: Andrea Bocelli performing at the Royal Albert Hall
‘I was eight when I started having lessons, and when my father bought me my own horse I couldn’t wait to go off on my own.’
His life changed forever in 1992 when his unique voice was noticed by Luciano Pavarotti, who took the young Bocelli under his wing. Bocelli began recording on his own and eventually went on to sell 70 million albums worldwide.
But he is not the first famous blind man to bravely embark on a bicycle ride. Former Home Secretary David Blunkett revealed in his autobiography that he enjoyed cycling around Sheffield as a youngster.
He said: ‘For me, riding a two-wheeler bike was very risky. Counting the pedal strokes before turning a corner and learning to hear the sounds coming from buildings, grass and the climbing frame made all the difference to basic survival and ensured that I didn’t end up head-first in the sandpit.’
A Royal National Institute for Blind People spokesman said: ‘People are often quite
surprised by the sport and leisure activities practised by the blind. For example, tandem cycling is very popular.The Benxi Steel Group in Liaoning Province, China Andreas Habich
China has become a world leader in the fight against global warming, but its severe winter air pollution has worsened—likely as a result of changing atmospheric circulation caused by climate change, according to a new study published in the journal Science Advances. While emissions are decreasing in China, the winter haze is not improving “because of a very rapid change in the high polar regions where sea ice is decreasing and snowfall is increasing,” said study author Yuhang Wang, a professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “This perturbation keeps cold air from getting into the eastern parts of China, where it would flush out the air pollution.” The scientists studied these effects in the East China Plains — where Beijing is located — during the winter of 2013, when instruments measured high levels of particulate pollution. These are tiny particles in the air that reduce visibility and can travel into the lungs. Exposure can produce short-term health effects such as eye, nose, throat and lung irritation, coughing, sneezing, runny nose and shortness of breath, and also can exacerbate more serious conditions, such as asthma and heart disease. In a separate study, also released this week, scientists studying air pollution in China estimated that tighter air quality controls could prevent 3 million deaths each year.
Beijing in August of 2005. The photo on left was taken after two days of rain. The photo on the right depicts a typical smoggy day. Bobak
Long-term air quality measurements aren’t available in China, so the researchers had to piece together estimates based on visibility measures and satellite data. To analyze the historical records, they created a new Pollution Potential Index that used air temperature anomalies and wind speeds as a proxy for ventilation conditions over eastern China. Wang said this paper is the first to connect sea ice and snowfall to localized air pollution. “As emissions were reduced, the ventilation condition worsened,” he noted. “It shows that improving air quality is a complex process and sometimes unforeseen factors require a doubling up of the efforts.” Sarah B. Kapnick, a research scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s geophysical fluid dynamics laboratory who was not involved in the study, called the research “novel for identifying how a large-scale event, low sea ice, coupled with a regional event — snow in Siberia — contribute to altering regional circulation — the East Asian Winter Monsoon — to create conditions ripe for extreme pollution.” But Kevin E. Trenberth, a scientist with the climate analysis section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (who also was not involved in the study), cautioned against concluding that climate change was responsible for the anomalous conditions. “Yes, atmospheric circulation matters a lot, and it varies from year to year, and can indeed worsen pollution, or improve it,” he said, adding that a specific link to climate change “seems highly speculative.” “We know that a lot of variations occur for natural reasons,” said Trenberth. “The effects of Arctic sea ice may be present in late summer, but not so much in winter, largely because in winter the Arctic Ocean is covered with ice.”
Haze over eastern China NASABack in March, the second generation of Oculus’ work-in-progress virtual reality headset went up for pre-order for $350. No one knew exactly when the new headset would actually ship, outside of a target window of “sometime in July”.
Word on the Oculus fan forums was that the company would announce more details today, and sure enough: the company has just announced that the first DK2 (Developer Kit #2) headsets should start arriving by the week of July 14th.
The bad news: even with that sweet, sweet Facebook cash behind them, they can’t keep up with pre-orders — so if you didn’t get your order in early, you might be waiting a while. Oculus has received just over 45,000+ pre-orders for the DK2, but just 10,000 headsets are expected to ship this month.
Company founder Palmer Luckey previously mentioned that roughly 12.5 thousand pre-orders came in the first 36 hours alone; in other words, even some people who got their orders in by the second day won’t be getting their headsets for a few weeks.
For reference: by the time Oculus “ran out of materials” to build their first generation Rifts, they’d sold around 50,000 units. With 45,000 units pre-ordered, the second-gen dev kit is already set to surpass the original.This article is about the country. For the archipelago, see Comoro Islands
Coordinates:
The Comoros ( (); Arabic: جزر القمر, Juzur al-Qumur / Qamar), officially the Union of the Comoros (Comorian: Udzima wa Komori, French: Union des Comores, Arabic: الاتحاد القمري al-Ittiḥād al-Qumurī / Qamarī), is an island country in the Indian Ocean located at the northern end of the Mozambique Channel off the eastern coast of Africa between northeastern Mozambique, the French region of Mayotte, and northwestern Madagascar. The capital and largest city in Comoros is Moroni. The religion of the majority of the population is Sunni Islam.
At 1,660 km2 (640 sq mi), excluding the contested island of Mayotte, the Comoros is the fourth-smallest African nation by area. The population, excluding Mayotte, is estimated at 795,601.[4] As a nation formed at a crossroads of different civilisations, the archipelago is noted for its diverse culture and history. The archipelago was first inhabited by Bantu speakers who came from East Africa, supplemented by Arab and Austronesian immigration.
The sovereign state is an archipelago consisting of three major islands and numerous smaller islands, all in the volcanic Comoro Islands. The major islands are commonly known by their French names: northwestern-most Grande Comore (Ngazidja), Mohéli (Mwali), and Anjouan (Nzwani). In addition, the country has a claim on a fourth major island, southeastern-most Mayotte (Maore), though Mayotte voted against independence from France in 1974, has never been administered by an independent Comoros government, and continues to be administered by France (currently as an overseas department). France has vetoed United Nations Security Council resolutions that would affirm Comorian sovereignty over the island.[5][6][7][8] In addition, Mayotte became an overseas department and a region of France in 2011 following a referendum passed overwhelmingly.
It became part of the French colonial empire in the end of 19th century before becoming independent in 1975. Since declaring independence, the country has experienced more than 20 coups d'état or attempted coups, with various heads of state assassinated.[9][10] Along with this constant political instability, the population of the Comoros lives with the worst income inequality of any nation, with a Gini coefficient over 60%, while also ranking in the worst quartile on the Human Development Index. As of 2008 about half the population lived below the international poverty line of US$1.25 a day.[11] The French insular region of Mayotte, which is the more prosperous territory in the Mozambique Channel, is the major destination for Comorian illegal migrants who flee their country. The Comoros is a member state of the African Union, Francophonie, Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, Arab League (of which it is the southernmost state, being the only member state of the Arab League with a tropical climate and also entirely within the Southern Hemisphere) and the Indian Ocean Commission. Other countries near the Comoros are Tanzania to the northwest and the Seychelles to the northeast. Its capital is Moroni, on Grande Comore. The Union of the Comoros has three official languages—Comorian, Arabic, and French.
Etymology [ edit ]
The name "Comoros" derives from the Arabic word قمر qamar ("moon").[12]
History [ edit ]
Precolonial peoples [ edit ]
A large dhow with lateen sail rigs
The first human inhabitants of the Comoro Islands are thought to have been Austronesian settlers travelling by boat from islands in Southeast Asia. These people arrived no later than the sixth century AD, the date of the earliest known archaeological site, found on Nzwani, although settlement beginning as early as the first century has been postulated.[13]
The islands of the Comoros were populated by a succession of peoples from the coast of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf, the Malay Archipelago, and Madagascar. Bantu-speaking settlers reached the islands as a part of the greater Bantu expansion that took place in Africa throughout the first millennium.
According to pre-Islamic mythology, a jinni (spirit) dropped a jewel, which formed a great circular inferno. This became the Karthala volcano, which created the island of Grande Comoro.
Development of the Comoros is divided into phases. The earliest reliably recorded phase is the Dembeni phase (ninth to tenth centuries), during which each island maintained a single, central village.[14] From the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, trade with the island of Madagascar and merchants from the Middle East flourished, smaller villages emerged, and existing towns expanded. Many Comorians can trace their genealogies to ancestors from Yemen, mainly Hadhramaut, and Oman.
Medieval Comoros [ edit ]
According to legend, in 632, upon hearing of Islam, islanders are said to have dispatched an emissary, Mtswa-Mwindza, to Mecca—but by the time he arrived there, the Prophet Muhammad had died. Nonetheless, after a stay in Mecca, he returned to Ngazidja and led the gradual conversion of his islanders to Islam.[15]
Among the earliest accounts of East Africa, the works of Al-Masudi describe early Islamic trade routes, and how the coast and islands were frequently visited by Muslims including Persian and Arab merchants and sailors in search of coral, ambergris, ivory, tortoiseshell, gold and slaves. They also brought Islam to the people of the Zanj including the Comoros. As the importance of the Comoros grew along the East African coast, both small and large mosques were constructed. Despite its distance from the coast, the Comoros is situated along the Swahili Coast in East Africa. It was a major hub of trade and an important location in a network of trading towns that included Kilwa, in present-day Tanzania, Sofala (an outlet for Zimbabwean gold), in Mozambique, and Mombasa in Kenya.[14]
After the arrival of the Portuguese in the early 15th century and subsequent collapse of the East African sultanates, the powerful Omani Sultan Saif bin Sultan began to defeat the Dutch and the Portuguese. His successor Said bin Sultan increased Omani Arab influence in the region, moving his administration to nearby Zanzibar, which came under Omani rule. Nevertheless, the Comoros remained independent, and although the three smaller islands were usually politically unified, the largest island, Ngazidja, was divided into a number of autonomous kingdoms (ntsi).[16]
By the time Europeans showed interest in the Comoros, the islanders were well placed to take advantage of their needs, initially supplying ships of the route to India and, later, slaves to the plantation islands in the Mascarenes.[16]
French map of the Comores, 1747
Portuguese explorers first visited the archipelago in 1503. The islands provided provisions to the Portuguese fort at Mozambique throughout the 16th century.
An 1808 map refers to the islands as "Camora".
Assembly Square, Moroni, 1908
In 1793, Malagasy warriors from Madagascar first started raiding the islands for slaves. On the Comoros, it was estimated in 1865 that as much as 40% of the population consisted of slaves.[17] France first established colonial rule in the Comoros in 1841. The first French colonists landed in Mayotte, and Andriantsoly (also known as Andrian Tsouli, the Sakalava Dia-Ntsoli, the Sakalava of Boina, and the Malagasy King of Mayotte) signed the Treaty of April 1841,[18] which ceded the island to the French authorities.[19]
The Comoros served as a way station for merchants sailing to the Far East and India until the opening of the Suez Canal significantly reduced traffic passing through the Mozambique Channel. The native commodities exported by the Comoros were coconuts, cattle and tortoiseshell. French settlers, French-owned companies, and wealthy Arab merchants established a plantation-based economy that used about one-third of the land for export crops. After its annexation, France converted Mayotte into a sugar plantation colony. The other islands were soon transformed as well, and the major crops of ylang-ylang, vanilla, coffee, cocoa beans, and sisal were introduced.[20]
In 1886, Mohéli was placed under French protection by its Sultan Mardjani Abdou Cheikh. That same year, despite having no authority to do so, Sultan Said Ali of Bambao, one of the sultanates on Ngazidja, placed the island under French protection in exchange for French support of his claim to the entire island, which he retained until his abdication in 1910. In 1908 the islands were unified under a single administration (Colonie de Mayotte et dépendances) and placed under the authority of the French colonial governor general of Madagascar. In 1909, Sultan Said Muhamed of Anjouan abdicated in favour of French rule. In 1912 the colony and the protectorates were abolished and the islands became a province of the colony of Madagascar.[21]
Agreement was reached with France in 1973 for the Comoros to become independent in 1978. The deputies of Mayotte abstained. Referendums were held on all four of the islands. Three voted for independence by large margins, while Mayotte voted against, and remains under French administration. On 6 July 1975, however, the Comorian parliament passed a unilateral resolution declaring independence. Ahmed Abdallah proclaimed the independence of the Comorian State (État comorien; دولة القمر) and became its first president.
Independence (1975) [ edit ]
The next 30 years were a period of political turmoil. On 3 August 1975, less than one month after independence, president Ahmed Abdallah was removed from office in an armed coup and replaced with United National Front of the Comoros (FNUK) member Prince Said Mohamed Jaffar. Months later, in January 1976, Jaffar was ousted in favour of his Minister of Defense Ali Soilih.[22]
At this time, the population of Mayotte voted against independence from France in two referenda. The first, held on 22 December 1974, won 63.8% support for maintaining ties with France, while the second, held in February 1976, confirmed that vote with an overwhelming 99.4%. The three remaining islands, ruled by President Soilih, instituted a number of socialist and isolationist policies that soon strained relations with France. On 13 May 1978, Bob Denard returned to overthrow President Soilih and reinstate Abdallah with the support of the French, Rhodesian and South African governments. During Soilih's brief rule, he faced seven additional coup attempts until he was finally forced from office and killed.[22][23]
In contrast to Soilih, Abdallah's presidency was marked by authoritarian rule and increased adherence to traditional Islam[24] and the country was renamed the Federal Islamic Republic of the Comoros (République Fédérale Islamique des Comores; جمهورية القمر الإتحادية الإسلامية). Abdallah continued as president until 1989 when, fearing a probable coup d'état, he signed a decree ordering the Presidential Guard, led by Bob Denard, to disarm the armed forces. Shortly after the signing of the decree, Abdallah was allegedly shot dead in his office by a disgruntled military officer, though later sources claim an antitank missile was launched into his bedroom and killed him.[25] Although Denard was also injured, it is suspected that Abdallah's killer was a soldier under his command.[26]
A few days later, Bob Denard was evacuated to South Africa by French paratroopers. Said Mohamed Djohar, Soilih's older half-brother, then became president, and served until September 1995, when Bob Denard returned and attempted another coup. This time France intervened with paratroopers and forced Denard to surrender.[27][28] The French removed Djohar to Reunion, and the Paris-backed Mohamed Taki Abdoulkarim became president by election. He led the country from 1996, during a time of labour crises, government suppression, and secessionist conflicts, until his death November 1998. He was succeeded by Interim President Tadjidine Ben Said Massounde.[29]
The islands of Anjouan |
to raise high enough to really help with Legendary finding (+300%) without grinding to high levels, and then gave high level characters maximum MF without them making any effort or equipment sacrifice to obtain it, making the rich richer. The coming RoS change swings back in the other direction by nerfing the bonus of MF for Legendaries (which is all anyone really wants MF for) almost to nothing. MF is further reduced in importance by the general drop rate buffs of Loot 2.0, and it seems likely to be the least-important bonus in the Adventure Tab.
The ideal purpose of Magic Find seems quite simple to me, and I remain puzzled why it’s never yet been properly utilized in Diablo 3. As I see it, Magic Find is a bonus on items that players can choose if they want to improve their chances of finding great gear, at the cost of other affixes that would boost their killing speed and/or survival. It’s a way to customize your play experience and style, and is optional. It should provide better odds of finding better gear; not so good that you’re guaranteed, or that high MF feels mandatory to make a profit (that’s how D3V works today, for most players), but if you pursue it you should be rewarded for your efforts.
So the whole issue is balancing the reward. Adding MF gear should be something of a sacrifice of DPS/Toughness, and the challenge is to balance the gains players get from MF with the cost of enabling it. And the coolest thing is the possibility of items like Wealth or Chance Guards or Goldwrap, where players can choose to use gear that’s intentionally much worse (for killing and survival) in order to raise their MF. That’s fun, that’s a trade off, and that’s exactly how the item game is supposed to work in Diablo. It’s boring if everyone just tries to get the best DPS/Toughness, and it’s boring if everyone finds the same quality of items, whether because MF does nothing, or because it does everything.
Boring was Magic Find phase one in D3V, Everything was phase two, and Nothing is coming in phase three. Will we ever see a phase four and Something? Not crossing my fingers…Cork and Mayo will battle in the opening game of TG4's live coverage.
Cork and Mayo will battle in the opening game of TG4's live coverage.
TG4 HAVE ANNOUNCED details of their spring GAA coverage which will see them broadcast 49 games over the next four months.
The TV station’s coverage commences with the meeting of Cork and Mayo in the Allianz football league on Sunday week, 31 January. Live coverage of that game is followed by deferred showing of the meeting of Roscommon and Monaghan.
TG4′s coverage continues for the duration of the Allianz football and hurling leagues while they will also televise the All-Ireland senior club semi-finals and finals in football and hurling.
The third-level finals in the Fitzgibbon, O’Connor and Sigerson Cups will also be televised along with the Lidl ladies football league finals.
JANUARY
Sunday 31 January
Allianz Football League, Round 1
LIVE – Cork v Mayo, Páirc Uí Rinn
DEFERRED Roscommon v Monaghan, Hyde Park
FEBRUARY
Saturday 6 February
AIB All-Ireland SHC club semi-finals
LIVE - Sarsfields (Galway) v Ruairí Óg (Antrim), Páirc Tailteann at 2pm
LIVE - Oulart-The Ballagh (Wexford) v Na Piarsaigh (Limerick), Semple Stadium at 3:45pm
Sunday 7 February
Allianz Football League, Round 2
LIVE - Kerry v Roscommon, Fitzgerald Stadium
DEFERRED – Donegal v Cork, Ballyshannon
Saturday 13 February
AIB All-Ireland SFC club semi-finals
LIVE - Ballyboden St Endas (Dublin) v Clonmel Commercials (Tipperary), O’Moore Park at 4:30pm
LIVE - Castlebar Mitchels (Mayo) v Crossmaglen Rangers (Armagh), Kingspan Breffni Park at 6:15pm
Castlebar Mitchels players toasted Connacht glory last November against Galway's Corofin. Source: James Crombie/INPHO
Sunday 14 February
Allianz Hurling League, Round 1
LIVE – Waterford v Kilkenny, Walsh Park
DEFERRED – Galway v Cork, Pearse Stadium
Saturday 20 February
LIVE – Sigerson Cup Final, Ulster University Jordanstown at 2:30pm
Sunday 21 February
Allianz Hurling League, Round 2
LIVE – Kilkenny v Tipperary, Nowlan Park
DEFERRED – Wexford v Clare, Innovate Wexford Park
Saturday 27 February
LIVE - Fitzgibbon Cup Final, Cork IT at 3pm
Sunday 28 February
Allianz Football League, Round 3
LIVE - Donegal v Mayo, Páirc Mhic Cumhaill, Ballybofey
DEFERRED – Down v Kerry, Páirc Esler, Newry
A long trip north for Kieran Donaghy and his Kerry teammates to take on Down. Source: Matt Mackey/Presseye.com
Sunday 6 March
Allianz Football League, Round 4
Allianz Hurling League, Round 3
Live & deferred coverage TBC
Saturday 12 March
O’Connor Cup Final (Ladies Football 3rd Level Colleges)
Sunday 13 March
Allianz Football League, Round 5
Allianz Hurling League, Round 4
Live & deferred coverage TBC
Thursday 17 March
AIB All Ireland senior club hurling and football finals
Henry Shefflin and Ballyhale Shamrocks won last year, who'll be All-Ireland senior club hurling kingpins in 2016? Source: Donall Farmer/INPHO
Sunday 20 March
Allianz Hurling League, Round 5
Live & deferred coverage
Sunday 27 March (Easter Sunday)
Allianz Football League, Round 6
Live & deferred coverage
Monday 28 March
Masita Post Primary Senior Hurling Finals (Semple Stadium, Thurles)
Saturday 2 April
Masita Post Primary Senior Football Finals (Páirc an Chrócaigh)
Sunday 3 April
Allianz Football League, Round 7
Live & deferred coverage
Sunday 10 April
Allianz Football League Division 1 semi-finals
Live coverage
Saturday 16 April
Eirgrid All-Ireland U21 Football Semi-Finals
(Connacht v Leinster & Munster v Ulster)
Live coverage
Sunday 17 April
Allianz Hurling League Division 1 Semi-Finals
Live coverage
Saturday 23 April
Allianz Football League Division 3 & 4 Finals
Live coverage
Sunday 24 April
Allianz Football League Division 1 & 2 Finals
Live coverage
Saturday 30 April
Lidl Ladies National Football League Division 4 Final
Eirgrid All-Ireland U21 Football Final
Live coverage
Sunday 1 May
Allianz Hurling League Division 1 Final
Live coverage
Saturday 7 May
Lidl Ladies National Football League Finals – Division 1, 2 & 3“Is my 4-year-old gay?” read postings on parenting Web sites that offer strings of advice that can, by turns, be acidly dismissive or thoughtfully engaging.
The dialogue represents a new direction. “Ten years ago, the gender and sexual meaning of young children’s behavior was only discussed by a small handful of developmental psychologists,” said Arlene Istar Lev, a family therapist in Albany. “Children who expressed that were silenced and their parents were ashamed of them: ‘You will not walk out of the house that way.’ ”
Now, Ms. Lev said, “parents want to be supportive and that’s what is new. A generation of parents is developing a philosophy of encouraging their children: ‘Sweetie, let’s talk about this.’ ”
Such support goes beyond embracing preschool fantasy dress-up. Some parents permit sons to wear skirts and daughters to wear camouflage pants, ties and fedoras, much like the oft-photographed Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, 5.
As these children enter elementary school, parents negotiate with administrators about clothing. Janet Ciarrocca, principal of the Learning Community Charter School in Jersey City, whose teachers receive training to support children with gender nonconforming behavior, encourages the individuality of each child. But there are rules. “They all have to wear sneakers to school and participate in gym,” she said. “Little girls can’t wear ballet flats, either. Too slippery.”
Parents may seek like-minded play groups, and even move to communities where they believe their children will be more accepted. Others turn to couples’ counseling, family therapy and parent groups.
It’s impossible to quantify how many families make such choices. But therapists, clinics and organizations such as Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (pflag.org) report that more parents have been asking about the gender behavior and sexuality of their 4-year-olds.
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Their views are seeping into the culture. There are children’s picture books like “My Princess Boy” and “10,000 Dresses,” and books for parents like “Gender Born, Gender Made: Raising Healthy Gender-Nonconforming Children.” A growing blog roll includes sites like “Accepting Dad” and “Raising My Rainbow: Adventures in Raising a Slightly Effeminate, Possibly Gay, Totally Fabulous Son.”
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The author of the latter, the wife of a police officer in Orange County, Calif., started the blog after her son, CJ, now 4, wanted to be Snow White for Halloween. Writing as “CJ’s Mom,” her posts celebrate her diva preschooler, whose recent anticipation of a ride on a tramway crumbled when he realized that “aerial” did not refer to Disney’s Little Mermaid.
“I’m getting amazing responses,” CJ’s Mom said. “From families a lot like ours, who we can share experiences with. From gay men who wish an adult had done for them what I’m doing for CJ. I needed to take steps to change his world to try to protect him, without denying him who he was created to be.”
No one has provoked a national conversation about children and gender norms like the retailer J. Crew. In its April catalog, the “Jenna’s Picks” page showed Jenna Lyons, the company’s creative director, playing with her barefoot son, Beckett, 4 ½. The copy read: “Lucky for me, I ended up with a boy whose favorite color is pink. Toenail painting is way more fun in neon.”
The blowback on talk shows, which Jon Stewart called “Toemageddon 2011,” was to be expected. The applause, however, signaled a game changer. A Facebook group even announced, in solidarity, “Pink Toenail Polish Day.”
Still, parents with children at the epicenter of these conversations say they make wrenching daily decisions, always calculating how to show unconditional love for their children, while being realistic about protecting them.
Little girls can experiment further along the gender spectrum than boys, but they, too, have socially cordoned boundaries. Elle, a Las Vegas mother, has a 4-year-old daughter who likes to be called “Handsome Prince.” When the girl, who has long blond hair, begged for a Mohawk, Elle quavered.
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To pass social muster, Elle presented the haircut as a gesture for charity: to raise money for a children’s hospital, her daughter offered to get a Mohawk. She quickly surpassed her $200 goal.
When the child climbed into the salon chair, she met the hairstylist’s astonished face with an enormous smile. “She couldn’t get him to cut her hair off fast enough,” Elle said.
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But when her daughter showed up at preschool with the new ‘do, running to the boys to play basketball, the boys shrank from her. When she tried to play “Unicorns and Bunnies” with the girls, they shunned her, too.
Elle hopes the Mohawk will grow out into a pixie cut before kindergarten starts. But if her daughter continues to be rejected, Elle will switch schools.
“I don’t want my child to wait till she’s 43 to say, ‘Hi, here is who I really am,’ ” Elle said. That was the age when Elle’s own father came out of the closet. “I don’t want her to hide her true self from Daddy and me.”
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But what true self are these very young children expressing? A handful of studies have looked mostly at boys who did not conform to gender conventions. The studies’ methodologies and results differ, but there is some indication that, in adulthood, many of those boys describe themselves as gay (rarely transgender). Yet, as one researcher noted, most of the studies’ subjects were children whose parents brought them to clinics for evaluation, making them a self-selecting group.
In general, researchers say, the behavior of very young children may not be a strong predictor of their adult sexual orientation. “Even when the child has extremely gender variant behavior at 4, it doesn’t necessarily mean the child will be gender variant at 10 or 15,” said Dr. Edgardo J. Menvielle, who directs the Gender and Sexuality Psychosocial Programs at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. “It’s possible they will remain who they are and they may also change in a variety of ways.”
In other words, parents have to wait, a limbo that many find unbearable. Some rush to aggressive advocacy. Diane Ehrensaft, a therapist in Oakland, Calif., said that a parent might say to her, “ ‘I know my child is transgender and I’m ready to go with hormone blockers.’ ”
Her response? “Whoa, not so fast.”
Challenges for parents increase as children enter elementary school. Tim, an Internet technology manager, allowed his young son, P. J., to grow his hair long and occasionally wear skirts to preschool. When P. J. was ready for first grade, the family decided to move from the Midwest to Jersey City, in part because of its vibrant gay community.
So far, mixed results. P. J.’s hair is still long. He wears pink and purple shirts now, not dresses. When he was 6, he asked: “If Jersey City is so diverse and so understanding, then why does everyone keep calling me a girl?”
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By supporting their children’s wish to dress as gender-benders, parents may inadvertently put them at greater risk for taunting. When Harry, the Los Angeles boy whose father gave him a Barbie, was 2, he attended a dress-up birthday party for his sisters’ friend, in costume. One father called him “Little Liberace;” another compared him to an L.A. drag queen. The second-grade brother of CJ, star of the Raising My Rainbow blog, is teased. “The boys say, ‘Why does your brother like girls’ toys, that’s so gay,’ and run from him,” his mother said.
Parents say their job is not to change their children, but to help them withstand cruel comments. A 2010 study by the Family Acceptance Project at San Francisco State University that focused mainly on adolescents found strong correlations between positive family attitudes toward their lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender children and decreased risks of depression, substance abuse and suicide.
As children grow older, many parents define behavior that is fine in private but not in public, to protect them from bullying. Ellen, of Bergen County, N.J., has a 9-year-old son who craves high heels. She told him they are not school shoes, and too expensive to buy to wear around the house. Her compromise: At Payless, with its buy-one-get-a-second-pair-half-price offer, she bought him shoes for school (sneakers) and home (gold-sparkled ballet flats).
While few couples would describe their child-rearing philosophy as consistently unified, raising a child who plays outside the conventional gender box can strain a relationship.
Ed, a natural resource manager in the Southwest, and his wife disagree about their son, 7, who usually plays with girls. To his wife, this is a phase.
“He has said, ‘Mommy doesn’t like me to play with girl things,’ ” Ed said. “But if he wants and deserves something, I don’t want to deny him on the basis of it being gender-inappropriate.”
Like nail polish. The mother does not want the boy to have it. So Ed made an agonized decision. His wife has to go out of town for work soon. When she does, Ed will buy fake nail polish.
Then, he told his son, “We’ll paint your nails and wash them off before you go to school the next day.”One signature will ripple her reality. Suffering from night terrors, Jessica participates in an extraordinarily compensated clinical trial. Implanted deeply within her skull by the Ventriloquist Dream Institute is an experimental dream chip.
After its first use, waking up she never recollected in no way imagined such lucidly was possible. A reoccurring dream, with a woman living in a box shaped room, colorless walls, ceiling, and base, illuminating them, painting a world that comes to life on a canvas from her painting, it seemed even more detailed and real. Not to come without a price though—involuntarily side effects from the dream chip were about to bleed over into her waking self.
Meanwhile Brad released from prison is taken to a shack to be prepped for surgery. A mysterious women introduced to him as Luna, frees him from his unasked for tampering. Sneaking away from his newly met rescuer, he meets Jessica in her back yard. Quickly forming a trust for each other, he convinces her to free herself from the dream chip she is suffering horrifying side effects from its attachment to her brain.
However, soon to be discovered she finds out that there is no cancellation policy for her clinical trial. As her dream world continues mixing into her, awaken self, exhausted with hallucinations, she searches for a way out.
Running parallel and can be enjoyed as a standalone book to "One Light Burning" Book 2 in the Rippled Reality Trilogy adds more depth and background to the trilogy to be concluded in book 3More Evidence That Tons Of DMCA Takedowns Are Bad News... And That People Are Afraid To Counternotice
from the it's-a-real-problem dept
We put a great deal of resources toward processing takedown notices because we take our responsibilities under the DMCA seriously. We aim to respond to all inbound takedown notices within 48 hours, exceeding the law’s requirements. But a significant portion of the resources we put towards our DMCA program are aimed at combating the shortcomings of the notice and takedown system. For example, we spend significant effort reviewing and trying to weed out overbroad and abusive DMCA takedown notices, so that our users’ speech isn’t needlessly censored. This is a real cost to us, and diverts resources from more productive uses, like improving the products and services we offer our customers.
Our statistics bear this out. As discussed below with respect to Subject No. 30, our statistics show that about 10% of the notices of claimed infringement we receive are otherwise valid but are clearly false or mistaken. But we receive many fewer counter notifications than that—only about one-half of one percent of the total number of notices we receive. We think this ratio shows that the low number of counter notifications is not the result of a correspondingly low number of false and mistaken assertions of infringement, but instead results from the concern that sending a counter notification is likely to result in costly litigation, even if that litigation would ultimately turn out to hold that no infringement had occurred. The company notes that out of a batch of approximately 1,700 "valid" but bogus notices, only 113 counter notices were sent. Most people just don't bother out of fear of getting sued.
A medical transcription training service that used forged customer testimonials on their website submitted a takedown for screenshots of the fake testimonials in a blog post exposing the scam.
A physician demanded removal of newspaper excerpts posted to a blog critical of the physician, by submitting a DMCA notice in which he falsely claimed to be a representative of the newspaper.
A model involved in a contract dispute with a photographer submitted a series of DMCA notices seeking removal of images of the model for which the photographer was the rights holder.
An international corporation submitted DMCA notices seeking removal of images of company documents posted by a whistleblower.
A frequent submitter of DMCA notices submitted a DMCA notice seeking removal of a screenshot of an online discussion criticizing him for submitting overreaching DMCA notices.
Earlier this week, we wrote about a major new study that revealed that a ton of DMCA takedown notices are clearly faulty, and how that shows just how messed up the DMCA's notice-and-takedown provisions are in giving tremendous incentives to send notices withfor filing bogus takedowns. The legacy music industry and its supporters keep claiming that the fact that there are so few counternotices is evidence that there's almost no abuse. In fact, in the legacy music industry filing we wrote about earlier today, they even had the gall to claim that the real abuse is in the counternotices themselves.As more and more comment filings to the Copyright Office about the DMCA process are being released, there's increasing evidence that the legacy entertainment industry's claims are, simply, full of shit. The latest is the excellent comment filed by Automattic (the folks who make Wordpress), whose Wordpress.com offering hosts over 80 million websites. The company notes that even while hosting so much content, the majority of the time the company spends dealing with DMCA notices is... dealing with the bogus ones:As with the study we highlighted earlier this week, Automattic notes that a huge number of notices it receives are invalid. First, it notes that approximately 29% of notices simply aren't valid notices in that they fail to meet the criteria laid out by the DMCA for what constitutes a valid notice. Then, another 10% of notices do meet the criteria to be an official notice, but areAnd that's based on their own review of the notices. So, approximately. But, contrary to what the legacy industry folks and their shills are saying, Automattic notes that very few people file counternotices, out of a fear of being sued, and they're concerned about how this leads to censorship of perfectly legal speech.The company also highlights just how broken Section 512(f) is -- which is the section that is supposed to be used against bogus takedowns. But as we've written about in the past, it's basically a dead letter. There are almost no examples of 512(f) being used successfully against someone for sending a takedown... with the one exception being Automattic! As we wrote about, a few years ago, Automattic actually sued over egregiously bad DMCA notices and even won a case, but... it was by default, because the notice sender just ignored the lawsuit. In the other lawsuit, it could never actually find the plaintiff who sent the bogus censorious takedowns.The company also provides a number ofof bogus DMCA takedown notices to get beyond just the statistical aspect and to prove the problem is real:As the company notes, each of these were clearly bogus, but since 512(f) is basically useless, it would be a complete waste of time to sue over them.It's good to see companies sharing this kind of information, and it tracks closely with what the study from earlier this week said, which was based on a different corpus of data. So, yeah, when the legacy guys claim there's no abuse, they're simply full of shit.
Filed Under: abuse, censorship, copyright, counternotices, dmca, dmca 512, notice and takedown, safe harbors, wordpress
Companies: automatticSpotlight tonight took the big prize at the 88th Academy Awards with a Best Picture victory. Nominated for a total of six Oscars tonight it also was the big winner Saturday at the Independent Spirit Awards. The Open Road-distributed and Tom McCarthy-directed drama about the Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative team’s exposes of rampant sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests and the subsequent cover-ups was chosen as one of the top 10 films of 2015 by AFI. McCarthy lost on Best Director on Sunday to The Revenant’s Alejandro G. Inarritu.
“This film gave a voice to survivors, and this Oscar amplifies that voice which we hope will become a choir that will resonate all the way to the Vatican,” said producer Michael Sugar onstage, surrounded by Spotlight‘s cast and creatives. “Pope Francis, it is time to protect the children and restore the faith.”
Before tonight’s ceremony, McCarthy, actor Mark Ruffalo and co-writer Josh Singer were among protesters outside L.A.’s Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. “Standing with the survivors of priest sexual abuse,” Ruffalo tweeted on Sunday in solidarity with the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests demanding the public release of the names of pedophile members of the clergy.
Spotlight‘s only other Oscar win was for the Original Screeenplay by Josh Singer and Tom McCarthy, making it the first film since 1952’s The Greatest Show On Earth to win the Best Picture category with only one other award.
In total, Spotlight was nominated this year for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Original Screenplay and Best Editing. The other films competing with Spotlight this year for Oscars’ biggest prize were The Big Short, Bridge of Spies, Brooklyn, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Martian, Room and The Revenant.Circumcision: One Woman’s Piercing Commentary
When Enedina Vance posted a photo of her smiling baby with a pierced cheek on Facebook, she expected — and wanted — a reaction. She probably didn’t expect the reaction to be so vehement.
She received death threats. Some commenters claimed to have called government “child protective services” to come take the child away from an “abusive” mother.
When Vance revealed that the photo was fake (no, she hadn’t really had her child’s dimple pierced) and intended as social commentary, the hate level seemingly went up rather than down. Her target topic: Circumcision. If her goal was to fire up debate on the issue, mission accomplished.
Statistics vary by area and timeframe, but the bottom line is that more than half of American male infants are subjected to circumcision, a painful genital mutilation ritual in which part of the penis (the foreskin) is amputated.
In some cases, the ritual is religious. In America the justification usually goes back to the Old Testament covenant between God and Abraham. Religious Jews practice circumcision, and many Christians, because our religion is an offshoot of Judaism, consider it non-controversial (we’re not so tolerant of Muslim equivalents as applied to female infants).
In most cases, the ritual is medicalized — conducted at a hospital, by a doctor, based on one or more sketchy claims of health benefits. That started in the 19th century when masturbation was considered unhealthy and circumcision was thought to minimize it. In recent years, circumcision advocates cite research claiming benefits from reductions in penile cancer (which only affects 1–2 males per 100,000 anyway) to reductions in HIV transmission (that claim remains in dispute) and so forth.
If I started a new religion which required its adherents to cut each infant child’s left little toe off, those adherents would go to prison if they tried to live their faith.
As for the medical excuses, hey, I know how we can eliminate carpal tunnel! All we have to do is amputate each newborn’s arms right below the elbows! I’m kind of guessing that suggestion’s not going to fly with the American Medical Association.
The reason — the ONLY reason — infant male genital mutilation is tolerated (even justified and promoted!) in America is that it’s a millennia-old custom, “grandfathered in” to our culture. If we set aside the age of the habit, it stands revealed as nothing more than a brutal assault on a helpless victim.
Let’s cut circumcision out.
Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.
PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY(CNN) Carrots have long been credited with helping you see in the dark -- now one rider believes they can help win Olympic gold.
Italian Luca Moneta i s one of the world's leading show jumpers but has been labeled by his peers "The Carrot Man" for his novel approach to training horses.
Last year he won the "Puissance" event at the prestigious Olympia Horse Show feeding his horse Quova de Vains a carrot after every successful jump.
And this year, he will return to the London event, which gets under way on December 16, in a bid to defend his title with the same methods he's honed in recent years.
Of his alternative approach, Moneta admits the reaction was mixed: "When you want to change something and you're too far from what they're doing you make people scared.
"And they were like 'this is silly, stupid, crazy. He doesn't know what he's doing. It doesn't work'. People were complaining. I think 99% of people were 'oh, oh, this is not good.'"
So what exactly is the 46-year-old's approach to the animals he rides?
It is based on Parelli Natural Horsemanship, a program designed by American horseman Pat Parelli that used natural equine behaviors to communicate with and, hence, train horses. This, in itself, is based on ethology, the scientific and objective study of animal behavior.
For Moneta, the first sighting of this more novel approach to riding and training horses came from watching an unnamed British rider on a clip jumping a barrel without a bridle.
The Italian himself has likened his own program to teaching humans a new language. And rather than treating the horse as a beast, he treats them as equals and gets them to take the lead.
"If you make me cook spaghetti for you with a gun," he says by way of an analogy, "you put a gun here and say 'if you don't cook spaghetti for me, I will kill you.'
"For sure you will have spaghetti but the quality is different than when I become your best friend and say 'I really want to cook spaghetti for you because this is my favorite dinner and we will enjoy spaghetti with a good bottle of red wine.' This is the difference."
He appreciates his attitude seems little short of insanity on the surface but his on-going results speak for themselves.
Moneta fully accepts he was ridiculed for a time but, as his success continues, he expects others to follow suit.
"When they [the horses] choose to do the right thing, I will use a lot of positive enforce (sic). They were calling me the carrot man, it's not because I have a sponsor that sells carrots but because the horses love it.
"I think it's time [for this approach] because it's like with kids. You remember 40 or 50 years ago they gave you a cane on the hands when you did something wrong.
"When I started with horses, people were just hard with them. 'This is the animal, it must listen, I must be the leader, it must follow what I say, the big man that dominates the horse'. Now it's totally different."
Olympic spirit
He modestly downplays himself as a less capable horseman than many of his peers, instead crediting his results in the saddle to his approach in training.
Despite his humble attitude, is an Olympic gold at Rio 2016 attainable?
"Why not?" he says. "There's always one that wins. It's not so difficult, you just need to beat all the others. I am a dreamer, always in my life, and I never quit dreaming."
On a personal level, this horse whisperer of sorts has recaptured his love for all things equine with his techniques when previously it had been on the wane.
For him, it is simple horse play with or without the results in competition.This is fan made translation. The full right goes to the authour Ichiei Ishibumi. Please support the original authour if possible.
This is Korean To English Translation.
Translator: daniel Yang
Editor/QC: Alexis138
Special Thanks to Code Zero for the help!
On Baka Tsuki
Life.6 Maniac’s Sanctuary.
Part 1
It was a day near the beginning of our winter holiday.
“Hmm, this is coming along nicely♪”
As I was saying this, I moved my hands and was also whistling. I am currently in an unused room that’s located in the upper floor of the Hyoudou residence and I am in the process of…. Building a Pla-model. The current phase is painting and I was washing the parts after using the sandpaper. <TN Plastic model. Ones where you assemble yourselves.>
Lately we Gremory peers have been busy like crazy. Not only do we have to focus on our school as well as our job as a Devil, we also needed to fight terrorists. In addition to this, we can’t skip out training in case of an emergency and so that we can respond when required in short notice. The truth is that things such as these are not something High Schoolers should be doing.
But it can’t be helped. I’m a person with the power of… the current Sekiryuutei. I want to do as much as I am able to with my power as I don’t want my friends to get hurt.
But I do like to have my own personal time where I can relax and focus on something else. Maybe since I have been accompanied by many people lately, I wanted to spend time on my own. So a thing which I do when I get time for myself is… building a pla-model.
This empty room is my own personal space. I keep my tools on the desk and I also have an old compressor as well as an air brush which I got from Azazel-sensei. I can build my pla-model without any unwanted disturbance.
I’m building a robot pla-model. When I was young, I was into [Mobile Suit Gundam] and often built one of them. As I got older, I slowly stopped but even after becoming a High Schooler, there’s been a time when I wanted to build one. W-Well, it could be said that I was only using an empty box to hide my porn DVD…
The notion of being given such an expensive compressor by sensei and not using it bugged me a little. To get something that I wanted when I was young but couldn’t afford it for free… I’m glad we have the peace treaty between the three factions!
After about an hour of starting the painting with an air brush, I heard a knock coming from the door and Asia entered.
“Ise-san, I’m sorry to bother you. Umm, there’s a guest who came to meet Rias-onee-sama so she wants everyone to come and greet her.”
Rias’s guest? Hmm, from her tone, guest seems to be a VIP guest… if that’s the case I should get going. After becoming the Sekiryuutei, I keep hearing [You should make acquaintance with people for now.] or [There’s no harm meeting them] from others.
“Okay”
Leaving my Pla-model aside for now, I headed towards the VIP guest room with Asia.
The person who unexpectedly visited Hyoudou residence was… a female Devil who seems to be around our age.
She wore a pair of glasses which covered her beautiful eyes, gives off a sense of coldness rather than calmness and had a blond hair with a slight hint of light green. She has a stricter aura though compared to Sona-kaichou when I first met her.
She wore clothes that are fitting for nobles. The flashy design and accessories with an Agares seal on them gave off a posh vibe. Although she’s a woman, she wasn’t wearing a dress but instead, she was wearing a mini skirt and high boots. She was wearing very well for a person who looks like she’s about our age but was matched with posh clothing.
“It’s nice to meet you all. I’m sorry I came here so unexpectedly.”
The person who greeted us with a smile in a cool voice was the next heiress of Archduke… Seekvaira Agares-san! Behind her was a black haired guy in the butler uniform… that person is Agares peerage’s male [Queen].
But for Seekvaira-san to visit the Hyoudou residence is unexpected! Well she is a member of the anti-terrorist organisation [DxD] and like Rias, Sona-kaichou and Sairaorg-san, she is one of the [Rookies Four] so she is one of our acquaintances. But this is the first time she visited here for personal matter.
Rias, who seems to have been told of today’s visit, told everyone.
“Seekvaira came here because she’s got something she needs to discuss with Azazel, more specifically, with Grigori.”
She’s got something to discuss with Azazel-sensei? Well that guy is normally around this village so if you want to meet him, the fastest way is to come here.
Seekvaira-san sipped her tea that Akeno-san made and spoke.
“I stopped by here since I’m an hour earlier than the time I was supposed to meet with the former governor.”
So she just stopped by. Hmm, her movement while drinking tea is elegant and graceful! It’s like I’m seeing what a noblewoman should act like! She has a scary aura but she’s also really beautiful! Her figure… also looks amazing!
“(……Ise-sama, it’s rude to just stare.)”
Ravel gave me a warning in small |
Office in Manila, 2.3 percent of the entire Philippine population of 93 million is an INC affiliate. Its present head is Executive Minister Eduardo V. Manalo, the eldest son of Felix.
INC rejects the Christian doctrine of trinity and believes Christ is one of several prophets. It is focused on the end times, and believes Manalo is a prophet and considers the Catholic Church apostate. In the Philippines INC is a robust and influential religious sect whose head is often the object of courtship and obeisance of politicians during election time because he reins on his flock whose block votes he could sway almost blindly and fanatically to the candidates who carry his favor. This is due to its doctrine of unity which puts the penalty of expulsion on anyone
The Iglesia ni Cristo has expanded to more than 6000 congregations in the Philippines, called locales, and more than 600 in 96 countries and territories in six continents. It has established congregations in many states notably, California, Washington, Texas, New York, New Jersey, and Hawaii, where there are vast colonies of Filipinos.
At its peak, Scenic, South Dakota was pure Old West. It had two restaurants, three gas stations, a dance hall, a hotel, a school, a bank and a post office. It’s now a deserted, lifeless township. The hotel is long empty. The environs are lined with aged cattle skulls strewn under overgrown brush. The roadside jail cells are rusty and worn out and the wooden structures are decrepit after decades of neglect.
But its future is shrouded in new mystery. Wait for what the Iglesia ni Cristo in Manila, the new owner, will do with the property. And the few residents there, numbering nine in all, are excited about the possibilities the town pulsates with life again when the INC starts building its landmark super structures with spires pointing to the sky and its cavernous hall reverberating with shouts of worship.
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MOST READTop of the league, unbeaten and best goal difference – not much to worry about for Manchester United so far this season.
Their defence can take a fair share of the credit for that – just five goals conceded from seven games is an impressive record, especially considering the injury problems in that department, and the fact that ever-reliable stand-ins John O’Shea and Wes Brown have left the club for Sunderland.
A peculiarity in United’s season so far, however, is that they have conceded the joint-most shots of any club in the league, 97.
Raw data
This may seem a statistical irrelevance, but the more you consider the type of clubs who concede a lot of shots, the more it seems bizarre. The other side to have conceded 97 shots is Bolton Wanderers, currently bottom of the league having lost their last six games. The three sides who conceded the most shots last season – Blackpool, West Ham and Birmingham – were the same three clubs that were relegated.
For a midtable club to be conceding the most shots would be interesting, for the best club in the league to be doing so is extremely odd, even given the relatively small sample size of seven games played. United conceded the third-least shots in the Premier League last year. From 3rd-best to 20th-best is quite a drop.
As the above graph shows, United have conceded 13 or more shots in every game. The dotted line indicates the average number of shots per side per game in the Premier League this season, 14.9 – which logically, is also the number of shots conceded per side per game. The game against Stoke is the only game where United haven’t allowed more shots than the average.
Below, we can also see that in three of their seven games, United have conceded more shots than they’ve attempted.
Position of shots
First, it’s worth considering precisely where the shots are coming from. Data from the first graph shows that 51.1% of shots are coming from inside the area, and 48.9% from outside the box. The second figure seems high – the average Premier League side is taking 43.5% of shots from outside the area so far this season.
Looking at the ’shots on target‘ conceded from outside the box is also interesting. United’s keeper has been tested 24 times from inside the area, not dissimilar to the average of 21.3. From outside the area, however, the figure is 18 times, much higher than the average of 11.5. Opponents are particularly keen on testing United from long-range (compared to other sides) – the position of the shots displayed below illustrates a further breakdown.
Why?
To return to the question – why? Or, to rephrase the question with the evidence from above, why are United conceding so many shots from long range? There are a few possible answers.
1. David De Gea’s perceived weakness from long-range shots?
After letting in Edin Dzeko’s long-range strike in the Community Shield, there was a lot of attention paid to De Gea’s ability to deal with long shots – in particular, his footwork was questioned. Meanwhile, Opta put out a stat that suggested he had a poor record from long-range last year in La Liga. Is De Gea weak from distance? In this case, the true answer isn’t really relevant – the key is that opponents think he is, hence why they’ve been peppering him from 20+ yards. He’s yet to concede a goal from outside the box in the Premier League.
2. Defensive injuries?
Rio Ferdinand and Nemanja Vidic have both been injured, whilst Chris Smalling and then Antonio Valencia have been played out of position at right-back. United’s defence has coped well in the circumstances, but there is still a question mark about how much of a solid partnership there is at the back, particularly when one centre-back needs step forward and the other needs to cover, as Fernando Torres’ goal at Old Trafford showed. Ferdinand and Vidic had that art perfected, although United have learnt to cope without the former.
3. No true holding player?
It’s arguable whether Michael Carrick is a holding player or not, but he’s certainly more of one than both Anderson and Tom Cleverley, Ferguson’s favoured midfield partnership so far this season. An interesting feature of United’s 4-4-2 last season was the use of one calm, intelligent passing player who would remain in front of the back four (Carrick or Paul Scholes) and a runner who would break forward (Darren Fletcher or Anderson). Ferguson was reluctant to use two passers or two runners together.
Cleverley is an altogether different player – more attack-minded than any of the players mentioned above, and the use of him and Anderson leaves too much of a gap between midfield and defence, with no-one screening. Carrick, whilst far from the tough tackler some still favour in that position, is very good at tracking and intercepting. United might well be a better side overall without him, but defensively they’re not as solid.
4. Rooney working less?
As Stewart Robson recently mentioned, Rooney’s run of form as a true number ten has coincided with him running less without the ball. He worked extremely hard when fielded wide as United were dominated by Cristiano Ronaldo, and did the same when used as a lone forward. Now, epitomised by his lax tracking of Sergio Busquets in the Champions League final, the start of United’s problems in midfield in that game, he doesn’t work as hard to close down. As a result, the midfielders have to do more work higher up the pitch, and leave gaps in behind.
5. More fluidity = less structure?
The Community Shield performance was a marked difference from United last season. In 2010/11 they were linear, well-defined and organised. Now, they’re much more free-flowing and flexible. As a result, they’re more likely to put together great attacking combinations, but also more likely to be opened up by opponents in midfield. The identity of players as a result of this change has also contributed – with a fluid system you’d favour Ashley Young and Nani over Park Ji-Sung and Antonio Valencia, but the latter two are clearly much more disciplined players.
Conclusion
Five possible answers that all have their merits. De Gea’s reputation as being dodgy from long-range is clearly a contributing factor, but the combination of the final three points, which are all interlinked, is also worth consideration. If Rooney doesn’t close down, then Cleverley and Anderson will surely be exposed by top-level opponents at some stage.
Perhaps the most obvious reason initially, the defensive injuries, seems less of a factor. Evans, Jones and Smalling have all impressed – the issue is higher up the pitch.
Still, United’s defensive record is nothing to worry about so far, and the improvement in attacking potential compensates for the question marks when United don’t have the ball. Still, we can’t rule out the odd game where United’s defence looks vulnerable, and they end up conceding a few goals.
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Related articles on Zonal Marking:Cathilee Whitmore with her son Nathan who was bullied at school. Credit:Chris Hopkins The bullying only stopped when Nathan reported it to police and Ms Whitmore was granted an intervention order against the ringleader. "He would say, 'You're a gay faggot who everyone hates, just go kill yourself and get it over with, everyone would be happy and better off'," Nathan said last year. "In Year 7 it was mostly verbal but when I got to Year 8 he started pushing me around and kicking me until it got to the point where he bashed me with a skateboard. That's when we went to the police and got the restraining order." Nathan left the Somerville school to move to Elisabeth Murdoch College in Langwarrin, where he felt happy and accepted. But he is currently not at school as he struggles with a major depressive disorder.
Nathan Whitmore is suing the Victorian education department. Credit:Chris Hopkins The Supreme Court writ, filed earlier this month, states that on top of the depressive disorder, Nathan had also been suicidal, suffered weight loss and anorexia, had sleep problems and anxiety and was socially withdrawn. He is suing the Department of Education and Training for an undisclosed sum that would cover the thousands of dollars Ms Whitmore spent in counselling and other medical expenses for her son, and for pain and suffering. The writ says a psychiatrist last year found Nathan had suffered a learning impairment through the result of his emotional injuries and chronic post-traumatic stress, and would not reach his educational potential. The emotional injuries would therefore limit his future employment options and earning capacity, the psychiatrist found.
Nathan and his mother claim the Somerville school failed to provide adequate supervision and protect him from the bullying students, failed to discipline the bullies, failed to take heed of the complaints and did not provide the teenager with counselling. Somerville Secondary College principal Christopher Lloyd declined to comment on Tuesday. He has previously acknowledged there was bullying and that Nathan had been physically and verbally "harassed, bullied and intimidated" by a boy who recruited other students to abuse Nathan. A spokesman for the Department of Education and Training said the department could not comment because the case was before the court. Nathan has spent time in hospital after attempts on his own life and still self-harms as a way to deal with the emotional pain. He says he has aspirations to study nursing and counsel other victims of bullying.
Shine lawyers general manager Stuart Le Grand said the impact of the bullying had been devastating for Nathan and his family, and had reduced his enjoyment and quality of life. Mr Le Grand said it was imperative schools provided a safe and supportive environment for their students. "Schools owe their students a duty of care and where this is breached, they may be held liable for the damage and may be compelled to compensate those who've been harmed," he said. For help contact: Loading
Lifeline 131 114 beyondblue 1300 224 636A federal grand jury has subpoenaed several former senior Justice Department attorneys for an investigation into the politicization of the Department's own Civil Rights Division, according to sources close to the investigation.
The extraordinary step by the Justice Department of subpoenaing attorneys once from within its own ranks was taken because several of them refused to voluntarily give interviews to the Department Inspector General, which has been conducting its own probe of the politicization of the Civil Rights Division, the same sources said.
The grand jury has been investigating allegations that a former senior Bush administration appointee in the Civil Rights Division, Bradley Schlozman, gave false or misleading testimony on a variety of topics to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Sources close to the investigation say that the grand jury is also more broadly examining whether Schlozman and other Department officials violated civil service laws by screening Civil Rights attorneys for political affiliation while hiring them.
Investigators for the Inspector General have also asked whether Schlozman, while an interim U.S. attorney in Missouri, brought certain actions and even a voting fraud indictment for political ends, according to witnesses questioned by the investigators. But it is unclear whether the grand jury is going to hear testimony on that issue as well.
One person who has been subpoenaed before the grand jury, sources said, was Hans von Spakovsky, who as a former counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights was a top aide to Schlozman. An attempt to reach Spakovsky for comment for this story was unsuccessful.
Earlier this year, Spakovsky withdrew his name from nomination by President Bush to serve on the Federal Election Commission after repeatedly claiming a faulty memory or citing the attorney-client privilege to fend off questions from senators about allegedly using his position to restrict voting rights for minorities -- and that he hindered an investigation of Republican officeholders in Minnesota accused of discriminating against Native American voters.
Three current and former Justice Department officials were questioned by investigators about allegations that Schlozman--with Spakovsky advising and assisting him-- made decisions whether to hire and fire attorneys in the Civil Rights Divison on the basis of their political affiliation.
Another person subpoenaed by the grand jury, according to several sources, was Jason Torchinsky, who, like Spavosky, was also a Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights.
Torchinsky is not under investigation for any wrongdoing himself, but rather subpoenaed as a witness in the probe, sources said. Previously, however, Torchinsky had refused to voluntarily answer questions from investigators working for the Justice Department's Inspector General about the politicization of the Civil Rights Divison. Reached at his home on Tuesday night, Torchinsky declined to comment for this article.
Sources familiar with the federal grand jury subpoenas say that they were approved at the highest levels of the Justice Department.
The sources said that investigators working the case as well as senior Department officials were distressed that some of the Justice Department's most senior political appointees refused to co-operate with an investigation by the very Department they once served.
"What does this say for the average person on the street if we want them to co-operate?" said a senior official, "How can we say to the ordinary citizen that you should report crimes, tell the government what you know, when the people who ran the Department of Justice thumb their noses at the system?"
Another federal law enforcement official familiar with the subpoenas said that they believed that senior Justice Department officials had no choice but to approve the subpoenas because to do otherwise would have meant overruling career prosecutors and their actions would appear political if they did. The official also said that political appointees at the top of the Department had to appear to be aggressive in their investigation of the politicization because to do otherwise might lead to calls for a special prosecutor to take over the investigation from them.
A former Justice Department attorney who was subpoenaed said that he believed they had been called before the grand jury as "retaliation" for refusing to talk voluntarily to investigators working for Justice's Inspector General. Current Justice Department employees are required to talk to investigators, while former employees are not.
But sources with first-hand knowledge of the investigation said that the former Justice Department officials were subpoenaed because they had information necessary to the Department's probe and without subpoenas there was no other way to compel their testimony.
During his tenure in the Civil Rights Division, career employees charged that Schlozman disregarded longstanding voting rights law to electorally favor Republicans over Democrats.
Joseph Rich, who was chief of the voting rights section of the Civil Rights Division under Schlozman, told the Boston Globe: "Schlozman was reshaping the Civil Rights Division. Schlozman didn't know anything about voting law.... All he knew is he wanted to be sure that the Republicans were going to win."
Schlozman and other Bush administration appointees in the Justice Department claimed that federal law enforcement authorities had been deficient in prosecuting cases of voter fraud. Schlozman and other Bush administration officials--most prominently Karl Rove- claimed that the failure to prosecute purported voter fraud benefited Democrats at the expense of Republicans. But most independent assessments suggest that the vast majority of reports of voting fraud are unfounded.
A study [PDF] by Lorraine C. Minnite, an assistant professor of political science at Barnard College, found that most reports of voting fraud turned out to be "unsubstantiated or false claims by the loser of a close race, mischief, and administrative or voter error." Joseph Rich, who was chief of the voting-rights section in Justice's Civil Rights Division until 2005, told me in an interview: "There is virtually no evidence that voter fraud ever occurs except by individuals and in rare instances."
Democrats and interest groups ranging from the League of Woman Voters to the NAACP to those who protect the rights of the disabled, assert that the White House and Republican activists exaggerate claims of voter fraud as a means to suppress voter participation. Citing allegations of purported voter fraud, the Bush White House has supported state initiatives which would require voters to produce state photo identification at the polls.
In the courts, however, state and federal judges have said that such requirements might discourage voting by minorities, the disabled, the impoverished, students, and the elderly--all segments of voters who traditionally vote in greater numbers for the Democrats.
Von Spakovsky, Schlozman's deputy, who has been subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury because of his refusal to speak to investigators, was also alleged to have to misused his official position by setting aside the law to take actions to help Republican candidates.
When von Spakovsky was nominated to serve on the Federal Election commission, six career officials of the Justice Department's Voting Rights Section, who had worked under him, wrote the Senate asking that he not be confirmed.
The six alleged that "during the 2004 election cycle" von Spakovsky "broke with established Department policy by getting involved with contentious and partisan litigation on the eve of the election. Mr. von Spakovsky drafted legal briefs between the Republican and Democratic parties in three battleground states, Ohio, Michigan and Florida just before the election, all in favor of the Republican party's position." The six career officials further asserted: "These briefs ran counter to the well-established practice of the Civil Rights Division not to inject itself into litigation or election monitoring on the eve of an election where it would be viewed as expressing a political preference or could have an impact on a political dispute."
These briefs, the former Voting Rights attorneys said in their letter, ran counter to the well-established practice of the Civil Rights Division not to inject itself into litigation or election monitoring on the eve of an election where it could be viewed as expressing a political preference or could have an impact on a political dispute. Moreover, in another case between the Republican and Democratic parties which concerned an Ohio law that permitted political parties to challenge voters, he drafted a letter that was sent to the court which supported the Republican Party position even though the law did not implicate any statute that the Department enforces.
During his tenure with the Civil Rights Division, Schlozman also repeatedly clashed not only with career attorneys in his own office but also with federal prosecutors who he did not believe were taking the issue of voting fraud seriously enough.
One of those he clashed with was Todd Graves, the U.S. Attorney in Kansas City, Missouri, a conservative Republican stalwart who excelled in his job, but who also was fired by the Bush administration in March, 2006-- only to be temporarily replaced by Schlozman.
As interim U.S. attorney, less than a week before a tightly contested U.S. Senate race in Missouri in 2006, Schlozman brought an indictment of voter fraud against four workers with a liberal advocacy group, despite the fact that Justice Department guidelines prohibit such indictments so close to election day. Schlozman said that he was justified in his actions because he was afraid that more fraud might take place.
But Robert Kengle, a former deputy chief in the voting-rights section at Justice during the Clinton and Bush administrations, told me in an interview: "They cooked up that there is a general exception to the policy because they wanted to prevent more fraud. But indicting people before the election was not going to change anything. Registration had already closed.... There just wasn't a justification for bending the law."
The Justice Department guidelines state: "Federal prosecutors and investigators should be extremely careful not to conduct overt investigations during the pre-election period or while the elections are underway."
One reason for such a policy, the guidelines say, is that "a criminal investigation by armed, badged federal agents runs the obvious risk of chilling legitimate voting and campaign activities."
In the end, the indictment had to be reissued after the election. In his haste to bring charges, Schlozman had indicted the wrong person--someone with a name similar to the person he wanted to charge.Physicists have announced their fourth-ever detection of gravitational waves, and the first such discovery made together by observatories in Europe and the United States.
The Virgo observatory near Pisa, Italy, has been hunting for ripples in the fabric of space-time since 2007. But it was being upgraded at the time of the historic first detection of gravitational waves by the twin laboratories of Virgo’s US cousin, the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), and was also out of action for two subsequent sightings.
Virgo rejoined the hunt this year on 1 August, following a 5-year, €23-million (US$27-million) upgrade. And on August 14, both it and LIGO picked up the spiral of a pair of rotating black holes, with masses of 31 and 25 times that of the Sun, as they merged together, physicists announced on September 27 at a press conference in Turin, Italy. The collision happened around 550 million parsecs (1.8 billion light years) away.
Observing the event with three detectors, rather than LIGO’s two, allowed researchers to dramatically increase the accuracy with which they can pinpoint the location and distance of the merging black holes.
For the Virgo team that has spent more than 20 years working on the project, the sighting is vindication that the time and effort was worth it. “It’s a big event for me,” says Alain Brillet, a physicist at the University of the Côte d'Azur in Nice, France who co-founded Virgo. He began lobbying to build a European gravitational wave detector in 1980, and is now about to retire. “It’s very nice to become sure that you have not worked for nothing,” he says.
“We have credibility. At least we can show that we make promises and we can deliver on our promises,” adds Jo van den Brand, a physicist at the VU University Amsterdam and spokesperson for the Virgo Collaboration.
This year's observation run ended on August 25, and now both observatories are working on upgrades that should improve their sensitivity. “This is just the beginning of observations with the network enabled by Virgo and LIGO working together. With the next observing run planned for late 2018, we can expect such detections weekly or even more often,” says David Shoemaker, a physicist at the Masschusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and spokesperson for the LIGO collaboration.
Triple power
Named GW170814, after the day it was detected, the wave arrived first at LIGO’s station in Livingston, Louisiana, as a ripple in space-time that subtly shifted the relative lengths of two arms of the detector as it passed. Just 8 milliseconds afterward, the same wave swept past LIGO’s second detector in Hanford, Washington, before arriving at Virgo 14 milliseconds later.
With three detectors, physicists can be more precise about the wave's origin than was possible before. On the basis of the time that Earth’s detectors received the signal, the teams triangulated the likely location of the source, whittling it down to a patch of sky that, as seen from Earth, appears about 300 times the size of the full Moon. That region is more than 10 times smaller than LIGO has managed to pinpoint for its previous sightings.
Having three detectors also enables researchers to make a rough measurement of the wave’s polarization — a property that indicates how the black holes’ orbital plane (the plane on which they rotate around each other) is orientated with respect to Earth. Because this angle dictates how much gravitational-wave energy is emitted in Earth’s direction, combining polarization with other data allowed researchers to derive a more precise estimate of total energy released by the event and so reduce the error in their distance estimate.
Precisely targeting the origin of a gravitational-wave signal is a significant step forward, says van den Brand. Some events — such as a collision of two neutron stars — are expected to produce such ripples and could emit a wide range of other kinds of radiation as well. If telescopes could be trained to look in precisely the right place after such a detection, they could spot this, and help astronomers to learn much more about the cataclysmic events.
Some 25 telescopes raced to observe the patch of sky after the latest sighting, but none saw any kind of electromagnetic radiation coming from the event. No such signals would be expected from colliding black holes, however.
Simultaneously ‘seeing’ a neutron-star collision with conventional telescopes and ‘hearing’ it through the vibrations of gravitational waves would mark a new era of astronomy. Last month, rumours swelled that the LIGO and Virgo teams might already have seen colliding neutron stars: telescopes are known to have been trained on a specific patch of sky after being alerted to another potential gravitational-wave detection. But the collaborations have yet to confirm what, if anything, their observatories saw.
This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on September 27, 2017.(LAST UPDATED: 4:45 a.m., Nov. 4, 2016) Korean-American Sung Y. Kim was sworn in Thursday as the new ambassador of the United States to the Philippines.
Kim, former special representative of the United States for North Korea Policy, was nominated by President Barack Obama on May 2016 and confirmed in September.
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He replaces Philip Goldberg, who has been the subject of repetitive personal attacks from President Rodrigo Duterte.
State Secretary John Kerry administered the oath of office to Kim in a ceremony in Washington, D.C.
Kerry has maintained that the relationship between the Philippines and the US remains “ironclad” despite President Duterte’s anti-US sentiments.
“The United States continues to place a high value on the close ties that exist between our countries,” he said.
“We continue to recognize our ironclad commitment to the sovereignty, independence, and security of the Philippines. And we will continue to cooperate in efforts to maintain peace and stability, and to promote shared prosperity in the Asia Pacific region.”
Kim’s assignment to Manila comes weeks after President Duterte announced in China the Philippines’ split from the US.
Assistant Secretary for East Asia and Pacific Affairs Daniel Russel went to Manila to seek clarification of the President’s remark.
A report for the US Senate committee on foreign relations made favorable remarks about Kim, saying: “His outstanding managerial skills, open interpersonal style, and ability to work well with numerous US government agencies on sensitive and complex policy issues and priorities, makes him well qualified to serve as US Ambassador to the Philippines.”
Kim, a career member of the US foreign service, served as the US ambassador to the Republic of Korea from 2011 to 2014 and as special envoy, with rank of ambassador, for the Six-Party Talks from 2008 to 2011.
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Previously, he was the Political-Military Unit chief at the US Embassy in Seoul from 2002 to 2006, according to a White House news release.
From 1999 to 2002, he served as a political officer in Tokyo. His other overseas assignments included Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong.
In Washington, DC, Kim worked in the Office of Chinese Affairs and served as staff assistant in the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, where he rose to become deputy assistant secretary.
Before joining joining the foreign service, he worked as a public prosecutor in the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office.
Kim was born in Seoul, South Korea, in 1960, the son of a South Korean diplomat. In 1973, he and his family moved to Los Angeles, where he grew up.
A graduate of University of Pennsylvania, Kim took his juris doctor degree at the Loyola University Law School. He earned a master of laws degree from the London School of Economics and Political Science. /atm
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MOST READMáiréad Nesbitt (pronounced "mawr-aid") is an Irish classical and Celtic music performer, most notably as a violinist. She is formerly the fiddler for the group Celtic Woman.
Background [ edit ]
Nesbitt was born to John and Kathleen Nesbitt, both music teachers in Co.Tipperary, Ireland. She has a sister, Frances, and four brothers, Seán, Michael, Noel and Karl, all of whom are musicians. She has been a piano player since the age of four, and began playing the violin at age six.
Her formal musical studies began at The Ursuline Convent in Thurles, County Tipperary and progressed through the Waterford Institute of Technology and the Cork School of Music, during which time she participated in the National Youth Orchestra of Ireland. Nesbitt completed postgraduate studies at Royal Academy of Music and Trinity College of Music in London under Emanuel Hurwitz.[2]
Besides her family, Nesbitt has stated that her influences range from Itzhak Perlman and Michael Coleman to bluegrass artist Alison Krauss and rock's David Bowie and Sting.[3]
Career [ edit ]
After finishing her post-graduate studies, Nesbitt joined the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, thus beginning her professional career as a violinist at age 16.[4] She later moved into solo performances, working with a variety of performers, including Van Morrison, Clannad and Sharon Shannon. She also spent some time as fiddler for the Irish group Coolfin, and recorded an album with them.[5]
Nesbitt broke into the wider world in 1996 when she was invited to perform in the Michael Flatley show Lord of the Dance.[6] There, she played lead fiddle until 1998, at which time she went with Flatley to his second show, Feet of Flames. She toured in this production, again as lead fiddler, until leaving in 2001. Nesbitt also played on the original soundtracks to both shows, as well as for the soundtrack to Riverdance.
Nesbitt released her début solo album in 2001, Raining Up, which features a broad range of musical styles, both traditional and contemporary. The album features a number of guest performers and members of Nesbitt's own family: her mother, sister, and brothers Seán and Karl. In promotion of the album, she toured with her own band.[7]
In 2004, Nesbitt was invited to play violin for a performance at the Helix Theatre in Dublin, called Celtic Woman.[8] The popularity of this and subsequent performances on television and live albums has led to five tours across the United States. Celtic Woman has released a total of nine albums to date: Celtic Woman, Celtic Woman: A Christmas Celebration, Celtic Woman: A New Journey, Celtic Woman: The Greatest Journey, Celtic Woman: Songs from the Heart, Celtic Woman: Lullaby, Celtic Woman: Believe, Celtic Woman: Home for Christmas, and Celtic Woman: Emerald - Musical Gems.
Nesbitt has worked with the bhangra fusion band The Dhol Foundation on their 2005 album Drum-Believable, has composed the original music score alongside Tibor Kasza for the tour of Irish Dance Invasion, a production based in Budapest, and has played and recorded with the group Afro Celt Sound System. Nesbitt also performed privately for HRH The Princess Anne during her visit to Dublin in September 2004. The Celtic Tenors Live in Concert DVD released in 2006 also features Nesbitt on several tracks.
Nesbitt is featured as a soloist on Walt Disney's direct to DVD film Tinker Bell. Joel McNeely composed music specifically to fit Nesbitt's distinctive style, and collaborated with her to further polish the music for Celtic authenticity.[6][9]
As of March 2010, Nesbitt was working on a second solo album, as well as an album with her very musical family.[9][10]
Shortly before Thanksgiving, 2011, Nesbitt married Jim Mustapha Jr., lighting director for The Who in Maui, Hawaiʻi.
On May 4, 2016, Nesbitt announced she was recording a new solo album, Hibernia, in August 2016.[11] The album was released on December 9, 2016. It debuted at No. 4 on both the Billboard World Albums chart and at No. 11 on the Billboard Classical Albums chart.[12][13]
On July 11, 2016, Nesbitt announced she would be launching her own line of violins called Celtic Violins by Máiréad Nesbitt Celtic Violinist. Nesbitt also announced she would be using a new violin alongside her 17th century Matthias violin on upcoming projects, including on Hibernia.[14]
On August 7, 2016, it was announced that Nesbitt would be stepping away from Celtic Woman to focus on working on her own projects.[15][16]
In February 2017, Nesbitt was announced as the featured violinist on the inaugural tour of Rocktopia, a fusion of rock and classical music. The inaugural tour ran from March 28, 2017 to April 23, 2017, with an additional show on August 12, 2017.
On June 30, 2017, the Nesbitt family released a family album, Devil's Bit Sessions. The album features 13 members of the Nesbitt family, spanning 3 generations from age 10 to 81. It was recorded in the Nesbitt family home in County Tipperary, Ireland and is named after the local mountain, The Devil's Bit.[17][18] The album first appeared on the Billboard World Albums chart at No. 9, the week of July 29, 2017.[19]
Rocktopia is appearing in a limited six-week run on Broadway from March 20 to April 29, 2018.[20][21][22][23]
Discography [ edit ]
Solo
Raining Up (2001 UK Release; 2006 US Release)
(2001 UK Release; 2006 US Release) Hibernia (December 2016)
With Celtic Woman
With The Dhol Foundation
Other contributions
Filmography [ edit ]Evgeny Kazantsev is a digital artist who specializes in corporate identity, advertising, illustrations and concept. He was tasked with imagining what the Ancient Wonders of the World would look like if they were created today.
The result is these 10 beautiful images created for Gefest Insurance.
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Legend claims the hanging gardens were constructed by Nebuchadnezzar II for his wife, Queen Amytis, to remind her of the fertile hills and valleys of her home, Medes (Modern Iran). No archaeological proof has been found, but we have Greek and Roman writings describing the massive size of the gardens.
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The Statue of Zeus at Olympia was a giant statue of Zeus, the Greek God of sky and thunder. The statue stood around 42 feet tall and was crafted from gold, ebony and precious stones.
According to Plutarch, when the Roman general Aemilius Paulus saw it, he “was moved to his soul, as if he had seen the god in person.”
The statue was built in the Temple of Zeus at Olympia by the sculptor Phidias around 435 BC. It was eventually destroyed around 425-475 AD when the temple burned down.
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The Parthenon was a temple on the Athenian Acropolis in Greece. It was dedicated to the goddess Athena, the goddess of wisdom, craft, and war. Ruins of the Parthenon remain, but the site today is nowhere near its former glory.
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The Colossus of Rhodes is one of official Seven Ancient Wonders of the World and was located on the Greek island of Rhodes. The statue depicted the Greek God of the Sun, Helios, and was built to commemorate Rhodes’ victory over Cyprus.
The Colossus stood over 98 feet tall – making it one of the tallest statues in the ancient world. In comparison, the Statue of Liberty is 111 feet tall from her heel to the top of her head. Both statues were built as symbols to freedom.
The Colossus stood for approximately 50 years before it was destroyed by an earthquake, but the imposing ruins continued to draw visitors for hundreds of years before it was eventually used for scrap metal.
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The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus was a large tomb built between 353 and 350 BC in present day Bodrum, Turkey. Created to house the remains of Mausolus, a satrap of the Persian Empire, and his family, the tomb was approximately 150 feet tall and ruins remain today.
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The Sphinx is the largest monolith statue in the world, standing at 66 feet tall and 241 feet long. The nose of the Sphinx is famously broken, but this image gives you a good idea of what it may look like if it was restored to its former glory.
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The Temple of Artemis was a large temple dedicated to the Greek goddess Artemis located in modern day Turkey. The final version of the temple included 127 columns, was 450 feet long, 225 feet wide and 60 feet tall. Ruins of the temple are still visible today.
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Petra is an ancient city carved into mountains in Southern Jordan.
Petra still exists today and is Jordan’s most popular tourist destination, but fortunately there isn’t a major highway running through it – yet. The area is under threat from unsustainable tourism, despite the fact that UNESCO describes Petra as “one of the most precious cultural properties of man’s cultural heritage.”
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The Taqi ad-Din observatory was the largest astronomical observatory built in the Islamic world. It was constructed in Istanbul |
The viewers started sending me a lot of encouraging messages with tons of positive feedback. I got messages from different players/viewers almost every day for weeks! I kept streaming as often as I could. I talked a lot about Faeria strategy while I played which the viewers seemed to enjoy a lot. I even managed to get DanF (developer) and Sho7gun (balance tester) with me on stream once where we discussed removal cards. That was big for me. After that I started to feel more comfortable streaming, and I started to actually enjoy it. Time went by and as new streamers arrived I tried to visit their streams as much as I could to welcome them to the game and to offer some advice. I kept getting a lot of PM’s with questions on Discord about different Faeria-related things, so I decided to write a guide called “How to improve at Faeria”.
In March Scream112 (MetagamingTV) and I hosted and casted the first community-created tournament, “Codex Cup #1” after which I was invited to cast “Coil Gaming Faeria Lunar Rumble #1” and “Tales of the Ouroboros”.
While casting I got to know Crow, and invited him to do “Faeria Showdown” with me, which has now become quite popular and my favorite event to cast! All in all I have casted seven tournaments/events so far, and made plenty of interviews with the best players.
Even though I get plenty of positive feedback, I don’t think I’m even close to as good as most of the other Faeria casters. I’m really bad at showing my excitement during games, which is unfortunate since it is a rather important quality for a caster.
After a lot of casting I want to focus more on helping new players again, so I recently launched my new website, faeriacoaching.com, offering free coaching to help them get into the game. I very much enjoy helping people and that, in addition to making interviews/talks, is what I would like to say my role in the community is (currently).
You have a new show called Yak Talk that came out a few days ago. What’s that about and what benefit could it provide to potential viewers?
Yak Talk is basically supposed to be a “Faeria news” show, much like MetagamingTV’s Kappa Council, but much shorter. Nightingale and I are both very active on the forums, Reddit, Discord and Twitch, but far from all players are, and we want to compile the recent events and talk about it quickly in the video for those who aren’t.
What do you think the future of Faeria is from an eSports perspective?
Faeria has enormous potential. I am a big eSports fan and I am super excited about the future of Faeria. The game has what it takes, but the difficult part is making sure everyone finds out!
If you had the choice, what new features or modes would you want added to Faeria?
I would love to have access to various statistics for my account and for my decks. I would also very much like to have the ability to watch replays (and share them).
Another thing that I would love to have, but don’t think will ever happen for multiple good reasons, is a draft-mode like the one used in Magic the Gathering.
Do you have any advice for people trying to get into the competitive scene for Faeria? How about for people new to strategy games?
The best way to get an understanding of the game is to play it. After you’ve played it go watch better people play. Many streamers communicate with the viewers whilst they play and explain their moves. The Faeria community is incredibly friendly so if you are watching someone but don’t understand why they play like they do, don’t be afraid to ask!
Once Pandora is released, will you be sticking to that or be playing it in addition to ladder?
I’m actually not so crazy about Pandora. I will obviously try it but I don’t think I will play it more than I play regular ranked games. But who knows, maybe it will be a lot more fun for me than I’m expecting it to be. Let’s hope so!
Thanks again to J0k3se for speaking with us! Just in case you missed last week’s community spotlight with Cappuccino, you can check it out right here. See you next week!Penny for the old guy.11 Cry of the children as the effigy of Guy Fawkes, the guardian of the gunpowder, was burnt on 5 November, the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot (1605) to blow up the English House of Lords with King James I of England in it. Since Ranajit Guha, at 90, is our ‘old guy’, and Vivek Chibber burns him for misreading the English Revolution, this child's cry seemed an appropriate title.View all notes
2 2 I have long wanted to admit that I forgot this lesson when I was in my thirties twice (with reference to Jürgen Habermas and James Wolfensohn) and have bitterly regretted it. For consciousness-raised ideologically bound feminist readers of this review, of a book that has no feminist concern, I mention that part of this forgetfulness was because I felt unselfconsciously obliged to prove to my then partner that I was not a ‘bourgeois proto-fascist’ (his repeated phrase). This book is by a resolutely non-identitarian South-Asian-American. The personal may be political. View all notes
Alexandre Aspel told me that I should always try to see what is best in what I read. Jacques Derrida taught us to say ‘yes’ twice to a text. I have tried to read Vivek Chibber's book in that spirit.He himself participates in that by locating Ranajit Guha as the best of the three authors he reads. If, however, the book wishes to ‘begin … to expose the flaws of [postcolonial theory], even to displace it’ (276), I am obliged to say that Vivek Chibber may not be the person to do that. His definitive example of postcolonial theory is the Subaltern Studies group of historians of South Asia (1983–2005). This choice is perhaps not an entirely convincing one. The thrust of the work of the subalternists was the colonial history of India, and the historiography of anti-colonial resistance. They brought about a significant change within the discipline of history—especially the history of South Asia. This change is perceptible in the Indian subcontinent and in the United Kingdom (UK), South Africa, and Australia, where the study of Indian history is more robust. Chibber's need to misrepresent this field in order to make his point obliges him to disregard two of the most powerful subalternist historians still working in India: Shahid Amin and Shail Mayaram.
Specifically ‘postcolonial’ theory, arising in the United States (US) and UK with Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, related back to Edward W Said's Orientalism (1978 Said, Edward W (1978) Orientalism (New York: Pantheon)), and to the phenomenon of cultural studies in Birmingham under the auspices of Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall (Thompson 1985 Thompson, John (1985) Studies in the theory of ideology (London: Polity Press)).
Subaltern Studies certainly came in contact with the US branch of postcolonial studies through Spivak's visit in 1984. (I believe Guha has known Bhabha's way of thinking since the latter was a student at Oxford.) Chibber refers to this insultingly at the beginning of the book, and assumes this to be sufficient proof of the pernicious effect of ‘poststructuralism’, undocumented as such and presented through the generalizations of received wisdom.
In actual fact, Spivak's intervention, perceived as applying standards of literary criticism to history, was hotly contested by subalternists as well as general historians from and of South Asia. Guha himself was disappointed by Spivak's performance of her co-editorial obligations to the original volume of Selected subaltern studies (Guha and Spivak 1988). Although her relationship with the collective remained cordial and intellectually productive, Spivak's ‘influence’ on their work is insignificant, if at all there.
Chibber pays no attention to Pan-Africanism (including Negritude), which was the first example of a postcolonial vision. He refers not at all to the significant phenomenon of Latin American postcolonial theory (Walter Mignolo, Mary-Louise Pratt) and Latin American subaltern studies (John Beverley, Alberto Moreiras, Ilyana Rodriguez, this last with the connection to Spivak's work which Chibber incorrectly claims for South Asian subaltern studies).
In a 306-page book full of a repeated and generalized account of the British and French revolutions, and repeated clichés about how capitalism works, and repeated boyish moments of ‘I have disproved arguments 1, 2, 3, therefore Guha (or Chakrabarty, or yet Chatterjee) is wrong, and therefore subaltern studies is a plague and a seduction, and must be eradicated, although it will be hard because careers will be ruined, etc.’, there could have been some room for these references to describe the range, roots and ramifications of postcolonial studies, so that the book's focused choice could have taken its place in Verso's protective gestures towards the preservation of ‘Little Britain Marxism’, shared to some degree by the journal Race and class. Aijaz Ahmad's In theory (1992) was such an attempt. Postcolonial theory is the blunter instrument, and its attempt to disregard the range of postcolonial studies in order to situate subaltern studies—confined to three texts—as its representative can mislead students more effectively.
There is no room in this book for perceiving nuance, as described in the following passage at the very opening of Chatterjee's Nationalist thought:
[I]n an ideological world … words rarely have unambiguous meanings, where notions are inexact, and have political value precisely because they are inexact and hence capable of suggesting a range of possible interpretations …. [T]his inexact world … of dreams and illusions … rules established values asserted, revolutions accomplished and states founded … [C]ritical viewpoint reveals that [a political revolution] … at the same time, and in fundamental ways, is not a revolution. (Chatterjee 1993 Chatterjee, Partha (1993) Nationalist thought and the colonial world: a derivative discourse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), vii)
Writing as a member of the Subaltern Studies collective, I should say that we could no doubt profit from a robust constructive criticism of Chibber's sort. In order, however, to be successful at such a critique, the critic must not only give the reader an idea of the scope and range of postcolonial studies, but also be able to enter the actual project of Subaltern Studies and notice that the two are not the same. Vivek Chibber is stumped by his desire to ‘correct’ everybody—the examples are altogether too many to quote. Here is a typical sample: ‘Guha's mistaken view of the European experience does not simply undermine his analysis of the postcolonial polity. It also has grave implications for his more ambitious project of political critique’ (80).
There is no hint here of the sense where Chibber might himself be corrected—with a careful auto-critique, a strong sense of being folded together in a complicity with the very people whom he wants to demolish in an embarrassingly arm-wrestling way. (If he thinks they ignore class, they think rigid class analysis ignores subaltern social groups.) The harder they come, the harder they fall. Interpretation is a responsible task, a risky business.
And so Chibber carries on, merrily mistaking a primary text for a secondary text as he proceeds to ‘correct’ Ranajit Guha because he is ‘wrong’ about the British and French revolutions. Guha's ‘understanding of the European experience is fatally flawed’ (101).
In order to prove someone completely mistaken, you have to read all of what they have written. It is embarrassing to be told that, ‘judged in terms of space or of word count, Guha does not devote much attention to the fortunes of the landed classes’ (81), when the entire deep background of Guha's work lies there. The thing to do is to read A rule of property for Bengal (1963 Guha, Ranajit (1963) A rule of property for Bengal: an essay on the idea of permanent settlement (Paris: Mouton)) side by side with The small voice of history (2009 Guha, Ranajit (2009) The small voice of history (Ranikhet: Permanent Black)) to get a grasp of what is at stake in the work of this counterintuitive historian.
Guha, a seasoned communist who paid the price of his political convictions during a brilliantly maverick career as a historian, created a revolution within the discipline. For Chibber to prove him ‘wrong’—especially as an Orientalist misreader of Europe who believes that the ‘non-West’ has a different psychology—is somewhat like proving WEB Du Bois ‘wrong’ when he calls the exodus of the newly emancipated slaves a ‘general strike’, like the repeated attempts by folks like Bernard Lewis to prove Edward Said ‘wrong’, even, and I do not want to be mischievous, a well-meaning smart sophomore's attempt to show that in the Poetics Aristotle is ‘illogical’.33 Compare Kirti Chaudhuri's impatience: ‘While it is possible to criticize Braudel's works on matters of factual detail or interpretation, to do so is rather like standing in front of Michelangelo's statue of David in Piazza Signoria in Florence or looking up at his paintings in the Sistine Chapel in Rome and saying that the artist's grasp of the human anatomy was all wrong’ (Chaudhuri 1991 Chaudhuri, KN (1991) Asia before Europe: economy and civilization of the Indian Ocean from the rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), 6, emphasis mine).View all notes
I will look at the way in which Guha establishes his premises and alliances in Dominance without hegemony (1998 Du Bois, WEB (1998) Black reconstruction in America (New York: Free Press)). I will begin with a longish quote from Hayden White cited by Guha:
There does, in fact, appear to be an irreducible ideological component in every historical account of reality. The very claim to have discerned some kind of formal coherence in the historical record brings with it theories of the nature of the historical world and of historical knowledge itself which have ideological implications for attempts to understand the ‘present’, however this ‘present’ is defined … The ideological dimensions of a historical account reflect the ethical element in the historian's assumption of a particular position on the question of the nature of historical knowledge and the implications that can be drawn from the study of past events for the understanding of the present. (Guha 1998 Guha, Ranajit (1998) Dominance without hegemony: history and power in colonial India (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press), 6, emphasis added)
1976 Marx, Karl ( 1976 ) The German ideology ( Moscow : Progress Publishers )
To read this citation correctly, Chibber has to be able to understand the difference between ‘ideology’ and ‘psychology’. (This is also true in the case of his unproductive misreading of Chakrabrty and Chatterjee.) He uses ‘ideology’ in the uncritical colloquial US sense of ‘ideas held by a particular group’. The subalternists, including, of course, Guha, use it in the Marxian tradition, beginning with(Marx) and continuing through a long critical tradition of debate, which Chibber simply dismisses without discussion because it does not square with his presuppositions, his method being to trivialize the opposition and show, point by point, that every principle emphasized by them—as he understands without his being prepared to read them with the sympathy required to produce constructive, or even destructive, criticism—is just ‘wrong’ as proved by him, QED. This is an embarrassing method. Guha and the subalternists certainly use the word ‘consciousness’, in the Hegelian tradition, with the lightest touch of psychoanalysis (to which they were never seriously committed), certainly not to be confused with ‘psychology’, the accessible workings of a rational choice/behaviourist model of mind that is presupposed by analytic/US ideology and all thinking influenced by it (an extended discussion would have to make an exception in the case of Noam Chomsky).
Chibber cannot distinguish between ‘capital’ and ‘capitalism’. Here are some examples. ‘What does capitalism universalize?’ he asks. And, in the next sentence, answers: ‘To assess whether capital abandoned its universalizing mission in its colonial venture, we must first ask, what it is supposed to universalize?’ (109). The answers to the two questions are different. Capital is the abstract concept, capitalism and/or socialism are two opposed means of human control of capital, requiring coercive/persuasive ideology and policy. This is where an understanding of ‘ideology’ in the sense used by the subalternist historians (and many others, of course) would lead to a possibly serious criticism, if needed.
Capital ‘universalizes’, then as now, because it seeks to establish the same standard of exchange, whatever the level of ‘development’. This is, in different ways, colonialism and imperialism. This is how capital's behaviour becomes different. Capital-ism finesses this by talking ‘civilizing mission’, then as now. At the same time, capital produces difference in order to be capital (produce and use surplus). That is called ‘class’. To suggest that ‘subalternist theorists mistakenly urge that the forms of domination that obtain in postcolonial formation are not capitalist’ (280) is itself mistaken because Chibber is focused on a ‘correct’ reading of the French and English revolutions.
Chakrabarty gets it in the rear because Chibber is unable to grasp the difference. History 2 is ‘the category charged with the function of constantly interrupting the totalizing thrust of History 1’, writes Chakrabarty. (Is he thinking of the permanent parabasis whereby, in the old Attic comedy, the chorus interrupts the main action repeatedly, as Fichte noted? No matter.) ‘To interrupt the totalizing thrust of capitalism’—how did ‘History 1’ become ‘capitalism’?—‘is to undermine its universalization,’ writes Chibber (217). Chakrabarty is consistently talking about ‘capital’, and then, in an intriguing move, invokes ‘translation’ into ‘capitalism’ and suggests that that move does not just happen in one way. Chibber cannot read this. The same problem crops up on page 227 before we finally get this narrative:
Hence, if there is any genuine source of opposition to capital's universalizing drive, it is the equally universal struggle by subaltern classes to defend their basic humanity. That is the core motivation in all those thousands of campaigns for wages, land rights, basic health, and security, dignity, self-determination, autonomy, and so forth—all those Enlightenment concepts against which postcolonial theorists inveigh. (233)
Investigating the absence of internationalism in the rank and file of the labour movement and its relationship to colonialism has to be forgone in a brief review; as must the pre-critical notion that capital's universalization is ‘market dependence’ (125). Any effort with labour worldwide immediately brings up the issue of outsourcing. There is also the gender politics within established organized labour which encourages the cynical concept of ‘permanent casuals’.
The main problem, however, is not labour idealism. The main point is that subaltern social groups are not the international proletariat. That is the basic message of Gramsci's essay on the historiography of the subaltern classes. That he does not know this is clear in Chibber's dismissal of Chatterjee's reading of Gramsci as ‘references to Gramsci more prominently on display’ (250). In order for the South Asian subaltern to find an objective concept for collectivity, it is often the discourse of religion that is mobilized. This is no mere liberation theology, as I will explain below.
Indeed, because Chibber is eager to prove that nothing that the subalternists acknowledged was more than ‘trend’-y, he dismisses Gramsci's influence as a trend (6). When on page 27 he discloses, ‘I do not analyze the nature of [the Subalternists’] connection [to Gramsci] … primarily because of my desire that the reader not be distracted by whether Subalternists have correctly interpreted a given theorist', this reader is obliged to conclude—and not only because of this ‘correct’-fetishist gurumahashay's demonstrated inability to be auto-critical—that he is not ‘familiar with the relevant literature’.
For then he would have known that Gramsci's main contribution was not ‘popular history and matters of consciousness’ (6). (Gramsci's concern anyway is not consciousness-raising but epistemology, education.) Gramsci's main contribution was to notice that, precisely because Italy, with its tail tucked into Africa, is not France, Britain, Russia or the US, the Risorgimento did not sufficiently assimilate ‘class’ differences created outside of capital logic (basically the incentive to establish the same system of exchange everywhere). This is why the Subalternists chose the word ‘subaltern’. The existence of the subaltern is also evident in the Pan-Africanist WEB Du Bois's writings, in such essays as ‘The Negro mind reaches out’, although, being a distant yea-sayer to Stalin (of whose purge techniques he was unaware, as opposed to the lynching techniques of the Southern bourgeoisie), Gramsci's ‘enemy’, he did not know the word ‘subaltern’ (Du Bois 1968 Du Bois, WEB (1968) ‘The Negro mind reaches out’, in AlainLocke (ed)The new Negro: an interpretation (New York: Atheneum Press), 392–397., 385–414). So, not not capitalist, but separated from full capital logic. The distinct difference is that, whereas a Southern Benedetto Croce could become fully ‘Northern’, in a colony, full P (power) could not be acquired by the ‘improved’ (in French, the word is évolué) bourgeoisie. Chibber should have known a bit more about colonialism ‘correctly’ or perhaps remembered that Guha had the lived experience of full colonialism and complicity with the ‘improved’ class. If you are repeatedly going to ‘prove’ a respected senior scholar ‘mistaken’, it is your obligation to research him well. It is in that spirit that I have recommended the introduction to The small voice of history (Guha 2009) as required reading. One of the chief insights in Spivak's generation, in India and North and continental Africa, was the inability to use the Enlightenment when the colonial difference was no longer at work in postcoloniality. She ‘parachuted’ across the street in Calcutta (8), turning left by an open garbage dump, because the subalternists were theorizing this.
Chibber takes his model of postcolonialism from upwardly class-mobile or professional second-generation immigrants in the US, who do speak of the ‘East’ and the ‘Non-West’, and may sometimes imply culture equals psychology, legitimizing by reversal. By contrast, subalternists everywhere name countries and colonies.
Here I would like to mention Kathleen Collins, author of the excellent book Clan politics and regime transition in Central Asia (2006 Collins, Kathleen (2006) Clan politics and regime transition in Central Asia (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press)). Because she wanted to avoid, like the subalternists, the (racialized) idea that there is some peculiar psychology in Central Asia, she made it her business, although not a trained Europeanist, to include a short narrative ‘history of Europe’ and empirically established a possible relationship between clan/goon politics in the historical gap between the absolutist state and democracy. She does not consult Gramsci. But her intellectual curiosity and disciplinary acumen permit her to re-discover that southern Italy has a conjuncture comparable (of course not identical) to Central Asia—mixture of capitalist and pre-capitalist ideological formations (not psychological essentialism, as per Chibber)—separating proletarian and subaltern. Chibber, ignoring this type of possibility, takes ‘subaltern’ as a synonym for ‘proletarian’ and offers the usual mechanical Marxist utopian pronouncement.
It is on this level of generality that Chibber insists that what produces a connection between all the ‘subaltern classes’ (according to his definition) all over the world is ‘physical well-being’ (200–202). There is no grand narrative on the level of ‘physical well-being’, or it is so grand that it is inaccessible to the subject. (Lévinas's argument in Otherwise than being [1998 Lévinas, Emmanuel (1998) Otherwise than being, or, beyond essence, transl Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press)]). The moment you go from body to mind, from physical well-being to fighting for physical well-being, there is language, history and ‘permissible narratives’ (Said 1984 Said, Edward W (1984) ‘Permission to narrate’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 13:3, 27–48., 27–48). For example, the mother thinks honour, the daughter thinks reproductive rights. What history happened in between? A change in localized permissible narratives that still cannot touch pharmaceutical dumping. If physical well-being were a race-free, class-free, gender-free grand narrative, there would be no point in having any theories of justice, politics, human rights and gender compromise. (Ellen Bostrup and Amartya Sen's work on women's notion of preserving physical well-being is by now honourably dated.44 Sen (1981). His work was enriched by Esther Bostrup's work on famines since the ‘60s.View all notes) Indeed, there is no point in Marx's (1990 Marx, Karl (1990) Capital: a critique of political economy, volume 1, transl Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books)) exhortation to his implied readership in Capital volume 1 to change their self-concept from ‘victim of the capitalist’ to ‘agent of production’. (The ‘subaltern’ is not an agent of capitalist production.) If we go back to ‘whose physical well-being, by what permissible narrative’, we are back in the division within organized labour in terms of outsourcing, of the sub-proletariat, its complete ignorance of the non-generalizable subaltern populations of the world, its usual lack of sympathy for women and homeworkers and its connections with management. The required reading, at two ends of the spectrum, is the entire vanguardism–social-democracy debate, of which Rosa Luxemburg's The mass strike (2007) is a part, and the new thinking started by DD Kosambi, whom Guha cites at the very beginning of Dominance without hegemony (35). This is like justifying war or peace through the Christ story(a different permissible narrative. No psychological essentialism here, especially since polymath Kosambi, whose polymath father became a Buddhist under BR Ambedkar's influence, is speaking of how the converted Buddhist Emperor Asoka's new imperial-universal notion of dhamma, not to be found in the classic Arthasastra, was in its turn miscast into dharma, both instruments of class reconciliation between sovereign and subject. Historical change, class accommodation, not psychological essence. Just dhamma, dharma, ‘Improvement’, ‘civilizing mission’ in general theory, today ‘development’; allowing invented ‘tradition’ to work at reconciling established class/caste convictions in the lower social strata, related to, but certainly not identical with, building temples and churches (119). To say that ‘Guha does not consider that the shift to capitalist social structures might actually fit quite well with the idiom of traditional politics’ (52), or that ‘postcolonial theory … portray[s] the East as an unchanging miasma of tradition’ (291), is astonishing.
Would Professor Chibber correct Rosa Luxemburg and DD Kosambi? No, because he knows they are primary texts. He misses out on Guha because Guha has been placed within an academic battle between what I keep calling Little Britain Marxism and located postcolonial historiographies, here confused with the metropolitan second-generation version, particularly in the US. Chibber's knowledge of the detail of Marx is shaky, but his convictions, coming as they do from a disciplinarization in sociology, notoriously quantitative in the US, with some notable exceptions, such as his alma mater Wisconsin, especially if the degree comes through their spectacular Center for South Asia, are remarkable in their qualitative vigour. I therefore guess that, if I remind Chibber of the famous first paragraph of Kosambi's An introduction to the study of Indian history (1975 Kosambi, Damodar Dharmanand (1975) An introduction to the study of Indian history (Mumbai: Popular Prakashan)), he will perhaps say that, although this is acceptable in a dated classic, his own general idea that Indian colonial and postcolonial history ‘are subject to the same basic forces and are therefore part of the same basic history’ (291). He does not have enough auto-critical skills to know that his own position is also dated and spaced within a turf battle slightly more than academic; that the same basic history is a site of conflictual differences.
Here is Kosambi:
The light-hearted sneer ‘India has had some episodes, but no history’ is used to justify lack of study, grasp, intelligence on the part of foreign writers about India's past. The considerations that follow will prove that it is precisely the episodes—lists of dynasties and kings, tales of war and battle spiced with anecdote, which fill school texts—that are missing from Indian records. Here, for the first time, we have to reconstruct a history without episodes, which means that it cannot be the same type of history as in the European tradition. (Kosambi 1975, 1)
I have indicated that Kathleen Collins found, in accounting for clan/goon politics in some places and not in others, that such politics was determined by the gap between the establishment of the absolutist state and democracy. Into this argument we can also place the colonial state, without direct access to the agency of P at the top and, of course, the totalitarian state.
Let us now consider Chibber's remark about the subalternists' assumption about democracy: ‘subalternists attribute to the bourgeoisie a democratic mission that it in fact rejected and fought against. The idea that modern democratic culture derives from the beneficence of capitalists is central to Ranajit Guha's work’ (286, emphasis original).
To begin with, the passage is problematic because ‘bourgeoisie’ and ‘capitalists’ are used as synonyms. (As for the passage on page 147, where Chibber does grant that there is a ‘link between capitalism and democratization’, there he again thinks the subalternists mean ‘capitalists’ when they say ‘bourgeoisie’; the bourgeoisie are actually the politico/ideological, the juridico/legal, the intellectual/rentier; a section of the bourgeoisie may be capitalists.) But let us lay that aside. It is not capitalist beneficence that calls forth something that looks like democracy. Marx abundantly acknowledged capital's social productivity. Capitalism manages it for sustainable underdevelopment. Capital needs to establish uniformity in order to function well. (I prefer that to ‘universalization’, but it is not a serious objection; simply a preference.) Capitalism, and its organic intellectuals, who are probably members of the bourgeoisie, finesses this in various ways so that capitalist social relations of production can be preserved. This is not a romantic belief. It continues to our own time. I am sure Professor Chibber has read the work of Jack Snyder, Fareed Zakaria, Nicholas Doyle and many others, arguing that the enforceability of democracy depends upon per capita income and a good working capitalist system. ‘Exporting democracy’ and ‘liberating women’ have also led to some tremendous wars, beginning in the turn of the twenty-first century, in the oil circuit of the Middle East; Syria will not be the last domino to fall. To get a detailed argument about the connection between the establishment of democracy in the American South and the play of Northern capital, controlled by Northern capitalists, to undermine labour's agency of capital, once again I would recommend consulting WEB Du Bois's Black reconstruction in America (1998 Du Bois, WEB (1998) Black reconstruction in America (New York: Free Press)).
Chibber's confusion of the bourgeois and the capitalist is a serious problem if one wishes to understand what people like Guha—and there were not too many like him when he began—are talking about when they compare the colonizing and the colonized bourgeoisie. These are people who are steeped in the long debate between vanguardism and social democracy, within which the critique of imperialism and the possibility of socialism are launched—even with deep background in inconvenient people like Bakunin, and that is where the argument is coming from. This is why, if I may leap forward a bit, Chibber is unable to understand, when Chatterjee is criticizing Nehru and Gandhi, that Chatterjee may be thinking of the possibility of socialism, not of giving up on reason; that he may be questioning the version of reason that grounds Chibber's own conviction that economic growth is human development—a position opposed by millions of people in the world outside the academy as well: ‘[I]n the era of decolonization parts of the Global South have dramatically improved their material conditions’ (275). Kosambi could have told him that many on the left thought Nehru was selling capitalism in the name of democratic socialism. And Ranajit Guha actually quotes a cluster of passages from Gandhi, in Domination without hegemony, claiming that his theories of corporate social responsibility were there to fight socialism. I give one example here: ‘“I enunciated this theory,” he [Gandhi] said, “when, the socialist theory was placed before the country in respect to the possessions held by zamindars [landowners] and ruling chiefs”’ (Guha 1998 Guha, Ranajit (1998) Dominance without hegemony: history and power in colonial India (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press), 37). Professor Chibber may not agree, but he cannot accuse Chatterjee of illogic if he suggests that, in different ways, Gandhi and Nehru are continuing the old ‘improvement’ logic. Professor Chibber, in spite of the good motive to clean the house of poor theorizing, cannot, to quote my old friend Teodor Shanin, understand that ‘socialism is about justice, not development’55 Unpublished conversation, 1989; I cannot reproduce his persuasive and thunderous accent, alas.View all notes (here our generation understood ‘development’ as ‘exploitation’).
It is also clear that Chibber has not read the Subaltern Studies material clearly. One of their research undertakings was to point at Gandhi's separation from peasant movements.66 Amin (1984 Amin, Shahid (1984) ‘Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakhpur District, Eastern UP, 1921–2’, Subaltern Studies, 3, 1–61.); Chatterjee (1984 Chatterjee, Partha (1984) ‘Gandhi and the critique of civil society’, Subaltern Studies, 3, 153–195.).View all notes If Chibber wants to get a sense of this, he may also want to look at the exchange between Sumanta Banerjee (2013 Banerjee, Sumanta (2013) ‘Gandhi's flexible non-violence’, Economic and Political Weekly, 48:31, 4.) and David Hardiman (2013 Hardiman, David (2013) ‘Gandhi's adaptable non-violence’, Economic and Political Weekly, 48:33, 4–5.) in the pages of Economic and Political Weekly.
Is it only the subalternist historians who believe that liberals supported modernization as capitalist development in order to keep socialism at bay? Professor Chibber comes out with a centrist common-sense bit of criticism: ‘[Chatterjee] simply denies what so many nationalist leaders saw as self-evident—that whatever else the postcolonial state did, it would have to find a way to develop the local productive forces’ (287). Is this what Verso wants to propose as a socialist solution, mindful of classes, in globality?
To continue with the things that one must be familiar with in order to point out that subaltern studies have not been useful, I cite ‘abstract average labour’, or labour-power. It is not ‘a dimension of concrete labors’; nor does it ‘refer to properties that the latter have in common, properties which can be compared with one another and which are rewarded by the market’. ‘The most important such property is’ not ‘labor's productive efficiency, which can be measured in its throughput’ (140, emphasis original). It is the product of what today we call ‘quantification’. In order for the capitalist to progress, labour must be put in the form of value (‘contentless’, says Marx [1990 Marx, Karl (1990) Capital: a critique of political economy, volume 1, transl Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books)] in Capital, volume 1), so that calculations can be made. It is as simple as that. Since Chibber seems not to have grasped this at all, and ignores the ins and outs of the so-called ‘reification’ debates—which are now going completely in the direction of liberal humanism in the work of Axel Honneth (2012) and others. Honneth's recent Tanner lecture simply put the critique of reification in the classless identitarian area of ‘recognition’—which reflects a tendency much more insidious than anything the efforts of the subalternists might signal. But Chibber is located in the tendency among Little Britain Marxists patronized by the now defunct British new left, which produces, periodically, peculiar texts demolishing any attempt at expanding the |
a bond. Dwyer has been out of jail since posting bail hours after his Sept. 17 arrest.
Updates from Monday, Oct. 6
The Associated Press confirms Jonathan Dwyer has pleaded not guilty to assaulting his wife:
Arizona Cardinals running back Jonathan Dwyer pleaded not guilty to charges that he assaulted his wife during two arguments in July at their Phoenix apartment. Dwyer appeared at an arraignment hearing Monday in Maricopa County Superior Court. He is charged with felony aggravated assault and eight misdemeanors, including assault.
Updates from Monday, Sept. 29
The Associated Press, via ESPN.com, shared an update on Jonathan Dwyer's situation following his arrest:
Arizona Cardinals running back Jonathan Dwyer has been formally charged with assaulting his wife in two arguments in July at their Phoenix apartment. An indictment publicly released late Friday charges Dwyer with felony aggravated assault and eight misdemeanors. (...) Dwyer had been booked on suspicion of assaulting his son, but the indictment doesn't charge him with crimes related to the child.
Updates from Wednesday, Sept. 24
The Associated Press (via ESPN.com) provided details of the events surrounding Dwyer's arrest:
Police say Arizona Cardinals running back Jonathan Dwyer broke his wife's nose with a head-butt during an argument that began after she learned about his recent phone contact with another woman. Search-warrant records made public Tuesday say the July 21 argument came after Dwyer's wife came to believe her husband was cheating. Dwyer was arrested last week after his wife told police her husband assaulted her on July 21 and 22 at their Phoenix apartment.... In the first encounter, police say Dwyer attempted to kiss and undress his wife, but she refused. Someone who heard the argument called police, who showed up at the apartment but did not make an arrest. Dwyer hid in a shower and his wife said she hadn't been assaulted and denied he was in the home because the running back threatened to kill himself in front of her and their child if she told police about the assault, police said.
However, things continued the next day, per the report:
The next day, Dwyer punched his wife in the face and threw a shoe at her and instead struck their 17-month-old son, whom she was holding, police said. The child wasn't injured. As his wife tried to call police, Dwyer grabbed her cellphone and threw it down from the apartment's second story, police said.
Updates from Thursday, Sept. 18
Darren Urban of AZCardinals.com reported the Cardinals placed Jonathan Dwyer on the reserve, non-illness list Thursday:
The Cardinals have moved running back Jonathan Dwyer, arrested Wednesday in a domestic violence case, to the reserve/non-football illness list, and brought back running back Jalen Parmele to the active roster to get the team back to four backs going into the San Francisco game. The reserve list Dwyer is on means the Cardinals have the option not to pay him. In addition, the Cardinals have cut running back Chris Rainey from the practice squad and signed former Colts running back Kerwynn Williams to fill that spot.
Ian Rapoport of NFL.com reported more about Dwyer following the move by the Cardinals:
Kent Somers of AZCentral.com reported on why the Cardinals placed him on the non-football illness list:
SportsCenter provides the latest on Dwyer after the Cardinals running back was arrested on a domestic violence charge Wednesday:
Jacques Billeaud of the The Associated Press reported the details behind Dwyer's arrest:
Arizona Cardinals running back Jonathan Dwyer head-butted his wife and broke her nose after she refused his sexual advances, and punched her in the face the next day, police said Thursday.... In the first encounter, police say Dwyer attempted to kiss and undress his wife, but she refused. Someone who heard the argument reported the assault to police, who showed up at the apartment but did not make an arrest. Dwyer hid in a bathroom and the wife denied he was in the home because the running back threatened to kill himself in front of her and their child if she told police about the assault, police said. The next day, Dwyer punched his wife with a closed fist on the left side of her face, according to police. He also punched walls and threw a shoe at his 17-month-old son, who was not injured. As his wife tried to call police, Dwyer grabbed her cellphone and threw it down from the home's second story. Witnesses told police that Dwyer's wife said, "I'm calling the police" as she held her swollen face and clutched her son. During his police interview, Dwyer acknowledged hiding in the bathroom when police responded to the first argument and sending a photo of a knife with suicidal threats. Dwyer denied committing an assault, though he acknowledged that he punched walls in his home, threw a phone and that his wife bit his lip during the disputes, according to the police report. As he was released from jail Thursday, he said he never hurt his son.
Original Text
Arizona Cardinals running back Jonathan Dwyer was arrested Wednesday afternoon on charges of domestic violence.
Tyler Baldwin of 3TV News in Arizona first reported the news:
CBS Evening News confirmed the report:
Mike Garafolo of Fox Sports added more details of the allegations:
David Kadlubowski of The Arizona Republic snapped a picture of Dwyer with the police:
Jane McManus of ESPN reported that the Cardinals have since deactivated Dwyer:
The Cardinals released a statement explaining their actions, via Darren Urban of AZCardinals.com:
Urban outlines more information:
Given the climate in the NFL right now, the arrest—stemming from an incident with Dwyer, a woman and an 18-month child—didn't take long to make national news. Dwyer was in the locker room prior to practice, so the arrest happened after that. According to azcentral.com, police took an incident report last week and have been gathering information. Police said Dwyer was accused of aggravated assault "over a fracture" as well as an allegation of assault involving a minor and preventing the use of a phone during an emergency. While further details are unclear at this point, this serves as the newest development in what has been a week chock-full of awful news in the NFL.
This comes just days after video surfaced of Ray Rice knocking out his then-fiancee—along with allegations that the NFL covered up the video—as well as news that Adrian Peterson faces a child abuse charge after he spanked his four-year-old son with a switch.
Earlier Wednesday, the Carolina Panthers placed defensive end Greg Hardy on the NFL's exempt list (as the Minnesota Vikings did with Peterson) while his domestic violence case is resolved, per ESPN.com's David Newton.
It's a dark time in the NFL, and with each new terrible domestic violence story, the pressure will continue to mount on Commissioner Roger Goodell. As Sports Illustrated's Michael McCann argues, though, the blame can be spread out:
As for Dwyer, 25, a first offense of domestic abuse results in a six-game suspension under the new personal conduct policy, which was amended in the wake of the controversy surrounding Rice. However, San Francisco 49ers defensive tackle Ray McDonald was arrested on charges of domestic abuse just days after the NFL put the new policy in place, but he continues to play as the team and league wait for his case to go through the court system.
USA TODAY Sports
With details of Dwyer's situation not yet known, his future with the Cardinals is up in the air. Once more information is available, one can only hope that the NFL has learned from its past mistakes and acts swiftly.It was the 18th-century scientist Carolus Linnaeus that laid the foundations for modern biological taxonomy. It was also Linnaeus who argued for the existence of Homo troglodytes, a primitive people said to inhabit the caves of an Indonesian archipelago. Although troglodyte has since been proven to be an invalid taxon, archaeological doctrine continued to describe our ancestors as cavemen. The idea fits with a particular narrative of human evolution, one that describes a steady march from the primitive to the complex: Humans descended from the trees, stumbled about the land, made homes in caves, and finally found glory in high-rises. In this narrative, progress includes living inside confined physical spaces. This thinking was especially prevalent in Western Europe, where caves yielded so much in the way of art and artifacts that archaeologists became convinced that a cave was also a home, in the modern sense of the word.
By the 1980s, archaeologists understood that this picture was incomplete: The cave was far from being the primary residence. But archaeologists continued focusing on excavating caves, both because it was habitual and the techniques involved were well understood.
Then along came the American anthropological archaeologist, Margaret Conkey. Today a professor emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, she had asked a simple question: What did cave people do all day? What if she looked at the archaeological record from the perspective of a mobile culture, like the Inuit? She decided to look outside of caves.
For the past 20 years, Conkey and her team have been conducting open-air field research in the Ariège region, in the Central Pyrénées foothills of France. Her project, titled “Between the Caves,” concentrated on the Paleolithic era, also known as the Stone Age, before humans became sedentary. Challenging the status quo, she found that the Paleolithic people were much more than cavemen.
The California-based Conkey spoke to Nautilus from Seattle, where she was, coincidently, helping her daughter re-organize her home.
Also in Archaeology The Code of the Conch By Miriam Kolar Three thousand years ago, an expansive ceremonial complex dominated life in the steep Andean valley of Chavín de Huántar, Peru. It was the center of an enigmatic cult where psychotropic plants were used in transformative rituals. Today, a few imposing...READ MORE
Why did you launch the “Between the Caves” project? Were cave sites too crowded with other archaeologists?
Well, one might say that! In the early 1970s I was thinking about a new project. At the time, American archaeologists were developing an open-air survey methodology, where we’re out on the landscape looking for archaeological artifacts. The method wasn’t yet used in France or Spain, or other European countries. So I proposed to my French colleagues a project looking for materials out on the landscape. For Paleolithic research, those materials would be stone tools. They said, “You won’t find anything.” I said, “Why won’t I find anything?” They said, “Nobody’s really found anything or reported anything.” I said, “Has anybody looked systematically?” They said, “Well, no.” They thought I was nuts.
I don’t blame anyone for focusing on caves. Caves are constrained spatially, preservation is excellent because they’re usually limestone and very alkaline, which helps preserve bone and other materials that don’t often preserve in the open air. But caves are an unrepresentative sample of where people were and what they did. People were clearly inside caves—painting, drawing, and doing other kinds of artistic and cultural activities. But they weren’t hunting in a cave, they weren’t collecting raw materials in a cave, they weren’t collecting firewood or other things. So where were they the rest of the time, and what were they doing?
What tells an archaeologist that Paleolithic people spent less time in caves than we imagined in the past?
One big clue is seasonal occupation evidence, something archaeologists infer based on things like animal bones. For example, by looking at found animal teeth, we can tell you at what season of the year the animals were killed. Also, certain animals are only available at certain times—fish that spawn at certain seasons of the year, for example. Almost all caves are described by archaeologists as seasonal, namely as autumn or winter occupations. It’s clear that people were in caves for maybe a couple of months a year at the most.
How did you look for evidence on the landscape and what did you find?
We looked at plowed fields, because when plows churn up dirt, they expose artifacts. We surveyed 360 plowed fields—cornfields, vineyards, sunflower, soybean, sorghum, and other crops in the Central Pyrenees, Ariège region in France. We walked between rows of crops in a systematic way, looking for flint artifacts. Ideally a crop is low enough that you can walk down one row and look to the left and to the right at the same time. Right away we started finding a lot of artifacts.
Caves are an unrepresentative sample of where people were and what they did.
Then we discovered what we think is an open-air habitation site in Peyre Blanque, also in the Ariège region, on a ridge that’s never been plowed. We found artifacts eroding out of a muddy horseback-riding trail in the woods. The horses had stirred up the mud, and exposed some stone tools; now the site has yielded hundreds of them. We started excavating and found stone slabs, which we believe is a habitation structure in the open-air, probably from the Upper Paleolithic, about 17,000 years ago. We also found yellow, black, and red pigments, meaning ochre—powdered hydrated iron oxide—that early humans used for art and body art.
We also found pieces of flint that came from sometimes 200 or more kilometers away. In some fields there were no flint sources anywhere nearby, so finding pieces of flint that are flakes, or otherwise worked, suggested that people carried flint from somewhere, used it for tools, and left it. That means that people were on the move; they were making long treks, or passing these materials to each other as they met somewhere on the landscape. The number of artifacts we found suggests a long-time use of the landscape—people were coming to this area probably 80,000 years ago and even into the Neolithic.
We found many Paleolithic sites, but we can’t determine exactly what period because we just don’t have any datable, organic materials. We’re using a typological classification system that the French perfected—we look at how the people made their tools. Neanderthals, for example, have a very distinctive technique of removing a flake from a core, called the Levallois technique. We found more Neanderthal tools than anybody ever imagined were in this area!
How would you define home?
Home is a place or places on the landscape that you are somehow connected to. It’s also a conceptual and symbolic notion as to where people are from, where they relate to, and where certain important aspects of their lives take place. Home is a place where you reconnect with people or memories. We found that some of our sites were revisited for thousands of years, again and again. On the same sites, we found artifacts that are characteristic of Neanderthal populations of the Middle Paleolithic era, and artifacts that are characteristic of modern humans from the later, Upper Paleolithic era. We call these sites “Places of Many Generations.”
Interestingly, not all these locations are next to a source of flint, so people intentionally chose to use, and re-use, a location with clear evidence of previous generations, previous peoples, and maybe even previous kinds of peoples. People would recognize the stone tools of other groups, similarly to how we’d recognize this funny thing from the 1800s. We see some tools that were possibly made earlier and then reworked much later with different techniques. I think people of the landscape had social memories of the uses of the landscape, and they understood that people before them used those places too. These Places of Many Generations actually could be places of memory and memory-making. So people of the landscape created memories and, in doing so, created a home.
Would an archaeologist from a mobile culture have a different view of what home is compared to an archaeologist from a sedentary culture?
I think so. Archaeologists are influenced by their culture, not surprisingly. We can’t be totally neutral—we’d be like a blob—but it’s important to recognize what biases we bring to our work. My colleagues and I are suggesting that we have certain biases about what constitutes a “home” and that mobile people didn’t think of home as a stationary physical structure. A “homeless” archaeologist would have a different perspective. Only instead of using the term “homeless,” which in our culture has a negative connotation, I use the term “spatially ambitious.” Clearly, based on what we found, our ancestors were way more spatially ambitious than the cavemen we had thought them to be. Accepting that fact can help us recognize our modern spatially ambitious behavior—immigration, emigration, globalization—and understand what the concept of home means for modern humans.
Jude Isabella is a science writer based in Victoria, British Columbia. Her new book, Salmon, A Scientific Memoir, will be released next year.
This article was originally published in our “Home” issue in December, 2013.Just days after being challenged by Black Lives Matter activists to do a better job of addressing police violence against black women in the U.S., presidential candidate Bernie Sanders on Wednesday released a statement in response to new footage of Sandra Bland's arrest which he called "totally outrageous."
The development, say observers, demonstrates the power of bold action and the potential impact of the growing racial justice movement.
Dashcam footage of her arrest was released Tuesday night, showing a chain of events that betray Encinia's earlier claim that Bland had assaulted him. Instead, the footage shows that the officer escalated their encounter with threats before violently restraining her.
"This video of the arrest of Sandra Bland shows totally outrageous police behavior," Sanders stated on Wednesday. "No one should be yanked from her car, thrown to the ground, assaulted and arrested for a minor traffic stop. The result is that three days later she is dead in her jail cell. This video highlights once again why we need real police reform. People should not die for a minor traffic infraction. This type of police abuse has become an all-too-common occurrence for people of color and it must stop."
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Bland, who had recently moved to Texas from Illinois to begin a job at her alma mater of Prairie View A&M University, was pulled over by Texas State Trooper Brian Encinia on July 10 for failing to use a turn signal. She was found dead in a Waller County jail cell on July 13.
Partial footage of the arrest, filmed by a bystander, began circulating last week. Several activists staged a protest on Saturday at Netroots Nation—a progressive conference which included speeches by Sanders and his Democratic rival for president, former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley—chanting "Say her name!" and challenging the candidates to give "concrete action plans" on ending police violence against black men and women.
As of this writing, neither O'Malley nor Hillary Clinton have responded to the footage released Tuesday.
Both Sanders and O'Malley were criticized over what many saw as a failure to adequately respond to that challenge. The candidates "claim that they represent all of America, but then you get up there and you see when they're pressured on issues that are specifically black they fumble," one organizer, Ashley Yeats, said in an interview on July 18. "They have to address it head-on. They have to use simple and clear language."The Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte (MBQ) are proud of our heritage, history, and culture. MBQ is part of the Mohawk Nation within the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy. We are one of the Six Nation communities politically associated with the Iroquois Caucus and a member First Nation of the Association of Iroquois and Allied Indians (AIAI).
Our current membership as of February 1st, 2017, is 9,714, of which 2,178 members live on the Territory. As of 2007, we have the ninth largest membership of all First Nations in Canada, and are the third largest in Ontario. We welcome you to explore our website to learn more about our community and culture, the programs and services provided by the MBQ Administration, and the political leadership of Tyendinaga Mohawk Council. — R. Donald Maracle, ChiefYou’ve already caught a glimpse of what lies behind the final window, haven’t you? You are so naughty. But then again, there was no hiding that particularly cubic outline, was there?
It’s… Minecraft!
Jim: Pedantically speaking, this isn’t a game that came out in 2010. It’s only just gone into beta. But then again, whatever label software wizards might put on their projects, if you are paying money to play it, then it’s out. And there’s no doubt that Minecraft has dominated this year. Here’s my list of Why Minecraft:
1) It’s an amazing demonstration of what can be done by a small team (essentially just Mr Notch) if the ideas are a good. It’s both the power of procedural generation and the beauty that can be found in lo-fi presentation. This is very much What We Were Hoping For when this indie revolution started to spool up for real.
2) It’s absolutely, fundamentally The PC. Digitally distributed, patched constantly – a rolling project supported by its community and the open-ended power of the internet. It’s about user-generated content at its core, and it’s a brilliant platform for modding.
3) This, in stark contrast to – say – Lego Universe, demonstrates just how much we like building and tinkering, and how valuable that can be if we’re allowed real scope to experiment. It’s not just about being given the tools for building, it’s being given the game design context to have real freedom to use the tools as we see fit. Minecraft is freedom to build.
4) Related to 3) It’s an awesome platform for crazy people to do insane stuff. There’s nothing better than that. (See the Minecraft CPU map, etc.)
5) Because there’s a real choice between playing single-player and multiplayer. So many games go the multiplayer route when they don’t need to, or don’t offer multiplayer when they clearly should. Minecraft has, albeit incompletely, supported both. When survival mode is a little more mature and totally supportive of online play then this will just be scintillating.
6) Survival mode. I’ve lost count of the number of times over the years I’ve read people say something along the lines of “Yeah, I wish there was just some sandboxy game where I could wander about, build my base, do a bit of a exploring, at my own pace.” And here it is.
It’s not over yet. There are potentially years of development left to go. There’s a real danger, I think, that Notch will evolve Minecraft into a place where it loses what makes it magical. Maybe not, perhaps he’ll avoid the shiny lures and pitfalls that take down so many other projects, but even if this game does stray down the wrong path, we can say for sure that in 2010, it was peerless. Good work, Notch. And here’s to digging straight down without a plan in 2011.
John: It’s been a while since I’ve had time to play Minecraft. In fact, I’ve not had a chance to return since the introduction of the biomes, portals, and all the accompanying extras. But for the last couple of days it’s pretty much all I’ve done, and I’m interested to discover that despite all the changes, despite ticking over from alpha to beta, I’m still playing it in the exact same way as I always have.
Wherever I appear, that’s home. If the starting area is some barren desert, I ditch it and start a new one. All I want is a mountain and a large patch of sea. I start off by building a tall tower so I can find my way back. Then pootle about, hopefully finding some coal along the way. I make sure I’ve got some basic stone tools. As dusk appears, I dig a hole, wall it up, and begin mining. (Except, coo, look at that! Dusk is so much prettier now!)
In what will be my home I build a storage crate, an oven, and a crafting table. And other than armour and a boat, it never gets more complicated than that.
I’m not sure what I’m mining for – why I care so much about finding gold, diamond, or especially redstone. But those are my goals – finding those rarer minerals. I’ve no intention of building minecart rails, elaborate mechanisms, nor super-computers. I don’t need any of them for anything I hope to do. All I want is to find the stuff, put it in a box, and maybe make a shirt out of it. Then get in my boat, aim for a different island, and start digging there too.
And it keeps me so happy. It’s such perfect fodder, entertaining me while I watch a TV show on the other screen (yesterday it accompanied Dr Katz, today The Trip), enticing me to find a path down to the glint of blue ore.
For me it’s about those moments when I’m just digging a staircase down into the rock and my pick goes through into a cave. The thrill of it, working out if it’s an indefensible cavern, a single room, or a network of caves leading to an all-important lava stream. There I’ll build a waypoint, a chest and a crafting table. I’ll put in all the stuff I don’t want to lose, then go exploring further.
And then, returning with pockets bulging, I’ll bring everything back to my main home with the plan to return there to continue my conquest. After lighting the correct route with many torches to make sure I ever find it again, I’ll process whatever I’ve found into gorgeous armour, take a handful of excellent equipment with me, get back to where I’d left off, and then immediately get pushed in the lava by a surprise zombie, lose everything, and never want to return to that world again.
It happens every single time. It’s literally just happened. I’m writing this now because it’s too upsetting to go back there. And this time I spent the first few hours making sure I’d definitely not lose my home base while exploring elsewhere. I can’t let this much effort go to waste:
Or I’ll just start again, like I always do. This is unquestionably my game of the year. Not just in terms of time spent, but contentment received. It taps directly into a part of me that’s always wanted a game. It lets me potter, aimlessly, with no pressure. That’s such a huge gift. It lets you do something completely different. And that’s why it’s magical.
Alec: The bloke who fixed my boiler plays it with his kid.
At least one PR with a complicated London haircut plays it.
One of the Apple-worshipping, PC-loathing designers in the office plays it.
Any games journalist with a genuine interest in gaming plays it.
Millions and millions of people are playing it, and I’m pretty sure quite a few of them wouldn’t call themselves ‘gamers.’
They’re out there. They’re everywhere. They’d never get along, but they think as one.
Minecraft isn’t such a surprise. It was always going to happen, because there needed to be a new Sims. We’ve often remarked on RPS how strange it is that so few games sought to challenge The Sims’ crown, but then along comes Minecraft, doing it by mistake. That universal appeal of self-expression, self-indulgence and construction is at its very core, and neatly proving that all those expensive action games don’t really understand the human urge to explore a digital fantasyscape.
FarmVille, which very, very broadly explores similar concepts of collection and construction, is all that really holds it back from unassailable world domination, but then the best may well be yet to come.
I could name a dozen tiny things Minecraft does which meant it was always destined to be so much more than an obscure indie building game – the way some blocks hover magically when their surroundings are carved away, spying a cow from miles away and haring off across the world to hunt it for its hide, the effect of the day/night cycle on enemies, the transformative texture packs… The key for me, though, is that it’s a game about recycling. Almost nothing is destroyed in Minecraft – instead, it’s turned to new purpose, or flat-packed down into blocks awaiting new purpose. The world doesn’t reduce, it doesn’t even grow – like energy, it simply transforms. That’s the real key to creation. Epic-scale plasticine, forever permitting as much as you can imagine.
Minecraft itself, on the other hand, is only going to get bigger. Like Jim, I worry one change too many will bring this good-natured Jenga tower crashing down, but I also suspect that we’ll see some sort of update that really, truly makes this a game for everybody.
Kieron: As Alec says, it really was a phenomenon. And I’m going to use a really cynical metric to prove this.
Minecraft was absolutely RPS’ game of the year. Not just because we loved it – and we all did – but because how much it contributed to the material existence of the site. In terms of sheer number of page impressions, nothing we covered managed to get as many people reading. And so, via the wonders of advertising, giving us money. Second biggest link of the year was Quinns’ Mine The Gap series. Taken as a whole, it was bigger than everything.
(The first was the revealing of the online-only Ubisoft DRM, for those who are interested.)
(And doing an article on the Top 50 stories at RPS of the year does appeal. They’re not quite what you’d expect.)
And the wonderful thing about this? For a good couple of months, we were the only fuckers covering it. Well, us and the other place. It felt a little the days before the mid-nineties, where you only really got music coverage in the music press, and the NME was selling something like 500K because it was the only place you could find out about the Smiths. How on earth could everyone else be so stupid? How could they be missing covering this enormous, generational, life-affirming THING?
Well, because to paraphrase the immortal words of Huggy Bear, it was happening without their permission. It didn’t come with a press release. It didn’t come on a corporate-approved console-DRM-box. It just existed, was inspired, allowed people to prove their own inspiration, and everyone who got it profited from the experience. It broke every single rule, and showed how nonsense those rules were. William Goldman’s line about Hollywood applies as much to games: NO-ONE KNOWS ANYTHING. It burns down civilization and revealed what an untamed landscape gaming really is.
We can build anything from here. And with luck, we will.
Quinns: Kieron already mentioned Mine The Gap, and through those articles I’ve already spoken and shouted and whimpered my piece about Minecraft, but there is one thing I have left to say. It’s this: Not an hour goes past where I don’t give thanks for whatever dark zap of imagination led to Notch putting Creepers in this game.
I love Creepers. I love the phenomenon they’ve become (nsfw). On the off chance you haven’t played Minecraft yet (you eventually will, by the way), Creepers are one of the few wandering monsters in the game. They do one thing, and one thing only. They get close to you, start hissing, and then detonate, taking their surroundings with them. More often than not you fail to notice their approach because you’re so engrossed in what you’re building, and by the time you hear the hiss you don’t have enough time left to do anything about it.
Creepers are the simplest of monsters, but it’s amazing how they work to make Minecraft so much more than a sandbox game. Everybody who plays Minecraft will have their own Creeper story, and their own pocketful of emotions towards the things, despite their lack of animations and single sound effect. They give me hope about what Notch plans to do with Minecraft in the long term. If Notch can implement his world and story as elegantly as the Creepers, it’s going to be a beautiful finished piece.
Of course, it’s already beautiful. Contrary to what Frightened Rabbit may believe, you will find love in a hole. There’s a lot to love down there- rock formations and lava flows, diamonds and monsters.
You’ll find love in a tree, too. You’ll find love at the top of a mountain. You’ll find love in a pitiful dugout, constructed in 15 seconds to escape from angry spiders that slide around the world like Segways. You’ll find love in your painstakingly constructed new cabin, built over 15 hours for no purpose whatsoever. You’ll find love behind a waterfall. You’ll find love crossing a river in a tiny boat. You’ll find love at sunrise, and sunset. You’ll find love in a snowstorm. But mostly, you’ll find love in a hole.
Thanks for reading, everybody! And Merry Christmas.Proposals include simpler and less intrusive self-declaration system for those over 16 who want to change gender
People wishing to legally change their gender may be able to do so by signing a statutory declaration from the age of 16 under plans to radically reform gender recognition law in Scotland.
The proposals include the option of full legal recognition for non-binary people – those who do not identify as either male or female – which would make Scotland one of a handful of countries to do so. The plans follow a ruling by Germany’s highest constitutional court on Wednesday that birth certificates should allow a third gender category.
Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister, pledged at an LGBTI hustings before last year’s Holyrood elections that legislating for non-binary recognition would be as important in her next parliamentary term as equal marriage was to the last.
Launching the consultation on Thursday, Angela Constance, the cabinet secretary for communities, social Security and equality, said: “Scotland rightly has a reputation as one of the most progressive countries in relation to LGBTI legal and human rights equality in Europe – but we need to do more to progress equality for trans people.”
The plans, which are intended to make it simpler and less intrusive for transgender people to be legally recognised, will remove the requirements to provide medical evidence and to live in an acquired gender for two years.
The new self-declaration system, based on the model practiced in the Republic of Ireland, will require an individual to apply to a specialist government unit, to complete a simple applications form and then to sign a statutory declaration before a legal official that they understand the consequences of their actions, and intend to live in their acquired gender for the rest of their life.
Theresa May plans to let people change gender without medical checks Read more
James Morton, manager of Scottish Trans Alliance, welcomed the move to self-declaration, saying: “The current process to change the gender on a trans person’s birth certificate is a humiliating, offensive and expensive red-tape nightmare which requires them to submit intrusive psychiatric evidence to a faceless tribunal panel years after they transitioned. It makes sense for birth certificates to be brought into line with the self-declaration process already used to change all other identity documents when trans people start living in their gender identity.”
On Thursday, a coalition of Scottish women’s organisations, including Engender, Rape Crisis Scotland and Women 50:50, stated that they would collaborate with trans and other equality organisations to ensure that the new processes were appropriately designed.
In a jointly issued statement in support of legal reform for gender recognition, they added: “We do not regard trans equality and women’s equality to be in competition or contradiction with each other. We support the Equal Recognition campaign and welcome the reform of the Gender Recognition Act. Rape Crisis and Women’s Aid in Scotland provide trans inclusive services on the basis of self identification.”
The Scottish government has confirmed that it will continue to gather separate data for men and women where it is appropriate, for example regarding the pay gap.
The UK government announced plans to consult on gender recognition legislation in July, but their consultation is not expected before the new year.I suggest that that is a good point for me to come in to somewhat disprove the final comments of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt. However, before I do so, I should like to say to all noble Lords who have spoken that it is a challenge—in fact, almost impossible—to sum up a debate such as this, but it is also a privilege to have been able to listen to such a wide-ranging debate. We have talked about home affairs, law and justice, health and education. All those are important, as today’s debate has shown.
If noble Lords agree, I shall do my usual thing of writing a commentary on the debate and will circulate it to all noble Lords who have spoken. Obviously, in doing that, I shall need the help of my noble friend Lord Faulks. I shall also certainly need the help of my noble friends Lord Howe and Lord Nash, who will provide me with the technical expertise that I shall do my best to demonstrate in my brief comments. However, I am obviously way outside my comfort zone in certain of these areas.
Before I go on to comment, I should like to congratulate our two maiden speakers. It is not often that we have two excellent speeches such as we have heard today. My noble friend and the right reverend Prelate are from extremely different backgrounds and have different callings in life, but both demonstrated a determination to be good at what they felt they were called to do and, furthermore, they did so with a great sense of humour. I am delighted to welcome the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chelmsford to this House, and I am sure that we will hear from him; he has a lot to tell us. My noble friend Lord Glendonbrook, as I must learn to call Michael Bishop whom I have known for an awfully long time—before I came here and before he did—said that he is a great supporter of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company. In many ways he has shown how one can be successful in business and successful in achieving other things in life that are important to so many other people.
I shall now turn to the matters in hand. The modern slavery Bill is warmly welcomed by noble Lords. I pay tribute to the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, and her committee. She is not in her place now but she was earlier today. The pre-legislative scrutiny committee has enormously helped the Government to present their Bill. We have been able to hear from two Members of that committee today—the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby and |
by a shared passion for space exploration
Despite never meeting in person, space and LEGO fans Felix Stiessen and Valérie Roche beat the odds with their wonderfully brick built version of the iconic Apollo rocket. It was a collaboration that tested their skills in numerous ways but, as it turns out, the long-distance collaboration also proved to be a significant benefit to their project, as Felix states "there were often times when one of us abandoned the project for a few weeks and came back to it later; however, thanks to the fact that it is a collaborative project, it was always the case that one of us continued making progress on the project and re-motivated the other".
Felix and Valérie's collaborative spirit was tranferred to the LEGO design team as well, who took over the project once it was approved, in order to ensure it lived up to LEGO quality standards. Two designers, Michael Psiaki and Carl Thomas Mirriam, motivated by their enthusiasm for space, teamed up to bring the final model to life. "We were actually not asked. I was so excited when I heard that the project was potentially going to happen, and told Carl about it because I knew he was also a space fanatic. We decided it would be really cool to work together since it is such a big mode, so we approached the Ideas team about helping develop the product", Michael said.Yankee Stadium hosted a friendly between Spain and the Republic of Ireland in 2013. (Mike Stobe, Getty Images) Yankee Stadium hosted a friendly between Spain and the Republic of Ireland in 2013. (Mike Stobe, Getty Images)
Major League Soccer's New York expansion team will begin play in one of the city's most iconic venues.
According to a report in the New York Times, New York City Football Club (NYCFC) will play their first three MLS seasons at Yankee Stadium, the home field of their co-owners the New York Yankees. NYCFC, a joint venture between the Yankees and Manchester City of the English Premier League, had been searching for a concrete stadium plan since being announced as MLS' 20th team on May 21, 2013. The team begins play next season.
Yankee Stadium had been rumored as a temporary destination as a permanent solution was found, but efforts to secure that permanent deal have been stymied in the past. The club's plans to build in Queens within Corona park were halted by community opposition, and though the club reportedly submitted plans to build a venue nearby Yankee Stadium, there has not been any update since.
Yankee Stadium has been used as a soccer venue four times in its current iteration -- twice each in 2012 and 2013. For each of those games -- three pre-season warmups between European clubs and one international friendly between Spain and the Republic of Ireland -- temporary grass was laid over the dirt infield. The stadium is also set to host an International Champions Cup match between Manchester City and Liverpool on July 30th of this year. However some (including, reportedly, Major League Baseball) believe accommodating a full season of soccer and baseball each summer might be too much for the stadium's turf to handle.Los Angeles Rams punter Johnny Hekker has been named the team’s social media star, he’s been absolutely superb to this point in his NFL career and now, we’ve come to find out that he’s apparently got amazing hands as well.
Seriously.
Via the team’s official Instagram account:
All jokes aside, that was pretty awesome. Best of all, Hekker knew it was awesome with that little post-catch celebration.
Hekker is a two-time Pro Bowler, two-time first-team All-Pro and was named a second-team All-Pro once as well. Over his four years in the NFL, he’s seen his average yards-per-punt increase each year, while dropping a career-high 41 punts inside the opponents’ 20-yard-line in 2015.
While Hekker is an elite punter, maybe we can see him get out there for a few trick plays as a wide receiver in 2016? Alright, probably not, but hey, it’s fun to think about at least.I am a rich person.
By the end of this article, you might conclude that you are a rich person too.
I’ve long since wondered what I should do with the awkwardness that I feel knowing that I am rich in the presence of those with whom I minister.
A little about my context:
My wife and I live in Alotau (city), Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea (country). I live a double life. To many of you, I’m the financial guy who blogs about the topic of money and the Bible. However, what you don’t see is that I spend most of my day sitting with, talking to, studying with, and getting to know the world’s poor. Most of my closest PNG friends make under $1,000 USD per year.
There is a huge gulf. I am a rich man in the midst of the poor.
These pictures are taken at the house of one of the people I interviewed.
What Do The Poor Have To Say About The Rich?
After church one Sunday, I asked some folks from church if they wouldn’t mind coming to my house to help me work on a project. The instructions were blissfully unclear and everyone willingly agreed.
They also don’t know that I live a double life. Only a couple in the group had ever even heard of the Internet and none of them knew I was doing any writing on the topic of Bible and money.
I invited some fellow church members to my house for lunch. John, Siggy, Ponifasio, Lorraine, Rizpha, Susan, and Joel are good representatives of the standard of living in and around Alotau. I fed them some sandwiches so everyone would be in good spirits, and I told them what we were going to talk about – money.
I stated the obvious. “I know, and you know I’m rich”. In terms of the world, you would be called ‘the world’s poor’.” I pleaded with them to be completely honest with me – don’t sugar coat what you want to say – tell me what the world’s poor have to say about their lives, the rich, and the gospel.
Question #1: What must a person accumulate or have to be considered rich?
The folks in Milne Bay are shy people. Furthermore, they aren’t given to asking or responding to direct questions. My question stunned them into silence. They knew we were about to step onto thin ice. We were going to talk directly about the topic of wealth and poverty. For a full 45 seconds everyone avoided eye contact and no one spoke.
I decided I needed to find a backdoor to get access to the information I was seeking.
I went around the room person by person and asked them the question, “Are you rich?” All, understandably, said no – if I was speaking about material things. But, there was still one person I didn’t ask the question to – myself.
Question #2: What about me? Am I rich?
Almost instantaneously their faces were plastered with sly smirks. The smirk said it all – of course you are rich. Shortly thereafter, everyone verbally affirmed their non-verbal expression by saying yes, I am rich.
Question #3: So what makes me rich? What do I have that makes you think I am rich?
Interestingly, the first answer was my skin color – I am a Caucasian. Then they gave some details about what you must possess or have to be categorized as rich:
A job
Car
Shop for food any time you want
House with lights, a house made of materials not taken from the bush
No worries about tomorrow’s needs
Have pride [with pride she meant confidence] and happiness
Have knowledge
Question #4: If you could choose to be rich or poor, which would you choose?
The answers were split 50/50.
Those who would rather be poor said that even if they had more they might not be satisfied. They feel like life is easier without many items and they thought ultimately they would be happier with less.
Those who would rather be rich said they wanted the freedom to move around as necessary, they wouldn’t need to worry about the future, they would have what they need for school fees. Money would offer them security.
Question #5: What does it take to be rich? How does one become rich?
Time, effort, and hard work in the garden
A good family background so good lessons could be passed on from generation to generation
Education
Exposure to the rich – the opportunity to work with or for a rich person
Question #6: How do most people feel about rich New Guineans?
Jealous. They don’t think they can do it (become rich) and they believe that person must know something that they do not know.
Editor’s note: In many third world countries, there is a type of thinking called “limited goods”. Money would be viewed like a pie. If you take too much money, (too big of a piece of pie) I won’t be able to get as much. Compare that to the North American mindset that money is unlimited; my ability to earn and produce income does not necessarily take away from your ability to earn a living.
Questions #7: What are the advantages of being the world’s poor?
No fear of robbery
Freedom of time
No worrying about your property
You can live at peace
Don’t have to worry – you can rest good and you don’t have to think so much. The rich have so much on their minds.
Question #8: What are the disadvantages of being the world’s poor?
Cannot travel – especially cannot see the other places in the world
Cannot get a good education
Lack of money for things like school fess and food
City life is hard because you don’t get paid enough to manage the needs of your family
Cannot meet needs – what to eat the next day and clothing
Poor health services
Question #9: How much of their income do most people spend on food?
Everything
All of it
99.8%
Question #10: Earlier someone mentioned needs and luxury. What things would you say are luxuries?
There was that smart little smirk again. Everyone tried inconspicuously glancing around my house as if to say, “look around”.
TV
Vehicle
Stove
Fridge
Electricity
Clean water
watches
rings
expensive cell phones
Things in the house – toilet and running water
Good house (defined as having an iron roof)
Air conditioning in the office
House full of food
Cupboards
Tables
Kids’ education
Question #11: For a moment, think specifically about Milne Bay. What are the best things the rich could be doing with their money to help the world’s poor?
Help with school fees
Build a university
Better school teaching and materials
Training and courses for vocational skills
Health services that includes training doctors
Programs to address social issues like drinking. Rehabilitation. Sports programs. Counseling. The poor think negatively about themselves and look down on themselves.
Sponsor a missionary
Question #12: How much should the rich give to the poor?
Enough
What their hearts are willing to give
Whatever they are satisfied to give. As they know their giving makes a difference, they might be satisfied to give more.
Question #13: If God blesses people who work hard, why are so many hard working people in PNG poor?
Because of the culture issue. When someone works, all other family members feed off them. The working class pays for everyone else and all income is drained by the poor.
Lots of family members live in the same house. People are expected to help family and so they cannot accumulate any savings.
—————-
With that question, I ended the interview.
The next day several people told me how much they loved the interview. They enjoyed exploring some of these topics and especially felt a sense of relief knowing that the dust was settled and it was all out in the open – I’m a rich person living in the midst of the poor.
Perhaps in the future I will share some of my responses and reflections, but for now I’m interested in knowing what you thought about these answers. What answer stood out to you or challenged you the most?Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) says Republicans who want to split the California-based 9th Circuit Court of Appeals into two courts are trying to engage in “judicial gerrymandering.”
Nadler defended the court during a Thursday hearing in a House Judiciary subcommittee about proposals to split the 9th Circuit into two courts, creating a new 12th Circuit Court of Appeals.
“Like clockwork, we see proposals to split up the 9th Circuit whenever it delivers a controversial decision with which conservatives disagree,” he said, a day after a federal district judge in Hawaii temporarily blocked President Trump’s revised travel ban nationwide.
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Hawaii is one of several states in the 9th Circuit’s jurisdiction. The court last month upheld an order from a federal district judge in Washington blocking Trump’s initial order.
Nadler called it “highly inappropriate” to manipulate the court in order to get a certain opinion.
“Just as there is a nationwide movement to end legislative gerrymandering, we should resist this form of judicial gerrymandering as well,” he said.
Republicans in the House and Senate have offered bills to split the court into two separate Circuit Courts of Appeals.
Republicans say the court — which covers California, Arizona, Alaska, Nevada, Idaho, Oregon, Montana, Washington and Hawaii as well as Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands — has become too big to be effective.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz Jason ChaffetzTop Utah paper knocks Chaffetz as he mulls run for governor: ‘His political career should be over’ Boehner working on memoir: report Former GOP lawmaker on death of 7-year-old migrant girl: Message should be ‘don't make this journey, it will kill you' MORE (R-Utah) said the decisions coming out of the 9th Circuit are “infuriating.”
“To look to the 9th Circuit, to see people say, ‘Well there’s 70 people here we have to protect and 80 people here,’ what about protecting the United States of America?” he asked.
“It’s the 9th Circuit that is causing these problems and taking away the duties that the Judiciary Committee, the Congress has given to the President of the United States to protect our borders.”
The Thursday hearing was held by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet.LDS.org Appearance, Menus to Evolve Over Time
Contributed By Camille West, LDS.org Church News
Article Highlights Ever-changing technology and Church needs mean LDS.org will need to evolve over time.
Improvements include an updated appearance; menu and navigation changes will come later.
“We are always striving to make LDS.org more intuitive and easy to use.” —Jeff Isom, director of LDS.org
LDS.org is getting a new look in a release scheduled for early February, the first in a series of improvements meant to make the official Church website more personalized and easy to use.
According to Jeff Isom, director of LDS.org, the Church’s approach for adapting LDS.org to meet the needs of members “is one of evolution, not revolution. This means we will make regular small improvements to the site instead of less frequent, large changes,” he said.
All of the resources and tools visitors are accustomed to using on LDS.org will continue to be available. For now, the LDS.org menu and navigation will remain the same, but the evolution of changes will eventually culminate in a new navigation menu structure and user experience, similar to that found in the Gospel Library mobile application.
“We recognize that any change can be frustrating for regular site visitors who have learned to find a resource in a certain location. However, with a site as large and complex as LDS.org, change is necessary to stay current with Church needs and technology changes. We are always striving to make LDS.org more intuitive and easy to use.”
Those who work on the website regularly review user feedback, conduct research, and seek direction from Church leaders to identify what should change on LDS.org, he said.
The changes will affect all LDS.org language sites and country communication pages (country websites).
After the February release, visitors to LDS.org will see the following new features:
Appearance changes
New My Account and Ward selector
New Country and Language selector
Addition of menu navigation and search options to country communication pages
Appearance Changes
In an effort to provide visual consistency, better readability and user experience, and an updated design across the site, some visual elements will change. The most noticeable change will be the background color changing from blue to white.
Some upcoming changes to LDS.org include changing the background color from blue to white.
New My Account and Ward Selector
This selector found at the top of the all pages on the website will replace the Sign-In/Tools link and will feature content options in an easier-to-read, more mobile-friendly drop-down menu.
The new My Account and Ward selector makes it easy for visitors to find personalized information.
New Country and Language Selector
This selector, also found at the top of the website, will replace the language selector, making it easier for members to find local content for their area on their country communication pages.
The new Country and Language selector helps visitors to LDS.org select their language and find local content for their area.
Addition of Menu and Search Options to Country and Area Communication Pages
Country communication pages will now include the same navigation menus found on LDS.org (Scriptures, Teachings, Resources, and News). This means when members visit their country communication page for local content, they can also easily access Church resources without needing to open LDS.org. If they do navigate to LDS.org, they can easily return.
In addition, users will be able to choose between site-specific search options (whether to search their local content only, or all of LDS.org content).
The addition of the LDS.org menu structure to local pages means visitors don’t have to leave local pages to access scriptures and other resources.
Feedback Requested
As with all attempts to improve online resources and experiences for members, Church designers and developers encourage patience and flexibility throughout the process. To help ensure these and other upcoming changes are meeting members’ needs, users are invited to provide feedback. Simply scroll to the bottom of LDS.org and select Feedback.
Visitors to LDS.org can help improve the site by submitting feedback.This post contains affiliate links. Please see my disclosure policy.
One of our favorite ways to decorate the tree every year is with homemade ornaments. Salt dough is a fun and easy craft for the kids and in the end you have an adorable keepsake ornament for your tree. There are SO many creative ideas out there for Christmas salt dough ornaments that I couldn’t pick just one, so here are some ideas that I’ve rounded up for you.
Before you get started here are some important supplies you’ll want to have on handy when you make your ornaments aside from the flour, salt and water for the dough, you’ll want to make sure you have festive holiday ribbon, paints, rolling pins, and most importantly an all purpose sealant like the one we use below!
Check out these 27 Christmas salt dough ornaments for kids to make below.
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25+ DIY Christmas Salt Dough Ornaments
Click on the links below for instructions.
1. DIY Snowman Hands – From Paging Fun Mums
2. Reindeer Handprint Clay Ornament – From Happy Go Lucky
3. Salt Dough Handprint Christmas Tree Ornaments – The Imagination Tree
4. Frozen Olaf Salt Dough Christmas Ornament – From I Heart Arts n Crafts
5. Fingerprint Snowman Salt Dough Christmas Ornament – From Crafty Morning
6. Reindeer Footprint Ornaments – From Fun Handprint Art
7. Glow in the Dark Salt Dough Recipe – From Growing A Jeweled Rose
8. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Ornaments – From Viva Veltoro
9. Snowflake Salt Dough Suncatcher Garland – From Homegrown Friends
10. Baking Soda Clay Ornaments – From Mama Papa Bubba
11. Rainbow Marbled Salt Dough Ornaments – From Twodaloo
12. Salt Dough Candy Cane Ornaments – From Fun At Home With Kids
13. Hand Print Santa Keepsake Ornament – From From ABCs to ACTs
14. Fingerprint Gingerbread Man Salt Dough Ornament – From Crafty Morning
15. Melted Crayon Salt Dough Ornaments – From The Artful Parent
16. Salt Dough Hand Print Ornament – From This Blessed Nest
17. Fingerprint Heart Ornaments – From Mama Papa Bubba
18. Cinnamon Scented Ornaments – From Smart School House
19. Salt Dough Handprint Ornaments – From Olive Juice Mama
20. Olaf Salt Dough Ornament – From The Educator’s Spin On It
21. Thumbprint Christmas Tree – From Seven Alive
22. Salt Dough Decorations – From The Imagination Tree
23. Handprint Mitten Ornaments – From Busy Bugs
24. Sparkly, Beaded Salt Dough Ornaments – From The Artful Parent
25. Toddler Painted Salt Dough Ornaments – From Alisa Burke
26. Christmas Salt Dough Letters – From Nurture Store
27. How to Make Salt Dough Ornaments – From Viva Veltoro
Make sure to follow I Heart Arts n Crafts on Facebook and Pinterest! And if you decide to make any of my crafts, please share them on my Facebook page or use #iheartartsncrafts on Instagram for me to see!
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15 Christmas Cards Kids Can Make!Siu Yuk, a popular Cantonese dish that has disseminated throughout Southeast Asia and revered for its crispy, crackling skin and layers of rendered pork fat. This beautiful cut of fatty pork is a cut of pork belly rubbed with 5 spice, salt, and sugar then roasted at a high temperature until the skin bubbles and crackles very much like pork rind. In my family, the dish is called Heo Quay which in Vietnamese literally translates to Spun Pork because traditionally, the entire pig is roasted over a pit of coal and hand spun.
It tastes great with steamed buns or rice. The crispy skin and succulent meat makes it very addicting.
This recipe is best when prepared overnight so that the pork has time to absorb the 5 spice flavors. Okay, the best place to find pork belly is at an Asian market. They’re usually pretty inexpensive. Once you get your hands on some pork belly, what you want to do first is to run the pork belly under water and pat it dry with a paper towel. Then place it on a foil sheet skin side down.
Now, mix the salt, 5 spice, and sugar together.
And rub it evenly on the meat side of the pork, avoiding the skin part. This is starting to look good. Smells good too.
Flip the pork over and using a very sharp knife, make incisions on the skin without cutting deep into the meat part. You an also score the skin diagonally. It doesn’t really matter. The point is when the fat starts to cook, the incisions will allow the steam to escape and this makes the skin crispy! Sprinkle the skin with salt. Slowly fold the foil to cover the meat but leave the skin exposed. Leave it in the fridge to cure and dry overnight. Or if you’re in a hurry, wait for 4 hours. The longer you allow the pork belly to dry, the crisper it will be so it’s worth the wait!
Preheat your oven to 375 degrees fahrenheit. Line a non-stick pan with foil. Invert a pie pan on the baking pan. Remove pork belly from the foil and place on top of pie pan with skin side down. If you have a roasting rack, use it instead of doing it this way. The important thing is to let the fat drain. Now place the pan on the middle rack and roast for 40 minutes. Then remove the pan from the oven and flip the pork belly over with skin side on top and dab any liquid on the skin with a paper towel, ensuring that the skin is dry. Baste with vinegar and roast for another 40 minutes with skin side up. Then broil for 10 minutes 425 degrees.
Remove from oven and let rest for 5 minutes before cutting and serving. Also congratulations! You’re now a pork belly rock star! Look at that bubbly skin! YUM!
Recipe yields 4 servings
Pork
• 2 pounds of unsliced pork belly with skin on
• 1 tablespoon of 5 spice powder
• 1 teaspoon of salt plus extra on the side
• 1 tablespoon of granulated sugar
• aluminum foil sheet
Basting liquid
• 1 tablespoon of distilled white vinegar
Equipment
• Pie Pan
• Non-stick baking pan
• metal tongs
• basting brush
1. Mix 5 spice powder, salt, and sugar and set aside.
2. Run pork belly under water and pat dry with paper towel.
3. Lay pork belly skin side down and rub seasoning on the meat and sides but do not allow the seasoning to coat the skin or it will turn dark when cooking.
4. Flip the pork belly over with skin side up and using a sharp knife, make small horizontal incisions throughout the skin without cutting deep into the meat. Lightly sprinkle the skin with salt.
5. Cover the pork belly meat with aluminum foil, leaving the skin (top) exposed. Transfer onto a tray and refrigerate overnight or at least 4 hours. Remember to leave the top uncovered. Dry skin will ensure crispy pork.
6. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Invert a pie pan on the non-stick baking sheet and place pork skin side down on top of the pie pan and roast for 40 minutes. Remove from oven and flip pork over with skin side up, dab any moisture/seasoning on skin off. Lightly base the skin with the vinegar and add back in the oven for 40 minutes. Broil for 10 minutes at 425 degrees minutes until skin is crispy and bubbly. Allow to rest for 5 minutes before cutting into bite sized pieces. Now give yourself a pat on the back. You’re now a pork belly champion! Yay.
AdvertisementsA Belgian minister has warned of more Euro 2016 terror plots as it emerged a dozen suspects remain in custody following a series of raids.
In a mass operation, police arrested 40 people in Brussels, Liege and Anderlecht in the early hours of Saturday morning.
Amid fears of an 'imminent' attack on Euro 2016 football fanzone, Interio Minister Jan Jambon warned: 'It's not over'.
Scroll down for video
Belgian soldiers walk the streets of Brussels today after a suspected terrorist cell was dismantled overnight. Suspects were seen scoping out a fanzone where today fans will watch Belgium's game against Ireland
Police officers search a man's backpack in central Antwerp. The whole of Belgium is in a state of high tension
He added: 'All of those arrested in the raid were initially held, and twelve remain in detention.'
Referring to a threat scale which goes from one to four, Mr Jambon added today: 'We remain under terror alert three, which means something is still up.'
Heavily armed special forces police officers wearing balaclavas carried out the raids on well over 100 flats, homes and garages.
Belgian police said the raids 'passed off without incident' and said 'no arms or explosives were found'.
They searched 152 garages and lock-ups in Brussels, Molenbeek, Schaerbeek, Anderlecht, Koekelberg, Sint-Agatha-Berchem, Evere, Frost, Boitsfort, Ganshoren, Zaventem, Ninove, Wemmel, Fleurus, Tubize and Liège.
A bomb squad unit was also called to the train station in the city of Antwerp after a suspect package was reported.
While no arms or explosives were found, Mr Jambon hailed the operation as a 'great success'.
Tonight, Federal prosecutors said three men arrested in the raids had been charged with 'attempting to commit a terrorist murder, and participation in the activities of a terrorist group'.
Belgian soldiers, their faces covered, stand guard outside the prime minister's office today
Belgian's prime minister Charles Michel (pictured) urged people to remain calm but vigilant
They were identified as Samir C., 27, Mustafa B., 40, and Jawad B., 29, and came from the 'Brussels area', said a prosecuting source. All now face trial, and possibility of a life sentence in prison.
The source added: 'Phone taps enabled investigators to work out what the group was up to. When enough evidence was gathered, the raid was launched.'
All those charged were allegedly in the 'inner circle' of the El-Bakraoui brothers, who blew themselves up during the airport and Metro bombings in March.
Another of the suspects arrested over Friday night - who has not yet been charged - was said to be working at Zaventem Airport in Brussels.
Identified as Youssef E.A, 29, he was also a childhood friend of Khalid El Bakraoui, one of the suicide bombers in Brussels' Maelbeek metro station on March 22nd.
The man had direct access to flight information, and police are said to have found messages on his computer allegedly sent to El Bakraoui which stated that planes from America, Russia and Israel take off every Tuesday from Zaventem.
Belgian police officers patrol in central Brussels today, following overnight raids on terror suspects
A French RAID commando keeps tabs on the stadium in Bordeaux. RAID commandos were involved earlier in the week when they shot dead a man claiming allegiance to ISIS after he killed a Paris police commander and his wife at their home
In the wake of the charges, Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel announced that Euro 2016 fanzones would remain in place, but with extra security measures.
'We want to continue living normally. The situation is under control,' said Mr Michel.
'We are extremely vigilant, we are monitoring the situation hour-by-hour and we will continue with determination the fight against extremism, radicalisation and terrorism.'
ISIS terrorists struck in Belgium in March, in two coordinated attacks that led to 32 people being killed by suicide bombers at the city airport, and an underground station.
They were part of the same ISIS cell that attacked Paris in November 2015, killing almost 150 people in one night of extreme violence.
A football international at the Stade de France between France and Germany was among the targets for bombers, and Isis has since said that Euro 2016 is a prime target.
Mr Jambon said a car containing suspected terrorists had been spotted close to a Brussels fanzone on Friday.
Belgians walk past a bomb squad van outside the central station in Antwerp. Police and the bomb squad unit responded to a suspect package in the station as the country was put on heightened alert
Police carry out checks inside the stadium in Bordeaux prior to today's game
This was the day before Belgium played Ireland in a Euro 2016 tie attracting an audience of hundreds of thousands, including many watching in the Brussels fanzone.
The Belgian team, known as the Red Devils, played in Bordeaux this afternoon but it is thought Brussels was the target.
In the event the game passed off without incident, Belgium winning 3-0.
Charles Michel, the Belgium prime minister, said his country would'remain extremely vigilant, hour by hour', because the threat of an attack was 'possible and likely'.
Following a security council meeting, Mr Michel said: 'We'll take additional and adapted measures in the coming hour.'
Mr Michel and Mr Jambon are among four senior measures who are receiving special protection following specific threats, said the Prime Minister.
The game between Belgium and Ireland (pictured, with Belgium in the red kit) has now kicked off in Bordeaux and security is high in the Belgian capital, especially around the fanzone
Belgium's Romelu Lukaku celebrates the first of his two goals against Ireland
On Wednesday, Belgian police received an anti-terrorism alert warning that a group of Isis combatants had recently left Syrian, and were en route to the EU.
Many of the Belgium and French nationals who carried out the attacks on Paris and Brussels had spent time training with Isis in Syria.
Security experts in both France and Belgium have warned that Euro 2016 fanzones in major cities such as Brussels and Paris could easily turn into deathtraps if they are targeted by the kind of Kalashnikov-weilding suicide bombers involved in earlier attacks.Market Ticker
Articles of Impeachment? Bear Stearns Buyout Illegal?
Karl Denninger
“On or about March 16th, 2008, George W. Bush, both personally and through his Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, caused to be provided to JP Morgan/Chase a bribe(1) ultimately flowing from the United States Treasury in an amount not to exceed $30 billion dollars US, via The Federal Reserve, in order to induce JP Morgan/Chase to assume the liabilities and assets of Bear Stearns and Company at a price not determined in the free market or via public bidding, in violation of the limitations expressly set forth in The Federal Reserve Act of 1913, 12 USC Ch 6.”
(1) Bribery is defined by Black’s Law Dictionary as the offering, giving, receiving, or soliciting of any item of value to influence the actions of an official or other person in discharge of a public or legal duty.
I have spent a solid week both reading The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 and thinking about the circumstances of this transaction trying to find a means under which “backstopping” Bear Stearns debt via The Federal Reserve is legally permissible.
Despite my best efforts I can’t find explicit or implicit authorization for “a put”, as differentiated from a loan, anywhere in The Federal Reserve Act. You can call something whatever you’d like but if in point of fact there is no recourse then it is not a “loan” at all; it is a “PUT” or a “conditional payment”, and under The Federal Reserve Act such an action appears to these eyes to be a direct violation of the law.
It is widely reported that both Hank Paulson and George Bush personally “signed off on” The Bear Stearns “bailout” last Sunday. As such their direct and indirect actions, in my view, constitute a “High Crime and Misdemeanor” within the meaning of the United States Constitution and therefore subject George W. Bush to impeachment proceedings as proposed in the above sample article for same.
By the way, I’m not the only one who thinks this is an illegal transaction. John Hussman, of The Hussman Funds, has this to say in a letter with a publication date of tomorrow, March 24th:
“In my view, the deal would be palatable if J.P. Morgan was to remain fully responsible for any losses on the ‘collateral’ provided to the Federal Reserve, assuming shareholders were to consent to the buyout. As it stands, Congress should quickly step in to bust the existing deal and demand an alternate resolution, by clearly insisting that the Fed’s action was not legal.
The Fed did not act to save a bank, but to enrich one. Congress has the power to appropriate resources for such a deal by the representative will of the people ““ the Fed does not, even under Depression era banking laws. The ‘loan’ falls outside of Section 13-3 of the Federal Reserve Act, because it is not in fact a loan to either Bear Stearns or J.P. Morgan. Bear Stearns is no longer a business entity under this agreement. And if the fiction that this is a ‘loan’ to J.P. Morgan was true, then the only point at which the ‘collateral’ would become an issue would be in the event that J.P. Morgan itself was to fail. No, this is not a loan. It is a put option granted by the Fed to J.P. Morgan on a basket of toxic securities. And it is not legal.”
Finally, it appears that even the SEC Chairman, Christopher Cox, isn’t sure that Bear was “done”; that is, this entire transaction might smell like dead fish:
“In what is likely to be a bit of a blockbuster, SEC chairman Christopher Cox sent a letter to Swiss regulators indicating the Bear Stearns (NYSE:BSC) did not have to go the way of all flesh. According to The New York Post “the fate of Bear Stearns was a lack of confidence, not a lack of capital,” Cox, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, wrote in a five-page letter sent to a Swiss regulator.””
So there you have it.
Now, the question is, do our Congressfolk have the necessary will to stop this raiding of the public treasury for the enrichment of a private firm – if necessary, by bringing the above article of impeachment?
If you think they should, then I have a solution for you.
SIGN THE PETITION
to Congress for the purpose of raising debate on this exact issue and stop the mockery of our legal and regulatory systems.
PS: I’m a lifelong registered Republican, voted for George W. Bush twice, and have one of Gingrich’s “Speaker’s Gavels” on the credenza behind my desk, so before you go accusing me of being a “leftwing nutjob”, think again. Nonetheless, what’s right is right and I must stand for what’s just, and when the political party I am a member of does something wrong, they must admit to it and face the consequences. Sorry Mr. President; I like you a great deal, but what happened here was, in my opinion, blatantly unlawful. The $30 billion “backstop” must be rescinded until and unless Congress explicitly authorizes that act through legislation and you sign same.
(Source)A House committee passed a bill Thursday aimed at protecting individuals, groups and businesses that refuse for religious reasons to recognize same-sex unions or provide benefits to gay couples in a largely party-line vote.
The Federal and State Affairs Committee’s action comes amid an uncertain legal climate for states like Kansas that ban same-sex marriage. Federal judges recently struck down bans in Oklahoma and Utah.
Kansas law already protects employees from being sanctioned based on religious beliefs, but supporters of House Bill 2453 said more legislation is necessary to protect religious freedom.
The bill says governmental entities can’t require individuals, businesses or religious groups to provide services, facilities, goods or employment benefits related to any marriage or domestic partnership. It also prohibits anti-discrimination lawsuits on such grounds.
Critics say the measure promotes discrimination against gays and lesbians and encourages government officials to ignore court rulings favoring gay marriage.
"The government is for all people," said Rep. Annie Tietze, D-Topeka. "In this type of wording we see the effort to not provide government services to just some of the people."
Tietze offered an amendment to remove adoption, foster care and social services from the bill, but it failed.
Rep. Allan Rothlisberg, |
the closest I’ve ever come to kissing a man. Really kissing him. I loved that man that moment. I did.”
CREDITS:
Producers: Ross Greenburg, George Roy, Steve Stern
Director and Editor: George Roy
Writer: Steve Stern
Narrator: Peter CoyoteROBERT HUNTER HITS THE ROAD THIS FALL
After spending nearly a decade off the road,lyricistis heading out for eight shows this fall. “I began thinking about touring again and started working on my guitar playing,” Hunter said recently. “And the more I played the more I was reminded of the special joy that connecting with an audience brings. And I realized I missed it. It’s time to hit the road.”
Hunter’s live shows have historically been mostly filled with Grateful Dead classics, though sometimes with slightly alternate lyrics and other songs from his catalog amassed over the years. For a sample of what to expect, have a listen to this great soundboard recording from PNC Arts Center, August 10, 2004, when Hunter was opening a dozen shows for The Dead.Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman is not a fan of his team’s play-calling.
Shortly before quarterback Russell Wilson connected with wide receiver Doug Baldwin on a 1-yard touchdown pass in the third quarter, Sherman could be seen shouting on the sidelines.
“I don’t like it when we throw the ball at the 1 [yard line],” Sherman told reporters. “We throw an interception at the 1. Luckily it went incomplete, and I wasn’t going to let them continue to do that.”
Them? Who’s them?
“I was letting Pete know,” Sherman said. “I was making sure Pete knew that we’re not comfortable with you throwing the ball at the 1.”
That would be Pete Carroll, Sherman’s head coach.
“One hundred percent, 100 percent,” Sherman answered when asked whether it was standard operating procedure to question — let lone confront — his head coach. “We go out there, we sacrifice, we battle. We don’t give away our battle, you honor our sacrifice.”
Carroll had said during his postgame press conference that the jawing on the sideline was between Sherman and wide receiver Doug Baldwin. He never mentioned himself.
“What was said in there, it doesn’t matter,” Carroll said. “I know you’d love to know more. You’ll probably figure out more, but I don’t care. But right now that was one of our guys who has as much emotion and passion for this game as you could ever want. And sometimes it goes one way where you’ve got to reel it back in.
“And he did exactly that. He did a nice job of coming back to poise and finished the game really well.”
Well enough to land himself a head coaching position one day?
“I’m always available,” Sherman replied. “Make sure the pay is right.”Free-agent outfielder Torii Hunter told MLB Network on Monday morning that he's going to wrap up a decision about where to sign quickly, and a source indicated that the time frame is about two weeks.
The most aggressive pursuer thus far has been the Detroit Tigers, the team most likely to offer Hunter a two-year deal, a shot at his first World Series and an everyday job. The New York Yankees also have shown serious interest.
The Boston Red Sox talked with Hunter's agent, Larry Reynolds, but that process was in the preliminary stages during the GM meetings last week in Indian Wells, Calif.
Even though the 37-year-old Hunter said he would make a decision soon, an industry source tells ESPNBoston.com that Hunter has not received any offers from any of the interested clubs.
The Dodgers spoke with Hunter's representative, but, according to a source, have moved on in their search for a right-handed hitting backup outfielder. The team was considering signing Hunter as insurance because of injuries to Carl Crawford and Matt Kemp, but couldn't guarantee Hunter more than 350 at-bats next season. Dodgers general manager Ned Colletti denied reports that he is considering trading right fielder Andre Ethier.
On Saturday, sources told ESPNLosAngeles.com that the Dodgers had shown some willingness to go to two years for Hunter.
Hunter is a nine-time Gold Glove winner coming off one of his finest seasons. He batted.313 with 16 home runs and 92 RBIs for the Los Angeles Angels, who did not extend a qualifying offer to him. Because of that, any team that signs Hunter would not have to surrender a draft pick.
Hunter, who's spent the past five seasons with the Angels, is close friends with Kemp and owns a home in Newport Coast, Calif.
Information from ESPNBoston.com's Joe McDonald was used in this report.Very few studies on female sexual dysfunction have looked at postcoital dysphoria (PCD), or "post-sex blues," which is characterized by tearfulness, a sense of melancholy or depression, anxiety, agitation, or aggression following sexual intercourse.
Among 230 female university students who completed an online survey, 46% of respondents reported experiencing PCD symptoms at least once in their lifetime, with 5.1% experiencing PCD symptoms a few times within the past 4 weeks. There appeared to be no relationship between PCD and intimacy in close relationships.
"The findings build upon our previous research investigating the correlates of sexual functioning in women," said Dr. Robert Schweitzer, lead author of the Sexual Medicine study. "The results of our original research in this area have now been confirmed in an international multinational study on negative postcoital emotions, which appear to have evolutionary functions."
###Picture this: Your house is on fire. You call 911, the fire trucks arrive, and the firefighters, hoses hoisted over their shoulders, rush to the hydrant on your corner. The clock is ticking while the fire consumes your home, but there’s a problem: The hydrant doesn’t work.
National statistics on hydrant performance are hard to track down, but when local studies are compiled, the numbers tell the story: A 2013 report says one in seven fire hydrants in Newark, New Jersey, don’t work. Replacing them could cost upwards of $500 million. Phoenix spends $3 million a year repairing busted or old hydrants. In Philadelphia, illegally opened fire hydrants cost taxpayers $1 million each year.
In the early ’90s, he set out to change how the hydrant is made, both inside and out. He spent the next 20 years researching, developing, and perfecting his prototypes. Now, he says his creation, the Sigelock Spartan, is safer and more efficient than its predecessors, and has the potential to transform our urban infrastructure.
Tales of malfunctioning hydrants are frighteningly common. In January, a blaze on Long Island raged out of control while firefighters searched for a hydrant that wasn’t frozen. A girl died in a Detroit fire when a working hydrant was nowhere to be found. A report from Atlanta this month found many of the city’s hydrants are dry. “People live under a false sense of security,” Sigelakis says. “People don’t realize they need it until they need it, and when they need it, it doesn’t work.”
“All the time. It’s always in the back of our minds.” Sigelakis says “our minds” because he spent 15 years as a New York City firefighter before retiring in 2000. Now, he’s the man behind the first major redesign of the fire hydrant in more than a century.
It would shock you how often fire hydrants don’t work when you need them.
To redesign the hydrant, Sigelakis needed to understand why they break in the first place. The problem is twofold: First, most hydrants are made of cast iron, which erodes with time and exposure to the elements, leading to cracks, leaks, and freezing. Second, they’re easy to open, making them a perfect target for anyone looking to cool down on a hot summer day. But hydrants are not intended to be used as a sprinkler. On full blast, an open hydrant can put out more than 1,000 gallons of water per minute. That kind of force is both wasteful and dangerous. Plus, residents may not close the hydrant properly, leading to leaks and wasted water.
So Sigelakis’s first step to a better hydrant was to make it nearly impossible to break in to. The working parts of the Spartan “Security Model” are completely encapsulated in a smooth, spherical locking mechanism. “I realized you need to shield it, encapsulate it, so they can’t put any kind of wrench on it and open it up,” Sigelakis says. The lock can only be opened with a special tool he provides, which exerts more than 3,000 pounds of inward force. The result is a nearly impenetrable, simply-designed (if somewhat odd-looking) nub. “Everybody says I have the funny looking hydrant,” he muses. But with the new design comes a new level of safety. During testing, it took hours to crack into the hydrant with an arsenal of tools that included torches.
To prevent leaks and rotting, Sigelakis swapped out cast iron for a mixture of stainless steel and ductile iron, materials that are both resistant to corrosion. Special powder coating on the Spartan further prevents rust. He reengineered the internal parts to prevent leftover water from pooling and freezing in the winter. “This will last 200 years maintenance free,” Sigelakis boasts. “This is a maintenance-free hydrant.” The Spartan hydrant met and exceeded all the requirements for certification from Underwriters Laboratories, an independent organization that tests products for public safety. It is the first and only hydrant to receive a new UL certification–“264B“–verifying its tamper resistance.
There is perhaps no better place to test Sigelakis’s claim than his own seaside community of Long Beach, New York. In 2012, mother nature put the hydrants to the test, unleashing Superstorm Sandy, which left parts of Long Beach submerged under several feet of corrosive saltwater. Chris Windle, superintendent of the Long Beach Water District, installed several Sigelock hydrants before the storm, one of which was submerged for more than 8 hours. “It went through the most brutal winter that we’ve had, and it works like the first day we put it in. After the water subsided, the thing was sparkling,” Windle says.
Since Sandy, Windle has replaced 90 storm-damaged conventional hydrants. He no longer orders new parts for them, instead opting to replace the whole hydrant with Sigelakis’s design. He plans to have 130 in the ground by Christmas, which is a controversial move, since the Spartan is about 20% more expensive than other hydrants. Exact prices vary depending on location and “bury depth,” but the city of Long Beach paid roughly $2,700 for each new Sigelock hydrant. That’s not an insignificant cost, but Windle says the future cost-saving potential of a maintenance-free hydrant is important to consider. The city spends $40,000 a year just to paint the old hydrants, he says. That, plus the cost of replacement parts, wasted water from leaks, and lawsuits (Long Beach sees between 10 and 20 hydrant-related lawsuits a year over things like leak damage and injuries from open hydrants), adds up.
Right now, there are 150 Sigelock hydrants installed across 11 states. Sigelakis wants to see them in all major cities, and his hope is that the hydrant’s success in these smaller communities will provide him with the evidence he needs to convince others to come on board. He spends many weekends traveling to trade shows across the country.Which is crueler? Expelling an urban family from its home in Jerusalem's Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, or bulldozing a meager tent encampment of shepherds living on private Jordan Valley land they leased, destroying their water tanks, their tents and their sheep pens, and expelling families with many children from the land on which they live? It's hard to say. But while the Sheikh Jarrah expulsions are attracting interest in Israel and elsewhere, hardly anyone notices or protests what's going on in the Jordan Valley.
Shepherd Abdel Razeq Bani Awda (right) and one of his sons. In winter, they’ll have to leave here too. Limor Edrey
There, far from view, Israel has been trying for several years to methodically remove Palestinian inhabitants from wide swaths of land. And in a week when the prime minister was making more promises about a "package of gestures" to the Palestinians, in order to curry favor in Washington, the Civil Administration bulldozers brutally destroyed several more encampments, leaving dozens of residents helpless and destitute under the open sky. But the Jordan Valley is far from the public eye and the public heart, and there Israel can do as it pleases.
One look at the landscape tells the whole story: The settlement of Beka'ot, with its lush greenery and plentiful electricity and water at one end of the magnificent valley, and the ruins of the meager shepherd encampments at the other end, with no electricity, no water, no nothing. One picture is worth a thousand words. It's a far cry from the words of the old propagandistic song once sung by the Central Command musical troupe, about the little settlement in the Valley that "guarded the line, called out for peace and served up hope in the form of colorful flowers." Calls for peace? Gestures of hope? Go ask the neighbors about that.
This week, Dafna Banai, an activist from Machsom Watch, described the most recent expulsions: 15 families were expelled from their encampments on July 1; the week before, another 16 families received demolition and evacuation orders. For more than a year, the entire valley has been strewn with dozens of cement blocks preventing entry and warning of "firing zones" wherever Palestinians live. Israel already has enclosed all the territory west of Highway 90 with impassable ditches, and residents can exit only twice a week, when Israel opens the locked gates on the roads.
Israel declares huge amounts of private Palestinian land as firing zones and expels the residents under the false and self-righteous guise of concern for their welfare, lest they be harmed by the military training; but these firing zones are always to be found solely on Palestinian land, and never on settlement land. Have you ever heard of any settlers being expelled from their homes because their settlement was declared part of a firing zone? But against these wretched shepherds in the Jordan Valley, anything goes. This is Israeli justice, this is equality as practiced by the Israel Defense Forces.
Perhaps the explanation for this appalling expulsion policy can be found in comments by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicized last Friday on Channel 10. During a condolence visit to the home of a settler family in 2001, Netanyahu divulged his dastardly plan: He told his hosts he would proclaim the entire Jordan Valley a "designated military site."
This is how the prime minister thought to mock the Americans at the time, so they would let Israel do as it pleases in the Jordan Valley. Now he is prime minister again, and his trick is working splendidly. A Jordan Valley cleansed of Palestinians will one day be more easily annexed to Israel.
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The Civil Administration, naturally, attempts to deceive, dissemble and disregard all this. What connection could it possibly have with acts of systematic expulsion? After all, it is simply concerned with the welfare of the residents and the preservation of law and order. If an expulsion is taking place, the administration is not the one making the decisions; it's just acting as a contractor.
In any event, what's going on here is "self-evacuation," as the spokesman put it, and "abandoned structures."
"This is a matter of tin structures and tents, which were set up recently, without the necessary permits, in firing zones, endangering the inhabitants' lives," the spokesman said. "Most of the structures under discussion were abandoned independently by their residents, and a few were destroyed. Most of the people who built these structures own permanent homes in the valley, and most of the structures were already abandoned on the day they were destroyed."
Owners of permanent homes? Have you heard of settlers being evacuated because they have another house in Petah Tikva?
On second thought: The expulsion in the Jordan Valley is worse than that of Sheikh Jarrah. It is more systematic, more large-scale, and it's being committed against a weaker population. But the demonstrators won't come here. It's too far away.
In an empty room that serves as the headquarters of a remote village council, local activists elaborate on their fears: Israel is seeking to expel all the area's shepherds to here. Two big spiders silently spin their web on the ceiling. In the past month, dozens of families have received demolition and evacuation orders, all in accordance with the law, of course, the law of the occupation.
The elderly Abdel Rahim Basharat says it's not a village, it's a prison.
"If you close off the shepherds from every direction, to them it's a jail, because their lives are tied to the land. If they are made to move to this village, they'll have to sell their flocks, their only source of income. Taking our lands from us is the same as taking our lives."
Basharat has a question: "Does Area C mean evacuation and expulsion?"
And what will you tell him? What can one tell him?
And he has another question: "Why don't you ask about the water problem?"
Ataf Abu al-Rub, the B'Tselem investigator in the area, explains: "Sometimes these shepherds hear water trickling through the pipes that pass through their fields on the way to settlements, but they are forbidden to use it. Sometimes they hear the crackle of electricity in the high-tension wires, but the electricity is meant only for the settlers."
Al-Rub says this is the most closed open area in the world. Four families have already left for the village, after the encampments were repeatedly destroyed and they tired of hopeless battle. The rest are persisting in a desperate fight for survival. We go out to see, driving past harvested wheat fields on our way to the sites of destruction.
Abdel Razeq Bani Awda's family already has erected a new encampment. On July 1, the previous one was destroyed, and its ruins lie on the opposite hillside. They'd lived there for 15 years, on private land that belongs to a resident of Tubas who leased it to them. They have documents to prove it. Now they are stuck in the middle of a wheat field; when winter and planting times comes around, they'll have to leave here, too. This is the fifth place they've moved to in the past few years, since Israel began implementing its policy of evacuation and expulsion. Two families - a father and son and their children, and 160 sheep, their only source of income. The sheep are now crowded into new pens, seeking shelter from the heat.
The road is too treacherous for our car, as we make our way up the hill from the ruins of their recently destroyed camp. Hardly anything is left of it. Strewn about the ground are some wrecked tent stakes, a spoon, a rusty kettle, a blackened coffee pot, a spilled container of tehina and a broken-down refrigerator. Remnants of a meager life. Basharat asks why Israel is also destroying the water tanks.
"The tents are one thing, but why the water tanks? Sometimes they empty them of water. What will the children drink? And why do they always come when times are the toughest, or in the middle of summer, when the heat is terrible, or during the rains, when there is no other shelter? It's not by coincidence. And why do they destroy the taboun ovens? They know it takes four to five days to build a new taboun, and in the meantime we have no bread. Do they want us to die of hunger and thirst? Is that what they really want? Our children know the Israeli army is the one doing this. And what do they expect them to remember when they grow up?"
Basharat's questions go unanswered, echoing through the valley. We sit beneath the remnants of a tin shack that wasn't thoroughly destroyed. An old refrigerator door serves as a bench, until it, too, collapses beneath us. The Bani Awda family will return here in the winter. They have no other choice. They have already re-erected one tent. Across the way, Beka'ot is blooming; there is a spa there.
On the western part of the hillside is another ruined encampment. This is where Hassan Bani Awda's family lived before they migrated eastward. Another encampment, closer to Beka'ot, is still standing. Nine times this family has had its home destroyed. We sit in silence and gaze out at the valley. It could be so beautiful, if not for the ugliness of the expulsion. We make our way to the next encampment.
An old wooden chair has an old sticker attached to it: "Israel is Strong with Shimon Peres." Israel is also strong with Benjamin Netanyahu, especially in dealing with the weak: Mohammed Bani Awda and his 11 children are also living under the threat of expulsion. He has 270 sheep and a combine that belongs to the landowner from Tubas. This family already has been forced to move four times. Now they've been instructed to tear down just the storehouse for the sheep's food. Is Mohammed afraid? He says: "They're going step-by-step. They started in the east and when they finish clearing out there they'll come here too. We'll be the next stage."
The two shepherds, Basharat and Bani Awda, consult with one another. What to do? Bani Awda suggests appealing to the High Court, and Basharat says there's no point.
"There's no point appealing to Israeli law and justice. They'll declare the whole Jordan Valley a military zone and that will be the end of the story."
Mohammed's son Jihad, a 19-year-old shepherd, wears a New York baseball cap. He says he dreams of going there one day, but all of us in the tent knew it will never happen. It's unlikely that he'll every get as far as JerusalemIGNProLeague Profile Joined April 2011 1147 Posts Last Edited: 2012-01-30 23:53:10 #1
IGN Pro League Fight Club! This is a weekly king of the hill showmatch series. Basically, there will be a 1 vs. 1 best of 9 showmatch each and every week, where the winner will earn a $500 prize and a $100 bounty on their head. For example, if a player wins three weeks in a row they will have earned $1,500 and a $300 bounty. If a NEW challenger defeats him, they will earn $500 for the showmatch, take the $300 bounty home, and have a new $100 bounty placed on their head for each week that they win. (Similar to The time has come for our eighth! This is a weekly king of the hill showmatch series. Basically, there will be a 1 vs. 1 best of 9 showmatch each and every week, where the winner will earn a $500 prize and a $100 bounty on their head. For example, if a player wins three weeks in a row they will have earned $1,500 and a $300 bounty. If a NEW challenger defeats him, they will earn $500 for the showmatch, take the $300 bounty home, and have a new $100 bounty placed on their head for each week that they win. (Similar to IPL Team Arena, but without the teams!)
Stream Link: http://www.ign.com/ipl
IPL Fight Club
When: Sunday, Jan 29 1:00am GMT (GMT+00:00) (we will also have a European re-broadcast as usual at Sunday, Jan 29 5:30pm GMT (GMT+00:00) )
Last week, Acer.Nerchio managed to dismantle the reigning champion, mouz.MaNa with a brilliant display of Zerg aggression. This week, he will face undoubtedly the toughest opponent yet, NSHS.Jjakji! This GSL Code S winner looks to prove that he is not just a flash in the pan in IPL Fight Club. Tune in to see if one of the very best foreign Zerg players can hang with GSL royalty!
Acer.Nerchio
NSHS.Jjakji
Poll: Who Will Win?!
NSHS.Jjakji (209)
71%
Acer.Nerchio (85)
29%
294 total votes (209)71%(85)29%294 total votes Your vote: Who Will Win?! (Vote): Acer.Nerchio
(Vote): NSHS.Jjakji
Results!
+ Show Spoiler [IPL Fight Club Results] + Nerchio < Tal'Darim Altar > Jjakji
Nerchio < Terminus > Jjakji
Nerchio < Antiga Shipyard > Jjakji
Nerchio < Shakuras Plateau > Jjakji
Nerchio < Daybreak > Jjakji
Nerchio < Calm Before the Storm > Jjakji
Nerchio < Atlantis Spaceship > Jjakji
Nerchio < Darkness Falls > Jjakji
Nerchio < Shattered Temple > Jjakji
Congratulations to NSHS.Jjakji for winning 5-4! Nerchio put up a valiant effort, but was dethroned!
The VODs are now on our YouTube channel, so you can watch at your own pace! The VODs are now on our YouTube channel, so you can watch at your own pace! Jjakji vs Nerchio bo9 - IPL FC8
Last week,Acer.Nerchio managed to dismantle the reigning champion,mouz.MaNa with a brilliant display of Zerg aggression. This week, he will face undoubtedly the toughest opponent yet,NSHS.Jjakji! This GSL Code S winner looks to prove that he is not just a flash in the pan in IPL Fight Club. Tune in to see if one of the very best foreign Zerg players can hang with GSL royalty! Map List
Terminus SE
Darkness Falls
Sanshorn Mist
Atlantis Spaceship
Shakuras Plateau
Calm Before the Storm
Shattered Temple
Antiga Shipyard (Cross Only)
Daybreak
Tal’Darim Altar
All the maps can be found on NA, EU, or KR by searching for IPLMap!
The first map will be on a set rotation, and then it is loser's pick.
Casters
This week's games will be commentated by CatsPajamas, HDStarCraft, PainUser, Doa, and/or AskJoshy!
Twitter, Stay up to date with IPL 4 Qualifiers, IPL TV, IPL Fight Club, and IPL Team Arena Challenge by checking our Facebook YouTube, and Twitch.TV
JohnMatrix Profile Joined April 2011 France 1274 Posts #2 Jjakji ezpz
Ansinjunger Profile Joined November 2010 United States 2443 Posts #3 Wow, if Jjakji plays like he did against Leenock, it'll be the hardest ZvT for Nerchio.
Flowjo Profile Joined March 2011 United States 928 Posts #4 It's like throwing free money to Jjakji, gl to Nerchio I guess he's gonna need it. IMNestea's biggest fan.
RinconH Profile Joined April 2010 United States 512 Posts #5 Cool match but, comon, this is Jjakji we are talking about...
WigglingSquid Profile Joined August 2011 5189 Posts Last Edited: 2012-01-26 18:43:43 #6 CatsPajamas was hyping this match up on yesterday's stream, which hopefully means that Nerchio has put up a fight.
CosmicSpiral Profile Blog Joined December 2010 United States 10772 Posts #7 This will probably be the hardest ZvT Nerchio has ever played, but I think he will make it a close series. Writer Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.
VirgilSC2 Profile Blog Joined June 2011 United States 5748 Posts #8 Hopefully Nerchio can at least take a game or two off Jjakji.
He's clearly the underdog by a huge margin though. Clarity Gaming #1 Fan | Avid MTG Grinder | @VirgilSC2
TheDougler Profile Joined April 2010 Canada 8015 Posts #9 Jesus... I love foreigners but THIS match is gonna be a slaughter! This is the part of fight club where you just wanna destroy something that was beautiful eh? (lol, <3 you guys though, can't wait to see this and see who eventually dethrones "the winner" of this) I root for Euro Zergs, NA Protoss* and Korean Terrans. (Any North American who has beat a Korean Pro as Protoss counts as NA Toss)
nastyyy Profile Joined December 2009 United States 262 Posts #10 These series are getting crazy. Sometimes I like to play instead of getting stuck watching a Bo9. one time
MangoMountain Profile Joined June 2011 Norway 2035 Posts #11 IPL never ceases to amaze me with the caliber of players they manage to get in on these showmatches.
FiWiFaKi Profile Blog Joined February 2009 Canada 5042 Posts Last Edited: 2012-01-26 19:04:55 #12 On January 27 2012 03:59 MangoMountain wrote:
IPL never ceases to amaze me with the caliber of players they manage to get in on these showmatches.
Well look at the prizepool.
And I think people are REALLY underestimating Nerchio. He is one of the best-foreign zergs, only person that I think is better than him is probably Stephano. Some people forget the huge amount of tournaments he's won.
Gogo Nerchio, should be an easy win for you.
Edit: 83 medals in TLPD just for reference. Well look at the prizepool.And I think people are REALLY underestimating Nerchio. He is one of the best-foreign zergs, only person that I think is better than him is probably Stephano. Some people forget the huge amount of tournaments he's won.Gogo Nerchio, should be an easy win for you.Edit: 83 medals in TLPD just for reference. In life, the journey is more satisfying than the destination. ||.::Entrepreneurship::. Living a few years of your life like most people won't, so that you can spend the rest of your life like most people can't || Mechanical Engineering & Economics Major
DarkPlasmaBall Profile Blog Joined March 2010 United States 37873 Posts #13 Jjakji beat Leenock.
Nerchio shouldn't be much trouble.
DarkPlasmaBall Profile Blog Joined March 2010 United States 37873 Posts Last Edited: 2012-01-26 19:10:48 #14 On January 27 2012 04:02 FiWiFaKi wrote:
And I think people are REALLY underestimating Nerchio. He is one of the best- foreign zergs, only person that I think is better than him is probably Stephano. Some people forget the huge amount of tournaments he's won.
Gogo Nerchio, should be an easy win for you.
Edit: 83 medals in TLPD just for reference.
I hear his run through the GSL was pretty good too.
I don't even know if you're serious. I will be amazed if Nerchio's level looks to be anywhere close to that of Jjakji's in this series.
P.S.- 83 Nerchio medals < GSL Code S win. By far. I hear his run through the GSL was pretty good too.I don't even know if you're serious. I will be amazed if Nerchio's level looks to be anywhere close to that of Jjakji's in this series.P.S.- 83 Nerchio medals < GSL Code S win. By far.
HappyChris Profile Joined October 2011 1534 Posts #15 Nerchio allmost never lose online and Jjaki dont know Nerchios style. However when that is sayd Jjaki are a monster. Was so impressed by him when he played vs Stephano when he was in Korea.
Ill say close match but Jjaki gonna edge it out
However if Nerchio wins Im just gonna say it before anyone els Jjaki must have been lagged o.0 Herpderp
DamageControL Profile Blog Joined July 2007 United States 4222 Posts #16 On January 27 2012 04:02 FiWiFaKi wrote:
Show nested quote +
On January 27 2012 03:59 MangoMountain wrote:
IPL never ceases to amaze me with the caliber of players they manage to get in on these showmatches.
Well look at the prizepool.
And I think people are REALLY underestimating Nerchio. He is one of the best-foreign zergs, only person that I think is better than him is probably Stephano. Some people forget the huge amount of tournaments he's won.
Gogo Nerchio, should be an easy win for you.
Edit: 83 medals in TLPD just for reference. Well look at the prizepool.And I think people are REALLY underestimating Nerchio. He is one of the best-foreign zergs, only person that I think is better than him is probably Stephano. Some people forget the huge amount of tournaments he's won.Gogo Nerchio, should beEdit: 83 medals in TLPD just for reference.
????
what?
I'm not saying Nerchio is a pushover but I have no idea where you get "easy win"????what?I'm not saying Nerchio is a pushover but I have no idea where you get "easy win" Liquid | SKT
LunaSaint Profile Blog Joined April 2011 United Kingdom 619 Posts #17 As much as Nerchio's online reign impresses me, this is Jjakji. It'll be rough, but I sure as hell would love to watch this :D
GoSuChicken Profile Blog Joined December 2011 Germany 1444 Posts #18 sick dude sick
Canucklehead Profile Joined March 2011 Canada 4922 Posts #19 On January 27 2012 04:02 FiWiFaKi wrote:
Show nested quote +
On January 27 2012 03:59 MangoMountain wrote:
IPL never ceases to amaze me with the caliber of players they manage to get in on these showmatches.
Well look at the prizepool.
And I think people are REALLY underestimating Nerchio. He is one of the best-foreign zergs, only person that I think is better than him is probably Stephano. Some people forget the huge amount of tournaments he's won.
Gogo Nerchio, should be an easy win for you.
Edit: 83 medals in TLPD just for reference. Well look at the prizepool.And I think people are REALLY underestimating Nerchio. He is one of the best-foreign zergs, only person that I think is better than him is probably Stephano. Some people forget the huge amount of tournaments he's won.Gogo Nerchio, should be an easy win for you.Edit: 83 medals in TLPD just for reference.
We heard the same story at home story before nerchio played MC. Then MC proceeded to stomp nerchio without even breaking a sweat. We heard the same story at home story before nerchio played MC. Then MC proceeded to stomp nerchio without even breaking a sweat. Top 10 favourite pros: MKP, MVP, MC, Nestea, DRG, Jaedong, Flash, Life, Creator, Leenock
Mista Menace Profile Joined January 2012 4 Posts #20 WOW! IPL you rock; idfk how you got Jjakji but its so awesome you did.
1 2 3 4 5 35 36 37 Next AllHouston's craft beer scene just keeps getting better. In the same week that Buffalo Bayou Brewing Company revealed its plans to open a massive new brewery in Sawyer Yards, Saint Arnold Brewing Company has finally shared details of its long-awaited beer garden.Slated to open next summer, the new addition will be located next to Saint Arnold's brewery on Lyons Street. As seen in the renderings above, the space, which is designed by local architects Natalye Appel + Associates and landscape architects Office of James Burnett, will feature a view of the downtown Houston skyline and murals depicting local scenes."Since opening Saint Arnold Brewing Company in 1994, I have long had a dream of creating a beer garden that would be a destination for the community to gather - a place Houstonians are proud of and want to bring visitors to," said Saint Arnold founder Brock Wagner in a statement. "After 23 years, much brewing, getting laws changed, and moving to our downtown location, this dream is finally becoming a reality."DELTONA, Fla. - A controversial class assignment has forced a Volusia County school to issue an apology.
[WATCH: News 6's first report ]
The lesson has since been pulled from Heritage Middle School. It was called "Not Just a Theory". The assignment was on scientific standards, differentiating between a scientific theory and scientific law. The lesson, however, turned personal for parents because of two lines.
Parents went to social media fearing the assignment insinuated anyone dismissing evolution was misleading students.
The line reads, "If that person is a teacher, a minister, or some other figure of authority, they should know better. In fact, they probably do and they are trying to mislead you," read the 8th-grade assignment.
The Volusia County School District spokesperson said the assignment was not district-mandated. Three science teachers used it a few weeks ago. When parents such as Jennifer Flinchum first read those lines, "the hair on the back of my neck stood up," she said.
"It's not so much the evolution aspect of it, it's just the way they phrased those few sentences how they were kind of taking the rights away from the parents," said parent, Lisa McNeil.
The complaints forced the school to pull the lesson and issue a |
passed it would make Prison Rape Joke Day a federally recognized holiday as well as authorize funding for a museum dedicated to cataloging and preserving for public display every written and spoken joke referring to prison rape.What has become of the federal Information Commissioner's investigation into Canada's muzzled federal scientists?
Harper's Seven-Year War on Science read more
Announcements, Events & more from Tyee and select partners ‘Punch to the Gut’ Musical on Residential Schools Returns to Vancouver Children of God has been shaped by intense audience reactions, says director Corey Payette.
There's evidence that scientists are being silenced, and that the government has been misleading the public and Parliament about it. The damage to the public interest is extensive and ongoing.
Yet in almost two and a half years since the investigation was launched, information commissioner Suzanne Legault hasn't provided any information about its progress. Maybe the creeping investigation is due to the commission's funding crisis, but no one is saying.
When I contacted the Office of the Information Commissioner in April, I got no answers. "The investigation is ongoing," the office said. "We cannot comment further given the strict confidentiality rules governing our investigations." The commission does not "speculate on a completion date for any of our investigations," it said.
That's not good enough. The stalled investigation has allowed the government to continue to muzzle federal scientists. Information that should be shaping our public policy debates is being kept from citizens.
Who are the muzzled?
The commissioner's investigation was launched in March 2013 following a joint complaint from the University of Victoria's Environmental Law Centre and Democracy Watch. It alleged "systematic efforts by the Government of Canada to obstruct the right of the media and through them, the Canadian public to timely access to government scientists."
The complainants submitted an exhaustive 128-page report documenting the silencing of scientists and highlighting three cases.
• Environment Canada ozone scientist David Tarasick was prevented from speaking to the media about the discovery of the very first Arctic ozone hole, as published in the prestigious journal Nature. After intense public pressure, the federal government relented.
• Fisheries and Oceans scientist Kristi Miller was not permitted to talk to the media about her research implicating a virus in the death of sockeye salmon on B.C.'s coast. Miller's findings were published in the leading scientific journal Science.
• Natural Resources scientist Scott Dallimore was prevented from talking to the media about a colossal flood that swept across northern Canada 13,000 years ago and reported in Nature. By the time permission arrived, media deadlines (and interest) had passed.
There are other examples.
Environment Canada scientist Mark Tushingham was stopped from talking about his novel that dealt with climate change. Environmental scientist Philippe Thomas was prevented from discussing toxins in fur-bearing animals in the oilsands. Ice scientist Leah Braithwaite was denied the opportunity to speak about the deteriorating Arctic ice cap, and National Research Council scientists were not allowed to discuss a snow study they conducted with NASA.
Imagine, Canadian government scientists not allowed to discuss ice and snow!
Two other cases are even more absurd: The federal government tried to extend its muzzle to U.S.-based scientists, and algae scientist Max Bothwell was prevented from talking to the media about "rock snot," an unwelcome river algae.
The Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada surveyed government scientists and found 90 per cent reported they are not allowed to speak freely with the media. In one case, the government sent "minders" with scientists to a conference in order to "monitor and record" what they were saying.
"This is the type of thing I used to see when, back in the 1980s, I reported from the Soviet Union," political commentator and journalist Lawrence Martin noted.
'Byzantine' series of approvals
The muzzling of scientists apparently began in earnest in early 2008 when Environment Canada ordered its scientists to redirect media requests to Ottawa. Their goal was to manage the message and eliminate "surprises" for the environment minister. Other departments followed suit.
Here's how the muzzle works. When a reporter emails or calls a government scientist with a question, it has to be forwarded to department communications staff. From there, a "Byzantine" series of approvals must be sought before the scientist is allowed to respond. In the case of the study of the deteriorating polar ice cap, the request had to go through nine levels of approval.
If, somehow, government decides to let the scientist speak, "media lines" are developed by communications staff. The scientist is expected to stick to the script. Finalizing the talking points can take days or weeks and involve a small army of operatives. The request for answers about "rock snot" resulted in 110 pages of emails among 16 different communications staffers. It's an astonishing waste of taxpayers' money.
The policy effectively prevents the public from hearing from government scientists. Media timelines are short. Because the approval process is so involved, reporters abandon their interview requests.
Some departments have gone further. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans, for example, authorizes managers to block scientists from publishing in peer-reviewed scientific journals. Government librarians have to get permission to speak at a conference or school, even on their own time.
How widespread is muzzling? Evidence for Democracy, a non-partisan, not-for-profit organization (I sit on its advisory board), graded 16 Canadian federal government departments on their communication and media policies. It found that "overwhelmingly, current media policies do not effectively support open communication between federal scientists and the media" and "government media policies do not protect against political interference in science communication."
Info requests show government's decisions
Journalists have used access to information requests to shed light on how scientists are muzzled, and who is behind the decisions.
Fish scientist Kristi Miller was muzzled by the Privy Council Office, which supports the Prime Minister's Office and cabinet. Ministerial Services cancelled the polar ice briefing. Toxics expert Philippe Thomas was stifled by the environment minister's office, as was ozone scientist David Tarasick.
Opposition MPs repeatedly grilled the environment minister about Tarasick's muzzling during Question Period after the story broke in Oct. 2, 2011. On Oct. 3, Peter Kent, then the minister, said "let me say again that we are not muzzling scientists." The next day, he stated categorically, "We do not muzzle our scientists." Two days later, he admonished MPs that "one should not believe everything one reads or hears in the media," and then added Tarasick would be interviewed "depending on his availability." Six months later, the minister suggested that the "circumstances simply did not work out."
But documents show that Tarasick was available and interested in doing the interview. Kent's office silenced Tarasick, but he repeatedly told Parliament the opposite. Nobody was publicly held to account for misinforming Parliament, an oversight for which the opposition is partly responsible.
The government continues to claim it is not muzzling scientists despite clear evidence that it is.
Message control
Almost all the muzzled scientists were studying the environment at a time when oil and pipelines were emerging as the government's priority. Research was increasingly showing that development of the oil sands and fossil fuel use was environmentally unsustainable. Toxins from the oil sands were found to be accumulating, and the threat of climate change was provoking calls to action.
The government's program of total message control let it advance its priorities while suppressing information that raised troubling questions.
The new communications policies appear to have worked. An internal Environment Canada document revealed that in 2008 "media coverage of climate change science, our most high-profile issue, has been reduced by over 80 per cent." The media silence presaged Canada's withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol, a global agreement for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.
Muzzling added to the public's confusion on climate change. Several MPs and senators have questioned the scientific legitimacy of climate change. In normal times trusted government scientists could have been interviewed to correct their misconceptions.
Cutting scientists out of the media cycle was useful to the government. The silence of scientists was crucial to message control as the government rolled out draconian cuts and legislative changes beginning with the 2011 budget. Environment Canada was severely wounded, its budget ultimately reduced by half. More than $100 million was cut from Fisheries and Oceans Canada, responsible for protecting Canadian waters. Cuts to Libraries and Archives Canada led to the dumpstering of scientific collections -- a modern-day book burning which continues to this day.
The government has still not disclosed what programs were cut; the Parliamentary Budget Officer famously sued (and failed) to obtain this information. Because government scientists were not allowed to speak, news of impact on programs important for Canadian's health and safety trickled out from other sources.
We still have only a partial understanding of what has been lost, but a few examples stand out. Environment Canada's ozone research group -- inventors of the UV index now used around the world -- was dissolved despite having just observed the first ever Arctic ozone hole. The Experimental Lakes Area, a unique facility established in 1968 to protect Canada's freshwater resources, was shuttered.
Environmental protection legislation was subsequently gutted using omnibus legislation, and documents showed that some changes were suggested to the government by the oil industry. Fish habitat protections were eliminated from the Fisheries Act, provoking four former ministers to express their "serious concern." Protections for most rivers and lakes were removed from the Navigable Waters Protection Act. The Environmental Assessment Act was repealed and replaced with much more limited legislation.
The muzzling of scientists contributed to a broader loss of voices. In what might be called a war on dissent, savage cuts were made to non-governmental organizations and the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy was eliminated for providing unwelcome advice. Tax audits targeted environmental charities. At the same time, the two reporters who did the most to expose the government's cuts and muzzling program -- Margaret Munro and Mike de Souza -- were laid off.
Science and democracy
And here we come to the crux of the matter. Muzzling represents an erosion of the principle of free speech and impoverishes the public debate. We can't hope to make sound decisions on complex problems like climate change without input from those who know the most about it -- the scientists. But instead, we have a federal government silencing scientists in a scurrilous "attempt to guarantee public ignorance," as the New York Times put it.
Government scientists occupy a special place in our democracy. They are the only scientists paid specifically to protect the public interest. They are also the only scientists whose task is to inform government on scientific matters, to the exclusion of any competing interests. Silencing government scientists ultimately damages the common good.
My colleague Jeff Hutchings once wrote: "Let's be clear. When you inhibit the communication of science, you inhibit science. The legitimacy of scientific findings depends crucially on unfettered engagement, review, and discussion among interested individuals, including members of the public."
Let me add to this by saying that when you inhibit science, you inhibit democracy. Muzzling undermines the ability of citizens to exercise their democratic rights. Depriving citizens of scientific evidence weakens their ability to hold policy makers to account. This cannot be tolerated in a free and open society.
The information commissioner's two-and-a-half-year investigation is overdue. The commissioner could have made an important contribution to the present discussion. Release of her report will now presumably wait until after the federal election. If she rules muzzling illegal, the next government will trot out some version of the "bad apples" defence. If, on the other hand, the commissioner finds the government acted legally, the opportunity for candidates to explain how they would remedy this deficit in the law will have been lost.
It now falls to Canadian voters to hold their politicians to account. Candidates in the federal election should be pressed to explain their views on science policy and to commit to letting scientists speak. The U.S. government has a scientific integrity policy that protects the right of scientists to speak to the media and the public about their official work without censorship. Canadians should expect no less.Google Fiber Hasn't Hit A 'Snag,' It's Just Evolving
from the disruption-ain't-easy dept
"Some analysts see the delays as indications that Google Fiber is more strategy than product -- an attempt to get competitors, cities and other service providers to install fiber networks that would foster faster and more widespread consumption of Google's online offerings. "It's not clear (Google was) ever all that serious about doing this at any real size," said MoffettNathanson Research analyst Craig Moffett.
"Google parent Alphabet Inc. is rethinking its high-speed internet business after initial rollouts proved more expensive and time consuming than anticipated, a stark contrast to the fanfare that greeted its launch six years ago."
When Google Fiber jumped into the broadband market in 2011, the company knew full well that disruption of an entrenched telecom monopoly would be a slow, expensive, monumental task. And five years into the project that's certainly been true, the majority of Google Fiber launch markets still very much under construction as the company gets to work burying fiber across more than a dozen looming markets. Wall Street, which initially laughed at the project as an experiment, has been taking the project more seriously as Google Fiber targets sprawling markets like Atlanta, Chicago, and Los Angeles.This week however things took an interesting turn with the news that Google Fiber was pausing deployments in Silicon Valley and Portland, Oregon, to take stock of possible wireless alternatives. Neither deployment was formally official (both cities were listed as " potential " targets); and Google Fiber execs are simply considering whether or not it makes financial sense to begin using some fifth generation (5G) technologies to supplement existing fiber deployment.This isn't really surprising; Under the guidance of former Atheros CEO Craig Barratt, Google has filed applications with the FCC to conduct trials in the 71-76 GHz and 81-86 GHz millimeter wave bands, and is also conducting a variety of different tests in the 3.5 GHz band, the 5.8 GHz band and the 24 GHz band. The company also recently acquired Webpass in the hopes of supplementing fiber with ultra-fast wireless wherever possible. Wireless has been on Google's radar for several years. It's a great option in cities where construction logistics are a nightmare, or in towns where AT&T's using regulations to hinder fiber deployment Oddly though, as the week wore on, the narrative in the press began to mutate from one focusing on Google Fiber's evolution, to one suggesting that Google Fiber was somehow in trouble. Reports sprung up arguing that Google Fiber was somehow shocked by the steep costs of deploying broadband, ill-prepared for the realities of the telecom market (certainly a narrative incumbent ISP competitors would prefer). Certain stock jocks were quick to proclaim that Google Fiber was somehow backtracking on the initiative:While Google Fiber was initially seen as a creative way to light a PR fire under lazy broadband incumbents (and that certainly is part of the goal), ongoing construction in Charlotte, San Antonio, Austin, Kansas City, Raleigh, Nashville, Atlanta and countless other markets is continuing slowly but largely as normal, with Google Fiber simply getting more bullish on wireless as the technology evolves. That's not really a "snag," especially if you consider that Google Fiber has been making its interest in wireless as a supplemental technology clear for several years now.Most of the narratives that Google Fiber is somehow in trouble appear to have originated with a Wall Street Journal story suggesting that Google Fiber was in over its head:Except Google Fiber isn't "rethinking" the entire business, nor has it hit a "snag." It's simply riding the evolutionary currents, realizing that it needs to embrace multiple concurrent solutions if it wants to get many of these cities up and running sometime this century. In addition to wireless, Google Fiber has embraced a number of other new efforts for the ISP, such as its plan to offer service over a planned municipal fiber build in Huntsville, Alabama, or its plan to begin offering service in Atlanta and San Francisco over existing fiber networks.Building a nationwide network from the ground up in the face of regulatory capture is, and only companies with Alphabet's deep pockets and lobbying muscle are even willing to try at any real scale. Incumbent ISPs certainly benefit from the narrative that the company is in well over its head, but at the moment Google Fiber's simply trying multiple concurrent solutions to see what works. And while it's certainly possible that Alphabet will someday get bored and sell the entire project off to the lowest bidder, at the moment the goal remains the same: deliver a swift kick in the ass to one of the least competitive markets in America.
Filed Under: broadband, competition, fiber, google fiber, wireless
Companies: googleAstronomy Picture of the Day Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2009 October 30
The Bubble and M52
Credit & Copyright: Tony Hallas
Explanation: To the eye, this cosmic composition nicely balances the Bubble Nebula at the upper right with open star cluster M52. The pair would be lopsided on other scales, though. Embedded in a complex of interstellar dust and gas and blown by the winds from a single, massive O-type star, the Bubble Nebula (aka NGC 7635) is a mere 10 light-years wide. On the other hand, M52 is a rich open cluster of around a thousand stars. The cluster is about 25 light-years across. Seen toward the northern boundary of Cassiopeia, distance estimates for the Bubble Nebula and associated cloud complex are around 11,000 light-years, while star cluster M52 lies nearly 5,000 light-years away.So by this point most of us are familiar with the steampunk aesthetic. But how many people out there know about dieselpunk? Dieselpunk style is similar to steampunk, but there are distinct differences. While steampunk focuses on Victorian-age sci-fi, dieselpunk is based on the style and technology of the early 20th century, from World War I through World War II. The “punk” suffix on the word indicates its counter-cultural influence in regard to its opposition to historically-accurate and contemporary aesthetics. It’s similar in many ways to the noir styles of the time, though isn’t necessarily as dark.
The term “dieselpunk” was coined in 2001 by game designer Lewis Pollak to describe the style of his role-playing game Children of the Sun, but it has since grown to encompass the style of a number of mediums, including art, music, movies, fiction, and more. There are two basic styles of dieselpunk, one based on the roaring twenties with a mostly positive view of technology and culture, and the other based on World War II with a much darker style and often based on widespread warfare.
Below are more than 50 awesome dieselpunk artworks to give you a taste of what dieselpunk is all about!
Cars by RyanLovelock
KIEV Dieselpunk Hovercraft by Lipatov
Dieselpunk Hovercraft by Lipatov
Arrival in Utopia by Lipatov
DeiselPunk Gall by Kaaskop
Dieselpunk Robot by Chaingunchimp
Dieselpunk by Sedeptra
Dieselpunk Girl by Vadich
Desert Sands by Mykeamend
Soldier by Beaver-Skin
Gwen in Her Hepmobile Rocket by BWS
The Widowmaker by Davincisghost
090509 – Dispute by 600v
Claudia by Lipatov
Red Baroness by LadyDeuce
Mobilzitadelle “Franz-Josef I” by JanBoruta
The City of Tomorrow by BWS
Rush Hour by Malaveldt
250409 – BB2 3-4 by 600v
290809 – NFZ T1 v2 by 600v
210609 – NFZ A2 by 600v
Ironclas by MurderousAtomaton
Let’s Have Another Cup… by BWS
Aviatrix by Conceptbloke
Calling the Space Patrol by BWS
GateHouse Gazette 10 Cover by mykeamend
Eurocentric Liner by Stefanparis
Diesel City3 by Stefanparis
Retro-Futurism Poster Project by Inochi-zero
Wheel of Fortune by Mykeamend
Fasten Your Seat Belt by Stefanparis
At Your Usual Dealer by Stefanparis
Twentieth Century by Stefanparis
The Iron Baker by Kallini
Freedom in the Clouds by ViaruTarkin
Pegasus IV by Stefanparis
Panzerarmee “Radetzky” by JanBoruta
Grenadier by Vkucukemre
Space Spy by Innovari
Dieselpunk Airships by Tome WilsonImage: Svakom
If you're using an internet-connected vibrator equipped with a camera that allows you to stream your "pleasure" right to the internet, your intended viewers might not be the only ones watching.
Hackers from the UK-based security firm Pen Test Partners have found that it's trivially easy to hack into a Svakom Siime Eye, a $249 Internet of Things dildo that has a small camera on its tip, allowing users to stream a video to anyone of their choosing over the internet. However, if you're in Wi-Fi range of the dildo and can guess the password, which by default is "88888888," you can watch the video stream. With a bit more hacking, you can take control of the firmware and then connect to it remotely as well.
Read more: Internet of Things Teddy Bear Leaked 2 Million Parent and Kids Message Recordings
"When somebody is using it, someone else could be seeing the video stream," said Ken Munro, the founder of Pen Test Partners.
What's worse, "you'd never know about it," said the researcher who investigated the security of the device, who asked to be referred to only as Beau du Jour.
It's the first dildo hack that could potentially expose live footage of someone's most intimate parts (literally).
Of course, this is not the first dildo to get hacked. Security researchers have time and time again warned that some of the new internet-connected sex toys were awfully insecure, and a privacy nightmare. Earlier in March, the maker of a connected vibrator that collected sensitive personal information agreed to pay $3.7 million to settle a class-action lawsuit.
But it's the first dildo hack that could potentially expose live footage of someone's most intimate parts (literally).
Beau du Jour found that the Siime Eye creates a Wi-Fi internet access point whose password, by default, is "88888888." That way, anyone in range can connect to it by guessing the simple password, as he explained in a blog post published on Monday. By looking at the code of the mobile app that comes with the dildo, the researcher also found that once on the dildo's Wi-Fi, you can access its webserver. This has a login portal, but the user is "admin" and the password is blank.
By reverse engineering the firmware, Beau du Jour found a way to get root—hacker speak for taking full control of it—and get persistence on the device, meaning that he could connect to it even outside the range of the Wi-Fi. At that point, it was game over for the smart camera dildo.
"The fact they chose to use Wi-Fi was utterly stupid."
The researcher said he tried to warn Svakom of these vulnerabilities with repeated emails in December, January, and February but he received no response. The company did not respond to Motherboard's request for comment either.
The researchers also found that by creating a Wi-Fi access point always with the same name, it's possible, in theory, to just drive around a city and look for Wi-Fi networks called "Siime Eye." Some of these networks, in fact, have been logged onto the Wi-Fi wardriving site wigle.net.
"The fact they chose to use Wi-Fi was utterly stupid," Munro said in a phone interview.
Once again, the lessons learned with this dildo show us that most Internet of Things devices aren't ready for prime time. And they're not designed taking into account basic security principles that can safeguard users privacy. From Teddy Bears to medical washing machines, and from lightbulbs to freaking Crock-Pots, the Internet of Things is still the Internet of Shit when it comes to security.
So, for now, the Munro's advice to anyone owning a Siime Eye is throw the device away "and never use it again."
Subscribe to pluspluspodcast, Motherboard's new show about the people and machines that are building our future.CTVNews.ca Staff
One day after a peaceful protest, the controversial statue of Halifax’s founder was defaced with graffiti.
Sometime after the tarp was removed from the Edward Cornwallis statue in the city’s Cornwallis Park, graffiti reading “F*** 150” was written near the base, in reference to Canada’s 150th anniversary. City maps were taped over the graffiti until city officials used a power washer to remove the writing.
Protesters surrounded the statue on Saturday afternoon and cheered as a city-owned truck helped drape the statue with a tarp, a compromise after a call to remove the statue.
Cornwallis founded the city of Halifax in 1749 shortly before issuing a bounty for Mi’kmaq scalps. Throughout the years, the Mi’kmaq people have continued to call for the removal of the statue.
A call to action was read out at the protest which was accepted by Halifax Mayor Mike Savage. Savage said he will bring the demands to the city council on Tuesday.
The tarp remained on the statue throughout Saturday, before it was defaced.Legal history was made in the Criminal Courts of Justice yesterday when the first member of the judiciary convicted of a serious crime and forced to resign, was sent to prison.
Heather Perrin, a 61-year-old woman born into a modest background where third-level education was not an option, one who “pulled herself up by the bootstraps” to progress from legal secretary to qualified solicitor at the age of 31, and to a seat on the bench at 57, is now consigned to An Dóchas women’s prison.
Prisoners there now routinely double up in rooms designed as private singles, and sleep in “hard bunk beds with thin duvets”, in the words of one source.
A woman known for her liking for good jewellery and prestigious car marques, one for whom her public face and dignity were perceived to be particularly important, will be reduced to purchasing stock from the prison shop on a stipend of less than €2 a day.
However, one of the biggest challenges she faces in prison, perhaps, will be the known fact of her former occupation, a factor acknowledged by Judge Mary Ellen Ring.
The cataclysmic fallout from her crime will not end there. Perrin must bear the responsibility for the fact that her two adult children “have become a feature of the case”, said the judge, since they were “caught up in a nightmare not of their making, but of their mother’s”.
And even when Perrin has served her time, it is “unthinkable that she would be allowed to practise hereafter”, Judge Ring said. The “public disgrace” of being the first judge to be convicted will “mark her for the rest of her life”.
Genteel, middle-class women in pearls and men in business suits, many pillars of the north Dublin Anglican community, sat incongruously among throngs of criminology and transition-year students, members of the public and idle lawyers, listening as Judge Ring talked about “actions that do not indicate the greatest level of sophistication that could have been deployed”.
They heard details of her poor health from an orthopaedic consultant, Prof Damien McCormack, who spoke of a “very unusual”, “unexplained” life- and limb-threatening infection in Perrin’s calf area after an “uneventful” knee replacement operation last summer.
They also heard character evidence from the Church of Ireland Archdeacon of Dublin, David Pierpoint, noting her intensive, long-term involvement on the international council of the Girls’ Brigade.
There were also references to her private, charitable good works and time devoted to her community and her children’s schools. It is understood that one of her character references was from Olasupo Olorunyomi, a young Nigerian whom she helped in his lengthy battle to gain residency.
Judge Ring pronounced sentence of 2½ years. Without the medical issues, she said, she would have imposed a further year.
Clearly, Perrin had anticipated a suspended sentence. Her face registered deep shock, before turning, almost child-like, to seek out her husband, who stood up to comfort her.
As her face crumpled in distress, he held her for long moments, shielding her from the public gaze, while prison officers stood by. When she was led away through a side door, leaning heavily on her crutches, he collapsed into a seat, his head in his hands, shaking with grief.
Her brother Mark looked on helplessly amid audible weeping around the courtroom.Foxconn, the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer, has become the latest company to back Mozilla’s Firefox OS and is developing more than five devices running the mobile operating system for its customers.
Michael Kan/IDGNS Mozilla executive Li Gong shows off a reference model tablet running the Firefox OS.
The Taiwanese manufacturing giant is working on the devices as part of a new partnership with Mozilla to build up the Firefox OS ecosystem, the companies said on Monday.
Foxconn, best known as the maker of Apple’s iPhone, also assembles PCs, TVs and handsets for many other top vendors including Nokia, Sony and Hewlett-Packard, according to analysts.
Through the partnership with Mozilla, the company wants to provide reference models for new products built using the fledgling Firefox OS. Covered devices could include smartphones, tablets, laptops, and TVs, said Young Liu, general manager for Foxconn’s innovation digital system business group.
“We are not coming out with our own brand,” he stressed. Instead, the company wants to help technology vendors transition to the post-PC era, at a time when the industry is straying away from Windows and Intel-based chips. Now many PC vendors are focusing on mobile devices, and releasing tablets and smartphones to drive sales.
“It can’t just be like in the past, where we used hardware to compete. You have to compete on the entire user experience,” he said. “We hope with Firefox we can create an ecosystem in order to help our past PC customers improve their competitive edge.”
The Firefox OS is based on the HTML5 web standard and is meant to compete against Google’s Android OS and Apple’s iOS, both of which are now dominating the mobile devices market.
The first phones built with the Firefox OS are slated to launch in emerging markets mid-year. So far, 18 carriers and five handset makers, including Sony, Huawei Technologies and LG Electronics, plan to release products using the operating system.
Mozilla expects the partnership with Foxconn will help pave the way for more Firefox OS devices from other branded vendors, said Li Gong, Mozilla’s senior vice president for mobile devices.
“They [Foxconn] are going to bring not just smartphone, but a number of other devices, and that’s another big addition to the Firefox ecosystem,” he said.
To illustrate his point, Gong showed off a 10-inch tablet running the Firefox OS. The device itself is a reference model, supplied from a manufacturer he declined to name. When the tablet reaches the market will depend on vendors.
Updated at 10:51 a.m. PT with a video report from IDG News Service.SANDF: We're not scared to go to war
Johannesburg - The SA National Defence Force (SANDF) was "ready to tackle" the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo rebel group M23, its spokesperson said on Monday.
"We are not scared to go to war," SANDF spokesperson Xolani Mabanga told SAfm.
"If they [M23] declare war against the SA National Defence Force personnel, we are ready to tackle them. We, as the SANDF, will never be deterred by any circumstances to pursue or do what we are asked to do by the government of South Africa."
Mabanga said the situation in the eastern DRC was different to that of the South African troops deployed in the Central African Republic (CAR), where 13 soldiers were recently killed.
"We know what is the conflict [in the DRC], whilst we cannot say the same with the situation in the CAR."
Mabanga would not say how many soldiers would be deployed to the DRC as part of a United Nations intervention force.
Asked if the SANDF was aware of the potential danger of such a deployment, Mabanga replied: "When we joined the SANDF, we said, we are prepared to die and we are prepared to do anything and therefore that is the sacrifice we have done for the nation.
"We are not scared to go to war. We are not scared to anywhere where we are asked to go," said Mabanga.
Last week, the UN Security Council adopted a resolution which approved the deployment of an intervention force into the eastern DRC.
Several armed groups, including the M23 rebels, are active in the east of the DRC and fighting for control of the country’s vast mineral resources, such as gold, the main tin ore cassiterite, and coltan, which is used to make electronic devices, including cellphones, according to an earlier report by the international PressTV.20 Gallery: NJN Closes After 40 Years
TRENTON — Tears welled in longtime journalist Michael Aron’s eyes as he and colleague Jim Hooker said their goodbye on New Jersey Network’s final evening newscast from Trenton.
The broadcast cut to a small room of empty cubicles. The lights turned off, and a small, blue NJN sign glowed on the back wall. The screen faded to black. "New Jersey Network. April 5, 1971 - June 30, 2011."
"Oh baby," Hooker said with a sigh, after the cameras turned off. "Tough one."
The beleaguered station signed off today from its headquarters on Stockton Street. As of Friday, 130 people are out of work. They packed up their desks and grabbed as many hugs as they could before leaving out the back door.
Now, the station becomes NJTV and New York-based WNET takes control after a prolonged push by Gov. Chris Christie to get the state out of the public broadcasting business. Christie also sold off NJN’s nine radio licenses.
Created in 1971, the station was the solution to bolstering news coverage in a state otherwise divided between the Philadelphia and New York markets. With little flash compared to network television, and a fraction of the audience, NJN nonetheless attracted loyal viewers from all corners.
Hundreds of callers flooded the station during the past few weeks to express a mix of condolences and outrage. "I must tell you, I’m so heartbroken," one woman said in a voicemail. Others lamented the loss of Aron and Hooker, the respected roving reporter and the pun-prone anchorman.
"...Mr. NJN is standing by at the Statehouse with the latest," Hooker said during a newscast Monday, tossing to Aron.
"Thank you, other Mr. NJN," the tall, deep-voiced Aron said with a slight smile.
The tug-of-war over the station put its news crews in the peculiar position of covering their own calamity. But the fight was in some ways one-sided, because as journalists they could not hold rallies or lobby for their jobs. Their profession told them to stay the course, and stay away from opinion.
"We thought about reaching out into people’s living rooms and asking, ‘Please help us,’" said Aron, 65, a veteran political correspondent and 29-year employee. "In some subtle ways, we did. We reminded people how long we’ve been on the air, and that we would soon be gone. But that was about as far as we were willing to go."
There were other hints of displeasure: About a week ago, crews working in the trucks once parked outside the Statehouse turned the magnetic NJN signs upside down. And for the first time in 20 years, Aron said, the station decided not to air the Senate and Assembly budget vote live. The cameramen could not bear to watch anymore, he said.
Even Aron, the dean of the Statehouse press corps, skipped the budget wrangling Wednesday but for a brief stop in the Senate chambers. Fellow reporters dutifully took notes in the back of the room; Aron shook hands with a few lawmakers and staffers, then left without looking back.
"I wish I could have stayed," he said.
Back in the studio, Hooker, 55, wrapped up his Wednesday newscast and returned to his desk after most people had left for the day. He took a call from David, a developmentally disabled man he befriended about a year ago and recently met at a Special Olympics event.
"Are you aware you won’t be seeing your friend anymore after Thursday night?" Hooker said into his cell phone, promising to keep in touch. "What is it you say? We accept... We take it in stride and we move on."
The death knell that rang inside NJN for months took its toll.
"It’s been like a funeral around here," said Mike Curtis, 51, executive producer of NJN news and a 17-year employee.
When Aron laid his signature show, Reporters Roundtable, to rest last week, he ended with a line that he started using five years ago: "In any event, if you’re a reporter, New Jersey never lets you down."
"Part of it was a very subtle, maybe too subtle, way of saying I have loved what I do and they’re taking it away from me," he said. "There was probably a tinge of self-pity in the statement. Maybe that was overdoing it. I don’t know."The home of a prominent Israeli peace activist has been vandalised, with death threats and swastikas spray-painted on walls and a nearby vehicle, amid alarm among human rights groups about increasingly hostile and violent actions against them.
Police confirmed they were investigating the attack on the Jerusalem home of Hagit Ofran, who works for Peace Now, an Israeli organisation that monitors settlement activity in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
The graffiti included the words "Hagit Ofran ‚Ä" zal [of blessed memory]"; "Rabin is waiting for you", a reference to the assassinated Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin; and "price tag", the signature of extremist settlers who carry out operations in revenge for moves to demolish unauthorised West Bank outposts. The names of two recently dismantled outposts were also sprayed on walls.
It is the second such attack on Ofran's home in two months. On Sunday, Peace Now's offices were evacuated after a telephone call warned of an imminent bomb attack. "The building will explode in five minutes," the caller said. Staff found the words "price tag" had been sprayed |
graphviz) "dot" graphs to show register dependences between instructions.
When required, XED can be built without the encoder or the decoder to reduce the code/data footprint. The code in the XED library is written in C and is partially generated from tables using python scripts at build time. XED is designed for embedding and has a minimal set of simple external dependencies. XED requires only 6 simple external library functions (like memcmp and memset). The libxed library makes no system calls and allocates no memory. It is multithread-safe after one-time initialization of the tables.An ironic juxtaposition has me dwelling once more on Freud’s remarkable endurance. Psychoanalysis, the theory/therapy that Freud invented more than a century ago, has been bashed since its inception. Philosopher Karl Popper upheld it as a paradigmatic example of pseudo-science, and many modern scientists agree.
One of Freud’s most relentless critics is literary scholar Frederick Crews. For decades, he has attacked Freud’s character as well as his ideas--accusing him of being a cocaine-addled liar and egomaniac--in The New York Review of Books.
Last month, in that same venue, Crews renewed his assault while reviewing a biography of Freud by Elisabeth Roudinesco. Crews claims that Roudinesco, a fan of Freud, inadvertently reveals how her hero “subordinated all values to the causes of forwarding his brainchild without regard to its social or medical utility.”
Roundinesco downplays Freud’s cocaine usage, Crews asserts, as well as evidence that “Freud’s early patients rejected and even mocked his sexual explanations of their troubles.” Freud “convinced millions that he belonged in the company of Copernicus and Darwin,” Crews contends, by “boasting, cajoling, question begging, denigrating rivals, and misrepresenting therapeutic results.”
So what is the “ironic juxtaposition” alluded to above? I read Crews’s review while transcribing my interview last summer with Elyn Saks, a professor of law and psychiatry at the University of Southern California. In her remarkable bestselling 2007 memoir The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness, Saks reveals her struggles with schizophrenia.
She has been hospitalized several times for periods totaling hundreds of days. Doctors once called her prognosis “grave,” which meant that she would probably never be fully autonomous, and she would work, at best, in menial jobs.
She has nonetheless overcome her disorder with the help of medications and—you guessed it--psychoanalysis. Saks has undergone psychoanalysis since she had a psychotic breakdown at Oxford University in the late 1970s, and she plans to continue being treated for the rest of her life.
Saks, who has a Ph.D. from the New Center for Psychoanalysis, saw no contradiction between psychoanalysis and physiological approaches to the mind and its disorders. They represent two levels of “discourse,” she explained to me. “One is at the level of molecules and neurotransmitters and brain cells and so on, and the other is at the level of personality, goals, meaning.”
She is well aware of the criticism of psychoanalysis. She nonetheless finds it “richer and deeper” than alternative theories and therapies, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy. Freud, she said, was “an amazing writer. The case studies read like novels.”
Freud’s ideas, Saks noted, have spawned many rival schools of psychoanalysis. Saks’s first analyst practiced a therapy pioneered by Melanie Klein. But Freud is “the granddaddy.”
In her memoir, Saks notes that “Freud and his teachings had always fascinated me.” Psychoanalysis “asks fundamental questions: Why do people do what they do? When can people be held responsible for their actions? Is unconscious motivation relevant to responsibility?”
Saks’s affinity for psychoanalysis is part of larger trend. In her 2015 book In the Mind Fields: Exploring the New Science of Neuropsychoanalysis, journalist Casey Schwartz reports on recent attempts to find common ground between neuroscience and psychoanalysis.
In a 1996 article for Scientific American, “Why Freud Isn’t Dead,” I offered positive and negative reasons for the persistence of psychoanalysis. The positive reasons are those noted by Saks: Freud’s essays and case studies have the compelling complexity and depth of great literature.
The negative and more important reason is that science has not produced a theory/therapy potent enough to render psychoanalysis obsolete once and for all. “Freudians cannot point to unambiguous evidence that psychoanalysis works,” I wrote, “but neither can proponents of more modern treatments.”
I stand by that assessment. Critics liken psychoanalysis to phrenology, the 19th-century pseudo-science that linked personality to the shape of the skull. But if psychoanalysis is akin to phrenology, so are alternative therapies, which range from psychopharmacology and cognitive-behavioral therapy to “electro-cures” and Buddhism. As I reported recently, prescriptions for psychiatric drugs keep rising, and yet the mental health of Americans has deteriorated, according to measures such as disability payments.
In his 2016 book Schizophrenia and Its Treatment: Where Is the Progress?, Matthew Kurtz, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Wesleyan, reports that schizophrenia remains poorly understood and resistant to treatment. “[O]utcomes for people with the disorder have remained highly recalcitrant to change over the past 100 years.”
Fortunately, some treatments help some people, like Elyn Saks, overcome their illness, but our ability to explain and treat mental disorders remains primitive. Until science yields an indisputably superior theory/therapy for the mind, psychoanalysis--and Freud--will endure.
Further Reading:
Meta-Post: Horgan Posts on Antidepressants, Brain Implants, Psychedelics, Meditation and Other Therapies for Mental Illness
Psychiatrists Must Face Possibility That Medications Hurt More Than They HelpMāori leaders are calling for a national day to commemorate New Zealand's land wars - and say if it's good enough to pause for Anzac Day, those killed during wars in New Zealand should be paid the same respect.
Photo: RNZ / Andrew McRae
The conflicts known as the Māori land wars took place between government forces and Māori.
At the peak of the wars in the late 1800s, heavily-armed British troops battled Māori including women and children, who were outnumbered and often just defending their pā sites.
Waikato-Tainui spokesman Tukoroirangi Morgan said his iwi lived with the earlier settlers quite comfortably.
"In the Waikato itself, we had thousands of acres of produce which our people grew, we had our own trading ships - in fact we had 27 sailing ships that supplied the waters between here Australia, Asia and the Americas selling produce, flax and flour," he said.
Photo: Wikipedia
Mr Morgan, who is calling for the national day of commemoration, said Māori in Waikato had control over their way of life.
"Then war came and undeniably changed the face of our way of life and this nation, and on that basis it's an indictment on this country that those wars have never been taught in schools," he said.
"The commemorative day is about changing the narrative, our understanding as a nation of our earliest history when our people were murdered by the colonials and our lands were taken."
Mr Morgan said Māori leaders were onboard and it was time for the government to move forward on the issue.
Speaking from Vietnam, Prime Minister John Key said it was not that simple.
"The Māori Party has raised that issue with us. The question is what form does it take, is it a national holiday and what would it replace. It's not as straightforward as it sounds," Mr Key said.
Land wars took heavy toll on King Country
Ngāti Maniapoto was part of one of the most significant battles at Ōrakau Pā near Kihikihi, where 1500 colonial soldiers fought and killed more than 100 Māori - forcing the surviving men, women and children to flee into the bush.
Photo: Alexander Turnbull Library
Kaumatua Tom Roa, a descendant of one of the survivors, said New Zealanders remembered Anzac Day and should remember the fallen in this country's own wars too.
"A national day will continue to raise consciousness of all New Zealanders in terms of what is best not just for Māori or Maniapoto but what is best for all New Zealand," Mr Roa said.
Mr Roa said he did not agree with the Prime Minister's reasoning on the issue.
"Anzac Day is a day of commemoration of battles for us overseas; these battles are fought for us by us here in Aotearoa so they should at least have a national day of remembrance."
Photo: Supplied
Just south of Kihikihi, where the Battle of Ōrakau took place, two Otorohanga students have begun a petition.
After learning about the Waikato land wars, they have collected 10,000 signatures to support a commemoration day, which they will present to Hauraki-Waikato MP Nanaia Mahuta next month.
Ms Mahuta said those students represented a whole other generation.
"Their hope and dreams is that we don't lose the importance of New Zealand history in terms of teaching that to the next generation, the importance of the New Zealand wars and the creating of our national identity," she said.
The Māori Party will continue to raise the issue with Mr Key, with co-leader Marama Fox saying she wanted to drive it within Parliament.
"We need to start embracing our New Zealand history as a whole, warts and all. It will be a great opportunity to bring people together and I'd love to lead that in Parliament," she said.
Mr Morgan said Māori leaders would push ahead with the idea, and try and find a date of significance for all Māori.
He said Māori King Tuheitia had extended an invitation to all iwi at next year's coronation at Tūrangawaewae Marae.
Meanwhile, the Māori Party has also called for 5 November to be recognised as Parihaka Day - marking the sacking of the pacifist settlement in Taranaki in 1881 - instead of Guy Fawkes.
Watch a video about the battle of Rangiriri Pā in Waikato in 1863:A controversial new intelligence law went into effect on Wednesday aimed at allowing the Chinese government to even further crack down on foreign spies by monitoring suspects, searching homes, seizing property and mobilizing spies of their own, providing legal ground for domestic intelligence agencies to carry out operations both inside China and abroad.
The National Intelligence Law was approved (rather quickly) at the bi-annual meeting of the National People’s Congress (NPC) Standing Committee and has now taken full effect in China. It is China’s first attempt at legislating — and providing legislative cover for — its spy agencies and operations.
Passed with the intention of combating foreign espionage, the law demands that “China’s intelligence personnel should collect and process intelligence related to overseas organizations and individuals or anyone sponsored or instigated by them, as well as relevant intelligence about threats to China’s national security and interests.”
While this sounds like China’s Counter-espionage Law passed back in 2014, this new law reportedly focuses less on defense and encourages direct actions against possible foreign spies.
“Foreign spies are rampant in China,” anti-terrorism expert Li Wei told the Global Times. “The intelligence law, which also supports counter-espionage work, gives Chinese intelligence officials more power and ‘legal authorization’ to crack down on spies, who conduct their operations in the shadows.”
Li thinks the law will make it easier for government departments to work together and target suspects more efficiently than before.
“Previously, intelligence personnel needed to ask permission from authorities on a case-by-case basis as there was no law in the field,” he said. “Now they can carry out their intelligence work in accordance with the law.”
The law allows the Chinese government to investigate possible cases of espionage in all areas “where China’s interests are involved,” according to Wang Qiang, a specialist on non-war military actions. Wang claims that it’s crucial for the law to extend outside of China’s borders because of “widespread terrorism.”
As Reuters notes, the law passed unusually quickly. Most laws get at least two rounds of public consultation before being approved, but the National Intelligence Law received only one three-week long round. The standing committee also passed it after just two rounds of discussion, less than most laws, which are discussed for three or more rounds.
While foreign espionage is cause for concern, many are worried about the law’s other implications — most of which grant the government more power to use surveillance.
According to the law, obstructing espionage work can lead to up to 15 days detention, along with harsh inspections and “quarantines” for rule breakers.
Additionally, if the government suspects someone of espionage, they can confiscate personal property like vehicles, cellphones and even homes, according to Reuters.
However, it appears that even without this latest law, China’s counter-espionage efforts have been rather successfully recently. Last month, the New York Times published a report alleging that China had managed to cripple US spying operations in its country by killing or imprisoning 20 CIA spies earlier this decade.
Additionally, China has often looked to crowdsource its counter-intelligence operations. Back in 2015, the country set up a national hotline so that citizens could easily report foreign agents. To help its people identify a foreign spy, authorities issued a handy list of suspicious traits to look out for, including: “People who regularly visit certain places to exchange good or documents.” This April, the Beijing department of China’s National Security Bureau offered rewards of up to 500,000 yuan for help in unmasking foreign spies.
Most infamously, last April, Beijing’s state security launched a campaign to warn susceptible Chinese women to be wary when dating foreign men, in case they should turn out to be spies, only after China’s secrets.
By Caroline RoyNew Delhi: The government is likely to amend the Reserve Bank of India Act to extinguish the validity of Rs 500 and Rs 1000 printed before November 9 and a reference to this effect would be made in the upcoming Budget.
As part of the demonetisation process, there would be a law to make Rs 500/1000 notes invalid and it can be made effective from March 31, sources said.
"In 1978, when the currency was banned, the law to annul the validity came ahead. This time the government acted under 26 (2)," sources said.
As per RBI Act Section 26 (2), the central government, on the recommendation of the Central Board of RBI, may by notification in the Gazette of India, declare that, with effect from such date as may be specified in the notification, any series of bank notes of any denomination shall cease to be legal tender.
Asked about the amount of money which did not get into the system, sources said, it would add to bottomline of the RBI and it would be in a position to pay the government in the form of higher dividend or special dividend.
Banks have received Rs 12 lakh crore demonetised currency notes as against Rs 15.5 lakh crore. The government expects Rs 13 lakh crore to come back to banking system.
Higher dividend from the RBI due to cancellation of Rs 500/1000 may not be applicable until the RBI law is amended.
Last week, Reserve Bank Governor Urjit Patel had said it would not have any automatic impact on the central bank's balance sheet as per the existing law.
"Actually, the withdrawal of legal tender characteristics status does not extinguish any of RBI's balance sheet.
Therefore, there is no implication on the balance sheet as of now. The question of a special dividend automatically does not arise as of now," Patel had said.
RBI has issued currency notes worth over Rs 4.27 lakh crore to public through banks and ATMs following the demonetisation of old high value bills.
Consequent to the announcement of withdrawal of legal tender status of banknotes of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 from the midnight of November 8, 2016, the central bank made arrangements for exchange and/or deposit of such notes.
Long queues for cash withdrawal have been witnessed outside banks and ATMs all over the country since November 10. The bank were kept closed on November 9, the day demonetisation came into effect.Proof that the Internet can truly solve all of your problems: There exists a website that will find your lost wedding ring, engagement ring, or any type of jewelry, really, for you. And they'll do it fast and cheap.
Behold TheRingFinders.com, an international online directory of stealthy "metal detecting specialists" who will, for a nominal fee, go out and hunt for your [insert lost piece of jewelry here] for you. They're often successful, too, even with the most dire of cases: They've made 2,998 recoveries—worth more than $5.2 million.
It all started with Vancouver-based Chris Turner, who purchased his first metal detector at the age of 13 in 1973. At the time, his neighbor asked him to help hunt for her wedding ring—which she had lost while gardening 10 years ago. "I went out and I found it for her," Turner told the podcast Reply All. "I got apple pie for a year." The feeling of helping others reunite with their precious pieces stuck with him, and he's since made 500 recoveries on his own. The experience also led him to create The Ring Finders some 21 years ago.
How it works is people like Turner—who are adept at hunting for small objects with their metal detectors—pay dues to belong to the Ring Finders directory. If you've lost a piece of jewelry, all you have to do is visit the site, see if there is a Ring Finder in your area, and give them a call. There are currently 374 Ring Finders in 25 countries.
Reply All shared the success story of Tim, who got married less than six months ago—and watched his wedding ring come flying off while swimming in the ocean in South Carolina. Unaware of the Ring Finders, he and his wife posted a listing on Craigslist in case it washed ashore and someone found it later. That listing connected them with a Ring Finder, who met them at the beach and simply said, "I'll call you when I find it." Ten minutes later, his wife's cell phone rang: He had the ring.
So the next time you find yourself praying desperately to St. Anthony, maybe give the Ring Finders a call instead.Friends talked about an aspiring young rapper who went by the stage name Kea-lo Ivy, who was killed earlier this week while filming a music video. (Published Friday, April 3, 2015)
Police say the victim of a fatal shooting in Seat Pleasant, Maryland, was filming a music video at the time of his death.
Keaway Lafonz Ivy, 21, of Southeast D.C., was found dead in a parking lot in the 400 block of Eastern Avenue at about 10:30 p.m. Wednesday. Ivy was pronounced dead at the scene.
Police say Lafonzo Leonard Iracks, 21, of Northeast D.C., was arrested Thursday and charged in connection with Ivy's death.
According to a preliminary investigation, Ivy and Iracks were shooting a music video when Iracks discharged his weapon, striking Ivy. Investigators have not said whether the shooting was intentional or accidental.
There's no word on what charges Iracks is facing. He is currently being held in D.C. and is awaiting extradition to Prince George's County.1. Everyone in the organization adores Teddy Bridgewater. And, prior to last summer’s horrific knee injury, he was genuinely believed to be the future. But here’s the cold hard truth: Sam Bradford is a markedly better quarterback than Bridgewater. Bradford, with superior arm strength, accuracy and sense of dropback timing, is the one the Vikings worry about re-signing after this season, not Bridgewater (whose fifth-year option was not picked up).
2. It’s only a matter of time until second-round rookie Dalvin Cook officially becomes the featured back. We’ll find out how reliable he is as a blocker and receiver in passing situations. As a runner, Cook has more talent than former Raider Latavius Murray, a 230-pound back who runs with very little attitude and power.
3. Did the Vikings overspend for ex-Lion Riley Reiff to be their new left tackle (five years, $26.3 million guaranteed)? Probably. And did they overspend for ex-Panthers right tackle Mike Remmers (five years, $10.5 million guaranteed). Again, probably. But anyone who watched this team in the second half of last year can’t blame them. After legions of offensive tackles went down and T.J. Clemmings, whose NFL future (if there is one) is as a backup guard, was put back into the lineup at left tackle, the offense had to reduce its passing game to screens and hastened three-step dropbacks. Bradford & Co. never had a chance.
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4. This will be a three-receiver offense. The Vikings are solid at wideout and, besides seventh-year TE Kyle Rudolph, they have no proven tight ends and fullbacks. Rudolph is a vulnerable run-blocker but steady inside-aligned receiver who can get open within the context of a play design.
5. This is the year Stefon Diggs emerges as a 1,000-yard receiver. It would have been last season if Minnesota’s passing game hadn’t been derailed by O-line injuries. (Diggs finished with 903 yards on 84 catches in 13 games.) He has outstanding short-area quickness and acceleration—two traits that can make him dominant from the slot.
Harrison Smith - Hannah Foslien/Getty Images Harrison Smith Hannah Foslien/Getty Images
6. The Vikings are a predominantly two-high safety defense. They love to play zone coverage out of this structure. The reason more teams don’t play with two-high safeties is it leaves you with one less body in the box, which hurts your run defense. The Vikings, however, have a trio of stingy run-stoppers inside with oversized linebacker Anthony Barr, athletic linebacker Eric Kendricks and gargantuanly underrated nose tackle Linval Joseph. Defensive ends Everson Griffen and Danielle Hunter aren’t great edge-setters, but in a two-high scheme they don’t need to be. Edge-settings falls to the cornerbacks or safeties (depending if it’s Cover 2 or Cover 4 zone). All of Minnesota’s defensive backs, led by Harrison Smith, are sure tacklers.
7. Speaking of Smith, he’s the guy who makes much of this defense go. Besides having terrific awareness and poise back in space, and almost never missing a tackle, Smith is a select edge blitzer in head coach Mike Zimmer’s staple double-A-gap concepts.
8. Another key component of that double-A-gap is Kendricks. With both linebackers walked up to between the guard and center, it’s imperative they have the athleticism and wherewithal to retreat into landmark zone coverage when the blitz is merely a bluff. Kendricks is tremendous here. In fact, aside from maybe Carolina’s Luke Kuechly and Thomas Davis, he might be the best all-around zone coverage linebacker in football.
9. Fifth-year pro (and recently paid) Xavier Rhodes has blossomed into a bona fide No. 1 corner. He traveled with top receivers last season, including into the slot. That’s not something Zimmer typically does with his cornerbacks. Rhodes is most effective along the boundary. He has long arms and strong hands; when he jams receivers outside, he can gradually force them toward the sideline, out of the action.
10. At 34, defensive end Brian Robison’s role is scheduled to be reduced. More of his snaps will go to rising 22-year-old Danielle Hunter. That doesn’t mean Robison can’t still play. He showed up again and again on film last season. He’s an excellent technician with agile body control and the ability to play inside or outside.
• Question or comment? Email us at talkback@themmqb.com.Ray Winstone The Latest Awesome Actor Cast As A Dwarf In Snow White And The Huntsman By Sean O'Connell Random Article Blend Snow White and the Huntsman, it’s official that neither Snow White, the Huntsman or Charlize Theron’s evil queen will be the reason why we line up for this adventure next summer. It will be to see the seven dwarfs director Rupert Sanders has recruited for this bizarre fairy tale adaptation.
British tough guy Ray Winstone (44-inch Chest, The Departed) is the latest name added to the eclectic ensemble of knockaround sons of bitches who Kristen Stewart’s Snow White will befriend on screen, according to Happy-Go-Lucky star Eddie Marsan. I’m not sure this film can get more awesome.
Lately Universal has been winning the PR battle against Relativity’s rival Snow White project, which has Julia Roberts, Lily Collins and Armie Hammer as its leads. That version, directed by Tarsem Singh, has some ground to make up now that Sanders’s Snow has revealed such bold choices for its dwarfs. But I’m telling you, covering the Snow White race has been more fun than watching these films could ever be. Let’s hope we’re not too disappointed when both films hit theaters next year. Following a flurry of activity over in the casting department of Universal’s planned, it’s official that neither Snow White, the Huntsman or Charlize Theron’s evil queen will be the reason why we line up for this adventure next summer. It will be to see the seven dwarfs director Rupert Sanders has recruited for this bizarre fairy tale adaptation.British tough guy Ray Winstone () is the latest name added to the eclectic ensemble of knockaround sons of bitches who Kristen Stewart’s Snow White will befriend on screen, according to The Hollywood Reporter. He’ll join recently cast actors Ian McShane, Eddie Izzard, Bob Hoskins and Toby Jones for a version that has dwarfs named after Roman emperors like Caesar, Claudius and Tiberius. Winstone will play Trajan, who is the twin brother of Hadrian, to be played bystar Eddie Marsan. I’m not sure this film can get more awesome.Lately Universal has been winning the PR battle against Relativity’s rivalproject, which has Julia Roberts, Lily Collins and Armie Hammer as its leads. That version, directed by Tarsem Singh, has some ground to make up now that Sanders’shas revealed such bold choices for its dwarfs. But I’m telling you, covering therace has been more fun than watching these films could ever be. Let’s hope we’re not too disappointed when both films hit theaters next year. Blended From Around The Web Facebook
Back to topUS Rep. Tom Price of Georgia tearing a page from the national healthcare bill during a press conference at the US Capitol in 2012. Win McNamee/Getty Images Rep. Tom Price of Georgia on Tuesday was nominated as the new secretary of health and human services by President-elect Donald Trump.
A former orthopedic surgeon, Price has an impressive record in the healthcare field. He is also a vocal critic of the Affordable Care Act, the healthcare law better known as Obamacare, and his appointment perhaps signals Trump's seriousness in intending to dismantle the law.
"The Trump administration's mantra has been that the ACA is a disaster and the only way to fix it is to repeal and replace it, and this appointment seems to confirm that idea," Timothy Jost, a law professor and health-policy expert at Washington and Lee University who supports the ACA, told Business Insider.
Price has been at the forefront of congressional fights to repeal and replace President Barack Obama's signature legislation.
While Trump's own details on how to replace the law have been spotty, Price has written legislation called the Empowering Patients First Act, which would repeal most of the sections of Obamacare and shift toward what Republicans call a "market-based" approach.
How it would work
Price's plan would significantly restructure the benefits given to Americans without health insurance through their employer or the government. Price's plan structures tax credits based on age brackets — $1,200 for people ages 18 to 35 and up to $3,000 for those 50 and older. This is different from the ACA, which bases its tax credits on the income of the patient.
Another key aspect of Obamacare — one Trump has said he would consider keeping — that prevents insurers from denying coverage based on a preexisting condition, would change. Under Price's proposal, people would be able to continue coverage if they shifted from the employer market to the individual market, but only if they have no interruptions in coverage. Thus, a break in care would allow insurers to deny coverage to people with an illness.
For those who do not maintain that care, Price's plan would institute state-level high-risk pools to help cover them. The Price plan would provide $1 billion in federal funding to help control costs for these pools. The Commonwealth Fund, however, a nonpartisan health-policy think thank, estimates that these pools would require well over $170 billion a year in federal funding to cover those who today have ACA-based plans.
Additionally, such high-risk pools typically have premium costs double those of normal individual-market plans.
The expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare would also be rolled back under Price's plan, shifting roughly 15 million people from the government-sponsored insurance to the individual marketplace. The expansion provided coverage for those making roughly $16,490 and below annually. Questions loom over, even with a subsidy, how affordable it will be for those people to obtain plans on the individual market.
In total, Price's proposal bears much of the same hallmarks of plans from Republican other congressional leaders, such as House Speaker Paul Ryan, who called Price the "absolute perfect choice" for the position in Trump's Cabinet.
"We could not ask for a better partner to work with Congress to fix our nation's healthcare challenges," Ryan said in a statement.
Mark Wilson/Getty Images
'Asking the fox to guard the hen house'
The appointment of Price has drawn criticism from Democrats and advocates of the Affordable Care Act. Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the incoming Senate minority leader, said Price's healthcare proposals were "far out of the mainstream of what Americans want."
"Nominating Congressman Price to be the HHS secretary is akin to asking the fox to guard the hen house," Schumer's statement said.
Jost said Price's proposals would, incidentally, end up hurting many of the people who elected Trump to the White House.
Price's plan "shows where we're heading," Jost told Business Insider. "It will help wealthier people and does nothing to help the working-class people who actually voted for Trump."
Critics point to potential rollbacks of provisions in the ACA that compel insurance companies to provide certain types of care, meaning insurance companies could exclude comprehensive coverage needed by sick people. For older individuals, Price's plan would take away the provision linking what insurers can charge young people compared with seniors, providing the potential for insurers to increase rates for older people with chronic-care needs.
Even the majority of Americans who get their insurance through their employer, Jost said, might see their costs increase under a Price-type plan. Those with insurance through their workplace currently do not pay federal taxes on premiums and other health-related payments — such as health savings accounts and health reimbursement arrangements — paid to these plans.
Price's plan would cap the amount of healthcare spending that is non-taxable at $20,000 for a family and $8,000 for an individual. While such a provision could hurt affordability for those with employer-based insurance, according to the Tax Policy Center, the exemption cost the federal government $250 billion in lost taxes in 2015.
Jost also suggested many of the provisions in Price's plan — such as state-level tribunals for malpractice cases and limitations on what patients may use in cases as evidence against a doctor — are designed to guard physicians from patients.
"The bill should probably be called 'Empowering Doctors First,'" Jost told Business Insider. "He's a doctor, and it's clear he is trying to shield doctors."Condo developers in Alberta will have to set firm move-in dates for buyers and be prepared to refund deposits if they miss those deadlines under new condo regulations unveiled Thursday by the NDP government.
Service Alberta Minister Stephanie McLean announced the changes Thursday in Calgary, saying they will be good for both condo buyers and those who build and sell them.
McLean says the new rules include:
A new onus on developers to stipulate a final move-in date. If that date is not honoured, buyers will have the option of re-negotiating contracts or getting their deposits refunded.
Deposits will now have to be held by a lawyer while the condo is being built.
Details such as floor plans and finishes will have to be written into contracts.
Developers will be required to provide more information to new condo boards — such as building plans and tax records — for a smoother transition to the owners.
"We are also preventing fee shock, by requiring developers to give you a realistic estimate of condo fees that you can expect to pay when you move in," McLean said.
If an estimate is off by more than 15 per cent, the seller must cover that difference for the first year.
"We believe Albertans deserve to be protected when making a purchase, and no purchase is more important or large than buying a new home," McLean said.
"With these protections come consumer confidence."
She says the province held a series of consultations in Alberta's five largest condo markets to make sure the changes benefit buyers, developers and builders.
Developer praises new rules
Changes to the Condominium Property Amendment Act in 2014 gave the province the power to regulate and make other changes.
Jade Mahon, a vice-president at Partners Development Group, said the new rules are a win-win for buyers and sellers.
"We know that these regulations will enhance consumer confidence and their security in making such a large investment in their home, therefore increasing homeownership in the marketplace," she said.
"When we have strong regulatory frameworks, consumers and businesses prosper together."
The province is now conducting an online survey for one month to get feedback on the next set of new rules, which will affect the way day-to-day condo operations are regulated, McLean says.
These rules could address such things as the way meetings and votes are conducted, what qualifications are needed for property managers and whether tribunals should be created to resolve disputes outside the courts.
"We will use the feedback to help draft new rules, with the target of bringing them into effect next year," she said.
Sorely needed
A national condominium association says the changes makes for a more balanced relationship between developers and new owners.
"This is actually sorely needed and we are really, really pleased that this has come forward," Anand Sharma of the Canadian Condominium Institute, North Alberta Chapter told The Homestretch.
"Currently developers have a major hand in what these purchase agreements look like and they are tilted in their favour and people get stuck with un-built condominiums for many years in some cases, without a way of getting out of their contract."
Sharma says new owners would sometimes fall for sales pitches.
"This levels the playing field a little, but for new potential owners. In the past it was buyer beware, and now it's still buyer beware but there is some balance," he said.
"In an attempt to sell a condominium, developers would low-ball condominium fees and short-change the owner's condo boards and set unrealistic expectations for new owners."
With files from The Homestretch
Much has been made of the fact that Ryan Adams last released an album three years ago. While that’s true, the underlying implication that his pace has slowed is misleading. Sure, Adams once put out three LPs in one year, and managed an impressive 10 albums between 2000-08. But it’s not as if he set music aside after 2011’s Ashes & Fire to play vintage pinball machines and tweet cat photos. On the contrary, the musical polymath found time for that stuff while also running his Pax Am Studio in L.A., where Adams has kept busy recording and producing other artists (Fall Out Boy, Liz Phair and Jenny Lewis among them), and where he spent $100,000 making an album with Glyn Johns that he shelved because it was “slow adult shit,” Adams told NME last month.
Add it to the pile: By this point, Adams must have an archive of unreleased music as extensive as the catalog of material he has released. It’s a tantalizing prospect for fans of the former Whiskeytown leader, whose self-titled new album marks his 14th solo release. It’s more of a rock ’n’ roll album than the rootsy, understated Ashes & Fire, and while Adams includes a handful of the wrenching ballads he does so well, bold electric guitars hold sway on most of these 11 new songs.
He deploys a distinctive guitar tone on his rock ’n’ roll songs, dialing in a carefully calibrated mix of treble, grit and reverb that he has honed over the past dozen or so years. It’s in full force on the punchy riff that kicks off lead track “Gimme Something Good,” rings out like an alarm on “Stay With Me” and tumbles down in cascades on “Feels Like Fire,” a song that sets up brusque verses and then washes them away with a lush, sweeping hook on the chorus.
Adams inverts that approach on “Kim,” using an ebb-and-flow guitar part like a bellows to build a yearning zig-zag melody into the one-word refrain that echoes the song title. He trades the electric for an acoustic guitar on another ballad, “My Wrecking Ball.” It’s one of those devastating quiet songs that sounds as though Adams is singing from inside the wreckage of a broken heart. Those gutbucket songs are still what Adams does best, though he’s become a more consistent rock ’n’ roll songwriter since, well, Rock N Roll, his raucous 2003 album stepping away from the alt-country tag that had stuck to him since the Whiskeytown days.
Since then, when he hasn’t dipped back into country on albums like Easy Tiger in 2007 (or gone in a sci-fi metal direction on his 2010 concept album Orion), he’s either dabbled in rock, on 2008’s Cardinology, or emphasized ballads on Ashes & Fire. Ryan Adams strikes the best balance between them that he’s found yet.Shane van Gisbergen expects to challenge for class honours as he prepares for his fourth shot at the Daytona 24 Hours this weekend.
The new Supercars champion will rejoin WeatherTech Racing where he will pilot a brand new GTD class Mercedes AMG GT3 alongside experienced Americans Cooper MacNeil and Gunnar Jeannette and factory Mercedes driver Thomas Jaeger.
The New Zealander has quickly earned a strong reputation with the American operation since he made |
, a regular intake of table sugar is important in regulating insulin productivity. There are also positive metabolic effects. Sugar is added to FDA-approved energy products for a reason--it's a safe stimulant that augments energy in a confined period of time and promotes a heart-healthy agenda. Thus, it is somewhat difficult to say exactly how much sugar per day any one person may require. For someone with a regular metabolism, that doesn't devote time to exercise, a 100g maximum should not be crossed (and in many cases not be approached.) However, athletes may consume 150% of this without seeing notable side-effects. It is important that I reiterate that in either case this threshold should not be approached. Sugar in very high doses is dangerous; if you're concerned for your health it is best to stay at a far more shallow intake than the maximum dosage recommends.Recommended amount of any food per day is always subjective to the following:a. Ageb. Health conditionsc. Physical activity (calorie expenditure per day)d. General food habits (based on locality of individual, he may be consuming more of one food and may be immune to bad effects of it)e. OthersThere are many other minor factors which may determine the amount of sugars that a person needs. So based on the law of individualism, each individual is unique and their needs are different based on various factors.Processed sugar is not necessary at all in anyone's daily diet. It should be avoided. Our body gets enough carbohydrates from ordinary foods and converts raw carbs to sugars as needed. Grains, fruits, and other carbs provide enough(sometimes too much) sugars as is. Dried fruits such as raisins are especially full of sugars. To add even more processed sugar is harmful. As a dentist, I see daily the harm done by hard candy, chocolate, soda, cough drops (98% sugar), sweetened tea, coffee (with either sugar and sometimes powdered cream substitute (contains high % sugar), pastries, pies, cakes, cookies.Hope I have been of some help to you. Consult a dietitian if you disagree with anything that I have said.The answer is different for each individual. A much more useful answer that may save lives is: Everyone is different. If you are diabetic and worried about harming your body with sugar intake (as you should be), then it is small comfort if your intake is fine for average people but tends to cause high blood sugar forin particular.Rather than researching grams of sugar and asking people (or even doctors) if that's harmful, you should buy a glucometer (blood glucose meter) at any drugstore, learn to use it, and find out what foods you can eat (on your current medicine and diet) that will keep your blood sugar in the safe ranges according to the link belowAfter you have determined how much milk or sugar or carbohydrate you can eat and stay within these boundaries, then and only then are absolute grams of carbohydrate or sugar a useful thing to know.Get the biggest Manchester United 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
Former United captain Gary Neville believes The Reds fail to take "risks" and are "predictable" in Louis van Gaal's 3-5-2 system.
United's supporters chanted "4-4-2" towards the end of a disjointed first-half at Queens Park Rangers on Saturday, six days on from The Reds failing to register a shot on target in the defeat to Southampton.
Jonny Evans' injury forced Van Gaal to switch to 4-4-2 at Loftus Road and a minute later substitute Marouane Fellaini, introduced for Juan Mata at half-time, opened the scoring.
Neville confessed on Monday Night Football he wasn't a fan of 3-5-2 and suggested United enjoy too many spells of sterile domination.
"Louis van Gaal wants them to recycle the ball and switch the play," Neville said.
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"I'm not a fan of 3-5-2 because centre-backs are the free men and they become the safe option.
"They play out the back but the tempo too slow. Far too often they are keeping possession and passing backwards.
"They've become quite predictable in past few weeks. Manchester United looked far more dangerous on Saturday when they changed the system.
"Fans want them to go 2-0 up and then keep possession rather than fight for goals near the end."
Shortly after he joined United, Rio Ferdinand was told by Neville: "Listen, stop f*****g playing safe, you're not at f*****g West Ham or Leeds now."Kelli King, also known as “Sydney” is a PAYDAY 2 character that was released earlier this week. She is the second character I have worked on since I took on the role of Game Writer for the game.
Jimmy was the first character, but as he was the result of a collaboration with the Hardcore Henry movie (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3072482), he wasn’t designed by us at Starbreeze; and instead, I got to read the script of the movie and watch some uncut footage (this was before the movie had premiered) to try and get a sense of Jimmy’s personality. Based on the reception from the community and my colleagues, it seems as if I succeeded which makes me very happy 🙂
On to Sydney then.
So, Sydney is the first original playable character I created for PAYDAY 2.
The guidelines I received from upper management was that we were to introduce an Australian female heister portrayed by Georgia Van Cuylenburg. That left me a lot of room to come up with what kind of person I wanted her to be.
The first thing that came to mind was that I wanted her to be crazy, on the verge of mental. A person who fully embodied the life of a criminal and who basked in the chaos she created. I wanted her to be young and ambitious, with a clear goal in mind that she wanted to leave her mark in history as one of the greatest criminals to have ever lived. To achieve this, she would have to team up with the PAYDAY gang, because let’s face it, no one does it better than them.
As always when I come up with a character (regardless of medium), I get an image in my head of how they look. One of the awesome things about working at Starbreeze is that I have the opportunity to work with amazing concept artists who takes what I have in mind and bringing them to life. Sydney’s hair was the first thing I imagined when I started working on the character. I wanted her to have a fiery red mohawk and a more thrashed outfit that would capture her wild and chaotic spirit.
The picture below is the result of the first briefing I gave Joakim, who’s an absolutely amazing artist (http://joakimericsson.se/?page_id=1058).
I was happy with this iteration, to be honest, the only thing I would have wanted was more yellow in her clothing, a yellow tie for instance. I think it would have looked great and symbolized the element of a fiery spirit even stronger. But, remember, I am not the Art Director at Starbreeze, so at this point I left the appearance to the professionals and began working on her backstory. They had gotten enough ideas from me that they could run with it.
The art team worked a bit back and forth, and had her more “punk” than I had imagined, but I was still very happy with the result when they showed it to me. She looked mean and cool and crazy at the same time, which was the goal from the start. Below is a picture of her final appearance and how she looks in the game today. I think this style is more fitting to the PAYDAY gang and that they did a great job 🙂
For her backstory, I wanted her to be a wild spirit from a young age. I didn’t want a traumatic experience to have shaped her into what she is today; rather I wanted her to have such a strong personality that “regular” life was never an option for her. She was simply born to spread chaos and disobey the rules of society. As she grew up, she realized that the life of crime was her destiny, and would ultimately be her only way to gain fame for the one thing she was good at.
When I started writing her voice lines, I talked a lot with Georgia (the actress portraying her, who’s an Australian herself) about using different curse words and lingo that would make her feel authentic. That part was very important for me to get right, because I know we have a large group of Australians playing the game.
That’s all for this time, but I’ve posted her complete backstory below for those interested in reading and learning more about Kelli “Sydney” King. If you guys have any further questions, just hit me up on Twitter and I’ll get back to you 🙂
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Kelli “Sydney” King
Biographical Information
Name: Kelli King
Aliases: Sydney
Affiliation(s): The PAYDAY Gang, The Dingos
Age: 24
Nationality: Australian
Language: English
City of birth: Melbourne
Family: Peter King (father), Kelly King (mother)
Hair color: Dyed blue
Eye color: Hazel
Ethnicity: Caucasian
Portrayed by: Georgia Van Cuylenburg
Voiced by: Georgia Van Cuylenburg
Description
Kelli “Sydney” King is an Australian former gang member, and the fifteenth character for PAYDAY 2.
Background
Kelli King grew up in Melbourne, Australia and was a rowdy child right from the get go. She would suddenly have outbursts of anger, usually ending with violence of some sorts. Her parents tried everything to make her “normal”, but nothing worked – Sydney was simply not like other children.
Kelli grew up hating all kinds of rules and authority. She couldn’t stand it when someone told her she wasn’t allowed to do something. This behavior grew worse and she was eventually kicked out of school. Her parents grew more desperate and threatened to institutionalize her, so she ran away from home
and ended up joining a criminal gang called the “Dingos”.
The Dingos consisted of troubled youths, all with an appetite for violence and disobedience – but no one was crazier than Kelli which she often displayed by pushing her limits to the extreme, always looking for the bigger rush.
She ran with the Dingos for several years, robbing stores and fighting other gangs. That kept her satisfied for a while, but after some time she was starting to get bored. It wasn’t extreme enough. And while some of the other Dingos would maybe decide to leave the criminal life behind someday, Kelli knew she could never do that. She would never fit in to society and be like everyone else.
As she became older her anger and hatred was directed more towards the system itself, and that’s why she decided the Dingos alone couldn’t satisfy her needs anymore. She wanted to take it to the next level and challenge the perception of how life was supposed to be lived.
It was around this time that she one day stumbled upon a news article talking about an infamous group of criminals called the PAYDAY gang. Kelli realized that this group of criminals were living the life she wanted, and not only that; they were getting the fame and recognition she had started to crave.
She wanted a piece of that fame.
With that in mind, she left everything behind and traveled to America in pursuit of her new goal which was to join the PAYDAY gang. To accomplish this, she knew she had to prove herself to them. She was going to have to do something extreme…
Washington seemed to be where they operated from, so when Kelli arrived she got herself a small apartment, a police radio to monitor the PAYDAY gang’s activity and the weapons and explosives needed to pull her plan off.
The time finally came when she decided to crash an ongoing bank heist executed by the PAYDAY gang. Out of nowhere she showed up and attempted to steal their loot. The element of surprise mixed with an array of explosives got her the edge she needed.
The officers at the scene were just as confused as the PAYDAY gang seemed to be, which resulted in a wild west-shootout between the three parties. In the end, Kelli succeeded to escape with a bag of cash, which she had barely managed to secure.
The days after, she waited in her apartment. She knew it would only be a question of time before the PAYDAY gang would retaliate. She’d read that they had gone after a certain Hector Morales and executed him for double-crossing them. They were not going to let her get away with what she’d done.
In the mean time, she felt a moment of acknowledgment as she saw that her stunt was headlining the papers and various news reports. This could be her future if her plan worked out the way she was hoping.
A mysterious voice suddenly took control over her police radio. The man speaking claimed to be Bain, the infamous individual in charge of Crime.Net. He casually stated the address she was located at and warned her to not try anything stupid. “I respect your spirit, miss King,” he said and Kelli gasped as she heard him mention her surname.
“You are good, but you’re not that good. You made it personal by attacking us, and the gang isn’t too happy about that. I don’t blame them. You lack real experience but you have balls – I’ll give you that. I’m guessing that was the purpose of your little stunt? To show you could play in the big leagues?”
Before she could react, the door came crashing down and several guns were pointed in her face.
It was the PAYDAY gang.
“Right on cue,” Bain continued. “You wanted our attention? You got it.”
Kelli nodded and smiled
It was time the world learned the name of Kelli ‘Sydney’ King.
AdvertisementsA gray whale was spotted inside of the Newport Harbor on Thursday, two days after it was seen in Dana Point Harbor. (Chelsea Mayer/ Davey’s Locker Whale Watching)
A gray whale was spotted inside of the Newport Harbor on Thursday, two days after it was seen in Dana Point Harbor. (Chelsea Mayer/ Davey’s Locker Whale Watching)
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A gray whale was spotted inside of the Newport Harbor A gray whale was spotted inside of the Newport Harbor on Thursday, two days after it was seen in Dana Point Harbor. (Chelsea Mayer/ Davey’s Locker Whale Watching)
A gray whale was spotted inside of the Newport Harbor on Thursday, two days after it was seen in Dana Point Harbor. (Chelsea Mayer/ Davey’s Locker Whale Watching)
A gray whale was spotted inside of the Newport Harbor on Thursday, two days after it was seen in Dana Point Harbor. (Chelsea Mayer/ Davey’s Locker Whale Watching)
A gray whale was spotted inside of the Newport Harbor on Thursday, two days after it was seen in Dana Point Harbor. (Chelsea Mayer/ Davey’s Locker Whale Watching)
A gray whale was spotted inside of the Newport Harbor on Thursday, two days after it was seen in Dana Point Harbor. (Chelsea Mayer/ Davey’s Locker Whale Watching)
A juvenile Gray whale makes it’s way around Aliso Beach in Laguna Beach after leaving Dana Point Harbor on Tuesday, August 8th. (Photo courtesy of Mark Girardeau)
A juvenile Gray whale makes it’s way around Aliso Beach in Laguna Beach after leaving Dana Point Harbor on Tuesday, August 8th. (Photo courtesy of Mark Girardeau)
A juvenile Gray whale makes it’s way around Aliso Beach in Laguna Beach after leaving Dana Point Harbor on Tuesday, August 8th. (Photo courtesy of Mark Girardeau)
A Gray whale is seen in Dana Point Harbor on Tuesday, August 8, 2017 (Photo courtesy of the OC Sheriff’s Dept. Harbor Patrol)
A Gray whale swims in Dana Point, on Tuesday, August 8, 2017.
A Gray whale is seen in Dana Point Harbor during Captain Dave’s Dolphin and Whale Watching Safari in Dana Point, on Tuesday, August 8, 2017. (Photo courtesy dolphin safari.com)
A Gray whale is seen in Dana Point Harbor during Captain Dave’s Dolphin and Whale Watching Safari in Dana Point, on Tuesday, August 8, 2017. (Photo courtesy dolphin safari.com)
A Gray whale is seen in Dana Point Harbor during Captain Dave’s Dolphin and Whale Watching Safari in Dana Point, on Tuesday, August 8, 2017. (Photo courtesy dolphin safari.com)
At this rate, it’s going to be a long time before this whale gets to Alaska.
Two days after a juvenile gray whale made its way into Dana Point Harbor, then came up close to shore near swimmers in Laguna Beach, it has been spotted in Newport Harbor.
Newport Coastal Adventure captain Taylor Thorne saw the more than 20-foot whale cruising around far into the harbor on Thursday, Aug. 10, an “extremely rare occurrence,” he said.
“It’s supposed to be in Alaska right now,” he said. “And it is far from Alaska.”
The whale could be the same one seen inside the Agua Hedionda Lagoon in Carlsbad Monday.
Thorne said it was behaving normally, though it looked skinny.
“It was a small animal, definitely not fully grown,” he said.
He said he spotted the whale near Lido Island, and “it was heading straight toward Hoag Hospital.”
Gray whales have the longest migration of any mammal on Earth, making their way from Baja – where they spend winter months giving birth – up north to Alaska.
Most have already passed the area and are at their summertime destination.
“I don’t know what it’s doing,” he said. “It’s just going deeper and deeper into the harbor.”
Alisa Schulman-Janiger, who runs the American Cetacean Society’s Los Angeles Chapter Gray Whale Census and Behavior Project at Point Vicente off Palos Verdes, confirmed the whale is the same one that thrilled onlookers and led the Orange County Sheriff’s Harbor Patrol and a group of stand-up paddle boarders on laps through Dana Point Harbor just two days ago.
“It’s definitely the same whale,” she said, after matching up a photo taken this afternoon with a screen grab from a video taken Tuesday. “We matched it by distinctive white spots on the back and side.”
Schulman-Janiger said while some people have said the whale is lost, its behavior is more on of exploration. She also dispelled the notion that the whale is emaciated, saying it is skinny but not sickly looking. There are no bone or skeletal structures showing.
“It’s not unusual for whales to harbor hop,” she said. “Maybe he found it fun on Tuesday in Dana Point and is doing it again.”
By mid-afternoon, the whale had passed the mooring area of the harbor and appeared to be going out with the tide.
Mark Girardeau, who had spotted the whale leaving Dana Point Harbor Tuesday afternoon and left it as it headed past Emerald Bay in Laguna, went to look for it later that night. Though he didn’t find it, he said he was told by others it still remained in the harbor near Lido Island.
Newport Sea Base captain Robert Sloan was out in a boat when he spotted the whale and contacted employees inside the education center about the rare sight. Melissa De Leon, education coordinator at the Newport Sea Base, and a group of summer camp kids, ran out to the docks to see the whale.
“It was just cruising through the harbor here, it didn’t seem injured,” De Leon said. “It’s the first time I’ve seen a whale. Every once in a while we’ll get a dolphin or sea lions. We’re pretty far up the harbor here, we don’t usually see any larger animals here.”
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Stranding Coordinator Justin Viezbicke said there are no efforts to try to usher the whale out of the harbor. Efforts were being made to help an entangled sea lion in Newport Beach.
“Really not much we can do with the whale,” he said via text.
He noted that it’s best to give the whale space “as close approach can be stressful to whale,” especially in confined spaces like harbors.Whether you think it was a dumb overblown gaffe or a revealing moment that exposed the candidate as a lightweight, Marco Rubio's debate performance on Saturday in which he robotically repeated the same talking point again and again and again (see above) probably contributed to his dismal fifth-place finish in the New Hampshire primary.
Rubio acknowledged this himself, telling supporters during his concession speech Tuesday night, "Our disappointment is not on you, it's on me. I did not do well on Saturday night. But listen to me: That will never happen again."
But he was apparently late to realizing he screwed up. According to a report by the New York Times's Jeremy Peters and Michael Barbaro, Rubio didn't know he had done poorly in the debate until aides told him after, and he didn't get the full extent of the disaster until he checked … Twitter:
The episode was such a shock that not even Mr. Rubio seemed to understand the gravity of the situation as he left the stage at St. Anselm College just after 10 on Saturday night. His wife and four children rushed to greet him in a private back room, followed by somber-faced aides, who delivered their candid assessment. It was not, Mr. Rubio conceded to them, his best performance. But only after the senator scrolled through Twitter — flooded with brutal, mocking reviews — did he fully grasp the damage he had done to his own campaign.
On the one hand, you can interpret this as a sign of Rubio's self-delusion, that he is so confident of his own abilities that it took him scrolling through every mean thing said about him on social media to realize he'd made a mistake. But that seems unlikely. By all accounts, Rubio is a very anxious person; overconfidence isn't his problem.
The bigger takeaway is that perceptions — and in particular perceptions among journalists, who dominate political Twitter and were likely heavily represented among the feeds Rubio read — matter, and perhaps matter more than the immediate reaction of viewers to a debate. New Hampshire voters didn't just watch the debate, they read three days of brutal media coverage — including here at Vox, including by me — describing it as a big blunder. That almost certainly worsened their view of Rubio, just as it altered Rubio's own opinion of his performance.A lot of products come out each week — we don't highlight all of them, but all of them make it into The Verge Database. In Spec Sheet, a weekly series, we survey the latest product entries to keep track of the state of the art.
Oculus has been trying to put virtual reality into the hands of consumers since 2012, and apparently Sony has also been experimenting with it behind closed doors. Sony revealed its Project Morpheus VR prototype at GDC 2014, saying it was the culmination of over three years of work (the headset will double as an upcoming developer kit). Oculus also released what it claims is its final development kit, the Rift DK2, and while it's too soon to tell how Morpheus will compete with Rift on store shelves, we can take a look at the preliminary nuts and bolts and see how the two stack up.
The main component of both Oculus' and Sony’s machines is a head-mounted display, but their designs differ greatly and evoke distinct styles. Oculus’ newest headset is slightly more svelte than the two previous models, trading in the original pointed edges for curved ones. While it’s still a pair of large, black goggles with an embedded screen sitting on your face, this one looks slightly less intimidating. Sony has tried its hand at VR in the past, but Project Morpheus is the first with a polished look and a build that’s similar to the Rift. The headset looks like a pair of cyborg-esque ski goggles that wrap around the face, the edges rimmed with silver and emitting the recognizable PlayStation blue light.
Click above for full specs for each device.
But inside the headsets is where all the heavy lifting happens. The Oculus Rift DK2 is a refined version of the Crystal Cover prototype we saw at CES 2014, which upgraded to a 1080p OLED display with a 100-degree field of view. The display has been one of Oculus’ biggest focal points: using a low persistence technique, it receives information slowly so the player’s brain can smooth out the images the eyes take in, making it feel like you’re looking through a window and not at a screen. Oculus also made the new lenses from a type of resin that they claim will deliver a higher quality image across the entire field of view.
The new developer kit also includes an external camera that tracks 40 infrared LEDs embedded beneath the headset’s shell, allowing for better positional tracking. Verge reporter Sean Hollister found that the camera provided a more fluid gaming experience because it tracks more 3D space, however it cannot track your head accurately if you turn completely around since the LED lights are only embedded on certain parts of the headset.
Morpheus wants to provide an immersive experience
Sony's first entry into the VR world matches the Oculus Rift on many fronts: Project Morpheus also has a 1080p display, although it’s LCD and not OLED, and has a slightly smaller field of view of 90 degrees. Verge reporter Adi Robertson noted that Morpheus’ screen is slightly blurrier than the Rift's, and it’s unclear whether Sony could achieve the same low persistence technique Oculus can using its current LCD screen.
The company also claims Morpheus will provide a more immersive experience. Unlike the Rift that only has LEDs for tracking on the front and sides of the headset, Morpheus has tracking technology all around it, allowing the camera to track the movement of the entire device. The company is also working on 3D binaural technology that could recreate stereoscopic sounds in real time, and the headset is supposed to be comfortable enough that it won’t put excess weight on your nose or cheeks. When we demoed Project Morpheus, it was comfortable to wear; while it did fog up after some time, it did a decent job blocking out light.
The headset is currently connected to a PS4 by a 5-meter-long cable, but Sony eventually wants it to be wireless. The same camera that tracks the PS4 Move controllers tracks the headset and how you move in space, and we found in our demo that the position tracking was good, although not totally precise — you could feel like you’re drifting away as the pictures in front of you move out of view.
These prototypes show that Oculus and Sony are getting close to making VR a thing average consumers have in their living rooms, but it’s still fairly early in the game. These devices probably won’t look anything like the final products the two companies release down the line. Oculus told The Verge that the Rift will undergo a complete redesign before the final version reaches consumers, and Sony said it won’t release a consumer product this year. But currently, Project Morpheus is a worthy competitor for the Oculus Rift, and that’s a good thing. Sony’s name recognition could get more people interested in VR, and that could also mean more developers, designers, and engineers get seriously involved in shaping the sphere. We’ll see more healthy competition between Oculus, Sony, and other VR companies, which eventually means more choices for consumers — but the biggest impact could be making VR more accessible, affordable, and enjoyable for everyone.
If you want to learn more about any of the products mentioned above, all of our information on them can be found through the database box located beneath the article. For more on displays and just about every product around, you can check out the full Verge Database right here.It is tough life you're leading if you're US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power. Invariably when you're not running over African children you are working yourself into moral outrage over governments with far less to answer for than your own.
But how do you accomplish that? Simple, all it takes is a wild imagination and a healthy dose of hypocrisy:
To the Assad regime, Russia, and Iran – three Member States behind the conquest of and carnage in Aleppo – you bear responsibility for these atrocities.
By rejecting UN-ICRC evacuation efforts, you are signaling to those militia who are massacring innocents to keep doing what they are doing. Denying or obfuscating the facts – as you will do today – saying up is down, black is white, will not absolve you.
When one day there is a full accounting of the horrors committed in this assault of Aleppo – and that day will come, sooner or later – you will not be able to say you did not know what was happening.
You will not be able to say you were not involved. We all know what is happening. And we all know you are involved.
Aleppo will join the ranks of those events in world history that define modern evil, that stain our conscience decades later. Halabja, Rwanda, Srebrenica, and, now, Aleppo.
To the Assad regime, Russia, and Iran, your forces and proxies are carrying out these crimes. Your barrel bombs and mortars and airstrikes have allowed the militia in Aleppo to encircle tens of thousands of civilians in your ever-tightening noose. It is your noose.
Three Member States of the UN contributing to a noose around civilians. It should shame you.
Instead, by all appearances, it is emboldening you. You are plotting your next assault.
Are you truly incapable of shame? Is there literally nothing that can shame you?
Is there no act of barbarism against civilians, no execution of a child that gets under your skin, that just creeps you out a little bit? Is there nothing you will not lie about or justify?Some companies crank hiring for the holiday rush.
In research note, RBC Capital Markets looks at the hiring plans for several big retail and transportation companies for the coming holiday season.
The biggest holiday hiring spree comes from Amazon, planning to hire 100,000 workers for the big holiday rush, up from 80,000 in 2014.
The authors of the note observe that this big hiring push could lead to impressive overall jobs numbers in the next few months:
"If we assume this rate of increase on average over the 2014 retail hiring levels and bake in the average non-retail level of growth of the last 3 years (which is probably conservative), the seasonally adjusted private payroll gains for October and November shake out to 265/285K respectively."
Here's how many people the companies are planning to hire for the holiday season, in thousands:This is the first in a series of articles talking about YA science fiction and fantasy. In the coming months we’re going to look at YA as a sub-genre of SFF—and decide if it really is a subgenre at all—and go back to its roots to track its evolution. Finally, we’ll take a look at just what makes YA what it is and examine whether it is a matter of marketing, the age of its protagonists, or if there is something very specific that YA novels exhibit that make it an inherently different genre to standard fantasy and science fiction. In this month’s article, we’re going to lay the foundations for the rest of the series and pave the way for the deeper analysis to come.
People in general don’t talk enough about YA science fiction and fantasy. Perhaps it’s because “adults” balk at reading something they perceive is written for “children” and young adults, due to the lack of choice and progress within the genre supposedly written for them, feel patronised and are desperate to justify themselves as intelligent, opinionated adults by shooting past the YA titles and diving headlong into regular fantasy. I’m not going to call it “adult”; that’s patronising. You’re an adult on a plane or train ticket from age fifteen (sometimes even twelve). It’s not a matter of maturity or experience and choosing a YA title over one found in the regular section does not somehow undermine your intelligence. In fact, statistically, it’s suggested that a great many more adults read YA fiction than teenagers and children.
That’s because a book is a book is a book. But that’s not how people see books anymore, unfortunately. They’re badges; expressions of who we are. Books are accessories, just like everything else. The problem is, sometimes people are ashamed of being seen reading a particular type of book. Some people feel genuinely judged by what they read.
This might be one of the problems surrounding the reception of YA. I was lucky enough to have what seemed like tailor-made YA fantasy right under my nose—but then I grew up with Harry Potter. Older readers of SFF who might feel like approaching YA will look to the choices they had when they were kids to help navigate the new titles and sub-sub-genres found in YA. Until recent years what was available was patronising, childish and entirely limited to fiction that catered only for ages twelve-thirteen, and these potential readers will merely browse the aisles and then quickly get lost when pointed by trends to the en vogue novels of the day. That is not the way to get into reading YA—especially if you don’t appreciate romance to dominate your novels.
There’s nothing wrong with romance: one of the reasons YA can be so rewarding is the development of real and tangible relationships. However, there is a notable branch within YA that focuses on romance (usually paranormal) and this can be alienating. Books like Twilight are invaluable to the YA genre because of the interest they generated and because of how many young readers found a doorway into the genre through the lives of Edward and Bella. But they’re also inaccessible to a whole percentage of the audience that really might find something to love in the YA and teen sections, if they just knew where to look.
It is very true that YA might have had a bit of a comeback over the past few years, but much of it has been very romantic and in the wake of Twilight, similar titles were given similar covers and marketed in similar ways. This is how marketing works. Take the bizarre success of Fifty Shades of Grey and walk into your nearest bookstore: you won’t be able to move for the—shall we say?—classy —ahem!—smut now lining the shelves. The covers are all similar, promising the same ethos of Fifty Shades. This is the same with YA novels, many featuring stunningly pretty heroines dressed in floaty, romantic dresses, all vying to be the next Bella.
Except that they’re not: it only seems that way. None of those YA books are anything at all like Meyer’s series—you’re being tricked into thinking they are.
This is nothing new; it happens with every genre. Lit-fic has its minimalist covers or long, misty piers reaching across lakes. Urban fantasy has leather-clad women glancing over the same shoulder, hips thrust at unnatural angles. Epic fantasy has its hooded men. The problem is, people are stubborn and think they know a book by its cover, or by where it sits on the shelves. I’ve seen people jeering at YA, claiming it’s for children and they’re far too sophisticated for it. What these people don’t seem to realise, is that YA is for everyone.
The market has changed a lot. The YA that you think is available is merely the tip of the iceberg: there is so much more than Twilight and The Hunger Games. Personally. I am a huge YA fan and I’ve read neither.
But I have read Laura Lam and Cinda Williams Chima. And countless others. Some of these names you will find in the adult sections, regardless of their rightful place on the YA and teen shelves. This is a good thing, since it makes readers still sceptical about the genre think, “Well, I loved that book…But wow, was that really YA?”
Yes, actually, it was. The time of YA books being so very far removed from regular fiction is over. YA fiction has never been more sophisticated and in many ways, it’s evolving in ways that standard SFF needs to start thinking about, before it starts being accused of being old and stoic. I’m going to go out on a limb and say you won’t find a story and characters like those in Pantomime in an “adult” SFF novel (from a traditional publishing house), despite the fact that pretty much everyone in the literary world needs the education books like Pantomime offer.
I’m somewhat of an enthusiast for Angry Robot’s YA imprint, Strange Chemistry—and for good reason. No two books in their catalogue are the same. Not even similar. Strange Chemistry has really taken the bull by the horns with regards to the changing and evolving genre of YA and made sure to get there first, to lead the mini revolution within the genre. And I do think that’s what’s happening: more and more people are taking notice of YA and people who previously saw teen SFF and standard SFF as two separate branches are beginning to realise that they form a part of the same tree.
There’s a lot to talk about when it comes to YA SFF and over the coming months we’re going to give it a broad and detailed consideration, by the end of which you’ll find yourselves more educated as to precisely what YA was and now is and perhaps even where it’s going. From true YA science fiction (which is rarer than you’d think) to YA epic fantasy, and teen urban fantasy that’s not paranormal romance, to everything that falls between the gaps, making a unique statement—we’ll be exploring everything. Without looking at the full map, it’s impossible to really understand the genre…and of course, the exact same thing can be said for standard SFF, which is just as varied and broad. By the end of this series, you might begin to notice that YA and what you consider standard SFF are not so different after all and that it might just be a matter of perception.
In the next instalment we will travel back to the very first instances of YA and teen SFF and see just how it all began.
Title image by Kristin Kest.Malware researchers have uncovered an attack targeting an organization in the energy industry that attempts to wreak havoc by permanently wiping data from an infected computer's hard drive and rendering the machine unusable. Symantec would not name the victimized firm, and so far has seen the attack only in this one organization.
W32.Disttrack is a new threat that is being used in specific targeted attacks against at least one organization in the energy sector. It is a destructive malware that corrupts files on a compromised computer and overwrites the MBR (Master Boot Record) in an effort to render a computer unusable.
W32.Disttrack consists of several components:
Dropper—the main component and source of the original infection. It drops a number of other modules. Wiper—this module is responsible for the destructive functionality of the threat. Reporter—this module is responsible for reporting infection information back to the attacker.
Ten years ago we used to see purely malicious threats like this," muses Symantec researcher Liam O Murchu. The likely scenario for the victim would be an experience in which the computer is booting up, but all the files get erased, and the computer collapses into a non |
the controversial spying.
Last week, the Guardian and the Washington Post reported that Internet giants including Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Yahoo are involved in an NSA program that enables the government to monitor emails, file transfers, photos, videos, chats, and other private data. The companies have denied providing the NSA with “direct access” to their servers. However, executives from unnamed companies linked to PRISM have since acknowledged some level of participation in the NSA program—which appears to involve using broad court orders issued under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to gain access to foreigners’ private communications.
There were many striking details in the Washington Post’s scoop about PRISM and its capabilities, but one part in particular stood out to me. The Post, citing a top-secret NSA PowerPoint slide, wrote that the agency has a specific “User’s Guide for PRISM Skype Collection” that outlines how it can eavesdrop on Skype “when one end of the call is a conventional telephone and for any combination of ‘audio, video, chat, and file transfers’ when Skype users connect by computer alone.” (Emphasis added.)
This piece of information is significant for a number of reasons. Last year, speculation arose in the hacker community that Skype, which was purchased by Microsoft in 2011 and had been difficult to wiretap, had become compliant with law enforcement demands. I pressured Skype to disclose its eavesdropping capabilities, but the company refused to discuss the matter. After a range of advocacy groups published an open letter calling for more clarity on the issue, Microsoft eventually released a transparency report detailing information about law enforcement requests for user data. The report devoted an entire section to Skype and claimed that in 2012, it hadn’t handed any communications content over to authorities anywhere in the world. Microsoft also said in notes accompanying the transparency report that calls made between Skype-Skype users were encrypted peer-to-peer, implying that they did not pass through Microsoft’s central servers and could not be eavesdropped on—except maybe if the government deployed a spy Trojan on a targeted computer to bypass encryption.
But the NSA “PRISM Skype Collection” guide casts doubt on whether any Skype communications are beyond the NSA’s reach. That the NSA claims to be able to grab all Skype users’ communications also calls into question the credibility of Microsoft’s transparency report—particularly the claim that in 2012 it did not once hand over the content of any user communications. Moreover, according to a leaked NSA slide published by the Post, Skype first became part of the NSA’s PRISM program in February 2011—three months before Microsoft purchased the service from U.S. private equity firms Silver Lake and Andreessen Horowitz.
The PRISM system operates under FISA, which can be used to secretly demand user data and force gag orders on companies so that they cannot disclose their involvement in the surveillance. Microsoft told me in an emailed statement that it “went as far as it was legally able in documenting disclosures in its Law Enforcement Requests Report,” adding that “there should be greater transparency on national security requests and Microsoft would like the government to take steps to allow companies to do that.”
However, even if Microsoft were under a FISA gag, it could still have put a vague disclaimer on its Skype transparency report noting that for unspecified national security reasons it could not provide details of all cases in which it handed over communications content. True, no other companies disclose FISA requests, either, but at least they acknowledge handing over some communications when presented with search warrants. Microsoft portrayed Skype communications as totally beyond the reach of the government. Indeed, the company apparently chose to claim that it handed over the content of zero communications in 2012—while at the same time complying with a FISA surveillance program that enables the NSA to sift through Skype communications. If reports of Microsoft’s participation in secret FISA-PRISM surveillance are accurate, the company disingenuously created a false sense of security by implying that users’ communications were not being turned over to the government.
Following the revelations about PRISM, Microsoft has joined forces with other Internet giants to call on the U.S. government to be more transparent on FISA surveillance. But Microsoft—like Google, Facebook, and others—cannot claim to be a passive victim in this story. Unlike Twitter, it did not push back against excessive U.S. government surveillance requests until the leaked documents were disclosed, and in some cases may have been complicit in misleading the public over the extent of the snooping. That is why it is crucial that while the U.S. government is the center of international attention in the PRISM saga, the companies linked to the program should feel the full heat of the spotlight, too.New base in Gulf funded by kingdom recently condemned for arresting activists and shutting down opposition party
The Bahrain government, under renewed international criticism for arresting human rights activists and closing down an opposition party this week, is paying the bulk of the costs of the construction of a new Royal Navy base in its country, a freedom of information request has revealed.
The precise value of the Bahrain contribution is being kept secret under UK government disclosure rules, but the UK is to pay only £9m over three years towards the construction of the new naval base central to the UK government’s new “East of Suez” strategy. The contract for the Mina Salman support facility was signed in 2014. It is currently under construction and is designed to service all Royal Navy ships in the region.
Britain pulled back from the Gulf in the early 1970s, but with the US focusing more of its attention on the Asia-Pacific region, the UK envisages an enhanced role east of Suez in the Gulf, the Near East and north Africa, and the new base is part of that strategy.
In a major new report reviewing the Foreign Office relations with Bahrain, which is a former UK protectorate, the UK-based Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy (Bird) claims the UK has become “an unconditional ally” of the Sunni-led kingdom.
Bird claims that the UK government’s interest in Bahrain’s human rights and promoting political dialogue has “declined precipitously” since the 2014 agreement to construct the port, with the number of meetings between the Foreign Office and Bahrain advocacy groups falling sharply.
It also claims UK government funds to improve Bahrain human rights institutions since the repression that followed the Arab spring has largely been spent on well-intentioned bodies that have proved not to be truly independent of government.
The criticisms, in a 75-page report assessing the Foreign Office approach to Bahraini politics, comes after a Bahraini court suspended the activities of the country’s main Shia opposition group on charges of terrorism, extremism and violence. The court declared the Al-Wefaq society suspended pending a decision on its total dissolution.
The decision to suspend Al-Wefaq came the day after the family of leading human rights activist Nabeel Rajab said he had been detained by police. Another prominent activist, Zainab al-Khawaja, fled to Denmark last week after reportedly being threatened with prison.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Al-Wefaq’s headquarters in Bilad al-Qadeem, west of Manama. Photograph: Hamad I Mohammed/Reuters
Rajab was charged with publishing and broadcasting false news that undermined the prestige of the state. He was detained for seven days. His arrest came as Bahraini human rights activists travelled to Geneva for the opening day of a session of the UN’s human rights council. His arrest has been condemned by the UN and the US State Department.
Since the Bahraini uprising in 2011, Rajab has spent two years in jail between 2012 and 2014. The government says the resistance movement is funded and supported by Iran.
The latest crackdown – five years after the uprising – is a setback for the UK government, which has invested considerable effort and £3.4m in providing technical assistance on human rights to the UK’s closest ally in the Gulf.
Bird claims this assistance “has become a facade to hide the lack of political will in the kingdom to implement reforms”.
The Foreign Office funding helps with a new ombudsman for the Ministry of Interior, the National Institute for Human Rights, the Prisoners’ and Detainees’ Rights Commission, as well as to train the police and judiciary.
Allegations of arbitrary arrest and torture are frequently made against the authorities.
Bird claims the ombudsman is appointed by the minister and partly funded by the interior department. Any complaints of torture or mistreatment have to be sent to the special investigations unit in the public prosecutor’s office, and there is no guarantee that complaints to the ombudsman are kept confidential from other government departments, with the result that witnesses are intimidated.
Similarly, Bird questions the independence and quality of the prisoners’ rights and human rights committee, since many of its key figures are members of the Bahraini parliament, which denies that torture takes place in the country.
The UN special rapporteur on torture has been repeatedly denied entry to Bahrain.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Human rights activist Zainab al-Khawaja has left Bahrain for Denmark. Photograph: Hasan Jamali/AP
Bird claims: “The laws governing these bodies, and actions by individuals within them, undermine the mandates of all these institutions. The net effect is to give the appearance of substantial reform: however, they continue to fail to hold human rights violators to account. No high-level official has been held to account for any human rights abuses occurring between 2011 and the present, and no such official looks set be held accountable.”
The Foreign Office points out it has classified Bahrain as a country of human rights concern, and the decline in contact appears to stem from the UK government’s regret that the main opposition party, Al-Wefaq, decided to boycott the 2014 Bahrain elections.
But Bird claims: “The UK government has avoided overtly criticising the government of Bahrain for the prosecution of political leaders, human rights activists, trade unionists and street protesters alike. Rather than sending a clear message rejecting the abuse of human rights and condemning the arbitrary arrest of human rights defenders and opposition leaders, the FCO instead calls for due process to be followed.”
They said foreign secretary Philip Hammond’s last visit to Bahrain on 30 May, when he welcomed “Bahrain’s commitment to continuing reforms”, came on the same day an appeals court increased Al-Wefaq leader Sheikh Ali Salman’s prison sentence from four years to nine.POSTED July 3, 2013
Sarah was born in North Korea. After marrying Nathan and having a child together, they decided it would be best to escape into China in hopes of finding freedom and starting a new life together. Because they left when their son was an infant, he would never know the challenges of living in North Korea, however, as for many, the decision to leave was not any easy one. For Sarah, making the choice to find freedom for herself and her family, meant leaving behind family and friends — a choice many of us can’t even fathom making.
After connecting with LiNK and resettling in South Korea, she has learned that there are still challenges she will face. While her husband and son are away at work and preschool, respectively, she is home alone for much of the day. This has lead to slight feelings of loneliness, but luckily she’s become part of a very welcoming church community and has started to make friends! She’s also taking classes to pursue her dream of working in the healthcare field.
Even as she faces challenges, Sarah is happy with the decision she made to leave her homeland. Watching her son acclimate to life in South Korea is very exciting for her, and her face lights up when she talks about him. Because he arrived so young, he’s learning to speak with a South Korean accent and will grow up truly identifying with the culture! Thanks to networks of generous, caring people, one little boy has the chance to grow up without knowing the challenges he was destined to face.
UPDATE: July 2013
For almost a month, Sarah’s son has been in and out of hospitals, fighting stubborn infections. She’s had to sleep on cots and eat hospital food for days at a time, unable to go home and shower. Exhausted, she became sick herself. Her husband has been helpful and supportive, letting her go home and rest on the weekends despite his demanding class schedule and three-hour commute. Thankfully, her son’s condition improved and they’re finally back at home. She’ll finally be able to get proper rest and resume computer literacy class.
Thanks Worchester Academy for supplying the funding for Sarah’s rescue mission. Your efforts have changed Sarah’s life and has provided the opportunity for her to enjoy this new LIBERTY.
Help make more rescues possible by supporting our mission.(CNN) -- An Ohio man who was suspended as the drum major of a band for giving President Obama a nod during last week's inaugural parade is calling it quits.
John Coleman quit his band after it suspended him for nodding to President Obama last week.
John Coleman resigned from the Cleveland Firefighters Memorial Pipes & Drums a week after the parade in Washington. Publicity about his suspension had gotten to be too much, he told CNN affiliate WEWS.
"It's come to a point where I don't want embarrassment anymore between the pipe band and myself," Coleman, who is a firefighter, told WEWS on Tuesday.
Coleman was seen during the nationally televised January 20 parade nodding toward the new president while marching with the band. A few steps later, he appeared to wave briefly.
He told WEWS that as the band was marching past the grandstand where Obama was sitting, he made eye contact with the president.
"Contact was made with our eyes both together and he smiled and waved at the band," he told the station. "And just as a gesture, I nodded my head. I gave him a slight wave and went on." Watch parade and explanation »
Representatives from the group did not return calls from CNN. But bandleader Mike Engle told the Cleveland Plain Dealer that Coleman was suspended because he ignored military protocol.
"We had gone over and over time and again with everyone in the band that this was a military parade," Engle told the newspaper. "Protocol and proper decorum had to be followed at all times. Unfortunately, John chose to ignore that."
Coleman had been suspended from the band for six months.
In a written statement, band manager Ken Rybka said Coleman's resignation from the group "comes as a shock and surprise."
The band has been inundated with phone calls, e-mails and messages on its Internet pages -- almost all of them critical -- since the story first broke on Monday, Rybka said. iReport.com: 'Pretty cool thing that he acknowledged the president'
"It is unfortunate that an internal band issue has raised so much discussion and ire from the general public," Rybka said in the statement. "It has disheartened me more than you can imagine."
Rybka said that he will be taking a leave of absence from the band because of the furor.
"The 'afterglow' of participating in the inaugural parade is gone," he said.
All About Barack Obama • U.S. Presidential InaugurationKeuchel has become a fearless finesse pitcher like Glavine and a master craftsman like Maddux, after struggling early in his career, just as they did.
“It’s almost identical,” Charlie O’Brien said. “They had to learn who they were, that’s the biggest thing. They knew: ‘I can’t throw fastballs past people all the time. I’ve got to pitch, I’ve got to change speeds, I’ve got to throw guys’ timing off.’ And that’s what they did. Once they figured it out, they never changed. All they did was get better and better, and that’s why Dallas is going to have a successful career.
“He’s never been a guy that throws 95 or 97, like some of these young kids today. Those guys, when their stuff goes, most of them can’t make the transition. But he’s always had to compete and pitch, and now he’s refining it and getting even better.”
Jeff Luhnow, the Astros’ general manager, ran the St. Louis Cardinals’ draft in 2009. He scouted Keuchel and projected him to go in the top 10 rounds, with a two-seam fastball (or sinker) that was ready for the major leagues. It was an accurate report, as far as it went — which was not very far. Keuchel has never forgotten the industry’s tepid projections.
“I feel like I’ve been slighted, and I’m going to make sure people know who I am,” he said. “That’s my main goal: to make sure people in baseball remember they missed out on Dallas Keuchel, the 221st pick over all in the ’09 draft. I mean, that’s not all I think about. But it’s mainly what I think about.”
On the mound, he thinks about one thing: using the late movement of his pitches to disrupt hitters’ timing.
“And that’s the key word — disrupt,” Keuchel said. “I’m trying to make it a craft, like artwork.”
Keuchel induces the batter to hit the ball weakly, off the handle or the end of the bat. Then he can trust his fielders, or himself, to take care of it. Keuchel, who played center field when he was not pitching in high school, has won two Gold Gloves. Like Maddux, who won 18, he commands pitches that can run in either direction on both sides of the plate.In case you haven’t noticed, there is a battle going on, and I’m not talking about the “war on” poverty, drugs, illiteracy or terror. The conflict I’m talking about is taking place within the Republican Party. In the wake of Mitt Romney’s disappointing loss to arguably the worst President in U.S. history, “Constitutional Conservatives”, “Social Conservatives”, “Fiscal Conservative/Social Liberals”, “Libertarians”, “Moderates” and “RINO’s” are all beating the hell out of each other…and they’re doing so in public forums, much to the amusement of the Democrats. I want to address the latter two factions for now, but I’ll discuss some of the others in future posts.
While lines can be blurry at times, I believe the distinction between RINO and Moderate Republican is an important one. Without some “wiggle room”, the GOP will continue to self destruct. Take a look at my definitions and tell me if they provide a reasonable framework for constructive internal discussion.
A “RINO” (Republican in Name Only) is a voter, candidate or elected official who claims to be a Republican but uses the logic and language of the Far Left to demonize conservative dissent. “RINO” candidates are selfish and cowardly. They will say and do everything their poll-addicted “consultants” deem necessary to “win”, even if it means accepting and perpetuating “progressive” false premises, straw man arguments and blatant lies. They damage their Party, and the country, by validating ridiculous left wing arguments and providing perfect sound bites for liberal activists, talking heads and politicians. RINOs also fear the main stream media and, consequently, they relentlessly court their approval. That means, rather than educating and leading, they choose to pander and follow. They have no spine, no values and no soul. They can’t or won’t reject false premises. They are professional job seekers who should really just end the charade and become Democrats.
“Moderate Republicans” may side with RINOs and Democrats on some issues, (much to the dismay of conservatives like myself), but they never abandon certain core values or knowingly provide “ammunition” for the Far Left. They might “cross over” on a vote now and again, but they do so for solid strategic reasons that ultimately support the overall goals of limited but effective government, respect for the Constitution, national security and economic growth. They believe in empowerment over entitlement. They believe in American exceptionalism. They believe in equality of opportunity vs. equality of outcome. They simply choose a circuitous path from “Point A” to “Point B”. They are not “pure”, but they are pragmatic and well-intentioned…and there’s still a place for them in the GOP.
I believe that the distinction between “RINO” and “Moderate” is more than just semantics. As I witness the “circular firing squad” of internal GOP politics, I can only imagine the laughter in the Oval Office and DNC headquarters. Let’s weed out the RINOs through the primary process and give the Moderates a little slack…for now. At the same time, let’s differentiate between “Old School Dem’s” and the current crop of “Progressive Socialists”. Doing so may get them fighting with each other and increase GOP recruitment and momentum for the next election cycle.
AdvertisementsNEW YORK -- Justice Department lawyers faced tough questioning from federal judges Thursday over whether former high-level officials like John Ashcroft and Robert Mueller III can be held accountable for abuses of immigration detainees in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.
"Tell me now who did it," Judge Richard Wesley, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, asked. "Someone had to say it's the FBI's call."
But the Justice Department lawyers would not say who decided to place the fate of more than 700 Arabs and Muslims swept up on immigration violations under the FBI's control. Ashcroft was then the attorney general, Mueller the director of the FBI.
For more than a decade since Ibrahim Turkmen and other detainees filed their lawsuit in 2002, government lawyers and civil liberties advocates have been fighting a complicated battle over who can be held responsible for the harsh treatment they experienced.
After the FBI designated them all as persons of interest in the 9/11 attacks, often on the flimsiest of evidence, the Arabs and Muslims were held in jails for months under conditions as harsh as those at the federal "supermax" prison in Florence, Colorado. They were banned from talking to lawyers, prevented from reading the Quran and, in some cases, slammed against walls.
Two withering reports from the Justice Department's inspector general blasted those jailhouse conditions, but no high-level official from the George W. Bush administration has ever been held accountable. The class action lawsuit against Ashcroft, Mueller and others has instead faltered, hobbled by the 2009 Supreme Court ruling in a similar case, Ashcroft v. Iqbal.
In the Iqbal case, the court ruled that wronged immigrants could only proceed with a lawsuit against Ashcroft and Mueller if they had a "plausible" claim that those officials knew about or directed unconstitutional discrimination. Because those plaintiffs had been denied discovery -- the legal process by which they might have been able to probe the government's documents for more evidence -- their case was fatally hamstrung.
In Turkmen v. Ashcroft, the government is similarly attempting to shut out the plaintiffs. It argues there is no plausible basis to conclude that an FBI directive to hold the plaintiffs under the tough conditions accorded to suspected terrorists -- instead of those generally accorded to immigration violators, which they by and large were -- led to the resulting abuses in Federal Bureau of Prisons custody.
"The key point here is, somebody made a decision to hold them in segregation -- but Mr. Ashcroft and Mr. Mueller did not make that decision," said Justice Department attorney H. Thomas Byron III.
Judge Rosemary Pooler asked whether that meant the warden at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Manhattan -- just blocks from where the World Trade Center towers once stood and the site of some of the worst abuses -- had led a "rogue organization."
In January 2013, a U.S. district judge agreed with the Justice Department, throwing out the part of the lawsuit aimed at Ashcroft, Mueller and James Ziglar, former director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. But lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights are appealing to have the case against those officials reinstated, as well as pursuing other claims in the same lawsuit against Bureau of Prisons officials who directly oversaw the prisons where their clients were abused.
Intense questioning from the circuit judges on Thursday suggested that they may be searching to find a way to keep Ashcroft and Mueller in the case, despite the Supreme Court's ruling in Iqbal.
"It seems to me that it is plausible that Mr. Ashcroft might be right back in this litigation," said Wesley.Get the biggest Sunderland AFC 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
Ex-Sunderland boss Paolo di Canio has blamed Sunderland’s problems on owner Ellis Short.
The Italian, who kept Sunderland in the Premier League two years ago before being sacked just two months into the new season after a dressing room revolt against his authoritarian methods, says the club is in ‘disarray’ following another season battling relegation.
And head coach Gus Poyet is understood to be on the brink of the sack after the weekend 4-0 home defeat against relegation rivals Aston Villa, which saw thousands of fans stream out of the Stadium of Light long before the final whistle.
But Di Canio says his successor Poyet is not responsible for the club’s decline, and points the finger at owner and chairman Short.
(Image: Bethany Clarke/Getty Images)
“With me it never happened that the fans leave the stadium early, despite the problems that there were under my management,” Di Canio told Fox Sports.
“It never happened because there was dignity in our behaviour and the fans understood that.
“In this case I do not know, but certainly the team is in disarray and it is normal to be so.
“It’s not the fault of the fans, who are fantastic, they are always in 45,000 at every game.
“But, like all fans, they do not accept what goes beyond the limits of decency and tramples the jersey.
“I am not speaking of those who succeeded me on that bench, Poyet, because the problems are born from above, from the owner Ellis Short.
“I saved Sunderland when it was in free fall. I and my staff made a real miracle, in the field but also in spirit.
“We tried to change the philosophy of a group where in two years, despite everything that happened had never been fined for indiscipline.
“I gave fines even for being five minutes late because it is a matter of respect towards all, serves to maintain order in the locker room.
“I took all the responsibility, but my project was immediately stopped.
“The indecency is now before the eyes of all and the fans are not happy. But then again, the choices come from above.”
(Image: PA Wire)
Di Canio also accused Sunderland of being content to rely on there being three worse teams than themselves each season, to spare them from the drop.
He said: “If the strength of a team does not give you certainty, a team that perennially – rather than survive by the merits on the field – prefers to hope that there are three worse [teams]...
“This is a fact, is the state of things and the results prove it.”
Read more:© Flickr/ Campact
In a response to criticism of covert TTIP negotiations, German politicians will soon be able to get a look at the secret documents in aat the Ministry for Economic Affairs.The German government has reacted to criticism of secretive Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations by providing a reading room in the Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs, where politicians will be able to read TTIP documents.TTIP is a bilateral trade agreement between the EU and US that aims to reduce regulatory barriers to trade. In practice, the deregulation threatens the dismantling of legal standards in areas such as privacy, environmental protections, food safety, public health and safety at work. It also strengthens copyright and patent restrictions which, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, "would never pass muster under public scrutiny."The proposed TTIP agreement also opens up more public services and government contracts to the private sector, and critics have raised concerns that privatization would be effectively irreversible The agreement's contents will only be disclosed when the negotiations are complete, and those who oppose the deal have been able to arm themselves with information only due to Freedom of Information requests and leaked documents.On Tuesday, the Funke Media Group reported on the contents of a leaked letter from German Minister for Economic Affairs Sigmar Gabriel to Bundestag President Norbert Lammert and Bundesrat President Stanislaw Tillich, which offers German federal and state politicians the chance to examine TTIP documents in a special reading room at the Ministry.Gabriel said the offer was a bid to increase confidence in TTIP negotiations, and offered to open a room in his ministry for the viewing of documents from February 1.Sigmar Gabriel is opening a reading room for secret TTIP documents,' Der Westen reported.German politicians will be able to see "consolidated negotiating texts," meaning documents in which the positions of both the European Commission and US government are presented, according to the report."The necessary better acceptance and legitimacy for the negotiations between the European Commission and US can only be created through transparency and close involvement of national parliaments," Gabriel wrote, portal Der Westen reported."Since the beginning of the negotiations about TTIP, [the German government] has promoted transparency both with regard to the public and the parliaments of EU member states," the minister said in his letter to the two chambers of parliament.Labor is set to launch a High Court challenge over the eligibility of Assistant Health Minister David Gillespie to sit in federal parliament. The case has been brought by Peter Alley, the ALP candidate who ran against Gillespie in Lyne at the 2016 federal election.
The action is based on Gillespie, a Nationals MP, owning a small shopping centre in Port Macquarie that contains an Australian Post outlet. As Australia Post is a government-owned corporation, Labor claims this results in Gillespie having an indirect pecuniary interest contrary to Section 44(v) of the Constitution.
If the High Court agrees, Gillespie would be ineligible to sit as an MP.
What does the Constitution say?
Section 44 of the Constitution sets out several grounds of disqualification from holding parliamentary office.
Under Section 44(v), someone “shall be incapable of being chosen or of sitting as a senator or a member of the House of Representatives” if they have:
… any direct or indirect pecuniary interest in any agreement with the Public Service of the Commonwealth otherwise than as a member and in common with the other members of an incorporated company consisting of more than 25 persons.
Before this year, the High Court had only considered this section on one occasion, in 1975.
In that case, Chief Justice Garfield Barwick took an extremely narrow interpretation of the provision, based on a finding that its historic purpose was to protect parliament’s freedom and independence from the influence of the Crown.
An “indirect pecuniary influence” would only be disqualifying where it involved a legal or equitable interest in a contract with ongoing obligations, and where the possibility of financial gain by the agreement’s existence or performance could conceivably allow the Crown to influence an MP in relation to parliamentary affairs.
Under this narrow interpretation – which had been subject to considerable criticism – Gillespie would not be considered ineligible based on his interest in the shopping centre.
The Bob Day case
The High Court revisited the meaning of “indirect pecuniary interest” in April this year. It unanimously held that former Family First Senator Bob Day had an “indirect pecuniary interest” at the time of the 2016 federal election, and was therefore ineligible to be a senator.
Day had already resigned from the Senate before this ruling. But the High Court’s decision was significant for two key reasons.
The first was its immediate importance in deciding how a replacement senator was to be selected.
The second, which will now be critical when considering Gillespie’s future, was its reconsideration of what constitutes an “indirect pecuniary interest” under Section 44(v).
The Day case concerned a lease agreement between the Commonwealth and Fullarton Investments Pty Ltd for premises Day used as his electorate office. There were a variety of ways in which Day was connected to both the company and property. However, a fact the court found to be particularly significant was that in February 2016, Fullarton Investments directed that rental payments be made into a Day-owned bank account.
The High Court declined to follow the 1975 precedent and adopted a broader interpretation of Section 44(v). Importantly, it found the section had a wider purpose than solely protecting parliament’s independence from executive influence. It was also intended as an anti-corruption provision, designed to protect against potential conflicts of interest by ensuring the public duties of MPs are kept separate from their personal interests.
Under this broader view, an individual would be disqualified where there was an expectation of financial gain if the agreement in question was performed. The court would look at the agreement’s practical effect when making this assessment.
High Court justice Patrick Keane observed:
It is enough that the person’s pockets were or might be affected.
However, it was noted there will be no relevant interest:
… if the agreement in question is one ordinarily made between government and a citizen.
The case against Gillespie
So, is Gillespie ineligible based upon this new, broader interpretation of Section 44(v)?
There is no question of a direct financial interest in this case. Rather, the information currently available suggest that a company owned by Gillespie and his wife leases space in a shopping centre it owns to an Australia Post licensee.
The possible financial interest in this case certainly seems to be more remote than in Day’s case. However, there is still sufficient uncertainty surrounding the outer limits of section 44(v) for this case to be of real concern to the Turnbull government.
What happens now?
If the High Court finds Gillespie is incapable of sitting as an MP under Section 44(v) there would necessarily be a by-election in Lyne.
Given the Turnbull government only has a one-seat majority, the immediate stakes are as high as they could possibly be.
There is also a broader issue worth considering. Gillespie is the third member of the 45th parliament – after Day and Rod Culleton – to have their constitutional eligibility challenged before the courts. In Day’s case, High Court Justice Stephen Gageler emphasised the importance of certainty in this area, so candidates and MPs know where they stand.
Given recent controversies, it would seem an opportune time to review Section 44 to make sure the disqualification provisions in our Constitution are clear, fair, and reflect voters’ real concerns.In his UFC debut, Magomed Bibulatov looked every bit the potential title contender longtime UFC flyweight champion Demetrious Johnson has sought.
But he also may want to cut down on the fouls if he’s going to fully live up to the hype.
The undefeated Bibulatov had little trouble dispensing of Jenel Lausa in the opening matchup of UFC 210 at Buffalo’s KeyBank Center on Saturday night. The judges scores were 29-26 across the board.
The scores, though, came in part due to a string of fouls, which ultimately ended up in a point deduction. In the first round, Bibulatov landed a knee to the groin. At the end of the round, he landed a knee to the body after the horn. Finally, in the second, Bibulatov drilled Lausa with a kick to the groin, causing referee John McCarthy to deduct a point.
Other than that, though, the Chechnyan Bibulatov lived up to his advance billing. His striking was crisp, he barely missed on multiple spinning strike attempts which may have ended the fight, and in the third, he scored a slam and worked over Lausa for the rest of the round.
That improved Bibulatov to 13-0 for his career. Lausa (7-3), from the Philippines, had a five-fight win streak snapped and dropped to 1-1 in the UFC.BEIRUT — Lebanese security forces arrested 17 men in two Beirut hotels on Friday on suspicion that they were plotting to assassinate a prominent Lebanese Shiite leader, a government official said, describing an attack that could inflame sectarian conflict across the Middle East.
Investigators are exploring whether the men intended to kill Nabih Berri, the speaker of Parliament, who has been a leading Shiite political figure in Lebanon for decades, the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity under government rules. Intelligence reports identified the men as members of a newly established militant cell in Beirut that was believed to include foreigners, the official said, adding that there were suspicions that they belonged to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the Sunni militant group known as ISIS.
Such a plot would be a bold and dangerous escalation by ISIS, which wields extremist and sectarian ideology and brutal tactics in its drive to erase the existing nations in the region and create a fundamentalist Islamic caliphate in their place. The group’s insurgent fighters, who already control large parts of northeastern Syria, swept across northern Iraq last week, slaughtering captured Shiite soldiers and proudly broadcasting the killings on the Internet.Have you felt it? There’s been an awakening… in downloads and revenue for mobile apps based on the Star Wars saga. With “The Force Awakens” smashing box office records, Sensor Tower wanted to determine if its runaway success has had any effect on apps tied to the lightsaber-hot intellectual property. What we found had us more surprised than parts of the movie we promise not to spoil in this post.
About Our Data
Utilizing our Store Intelligence platform, we pulled worldwide download and revenue estimates for 22 licensed Star Wars apps and games on Apple’s App Store, looking at opening day for “The Force Awakens”—Friday, December 18—and the day after, compared and the previous two Fridays and Saturdays: December 11 and 12, and December 4 and 5.
For the two Fridays leading up to the film’s release, the 22 apps we examined generated an average combined revenue of $222,000. On December 18, they brought in a combined revenue of $335,000. In the chart below, you can see opening day for “The Force Awakens” compared to the preceding Fridays we looked at:
The increase in revenue visualized above translated into a 51 percent jump when compared to the average of the previous days studied. Of the apps we looked at, the top three in terms of revenue on December 18 were Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes ($186,000), Star Wars: Force Collection ($56,000), and Star Wars: Commander - Worlds in Conflict ($43,000).
In terms of worldwide downloads, they were also up over the average for the two preceding Fridays we looked at, totaling 381,000 for a 102 percent increase over the average of the two preceding Fridays. The top three apps by downloads on the film’s release date were Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes (164,000), LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga (41,000), and Star Wars: Commander - Worlds in Conflict (29,000).
The Day After The Force Awoke
While the week-over-week increases in revenue and downloads seen on December 18 were impressive, they couldn’t compare to what happened the day after the film’s premiere—December 19—when millions had returned from their journey to a galaxy far, far away.
Combined revenue for the 22 apps we looked at was $334,000 on December 19—this was up 74 percent compared to the $192,000 average for December 5 and 12. The day after |
by police as 'possibly Muslim', although Simpson said: 'We have not been able to find those girls to verify that.'
The suspect was arrested after he ran from the Hollywood transit station in Portland, Oregon, around 4.30pm on Friday
'It's horrific,' Simpson said. 'There's no other word to describe what happened today.'
Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley wrote on Twitter: 'Terrible tragedy on Portland's Max Train. Champions of justice risked and lost their lives. Hate is evil.'
Portland's Commissioner Chloe Eudaly issued a statement saying: 'This is an especially sad and disturbing incident. People lost their lives or were injured because they stood up to hate.
'We need to offer our heartfelt support to the two women and others who were targeted. The courage of the people who stood up for them is a reminder that we as a city need to stand together to denounce hate.'
The FBI also offered their assistance in the investigation, saying: 'At the core of the FBI's mission is the belief that every person has the right to live, work and worship in this country without fear.
'Hate and bigotry have no place in our community, and we will not allow violence in the name of hate to go unanswered.'
Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley wrote on Twitter: 'Terrible tragedy on Portland's Max Train. Champions of justice risked and lost their lives. Hate is evil'
Millions of Muslims marked the start of Ramadan on Friday, a time of intense prayer, dawn-to-dusk fasting and nightly feasts.
'Our thoughts are with the Muslim community,' Simpson said. 'As something like this happens, this only instills fear in that community.
'We have already reached out previous to this incident to our Muslim community partners and the different imams about extra patrol during Ramadan. We want to reassure them that that will continue.'
MAX trains were halted for several hours after the incident, and an investigation is ongoing.TAMPA — Emergency room physician Anthony Davis has seen a lot of overdose cases. When he does, he checks to see who prescribed the drugs.
One name grew familiar: Edward Neil Feldman.
Fourteen months ago, Davis told the Florida Department of Health that he was sick of seeing the Pinellas Park doctor's overmedicated patients.
Davis likened Feldman to a drug pusher and said patients claimed he prescribed the pain killer oxycodone in powdered form.
"The only reason Feldman is prescribing the powder is so the patients can snort or inject it," a state investigator wrote, listing one of Davis' complaints.
The allegation is but one piece of the trouble that now surrounds Feldman, target of both state licensing actions and a federal criminal case.
An indictment unsealed last month blames the 75-year-old doctor for the prescription drug overdoses of three patients, while accusing him and his nonphysician wife, Kim Xuan Feldman, of a $6 million pain clinic conspiracy.
Both have entered not guilty pleas.
The doctor could face life in prison if convicted.
Since his arrival from New York 38 years ago, he has survived other serious legal and professional challenges, emerging with his medical license and freedom intact.
A pimp once identified Feldman as a repeat client in a teen and adult prostitution ring. An FBI agent spotted him discarding marijuana residue and a bong at a Tampa park. Both prosecutions were dropped, and Feldman had the sex arrest expunged.
Eleven years ago, he pleaded guilty to federal charges in an MRI kickback scheme.
The state Department of Health wrote afterward that he lacks the qualities of "reliability, honesty and good moral character" and is "not worthy to be entrusted with the privileges and authority vested in those who are licensed to practice medicine."
The Board of Medicine withheld trust for just six months before lifting a one-year suspension and setting Feldman free to ride his profession's most lucrative waves.
• • •
The medical board, once known as the Florida Board of Medical Examiners, first licensed Feldman in 1976 despite New York performance reviews that rated all aspects of his professional character, including medical knowledge, "poor" or "fair."
The reviews came from the Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center and a U.S. Public Health Service hospital on Staten Island, where the native New Yorker, trained in Switzerland, was a resident specializing in orthopedic surgery.
He has since worked on both sides of Tampa Bay.
Early on, he walked into a void left by the 1978 death of respected orthopedic surgeon Lee J. Cordrey, a staple of personal injury trials. Feldman set up shop in Cordrey's former office on Cass Street near downtown Tampa.
The newcomer hit the radar and lawyers started calling. But while Cordrey had provided expert testimony on behalf of both plaintiffs and defendants alike, Feldman became known as a plaintiff's doctor, one who helped personal injury lawyers dig for gold.
"If a plaintiff was being treated by Ed Feldman, it would be a safe assumption that he was directed there by his attorney and could expect a favorable report," said Tampa lawyer H. Vance Smith.
Within five years of arrival, Feldman had bought two homes off Bayshore Boulevard in South Tampa. His apparent financial success became fodder for gossip and his ties to personal injury lawyers were duly noted by colleagues.
The norm was for new arrivals to affiliate with hospital staffs to establish a patient base. Hospitals provide an extra layer of oversight for inexperienced doctors. Feldman was an outsider.
"He's not been on staff at any of the hospitals I've practiced at in the course of my career," said veteran orthopedic surgeon Richard Goldberger, whose affiliations included Tampa General and St. Joseph's hospitals, among others. "It's unusual in the course of a 31-year practice that you don't run into another doctor."
If doctors didn't know Feldman well, lawyers made a point of studying him, especially the defense lawyers who needed to discredit him as a witness.
His credentials were vulnerable. He wasn't certified as a specialist by a board Florida recognized.
Lawyer John Campbell was known to get under his skin.
"It reached the point where I walked into his office to take a deposition and he refused to give the deposition to me," Campbell said.
Feldman's initial flurry of success was followed by Chapter 11 reorganization in bankruptcy court, IRS tax liens and the beginning of what would be decades of court filings over missed mortgage payments.
When he had money, he didn't hide it. After thieves mugged him in 1998, he reported the theft of a $2,800 Omega watch.
Soon, federal agents were among those noticing. He was watched closely enough that an FBI agent examined the trash Feldman left at Ballast Point Park in the summer of 2000, finding the bong.
Feldman had opened a practice on MacDill Avenue in Tampa that increasingly drew from the ranks of injured U.S. Postal Service workers. He would write reports on their behalf for compensation claims.
The Department of Labor was sometimes critical of his medical opinions for lack of evidence.
But even when clients didn't win, he won. He had arranged to get illegal kickbacks from MRIs, prosecutors charged.
When sentencing day rolled around in the kickback case, Feldman's attorney argued that the doctor shouldn't be subjected to an added penalty for violating a position of trust because the Department of Labor didn't actually trust him.
"There was almost a position of distrust," defense attorney Jack E. Fernandez Jr. said at the time, according to a transcript. "It was, at a minimum, a very arm's length relationship."
• • •
Amid all of that, there were allegations, never proven in court, that Feldman paid for introductions to prostitutes, including a 13-year-old runaway.
The girl's recovery by law enforcement officers in January 2001 revealed the existence of a teen sex ring operated by Tampa personal injury lawyer David Russell Stahl and his paralegal, Shawn Martin, now convicted sex offenders. Martin is still in prison.
Feldman would sometimes call asking for Stahl's "flavor of the day," knowing that his girlfriends were prostitutes, Martin said under oath during the investigation.
"Do you know anybody that can come over and hang out with me?" Feldman would ask, according to Martin's statements.
The paralegal provided names of several prostitutes he said he introduced to Feldman, including a 13-year-old.
"Oh, she looks young, are you sure that she is of age?" Martin recalled Feldman saying.
Martin responded that the girl was 18, he said under oath.
When he returned, he said, Feldman paid him $300.
Feldman, then 62, was arrested March 22, 2002, on three counts of lewd and lascivious acts with a minor. His booking card stated that he was 6-foot-2 and 278 pounds at the time.
He hired high-profile criminal defense lawyer Barry Cohen.
Stahl, in later court papers, claimed Feldman paid $1 million in lawyer fees.
According to Cohen, the proof didn't support the sex charge.
The state, after hearing Feldman's proposed defense, dropped the case.
Had it proceeded, Feldman would have said that he met the girl but didn't have sex because she seemed young, prosecutor Mike Sinacore explained at a related hearing for Stahl in 2005. Sinacore said Feldman also would have agreed that he paid.
"The problem," Sinacore said, "is that Dr. Feldman would pay Shawn Martin for introducing him to these girls regardless of whether they had sex."
Now 27, the girl spoke with the Tampa Bay Times under the condition that her name not be used. She said she remembers Martin taking her to Feldman's South Tampa home.
Only she and Feldman know if anything happened.
But her life got better. She returned to eighth-grade and grew up. And she heard recently about his federal drug case.
"This isn't some McDonald's worker," she said. "If you're an attorney, a doctor, a professional, you should be held to a higher standard."
• • •
Feldman, through his attorney, declined to be interviewed for this story, provide a statement or refer the Times to friends who might speak on his behalf.
The few dozen friends listed on his Facebook page include former Tampa Mayor Dick Greco, who said Feldman's name isn't familiar. Some Facebook friends reached by the Times, including a pharmacist and a lawyer, said they didn't know him well enough to comment.
One correspondent called him kind and generous but would not agree to an interview.
A former neighbor from Knights Avenue, where Feldman lived the longest, characterized him as reclusive. The sex arrest was common knowledge. People kept their distance.
The 7,300-square-foot house went for $650,000 in a short sale last year, averting a scheduled foreclosure auction. Until deals were struck with two banks, Feldman owed about $1.9 million on a mortgage and equity line.
Buyer Scott Gargasz said the house wasn't habitable. The roof leaked. Windows were broken. None of the five air conditioning units worked.
Robin Piccolo, 43, stayed with Feldman on Knights Avenue after the doctor's hip surgery about seven years ago. They had known each other for years.
She described him as "quirky" and "awkward around people," but she said he had friends over sometimes. He had a theater room in his house with a ring of red leather recliners. He dated younger women and he liked to go out to Ybor City, she said.
She defends him. She said he once prescribed her pain medication but was insistent she get off it.
"I don't think he would ever prescribe anyone medication with the idea that it might kill them," she said.
They dramatically parted ways in December 2008.
Feldman told police Piccolo let herself into his house and robbed him at gunpoint. She said he owed her money. He didn't pursue charges. She wound up in prison, anyway, on an unrelated robbery charge and was recently released.
During that December encounter with police, Feldman mentioned something else.
He was dating a woman from Canada.
The woman, then Kim Xuan Nguyen, had been born in Vietnam.
Soon they would be husband and wife. And co-defendants.
• • •
That year, after decades of attending symposiums on back pain, nearly all of them in the United States, Feldman developed a sudden interest in cosmetic surgery and Vietnam.
He flew to Ho Chi Minh City for two weeks of liposuction training.
In October 2008, he incorporated the now-closed Forever Beautiful Medspa on 38th Avenue N in St. Petersburg.
He also had a pain management clinic, now called Feldman Orthopedic and Wellness Center, on Park Boulevard in Pinellas Park.
He was straddling two of America's obsessions at once.
Before long, state and federal investigators were asking questions.
Libor Mark Kittler of Seminole, a patient, died of an overdose in March of 2009. He was 26. His mother later filed a complaint against Feldman, who had prescribed painkillers.
The following September, Feldman began prescribing controlled drugs to a woman in her 50s, known as P.B. in state records. A tipster told the state the dosages were extremely high. There is no indication she died.
Records reviewed by the Times show that at least 17 people in possession of prescriptions from Feldman have died of overdoses since 2009.
In at least seven cases, the Pinellas-Pasco Medical Examiner's Office specifically noted that the deceased patients had histories of drug abuse. At least three had drug arrests visible in Pinellas County jail records that predated the prescriptions bearing Feldman's name.
Federal authorities allege that he prescribed drugs to people who didn't medically need them.
Feldman had action on all fronts in 2010.
In May 2010, one of his lien holders filed papers to foreclose on his Knights Avenue home.
In July 2010, the state began to investigate his care of P.B. Within five months, he would be juggling two state licensing probes, both relating to his prescribing of pain medications.
In August 2010, he married the woman who would later be federally accused of helping him to hide the proceeds of an illegal drug conspiracy. Authorities would say the conspiracy had already begun by then.
She wore a white veil and he wore a watermelon-red shirt and dark pin-striped suit, looking simultaneously startled and exuberant as he towered over her.
His Facebook page went wild with a series of increasingly glamorous photos of the new Mrs. Feldman.
"She is a great model for my photography hobby," he wrote.
He was 70. She was 60.
He was a longtime bachelor if not a lifelong bachelor. Court records show no other local marriages.
"Something must be going well," friend Geoffrey Blake Steiner posted below a shot of the smiling couple.
It looked that way on Facebook.
• • •
The Department of Health offered him a chance to quietly resign after the P.B. complaint.
He didn't accept.
Two days after his wedding, he told a state investigator he was weeding out bad patients and that he was running a legitimate practice. He defended his care of P.B. and called it conservative.
One of his attorneys nearly reached a settlement that would have allowed Feldman to pay a fine, take some training and keep practicing.
But last summer the settlement offer vanished.
The emergency room doctor's complaint about powdered oxycodone had ripened into a monthslong investigation and the Department of Health's prosecution unit no longer wanted to suggest a deal to the Board of Medicine, records show.
It wasn't just powdered oxycodone that Davis brought up. He said Feldman was also operating a website called superpain doctor.com, no longer active. And he criticized Feldman's prescriptions for a 35-year-old stage hand who was later seen at Edward White Hospital, where Davis worked before it closed.
Feldman disputed the complaint in a brief response to the state that included, "I did not inappropriately or excessively prescribe controlled substances for Patient R.L"
Looming in the background was something larger than a licensing matter: an investigation by a Drug Enforcement Administration task force that had also been paying attention.
When a federal grand jury returned an eight-count indictment against the doctor on Dec. 10, naming Mrs. Feldman in five of those counts, the language was as much about money as about drugs.
Six weeks later, the U.S. Attorney's Office listed assets that could be subject to forfeiture upon conviction.
They included a Porsche 911, an Infiniti EX35, a Mercedes-Benz CLS550, and at least $787,000 in gold coins, jewelry and cash, much of it scattered in safe deposit boxes in Mrs. Feldman's name.
Prosecutors alleged that the Feldmans' Pinellas Park clinic and their current home in the Ballast Point neighborhood were purchased with proceeds of a conspiracy.
The indictment also listed the initials of three deceased patients: R.G., J.M., S.W.
• • •
More than a decade ago, Feldman stood in a federal courtroom in Tampa and faced U.S. District Judge Steven Merryday for sentencing in the kickback scheme.
Feldman's attorney, Fernandez, called him "deeply remorseful" about a crime committed late in life. Fernandez said Feldman, then 64, would probably lose his medical license.
"He's a good physician," Fernandez said. "There's never been much question about that."
Merryday put Feldman on probation and ordered him to pay a $10,000 fine.
"I take you at your word that I won't see you, again," the judge said.
"I don't think you will," Feldman answered.
News researcher John Martin contributed to this story. Contact Patty Ryan at [email protected] or (813) 226-3382.On Sunday, Aaron Rodgers made the best throw in a clutch situation I’ve ever seen, a 36-yard shot down the left sideline to Jared Cook.
Rodgers’ body position (rolling left) and the absolute on-target missile, I’ve never seen a better throw. You will read and watch countless people discuss this play, drawn up by Rodgers on the fly in the huddle. However, you won’t read or watch it discussed through the eyes of an offensive lineman, with help from three of the Packers who were in the huddle Sunday in Dallas.
Every part of a game plan is scripted out. We have plays for third-and-long, plays packaged for the 1-yard line. There are shot plays at the +40, trick plays at midfield … on and on. So, of course, there are a set of plays for the end of the game. The Hail Mary is schemed. One WR at the front of the end zone to catch a batted ball, the tallest guy in the middle to jump and one WR at the back of the end zone. Well, offenses also design plays for the situation the Packers were in against the Cowboys on Sunday.
With the game tied at 31 and 35 seconds left, the Packers started their final drive at their 25-yard line with two timeouts knowing they needed at least 35 yards to get into field goal range. The plays in this situation fall into the category of the “final four plays.”
These are plays designed to get down the field, out of bounds, or in the Packers’ situation, with those timeouts, using the entire field while taking up minimal clock time. Included in those final four is a screen, which the Packers ran on Sunday to gain 17 yards on second-and-10 in this situation.
Typically, these plays are run half-heartedly at the very end of the Saturday walk-through, just to help the wideouts remember the routes.
As an offensive line, we assume we’ll get a three-man rush in most of these final four situations, so we build in double teams to most of these plays. It’s always made me wonder why teams don’t bring pressure in those situations. It would force the quarterback to throw quicker and not allow routes to develop.
These are slides left to protect the blind side 99 percent of the time, so the back would double team with the right tackle. Most quarterbacks I’ve played with are pocket passers and it’s designed for them to remain in the pocket. There have been situations and plays I’ve practiced, where the quarterback eventually finds his way out of the pocket, to the right, to buy himself time for a longer downfield throw.
What makes Aaron Rodgers so efficient in these end of game scenarios is his ability to get outside of the pocket to buy himself time to let these routes develop. Teams have started to catch on when he rolls right. They’ve started to bring pressure against the Packers in end of game situations.
It’s very unique having to handle pressure in a final four situation. If you head back to last season in the Divisional round, the Packers at the Cardinals, on the final play of regulation in a Hail Mary situation, the Cardinals bring pressure from the right, and the Packers don’t block it well. The Cardinals know Rodgers wants to throw right, so they force him left.
The Cowboys took a page from the Cardinals’ playbook and brought pressure the two plays previous to the long throw to Cook.
Here they bring double edge pressure and sack Rodgers. The back, Montgomery is late scanning to the safety pressuring left, and he crushes Rodgers. I’m amazed Rodgers held onto the ball. This forces Green Bay to use a timeout, backs them up, and in all honesty, it should have ended the game. Jeff Heath should have gone for the strip on this sack. If that happens, the Cowboys would have recovered and kicked a game-winning field goal.
On the next play, the Cowboys run a designed pressure for this situation. They rush three and have two linebackers spying Rodgers. If he rolls out to a side, they will come downhill and force a quicker throw.
It doesn’t totally work, but the concept is now known to the Packers.
Now we get to the final play. We’ve all seen the TV copy showing Rodgers possibly telling Cook to run a deep over (crossing route).
Well what did he tell the offensive line? I spoke with right guard T.J. Lang, right tackle Bryan Bulaga, and left guard Lane Taylor to get an idea of the scheme for this play.
Everyone in the huddle knew they would need to give Rodgers just that extra bit of time. Maybe even more than the usual five seconds he gets.
Rodgers told them, “I’m rolling left.” Like most offensive schemes with a right-handed quarterback, the Packers don’t roll out to the left often. It’s rarely practiced. It does take work as an offensive line figuring out the nuances of rollout protection. As evidenced on the final play.
The idea of a rollout protection is to allow the offensive line to set aggressively to the side of the rollout without worry about getting beat inside. If someone crosses your face to the inside, the lineman next to you will take him. This last rollout wasn’t the usual way it’s protected, and it’s different by design.
When the Packers rollout, Rodgers sits in the pocket for a second, to allow the tackle to the play side and pin his defender inside. The defensive end will rush inside when given the option, and since Rodgers is still in the pocket, he will rush inside 100 percent of the time. This protection allows the quarterback to get out clean, and it allows an uncovered lineman to leak out to protect the throw.
Because this isn’t a true rollout, the left guard doesn’t need to help the left tackle with an inside move. As Taylor told me “I just let Dave [David Bakhtiari] take care of the defensive end and I adjusted the defensive end’s inside move.”
It allows him to leak out and block that spying linebacker, which didn’t happen the play before. This allow Rodgers extra time.
Without this block, this play doesn’t happen.
Now, here’s where not practicing rolling left shows itself. If you look inside, the center is treating this like a sprint out, but the right guard is hanging back a bit because it’s “dash” protection, not a straight sprint out. So the defender splits the right guard and center. However, unlike what Twitter would tell you, T.J. Lang uses a slingshot (which is legal) to regain leverage on the defender. Next level stuff here.
Once Rodgers was able to roll out and buy time with Taylor out there to protect him, he could unleash this ridiculous rocket.
First, Rodgers’ feet are both pointing forward at the moment he’s throwing the ball, so it’s just an arm throw. He had a tiny window to fit that ball into. The Cowboys are running a cover 2 defense. The “honey hole” in any cover 2 defense is between the second level player and the safety. This is basically where Rodgers found Cook.
The outside defender stayed man on the wide receiver running a clear out, and No. 31 was left in a bind. He sees Cook running behind him, but can’t totally commit to covering him because Rodgers can run. He gets caught in between. I’m going to assume he thought the defender covering the go would settle back into his zone to take Cook. Either way, no one covers him and Rodgers finds the only spot where Cook can catch the ball. It’s a remarkable play.
The Packers’ offense is on fire. The Falcons offense is historic. If you like points, Sunday’s NFC Championship game is for you.“Some people may say painting with my mouth is a remarkable talent,” artist Alana Tillman shares on her website; “however, I want to be known for the quality of my artwork rather than how I created it.”
The self-taught painter took up her craft at five years old, honing it over the next 28 years in spite of the challenges she faced from a rare motor limitation.
“The disability is called Arthogyposis,” Tillman writes in a comment on Reddit. “That’s the Wikipedia version anyway. The jury is still out on if it’s genetic or from environmental variables.”
She notes that the condition affects the joints in her elbows and has caused “a lack of muscular development” in her arms, hence her adaptive approach.
“It is a lot easier for me to paint with my mouth than my feet,” Tillman explains in a comment. “I use my teeth to bite down on the tool and my tongue to control the direction that I need the paint brush or pencil to go.”
After her sibling, Reddit user WhoFramedVWRabbit, posted a gallery of Tillman’s artwork to the Pics community, her art went viral—reaching the front page of Reddit and leading users who saw her paintings to request an AMA (Ask Me Anything) from their creator.
The next day, Tillman joined the site to answer questions from her new fans.
Advice for Kids With Disabilities
The MFPA
How She Types
Dark Themes
Vintage Nostalgia
Pet Projects
When one redditor inquired about Tillman’s pet portraits, the artist expressed her affection for canine commissions, like this whimsical, pen-sketched pooch:
What’s Next?
To see more of Tillman’s art, check out her Instagram and website.A woman who won’t drive long distances because she has panic attacks in the car. A man who has contamination fears so intense he cannot bring himself to use public bathrooms. A woman who can’t go to church because she fears enclosed spaces. All of these people have two things in common: they have an anxiety disorder. They’re also parents.
Each of these parents sought help because they struggle with anxiety, and want to prevent their children from suffering the same way. Children of anxious parents are at increased risk for developing the disorder. Yet that does not need to be the case, according to new research by UConn Health psychologist Golda Ginsburg.
Ginsburg and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University tested a one-year family therapy intervention as part of a study of 136 families with at least one parent with anxiety and at least one child between the ages of 6 and 13.
The study, published online Sept. 25 in The American Journal of Psychiatry, found family-based intervention works. Only 9 percent of children who participated in a therapist-directed intervention developed anxiety after one year, compared to 21 percent in a group that received written instruction, and 31 percent in the group that did not receive any therapy or written instruction.
“The finding underscores the vulnerability of offspring of anxious parents,” says Ginsburg. She wants to do something about that vulnerability. “If we can identify kids at risk, let’s try and prevent this.”
Anxiety tends to run in families, with up to 50 percent of children of anxious parents growing up to be anxious themselves. Until now, anxiety prevention programs have been largely conducted in schools, with only modest success.
For an anxious child, meeting a new peer for the first time can be paralyzing. Trying an unfamiliar food might summon worries of being poisoned. To cope with this kind of debilitating anxiety, kids start avoiding whatever provokes the anxious feelings. If they’re afraid of the dark, they might insist on sleeping with all the lights on. If they’re afraid of failing, they won’t try new things. In extreme cases, they may refuse even to leave the house.
“Anxiety and fear are protective and adaptive,” says Ginsburg. “But in anxious kids they may not be, because these children have thoughts about danger and threat when there really isn’t one.”
Both inborn temperament and life experiences play a role, she says. The more negative experiences a person has growing up, the greater the likelihood he or she will struggle with anxiety as an adult. But there is also a component of anxiety that is learned, taught inadvertently by parents who model the behavior. It’s these learned behaviors and thought patterns that interventions can help change.
Most of the adults who participated in the study struggled in school and didn’t tell anyone. They didn’t raise their hands, or they got sick before exams. They might not have had any friends. As adults, their anxiety still limits their activities and sometimes those of their family members, and they are very motivated to help their children avoid the same.
In the study, some of the families participated in eight, hour-long sessions with a trained therapist over a period of two months. Others were just given a pamphlet that contained general information about anxiety disorders and treatments. Still others received nothing at all.
The families who participated in therapy were taught to identify the signs of anxiety and how to reduce it. They practiced problem-solving skills, and exercised safe exposures to whatever made their child anxious.
One of the ways to reduce anxiety is the reality check – learning to recognize when a fear is healthy and worth paying attention to (a growling dog) or unhealthy (a suspicion that the birthday cake is poisoned).
“We taught the kids how to identify scary thoughts, and how to change them,” Ginsburg says. For example, if a child is afraid of cats and encounters one in the street, the child can first identify the scary thought: “That cat is going to hurt me.” Then the child can test that thought – is it likely that the cat will hurt me? No, the cat doesn’t look angry. It isn’t baring its teeth or hissing, it’s just sitting there. OK, I can walk past that cat and it won’t do anything.
In general, children who participated in the intervention had lower anxiety overall than children who did not participate in the intervention with their families.
Now the researchers have funding from that National Institutes of Health for a follow-up to see whether the effects are maintained over time. Ginsburg wonders whether there would be value in providing regular checkups for families on the mental health issue. Along those lines, she is considering approaching insurers about offering this kind of service to families at risk, to see if it lowers their healthcare costs overall.
“I’d say we need to change our model of mental health to a checkup method,” Ginsburg says. “Like going to the dentist every six months.”Lenin’s love of donning his hiking boots and heading off with glee to the mountains, his urge to set out skating on any piece of frozen ice, his pleasure in diving into a river or the sea for a good swim, or his joy in pulling out his bicycle and riding it all day are rarely, if ever, understood for the vital role they played in his life. In these extended periods in the mountains, in the sea or on the road, Lenin would typically banish any thought of work from his mind. Now his body would work hard, allowing his mind to run freely to whatever thought might appear next. For anyone who engages in such activities (mine is long-distance cycling for days and weeks at an end), the effect is extraordinary: as the end of the ride or hike draws nigh, a reluctance to return home sets in and plans and dreams of much longer expeditions begin to form. All one wishes to do is stay on the road, concerned merely with the next meal, a place to sleep for the night, the smooth working of one’s body and, if on a bicycle, machine. And when the door of home does open all that had weighed so heavily on one’s mind at departure now seems far less pressing, so much so that one wonders what all the fuss was about.
In Lenin’s case, of course, the issue is the body of a revolutionary. People noted that he had the body of a well-built athlete, enjoying even sailing and the trapeze. That he was supremely fit goes without saying; that he was skilled to the point of impressing observers is noted by Krupskaya when Lenin skated on the frozen river in Shushenskoye on his mercury skates, cutting figures and performing all manner of tricks such as ‘giant steps’ and ‘Spanish leaps’, or when he swam (daily when possible) (Krupskaya, Reminiscences, pp. 39-40, 262; Collected Works 37: 71, 78, 112, 176, 204, 209, 227, 238, 307, 332, 365-6, 369, 387, 463, 485, 489, 494, 509, 560, 573, 574, 576, 578-9, 582-3, 602, 604, 610. One caveat must be noted here, for Lenin was a lousy hunter, no matter how passionately he pursued it. Again and again in her letters to Lenin’s mother and sisters, Kruspskaya would comment on how ‘Volodya’ would grasp his ‘famous gun’ and go out for hours, dressed in leather breeches and hunting jacket, with a dog he had trained and a local accomplice from Shusehnskoye, but come back empty-handed. On one occasion when they were out for a walk together, he brought his gun, but said, ‘“You know, if I come across a hare I won’t shoot it, because I didn’t bring my bags. It will be awkward to carry.” Yet as soon as a hare came bounding out he would let go at it’. But he missed, for he was ‘apt to get too excited’ over hunting (Reminiscences, p. 39). An equally successful expedition took place in autumn of 1898. Faced with a flock of partridges rising from the sides of the road, Lenin groaned with pleasure, took aim and fired, ‘but the partridge simply walked away without even bothering to fly’ (Collected Works 37: 464, 579, 558, 583).
But let me draw out an activity on which he spent much energy, namely, hiking. For most of the information on these matters, we are dependent largely on Krupskaya, who more often than not accompanied Lenin. Or rather, these were activities they undertook together, relishing the opportunity to share in what was close to both their hearts. At the simplest level were the daily walks, a habit they maintained even after the October Revolution, albeit intermittently and more limited in extent. Unlike the extended hikes when they would banish all thought of work from their minds, the daily walks were a time for talk, sharing thoughts on what they were writing. For Lenin, this process was an extension his habit of writing, in which he would ‘pace up and down the room, whispering what he was going to write’. In this light the daily walks ‘became as much a necessity to him as whispering his article over to himself before putting it down in writing’ (Reminiscences, p. 63; see also Collected Works 37: 112, 332, 361, 365-6, 509, 516, 560, 578-9, 583, 601, 614). More strenuous were the day-long hikes together, usually ‘scrambling up mountains’, at times with a group dubbed the ‘excursionist party’ (Collected Works 37: 516, 507-8). Krupskaya writes of walks in the Wolski Forest near Krakow, the snow-capped summits of the Tatra Mountains in the south of Poland around Poronino, the mountains around Zakopane and those near Sörenberg, such as the Rothorn and Schrattenfluh, in Switzerland. At Sörenberg, they would try to work in the morning and set off in the afternoon, but often the temptation became too great and they would climb mountains all day (Reminiscences, pp. 262-3, 268, 307-8, 310-11; Collected Works 37: 622). From these locations, they would send ‘hikers’ greetings’ to family members, occasionally on a postcard (Collected Works 37: 363-4, 471). The Bolshevik Pianitsky tells of Lenin’s cycling when he could and of a hike together up to the ‘The Eye of the Sea’ (Morskie Oko), the largest mountain lake in the Tara Mountains, near Poronino. They arrived home after dark, drenched and cold, after climbing over rocks and up cliffs with the help of iron hooks made fast in the rock. When they made the peak, it was covered in cloud, and three times they began their descent, only for the sun to come out and another scramble to the top (Memoirs of a Bolshevik, pp. 182-3).
Yet what draws me in, causing me to dwell long over the brief notes, recalling my own experiences and imagining what it would have been like to walk with them, are the hikes for weeks on end in the mountains. They were extraordinary, almost utopian expeditions. For instance, they spent six weeks hiking in the Swiss Alps in 1916, with a base in Tschudiweise. Living a ‘carefree existence’, they would set out from their base and ramble through the mountains. So absorbed was Lenin, that on one descent he caught sight of some mushrooms and began to pick them eagerly (as he often did with berries and other wild fruits). The problem was the rain, for it was pouring. Soaked to the skin but with a bagful of mushrooms, they of course missed the train home and ‘had to wait two hours at the station for the next |
are done with the textures, create a “Curves Adjustment Layer”.
Adjust the curves to increase the contrast and eliminate the pure black, replacing it by a grey tone. For that, set the line curves like this:
With this, we are done with the photo treatment. Now we need to only add the blood-inspired red detail at the bottom.
To create this blood-inspired red detail, we will use a copy of the Texture 2 layer. Click on Texture 2 layer and drag to the “Create New Layer” icon. Then drag the new layer to the top of all layers. Now delete the mask of this new layer, by clicking right button of mouse on the mask and select “Delete Layer Mask”. Change the opacity to 90%.
To give the red color to this texture, select the layer and adjust the “hue/Saturation”.
Now create a new mask on this layer and brush with black all the area that doesn’t need to be red. Keep only the bottom, create the shape as you desire with the brush.
To finish, with the red texture layer selected, select the “Brush“ tool and change the “Mode” to color, with opacity:50%, brush the edges of the red texture with light orange color.
The final result:
After you finish this editing, you can use the same file to personalize other photos. Just change the masked areas of the textures to suit each portrait. Here are some more examples:
To see more of his work, follow Rodrigo Capuski on 500px and thumb up his Facebook Page. You can also visit his creative photography studio website, Nadalin Photography.
Got questions for Rodrigo about this tutorial or his work? Comment below!Floodgates. You’ve seen them before. They’re everywhere and they’re annoying. In fact, I would go as far as to say that floodgate cards are the lynchpin of competitive side decking right now. For those of you who do not know what I am referring to when I say “floodgate cards,” I will briefly elaborate. A “floodgate” is a card that sits on the field and prevents the opponent from playing Yu-Gi-Oh. They are usually so crippling to the opposing strategy that entire games can be won with just a single copy of any given floodgate card. Examples include Shadow Imprisoning Mirror, Light Imprisoning Mirror, Soul Drain, Macro Cosmos, Dimensional Fissure, Stygian Dirge, Vanity’s Emptine$$, Rivalry of the Warlords, and Gozen Match. I am going to break down these cards and explain which ones you should be siding against specific matchups.
We’ll kick things off with the not-so-familiar floodgate card known as “Stygian Dirge.” I only recently found out about it card at ARGCS Milwaukee this year while watching a Geargia player get absolutely destroyed. The effect reads as follows:
Continuous Trap
Reduce the Levels of all monsters your opponent controls by 1.
Seems simple enough, right? But that’s just it; it’s too simple. Cards like that are typically extremely broken (think Pot of Greed, Dark Hole, Raigeki, Harpies Feather Duster, etc). Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not saying Stygian Dirge is as powerful as those cards, but I am saying that it has one line of super effective text. It’s kind of like Stealth Rock on a Charizard. If you haven’t put 2 and 2 together yet, let me assist you with the answer. It destroys decks that aim to make a specific rank of Xyz summons over and over again. Examples include: Geargia, Infernity, Burning Abyss, and Satellarknights. The aforementioned strategies attempt to spam Rank 3 or Rank 4 summons until they win. Unfortunately, there isn’t much room to include random Xyz monsters that are one rank below that. And even if they could, there aren’t many good options to help in that particular situation, anyways. If you’re thinking Zenmaines, I can tell you that that’s wishful thinking.
In my opinion, I think that everyone should be siding some number of this card. It completely ruins mirror matches for the opponent, while keeping your entire strategy intact. In the finals of ARGCS Atlantic City, you can see Tyree Tinsley and Aaron Furman utilizing Stygian Dirge to control their matches. This is mainly because Satellarknights cannot make real plays without Rank 4s. Burning Abyss becomes a deck of 2-star monsters that do nothing but cycle. The same is pretty much true for Infernity and Geargia. I should also mention that this card is not good against decks that play tuners because they can typically Synchro summon their way out of it.
Next up we have the infamous Shadow Imprisoning Mirror and Light Imprisoning Mirror. For short, I will refer to them as SIM and LIM. These cards are not new to the game of duel monsters. They have been around since 2007 and they have jumped in and out of relevance ever since. SIM should obviously be sided against Shaddolls and Burning Abyss. LIM should be sided against Satellarknights and Lightsworn. These cards stop a plethora of powerful effects, like Kuribandit, Dark Armed Dragon, every Shaddoll so far, every Satellarknight, all of the Artifact monsters, etc. They do not stop continuous effects, such as Thunder King Rai-oh’s effect that prevents players from searching their decks, but it would stop his effect to tribute himself and negate the special summon of a monster. You wouldn’t be able to negate El Shaddoll Winda’s effects that prevents players from special summoning more than once per turn, or her effect that says she cannot be destroyed by your opponent’s card effects, but you would be able to stop her effect that adds back a Shaddoll spell/trap when she is sent to the graveyard. Do not forget, though, that all of these effects that are negated by SIM and LIM can still be activated, but they will simply resolve without effect. In rare cases, this can be relevant.
Moving right along, let’s take a look at Soul Drain. It prevents the activation of monster effects that activate in the graveyard or in the banished zone. If you were around last year for Dragon Ruler format, you will know that this card used to be insane against them because they all activate in those two places (and the hand and field, too, if we’re being technical). Now we have the Burning Abyss and Shaddoll monsters that are all graveyard effects, and Soul Drain shuts them down all the same. On the plus side, Shaddolls have pretty good flip effects that may be able to help against Soul Drain, like Shaddoll Dragon, who returns one card on the field back to the hand.
Soul Drain can also be really good against Bujins and Frog Monarchs because they play several cards that utilize the graveyard. If your deck can operate without graveyard effects or banished zone effects, then this is the card you want to include in your side deck. Satellarknights make perfect use of it because it does not affect a single thing about them.
I’m sure everyone already knows a lot about Dimensional Fissure and Macro Cosmos. They have been around forever. Literally. Forever. On the plus side, I think the only deck that is capable of siding them is Satellarknights, but I am not too big on siding Macro Cosmos in that deck because it relies heavily on Altair, and Cosmos interferes with that. Dimensional Fissure, on the other hand, is perfect because when you detach your Deneb from under an Xyz, it will still go to the grave. If you draw Dimensional Fissure or Macro Cosmos against a Shaddoll or Burning Abyss deck, you should make your next focus on getting out Cairngorgon, Antiluminescent Knight. He will protect it from simple destruction like Mystical Space Typhoon, Artifact Ignition, Twister, Dust Tornado, Lyla, etc. Beware of Malevolent Catastrophe, though!
Perhaps two of the most powerful floodgate cards in the game, Rivalry of the Warlords and Gozen Match, have also been around for quite some time. Rivalry stops players from controlling monsters with different types and Gozen stops players from controlling monsters with different attributes. They are both incredibly annoying and incredibly hard to play around. I actually side three copies of Rivalry of the Warlords in my Shaddoll deck because it deals with Burning Abyss. You see, when they Xyz for Dante, he is a warrior monster, and the rest of their deck is all fiends. You can literally lock them out of the game until they draw an out, which will usually be in the form of either Phoenix Wing Wind Blast or Rank-Up Magic Astral Force to make Constellar Pleiades. In either scenario, they will still be in a tight spot because they cannot commit to the field knowing you have a Rivalry. It puts the deck into a very awkward situation that allows you to gain momentum. Also, a lot of Burning Abyss players use Raiza instead of Caius, which is certainly fine, except it gives them one less out to a card like Rivalry.
Satellarknights can actually side both Rivalry and Gozen as well. When you really sit down and think about it, the deck can side just about everything. All of their monsters are light warriors, so the same rules apply against Burning Abyss. What I love about Rivalry is that it happens to be great against Infernity and Mermails, too. It can prevent both of them from making powerful Xyz plays to win the game, which is usually how they operate. I noticed how incredibly detrimental it was to Mermails at the ARG $20K when Patrick Hoban flipped Rivlary on my Mermails. Their typing is all over the place, and it utterly destroys them. Madolches suffer the same fate, too—all of their monsters are different types.
Last, but certainly not least, we have our new money card, Vanity’s Emptiness. This pesky trap is everywhere right now, and you need to be prepared for it. Leading up to ARGCS Atlantic City, I noticed how powerful Emptiness was if you didn’t have an immediate out to it. I decided to main Mystical Space Typhoons as a result. I noticed that a lot of the players who topped the event also mained Mystical Space Typhoon. Emptiness is just one of those cards that can outright win a game on its own, and it sucks when you’re on the opposite end of it. In fact, one of my losses at the event was to Soul Drain and Emptiness being simultaneously face-up on the field. When you smell an Emptiness in the backrow, you need to make sure that your play is not going to leave you completely shut out if the card is flipped. Try to wait until you have an out to it before proceeding, and if you do not have an out, then at least have a backup plan. I typically hold a copy of The Monarchs Storm Forth in my hand for those scenarios. You can do the same thing by holding your copies of Mystical Space Typhoon.
If you want to do well in this format, you need to be ready for floodgate cards. In games two and three, players should be saving their backrow destruction for a time of need. The only time I would warrant using a Typhoon, or any card like it, in games two and three is when your opponent has just one backrow. If they have multiple, you should wait until they flip the floodgate.
Before I end this article, I want to leave you with this. It would be fair to say that in game one, Shaddolls and Burning Abyss are the two best decks in this format, but because of the numerous floodgate cards available to Satellarknights in games two and three, I’d argue that Satellarknights are the best deck post siding. And since we play more games with our side decks than without them, it would also be true to say that Satellarknights are the best deck. Now, ideally, the format is still wide open, and the absolute best deck has yet to be discovered, or at least the perfect list, anyways. Unfortunately, this forbidden list expires on September 30th, so it is completely possible that there isn’t enough time to find it. So what do you think about the flood? Do you agree that Satellarknights are best because of it? Let me know in the comments below.
Until next time, duelists! Play Hard or Go Home!
-Frazier Smith
-The Dark Magician
Discussion
commentsThe H.B. Reese Candy Company Edit
In 1928, The H.B. Reese Candy Company was established in the basement of Reese's home in Hershey, Pennsylvania.[4] Reese had originally worked at a Hershey dairy farm, and from the start he used Hershey Chocolate in his confections. Reese's Peanut Butter Cups were his most popular candy, and Reese eventually discontinued his other lines.[5] H. B. Reese died on May 16, 1956, in West Palm Beach, Florida passing the company to his six sons, Robert, John, Ed, Ralph, Harry, and Charles Richard Reese.[6] On July 2, 1963, the Reese brothers merged the H.B. Reese Candy Company with the Hershey Chocolate Corporation in a tax-free stock-for-stock merger. In 2017 after 54 years of stock splits, the Reese brothers' original 666,316 shares of Hershey common stock represented 16 million Hershey shares valued at over $1.8 billion that paid annual cash dividends of $46 million.[7][8] In 1969, only 6 years after the Reese/Hershey merger, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups became The Hershey Company's top seller.[9] The H.B. Reese Candy Company is maintained as a subsidiary of Hershey because the Reese plant workforce is not unionized, unlike the main Hershey plant. In 2012, Reese's was the best-selling candy brand in the United States with sales of $2.603 billion, and was the fourth-best-selling candy brand globally with sales of $2.679 billion—only $76 million (2.8%) of its sales were from outside the United States market. Additionally, the H.B. Reese Candy Company manufactures the Kit Kat in the United States, which had 2012 U.S. sales of $948 million.[10] As of October 2017 in the U.S. convenience store channel, Reese’s was the largest confection brand by far: it was 62% larger than the next brand, with more households purchasing Reese’s than any other confection brand across the United States. Reese’s includes the overall top-selling confection item—the iconic Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups King Size—as well as six of the top 20 chocolate/non-chocolate items. Additionally, the Reese’s brand accounts for over 47% of all seasonal sales within the U.S. convenience store channel, including the top two items in the largest four commercial seasons: Valentine's, Easter, Halloween, & Christmas. As a comparison, the next largest brand accounts for only 10% of seasonal sales.[11]
Variations Edit
A trio of different sized cups. Starting from the left: mini, regular and big cup. Hershey's produces "limited editions" of the candy that have included:[12] Big Cups : an oversized version of the traditional cup (also available in white chocolate, with peanuts, mixed nuts, and with a combination of nuts and caramel, and most recently, with Reese's Pieces inside).
: an oversized version of the traditional cup (also available in white chocolate, with peanuts, mixed nuts, and with a combination of nuts and caramel, and most recently, with Reese's Pieces inside). Big Cups with Reese's Pieces : This version of the Big Cup contains Reese's Pieces, mixed in the peanut butter filling.
: This version of the Big Cup contains Reese's Pieces, mixed in the peanut butter filling. Caramel : the traditional cup with an added layer of caramel filling.
: the traditional cup with an added layer of caramel filling. Chocolate Lovers : a thicker chocolate cup with a thinner layer of peanut butter.
: a thicker chocolate cup with a thinner layer of peanut butter. Crunchy Cookie Cup : a layered cup with crushed chocolate cookies and peanut butter filling (discontinued in 1999, but was brought back in 2008 as a limited edition. In 2017, Reese's announced to relaunch a new version. [13] )
: a layered cup with crushed chocolate cookies and peanut butter filling (discontinued in 1999, but was brought back in 2008 as a limited edition. In 2017, Reese's announced to relaunch a new version. ) Crunchy : a traditional cup with crunchy peanut butter, as opposed to the smooth peanut butter in the original.
: a traditional cup with crunchy peanut butter, as opposed to the smooth peanut butter in the original. Dark Chocolate : peanut butter filling in a dark chocolate cup.
: peanut butter filling in a dark chocolate cup. Double Chocolate : chocolate fudge filling instead of peanut butter. Limited edition.
: chocolate fudge filling instead of peanut butter. Limited edition. Double Crunch : a traditional cup with peanut filling similar to a Snickers bar, released in the fourth-quarter of 2010.
: a traditional cup with peanut filling similar to a Snickers bar, released in the fourth-quarter of 2010. Fudge : a thicker, darker chocolate cup with peanut butter filling.
: a thicker, darker chocolate cup with peanut butter filling. Half-Pound Cup : a single cup weighing 226 g; released in Canada in 2011.
: a single cup weighing 226 g; released in Canada in 2011. Hazelnut Cream : hazelnut cream instead of the standard peanut butter filling.
: hazelnut cream instead of the standard peanut butter filling. Honey Roasted : a traditional cup substituting honey roasted peanut butter.
: a traditional cup substituting honey roasted peanut butter. Inside Out : chocolate filling in a peanut butter cup (a reversal of the traditional version).
: chocolate filling in a peanut butter cup (a reversal of the traditional version). Marshmallow : the traditional cup with an added layer of marshmallow filling.
: the traditional cup with an added layer of marshmallow filling. Miniatures : bite-size versions available year-round in bags. These chocolates come wrapped in black paper and gold foil.
: bite-size versions available year-round in bags. These chocolates come wrapped in black paper and gold foil. Minis : Unwrapped Mini Cups.
: Unwrapped Mini Cups. Peanut Butter & Banana Creme : a layered cup with a top chocolate layer, bottom banana creme layer, and peanut butter filling; released in tribute to Elvis Presley. It was available in standard, Big Cups and Miniatures sizes.
: a layered cup with a top chocolate layer, bottom banana creme layer, and peanut butter filling; released in tribute to Elvis Presley. It was available in standard, Big Cups and Miniatures sizes. Peanut Butter Lovers : a layered cup with top peanut butter layer, thin chocolate layer and peanut butter filling.
: a layered cup with top peanut butter layer, thin chocolate layer and peanut butter filling. White Chocolate : peanut butter filling in a white chocolate cup.
: peanut butter filling in a white chocolate cup. "World's Largest": World's largest cups weighing in at 8 oz each.[14]
Other Reese's products Edit
Marketing and advertising Edit
The Reese's logo In the United States, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups typically come in packs of 2, 4, 5, 10 or 20 in distinctive orange packaging, set on thin but rigid paperboard trays. The "Classic" two-pack is a 0.75 oz. cup since 2001 (originally a 0.9 oz. size, reduced to 0.8 oz. in 1991), the "King Size" four-pack introduced in the early 1980s is a 0.7 oz. cup (originally a 0.8 oz. cup until 1991) and the "Lunch" eight-pack is a 0.55 oz. cup. "Large Size" packs of three 0.7 oz. cups, as well as bags containing 0.6 oz. cups, are also available. The "mini" cups come in various bag sizes and foil colors for seasonal themes like red, gold and green for the Christmas holiday season. In Canada, where they are packaged as Reese Peanut Butter Cups (except Reese's pieces), but still widely referred to by their American name, they come in a standard pack of three 0.55 oz. cups or the king-size variation with four cups. In the United Kingdom and Ireland, they were originally available only in two-packs, though are now only available in three-packs, imported from Canada. In 2008 Reese's Peanut Butter Cups were made available in Europe by Hydro Texaco and 7-Eleven. In Australia, Reese's products can be found in many specialty candy stores, as well as from American stores such as Costco. In the 1970s and 1980s, a series of commercials were run for Reese's Peanut Butter Cups featuring situations in which two people, one eating peanut butter and one eating chocolate, collided. One person would exclaim, "You got your peanut butter on my chocolate!" and the other would exclaim, "You got your chocolate in my peanut butter!". They would then sample the mixture and remark on the great taste, tying in with the slogan "Two great tastes that taste great together." In the 1990s, the product's slogan was: "There's no wrong way to eat a Reese's." The current slogan, introduced in the mid-2000s, is: "Perfect". Reese's was an associate sponsor of Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series drivers Mark Martin (1994), and Kevin Harvick (2007–2010).
Criticism Edit
Reese's Peanut Butter Cups are made with the controversial ingredient PGPR (Polyglycerol polyricinoleate, E476, a.k.a. Palsgaard 4150),[24] which is used as a replacement for cocoa butter.[25] The FDA has determined it to be "safe for humans as long as you restrict your intake to 7.5 milligrams per kilogram of body weight".[26]
See also EditGail Trimble can press a buzzer with alarming speed but, more importantly, she has a head full of a rich panoply of general knowledge that ranges across literature, languages, botany, and mathematical puzzles.
In all the decades University Challenge has been testing the wits of the nation’s undergraduates, old hands are saying there has never been a contestant to match her. Last night, she led her team, Corpus Christi College, to victory over Manchester University in the final of the six-month long general knowledge quiz show. The result was quite close, by the standards of Corpus Christi, in that Manchester managed to chalk up a score of 190 to Corpus Christi’s 275.
It was the first time in the contest that the little Oxford college, which houses only 400 students, had failed to achieve a three- figure win. This time, at least, their opponents held them down to just seven “starter” questions, making it less of an embarrassingly one-sided contest than Corpus Christi’s appearance against Exeter University, which produced the most decisive win the show has seen since 1971.
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Corpus Christi’s success was almost entirely down to their captain, who has scored more points than her three teammates put together. She has been nicknamed the new Stephen Fry, but that may be doing her an injustice. Fry is clever, of course – but could he, without warning and without hesitation, answer questions ranging from what does Mathilda in a poem by Hilaire Belloc have in common with Miss Havisham, in the Charles Dickens novel Great Expectations, to a mathematical puzzle about the difference between 10 metres squared and 10 square metres? Because Ms Trimble, a 26-year-old classicist, did.
Yesterday, Ms Trimble declared herself bemused by her new-found status as a sex symbol, a status allotted to her by some – but by no means all – of the bloggers who have commented about her on the web.
“I’m glad people are being nice about me rather than nasty,” she told Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour. But she added: “I very much think this would not be happening if I was a man. People would not feel it necessary to comment on my looks so much.”
She attributed the span of her knowledge to a stimulating childhood in a household filled with books, and to her “amazingly supportive” parents, who are both scientists, from Walton-on-Thames, in Surrey.
Ms Trimble was educated at a fee-paying school, Lady Eleanor Holles in Hampton, Middlesex, where she achieved 11 GCSEs – 10 at A* and one A – and four A-levels in Latin, Greek, English Literature and Maths – all grade A.
In her “undergraduate profile” on the Oxford University website, she is lyrical about the pleasures of learning Classics. “The best academic experiences tend to be completely unexpected – lectures on Plato’s Symposium on Monday afternoons in the summer, given in a remote room somewhere in the orchards in Worcester, where we would hear brilliant thoughts on Plato as the sun streamed in and ducks walked past the window,” she wrote.
On the radio yesterday, she confessed to gaps in her general knowledge that included any questions on biology or sport. When challenged with a few pub quiz questions by a tabloid newspaper, she had to admit she could not name the manager of Chelsea FC, the winner of Celebrity Big Brother, nor even the British lead actor in Slumdog Millionaire. (The answers, for those who also do not know, are Guus Hiddink, Ulrika Jonsson, and Dev Patel.) By contrast, on hearing Jeremy Paxman read out a list of names, she instantly recognised them as characters from the works of Jane Austen.
Fingers on the buzzers: Questions from last night's final
*1: What everyday concept did Iris Murdoch describe as “… the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real”?
*2: To what set of attested languages, i.e. those of the Germanic, Slavic, Romance and other families, do the initial letters P.I.E. refer?
*3: If a tap leaks a millilitre of water every second, how many 10-litre buckets will it fill completely in a day?
*4: Giving its name to an early form of capacitor, which city to the south-west of Amsterdam is home to The Netherlands’ oldest university, founded in 1575?
*5: Which of Shakespeare's plays is the only one to be set in Vienna and concerns the city’s Duke adopting a disguise in order to observe the actions of his subjects, including his deputy Angelo?
*6: A taco terrier is a cross between a toy fox terrier and which other breed of dog, originating in a country of Latin America?
*7: Which French obstetrician, who died in 1957, gave his name to a method of childbirth involving exercises and breathing control designed to give pain relief without drugs?
*Answers:
1: Love (in the essay: ‘The Sublime and the Good’, 1959)
2: Proto-Indo-European
3: Eight (8.64)
4: Leiden (the leyden jar)
5: Measure for Measure
6: Chihuahua (from Mexico)
7: Fernand Lamaze (the Lamaze technique)Jim Marrs on a satellite broadcast pimping L. Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth. Photo from Pacific Television Center.
Doomed forever to repackage and resell the same old works of L. Ron Hubbard over and over ad infinitum, the Church of Scientology has now decided to relaunch one of the worst SciFi books ever, and here we speak of Battlefield Earth — which was also one of the worst movies ever. That the movie starred Scientologist John Travolta was perhaps the main reason for the epic awfulness of the movie. The book and the movie were bad because L. Ron Hubbard’s “Battlefield Earth” fails in so many areas. The plot, characters, dialogue and the writing itself are idiotic, turgid, and laughable. The book is unreadable in its present form.
A cursory look at the Galaxy Press website show the original 1982 first edition of Battlefield Earth still being offered at $75.00. This means Galaxy was never able to move all of its 1982 Battlefield Earth stock — and yet it is now trying to sell a 2016 edition.
So what to do? How does the Church of Scientology’s for-profit Galaxy Press hype and sell the unreadable Battlefield Earth?
This is where UFO, NWO, JFK assassination writer, and 911 Truther Jim Marrs enters the picture. That Scientology’s Galaxy Press has hired master conspiracy theorist Jim Marrs to help promote Battlefield Earth is bizarre on so many levels:
1. Jim Marrs is taking Scientology blood money to promote Battlefield Earth. This is a bad way for Marrs to finalize his legacy; Jim Lynch is remembered only for taking blood money to work Scientology’s atrocious Freedom Magazine. Working for Scientology is the cultural equivalent of being an American who is paid to write propaganda for North Korea. There is an undertone of treason against reason and sanity, a sort of a Tokyo Rose motif in which these writers have crossed over to betray Culture itself in favor of a violent, secretive, and diabolical Cult bent upon world conquest. 2. Marrs’ book Alien Agenda is considered one of the best UFO books out there. For Scientology to associate itself with a UFO author only serves to heighten and underscore spacelord Xenu and the Xenutian genocide mythology embedded in the Section II of OT III. 3. Scientology does not like being called a “Space Alien UFO Cult” and yet they are hiring Marrs who is primarily associated with UFO’s, space aliens, and secret societies. Scientology is trapped by its own mixed messages: It is a space alien cult centered around Xenu; it is where spirituality meets technology; it has effective answers for life and yet is a doomsday cult that has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to bury Hubbard’s writings in nuclear proof vaults built to survive Armageddon. Scientology wants to be everything to everybody and yet it fails at everything except being what it is and that is a transnational criminal syndicate wrapped in a Doomsday Cult blanketed in lies, phony PR, and IRS tax exemption. Marrs evidently feels attracted to this morass of surreal Scientology lunacy. 4. Jim Marrs is now permanently associated with L. Ron Hubbard and everything L. Ron Hubbard stands for. I wonder if Marrs even knows the dark side of Scientology? 5. That Scientology had to hire yet another wog, yet another non-Scientologist, to promote Scientology and LRH proves, once again, that Scientology has no in-house talent capable of doing so or willing to do so. Scientology is being increasingly outsourced to wogs and the irony of this is enormous and very funny when we consider that Hubbard said “a wog is someone who isn’t even trying.” Why is Scientology hiring people who are not even trying? 6. Stalin and his Kremlin had their “Useful Stooges.” Scientology has its “Useful Wogs” and here I am thinking of people like Jim Marrs, L. Fletcher Prouty, J. Gordon Melton, and the newest useful wog Donald Westbrook the “religious scholar” from Claremont. Click the link to read some of Westbrook’s putrid apologia for Scientology. From my perspective, Westbrook does not comprehend Scientology in any meaningful way. He is bereft of a complete contextual understanding and, as it appears, quite willingly so. As expected, this willful blindness is a trait shared by all of Scientology’s useful wogs. 7. One major irony here is that Marrs writes books warning of the Luciferian NWO while pimping for the Luciferian Cult of Scientology. Looks like Jim Marrs took Scientology’s blood money and drank the Kool-Aid. Have a good time on the way down Jim. 8. David Miscavige ordered people at Gold Base to read Jim Marrs’s Alien Agenda and Rule by Secrecy and other Marrs’ books many years ago, this according to former Sea Org executuve Aaron Smith-Levin. David Miscavige felt that these books resonated with Scientology. Aaron Smith-Levin made a brilliant and insightful post today on the Underground Bunker: Oh man, I’m late on this one for today. Jim Marrs’ books, “Rule By Secrecy” and “Alien Agenda” were mandatory reading for all OSA staff in Scientology around 2002-2003. Because of this fact, many rank and file staff & SO members read them as well, including me. The book was given to me by Bruce Thompson, the then-DSA Philly and also my then-step-father. Bruce now works in OSA’s special D.C. office. Jim’s books match up perfectly with Scientology’s “Alien origin / prison planet” story about Earth and the human race. The reason for OSA to read the books was to reinforce the idea that “this whole-track alien agenda is the real enemy we are up against on this planet”. Believing this fact is what keeps some OSA staff (and Ethics Officers, etc.) from getting bogged down into the details of complaints from people who are publicly speaking out against SCN. No matter how true a specific series of complaints may be, the OSA/Ethics staff can brush it off as just another attack from a pawn in the alien agenda. They think “If their complaint was really what they were upset about, they’d be handling it internally, and not attacking SCN. They’re only pretending to be upset about these things. Their real intent is to destroy SCN”. I’ve said it before…if someone believes in the state of Full OT and believes SCN’s prison-planet story, there is NOTHING they won’t do, and NOTHING that cannot be justified in the name of protecting Scientology. Jim Marrs’ books actually reinforce this belief for many staff / SO members. If Jim is promoting Battlefield Earth it’s probably because LRH’s fiction matches up quite nicely with what Jim believes to be actually true. And Jim probably knows LRH thought it was true was well. So there’s a kinship of sorts. I don’t believe however that Jim has had any actual involvement with Scientology. I could be wrong though. 9. Jim Marrs has been associated with Scientology in the past. Tom Cruise purportedly had a copy of Marrs’ book on his bed stand according to this video. While I do not endorse this video, I am posting it as parts of it are quite interesting:
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PrintThe number of homeless veterans in the United States has fallen 33 percent since 2010, to just under 50,000 as of January. The number of homeless veterans sleeping in the street, as opposed to in shelters, fell even faster, down nearly 40 percent over the past four years.
At least those were the figures put out by a trio of federal agencies in a news release Tuesday. When I first saw the numbers, I was more than a little skeptical. A change that dramatic often reflects a shift in the way data is collected or some other statistical quirk, not a trend. Moreover, the Obama administration has every incentive to make the numbers look good, especially at a time when the Department of Veterans Affairs is mired in scandal.
I’ve looked into the numbers, though, and it seems my skepticism was misplaced. The number of homeless veterans really does seem to be falling. What’s more, it’s falling at least in large part due to government intervention.
Here at FiveThirtyEight, we had a few theories about how the numbers could be misleading. My first thought was demographics: Vietnam veterans are starting to qualify for Social Security and Medicare, which might be helping them get off the streets. In that scenario, the decline in homelessness is real, but it isn’t anything for which the Obama administration can claim credit.
In a similar vein, DataLab editor Micah Cohen wondered whether the post-2010 decline was more about the improving economy than any policy shift. My colleague Carl Bialik, meanwhile, offered a more pessimistic theory: Maybe this year’s unusually cold winter artificially reduced homelessness counts by driving people indoors.
None of those explanations turned out to hold much water. Carl’s is the easiest to debunk (sorry, Carl): The number of homeless vets has been falling pretty steadily for the past four years, so this wasn’t a one-year blip driven by cold weather. The same goes for the number of “unsheltered” homeless veterans, who were presumably the ones most affected by the icy winter.
Micah’s theory about the economic recovery is harder to reject because good data on the number of homeless veterans only goes back to 2009. But we have data on overall homelessness going back to 2007, before the recession began. Those figures show that homelessness didn’t increase much during the recession, ticking up only slightly in 2010. In general, the number of homeless Americans has been trending down, but not nearly as quickly as the number of homeless vets. There’s no particular reason to think that the recession would have disproportionately hurt veterans, or that the recovery would have disproportionately helped them. So it’s unlikely that the recovery is the only thing helping vets.
As for my theory, it’s possible that demographics are playing some role, but they don’t appear to be the primary explanation. The government’s main annual report on homelessness doesn’t usually include any demographic information, but the 2011 report did provide a basic age breakdown of veterans in homeless shelters. (It doesn’t have data on veterans living on the street.) About 10 percent of them were 62 or older, and 42 percent were between 51 and 61. A report from the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service in November also looked at data from the VA’s programs for homeless vets. Those sources found that between a quarter and a third of homeless vets served during the Vietnam era, but that even more – about half – served in the post-Vietnam, pre-Gulf War era. More recent veterans, meanwhile, make up an additional 20 percent or so. So, while there are indeed lots of homeless veterans entering their |
it to decrypt the message. Another of our changes to the code then prints out the cleartext of the message using the debugger. As we could observe, the decrypted message is indeed shown.
This shows that in our tests Android smartphones exclusively sent end-to-end encrypted messages to receivers capable of E2E encryption. And these messages were encrypted according to the TextSecure protocol. Whenever we tested this with iOS clients, received messages weren't protected in this way.
Our patched yowsup echo client shows the encrypted message coming in and then prints out the plaintext resulting from the decryption by the axolotl library.
As part of our analysis of the network traffic we did not find any evidence that would point to the WhatsApp client also sending the same data without E2E protection to the servers. At this point we do have to go into the frustrating list of things we could not show with our experimental setup. For example: We do not know if E2E encryption is actually used in all cases where this is possible or if it is switched off when certain criteria are met – such as requests by intelligence services or when the device is in use in a certain country. We do know that turning off the encryption is built into the design after all: WhatsApp clients sent messages without E2E encryption to iPhones, for example.
We also don't know if the secret keys generated by the WhatsApp client leave the device under certain circumstances. But as long as WhatsApp can tell any client to drop its encryption and users don't have a chance to notice this, getting the keys is probably a low priority anyway.
Uncertainty Abounds
This seems to be the core problem with WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption: You never really know if it is actually being used. Neither when sending nor when receiving messages with the official WhatsApp client is there any indication if E2E encryption is in place. Our lab tests only show that messages are encrypted in principle but that is not enough for dependable use in the real world. Even heavier weighs the fact that, as far as we know, WhatsApp has never committed to guarantee its users E2E encryption. E2E encryption with WhatsApp therefore remains a token effort. (fab)765
Omg! This marinade is SOOO good!!! The only change I made was due to what I had on hand; no hot pepper sauce, so I subbed crushed red pepper flakes and a little of Emeril's Southwest Seasoning...
I love fish tacos and have made them many times before, but wanted some ideas on a few variations so I went hunting. The marinade and sauce look very promising here and sound delicious, but I do...
Shawnie 3 5
Omg! This marinade is SOOO good!!! The only change I made was due to what I had on hand; no hot pepper sauce, so I subbed crushed red pepper flakes and a little of Emeril's Southwest Seasoning... Read more
ReddGypsy 577 61
This is really good...BUT!!! I would just like to add a word of caution. The first time I made this I accidently bought chipotle peppers in adobo sauce rather than just the adobo sauce. I picke... Read more
duchessmellie 97 13
Great Recipe, I followed the suggestion of others and omitted the adobe sauce. I only marinaded the fish for an hour and then I baked it at 350 for 15 minutes in the marinade. For garnish I us... Read more
BATCAVES 709 100
The marinade was great. I increased the cumin to 1 tsp, honey to 2 tsp, and lime juice to 3 tbsp. I cooked the fish in a pan instead of the grill, for convenience. Instead of making the dressing... Read more
Diana S. 390 271
The marinade gets 5 stars... it's fantastic! Overall though, I gave this a 4 because the tilapia, in my opinion, is just too delicate of a fish to stand up to this recipe. Next time I'll use had... Read more
Stephicus 249 16
I love fish tacos and have made them many times before, but wanted some ideas on a few variations so I went hunting. The marinade and sauce look very promising here and sound delicious, but I do... Read more
Owen 23 11
These are amazing. We have been looking for good fish taco's since moving from California, and this beats all the restaurants in town by far. The sauce is very hot though, and we reduced the ch... Read more
James Hodge 149 27
The only reason this got 4 stars instead of five is because the sauce isn't very good. It had a very strong lime taste that overwhelmed everything else. Read moreBy David Lawder
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democrats appear to have little recourse against a House of Representatives rule change that could prompt a steep cut to Social Security disability benefits next year, congressional aides said on Monday.
The new legislative rule, pushed through with little notice last week, would prohibit a routine transfer to the Social Security Disability Trust Fund, which is expected to be depleted by late 2016.
Without an injection from the main Social Security retirement fund, the disability program would have to cut benefits by some 20 percent, only paying out what it can collect from payroll taxes.
Congress approved the last such "reallocation" transfer in 1994 after several in the 1980s under President Ronald Reagan.
Republicans say they passed the rule change to force reforms to the disability program, which they claim is rife with fraud and mismanagement. Democrats, unable to stop the shift, have called it a "stealth" move to cut benefits.
On Monday, Senate Democrats issued a plea to Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to oppose an "audacious" rule change that would "hold hostage" benefits for some 9 million disabled Americans.
"It only increases the chances of yet another unnecessary manufactured crisis, akin to shutting down the government or threatening the full faith and credit of the United States," Richard Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Senate Democrat, and seven others wrote in a letter to McConnell. They asked him to "forcibly reject" the change.
McConnell has not commented on the request, but Republican aides say there is little he can do about a legislative rule passed in the House. Since revenue measures must originate in the House, the House rule would ensure that a routine transfer could not take place.
A Democratic aide on the House Ways and Means Committee acknowledged that not much can be done about the rule change until 2016, when the disability fund is close to depletion and an election-year showdown over benefit cuts could occur.
Republican Representative Sam Johnson, of Texas, who authored the rule change, said it was meant to protect Social Security retirement benefits from being "raided" by the "fraud-plagued disability program" and to encourage reforms.
(Reporting by David Lawder; Editing by John Whitesides and Leslie Adler)Heavy machinery working at the site designated for the new settlement, Amichai, June 2017.
The Israeli cabinet on Sunday approved the allocation of 55 million shekels ($15.3 million) to the Interior Ministry for the completion of infrastructure work on Amichai, a new West Bank settlement for former residents of the unauthorized outpost of Amona, which was evacuated in February.
Amichai is being built in the central West Bank, north of Ramallah near the settlements of Eli and Shiloh.
Work at the site was suspended in July after the Construction and Housing Ministry said it needed more funds to continue work.
Although the Prime Minister’s Office has been pressing the Finance Ministry for more money to build Amichai, the funds that were approved Sunday were part of the existing budget for the community rather than an additional allocation.
The cabinet’s decision allows the treasury to transfer 55 million shekels to the Interior Ministry, the lion’s share of the 60 million shekels that the cabinet allocated for the establishment of roads as well as electricity, sewage and water systems for Amichai.
The Housing Ministry’s insistence that double this amount was needed led to the suspension of work in July.
Sunday’s cabinet resolution noted that the commitment to transfer the money for the completion of the infrastructure work “depends among other things on court verdicts,” because “legal proceedings are now before the court against the construction of the new settlement, including the infrastructure work.”
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The resolution stated that the cabinet “notes the commitment of the Mateh Binyamin Regional Council to complete all the required work... based on the receipt of assistance that will not exceed said funding.”
At least 160 million shekels were earmarked for the evacuation of Amona. This includes 60 million shekels to build Amichai, 40 million shekels for compensation to evacuees — including nine families who were previously evacuated from illegally built homes near Ofra — tens of millions of shekels for the evacuation operation and the cost of temporary housing for evacuees.
Last month Haaretz reported that following the Housing Ministry’s request for more funds, the Prime Minister’s Office had asked the Finance Ministry for another 30 million to 70 million shekels for the community’s construction. Sources familiar with the details said such an allocation would breach budget limits and that the additional funds aren’t likely to be approved.Welcome to the another installment of Side B! Like looking at the the B-side of old vinyl records, this segment is designed to allow for a closer look at some tracks that may have been overlooked or overshadowed by the more popular tracks in a group’s discography.
This week, I have the honor of highlighting the Burning, Lovely, Untouchable, and Emotional… C.N. Blue! In light of the fact that the boys are finally making a comeback in Korea following up from a successful promotion period in Japan (as well as a concert in L.A. that Johnelle and Jessie were lucky enough to attend), I’ve decided to devote this week’s Side B to looking at the band’s Japanese material, because I strongly feel that it is their music in Japan, and not Korea, that really reaches down into their roots.
If you ask the typical K-pop fan that isn’t too familiar with the band which songs that they like the best from C.N. Blue, you will almost unequivocally get the names of the same few title tracks that they’ve promoted heavily on Korean music shows (“I’m a Loner,” “Love,” “Intuition“). And while these tracks are great tracks in their own right, if you ask a BOICE what their favorite C.N. Blue songs are and what draws them to C.N. Blue’s music, they might point you to some of their non-title Korean tracks (“Love Light,” “Tattoo,” “Love Girl“) as well as the boys’ Japanese discography.
Why? For two main reasons: Firstly, C.N. Blue fans tend to like the tracks composed by C.N. Blue themselves, the best. Secondly, it seems to be the trend that when not using remakes, Korean companies allow for more artistry and freedom when it comes to Japan. It is for these very same reasons that among Cassies, the material produced by Tohoshinki (“Doushite,” “Love in the Ice,” “Bolero“) generally elicits a stronger emotional reaction than the more well-known material produced in the past by DB5K.
Let me start you off with a brief history of C.N. Blue. Although they are widely perceived in Korea as a pretty-faced idol boy band, what not everyone knows is that C.N. Blue actually had its humble beginnings in 2009 (prior to their debut in Korea) as an indie band playing on the streets and live clubs of Japan.
They debuted with their first mini-album Now or Never on August 19th, 2009 under indie label AI Music. At debut, the original bassist of the band was Kwon Kwang-jin, who left the group in late September of that year and was replaced by Jungshin instead. In addition, the leader of the band was originally Jonghyun during their early days; he switched places with Yonghwa during their Korean debut with Bluetory on January 14th, 2010.
With the explosive success of “I’m A Loner” under FnC Music, C.N. Blue became widely known to the general Korean public as an idol boy band. However, with the label of “idol” came quite a few drawbacks and accusations, the foremost being that music critics questioned the legitimacy of the group as a real band. The fact that in Korea, C.N. Blue was forced to hand-mime performances on weekly shows (though to me, it showcases the faults of Korean music programs for not being able to supply adequate equipment or trust their performers, than anything) simply added fuel to the fire, as well as the plagiarism controversy that briefly sprung up around their debut track, “I’m A Loner.”
The funny thing is, “I’m A Loner” wasn’t even composed by any of the members of C.N. Blue. It was instead co-composed by songwriters Lee Sang-ho and Kim Do-hoon. A $50,000 lawsuit from the indie band Ynot, pressed against the co-composers for plagiarizing their material soon followed, but after investigation into the matter, the court ruled (for the first time) in favor of the defendants, and the plagiarism accusation was lifted. C.N. Blue’s reputation, however, was permanently tarnished in the process. Now, not only were they scrutinized for hand-miming, but it was also passed around the K-pop sphere that they didn’t even compose their own music, further casting public doubts as to their legitimacy as a real band.
This kind of claim saddens me because if you take a closer look at their discography, Yonghwa and Jonghyun in fact compose the majority of C.N. Blue’s music. And if you take a look at their live performances outside of the idol-centric Korean music shows, it becomes vastly evident that C.N. Blue does not need any backtracking at all in order to perform their songs… in fact… they sound the best when left to simply their raw voices and their instruments. In Japan, where the rock scene is generally a bit more developed and mainstream, C.N. Blue is, for the most part, able to hold live performances on programs without a hitch. In addition, many of their title tracks in Japan are self-composed, which to me marks a huge difference in the way that AI and FnC approach their audiences.
For some reason or other, FnC chooses to use songs written by outside composers for the majority of C.N. Blue’s title tracks in Korea, despite the fact that many of the songs within their albums are self-composed. Indeed, it is said that “Hey You,” the title track for C.N. Blue’s soon-to-be-released 3rd Korean mini-album Ear Fun (2012), is once again composed by Lee Sang-ho and Kim Do-hoon. Although I’m sure that the boys will manage to make the song their own (and it sounds great based on the teasers so far), a part of me wishes that FnC would have enough faith in themselves to allow C.N. Blue to release more title tracks that they composed on their own.
But where business and music mix together, things become complicated — especially in Korea, where the ‘business’ side of the equation seems to be vastly (and sadly) more important. I get that FnC is trying to play it safe — trying to recreate a previous formula of success — and appeal to the larger market by pushing forward compositions that may fit in better with the general K-pop landscape. However, the way I see it, by bringing in outsiders to create the boys’ Korean title tracks, they are also shooting themselves in the foot and further reinforcing malicious stereotypes about the group. And I’m saying this because the boys are more than capable of taking care of these things (their music, their performances, their compositions) by themselves, the way that they have done successfully in Japan.
This is why I find it laughable whenever someone states that C.N. Blue is a fake idol band masquerading as a real band, because anyone familiar with the group beyond a cursory glace is aware of the fact that the opposite actually holds more credence: they are a real band, forced to hand-mime and masquerade as a pretty-faced idol band… while they are in Korea.
In chronological order of original release date, here are some of my favorite, C.N. Blue tracks from albums released in Japan. I will be including several title songs in this list as well, because despite what level of success they might have attained in Japan, I still find them to be lesser-known among the general K-pop audience.
“Teardrops in the Rain”
“Teardrops in the Rain” first appeared on Now or Never (2009), C.N. Blue’s debut mini-album in Japan, and also appeared on their first full-length Japanese album, ThankU (2010). The mini-album contained five songs, all written in English. One of them was “Love Revolution,” which later made a reappearance on their first Korean mini-album, Bluetory (2010). The mini-album, although failing to chart on the Oricon, showcased C.N. Blue’s versatility, as each song had its own unique feel, ranging from upbeat and poppy to more symphonic and alternative. “Teardrops in the Rain” was the last track on the album, and showcases a mellow and easygoing side to C.N. Blue.
“Why, Y”
“Why, Y” was composed by Yonghwa and is the fourth track off of Voice (2009), C.N. Blue’s second Japanese mini-album. It also appears in ThankU, and was later translated into Korean to resurface again in Bluetory. I love the harmonization between Yonghwa and Jonghyun’s voices in this song.
“One Time”
“One Time” was penned by Yonghwa and is the first track off of C.N. Blue’s first Japanese single, The Way (2010), as well as the second track off of their 2nd (and last) Japanese full-length indie album, 392 (2011). It’s a really, really fun song to listen to, and you can tell that the boys have a ton of fun performing it as well. Check out that sexy rapping by Jungshin in the middle! And lovely Minhyuk looking oh-so-fine drumming away in the background. This song was later translated into Korean and resurfaced on their first Korean full-length album, First Step (2011).
“Eclipse”
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it time and time again — Jonghyun is, without question, my future husband one of the most underrated people in the K-pop-verse. Aside from having a bit of a shy personality, this boy is pretty much the whole package: he has the voice, the composition skill, the instrumental skill (guitar, piano, bass, and harmonica), and the looks (he was a famous ulzzang when he was younger). As an added bonus, he even has a black belt in both Judo AND Taekwondo.
Back to the song — “Eclipse,” composed by Jonghyun, is the third track off of The Way (2010) and the sixth track off of 392. The song starts off pretty minimalistically and slowly builds up over time. There’s also a lovely guitar solo in the middle by Yonghwa (which is intriguing to me because with their Korean material, it is usually Yonghwa taking the singing lead, and Jonghyun doing the guitar riffs). I love when bands create breathing room to showcase the sounds of the individual instruments themselves; to me it really shows their respect for the genre and the music itself.
“I Don’t Know Why”
“I Don’t Know Why” is the title track off of C.N. Blue’s second Japanese single, I Don’t Know Why (2010) and the 7th track off of 392. The song and lyrics were composed by Yonghwa. I love this performance in particular because not only are there moments that highlight each member individually, but there’s also such a perfect interaction and harmony between their voices and instruments. “I Don’t Know Why” managed to reach #8 on the Oricon Daily Chart, marking the first time the band made it within the Top 10, as well as reaching the #1 position on the Japanese Indie Top Chart. This song later resurfaced on their first Korean full-length album, First Step (2011).
“Lie”
“Lie,” composed by Jonghyun, is the second track off of I Don’t Know Why and the fifth track off of 392. I don’t really know what to say besides the fact that I think this track is as close to perfection as it gets… so many things just seem to click together all at once. “Lie” was later rewritten in Korean and re-released in First Step.
“Don’t Say Goodbye”
Yonghwa sheds his guitar for this particular performance of this song, and pours all of his energy and emotions into his singing instead. Written and composed by Yonghwa, “Don’t Say Goodbye” is the second song off of C.N. Blue’s third Japanese single Re-Maintenance (2011) and the sixth track off of 392. It was also rewritten in Korean for their third Korean mini-album, First Step +1 Thank You (2011).
“Kimio”
This is hands down my favorite C.N. Blue song of all time; I can literally listen to this song on loop, for hours. Composed by Jonghyun, this is the third song off of Re-Maintenance and the final track in 392. Out of all the songs on C.N. Blue’s discography, I feel that this one draws the most from a J-rock influence. This is not too surprising considering that after all, Jonghyun grew up for a period of his life in Japan.
“In My Head”
Composed by Yonghwa, this is the title track off of C.N. Blue’s first debut single under a major label (they are currently signed with Warner Music Japan, graduating away from AI Music, their original indie record label), In My Head (2011). The song peaked at #3 on the Oricon Daily Chart and #4 on the Oricon Weekly Chart, and the album also managed to earn a gold record accreditation according to the RIAJ (Recording Industry Association of Japan), which means that it sold over 100,000 copies within a month of being released.
This song is also rumored to be resurfacing on their soon-to-be-released 4rd Korean mini-album, Ear Fun (2012). The boys sound even better live than recorded, don’t you think?
“Where You Are”
“Where You Are,” released on February 1st, 2012, is the title track off of C.N. Blue’s 2nd Japanese single under Warner Music Japan, Where You Are (2012). Penned and composed by Yonghwa, the song reached #1 on both the Oricon Daily Chart and the Oricon Weekly Chart, becoming the first foreign band to top the chart in 41 years.
————————————————————————————————————-
That’s it for this week’s Side B! I hope you enjoyed listening to this list as much as I enjoyed compiling it! What are some of your favorite, lesser-known C.N. Blue songs?
(Cnblue4brothers, arwin0820, judegee1, BurningNoona, warnermusicjapan)F1 champion Jenson Button has rounded off 2014 by marrying his longtime partner Jessica Michibata.
The couple, who dated for six years, finally tied the knot in front of friends and family in a lavish ceremony in Maui, Hawaii this week.
Lingerie model Jessica had hinted that she had exchanged vows with her 34-year-old fiance after posting an Instagram snap of her in what looked like a bridal gown on Christmas Day.
Happy ever after: Formula One driver Jenson Button married fiancee Jessica Michibata in Hawaii over the festive break
Now new pictures have shown the pair's extravagant ceremony in all its glory.
Jessica wowed guests at her big day in a traditional white strapless wedding gown with a huge flowing veil, which had to be kept under control by her trusty bridesmaids.
Meanwhile, her new husband looked dapper in a navy three-piece suit, white shirt and pale blue tie.
They looked ecstatic as they posed for professional pictures alongside the bridal party in the lush landscape of the idyllic island.
Look of love: The pair looked longingly at each other as they exchanged vows on the island of Maui
You may kiss the bride: Jenson was more than happy to share a smooch with his stunning new wife
Sweet: The pair have dated since 2008 and Jenson finally proposed on Valentine's Day 2014
Seeing as though cars have played such a major part in their courtship, they couple hopped in a convertible classic Pontiac GTO draped with ribbon and were driven off into the sunset.
Jessica has been by the Brit's side since they first met in Tokyo in 2008.
The pair split in 2011, but spoke constantly during their time apart and decided to give their relationship another go six months later.
Speaking about how she wanted to marry the driver even as far back as 2009, the beauty said: ‘He told me he wants to get married – he said he is the marrying type.
'If Jenson wins the title we will celebrate by him getting down on one knee. He told me I am the one for him. I hope he means it.’
Stunning: Jessica went for a traditional white lace strapless gown
Veil threat: The lingerie model had several women help get her huge lace veil in order before her ceremony
Dramatic: The headpiece ensured the 30-year-old beauty made an impact as she arrived for her nuptials
Beautiful setting: The sun-soaked island, a favourite with the couple, provided the perfect backdrop for their big day
Say cheese: The newlyweds were then surrounded by their bridesmaids for official shots
Such cheek: Jenson looked dapper in his three-piece blue suit with a pale tie
Celebration: The couple were surrounded by family and friends for their group shot
Not exactly McLaren: In a nod to his day job, the pair were whisked off in a convertible classic Pontiac GTO
With the top down: The couple soaked up the sun in the back of the car
The McLaren star finally proposed on Valentine's Day 2014, with a ring reported to be worth £250,000.
Of Jessica's stunning engagement ring, Vashi Dominguez, CEO and founder of diamond jewellery specialist Vashi.com told MailOnline: 'This is a stunning engagement ring but a brave choice if Jenson selected it himself.
'It looks to be a pear shaped five carat diamond three stone engagement ring set in platinum and we would estimate the cost would be in excess of £250,000.'
Before meeting his now wife, he had flings with a string of women including Prince Harry’s ex – 29-year-old model Florence Brudenell-Bruce.
The model has previously said: ‘Of course, I read about him being a playboy, but I don’t see that side of him. We spend nights watching films and making sushi rather than going out to nightclubs.’
The wedding, however, was bound to be somewhat bittersweet for Jenson, who lost his beloved father John last January.
The proud patriarch had attended all of his son's races since he was 14.Have you met Gators Girl yet? She was featured prominently in our Florida Gator Girls Gallery, however not prominently enough for my tastes. Let me tell you a bit about her. Her name is Heidi, she likes Tim Tebow, she’ll be rooting for the Florida Gators tomorrow, and these are her pictures. Yep, that is about all I know. Enough for yah? If you want to buy some of these photos, I believe she sells them on flickr, but I don’t really know how that crap works. Probably not the low resolution garbage you see here, but some nice big photos that you could hang on your wall, or above your bed. She has tons more photos on her Flickr account, so go give the girl some money, and hopefully she’ll keep making photos.Submitted by Arthur Submitted by Brian Site News In addition to regular tags, I’ve started tagging my personal favorite posts with a “favorites” tag. Keep an eye out for them! Submitted by Kevin Uli is one freaky looking cat. Submitted by Alexander Bragnadaar’s transformation from young Jedi knight to a fat, lazy Sith. Submitted by Jonathan Submitted by BryanSays This submission by Andrew included this story: Darth Tedward lept through the air, his aged muscles enhanced by the Force to make what seemed an impossible jump a simple endeavor. Twisting his body and tucking his small arms and legs, he folded into a flip in midair and landed upon a chair, his paw shooting down to grasp his light saber and engage it all in one fluid movement. As Tedward turned to face his nemesis, the lightsaber hissed and crackled in the air. The shadows danced a distorted waltz throughout the room, brought to life by the sickening red light the lightsaber cast.
Darth Tedward hunkered down into a defensive stance and smiled an evil yellow-fanged rictus.
Macy wan Boxellis slowly…calmly…strode forward and stopped. She took a moment to listen to Tedward’s labored breathing, to feel every minute particle of air surrounding him pulsate an with almost-palpable hatred.
Her concentration almost broke at the foul odor that assailed her nostrils. She grimly recognized the smell as his thick rank breath caused by decaying teeth.
In a way, Macy felt sorry for him. She forced the horrific smell from her consciousness and focused her energy on seeing through his physical body. She saw the warped, twisted animal he had become by giving himself up to the dark side. Pushing past her instinctual good nature, she knew in her heart that feeling sorry for this decimated creature was useless. He had turned too far, had been corrupted thoroughly to be brought back. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, letting energy from the Force fill her body and mind.
Her eyes flicked open.
It seemed her lightsaber lept from her belt into her paw. A low peaceful hum filled her ears and caused Darth Tedward to flinch ever-so-slightly. Macy noted the red and blue light from ancient energy weapons seemed to clash in the darkness, giving an odd sort of preview of the battle she knew would happen within the next few moments.
No words were spoken as the two combatants surged forward to fight the final fight. Both knew only one would walk away this time….Alberta Town Named First International Dark Sky Community In Canada
BON ACCORD, Alberta and TUCSON, AZ (12 August 2015) – In the shadow of Alberta’s capital city, the Town of Bon Accord has seen its role in the province change from a center of local agriculture to other sectors such as support for nearby Canadian Forces Base Edmonton. In recent years the town has also embraced the principles of dark skies preservation to expand the reach of its brand and its appeal as a destination for tourists and new residents alike. In recognition of the town’s actions to protect its dark night skies, the International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) has designated Bon Accord as an International Dark Sky Community.
Bon Accord is the first Canadian community to receive IDA status, and only the eleventh Dark Sky Community in the world. It is also the first location from the province of Alberta welcomed into the International Dark Sky Places Program. The Town’s new IDA status is separate from, but complimentary to, the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada’s Dark Sky Site designation program.
“We are pleased to honor the efforts of Bon Accord in setting a laudable example for other cities in the Canadian West,” IDA Executive Director J. Scott Feierabend said. “We hope other municipalities throughout Canada will follow the town’s lead.”
Despite its location only 40 kilometers north of downtown Edmonton, the quality of Bon Accord’s night skies is comparable to some of IDA’s Dark Sky Parks. Residents have demonstrated their commitment to maintaining these conditions while allowing the town to grow responsibly and sustainably.
“This is truly a new beginning for Bon Accord as a leader in community wellbeing relating to our nighttime environment and as a tourism destination for the Alberta Capital Region and beyond,” stated Mayor Randolph Boyd. “Looking at this long term initiative helps provide Bon Accord the ability to develop sustainable, responsible guidelines for growth while maintaining our existing quality of life goals for a community such as ours within a rural area. We hope to be a blueprint for other communities as well, looking for ways to become or maintain their own dark sky.”
As part of its bid for IDA status, Bon Accord enacted one of the most progressive and comprehensive outdoor lighting policies in Canada. The Light Efficient Community Standards Bylaw 2015-07, based largely on the Model Lighting Ordinance developed jointly between the IDA and the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America, calls for fully shielded light fixtures and limits on the total amount of light allowable on public and private properties. It also establishes a series of lighting “zones” throughout the town where allowable light levels are based on expected ambient light conditions.
Planning and Development Coordinator Kyle Miller observes, “This innovative bylaw has potential to become a model for other communities looking to enhance nighttime enjoyment of public spaces while limiting light glow and trespass created by neighbours, businesses and other infrastructure.”
To show support for the bylaw, the town brought nearly all its municipally owned lighting into compliance with the bylaw’s requirements. Further efforts to support dark skies in Bon Accord involved ramping up messaging to the community about dark skies through local media, and public outreach and in local school curricula.
“Residents throughout Bon Accord value their ability to view the night sky and acknowledge its importance to our community,” Bon Accord Economic Development Manager Patrick Earl explained. “The overall brand message of the community has incorporated an education and environmental message of Bon Accord being a dark sky community and reasons why.”
News of the IDA Dark Sky Community designation comes in time for the September celebration of Bon Accord’s annual Equinox event, showcasing the Town’s pride and appreciation of the global environment and connecting the scientific and artistic components of society.
Future plans include construction of Bon Accord Observatory Park, a public observatory intended as a base for future dark skies and astronomy-themed event programming to further expand the tourism opportunities and resident quality of life for Bon Accord.
About the IDA Dark Sky Places Program
IDA established the International Dark Sky Places conservation program in 2001 to recognize excellent stewardship of the night sky. Designations are based on stringent outdoor lighting standards and innovative community outreach. Since the program began, 11 Communities, 26 Parks, nine Reserves and one Sanctuary have received International Dark Sky designations. For more information about the International Dark Sky Places Program, visit https://www.darksky.org/night-sky-conservation/dark-sky-places.
About IDA
The International Dark Sky Association, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization based in Tucson, Arizona, advocates for the protection of the nighttime environment and dark night skies by educating policymakers and the public about night sky conservation and promoting environmentally responsible outdoor lighting. More information about IDA and its mission may be found at https://www.darksky.org.
About Town of Bon Accord
Bon Accord is situated along Highway 28, a major route to destinations in northeast Alberta including the province’s oil sands. The Town is approximately 20 minutes north of Edmonton, the provincial capital of approximately one million people, and 15 minutes north of the Edmonton Garrison, a large Canadian military base. Centrally located in Sturgeon County, residents enjoy affordable rural living within a short commute to the vast amenities offered in Alberta’s Capital Region.
Media Inquiries
International Dark-Sky Association
Dr. John Barentine (Dark Sky Places Program Manager) john@darksky.org; +1 520-293-3198
Town of Bon AccordUse the sliders or number inputs to adjust the colour transformation matrix. The input red/green/blue are the default HUD colours and the output red/green/blue are what is shown. For example, putting 100% of input red to input blue (and nowhere else) makes everything that is red by default show as blue.
Copypaste the generated configuration snippet on the left into the file GraphicsConfiguration.xml, replacing (only) the similar lines inside the <GUIColour><Default> tags. Note that this file is overwritten when the game updates, so you will need to re-apply your theme every time that happens. The file GraphicsConfigurationOverride.xml can be used to make the theme persistent (see example).
Refer to the forum thread for help and feedback regarding the theme editor.
You can link to themes directly in the editor by copying the URL from “link to this theme” below.
This completely unofficial and unsupported editor was made by Kimmo Kulovesi (aka Arkku). Provided as is with absolutely no warranty, mod the game at your own risk only!
The screenshots are obviously from Elite: Dangerous by Frontier Developments plc, with which the author is not affiliated other than having backed the game. =)With lifetime access to over 76 courses and 35 hours of training (all of which count towards the 35 contact-hour requirement for the PMP®), you'll learn everything there is to know about project management. These courses are approved by the Project Management Institute for meeting the strict educational criteria necessary to earn the PMP® and CAPM® certifications.
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Soyinka turns 80 this week and continues to express his views as one of the |
to womankind: and moreover, as is commonly known, she has sown and disseminated many opinions contrary to the Catholic faith and tending to the denigration of certain articles of the orthodox belief, wherein she appears evil-thinking, suspect, and defamed. The said bishop had proposed and resolved to institute proceedings against her since she was in his diocese and had therein committed all which was reported of her: now it came to pass according to God's pleasure that she was captured, taken and arrested in his diocese and within the limits of his spiritual jurisdiction, but that he had meanwhile been translated elsewhere. When this fact came to the knowledge of the said reverend father he of his own authority and by other means required and admonished the illustrious prince the Duke of Burgundy and the noble lord Jean de Luxembourg and the other warders of this woman to surrender her to him, for it was his lawful and reasonable duty
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as the ordinary judge to institute inquiries and proceedings against this woman who, suspected of heresy, had committed so many misdemeanors against the Catholic faith, and who, it was said, had been captured, detained and arrested within the territory of his spiritual jurisdiction. These lords and the others who held Jeanne captive, being summoned to this end, both by the most Christian prince Henry our lord and king of France and England, and by our mother the University of Paris, obeyed these requisitions and demands: like faithful Catholics devoted to their faith, they surrendered and delivered this woman to our Lord the king or his commissaries, had her led to the city of Rouen where she was put into safe custody, and now, at the order and with the consent of our lord the king she has been surrendered, given up and delivered to the said reverend father in Christ. For many considerations and reasons, and especially upon careful reflection of the present circumstances, it has seemed meet to institute proceedings in this city of Rouen, according to the theological and canonical sanctions, and to carry out here the inquiries which appear necessary in this case, and, in a word, to perform all the varied business pertaining to. a suit of this kind, with all the consequent details. Certainly our bishop does not mean to put his scythe in our harvest, to act without our consent; hence he has requested us to grant him territory to assist his legal want and to perform all the acts pertaining to his suit. Therefore, approving the demand of the said reverend father, and deeming it both just and in accordance with the interests of the Catholic faith, we have granted, given and assigned him territory, and by the present letter give and assign him territory, both in this city of Rouen, and wherever in the limits of the diocese as shall appear necessary to him for all usages concerning this trial and for the execution, comprehension, decision and termination of everything pertaining
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thereto. Hence we warn all our subjects, of either sex, living in the town of Rouen and in our diocese, of whatever condition, and hereby enjoin them in virtue of holy obedience, to comply with, obey and lend aid and favor to the said reverend father in all that concerns this suit, and its consequences, by supplying testimony and advice and by other means. We allow and grant that every act arising from the inquiry shall receive its full and free effect according to law, as if it had been accomplished in his own diocese of Beauvais, whether it was in fact done by his authority, by his present or future commissioners or deputies or in conjunction with the Inquisitor of Heretical Error, or his present or future deputy, either separately or in conjunction, and shall be executed and concluded. We give and grant him, so far as is necessary and God will allow, all authority and power excepting the right of the archiepiscopal dignity of the diocese of Rouen in other matters. December 28th, in the year of Our Lord 1430"
Signed: R. Guérould
Follows the tenor of the letter concerning the Promoter
"To all those who shall see these present letters, Pierre, by divine mercy bishop of Beauvais, greeting in Our Lord. A certain woman commonly called Jeanne the Maid has during the course of the present year been taken and captured within the boundaries and limits of our diocese. On behalf of the most illustrious prince our lord the king she has been delivered and restored to us her ordinary judge, defamed as she was by common and public report, as scandalous and suspected of many spells, incantations, invocations and conversations with evil spirits and of many other matters concerning the faith, so that we could institute proceedings against her according to the legal form customary in matters of faith. And we, desiring to proceed maturely in the said matter of
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faith, according to the legal form and upon the advice and consultation of a great number of our counselors in both canon and civil law who had assembled at our instructions in this city of Rouen (of which the spiritual jurisdiction had formerly been granted us to permit us to execute and decide this matter), we judged it both necessary and fitting to have a Promoter General appointed by us in this trial, with counselors, notaries or scribes, and an usher to execute the commands and convocations necessary in the course of the trial. Be it known therefore that being desirous of following both this advice and consultation and the legal forms, having full confidence in God and being duly informed of the fidelity, integrity, intelligence, competence and personal ability of the venerable master Jean d'Estivet, priest, canon of the churches of Bayeux and Beauvais, we have constituted, created, ordained and appointed the said Jean and do hereby constitute, create, ordain and appoint him our Promoter or Procurator in everything concerning the general and particular conduct of this trial. And we give the said Promoter or Procurator by these presents license, faculty and authority to sit and appear in court and extra-judicially against the said Jeanne, to give, send, administer, produce and exhibit articles, examinations, testimonies, letters, instruments and all other forms of proof, to accuse and denounce this Jeanne, to cause and require her to be examined and interrogated, to bring the case to an end, and to exercise all acts known to be proper to the office of Promoter or Procurator, according to law and custom. Therefore, to whom it may concern, we require submission, obedience, counsel and aid towards the said Jean in the exercise of his office. In witness whereof we have affixed our seal to these present letters. Given in the house of Jean Rubé, canon of Rouen. January 9th, in the year of Our Lord 1431"
Signed: E. de Rosières.
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Follows the tenor of the letter concerning the notaries
"To all those who shall see these present letters, Pierre, by divine mercy bishop of Beauvais, etc. Be it known therefore that being desirous of following both this advice and consultation and the legal forms, having full confidence in God and being duly informed of the fidelity, integrity, capacity, competence and ability of master Guillaume Colles, otherwise called Boisguillaume, and of master Guillaume Manchon, priests of the diocese of Rouen, apostolic and imperial notaries and sworn notaries of the archiepiscopal court of Rouen, and subject to the consent and approbation of the venerable vicars of the archbishopric of Rouen during the vacancy of the see, we have appointed, elected and named them, and do now appoint, elect and name them notaries or scribes in this suit. And we give them license, faculty and power to have access to the said Jeanne as often as they need to question her or hear her questioned, to receive the oaths of witnesses, to collect the confessions of Jeanne, the sayings of witnesses and the opinions of the doctors and masters, and to report them, word for word, in writing to us, to put in writing all the present and future facts of this case, to set down in writing and draw up the whole proceedings in the proper form, and in short to perform all the tasks of a notary whenever and wherever suitable. In witness whereof etc." [as above].
Follows the letter appointing a counselor
"To all those who shall see these present letters, Pierre, by divine mercy bishop of Beauvais, etc. Be it known that desirous of following both this advice and consultation and the legal forms, having full confidence in Our Lord and being duly informed of the fidelity, integrity, competence and ability
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of the venerable and prudent master Jean de La Fontaine, master of arts, licentiate in decrees, we have made, ordained, charged, appointed and retained the said master Jean in the quality of counselor and examiner of the witnesses to be produced in the trial by our promoter: and we give and grant the said master Jean license, faculty and authority to receive the said witnesses, to put them on oath and examine them, to absolve them conditionally, to draw up and cause to be drawn up in writing their depositions, and to perform everything pertaining to the office of one duly appointed counselor, commissary and examiner, everything we should ourselves do if we were acting in his place. In witness whereof we have affixed our seal to these present letters. Given in the house of Jean Rubé, canon of Rouen. January 9th, in the year of Our Lord 1431."
Signed: E. de Rosières.
Follows the tenor of letters appointing the executor of our mandates
"To all those who shall see these present letters, Pierre, etc. Be it known that desirous of following both this advice and consultation and the legal forms, having full confidence in Our Lord and being duly informed of the fidelity, competence and prompt diligence of the discreet master Jean Massieu, priest, dean of the Christendom of Rouen, we have appointed, retained and ordained him executor of the mandates and convocations emanating from us in this trial: we have granted him license and by these present letters grant him all license of that office. In witness whereof we have affixed our seal to these present letters. Given in the house of Jean Rubé, canon of Rouen, 9th January in the year of Our Lord 1431."
Signed: E. De Rosières
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January 13th, 1431. Reading of the evidence against Jeanne
On the following Saturday, January 13th, we the said bishop assembled in our dwelling at Rouen the following lords and masters: Gilles, abbot of Ste. Trinité de Fécamp doctor of theology; Nicolas de Venderès licentiate in canon law; William Haiton and Nicolas Couppequesne, bachelors of theology; Jean de La Fontaine, licentiate in canon law and Nicolas Loiseleur, canon of the cathedral of Rouen. In their presence we set forth all that had been accomplished in the previous session, and requested their advice upon the subsequent procedure in the case. In addition we read to them certain evidence collected both in the district where this woman was born and elsewhere, and also certain memoranda prepared upon particular points indicated earlier in the said evidence or referring to common report. When all this had been seen and heard the lords and masters decided that certain articles should be duly prepared so that the matter might appear in greater distinctness and better order, and they could more certainly decide whether there was sufficient matter for the institution of a summons and trial in matters of faith. Therefore in accordance with their advice we resolved to proceed to the preparation of such articles, and we appointed to this effect certain notable persons of especial learning in canon and civil law to assist the said notaries. And they, diligently complying with our command, proceeded to draw up the said articles on the following Sunday, Monday and Tuesday.
January 23rd, 1431. Decision concerning the preparatory information
On Tuesday, January 23rd, the following lords and masters appeared in our dwelling: master Gilles, abbot of Fécamp Nicolas de Venderès William Haiton, Nicolas Couppequesne,
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Jean de La Fontaine and Nicolas Loiseleur. In their presence the articles which had been drawn up were read, and we requested their most prudent counsel upon the articles and upon the subsequent procedure. They informed us that the articles were drawn up and prepared in a good and competent form, that it was fitting to proceed to the interrogations corresponding to these articles: and declared that we the said bishop could and should proceed to draw up the preparatory information upon the acts and sayings of the prisoner. Following this advice we resolved and commanded that this preparatory information should be prepared, but since we were otherwise engaged we appointed the venerable and discreet master Jean de La Fontaine, licentiate in canon law, to conduct this inquiry.
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February 13th, 1431. The officers appointed take oath
On the morning of Tuesday, February 13th of the same year there appeared before us in our dwelling the following lords and masters: Gilles, abbot of Fécamp, Jean Beaupère, Jacques de Touraine, Nicolas Midi, Pierre Maurice, Gerard Feuillet, doctors; Nicolas de Venderès and Jean de La Fontaine, licentiates in canon law; William Haiton, Nicolas Couppequesne, Thomas de Courcelles, bachelors of theology; and Nicolas Loiseleur, canon of the cathedral of Rouen. We summoned the officers already appointed and ordained by us in this suit, namely master Jean d'Estivet, the promoter; Guillaume Boisguillaume and Guillaume Manchon, notaries; master Jean Massieu, executor of our convocations and commands. We required them to take oath to fulfil their offices faithfully, and in obedience to our request they swore between our hands to fulfil and exercise them faithfully.
February 14th 15th and 16th 1431. The preparatory information is drawn up
On the Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday following, the said Jean de La Fontaine with the assistance of the two notaries proceeded to draw up the preparatory information which we had commanded.
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February 19th 1431. Decision to summon the Inquisitor
On Monday, February 19th 1431, the following lords and masters appeared before us in our dwelling at eight o'clock in the morning. Gilles, abbot of Fécamp Jean Beaupère Jacques de Touraine, Nicolas Midi, Pierre Maurice, Gerard Feuillet, doctors of theology; Nicolas de Venderès, Jean de La Fontaine, licentiates in canon law; William Haiton, Nicolas Couppequesne, Thomas de Courcelles, bachelors of theology; and Nicolas Loiseleur, canon of the cathedral of Rouen. We the said bishop informed them that we had commanded a preparatory inquiry into certain articles concerning the words and deeds of this woman whom, as we had formerly said, our lord the king had surrendered and entrusted to us, to discover if there were sufficient cause to proceed against her and summon her in matters of faith. In their presence we read the articles and depositions contained in this preparatory evidence. When this had been read they were fully considered by the lords and masters in a long and mature consultation. Finally at their counsel and advice we concluded that we possessed sufficient evidence to proceed against this woman and summon her in matters of faith, and we decreed that she should be cited and summoned to reply to certain interrogations to be addressed to her. Moreover for the more convenient and salutary conduct of the matter, and in our respect for the apostolic holy see which has especially appointed lord Inquisitors of Heretical Error to correct the evils which arise against the orthodox faith, we resolved at the advice of our experienced counselors to invite and summon the lord Inquisitor of Heretics cal Error for the kingdom of France to collaborate with us in this trial if it were according to his pleasure and interest. Since however the said lord Inquisitor was then absent from the city
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of Rouen, we commanded that his deputy, who was present in Rouen, should be summoned and called in his stead.
The afternoon of the same day. The Vicar of the Lord Inquisitor is summoned
The same Monday, at four in the afternoon, we were visited in our house by the venerable and discreet master Jean Le Maistre of the order of Preaching brothers, Vicar of the lord Inquisitor of the kingdom of France and appointed by him to the city and diocese of Rouen. We summoned and required the said vicar to join with us so that we might proceed in conjunction in the said matter, and we offered to acquaint him with everything which had been or should in future be done therein. Whereupon the said vicar answered that he was prepared to show us his commission or letters of appointment given him by the lord Inquisitor and according to the tenor thereof he would gladly perform all that he was in duty bound to do on behalf of the holy inquisition. Yet, since he was especially appointed for the diocese and city of Rouen only, he doubted whether his commission could be interpreted to include the present trial, although the territory had been ceded to us, because we had nevertheless undertaken these proceedings in virtue of our jurisdiction in the diocese of Beauvais. We answered that he should return to us on the next day when we should have taken counsel upon the matter.
Tuesday, February 20th 1431. The Vicar of the lord Inquisitor refuses to act
On the following Tuesday, February 20th there appeared before us in our dwelling brother Jean Le Maistre, vicar of the lord Inquisitor; master Jean Beaupère Jacques de Touraine, Nicolas Midi, Nicolas de Venderès, Pierre Maurice, Gerard Feuillet, Thomas de Courcelles, Nicolas Loiseleur, canon of
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the cathedral of Rouen, and brother Martin Ladvenu, of the order of Preaching brothers. In their presence we reported that we had seen the commission or letter of appointment given to the said brother Jean Le Maistre by the lord Inquisitor, and that it was the opinion of the learned authorities to whom we had shown this letter that the said vicar could in virtue of this commission collaborate with us, that this commission included this city and the entire diocese of Rouen, and that he could conduct the present trial conjointly with us. But nevertheless to avoid the nullification of the trial we had resolved to address a summons or requisition in the form of letters patent to the lord inquisitor, requesting him to come in person to this town of Rouen and conduct the trial in person or provide a deputy authorized with more extensive and particular powers, according to the tenor of our letters transcribed below.
Whereupon the said brother Jean Le Maistre replied that for the serenity of his conscience and the safer conduct of the trial he would not participate in the present matter, unless he received especial authority. Nevertheless as far as he lawfully might he allowed that we the said bishop should proceed further until he had received more ample counsel upon the question whether he could in virtue of his commission undertake the conduct of this trial. Thus with his consent we once again offered to acquaint him with the past and future procedure. And after receiving the decisions of the assessors, we decreed in our letters of citation transcribed below, that this woman should be summoned to appear before us on the following Wednesday, February 29th.
First follows the tenor of letters of appointment of the said lean Le Maistre
"Brother Jean Graverent, of the order of Preaching brothers, professor in sacred theology, by apostolic authority Inquisitor
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of Heretical Error in all the kingdom of France, to his well loved brother in Christ, Jean Le Maistre, of the same order, greeting in Our Lord Jesus Christ, the author and consummator of our faith. Heresy is a disease which creeps like a cancer, secretly killing the simple, unless the knife of the inquisitor cuts it away. Hence, with confidence in your zeal for the faith, in your discretion and integrity, and in virtue of the apostolic authority which we enjoy, we have made, created and constituted you, and by the tenor of these present letters we make, create and constitute you our vicar in the town and diocese of Rouen, giving and granting you entire authority in this town and diocese against all heretics and them suspected of heresy, their accomplices, protectors and concealers, to investigate, cite, summon, excommunicate, apprehend, detain, correct and proceed against them by all opportune means, up to and including the final sentence, with absolution and the pronouncement of salutary penances, to perform and exercise in general each and every duty pertaining to the office of inquisitor by law, custom or special privilege, which we ourselves should perform if we were acting in person. Given at Rouen, August 21st in the year of Our Lord 1424."
Follows the tenor of the letter which we the said Bishop addressed to the Lord Inquisitor of Heretical Error
"Pierre, by divine mercy Bishop of Beauvais, to the venerable father master Jean Graverent, doctor of theology, Inquisitor of Heretical Error, greeting and sincere love in Christ. Our lord the King, burning with zeal for the orthodox faith and the Christian religion, has surrendered to us as ordinary judge a certain woman named Jeanne, commonly called The Maid, who, notoriously accused of many crimes against the Christian faith and religion, suspected of Heresy, was captured and apprehended in our diocese of Beauvais. The chapter of the
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cathedral of Rouen, in the vacancy of the archiepiscopal see, having granted and assigned us territory in this city and diocese in which to hold this trial, we, desiring to drive out all unholy errors disseminated among the people of God, to establish the integrity of the wounded Catholic faith, and to instruct the christian people, teaching them salvation, particularly in this diocese and other parts of this most Christian realm, resolved to examine the case of this woman with all diligence and zeal, to inquire into her acts and ways concerning the Catholic faith, and, after assembling a certain number of doctors of theology and canon law, with other experienced persons, did, after great and mature consultation, begin her legal trial in this town. But as this particularly concerns your office of inquisitor, whose duty is to direct the light of truth upon the suspicions of heresy, we beg you, venerable father, require and summon you for the faith's sake to return without delay to the town of Rouen for the further conduct of the trial and to participate therein as is incumbent upon your office, according to legal form and apostolic sanctions, so that we may continue in this suit with a common sentiment and uniform procedure. And if your occupation or other reasonable cause should occasion any delay, at least entrust your authority to brother Jean Le Maistre your vicar in this city and diocese of Rouen, or to some other deputy, so that you are not charged with the grievous delay caused by your absence after so urgent a summons, to the prejudice of the faith and the scandal of the Christian people. Whatever you decide to do, please inform us of forthwith in your letters patent. Given under our seat at Rouen, February 22nd, in the year of Our Lord 1431."
Signed: G. Boisguillaume. G. Manchon
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Wednesday, February 21st. The First Public Session
On Wednesday, February 21st, at eight o'clock in the morning we the said bishop repaired to the chapel royal of the castle of Rouen, where we had summoned the said woman to appear before us at that hour and day. When we were seated in tribunal there were present the reverend fathers, lords and masters: Gilles, abbot of Ste. Trinité de Fécamp Pierre, prior of Longueville-Giffard, Jean de Châtillon Jean Beaupère Jacques de Touraine, Nicolas Midi, Jean de Nibat Jacques Guesdon, Jean Le Fèvre Maurice du Quesnay, Guillaume Le Boucher, Pierre Houdenc, Pierre Maurice, Richard Prati, and Gerard Feuillet, doctors of sacred theology; Nicolas de Jumièges Guillaume de Ste. Catherine, and Guillaume de Cormeilles, abbots; Jean Garin, canon, Raoul Roussel, doctors of canon and civil law; William Haiton, Nicolas Couppequesne, Jean Le Maistre, Richard le Grouchet, Pierre Minier, Jean Pigache, Raoul Le Sauvage, bachelors of theology; Robert Le Barbier, Denis Gastinel, Jean Le Doulx, bachelors of canon and civil law; Nicolas de Venderès, Jean Basset, Jean de La Fontaine, Jean Bruillot, Aubert Morel, Jean Colombel, Laurent Du Busc, and Raoul Anguy, bachelors of canon law; André Marguerie, Jean Alespée, Geoffrey du Crotay, and Gilles Deschamps, licentiates in civil law. In their presence there were read first the letters from the king upon
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the restoration and surrender of the said woman to us, then the letters from the chapter of Rouen granting us territory: the tenor of which is given below. Then master Jean d'Estivet, appointed and constituted our promoter in this trial, reported that he had caused the said Jeanne to be cited and summoned by our usher to appear at the said place, on the day and hour prescribed, to answer the questions which should legally be put to her, as is clearly shown in the report of the usher affixed to our letters of citation.
Follows the tenor of the letters of citation and writ
"Pierre, by divine mercy bishop of Beauvais, being in possession of territory in the city and diocese of Rouen, by the authority of the venerable chapter of the cathedral of Rouen in the vacancy of the archiepiscopal see, for the purpose of undertaking and concluding the aforementioned matter, to the dean of the Christendom of Rouen, to all priests, whether curates or not, of this city and diocese, who shall see these present letters, greeting in the author and consummator of our faith. Since a woman commonly called Jeanne the Maid had been captured and apprehended within our diocese of Beauvais, and had been surrendered, dispatched, given and delivered to us by the most Christian and serene prince the lord King of France and England as a person vehemently suspected of heresy, so that we should institute proceedings against her in matters of faith in view of the fact that rumors of her acts and sayings wounding our faith had notoriously spread not only through the kingdom of France, but also through all christendom, we, desirous of proceeding maturely in the affairs, resolved, after a diligent inquiry and consultation with learned men, that the said Jeanne should be summoned, cited, and heard upon the articles and interrogations given and made against her, and upon things concerning the faith. Hence we
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require each and every one of you not to wait for another if he is summoned by us nor to excuse himself by another. Therefore peremptorily summon the said Jeanne so vehemently suspected of heresy to appear before us in the chapel royal of the castle of Rouen at eight o'clock in the morning of Wednesday, February 21St, to speak the truth upon the said articles, interrogations and other matters of which we esteem her suspect, and to be dealt with as we shall think just and reasonable, intimating to her that she will be excommunicated if she fails to appear before us on that day. Give us a faithful account thereof in writing, you who are to be present to follow it. Given at Rouen under our seal Tuesday, February 20th 1431."
Signed: G. Boisguillaume. G. Manchon
The Usher's writ
"To the reverend father in Christ, the lord Pierre by divine mercy bishop of Beauvais, possessing territory in the city and diocese of Rouen by the pleasure of the venerable chapter of the cathedral of Rouen in the vacancy of the archiepiscopal see for the purpose of undertaking and concluding the aforementioned matter, your humble Jean Massieu, priest, dean of the Christendom of Rouen, prompt obedience to your orders in all reverence and honor. Be it known to you, reverend father, that in virtue of the summons you addressed to me, to which this present writ is joined, I have peremptorily cited to appear before you at eight o'clock in the morning of Wednesday, February 21st, in the chapel royal of the castle of Rouen, the woman commonly called The Maid, whom I have apprehended in person in the limits of this castle, and whom you vehemently suspect of heresy, to answer truthfully to the articles and interrogations which shall be addressed to her upon matters of faith and other points on which you deem her
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suspect, and to be dealt with according to law and reason and the intimation of your letters. The said Jeanne replied that she would willingly appear before you and answer the truth to the interrogations to which she shall be subjected; that, nevertheless, she requested you to summon in this suit ecclesiastics of the French side equal in number to those of the English party and, further, she humbly begged you, reverend father, to permit her to hear Mass before she appears before you, and to inform you of these requests, which I have done. By these present letters sealed with my seal and signed with my sign manual, I testify to you, reverend father, that all the foregoing has been done by me. Given in the year of Our Lord, 11431, On Tuesday preceding the said Wednesday.
Signed: Jean.
The Petition of the Promoter. Decision forbidding Jeanne to attend divine offices
After the reading of these letters the aforesaid promoter urgently required this woman to be commanded to appear in judgment before us in accordance with the summons, to be examined upon certain articles concerning the faith; which we granted. But since in the meantime this woman had requested to be allowed to hear Mass, we informed the assessors that we had consulted with notable lords and masters on this question, and in view of the crimes of which this woman was defamed, especially the impropriety of the garments to which she clung, it was their opinion that we should properly defer permission for her to hear Mass and attend the divine offices.
Jeanne is led in to judgment
Whilst we were saying these things this woman was brought in by our usher. Since she was appearing in judgment before us we began to explain how this Jeanne had been taken and
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apprehended within the boundaries and limits of our diocese of Beauvais; how many of her actions, not in our diocese alone but in many other regions also, had injured the orthodox faith, and how common report of them had spread through all the realms of Christendom; how recently the most serene and Christian prince our lord the king had given and delivered this woman to us to be tried in matters of faith according to law and reason. Therefore, considering the public rumor and common report and also certain information already mentioned, after mature consultation with men learned in canon and civil law, we decreed that the said Jeanne should be summoned and cited by letter to answer the interrogations in matters of faith and other points truthfully according to law and reason, as set forth in the letters shown by the promoter.
First exhortation to Jeanne
As it is our office to keep and exalt the Catholic faith, we did first, with the gentle succor of Jesus Christ (whose issue this is), charitably admonish and require the said Jeanne, then seated before us, that to the quicker ending of the present trial and the unburdening of her own conscience, she should answer the whole truth to the questions put to her upon these matters of faith, eschewing subterfuge and shift which hinder truthful confession.
She is required to take oath
Moreover, according to our office, we lawfully required the said Jeanne to take proper oath, with her hands on the holy gospels, to speak the truth in answer to such questions put to her, as beforesaid.
The said Jeanne replied in this manner: I do not know what you wish to examine me on. Perhaps you might ask such things that I would not tell." Whereupon we said: "Will you
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swear to speak the truth upon those things which are asked you concerning the faith, which you know?" She replied that concerning her father and her mother and what she had done since she had taken the road to France, she would gladly swear; but concerning the revelations from God, these she had never told or revealed to any one, save only to Charles whom she called King; nor would she reveal them to save her head; for she had them in visions or in her secret counsel; and within a week she would know certainly whether she might reveal them.
Thereupon, and repeatedly, we, the aforementioned bishop, admonished and required her to take an oath to speak the truth in those things which concerned our faith. The said Jeanne, kneeling, and with her two hands upon the book, namely the missal, swore to answer truthfully whatever should be asked her, which she knew, concerning matters of faith, and was silent with regard to the said condition, that she would not tell or reveal to any person the revelations made to her.
First Inquiry after the oath
When she had thus taken the oath the said Jeanne was questioned by us about her name and her surname. To which she replied that in her own country she was called Jeannette, and after she came to France, she was called Jeanne. Of her surname she said she knew nothing. Consequently she was questioned about the district from which she came. She replied she was born in the village of Domrémy, which is one with the village of Greux; and in Greux is the principal church.
Asked about the name of her father and mother, she replied that her father's name was Jacques d'Arc, and her mother's Isabelle.
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Asked where she was baptized, she replied it was in the church of Domrémy.
Asked who were her godfathers and godmothers, she said one of her godmothers was named Agnes, another Jeanne, another Sibylle; of her godfathers, one was named Jean Lingué, another Jean Barrey: she had several other godmothers, she had heard her mother say.
Asked what priest had baptized her, she replied that it was master Jean Minet, as far as she knew.
Asked if he was still living, she said she believed he was.
Asked how old she was, she replied she thought nineteen. She said moreover that her mother taught her the Paternoster, Ave Maria and Credo; and that no one but her mother had taught her her Credo.
Asked by us to say her Paternoster, she replied that if we would hear her in confession then she would gladly say it for us. And as we repeatedly demanded that she should repeat it, she replied she would not say her Paternoster unless we would hear her in confession. Then we told her that we would gladly send one or two notable men, speaking the French tongue, to hear her say her Paternoster, etc.; to which Jeanne replied that she would not say it to them, except in confession.
Prohibition against her leaving prison
Whereupon we, the aforementioned bishop, forbade Jeanne to leave the prison assigned to her in the castle of Rouen without our authorization under penalty of conviction of the crime of heresy. She answered that she did not accept this prohibition, adding that if she escaped, none could accuse her of breaking or violating her oath, since she had given her oath to none. Then she complained that she was imprisoned with chains and bonds of iron. We told her that she had tried elsewhere and on several occasions to escape from prison, and
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therefore, that she might be more safely and securely guarded, an order had been given to bind her with chains of iron. To which she replied: "It is true that I wished and still wish to escape, as is lawful for any captive or prisoner."
We then commissioned as the safeguard of the said Jeanne the noble man John Grey, Squire, of the bodyguard of our lord the King, and with him Jean Berwoit and William Talbot, enjoining them to guard her well and faithfully, and to permit no person to speak with her without our order. Which, with their hands on the Gospel, they solemnly swore to do.
And finally, having completed all the preliminaries, we assigned the said Jeanne to appear the next day, Thursday, at eight o'clock in the morning, in the Robing Room at the end of the great hall of the castle of Rouen.
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Thursday, February 22nd second session
On Thursday, February 22nd, we entered the Robing Room at the end of the great hall of the castle of Rouen, where there were assembled the reverend fathers, lords, and masters: Gilles, abbot of Ste. Trinité de Fécamp, Pierre, prior of Longueville, Jean de Châtillon, Jean Beaupère, Jacques de Touraine, Nicolas Midi, Jean de Nibat, Jacques Guesdon, Jean Le Fèvre, Maurice du Quesnay, Guillaume Le Boucher, Pierre Houdenc, Pierre Maurice, Richard Prati and Gerard Feuillet, doctors of sacred theology; Nicolas de Jumièges, Guillaume de Ste. Catherine, Guillaume de Cormeilles, abbots; Jean Garin and Raoul Roussel, canons, doctors of canon and civil law; William Haiton, Nicolas Couppequesne, Jean Le Maistre, Richard de Grouchet, Pierre Minier, Jean Pigache, Raoul Le Sauvage, bachelors of sacred theology; Robert Le Barbier, Denis Gastinel, Jean Le Doulx, bachelors of canon and civil law; Jean Basset, Jean de La Fontaine, Jean Bruillot, Aubert Morel, Nicolas de Venderès, Jean Pinchon, Jean Colombel, Laurent Du Bosc, Raoul Anguy, bachelors of canon law; André Marguerie, Jean Alespée, Geoffroy du Crotay, and Gilles Deschamps, licentiates in civil law; the abbot of Préaux, brother Guillaume l'Erm |
oil industry as we know it; which sets out the time frame for addressing the demand for something else.
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Appendix — Reading tea leaves and writings on walls about the end of the Oil Age
Ward, Karen, Zoe Knight, Nick Robins, Paul Spedding and Charanjit Singh. 2011. Energy in 2050 — Will fuel constraints thwart our growth projections? HSBC.
The authors explore the necessity of major changes ahead in response to oil and energy challenges: “Anyone who drives a car, heats a home, or runs a factory has every reason to be concerned about the strains on global energy resources in the next four decades. Either the world is going to deplete its supplies at an unacceptably fast rate — and overheat the planet in doing so — or it is going to have to make massive investments in energy efficiency, renewables and carbon capture. As things stand, the world simply doesn’t have the luxury of turning its back on nuclear power, despite the recent disaster in Japan. We follow up our World in 2050 report by arguing that the rise of emerging markets will impose new strains on energy supply. We conclude the world can grow and without excessive environmental damage — but it will need a change in human behaviour and massive collective government foresight.” To which GB says, really? When was the last time “government foresight” induced drastic change or when entire populations changed their behaviour out of their own wisdom? — except under sheer duress. Except under constraints of war or major catastrophe, people change by adopting radical innovations stemming from bold entrepreneurship.
Morgan, Tim. 2013. Perfect storm — Energy, finance and the end of growth. Tullett Prebon Group Ltd, financial brokers.
A rather explicit title. Dr Morgan’s analysis overlaps substantially with ours. He anticipated much of what happened since 2013.
Al-Hamad, Abdlatif and Verleger, Philip, Jr. 2016. Oil and the Global Economy — includes two papers: The Challenges Ahead for the Oil Producer and Consumer Countries in the Middle East and North Africa Region and Oil: An Ossified Industry. Occasional Paper №94, Group of Thirty, Washington, D.C.
Al-Hamad argues that structural and economic reforms are crucially important if states are to move away from undue reliance on oil, and to ensure sustainable growth and stability in the region; while Verleger argues that the world’s largest firms face huge challenges, from technological breakthroughs, to shifts in consumer preferences, to innovation, and that the business models used by the largest firms are out of step with the new economic and oil price reality. Verleger warns that much of the debt built up by oil majors in pursuit of their flawed strategies may never be repaid; if so, the defaults will cascade through the global financial system, with many negative effects.
Doshi, Viren, Clark, Andrew, del Maestro, Adrian. 2016. Oil and gas trends — Are you prepared for a future that limits fossil fuels? PriceWaterhouseCoopers.
The title is explicit. While the authors focus on carbon constraints related to policies to combat climate change, somewhat ironically they are nonetheless correct in concluding that much tighter constraints are in the making. In fact they are likely to occur much faster than they imagine as they are derived from the loss of access to all forms of carbon…
England, John W., 2016, Short of capital? Risk of underinvestment in oil and gas is amplified by competing cash priorities, Deloitte Center for Energy Solutions, Deloitte LLP.
Explores the dilemma affecting the oil industry as it struggles under OFDK in what we call a Big Mad Energy Scrambling mode (BigMES, that we will explore further in subsequent posts) and advises to plan for a capital-constrained future.
Regarding Deloitte’s above study, the Bank of England recently commented: “The embattled crude oil and natural gas industry worldwide has slashed capital spending to a point below the minimum required levels to replace reserves — replacement of proved reserves in the past constituted about 80 percent of the industry’s spending; however, the industry has slashed its capital spending by a total of about 50 percent in 2015 and 2016. According to Deloitte’s new study, this underinvestment will quickly deplete the future availability of reserves and production.”
England, John and Slaughter, Andrew. 2016. The crude downturn for exploration & production companies — One situation, diverse responses. Deloitte Center for Energy Solutions.
This study identified five options chosen by E&P companies… filing for bankruptcies (“Submit”), seeking aid from financial institutions (“Borrow”), venturing out to seize an opportunity or time the downturn (“Venture”), pulling financial levers to correct balance sheets (“Adjust”), and optimising operations (“Optimise”). In fact, from our point of view all options are variations of responses to OFDK in a BigMES mode. To date, most oil companies still struggle under one or more of these “options”.
Fustier, Kim, Gordon Gray, Christoffer Gundersen and Thomas Hilboldt. 2016. Global oil supply — Will mature field declines drive the next supply crunch? HSBC. This study echoes in part the work of Robelius. The question in its title is rhetorical.
The authors stress that: “near term productivity gains are temporarily masking a steady increase in mature field decline rates which could cut existing capacity by >40mbd (>42%) by 2040”. Although they misinterpret medium to long-term oil price prospects, they are correct in raising concerns about the likelihood of substantial supply issues in the medium-term.
Jefferson, Michael. 2016. A global energy assessment. WIREs Energy Environ 2016, 5:7–15. doi: 10.1002/wene.179.
Abstract: Against the background of IIASA’s massive (their word) ‘global energy assessment’ (GEA), this paper takes a closer look at the challenges posed by population growth, energy poverty, the fossil fuels and carbon storage, renewable energy, energy efficiency, natural catastrophes, and potential climatic change to offer a somber, although arguably more realistic, overview of what the future may hold than the GEA achieved.
Conclusion: “The World in the 21st Century is faced with huge challenges that go far beyond, but importantly include, energy challenges on the supply, access, and use sides. So severe are these challenges, mainly arising from the demands of a rapidly increasing human population on the Earth’s limited resources, that the future existence of large numbers of people may be threatened with extinction. In that sense, we may be observing the twilight of the Anthropocene (Human) Age. Energy transitions, as Vaclav Smil has constantly reminded us over the years, are protracted affairs. But as Julius Caesar wrote: ‘The unusual and the unknown make us either overconfident or overly fearful’. We should not assume either inexorable progress or unavoidable collapse.”
Stevens, Paul, 2016, International Oil Companies: The Death of the Old Business Model, Energy, Research Paper, Energy, Environment and Resources, Chatham House.
Another explicit title. Stevens demonstrates that the current oil industry model has no future.
Ahmed, Nafeez. 2017. Brace for the Oil, Food and Financial Crash of 2018. Sourced: http://observer.com/2017/01/brace-for-the-oil-food-and-financial-crash-of-2018/19/04/2017.
Reviews recent reports by HSBC and European government scientists: “contrary to the commonplace narrative in the industry, even amidst the glut of unconventional oil and gas, the vast bulk of the world’s oil production has already peaked and is now in decline; while European government scientists show that the value of energy produced by oil has declined by half within just the first 15 years of the 21st century. The upshot? Welcome to a new age of permanent economic recession driven by ongoing dependence on dirty, expensive, difficult oil… unless we choose a fundamentally different path.”
Argus Media. 2017. Aramco, IEA warn of future supply crunch. Sourced from: http://www.argusmedia.com/news/article/?id=1449742. 27/04/2017.
Warns of supply concerns focusing essentially on the recent drop in exploration and production investments but fail to consider the ongoing decline in discoveries since the late 1940s.
Berman, Arthur. 2017. Why Breakeven Prices Are Plunging Across The Oil Industry. Sourced from: http://oilprice.com/Energy/Oil-Prices/Why-Breakeven-Prices-Are-Plunging-Across-The-Oil-Industry.html. 11/04/2017.
Well known oil expert Berman debunks that the steep decline in breakeven prices are result of technology improvements. He stressed that: “sharply lower breakeven prices are 10 percent technology and 90 percent industry bust… Instead of celebrating lower breakeven oil prices, we should be lamenting lost future cash flows that an oil industry depression has wiped out.” In other words the decline is an effect of the BigMES and in particular the industry cannibalising itself in order to try and survive.
Bloomberg News. 2017. Oil Discoveries Hit A 65-Year Low In 2016, But Should Rebound. Sourced from: http://www.investors.com/news/oil-discoveries-hit-a-65-year-low-in-2016-but-should-rebound/. 06/04/2017.
Reviews Wood Mackenzie’s analysis of the declining trends since the late 1940s only to try and reassure readers with fantasy hopes of an impossible rebound (in contrast with Robelius’ in-depth research work).
Bousso, Ron. 2017. Oil majors’ reserves are shrinking and investors don’t mind. Sourced from: http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-oil-majors-reserves-idUKKBN17D0N7. 24/04/201.
An article that illustrates the disconnect between investors and industry reality.
Brown James H., William R. Burnside, Ana D. Davidson, John P. Delong, William C. Dunn, Marcus J. Hamilton, Norman Mercado-Silva, Jeffrey C. Nekola, Jordan G. Okie, William H. Woodruff, and Wenyun Zuo. 2011. Energetic Limits to Economic Growth. BioScience 61: 19–26. doi:10.1525/bio.2011.61.1.7.
This paper contrasts with rather superficial main media articles on oil and energy. It highlights a number of fundamental aspects of energy and society, notably the pre-eminence of energy as a resource.
Abstract: The human population and economy have grown exponentially and now have impacts on climate, ecosystem processes, and biodiversity far exceeding those of any other species. Like all organisms, humans are subject to natural laws and are limited by energy and other resources. In this article, we use a macro-ecological approach to integrate perspectives of physics, ecology, and economics with an analysis of extensive global data to show how energy imposes fundamental constraints on economic growth and development. We demonstrate a positive scaling relationship between per capita energy use and per capita gross domestic product (GDP) both across nations and within nations over time. Other indicators of socioeconomic status and ecological impact are correlated with energy use and GDP. We estimate global energy consumption for alternative future scenarios of population growth and standards of living. Large amounts of energy will be required to fuel economic growth, increase standards of living, and lift developing nations out of poverty.
Cheong, Serene, 2017, Goldman Warns of Oil Below $40 Without OPEC ‘Shock and Awe’. Bloomberg. http://www.rigzone.com/news/article.asp?hpf=1&a_id=150965&utm_source=GLOBAL_ENG&utm_medium=SM_TW&utm_campaign=FANS. Tuesday, July 11, 2017.
The prospect of drastic supply cuts in the order of several million barrels per day being low, in effect Goldman begins to read writings on some walls that prices are on a trend down and down…
Cook, Lynn and Cherney, Elena. 2017. Get Ready for Peak Oil Demand. Walls Street Journal. Sourced from: https://www.wsj.com/articles/get-ready-for-peak-oil-demand-1495419061. 21/05/2017.
An example of a growing number of articles contemplating some “peak” in oil demand in the medium to long-term, not realizing that the symptoms that they are mustering in the process have essentially to do with the BigMES that has been underway since at least 2014 in response to the impacts of OFDK.
Denning, Liam. 2017. Venezuela’s Complicated Crisis For Oil. Sourced from: https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2017-04-25/venezuela-s-oil-crisis-not-just-a-supply-shock. 27/04/2017.
This article attempts to review what happens when a major oil producing country is struck by the terminal decline of its key industry: there is no way out.
DiChristopher, Tom. 2017. The oil market has one big problem: People aren’t buying enough gas. Sourced from: http://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/24/the-oil-market-has-one-big-problem-people-arent-buying-enough-gas.html. 25/04/2017.
An example of a growing number of articles highlighting the need to focus on a weak and even declining demand for transport fuels.
Exxon Mobil Corporation, 2017, 2017 Outlook for Energy: A View to 2040, sourced from exxonmobil.com.
ExxonMobil, page 38, quoting IEA data, considers that over the 25 years between 2015 and 2040, some $11.25 trillion would have to be invested in exploration and production activities alone in order to attempt to alleviate an unavoidable drop from present conventional crude oil supply levels of approximately 85Mbbl/day down to approximately 18 Mbbl/day by 2040. Such a drop is roughly in line with our analysis. The difference of views between the likes of Exxon Mobil and us is that, for the thermodynamic reasons that we have analysed, we consider that no amount of investment can prevent such a drop.
Farrell, A. E. and Brandt, A. R. 2006. Risks of the oil transition. Environ. Res. Lett. 1 (2006) 014004 (6pp).
Abstract: The energy system is in the early stages of a transition from conventionally produced oil to a variety of substitutes, bringing economic, strategic, and environmental risks. We argue that these three challenges are inherently interconnected, and that as we act to manage one, we cannot avoid affecting our prospects in dealing with the others. We further argue that without appropriate policies, tradeoffs between these risks are likely to be made so as to allow increased environmental disruption in return for increased economic and energy security. Responsible solutions involve developing and deploying environmentally acceptable energy technologies (both supply and demand) rapidly enough to replace dwindling conventional oil production and meet growing demand for transportation while diversifying supply to improve energy security.
GreenWatch Admin. 2017. It’s Electric Car-mageddon! — GreenWatch. Sourced from: https://green-watch.net/its-electric-car-mageddon-6b442286da0a. 10/05/2017.
This brief article illustrates well the concerns raised by numerous parties about the grid management issues, risks of blackouts, that the emergence of EVs are bound to cause — an example of how BigMES responses to OFDK propagate to the entire non-oil energy supply part of the GIW.
Hewitt, Henry. 2017. Who Will Lead The Transportation Transformation? Sourced from: http://oilprice.com/Energy/Oil-Prices/Who-Will-Lead-The-Transportation-Transformation.html- May 12, 2017.
An example of numerous articles raising concerns about future transport means.
Hughes, J. David. 2014. Drilling Deeper, A Reality Check on U.S. Government Forecasts for a Lasting Tight Oil & Shale Gas Boom. Post Carbon Institute.
Independent oil geologist Hughes develops a detailed critique of EIA forecast and shows that “tight oil production from major plays will peak before 2020. Barring major new discoveries on the scale of the Bakken or Eagle Ford, production will be far below the EIA’s forecast by 2040… These findings have clear implications for medium and long term supply, and hence current domestic and foreign policy discussions, which generally assume decades of U.S. oil and gas abundance”.
Jefferies, Duncan. 2017. Smaller, lighter, greener: are micro EVs the future of city transport? Sourced from: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/may/11/micro-evs-city-transport-suemens-renault-green-air-pollution. 12/05/2017.
A further example of concerns about future transport means.
Lewis, Mark C. 2014. Toil for oil spells danger for majors — Unsustainable dynamics mean oil majors need to become “energy majors”. Kepler Cheuvreux, a leading independent European financial services company. Sourced from: https://www.keplercheuvreux.com/.
While not apparently aware of the thermodynamic challenges affecting the oil industry, Lewis, nonetheless identifies danger ahead and the need for the industry to transform if it is to avoid disappearing: “If we are right, the implications would be momentous: it would mean that the oil industry faces the risk of stranded assets not only under a scenario of falling oil prices brought about by the structurally lower demand entailed by a future tightening of climate policy, but also under a scenario of rising oil prices brought about by increasingly constrained supply… we think the conclusion for the majors is clear: their business model is already being eroded by rising capital intensity and diminishing returns, while in future they will face much greater competition from renewable energy in the road-transportation market. At the same time, the threat of tighter environmental and climate legislation at a global, regional, and national level is always looming in the background and pressure for more concerted climate-policy coordination will in our view only increase in future. As a result, we think they should already start directing much more of their future capital investments to renewable projects. This would enable them to become the energy majors of the future rather than ending up as the oil majors of the past”.
Maguire, Gavin and Gloystein, Henning. 2017, Exclusive: IEA to review oil demand outlook after China, India signal auto policy shifts. Sourced from: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-oil-demand-iea-exclusive-idUSKBN18809U. May 12, 2017.
Another example of concerns about a prospects of declining demand for oil as large countries enter BigMES Mode and search for alternative solutions, including a shift to EVs.
Murphy, D.J., Hall, C.A.S., Adjusting the economy to the new energy realities of the second half of the age of oil. Ecol. Model. (2011), doi:10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2011.06.022.
The authors in our view wrongly expect future high prices resulting from “the depletion of conventional, and hence cheap, crude oil supplies (i.e. peak oil)” and that “increasing the supply of oil in the future would require exploiting lower quality resources (i.e. expensive)”; however they rightly conclude that: “the economic growth of the past 40 years is unlikely to continue unless there is some remarkable change in how we manage our economy.”
Muttit, Greg. 2017. Forecasting failure — Why investors should treat oil company forecasts with caution. Oil Change International, www.priceofoil.org and www.greenpeace.org.uk.
Analyses the major weaknesses and repeated failures of the oil industry’s forecasting.
Renshaw, Jarrett. 2017. U.S. gasoline demand falls for second straight month: EIA. Sourced from: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-gasoline-demand-idUSKBN17U2MC. 30/04/201.
A short article that further illustrates concerns that rather than focusing exclusively on an over abundance of oil supply one should pay attention on the reasons for a weak and even declining demand for transport fuels.
Ryle, Briton. 2017. What if it IS Different for Oil This Time? Sourced from: https://www.wealthdaily.com/articles/what-if-it-is-different-this-time/8654. 09/05/2017.
A simple quote summarises Ryle’s perspective: “When oil prices collapsed in late 2014, we may have witnessed the end of the oil age… oil’s time as a dominant resource may be over. And it would be especially ironic if it was Saudi Arabia that tipped the balance.”
Rystad Energy. 2017. 2016 offshore discovered liquids resources were 90% lower than in 2010. Sourced from: https://www.rystadenergy.com/NewsEvents/PressReleases/2016-offshore-discovered-liquids-resources-lower-than-in-2010. 13/04/2017.
Another indication that the global industry is losing the means of ensuring ongoing supplies. The article fail to acknowledge that the overall decline dates in fact from the late 1940s.
Slav, Irina. 2017. Reeling From Low Oil Prices, Saudis Look To Freeze Megaprojects. Sourced from: http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Reeling-From-Low-Oil-Prices-Saudis-Look-To-Freeze-Megaprojects.html. 24/04/2017.
This article illustrates examples of the kind of business contraction and self-cannibalisation that occur when a mining industry enters terminal decline, which is now the case for oil under the BigMES precipitated by OFDK.
Steve St. Angelo. 2017. Future World Economic Growth In Big Trouble As Oil Discoveries Fall To Historic Lows. Sourced from: https://srsroccoreport.com/future-world-economic-growth-in-big-trouble-as-oil-discoveries-fall-to-historic-lows/. 02/05/2017.
This articles echoes the concerns raised by Robelius, Exxon, Tverberg and many others that regardless of the amounts invested in exploration annual additions to oil reserves have been declining since the late 1940s, are now well below yearly oil consumption levels, and are unlikely to revert back to the much higher levels experienced in earlier decades. In short the industry is rapidly depleting its stocks and not replenishing them.
Steve St. Angelo. 2017. Two Charts Why The Middle East’s Largest Oil Producer Is In Serious Trouble. Sourced from: https://srsroccoreport.com/two-charts-why-the-middle-easts-largest-oil-producer-is-in-serious-trouble/. 17/04/2017.
St Angelo shows that Saudi Arabia’s oil exports have substantially declined since the 1980s and that is foreign exchange reserves are now in steep fall.
Steve St. Angelo. 2017. The blood bath continues in the US major oil industry. Sourced from: https://srsroccoreport.com/the-blood-bath-continues-in-the-u-s-major-oil-industry/. 08/02/2017.
St Angelo highlights the steep decline of the US oil industry’s profitability since 2011, i.e. well before the oil crash of late 2014.
Tverberg, Gail, 2017. Why We Should Be Concerned About Low Oil Prices. Sourced from: https://ourfiniteworld.com/2017/05/05/why-we-should-be-concerned-about-low-oil-prices/. 07/05/2017.
The following quote summarises the perspective of actuary Gail Tverberg: “Most people assume that oil prices, and for that matter other energy prices, will rise as we reach limits. This isn’t really the way the system works; oil prices can be expected to fall too low, as we reach limits. Thus, we should not be surprised if the OPEC/Russia agreement to limit oil extraction falls apart, and oil prices fall further. This is the way the ‘end’ is reached, not through high prices… Oil prices have been too low for producers since at least mid-2014. It is possible to hide a problem with low prices with increasing debt for a few years, but not indefinitely. The longer the low-price scenario continues, the more likely a collapse in production is. Also, the tendency of international organizations of government to collapse… takes a few years to manifest itself, as does the tendency for civil unrest within oil exporters… Once an incorrect understanding of our energy problem becomes firmly entrenched, it becomes very difficult for leaders to understand the real problem.”
Tverberg, Gail, 2017. The “Wind and Solar Will Save Us” Delusion. Sourced from: https://ourfiniteworld.com/2017/01/30/the-wind-and-solar-will-save-us-delusion/. 07/05/2017.
Tverberg stresses that in her analysis current “green” alternatives can’t fully substitute to oil and other fossil resources, and by a wide margin: “The ‘Wind and Solar Will Save Us’ story is based on a long list of misunderstandings and apples to oranges comparisons. Somehow, people seem to believe that our economy of 7.5 billion people can get along with a very short list of energy supplies. This short list will not include fossil fuels. Some would exclude nuclear, as well… we find ourselves with a short list of types of energy… hydroelectric, geothermal, wood, wood waste… liquid fuels from plants, Wind, and Solar… Unfortunately, a transition to such a short list of fuels can’t really work… In my opinion, the time has come to move away from believing that everything that is called ‘renewable’ is helpful to the system. We now have real information on how expensive wind and solar are, when indirect costs are included. Unfortunately, in the real world, high-cost is ultimately a deal killer, because wages don’t rise at the same time. We need to understand where we really are, not live in a fairy tale world produced by politicians who would like us to believe that the situation is under control.”
Widdershoven, Cyril. 2017. The Risk Of A Major Oil Outage Just Grew Substantially. Sourced from: http://oilprice.com/Geopolitics/International/The-Risk-Of-A-Major-Oil-Outage-Just-Grew-Substantially.html. 12/04/2017.
This article highlights the tight links between terrorism, wars in the MENA region and increasing stresses within the global oil industry.
ZeroHedge. 2017. World’s Largest Oil Trader Warns OPEC: Beware Of Weak Demand. Sourced from: http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Worlds-Largest-Oil-Trader-Warns-OPEC-Beware-For-Weak-Demand.html. 10/06/2017.
Yet further concerns about weak demand versus abundant supply…
*******************************************************************
Endnotes
[1] Pechelbronn was the birthplace in 1926 of now transnational oilfield services company Schlumberger.
[2] King Hubbert, M.: Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels, Shell Development Company, Exploration and Production Research Division, Houston, TX, Publication №95, 1956. http://www.energybulletin.net/node/13630 (1956). Hubbert, Marion King, 1979, Hubbert Estimates from 1956 to 1974 of US Oil and Gas, in Grenon, Michel, Methods and Models for Assessing Energy Resources, First IIASA Conference on energy resources, May 20–21, 1975, Pergamon Press.
[3] Hubbert, Marion King. Note to Ivanhoe, L. F (Buz). Undated. Available from: http://www.oilcrisis.com/Hubbert/to_Nissen.htm, undated, probably from the 1970s.
[4] Robelius Frederik. Giant Oil Fields -The Highway to Oil. Giant Oil Fields and their Importance for Future Oil Production. Uppsala, Sweden: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Digital Comprehensive Summaries of Uppsala Dissertations from the Faculty of Science and Technology. Uppsala; 2007. ISBN 978–91–554–6823–1.
[5] Concerning oil production and prices, this fuel gauge matches empirical data with correlation coefficients above 0.9, an overall error margin ±4.5% and has enabled THG to anticipate the Oil Pearl Harbor-like price crash of late 2014 by over 6 months when most pundits expected ongoing high prices — since then prices have remained below or on the MASOP curve, as dictated by the ETP fuel gauge (see figure 6 of our fourth post).
[6] Dittmar, Michael, 2016, Regional Oil Extraction and Consumption: A Simple Production Model for the Next 35 years Part I, Biophys Econ Resour Qual (2016)1:7 DOI 10.1007/s41247–016–0007–7; Dittmar, Michael, 2017, A Regional Oil Extraction and Consumption Model. Part II: Predicting the declines in regional oil consumption, arXiv:1708.03150v1 [physics.soc-ph] 10 Aug 2017.
[7] We use current dollars statistics and no purchasing power parity ones (PPP) because oil is sill traded essentially in current dollars.
[8] Grübler, Arthur. The rise and fall of infrastructures: dynamics of evolution and technological change in transport. Heidelberg. Physica-Verlag. 1990. Grübler, Arthur, Time for a change: on the pattern of diffusion of innovation. In: Ausubel, Jesse H, Langford, H. Dale. (eds.) Technological Trajectories and the Human Environment. Washington, D.C. National Academy Press; 1997. p. 14–32.A Texas man has been cleared of drug possession charges after authorities say they mistook kitty litter in his car for methamphetamine.
Ross Lebeau was arrested last month, fingerprinted and had his mugshot taken after cops say he admitted to having marijuana in his car during a traffic stop.
Read: Newly Elected Sheriff Stole Meth From Police Station's Evidence Storage: Cops
However, cops apparently weren't as interested in the green stuff after they say a field test of a substance they discovered in a sock in Lebeau's car came back positive for meth.
The bewildered 24-year-old was charged with possession of a controlled substance of 200 grams, a big bust for the Harris County Sheriff's Office, who even released a statement boasting they "may have kept our children and loves ones free from being introduced to drugs."
As it turned out, they only discovered what was keeping Lebeau's windshield free of fog.
Lebeau told KTRK the kitty litter was placed in a sock and left in his car by his father to prevent the glass from fogging up.
Lebeau's attorney, George Reul, blamed the method used for field testing the alleged drugs, not police ineptitude.
"Ultimately it might be bad budget-cutting testing equipment they need to re-evaluate," said Reul.
Nonetheless, Lebeau said he wants an apology as he seeks to clear his name after all charges related to the arrest were dismissed.
In their defense, the folks at the Harris County Sheriff's Office say Lebeau told them he had no idea what was in the suspect sock.
The office write in a statement:
The drugs were recovered and in the process of inventorying his vehicle a substance was found wrapped in one sock in his vehicle. Mr. LeBeau was questioned about the contents at which time he indicated that he had no idea what it was. The deputies followed proper procedures and field tested the substance on two separate occasions which field tested positive for methamphetamines, notified the District Attorney's Office who accepted charges for possession of controlled substance of 200 grams and Mr. LeBeau posted bond and was released.
Read: Woman Caught Smuggling Meth Burritos Worth $3,000 Across U.S.-Mexico Border: Authorities
During the investigation Mr. LeBeau failed to identify the substance and later, after being released indicated on social media that the substance was cat litter that he kept in a sock in his vehicle.
Regarding this incident all indication shows that the deputies followed basic procedures and followed established protocol related to this incident. Because of the established procedures in place and this contraband was submitted to the Institute of Forensic Science it was determined not to be methamphetamine and charges were dismissed.
$900 Million Worth of Meth Found Hidden Inside Thousands of Bras
Related Articles:From coast to coast and around the world, more than 1 million people gathered Saturday in support of women's rights. Times columnist Nicole Brodeur was in Washington, D.C., and we had staff stationed across Seattle. Here's how the day unfolded:
What you need to know:
Organizers of the Women’s March on Washington received a permit for at least 200,000 people to rally in D.C. the day after Donald Trump was inaugurated as the nation’s 45th president. Here’s why they’re gathering.
Cities across the world are hosting simultaneous marches Saturday, including in Seattle. The movement is on track to mark the largest demonstration related to a presidential inauguration in U.S. history.
Organizers of the Seattle event opted to spell “women” with a “x” to acknowledge the impact of discrimination based not only on gender identity but also race, sexual orientation, nationality, faith, class and disability.
The local event began with a rally at Judkins Park, followed by a march of about 3.6 miles to Seattle Center.
Local organizers, who originally anticipated crowds of about 50,000 people, estimate the march topped 100,000. That would surpass the WTO protests in 1999 as one of the largest political demonstrations in the city’s history.
This feed of updates from women’s marches throughout the day is now closed. Read the full stories:
Update, 4:00 p.m.
From New York to London, more than one million people joined marches around the country Saturday to send President Donald Trump an emphatic message of resistance on his first full day as president, the Associated Press reports.
Organizers of the Womxn’s March on Seattle estimated a crowd of more than 100,000.
Many Seattle women also traveled to Washington D.C., to be part of the main women’s march there. They included Melissa Braddock, 52, of West Seattle, who started making plans to travel there shortly after election night, when she said she and her friends watched the results of Trump’s presidential win stream in at a bar.
“I couldn’t believe it. We stepped outside to get some air,” she said. “And I said, ‘We’re going to have to go march and get active.'”
Rep. Pramila Jayapal at the Women's March in DC: "For me, it's soul-filling. The unity that you see here and the resolve that women have." pic.twitter.com/B8w2ybJoe0 — nicole brodeur (@nicolebrodeur) January 21, 2017
Braddock is CFO of Eden Labs, joined a Seattle group with a friend who was making the trip. On her Friday afternoon flight out of Seattle, she said roughly 30 people — both men and women — on board were sporting pink ‘pussy’ hats.
The group arrived to the National Mall Saturday morning, where the march began, and tried to maneuver through the massive crowd to get close to speakers.
“It was just insane,” Braddock said. “Every single person had a smile on their face.”
Gloria Steinem takes the stage at Women's March in DC. Waves of cheers carry over the crowd. — nicole brodeur (@nicolebrodeur) January 21, 2017
Beyond women’s rights, she cited health care coverage as an issue of her concern under Trump’s administration.
After marching all day, Braddock said the Seattle group took time in the evening to check out the news coverage of how the day unfolded elsewhere.
“There is a movement that is going to take place; it’s taking place,” she said. “A lot of people are not happy.”
Update, 3:30 p.m.
The Womxn’s March on Seattle is winding down.
Marchers are leaving the Seattle Center area, while the back of the crowd makes its way downtown.
King County Metro Transit says all routes previously impacted by the march have resumed regular service, though commuters should prepare for delays.
The last of the #WomensMarchSeattle participants have arrived at Seattle Center! — Seattle Police Dept. (@SeattlePD) January 21, 2017
Please be patient and plan for delays getting in/out of downtown Seattle following the #WomxnsMarchSeattle. — King County Metro (@kcmetrobus) January 22, 2017
Update, 2:23 p.m.
USA Today has estimated more than 2 million people across the globe joined in Women’s Marches to protest the first full day of Donald Trump’s tenure in the White House.
Stealing a favorite term from the new president, the Washington Post described the leading march in the nation’s capital as “huge” and shared details of the “packed Metro stations and trains, long waits at intersections and crowded bridges” that greeted participants on their way home.
The Seattle Department of Transportation already warned of traffic delays getting in and out of downtown, but recent escalator malfunctions at light-rail stations could cause even more frustration: The Washington Post reported a broken escalator at a popular Metro station in D.C. added to headaches as thousands of Women’s March participants rushed to leave downtown.
“Beyond the turnstiles, dozens were packed trying make their way down one functioning escalator to the platform, waiting as much as 10 minutes,” the Post reported. “Some couldn’t even swipe past the turnstile because there was no rooms One group of friends started singing “Yellow Submarine” to lighten the mood.
“An exasperated Metro police officer, barely audible from the din upstairs, shouted directions to manage the flow of hundreds of newbies.”
Update, 1:46 p.m.
As tens of thousands of people continued walking through central and downtown Seattle, Nasrin Rousta reflected on her move to the U.S.
Rousta, originally from Iran, came to the country as a student in 1977. She sought political asylum because it wasn’t safe in Iran for an educated woman.
She said she valued the U.S. because it was |
ed when she became pregnant. "But Aarav needed 24-hour care," she says, "so I had to quit my job." The child's condition is a financial disaster for the young family. Her husband would like a second child, "but we can't afford it. What happens if that child is also unhealthy?" Annamika asks. She prays a lot to Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of health, says the young mother. "Only the gods can help us."
The suffering of their children constitutes both an emotional and a financial burden for families. Many perceive a disabled child as a double punishment. "The parents are often in poor health themselves, but they have no choice. They have to go to work to be able to buy food and medication for themselves and their children," says Rashida Bee. As a result, many care-dependent children are left to their own devices in their huts during the day.
There is a long waiting list for treatment at the Chingari Trust. The center is located on one of Bhopal's busy main streets, just a short walk from the decaying ruins of the Union Carbide plant. In the hallway, which is painted in bright colors, Bee speaks with the parents who are sitting on the floor with their children, waiting for treatment. The air is stuffy and the children are crying, because their splinted legs hurt.
Guinea Pigs
Bee estimates "that close to 3,000 disabled children from the surrounding neighborhoods urgently need help." But facilities like the Chingari Trust are rare or unaffordable for the poor. And local residents have distrusted the Bhopal Memorial Hospital and Research Center, established in 1984 for the free treatment of victims of the gas leak, ever since it was revealed in 2011 that Western pharmaceutical companies like AstraZeneca and Pfizer were conducting drug tests on patients. The gas victims were being misused as test subjects for new heart drugs and antibiotics.
"Bhopal holds up a mirror to India," says Vinuta Gopal of Greenpeace India. The environmentalist deplores the lack of a sense of responsibility for human beings and nature among large corporations. "Companies have the certainty that not much can happen to them here," she says, noting that Bhopal is still the blueprint for the way companies handle such disasters in the country.
In 1989, US-based Union Carbide and its Indian subsidiary paid about $470 million to the Indian government, effectively buying their way out of any further criminal prosecution. Only a fraction of the money reached the victims. It was a cheap decision in every respect.
By comparison, in 2011 a US court ordered the giant corporation that now owns Union Carbide to pay $3 million to an asbestos victim with cancer. In Bhopal, the families were paid about $1,600 for each dead relative, while those with injuries were palmed off with $500 -- only enough to pay for a few months of their medications, in many cases. Today the widows of gas victims receive a monthly pension of 150 rupees, or about 1.50.
To this day, Union Carbide denies any responsibility for the long-term damage to human beings and the environment in Bhopal. Its representatives claim, for example, that the company "secured" the evaporation basin with a plastic tarp. They insist that the fact that pollutants still entered the groundwater was purely the fault of local residents, who had "damaged" the material. "The question of toxic waste cleanup on the factory grounds should not be taken up with us, but with the local authorities," says a company spokesman.Because I’m going to talk about something in the body of this post that leaves a bad taste in my mouth, I want to bookend it with some palate-cleanser.
So, first: Tansy Raynor Roberts has a pretty entertaining series of posts on Xena: The Warrior Princess. (I have very fond memories of watching Xena on DVD with some other persons of historical bent. We found the Greek in “A Day in the Life” very confusing, until we realised whoever had done the cards had confused the orthography of their nus and upsilons. And oh, the mad yet-classically-appropriate approach to myth reuse and recycling! And the lesbian subtext. Good times, good times.)
So, what’s up with all those guys in the last few months complaining about “fake geek girls”? (There’s Scalzi’s post on the sod from CNN in July, and then mid-November some comics artist bloke decided to have a go at female cosplayers for being neither geeky nor hot enough to satisfy him… and there are more, I’m sure.)
I suppose I’d better make a confession. I’m not a capital-F Fan. I’m not a capital-G Geek. I’m not a Nerd. I don’t self-identify as part of the tribe. (I’m even reluctant to go to conventions, since all of the four times I’ve been to one, I’ve been struck by how very much out of place I was: neither middle-class nor yet middle-aged, insufficiently comfortable with the American-ness* of the occasion and the conversation, feeling rather alienated by the fact that the space I was occupying seemed to be far less heterogenous than my everyday life. About the only count on which I didn’t feel out of place was gender—there. Then. At that time.)
*Articulating how this in particular is alienating to an American audience is rather like trying to find the right way of explaining drowning to fish. (Cultural hegemony! It’s what’s for supper!) It’s a topic I’ll revisit if I ever find the words.
This “fake geek” nonsense arises from a rigid sense of self-identification and stringent boundary policing among a subset of (although they don’t realise it) a much wider and more permeable community. These men feel their social power being eroded by the increased visibility of a previously much more marginalised class within the community, and the misogynistic nature of their retrenchment is evident in the ways in which they rank the “fakeness” of female participants in community activity in an implied scale based upon the visibility of female sexuality. Participation in community activity is deemed (by these guys, at least) to be a male prerogative: you can be one of the guys as long as you’re willing to be one of the guys, and not threaten them by either obvious difference or by being a better “guy” than they are.
So far, so much bullshit on the part of the people deploying terms like “fake geek” and “slut” to devalue the legitimacy of participation of those against whom such terms are used. Am I right?
But the problem is wider than a few… ah, gentlemen… who react to the presence of cosplayers and other visibly female women within community spaces with aggressive delegitimisation.
Do you remember Patrick Rothfuss’s Fantasy Pin-Up Calendar?
Does anyone see, perhaps, a small problem with the image of women’s participation in genre-community spaces implied by the promotional pictures on view? It appears that this calendar does nothing to subvert the traditional frame of the male gaze, which casts women as passive/submissive receptacles of desire, objects for consumption. The female gaze is irrelevant to this calendar project: the female onlooker is irrelevant, and the presence of active female sexual agency ignored. Not that I judge Patrick Rothfuss for his participation in such a project… but while the vision of fantasy and the voices of the genre community here aren’t as hostile as the cries of “fake geek!” it still isn’t exactly welcoming for people who are not heterosexual males.
It implies that we’re not as much a part of the community as the people to whom this calendar is designed to appeal. And that sort of thing? That sort of thing emboldens the criers of “fake geek” (and “slut”) into imagining more people agree with them.
So who’s a “real” part of the genre community and its conversations? Who gets to define “real”? Normally I’d leave questions of ontology and epistemology to those poseurs with undergrad degrees in philosophy**—but here, I think the idea of “fakeness” and legitimacy is a pretty thin smokescreen over plain old sexism.
**That crash you heard was one of the panes in my glass house going SMASH. (Half of my undergrad degree is theology. Can’t throw any more stones, or it’ll get draughty in here.)
There’s no such thing as a “fake geek.” Who can be bothered pretending?
And to close, more Tansy Raynor Roberts. If you missed it, she’s written a really interesting series examining the women of Discworld, “Pratchett’s Women.” I was pointed at the ninth instalment some time ago, and went back to read them all from the beginning:
The best part is watching the way that Sacharissa steals the novel from under William’s feet. Their romance, if you can call it that, is one of those vague baffled courtships that Pratchett does so often, in which both parties spend the whole time loudly thinking about everything except their attraction to each other, and dance around the subject so subtly that you’re not always sure that he MEANT you think it was a romance at all. But for the most part, Sacharissa isn’t bothered about impressing William or finding herself a bloke – instead she, like William, falls deeply in love with the newspaper business. This romance is a threeway.
—“Pratchett’s Women IX: The Truth Has Got Her Boots On”
Find Liz Bourke @hawkwing_lb on Twitter.Tax crackdown: Treasurer Joe Hockey announces plans to embed auditors in multinationals' offices
Updated
Multinational companies who seek to minimise tax or move profits offshore are now firmly in the sights of the Federal Government.
The Australian Tax Office has been given 60 extra staff to embed teams of auditors in 10 multinational companies which operate in Australia.
It is believed that several IT giants, such as Google, are being targeted in an effort to close loopholes which have seen corporations who operate in several countries pay very little tax in Australia.
"We are going to work as hard as we can to make sure that companies that earn profits in Australia pay tax in Australia, but it needs to be a coordinated global effort and that is certainly what we are undertaking at the moment," Mr Hockey told journalists at a press conference this morning.
While not naming any companies, Mr Hockey confirmed extra resources had been given to the ATO in a bid to extract more tax from multinationals.
He said the Government estimated that Australia was missing out on between $1 billion and $3 billion a year in revenue.
However, the Federal Government also announced the shedding of roughly 3,000 Tax Office staff as part of its public sector savings in May's budget.
That included the axing of 900 positions already announced in late 2013.
The union representing Commonwealth public service staff, the CPSU, told the ABC that all those jobs cuts were already implemented by October 31.
The CPSU said a further 1,700 jobs are due to go from the ATO by the end of the 2016-17 financial year.
The Federal Government has also been working with other countries, particularly through the G20, to close the loopholes in tax rules that allow much of the minimisation behaviour to occur legally.
"Multinationals will no longer have the option of trying to use clever accounting to reduce their tax liabilities in Australia. Those days are coming to an end," Mr Hockey told Marius Benson on ABC NewsRadio.
"Australia has led the charge in that regard in the G20 and through the OECD, but we're also going to take very strong action domestically here in Australia."
Mr Hockey acknowledged that such a process may not be a one-way street, with some Australian multinationals also exploiting tax loopholes in other countries.
"If Australian companies are not paying their fair share of tax overseas it is equally unfair for those jurisdictions," he said at the press conference.
"We are trying to have a fair global taxation system."
Topics: tax, multinationals, business-economics-and-finance, australia
First postedLadies and gentlemen… I am back!
It’s been a year. For shame! Shame on the Nu Metal Apologist. I got a new job and moved to a new city but all that new made me neglect the nu. I apologise.
Why did I decide to return today of all days? Well, you remember of course the exciting new band I covered ages ago, Nu York’s finest, Sylar? Well, today they released their first brand new song in a couple of years, the alternatively crushing and crooning “Assume”.
That describes a lot of nu metal, doesn’t it? So why pick them out in particular? As I said in my review of their brilliant album “To Whom It May Concern”, it’s because they take the formula and they do it really, really well. The intro to this song is very different – offbeat and original. From there, the song just gets better. Thunderous riffs, an unbelievable hook… Look, just follow the link and listen to it OK? There’s a reason it has racked up nearly 4 and a half thousand views since they posted the link just 2 hours ago.
Coming on like an evil hybrid of Meshuggah and Justin Bieber’s cool, gym-addicted brother (yeah, I said it) this new song is a total stormer. It’s got me almost unbearably excited for the new album in August. For now though, I am happy to spin this on repeat!
Listen to “Assume” here
New album “Help” out August 26th on Hopeless Records.
AdvertisementsOne part of the Judy Mikovitz story has come to a close today, as Science will be formally retracting the paper in which she and her collaborators linked the XMRV virus to chronic fatigue syndrome. Bruce Alberts, the Editor-in-Chief of Science, indicates that the journal's staff had "lost confidence in the Report and the validity of its conclusions" after listing many of the issues we described in our coverage: the failure of other labs to replicate the findings, a retraction of portions of the results, evidence of poor quality control, and a failure to properly disclose experimental procedures.
Despite all those obvious reasons for retraction, there appears to have still been a bit of behind-the-scenes drama. Alberts writes that "the majority of the authors have agreed in principle to retract the Report," suggesting that some of them either cannot be contacted, or are stubbornly refusing to acknowledge the paper's problems. Stranger still, the ones that are willing to retract can't agree on how to do so. "They have been unable to agree on the wording of their statement," Alberts acknowledges. "It is Science's opinion that a retraction signed by all the authors is unlikely to be forthcoming."
Given the widely publicized issues with the paper, the retraction is probably a formality at this point. But it does bring some closure to the scientific side of the story, and shifts attention to the court case between Mikovits and her former employers.SCIENCE COMMUNICATION
Climate Rapid Response Communications Team Gears Up
Scientists Get Off the Sidelines to Right Media Wrongs
It’s not easy being a climate scientist these days. They live in a world where well-funded organizations collude to spread lies and misinformation about their discipline, and where political pundits and elected officials alike engage in blatant harassment to promote an anti-science political agenda. Conservative pundits such as Mark Morano, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh have called for climate scientists to be “publicly flogged,” to commit “hara-kiri,” and worse.
Sadly, despite the rancor and conspicuous absence of any data or actual science, these fossil fuel-funded tactics have proven effective at swaying public opinion. Poll results have shown a marked decline in Americans’ belief in global warming, from a high of 85 percent in a 2006 poll to 63 percent during the summer of 2010.
Surely some of the blame must be shared by traditional media outlets for elevating the spurious claims of television weathermen and ex-governors to the same level as peer-reviewed, data-driven, scientific analysis conducted by credentialed experts. Others blamed climate scientists themselves for not being better organized to defend themselves against the onslaught of well-funded and well-organized public relations professionals.
But who can blame them? Scientists have never been particularly good at communicating with the media— historically it’s not really been their job. Scientists are trained not to shape public opinion but to examine the natural world. But that may have to change the longer climate science remains in the crosshairs of the fact-free conservative punditocracy. According to science historian Spencer Weart, “we’ve never before seen a set of people accuse an entire community of scientists of deliberate deception and other professional malfeasance. Even the tobacco companies never tried to slander legitimate cancer researchers.”
To fight back, 40 scientists have come together to form the “climate rapid response team.” Led by Dr. John Abraham of St. Thomas University, the rapid response team is an informal group of scientists who have decided to put their spare time to use fielding media questions about climate science, and even going up against hostile anti-science audiences. Science Progress had the opportunity to catch up with Dr. Abraham on the phone earlier this week; what follows is excerpted from our interview with him. (Note that Dr. Abraham’s responses are paraphrased, except where marked with quotation marks.)
What is the purpose of this rapid response effort?
Think of it as a matchmaking service to provide high-quality climate scientists from around the world to members of the media…Almost all of the scientists on our team are practicing climate scientists in academia.
Are you guys doing any training to prepare these scientists for potentially hostile media engagements?
No, we’re just aiming to deliver rapid, high-quality science information, in scientists’ own words.
Any worry that having climate scientists wade further into the political quagmire could politicize the issue further? Or even undermine the discipline? Or are we already past the point of no return?
You know this is something that climate scientists are always discussing—on a daily basis. Contrary to how we have been portrayed by some media stories, the purpose of our effort is not to politicize, it’s to provide highly accurate and timely information…We [scientists] are more comfortable staying in the ivory tower and discussing the science amongst ourselves, but we clearly need to get better at communicating to the public.
Why has climate science become so political? Why do you think conservatives are so skeptical, even hostile, toward climate science and those who practice it?
I think conservatives are more opposed to the solutions, rather than the science itself. That is to say, I think their ideological opposition to Big Government perhaps biases their view toward the science. Of course, the irony is that cap and trade has been used successfully to reduce smog for decades.
Is there still uncertainty in climate science?
Yes, but not about the basics. Whether or not the planet is warming, and whether human activity is driving that…these are not really up for debate anymore. Where there is still some uncertainty is over the degree, the rapidity, and the social reaction. We just don’t know what emissions path we are going to be on in the coming decades—whether humanity will get it together to reduce or not.
How are you going to communicate that uncertainty to people honestly? In a world where the conservative media has taken a very hard-line, anti-science stance that speaks often in terms of absolutes, how do you fight back without sinking to the same level?
A metaphor that I like to use when it comes to uncertainty and risk is the loaded revolver. Look, you’ve got a revolver. The more greenhouse gasses you put in the chamber, the higher the likelihood that your next shot is live…it’s a probability issue. Risk is something that our economic and political system deals with all the time.
Climate scientists didn’t ask for this attention. It just happens to be that climate science stands above other scientific disciplines in the severity of its implications for human destiny. Climate scientists didn’t charge headlong into the realm of politics with an ideological axe to grind. Rather, it was politicians and energy lobbyists that waded into the realm of climate science wielding a pro-fossil fuel agenda. So long as climate science remains so relevant to our politics, climate scientists have a moral obligation to defend their discipline from the kind of blatant misinformation that has dominated our news for the past 12 months.
Though some purists may hold to the belief that scientists should not wade into the quagmire of public opinion politics, Dr. Abraham has higher hopes for what his efforts could accomplish. “Deep in my heart I really wish there was some civility to this,” he shared as we were concluding our interview. “The vitriol that flies back and forth is not helpful. You will hear from me no vitriol. You’re not going to hear me demonizing anyone. You’re going to hear me communicating the science. If we can bring a civil but candid discussion to the media and the public—that is a success.”
This is cross-posted at Climate Progress. Sean Pool is assistant editor for Science Progress and Climate Progress. Ben Kaldunski also contributed invaluable research to this article.
By clicking and submitting a comment I acknowledge the Science Progress Privacy Policy and agree to the Science Progress Terms of Use. I understand that my comments are also being governed by Facebook's Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.NOME — Summer construction on the first fiber-optic cable to cross the Arctic has rural Alaska telecom providers promising a huge market shift in a region that is on the underserved side of the digital divide.
As two ships unspool cable onto the floor of the Bering and Chukchi seas, consumers in six coastal communities from Nome to Barrow anticipate cheaper, speedier internet and the ability to download more data without overage charges by the middle of next year.
The economics of bringing internet to rural Alaska are lousy, which is why the federal government, through various programs, subsidizes connectivity. And even then, rural consumers pay high rates for plans with low data limits and download speeds.
But these communities — Nome, Kotzebue, Point Hope, Wainwright, Barrow and the oil industry work camps at Prudhoe Bay — happen to be along the path of a fiber-optic line, financed by one of the world's richest men, to connect the global financial hubs of London and Tokyo.
The project run by Quintillion Subsea Operations is notable in many ways. If completed, it would take the first fiber-optic cable through the Northwest Passage. It would significantly shave trading times between stock markets in Europe and Asia and presumably make subscription a must for financial institutions and high-speed traders, who operate in a world where milliseconds can be worth millions.
And it's being quietly backed by Leonard Blavatnik, whose global conglomerate Access Industries owns companies in plastics, oil and gas, fashion, telecom, tech, entertainment and real estate. Blavatnik's Warner Music Group owns the record labels of Bruno Mars, Blake Shelton and Coldplay. As of Sept. 1, Forbes' real-time wealth ranking listed Blavatnik as the world's 58th richest person, with a net worth of $15.6 billion.
But what matters most to consumers in the path of Blavatnik's history-making project is the prospect of solid internet connections with more speed and data that cost less than what regional telecom companies can provide through the satellite and microwave systems currently in place.
Sarah Bernick, the pastor's wife and Sunday school teacher at Bible Baptist Church in Wainwright, said her household pays $120 a month for a plan through Arctic Slope Telephone Cooperative Association. But she still uses the more reliable connection at the school to make important transactions online.
"They don't guarantee service or speed and the service goes out pretty frequently," Bernick said. "All of a sudden for a day we don't have internet and sometimes they have to fly a service person up here."
She called the internet "a lifeline," used heavily in the village of about 600 people for buying groceries, clothes, household appliances and, because there is no local bank, paying friends and neighbors for goods and services through account transfers.
In Nome, the fiber, encased in copper, steel and polyethylene, comes ashore about 2 miles outside town on the Nome-Council Road. The line snakes past corroded gold-mining equipment, down dirt alleys — to avoid water and sewer lines — and under the wood siding of the TelAlaska building, where equipment to run and power the cable now shares space with every phone line in the city of 3,800 people.
Outside St. Joseph Catholic Church in late August, a crew with an excavator and shovels placed a final section of cable overlaid with red warning tape.
Quintillion is entering territory held by GCI, the state's dominant telecom company, whose TERRA network provides broadband connections via microwave towers to 72 communities in rural Alaska. TERRA relies heavily on federal subsidies either directly or through programs such as the Universal Service Fund, which essentially gives schools and libraries a discount on communications services by compensating vendors. (TERRA stands for Terrestrial for Every Rural Region in Alaska.)
The two companies say there is plenty of business to go around. Martin Cary, senior vice president of business services at GCI, insists that Quintillion will not significantly affect market share.
He noted that Quintillion is focused on hub communities, with the exception of Wainwright and Point Lay, whereas GCI serves a much wider group of villages.
"Quintillion is not picking up any of the villages, they're just picking up regional centers and that's not a solution for the school districts and for the health corporations because their primary customers are in their villages, which is where we focus — putting complete solutions together for our anchor tenant customers."
GCI recently began expanding into Noorvik and Golovin. Construction in Buckland will begin once permitting is complete, according to a GCI press release Friday. The company expects to have TERRA in 84 communities by the end of 2016.
Arctic telecom providers are optimistic overall that Quintillion will expand choice and competition, improve service and potentially lower prices.
Quintillion plans to sell capacity on its 30-terabit line to the region's telecom providers. In turn, TelAlaska, OTZ Telephone Cooperative and Arctic Slope Telephone Association Cooperative all plan to either lower rates or offer data plans with better value to consumers. Cary said GCI is in "ongoing conversations" about purchasing capacity on the line. AT&T has also voiced interest, Quintillion spokesman Tim Woolston said. ACS, which has a far more tenuous foothold in rural Alaska than rival GCI, plans to expand service in markets served by Quintillion, according to spokeswoman Hannah Blankenship.
"In terms of the cost for consumers, those negotiations are still going on," said Dave Goggins, president and general manager of TelAlaska. "For consumers, even if the cost is exactly the same, the quality will be much better. People are not going have that little spinning rainbow-colored wheel sitting in the middle of the computer screen while it's buffering."
Farther north in Kotzebue, local telecom co-op OTZ is developing new data packages for customers, said CEO Doug Neal.
"We should be able to pass on significant savings to our users here in Kotzebue," he said.
The Arctic Slope Telephone Association Cooperative, which serves the North Slope, plans to transition from using expensive satellite bandwidth as the primary means of connectivity to purchasing it as a backup to fiber, said CEO Jens Laipenieks.
"We intend to roll out a whole new portfolio of internet products based on the new bandwidth and depending on the plan consumers select, the cost per megabyte will be reduced," he said. "Quintillion is definitely a game-changer at the end of the day."
Quintillion CEO Elizabeth Pierce said the up-front cost of laying fiber will be more than made up for in low maintenance costs and the opening of new markets. Pierce spent more than a decade in various roles at ACS, most recently as director of risk management.
"When broadband has limited ability and high cost, it stifles economic growth," Pierce said during at interview Wednesday at the company's Anchorage office. "If we can get the cost of broadband to a point that is palatable in these communities, the economies will blossom and the whole market will get bigger. And so, it is a long-term strategic plan to grow the size of our market."
Should the cost come down enough, the market does appear primed to grow. In Wainwright, Bernick said, people regularly sit outside the school when it's closed, even in the dead of winter, to use the open wireless system.
"I can see the front of the school from my house and I'll see a half dozen teenagers sitting outside in a nook out of the wind. Or they'll be all bundled up sitting on a four-wheeler parked out behind the school getting on the internet and playing Minecraft."The search continues for the gunman who shot a Waco, Texas-area television meteorologist following an altercation in the station's parking lot Wednesday morning.
Patrick Crawford, a Plano native and the morning meteorologist for NBC affiliate KCEN, was in his car in the employee parking lot when he was confronted by an unidentified man at about 9:15 a.m., the Texas Department of Public Safety said.
The two exchanged words before the man pulled out a semi-automatic weapon and shot Crawford several times, the station reports. He was wounded in the shoulder and the abdomen.
Crawford managed to drive away and flag down a nearby construction worker for help. He was taken to Scott and White Memorial Hospital in Temple where he underwent surgery, KCEN reports. A hospital spokesman said Crawford is in fair condition.
A motive for the shooting has not yet been revealed. Meanwhile, the search for the shooter continues; police are looking for a man described by KCEN as white with a receding hairline, about 35 years old and wearing a black hoodie and jeans.
A person of interest taken into custody early Wednesday afternoon was cleared and determined to be "definitely not a suspect" in the shooting, according to WacoTrib.com.
KCEN-TV's studio is in rural Bruceville-Eddy south of Waco. KCEN broadcasts to the Waco-Temple-Killeen area in Central Texas.
Copyright Associated Press / NBC Southern CaliforniaEvangelicals who pushed Donald Trump over the top in the election are surely pleased with several of his appointments to the cabinet and other high-ranking positions in his administration.
Trump promised to be "the greatest representative of the Christians," and he seems to be heading in that direction. Before even being elected, he chose Mike Pence as a running mate, a man who denies evolution and has voted to restrict LGBT rights based on "religious freedom." Trump has also appointed several other religious fundamentalists who pose a threat to church/state separation.
Here's a look at a number of them.
Betsy DeVos
A staunchly Christian woman who wants to "advance God's Kingdom" has become the head of the U.S. Department of Education.
Betsy DeVos has been critical of public schools for decades and is a major proponent of the voucher system, which takes money from the public schools and moves it to private — usually religious — education institutions.
She and her husband, Dick (whose father co-founded Amway) are billionaire philanthropists, and have made it clear that their faith motivates their decisions on education reform.
"This is a significant threat to the separation of state and church," FFRF Staff Attorney Patrick Elliott says. "We know from state voucher programs that the overwhelming beneficiary of these programs are not students, but are instead the churches and parochial schools that take in public money."
According to Politico, the DeVoses assert school choice leads to "greater Kingdom gain." They "lament that public schools have 'displaced' the church as the center of communities, and they cite school choice as a way to reverse that troubling trend."
Betsy DeVos has used biblical terms to criticize public schools, "referring to her crusade to fund religious schools as a 'Shephelah,' a Hebrew term referring to an area where battles were fought in the Old Testament," Politico writes.
"Our desire is to be in that Shephelah, and to confront the culture in which we all live today in ways that will continue to help advance God's Kingdom, but not to stay in our own faith territory," Betsy DeVos said during a 2001 meeting of "The Gathering," an annual conference of some of the country's wealthiest Christians.
"The decision to appoint DeVos to this post signifies a serious attack on public education," FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor says. "As the top education official in the United States, she can be expected to do everything in her power to take taxpayer money from public schools and send it to private religious schools."
Kary Moss, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, explained to the Washington Post the anxiety many have about DeVos as education secretary: "We strongly urge Congress to scrutinize the record of Betsy DeVos, who has been a staunch proponent of school vouchers, a misguided idea that diverts taxpayer dollars into private and parochial schools and perverts the bedrock American value of separation of church and state."
According to Politico, the DeVoses adhere to the Calvinist view of Christianity. Richard Israel, a professor of the Old Testament at Vanguard University in California, said Calvinists see it as the work of Christians to influence culture.
"Their view of the Christian mission isn't to be in the fortress and hold out against the pagans, but to engage culture from a Christian worldview and transform it," Israel told Politico.
Ben Carson
Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson will be heading the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Rep. Elijah Cummings, the Democratic ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, called Carson "woefully unqualified."
While that may be true, it's his stance on state/church issues that should have all Americans even more worried. Carson has denounced the notion of separation of church and state.
"We Americans must be proud of who we are. We cannot give away our values and principles for the sake of political correctness," he said while still a candidate for the presidency. "There are those who go around proclaiming separation of church and state. You can't put anything up that has anything to do with God.... I'll have a seizure if I see a cross, and all of this kind of crap. The fact of the matter is — do they realize that our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, says we have certain unalienable rights given to us by our creator, aka God."
Carson gave a telling response to Justin Scott, an FFRF member from Iowa who asked state/church questions of the presidential candidates during the lead-up to the Iowa caucuses.
"Fortunately, our Constitution, the supreme law of the land, was designed by men of faith, and it has a Judeo-Christian foundation. Therefore, there is no conflict there. So it is not a problem," Carson told Scott.
Scott Pruitt
Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, no friend to the environment, is now the head of the Environmental Protection Agency.
FFRF has tussled several times with Pruitt, an active promoter of oil, fossil fuels and fracking who has openly opposed the EPA and calls climate change a "hoax." Pruitt has also gone out of his way to target FFRF.
"This is yet another cabinet nomination that would involve the fox guarding the chicken coop," says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. "Pruitt's not only a theocrat on civil liberties issues, but his blinkered faith-based views make him an entirely inappropriate candidate to run the science-based EPA."
After FFRF sent letters to 26 Oklahoma school districts in 2015 about illegal bible distribution in public schools by the Gideons, Pruitt jumped into the fray, sending a letter to superintendents statewide that smeared FFRF. Pruitt wrote: "As the attorney general of Oklahoma, I will not stand idly by while out-of-state organizations bully you or any other official in this state into restricting the religious freedom the Founders of this country held dear."
It's not the first time Pruitt maligned FFRF. In 2014, while discussing the Internal Revenue Service's policy on pulpit politicking, he claimed FFRF "is unabashed in its desire to destroy" free speech and the First Amendment's free exercise clause. He has also refused open records requests from FFRF over his involvement in promoting the distribution of bibles and so-called "religious freedom" in public schools.
Pruitt's hostility toward FFRF is part of a pattern. For instance, he long fought to retain a Ten Commandments monument that the state Supreme Court ordered removed in 2015 from the Oklahoma Capitol.
Rick Perry
Rick Perry, to be named secretary of the Department of Energy, is another fanatically religious nominee who has scuffled with FFRF.
On behalf of hundreds of members in Texas, FFRF and five of our Houston members sued Perry as Texas governor in July 2011 over Perry's initiation, organization, promotion and participation of a prayer event. Perry not only issued a proclamation that Aug. 6, 2011, was a "Day of Prayer and Fasting for our Nation's Challenges," but actually initiated the very call for the event. He videotaped an invitation posted at the official gubernatorial website asking citizens to turn to Jesus and ask for God's forgiveness.
But the judge dismissed our lawsuit, ruling that the plaintiffs lacked standing. Perry did not, however, repeat the Texas prayer event.
Perry intruded into our complaint over cheerleaders at public high school games in the Texan city of Kountze. These cheerleaders had painted paper banners with New Testament bible verses for football players to run through at the start of games. Perry grandstanded in vocally siding with the cheerleaders.
And he even issued a gubernatorial prayer proclamation for rain! It was to no avail; the state endured unprecedented wildfires after his decree.
It's obvious that a climate change denier who opposes science education and the need for an Energy Department should not have been nominated to run that very department.
If he is confirmed, we can expect Perry to use his cabinet position to wreak havoc on the environment — and to unabashedly promote religion.
Jeff Sessions
Jeff Sessions, a U.S. senator from Alabama who has called church/state separation an "extra-constitutional doctrine," will be the next U.S. attorney general.
"As a result of his alarming views, Sessions played a key role in keeping a 29-foot cross on display on government property in Southern California and sponsored a resolution in the Senate encouraging the display of the Ten Commandments at government facilities, including courthouses," writes American United for the Separation of Church and State.
Nikki Haley
Nikki Haley, the South Carolina governor who will serve as the United States' representative to the United Nations, has been rightfully criticized for organizing a massive prayer rally.
The ACLU of South Carolina filed an open records request seeking an accounting of whether or |
Full size image
High-capacity removal of heavy metal ions
The 3D-GMOs as an electrode of the electrolytic deposition are investigated to remove heavy metal ions from aqueous solutions. The electric capture process of heavy metal ions is schematically illustrated in Figure 5a. We employ platinum (Pt) foils as anodes and free-standing 3D-GMOs as cathodes. Aqueous solutions containing single heavy metal ions (e.g. Cd2+, Pb2+, Cu2+, Ni2+) are used as electrolytes. Electrolytic deposition process is performed under a constant current of 0.05 A for 5 min, 10 min, 15 min and 20 min, respectively, and the final concentrations of the single heavy metal ions mentioned above in the aqueous solutions are measured by inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometry (ICP-AES). As shown in Figure 5b, the adsorption capacities of 3D-GMOs increase with deposition time (Supplementary Fig. S3a–d). After 20-min deposition, the adsorption capacities are 434 mg/g, 882 mg/g, 1,683 mg/g and 3,820 mg/g corresponding to Cd2+, Pb2+, Ni2+ and Cu2+, respectively, which are much higher than that of the reported typical results using active carbon-based materials as adsorbents24,25,26,27. In addition, these values are higher than those of the reported graphene based adsorbents: 106.3 mg/g and 145.48 mg/g for Cd(II)33,36, 479 mg/g and 842 mg/g for Pb (II)31,40, 46.55 mg/g for Ni (II)43, 130 mg/g and 46.6 mg/g for Cu (II)34,35 (Supplementary Table S1) Interestingly, the deposited products on 3D-GMOs for 20 min show 3D porous structures derived from the 3D-GMOs templates in Figure 5c–f characterized by SEM (Supplementary Fig. S4), and the deposited products of Cd2+, Pb2+, Ni2+ and Cu2+are Cd(OH) 2, PbO, Ni and Cu/Cu 2 O, respectively, determined by X-ray diffraction (XRD) patterns and energy dispersive X-ray (EDX) spectra (Supplementary Figs. S5–S8). We speculate that the high adsorption capacities for heavy metal ions originate from the following reasons. Firstly, the honeycomb-like 3D-GMOs provide the large-area templates for the deposited products of the metal ions, which continuously offer the 3D porous templates for the subsequent electrolytic deposition (Supplementary Fig. S3c–g). Secondly, the high conductivity of 3D-GMOs could enable the high electrolytic deposition rate. Lastly, the high density and effectively cross-linked structure of graphene layers sustain the free-standing monoliths and protect them from collapsing during the deposition process. Further, to investigate recovery performance of the 3D-GMOs, a desorption process is performed. In terms of the desorption of the deposited product of Cd2+, the free-standing 3D-GMO (deposited for 20 min) and the Pt foil are the anode and the cathode, respectively. A high concentration of 1.0 g/L (pH = 2.0) Cd (NO 3 ) 2 aqueous solution is electrolyte. After a constant current of 0.1 A applied for 1 min between the two electrodes, the deposited products on the 3D-GMO almost disappear (a desorption efficiency >96%) (Supplementary Fig. S9).I try to stick to evidence and logic in my arguments. I emphasize that in the absence of a direct evidentiary tie between the crime and the defendant, it’s legally improper to deliver a guilty verdict. Henry makes a more emotional appeal. Without questioning whether the defendant wrote the confession, he suggests that its contents may have been written under duress. He is shouted down by the others, who tell him that because this possibility was not presented by the defense, it’s merely a conspiracy theory and we can’t consider it.
Secretly, I’m considering it too. According to Stevenson’s Innocence Project, out of the hundreds of prisoners exonerated by DNA evidence after its introduction in the 1980s, one in four made a false confession. If the defendant did in fact write a confession but is claiming he didn’t, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the account given by the police is therefore the truth. An innocent man facing a monolithic judicial system accusing him unjustly might well lie if it seemed like his best hope of exonerating himself. How would we know, if not for his testimony? What would it look like if the earth revolved around the sun?
The defendant also claims he was never notified of a call from a lawyer to the precinct where he was being held. The form noting the call is marked with a time just minutes after the time noted on the confession. The proximity seems to me to be cause for unease. I’m suspicious of the chronology. The others tell me that if the confession was made after a call from a lawyer, it would have been illegal, and should have been excluded from evidence. If it hasn’t been excluded, I need to consider it. The implication is that if cops break the law, we have no means and no right to stop them.
The defendant did sign a Miranda waiver, a fact made much of by some of my fellow jurors. An innocent person wouldn’t talk to the cops, they say. I remember an article I once read about the psychology of interrogation. In actual fact, 80% of suspects decline their Miranda rights in order to appear cooperative. Hostile officers, interrogation rooms, hunger — it’s hardly a stretch to say that these factors can cause intimidation and hasty compliance, especially in light of growing awareness of police brutality. Would a young black man who is under arrest sign a blank page if instructed to do so by a cop? I don’t know whether or not this one did, but it would be unmistakably prejudicial to rule it an impossibility.
Anthony is angry at the direction taken by our deliberations, which he believes should proceed with the inexorable logic of a mathematical proof. He surreptitiously writes a jury note, which the judge told us should be delivered with the whole jury’s consent. He privately asks the foreman to sign it. Before he’s able to deliver it, I stop him. The note accuses another juror of improperly insisting on “baseless speculation.” It’s a coded attempt to eliminate Henry from the jury. To the rest of the jury’s credit, no one allows it to reach the judge. The foreman admits she didn’t know what it said when she signed it.
I’m struck by the incident’s resonance. It’s a conspiracy that hinges on a person signing a form she didn’t read.Used LS3 Engines For Sale
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Federal law does not protect workers in the private sector — only government employees.
“There is no federal law protecting against discrimination or retaliation for political activity” at private companies, Paula Brantner, a senior adviser at Workplace Fairness, told TheWrap. “A lot of people think they have First Amendment rights, but those only apply to government employees.”
Also Read: What's Colin Kaepernick Doing Now?
The power of employers to dismiss workers was demonstrated in August when Google fired one of its engineers, James Damore, for circulating a memo lashing out at the Silicon Valley giant’s efforts to bring more women into the male-dominated company.
In Berkeley, the Top Dog hot dog chain parted ways with one of its cooks, Cole White, when sleuths on Twitter said he had taken part in the white nationalist march in Charlottesville, Virginia. (He denied he is a white nationalist, and Top Dog said he had resigned, not been fired.)
Californians like Damore and White have some protections many other Americans don’t because California law forbids employers from firing workers for off-duty partisan political activity if it is legal. Colorado, Connecticut, Montana, New York, North Dakota, and Washington, D.C. have also enacted some speech protections for workers, but those protections are not absolute.
Also Read: Megyn Kelly Tackles Trump-NFL Drama Day After Saying She's 'Done With Politics' (Video)
American workers in the private sector who work in states without those laws have no protection for political speech, University of Dayton law professor Jeannette Cox wrote in a recent American Bar Association article.
But government employees are in a different position, Harvard Law professor Mark Tushnet told TheWrap. He said that under the First Amendment, government workers who speak about public policy can’t be fired unless their speech interferes with their jobs — by provoking fights, for example.
“Typically, though, governments aren’t able to make that showing,” he said.
The nation’s 22 million government workers got a boost last year when the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment forbids government bosses from firing workers for supporting a political candidate the boss doesn’t like.
Also Read: 11 Women Who Have Left Fox News Shows, From Megyn Kelly to Laurie Dhue (Photos)
“The Constitution prohibits a government employer from discharging or demoting an employee because the employee supports a particular political candidate,” Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote in the decision.
NFL owners, perhaps fearful of a public-relations backlash, have not obeyed President Trump’s Sept. 22 call on them to fire any “son of a bitch” who kneels during the National Anthem. Trump was referring to former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick and other players who started kneeling during the National Anthem last year to protest racism and police brutality.
But NFL owners have broad freedom to fire players perceived to violate the NFL’s Personal Conduct Policy. According to the policy, posted on the NFL website, “prohibited conduct” includes “conduct that undermines or puts at risk the integrity of the NFL, NFL clubs, or NFL personnel.”
Discipline can include a fine, suspension or banishment from the league with an opportunity to reapply, the policy states.
In addition to the policy, players may be required to sign contracts with a “morals clause,” which gives team owners another potential justification for firing them if they say or do anything that might potentially make the team look bad.
A copy of former running back Arian Foster’s contract with the Houston Texans, posted online, provides an example of some morals-clause language. (If you’re wondering why his contract is online, here’s an explanation.)
The language requires him “to give his best efforts and loyalty to the Club, and to conduct himself on and off the field with appropriate recognition of the fact that the success of professional football depends largely on public respect for and approval of those associated with the game.”
Of course, teams don’t have to explicitly state that they are cutting a player for making a political statement, or violating any policy. They can simply unofficially blacklist someone they deem difficult or troublesome.
Since Kaepernick opted out of his contract with the San Francisco 49ers to become a free agent in March, no team has signed him. President Trump has taken partial credit for that fact.
“It was reported that NFL owners don’t want to pick him up because they don’t want to get a nasty tweet from Donald Trump,” he said in July.Secretary of State John Kerry arrives in Geneva, Wednesday, April 16, 2014, where he is scheduled to participate in talks on the ongoing situation in Ukraine with representatives from Ukraine, Russia and the European Union. (AP Photo/Jim Bourg, Pool)
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration is preparing to ratchet up sanctions on Russia and boost assistance for the Ukrainian military in the coming days, U.S. officials said Wednesday, as Ukraine struggles to contain a pro-Russian uprising in its eastern cities.
Officials said they had no plans to levy new sanctions ahead of Thursday's talks in Geneva between the U.S., Russia, Ukraine and the European Union. But with low expectations for a breakthrough in those meetings, officials already have prepared targets for sanctions that include wealthy individuals close to Russian President Vladimir Putin and the entities they run.
"Each time Russia takes these kinds of steps that are designed to destabilize Ukraine and violate their sovereignty, there are going to be consequences," President Barack Obama said in an interview with CBS News. "Mr. Putin's decisions aren't just bad for Ukraine. Over the long-term, they're going to be bad for Russia."
The administration also was working on a package of non-lethal assistance for Ukraine's military. The assistance, which was expected to be finalized this week, could include medical supplies and clothing for Ukraine's military, but was expected to stop short of providing body armor and other military-style equipment.
Ukraine has asked for military assistance from the U.S., a request that was believed to include lethal aid like weapons and ammunition. But Obama administration officials said they were not actively considering supplying Ukraine with lethal assistance, a step they said could be viewed as an escalatory act by the U.S. in the midst of an already tense situation.
"We don't want to see more escalation. What we want is de-escalation," State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said. "At the same time we're constantly reviewing Ukrainian request for assistance and determining what's most appropriate to provide."
Administration critics have been pressing Obama to arm the Ukrainian military in order to bolster its efforts to reassert control of its eastern region from pro-Russian insurgents who have seized numerous government facilities.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said over the weekend that the least the U.S. could do was "give them some light weapons with which to defend themselves."
U.S. assistance to Ukraine's military so far has been limited to about 300,000 ready-to-eat meals, which were shipped in late March. The U.S. also has authorized a $1 billion loan guarantee for Ukraine's fledgling government.
Secretary of State John Kerry arrived in Geneva on Wednesday for the high-stakes diplomatic meetings with Russia, Ukraine and the EU.
A senior State Department official suggested Kiev was preparing to take a more appeasing approach with Moscow during the talks, with Ukrainian diplomats preparing to brief Russia on efforts to give more autonomy to regions, protect Russian-speaking minorities and allow widespread inclusion of candidates in upcoming presidential elections. Doing so would mark a striking urgency to avoid confrontation just as Kiev struggles to maintain its sovereignty against Russian troops on its borders and pro-Russian separatists fueling unrest in eastern Ukraine.
In addition to seeking a way to de-escalate tensions between Kiev and Moscow, the Geneva meeting also was expected to touch on the West's efforts to help stabilize Ukraine's economy with an anticipated loan by the International Monetary Fund. IMF finance ministers this week endorsed a loan package ranging from $14 billion to $18 billion to help the country avoid a financial meltdown.
The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the U.S. response to Russia's actions by name.
Ukraine's military launched its first actions against the pro-Russian forces on Tuesday. But just a day later the central government's hopes of re-establishing control of the restive east were dampened when the insurgents commandeered six Ukrainian armored vehicles along with their crews and hoisted Russian flags over them.
The Ukrainian soldiers manning the vehicles offered no armed resistance, and masked pro-Russian militias in combat fatigues sat on top as they drove into the eastern city of Slovyansk, a hotbed of unrest against Ukraine's interim government.Linus Torvalds
Linus Torvalds has been given the 2014 IEEE Computer Society Computer Pioneer Award, 20 years after the release of the Linux kernel 1.0 that he developed as a University of Helsinki student in his native country of Finland. In the two decades that followed, shock waves spread far beyond the humble Linux kernel, spawning a worldwide open-source development movement that today shows no signs of slowing.
The IEEE Computer Society recognizes industry figures in a broad array of categories, including technical and pioneering achievements, and entrepreneurial activities.
Linux forms the basis for 79 percent of all mobile devices and 96 percent of the world's supercomputers, according to Net Applications, a web analytics company. In April of 2014, there were 959 million web servers in the world, according to a Netcraft report. And of those, 38.6 percent use Linux and 60.6 percent use the open-source Apache web server.
[Related: Intel All-In On Embedded Linux Development ]
Linux also represents the fastest-growing segment of the embedded device industry. A recent statement from embedded-industry researcher VDC predicts that by 2015, worldwide shipments of Android-based devices will grow by more than 71 percent in medical machines, by 62 percent in connected cars and by about 47 percent in military communications devices. Android is based on Linux.
Now a fellow at the Linux Foundation, Torvalds still controls what new code gets incorporated into the standard Linux kernel. With the IEEE's award, he joins such prestigious industry figures as David Kuck, a parallel computing trailblazer; Edward Feigenbaum, who pioneered artificial intelligence; and Cleve Moler, inventor of the MATLAB numerical libraries that revolutionized computational programming.
In 2012, Torvalds received the Millennium Technology Prize from the Technology Academy of Finland; in 2010, NEC's C&C Prize; in 2008, the Takreda Award for Social/Economic Well-Being; in 2000, the British Computer Society's Lovelace Medal; and in 1998, the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award. In 2008, he also was inducted into the Computer History Museum's Hall of Fellows, and in 2012 into the Internet Hall of Fame.
Yet the name Linus Torvalds is, perhaps, not as commonly associated with the Internet as, say, that of Mark Andreesen, Tim Berners-Lee, or even Al Gore. But unless the subject turns to servers, and specifically the system that operates most servers on the Internet, Linus Torvalds gets nary a mention. And it's Linux that powers most of the devices that encompass the trend we're now calling the Internet of Things.
PUBLISHED MAY 2, 2014It's been a week since Montreal's three first safe injections sites opened and officials say they're a success so far.
The sites were approved by Health Canada last month and are run by community organizations that have been operating needle exchange programs in the city for years — Cactus, Dopamine and Spectre de rue.
Sandhia Vadlamudy, who heads Cactus, said the new site on Sanguinet and Berger streets has welcomed 40 people every evening since it opened.
"For us, it's a sign that the people we're here for, they have confidence in the services we offer," she said.
Residents of the neighbourhood where Spectre de rue opened voiced their uneasiness about that site's location near the Marguerite Bourgeoys elementary school in a petition, but advocates say the service makes communities safer by reducing the amount of syringes in the streets.
"Every injection that takes place in our facility does not take place in the street, in the alleys, public spaces," Vadlamudy said.
Sandhia Vadlamudy, executive director of Cacuts, said she hopes the centre is a step towards more services to keep drug users in the city safe. (CBC)
She added that the sites' workers didn't expect to "have the approval of everybody" but they're trying keep in touch with the community to hear its concerns.
Public safety
Herbie, a passerby who preferred not to give his last name, said he contracted hepatitis C from a needle decades ago, before the public was educated about it.
'These sites are good in doing the best we can in a bad situation,' says Herbie, a passerby, of the safe injection sites. (CBC)
"Perhaps back then, if this had this been there, I might not have," Herbie said. "It was just a one off thing, but I kind of suffered 40 years from it … We have to do something and stop the spread of this stuff, so I'd give [the service] a plus."
In May, Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre hailed the go-ahead from Health Canada for its potential to save lives – diseases and overdoses being among the dangers.
"What would you prefer: To have syringes all over the place? To have some people die of an overdose in the area?" he said at the time in response to critics of the program.
The Quebec government has provided $12 million in funding over three years to ensure that the safe injections sites are fully functional.
A step forward
Vadlamudy said her hope is that the centres are "one more step" towards offering more services that will keep drug users safe.
Marie Musso, who lives near Cactus, said she'd just learned about it and thought it was a good initiative.
"People who do drugs are here anyway so I think it's better to supervise them … and make sure they don't overdose," Musso said.
Organizers behind the centres hope their services will also be used as a preventive measure to combat the fatal effects of fentanyl.
Shortly before they opened, Montreal police carried out a drug bust, finding small amounts of the powerful drug.
They'd started the investigation in April after officers received multiple calls of fentanyl overdoses in the southern part of Montreal.
The fourth site, L'Anonyme, will be mobile and opens in the fall.Say “Cheers!” to the first-ever sitcom Web series taped in front of a live studio audience, “L.A. Beer.”
Set in a microbrewery, the workplace comedy follows a group of beer lovers and brewers as they compete in a growing industry. The series stars Sam Daly (“Hot in Cleveland”), Arianna Ortiz, Kevin High, Alicia Ying, standup comedian James Lontayao and Sarah Stoecker.
Executive producer Sam Miller, also a staff writer on CBS’ “Mom,” was looking to create a primetime-quality Web series. “I was a writers’ assistant who just wanted to experience the collaboration and creative energy that only comes from being a writer in a writers’ room,” Miller said. “Fortunately, I found an amazing group of dedicated people who believed our combined industry contacts and resources could produce a show that was just as good as something on television. Making Web series history and getting free beer was just a bonus.”
“L.A. Beer” was funded via Kickstarter, allowing the team to produce the sitcom for “1/200th of what the comparable cost for a network sitcom would be,” according to Miller.
The series will debut with five episodes on YouTube beginning May 11, in conjunction with American Craft Beer Week. Five more episodes will drop in June to align with L.A. Beer Week.
“We have #Beer themed episodes for American Craft Beer Week and #LA themed episodes for LA Beer week,” Miller said. “After that, depending on our ability to grow an audience, we hope to find interested buyers or possibly do another crowdfunding campaign.”
“L.A. Beer” bows on YouTube May 11.When you google Nicole Kidman, words like "ice queen" and "control freak" pop up. But in Seoul early this month, to unveil Omega's De Ville line, the Hollywood star exudes a chatty vibe.
In a figure-hugging Dolce &Gabbana cocktail gown, she asks us for advice on what nightclubs and hotspots to visit. Kidman suffered a recent setback when her father Dr Antony Kidman died suddenly while on holiday with her sister in Singapore.
Barely two weeks later, she says that the family is still "shattered". Here she reveals to ETPanache what she looks for in her man (and why it doesn't matter if he's shorter than her):
Do you judge a man by his shoes or by his watch?
(Laughs) I primarily judge him by his heart and his actions. Men can do the talk, right? But they've got to be able to show you as well. If I had to choose between shoes or a watch, I'd go for the latter. The Dark Side of the Moon is the coolest watch. It instantly made me go, "Okay, there's Keith's (husband Keith Urban) Christmas present."But shhhh... don't tell.
Shorter men are often intimidated by tall women. As a tall, beautiful woman, what advice can you give them?
I've always gone out with men shorter than me. I've never gone out with a man that's taller. But I don't judge. I'd say a guy should stand up tall and not worry because — I don't know if I should this, but I will anyway — aren't we all the same height lying down? At least, that's what many men have told me.
You're Australian, but live in the US. Where do you feel at home? How do you beat jetlag?
I was just given this tip to eat two kiwi fruits to beat jetlag. Home is where my family is. We can live anywhere in the world, strangely enough. We bring along blankies, pillows and candles, but can set up home everywhere. I did a film this year in Morocco and had my kids living out in tents.
How do you talk to your children when you travel without them?
FaceTime. I even have dinner with them on FaceTime. Recently, I was chatting with my daughter and I could tell that she was hungry. I told my husband, "She needs a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and she'll want to go to gymnastics." I was right.
What's your secret to beat ageing?
I feel like I'm ageing. I find travel a lot harder now. I don't sleep as well as I used to. What I love about being older is the patience and wisdom that you get. On the flip side, you don't have the physical energy.
How do you cheer yourself up when you're down?
Hug my children. Kiss my husband. Make love, not war. The simplest things give joy. I don't need that much. Looking at the sun rise. A swim in the ocean — that makes my day. Playing in the park with my kids. When you're 17, that's like... (groans). But at this age, it's joyful. We always do big Christmases and Halloween parties at home. My husband says,"You love seeing other people have a great time."
Is it easy being part of a couple when you're both famous?
If there is an enormous amount of love, yes. I have a partner who is an extraordinary man. That makes it incredibly easy.
How have you coped with your father's sudden death?
It was devastating because I was so close to him. My family is shattered. He was so joyful. Every time he'd see me worrying about a part or my children, he'd say, "Nicci, don't worry, be happy." That is how I've pledged to live my life from this point on. He was also about the underdog, taking care of people who were less fortunate. He was a psychologist and a giver. That is what I hope he's given me and my sister.AT&T today announced a new feature for its data plans called Stream Saver that will effectively throttle mobile video streams starting sometime next year. Touted as a “free and convenient, data-saving feature,” AT&T will cap what it says are most video streams to 480p by default. To watch video in high definition, consumers will have to opt-out using the myAT&T app or on the company’s website. AT&T says there is no charge to use the feature.
AT&T’s Stream Saver caps mobile video streams to 480p by default
It sounds innocuous right now, and in most cases having a data-saving tool you can toggle on and off at will is a good thing. (AT&T killed overage fees in August, so it no longer has a vested interest in letting customers exceed their limit.) Yet Stream Saver could pave the way for AT&T to start enabling the potentially net neutrality-violating exemption features championed by T-Mobile and its Music Freedom and Binge On initiatives. Those services are known as zero-rating because they exempt certain companies’ products and services, namely streaming services like Netflix and Spotify, from counting toward a customer’s monthly data cap.
AT&T has not announced any plans to zero-rate streaming services, but the lengthy launch window for Stream Saver gives the company the room to strike deals. AT&T already offers free mobile data to DirecTV customers, which has it at ends with the FCC because, well, AT&T owns DirecTV. One silver lining here with Stream Saver: AT&T will let you opt-out of the feature only once and it will stay that way, where as T-Mobile makes customers of its unlimited data plans toggle HD video on each and every day if they want to stream higher than 480p without Wi-Fi.
Given the results of the presidential election on Tuesday, the state of net neutrality under President-elect Donald Trump is now far more uncertain. Trump has signaled that he may roll back certain FCC protections that prevent companies like AT&T, Comcast, and T-Mobile from violating net neutrality principles. Of course, it’s likely AT&T had Stream Saver in the works for quite some time and there is no material connection between a Trump win and the actions of a giant telecom just a few days later. But AT&T now has an ally in Washington who may rule in its favor when the time comes to decide how service providers can and should treat internet traffic.Back in 2012, I presented a paper to the Association of Heterodox Economists entitled, A world rate of profit (a world rate of profit). Marx’s model of capitalism and its laws of motion are based on ‘an economy’, in other words, a world economy. Of course, there are still many barriers to the establishment of a world economy and a world rate of profit from labour, trade and capital restrictions designed to preserve and protect national and regional markets from the flow of global capital.
But in 2014, capitalism is much closer to be being a global economy than it was in 1914. So I tentatively suggested in that paper that, maybe, we could start to talk about a world rate of profit and start to measure it as an indicator of the underlying health and activity of capitalism globally.
In the paper I set out to try and measure a world rate of profit. I was not the first to do this. Minqi Li et al did some ground breaking work in their paper, Long waves, institutional changes and historical trends: a study of the long-term movement of the profit rate in the capitalist world economy, Long-Term Movement of the Profit Rate in the Capitalist World-Economy. They developed a world rate of profit for a long period going back to 1870. For the 19th century, their study integrated just the UK, US and Japanese rates of profit. For the period after 1963, the authors brought in Germany, France and Italy, to make the G6. Among other things, Minqi Li et al found that their world rate of profit tended to fall between the late 19th century and the early 20th century and again tended to fall between the mid-20th century and the late 20th century. And they confirmed a rise from the mid-1980s to a peak in 1997.
In my own study, I developed a world rate of profit that includes all the G7 economies plus the four economies of the BRIC acronym. So this includes 11 top economies which constitute a significant major share of global GDP. I use the extended World Penn Tables that David Zachariah used in his individual country study (see his paper, Dave Zachariah, Determinants of the average profit rate and the trajectory of capitalist economies, 4 February 2010, zacha10) I weighted the national rates for the size of GDP, although the crude mean average rate does not seem to diverge significantly from the weighted average. A proper measure of the world rate of profit would have to add up all the constant and variable capital in the world and estimated the total surplus value appropriated by global capital. This is really an impossible task. So weighted national profit rates are the only feasible way of getting a figure.
I found that there was a fall in the world rate of profit from the starting point of the data in 1963 and the world rate has never recovered to the 1963 level in the last 50 years. The world rate of profit reached a low in 1975 and then rose to a peak in the mid-1990s. Since then, the world rate of profit has been static or slightly falling and has not returned to its peak of the 1990s. And there was a divergence between the G7 rate of profit and the world rate of profit after the early 1990s. This indicates that non-G7 economies played increasing role in sustaining the world rate of profit. The G7 capitalist economies have been suffering a profitability crisis since the late 1980s and certainly since the mid-1990s.
Now I have gone over all this again because there has been a brand new estimate of the world rate of profit in a new paper by Esteban Maito of Argentina (Maito, Esteban – The historical transience of capital. The downward tren in the rate of profit since XIX century). His paper presents estimates of the rate of profit on 14 countries in the long run going back to 1870. And Maito uses national historical data for each country not the Extended Penn Tables that I used. His results show a clear downward trend in the world rate of profit, although there are periods of partial recovery in both core and peripheral countries. So the behaviour of the profit rate confirms the predictions made by Marx about the historical trend of the mode of production. There is a secular tendency for the rate of profit to fall under capitalism and Marx’s law operates. Here is Maito’s world rate of profit back to 1869 (simple mean version).
Maito also finds, as Minqi Li and I do, that there was a stabilisation and even a rise in the world rate of profit from the early or mid-1980s up to the end of the 1990s, the so-called neoliberal period of the destruction of trade unions, a reduction in the welfare state and corporate taxes, privatisation, globalisation, hi-tech innovation and the fall of the Soviet Union. Again this seems to have peaked about 1997 (if China is excluded).
This is where Thomas Piketty comes into the story. In his book, Capital in the 21st century, now acclaimed by all the great and good in mainstream economics (see my posts, https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2014/04/15/thomas-piketty-and-the-search-for-r/ and https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2014/04/16/piketty-fest-continues-some-directions-for-the-reader/), and by many on the heterodox left, Piketty alludes to his book title as a follow-on from Marx’s Capital.
But he takes time out to insist that Marx’s law of profitability has proved to be fallacious. According to Piketty, “the rate of return on capital is a central concept in many economic theories. In particular, Marxist analysis emphasises the falling rate of profit – a historical prediction that has turned out to be quite wrong”. I won’t go into Piketty’s reasons for claiming why Marx was wrong here (I am saving that for my upcoming review of Piketty’s book in Historical Materialism). But the evidence from Maito, Minqi Li and myself makes a nonsense of Piketty’s conclusion about Marx’s law.
Piketty reckons that the net rate of return on capital (Piketty’s r) has been pretty static over the last 200 years at about 4-5%. This is crucial to his explanation of how capitalism can get into deep trouble. For him, it will be due to a rising share of profit going to capital and causing such extreme inequality that it threatens social instability. In contrast, Piketty does not see any crisis coming from falling profitability in the capitalist mode of production.
Piketty’s calculation that the net rate of return on capital has been steady is dubious even on his own definition of capital. But the real problem is that he defines capital as the same as wealth and thus includes residential property, even though houses are not means of production and do not ‘earn’ an income (unless they are owned by real estate companies and rented out). By including residential property in his calculations and concocting the ‘income’ from people’s homes as ‘rental equivalents’, Piketty ends up with completely distorted results for his r.
Moreover, here is some irony. Maito uses Piketty’s historical data for Germany to get a rate of profit for that economy. But Maito leaves out residential property and correctly categorises capital as the value of the means of production owned and accumulated in the capitalist sector. The result is not some steady r, but a falling rate of profit a la Marx |
single target right click damage and bonus track gold he brings is not enough to keep him in the top hero tiers, as he has a lot of trouble surviving against trilanes and lacks the split push potential of Nature’s Prophet, the semi carry damage of Weaver or the raw power of Lone Druid. He could see some use as a niche pick against invis-heavy line ups, but there are simply too many better choices for now.
Coming back out of semi retirement is the forgotten initiator Earth Shaker, just making it onto the list for this month. His low mana pool and melee attack range give him a hard time in the laning phase, and he needs to farm a Blink Dagger and Arcane Boots to be effective in a team fight so it can be hard for him to get up in the teamfights when he is losing out in gold and experience in his usual role as a trilane support. Echo Slam is a great counter to heroes like Nature’s Prophet and Phantom Lancer so he may see some use there but it’s likely we won’t see him on the charts again next month.
As I predicted, Lion has moved up the ranks and looks set to... whats that? A 15% win rate? Never mind then.
Predictions
Ogre Magi has shown up in a few games now as a trilane support. He's a naturally ranked support with both a stun and a slow, though he has a very high skill cap. Bloodlust is also an extremely underrated move, and is almost the equivalent of giving team mates a free Hyperstone every 30 seconds, which will synergize well with top tier carries such as Alchemist, Sven, Lone Druid, or Lifestealer. His offensive spells are only single target though, and late game, once the enemy team has BKBs, he is fairly ineffective so while I don't see him becoming a top tier pick, keep an eye out for Ogre Magi, especially in mid game oriented line ups.
Another hero that has been experimented with by some teams is Treant Protector. With the highest starting base damage in the game and Living Armour giving so much early game tank potential, he can easily dominate his lane. This survivability and damage means that he doesn't need to be babysat by supports and could be a good long lane or even mid lane choice. He can really use the farm and levels, and use Nature's Guise and Overgrowth for ganking. He's mostly been picked by CIS teams so far, so whether any NA or Eastern teams will give him a try remains to be seen.
Dendi has a new favourite hero, and it's Skywrath Mage. With huge damage and low health, players have to be wary of him being focused down in a team fight before he has a chance to contribute. In the mid lane Skywrath Mage can bottlecrow to ensure he has enough mana to force even the most survivable heroes out of lane, and with the early levels he can make a big impact in the early game. A BKB makes him next to useless though and with his severe case of the squishies he's not likely to become a hero we'll see every game, but will add to the ever expanding variety of professional Dota 2.
Finally, Slark is on the way up. He's been picked up a few times in the TI3 Western Qualifiers and has performed pretty well there. Dark Pact makes him a great counter to Batrider as he can purge off Sticky Napalm as well as Flaming Lasso, and the move speed and regen from Shadow Dance makes him a ganking machine. He's seen action in the mid and long lane for early levels and farm, which allow him to get ganking as early as possible but if he doesn't get the items he needs then he can have a very bad time. However if he does get that sweet sweet farm then he can quickly snowball into a very dangerous hero, and I expect we'll be seeing more of him in the fuutre.
That's all for April, make sure to comment with how you think the Western and Eastern Qualifiers as well as the G1 League finals will change the tiers for this month! One thing is for sure, we're going to see some great Dota over the next few months leading up to the international. Thanks for reading and until next time, Happy gaming!news The Australian division of digital rights movement the Pirate Party has launched an online petition through which it is collecting support from Australians who object to the wide-ranging new tranche of surveillance and data retention powers currently being proposed by the Labor Federal Government.
The Federal Attorney-General’s Department is currently promulgating a package of reforms which would see a number of wide-ranging changes made to make it easier for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to monitor what Australians are doing on the Internet. For example, the Government is interested in establishing an offence which would allow Australians to be charged with failing to assist in decrypting encrypted communications. Also on the cards is a data retention protocol which would require ISPs, for example, to retain data on their customers for up to two years, and changes which would empower agencies to source data on users’ activities on social networking sites.
Instead of law enforcement agencies being forced to request multiple different types of interception warrants, the legislation would be modified to allow authorities to request a new more comprehensive centralised type of warrant with multiple powers. Provisions under the ASIO Act for the intelligence agency to request warrants are to be modernised and streamlined, and the agency is to gain the power to disrupt a target computer for the purposes of accessing the information on it — or even to access other third-party computers on the way to the target machine.
Speaking on ABC television several weeks ago, EFA executive office Jon Lawrence said what the package amounted to was “a massive increasine in surveillance powers, with a corresponding decrease in accountability”. “What we’re seeing here is the sort of powers that probably fit better in a place like China or Iran,” he said. Both China and Iran are noted for being countries where citizens’ activities on the Internet and other communications channels are strictly controlled and monitored, especially in areas where citizens have the capacity to express dissent against the countries’ ruling governments.
The Greens also strongly object to the package, with the party’s Communications Spokesperson Scott Ludlam describing the package as representing a “systematic erosion of privacy”.
In a statement issued yesterday, the Pirate Party of Australia said its petition would be presented to the Senate, and that it was also planning a submission to the parliamentary committee currently considering the proposed legislation.
“This is one of the most sweeping attacks on our privacy that has ever been attempted in Australia,” said Mozart Olbrycht-Palmer, Deputy Secretary of Pirate Party Australia. “Pirate Party Australia is actively committed to campaigning to ensure Australians enjoy a high level privacy. It is necessary that police, security and intelligence agencies have certain restricted powers to protect the community, but blanket provisions for compromising privacy should not be introduced.”
The petition itself states that those who sign it are critical of:
Claims that Australians have a low expectation of the fundamental right to privacy in order to justify greater surveillance and erosion of privacy protections;
The expansion of the scope of interception warrants which would allow unrelated devices belonging to third parties to be accessed unknowingly; and
The lack of proper public consultation, including a small window of time for submissions to the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Intelligence and Security to be made.
It requests that the Senate makes a number of commitments to Australians’ digital rights, such as only authorising surveillance where judicially sanctioned and targeted at specific individuals; refraining from implementing surveillance that violates “fundamental human rights and freedoms”, especially relating to data retention; and expecting lawmakers and intelligence and law enforcement officials to respect the values of Australian citizens by respecting “the fundamental right to privacy”.
opinion/analysis
Do I expect Australia’s parliamentarians to pay any attention to this petition? No, I don’t. Just as they are currently ignoring the howls of protest from many sections of Australia’s community with respect to the Attorney-General’s Orwellian package of surveillance and data retention reforms, I expect them to ignore the Pirate Party’s petition as well. But change has to start somewhere, people, and this sort of initiative is what eventually got Labor’s mandatory filter knocked back. I encourage anyone concerned about this issue to sign this petition and write to their parliamentarian as well.
Image credit: Anja Ranneberg, royalty freeThe Undercover Economist Strikes Back: How to Run or Ruin an Economy
Tim Harford's latest book, The Undercover Economist Strikes Back, is a great macroeconomic companion to his 2005 debut, The Undercover Economist (UK edition), an excellent and accessible book on microeconomics. Structured as a dialog between an economist (Harford) and a notional punter who has been put in charge of getting an imaginary economy going after a deep, long recession (ahem), Strikes Back is full of Harford's witty, clear and memorable explanations of complex and vital subjects.
I know Harford and consider him a friend, even though as he's pointed out, we don't exactly agree on economics (we don't entirely disagree either). I was educated, informed and delighted by nearly everything in this volume, but worried about what was missing. Particularly on the subject of continuous economic growth, I was concerned about the breeziness with which Harford predicted growth in economic activity by means of buying and selling information, which is a rather fraught and complex subject (and worthy of its own book, which is probably why it didn't get the explanation it deserved). One thing that's clearer every year is that the ability to charge money for information is entirely dependent on the cooperation of the buyers, who can choose at virtually no risk to themselves to get the same information for free. This doesn't mean that no one will pay, but it does point to a complicated future for information marketplaces.
I was more worried about the lack of consideration given to corruption and its place in markets, regulation and economics. Harford points out that the increasing inequality in the world is bad in many ways, and suggests multiple causes for this phenomenon, but underplays the role that corruption has played. It's pretty mainstream to observe that we are in the grip of a cycle of policies that enrich important and wealthy people, whose wealth and import then grows, who are then better positioned to influence policy to enrich themselves further still (lather, rinse, repeat). The distorting effect of corruption on sound policy is vital to understanding recession, poverty, inequality, environmental problems and many of the other phenomena that Harford addresses with otherwise exemplary thoroughness.
But let me reiterate that while I argued with what was missing from this book, I have enormous admiration for what was present. Harford is a gifted explainer of complex ideas, and his use of narrative in storytelling makes his explanations sticky and memorable. There is no one book you can read to understand macroeconomics, but Strikes Back is one book you should read to gain that understanding.
The Undercover Economist Strikes Back: How to Run or Ruin an Economy (UK edition)Update: The Blues signed Chris Thorburn to a two-year deal.
*****
The St. Louis Blues enjoyed employing one of the best enforcers in the NHL over the past few seasons through Ryan Reaves. Though the term “enforcer” is becoming increasingly outdated and Reaves was far more than just a tough guy, the team elected to trade him to Pittsburgh in a deal which many would say the Blues won.
Now, as free agency opens up, the Blues are keeping their eyes open for a new enforcer to take Reaves’ place. According to STLToday, the Blues don’t feel like they should go “cold turkey” after having one of the game’s best. However, the team wants to make sure any addition they make won’t come at the cost of developing their younger talent.
GM Doug Armstrong said:
“I talked to a lot of (general) managers and they haven’t had (that element) for a number of years, but I’m not sure we want to go cold turkey after having maybe the best one in the business (Reaves) for a number of years. We’re going to talk to different people, but it’s going to have to come at a price range that allows growth for other players.”
Summarized, Armstrong recognizes that the NHL has moved on from the stereotypical enforcer role. Instead, teams have shifted to players who combine both muscle and talent and can contribute beyond just the gritty side of the game. That being said, Armstrong saw the positives Reaves brought to the table and thinks it may be a tough transition to abandon that style/strategy completely.
The problem comes in finding a player who can help fill the void left behind by Reaves. Reaves was able to fetch a strong price through a trade because he isn’t the stereotypical fighter. He won’t be directly replaced, but the Blues could find a player who doesn’t shy away from the physical side of the game.
Who are the Blues looking at? Chris Neil is one player who has popped up in rumors. The 38-year-old recently skated with the Ottawa Senators for a $1.5 million contract and had four points and 63 penalty minutes in 53 games. Another rumor suggests the Blues may want Chris Thorburn, a player who was recently selected by the Vegas Golden Knights in the expansion draft. At 34, Thorburn is a bit younger than Neil but carries a similar overall player profile when it comes to the physical side of the game.
The Blues may not be ready to give up their grit completely, but whether or not a match is found depends on the price asked by the available options.I did a ridiculous amount of reading when I was pregnant. I read natural parenting books and baby scheduling books and how to make your baby happy with no crying and eating is good for everyone led by the spirit of "your baby, yourself" books. If there was a book to read, rest assured, I gave it a go.
I thought I knew everything I'd need to know.
How much of that information did I actually use? Some. A little. The best bits of this, a quick trick from that, but no single book was spot-on accurate, and nothing was anywhere near as easy as all my reading had led me to believe. Fable was just herself, and apparently, she hadn't been reading the same stuff I'd been bingeing on. All that reading was mostly a waste of time.*
These are the words I wish I'd read instead, before jumping headlong into the mommyhood with my books and my charts and my ideals and my high horses. They're flawed, and they aren't all pretty, but they're hard-won and honest and as true as I can get 'em.
Here's what I wish I'd known:
1. You are going to suck at this parenting gig and be awesome at it at the same time, all the time. You will be a different parent every morning to a child who will also be different, sometimes changing in just hours, or minutes, or before your eyes. There will be good days and bad days, good minutes and bad minutes, good choices and not-so-good ones. You will do some things, probably a lot of things, wrong. Be gentle with yourself, because you are wildly loved and incredibly needed. You are climbing Mt. Everest with basically zero conditioning -- expect to be kind of terrible at it for a while. You are beautiful. We are for you.
2. Postpartum bodies are squashy and wobbly and dimpled and stretched and foreign and embarrassing and difficult and painful and gorgeously imperfect, and they tend to stay that way for quite awhile. You made a human. Now make your peace. Eat good food. Walk around when you're well enough. Listen to the people who tell you you're beautiful. Take them at their word. Remember where your worth comes from.
3. Your baby is not like the other babies. Your baby is the only one of herself who has ever been, and you and your partner are the only experts on her. Your baby will not behave like the books say, won't like what she's supposed to like, won't do what she's supposed to do when she's supposed to do it, and that's normal and great and perfectly OK. The best thing you can do is put down your literature and get to know your baby. What does she like? What makes her laugh? How does she best fall asleep? What does hungry sound like? The discovery of these things will serve you so much more than any stranger's care instructions ever will. You don't have to make your life or your family look like any particular model -- you don't have to follow the rules. You just have to create a life that works for you and fosters love and security and a whole lot of laughter. If that looks like 2 a.m. pancake parties, I'm not going to tell on you. I might actually admire you and be just a little bit jealous.
4. We have got to stop telling people that things should be easy and painless. We live in a culture that equates ease with value -- the easier it is, the better it is; if it hurts you, something is wrong. Reality check: sometimes things that are hard and painful are also really, really good. Every once in a while as a parent, one of the things that you thought would be really difficult turns out to be incredibly easy and drama-free. This is called a miracle, and though it might be somehow related to some book you read and the alignment of the stars and a magic way you pat the soles of your baby's feet and the tea you drink on Thursdays, it's still mostly a miracle, and the odds of that same miracle happening to EVERY OTHER PARENT EVERYWHERE are pretty slim, even with books and stars and tea and so much foot-patting. We get excited in our victories, and want to share them, but it's important to remember that we are all struggling with different issues. One daddy's easy is some mama's nightmare. And just because your baby doesn't sleep through the night at five weeks or eat with a fork by her first birthday or cries a lot or your boobs get sore from breastfeeding (even though her latch is perfect) -- just because it isn't EASY and PAINLESS -- it isn't necessarily wrong. Sometimes hard is OK, sometimes, often, it's even good. Hard is how we grow. And guess what, kiddo -- parenting is hard. Any book that tells you otherwise deserves the big fat sticker of bullshit.
5. Speaking of bullshit, oh mylanta, the poop. They warn you. They tell you. And despite every warning, it is still baffling and alarming and downright awe-inspiring how much of your next year is going to be spent dealing with, assessing, smelling for, washing off, evaluating, discussing, logging and transporting poop. Get good and comfy with poop, friends. The poop cometh. For whom the poop tolls. The hunt for poop-tober -- you get the idea.
6. The sooner you can figure out how to accept unwanted advice gracefully, the easier your year is going to be. For whatever reason, people love to weigh in on babies -- everyone has an opinion, and everyone wants to share. I believe that most of this advice is pretty well-intended -- most of it falls into the "it worked for me and I am so happy and I want to share my joy joy joy with you because you look very tired" category, which is at least only mildly offensive and really very sincere.
Here's the thing -- you can stumble through this crazy first 12 months in defense mode, snapping witty comebacks at judgmental old ladies or know-it-all childless people, or you can decide to give everybody the benefit of the doubt, smile and say thank you, and become very zen and confident about knowing what's best for your child and not giving one ounce of your abundance of poop about what anyone else says.
If I were you, I'd aim for zen.
Nobody is out to get you. Everyone wants you to succeed. And screw them all anyway, because you are raising a child, and that is awesome. Did your kid eat something today? Is she relatively hygienically sound? Smiles occasionally? You win all the things. You are awesome enough to absorb any and all commentary, keep the bits you like, and toss the bits you don't. How sweet of them to care.
7. Start stretching, because it's time to get flexible. I'm not a big fan of general statements like "All babies like swaddling," or "Co-sleeping is best for everybody," but there is one I can get behind -- babies are really inconvenient. Your schedule, your sleep, your stellar punctuality record, your deadlines, your best shirts, your relationships -- everything is about to get messy and complicated. You have two choices: become a cweepinghungrytiredmess of doom, or swallow every ounce of pride you have and become flexible. Ask for help. Admit failure. Be late. Stay in your pajamas. Ignore the dishes. Let slide what can slide and rejoice when you make it through with all your bare necessities intact. You are going to miss a few parties and a lot of snoozes and probably many other important things, and it will be OK. It will be better than OK. It will be amazing.
Maybe, just maybe, you'll be one of those parents who gets a magic baby who responds to the methods in whatever book you read or is just naturally benevolent and fits like a glove into your fabulous and organized life. Again, this is called a miracle. We love you and are happy for you. Now please, shut up.
8. The most important thing to get for your baby is not a Rock n' Play, nor a good set of swaddling blankets, nor a high-end stroller. The most important thing to get for your baby is a village. Your village will keep you afloat. They will carry you when you are tired, feed you when you are starving, forgive you when you are unkempt and hours late and a neglectful friend who can't remember to wear socks let alone whose birthday it is. They will love your baby when you are too tired or frustrated to hold her at the moment, because you are imperfect and human and have imperfect and human failings. They will remind you who you are when you start to think your whole life is only about poop. They will lift you up.
9. We have to lift each other up. Raising babies is the hardest thing many of us have ever done. We can tear each other to bits, criticize choices and turn up noses, or we can love each other, admire adorable babies, offer a hand and celebrate victories. This is not a difficult choice, people. Nobody cares that your way is better. Everyone cares that your kid is gorgeous and let's chat over coffee and what have you been doing with your hair lately because, girlfriend, you look fabulous. Don't be horrible. It isn't really that hard.
10. Success is found in being willing to grow. Here's the truth: you don't know much of anything. A year from now, after your fantastic kid turns 1, you won't know much of anything still. Gather wisdom around you. Learn from your mistakes. Stay humble. Stay open. When you know better, do better. Be a better parent tomorrow than you were today, always, everyday, as often as you can. Try things out and leave them behind shamelessly if they don't work out. Life isn't a contest or a game -- it's simply only beautifully life. Live the minutes instead of scoring them. Love that incredible baby.
Oh, lovely -- you are going to have so much fun!
*A note: Apparently, it needs to be said that I actually quite like books and am in favor of reading (the rest of this blog will clue you in to that right quick). By all means, read books, people. Tons of books are full of great info. Just don't let books stress you out. No single book is going to fix parenting for everybody. Ha -- don't we all wish. ;)Halloween is one of my favorite times of the year. You get to dress up, go out and get lots of candy. Scaring people is pretty fun too. But Halloween can be hard when you have a dietary restriction like being a vegan. Have no fear! There are lots of accidentally vegan candy out there that are just dying to get in your plastic pumpkin.
Halloween is one of my favorite times of the year. You get to dress up, go out and get lots of candy. Scaring people is pretty fun too. But Halloween can be hard when you have a dietary restriction like being a vegan. Have no fear! There are lots of accidentally vegan candy out there that are just dying to get in your plastic pumpkin.
Here are some ingredients to look for that may surprise you. First, if the candy says gelatin STAY AWAY! Gelatin is made from animal bones, skin and tendons. Also look for Carmine as a color. This red pigment is made from crushing the female cochineal insect. Also, if white sugar or confectioner’s glaze is mentioned you might want to stay away.
White sugar is made from bone char and confectioner’s sugar is made from the secretions of the female Lac insect. Why is everything made from bugs? While all of these are PETA friendly, if you avoid white sugar then I would stay away from these and find vegan alternatives. It’s always important to do your own research.
Airheads
That’s right, Airheads are vegan! They contain no animal ingredients, like gelatin, and are super good. Yeah, the sugar is pretty bad for you but come on, it’s Halloween.
Smarties
While this isn’t a super popular Halloween candy if some ends up in your bag this year you can enjoy it. The calcium stearate, used to help prevent caking, isn’t made from animals. Nope, its plant-based!
Skittles
Yeah, you heard that right. Skittles are completely vegan! They actually have been vegan for a long time but most people assume candies are not. Start hoarding all the Skittles you can find.
Sour Patch Kids
These are a personal favorite of mine. I could eat them all day and thanks to being vegan, I think I will! I love any gummy candy that isn’t made from yucky gelatin.
Twizzlers
Twizzlers, as well as Red Vines, are completely vegan. While I am not a fan of licorice, a lot of vegans will be pretty happy to know this candy is good to go!
Charm’s Blow Pops
If you got one of these while tick ‘r treating you were a god among kids. You will be happy to know it is vegan so you can totally eat it! Just try not to get the gum in your hair.
Dum Dums
Most suckers are pretty safe but this classic is 100% vegan! You can eat your Smarties and your Dum Dums.
Jolly Ranchers
Jolly Ranchers are basically just hardened sugar so it's not surprising that these sweet treats are vegan. I always liked the watermelon flavor the best!
Swedish Fish
While this isn’t everyone’s favorite candy to get in their bag you can rest easy knowing they are vegan.
Pixy Sticks
Pixy Sticks, a kid’s favorite, is just flavored sugar in a tube. Again, if you avoid white sugar then I would stay away from this just to be safe. While it is considered vegan-friendly, I am not so sure about the sugar.There's a shake-up coming to the DC universe. io9 can exclusively reveal that Catwoman writer Ann Nocenti will helm a new comic starring Klarion the Witch Boy in October — while author/io9's own Genevieve Valentine takes over Catwoman! We were able to talk to both writers about their series and what's in store.
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Created by Jack Kirby in 1973, Klarion "The Witch Boy" is a young, hell-raising (sometimes literally) sorcerer perhaps best known as his role as a recurring antagonist in the recent Young Justice cartoon. Here, Nocenti explains how Klarion and his feline familiar will be on a chaotic new journey in the New 52, with help from artist Trevor McCarthy.
io9: Klarion the Witch Boy is a pretty obscure character. Why give him his own series?
Ann Nocenti: Klarion isn't naturally heroic. He's not out to save the world or rescue anyone. He's a mischievous teenager who has done some bad things, but perhaps there's more to him. So what came to mind was an occult coming-of-age story. The high school years are a strange time of questioning, searching for direction, and rebellion. Klarion's on a reluctant quest to master sorcery and, hopefully, become one of the protectors the mystical universe.
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This is Klarion's New 52 debut. So what's new about him?
Nocenti: The Klarion series is a mix of sci-fi, horror and mysticism. Trevor McCarthy is a fabulous artist and he's bringing a wild, inventive style to the book. The new Klarion series explores the dynamic: Is technology saving or destroying the planet? In the 1950s and 60s, people feared nuclear power. Film, art and comics reflected that fear with radioactive mutants and monsters. What do we fear now? We all love and need our tech. New wearable and even implant tech is both wonderful and frightening. Can you really bio-hack into someone else's body? The nanobots that you can swallow to track your health, or implant near your spinal column to regulate your body's systems, have the potential to help people with crippling disease. But what other doors does this open? Would you swallow one? With genetically modified seeds and factory farming, "You are what you eat" is a more visceral concern than ever. There are cars that can drive themselves. What will that be like? This stuff creates a sense of excitement and also dread. We're all in this petri dish together. We ARE the experiment. There is a mystical dimension to this fear that we're playing with in the Klarion series. Trevor and I are developing a cast of new young witches and wizards, some learn the pagan ways and try to protect the planet; others fall under the spell of the new Tech-Wizards.
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So what is Klarion planning on doing?
Nocenti: Klarion is at a crossroads in time and space. He chooses to go to Gotham, almost on a whim. So the story opens like a Western: a stranger comes to town. How is that going to change the town? Klarion begins to practice, rather than just toy with, the mystic arts, and to seek out mentors and master spells. As Klarion "wakes up," other sorcerers and techno wizards begin to notice – and attack – him.
There are two "schools" of thought that prey on young witches and wizards. Coal and the Necrots believe in the power of technology. Piper nd Noah believe in the pagan power of the planet. Coal has a heavy metal club, The Necropolitan, and techo and metal music are part of his power. There will be intense battles between these wizards, and all the characters have secrets. Deep secrets. Coal is a talented novice of Techno-Wizardry. He lives in a computer graveyard, a techno breeding ground. Coal needs technology to thrive and be powerful, just as Klarion needs the planet to be healthy in order for him to draw on his pagan powers. Coal and Klarion are in a battle for the health (or death) of the planet.
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Klarion's relationship with his "familiar," his monster cat Teekl, and his power to control strange critters, is a big part of the series, an aspect of his powers that he becomes obsessed with. And eventually you'll see DC's great super-natural characters, like Spectre, The Demon, Zantana and others.
What are you most excited about doing with the character?
Nocenti: Working with [artist] Trevor McCarthy and my editors. We've all been shooting emails back and forth, talking a lot, spit-balling ideas on the new characters. Harvey has been sending us some wild art styles to inspire us. We want to play with the icons of mystical books — how Klarion and the other wizards hold their hands when casting spells, how to make and "cook" spells. Trevor is working on a Rune alphabet. We want the book to be layered in occult history. And we developed Klarion's support cast. Zell is a young girl who literally likes to let her hair down, in every way. Weed is a girl with deep pagan power who is just learning to walk. She IS a weed— a stubborn, invasive plant, and she hates how technology is strangling her world and she fights back. Rasp is from a long line of charismatic occultists going back to Rasputin, who was famously difficult to kill. Noah and Piper are powerful wizards who want to save the Earth, but if not, they are willing to lead witches and wizards to someplace better, even if that means leaving Earth and opening a new door in time and space. Where will Klarion fall in this battle for the planet? Will he accept his destiny as protector of the mystic universe or blow it off and continue his cavalier ways?
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We all know Catwoman, but we're obviously super-excited to have Geneieve Valentine, author of Girls at the Kingfisher Club, Geek Wisdom and other books — and who recaps Sleepy Hollow and Penny Dreadful for us, among other things— writing the series. We tried to use all our powers of persuasion/guilt/threats to make her spill everything. Other than the news that Five Ghosts' Garry Brown will handle the interior art, with covers by Jae Lee, this is as much as we could get…. for now.
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io9: What's in store for Selina in your Catwoman series?
Genevieve Valentine: After the dust settles in Batman Eternal, Selina Kyle has discovered she's part of a legacy she never knew before, and heir to the family business. She decides to accept the position, both because she sees a chance to restore a ruined Gotham and because, deep down, Selina's always played power games against herself. In this arc, she'll be coming face to face with what she's willing to do to keep her power, on a scale that could shake the whole city.
Is Catwoman going to be committing crimes this time around?
Valentine: Even when she has good intentions, she doesn't seem to be able to help it, does she? And of course, at the head of a crime family, it's not so much a matter of If as a matter of When. That said, the crimes are of a very different nature than her usual; some clandestine larceny here and there is a very different thing from having so many eyes on you and giving the kinds of orders that make the underworld run.
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What do you feel motivates Catwoman to dress in a cat costume and go out and fight people?
Valentine: I think that Selina treasures her free agency; the thing that drives her to get in the suit some nights is simply that she can. She has an inherent distrust of authority (particularly when it's being misused, or in the hands of people who aren't as smart as she is, which could be practically anyone), and the suit gives her the freedom that only comes when you're not quite yourself. Giving up that freedom for a responsibility of this scale is going to affect her more than she thinks.
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What are you most excited about doing with the character?
Valentine: This is my first foray into comics, so I'm excited just to have a chance to walk with her for a little while! She's a character close to my heart; I'm particularly looking forward to examining the nature of what it means to rule – particularly for her, since she's absolutely got what it takes, and it's just a matter of what happens when she reaches a line she knows she can't cross.
How much Bat-romance should we expect?
Valentine: Whether it's possible for them to be together at a specific point in time is always tricky, and something like this is absolutely going to create distance, but even in the times they're not together there's a connection between them that at this point I think they know better than to deny.Fallout: Equestria - Empty Quiver Pg. 4
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Oh, sweet Celestia above this was pure paydirt. Greasy -did- say that there was another project she and her sister were working on along with the cruise missiles - which, I unfortunately only found out after pushing the external launch button could carry passengers... thanks, dad - and as I took to hovering up in the semi-submerged hangar, there wasn't much doubt in guessing this was it. That is one sexy jet...
Static slowly approached it as I wore a stupid grin, hovering around the large craft, looking at that sexy pair of forward-facing cannons and intakes for the hydrogen turbines. Peering inside through the cockpit glass, a pair of seats and a small door at the back caught my attention, along with the access hatch in the floor. Giddly landing beside the sharp forward nose of the craft, Static pulled one of the rolled-up papers from his saddlebags, unfurling it with a crumple as I ran a hoof along the right cheek of the craft.
"R&G Manufacturing, external structural diagrams for the experimental bomber/attacker mark one, codenamed 'Valkyrie'... well, goddesses above, this thing's supposed to be more heavily-armed than the Vertibucks could ever be! Proposed maximum speed of 1500 kilometers per hour, four tesla cannons in two defensive turrets that can be set for offensive purposes, two MWT 40mm machine cannons located either side of the cockpit, five-thousand kilo payload capacity..." Reading off from the blueprints, Static continued intermittently staring up at the craft, myself finally finding the little access panel that held the release for the hatch door. Smirking, a hoof reached in and gave the lever a tug, the small door swinging open with a hiss of pressure and producing a short ladder. From the sudden ruffle of paper, sounded like that |
Zhou Youguang in his article “Oracle Bones: A Wandering Poet, a Mysterious Suicide, and the Battle over the Alphabet” (The New Yorker, 16 & 24 Feb. 2004), p. 126, and in his book Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present (New York: Harper Collins, 2005), p. 262. The basic fact of Stalin’s intervention is corroborated in the memoirs of Mao’s personal secretary, Hu Qiaomu: Hu Qiaomu Huiyi Mao Zedong (Beijing: Renmin Chubanshe, 1994), p. 23. DeFrancis, The Chinese Language, p. 262. DeFrancis, The Chinese Language, p. 295. DeFrancis, The Chinese Language, p. 263. William Burr, ed., The Kissinger Transcripts (New York: The New Press, 1998), p. 97. Wang Li, Yuwen yu Xinxi 1(1980): 4. DeFrancis, The Chinese Language, p. 4. Ureal Heyd, Language Reform in Modern Turkey (Jerusalem, 1954). Jiao Yingqi’s views appeared in the inaugural issue of the online monthly magazine called China Now, which is assumed to have been published online in July or August 2003. I am indebted to Daniel Tschudi for this reference. http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2005-11/05/content_3734142.htm. My thanks to Mark Swofford for this item. John DeFrancis, ed., ABC Chinese-English Dictionary (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996), pp. 835 and 845. But why this particular letter? Could its selection have been motivated to invoke the famous Mr. D, i.e., Democracy, one of the major demands of the May Fourth movement? William C. Hannas, The Writing on the Wall (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). While the traditional approach of introducing Pinyin syllables by combining their components may be justified from the viewpoint of linguistic science, it may not be pedagogically appropriate for children who already know all the basic 400 or so syllables in spoken form. In any case, the Z.T. practice can claim greater success as part of a totally new pedagogical approach, as noted below. Yuan Weizi, Wunian zhi Xiaoxue Keben YUWEN di-san ci (Hubei: Renmin Jiaoxue Chubanshe, 1988). Ding Yicheng, Li Nan, and Bao Quan’en, “Zhuyin Shizi, Tiqian Duxie,” Yuwen Xiandaihua 8 (1985): 134–148. Reprinted from Wenzi Gaige Jianbao, 17 Sept. 1983. Further references to this basic study are contained in the Rohsenow article mentioned in the next note. John S. Rohsenow, “The ‘Z.T.’ Experiment in the PRC,” Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association. 31, 3 (1996): 33-44. I rely mainly on this important study for further notes on the experiment. It is worth noting that the lesson provided by the innovative Z.T. policy giving Pinyin a primary role at the outset of the instructional program, which resulted in Chinese students learning characters faster than students in programs introducing characters from the beginning, has been largely unnoticed by teachers of Chinese in American classrooms. However, apparently independently, Ping Xu and Teresa Jen have created an innovative program based on a philosophy that has some similarity to that of the Z.T. program. And an anonymous beginner in Chinese, more perceptive than his hidebound Chinese native teachers and unhappy at having character quizzes before oral examinations, prepared for himself a dialogue that was first based on Pinyin before converting to Chinese characters. But infatuation with characters still pervades American classrooms and holds back essential improvement in instruction. “RMRB ‘Commentator’ Urges Vigorous Promotion of Pinyin,” Beijing Remin Ribao (Internet Version—WWW in Chinese 26 [Nov. 2003], p. 2). I am indebted to Victor Mair for this reference (e-mail of 7 Dec. 2003). Victor Mair, e-mails of 21 Nov. 2005 and 28 Nov. 2005 and conversation of 19 Dec. 2005. Wei Zhisheng, “Diannao ruhe puji: Jiaowei zoucuole fangxiang,” Yuwen yu Xinxi 3 (1995): 1–2. See also Li Yueqin “Geren kan Zhongwen xinxi chuli,” Yuwen Jianshe Tongxun 40 (1993): 68–72. See www.wenlin.com. See note 48. Thanks to Daniel Tschudi for his e-mail of 5 Dec. 2005 forwarding figures from Professor Yang Guobin of Barnard College, Columbia University. Hannas, William C., Asia’s Orthographic Dilemma (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1997), p. 271 and p. 314 note 5. Rohsenow, p. 33. Mair e-mail of 10 Nov. 2005 to me. Ning e-mail of 19 Dec. 2005 to me. Hannas also notes that PC inputters of Chinese text are likely to ask “why go through the trouble to convert it?” Asia’s Orthographic Dilemma (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997), p. 276. China Rights Forum 4 (2005): p. 7. Peter J. Seybolt and Gregory Kuei-ke Chiang, eds., Language Reform in China: Documents and Commentary (White Plains, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1978), pp. 232–233. Taiwan Journal, 21 Nov. 2003, p. 7. An erudite and insightful study of the linguistic changes in Taiwan that is also useful in considering the problem in the PRC is Victor H. Mair, “How to Forget Your Mother Tongue and Remember Your National Language.” Steven Ribet, “ Mind Your Language,” The Standard-China’s Business Newspaper, 19 Nov. 2005. My thanks to Victor Mair for this item. World News on Stuff.co.nz. 20 Jan. 2006. My thanks to Mark Swofford for this item. Su Peicheng: “‘Jiuci Dazhu’ duhou,” Yuwen yu Xinxi 2 (1995): 23. John DeFrancis, “China’s Literary Renaissance: A Reassessment,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 17, 4 (1985): 52–63. Jennifer 8. [sic] Lee, “ Where the PC Is Mightier Than the Pen: In China, Computer Use Erodes Traditional Handwriting, Stirring a Cultural Debate,” New York Times, 1 Feb. 2001.
Exhibits
Exhibit 1
Tolstoy's “The Prisoner of the Caucasus” translated into Latinxua by Ting Shan and Siao [Xiao] San and published in Khabarovsk in 1937 by the Far East Publishing Office.
葱 cōng ‘scallion’ 猪肉 zhūròu ‘pork’ 姜 jiāng ‘ginger’ 虾仁 xiārén ‘shrimp meat’ 香油 xiāngyóu ‘sesame oil’ 白菜 báicài ‘Chinese cabbage’ 鸡蛋 jīdàn ‘egg’ 韭菜 jiǔcài ‘chives’
Exhibit 2
Shopping list of ingredients for jiǎozi 'dumplings' written February 15, 2006, by a PRC social science researcher on a visit to my colleague Cynthia Ning, who kindly passed it on to me. I have added the printed equivalent of the list. Note that three of the thirteen different characters are rendered in Pinyin.
Dajia, San-si nian yiqian, wo weile zai Beijing zhaokai de Pinyin Fang'an Guoji Yantao Hui xiele yi pian jiaozuo "Poqie xuyao gezhonggeyang de pinyin duwu." Shijishang, zhei pian lunwen you liang ge hen buyiyang de gaozi, yi ge shi wo ziji yuanlai xie de, lingwai yi ge shi Liqing jiayi daliang de xiugai. Liang ge gaozi dou jigei Beida Zhongwen Xi de Geng Zhensheng xiansheng. Bu zhidao weishenme, lian yi ge dou meiyou deng zai huiyi de lunwenji shang. Houlai, Su Peicheng xiansheng shuo guonei yuanyi zai shenme bie de shu li chuban. You guole liang nian er meiyou renhe xiaoxi. Xianzai de qingkuang zenmeyang? Zhu Jiankang kuaile! Mei Weiheng * * * Mei Weiheng jiaoshou: 11yue10ri de dianziyoujian shoudao. Nin de lunwen <Poqie Xuyao Gezhonggeyang de Zhuyin duwu> yijing fabiao zai Beijing Youyibinguan juxing de huiyi de lunwenji limian. Shuming shi <Yuwen Xiandaihua he Hanyu Pinyin Fang'an>, Beijing Yuwen chubanshe 2004nian2yue chuban. Zhang Liqing nvshi de wenzhang <A Few Suggestions for Hanyu Pinyin Orthography> ye fabiao zai tong yiben shunei. Shifen duibuqi, meiyou jishi he nin lianxi, songshang yangshu. Qing gaozhi ruhe ba shu songshang. Duibuqi! Su Peicheng
Exhibit 3
E-mail exchange between Prof. Victor H. Mair (Mei Weiheng) and Prof. Su PeichengPutting the copper-clad, 28-pound beast of a SACD player that is the Sony DVP-S9000ES up against my vintage Rotel RCD-855 seems a bit unfair, but it’s exactly what The Spirited Uncle M had me do.
Let’s be clear here, the vaults of The Sound Lab run deep, and there’s always some sort of experimenting going on in there. Which means, as The Sound Apprentice, my audiophile training is pretty much guaranteed to include quite a bit of gear testing and tweaking by order of The Spirited Uncle M, and it starts now.
As I mentioned in “The Sound Apprentice Goes Hi-Fi (Finally),” my first hi-fi CD player was the classic Rotel RCD-855 that debuted in 1989 for $399 with its prized Philips dual 16-bit TDA-1541A DAC chip. I described it as an excellent CD player for the beginner audiophile to consider because of its solid build, excellent internals, warm sound and imaging, and it can be found for cheap ($100 or less). That said, I was more than content with it. But The Spirited Uncle M is a tweaker, a real gear junkie, and he seemingly has an audio curriculum for me to follow—there was no way the Rotel would stay in my Apprentice Lab for long:
“Yo D-Man, I picked up a Sony DVP-S9000ES, which is an excellent stereo red book CD player/transport. This player will be added to your audio lab. I happen to own 3 of these players, that's how great they are. The Rotel is over 20 years old and the Sony is around 10 years old. The technologies are different but the end result is GOOD MUSIC. When Sony made this machine it was the first DVD player out of the ES division (Elevated Standard); that's Sony's Real Good Shit Division. I don't know if you should HEAR this... it is wicked (the sound is KILLER). BEWARE OF EARGASMS TO THE MAX.”
Enter the Sony DVP-S9000ES
Being Sony’s first DVD player to don the coveted “ES” insignia, they certainly didn’t slack on the audiophile details. Debuting in 2001 for a whopping $1,500, the DVP-S9000ES boasts gorgeous design, a solid aluminum faceplate, a fully copper-plated chassis, separate audio and video circuit boards that minimize noise, the ability to disable the video circuitry entirely for critical SACD and red book CD playback, a 24-bit/96KHz DAC, two audio master clocks, enhanced digital filtration, digital optical (toslink) and coaxial outputs, and other technologies that the much older Rotel could only dream. Let the “clash of the audio titans begin” in TSUM-speak.
I connected the Rotel RCD-855 and the Sony DVP-S9000ES to the NAD C 326BEE “CD” and “DISC” inputs so I would be able to switch between them quickly when necessary and dialed in the volume to a comfortable listening position. For those that think cables make a difference, I used the WireWorld Equinox 3+ RCA interconnects on both units and their stock power cords.
The Sony has two digital audio filtering modes: “Slow” and “Sharp.” The manual states that this filters noises above 22.05 kHz (Fs is 44.1 kHz), 24 kHz (Fs is 48 kHz) or 48 kHz (Fs is above 96 kHz). Sharp is supposed to provide a wide frequency range and spatial feeling, while Slow is intended to provide a smooth and warm sound.
I chose “Slow” in an effort to keep the comparison to the warm sound of the Rotel RCD-855 as fair as possible (this has no effect on SACDs). I also had it running in “Audio Direct” mode, which disables all video circuitry to ensure the lowest noise floor possible.
With three test tracks from three different genres lined up, it was time to sit back and hear how these players matched up.
Let the Best Player Win Test Track 1: Explosions in the Sky – “Last Known Surroundings”
This is a favorite track. I love the dynamics, the continual buildups and layers of percussion, guitars, pedal effects and ghostly voices that transcend the sensitive lows and crashing highs. Plus it has some peaks throughout the song that will challenge the separation abilities of most gear.
I found the Rotel’s overall sound to have a full low-end, nice cymbal clarity and moderate separation and imaging. But when the track gets busy with blaring distortion, screaming highs and bars of cymbal crashing, I thought the mids were rolling off and losing some of their dynamics, and the cymbals and lead guitar tend to melt together into a flurry of high notes. What would the Sony do differently?
To my surprise, there was an immediate increase in the definition throughout the dynamic range, it also seems like the Sony has a slightly higher line level output, but I don’t have a SPL meter to confirm that. Light accenting brush strokes on the snare drum in the beginning of the track gained clarity and moved forward in presentation. The parts of the song with hand-clapping to the rhythm sounded surprisingly more natural. To my ears, the Sony seemed “brighter,” leaning towards the highs and projecting greater detail; but it never got to be fatiguing or harsh. I think the increase in clarity influenced the perception that the lows lost a bit of fullness, however. Or maybe it can be described as a reduction in the boominess; the bass was definitely tighter and more defined.
Test Track 2: Bonobo – “Stay the Same”
Another favorite track that I’ve been hooked on. I’ve previously noted that the sound stage had nice depth and a low noise floor on the Rotel. Andreya Triana’s voice was somewhat forward with nice touch of warmth, while the little details, like the sound of fingers sliding across guitar strings, are clear and pronounced, and Jack Wyllie’s sax was especially moody, although somewhat recessed when competing with the vocals. Of course, the bass lines are punchy and the presentation simply sounds clean.
Switching over to the Sony, a distinct crispness came into the vocals without sacrificing any of their warmth. The bass lines also seemed to have an added smoothness and tighter presentation. Repeating what was heard on the first test track, the Sony added separation in the upper mids and highs. The hesitation notes on the sax gained a new edge that only added to the moodiness and the whole track shimmered a bit more. I'd say the Sony is definitely more analytical.
Test Track 3: Iron and Wine – “Boy With a Coin”
There’s just something about Sam Beam’s unique sound and lyrics that keep me coming back for more. Listening to his albums on my hi-fi setup have only increased my appreciation for his talents and those of the musicians he collaborates with. Through the Rotel his vocals are rich and full, forward in their presentation and simply pleasing to my ears. The acoustics just sound accurate and melt together to form a nice sound stage. Of course, the percussion and bass lines had the same warm characteristics as heard in the other test tracks; it’s what the Rotel seems to do best and the sonic signature is consistent across all genres of music.
Flipping back to the Sony, Beam’s vocals once again gained an edge in clarity that the Rotel just can’t rival. It is a striking improvement to my ears. I also noted the bass had more integrity and separation from the kick drum that follows it. The Sony just produces a very clean sound with lots of detail that seems to strike a fine balance across every test track.
Final Thoughts
Despite being dated, both players continue to offer good sound and good value for a stereo setup (although neither unit particularly likes burned discs; some played, some didn't). The Rotel RCD-855 can be found for around $100 or less, and the Sony DVP-S9000ES can be found for around $175 or less, depending on condition. If you’re curious why TSUM owns three of them, it’s because it’s very difficult to find spare parts for the Sony DVP-S9000ES anymore, but if you can find a used unit in good working condition for $175 or less, he says it’s a steal.
If you like a warmer sound, the Rotel is the clear choice in this shootout. It’s simply a very musical player. For those looking for a more analytical sound and enhanced clarity in the fine details, the Sony excels. There’s simply a crispness in its sound that the Rotel doesn’t deliver; the Sony DVP-S9000ES is a very exciting player to listen to. Even my girlfriend, who thinks every piece of audio equipment is just “another black box,” commented that the Sony “sounded prettier.” I’ll take that as a win, and I think I’ll try to convince The Spirited Uncle M to let me keep this one in my listening room for a while.For other people named Peter Phillips, see Peter Phillips (disambiguation)
Peter Mark Andrew Phillips (born 15 November 1977) is a member of the British royal family. He is the elder child and only son of Anne, Princess Royal, and her first husband, Captain Mark Phillips. He is the eldest grandchild of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. After graduating from university in 2000, he worked for Jaguar followed by WilliamsF1. In 2003, while working for WilliamsF1 in Canada, he met Autumn Kelly, whom he married in St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle in 2008. For many years Phillips has worked in the sports sponsorship and management fields. He is currently fourteenth in line of succession to the British throne.
Early life and education [ edit ]
Peter (centre rear) on a 1987 Christmas card with his grandparents, sister, and cousins William and Harry
Peter Phillips was born at 10:46 am on 15 November 1977, at Lindo Wing of St Mary's Hospital, Paddington, London.[1][2] He was the first child of Princess Anne and Mark Phillips, who had married in 1973.[2] At the time of his birth, there was a 41-gun salute from the Tower of London.[2] He was baptised Peter Mark Andrew Phillips on 22 December 1977, by the then Archbishop of Canterbury Donald Coggan in the Music Room of Buckingham Palace.[3][5]
Phillips was fifth in line to the throne at birth and remained so until the birth of his cousin, Prince William, in 1982. His parents were said to have refused offers from his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II, that would have led to his being born in the peerage. Phillips was therefore the first legitimate grandchild of a monarch to be born without a title or courtesy title for more than 500 years.[2][6] Phillips has a younger sister, Zara Tindall (née Phillips; born 1981) and two younger half-sisters, Felicity Tonkin (born 1985), the daughter of Mark Phillips and his former mistress Heather Tonkin, and Stephanie Phillips (born 1997), the daughter of his father's second marriage to Sandy Pflueger.
Phillips went to Port Regis Prep School in Shaftesbury, Dorset before following other members of the Royal Family by attending Gordonstoun School in Moray, Scotland. Whilst at Gordonstoun, he was chosen to be head boy[7][8] and also played in the XV.[9] During his gap year, he went to Sydney, Australia and worked for Sports Entertainment Limited (SEL), a company he would later return to; he also worked for Jackie Stewart's Formula One racing team during that time.[10]
He then went to the University of Exeter and graduated with a degree in sports science.[9] At university, he played for the Exeter University Rugby league team.
After his graduation in 2000, Phillips worked for Jaguar as corporate hospitality manager and then for WilliamsF1 racing team, where he was sponsorship accounts manager.[7][9][11] In 2004, while working for WilliamsF1, Phillips was in a van in China with three other employees when the van was hit by a car. Phillips was uninjured.[12] He left WilliamsF1 in September 2005, for a job as a manager at the Royal Bank of Scotland in Edinburgh.[9] In March 2012, he left RBS to take on a role as managing director at SEL UK.[13]
Unlike his sister's personal life, Phillips' personal life receives only limited publicity.[7] He dated Elizabeth Lorio, a cod liver oil heiress from the United States, for two years; in 2001 they lived together for eight months.[14] Later, he had a four-month relationship with Tara Swain, a flight attendant.[15]
In August 2012, it was announced that he would be the Guest of Honour at the 2012 Rugby league Challenge Cup Final between Warrington Wolves and Leeds Rhinos at Wembley on 24 August 2012.[16]
In the year leading up to June 2016 Phillips was responsible for organising the "Patron's Lunch", in celebration of the Queen's 90th birthday and involving a parade down The Mall and a hamper picnic for 10,000 guests.[17]
Personal life [ edit ]
Phillips in 2012 with his mother
In 2003, Phillips met Autumn Kelly, a Canadian management consultant, at the Formula 1 Canadian Grand Prix in Montreal.[7] Their engagement was announced on 28 July 2007.[9][14][19]
Autumn Kelly, who was raised in the Roman Catholic Church, was received into the Church of England before her marriage. If she had been Roman Catholic at the time of the marriage, Phillips would have lost his place in the line of the succession to the throne because of the terms of the Act of Settlement 1701.[20][21][22][23] Shortly before their wedding, the couple caused some reported unease in royal circles when they were interviewed and photographed by Hello! magazine, and were reported to have been paid £500,000.[24][25][26] They married on 17 May 2008 at St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle.[26][27] The service was conducted by David Conner, the Dean of Windsor.[28] The couple lived in Hong Kong after Phillips moved positions within the Royal Bank of Scotland to head their sponsorships activities in the region.
Their first child, and the Queen's first great-grandchild, a daughter named Savannah Anne Kathleen,[29] was born on 29 December 2010 at Gloucestershire Royal Hospital.[30][31] On Saturday, 23 April, the Queen was present for the baby's baptism, which took place at Holy Cross Church in Avening, Gloucestershire, near Gatcombe Park, the home of his mother. Savannah is 15th in line to the throne.[32] On 29 March 2012, the couple's second daughter, Isla Elizabeth, was born at Gloucestershire Royal Hospital. She is 16th in line to the throne.[33] Isla was baptized on Saturday, 30 June 2012, at St. Nicholas' Church in Cherington, Gloucestershire.
Arms [ edit ]
Coat of arms of Peter Phillips Notes These arms were granted to Peter William Garside Phillips, the father of Mark Phillips and grandfather of Peter Mark Andrew Phillips, in October 1973. Mark used these arms differenced with a three-point label, and the younger Peter with a five-point label, until Mark inherited the plain arms in 1998.[34][35] Crest On a Wreath of the colours, a spur rowed upward or, winged argent, enclosing a lozenge encharged with a label gules. Escutcheon Per chevron azure and Or, in chief a horse courant argent, and in base a spring of forget-me-not flowers, slipped and leaved proper.[34] Motto Pro rege et patria (For king and country).
Ancestry [ edit ]Gulen, an Islamic preacher, has been in self-imposed exile in the US since 1999. He started his movement, known as Hizmet (Service) in the 1970s, and has been accruing millions of followers around the world ever since.
Charities, schools and other organisations in the United States, Turkey, Asia and Africa are affiliated with him. Some of the charter schools in the US have been the target of law-enforcement probes.
Gulen supported Erdogan’s Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) in its rise to power at the start of last decade. The preacher had always encouraged his followers to get a good education, making them well suited to help the new government.
Members of the group became key civil servants, swelling the ranks of the police and judiciary in particular. Some also went to the military. Others, opened banks, businesses and media organisations.
As allies, the two tried to take down the vestiges of the old military tutelage in state institutions. Hundreds went up on trial in the Ergenekon cases launched in 2007, though nearly all have since been released, with much of the evidence doctored.
Tensions between the two men began to increase in recent years. The exact reasons were never clear.
The struggle became public in late 2013, when prosecutors launched corruption probes against the government, which Erdogan weathered, while blaming Gulenists for the investigations and the release of phone taps, in which top officials appear to be corrupt.
Turkey has since dubbed Gulen’s movement a terrorist organisation, even before the latest coup attempt. Thousands of alleged Gulenists were either arrested, purged from the civil service or shifted within state institutions to lessen their influence.
But what caused the tensions?
Erdogan and Gulen fought over foreign policy – including Syria and Israel – and domestic issues, such as the Kurdish question, including an attempted peace process between the state and the armed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).
There were also signs of Erdogan’s upset over the wide-ranging arrests during Ergenekon, and he even came out to defend a general who was detained.
“It is not only two egos, but the egos are clashing because they have different visions for the country and both are leaders of Islamist movements. By 2013, they were no longer able to work together,” says Ilhan Tanir, a Washington-based Turkey analyst.
“Turkey was not big enough for these two.”
A mystery also remains about why Gulen remained in Pennsylvania after the AKP’s rise to power after 2002 and especially after 2007, when the party held not only the government but also the presidency, overruling the military, which long had influence over politics.
“He says he stayed in America for health reasons. I don’t understand why he didn’t come after 2010 or 2011 when Erdogan was firmly in control and winning elections by wide margins,” Tanir says.
Obviously he was unsure about his safety.”
The US is demanding Turkey present solid evidence linking Gulen himself to the coup plot.
Analysts say Gulenists may indeed be involved in the attempt, but others might have been too.
Whether the preacher himself knew anything remains to be proven. He strongly denies the allegations.3D printing—a manufacturing technique by which objects are built from digital data in a way analogous to how computer text is printed on a page—has captured the imagination of many with its potential to offer flexible, inexpensive manufacturing for widespread use. 3D printers have been used to build everything from rockets to houses to guns to other 3D printers, their capabilities limited only by access to a low-cost 3D printer, a set of digital blueprints, and some ingenuity.
3D printing aficionados now include physicians, medical researchers, and patients, many of whom are beginning to explore what this technology might mean for health and health care. While not a panacea, 3D printing is increasingly finding its place in patient care, from its expanding use in surgical planning to the vision of printing whole new organs for transplantation (Video).
Video Summary: Medical Applications of 3D Printing Technologies
What Is 3D Printing?
Once a niche tool for industrial prototyping, 3D printing technology is based on the concept of “additive” manufacturing—that is, 3D printing builds structures by depositing material layer by layer. This is in contrast to standard manufacturing techniques, which often rely on creating structures by cutting, molding, or otherwise manipulating raw materials. As a consequence, 3D printing is flexible and can create myriad structures in a variety of materials, in nearly any shape or size. 3D printers are now capable of using components as varied as ceramics, sandstone, and chocolate.
3D printers leverage the advantages of computer design by making it simple to translate these designs into tangible objects. In this way, 3D printing serves as a bridge between digital 3D models and the physical world. Digital models can be widely distributed and modified, democratizing manufacturing in a way not previously imagined. Large communities with vast and varied interests have formed around sharing the digital data used to print models: one site, for example, contains more than 100 000 digital models of all kinds, which users can freely download and print.1
These communities have been empowered by the emergence of low-cost consumer-grade machines that have made 3D printers broadly available. New applications for 3D printing continue to appear every day: artisans now create individualized jewelry on demand, and maintenance workers can print replacement parts for household devices. Indeed, 3D printing may serve as a means of distributing manufacturing in the same way that the Internet distributes information.
3D Printing in Today’s (and Tomorrow’s) Medical Practice
Although 3D printing applications in medicine are increasing rapidly, its application in dentistry has been established for more than a decade,2 allowing rapid fabrication of molds for many common dental implants. More recently, head and neck surgeons have used 3D printing to provide preoperative models for complex surgeries. For example, several facial reconstructive surgeries are performed by first harvesting the fibula, which is then fashioned in the operating room into new bony structures. These surgeries can now be augmented using computer-planning programs to generate surgical plans that determine the ideal way to harvest and incise the fibula to create a reconstructive graft. 3D-printed models translate preoperative imaging data into useful tools that may help surgeons both reduce operating room time and potentially improve surgical results.3-5
In addition, using models based on imaging of real-world patients, 3D printing can be a useful tool in the instruction of normal and pathologic anatomy. For instance, at our institution, the use of 3D models to educate trainees about complex traumatic bony fracture patterns is being explored. These models may also be used to communicate imaging studies to patients in a tangible, easy-to-understand format.
Printing Devices, Cells, and Organs
Outside the clinic and operating room, researchers are using 3D printers to reshape health care. The flexibility of 3D printing allows investigators and manufacturers to create medical devices with a broad range of biological and physical properties. When paired with medical imaging, this flexibility may be leveraged to fabricate devices tailored to an individual patient’s anatomy in a way similar to how “omics” data are applied to create personalized therapeutics. For example, a customized polymer splint has been used to prevent airway collapse in neonatal bronchomalacia.6 This splint was composed of a biocompatible polymer, designed to be naturally resorbed within 3 years, and was specifically tailored to the neonate’s anatomy using 3D imaging.
Bioengineering researchers have begun to expand the range of printed materials to biological scaffolds and cells. Although these “bioprinters” are in their infancy, this technology is advancing quickly to create tools to facilitate drug discovery. Tiny microcosms of organs can be printed onto an in vitro substrate, where they are exposed to potential drugs. Using these “mini organs,” the effects of drugs and drug toxicity on human tissues may be observed without conducting in vivo studies. The “body-on-a-chip” project is combining bioprinting with microfluidics, which, if successful, could lead to extremely high-throughput drug screening.7 In addition, regenerative medicine researchers are exploring the possibility of using 3D printers to build biocompatible scaffolds with porous microstructures embedded with differentiation and growth factors. These scaffolds can then be seeded with stem cells to regenerate organs with the microscopic and macroscopic characteristics of a normal organ. However, many challenges to 3D organ printing remain, including providing appropriate vascularization and inducing robust stem cell growth and differentiation.
Medical 3D Printing in the Garage
Far removed from the aspirations of bioprinting, a community of health care professionals, patients, and advocates is emerging to create homegrown, do-it-yourself devices to fill individual medical needs. For example, an inexpensive 3D-printable prosthetic hand was developed for a 5-year-old boy.8 The digital blueprints for this hand, which could be modified as the child grew, have been made freely available for download and can be reproduced by a printer for approximately $10 worth of materials.
Homegrown innovation has spawned dozens of medically related startups. For instance, Bespoke Innovations creates 3D-printed prosthetics by tailoring aesthetics and functionality to each patient’s needs and wishes. Similarly, Evill Designs develops 3D-printed casts for broken extremities based on radiographs and 3D laser scans of the limb. These 3D-printed casts are made with a durable lightweight polymer material with holes to allow air to circulate beneath the cast.
Safety and Regulatory Considerations
Critical questions accompany the broad application of 3D printers in medicine. Few studies have evaluated the use of 3D-printed models for preoperative planning, education, or patient communication. A similar paucity of data exists for 3D-printed devices. At this early phase, it is unclear what the ultimate value of 3D printing will be for health and how it will specifically affect outcomes.
Additionally, the pathway to ensuring the safety of these devices remains unclear. Will previously cleared devices need additional oversight when produced by 3D printing? Many versions of a printable medical device may exist; will they all be subject to oversight as separate devices? How will the spread of design files be regulated? The US Food and Drug Administration has signaled that these difficult issues will need to be addressed soon—and will likely have significant implications for 3D printing in medicine.9
As 3D printing continues to integrate into medical practice, physicians and patients face the challenge of understanding this complex technology, taking advantage of its potential, and weighing its potential risks. Meanwhile, 3D printing is already beginning to reshape medicine. Although clicking the “print” button can be enough to appreciate the promise of 3D printing, its implications for health care may be substantially more complex.
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Corresponding Author: Mark H. Michalski, MD, Department of Diagnostic Radiology, Yale University School of Medicine, PO Box 208042, New Haven, CT 06520 (mark.michalski@yale.edu).
Conflict of Interest Disclosures: The authors have completed and submitted the ICMJE Form for Disclosure of Potential Conflicts of Interest. Dr Michalski is a PhD candidate in the Investigative Medicine Program, which is funded in part by grants from the National Center for Advancing Translational Science, a component of the National Institutes of Health, and reported serving as a consultant to Butterfly Network Inc and Hyperfine Research Inc. Dr Ross reported receiving support from Medtronic Inc and Johnson & Johnson Inc to develop methods of clinical trial data sharing, from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to develop and maintain performance measures used for public reporting, and from the US Food and Drug Administration to develop methods for postmarket surveillance of medical devices; receiving support from the National Institute on Aging (K08 AG032886) and the American Federation for Aging Research through the Paul B. Beeson Career Development Award Program; and serving as a member of a scientific advisory board for FAIR Health Inc.Video games are believed by many to be a waste of time - but this is something consistently being challenged by the people who love them. And despite the fact that video games just can't seem shrug off the label of "just for kids", new research (PDF) would suggest that you're never too old for them.
And as the debate |
ers, hooking up some electrodes to my temple. They were showing me a prototype of their "thinking cap," which they said increased focus by zapping your brain. Fast-forward to 2014 and Marc Andreessen — father of the modern web browser and the biggest name in tech investing today — just backed a $1.5 million seed round in Halo, a high-tech headband that promises to boost brain function through "neuromodulation," a fancy word for pumping electricity through your skull.
The Halo is the creation of Amol Sarva and Daniel Chao. Sarva is an entrepreneurial journeyman with the Peek email device and the Spotify-friendly Gramofon router on his resume. "After my company was sold I realized I had the freedom to pursue whatever was most interesting to me. So I made a list," says Sarva. He had read a story a decade earlier about increasing intelligence and creativity by directly stimulating the brain, and he says it "was the most amazing thing I had ever heard about and I had to pursue it."
"Neuromodulation," a fancy word for pumping electricity through your skull
Sarva hooked up with Chao, now Halo's CEO, and Brett Wingeier, both of whom had spent years working at NeuroPace, a company that creates medical devices that are implanted in the brain and use electric stimulation to alleviate seizures in epileptic patients. "That is fascinating and important work, but we wanted to try and create something that didn't require invasive surgery to use and had benefits for the average person," says Sarva. Recent studies at Oxford on transcranial electric stimulation have show it can improve math skills without an implant.
"There was this bright flash and then I was basically blind."
Together the three of them founded Halo Neuroscience. They began building simple prototypes using batteries and boards they bought at RadioShack, working with a community of DIY hackers. "It was pretty crazy," admits Sarva. During one early trial a hacker placed the electrodes too far forward, in front of his brain and directly next to his eyes. "I turned it on and there was this bright flash and then I was basically blind," he told me. The test had sent a direct blast into his optic nerve. "Luckily it cleared up after a few minutes," says Sarva. "We're much better informed now about which parts of the brain we need to stimulate."
The company isn't revealing much about its product yet, citing a range of intellectual property and safety priorities it needs to keep in mind as it seeks federal approval from the FDA. Sarva did say that the company plans to use a range of electromagnetic approaches, including electricity, magnetic fields, infrared light, and radio waves. Clinical trials are expected to start later this summer.By Emma Brennand
Earth News reporter
Young parrots tend to experiment with both feet before they settle on one.
Handedness was once a trait believed to be unique to humans. But it turns out that parrots prefer to use one side of their body more than the other too. A study published in the journal Biology Letters has found that almost all parrots prefer to use either their left eye and left foot, or their right eye and foot. Each bird becomes "left or right footed" in this way to help them scrutinise food, researchers believe. The discovery adds to growing evidence that even lower vertebrates prefer to use one side of the body more often to perform routine tasks. Young Sulphur-crested cockatoos all end up being left-footed, but when they first come out of the nest they are equally clumsy with both
Dr Culum Brown
Macquarie University, Australia
Parrot facts, pictures & stunning videos: BBC Wildlife Finder A team of researchers from Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia studied the eye and foot preferences of 322 birds across 16 species of Australian parrot. "We looked at the eye preferences these birds have," explains Dr Culum Brown, the project's lead researcher. "For every species except one, there was a very strong correlation between the eye they view food with and the foot they use to pick it up." The exception is the cockatiel, the smallest species of Australian cockatoo, which showed no relationship between eye and foot preference. The researchers suggest this difference may have evolved because of differences in cockatiel foraging behaviour, as cockatiels graze on small grass seeds that may require little coordination between the eyes and feet. Lefty or righty? Dr Brown's research shows that in four species of the 16, almost every individual member of each parrot species was either left handed or "left footed", or right footed, showing the preference for using one side has somehow become fixed in the population. "Indeed we have yet to find a right handed Sulphur-crested cockatoo, says Dr Brown. "It is interesting because there are very few examples of extreme foot preferences in any animals except humans." Foot preference also differed within parrot species families, with some species in the same family being left footed and others right footed. In humans, approximately 10 per cent of the population is left handed. Previous research has shown that handedness in humans reflects the use of one brain hemisphere over the other, a behaviour scientists call "laterality". Preference for one limb suggests that an animal's brain function is also lateralised, with one side of the brain dominating control of certain tasks. The team believes the hemisphere of the brain involved in the food selection of parrots may also be the area responsible for "footedness". "We think this is probably true of lots of animals, perhaps even humans. " Dr Culum told BBC News. "It is a reflection of the dominant hemisphere that is involved in analysing information about the potential food item." He adds: "Just like in human children, young parrots tend to experiment with both hands before they settle on one hand or the other."
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StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable versionYou do know that "Hispanic" isn't solely tied to being from Spain right? I'm honestly not trying to be rude or anything I swear! So I hope it doesn't come off that way I was just wondering if you knew because I am Hispanic. Specifically Mexican. And Mexican does fall under Hispanic. It describes a region you're from including Spain but not exclusively Spain.
What… the fuck is this ask?
‘Hispanic’ does NOT apply to Mexico, unless you want to count the piece of shit Spanish colonizers that sailed over here and destroyed the already existing cultures of the indigenous peoples of Mexico (and South America).
Saying that Mexicans are ‘Hispanic’ is basically telling them that their culture is not their own, but rather that of the people that colonized, murdered, and destroyed their ancestors.
But hey, if you want to associate yourself with the Spanish, by all means. Knock yourself out.Alberta’s small and mid-sized business owners appear to be in a good mood these days.
Huh? That may be people’s first reaction to that statement considering the province’s recession this year and the thousands of job layoffs, particularly in the oilpatch. Throw in some long work weeks and sacrifices to their personal lives and you may wonder why entrepreneurs aren’t in a more foul mood.
But the latest ATB Financial Business Beat Survey, released on Tuesday, says 77 per cent of business owners in Alberta are happy — and 22 per cent even say they are very happy.
Interestingly, a similar survey earlier this year of Albertans in general found only 13 per cent said they were very happy.
The survey found that 78 per cent of owners said the success of their business is important to their overall happiness. But it also found that 34 per cent sacrifice their work-life balance for their businesses, while 32 per cent have lost time with family and friends.
“I guess it’s sinking in at this point that they’re seeing the economic challenges, they’re reading about them. But I think what it really still says is that a lot of business owners haven’t really seen the impact on their immediate business yet,” said Wellington Holbrook, ATB’s executive vice-president of business and agriculture.
“The survey was just done. It’s very, very recent. Things like the layoffs that are happening in Calgary right now probably haven’t translated into how much they’re shopping at restaurants or shopping at retail stores and things like that yet. But we anticipate that’s going to start happening now.”
Rob Roach, director of Insight with ATB Financial’s Economics and Research team, which examines the economic and social forces that affect Albertans’ quality of life, said the latest numbers from the monthly Labour Force Survey by Statistics Canada show that self-employment in Alberta increased by one per cent between August and September. This translates into about 3,800 more Albertans working for themselves. There were 375,700 self-employed Albertans in September, which is 16 per cent of total employment.
“Self-employment tends to jump around from month-to-month so it is hard to interpret what this recent increase might mean,” said Roach in a research note. “We probably all know someone who has been laid off because of the drop in the price of oil who has decided to give self-employment a go. ‘I’m consulting right now’ is a common refrain. However, the number of Albertans running their own business remains down from where it was a year ago, suggesting that the large number of people who have lost their jobs during the downturn have not migrated en masse into the ranks of the self-employed.
“It is arguably a good sign that self-employment has edged upward because it means at least some Albertans feel confident enough to start a new business — even if they were ‘pushed’ into it because work as an employee is hard to come by.”
mtoneguzzi@calgaryherald.com
Twitter.com/MTone123Taking exhibition art to a new level, 2011 TED Prize winner, the anonymous JR, is now making Shanghai his canvas by etching huge black and white photographs on the facades of crumbling or dilapidated buildings. His previous work follows the same style, using a team of volunteers to mount a collection of expressions onto various places in poverty stricken zones, spanning the globe from Rio to Kenya, while taking care to operate under the radar. In his travel to the Middle East, he mounted supposedly the largest illegal exhibition in the world on the wall marking the border between Israel and Palestine with comic expressions of a rabbi, a priest, and an imam.
Hailing from France, JR fiercely guards his privacy and prefers the label “photograffeur” (graffeur = graffiti artist in French) rather than the more esteemed title of street artist. Street artist implies that one actually asks permission to plaster their creations, something he doesn’t do.
Incredibly enough, JR never faced any harassment from the Chinese police while he was working. No specifics on where these enormous murals are actually located, but for those unable to stumble upon these blown up portraits, Bund18 will showcase JR’s Wrinkles of the City project running this Sunday through to December 12.
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PrintWhen it comes to stratospheric Atlanta rents, YOO on the Park is pushing the envelope right now.
Standing 25 posh stories, the not-quite-finished tower up the street from Piedmont Park is offering some units for more than $3 per square foot — a benchmark once thought impossible in Atlanta. (For example: a 540-square-foot studio for $1,630).
Extrapolate that number to the size of your apartment/condo for perspective — and try not to cry.
What’s more, some of the choicest apartments here are asking for — and getting — nearly $6,000 per month.
The building has succeeded in renting three of four 1,923-square-foot penthouses at $5,875 monthly. It’s no surprise the fourth unit isn’t occupied, because it won’t be finished until mid-January.
Developers with Trillist have been saying this project would offer sophistication, elegance, next-gen technology, and world-class amenities like Atlanta has never seen before it broke ground on 13th Street.
Among other perks, the 245-unit building boasts a saline pool, cabinetry imported from Milan, in-unit 1-gigabit Wi-Fi and fiber connectivity, an outdoor yoga terrace, and a signature Fido-pampering service called Pet Respite℠.
At last check, the near-$6,000 stratosphere is significantly more expensive than the going rate for three-bedroom (but smaller) penthouses at Buckhead’s Cyan on Peachtree, where rents raised eyebrows upon the building’s debut last year.Reed Saxon/Associated Press
An annual report from a regional Federal Reserve bank is typically a collection of banalities and clichés with some pictures of local worthies who serve on the board.
And so it is with this year’s annual report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, whose pages are graced by the smiling, stolid portraits of board members who run local companies like Whataburger Restaurants.
But the text is something else entirely. It’s a radical indictment of the nation’s financial system. The lead essay, which is endorsed by the president of the Dallas Fed, contends that despite the great crisis of 2008, a cartel of megabanks is still hindering the economic recovery and the institutions remain too big to fail.
The country’s biggest banks look much as they did before the 2008 financial crisis — only bigger. They have “increased oligopoly power” and “remain difficult to control because they have the lawyers and the money to resist the pressures of federal regulation,” Harvey Rosenblum, the head of the Dallas Fed’s research department, wrote in the essay.
Having seen the biggest banks make risky bets, crush the economy and get rewarded leaves “a residue of distrust for the government, the banking system, the Fed and capitalism itself,” Mr. Rosenblum wrote.
Peter Foley/Bloomberg News
It’s one thing for the Occupy movement to point out how bailing out the biggest banks — with little cost to their executives or shareholders and creditors — has demolished credibility. It’s quite another for top officials in the Federal Reserve system to put it in an annual report.
As for Dodd-Frank’s “resolution authority” — the power to dissolve big financial institutions that Barney Frank famously hailed as a death panel for banks — well, not so much. “For all its bluster, Dodd-Frank leaves TBTF entrenched,” Mr. Rosenblum wrote, using the acronym for “too big to fail.”
Yes, Dodd Frank has mechanisms in place to prevent taxpayer bailouts of the largest banks, he concedes. Banks are supposed to have “living wills” that explain how they could be seized and wound down while minimizing the use of taxpayer money.
But the Dallas Fed is deeply skeptical that this would work in real life.
“We know under the current structure that the government would be called on once again,” the president of the Dallas Fed, Richard W. Fisher, told me. He has been giving a series of speeches about the continuing problem of “too big to fail.”
The biggest banks are like aspen trees (to borrow a famous, but incorrect, metaphor made by Scooter Libby in a different context): their roots are intertwined and they turn color at the same time. “If you believe the next time the problem will center on one institution and one only, I cross my fingers and am reasonably confident” that regulators will be able to liquidate it in an orderly fashion, Mr. Rosenblum told me. But that one institution would have to be largely in one market, with few lines of business and few connections to other institutions.
Obviously, there’s almost no giant financial institution that fits that description. It’s more likely that the next crisis will be similar to this one, one with “too many to fail,” Mr. Rosenblum contends.
Another problem, the report points out, is that the decision now doesn’t rest with the Fed or some institution that has some slight hope of being neutral, but with the Treasury secretary and the president. In other words, saving a big bank now will be even more political than before. Sure, some future president could act courageously, but the Federal Reserve bankers in Texas aren’t so naïve as to see that as likely.
Crucially, the Dallas Fed argues that these problems are making the system vulnerable to a future crisis and that the financial oligopoly is undermining the economic recovery and the Fed’s efforts to revive growth.
“Monetary policy cannot be effective when a major portion of the banking system is undercapitalized,” Mr. Rosenblum wrote in the report. “Many of the biggest banks have sputtered, their balance sheets still clogged with toxic assets accumulated in the boom years.”
Unfortunately for our banking regulation system, critics in the regional Federal Reserve banks haven’t had much influence on regulatory policy.
One reason is that the regional Fed officials seem to be talking their own book, or can be dismissed as doing so. Outside of New York, San Francisco and Richmond, Va., the regional Feds oversee only the small and midsize banks that compete with the “too big to fail” banks. The small guys suffer when the big banks are unfairly subsidized by the government, so the regional Feds can be brushed off as merely cheerleading for their team.
Mr. Fisher explained to me that, on the contrary, the Dallas Fed should be heeded because it has experience with “too big to fail”: During the savings-and-loan crisis of the late 1980s and early ’90s, some of the biggest banks to fail were from Texas.
But another major reason that they are disregarded may be that the rebel regional Fed presidents have been skeptical about the Fed’s aggressive and successful monetary policy and overly worried about inflation and the vulnerability of the dollar. That may have undermined their solid case on bank regulation.
Mr. Fisher, the Dallas Fed president, has been one of the fiercest inflation hawks. He has dissented against the Fed’s efforts to buy longer-term assets, known as quantitative easing, which was an effort to stimulate the economy. (He has been less worried about inflation more recently, arguing that unemployment is the top problem for the economy.)
“Sound money and sound structure go hand in glove,” Mr. Fisher said.
Thomas M. Hoenig, the former president of the Kansas City Fed, also articulated strong, compelling views on bank regulation coupled with a hard-money fever that is discredited in most economic circles. (Mr. Hoenig has been nominated to be vice chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which — an economist might say — is his highest and best use.)
The top bank regulators at the Fed have embraced unorthodox monetary policies, but have also had scant courage and originality in challenging the current structure of the country’s financial system.
Not so with the Dallas Fed. Its report champions “the ultimate solution for TBTF — breaking up the nation’s biggest banks into smaller units.”
Hear, hear.The trainers of a younger man? Michael Jordan models the ultimate sneakers (Picture: Henderson/Getty Images)
‘Shooooooze!’ squealed the guy behind the counter at The Size?
He pointed at my mate’s feet as he entered the store, causing all the other shoppers to gaze at his new Air Jordans. Despite the fact that he is a 33-year-old IT consultant, his 7s sure get him respect on ‘da street’.
I’m a big basketball fan thanks to Michael Jordan. He was the best the game has ever seen – and arguably the greatest sportsman of all time. And I also love his trainers. Always have.
When Mike was doing his thing for the Chicago Bulls, I would have killed for a black pair of Js.They were just too damn expensive for a schoolboy with a £5-a-week paper round.
I’m now at a time in my life when I can splash three figures on footwear though. Trouble is, I’m not sure Jordans would look right on me any more.
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I was just reading up on the history of the brand. Apparently MJ was fined $5,000 every time he wore the first pair created for him by Nike on the court.
They had to have some white on them you see, league regulations. His were only red and black – the Bulls’ colours. But he took the fine and wore them anyway. God, he was cool.
As well as this little story on the Wiki page, it also lists notable wearers of Air Jordans. Alongside NBA stars of today there is a list of other notables who wear them outside of sport – Drake, Nelly, Eminem and Ghostface Killah.
Drake can wear ’em (Picture: Scott Gries/Scott Gries/Invision/AP)
There’s a theme there – rappers. American hip hop stars whose personal styling – cap, gold jewellery, oversized white tees and jeans that don’t cover their arses – would make me look like I was walking round in fancy dress. Js at the bottom of this type of ensemble work because they are chunky enough to stay visible under the tide of denim. And they are bold too – a status symbol in the superficial world of hip hop.
US rapper and Air Jordan enthusiast Eminem (Picture: ANDRIEU/AFP/Getty Images)
My mate’s not a rapper though. And he’s pulling them off. He does dress a bit more ‘street’ than I do though – baggy Diesel jeans and Obey T-shirts. And Nike have been producing Air Jordans in more-subtle colours recently, like the grey Retro 10s.
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So I think the answer is that you can do Air Jordans as a thirty-something non-rapper – but only if you choose the right ones and match them with the right gear.
Remember, Mike spent $5,000 every time he wore his first pair. If you don’t already have a wardrobe full of baggy jeans and big T-shirts, you might have to shell out a little extra as well.Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull says Europe let security slip ahead of Brussels attack
Updated
Malcolm Turnbull has criticised security arrangements in Europe ahead of the attacks in Brussels, arguing they had been allowed to "slip".
Key points: PM praises Australia's border security arrangements in wake of Brussels attacks
Bill Shorten says it's "too soon" to speculate on the weakness of Europe's security
Australia's terrorism threat level remains unchanged
Australians urged to reconsider Belgium travel plans
Opposition Leader Bill Shorten has responded to Mr Turnbull's analysis, saying it was too soon to "hand out advice".
The Prime Minister has praised Australia's border security arrangements in the wake of the attacks in Belgium, which have killed 34 people and injured more than 200.
But Mr Turnbull said he could not rule out the possibility of a future terrorist attack domestically.
"You cannot guarantee that there will be no terrorist incident," Mr Turnbull told ABC News.
"But I can assure Australians that our security system, our border protection, our domestic security arrangements, are much stronger than they are in Europe where regrettably they allowed security to slip."
Mr Turnbull directly related the events overnight with the wider approach to security in Europe.
"That weakness in European security is not unrelated to the problems they've been having in recent times," he said.
Mr Shorten cautioned against speculative comments about the factors behind the attacks.
"I think it's premature for the Prime Minister be telling the Belgians what they did wrong within 24 hours of what happened in Belgium," Mr Shorten said.
"For me, today, is about recognising that people have lost their lives — innocent people have lost their lives.
"No doubt the hard questions will be asked in coming days."
Australian threat level unchanged
The Federal Government is not increasing Australia's terrorism threat level, which remains unchanged at 'probable'.
The Community and Public Sector Union has postponed strike action at the nation's international airports that was scheduled to begin at midnight.
That decision followed pressure from the Prime Minister for the union to reconsider given the global security environment.
The Department of Foreign Affairs has updated its travel advice for Belgium, urging Australians to reconsider travelling to the country in the wake of the attacks.
There are no reports of any Australians being injured or killed.
Mr Turnbull said Australia and Belgium were united in the fight against terrorism, and he condemned the attacks as cowardly.
"We are allies in this battle," Mr Turnbull told the ABC.
"Indeed, Australia is allied with Belgium in this battle just as our forebears were 100 years ago in the fields of Flanders, in the First World War.
"We are absolutely shoulder to shoulder with Belgium."
Belgium 'under-resourced', European security expert says
Belgium does not have the right ratio of personnel to track persons of interest, Aberystwyth University senior lecturer in European Security Alistair Shepherd has told ABC NewsRadio.
"That's where I think the problem is coming from," Dr Shepherd said.
"The fact that they are under-resourced is shown by the fact that there was a network of people with quite advanced plans."
He said the problem was the number of people the Government was trying to track simultaneously.
"It's not necessarily that their quality isn't as good as a lot of European countries — they provided good intelligence in the end to Paris," Dr Shepherd said.
"It's the vast numbers of people they they're trying to follow.
"Belgium's one of the highest per capital senders of recruits into Syria for training and for fighting on behalf of Islamic State."
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Topics: government-and-politics, world-politics, unrest-conflict-and-war, terrorism, parliament, federal-parliament, australia
First posted"Free space optical communications is a line-of-sight (LOS) technology that transmits a modulated beam of visible or infrared light through the atmosphere for broadband communications. In a manner similar to fiber optical communications, free space optics uses a light emitting diode (LED) or laser (light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation) point source for data transmission. However, in free space optics, an energy beam is collimated and transmitted through space rather than being guided through an optical cable. These beams of light, operating in the TeraHertz portion of the spectrum, are focused on a receiving lens connected to a high sensitivity receiver through an optical fiber."
The Pisa researchers.
(Credit: Corriere Della Sera.it)
Scientists in Pisa, Italy claim to have set a new world record for the fastest wireless data transmission. They report that during an uninterrupted 12-hour experiment, they were able to achieve throughput speeds above 1.2 Terabits per second; which they say beats the previous wireless data transmission speed record of 160 Gigabits per second by Korean scientists. The researchers claim that speeds of this magnitude can typically only be achieved using fiber optics.The technology that the Pisa scientists utilized to achieve such high bandwidth, actually shares a significant similarity with fiber optics: Both technologies use optical communications. Unlike Wi-Fi or microwave communications, which use radio-based transmissions, the Pisa scientists used a Technology called free-space optical communications, which transmits data using light. The Harvard Broadband Communication Laboratory provides this explanation of Free-Space Optical Communications:Free space optical communications has often been considered as means for " inter-satellite communications " of spacecraft, as "it is possible to transmit tens of megabits per second or more over many thousands of kilometers, using moderate laser average powers of the order of a few watts" in the vacuum of space. On Earth, however, there are a number of challenges that currently limit the range of free space optical communications to only a few kilometers.The Harvard Broadband Communication Laboratory states, "although relatively unaffected by rain and snow, free space optical communication systems can be severely affected by fog and atmospheric turbulence." Fog is a problem because the size of water droplets in fog "can modify light characteristics or completely hinder the passage of light through a combination of absorption, scattering, and reflection." One atmospheric problem is "scintillation," which is essentially air pockets with different densities that act as lenses that impact the "temporal and spatial variation in light intensity." Another atmospheric issue is "beam wander," which is "when turbulent wind current (eddies) larger than the diameter of the transmitted optical beam cause a slow, but significant, displacement of the transmitted beam."One of the biggest challenges that free space optical communications faces--whether in space or on Earth--is that communications are limited to line-of-site. Unlike some radio communications, free space optical communications requires that no obstacles interfere with the beam, and it cannot bend around objects.The Pisa team is made up of scientists from the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies of Pisa, Waseda University in Tokyo, and the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in Tokyo. The team is led by Ernesto Ciaramella, who is an Associate Professor in Telecommunication at Sant'Anna. Ciaramella proposes that one way to get around a number of these limitations would be to develop a communications technology that uses a combination of "photonics and radio." While Ciaramella did not elaborate on how such a scenario would be implemented, it is possible to envision a system where free space optical communications is used for back-end communications, and radio-based communications (such as Wi-Fi or WiMAX) are used for the last hundred feet or "last mile."Note: This story first came to our attention on EngadgetComing Soon
Antoine Griezmann: The Making of a Legend
With heart and determination, Antoine Griezmann overcame his small stature to become one of the world’s top soccer players and a World Cup champion.
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Opposites Guy and Sam take a road trip to save an endangered animal, learning to try new things like hope, friendship, and a certain delectable dish.
White Lines
When her brother is discovered dead, a Manchester woman leaves her quiet life to travel to Ibiza, where she seeks the truth about his disappearance.
Rhythm + Flow
Judges Cardi B, Chance the Rapper and T.I. search for the next breakout hip-hop star in this music competition series.
The Eddy (Working Title)
A jazz club in the heart of multicultural Paris faces danger in this musical drama series from "La La Land" director Damien Chazelle.
Medical Police
Two American doctors who discover a deadly virus in Brazil are recruited as government agents in a race to find a cure and uncover a dark conspiracy.
Jimmy Carr: The Best of Ultimate Gold Greatest Hits
Nothing is off limits as Jimmy Carr serves up the most outrageous jokes from his stand-up career in a special that's not for the faint of heart.
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Italian comedian Edoardo Ferrario riffs on life at 30 and unpacks the peculiarities of global travel, social media and people who like craft beer.NEWARK -- Urged to set an example for cities across the country and imbued with a sense of justice, Newark top brass welcomed 64 new police officers to its ranks Monday.
"It is a very difficult time to be a police officer in America today, particularly in these cities," Mayor Ras Baraka told the officers at the St. James A.M.E Church.
"I know that you are more than prepared to get on these streets and do what's necessary to make sure that you defend those who can't defend themselves, that you bring justice to this community. Every block that you walk on and every step that you take...you represent the good and the best of us."
The new officers will grow Newark's police force to 1,035 and help replenish the department after sweeping layoffs in 2010 cut more than 160 officers. The totals are still down from the about 1,337 officers who were employed by the department prior to the layoffs. At its peak the department numbered 1,700.
250 recruits will be added to'strained' Newark police force, officials say Police recruits have been approved, officials announced Tuesday.
"You have chosen the best career in the world because you can change lives every day," Public Safety Director Anthony Ambrose told the new officers, who sat neatly in the church pews. "There is an old saying that your first impression is also your last impression, so make sure you leave a positive impression with the people you come into contact with."
"We definitely have progress and you sure will add to the progress of 2017," Ambrose added.
He said the city saw a 13 percent reduction in overall crime last year compared to the year prior and a 10 percent decrease in violence over the same time period.
New officer Mapletine Braswell, 29, of Newark, said the experience felt "surreal." She graduated from the Morris County Public Safety Training Academy after trying for the second time.
"I was fortunate to have a second chance," said Braswell, who was cheered on by her young son. "(My son) saw me from the beginning to this point and I'm happy to show him the resilience paid off."
Traval Henry Junior, 14, yelled "That's my mom!" as his mother, Braswell, received a leadership award from the union. "To see her make it felt good, to see my mother finally become a cop," he said after he gave her a bouquet of flowers. "She didn't quit."
New officer Corey Alexander, 27, of Orange, said he was looking forward "to (being) out in the streets with the people because that's what policing is about."
"Hopefully, I can be a part of the change that the city is looking to make," he added.
Officers spent 26 weeks training at the police academy and five weeks training with Newark Police. The new hires will spend the first six months in the community-focused division, walking all the wards.
During the ceremony, Baraka spoke passionately to the new recruits, telling them to "take God with you."
"You take him with you and you hold him close to your chest. Hold him close to you and make sure that you get home to your family safe and make sure you bring justice to our community," he said.
Ambrose, too, had a piece of advice.
"There's one other thing you must bring with you: thermal underwear," he said as the audience laughed. "You will be walking all five wards of the city."
Karen Yi may be reached at kyi@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter at @karen_yi or on Facebook.GAINESVILLE, Fla. - At the end of the day, it just didn't twerk out.
A noise complaint made about a Gainesville woman landed her in jail after she refused to stop twerking on her car and playing loud music, the Independent Florida Alligator reported.
It was 3:15 a.m. Saturday when Gainesville police found Danielle Lanae Jefferson, 35, dancing to loud rap music, according to a police report.
The officers were responding to a noise complaint placed by Jefferson’s neighbors, alleging that Jefferson had been playing the music for more than 20 minutes.
When they asked her to turn down the music, she refused and began twerking on her vehicle while speaking to the officers, according to the report.
Police then issued her a noise-warning notice and gave her 15 minutes to comply, but she started twerking again.
According to the report, she told police they could arrest her if they wanted.
The officers then issued her a citation and asked her to sign it. Instead of signing it, she crumpled it and threw it at an officer’s chest, leading to her arrest on a charge of resisting an officer without violence, according to the report.
Following her arrest, Jefferson told an officer she thought he was “cute” and wanted to keep him around to “argue,” according to the report.
Police took Jefferson to the Alachua County Jail, where she was released Saturday on her own recognizance.
Copyright 2016 by WKMG ClickOrlando - All rights reserved.Mitsuo Yamaguchi (山口 光雄, Yamaguchi Mitsuo, born May 23, 1965), better known by the stage name of Kappei Yamaguchi (山口 勝平, Yamaguchi Kappei), is a Japanese actor and voice actor from Fukuoka, affiliated with Gokū[1] and 21st Century Fox.[2] He is best known for voicing lead characters in long-running popular anime shows. He voiced the male Ranma Saotome in Ranma ½, Inuyasha in Inuyasha, L in Death Note, Usopp in One Piece and Shinichi Kudo in Detective Conan. Other roles he has done include Jackson Neil in Miracle Girls, Tombo in Kiki's Delivery Service, Yattarō in Kyatto Ninden Teyandee, Ryuichi Sakuma in Gravitation, Hideyoshi Soya in The Law of Ueki, Yamada Hifumi in Danganronpa and Monta in Eyeshield 21. In overseas dubs, he is the Japanese voice for Kyle Broflovski, Bugs Bunny and Crash Bandicoot.
Yamaguchi has appeared in eroge as Kyōya Ushihisa (牛久 京也, Ushihisa Kyōya).[3] He made his first public appearance in North America at Otakon 2008;[4] and was also a guest at Sakura-Con 2009.[5][6] Yamaguchi's third appearance to date has been at Animazement in 2010. He also made a fourth appearance in Hawaii at Kawaii Kon in 2011.
He is married and has two sons.[7]
Filmography [ edit ]
Yamaguchi in 2014
Television animation [ edit ]
Original video animation (OVA) [ edit ]
Film animation [ edit ]
Internet animation [ edit ]
Tokusatsu [ edit ]
Video games [ edit ]
Dubbing roles [ edit ]
Animation [ edit ]
Commercials [ edit ]
Discography [ edit ]
Audio dramas [ edit ]
Singles [ edit ]
Rollin'(1990 -10-24 ), Futureland/Youmex – TYDY-5147 [68]
(1990 ), Futureland/Youmex – TYDY-5147 Kon'ya ha April Fool (1991 -01-21 ), Pony Canyon – Ranma ½ character single as Ranma Saotome (male) [69]
(1991 ), Pony Canyon – character single as Ranma Saotome (male) Otousan (1991 -01-21 ), Pony Canyon – Ranma ½ as Ranma Saotome (male), sings "China kara no Tegami" with Megumi Hayashibara [70]
(1991 ), Pony Canyon – as Ranma Saotome (male), sings "China kara no Tegami" with Megumi Hayashibara Characters Christmas (1991 -01-21 ), Pony Canyon – Ranma ½ as Ranma Saotome (male) [71]
(1991 ), Pony Canyon – as Ranma Saotome (male) Ranma to Akane no Ballad ( |
America and billionaire business tycoon Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic have not produced the boon in jobs and money that they promised. And to top it all off, the facility has just asked for another $2.35 million from cash-strapped New Mexico. It may not seem like a lot, but for the one of the poorest states in the nation in which a staggering 22 percent of residents live in poverty, it’s throwing good money after bad.
From the Albuquerque Journal:
In the past few years, the spaceport has gotten about $462,000 annually from the Legislature to help fund operations. Gov. Susana Martinez’s proposed $6.5 billion budget asks for the same annual outlay for the spaceport plus an additional, non-recurring $2.35 million “for operating costs due to a shortfall in revenue from other sources.”
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Right now, Virgin Galactic, the only active tenant in the facility, pays just $1 million per year to lease the Spaceport. They started paying in 2013, and their bill will increase to $3 million in 2018. But that pales in comparison to the money that has already been shelled out, and continues to be shelled out, by the state.
After Virgin Galactic’s tragic failure in 2014, when SpaceShipTwo exploded and killed one pilot, the people of New Mexico became even more pessimistic that space tourism would flourish in their state. Lawmakers are getting desperate to see their investment pay off. One idea for the Spaceport is to have it function as more of an entertainment or conference center. But that require more legislation to let Spaceport America do whatever it wants.
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Again, from the Albuquerque Journal:
Sen. John Arthur Smith, D-Deming, has introduced Senate Bill 147 at the spaceport’s behest to provide the facility with a governmental liquor license like the ones universities and some museums have, ostensibly to polish the facility’s credentials as an event location.
Virgin Galactic is actively trying to get a Spaceport built in the UK. Given space tourism’s track record in New Mexico, we might humbly suggest to our British friends that they make the billionaires pay for it themselves.
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[Parabolic Arc]
(AP Photo/Susan Montoya Bryan)They Viewed It As Vandalism By Tax Evaders
We have learned in recent months that leaders of the modern-day tea party movement are either ignorant of or apathetic about the facts of American history.
In Boston on her non-campaign tour of historic sites last week, Sarah Palin mangled the facts about the midnight ride of Paul Revere. As any school child knows, Revere rode out from Boston toward Lexington, Mass., to warn Samuel Adams and John Hancock that the British were coming for them. In Palin’s version, Revere was “ridin’ his horse through town” sending “warnin’ shots and bells” to warn the British that Americans love guns.
Earlier this year, Palin’s doppelganger, Rep. Michele Bachmann, misspoke in front of a New Hampshire audience, asserting that the battle of Lexington, which occurred subsequent to Revere’s ride, had happened in their state, not Massachusetts.
Even worse, campaigning for the presidency in Iowa back in January, Bachmann asserted that the Founding Fathers had ended slavery. She specifically cited the role of John Quincy Adams in freeing the slaves. She was apparently unaware that JQA was not a Founder and that slavery ended in the mid-1860s, long after he and his father’s generation had shuffled off this mortal coil.
Based on a new history of the Boston Tea Party — “American Tempest: How the Boston Tea Party Sparked a Revolution,” by historian Harlow Unger — if facts mattered to Palin, Bachmann and their tea bagger followers, they probably would have chosen another revolutionary era movement as a model:
As Unger points out, the first Tea Party in Boston Harbor had less to do with tea than the political ambitions of James Otis, Jr., a certifiably mad lawyer, and Sam Adams, a bankrupt brewer and convicted embezzler. After the British government tried collecting import duties to pay for American defense, Boston merchants — mostly smugglers and tax evaders — protested. American Tempest reveals how Adams and Otis took over the protest movement and seized political power in Massachusetts. Organizing waterfront workers into raging mobs, Adams and the tax protestors swarmed through the streets, burning homes and dragging opponents to the “Liberty Tree” to be stripped, swabbed in scalding tar, dressed in chicken feathers, and subjected to unmentionable agonies and humiliations. Then, on Thursday, December 16, 1773, about seven dozen men disguised as Indians dumped £10,000 worth of British tea into Boston harbor and sent Boston’s reign of terror spreading across America. Mobs dumped tea and burned tea ships in New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, and elsewhere, and stripped tens of thousands of Americans of their homes and properties, forcing nearly 100,000 to flee the land of their forefathers forever. Condemned as vandals by George Washington, the original Tea Party Patriots nonetheless set off a social, political, and economic storm that ended with the Declaration of Independence and birth of a powerful new, independent nation.
Yup, George Washington did not approve, as a group of tea baggers who toured historic Williamsburg found out when they question a Washington reenactor last summer:
Sometimes, the activists appear surprised when the Founding Fathers don’t always provide the “give “em hell” response they seem to be looking for. When a tourist asked George Washington a question about what should be done to those colonists who remain loyal to the tyrannical British king, Washington interjected: “I hope that we”re all loyal, sir” — a reminder that Washington, far from being an early agitator against the throne, was among those who sought to avoid revolution until the very end. When another audience member asked the general to reflect on the role of prayer and religion in politics, he said: “Prayers, sir, are a man’s private concern. They are not a matter of public interest. And nor should they be. There is nothing so personal as a man’s relationship with his creator.” And when another asked whether the Boston Tea Party had helped rally the patriots, Washington disagreed with force: The tea party ‘should never have occurred,” he said. “It’s hurt our cause, sir.” That may not have been the answer the man expected from the father of our country. But even in that spirited crowd, no one was going to tell George Washington he was wrong.
Though the mischief was the act of persons unknown, yet as probably they cannot be found, or brought to answer for it, there seems to be some reasonable claim on the society at large in which it happened.
— Benjamin Franklin, suggesting the colonial government should repay the East India Company for the lost tea
The record shows that Benjamin Franklin also viewed dumping about $1 million worth of tea into the harbor as vandalism, according to Masonic history:
Benjamin Franklin, a Grand Master of Masons in Pennsylvania, was in London at the time. He called the Boston Tea Party “an act of violent injustice.” A group of London merchants wanted to pay twice the value of the tea in order to keep trade open. Franklin offered to pay for the tea himself or raise the money in Boston. “Though the mischief was the act of persons unknown, yet as probably they cannot be found, or brought to answer for it,” Franklin said, “there seems to be some reasonable claim on the society at large in which it happened.”
C-SPAN’s Book TV recently presented a half hour lecture by Harlow Unger on the tea party. You can watch the video at BookTV.org, via this link — unfortunately, the video can’t be embedded, but here is a partial transcript:Pound 2016 has come and gone. As the #yearof64 rolls on, we were able to experience another exhilarating major. Competitors journeyed from far off places such as Florida and Canada to convene upon McLean, Virginia for the much delayed sixth iteration of this storied series. As 107 Smashers gathered in Tysons Corner, many questions were on their minds. Would the Fireblaster and BarkSanches rivalry be renewed in bracket? Will Virginia pull off an upset against Maryland in the Salty Suite? Will Losers Quarterfinals be streamed? But the number one question everyone was pondering: would a new champion be crowned or would SuPeRbOoMfAn reign supreme?
Day 1 – Salty Suite
The weekend of Smash started off very early for this Smash Writer. The team arrived at the venue as the first 64 players, eager to take in the sights of our first major. Jason “Nardwell” Mani eagerly snapped pictures of the major effort being undertaken to get the tournament underway. We were stoked to meet some Smashers, and soon enough the Canadian Captain Falcon main, Fck Vwls, arrived at the venue. As I sat down to play some friendlies, other 64 players slowly started to stream in and overtake our designated station. While it was exciting meeting other Smashers and playing against so many esoteric styles, I was eager to see some real competition. Luckily, the Salty Suite brought the hype I desired.
As I arrived at The Cave Gaming Center, the venue was already packed. All I had to do was look at each setup to see some of the legendary names of 64. The likes of SuPeRbOoMfAn, tacos, and KeroKeroppi were playing friendlies to warm up for the main event the next day. On the most impressive set-up, a hoard of players surrounded two gaming chairs. Here is where the Salty Suite matches would be contested.
Virginian IceKing and Baltimorean Moonshoes faced off in a battle for N64 games and regional pride. These two young players were looking to make a name for themselves by putting up some rare Nintendo 64 cartridges, worth a total of 270 dollars. In a tight battle, Moonshoes emerged victorious after being pushed to the limit in a five game set. Also on display was a crew battle between Q! and two Indy64 members. Bacorn and Dogs_johnson looked to defend their region’s name against a strong opponent. This set was entirely composed of Captain Falcon dittos and displayed some flashy combos. In the end, Q! handily defeated the two man crew, establishing Pennsylvania’s dominance over Indiana.
The Salty Suite also gave us another edition of the classic Fireblaster versus BarkSanchez rivalry. On the line: the competitors’ pride and twenty dollars. As has been the pattern lately, this set was a classic. Bark managed to bring the set back from a 2-1 deficit. Bark switched it up after the early deficit, using some different edgeguard patterns than he has used in the past. This proved useful, as he earned a relatively strong 2 stock in Game 4. The fifth and final game proved to be as epic as predicted. Fireblaster was down a stock the entire match, but never let it get out of reach. Unfortunately, the small deficit proved enough for his opponent, as Bark continued his recent dominance of the rivalry.
The main event of Maryland versus Virginia went about as expected. These two raucous groups were hyping up the crew battle, though it ended up looking like a bit of a mismatch. While the Virginians had a lot of heart, the Maryland crew proved that talent trumps all. LD’s Fox took 14 stocks from his opponents with his patented combos. This momentum rolled into Shears, as he dominated with the Mario Bros., taking 10 stocks with his pocket Luigi and 8 with a Mario no one knew he had. Moonshoes also had a decent showing with his Yoshi, nearly finishing the crew battle off. After the dust settled, Maryland had annihilated their opponents, finishing with a 13 stock lead. However, it is doubtful that this has quieted the interstate rivalry, as the Virginians are expected to keep challenging their neighbors at future majors.
Day 2 – Doubles Tournament and Singles Pools until Top 8
After a night of salty matchups, the real show was set to begin. Pool A of Doubles provided us with three expected results and one underdog advancing. The powerhouse teams of SuPeRbOoMfAn and tacos, as well as Bark The Shark and Darkhorse, known as Barkhorse, easily swept through their bracket to emerge on Winner’s side of Top 8. The New York duo of Jimmy Joe and th3kuzinator were knocked to losers by the top seed, but made quick work of rising Virginia duo, Rusty and Mustard Tiger, to advance. On the other hand, the second half of Baltimore’s BDSM crew, Shears and Daniel had to fight for their lives to earn their shot at Top 8. They were knocked out of the Winners side early by Jimmy Joe and th3kuzinator, but advanced through two rounds to face off against fellow Maryland team Fox, also known as LD, and The Protagonist. This duo was surprisingly swept by Barkhorse, showing some shaky play, despite previously dismantling them in a strong showing at Super Smash Con. Shears and Daniel managed to pull the upset 2-1, knocking out a strong contender from the bracket. This disappointing showing by Fox boded poorly for his chances in singles.
Pool B provided very little surprise, as the top 4 teams advanced to the bracket round. However, the debut of the online warriors, KnitePhox and Combo Blaze, proved troubling for the top seed of the pool, as they managed to defeat Revan and Fireblaster to advance. On the opposite side, the classic team of Nintendude and Firo faced a tough fight against the brotherly team of Dr. lampy and lord narwhal, though they squeaked out a 2-1 victory. From here, the two fallen squads easily swept their opponents in losers to make the bracket. Our eight victorious doubles teams were set, and the bracket was ready.
The first round of Top 8 proved rather unbalanced, as sweeps were produced in all of the sets. The monstrous team of SuPeRbOoMfAn and tacos showed why they were the prohibitive favorites, dismantling the brothers Barkhorse whilst using randomly selected characters. Nintendude and Firo disrobed the surprise online warriors Combo Blaze and Knitephox, while the new New York duo, JimmyJoe and th3kuzinator, shocked lord narwhal and Dr. lampy. Daniel and Shears had their impressive run terminated, as they were unable to dent an angry Fireblaster and Revan duo. The dominance of Boom and tacos extended into Winner’s Finals. Despite Nintendude and Firo putting up a valiant fight in Game 1, the set was one-sided. The top seed felt comfortable enough to switch characters each match, finishing the set with a very strong 4 stock. Losers Quarterfinals gave us an exciting rematch between Revan and Fireblaster and KnitePhox and Combo Blaze. After being upset in the pools round, Fireblaster and Revan looked to earn some measure of revenge, taking the rematch convincingly in a 3-1 win. Each victory was marked by very high finishing stock numbers of five or more. On the other side of the bracket, Barkhorse faced off against Jimmy Joe and th3kuzinator. Despite the 3-0 game count, each game was relatively close. The brothers from Baltimore clutched out the New Yorkers each time, showing strong synergy between their Pikachu/Kirby combo.
As we moved on to Losers Semifinals, we saw that BarkSanchez and Fireblaster were fated to play no matter what format the bracket was; Team Barkhorse was slated to face off with Fireblaster and Revan. This set proved to be the most thrilling of Top 8 as it went the distance. Game 1 was an intense back and forth affair, where Barkhorse barely managed to squeak out a victory in a game in which they trailed until the very end. Game 2 saw Fireblaster and Revan bounce back with a strong 3 stock,capped off with a particularly sweet team combo as Fireblaster’s Yoshi upsmashed Revan’s Kirby as he was on his way down from a forward throw. The third game seemed to show us that momentum was solidly in Fireblaster’s and Revan’s favor, as they dominated with simple yet solid play to earn a 5 stock. However, Barkhorse completely reversed that ending for Game 4 with their own 5 stock, marked by some tricky offstage movement by Bark to force Revan into his final death. Game 5 showed the power of momentum, as Barkhorse managed to take an early lead and never let go. This set truly showed the resolve of these two teams, and we expect to see more of this in the future.
Losers Finals gave us a matchup of risings stars against veterans: Barkhorse versus Nintendude and Firo. This set proved that Ness was very much still viable in a Dreamland only ruleset for doubles. Nintendude and Firo made a statement to the world here, sweeping away Baltimore’s last hope for a doubles champion. The synergy of Nintendude and Firo was evident here, as they weaved in and out of their foes using lower tier characters.
Grand Finals gave us a rematch of Nintendude and Firo against the monstrous opponents of SuPeRbOoMfAn and tacos. Once again, SuPeRbOoMfAn and tacos continued to swap through random characters, never feeling threatened. However, one moment that stood out was in Game 3. Firo was facing a 2 on 1 situation, and managed to take out both his opponents. Firo displayed his newly upgraded Ness skills all throughout doubles. Despite his heroics, nothing could stop the top seeded beasts, and SuPeRbOoMfAn and tacos won the doubles tournaments 3-1.
Singles was ramping up between Doubles Pools and Top 8. The pools round displayed plenty of high level play, though upsets were few and far between. All of the usual suspects advanced to Top 32. However, some upstarts proved their worth as well. In particular, JAMJAR, Rusty, and poobearninja were relatively shocking entrants into the Top 32. JAMJAR made quick work of all of his opponents in winners side until BarkSanchez. Despite losing 2-0 here, the newcomer’s Kirby proved quite an opponent for the mainstay’s Pikachu. Each game was tightly contested, only ending in 2 stocks. This was quite a result for this Smash Writer, as he makes his major debut. Rusty took a similar path to advance out of his pool, sweeping two early rounds before being swept by a Brody. Despite this, Rusty managed to win a close set over Zuko to advance to the Top 32. Poobearninja had a different path to Top 32, as he lost early in his pool. However, this steadfast Captain Falcon main won three losers rounds in a row to make Top 32.
Winners side of Top 32 saw six of our eight top seeds advance in sweeps. However, rivals BarkSanchez and Fireblaster faced some troubles. Bark was against Virginian Clubbadubba, an opponent who had given him trouble recently. Clubba managed to launch a comeback to close out game two, after dropping a lead in the first. Despite this, Bark turned it around and won with a dominating 4 stock in Game 3, nabbing his first win in Virginia against Clubba. Fireblaster was facing off with low tier master Firo, opting with his Mario for a more favorable matchup. After winning Game 1, overwhelming the Ness of Firo, it appeared Fireblaster had the advantage. However, Firo proved to have a few more tricks up his sleeve, reversing the result for Game 2 and dominating with a 3 stock in Game 3, walking away with the upset in the process.
Winners Quarterfinals saw Boom sweep Bark in three close games. This display by Bark was an early indication that his previous poor play in majors may be a thing of the past. Wizzrobe’s Yoshi proved to be too much for Fox, sweeping him easily. Fox seemed to be very shaky thus far at Pound, giving Baltimore some worry for its top player. Tacos and Revan played a very entertaining Pikachu versus Kirby, though tacos proved too strong in the matchup for the Canadian to overcome. In the most entertaining set of Winners Quarterfinals, Firo faced off against KeroKeroppi. Kero won the first two games easily against Firo’s Ness. However, Firo pulled out his secret weapon for the rest of the set: Link. Game 3 proved to be a highlight of the weekend, as Firo managed to neutralize Kero’s Pikachu with another low tier character. Firo kept Kero at bay with a mixture of bombs and boomerangs, dominating the neutral game and forcing it to be played at his speed. As the crowd went wild, Firo pulled off the final kill. Unfortunately for our hero, Kero’s change to Captain Falcon proved to be timely, as he easily maneuvered around Link’s projectiles for a strong victory to advance to Top 8. However, Firo clearly had won the heart of the crowd, as this victory was met with a chorus of light-hearted boos.
The final matches to make Top 8 were set to go. Among them was a matchup we had seen twice before this weekend: BarkSanchez versus Fireblaster. This set ended with the same outcome as the previous two: with Bark the Shark on top. Fire appeared to be slightly on tilt throughout the set, never seeming completely comfortable. This may be because of his extremely tough loss to Firo earlier. Despite this, Fire managed to keep the first three games close, only down 2-1. However, Game 4 proved dominant for Bark, closing the night with a 3 stock. Outside of this match, we had a few other players distinguish themselves in losers. Daniel won two sets to make it to Top 16, losing a close set to lord narwhal. Shears also won two sets in losers, advancing to Top 12. In this round, Shears was swept by Revan. However, the TO of Pound claims he should have won, only losing due to enduring many of his patented suicides. Clubbadubba had a similar course to Top 12, though he lost to the People’s Champ Firo. The stage was set, our Top 8 would be SuPeRbOoMfAn, tacos, KeroKeroppi, Wizzrobe, BarkSanchez, Fox, Revan, and Firo.
Day 3 – Singles Top 8
Top 8 began with the heroic Firo against the Canadian Kirby of Revan. Firo would go Link this entire set, but sadly it would prove to not be enough. As with his set against Kero, Firo earned the love of the people with some incredible bomb set ups and edgeguards. But his tactics and traps would not be enough to defeat the solid Kirby from the north, as Revan masterfully weaved in and out of bombs and boomerangs to set up easy gimps. Much to the dismay of his adoring fans, Firo was eliminated 3-1. However, this placing proved that despite has absence from majors over the past year, he is still a force to be reckoned with. On the other side of the bracket, we saw the two top Baltimoreans face off. Fox and BarkSanchez, two frequent opponents in the Xanadu series, would face off in an elimination round. This set furthered the narrative we had seen earlier in singles and during doubles. Bark was on a mission to shake off his history of poor placings at majors, while Fox looked rather shaky. Bark’s Pikachu seemed to be everywhere this set, earning solid edgeguards against the typically unedgeguardable Fox. In the end, Fox was eliminated 3-1 by his friend Bark.
After the loss of their hero Firo, the people needed someone to cling to, someone to warm their hearts. Winners Semifinals gave them that someone. In possibly the best set of the weekend, Wizzrobe would take favorite SuPeRbOoMfAn to his limit. Wizzy showcased his incredibly optimal Yoshi in Game 1, taking advantage of his superarmor to win many exchanges against Pikachu and win a tight match. Game 2 and 3 were much of the same. Wizzy managed to play the best player in North America very tightly, only just losing the second game while clutching out the third. Facing a 2-1 deficit, Boom made a character switch to Kirby. Game 4 proved his switch was timely, as he won with a solid 2 stock, including a tricky kill using Inhale. The final game was terribly one-sided, as Boom won with a 4 stock. Wizzy was caught too often using his double jump earlier, showing signs of impatience, allowing the favorite to win a tight set.
The other side of Winners Semifinals pitted KeroKeroppi against tacos. Tacos showed complete control of this set early on, as he won a dominant Game 1 with his Captain Falcon over Kero’s Pikachu. Game 2 saw tacos switch to Yoshi, trying to avoid a bad matchup against Kirby. However, Kero seemed intent on going Pikachu the entire set. The second and third games showcased very even play, with Kero managing to win a game against the best Yoshi in the world. Feeling confident, tacos decided to break out his Donkey Kong for Game 4, a truly crowd pleasing decision. Despite losing, tacos showed a very positive mindset throughout the game. He justified his confidence in Game 5, going back to Falcon and dominating with a stylish 4 stock, punctuated by frequent taunt cancels. Perhaps KeroKeroppi has another hurdle to jump before he can supplant Boom himself.
Winners Finals saw Boom’s Kirby against a trio of tacos’s characters. However, nothing tacos did was enough to take down the top player. In each game, Boom displayed complete control of the matchup, winning with 3 stocks in Games 1 and 3 and a 4 stock in Game 2. This was truly a statement from the Canadian beast, letting us know that his close set against Wizzrobe was a fluke. Unfortunately, some controversy occurred not allowing Losers Quarterfinals to be played on stream. Despite this, the show had to go on, and go on it did. This pair of sets saw some dominant performances, as Kero swept BarkSanchez 3-0, ending the Baltimorean’s first great major. Recently, Bark has faced some troubles in the Pikachu ditto against Kero, with this set signifying the debut of Bark’s Falcon in big tournament play. Wizzrobe was also beaten soundly this round, losing 3-1 to Revan. Unfortunately for the Yoshi, he was double eliminated by Canadian Kirbys, despite putting on quite a show against Boom.
Losers Semifinals had Revan facing off with KeroKeroppi. This set is the prime example of why the Kirby versus Pikachu matchup is so difficult. Despite masterful play by Revan, he had so much difficulty consistently getting in. Kero’s Pikachu abused Revan when he got the change, leading to a 3-0 sweep. Loser Finals would give Kero his shot at revenge against tacos. Unfortunately for him, it was not meant to be. Tacos started the set with an easy win as Captain Falcon over Kero’s Pikachu. This was very reminiscent of their earlier set. Game 2 was extremely heartbreaking for the man from New York. Tacos initiated a Pikachu ditto here, which played out extremely evenly, down to a last hit situation. As Kero was attempting to get back on stage he chose the wrong angle. He went straight down with Quick Attack for an SD. Frustration began to show on the face of Mr. Speziale, as Game 3 began. Here we saw Kero’s Kirby obliterate tacos’s Captain Falcon in a 4 stock. Kero completely abused the matchup with his blue Kirby, earning easy gimps and stylish uptilt combos. However, it was not meant to be, as his momentum slowed to a halt against tacos’s Pikachu. Despite fighting back to even the stocks in the end, Kero did not have enough left in the tank, as tacos won with a typical Pikachu gimp. Kero showed some level of frustration throughout this set. He has a lot to think about after not living up to his seeding, though this Smash Writer believes he still has a lot to give.
Grand Finals gave us a rematch between SuPeRbOoMfAn and tacos. Game 1 showed us why Boom was the favorite to win the whole thing, as his Kirby dominated tacos’s Captain Falcon with a 4 stock. This game is a perfect example for why Kirby wins this matchup, as Boom dominated the neutral game and showed how easily Kirby edgeguards Captain Falcon. The second game showed that perhaps tacos still had some fight in him, as he fought back to tie the game late with his Pikachu. Despite this, Boom was able to clutch out a victory with a hard-read forward smash. Facing a 2-0 deficit, tacos seemed to throw in the towel, as the two competitors switched to a Donkey Kong ditto. Tacos managed a tight victory in the first game, as the crowd was going wild over the rarely seen matchup. Boom showed his displeasure at losing a matchup, as he had set out to prove he was the master of all matchups. They initiated a Donkey Kong ditto for Game 4, which Boom won showing off some slick edgecancels and combos. After a long weekend of Smash, our champion of Pound 2016 had been crowned. Despite the best efforts of his rivals, the favorite answered the question: SuPeRbOoMfAn reigns supreme.One of the baddest pound-for-pound fighters on the planet will make his return to the Octagon at UFC 207 on Dec. 30 live on pay-per-view (PPV) from inside T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nev., as current Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) bantamweight king Dominick Cruz puts his 135-pound title on the line opposite knockout artist Cody Garbrandt. It will surprisingly mark Cruz's third Octagon appearance of 2016 after a string of injuries kept him out of the action for the majority of the past five years.
This will not be the first time Cruz defends his title against a member of Team Alpha Male. In the above video courtesy of UFC, "The Dominator" can be seen ending his storied rivalry with Uriah Faber, Garbrandt's coach and mentor, at UFC 199 this past June. Cruz would go on to earn a lopsided unanimous decision win over "The California Kid" to lock down his second victory of the infamous trilogy. The two have since squashed their beef.
As for Cruz and Garbrandt, the beef remains thick and bloody ahead of their UFC 207 title fight. It will be a matchup of raw power vs. technique and timing.
For the latest UFC 207 fight card news and updates click here.Researchers from the University of Cambridge and the Babraham Institute have found that a naturally occurring modified DNA base appears to be stably incorporated in the DNA of many mammalian tissues, possibly representing an expansion of the functional DNA alphabet.
The new study, published today (22 June) in the journal Nature Chemical Biology, has found that this rare ‘extra’ base, known as 5-formylcytosine (5fC) is stable in living mouse tissues. While its exact function is yet to be determined, 5fC’s physical position in the genome makes it likely that it plays a key role in gene activity.
“This modification to DNA is found in very specific positions in the genome – the places which regulate genes,” said the paper’s lead author Dr Martin Bachman, who conducted the research while at Cambridge’s Department of Chemistry. “In addition, it’s been found in every tissue in the body – albeit in very low levels.”
“If 5fC is present in the DNA of all tissues, it is probably there for a reason,” said Professor Shankar Balasubramanian of the Department of Chemistry and the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, who led the research. “It had been thought this modification was solely a short-lived intermediate, but the fact that we’ve demonstrated it can be stable in living tissue shows that it could regulate gene expression and potentially signal other events in cells.”
Since the structure of DNA was discovered more than 60 years ago, it’s been known that there are four DNA bases: G, C, A and T (Guanine, Cytosine, Adenine and Thymine). The way these bases are ordered determines the makeup of the genome.
In addition to G, C, A and T, there are also small chemical modifications, or epigenetic marks, which affect how the DNA sequence is interpreted and control how certain genes are switched on or off. The study of these marks and how they affect gene activity is known as epigenetics.
5fC is one of these marks, and is formed when enzymes called TET enzymes add oxygen to methylated DNA – a DNA molecule with smaller molecules of methyl attached to the cytosine base. First discovered in 2011, it had been thought that 5fC was a ‘transitional’ state of the cytosine base which was then being removed from DNA by dedicated repair enzymes. However, this new research has found that 5fC can actually be stable in living tissue, making it likely that it plays a key role in the genome.
Using high-resolution mass spectrometry, the researchers examined levels of 5fC in living adult and embryonic mouse tissues, as well as in mouse embryonic stem cells – the body’s master cells which can become almost any cell type in the body.
They found that 5fC is present in all tissues, but is very rare, making it difficult to detect. Even in the brain, where it is most common, 5fC is only present at around 10 parts per million or less. In other tissues throughout the body, it is present at between one and five parts per million.
The researchers applied a method consisting of feeding cells and living mice with an amino acid called L-methionine, enriched for naturally occurring stable isotopes of carbon and hydrogen, and measuring the uptake of these isotopes to 5fC in DNA. The lack of uptake in the non-dividing adult brain tissue pointed to the fact that 5fC can be a stable modification: if it was a transient molecule, this uptake of isotopes would be high.
The researchers believe that 5fC might alter the way DNA is recognised by proteins. “Unmodified DNA interacts with a specific set of proteins, and the presence of 5fC could change these interactions either directly or indirectly by changing the shape of the DNA duplex,” said Bachman. “A different shape means that a DNA molecule could then attract different proteins and transcription factors, which could in turn change the way that genes are expressed.”
“This will alter the thinking of people in the study of development and the role that these modifications may play in the development of certain diseases,” said Balasubramanian. “While work is continuing in determining the exact function of this ‘extra’ base, its position in the genome suggests that it has a key role in the regulation of gene expression.”
The research was supported by Cancer Research UK, the Wellcome Trust and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council UK.Last month Guido revealed that Unite were planning to stitch up the vote for a seat on Labour’s NEC at the party’s youth conference. Well, the vote was this weekend. And whaddaya know…
Below are WhatsApp exchanges between a Labour delegate and Unite fixer Charlotte Upton, in which Upton breaches secret ballot rules by insisting she checks each vote to make sure delegates choose the Unite candidate:
And here’s the proof it happened:
A source in the room claims Unite delegates blocked access to the polling area as they vetted their comrades’ voting intentions. One young delegates was “too scared to return to his hotel room” following the incident, and is believed to have sought accommodation away from his union delegation. Labour are now under pressure to launch an inquiry…Canada's economy expanded an an annualized pace of 2.9 per cent in the last three months of 2013, Statistics Canada reported Friday.
That was better than the downward-revised pace of 2.4 per cent seen in the U.S. over the same period. It was also better than the 2.5 per cent growth rate that analysts had been expecting.
The gains were broad-based, as most industrial sectors showed expansion. Mining, oil and gas, manufacturing and the public sector all grew.
Loonie rises
For 2013 as a whole, the Canadian economy grew by two per cent.
That's about three-tenths of a percentage point higher than predicted by the Bank of Canada and the latest federal budget. It also makes 2013 the best year for the Canadian economy since 2011.
"Overall, the fourth quarter economic performance was a healthy showing for Canada," TD Bank said in a note following the data's release. "The headline growth rate also confirms something we've long recognized: the second half of 2013 was much stronger than the first half."
The strong figures were good news for the hard-hit Canadian dollar, which gained about a quarter of a cent after the data's release to trade at 90.15 cents US.
The year ended on a down note, however. Bitterly cold weather all month and a massive ice storm toward the end of December dragged the economy down, as factories, retailers and some government activities temporarily closed or operated at less-than-peak productivity.
On a monthly basis, the Canadian economy shrank by 0.5 per cent in December. That's the worst monthly figure seen since the recession.
"Broadly speaking, the general message of a decent quarter ending on a soft note remains intact as weather … hit December figures negatively," Scotiabank economist Derek Holt said. "We expect December softness to result in deferred activity into … spring."
In revisions that helped the annual growth number, Statistics Canada said the economy had advanced by 2.9 per cent and 2.2 per cent respectively in the first and second quarters of 2013. It had previously recorded those growth rates as 2.3 and 1.6 per cent. The 2.7 per cent rate in the third quarter was left unchanged.Peter Sprigg speaks to CNN's Chris Cuomo (screen grab)
CNN’s Chris Cuomo confronted Family Research Council’s Peter Sprigg on Monday for embracing North Carolina’s anti-transgender law even though |
"package" tabs along the left side of the Features listing in D7. These bundles can be assigned to a specific profile, such as Panopoly or Open Atrium and will filter the Features listing to only show modules within the bundle's namespace. Assignment plugin settings are stored within the bundle, allowing different bundles to organize configuration in different ways. You can also easily export configuration to a different bundle, making it finally easy to copy your Features from one namespace to another.
Features is for Developers
Drupal 7 didn't have CMI -- core support for configuration management was added via Features. If a custom module contained configuration exported by Features, you needed to have the Features module enabled (in most cases), even on Production, to use that module. In Drupal 8 we wanted to remove the dependency on the Features module. When you create a module using Features D8, the module will work on any other D8 site even without Features being installed!
In Drupal 8, configuration is owned by the site and not by modules. This is a very important design decision behind CMI and how your site configuration is managed and deployed. Configuration provided by a module is imported into the site only when the module is enabled. Once the configuration is imported, any changes made to the config files in the module are ignored by the site. The only way to re-import the configuration is to uninstall the module and then reinstall it.
Drupal 8 also does not allow you to enable a module that contains configuration that already exists on the site. This can cause problems with updating configuration provided by a module. For example, if the Photo Gallery view within our Gallery module needs to be changed, you normally need to uninstall the module and then reinstall it. However, some configuration is not removed when you uninstall a module. Thus, you can have a situation where you uninstall the module and then cannot reinstall it because the configuration already exists. You must manually delete the view provided by the module before you can re-enable the module.
These hurdles and restrictions can make developing modules that contain configuration difficult. As a developer, Features provides functionality to help with these issues. When the Features module is active, it allows you to enable a module that contains configuration already on your site. Once a module is enabled, Features allows you to Import changes from that module into your site without needing to first uninstall the module. This prevents the situation of having a module that cannot be re-enabled, or a module that cannot be uninstalled because of dependencies and makes it much easier to update the configuration stored in the module during development.
You only need to install the Features module in your development environment. Once you have updated your feature module and imported the configuration changes into your dev environment, you then use normal Drupal 8 CMI to deploy configuration to staging and production. If you still want to keep the Features module enabled on staging or production for doing config imports, you can disable the Features UI submodule and only use the drush interface.
Overriding Configuration
If you change configuration in Drupal 8 that was imported from a module, Features will detect and display this change. If you import the new module configuration, it will overwrite the active site configuration. If you export the changes you will update the config data stored in your module. CMI controls the granularity of this configuration. For example, an entire View is a single configuration entity. Thus, there is no way to only import a simple change, such as the title of the view. Importing the view will overwrite the entire view, replacing any other changes that might have been made.
So far there isn't any way to manage partial configuration changes in Drupal 8. CMI was specifically designed not to handle partial configuration. Currently a module that needs to update partial configuration needs to implement an update hook. However, the code to update a partial configuration object is very specific to the configuration being changed. There is no overall consistent way to "merge" configuration between the module and active site. The config_synchronizer module is the beginning of some good ideas on monitoring site config changes to determine if it is safe to import new config from a module and might be the start of a better Features Override module in the future.
My Thoughts on Drupal 8
Rewriting Features for D8 was a very interesting project for me. I started with little knowledge of the guts of Drupal 8. I'm actually amazed by the amount of work that has gone into Drupal 8 to make it look and feel like Drupal (Views, Content Types, etc) and yet have a completely different architecture based on Symfony.
Working on Features for Drupal 8 was actually a joy.
Once I got the hang of some of the new concepts such as services and routing and plugins, it was actually fun to create Features. Sure, there are still some rough edges and some core config formats changed even during the Drupal Beta that caused some things in Features to break.
Ultimately I challenge developers to give Drupal 8 a chance and start "poking the tires" to give it a spin. In only four weeks I was able to learn D8 and produce a useable module for something as complex as Features (while also learning config_packager and doing a lot of refactoring). It's not nearly as onerous to develop in D8 as I had been led to believe by some bloggers. I'm very excited for this new chapter of the Drupal story and also happy that Features will be playing a much smaller part in that story than ever before.
Conclusion
If you want to learn more about Features and see a demo, come to my session at DrupalCon LA next month: Features for Drupal 8. If you want to help, go to the Features project page on drupal.org and download the latest 3.x version and start playing with it. Post your bugs and suggestions to the issue queue. We could really use some help writing automated tests in order to release a Beta version. I am looking forward to our bright future in Drupal 8 where we no longer need to curse about Features and can focus back on building reusable functionality.I n t r o d u c t i o n
Lots of role-players like to look down their nose at Blizzard's juggernaut, snort in contempt, and dismiss it as a mindless hack n slash affair, but what they need to realize is thatis a multi-faceted game that can be played in a variety of ways; namely, single-player, hardcore, PvP, Low level dueling, player killing and coop. Plus, there are some amazing mods like Median XL. But this post is given over to treatment of two forms of online play that I got a kick out of in the past: LLD and PK.Note that the following relates to basic Battle.net only, not theSin War.
This is where you face off against one or more other people in a fight to the death. There is a degree of etiquette involved and communication is kept to a minimum or is completely absent. You walk out into the zone, announce your readiness, and either kill or be killed. Pretty simple.
Now, the problem with LLD is that you can't just jump in, face off and expect to have fun. You need to actually invest time learning how to build and twink out a decent LLD build, and invest time farming, trading, imbueing and gambling. Otherwise, you will be a joke. This is where you face off against one or more other people in a fight to the death. There is a degree of etiquette involved and communication is kept to a minimum or is completely absent. You walk out into the zone, announce your readiness, and either kill or be killed. Pretty simple.Now, the problem with LLD is that you can't just jump in, face off and expect to have fun. You need to actually invest time learning how to build and twink out a decent LLD build, and invest time farming, trading, imbueing and gambling. Otherwise, you will be a joke.
You need extensive knowledge of the game's internal workings because you're dealing with items you want tailored to a restricted character level ("officially" levels 9, 18, 30 and 49).
You have to know, for example, that to gamble a rare circlet for an 18th level LLD you must use a 25th level character; to imbue an ethereal ornate plate for a 30th you must use a 64th-65th; to find rares for a 30th you're best off farming Nightmare tombz. You also need to know how re-rolling rares works, applying formulae so that each time you re-roll the item its level stays within your build range; otherwise it can't be worn and is all but useless to you. Just things like that.
All this pays off when you find, as a simple example, a sixth tier mod on an item, because that means you can simply equip the item to get the ability rather than "wasting" several pre-requisite skillpoints to earn it. And several skillpoints makes a massive difference to LLDs. As does rushing through Hell to get all the +skill and +stat bonuses x3. All LLDs are Hell-rushed, so don't even bother if yours isn't.
When you have knowledge of these things, you begin to appreciate the godly builds out there. (Mine was never one of them. I got to the point of "not so laughable" and inspired a few other casuals to build LLDs to beat mine, but that's it.)Bring Back Jimmy Carter! — Paul Craig Roberts
Bring Back Jimmy Carter!
Paul Craig Roberts
Caught with its pants down in Syria, the US government is making a fool of itself. By attempting to mischaracterize Russia’s actions against ISIS in Syria, Washington has admitted that the terrorists from outside Syria, who are attempting to overthrow the elected government of Syria, are “our guys.”
In an interview with Fox “News,” a senior US government official said: “Putin is deliberately targeting our forces. Our guys are fighting for their lives.”
Professor Michel Chossudovsky reports that “our guys” includes Western military advisers, intelligence agents and mercenaries recruited from private security companies.
The defense official told Fox “News” that the Russians are “completely disingenuous about their desire to fight ISIS.” According to the Obama regime, all of the hundreds of Russian air and missile attacks against ISIS are directed at US trained moderate terrorists — all five of them — and their hundreds of Western advisors.
Evidently, the senior defense official forgot that General Lloyd Austin, who heads US Central Command, recently told the Senate Armed Services Committee that only 4 or 5 of the US-trained “moderate terrorists” remain on the battle field. Obama has cancelled the failed $500 million waste of US taxpayers money to train “moderate terrorists” to overthrow the Syrian government. The trainees took the money and ran.
It is difficult to believe that even the incompetents who work for Fox “News” could really think that the Russians made hundreds of air strikes, supplemented with cruise missile strikes, against 4 or 5 moderate terrorists and their Western advisors. But the stupidity and ignorance of Fox “News” knows no limits. (The most discouraging aspect of my existance is the knowledge that millions of dumbshit Americans sit before Fox “News” for their daily brainwashing.)
But that is the story that senior US government officials are leaking to a gullible, or paid for, Fox “News.”
The truth of the matter—which will never emerge from Fox “News”— is that Washington is using ISIS in an illegal attempt to overthrow an elected government that will not submit to being a Washington puppet.
In clear words, Washington in total violation of law is behaving as a war criminal and is attempting to overthrow an elected government in order to replace it with a vassal answering to Washington.
President Putin has said that Russia will not stand for any more war crimes from Washington in areas of the world that affect Russian national interests. Russia has been asked for assistance by the legitimate government of Syria against ISIS, and the Russian air strikes are exterminating ISIS. This has the Washington war criminals upset. The senior US defense official told Fox “News” that the only role for Russia in Syria is to assist the US in overthrowing Assad. I guess the Washington official didn’t hear what Putin had to say.
The question that desperately needs to be asked will never be asked by the US print and TV media or by NPR. That question is: What is the point of the incessant US government lies about Russia, its actions, and its intentions? Are the warmongers in Washington trying to start World War Three?
Obviously the presidential candidates—both Hillary and all of the Republican dimwits—are determined to start World War Three. Watch the Americans vote for World War Three in the next election.
The United States government no longer has any credibility outside its borders and very little within, as evidenced by recent polls that show that 62 percent of American voters are wishing for a third party in the hopes that it might represent the people instead of a half dozen vested interests that, thanks to the Republican Supreme Court, have purchased the US government, lock, stock and barrel.
The reason so many voters admire Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, even though both have no idea what really needs to be done, is that these two are the only candidates who are raising a fuss about a politial system that serves only a few. Talk about dictators and disenfranchisement, the American voters are the most disenfranchised in human history. Allegedly the US is a democracy, but there is no sign of democracy in the behavior of the government. Sound and careful studies show that the US voter has no input whatsoever into the behavior and decisions of the US government. The US government is as far removed from the people, if not more so, than any dictatorship. We desperately need to be liberated outselves!
As former President Jimmy Carter recently said, America is no longer a democracy. America is an oligarchy.
Like so many things Carter was right about, but never given credit for by the corrupt American Establishment, Carter is again correct.
I say bring back Jimmy Carter. The man is moral and intelligent. He is a million times better than any presidential candidate in the running. At 90 years of age in a losing war with cancer, Jimmy Carter is our best bet.
references:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/10/14/official-russia-deliberately-targeting-us-backed-forces-in-syria/
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-program-isis-fighters-syria-general-lloyd-austin-congress/
http://www.globalresearch.ca/washington-accuses-putin-of-targeting-our-guys-including-cia-operatives-and-western-military-advisers-inside-syria-instead-of-isis-terrorists/5482475You’d never know it from President Barack Obama or the mainstream media, but America is under attack from its ideological adversaries, says an award-winning national security reporter.
After writing a comprehensive review of Obama’s statecraft, Bill Gertz says ominously, “Americans are in the dark” about the threats we face.
Gertz is a columnist at the Washington Times and a senior editor at the Washington Free Beacon. His newest and seventh book is “iWar: War and Peace in the Information Age.”
In this exclusive video interview for The Daily Caller News Foundation, Gertz recommends a comprehensive counter-information war and strategy to take on the emerging false narratives coursing through our culture from questionable forces.
The 35-page “dossier” on President-elect Donald Trump is just the latest example revealed to be fraudulent, and show a shadowy effort to harm the president-elect.
Gertz’s book reveals an array of foreign threats –including nuclear threats — actions, and aggressive hacking that have gone without response during Obama’s term in office.
As for the “Russian hacking” that lit up the intelligence community and the media lately, Gertz says Democrats are using the hacking narrative as a political ploy to undermine Trump before he takes office. The truth, Gertz says, is that the hacking of the Democratic National Committee really reveals a “massive counterintelligence failure” to keep the nation safe.
“Under the Obama Administration, we had three massive security failures and nothing was done to fix the problems,” citing Bradley Manning’s leak to Wikileaks, Edward Snowden leaks and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of an unsecured server that caused serious damage. It was only when the election went against the Democrats that Obama decided to rattle Russian President Vladimir Putin’s cage by some public reaction and sanctions.
Asked about Democrats’ “crocodile tears” regarding Russians trying to influence the election when leaked emails revealed George Soros manipulated elections in Europe and Obama’s team worked against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, Gertz believes false narratives are dominating American political culture.
Gertz calls Obama’s national security and foreign policy legacy “disastrous” and compares him to former President Jimmy Carter. The progressive’s post-modern worldview was dangerous as it led the White House to embrace our nation’s adversaries, which made them stronger, and confused our allies, he says.
In a lightning round, Gertz assesses America’s biggest adversaries – China, Russia, North Korea, Iran and the Islamic State. Also in his book, “iWars,” he has a penetrating chapter on the left and how it has eroded the strength of America with an information warfare of false narratives, propaganda, political correctness and subversion.
Remarkably, Gertz tells the story in this interview and in his book about the inability of the Obama administration to confidently counter the ideological warfare of Islamic terrorists recruiting on the internet, so they decided to farm out the function, giving federal grants to Muslim countries instead.
For more on Gertz, get the book, follow him on Twitter @BillGertz, and find him online at www.Gertzfile.com.
Mrs. Thomas does not necessarily support or endorse the products, services or positions promoted in any advertisement contained herein, and does not have control over or receive compensation from any advertiser.
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.Jane Costa was seriously injured by a foul ball at Fenway Park in 1998 (WBZ-TV)
BOSTON (CBS) – Jane Costa had two reactions when she saw what happened at Fenway Park Friday night when a shattered bat flew into the stands and critically injured Sox fan Tonya Carpenter.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God, I hope she’s OK,’” Costa said.
But Costa’s other response was more cynical – and understandably so, she says, once you hear her story.
Related: MLB To Re-Evaluate Fan Safety
“Honestly, my first thing was: good luck. Good luck getting what you need, paying your bills, because I went through all this.”
It was September 11, 1998 and then-40-year old Costa had just taken her seat at what was to be the second Boston Red Sox game of her life.
“And I heard the crack of the bat,” she said. “And all of a sudden, I honestly thought somebody elbowed me in the face. I couldn’t see anything. The pain was excruciating.”
A foul ball travelling close to 100 miles an hour broke every bone in Costa’s face, she says, shattering both of her eye sockets, her cheek bones, and breaking her jaw in three places.
“I never saw it coming, never saw it coming,” Costa said. “I heard it, but just never saw it coming.”
“To this day I don’t see right out of my left eye and I don’t hear right out of my left ear,” Costa added. “I still have horrible pain in my face all the time. I have permanent nerve damage.”
Costa couldn’t go back to work. Her bills mounted. In danger of losing her house, she went to the Red Sox – who balked.
She fought with them for six years, until an appellate court in 2004 decided that “the potential for a foul ball to enter the stands and injure a spectator [is] sufficiently obvious,” ruling in favor of the Red Sox, and adding that “a person of ordinary intelligence would perceive the risk and need no additional warning.”
Costa was insulted then, and is angry now that fans at Fenway are still susceptible to the danger she was.
“You need to know that if something bad happens when you’re there, you’re on your own,” she warned. “You’re absolutely on your own.”
“I think they need to take responsibility,” she said of Sox management. “I think they need to man up and when somebody gets that hurt and it affects their life for the rest of their life, do something, you know do something.”
WBZ reached out the team for a response to Costa’s story and received the following e-mailed statement in reply:
“All of us with the Boston Red Sox continue to extend our best wishes to Tonya Carpenter, who was injured by a broken bat at Friday night’s game. The well-being of Tonya and her loved ones are forefront in our minds. Major League Baseball will re-examine fan safety at ballparks, and we will fully participate in that process.”Given how much space physical media takes up, it’s hard for movie buffs to say no to the great promise of “cloud storage,” and the idea that we could summon anything we want to watch with just a couple of clicks. But so far, reality hasn’t matched the hype. Streaming services have been focused on exclusives and original programming, to the extent that the only way to have access to everything available is to spend hundreds of dollars a month on subscription fees. Meanwhile, older films keep disappearing from the digital archives; and even items that cinephiles “own” sometimes become inaccessible whenever software updates or a site shutters.
What follows then is a recommended core library of titles that every film geek—veteran or aspiring—should own on Blu-ray, and then hold on to tightly through every format war and upgrade to come. This isn’t intended as a “best movies of all time” list; nor is it meant to be comprehensive. Some great filmmakers are absent, often because they lack one outstanding Blu-ray collection that represents their work to its best advantage. These single discs and box sets were chosen for their re-playability, for the quality of their bonus features, and for how they represent a wide variety of genres, countries, eras, and auteurs. A media shelf with just these titles would in and of itself offer years of art, education, and entertainment. At the least, it’d provide a good foundation from which to build.
Cinema scholars could (and do) spend lifetimes studying the way Alfred Hitchcock delivered key narrative information through images alone, and the way he couched complex observations about human nature within gripping thrillers. This 15-film set is too heavy on the director’s lesser late-period work like Torn Curtain and Family Plot, but the wealth of bonus features attached to those movies helps to explain why Hitchcock matters. Plus, true to its name, this collection contains a generous allotment of bona fide masterpieces, including Shadow of a Doubt (Hitchcock’s own favorite, about a friendly misanthropic murderer), Rear Window (a wildly entertaining tale of urban voyeurism), Vertigo (an arty take on sexual obsession), North by Northwest (a rollicking spy story), and Psycho (a daring experiment in defying audience expectation... as well as one of the scariest movies ever made).
Francis Ford Coppola’s best film is either The Godfather or The Conversation... with Tucker: The Man and His Dream as a dark horse candidate. But the best way to understand the director—and the revolution that he tried to lead in American cinema in the 1970s—is to study this set, which tells the complete story of how Coppola and his closest colleagues spent a decade trying to update Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for the moral morass that was the Vietnam War. The “Full Disclosure Edition” of Apocalypse Now includes the longer, more scattered “Redux” cut of the film, plus the flawed-but-visionary original version and Eleanor Coppola and George Hickenlooper’s feature-length making-of documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse. Add in a Coppola commentary track and copious featurettes, and this collection gives a pretty full accounting of a brief moment in Hollywood history when blockbuster budgets and mad artistic ambition could coexist.
Disney has always taken home video seriously, from the days of limited edition VHS tapes in collectible clamshells, to DVD and Blu-ray sets that balance kid-friendly extras with ephemera aimed at hardcore animation geeks. Bambi is already one of the most fascinating films from the studio’s golden age. It’s a visually sumptuous, primally powerful tale of the natural world, combining pictorial realism with cartoony cuteness. The Blu-ray also contains one of the company’s all-time greatest special features: a sort of illustrated commentary track, which has actors reciting transcripts from Bambi -era story meetings while the screen juxtaposes scenes from the film with artwork from the bullpen. The result is a rare glimpse inside the creative process of one of Hollywood’s most venerable institutions.
Avant-garde filmmakers too often get excluded from canons; but while Stan Brakhage’s work represents only a fraction of what cinema’s great experimenters have had to offer over the past century, Criterion’s well-curated, extras-packed By Brakhage set does offer an essential introduction to a different way of approaching movies. Because Brakhage himself spanned decades in American underground film — working in styles ranging from diaristic home movies to explosively colorful abstract paintings — his best pieces serve as a guide to new ways of seeing the art-form. Love these films or be baffled by them; either way, it’s impossible to walk away from them without thinking that the screen is capable of containing much more than just stories and character sketches.
Because Citizen Kane has a reputation as the greatest film ever made, it’s sometimes hard for novices to approach it as marvelous piece of American showmanship, as opposed to an imposing cinematic monolith. The 75th anniversary Blu-ray helps reclaim the movie’s high entertainment value, thanks to commentary tracks by Roger Ebert and Peter Bogdanovich that cover the artistry of director Orson Welles and his collaborators, as well as Welles’ grandiose personality. For further context, don’t stop with Kane. Pair that disc with Criterion’s edition of Welles’ freewheeling essay film F for Fake, which captures more of his curious obsessions, and adds a fascinating documentary about all the projects throughout his career that the director started but never finished.
Due to various political and social tensions, it took much of the Western world until the ’90s to catch up with the stylistically simple but thematically complex cinema that sprung up in Iran in the ’80s, spearheaded in large part by director Abbas Kiarostami. The filmmaker’s 1990 movie Close-Up is one of his most sublime and enjoyable, bending the rules of both fiction and documentary by having non-actors re-stage a bizarre incident from their own lives, in which a con-man pretended to be another famous director. Criterion’s Blu-ray adds one of Kiarostami’s early neorealist films, The Traveler, plus interviews, documentaries, and a scholarly commentary track. Collectively, the extras and the films make for an excellent introduction to the man and the movement he anchored.
The collaborative demands of feature animation usually mean that directors can’t be “auteurs” per se, but the 11 films in this set are all distinctly the work of Hayao Miyazaki. His fascinations with flight, water, old European design, and limitless dreamscapes are threaded through movies as diverse as the fanciful kid-flicks My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service, the action-packed adventures Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and Castle in the Sky, and the strange and personal Spirited Away and The Wind Rises. Disney’s set has both the original Japanese language tracks and the thoughtful English dubs, plus some scattered TV work and Miyazaki’s recent retirement press conference, where he talks at length about the most remarkable career in animation history.
These three films are in no way an actual trilogy, given that they have different characters and unconnected stories, and are the work of two distinct directors — Ang Lee for the Oscar-winning masterpiece Crouching Tiger and Zhang Yimou for the other two. Sony packaged these together for the U.S. market because the company owns the rights to all three (and not to Hero, the Zhang picture that probably belongs here more than the Lee); and because what they do have in common is a visually splendid, emotionally rich take on the martial-arts genre. From the nuanced performances to the eye-popping stunts and sets, these movies (and the informative bonus features that come with them) present Asia’s whole cinematic subcategory of swords, sorcerers, and flying fists as some of purest image-driven storytelling in the medium.
In the second half of the 20th century, Eastern European filmmakers developed a different sensibility from their Western counterparts, facing up to the creeping political oppression in their homelands with expressive visual style, dark humor, and layered critiques of authoritarianism. All of these traits are evident in Dekalog, Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s ten-part meditation on the Ten Commandments, set in a housing project populated by people going through their own individual crises. Featuring a variety of storytelling approaches — from jittery suspense to dry comedy — Dekalog makes a fine compendium of what Kieslowski and his generation of Iron Curtain-era artists had to offer.
For much of the first half-century of cinema as an art-form, “personal” filmmaking was limited to fringe artists and the few clever Hollywood craftsmen who could sneak their own point-of-view into mainstream product. But in the ’50s and ’60s, the world saw the sudden emergence of geniuses like Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Jacques Tati, and Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, all capable of marshaling the resources to produce large-scale interpretations of their own quirky visions. The most inspiring talent to come out of that era was Federico Fellini, who came of age during the waning years of Italian neorealism and then went on to make dense cinematic pageants that presented his thoughts on art, politics, celebrity, Catholicism, Italian history, and gender relations. His pictures were internationally popular too. His La Dolce Vita isn’t just a sprawling study of the debauched Roman nightlife, it’s something of a cultural phenomenon, responsible for launching trends in fashion and movies — all of which are well-covered in Criterion’s Blu-ray.
As the first flowering of the French New Wave began to wilt in the early ’70s, a new generation of filmmakers — many of them female — began making some of their earliest work, setting themselves on paths that in some cases wouldn’t become truly verdant for decades. Like the Belgian Chantal Akerman and her fellow Frenchwoman Claire Denis, writer-director Catherine Breillat has spent much of her life putting the interior lives of women onto the screen, grappling with sexual desire, self-image, and the myths and fantasies that feed social conformity. Breillat’s most potent film is Fat Girl (available on a Criterion disc with extensive bonus features), about the relationship between a sexy teen and her angry, overweight kid sister. Daringly sardonic and frequently shocking, Fat Girl is representative of a mini-wave of late 20th century/early 21st century European movies that aimed to push buttons and challenge social norms.
Over the past 15 years, Hollywood comedy has been heavily influenced by writers and directors like Adam McKay, Paul Feig, David Wain, and Judd Apatow, all nurtured in the worlds of stand-up, improv, and sketches, and all used to a process that involves multiple takes and extensive riffing. Apatow’s The 40-Year-Old Virgin shows how this kind of filmmaking can be fruitful, maximizing laugh-lines while cutting deeper than the raunchy R-rated movies that inspired it. The 40-Year-Old Virgin Blu-ray is an education in itself, with ample behind-the-scenes footage and alternate/deleted scenes that explain how these films come to be.
One of the most influential documentary filmmakers of all time, Errol Morris has shown over and over that non-fiction storytelling can be playful and literary as well as informative. His first three features — contained on two separately sold, well-supplemented Criterion discs — run the gamut from the true-crime mystery The Thin Blue Line to the deadpan ethnography of Vernon, Florida. The best of the bunch though is Gates of Heaven, a one-of-a-kind wonder that initially seems to be about rival pet cemeteries but gradually reveals itself as a colorful, heartbreaking portrait of American hopes and dreams. Like the best fiction films, Gates of Heaven can be watched a dozen times and be interpreted a dozen different ways.
In one of the featurettes on the loaded Goodfellas Blu-ray, one of the gangster film’s famous fans, director Jon Favreau, admits that no matter where he is or what his plans are, if he turns on his TV and some cable channel is showing this movie, he’ll watch all the way to the end. Director Martin Scorsese has made more sophisticated and personal pictures than Goodfellas ; and sometimes he seems to regret that his career and his style have come to be defined by one flashy, violent, mob saga. But so it goes. This film contains so much of what’s made Scorsese one of the greats, from the lived-in performances to the cinematic bravura. This Blu-ray does the film justice too, with featurettes that place it in the context of the director’s career and the American gangster movie in general.
The invaluable archivists at Flicker Alley are responsible for these two packed sets, which collect some of the finest surviving examples of early 20th century American cinema, with plenty of documentaries and commentary tracks to provide some historical perspective. The Sennett anthology presents the work one of the movies’ first impresarios, who threw all sorts of talented people and technical innovations at the paying public, not necessarily out of any artistic integrity but because his Keystone Studios was perpetually in search of the next big thing. One of Sennett’s discoveries was Chaplin, who later left his Keystone boss and settled in for two years at Mutual, where he started experimenting with the techniques and tones that would later appear in his feature-length masterpieces of the ’20s and ’30s. All together, these two collections bring together hours of culturally significant films, which document the birth of an art-form and the remnants of a long-vanished America.
It took every bit of clout that Spike Lee built up over his first decade in the spotlight to get this biopic of one of the 20th century’s most polarizing political figures into theaters; and Lee sure didn’t waste the opportunities he made for himself. Malcom X is a triumph on multiple levels, from Denzel Washington’s charismatic, career-best lead performance to the way the director takes advantage of his subject’s long and varied life to make a movie that pays homage to multiple cinematic influences: MGM musicals, Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, and even David Lean. The Blu-ray goes in depth into how Lee pulled it off, via interviews and behind-the-scenes footage that’ll make a nice primer for any future filmmakers willing to sacrifice everything for their dream project.
Robert Altman was never fully a part of the film-school-trained early ’70s “New Hollywood” crowd that included Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, Francis Ford Coppola, and George Lucas; but the run of movies he made in the first half of the decade did exemplify the true spirit of that group, and how they sought to reshape classic Hollywood genres into culturally relevant pop-art. Altman’s first heyday (though not his last) culminated with 1975’s Nashville, a radical reinvention of the musical that pinged between two dozen disparate characters in and around the country music industry. Funny, tragic, masterfully acted, and dazzling both to the eyes and ears (thanks to Altman’s roving camera and overlapping dialogue), Nashville is an environment as much as it is a motion picture, and a wonderful place to get lost.
One of the first American directors to rise to the challenge of what auteurs like Bergman, Fellini, and Kurosawa were doing overseas, Stanley Kubrick started as an independent before working within the Hollywood system. He spent years between projects, carefully crafting what were essentially expensive art films, designed to be pored over by obsessives looking to understand his intricate visual designs and aloof, ironic take on humanity. The eight movies in The Masterpiece Collection cover everything he made from 1962 to his death in 1999, supplemented by multiple lengthy documentaries about his life and career as a whole. They encompass such disparate genres as political satire ( Dr. Strangelove ), brainy science-fiction ( 2001 ), dystopian social commentary ( A Clockwork Orange ), literary adaptation ( Barry Lyndon ), gothic horror ( The Shining ), and wartime adventure ( Full Metal Jacket ). Each of these films — plus the harder-to-categorize Lolita and Eyes Wide Shut — are all distinctly the work of the same hyper-controlling crank, who always knew exactly what he wanted in the frame, and left everyone else to puzzle over why.
It’s not entirely apt to say that a director as successful as Steven Spielberg “hasn’t gotten his due,” but it’s true that — like Alfred Hitchcock before him — he’s often been taken for granted, and unfairly dismissed as a shallow panderer. The eclectic batch of films included in this set are hardly a comprehensive collection of Spielberg’s best. (There’s no Close Encounters, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Saving Private Ryan, Schindler’s List, or A.I., to name just a few). But it does have three of his most beloved movies, Jaws, E.T., and Jurassic Park, each supported by extensive extras. To that the Director’s Collection adds two exciting low-budget early works ( Duel and The Sugarland Express ), two clumsy failures ( 1941 and Always ), and one underrated blockbuster ( The Lost World ). Together, they tell their own kind of story, about a popular artist who actually hasn’t played it safe, but has instead applied his innate entertainer’s instincts to movies meant both to play on the audience’s emotions and to provoke them into thinking about what really matters in their own lives.
Like any other subset of cinema, concert films can be blandly functional, or they can be so inspired that even viewers who don’t care about the performers become transfixed. Even if Talking Heads weren’t making exuberantly joyous music in Stop Making Sense, this Blu-ray would still be highly recommended for its commentary track, where the band’s frontman David Byrne and director Jonathan Demme describe how they approached the project. Thinking in terms of visual impact as well as how best to capture a dynamic musical moment, the two shaped the performance and the editing so that each song would have at least one unique element, and so that the personalities of the musicians on the stage would shine through, making them into |
playset that adds a whole new dimension to the game beyond the walls of the city. Play as the daring Rail Jacks that deal with deadly ghosts on the electro-train lines which connect the cities of the imperium.
UNLOCKED! ($13,000) Broken Crown: A playset for the game that adds new character and crew types so you can play a group of revolutionaries intent upon doing the impossible — assassinating the Immortal Emperor himself. By James Stuart.
UNLOCKED! ($15,000) Bluecoats of the Watch: A playset for the game that adds new character and crew types so you can play the meanest gang in Duskwall: The City Watch! Play as the inspectors, enforcers, and guardians that hunt and capture the scoundrels in the darkness.
UNLOCKED! ($18,000) The Spider: A seventh character type, the Spider is the mastermind and tactician of the crew. The Mastermind add-on includes an archetype that focuses on teamwork, long term projects, and mid-mission contingency plans. By Stras Acimovic and John LeBoeuf-Little.
UNLOCKED! ($21,000) Band of Blades: A complete dark fantasy hack, Band of Blades allows you to play a small band of soldiers desperately trying to shift the tide in a war against powerful sorcerer-kings and their undead minions. By Stras Acimovic.
UNLOCKED! ($26,000) Fully Illustrated Maps by Ryan Dunleavy. (See the bottom of this page for a sample.) Ryan will illustrate over my maps of Duskwall city to include a massive amount of additional detail (merchant stalls, boats in the canals, mysterious markings on rooftops, etc.) to help spark ideas when you play.
UNLOCKED! ($32,000) Moon Over Bourbon Street: A completely new setting for the game, plus new character and crew types. You are a thief in Crescent City, a bustling mélange of French colonials and planters, Spanish traders, American river men and adventurers, and Afro-Caribbean free men and slaves. Steamships traveling up and down the Mighty River disgorge a constant stream of valuable cargoes along with scoundrels and gamblers of every bent. But at night, the city turns dark indeed.... By Chris Bennett.
UNLOCKED! ($45,000) Leviathan Song: The hunting vessels sail out from Duskwall, enormous steam ships financed by the noble houses, captained by their unrecognized scions, and crewed by the unwashed masses. Following signs from shipboard dogs, gifted orphans, and madmen trained to hear the demon-song chanted in the depths, they sail the Never Sea, harpoons and hoses ready, preparing to drain the great beasts of their precious fluid. A new playset by Jonathan Walton (author of the Dungeon World Planarch Codex).
UNLOCKED! ($50,000) Grifters & Vigilantes: Introducing two new crew types for the game! The Grifters: Confidence artists who steal through lies, sell forgeries, exploit false identities, and get to the top, fueled by the greed of the rich. By Robert Wieland. The Vigilantes: Duskwall is a sewer of crime and corruption filled with thugs of one stripe or another. The Bluecoats? There for show. Servants of the rich and the powerful, oblivious and unconcerned with the plight of the people. There is no one to protect the downtrodden and the low. No one but you. By Sean Nittner.
UNLOCKED ($60,000): Blades Against Darkness. Get your dungeon-crawling fix with this total reskin and new playset for the game! You are a tomb robber — desperate for coin, driven by a thirst for knowledge, on a quest for your inscrutable deity, or, perhaps, just crazy. One way or another, you’ll take almost any job that comes your way. The Gods know there is plenty of bloody work to be had in the dark passageways below the earth. Damn little is honorable. Most all of it will get you killed. But you just might make it out alive... and rich. By Dylan Green.
UNLOCKED ($70,000): Sparrow's Folly. "The Central Pacific's barely built, but nonetheless shuttling folks in droves to our Great State of California, the land of goddamn milk and honey if you believe the papers. Wallowed halfway between Sacramento and the Sierras is Sparrow’s Folly, a Gold Rush shithole blessed not by lode, but by reputation. It's a haven for the forgotten, a heaven for the rich city bastards who get hard on secret sin. It ain’t on your fuckin map. It's a place where outlaws and outcasts vie for position among their own kind: highwaymen, whores, raildogs, scum. There’s a price for everything. Nobody never said it was fair.” – Ruby LaLond
Sparrow's Folly is a complete reskin of Blades in the Dark for playing gritty adventures in the Wild West, with new character types, crews, and factions, plus the guide and maps to Sparrow's Folly itself. By Allison Arth.
UNLOCKED! ($80,000) Null Vector: Four artificial intelligences secretly rule the world. You and your crew of cyber-augmented outcasts are some of the only people who know the truth. Will you oppose the invisible masters? Will you join one of the AIs, to bring its vision for humanity to life? What will you do to change the world? Null Vector is a complete reskin of the game for cyberpunk thriller action in the vein of Ghost in the Shell.
UNLOCKED ($90,000) The Doomed: "Look, we don't have to worry about The Dark Avenger; he's in the morgue. The Hero Squadron just got their minds swapped by The Mystic Eye or whatever, who knows. What I'm saying is: nobody's around to stop one little bank robbing spree. We just keep it low key and it's us and our powers versus a bunch of beat cops. What could go wrong? " The Doomed takes Blades in the Dark to the worlds of superheroes. You'll be playing the small-time villains trying to make it big in a world where an alien invasion is just another Tuesday. New characters and crew types give you everything you need to play in the style of The Superior Foes of Spider-Man and the Giffen/DeMatteis Injustice League. By Sage Latorra (co-author of Dungeon World).
UNLOCKED (2,000 Backers) Scum and Villainy is a complete reskin of Blades in the Dark for playing Rogues, Scoundrels, Bounty Hunters and aliens of all types looking to make a credit and keep their ship flying in a Space Opera setting. Includes new character types, crews, ships and modified basic moves that encourage blaster-shooting, hoverbike chasing and other over-the-top cinematic action. By Stras Acimovic.
UNLOCKED ($115,000) Womb of Night: A black expanse stretches between the stars, whose dim light shelters the thousand colonies of humanity. Riding the star-seas between them are crews of traders, marauders, explorers and pirates - all guided by the Sisterhood, whose Navigatrix acolytes portend safe passage through the hellish storms that make up the roiling mass they call the warp-space. In Womb of Night you play brave opportunists who seek out their fortune in the void of the cosmos, preying on fat merchant ships or finding rich new worlds to exploit. Space holds riches and power beyond your dreams, if you're bold enough to take them. By Adam Koebel (co-author of Dungeon World, and GM of Swan Song. Adam knows a thing or two about tense situations in space. His primary inspirations for Womb of Night are the art of Moebius, 70s heavy metal and a heavy dose of psychedelic culture.)
UNLOCKED ($120,000): Coneycatchers: It is a universal truth that mendacity and turpitude rule England, from Bankside trugging-house doxies to poor dying Queen Elizabeth. London herself is both procuress and homicide. Her markets are home to fat country rabbits with wide eyes and gold-filled purses, and her tangled alleys are home to the hard men and women with a million ways to separate the coneys from their coin. We are rufflers, whipjacks and foists, and in the service of every vice and crime we are as noble as princes. Cross us at your peril. It is a new age and we are ambitious. Coneycatchers is a reskin of the game with new character and crew types, factions, situations, and a guide for playing in Elizabethan London. By Jason Morningstar (author of Fiasco, Durance, and Night Witches).
UNLOCKED! ($125,000): Throne of the Void "The forms must be obeyed." —The Great Convention The Interstellar Empire was unified less than a century ago by the first Imperator. Since then his iron fist has enforced the compact that binds the Empire together. But he ages, and his grip weakens. And now the churn of plans, schemes and politics begins. In this decadent world, inhuman nobles, merchant guilds and religious groups all aim to control the throne by any means necessary. You play a crew of Agents, serving a powerful faction of the Interstellar Empire vying against Agents of other factions... and those of your own. You will be trying to move wheels-within-wheels as you play large-scale political and faction-based games in a deadly web of shifting alliances and rivalries. Throne of the Void is a complete stars-and-starships hack of Blades in the Dark and includes new character types, crews, factions, changed faction and downtime rules, plus galactic maps to the Empire itself. By Stras Acimovic. s
UNLOCKED! ($135,000) Blades of the Jhereg: The underworld of Adrilankha is ruled by a council of five ruthless bosses, known as the Right Hand of the Jhereg. You and your crew of scoundrels have been given a tiny piece of turf and are expected to impress them with your greed and opportunism. Will you rise to power in the Organization or be strangled by your ambitious rivals?
Blades of the Jhereg is an official licensed supplement for Blades in the Dark featuring the world of Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos novels (Jhereg, Yendi, Teckla, Taltos, etc.). The playset will include the character and crew types, NPCs, factions, situations, maps, and additional rules needed to play the exploits of a Jhereg criminal enterprise in Adrinlankha. Just remember to keep an eye out for that upstart Easterner. People say he's trouble. By John Harper (with editorial oversight from Steven Brust).
UNLOCKED! ($150,000) P38: Blood on the Streets. “Except for the Punic Wars, I have truly been accused of every possible thing” Giulio Andreotti, Italian prime minister, 1972-1973, and 1976-1979.
Italy, the 1970s. Upstart bank robbers compete and consort with the organised crime establishment, while the public follows from the front pages of newspapers, afraid and morbidly fascinated. This, however, is only the surface. The criminal underworld traces a wide, murky network, connecting the mob, terrorism and espionage. Some want to tear down the bourgeois state and start a revolution, others are building support for an authoritarian coup. Many are just in it for profit. Everyone is involved, and no one is innocent: terrorist groups and ruling parties, idealist students and national security agents, gangsters and foreign spies.
In P38: Blood on the Streets, you will step into this web, for money, power and ideology. What will you make of it? A playset based on one of the darkest decades of Italy’s republican history, by them crazy Italians: Flavio Mortarino, Alberto Muti, Renato Ramonda, Enrico Ambrosi, Daniele Di Rubbo, Luca Veluttini and Domenico Marino.
And many more!If 2016 deserves further scorn, it’s because Taco Bell failed to open another Chicago restaurant that serves alcohol. Fret not, because it’s 2017 and a second boozy bell appears on its way to the city, this time in the Loop. Taco Bell Cantina has applied for a liquor license for 407 S. Dearborn St., according to city records.
When news first spread in May 2015 that a Boozy Bell was headed to Chicago, national media went berserk and locals flipped at the notion of a late-night chalupa chased by a cheap beer. The new restaurant would go inside the Old Colony Building, which is a student housing tower. The Bell opened its first U.S. restaurant to serve booze in Wicker Park back in September 2015, featuring spiked Mountain Dew slushies, beer and wine. Outside the U.S., including in Spain, The Bell had served booze to customers for years.
Taco Bell has since opened Boozy Bells in San Francisco, Las Vegas, Austin, Texas, and Cleveland. Like Chicago, none of those cities have burned down due to hysteria from inebriated fans. Besides the Twisted Freezes and beer, the cantina model also includes an open kitchen to show millennials that the fast-food giant is not hiding anything. There’s also one planned for Boston, reportedly.
An email to Taco Bell wasn’t immediately returned, so there’s no info when this new restaurant would open. Although Wicker Parkers worried about security before it opened, this new Taco Bell Cantina will likely find less resistance than the regular Taco Bell planned for Pilsen. Come back later for more info.
UPDATE: Taco Bell PR confirmed the opening with a succinct reply: “Yes. We have a Cantina Taco Bell scheduled to open on Dearborn in Chicago.”Introduction
North Carolina officials have slapped Duke Energy with the state’s largest-ever penalty for environmental damages, fining the utility $25.1 million for groundwater contamination caused by coal ash — the subject of a previous Center for Public Integrity investigation.
The unprecedented fine, announced March 10 by the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources, resulted from unsafe levels of such contaminants as boron, thallium, selenium and arsenic — in some cases, for nearly five years — in groundwater from coal ash ponds at the Sutton Plant, near Wilmington. The fine followed violations cited by the state environmental agency at the now-shuttered Duke facility in August 2014.
In a statement, DENR Secretary Donald van der Vaart described the enforcement action as part of an “aggressive approach this administration has taken on coal ash.”
“In addition to holding the utility accountable for past contamination we have found across the state,” he said, “we are also moving expeditiously to remove the threat to our waterways and groundwater from coal ash ponds statewide.”
Coal ash is a byproduct of electric power generation. One of the nation’s largest refuse streams totaling 136 million tons a year, coal ash has fouled water supplies, endangered public health and threatened communities across the country. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency itself has recognized as many as 160 “damage” cases in which coal ash from ponds, landfills and other dumpsites have contaminated nearby aquifers, streams, rivers and lakes or tainted the air, including in North Carolina.
In a series of stories starting in 2009, the Center for Public Integrity highlighted the environmental and human health consequences of coal ash.
Duke Energy, the nation’s largest utility, owns and operates 32 coal ash ponds at 14 power plants throughout North Carolina. Last year, a Duke coal ash pond spewed 39,000 tons of waste into the Dan River, prompting state legislators to pass a law in September requiring the utility to close all of its ash ponds by 2029.
Last month, federal prosecutors filed criminal charges against Duke because of that spill — among the nation’s biggest involving coal ash — accusing the company of violating the federal Clean Water Act.
In December, the EPA unveiled the first-ever national standards regulating the disposal of coal ash at 1,425 coal ash ponds and landfills in 37 states across the country. Under the EPA’s rule, new and existing ash ponds and landfills will face requirements that dozens of states have failed to put in place on their own, such as groundwater monitoring and protective liners for coal ash ponds.
At the time, environmental advocates cited the North Carolina coal-ash law as far more stringent.
Duke Energy has 30 days to respond to the DENR fine.The University of Utah football team experienced some challenges at linebacker during the 2016 season, but some help will be on the way.
Arizona linebacker Cody Ippolito, who has been plagued by injuries during his career with the Wildcats, announced via Twitter that he'll be transferring to Utah to play out his sixth year of eligibility.
Playing my last season at University of Utah. Want to thank Coach Whittingham for taking me into their program. #GoUtes — Cody Ippolito (@CodyIpp57) January 9, 2017
In November, the Arizona Daily Star reported that Ippolito had been granted his release from the Arizona football program and was considering a transfer to Utah, Arizona State or UCLA.
The 6-foot-2, 248-pound Ippolito missed two-and-a-half seasons worth of games in his five years with the Wildcats thanks to three torn ACLs. He sat out all of the 2013 and 2015 campaigns and half of 2016.
He has amassed 80 tackles in his career, with 10.5 tackles for loss.
He'll join a linebacking unit that features a group of players with potential who struggled some in 2016, including Sunia Tauteoli, Cody Barton, Kavika Luafatasaga and Donavan Thompson.New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) said during a trip to Iowa on Tuesday that he is not running for president of the United States.
“No,” the mayor said, as reported by The Washington Post. “I’m not running for president.”
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De Blasio, who just easily won reelection in New York City, was in Des Moines to speak to Progress Iowa.
Visits to Iowa can often lead to speculation over politicians’ presidential aspirations.
The state is the first to vote in the primaries in presidential election years with the Iowa caucuses.
De Blasio, in an interview with the newspaper, said he has just over four more years of being New York City’s mayor and said he is focused on that for now.
“Look, seriously, mayor of New York City is one of the best public service jobs in the nation,” the mayor told the newspaper. “I can do big things, and do them quickly. I’ve got four years and 13 days left.”
The Washington Post added that De Blasio is putting his efforts behind helping Democrats across the nation win elections "with a focus on economic populism."The perfect, actionable to do list is necessary for productivity, yet so elusive for most of us. Even though we always start with our best intentions in mind, we often end up with more abandoned to do lists than we care to admit.
No doubt, the fact that we’re bad at planning must have something to do with it. But creating a better task list will allow you to be clear with yourself on what your most important tasks are, and what you need to do to achieve your goals.
Limit work in progress
You might be tempted to think that the more things you do at once, the more productive you will be. In fact, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Equally important to not multitasking when doing your work, is limiting your work in progress in the planning stages.
Focus on the most important areas of your work and discriminate ruthlessly between the tasks that are important and those that are just busywork. Don’t take on more projects than it is humanly possible to do simultaneously. Where possible, finish one before starting another.
Delegate the tasks that you can
This is one of the most overlooked productivity assets. There will inevitably be some tasks on your list that you can delegate. Now, if you are honest with yourself, you will find those tasks and delegate them in order to free up time for your most important tasks, and to protect your time and energy levels.
When you’re writing down your to do list for the day, find those tasks that you can delegate, and make a note next to it. If you can assign it to someone else, it will help you to focus on your most important tasks - which takes us to the next point.
Isolate your most important tasks
Every day, find your most important tasks in your list. Then get them done before everything else. Of course, there might be urgent things that come up that you will need to do before your most important tasks. But don’t let this become an excuse for not getting the most important tasks done. These are the tasks that will not only make you feel accomplished for getting them done, but will also allow you to inch closer to your goals every day.
Only include actionable tasks
Actionable tasks are the only ones that should be on your task list. Think verbs, not nouns when you’re writing down your to do list. Also break down big overwhelming tasks into smaller ones, things that you can actually get done.
You can have a separate list with ideas of projects or the goals you want to accomplish, but your to do list should only include actions that you can actually start doing as soon as you look over at your list.
Don’t schedule down to the minute
This is tougher to do than it seems, especially if you feel you need to control everything in order to be productive. But when you're making your to do list, try to leave some room for unexpected urgent tasks that will require your attention right away. By leaving some leeway you will be able to get to what's important even when other situations arise.
In the end, creating the best task list is not an exact science. Although there are some general guidelines that will make you more productive, you will eventually find out what works and what doesn’t through trial and error.
Try something for a week to see what feels right for you. Then you can tweak things around and make it work for you and your needs.TouchArcade Rating:
In my recent review of Hoplite ($2.99), I mentioned how the game benefited from a focused design. It’s vitally important when the team is small to avoid biting off more than you can chew, because you might end up with a game full of content of wildly varying quality that doesn’t measure up as an overall experience. This is unfortunately the case with the Trese Brothers’ latest, the fantasy strategy RPG Heroes of Steel (Free). The aspects of the game that are the most fun would have benefited from the extra resources that were spent on things that don’t work well at all. Specifically, the turn-based battles are very solid, but almost everything between them is a slog. If you have the patience to deal with or embrace the slower bits, the game is without a doubt a good value for its content, with the free prologue spanning about five hours alone and the promise of more to come via IAP chapters, the first of which is available for just a dollar. With a lot of competition in the turn-based strategy genre on iOS, though, it’s hard to recommend spending your time on this one.
There’s a huge back story to the game, and it’s clear a lot of careful attention went into building the world. Even the loading screens offer little bits of lore, and even though the writing is kind of stiff, I still got into the tale that the game spins. Your introduction to the world unfortunately comes somewhere around its hindquarters, as you join the story in a dungeon where four adventurers have been locked up. In the beginning, it’s unclear exactly why each of them is there, but over the course of the game, you learn more about what led to that situation. The four unlikely companions break out and attempt to make an escape together. The prologue chapter essentially covers this escape, through the dungeons and connecting caverns. Simply getting out does not guarantee freedom, however, and there are bigger things at work that even the available add-on chapter really just scratches the surface of at the moment with its single act.
Initially, unless you buy the extra sorcerer character available via IAP, you have no choice as to the members of your group. The developer plans to add other characters, presumably also as IAP, but, I suspect due to the character interactions, you can’t change your party once you’ve started, so if you want to use them, you’ll have to start a new game. In terms of the starter characters, you’ve got your usual bases covered here. There’s a strong and resilient warrior, a slightly squishy thief with many useful traversal skills, a very squishy wizard who can wreak havoc from afar, and a cleric with an assortment of healing skills and buffs. They are all well-defined in terms of character, with frequent conversations between them revealing their back stories and motivations.
You can explore areas by moving around individually or as a group, tapping on the location you want to move to. Certain skills can be used that offer useful benefits like uncovering traps, picking locks, or healing. Battles are fairly frequent, and once you’ve entered one, your moves are limited by each character’s action points. The battles play out like many other turn-based strategy RPGs, with one side moving all of their characters, followed by the other, until either all the enemies are defeated or one of your heroes falls. Each character has a wide assortment of skills they can use in battle, with most of the good ones consuming spirit points that can be replenished with potions or by camping at designated spots. After you’ve cleared all the enemies, you’re once again able to freely explore.
At least so far, the game is something of a road trip adventure. You’ll walk around fairly linear areas, characters will talk to each other a bit, a few treasure chests will be found, you’ll have a battle which will clear a path to the next linear area, rinse and repeat. Toss in some camps where you can distribute the points earned from your level-ups and have a few more conversations, and you’ve pretty much got Heroes of Steel in a nutshell. The biggest problem the game has is that the stuff in between battles really drag out. Your characters move almost unbearably slowly when they walk, and look incredibly strange doing it, to boot. The areas themselves aren’t very enjoyable to explore, with lots of similar-looking elements and too many empty nooks and crannies. There are some good weapons and items you can find if you look around, along with some extra battles, but most of the time you’ll find little of use for your troubles.
In contrast, the battles are quite enjoyable. Each character has a good selection of useful abilities, and depending on how you allocate your points on level up, each of your party members can wear a couple of different hats if need be. The enemy AI isn’t terribly hard on the default difficulty, but even there, it will use some genuine tactics when making its moves. Thanks to the small size of your party and the presence of only one natural damage sponge in the group, you really have to be aware of the positioning of friend and foe alike. Skillful use of the terrain is a must to create bottlenecks and guard your weaker party members. There’s also a sort of fog of war, which adds another layer of strategy to the proceedings.
You need to take care of everyone carefully, because if any of your characters are killed, you lose the battle. Should that happen, you have your choice of redoing the final turn or going back to just before the battle, so you don’t stand to lose too much of your time. The battles are very meat and potatoes type stuff for this genre, and you’ve almost certainly seen everything here before in another game. It’s executed competently, though, so I think genre fans are going to be more than happy with this part of the game, at least. I found myself wishing the game was just a series of battles with the story spliced in between. Most of your time playing will be spent in battles as it is, but the non-battle portions are very dull and drag down the overall enjoyment of the game. All the extra time spent wandering around also contributes to the repetitiveness of the surroundings.
You’re almost always underground in this game, and while there are attempts to make things look a bit different now and then, it never gets far away from the dark dungeons you started in. The enemy types are perhaps spread a bit too thin as well, with the Ratkin creatures in particular showing up far too often. The visual experience on the whole is a mixed bag. In addition to the aforementioned lack of variety, the artwork used in the game doesn’t shine all that well. I like the designs themselves, with the characters looking fairly distinctive and not overly busy, the way some fantasy games tend to go, but the character art in the game looks a bit rough. It stands out set against the clean-looking work done on the backgrounds and monsters. The sprites of the human characters look really odd, too. The game uses an overhead camera, and I think there was an attempt here to give a bird’s-eye-view of the characters, but the way they look and move is stiff and strange.
The UI has issues, too. A few of your many abilities are placed on the right-hand of the screen for easy access, and you can change them around, but using an ability that’s not in the shortcuts is inconvenient. I feel like the icon sizes could suffer being shrunk a little bit, even on the iPhone’s screen, in exchange for squeezing one or two more on there. The controls for movement for some reason differ when you’re moving as a group or moving individually, with individual movements using a double-click and group movement using a single click, with a second click canceling the command. That’s a really strange inconsistency. I get the purpose of the double-click in battle, so that you don’t burn AP by moving someone inadvertently, but it’s weird that it carries over outside of battle for individual units only.
If you’re a strategy or RPG fan, you’ve got nothing to lose by giving Heroes of Steel a try, and it’s certainly got some fans in our forum, but I wish I could recommend this for a better reason than it having a lengthy free component. It’s on the cusp of something really good with the battles, but the lack of variety hurts that end of things the same way it hits the whole game. Meanwhile, the non-combat aspects of the game are kind of dreadful, thanks to the slow speed, weak dungeon design, and stale environments. Things could get better, as this developer is well-known for making major post-release updates to their games, and Heroes of Steel has already had numerous issues addressed in the last few weeks. As for what’s here now, I appreciate that the developers seem to have a big story in mind, and I do hope they get to tell it, but in its existing form, the juice of Heroes of Steel isn’t quite worth the squeeze.A power optimizer is a DC to DC converter technology developed to maximize the energy harvest from solar photovoltaic or wind turbine systems. They do this by individually tuning the performance of the panel or wind turbine through maximum power point tracking, and optionally tuning the output to match the performance of the string inverter. Power optimizers are especially useful when the performance of the power generating components in a distributed system will vary widely, such as due to differences in equipment, shading of light or wind, or being installed facing different directions or widely separated locations.
Power optimizers for solar applications can be similar to microinverters in that both systems attempt to isolate individual panels in order to improve overall system performance. A smart module is a power optimizer integrated into a solar module. A microinverter essentially combines a power optimizer with a small inverter in a single enclosure that is used on every panel, while the power optimizer leaves the inverter in a separate box and uses only one inverter for the entire array. The claimed advantage to this "hybrid" approach is lower overall system costs, avoiding the distribution of electronics.
Description [ edit ]
Maximum power point tracking (MPPT) [ edit ]
For a broader coverage of this topic, see Maximum power point tracking
Most energy production or storage devices have a complex relationship between the power they produce, the load placed on them, and the efficiency of the delivery. A conventional battery, for instance, stores energy in chemical reactions in its electrolytes and plates. These reactions take time to occur, which limits the rate at which the power can be efficiently drawn from the cell.[1] For this reason, large batteries used for power storage generally list two or more capacities, normally the "2 hour" and "20 hour" rates, with the 2 hour rate often being around 50% of the 20 hour rate.
Typical cell I-V curves showing the relationship between current, voltage and total output for differing amounts of incoming light.
Solar panels have similar issues due to the speed at which the cell can convert solar photons into electrons, ambient temperature, and a host of other issues. In this case there is a complex non-linear relationship between voltage, current and the total amount of power being produced, the "I-V curve".[2] In order to optimize collection, modern solar arrays use a technique known as "maximum power point tracking" (MPPT) to monitor the total output of the array and continually adjust the presented load to keep the system operation at its peak efficiency point.[3]
Traditionally, solar panels produce voltages around 30 V.[4] This is too low to be effectively converted into AC to feed to the power grid. To address this, panels are strung together in series to increase the voltage to something more appropriate for the inverter being used, typically about 600 V.[5]
The drawback to this approach is that MPPT system can only be applied to the array as a whole. Because the I-V curve is non-linear, a panel that is even slightly shadowed can have dramatically lower output, and greatly increase its internal resistance. As the panels are wired in series, this would cause the output of the entire string to be reduced due to the increased total resistance. This change in performance causes the MPPT system to change the operation point, moving the rest of the panels away from their best performance.[6]
Because of their sequential wiring, power mismatch between PV modules within a string can lead to a drastic and disproportionate loss of power from the entire solar array, in some cases leading to complete system failure.[7] Shading of as little as 9% of the entire surface array of a PV system can, in some circumstances, lead to a system-wide power loss of as much as 54%.[8] Although this problem is most notable with "large" events like a passing shadow, even the tiniest differences in panel performance, due to dirt, differential aging or tiny differences during manufacturing, can make the array as a whole operate away from its best MPPT point. "Panel matching" is an important part of solar array design.
Isolating panels [ edit ]
These problems have led to a number of different potential solutions that isolate panels individually or into much smaller groups (2 to 3 panels) in an effort to provide MPPT that avoids the problems of large strings.
One solution, the microinverter, places the entire power conversion system directly on the back of each panel. This allows the system to track the MPPT for each panel, and directly output AC power that matches the grid. The panels are then wired together in parallel, so even the failure of one of the panels or microinverters will not lead to a loss of power from the string. However, this approach has the disadvantage of distributing the power conversion circuitry, which, in theory, is the expensive part of the system. Microinverters, at least as late as early 2011, had significantly higher price per watt.
This leads, naturally, to the power optimizer concept, where only the MPPT system is distributed to the panels. In this case the conversion from DC to AC takes place in a single inverter, one that lacks the MPPT hardware or has it disabled. Advanced solutions are able to work correctly with all solar inverters, to make possible optimisation of already installed plants. According to its supporters, this "hybrid" approach produces the lowest-cost solution overall, while still maintaining the advantages of the microinverter approach.
Implementation [ edit ]
Power optimizers are essentially DC-DC converters, taking the DC power from a solar panel at whatever voltage and current is optimal (via MPPT), then converting that to a different voltage and current that best suits the central / string inverter.
Some power optimizers are designed to work in conjunction with a central inverter from the same manufacturer, which allows the inverter to communicate with the optimizers to ensure that the inverter always receives the same total voltage from the panel string.[9] In this situation, if there is a string of panels in series and a single panel's output drops due to shade, its voltage will drop so that it can deliver the same amount of current (amps). This would cause the string voltage to drop as well, except that the central inverter adjusts all the other optimizers so that their output voltage increases slightly, maintaining the fixed string voltage required at the inverter (just at reduced available amperage while the single panel is shaded). The down side of this type of optimizer is that it requires a central inverter from the same manufacturer as the optimizers, so it is not possible to gradually retrofit these in an existing installation unless the inverter is also replaced, as well as optimizers installed on all panels at the same time.
See also [ edit ]Towel Day is celebrated every year on 25 May as a tribute to the author Douglas Adams by his fans.[1] On this day, fans openly carry a towel with them, as described in Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, to demonstrate their appreciation for the books and the author. The commemoration was first held 25 May 2001, two weeks after Adams' death on 11 May.[2]
Origin [ edit ]
The importance of the towel was introduced in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy original radio series in 1978. The follow-up book explained the importance of towels in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy universe in Chapter 3, using much of the same wording as the original radio series:
A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it |
controversial.”) “I felt 100 years older,” she wrote. Two years on, it looks like she has recovered her youth.
Her goal for the book, she said, is to “inspire people who feel disconnected from the political process,” particularly people her own age. “I’m friends with people that probably would describe themselves as socialists and people that are much more conservative than I am,” she said. “I can always find a middle ground.”
Criticizing the partisan bickering she sees on Fox News and MSNBC, she remarked that, although she and her friends sometimes disagree, “I can’t remember where there was ever a situation where we were screaming at each other.”
Believing that the incivility of current discourse has led many young people to tune out politics, she said, she wants her book to make the political process newly appetizing and relatable.
“I know what kind of books I read on vacation and it is not necessarily ‘Diplomacy’ by Henry Kissinger,” she said. “No disrespect to that book, I have read that book. But not on spring break.”
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Her own book would make as gripping a read for vacationers on South Padre Island as it would for students at midterms or for politicos on the eve of midterm elections.
But “Dirty Sexy Politics” is no young-adult memoir; it’s a strongly-worded political platform from which Ms. McCain attacks today’s moribund, inflexible Republican Party (“all the old dudes,” is one way she puts it) and clamors for change.
Throughout the book, she lays out her vision of a moderate, inclusive Republican Party that could win over young people like herself who have come of age with interactive social media and care about small government, defense, the environment and gay rights.
It infuriates her when rigid Republicans accuse her of being a Republican In Name Only, a RINO. “I cannot stand the word RINO, because I think it’s an easy way to belittle someone who’s flexible with the kind of world we live in,” she said.
“I’m pro-life, but I’m pro birth control. I am also pro being realistic about the kind of world we live in.” She supports marriage equality for gay Americans, she added, because, “I have friends who are gay, and I’d like to go to their weddings.”
This January she subjected herself to a Republican “purity test” in an article in The Daily Beast. She gave herself 8 out of 10 points, docking herself a point for her gay-marriage views, and a half-point each for her views on environmental cap-and-trade policy (“I believe in climate change”) and immigration amnesty (“I grew up in a border state. I think immigration is an essential part of American history and American culture. And amnesty comes with a lot of gray areas”).
Nevertheless, her progressive views have angered traditionalists within the Republican Party. In March 2009, she wrote a column in The Daily Beast that accused Ann Coulter, the conservative American political commentator and writer, of perpetuating “negative stereotypes about Republicans,” and called her “offensive, radical, insulting and confusing.” “I object to people who use politics as entertainment,” she told me. The column provoked Laura Ingraham, the conservative commentator and radio show host, to deride Ms. McCain on her show as “plus-sized.”
In response, Ms. McCain lambasted Ms. Ingraham on the talk show “The View.” “I want to have a political discussion about the ideological future of the Republican Party, and the answer is, ‘She’s fat, she shouldn’t have an opinion?’ ”
Photo
“What kind of message are we sending young women?” she asked. “It’s terrible!”
Last week, Edward Felsenthal, executive editor of The Daily Beast, who hired Ms. McCain as a writer in 2009, recalled that appearance. “It was kind of a ‘you go, girl’ moment, and she works that very well,” he said. “She knows who she is, she has fun with who she is, and she doesn’t worry about who she isn’t. She’s game.”
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Sherri Shepherd, a host of “The View” who has become friends with Ms. McCain, said, “Meghan is a role model for young girls are who are trying to figure out who they are.”
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But in Arizona, Ms. McCain admitted that she finds attacks on her looks hard to take. “It’s very harsh,” she said. “I’m of the belief that you should never say anything bad about a woman’s appearance, ever. It’s nothing I would ever do.”
Her conviction that her gender makes her vulnerable to misogynist criticism has discouraged her from becoming a candidate, though she shares her father’s instinct for leadership. (Her mother, Cindy, calls her “John McCain in a dress.”)
“We’re both very strong-willed and ambitious, and I think we have a similar sense of humor,” Meghan told me. “I think we both live our lives kind of fearlessly and without apologizing.”
But when it comes to electability, she’s a realist. “We still have a glass ceiling. It has not been shattered and until we have a woman president it won’t be shattered. I think everyone saw the way Hillary was treated and Sarah was treated, and it’s awful,” she continued, referring to Ms. Clinton and Ms. Palin. “There’s still blatant sexism everywhere.”
“I’m a 25-year-old woman with tattoos,” Ms. McCain said, waving her left hand to show the black cross on her wrist, “I just live my life very openly. I don’t think in this climate that I could get elected, either. I like to go to Vegas and I like to play blackjack with my friends. Can you do that if you’re a candidate? No. I rest my case.”
She still resents Ms. Ingraham’s remark but added, “I should send her a fruit basket. It’s one of the best things that’s ever happened to my career. I don’t care if she disagrees with me.”
In “Dirty Sexy Politics,” Ms. McCain brings similar bluntness to her recollection of a day when she was snubbed by another prominent woman — Laura Bush.
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It was in March 2008, two days after Mr. McCain had won four presidential primaries, clinching the Republican nomination. Mrs. Bush had invited Meghan and her mother to the White House for lunch.
Meghan dressed to the hilt, in an elegant black Diane von Furstenberg dress, a capelet and Tory Burch peep-toe heels, her hair swept up in plaits.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, Ms. McCain had struggled to appear decorous, knowing that as a candidate’s daughter, her “entire job” was “standing, waving and wearing the right clothes, like a princess doll.”
In memorable images, she stands sandwiched between her parents, playing backup to her crisp, St. John-suited mother and her grinning, square-shouldered father.
This sort of self-muffling warred with her instincts. It was, she writes, “essentially the exact opposite of who I am.” But she thought a White House visit called for glamour. “In my mind, even at nighttime at the White House, people would be wearing giant silk robes and golden slippers. Anything else would spoil the mood,” she writes.
But when Mrs. Bush, in a sweater and slacks, greeted her and her mother, she told them there’d been a misunderstanding. The invitation only applied to Mrs. McCain. Meghan was sent to the White House mess. “I was given a doggie bag of enchiladas,” Ms. McCain writes.
“Want to talk about feeling stupid and unwanted? Try carrying a take-out bag as you leave the White House in sparkly glitter heels and your hair braided in three huge cornrows.”
“I hope Laura and Jenna Bush won’t be angry with me for dishing like this,” she writes. “But I use Taylor Swift as a model: If you don’t want her to write a song about you, don’t give her a reason.” Zing! But at Blanco, Ms. McCain excused the Bush diss: “I think that it was a long eight years for them,” she said. “They’re not ill-intentioned.”
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After lunch, when we convoyed to the Valley Ho and sat around a Jetsons-style bar table over fizzy drinks, she confided that she was in the “very, very baby stages of some television stuff, just development.” She quickly added, “I would never do a reality show, ever.”
Could a “Meghan McCain Show” be a reasonable future move? “It’s easy to imagine that she could pull it off,” Mr. Felsenthal said. Ms. Shepherd had a still stronger reaction, “I absolutely see Meghan in television. When she comes on and talks she puts the ideologies in practical terms, and she makes it so you understand.” She added, “Meghan will never have to go on ‘Dancing with the Stars.’ ”
Ms. Shepherd was alluding to another female figure in the Republican political scene: Sarah Palin’s daughter Bristol, who is to appear on “Dancing with the Stars” this fall.
Ms. McCain’s revelation of her conflicted feelings about Sarah Palin and her family in “Dirty Sexy Politics” has drawn more news media attention than any of the book’s other juicy secrets.
There was the crazy sex among overworked “drones and journalists” blinded by “campaign goggles;” thefts of Mitt Romney signs by misbehaving McCainBlogettes; and even a Xanax mishap that left Ms. McCain “knocked out like a corpse” on a campaign plane (she gives a “special shout-out” to Cynthia McFadden of ABC, “for not putting it on ‘Nightline’ ”).
But on Aug. 31, when “Dirty Sexy Politics” was released, Mr. Stephanopoulos asked Ms. McCain so many questions on “Good Morning America” about the Palins that she interrupted him to say, “For the record, my book is not just about Sarah and Bristol Palin.”
When she appeared that night on the “O’Reilly Factor,” Bill O’Reilly plied her with still more Sarah Palin questions. Was she a “diva?” Ms. McCain shook her head. “I didn’t see her as a diva. I saw her as a woman who knew what she wanted.”
In the book, Ms. McCain calls Ms. Palin “the most beautiful politician I had ever seen,” but remembers thinking, “I don’t know anything about this woman and neither does the rest of the country.” Soon, she nicknamed her the Time Bomb. “I was waiting for her to explode.”
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On election night, weeks after that explosion had occurred (after Ms. Palin’s disastrous interview on the “CBS Evening News” with Katie Couric), and soon after her father had made his concession speech at the Arizona Biltmore, Ms. McCain was “shocked” to see Ms. Palin waving to the cameras.
“I saw something that I hadn’t really wanted to see before: Losing wasn’t an end for her. It was a beginning.”
For Ms. McCain, the political is inextricable from the personal. And whether she would like to see it this way or not, her father’s presidential loss also marked a new beginning for her. Since her book’s release last week, she has appeared on “The View,” “The Rachel Maddow Show,” “Fox & Friends” and “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno.”
“It was liberating to be able to tell my side of the story,” she told me in Scottsdale. But the new story she’s narrating is her own; she’s the front-runner in a race whose goal is still unknown, but whose progress is visible.
As she left the Valley Ho, driving off to see her mother, she hugged me goodbye: the reflex of a woman who can’t separate inclusiveness from effusiveness, and maybe doesn’t need to.CONFUSED tourists will no longer be left red-faced as they seek directions around the Old Town after a new survival guide to the Festival was published.
It includes much-needed pronunciation tips, designed to stop locals bursting into fits of giggles when asked to help visitors find the likes of Cockburn Street. The list also offers pronunciation help with Broughton and even Edinburgh itself. The Edinburgh Festival Survival Guide, which can be downloaded from the VisitScotland website, also offers advice on acts and performances to suit all tastes with thousands of shows on offer over July and August.
It is the organisation’s first handbook of its kind, detailing a selection of highlights from this summer’s events, plus insider hints and tips to make the most of the world’s festival city.
Tips within its 60 pages include advice on looking out for trams when crossing roads, starting the day early to snap up the best tickets and bringing a bag for all the flyers.
It also offers advice on where to eat, the history of the festivals, recommended LGBT bars and the top ten most visited attractions.
VisitScotland chief executive Malcolm Roughead said the organisation wanted to “help people make the most of their time in Edinburgh” when it is “absolutely buzzing”.
He said: “As Scotland welcomes the world this year for the XX Commonwealth Games, 970 Homecoming events and the Ryder Cup, I would highly recommend taking the time to explore the city and find out why the Edinburgh Festivals enjoy such incredible global recognition.”
But comedian and Evening News columnist Susan Morrison is worried a crucial source of joy for locals will be taken away.
“I think it’s another disappointing thing because it’s part of the fun of the Festival and about the only recompense for residents with people trying not to say Cockburn,” she joked.
“I will start a Keep Cockburn Campaign though if this goes any further.”
• www.visitscotland.com/see-do/events/edinburgh-festivals-survival-guide
NOT AS MUCH OF A TONGUE TWISTER AS YOU FEARED
Edinburgh: Ed-n-buh-ruh
Leith: Lee-th
Holyrood: Holly-rood
Lauriston: Lor-is-ton
Princes Street: Often mispronounced as ‘Princess Street’, this busy thoroughfare was actually named after the reigning King George’s sons, aka the Princes
Cockburn Street:
Co-burn Street
Broughton Street: Braw-ton Street
Cheyne Street: Cheen StreetThe price squeeze on heavy oil is gutting Alberta’s bottom line and Finance Minister Doug Horner says it’s now all hands on deck to cut spending and shelve projects.
“I’m very, very concerned about where those (oilsands) numbers are headed,” Horner said outside his legislature office Wednesday.
“This is a situation that is actually affecting the Canadian GDP. It’s that much of an impact on the Canadian economy.”
Horner said everything except higher taxes or new taxes is being explored. Key projects such as Premier Alison Redford’s proposed 140 new family-care clinics are still a priority but could also be up for review.
They’re going to have to ensure that we are being very aggressive in reining in our spending
“Yesterday at cabinet I made the comment to all of our cabinet colleagues that they’re going to have to make some very tough choices,” said Horner. “They’re going to have to ensure that we are being very aggressive in reining in and restraining our spending for us to meet our targets.”
But even with emergency austerity measures, the budget may not only end up in the red on the capital spending side, as previously announced, but also on the operating side.
“My role is to do everything in my control to make sure that we meet the targets (of a balanced budget) that we have for next year,” said Horner.
“Are you still confident you can meet that target?” he was asked.
“Today, I’m very concerned,” he replied.
The province runs a $40-billion budget with a quarter of its revenue from non-renewable resources.
Alberta is on track this year to run up a $3-billion deficit, which will be covered by the rapidly depleting Sustainability Fund.
Put simply, said Horner, Alberta is caught in a price vise.
Oilsands bitumen was selling for $US47 a barrel Wednesday, about US$40 a barrel less than the Northern American benchmark West Texas Intermediate.
The reason is demand is falling from Canada’s main customer, the United States due in part to that country’s struggling economy and a boom in light oil in North Dakota. As a result, said Horner, Alberta is being forced to sell at a comparative discount just to stay competitive.
Alberta desperately needs access to new customers in the roaring economies of China, Mexico and Brazil, Horner suggested.
“All of those jurisdictions are going to have fairly significant growth.”
The province has been lobbying to get extended pipeline access to the Gulf Coast in the United States and to get a line built to B.C. ports to ship oil to China.
It was a fudge-it budget to begin with
The economy has become a thorny political problem for Redford. She won a majority government in the April election on a promise to balance the budget and begin running surpluses.
Opponents called it the “Alison in Wonderland” budget based on unattainable oil revenue forecasts.
“It was a fudge-it budget to begin with,” said Liberal Leader Raj Sherman.
“They can’t balance the books or deliver the services they promised because the finance minister overestimated revenues and lacks the necessary financial control.”
Last month, Horner began stepping back from the balanced budget promise. He announced the government would begin taking on debt to pay for roads, schools and hospitals, but said the operating budget would be balanced.
We will not deficit finance the operations of this government
“We will not deficit finance the operations of this government,” Horner told the house on Nov. 26.
The Tories likened it to the family budget: debt is OK for big-ticket items such as a mortgage as long as you have a plan to pay it off and you aren’t borrowing to pay for day-to-day necessities.
So much for the grocery budget, said Wildrose finance critic Rob Anderson.
“At the very least you would think they would not borrow to pay for groceries, and it looks like they’re going to have to,” said Anderson.
“It’s right back out of the (high deficit) 1980s of (former premier) Don Getty,” he said. “It’s eerie.”
The cuts have already begun.
On Monday, Alberta Health Services said it was reducing the time allotted to seniors for home care.
On Tuesday, Education Minister Jeff Johnson told school boards the government may not be able to deliver on its promise for new education grant funding of one per cent next year and two per cent in the second and third years.
Anderson said that’s typical of a government that spends billions of dollars on “corporate welfare” carbon capture and storage projects and this summer flew cabinet ministers to London for the Olympics on a tab that included $114,000 for unused hotel rooms.
“Look at the waste,” said Anderson. “The premier has tripled the size of her communications staff. That alone right there is enough to fund the cut for seniors.”
NDP Leader Brian Mason pointed to six-figure payouts to former health executives.
“It seems that some people do get looked after by this government, but it’s not the people who depend on home care and it’s not special needs kids in schools,” said Mason.
The Tories have only themselves to blame, he said.
“Because of the cuts that they’ve made to taxes for wealthy Albertans and to corporations, and because we have some of the lowest royalties in the world, we don’t have the revenue stream to support our program expenditures,” Mason said.
“Since (the Tories) have refused to fix that problem, they’re now left with a situation of either going into debt or cutting programs — and I think they’re going to do both.”Noise is everywhere. Whether you’re sampling accelerometer data for a mobile game or trying to measure the temperature of a room, noise will be there. Even if you could remove all the noise from an input device, you’ll still have a certain degree of uncertainty. If a player has tapped on the screen, where did they really wanted to tap? All these scenarios forces to re-think about how we gather and preprocess data.
Introduction
Filters are mathematical and computational tools that, taken a series of observations, attempt to find the most likely signal that generated them. Filters are used to tackle the ubiquitous noise and uncertainty that permeates all sensor readings. All modern devices record user input via sensors. Whether it’s a touch screen or a joystick, mobile phones and game controllers are not immune to noise. Consequently, filters play an essential (yet somehow hidden) role in the perceived user experience.
This series on smoothing filters will introduce the most common types of techniques. Applying them to games can lead to significantly improvements in usability.
Noisy Signals
Let’s start with a very simple example which will help us to understand how noise affects signals. Imagine a sensor that is queried at fixed intervals, producing the observation at time. If you’re a game developer, it could be the input from a controller, such as Input.GetAxis("Vertical"). If you’re an engineer, it could be the voltage reading from a potentiometer, such as analogRead(3). What these time sequences have in common is that they are affected by noise. The following chart shows the above-mentioned signal, and how it is after being affected by noise.
In this example, noise has been artificially injected into the original signal. To each point of the original signal, a random value is added:
When this happens, we are talking about additive noise, uniformly distributed. The noise injected here is totally independent from the original signal. Additive uniform noise is often the result of an external interference. Like picking up static with an old CTR monitor.
Moving Average
Is it possible to recover a signal that has been corrupted by noise? The answer is …it depends. It depends on the type of noise (which is a direct consequence of the process that altered the signal), and on its extent. One of the simplest technique to attenuate additive noise is called moving average. It is based on the assumption that independent noise is not going to change the underlying structure of the signal. If this is true, averaging few points should attenuate the contribution of the noise. Moving average is the name of a technique that, for each point in a signal, calculates the average of its neighbouring points. If we average (for instance) three points, the filtered signal is given by:
If all the observations of the signal are available, we can define moving average with window size as:
In the following chart, a moving average technique (with window size of 6 points) has been applied to the above-mentioned noisy sinusoid:
The original signal is almost entirely recovered. If you’re a developer, this filter can be achieved with the following (very naïve) code:
public float [] MovingAverage (float [] data, int size) { float [] filter = new float [data.length]; for (int i = points/2; i < data.length-points/2; i++) { float mean = 0; for (var j = -points/2; j < points/2; j++) mean += data[i + j]; filter[i] = mean / size; } return filter; } 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 public float [ ] MovingAverage ( float [ ] data, int size ) { float [ ] filter = new float [ data. length ] ; for ( int i = points / 2 ; i < data. length - points / 2 ; i ++ ) { float mean = 0 ; for ( var j = - points / 2 ; j < points / 2 ; j ++ ) mean += data [ i + j ] ; filter [ i ] = mean / size ; } return filter ; }
Increasing the window size allows to reduce the effect of the added noise, but is also likely to cause an excessive smoothing of the original signal. Moving average, in fact, works nicely for signals that are continuous and smooth. When big changes are present, this filtering technique is likely to alter the original signal more than the noise itself:
It’s also interesting to notice that the signal is completely recovered in its linear parts. Moving average is the optimal solution when you have linear signals which are affected by additive uniform noise. Such a situation, however, is extremely fictitious. Real world applications are unlikely to have such convenient constraints.
Centred Moving Average
While presenting moving average, we have also introduced a contraint over : it has to be an odd number. This is necessary for this technique to be symmetrical. We sample an equal number of points before and after, and we count itself. This means we count points, which is indeed an odd number. If we want to use moving average with an even number, we have two possibilities. Let’s see an example by taking :
Both these expressions are valid, and there is no reason to prefer one over the other. For this reason, we can average the together to get a centered moving average. This is often referred as.
The result obtained looks very similar to a moving average centered on. But is different enough to introduce a new concept.
Weighted Moving Average
Moving average treats each point in the window with the same importance. A more reasonable approach is to value points that are further away from less. This is what weighted moving average does, introducing a weight for each time step in the window:
with the additional contraint that all must sum up to.
The previous code for moving average can be corrected like this:
for (var j = -points/2; j < points/2; j++) mean += data[i + j] * weights[j+points/2]; 7 8 for ( var j = - points / 2 ; j < points / 2 ; j ++ ) mean += data [ i + j ] * weights [ j + points / 2 ] ;
Looking back at the repeated average, we can now say that is equal to a weighted moving average with weights.
This tool is not incredibly more powerful, but at the drawback of having many more parameters to set. If you are familiar with function analysis, you might have recongised this as a very rough definition of the convolution operator. Carefully chosing the weights results in a variety of interesting effects, from edge detection to gaussian blur.
To give an example of this, we can perform a convolution of a square wave with the Mexican Hat function. To do this, all that is needed is to initialise the weights so that their shape follows this function:
With a piece of code like this:
float[] kernel = new float[10]; for (int i = 0; i <= kernel.length; t ++) { float t = i +4; kernel[i] = (1-(t*t)) * Math.exp(-(t*t)/2); } 1 2 3 4 5 6 float [ ] kernel = new float [ 10 ] ; for ( int i = 0 ; i <= kernel. length ; t ++ ) { float t = i + 4 ; kernel [ i ] = ( 1 - ( t * t ) ) * Math. exp ( - ( t * t ) / 2 ) ; }
Convolution with the Mexican Hat function allows to perform edge detection.
This technique extracts rapid changes from the data. If you’re a game developer, it can be used to detect sudden movements in the player’s input. This is the first step towards a reliable gesture detection algorithm.
Conclusion
This post introduced the problem of noisy signals, and discussed two common techniques to tackle it. It’s important to remember that there isn’t an “ultimate” technique that always works. Every algorithm has its own pros and cons. Knowing under which assumptions it has been design is essential.
The next part of this tutorial will explore how the moving average technique here introduced can be used to decompose time series. You’ll need this technique to fully understand (and possibly predict) your revenues on Steam.
Other resources
Part 1. An Introduction to Signal Smoothing
Part 2. Time Series Decomposition
Part 3. The Autocorrelation FunctionRendering of Fresh Thyme Farm Markets, a new specialty grocery chain emphasizing healthy and organic foods that will open two Cincinnati-area stores in fall 2014. (Photo: Provided)
After months of speculation and rumors, Fresh Thyme Farmers Market will open in the former Remke's space in the Newport Plaza, The Enquirer confirmed through facade renderings submitted to the city of Newport.
Planet Fitness next door will expand into 5,700 square feet of the former Remke space, according to city officials and officials with the management of the plaza.
The opening date for Fresh Thyme has not been released. Representatives with Fresh Thyme Market couldn't be reached for comment Monday morning and haven't returned previous messages as rumors swirled they would open in the plaza.
Fresh Thyme specializes in healthy and organic foods.
Remke's closed the Newport location in the plaza March 8 after 14 years operating there. Fresh Thyme won't take up all 53,000 square feet of the Remke space, according to the plans.
The exact size of the Fresh Thyme Market wasn't available, but they are typically smaller stores than Kroger. The two that opened last year in Oakley and Symmes Township are 28,000 square feet.
Facade work has already begun on the space in the Newport Plaza.
Planet Fitness will expand toward the back of its store adding more free weights and strength equipment, said Mike Hamilton, chief operating officer of Planet Fitness Midwest. Planet Fitness has operated for three years in the Newport Plaza.
Across the street in the Newport Pavilion shopping center, two large grocery stores – Target and Kroger Marketplace – operate.
Jaimie Niemczura, real estate manager for American Diversified Developments, couldn't comment on Fresh Thyme, but did say the traffic generated by the Newport Pavilion has increased interest in the Newport Shopping Center and Newport Plaza.
"Just the overall traffic generated from the Pavilion has helped our sites," Niemczura said.
Read or Share this story: http://cin.ci/1GypusRWith their vomit machine, scientists at North Carolina State have managed to create a device that both captures my general feelings about this week and adds to what we know about the way viruses spread. It took them two years to build the thing, reports Wired, and they published the results of their puke machine experiments online this week in PLOS ONE. Also: It has a terrifying clay face, so there’s that.
It looks a bit like an ill-considered science fair project, but it does have an actual point. The device is meant to simulate the action of the human body’s upper digestive tract, with a tube playing the part of the esophagus and a pressurized chamber acting as the stomach. Even the weird clay face isn’t just there for show — it acts as a weight at the end of the tube, so that the fake barf spews downward. You know, just like real barf. And then there’s the matter of the vomit itself, which is mostly vanilla pudding dyed an appropriately revolting shade of green, mixed with a real (albeit harmless) virus.
After testing the device, they found that the act of vomiting spreads about 13,000 aerosolized virus particles — not good, considering it takes as few as 20 particles to make a person sick. A reminder to keep your vomit to yourself, please.This 1971 Volvo 1800E has original blue California plates, overdrive, a one-owner history and many other desirable traits. According to the seller, it was picked up at the factory when new and driven the length of Russia before being shipped across the Pacific from Vladivostok–super cool. We always love a car with a story, but this is one of the more fantastic ones we’ve heard in a while. Find it here on Craigslist in Campbell, California for $19,500. Special thanks to BaT reader Clinton F. for this submission.
We aren’t sure how the owner received clearance to drive this car though the Iron Curtain, and we can’t imagine what it must have been like to do so. It’s clear that it meant a great deal to the owner since, as its current condition appears to be excellent. We particularly like this gold/black color combo.
Things are as tidy inside as out. The butternut upholstery is the perfect compliment for the gold exterior. According to the seller everything including analogue dash clock and rear window defroster remains functional.
Like many other P1800s on the market, this is a high mileage car. The odometer shows just over 231k miles, though the fuel-injected B20E is known to be a potential million-mile engine. The seller states that the car recently received a complete service, including the addition of new brakes, shocks, and fluids. All maintenance records are included as well, possibly to new.
A nice car with killer history, we’re happy to know that preserving this car means preserving that memory. Hopefully the seller took some snapshots along the way.3.8k SHARES Share Tweet
When German abolitionists talk about the situation of prostitution in Germany, we hear the same responses, over and over: “You’ve got to be kidding!” or “How is this possible?” When we do presentations in other countries, people in the audience will often start to cry or ask for a break after 15 minutes to get some fresh air. The same presentations in Germany cause outrage as well, but we’ve noticed that people have become so accustomed to the situation, their emotional response is subdued. In fact, German men will often openly and proudly out themselves as sex buyers at abolitionist events. There is no shame in being a john in Germany. This is an obvious and alarming sign that decades of legalized prostitution shape society.
It’s easy not to notice the harms of prostitution if we don’t look at them directly and, while all women are impacted by the realities of prostitution, most people who aren’t directly involved in the sex industry have limited knowledge as to what goes on in it. We have to ask ourselves honestly what the implications of normalizing prostitution are, and whether we have done enough to push back. It is not acceptable to simply say, “I am not personally affected by it and there are more important things to focus on.” When we uncover serious violations of human rights, as is the case in prostitution, it is our responsibility to do something about it. If we take an honest look at the situation in Germany, it is clear that action is sorely needed.
Politics and the profiteers of prostitution
Contrary to popular belief, with the exception of a short period of time in the early 20th century, prostitution had actually been legal in Germany for more than 100 years previous to the passage of the 2001 prostitution law, Prostitutionsgesetz. The bill was put forth by The Social Democratic Party of Germany and the Greens (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen), and was supported by Germany’s liberal party, the Free Democratic Party, and the Party of Democratic Socialism (now called Die Linke). It was opposed only by the Conservatives.
The law, which actually has more to do with the legalization of pimping, says that prostitution is no longer considered “against the good morals” of the country. Whereas, in the past, the “violation of morality law” meant that court cases involving exploitation were dealt with as a breech of ethics, this law is no longer applied in the context of prostitution. Despite its old-fashioned name, the violation of morality law has practically been the only way to challenge exploitation or unethical business transactions in areas not explicitly regulated by laws — things like extremely low pay, rent increases, or very high interest rates. The decision to exempt prostitution from this “morality” law may have sounded progressive, but it made exploiting women that much easier.
Our politicians celebrated this “big success” with a glass of champagne, wholly on board with the new normal. Even the Christian Social Union got involved in the building of a brothel in Dachau, calling it a “completely ordinary business.” Counselor Helmet Erhorn, who was working as an electrician on the project, said, “I think we are creating a great thing: a wonderful sauna, a whirlpool to relax in… It will be the most beautiful establishment in Dachau. […] We need places like that in the city.”
The German “underground”
In their efforts to discredit the Nordic model, opponents say that in Sweden, prostitution hasn’t actually declined, but instead has gone “underground.” This is, of course, not true. Law enforcement and social workers in Sweden, where the Nordic model has been in place for over a decade, say they have no problem finding prostitution and johns; the only issue is finding resources to address these situations.
In addition to legalizing pimping, the Prostitution Act made it possible for prostituted people to become regular employees, subject to taxation and access to social benefits. Yet only 44 out of an estimated 400,000-1,000,000 prostituted people have chosen to register as prostitutes in order to access said benefits.
In Wiesbaden, my hometown and the capital of Hesse (population 280,000), officials have no idea how many people are prostituted within the city borders but guessed it could be 250 women, saying, “Wiesbaden is too bourgeois, so there isn’t a big demand.” But through my own research, I found 1,000 prostituted women (and transwomen) working in the city. This is a much more realistic number than 250 — about the same number of prostituted women as there are in all of Ireland. There are only two (relatively small) recognizable brothels in the city, one “sauna club,” and a recently opened “flatrate” club. But most prostitution can be found in apartments all over the city, which are allowed even in the areas where brothels are prohibited. There are also porn theatres where men can find prostituted women, “tea clubs” (which mainly serve Turkish and Arab men and have mainly Bulgarian and Romanian women working there), your regular escorts, and, of course, online prostitution. Most people are surprised to learn that micro-brothels exist right in their own neighborhood, because they lack the visibility of mega-brothels like Paradise and Pascha.
Then there’s the organized crime factor. Organized crime groups like the Hells Angels, Mongols, Bandidos, United Tribuns, |
st came before Zeus with the report that they found men passing over to either abode undeserving... [Zeus] said, ‘we must put a stop to their foreknowledge of their death; for this they at present foreknow. However, Prometheus has already been given the word to stop this in them.’"
THEFT OF FIRE & INSTRUCTION OF MEN IN CRAFTS
Prometheus and the Eagle, Laconian black-figure kylix C6th B.C., Musée du Louvre
Prometheus stole fire from heaven to arm the helpless race of man, and then instructed them in the arts of Hephaistos (Hephaestus) and Athena.
Hesiod, Works and Days 42 ff (trans. Evelyn-White) (Greek epic C8th or C7th B.C.) :
"For the gods keep hidden from men the means of life [crops]. Else you would easily do work enough in a day to supply you for a full year even without working; soon would you put away your rudder over the smoke, and the fields worked by ox and sturdy mule would run to waste. But Zeus in the anger of his heart hid it, because Prometheus the crafty deceived him; therefore he planned sorrow and mischief against men. He hid fire; but that the noble son of Iapetos stole again for men from Zeus the counsellor in a hollow fennel-stalk, so that Zeus who delights in thunder did not see it. But afterwards Zeus who gathers the clouds said to him in anger: ‘Son of Iapetos (Iapetus), surpassing all in cunning, you are glad that you have outwitted me and stolen fire--a great plague to you yourself and to men that shall be. But I will give men as the price for fire an evil thing in which they may all be glad of heart while they embrace their own destruction.’
So said the father of men and gods, and laughed aloud. And he bade famous Hephaistos make haste and mix earth with water and to put in it the voice and strength of human kind, and fashion a sweet, lovely maiden-shape, like to the immortal goddesses in face [Pandora]... But when he had finished the sheer, hopeless snare [Pandora the first woman created by the gods], the Father sent [Hermes]... to take it to Epimetheus as a gift. And Epimetheus did not think on what Prometheus had said to him, bidding him never take a gift of Olympian Zeus, but to send it back for fear it might prove to be something harmful to men. But he took the gift, and afterwards, when the evil thing was already his, he understood."
Sappho, Fragment 207 (from Servius on Virgil's Aeneid) (trans. Campbell, Vol. Greek Lyric II) (Greek lyric C6th B.C.) :
"After creating men Prometheus is said to have stolen fire and revealed it to men. The gods were angered by this and sent two evils on the earth, women and disease; such is the account given by Sappho and Hesiod."
Ibycus, Fragment 342 (from Aelian, On Animals) (trans. Campbell, Vol. Greek Lyric III) (Greek lyric C6th B.C.) :
"The story goes that Prometheus stole the fire and Zeus in a rage rewarded those who reported the theft with a drug to ward off old age."
Aeschylus, Prometheus the Fire-Bearer (Greek tragedy C5th B.C.) :
Aeschylus' lost play Prometheus Fire-Bearer (Pyrphoros) dramatised the story of the Titan's theft of fire from heaven. It preceded Prometheus Bound in the trilogy.
Aeschylus, Prometheus the Fire-Kindler (lost play) (Greek tragedy C5th B.C.) :
Prometheus the Fire-Kindler (Pyrkaeus) was a lost satyr play which probably described the institution of the torch-race festival by Prometheus following his theft of fire.
Aeschylus, Fragment 116 Prometheus Fire-Kindler (from Galen, Commentary on Hippocrates' Epidemics 6. 17. 1. 880) (trans. Weir Smyth) :
"[Prometheus warns the Satyrs to keep clear of fire which they encounter for the first time :] And do thou guard thee well lest a blast strike thy face; for it is sharp, and deadly-scorching its hot breaths."
Aeschylus, Fragment 117 Prometheus Fire-Kindler (from Plutarch, How to Profit by our Enemies 2. 86F) :
"[Spoken, says Plutarch, by Prometheus to the satyr who desired to kiss and embrace fire on seeing it for the first time :] ‘Like the goat, you'll mourn for your beard, you will.’"
Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 1 ff (Greek tragedy C5th B.C.) :
"[Prometheus :] It is because I bestowed good gifts on mortals that this miserable yoke of constraint has been bound upon me. I hunted out and stored in fennel stalk the stolen source of fire that has proved a teacher to mortals in every art and a means to mighty ends."
Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 106 ff :
"Flashing fire, source of all arts, he [Prometheus] has purloined and bestowed upon mortal creatures. Such is his offence; for this he is bound to make requital to the gods."
Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 228 - 258 :
"Prometheus : However, you ask why he [Zeus] torments me [Prometheus], and this I will now make clear. As soon as he had seated himself upon his father's throne, he immediately assigned to the deities their several privileges and apportioned to them their proper powers. But of wretched mortals he took no notice, desiring to bring the whole race to an end and create a new one in its place. Against this purpose none dared make stand except me--I only had the courage; I saved mortals so that they did not descend, blasted utterly, to the house of Haides. This is why I am bent by such grievous tortures, painful to suffer, piteous to behold. I who gave mortals first place in my pity, I am deemed unworthy to win this pity for myself, but am in this way mercilessly disciplined, a spectacle that shames the glory of Zeus...
Chorus : Did you perhaps transgress even somewhat beyond this offence?
Prometheus : Yes, I caused mortals to cease foreseeing their doom (moros).
Chorus : Of what sort was the cure that you found for this affliction?
Prometheus : I caused blind hopes (elpides) to dwell within their breasts.
Chorus : A great benefit was this you gave to mortals.
Prometheus : In addition, I gave them fire.
Chorus : What! Do creatures of a day now have flame-eyed fire?
Prometheus : Yes, and from it they shall learn many arts.
Chorus : Then it was on a charge like this that Zeus--
Prometheus : Torments me and in no way gives me respite from pain."
Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 612 ff :
"Prometheus : I whom you see am Prometheus, who gave fire to mankind.
Io: O you who have shown yourself a common benefactor of mankind, wretched Prometheus, why do you suffer so?"
Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 944 ff :
"[Hermes rebukes Prometheus :] To you, the clever and crafty, bitter beyond all bitterness, who has sinned against the gods in bestowing honors upon creatures of a day--to you, thief of fire, I speak."
Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 441 ff (trans. Weir Smyth) (Greek tragedy C5th B.C.) :
"[After stealing fire from the gods Prometheus instructed mankind in the arts :]
Prometheus : Listen to the miseries that beset mankind--how they were witless before and I made them have sense and endowed them with reason. I will not speak to upbraid mankind but to set forth the friendly purpose that inspired my blessing. First of all, though they had eyes to see, they saw to no avail; they had ears, but they did not understand ; but, just as shapes in dreams, throughout their length of days, without purpose they wrought all things in confusion. They had neither knowledge of houses built of bricks and turned to face the sun nor yet of work in wood; but dwelt beneath the ground like swarming ants, in sunless caves. They had no sign either of winter or of flowery spring or of fruitful summer, on which they could depend but managed everything without judgment, until I taught them to discern the risings of the stars and their settings, which are difficult to distinguish.
Yes, and numbers, too, chiefest of sciences, I invented for them, and the combining of letters, creative mother of the Mousai's (Muses') arts, with which to hold all things in memory. I, too, first brought brute beasts beneath the yoke to be subject to the collar and the pack-saddle, so that they might bear in men's stead their heaviest burdens; and to the chariot I harnessed horses and made them obedient to the rein, to be an image of wealth and luxury. It was I and no one else who invented the mariner's flaxen-winged car that roams the sea. Wretched that I am--such are the arts I devised for mankind, yet have myself no cunning means to rid me of my present suffering...
Hear the rest and you shall wonder the more at the arts and resources I devised. This first and foremost : if ever man fell ill, there was no defence--no healing food, no ointment, nor any drink--but for lack of medicine they wasted away, until I showed them how to mix soothing remedies with which they now ward off all their disorders. And I marked out many ways by which they might read the future, and among dreams I first discerned which are destined to come true; and voices baffling interpretation I explained to them, and signs from chance meetings. The flight of crook-taloned birds I distinguished clearly--which by nature are auspicious, which sinister--their various modes of life, their mutual feuds and loves, and their consortings; and the smoothness of their entrails, and what color the gall must have to please the gods, also the speckled symmetry of the liver-lobe; and the thigh-bones, wrapped in fat, and the long chine I burned and initiated mankind into an occult art. Also I cleared their vision to discern signs from flames,which were obscure before this. Enough about these arts. Now as to the benefits to men that lay concealed beneath the earth--bronze, iron, silver, and gold--who would claim to have discovered them before me? No one, I know full well, unless he likes to babble idly. Hear the sum of the whole matter in the compass of one brief word--every art possessed by man comes from Prometheus."
Aeschylus, Fragment 108 Prometheus Unbound (from Plutarch, On Fortune 3. 98C) :
"[Prometheus speaks of his gifts to mankind :] Giving to them stallions--horses and asses--and the race of bulls to serve them as slaves and to relieve them of their toil."
Plato, Philebus 16b (trans. Fowler) (Greek philosopher C4th B.C.) :
"Sokrates (Socrates) : A gift of gods to men [i.e. the art of invention], as I believe, was tossed down from some divine source through the agency of a Prometheus together with a gleaming fire."
Plato, Protagoras 320c - 322a (trans. Lamb) :
"Prometheus arrived to examine his distribution [of gifts to animals and men], and saw that whereas the other creatures were fully and suitably provided, man was naked, unshod, unbedded, unarmed; and already the destined day was come, whereon man like the rest should emerge from earth to light. Then Prometheus, in his perplexity as to what preservation he could devise for man, stole from Hephaistos (Hephaestus) and Athena wisdom in the arts together with fire--since by no means without fire could it be acquired or helpfully used by any--and he handed it there and then as a gift to man. Now although man acquired in this way the wisdom of daily life, civic wisdom he had not, since this was in the possession of Zeus; Prometheus could not make so free as to enter the citadel which is the dwelling-place of Zeus, and moreover the guards of Zeus were terrible: but he entered unobserved the building shared by Athena and Hephaistos for the pursuit of their arts, and stealing Hephaistos's fiery art and all Athena's also he gave them to man, and hence it is that man gets facility for his livelihood, but Prometheus, through Epimetheus' fault, later on (the story goes) stood his trial for theft.
And now that man was partaker of a divine portion [i.e. of the arts originally apportioned to gods alone], he, in the first place, by his nearness of kin to deity, was the only creature that worshipped gods, and set himself to establish altars and holy images; and secondly, he soon was enabled by his skill to articulate speech and words, and to invent dwellings, clothes, sandals, beds, and the foods that are of the earth."
[For the first part of this extract from Plato see "Prometheus & the Creation of Man" (above).]
Plato, The Statesman 269a - 274d (trans. Fowler) :
"[Plato employs the myth of Prometheus in a philosophical discussion :]
Stranger : We have often heard the tale of the reign of Kronos... And how about the story that the ancient folk were earthborn and not begotten of one another?
Younger Sokrates (Socrates) : That is one of the old tales, too...
Stranger: In the reign of Kronos (Cronus)... all the fruits of the earth sprang up of their own accord for men... god himself was their shepherd, watching over them, just as man, being an animal of different and more divine nature than the rest, now tends the lower species of animals...
[But in the subsequent reign of Zeus,] men, deprived of the care of the deity [Kronos] who had possessed and tended us, since most of the beasts who were by nature unfriendly had grown fierce, and they themselves were feeble and unprotected, were ravaged by the beasts and were in the first ages still without resources or skill; the food which had formerly offered itself freely had failed them, and they did not yet know how to provide for themselves, because no necessity had hitherto compelled them. On all these accounts they were in great straits; and that is the reason why the gifts of the gods that are told of in the old traditions were given us with the needful information and instruction,--fire by Prometheus, the arts by Hephaistos (Hephaestus) and the goddess [Athena] who is his fellow-artisan, seeds and plants by other deities [i.e. Demeter and Dionysos]. And from these has arisen all that constitutes human life, since, as I said a moment ago, the care of the gods had failed men and they had to direct their own lives and take care of themselves."
Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 1. 45 (trans. Aldrich) (Greek mythographer C2nd A.D.) :
"Prometheus, after forming men from water and earth, gave them fire, which he had hidden in a stalk of giant fennel to escape the notice of Zeus. When Zeus found out, he ordered Hephaistos to rivet the body of Prometheus to Mount Kaukasos (Caucasus)."
Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 5. 67. 1 (trans. Oldfather) (Greek historian C1st B.C.) :
"[Diodorus rationalises the Prometheus myth :] To Iapetos (Iapetus) was born Prometheus, of whom tradition tells us, as some writers of myths record, that he stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind, though the truth is that he was the discoverer of those things which give forth fire and from which it may be kindled."
Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 4. 15. 2 :
"And Zeus, when Prometheus had taken fire and given it to men, put him in chains."
Aelian, On Animals 6. 51 (trans. Scholfield) (Greek natural history C2nd A.D.) :
"It behoves me to repeat a story, which I know from having heard it, regarding this creature [the viper], so that I may not appear ignorant of it. It is said that Prometheus stole fire, and the story goes that Zeus was angered and bestowed upon those who laid information of the theft a drug to ward off old age. So they took it, as I am informed, and placed it upon an ass. The ass proceeded with the load on its back; and it was summer time, and the ass came thirsting to a spring in its need for a drink. Now the snake which was guarding the spring tried to prevent it and force it back, and the ass in torment gave it as the price of the loving-cup the drug it happened to be carrying. And so there was an exchange of gifts: the ass got his drink and the snake sloughed his old age, receiving in addition, so the story goes, the ass's thirst. What then? Did I invent the legend? I will deny it, for before me it is celebrated by Sophokles, the tragic poet [C5th B.C.], and Dinolokhos [C5th B.C.], the rival of Epikharmos (Epicharmus), and Ibykos of Rhegion (Ibycus of Rhegium), and the comic poets Aristias and Apollophanes."
Pseudo-Hyginus, Fabulae 144 (trans. Grant) (Roman mythographer C2nd A.D.) :
"Men in early times sought fire from the gods, and did not know how to keep it alive. Later Prometheus brought it to earth in a fennel-stalk, and showed men how to keep it covered over with ashes. Because of this, Mercurius [Hermes], at Jove's [Zeus'] command, bound him with iron spikes to a cliff on Mount Caucasus."
Pseudo-Hyginus, Astronomica 2. 15 :
"Jupiter [Zeus], when he realized what had been done [Prometheus tricked him out of the best part of the sacrifice], in anger took fire from mortals, lest the favour of Prometheus should seem to have more weight than the power of the gods, and that uncooked flesh should not be useful to men. Prometheus, however, who was accustomed to scheming, planned by his own efforts to bring back the fire that had been taken from men. So, when the others were away, he approached the fire of Jove, and with a small bit of this shut in a fennel-stalk he came joyfully, seeming to fly, not to run, tossing the stalk so that the air shut in with its vapours should not put out the flame in so narrow a space. Up to this time, then, men who bring good news usually come with speed. In the rivalry of the games they also make it a practice for the runners to run, shaking torches after the manner of Prometheus.
In return for this deed, Jupiter, to confer a like favour on men, gave a woman to them, fashioned by Vulcanus [Hephaistos (Hephaestus)], and endowed with all kinds of gifts by the will of the gods. For this reason she was called Pandora. But Prometheus he bound with an iron chain to a mountain in Scythia named Caucasus for thirty thousand years."
Virgil, Georgics 6. 41 ff (trans. Fairclough) (Roman bucolic C1st B.C.) :
"Then he [the poet Orpheus] sings of the stones that Pyrrha threw, of Saturnus' [Kronos' (Cronus)] reign, of Caucasian eagles, and the theft of Prometheus."
Pliny the Elder, Natural History 7. 198 (trans. Rackham) (Roman encyclopedia C1st A.D.) :
"[On inventions :] The storing of fire in a fennel-stalk [was invented] by Prometheus."
Seneca, Medea 820 ff (trans. Miller) (Roman tragedy C1st A.D.) :
"[The witch Medea employs various fabulous ingredients in a spell to create magical fire :] Within this tawny gold [she takes a casket] lurks fire, darkly hid; Prometheus gave it me, even he who expiates with ever-growing live his theft from heaven, and taught me by his art how to store up its powers."
Nonnus, Dionysiaca 7. 7 ff (trans. Rouse) (Greek epic C5th A.D.) :
"[Aion, Father Time, addresses Zeus :] ‘Prometheus himself is the cause of man's misery--Prometheus who cares for poor mortals! Instead of fire which is the beginning of all evil he ought rather to have stolen sweet nectar, which rejoices the heart of the gods, and given that to men, that he might have scattered the sorrows of the world with your own drink.’"
For the RELATED myth of the creation of the first woman see PANDORA
PROMETHEUS & THE SACRIFICIAL SHARE
Hesiod, Theogony 511 ff (trans. Evelyn-White) (Greek epic C8th or C7th B.C.) :
"And ready-witted Prometheus he [Zeus] bound with inextricable bonds, cruel chains, and drove a shaft through his middle, and set on him a long-winged eagle, which used to eat his immortal liver; but by night the liver grew as much again everyway as the long-winged bird devoured in the whole day. That bird Herakles (Heracles), the valiant son of shapely-ankled Alkmene (Alcmena), slew; and delivered the son of Iapetos from the cruel plague, and released him from his affliction--not without the will of Olympian Zeus who reigns on high, that the glory of Herakles the Theban-born might be yet greater than it was before over the plenteous earth.
This, then, he regarded, and honoured his famous son; though he was angry, he ceased from the wrath which he had before because Prometheus matched himself in wit with the almighty son of Kronos (Cronus). For when the gods and mortal men had a dispute at Mekone (Mecone), even then Prometheus was forward to cut up a great ox and set portions before them, trying to befool the mind of Zeus. Before the rest he set flesh and inner parts thick with fat upon the hide, covering them with an ox paunch; but for Zeus he put the white bones dressed up with cunning art and covered with shining fat. Then the father of men and of gods said to him : ‘Son of Iapetos (Iapetus), most glorious of all lords, good sir, how unfairly you have divided the portions!’
So said Zeus whose wisdom is everlasting, rebuking him. But wily Prometheus answered him, smiling softly and not forgetting his cunning trick : ‘Zeus, most glorious and greatest of the eternal gods, take which ever of these portions your heart within you bids.’
So he said, thinking trickery. But Zeus, whose wisdom is everlasting, saw and failed not to perceive the trick, and in his heart he thought mischief against mortal men which also was to be fulfilled. With both hands he took up the white fat and was angry at heart, and wrath came to his spirit when he saw the white ox-bones craftily tricked out: and because of this the tribes of men upon earth burn white bones to the deathless gods upon fragrant altars. But Zeus who drives the clouds was greatly vexed and said to him : ‘Son of Iapetos, clever above all! So, sir, you have not yet forgotten your cunning arts!’
So spake Zeus in anger, whose wisdom is everlasting; and from that time he was always mindful of the trick, and would not give the power of unwearying fire to the Melian race of mortal men who live on the earth. But the noble son of Iapetos outwitted him and stole the far-seen gleam of unwearying fire in a hollow fennel stalk. And Zeus who thunders on high was stung in spirit, and his dear heart was angered when he saw amongst men the far-seen ray of fire. Forthwith he made an evil thing for men as the price of fire; for the very famous Limping God [Hephaistos (Hephaestus)] formed of earth the likeness of a shy maiden as the son of Kronos willed... So it is not possible to deceive or go beyond the will of Zeus; for not even the son of Iapetos, kindly Prometheus, escaped his heavy anger, but of necessity strong bands confined him, although he knew many a wile."
Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 482 ff (trans. Weir Smyth) (Greek tragedy C5th B.C.) :
"[After stealing fire from the gods Prometheus instructed man in the arts including the reading of the signs of the sacrifice :] ‘I marked out many ways by which they might read the future... The smoothness of their [the sacrificial animal's] entrails, and what color the gall must have to please the gods, also the speckled symmetry of the liver-lobe; and the thigh-bones, wrapped in fat, and the long chine I burned and initiated mankind into an occult art. Also I cleared their vision to discern signs from flames, which were obscure before this.’"
Pseudo-Hyginus, Astronomica 2. 15 (trans. Grant) (Roman mythographer C2nd A.D.) :
"When the men of old with great ceremony used to carry on the sacrificial rites of the immortal gods, they would burn the victims entire in the flame of the sacrifice. And so, when the poor were prevented from making sacrifices on account of the great expense, Prometheus, who with his wonderful wisdom is thought to have made men, by his pleading is said to have obtained permission from Jove [Zeus] for them to cast only a part of the victim into the fire, and to use the rest for their own food. This practice custom later established. Since he had obtained this permission, not as from a covetous man, but easily, as from a god, Prometheus himself sacrifices two bulls. When he had first placed their entrails on the altar, he put the remaining flesh of the two bulls in one heap, covering it with an oxhide. Whatever bones there were he covered with the other skin and put it down between them, offering Jove [Zeus] the choice of either part for himself. Jupiter, although he didn't act with divine forethought, nor as a god who ought to foresee everything, was deceived by Prometheus--since we have started to believe the tale!--and thinking each part was a bull, shoe the bones for his half. And so after this, in solemn rites and sacrifices, when the flesh of victims has been consumed, they burn with fire the remaining parts which are the gods. But, to come back to the subject, Jupiter [Zeus], when he realized what had been done, in anger took fire from mortals, lest the favour of Prometheus should seem to have more weight than the power of the gods, and that uncooked flesh should not be useful to men."
Heracles, Prometheus and the Caucasian Eagle, Athenian skyphos C6th B.C., National Archaeological Museum, Athens
THE CHAINING, TORTURE & RELEASE OF PROMETHEUS
Hesiod, Theogony 511 ff (trans. Evelyn-White) (Greek epic C8th or C7th B.C.) :
"And ready-witted Prometheus he [Zeus] bound with inextricable bonds, cruel chains, and drove a shaft through his middle, and set on him a long-winged eagle, which used to eat his immortal liver; but by night the liver grew as much again everyway as the long-winged bird devoured in the whole day. That bird Herakles (Heracles), the valiant son of shapely-ankled Alkmene (Alcmena), slew; and delivered the son of Iapetos from the cruel plague, and released him from his affliction--not without the will of Olympian Zeus who reigns on high, that the glory of Herakles the Theban-born might be yet greater than it was before over the plenteous earth. This, then, he regarded, and honoured his famous son; though he was angry, he ceased from the wrath which he had before because Prometheus matched himself in wit with the almighty son of Kronos (Cronus)... So it is not possible to deceive or go beyond the will of Zeus; for not even the son of Iapetos (Iapetus), kindly Prometheus, escaped his heavy anger, but of necessity strong bands confined him, although he knew many a wile."
Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 1 - 122 (trans. Weir Smyth) (Greek tragedy C5th B.C.) :
"[Enter Kratos (Cratus, Power) and Bia (Force), bringing with them Prometheus captive; also Hephaistos (Hephaestus).]
Kratos (Cratus) : To earth's remotest limit we come, to the Skythian (Scythian) land, an untrodden solitude. And now, Hephaistos, yours is the charge to observe the mandates laid upon you by the Father [Zeus]--to clamp this miscreant [the Titan Prometheus] upon the high craggy rocks in shackles of binding adamant that cannot be broken. For your own flower, flashing fire, source of all arts, he has purloined and bestowed upon mortal creatures. Such is his offence; for this he is bound to make requital to the gods, so that he may learn to bear with the sovereignty of Zeus and cease his man-loving ways.
Hephaistos (Hephaestus) : Kratos and Bia, for you indeed the behest of Zeus is now fulfilled, and nothing remains to stop you. But for me--I do not have the nerve myself to bind with force a kindred god upon this rocky cleft assailed by cruel winter. Yet, come what may, I am constrained to summon courage to this deed; for it is perilous to disregard the commandments of the Father. Lofty-minded (aipymêtês) son of Themis who counsels straight, against my will, no less than yours, I must rivet you with brazen bonds no hand can loose to this desolate crag, where neither voice nor form of mortal man shall you perceive; but, scorched by the sun's bright beams, you shall lose the fair bloom of your flesh. And glad you shall be when spangled-robed night shall veil his brightness and when the sun shall scatter again the frost of morning. Evermore the burden of your present ill shall wear you out; for your deliverer is not yet born.
Kratos : Well, why delay and excite pity in vain? Why do you not detest a god most hateful to the gods, since he has betrayed your prerogative to mortals?
Hephaistos : A strangely potent tie is kinship, and companionship as well...
Kratos : Hurry then to cast the fetters about him, so that the Father [Zeus] does not see you loitering.
Hephaistos : Well, there then! The bands are ready, as you may see.
Kratos : Cast them about his wrists and with might strike with your hammer; rivet him to the rocks.
Hephaistos : There! The work is getting done and not improperly.
Kratos: Strike harder, clamp him tight, leave nothing loose; for he is wondrously clever at finding a way even out of desperate straits.
Hephaistos : This arm, at least, is fixed permanently.
Kratos : Now rivet this one too and securely, so that he may learn, for all his cleverness, that he is a fool compared to Zeus.
Hephaistos : None but he could justly blame my work.
Kratos : Now drive the adamantine wedge's stubborn edge straight through his chest with your full force.
Hephaistos : Alas, Prometheus, I groan for your sufferings.
Kratos : What! Shrinking again and groaning over the enemies of Zeus? Take care, so that the day does not come when you shall grieve for yourself.
Hephaistos: You see a spectacle grievous for eyes to behold.
Kratos: I see this man getting his deserts. Come, cast the girths about his sides.
Hephaistos : I must do this; spare me your needless ordering.
Kratos : Indeed, I'll order you, yes and more--I'll hound you on. Get down below, and ring his legs by force.
Hephaistos : There now! The work's done and without much labor.
Kratos : Now hammer the piercing fetters with your full force; for the appraiser of our work is severe.
Hephaistos : The utterance of your tongue matches your looks.
Kratos : Be softhearted then, but do not attack my stubborn will and my harsh mood.
Hephaistos: Let us be gone, since he has got the fetters on his limbs. [Exit.]
Kratos : There now, indulge your insolence, keep on wresting from the gods their honors to give them to creatures of a day. Are mortals able to lighten your load of sorrow? Falsely the gods call you Prometheus, for you yourself need forethought to free yourself from this handiwork. [Exeunt Kratos and Bia.]
Prometheu s: O you bright sky of heaven, you swift-winged breezes, you river-waters, and infinite laughter of the waves of sea, O universal mother Earth, and you, all-seeing orb of the sun, to you I call! See what I, a god, endure from the gods. Look, with what shameful torture I am racked and must wrestle throughout the countless years of time apportioned me. Such is the ignominious bondage the new commander of the blessed [Zeus] has devised against me. Woe! Woe! For present misery and misery to come I groan, not knowing where it is fated that deliverance from these sorrows shall arise. And yet, what am I saying? All that is to be I know full well and in advance, nor shall any affliction come upon me unforeseen. I must bear my allotted doom as lightly as I can, knowing that the might of Necessity (anankê) permits no resistance.Yet I am not able to speak nor be silent about my fate. For it is because I bestowed good gifts on mortals that this miserable yoke of constraint has been bound upon me. I hunted out and stored in fennel stalk the stolen source of fire that has proved a teacher to mortals in every art and a means to mighty ends. Such is the offence for which I pay the penalty, riveted in fetters beneath the open sky... Behold me, an ill-fated god, chained, the foe of Zeus, hated of all who enter the court of Zeus, because of my very great love for mankind."
Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 115 ff :
"Prometheus [after being chained to the mountain] : Ha! Behold! What murmur, what scent wings to me, its source invisible, heavenly or human, or both? Has someone come to this crag at the edge of the world to stare at my sufferings--or with what motive? Behold me, an ill-fated god, chained, the foe of Zeus, hated of all who enter the court of Zeus, because of my very great love for mankind. Ha! What's this? What may be this rustling stir of birds I hear again nearby? The air whirs with the light rush of wings. Whatever approaches causes me alarm [i.e. he thinks he hears the Eagle approaching, sent by Zeus to feed on his liver].
[The Okeanides (Oceanids) enter on a winged car, probably representing the clouds.]
Chorus [of Okeanides] : Do not fear! For our group has come in swift rivalry of wings to this crag as friend to you, having won our father's [Okeanos' (Oceanus')] consent as best we might. The swift-coursing breezes bore me on; for the reverberation of the clang of iron pierced the depths of our caves and drove my grave modesty away in fright; unsandalled I have hastened in a winged car.
Prometheus : Alas! Alas! Offspring of fruitful Tethys and of him who with his sleepless current encircles the whole earth, children of your father Okeanos, behold, see with what fetters, upon the summit crag of this ravine, I am to hold my unenviable watch.
Chorus : I see, Prometheus; and over my eyes a mist of tears and fear spread as I saw your body withering ignominiously upon this rock in these bonds of adamant. For there are new rulers in heaven, and Zeus governs with lawless customs; that which was mighty before he now brings to nothing.
Prometheus : Oh if only he had hurled me below the earth, yes beneath Haides, the entertainer of the dead, into impassable Tartaros (Tartarus) [like the other Titanes], and had ruthlessly fastened me in fetters no hand can loose, so that neither god nor any other might have gloated over this agony I feel! But, now, a miserable plaything of the winds, I suffer pains to delight my enemies |
upheld France’s ban on the full-faced veil because veiling makes people uncomfortable.
S.A.S. is a 24-year-old French Muslim woman who wears a full-faced veil or niqab. She challenged the 2010 French law–which we’ve covered before–that bans wearing clothing that covers the face in public and imposes a fine of 150-euro ($205) and/or citizenship instruction. The ban, S.A.S. argued before the European Court of Human Rights, violates the European Convention on Human Rights, specifically the freedom of thought, conscience, and religion, and the prohibition of discrimination. The Court, however, disagreed and upheld the ban in a decision that cannot be appealed.
Why, according to the Court, is the ban OK? Is it a safety issue related to concealing ones identity? No. And, it is worth noting, S.A.S. willingly removes her niqab for identity check purposes at places like airports and banks, for example.
Is it about protecting women from alleged coercion? No. As the court said, “The applicant also emphasised that neither her husband nor any other member of her family put pressure on her to dress in this manner” and that she “wished to be able to wear it when she chose to do so… to feel at inner peace with herself.” And the Court explicitly rejected the claim of the French government that the ban related to women’s rights: “The Government referred to the need to ensure ‘respect for the minimum set of values of an open democratic society’, listing three values in that connection: respect for gender equality, respect for human dignity and respect for the minimum requirements of life in society (or of ‘living together’).” Though the Court “dismiss[ed] the arguments relating to the first two of those values, the Court accepted that the barrier raised against others by a veil concealing the face in public could undermine the notion of ‘living together’. In that connection, it indicated that it took into account the State’s submission that the face played a significant role in social interaction.”
So, according to the Court, “living together” requires being able to see people’s faces. And, according to the Court, covering ones face violates the rights of individuals who, “might not wish to see, in places open to all, practices or attitudes which would fundamentally call into question the possibility of open interpersonal relationships, which, by virtue of an established consensus, formed an indispensable element of community life within the society in question. ” Forcing people to see other people wearing veils violated “the right of others to live in a space of socialisation which made living together easier.”
Amnesty International’s John Dalhuisen described the ironic consequences of the ruling: “As the European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly insisted, discomfort and shock are the price democratic societies must pay precisely to enable ‘living together’. The reality is that in forcing people to ‘live together’, this ruling will end up forcing a small minority to live apart, as it effectively obliges women to choose between the expressing their religious beliefs and being in public.”
If France and the European Union are really committed to “living together” they must defend and protect the rights of all citizens, not just the majority.“I’m just not naturally stylish.”
Does that sound familiar?
Here’s the truth. Dressing well is a skill. And like any other skill, you can learn it and improve. Don’t believe me?
Yes, that’s me in high school rocking a terrible ponytail, along with glasses that were way too small for my head.
And to flesh out the image, my daily outfit in high school consisted of:
Plaid button up shirts
Baggy jeans with ripped hems because they were too long and I kept stepping on them
Clunky Rockabilly shoes I found at the mall
It wasn’t until college did I start paying attention to my style in a serious way. And if that kid above could learn, so can you.
In fact, you have a huge advantage as an Essential Man reader. I didn’t have a real resource, and had to go through years of trial and error before I’ve truly learned what great style was.
Today I’m sharing with you essential style tips for guys who want to dress better.
Whether you’re a complete beginner, or have been working on your style for a while and need a refresher, I’ve refined these concepts and tips over the last 11 years to help you look your best in no time.
1. REALIZE THAT DRESSING WELL IS A SKILL
Just like cooking or shooting free throws, dressing well is a skill that can actually be learned.
My job as a personal stylist isn’t to buy clothes for guys and send them on their way. I teach men how to choose clothes that enhance them so they can do it on their own. If dressing well wasn’t a skill that could be taught, I’d be out of a job!
With all skills, you get better the more you practice. And unless you live in some weirdo nudist colony (I would apologize here, but if you’re a nudist reading this blog, you’re in the wrong place), you need to get dressed everyday. That means you have an opportunity to practice and nurture the skill of dressing well every single day.
WHAT YOU CAN DO TODAY: Nobody is born in a perfectly tailored 3-piece suit, or with some magical intuition on how to dress well. (If you need a reminder, scroll back up and look at my high school picture again.) Realize that dressing well is a skill that can be developed through practice.
2. DEVELOP YOUR “EYE” BY IDENTIFYING STYLE YOU LIKE
Right after guys tell me that they’re just not “naturally stylish”, it’s often followed up with:
“I just don’t have an eye for putting together outfits or knowing what looks good”
Here’s what I tell them:
“Ok. Is there anyone who’s style you think looks good? Something you think ‘I’d like to dress like that’, even if you don’t think you could pull it off. Maybe it’s a celebrity, a musician, an athlete? Even a fictional character. Some of my clients have mentioned James Bond or Tony Stark before.”
The guy will then list off a ton of men he thinks dresses cool. And then I like to point out that he just debunked his own assumption that he doesn’t have an “eye”. He just showed me he can see and recognize great style!
Now, he might not know the why yet, and that’s often the reason why guys tell me they don’t have an eye. Understanding why is learnable.
But whenever you’re working on a goal, it’s important to identify and challenge stories you tell yourself. Whether it’s that you don’t have an eye for style, you’re too busy to work out, or you’re just a shy person. The stories we tell ourselves are often invisible barriers to keep us in our comfort zone.
WHAT YOU CAN DO TODAY: Take 5 minutes. List out 3 or more guys who style you think looks great and that is in the direction you’d like to go. Even if you don’t think you can pull it off, list it. It could be someone you know, a celebrity, or even a fictional character from a movie.
3. SOLVE 90% OF YOUR STYLE PROBLEMS BY GETTING THE RIGHT FIT
“F*@K Ryan Gosling!”
This is something an actual client said to me once after seeing the picture of Ryan Gosling above.
“How the hell does he look so cool wearing just a t-shirt and jeans?”
The answer, my friend, is fit.
Fit is the most important thing when it comes to great style. It’s so important, in fact, that I tell every one of my clients “wearing clothes that fit properly will solve 90% of your style problems.”
When clothes don’t fit properly, they throw off your body proportions. Because of the excess fabric, clothes that are too big make you not only look sloppy, but fatter and shorter than you are.
Men have the tendency to wear clothes that are too big for them because it either “feels more comfortable”, or they just don’t know how clothes are supposed to fit in the first place.
The right fit is how someone like Ryan Gosling (or me, or you) can look effortlessly stylish rocking a plain white t-shirt and jeans, and how someone can look terrible in a “nice suit” that probably cost 20x more.
This also means if you think you need a suit in order to look stylish, you don’t!
If you’re more leather jacket and jeans like me, you can be leather jacket and jeans and look great, as long as you’re wearing clothes that fit right.
WHAT YOU CAN DO TODAY: Download my Starting Style Guide Pack, which includes two cheatsheets: How pants should fit, and my trick to mastering the perfect fit in 10 minutes.
4. SURROUND YOURSELF WITH STYLISH PEOPLE (EVEN IF IT’S ONLINE)
When making any change in your life, especially something that’s physical like your style, the biggest roadblock is going to be the most surprising.
When it comes to the people around you now, your friends and family, your girlfriend, your coworkers, there is a high likelihood that they won’t all have a positive reaction to your change.
If you want to work with me one on one as a client, you have to agree to work with me solo. That means your girlfriend or wife is not allowed to sit in to any of our sessions or shopping trips.
I created this rule after working with a client whose wife insisted she sit in in our styling sessions. She would give me feedback on every single piece of advice I’d give. Her notes and comments amounted to “He doesn’t like that, he prefers to wear this.” Essentially negating any advice I would give.
She was enabling his bad style.
After a couple of weeks, I promptly refunded his money and created this rule.
Change is uncomfortable for people. It makes them face the reality that someone is working hard to improve, and it challenges what they’re doing for themselves.
One of my favorite quotes of all time is “You are the average of 5 people around you.” Who we surround ourselves with has an extremely important impact on our actions, behaviors, and mindsets.
This is why wealthy successful businessmen tend to be friends with each other. It’s why fit attractive Crossfitters are surrounded by fit attractive Crossfitters in Instagram pics. And it’s why obese parents are more likely to have obese kids.
When it comes to your style, that’s exactly what you need if you want to improve. You need to surround yourself with people with the same goals as you.
WHAT YOU CAN DO TODAY: The simplest change you can make is to start following stylish people on places like Instagram. It’ll give you a double whammy: It’ll expose you to great style and give you some inspiration, but it’ll also create an environment where dressing well is “normal”. Need some stylish Instagram recommendations? Check out this post I wrote about my favorite stylish Instagrams here.
5. FOCUS ON A CLASSIC STYLE FIRST BEFORE TRYING TO DEVELOP A PERSONAL STYLE
A mistake people make when trying to improve their style is thinking they need to create an original, 100% unique personal style.
This is a classic example of what’s called “Extreme thinking”.
Want to lose 20lbs?
“Ugh. I have to give up bread, rice, beer, alcohol, candy, meat AND have to do some crazy crossfit workout, and spend 2 hours at the gym. Forget it”
Want to save money for a vacation?
“That means I have to cancel my Netflix account, stop going out on weekends, defer my student loans. I probably had to miss some credit card payments if I ever want to have fun. That’s going to ruin my credit. I’m never gonna be able to relax on vacation now.”
When you’re starting to improve your style, think of it like how chefs learn to cook:
They don’t go into the kitchen thinking they need to create some amazing and original dish never seen before.
They learn the classic recipes and techniques first. Then they start adding bits and pieces of their personality and interests in to put a spin on them.
You’re going to do the exact same thing with your style.
Focus on classic styles first, then slowly add your own personal spin later.
WHAT YOU CAN DO TODAY: I write about classic styles in my “Essentials” series, you can see all the Essentials I’ve written about so far by clicking here.
6. THIS ALSO MEANS BUY CLASSIC STYLES FIRST BEFORE DABBLING INTO TRENDS
Tell me if this sounds familiar:
You open your closet. It’s filled with clothes.
You sift through all the hangers squeezed into your cramped closet and think to yourself “I have nothing to wear.”
So you go to the mall and buy even more clothes.
Then a month later, the same thing happens. You have “nothing” to wear.
You’re not going crazy.
This is what I call “Panic mode shopping”. You open your closet and freak out because things are outdated, they’re hard to mix, and there are so many choices. So you go out and buy more clothes and add to the problem.
It’s a vicious cycle. And one of the biggest reasons for this problem is trendy clothes.
Trendy translates to what’s cool now. It’s what all the blogs and magazines are talking about. It’s what’s in the stores. And because it’s new and fresh, it’s a little exciting.
But the big problem with any trend is that it eventually dies down.
Remember how leather sweatpants were really popular a couple years ago? And what about double monk shoes before that? Or if you’re old like me, trucker hats?
Trendy clothes are like that big Summer blockbuster that you can’t escape.
The actors are on every talk show. Commercials are playing non-stop. Posters are everywhere. But, come Fall, we’ve moved on.
Classics styles are like classic movies. The Godfather. Back to the Future. Taxi Driver. They’re not going anywhere.
That’s the advantage of classic styles of clothes. They’re time tested to look good. A leather jacket, dark blue jeans, boots? Looked great in the 1950s, still looks good today.
WHAT YOU CAN DO TODAY: Start shifting your shopping habits to look for and buy classic styles. What’s the difference between something that’s classic and trendy? How do you balance classics and trends in your wardrobe? Check out this post I wrote that answers that question.
7. STAY CLEAR OF GRAPHICS, LOGOS, AND WILD PRINTS (FOR NOW)
Many Essential Man readers are older professionals (30+), and I often get asked “How can I look older/more mature/get taken more seriously?”
One of the ways is to stay clear of graphics, logos, and wild prints on any kind of clothing, whether it’s a t-shirt, sweater, or god forbid, pants.
Whenever you wear a logo or graphic t-shirt, you either look like you’re in college, or are you’re on your way to a UFC fight. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m a HUGE MMA fan. But there is a certain style that goes with it.)
I’m not opposed to logos and graphic t-shirts as part of a solid wardrobe, but when you’re starting out, going solid colors is going to make you look 10x more mature and serious.
WHAT YOU CAN DO TODAY: Solid colors and graphic/logo-less clothes make you look more refined and mature. The great thing is that this change is a simple swap. Replace your graphic t-shirts and clothes with solid versions, like with the examples above.
8. STICK TO SOLID NEUTRAL COLORS
Every man’s wardrobe should be based around neutral colors.
What are neutral colors?
They’re colors that aren’t overpowering. Because they’re not overpowering they easily mix with each other. Powerful colors like a neon green and orange? Pretty hard to work with.
If your wardrobe is all neutral colors, you don’t need to know “how to mix and match colors”. A neutral color wardrobe is essentially self-working!
Here’s the other thing: You’ve probably already been dressing in mostly neutral colors without even knowing it.
Neutral colors are white, black, navy, olive, grey, khaki, brown
What I love about neutral colors, aside from it being self working, is that it’s a very masculine color palette. It makes you look refined, serious, and put together. It also provides the perfect backdrop when you want to start introducing more color to your wardrobe.
WHAT YOU CAN DO TODAY: I recommend a ratio of 3:1 when it comes to solid neutrals and non-neutral colors. Take 10 minutes check your closet. Do you have more non-neutrals, graphics and pattern clothes than solid neutrals? Make a note to start balancing it out to hit a 3:1 ratio.
9. TO QUICKLY UNDERSTAND QUALITY, GET HANDS ON
Why are some cashmere sweaters $100, and other $1,500? Is the $1,500 one really 15x better?
Are higher quality clothes “worth it”?
No doubt these questions have crossed your mind. And my answer is…
It depends.
It’s hard to make anything good for a low price. Whether that’s a pair of jeans, a laptop, or a steak dinner at home. When you have a limited budget to work with, there has to be some compromises.
There’s an assumption that because higher quality or designer clothes are expensive, “you’re getting ripped off” as a customer. You’ll sometimes read guys on blogs and forums proclaim you’re just “paying for the marketing costs”
I can tell you having worked 11 years as a menswear designer, it’s just not really true.
Better materials, better construction, and better design cost more to make, so it costs more for you to buy.
A perfect example: Cheap jacket zippers can be low as $0.50 a zipper. They’re light, can be frustrating to use and, of course, break easily.
When I was making leather jackets, I was using high end RiRi zippers. They’re heftier and nearly impossible to break. When you zip up your jacket, it was buttery smooth.
The downside? They can sometimes cost as much as $20 per zipper for me as a designer. That means by the time the jacket hits you in the stores, that single $20 zipper adds $60 to the price of the jacket thanks to a standard 3x markup.
That’s not marketing, that’s math.
But it’s hard for you to grasp how much better that zipper or $1,500 cashmere sweater is without trying it. The same way I can tell you one of the best meals I’ve ever had cost $220, per person, no matter how well I describe it, you can’t truly understand until you take a bite.
WHAT YOU CAN DO TODAY: Go to a store that you would consider out of your budget. A place that might even be uncomfortably expensive for you. You don’t have to buy anything. Just walk around, touch the clothes. Maybe even try something on. Make mental note of how things fit, feel, and how you feel wearing it. Then go to a fast fashion shop like Zara or H&M and try similar items on. Make note of what’s different and what’s similar. Anything surprising?
10. BUY THE BEST QUALITY YOU CAN FOR YOUR BUDGET
This leads us to the question, how much should you spend on clothes?
Simple: My recommendation to all my clients is to buy the best quality that fits in their budget.
If you’re making mid 6-figures a year, then a $200 pair of jeans might not be a big deal. But if $200 is barely what you make a day, there are plenty of great options at lower prices.
WHAT YOU CAN DO TODAY: To start, I always recommend J.Crew. They’re in almost every major city, are classic with a touch of trend, and they have solid prices. For more store recommendations, check out my post “Where I personally shop (and what I get there)”
11. SAVE TIME IN THE DRESSING ROOM USING THE “PULL 3” TRICK
Whenever I’m out shopping, I always see people pulling one size, then going back and forth from the showroom to the dressing room.
It drives me crazy! It’s such a waste of time.
Imagine cooking a meal at home where you took out one ingredient at a time from the fridge.
I’m going to show you how to cut your shopping time in half with one trick.
When you’re pulling clothes to try on in the dressing room, “Pull 3” of the same item:
One in the size you think you are
One size up
One size down
So if you’re shopping for jeans and you think you’re a 33, pull a 32 and a 34 and take all three to the dressing room. It saves you a couple trips, and is a bit of insurance in case it’s a new cut or the brand changed their sizing.
WHAT YOU CAN DO TODAY: Use the “Pull 3” trick when you’re out shopping
12. USE “THE SWAP TRICK” TO GRADUALLY STEP OUT OF YOUR COMFORT ZONE
There’s no change without stepping outside of your comfort zone.
But it doesn’t have to be terrifying.
I teach my clients what I call “The Swap Trick”. It’s a way of introducing something into your wardrobe – a new trendy piece, a new color they thought they could never wear, or an item of clothing they never considered before – gradually.
Here’s how it works.
Think of it like trying out hot sauces. You wouldn’t go from a mild hotsauce straight to a super hot ghost pepper sauce. You would try something slightly hotter than the last and work your way up.
It’s the same thing when you’re trying something new with your style. You probably don’t want to jump from a black leather jacket to a neon green one. The next step up would probably be a brown leather jacket.
Here’s another example:
You want to start wearing more colors and patterns for summer.
I’ll start with an easy outfit: linen oxford shirt, navy lounge pants, sunglasses, white sneakers. The color palette,while perfectly fine, feels a little boring and safe. So let’s swap out the shirt for something a little more colorful. We can go two ways, a brighter color, or a pattern/print.
Even though the choice of a light blue shirt isn’t so crazy, you can already see it feels a lot more colorful than the outfit we started with. With the print, it’s even better and more in the spirit of summer.
But notice how one simple swap can change the entire mood of the outfit! This is really the key to starting to wear more color. You don’t have to wear a lot to brighten up your look.
As a starting recommendation, I always advise to start with just one swap per phase. When you get more comfortable with wearing some color and patterns, take it a step further.
Each time, swap out one more item in your look for something a bit brighter and colorful. The great thing is, if you feel like you went overboard, you can always pull it back a level or two and still have a great outfit.
WHAT YOU CAN DO TODAY: Think about something you wanted to add to your style that you’re nervous about. How could you break it down and gradually introduce it into your wardrobe using “The Swap Trick”? If you need a specific example on how to use The Swap Trick for something like trends, check out this post I wrote on Effortless Gent.
13. YOU DON’T START WITH CONFIDENCE, YOU BUILD IT
Think about when you first started learning how to drive a car.
You were probably terrified.You were pretty sure within the first 10 seconds of hitting the road, you were going to crash.
You weren’t confident. Yet, as you kept driving, your confidence grew. Driving got easier. Now you illegally Snapchat on your phone while sipping your coffee and playing with the radio as you steer with your knee, and still get work in one piece.
It’s the same with your style.
You don’t need to start with confidence to improve your style. Your confidence grows as you work to improve your style.
Just like with driving, the more you do it, the easier it gets.
WHAT YOU CAN DO TODAY: Start with one outfit. Just one. Use the advice in the previous tips – stick with neutral colored, classic styles that fit well. You’re going to look and feel great. That quick win is important. Now use that feeling to keep going. Then, read the next tip to learn my favorite trick to help you build confidence even faster.
14. USE MY FAVORITE TECHNIQUE TO FEEL MORE CONFIDENT IN A NEW OUTFIT
This is a great technique to use in conjunction with The Swap Trick, and is a KILLER hack for a first date. In fact, it’s something I used when I first started dating my current girlfriend.
Whenever you have a date (or a conference, interview, or speaking event): Wear the outfit you’re going to wear to date for an entire day before the date.
Even if it’s a dressy outfit. Go about your day like it’s any other day. Get coffee. Go grocery shopping. Go to work.
What you’re essentially doing is “breaking in” the outfit. Getting yourself used to wearing it.
I started doing this because I noticed that when I would dress up for a date, even if it’s clothes I’ve had for years, I would always feel uncomfortable during the date. I’d feel self-conscious. I’d fidget a lot.
Then one day I had schedule a date right after work, since I had no time to go home and change, I wore my date outfit to work. By the time the date rolled around, I had spent an entire day in my date outfit and felt relaxed.
WHAT YOU CAN DO TODAY: Whether it’s a new jacket you got or an entire outfit for a date, break it in by wearing it around to do errands. Got a last minute date or event and can’t spare an entire day? I’ve found even wearing the outfit for a few hours before helps.
Need some date outfit ideas? Check out this post: “A beautiful woman lets you know how to dress (and what to do) on a first date”
15. SEEK THE HELP AND ADVICE OF EXPERTS
According to Mint, I spent $7,360 last year on books, courses, and consultants to help me improve my business, my skills like writing, and general knowledge in topics I’m interested in like philosophy.
It sounds like a lot, but ask yourself this question: What’s the cost of bad advice?
Imagine you’re a CEO of a company and you have a marketing budget of $25k. You read some advice from marketing forums filled with anonymous writers. You decide to take some of the advice and it turns out to be bad. Now you’re out $25k. Suddenly, a $7k investment in an top expert seems like a steal.
How many months, even years, will you waste following bad advice when it comes to your fitness routine? Your finances? Your style?
This tweet from Amy Hoy sums it up perfectly:
When it comes to learning how to dress, there are TONS of options. From style blogs, Instagrams, Reddit, and Youtube channels.
Some dish out great advice. Most are filled with guys who like to shop and like to talk about it online.
When it comes to style advice, it can be tricky to filter out the good from the bad.
As someone that’s been doing this for over 11 years, I know how style advice can be challenging to teach. Telling someone what to buy isn’t the same as teaching them how to have great style. The same way a cook telling you to buy ingredients doesn’t help you learn the technique.
WHAT YOU CAN DO TODAY: Whenever you read advice online, always consider the source. Do they dress well? More important, is it a style you want to adopt? If they are a stylist or have products, how do their clients and readers look? Good, or terrible? Do they have a background in fashion or style, or are they “a regular guy just like you!”
Once you find an expert you’ve vetted. You have two options:
Pay for their advice
This is the fastest way to learn. Whether that’s a book they’ve written, a course they’ve created, or hiring them for one-on-one time. And while this is the fastest, this is also the more costly option. This is my personal preferred way to learn because my time is limited. I can always make money back, but one thing I can’t make back is my time. Reach out to them via e-mail for advice
On the flip side, this option is “free”, but is going to take more time on your end. Before you reach out to an expert for advice, make sure you do your homework. Experts are often busy people. Make sure you search if they answered the questions you want to ask before. Skim through their blogs, Twitter, check if they’ve been interviewed on a podcast or magazine. If you can’t find the answer you’re looking for, only then should you consider reaching out to them. For that, I highly recommend reading this post: “How to get the attention of your favorite expert”
16. LEARN TO TAKE IT SERIOUSLY ENOUGH NOT TO TAKE IT TOO SERIOUSLY (AKA HAVE FUN, IT’S JUST CLOTHES)
I have a confession to make: I don’t read fashion blogs.
Shocker, right?
Sure, I skim sites like Hypebeast and Gear Patrol to see what’s new, but when it comes to blogs, forums, news about the industry, I stay clear. Why?
Well, for one thing, a lot of it’s really boring. It also doesn’t help me with my job.
I do a lot of research when it comes to learning the pains men have when it comes to their style. I often come across forums where guys are endlessly debating selvedge denim vs non-selvedge, having long discussions about the “death of original style”, and share their theories on what “DESIGNER X” was trying to say with his latest collection.
One thing I realized after I went from designing menswear to becoming a private personal stylist: I’ve learned to take it seriously enough not to take it too seriously.
Yes, great style can truly impact your life. I’ve seen it first hand.
Better style can make you get taken more seriously in your job. It can make you an unforgettable brand. And yes! It will make you more attractive! (What woman doesn’t want a well dressed, successful man?)
But the last thing I want you to do is spend hours on forums debating about clothes. I’d rather you put on an amazing new outfit (you learned thanks to me, of course), go out and live your life. Crush it at your job. Go on an amazing date.
Have fun.
Because if you aren’t having fun dressing better, it’s not going to last very long.
HAVING AMAZING STYLE IS EASIER THAN YOU THINK
To sum it up, make sure you:
Buy clothes that fit – It will solve 90% of your style problems
– It will solve 90% of your style problems Focus on the classics first – classics are classics for a reason. They’re time tested essentials that look good on every guy.
– classics are classics for a reason. They’re time tested essentials that look good on every guy. Stick to a neutral color palette – Neutrals automatically mix with each other, so you don’t have to worry about mixing colors. They make you look professional and masculine, and when you’re ready to introduce more color into your wardrobe, they serve as the perfect backdrop
– Neutrals automatically mix with each other, so you don’t have to worry about mixing colors. They make you look professional and masculine, and when you’re ready to introduce more color into your wardrobe, they serve as the perfect backdrop Have fun
Want to kickstart your new style even faster? Download my free “Starting Style Triple Pack”. It’s a combination of my 3 best guides to help you get started, and includes my “how clothes should fit” cheat sheets to help you master fit in 10 minutes. Just enter your info below and I’ll send it to you.Last post, I shared a docker container for compilation in C with ccache and colorgcc included. This time, we will extend that base container for development and packaging of Debian packages.
Not only it is handy to have the environment configured and packaged, but also opens some oportunities for optimization given the nature of docker, its catching overlays and its volumes.
Finally, it makes it easy to start developing Debian packages from another distribution, such as Arch Linux.
Features
GCC 6
Debian package development tools: lintian, quilt, debuild, dh-make, fakeroot …
quilt configured for debian patching
ccache for fast recompilation. Included in debuild and dpkg-buildpackage calls
eatmydata for faster compilation times
Only 192 MB uncompressed extra layer, totalling 435 MB for the whole container
If you are reading this post, you probably do not need an explanation about those tools. Look at the references section otherwise.
If you are wondering how this compares to sbuild and pbuilder, this approach is really very similar. The idea is the same: have another clean and isolated environment where compilation takes place. This solves several problems:
You can build for a different version of Debian, such as unstable or testing, without messing up your system with packages from those.
You can be sure that the dependencies are right, as the environment is minimal.
Well, docker containers can be used as a chroot in steroids, and can be regarded as an evolution of the concept using modern kernel features such as cgroups and namespaces.
Another nice benefit: it is very simple to manage docker containers. You can pull them, push them, export them and save them.
Last, a huge benefit at least for me personally is to be able to work from another Linux distribution, such as Arch.
Usage
Log into the development environment
docker run --rm -v "/workdir/path:/src" -ti ownyourbits/debiandev
We can now use the standard tools, the working directory ( /workdir/path in this example ) is an external folder accessible from the container, where you can do apt-get source and retrieve the.deb files.
Example: cross-compile QEMU for ARM64
In my experience, not all packages are configured well enough to support cross-compilation. Specially big packages tend to fail when it comes to the build-dep step. I found this nice exception in this post.
sudo dpkg --add-architecture arm64 sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get build-dep -aarm64 qemu apt-get source qemu cd qemu-* dpkg-buildpackage -aarm64 -b 1 2 3 4 5 6 sudo dpkg --add-architecture arm64 sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get build-dep -aarm64 qemu apt-get source qemu cd qemu-* dpkg-buildpackage -aarm64 -b
Example: package and tweak PHP, with CCACHE cache already populated
I like to use this container as a base for each specific project. This way, I can take advantage of the catching layers of docker to speed up the process, and at the same time I end up with the building instructions compiled in the Dockerfile.
If you decide to use a docker volume, you can always remove it if you want to start from zero. This has the benefit that upon running the container, /src will be populated with the results and cache from the Dockerfile step again. A real time saver!
# PHP Debian build environment with GCC 6 and ccache, and all debian dev tools # # Copyleft 2017 by Ignacio Nunez Hernanz <nacho _a_t_ ownyourbits _d_o_t_ com> # GPL licensed (see end of file) * Use at your own risk! # # Usage: # # docker run --rm -v "src:/src" -ti ownyourbits/phpdev # # Then, inside: # cd php7.0-7.0.19 # debuild -us -uc -b # # Note that with this invocation command, the code resides in a persistent volume called'src'. # See 'docker volume ls' # # It has already been build once with CCACHE, so you can just start tweaking, and recompilation will # be very fast. If you do 'docker volume rm src', then next time you run the container it will be # populated again with the fresh build ( but you would lose your code changes ). # # A second option is to do ` -v "/path:/src" and use "/path" from your system, but then you have to # do 'apt-get source' and 'debuild' yourself, because "/path" will be originally empty. # # Details at ownyourbits.com FROM ownyourbits/debiandev:latest LABEL description="PHP build environment" MAINTAINER Ignacio Núñez Hernanz <nacho@ownyourbits.com> ## Get source RUN sudo apt-get update;\ mkdir -p /src; cd /src; \ apt-get source -t stretch php7.0-fpm; ## PHP build dependencies RUN sudo apt-get update;\ DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive sudo apt-get build-dep -y -t stretch php7.0-fpm; \ sudo apt-get autoremove -y; sudo apt-get clean; sudo rm /var/lib/apt/lists/*; \ sudo rm /var/log/alternatives.log /var/log/apt/* ; sudo rm /var/log/* -r; sudo rm -rf /usr/share/man/*; ## Build first # this will build the package without testing but with the CCACHE options, so we are # building and catching compilation artifacts RUN cd $( find /src -maxdepth 1 -type d | grep php ); \ CCACHE_DIR=/src/.ccache DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=nocheck \ eatmydata debuild \ --prepend-path=/usr/lib/ccache --preserve-envvar=CCACHE_* --no-lintian -us -uc; # License # # This script is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it # under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by # the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or # (at your option) any later version. # # This script is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, # but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of # MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the # GNU General Public License for more details. # # You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License # along with this script; if not, write to the # Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, # Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 |
to improve the quality of life in West Dallas in all areas for the past 12 years.
Video: Kershaw extends efforts for underprivileged youth
"Kershaw's Challenge is all about giving kids an opportunity," Kershaw said. "We never expected to have a partnership with the Rangers, but it's awesome. We just wanted to do something here in our hometown … in our backyard. It's an incredible partnership."
In addition to the four full-size fields, there will also be a smaller tee-ball field. The complex will also include a main building that will house classrooms, batting and pitching cages, and weight and nutritional rooms for year-round use.
In addition to providing year-round baseball and softball instruction and play, including hosting tournaments, coaching clinics and skills camps, the Academy will provide children with access to tutoring programs, college prep classes, college and career fairs, financial literacy and internship programs, courses teaching math through the use of baseball statistics and MLB industry alternative career workshops.
Children also will have opportunities to be involved in drug-resistance and gang-prevention programs and healthy lifestyle classes.
The Texas Rangers Baseball Foundation has annually made a major commitment to the local Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities (RBI) programs, providing $250,000 over the past three years to allow 3,000 children to play baseball and softball in the North Texas area.
"This is a great partnership," said Neil Leibman, chairman of the Rangers ownership committee. "We are excited about the impact this Academy will have on [the] West Dallas area as well as [the] North Texas region.
"The Rangers have made a strong commitment in giving more opportunities for youngsters to participate in baseball and softball programs through our initiatives in the RBI program, Miracle League, and the Globe Life Rangers Baseball and Softball Grant Program. The construction of this Urban Baseball Academy will allow for the extension of those efforts in ways we could not have previously imagined."
There are already five Urban Youth Academies operating in Compton, Cincinnati, Houston, New Orleans and Philadelphia. The Washington Nationals are establishing one in the District of Columbia, and two others are planned in Kansas City and San Francisco.
"The beautiful thing about these complexes is we want them to be in areas where kids get the opportunity to play the game," said Omar Minaya, senior advisor in the Players Association. "The goal is to allow the kids the opportunity to play the game and go beyond … teach them the values that baseball brings in these urban areas."
Compton was the first Academy built in 2006, and Dillon Tate, the Rangers' first-round pick in the 2015 Draft, is among the graduates. All academies currently serve year-round for 12,000 boys and girls and over 20,000 through additional tournaments and programs.The flags of St George, the flag of Scotland and the Great Britain flag
Scots are heading to the polls later this month to decide on the possibility of independence.
But one Newcastle man thinks the borders of any new country should be redrawn - south of the Tyne.
Andrew Gray, a member of the Green Party, has launched a petition that he hopes could lead to a referendum which could see Newcastle vote to leave England.
While the eyes of the nation have been on Alex Salmond and Alistair Darling, Mr Gray, who lives in Heaton, believes the independence debate should extend beyond the Scottish borders.
Distance from London, tuition fees, the rising cost of social care and the privatisation of the NHS are among a hat-trick of reasons Mr Gray believes Newcastle should join Scotland.
His call said: “Many people in the North East feel distant from our government in Westminster, both economically and politically.
“The Scottish Parliament has proved that different ways of running public services are possible, including an NHS without the internal market, higher education without tuition fees, and, if there’s a yes vote in the referendum, defence without the threat of Trident.
“We therefore call on the UK Government to grant a referendum to all who live north of Hadrian’s Wall, or in Newcastle and North Tyneside council areas.
“We would choose whether to remain in England or to join Scotland.
“We call on the Government to arrange and fund this referendum, and to be bound by the result.”
Dr Alistair Clark, a senior politics lecturer at Newcastle University, said the idea was “interesting” but that Scotland is unlikely to expand.
He said feelings of neglect by Westminster have helped lead to the Scottish independence debate as well as devolved power for Northern Ireland and Wales, and those are shared by the region.
He said: “It’s an interesting idea and obviously there’s a lot of sympathy and shared feeling and a lot of links between Scotland and the North of England.
“The issue that it points to is that the north has not been well-governed from Westminster.”
But he added: “I do not think anyone has interest in moving the border. I don’t really think Scotland wants to add stacks of territory and I don’t really think England would want to give it up.
“There is no political will behind this and you would need considerable political will to make this move.”
The referendum on Scottish independence is due to take place on September 18.In his bestseller "Economics of Good and Evil," first published in the Czech Republic in 2009, 35-year-old academic and political advisor Tomá Sedláček defied the boundaries and stereotypes of his profession by exposing the roots of the economy in the cultural history of mankind.
From 2001 to 2003, Sedláček was an economic advisor to then Czech President Vaclav Havel, who valued his "new view on the problems of the contemporary world, one unburdened by four decades of the totalitarian Communist regime." Until 2006, Sedláček advised the Czech finance minister in a dispute over the consolidation of the budget, as well as the reform of the country's tax, pension and healthcare systems.
In the introduction to Sedláček's book, Havel wrote that most politicians "consciously or unconsciously accept and spread the Marxist thesis of the economic base and the spiritual superstructure." Sedláček, however, turns this hierarchy on its head on his philosophical journey through cultural and economic history. For him, all of economics ultimately revolves around the question of how we ought to live. The Yale Economic Review described him as one of the promising "five hot minds in economics."
Today, Sedláček is the chief macroeconomic strategist at the major Czech bank SOB, a member of the National Economic Council and a lecturer at Charles University in Prague. The German edition of his book was on the SPIEGEL bestseller list for weeks after it was published in February. The book was turned into a very successful play in Prague, which translates the author's parables and arguments into dialogue and engages the audience. An English translation of the book was published by Oxford University Press in July.
Mr. Sedláček, in Oliver Stone's 1987 film "Wall Street," the fictional tycoon Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas, pronounces the provocative motto of neoliberalism: "Greed is Good." Has the crisis in financial capitalism reduced greed to what it was once before, one of the seven deadly sins?
Sedláček: Gekko succeeds with his greed, but then he falls victim to it. Mankind's oldest stories tell us that greed is always Janus-faced. It is an engine of progress, but it's also the cause of our collapse. Being constantly dissatisfied and always wanting more seems to be an innate natural phenomenon, forming the heart of our civilization. The original sin of the first human couple in the Garden of Eden was the result of greed.
SPIEGEL: Not of temptation and curiosity?
Sedláček: Desire and curiosity are sisters. The snake merely awakened a desire in Eve that was already dormant inside of her. According to Genesis, the forbidden tree was a feast for the eyes.
SPIEGEL: Just like the suggestive images of modern advertising.
Sedláček: Eve and Adam grab the opportunity and eat the fruit. The original sin has the character of excessive, unnecessary consumption. It is not of a sexual nature. A desire for something she doesn't need is awakened in Eve. The living conditions in paradise were complete, and yet everything God had given the two wasn't enough. In this sense, greed isn't just at the birthplace of theoretical economics, but also at the beginning of our history. Greed is the beginning of everything.
SPIEGEL: So evil is the result of insatiability?
Sedláček: The demands of people are a curse of the gods. In Greek mythology, the story of Pandora, the first woman, who opens her jar out of curiosity, thereby releasing poverty, hunger and disease into the world, tells the same story as the Bible. In Babylonian culture, the Gilgamesh epic shows how desire rips man out of the harmony of nature.
SPIEGEL: Does the human species define itself by its existential dissatisfaction?
Sedláček: The saturation point, like the end of history, is never achieved. Consumption works like a drug. Enough is always just beyond the horizon. The Marxist philosopher Slavoj iek put it this way: "Desire's raison d'être is not to realize its goal, to find full satisfaction, but to reproduce itself as desire."
SPIEGEL: Which is why life is ultimately a Sisyphean task?
Sedláček: The economics of equilibrium are doomed to failure. Eve's desire -- in economic terms, her demand -- will never subside. And Adams's offer to toil by the sweat of his brow will never be enough. In the film "Fight Club," based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk, the protagonist Tyler Durden says to his nameless friend, who despises his profession in the auto industry: We work at jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. That is the expulsion from Paradise, transferred to the modern age.
SPIEGEL: And yet man always comes back to the dream of escaping the treadmill and finding the harmony of equilibrium. The memory of the paradise we have lost isn't extinguished.
Sedláček: Progress or satisfaction, that's the anthropological dilemma of the human condition. You can't have both. People are riding a dangerous animal. There seem to be two ways to reduce the discrepancy between desire and satisfaction, demand and supply. One can expand the supply of goods and the purchasing power needed to acquire them. That's the hedonistic program, which we have chosen since the days of the Greeks and Romans, but which threatens to fall apart in the debt crisis. The monetization of our society has strengthened the illusion that all the things we desire are within our reach.
SPIEGEL: In contrast, saving, rigorism and moderation are now the words of the day.
Sedláček: That's precisely the opposite program: that of the ancient Stoics. Demand is to be reduced so that it corresponds to supply. The Stoics had to spend their entire lives learning to limit their needs. Diogenes in the barrel was convinced that the less he had, the freer he was.
SPIEGEL: Except that he would hardly be an accepted role model today.
Sedláček: That was probably never the case, but his philosophical message is certainly modern. Diogenes is the prototype of the critique of civilization and technology.
SPIEGEL: A preacher of the limits of growth, which the Club of Rome also tried to establish, albeit unsuccessfully, in 1972.
Sedláček: The equation "more is better" doesn't add up anymore. This makes Diogenes a contemporary. The moment in which we realize that science and technology are ambivalent marks the end of modernity. After all, the Club of Rome was concerned with responsibility for the future of mankind.
SPIEGEL: It's easy to increase consumption, but decreasing it is much more difficult to do. Doesn't the uneven distribution of wealth also propel the wheel of desire, based on the motto that I want what others have?
Sedláček: Yes, the social ladder becomes sticky on the way down. The view of economists is that each individual seeks to maximize his benefit. The only problem with this is that we cannot precisely define what the optimal benefit is for us. We don't know what we want. That's why we need comparisons, examples and suggestion. Try imagining an object of your desire, a beautiful woman, for example. It doesn't work as an abstract idea, because the imagined image in your head is volatile. You need a photo, a description, a model. Someone has to tell you what you think is so great that you find it irresistible -- society, neighbors and colleagues, but also the advertising and entertainment industry, ads, films and books. All desires that exceed our basic biological needs are determined by culture. We want to live as if we were actors portraying ourselves.
SPIEGEL: The debts of Western countries haven't grown in the last 30 or 40 years as a result of need, but of abundance.
Sedláček: Aristotle, the philosopher of the golden mean, viewed excess as man's greatest weakness. He believed that one could only avoid excess through moderation.
SPIEGEL: Sure, but what's the right measure? Economists preach growth as the sole remedy. Is economic activity like riding a bike -- if you don't pedal you'll fall over?
Sedláček: I believe that the economy is more like walking: You can stand still without falling over. This reflects the idea of a Sabbath economy. God rested on the seventh day, after he had created the world, not because he was tired, but because he felt that what he had created was good. According to biblical custom, the fields were to be left fallow once every seven years, and debts were forgiven after 49 years. There's a saying that the good is the enemy of the better. It's correct the other way around: The best -- or chasing it -- is the worst enemy of the good.The Honky Tonk Man, who held the Intercontinental Championship for a record 454 days, is back with WWE.
The 60-year-old announced Thursday that he has come to terms on a multi-year contract with the sports-entertainment organization.
"I am honored to be back with the WWE and am very excited to be teaming up with WWE again for some more Shake, Rattle and Roll," said The Honky Tonk Man in a message released via his representative on Facebook.
The Honky Tonk Man personally added on Twitter, "HTM back in the game. Inks multi yr. WWE deal. Never say Never in #WWE."
The Honky Tonk Man last appeared as a regular character for WWE in 1997, as a manager and color commentator. After competing for several years on the independent circuit, he resurfaced on last month's "Old School" episode of Raw. Following a match pitting Brodus Clay and Tensai against 3MB, the legendary wrestler smashed Heath Slater over the head with a guitar. He then danced with Clay and Tensai to his signature "Cool, Cocky, Bad" theme song.‘The U.S. Constitution Does Not Have to Be a Suicide Pact’
On Wednesday, the same day an apparently politically-motivated non-Muslim opened fire on Republican lawmakers playing baseball, a Senate committee held a hearing to explore Islamic extremism — and figure out ways to combat it.
The hearing, in the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, highlighted how once-fringe views about Islam and extremism have entered the Republican mainstream, even as security officials grapple with the rise of non-Islamic extremism.
“The U.S. Constitution does not have to be a suicide pact,” said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), the panel’s chairman, suggesting that an overly expansive interpretation of constitutional freedoms could be dangerous. For his tenth hearing on extremism — all of which have focused solely on the threat from radicalized Muslims — Johnson called a panel of witnesses who painted a dire picture of the threat Islam poses to Western society.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former member of Dutch parliament and controversial critic of Islam who has referred to it as a “cult of death,” said, approvingly, that “Germany has closed some mosques.”
Asra Nomani, a former Wall Street Journal reporter now known for her criticism of traditional Islam, criticized Amazon for selling a book that quotes Islamic tradition to justify domestic violence. “We aren’t doing enough to police these ideas,” she said.
John Lenczowski, now a professor, worked in Soviet affairs under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. He raised the spectre of “civilizational jihad,” citing the risk of an impending Islamic takeover of Western society, warning of the dangers of sharia law and of the widely debunked “no-go zones” in Europe.
“Sharia law may not have made the kind of inroads in American society that it has in other parts of the world,” said Lenczowski, “but there are plenty of enclaves in Europe where they have established a parallel society.”
“It is being done under the protection of religious freedoms,” said Lenczowski.
Johnson said that he decided to call the hearing after he read an April interview with Ali in the Wall Street Journal in which she discussed her latest report, “The Challenge of Dawa.” In that report, Ali calls for a return to Cold War-era ideological screening, surveillance of mosques, a registry for Muslim immigrants, and for the Muslim Brotherhood to be designated a foreign terrorist organization.
Ali has also previously argued that Western democracies are hindered in their fight against terrorism due to the broad freedoms and protections that their constitutions mandate.
Many of those notions have become increasingly prevalent during and after the successful presidential campaign of President Donald Trump, who promised to ban Muslims from entering the United States, floated the creation of a Muslim registry, and selected advisors with a history of Islamophobic remarks.
But critics, including Muslim groups and plenty of Democrats on the Senate panel, argue that such measures would alienate American Muslims and play into the Islamic State’s narrative that Islam is at war with the West.
“The singling out of Muslims in this manner only breeds fear, cements a narrative of a cosmic war between Islam against the West, and flies in the face of actual trends of domestic violent extremism,” said the Muslim Public Affairs Council, an advocacy organization, in a submitted statement. “All violent extremists, whether it’s ISIS or white supremacist terrorists, seek to accomplish the very same goal: to divide our world along binary lines.”
The panel’s exclusive focus on Islamic radicalization — which seems to be mirrored at the Department of Homeland Security — also gives short shrift to the real threat of extremist violence from other quarters in the years since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
According to the April 2017 U.S. Government Accountability Office report on countering violent extremism, far right extremists killed 106 people in the United States between September 12, 2001 and December 31, 2016. In the same period, Islamic extremists killed 119 people.
“We face a threat from a variety of sources on radicalization, including white supremacists, eco-terrorists, ISIS, al Qaeda sympathizers,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Missouri), the panel’s ranking member.
She used her only witness slot to call Michael Leiter, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, and he refuted many of the points made by the other witnesses. He said he had never seen any evidence of no-go zones in Europe or that sharia is challenging U.S. constitutional law.
The fight against extremism should be based on “factual and truthful analysis of radicalization,” emphasized Leiter. “Radicalization is not occurring in mosques.”
Referring to sharia and other Islamic teachings brought up by the other witnesses, Leiter continued, “It is deeply mistaken and harmful to equate core Islamic concepts that are not inherently violent with extremist interpretations of these principles.”
Asked if the committee had any plans to hold a hearing examining right-wing extremism, Johnson’s office declined to comment.
Correction, June 15, 2017: Asra Nomani is a former Wall Street Journal reporter. A previous version of this article stated that she was a former journalist.
Mark Wilson/Getty ImagesFusarium’s tell-tale salmon-coloured signs of infection are present across the Prairies. Farmers can manage, but not avoid it. | Michael Raine photo
EDMONTON — Fusarium should be dropped from the Alberta Agricultural Pests Act, say members of the Alberta Wheat Commission.
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AWC members plan to lobby the province to amend the legislation, which has been in place since 1999.
By that year, Fusarium graminearum, the culprit in most yield and grade damaging head blights in Western Canada, had made a steady march from Manitoba to a few parts of Alberta.
In Manitoba and Saskatchewan, farmers saw up to $300 million in annual damages, fewer cropping choices and higher fungicide costs.
As well, reduced value of infected crops, especially in durum, has shifted wheat production and other cereal rotation choices westward.
The 1980s and early ’90s devastated fields of Roblin wheat, Manitoba’s favourite hard red spring variety.
Acres shifted to other cereals as the disease spread west. The droughts of 2002-03 suppressed the advancement and losses, but moist conditions at flowering in 2005 resulted in expansion of the disease in eastern Saskatchewan.
By the mid 1990s, Fusarium graminearum and Fusarium culmorum, the two species that produce the degrading vomitoxin or DON, were showing up as head blights in soft white wheats in central Alberta.
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Fusarium avenaceum was also in some samples near Edmonton. However, DON levels were very low, so the disease didn’t pose a significant risk to producers’ crops.
Alberta’s provincial government closed the province to wheat seed from infected regions and made the graminearum species an official pest. This meant that producers and the seed industry were required to take actions to avoid its production and spread.
The act specifies that, “no person shall for propagation purposes acquire, sell, distribute or use any seed, root, tuber or other vegetable material containing a pest.”
By 2009, a wave of wet conditions in southern Alberta caused more widespread infection by both Fusarium graminearum and Fusarium culmorum, with about 10 percent of the hard red spring wheat samples showing signs of the disease.
In 2010-11, grade reductions in some crop districts were again common.
Since then, the disease has shown up in most areas of the province but many crop districts still report limited instances of serious damage.
At the AWC meeting during Farm Tech in Edmonton, producers declared the regulatory war on fusarium over.
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Seed samples submitted to testing company 20/20 Seed Labs showed that 70 percent of last fall’s wheat crops in southeastern Alberta displayed signs of infection.
Farmers Will Van Roessel and Gerard Oosterhuis of Bow Island, Alta., put forward a motion to remove the disease from the provincial act.
Producer and seed grower Keith Dagenhardt from Hughenden, Alta., said, “if you are trying to keep the pest out, OK, use best management practices. Seed borne (fusarium graminearum) is a minor cause of spread. Unless we do blanket summerfallow it will be there. It is in the field debris.”
Grower Kevin Bender from the Sylvan Lake area said best management practices must be used by any producer looking to grow wheat profitably. He suggested that access to fusarium free seed is available from outside Alberta and removing the pest from the act will recognize that.
“Growers are going to Saskatchewan to buy seed in cases where there are shortages of local seed available, so we need to make this change,” he said.
While there was opposition, the motion passed and the AWC said it plans to lobby for the removal of the regulation.by
By the time the 23-year-old soldier’s court martial starts on February 4, 2013, Bradley Manning will have spent 983 days in prison, including nine months in solitary confinement, without having been convicted of a single crime. This week, in pre-trail hearings, a military court is reviewing evidence that the conditions under which he has been held constitute torture. These conditions include the nine-month period spent 23 hours a day in a six-by-eight-foot cell where he was forbidden to lie down or even lean against a wall when he was not sleeping – and when he was allowed to sleep at night, officers woke him every five minutes – and where he was subjected to daily strip searches and forced nudity. The UN Special Rapporteur for Torture has already found this amounted to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, and possibly torture.
For almost three years Manning has endured intense physical and mental pressure, all designed to force him to implicate WikiLeaks and its publisher Julian Assange in an alleged conspiracy to commit espionage. It is also a message to would-be whistleblowers: the U.S. government will not be gentle.
“[If] you saw incredible things, awful things… things that belonged in the public domain, and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington, D.C.… what would you do? … It’s important that it gets out…it might actually change something… hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms…”
These are purportedly Manning’s words*, and that is change many of us would like to believe in: that if you give people the truth about their government’s unlawful activities, and the freedom to discuss it, they will hold their elected officials accountable.
But it is one thing to talk about transparency, the lifeblood of democracy, and even to campaign on it – in 2008, candidate Obama said, “Government whistleblowers are part of a healthy democracy and must be protected from reprisal” – and another thing to act on it. On a fundamental level, Manning is being punished, without being convicted, for a crime that amounts to having the courage to act on the belief that without an informed public our republic is seriously compromised. Or, as he is quoted saying, for wanting “people to see the truth… regardless of who they are… because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public.”
The U.S. government is intent on creating a portrait of Manning as a traitor who aided and abetted Al Qaeda by releasing classified information into the public domain. But what actually occurred was that documents were sent anonymously to WikiLeaks, which published them in collaboration with The New York Times, The Guardian and other news media for the benefit of the general public, much like the Pentagon Papers were published a generation ago.
The emails the prosecution is using to try to prove Manning was the source of the leaks also depict the side of the story they want to hide, that of a young soldier grappling with the dilemma of a would-be whistleblower who knows he is taking great risks by exposing the state-sponsored crimes and abuses he witnessed, the “almost criminal political back-dealings… the non-PR-versions of world events and crises,” as he is quoted describing them to the confidant who ultimately betrayed him.
“I will officially give up on the society we have if nothing happens.” One can’t help wondering what Manning must think now, after so long under such brutal conditions of confinement. Did he expect the government to punish him in such a disproportionate and unlawful manner?
Manning’s abusive pre-trial treatment is a clear violation of the Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, the United Nations Convention Against Torture, and even U.S. military law. In fact, Manning’s defense attorney David Coombs is arguing in the pre-trail hearings this week that in view of this blatant disregard for his client’s most fundamental rights, all charges should be dismissed.
The government claims this was all done to prevent Manning from committing suicide, though any rational observer might point out that these conditions are more likely to drive someone to suicide than keep him from it. The more likely explanation is the obvious one: the government wants to break Manning enough to force him to implicate WikiLeaks and Assange, and make enough of a show of it to deter other whistleblowers. At stake is the foundation of our democracy, a robust free press, and the fate of a true American hero.
*Disclaimer: Bradley Manning has not been convicted of any charges, nor has he admitted to any of the allegations against him. Likewise, he has not acknowledged the chat logs that purport to be his words.
Michael Ratner is President Emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents WikiLeaks and Julian Assange as well as other journalists and major news organizations seeking to make the documents from the Manning trial public.An out-of-town Bank of America executive assaulted two topless desnuda street performers in Times Square Wednesday night after he accused one of them of pickpocketing his wallet, police sources said.
Mark Walters, 46, of Charlotte, NC posed for a photo with two of the painted ladies – Lourdes Carrasquillo, 32, and 20-year-old Maria Ruiz – with one on each of his arms, at West 44th Street and Broadway at around 9:30 p.m., sources said.
Walters realized his wallet was missing from his back pants pocket when he tried to tip the desnudas and then accused Carrasquillo of swiping his wallet.
“He turns to one of the women and says ‘where’s my wallet? You took my wallet!’” a law enforcement source said.
When Carrasquillo went to walk away, Walters allegedly grabbed her by her hair, dragging her to the ground, sources said. At that point Ruiz tried to intervene and then Walters allegedly elbowed her in the right side of her face, causing pain to her ear, sources said.
A cop about 50 feet away at his post dashed over and arrested Walters on two counts of assault charges, just before the “Silver Cowboy” of Times Square tried to help break up the chaos, sources said.
“That man needs to pay for what he did to me,” Carrasquillo told The Post on Thursday. “He hurt me. He grabbed us in the middle of the street and we tried to get away from him and he still kept trying to assault us.”
Ruiz, who is roommates with Carrasquillo in the Bronx, was treated for minor injuries at St. Lukes Hospital.
Cops found no evidence to support Walters’ claim that the desnudas swiped his wallet.
“I didn’t do any of that,” said Carrasquillo, referring to the alleged wallet theft. “I’ve been out here for two years.
Walters, who was in the Big Apple on business, was supposed to go back home to Charlotte on Thursday, sources said.
His bail was set at $1,500 during an arraignment in Manhattan Criminal Court Thursday night.
“I grabbed her. I was looking for the police, but I thought she pickpocketed me,” Walter told cops, according to prosecutors.
Walters’ lawyer Gurmeet Singh told Judge Felicia Mennin that Walters was actually “kicked a few times” by the desnudas.
“His wallet has still not been recovered,” he added.
Singh also claimed that Walters was thrown to the ground by the “Silver Cowboy” street performer, citing the silver paint on Walters’ clothes.
“I don’t think this is appropriate at all,” said Singh, who added that if the case did not involve the topless ladies the judge would likely release Walters on his own recognizance.
Additional reporting by Kevin Fasick and Rebecca RosenbergIn my second post in the series on Finite State Machines in Elixir we are going to break out our pure FSM data structure into its own process, essentially mimicking Erlang's :gen_fsm OTP behavior in Elixir.
Glass.new
First, let's adjust the concept of our state machine. At the present moment we have two possible states with two possible transitions, make a full glass or empty the glass. This isn't very much fun, so lets introduce the a 3rd state with some additional transitions to get in and out of that state. Naturally lets introduce the transitions of drink and fill where we can pass in an arbittary amount and and manipulate the amount in the glass. In the previous post I mentioned FSM allows the specification of arbitrary data and we will be taking advantage of this.
We should adjust our Glass FSM to match our new concept, first with a failing test:
test/glass_test.exs
test "can drink multiple times from the glass" do x = Glass.new |> Glass.fill_up |> Glass.drink(1) |> Glass.drink(2) assert x.data == 7 end
This test assumes that we will be able to drink from the glass multiple times until its empty and fill it up multiple times until its full. I'm going with an erroneous value for the total volume of the glass, setting the @max_volume to 10. So we'll add a module attribute to the code and an initial state of 0 using the FSM data variable.
lib/glass_server.ex
... use Fsm, initial_state: :empty, initial_data: 0 @max_volume 10...
Now the existing states and transitions can remain the same but we'll want to add a couple 'global' state transitions to satisfy our test.
lib/glass_server.ex
... # Global Event Handlers defevent drink(amount), data: volume do new_volume = volume - amount cond do new_volume <= 0 -> next_state(:empty, 0) new_volume -> next_state(:party, new_volume) end end defevent fill(amount), data: volume do new_volume = amount + volume cond do new_volume > @max_volume -> next_state(:filled, @max_volume) new_volume -> next_state(:party, new_volume) end end
Note: normally you want to stay away from global transition events as if not thought out properly they can get the FSM in an unintended state, but it works for our simple example. Purists will tell you that states should be finite and the only way to get in and out of them is through clear and explicit events. Notice the third state we've introduced when the volume isn't full or empty. Its a pretty ambiguous state harking back to classic problem of "Is the glass half empty or half full", but the :party state fits our domain model pretty well. Just make sure to put enough thought into your finite state machines.
Running mix test we should have passing tests and an updated Glass FSM that we will now back with a process.
GlassServer.start?
Processes run independently of each other, each using separate memory and communicating with each other by message passing. These processes, while executing different code, do so following a number of common patterns. In Erlang and Elixir, the most commonly used patterns have been implemented in library modules, commonly referred to as OTP behaviours. :gen_fsm is one of these as it offers a standard set of interface functions dealing with the behavior and callbacks necessary to implement.
GenFSM was depreciated in Elixir 0.12.5, it was decided by the Elixir gods that there existed better --- and easier --- ways to handle FSM's in the language. We are going to implement a standard GenServer process where the state will be a wrapper around our Glass data structure. You'll find separating the two to be the a preferred design pattern encouraged by Elixir.
We're going to use another library from the talented Sasa1977, his ExActor library which will simplify our implementation of a GenServer based process.
mix.exs
deps: [{:exactor, "~> 2.1.0"},...] mix deps.get
I'm using ExActor for a couple of reasons. First, it allows for less code - less code typically means less bugs. Two, it feels like a gentler introduction to OTP behavior, it showcases the Actor/Process design pattern prevalent in Erlang/Elixir, it's super runtime-friendly as its just macros and demonstrates the power of the Elixir Macro system, and third, I'm lazy and wanted to learn a new package.
Of course, we want to begin by writing a series of tests to confirm our behavior and that our actor acts like an FSM.
test/glass_server_test.exs
defmodule GlassServerTest do use ExUnit.Case test "initial server should have a initial state of 0" do {:ok, pid} = GlassServer.start_link assert GlassServer.state(pid) == :empty end test "the glass server should be completely fillable" do {:ok, pid} = GlassServer.start_link GlassServer.fill_up(pid) assert GlassServer.data(pid) == 10 GlassServer.drink_all(pid) assert GlassServer.data(pid) == 0 end test "the glass server should be completely empty-able" do {:ok, pid} = GlassServer.start_link GlassServer.fill_up(pid) GlassServer.drink_all(pid) assert GlassServer.data(pid) == 0 end test "the glass server should be able to take partial drinks" do {:ok, pid} = GlassServer.start_link GlassServer.fill_up(pid) state = GlassServer.drink(pid, 5) assert state.data == 5 end end
The final product of our glass server: lib/glass_server.ex
defmodule GlassServer do use ExActor.GenServer defstart start_link, do: initial_state(Glass.new) for event <- [:fill_up, :drink_all] do defcast unquote(event), state: fsm do Glass.unquote(event)(fsm) |> new_state end end for event <- [:fill, :drink] do defcall unquote(event)(data), state: fsm do Glass.unquote(event)(fsm, data) |> reply end end defcall state, state: fsm, do: reply(Glass.state(fsm)) defcall data, state: fsm, do: reply(Glass.data(fsm)) end
This will get our tests passing. Normally, we'd get our tests passing one at a time but for brevity's sake I'm regurgitating all of the code at once. I want to take you through the code line by line, expanding on how the FSM is being used with our ExActor code.
... use ExActor.GenServer...
will give us the macros necessary for our GenServer behavior.
defstart start_link, do: initial_state(Glass.new)
The defstart macro will define our start_link and init function. All we have to do is pass a new instance of the Glass module to our initial_state helper function.
Now, the functions to query the state of our process, meaning let's get back the current state of the FSM (make sure not to confuse the state of the FSM with the state of the process, the FSM is essentially the state as a whole of our process), and the current volume stored in the data variable.
... defcall state, state: fsm, do: reply(Glass.state(fsm)) defcall data, state: fsm, do: reply(Glass.data(fsm)) end
These are synchronous calls to the server and the caller will expect a result back. defcall macro will inject both the public function and the handle_call function and would look something like this:
def state(pid), do: GenServer.call(pid, :state) def handle_call(:state, _, state), do: {:reply, state, state}
The following metaprogramming magic will loop through an array of atoms and will define some |
Yes… but it’s unlikely.
Physical health is the foundation of academic excellence. To be a straight-A student, you don’t need to have the physique of an Olympic-level athlete. But you do need to take excellent care of your body.
Work on these three areas, and you’ll become a better learner:
1. Sleep
Eight hours of sleep a night is ideal; some people need nine.
If you’re sleeping four, five or six hours a night, you won’t be able to suddenly increase it to eight or more. The jump is too big, and you probably feel like you have too much to do during the day as it is.
So I recommend that you gradually bring forward your bedtime. 10 minutes earlier this week, 20 minutes earlier next week, 30 minutes earlier the week after, and so on, until you get to your target bedtime.
To remind yourself to go to bed on time, set an alarm. When the alarm goes off, start your bedtime routine.
But it’s not just about how much you sleep. How well you sleep matters too.
To improve your sleep quality, get the Twilight app for your Android phone. For your computer and jailbroken iPhone, install f.lux. (Unfortunately, if you have a non-jailbroken iPhone, there doesn’t seem to be a substitute app at the moment.) My own sleep quality has improved dramatically since I started using these two apps.
Next, make your bedroom as dark as possible at night. Put up blackout curtains and remove all light sources.
Turn off all electronic devices in your bedroom before you go to sleep. If, for whatever reason, you need to leave your phone on, turn it to airplane mode. This way, you’ll minimize the cell phone radiation you’re exposed to, and you’ll sleep better.
2. Food
It’s the usual advice:
Eat regular meals.
Drink 8 to 10 glasses of water a day.
Don’t overeat more than once a week.
Restrict your intake of processed foods.
Eat plenty of fruits and vegetables.
Don’t drink sugary drinks.
Do these things and you’ll feel more alert throughout the day. It’s hard to become a straight-A student if you’re always feeling lethargic!
3. Exercise
You’ve heard it before: Exercise at least three times a week, for at least 30 to 45 minutes each time.
Exercise enhances your memory and thinking skills, as proven by research. So make exercise a priority, and you’ll get better grades.
Rule #4: Don’t cram. Instead, use a periodic review system.
People are usually surprised to hear that I’ve never pulled an all-nighter before. As the research shows, cramming is a bad idea.
The more effective approach?
Periodic review.
If you periodically review the new information you learn, you’ll move that information from your short-term to your long-term memory. This way, you won’t forget important facts or equations come exam time.
The end result: Less stress and anxiety, and more A’s.
After much experimentation, I’ve found that the optimal review intervals for most students are as follows:
1 day after learning the new information
3 days after the first review
7 days after the second review
21 days after the third review
30 days after the fourth review
45 days after the fifth review
60 days after the sixth review
By the end of this cycle, the information is almost permanently stored in your long-term memory.
Note that each review is just a review of the key facts and equations, not a full review of the topic. As such, each review only takes 10 to 15 minutes to complete.
This system will save you dozens of hours by maximizing your studying efficiency.
Rule #5: Form a homework group.
Here’s why I recommend this.
You’ll run into difficulties while doing your homework, so it’s good to have friends around whom you can turn to for help. Even if they can’t solve the problem, you can bounce ideas off them. This process can be motivating and fun.
But if you do your homework alone, you’ll become discouraged more easily when you can’t solve a problem.
Your homework group should consist of three to four people, including you. More people than that and it’ll be distracting.
When it comes to studying, however, you may or may not be better off doing it in a group. Some students enjoy studying with friends, because there’s a healthy pressure to stay focused. But other students concentrate better when they study alone.
So run your own experiment and decide what works best for you.
Rule #6: Set up a distraction-free study area.
Here are some practical things you can do to make your study session as fruitful as possible:
Install and activate the Freedom app on your computer.
Turn off your phone, and put it at least 10 feet away from your study area.
Keep a clutter-free study area.
Work in 30- to 45-minute blocks. Time your study sessions to help you stay focused.
Give yourself a small reward every time you complete a study session, e.g. eat a fruit, watch a YouTube video, go for a short walk.
On a related note, don’t multitask. You might think that you’re able to watch TV, write an essay, check your Twitter feed, and solve a Math problem – at the same time.
But research shows that multitasking isn’t productive, and may even damage your brain. So focus on one thing at a time, and you’ll be that much closer to becoming a straight-A student.
Rule #7: Clarify your doubts immediately.
Many students wait until a week before the exam to clarify their doubts. This leads to panic and anxiety, a combination that doesn’t result in optimal exam performance.
The alternative is simple: Ask questions. Lots of them.
If you don’t understand a concept, ask your teacher to explain it again. If you feel shy about raising your hand during class, then approach your teacher after class.
Yes, if you do this consistently, your classmates might label you a “teacher’s pet” or a “brown noser.” There’s always a price to pay when you pursue excellence. Accept this fact and move on.
On a related note, go to class every single day.
Yes, your teachers might be boring. Yes, they might tell lame jokes. Yes, they might speak in a monotone.
But nonetheless, they’ll highlight the important areas to focus on, which will save you time and effort down the line. Furthermore, you’ll probably find it easier to make sense of your teachers’ explanation, than to figure things out on your own.
That’s why borrowing your classmate’s notes isn’t a substitute for attending class.
I’m proud to say that throughout my 17 years of formal education, I only ever skipped one class. 🙂 (That class was a review session on a topic that I’d already studied several times.)
The bottom line
Right now, you might be feeling overwhelmed. I can almost read your mind:
“These rules all sound good, Daniel. But there are just so many habits I need to change. I don’t think I can do it.”
Rest assured that I’m not asking you to put everything into practice all at once. That would be impossible.
I’m asking you to start with just one tiny change.
If you want to start exercising regularly, don’t set some huge, ambitious goal. Instead, start with a 10-minute walk, once a week. After a month, increase it to 15 minutes. The following month, increase it to 20 minutes, and so on. Eventually, you’ll be exercising three times a week, for 30 minutes each time.
The same principle applies to all seven rules. Focus on one rule at a time, and stick with it until it becomes a habit.
It took me more than 10 years to learn the rules, so don’t rush the process.
One other thing…
I mentioned it earlier, but I think it’s worth repeating: Straight A’s on their own don’t mean much. The process of becoming a straight-A student is what counts.
As you implement the seven rules, you’ll become more disciplined, organized, responsible, and self-motivated. These traits are vital for long-term success.
So start building the foundations of success, one day at a time, one habit at a time, and one rule at a time.
Please “like” and share this article with your friends.
BONUS: Don’t forget to download your free weekly schedule template, which will show you exactly how to use the 7 rules in your daily schedule.© CBC Heather Wise, the local artist who sculpted the new baby Jesus head, said the project was ‘an honour of my entire art career’. A handmade terracotta sculpture of baby Jesus’s head that was added to a broken statue in outside a Catholic church in Canada has prompted amusement and disappointment, with some likening it to the now infamous attempt by a Spanish woman to restore a crumbling fresco of Jesus.
For nearly a decade, a white stone statue of Mary and baby Jesus has stood outside Ste Anne des Pins Catholic church in downtown Sudbury. At times vandals had targeted the statue, leaving the head of baby Jesus rolling on the ground nearby.
About a year ago, the head of baby Jesus was knocked off again. This time, it seemed, the vandals had taken it with them.
The statue stood headless for months as the church’s priest, Gérard Lajeunesse, asked local businesses about crafting a new head. It would have to be custom-made, he was told, and could cost as much as C$10,000 ($7,500).
It was around then that he received a knock on his door from a local artist. Heather Wise had been walking the church’s grounds with a friend when she noticed the headless statue.
“I was so sad,” she told Sudbury.Com. “My feelings were hurt when I saw it, because I thought, ‘Who would do that?’ It’s just not a positive feeling to see that. I said ‘I’m an artist, I would like to fix it.’”
She had learned how to sculpt at a local college, but had never worked with stone. Still, she felt compelled to help. “I knocked on the door, talked to the priest and we’ve been getting this together, because we had to find out a way of doing it.”
Wise spent hours crafting the bright orange clay head. “To do a statue of baby Jesus for a church is like an honour of my entire art career,” she said, explaining that she would aim to sculpt a permanent head out of stone by next year.
The new head was attached about two weeks ago. Reaction was swift; parishioners reacted with hurt, surprise and disappointment, Father Lajeunesse told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
While he understood their point of view – “It really is shocking to the eyes because of the big contrast in colour” – he was stumped at how to handle the situation. “I wasn’t trained for this in seminary.”
He stressed that the new head – whose features are rapidly eroding in the rain – is just temporary. “It’s a first try. It’s a first go. And hopefully what is done at the end will please everyone,” he said. “She did this out of the goodness of her heart.”
The head sparked bemusement on social media, with some pointing out the striking resemblance between baby Jesus and Maggie Simpson.
Others defended the artist’s good intentions, while others dubbed her effort to be an Ecce Homo for the new age – a reference to the botched attempt by a Spanish octogenarian to restore a peeling fresco of Jesus Christ. That was described as the “worst restoration in history” by local press.
“No wonder Mary has her eyes closed,” wrote one commenter on the CBC website, while another pointed out: “Since nobody knows what Jesus looked like, what difference does it make?”Who serves in the active-duty ranks of the U.S. all-volunteer military? Conventional wisdom holds that military service disproportionately attracts minorities and men and women from disadvantaged backgrounds. Many believe that troops enlist because they have few options, not because they want to serve their country. Others believe that the war in Iraq has forced the military to lower its recruiting standards.
Previous Heritage Foundation studies that examined the backgrounds of enlisted personnel refute this interpretation.[1] This report expands on those studies by using an improved methodology to study the demographic characteristics of newly commissioned officers and personnel who enlisted in 2006 and 2007.
Any discussion of troop quality must take place in context. A soldier's demographic characteristics are of little importance in the military, which values honor, leadership, self-sacrifice, courage, and integrity-qualities that cannot be quantified. Nonetheless, any assessment of the quality of recruits can take place only on the basis of objective criteria. Demographic characteristics are a poor proxy for the quality of those who serve in the armed forces, but they can help to explain which Americans volunteer for military service and why.
Based on an understanding of the limitations of any objective definition of quality, this report compares military volunteers to the civilian population on four demographic characteristics: household income, education level, racial and ethnic background, and regional origin. This report finds that:
U.S. military service disproportionately attracts enlisted personnel and officers who do not come from disadvantaged backgrounds. Previous Heritage Foundation research demonstrated that the quality of enlisted troops has increased since the start of the Iraq war. This report demonstrates that the same is true of the officer corps. Members of the all-volunteer military are significantly more likely to come from high-income neighborhoods than from low-income neighborhoods. Only 11 percent of enlisted recruits in 2007 came from the poorest one-fifth (quintile) of neighborhoods, while 25 percent came from the wealthiest quintile. These trends are even more pronounced in the Army Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program, in which 40 percent of enrollees come from the wealthiest neighborhoods-a number that has increased substantially over the past four years. American soldiers are more educated than their peers. A little more than 1 percent of enlisted personnel lack a high school degree, compared to 21 percent of men 18-24 years old, and 95 percent of officer accessions have at least a bachelor's degree. Contrary to conventional wisdom, minorities are not overrepresented in military service. Enlisted troops are somewhat more likely to be white or black than their non-military peers. Whites are proportionately represented in the officer corps, and blacks are overrepresented, but their rate of overrepresentation has declined each year from 2004 to 2007. New recruits are also disproportionately likely to come from the South, which is in line with the history of Southern military tradition.
The facts do not support the belief that many American soldiers volunteer because society offers them few other opportunities. The average enlisted person or officer could have had lucrative career opportunities in the private sector. Those who argue that American soldiers risk their lives because they have no other opportunities belittle the personal sacrifices of those who serve out of love for their country.
This report proceeds in two parts.
First, it examines the demographic characteristics of the enlisted personnel in 2006 and 2007, using new data from the Defense Manpower Data Center.
Second, it examines the same demographic characteristics for 2007 graduates from the United States Military Academy (USMA) at West Point[2] and for members of the Army ROTC who were commissioned between 2004 and 2007 or enrolled in the Army ROTC as of March 2007. Officers who were commissioned in 2004 would have enrolled before the start of the war on terrorism, while those enrolled in 2007 were well aware that they were signing up during wartime. This makes it possible to assess whether the war in Iraq has degraded the officer corps' standards.
Enlisted personnel
The Defense Manpower Data Center provided The Heritage Foundation with data on enlisted recruits for all branches of the military in 2006 and 2007.[3] These data included the recruits' racial and ethnic background, their educational attainment when they enlisted, and information connecting recruits to their home census tracts. Using census tracts enables a more precise analysis of the recruits' family income than previous Heritage Foundation reports, which had data available only at the three-digit and five-digit Zip code tabulation area level.
Household Income
Enlisted recruits in 2006 and 2007 came primarily from middle-class and upper-middle-class backgrounds. Low-income neighborhoods were underrepresented among enlisted troops, while middle-class and high-income neighborhoods were overrepresented.
Individual or family income data on enlistees do not exist. The Defense Department does not maintain records on the household income of recruits or officers. Examining the earnings of most recruits before they joined the military is not possible because, for most of them, their first full-time job is in the military.
Instead, we approximated the recruits' household incomes by assigning each recruit the median household income of the census tract in which they lived. This approximates their parents' economic status. For example, 10 recruits in 2006 came from census tract 013306 in San Diego. Accordingly, we assigned to each of these 10 recruits a median household income of $57,380 per year (in 2008 dollars), the median income of that tract in the 2000 Census.
Census tracts are far smaller and more homogenous than five-digit Zip code tabulation areas. While the average five-digit Zip code tabulation area contains almost 10,000 residents, census tracts average approximately 4,000 residents.[4] Using census tract data consequently allows for a more precise imputation of household income than was possible in previous reports and, correspondingly, a more accurate analysis of how the recruits differ from the civilian population.
Using the median household incomes in their census tracts, the average household income for all 2006 recruits was $54,834 per year (in 2008 dollars).[5] The average enlisted recruit in 2007 had a household income of $54,768. This is modestly above the national average of $50,428. Chart 1 shows the distribution among enlisted recruits and the population as a whole by household income quintile.
As Chart 1 shows, low-income families are underrepresented in the military, and high-income families are overrepresented. Individuals from the bottom household income quintile make up 20.0 percent of the population of those who are 18-24 years old but only 10.6 percent of the 2006 recruits and 10.7 percent of the 2007 recruits. Individuals in the top two quintiles make up 40.0 percent of the population, but 49.3 percent of the recruits in both years.
Chart 2 shows the household income distribution of enlisted recruits for 2006 and 2007 in more detail. It also shows the difference in income distribution between enlisted forces and the overall civilian population.
Every income category above $40,000 per year is overrepresented in the active-duty enlisted force, while every income category below $40,000 a year is underrepresented. Low-income families are significantly underrepresented in the military. U.S. military enlistees disproportionately come from upper-middle-class families.
Members of America's volunteer Army are not enlisting because they have no other economic opportunities. Most recruits come from relatively affluent families and would likely earn above-average wages if they did not join the military.
Education
Contrary to popular perceptions, America's enlisted troops are not poorly educated. Previous Heritage Foundation studies found that enlisted troops were significantly more likely to have a high school education than their peers. This is still the case. Only 1.4 percent of enlisted recruits in 2007 had not graduated from high school or completed a high school equivalency degree, compared to 20.8 percent of men ages 18 to 24. America's soldiers are less likely than civilians to be high school dropouts.
The military requires at least 90 percent of enlisted recruits to have high school diplomas.[6] Most enlisted recruits do not have a college degree because they enlist before they would attend college. However, many recruits use the educational benefits offered by the military to attend college after they leave the armed forces.
More evidence of the quality of America's enlisted forces comes from the standardized Armed Forces Qualifying Test (AFQT) that the military administers to all recruits. Over two-thirds of enlisted recruits scored above the 50th percentile on the AFQT. The military tightly restricts how many recruits it accepts with scores below the 30th percentile, and only 2.3 percent of recruits in 2007 scored between the 21st and 30th percentiles (Category IVA; see Chart 3). The military does not accept any recruits in the bottom 20 percent.
Race
The all-volunteer force was instituted in 1973 amid concerns over whether the military could maintain race representation proportional to the overall population. In a time of war, people and policymakers would be even more concerned if the burden of war fell disproportionately on certain sections of the population.[7]
As reported in Table 2, the percentage of white active-duty recruits with no prior military service was 65.3 percent in 2006 and 65.5 percent in 2007. Based on calculations from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS), almost 62 percent of the U.S. male population ages 18 to 24 classified themselves as white in 2006.[8] The troop-to-population ratio in these years was 1.05, indicating that the representation of whites in the military is similar to, although slightly above, their representation in the overall population.[9]
The representation of blacks in the military is also above their population representation, with recruit-to-population ratios of 1.03 in 2006 and 1.08 in 2007. The percentage of Asian and Pacific Islander recruits is smaller than their population representation, with recruit-to-population ratios of 0.94 in 2006 and 0.93 in 2007.
American Indian and Alaskan natives are largely overrepresented in the military compared to their representation in the overall population. In 2006, the IPUMS reported that less than 1 percent of males ages 18 to 24 characterized themselves as American Indian or Alaskan. Yet this group accounted for 2.16 percent of new enlisted recruits in 2006 and 1.96 percent in 2007. This group is the most overrepresented among new recruits, with troop-to-population ratios of 2.96 in 2006 and 2.68 in 2007.
The population percentages and ratios for Hispanics are presented in Table 3. Hispanics are largely underrepresented among new recruits, with troop-to-population ratios of 0.64 in 2006 and 0.65 in 2007. Compared to the previous versions of this paper,[10] the Hispanic indicator variable had more complete responses, with many fewer recruits declining to indicate Hispanic ethnicity. However, the nonresponse rates for the Hispanic ethnicity indicator variable were still large enough that they may confound the results of the Hispanic analysis. If only recruits who responded to the Hispanic ethnicity question are considered, we still find that this group is underrepresented in the military.
Region
Representation by census region and division for recent active-duty military enlistees is found in Map 1. Similar to previous Heritage Foundation reports on the regional representation of troops, we find that the strong Southern military tradition continues with the 2006 and 2007 enlisted recruits. The South accounts for more than 40 percent of new enlistees-a proportional overrepresentation.
The Northeast is underrepresented in the enlisted population, while the Midwest and West are roughly proportionally represented. Map 2 shows the enlisted representation ratios for each state for 2007 enlistees with no prior military service. The figures for 2006 are in Table A1 in the Appendix.This is my entry for a Naruto contest hosted by Contest info: Uchiha in Spring / A new beginning for Uchiha Other Entries: Spring Uchiha 2016 Characters: Madara, Izuna, Hashirama, Mito, Tobirama, Itama and little KuramaDescription: After becoming the Juubi's Jinchuuriki, Madara launched his long-awaited Infinite Tsukuyomi plan and eliminated his "traitor" Black Zetsu before Kaguya could ever be ressurrected. Madara soon gained victory by casting the Infinite Tsukuyomi onto everyone, including team 7, as he believed this is the only path to eternal peace for the world. But his goal has yet to be fulfilled. Being the only conscious person left in this world, Madara allowed himself to be trapped inside the Infinite Tsukuyomi. A new beginning, a happier life has begun for Madara, where there'll be no more war, struggle and sorrow. The drawing shows an ordinary but lively spring day Madara spends with his brother and friends. Since the theme is about a newer happier life for our favourite Uchiha, I could have created a story in which Madara became Hokage and there'd be no "evil" Madara, the Curse of Hatred and the Shinobi World Wars. However, he would no longer be the Madara that I've come to love and admire. There wouldn't be so much depth and layers to this character if it weren't for what he's gone through. Hence, I decided to stick with the Canon timeline and changed the ending in Madara's favour. Though the idea is pretty cruel and unfair for everyone else in the Shinobi World, seeing it from Madara's viewpoint ('cause the contest it's about your fav Uchiha) you'll understand that the Infinite Tsukuyomi is his final resolve and the only possible way to a newer and happier beginning.P.S. if you're wondering why Mito and Hashi look so filthy like they've just rolled in the mud, well... that's my terrible attempt for inking them under a tree's shade T___TSize: 8.25" x 11"Tools: Pencil (sketch), Ink, FinelinerCharacters belong to Kishimoto Masashi______________________________Contest Result: Spring Uchiha 2016 Contest Winners Features! Thank you so muchfor organizing this contest. Big thanks to those who voted for me and the generosity of all the price donors! ^^A pitcher getting it done on the mound and at the plate helped the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters bring home a championship, just like everyone expected.
Not many had reliever Anthony Bass as said pitcher. What third baseman Brandon Laird did, that was pretty much business as usual.
The Fighters broke open a tense contest in the eighth inning, with a bases-loaded walk drawn by Sho Nakata, an RBI single by Bass and a grand slam courtesy of slugger Laird, and returned to the NPB summit with a 10-4 win over the Hiroshima Carp in Game 6 of the Japan Series on Saturday night at Mazda Stadium.
“We were on a mission this year” said Laird, who was named Japan Series MVP. “We had a long season, went through our ups and downs, but we overcame them. Look at us now, we’re Nippon champions, it feels great.”
The Fighters won their first Japan Series title since 2006, rebounding to win four straight games after dropping the first two in Hiroshima.
“We never got down even after losing the first two games of the series,” said manager Hideki Kuriyama. “We were able to win all three games at home and the momentum was with us when we came back to Hiroshima.”
Bass threw two scoreless innings to earn the win in relief. He struck out three and walked a batter. Bass finished the series with a 3-0 record, 0.00 ERA and eight strikeouts in 6 2/3 innings.
“I feel like I did my job, so I was happy with that,” Bass said. “More important is winning the championship. That’s why I signed here in Japan. I wanted to be part of a championship.”
The Fighters are champions for the third time in franchise history, also winning in 1962 and 2006. Their win continues the dominance of the Pacific League in the Japanese Fall Classic. Since 2003, PL teams have won 11 of the past 14 Japan Series titles. Nippon Ham accounted for the only losses in 2007, 2009 and 2012.
The Fighters got it right this time. Wrapping things up in Hiroshima was the cherry on top, as Nippon Ham entered the game just 2-11 on the road in the Japan Series since 2006.
“Definitely feel like we’re on top of the world right now,” Bass said. “Everyone put a lot of hard work in all season long, leading up to this. We faced a good team in the Carp. It wasn’t an easy series by any means. But we found a way to win, and it feels great.”
They won without calling on Shohei Otani again. Otani, who many thought would make another appearance in the series, either at the plate or on the mound, didn’t play Saturday. He was on deck in the eighth, but was called back to the dugout after Nakata drew his bases-loaded walk.
The Fighters would’ve likely started Otani in Game 7 had they lost. The team would’ve faced an emotional scene Sunday against retiring Carp hero Hiroki Kuroda. The veteran pitcher had mostly held Nippon Ham in check before leaving Game 3 with an injury.
“We faced Kuroda after we took the consecutive losses (in Games 1 and 2), but I was thinking that our players would’ve gone in the game on pure spirit,” said Kuriyama. “In a way, we took advantage of Kuroda’s energy. I really respect him. Maybe he wanted to pitch one more game, but if we were to play one more game, I’m not sure we could’ve won, so forgive me for that.
“I really don’t feel like we’ve actually done it. I need to sit back and reflect on it. But more than the Japan Series title, one of our goals was for the fans to have fun with each game.”
Laird’s grand slam was his third home run of the series. The Nippon Ham infielder, who had a tiebreaking two-run homer in the eighth inning that helped win Game 4, drove in seven runs during the Japan Series.
“I was just looking to have a good at-bat, just try to get a pitch I could hit,” Laird said of Saturday’s grand slam. “To get a big hit like that was unbelievable.”
He dedicated his performance to his grandfather.
“I’m just trying to do my best each and every day,” he said. “I’m playing for my grandfather right now, and I know he’s looking down proud. So thank you, grandpa.”
Laird gave his trademark sushi pose after the game and was joined during the award ceremony by Bass, Nakata and Haruki Nishikawa, who earned outstanding player honors. The Carp’s Brad Eldred was given the Fighting Spirit Award as the best player from the losing team.
Nippon Ham did all its damage in the eighth with two outs. Nishikawa, Takuya Nakashima and Hiromi Oka each singled to load the bases against Carp reliever Jay Jackson with the score knotted at 4-4.
Jackson walked Nakata to force in the tiebreaking run. Bass then hit for himself and delivered a single to center that tacked on another run.
“He walked the previous guy, so I was taking a strike and then looking for the fastball,” Bass said. “I haven’t swung in a long time, so I was just trying to start as early as I could. He left a fastball over the plate, and I just hit it.”
Bass pumped his fist wildly in celebration when he reached first base.
“I don’t know what came over me there in the eighth inning,” Bass said. “But it’s been fun. It’s a long season, and that’s why we work.”
Otani, who was 6-for-16 with four doubles during the series, was on deck during Nakata’s at-bat with Bass’ spot due up. But Bass said the plan was for him to hit for himself.
“The plan was, I was hitting 100 percent,” Bass said. “It was kind of like a fake out, I think.”
Laird then connected on a 135-kph slider to put the game away. His home run in Game 4 was also off Jackson, who was charged with the loss on Saturday.
The Carp, who won the Central League pennant for the first time since 1991, were trying to win their first Japan Series title since 1984.
Staff writer Kaz Nagatsuka contributed to this report.ICONOMI General Q&A
Tjasa Tolj Blocked Unblock Follow Following Apr 5, 2017
As our community is growing in numbers, we are getting a lot of recurring questions. Since we want to help the community to understand better what ICONOMI is and how it works, we are starting a series of Support blog posts. Please check this page before contacting our help desk, especially if you are new to this environment.
Where can I log in to / register with the ICONOMI platform?
We have seen many users confused about their ICONOMI accounts. This is completely understandable. We are in the midst of the deployment of the ICONOMI Digital Assets Management platform and this is the reason why, at the moment, there are two dedicated websites:
1. ICO ICONOMI is a platform where you can access your ICN tokens if you acquired them during our Initial Coin Offering (ICO).
Please note that you can only log in to the ICO ICONOMI website if you already have an ICO account.
2. ICONOMI Digital Assets Management platform is currently in beta testing. We are gradually inviting users to beta test our new platform. Users who applied for the beta testing program were added first, followed by the ICO participants based on the amount they contributed to the ICO, and then everyone else.
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How can I buy into to the ICONOMI.performance (ICNP) and ICONOMI.index (ICNX) array?
ICNP is reserved for ICO participants and subsequent signing up to the array is not possible until further notice.
Currently, INCX is available only for beta testers of the ICONOMI Digital Asset Management Platform. ICNX will open with the launch of our new platform and you will be most welcome to invest in it.
Where can I buy/sell ICN tokens?
ICN tokens are visible and tradable only on exchanges that support ICN tokens. You can see a list of all exchanges supporting ICN here. Because of the automatisation, exchanges differentiate between ETH and ICN addresses/accounts, so please be careful where you send them. If you decide to use the Kraken exchange, you can read our step-by-step instructions on how to buy/sell ICN.
If you do not have a lot of experience with managing digital assets, we strongly advise you to familiarise yourself with all aspects of trading and managing them first. If you send your ICN tokens to an exchange/wallet that does not support ICN tokens, you might irreversibly destroy them.
Can I send my ICN tokens to the ICO ICONOMI or to the ICONOMI Digital Assets Management platform?
No, there is no deposit option on the ICO ICONOMI platform. Until further notice, the same applies to the ICONOMI Digital Assets Management platform.
You will be able to transfer your ICN tokens (if you bought them on an exchange or stored them in your wallet) to the ICONOMI Digital Assets Management platform once the platform launches.
Please also note that with the launch of the platform all ICN tokens and the accounts from the ICO ICONOMI platform will be automatically transferred to the ICONOMI Digital Assets Management platform. (So you will not have to transfer them on your own.)
Obviously, new users (non ICO participants) don’t have an account ready, so they will have to register first and deposit their ICN tokens on their own.
Where can I store my ICN tokens?
You can withdraw ICN tokens from the ICO website to your ETH wallet, if it supports ERC20 app tokens. We strongly suggest that you use only an ETH wallet for which you own the private key. We provide a guide to using the two most popular wallets: Ethereum Wallet and MyEtherWallet.
If you do not have a lot of experience managing digital assets, we strongly advise that you leave your ICN tokens on our platform for the time being — until the launch of the new platform.
More questions?
Email us at support@iconomi.net.The Sky Walker 1306 is a unique quad and flies like no other! The main quad copter is enclosed in a protective roll cage that doubles as a protective shield and functions as a wheel! No longer do you have to worry about smacking the ground too hard or smashing the blades off hitting an obstacle, this flying ball will bounce off of every surface and even roll across the ground or the ceiling. The Sky Walker 1306 is equipped with easy to fly technology. It can take off from any surface and has an auto upright design for easy crash recovery. The included 2.4ghz transmitter provides excellent function and feel for the quad and features trim adjustments to fine tune the flying character. A 3.7v 300mah battery provides about 6-9 minutes of flight time.
Features:
* Durable material with super light weight chassis providing stability
* LED light in the canopy perfect for night flight
* 6 axis gyro provides more stable flight
* Omni directional flight
* Highly modular frame allowing easy replacement of spare parts
* Speed switch mode equipped making it suitable for both beginner and advanced pilots
* Specially designed canopy for more protection
* Product size: 24*21.5*21.5cm
Package Includes:
1 x RC Quad Copter
1 x 2.4ghz Remote Control Transmitter
1 x 3.7V 300mAh rechargeable battery
4 x Main rotor blade
1 x Charger
Product size: 9.4*8.5*8.5in
Battery Requirements:
* Transmitter: 4 AA Batteries For Transmitter (Not Included)Share This On Social
The US universal markets chain Sears continue to have difficulty in the second quarter, when its sales have declined amid strong competition from giants such as Walmart and Amazon
Hoffman Estates, the operator of Sears and Kmart, is trying to reduce the cost by closing stores, including 180 already closed this year, and plans to close another 150. The divestment is scheduled to release 28 Kmart stores further.
The company reported today that in the second quarter its loss has contracted to 251 million USD or 2.34 USD per share. Adjusted for one-time proceeds and costs, losses amounted to 1.16 USD per share.
The company’s revenue fell by 23% to 4.37 billion USD. The sales in stores that have been open for at least am year have fallen by 11.5%. For Kmart, the drop was 9.4% and Sears at 13.2 |
team used functional imaging to observe brain activity and found that the more blast injuries former soldiers had sustained, the less activity occurred in their cerebellums. To look closer at the changes, the team assessed the cerebellums of mice that were also exposed to a blast and observed some breakdown in the blood–brain barrier as well as a loss of neurons called Purkinje cells, associated with the cerebellum. Further, structural imaging of some of the veterans found that blast injury had changed their brains’ pathways, although precisely what those findings mean remains harder to interpret.
The study appeared yesterday in Science Translational Medicine and study authors Peskind, Cook and Meabon spoke with Scientific American about the research.
[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
In this study, you looked at traumatic brain injury (TBI) induced by an explosive blast. Can you describe what distinguishes a blast-induced injury like the ones these combat veterans sustain from more commonplace causes of concussion?
Cook: Blast-induced TBI is in many ways is more complex than, say, what happens if you get in an automobile accident and bang your head. When explosives detonate, they send out this incredibly intense shock wave that moves at supersonic speeds and is essentially a shell of highly pressurized air—that’s the so-called primary blast overpressure. That’s different from the secondary effects like the shrapnel and getting hit by flying objects and tertiary events that involve the person himself being hurled against the side of a vehicle or the ground, for example. The blast exposure can be very intense but doesn’t necessarily knock you over. But if the primary blast overpressure is intense enough, it is capable all by itself of killing you.
TBI is considered the signature injury of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s estimated that of the 2.6 million service members deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, 10 to 20 percent return with post-concussive symptoms. Why is that the case?
Cook: The soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are having a very unique experience both because they have very good body armor now and because of the way in which insurgents use a lot of explosives. The soldiers are exposed to a lot of explosions, so they get hit over and over again, but they’re protected from all but the worst cases of secondary and tertiary effects. Whereas had it been the Vietnam War, for example, they [the soldiers] would have been much more grievously injured and would have been evacuated.
Peskind: Probably the only war that is comparable to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is World War I, the trench and artillery warfare. The term “shell shock” came from that war and that really refers to the effects of these post-concussive symptoms.
In the group of veteran participants in this study, the average number of blast exposures that were severe enough to cause acute symptoms consistent with the diagnosis of mild traumatic brain injury was 20. It was more common to have been exposed to between 50 to 100 blasts than to have a single one.
Are there long-term consequences to these injuries?
Peskind: We’ve heard a lot about the effects of repetitive-impact mild TBI in professional athletes like boxers and football, soccer and hockey players. And we became very concerned that our young service members and veterans might similarly be at risk for chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a midlife neurodegenerative disorder, and also Alzheimer’s because head trauma is really the only environmental risk factor for Alzheimer’s.
Cook: TBI and Alzheimer’s disease share some common genetic similarities. If you’re familiar with the APOE [Apolipoprotein E] gene that’s associated with Alzheimer’s, you know that if you inherit the associated E4 allele gene, your risk for getting Alzheimer’s as you get old is significantly increased. Similarly if you have TBI and you harbor one of these E4 alleles, your likelihood of having a poor outcome is significantly increased.
Your findings in each part of this study pinpointed the cerebellum as especially vulnerable to damage. What does that finding tell us?
Peskind: The cerebellum has classically been thought of as an integrative center for sensory input and motor output. But now it’s thought to have a much broader set of functions. Damage to the cerebellum and cerebellar dysfunction may play a role in the behavioral and cognitive problems these veterans have with respect to mood, irritability, impulsivity and also cognitive complaints, which include the ability to multitask and problems with memory.
Meabon: The cerebellum is starting to be understood as a multisystem integrator. So what it does is it takes all parts of the brain and it gets them talking to one another at the right time. [Our study suggests that blasts can] throw those different systems out of whack, so that they can’t coordinate to perform efficiently.
Cook: Bear in mind that what we’re not saying is that the cerebellum is the only place or the major place. We know—from our work and excellent research from other groups—that this is not the only brain region involved and sensitive to repetitive blast exposure.
Within the cerebellum of blast-injured mice, you found a loss of a specialized neuron called a Purkinje cells. What’s their role?
Cook: One of the things that’s interesting about the Purkinje cells of any species is that [these cells] are the primary output of the cerebellum [for the integration of sensorimotor function, affect and cognition]. Any time you talk about messing with them, you’re talking about messing with connectivity between brain regions. That’s why we started looking at these pathways in and out of the cerebellum [with structural imaging].
How do you see your findings informing future research and efforts to help veterans with TBI?
Peskind: We feel that this study is a piece of a larger puzzle. There’s much more work to be done but we’re not waiting for that work to be done to try to find treatments to improve symptoms now and prevent neurodegeneration. So we’re doing a number of other studies to treat post-traumatic stress disorders linked to TBI and blast concussion, and to treat comorbid symptoms [that is, ones occurring simultaneously, but independently] like alcohol abuse and dependence as well as prophylaxis for post-concussive migraine. In the longer term we have two studies going on to prevent neurodegeneration.
Meabon: [Our findings] give you a sense of the magnitude of the issue. These guys are going out there and coming back home and they’re carrying with them this huge cumulative burden that continues to affect their daily lives. That’s really the question that the study wants to ultimately spawn other studies to start looking at.Using a 3D printer, researchers have, for the first time, forged a flexible, wearable battery that could see us ditch clunky power packs.
Electronics and 3D printing are merging to create a flexible and wearable battery – the first of its kind and, more importantly, very affordable.
The breakthrough was made by materials science researchers at Brunel University London, who in a paper detailed how they were able to stack silicone, glue and gel electrolyte pastes – similar to a layer cake – to make what looks like a clear festival wristband.
Sandwiched inside this small item is a supercapacitor that stores energy like a battery, but on its surface and without chemical reactions.
“This is the first time a flexible supercapacitor including all its components has been produced by 3D printing,” said Milad Areir, one of the team members.
“The most popular way to produce them is screen printing, but with that you can’t print the frame of the supercapacitor on silicone.”
Can be made from cheap household products
This new process improves upon previous attempts to make a wearable battery, which were often prohibitively expensive because they used different machines to make different parts.
In this new system, everything is made by one single 3D printer using cheap products from a household shop instead of sophisticated expensive metals or semiconductors.
All that is needed is a simple open-source printer connected by USB to a syringe driver with a stopper motor. This can print the paste layers, with only three or four syringes based on the size of the supercapacitor.
The wristbands themselves are printed in a honeycomb pattern, which means less material needs printing, so they are quicker to make and can be made into more complex shapes if necessary.
Looking to the future, Areir sees it replacing the clunky battery packs of today that are used for charging mobile phones on the go.
“For example, if the phone battery is dead, you could plug the phone into the supercapacitor wristband and it could act as a booster pack, providing enough power to get to the next charging point.”There are some Major Developments coming soon to Htmlcoin. Also, An Interview with EVP of Educational Technology: Zac Smith.
Joshua Rousseau Blocked Unblock Follow Following Aug 6, 2017
The On-exchange Swap Of Htmlcoins approaches rapidly; set for late September, or when 75% of all Htmlcoin currently in existence has been deposited. This swap will bring major updates to Htmlcoin code that I shall describe in detail below. These updates will bring dramatic improvements to the blockchain’s functionality.
Firstly of note, I would like to bring attention to the “Real-Time Check-pointing,” feature, number 2. There have been numerous 51% attacks on blockchains in the past, and many were successful. Even Htmlcoin itself suffered a 51% attack last month, which, I believe, is in part a reason why Html is currently trading at only 1 Satoshi on some exchanges. Yes you read correctly, just 1 sat! With Real-time check-pointing, even if a mining cartel or otherwise nefarious actor mounts and attack on the blockchain, it now is resistant to such attacks being able to alter data already written to blocks in the chain’s history: A huge plus for security.
Next, let’s look at the new features 1 and 3, this may be most interesting to miners. HTML will use the Neoscrypt mining algorithm, which is a refinement over the Scrypt mining algorithm, and offers a number of improvements over Scrypt. HTML will be readily GPU minable for a long time to come, and also, have a degree of ASIC resistance. The Enhanced Hash-Rate Compensation essentially reduces large changes to mining reward that could result from miners with a lot of hash power starting to mine, or stopping, which will make profit more consistent for the other miners. For the white paper on Neoscrypt see: http://phoenixcoin.org/archive/neoscrypt_v1.pdf
Features 4 and 5 are what have me most excited about these new HTML features. Htmlcoin will integrate Ethereum Virtual Machine functionality making It a fully functioning Smart Contracting Platform! This opens up a nearly limitless amount of possibilities for HTML in the future, from Distributed Applications, to integration within IOT devices, to Distributed Autonomous Organizations. When one considers that many Ethereum miners will look for new coins to mine after Ethereum switches to proof of stake, Htmlcoin starts to look like a good potential candidate.
Feature 8, is also worthy of note, “Account Layer Abstraction.” This means that in the not too far off future, all the possibilities Smart Contracting Platforms offer could be accessible from the Bitcoin blockchain using the Html chain as an intermediary. This is similar to what the Counterparty Blockchain does.
I hope this has helped you see just how big these updates at swap time during the end of September will be! And remember, If enough people deposit their coins to exchanges to reach the 75% threshold, It could be sooner! And now: An interview with Zac Smith, The new Executive Vice President of Educational Technology in the HTML Core Team, who has a Masters Degree in Cyber Security and Information Assurance and also is College Faculty at New Mexico State University.
I: Would you tell us a little about your background?
Zac: My background is varied, after serving in the military I earned a degree in legal science and worked as a paralegal and court clerk for a few years. I found it to be miserable work and returned to school, this time to learn welding and machining. I loved the work, hated the hours, hated the weather and hated the travel. So, again I returned to college and earned my BS in Information Communication Technology and began teaching computer science at university while I went to grad school for cyber security.
I: Has your previous work helped spark your interests in Crypto-currency? When was the “Ahh-ha,” moment for you?
Zac: I remember reading an article about bitcoin in Wired Magazine, then, a few months later, the feds busted the ‘Dread Pirate Roberts’ and it was bitcoin that aided this course of action. I don’t condone criminal action, but I was amazed that this unknown person had created this revolution in freedom. I am a huge fan of John Nash, the real John and not the Beautiful Mind character, and many believe he may be the creator. I have my own thoughts, which I will not express here; but, again I found it amazing. So, I read the White Paper and began to search for a community that made me feel at home. I found that community with Htmlcoin in late 2014 and have been involved since then.
I: How do you think Crypto-currency will benefit people?
Zac: I am a devoted believer in freedom, and that freedom of expression, freedom of press and personal freedom are fundamental to the survival of our species. Crypto-currencies represent freedom of transaction, and that is critical to business, to personal and community economic development. Crypto-currency allows anyone to regain a little freedom lost, even if it is just freedom to buy something they decide. Freedom in any degree is empowering, and so I feel that crypto-currency is empowerment!
I: What developments are on the road-map for the future?
Zac: This is an action-packed question; 5 years ago many looked at crypto-currency as money! Now, we see it as independence, empowerment and the method of creativity. I don’t have any idea how the blockchain will change our lives, yet everyday I see another company developing a tool or service that seems perfect for our lives. I can say this with all confidence: we have not even touched the surface of how Crypto-currency and the Blockchain will transform the world, and I feel confident that the cure for cancer and so many ails will, one day, be logged, shared, and protected through the forth-coming advancements!
I: We appreciate your work! Is there anything else you can tell us
about what you are working on? Is there anything else we can know now?
Zac: Currently I am researching ways to use smart contracts to conduct security assessments and creative methods to utilize the new technology of Htmlcoin. It’s funny, when I speak to non Crypto-currency people, they say things like, “can I buy a beer with it?” Yes, but image a system that allows organizations to securely verify someone’s identification without having to invade their lives. Sweden wants to put land titles in the blockchain so that they can better control and protect those details. Consider the poor farmer in a third world country where inflation is skyrocketing because of a corrupt government, the blockchain and Crypto-currency takes the power from corruption and places it back with that farmer. I don’t know where my research will take me, but it is exciting!
Well, that was a great interview. I’d like to thank Zac Smith for his time! I plan to write more articles like this in the future, lots more on Crypto-currency to come!
For full disclosure, as a Crypto-currency trader I have taken a position in HTMLcoin and fully expect It’s valuation to increase in the future. This is not Investment Advice, but merely my opinion. @cryptoboater on twitter.Tomas Young was shot and paralyzed below his waist in Iraq in April 2004 when he and about 20 other U.S. soldiers were ambushed while riding in the back of an Army truck. He died of his wounds Nov. 10, 2014, at the age of 34. His final months were marked by a desperate battle to ward off the horrific pain that wracked his broken body and by the callous indifference of a government that saw him as part of the disposable human fodder required for war.
Young wrote a poignant open letter to Bush and Cheney on the 10th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. He knew that they, along with other idiotic cheerleaders for the war, were responsible for his paralysis and coming death.
Young, who had been in Iraq only five days at the time of the 2004 attack, was hit by two bullets. One struck a knee and the other cut his spinal cord. He was already confined to his bed when I visited him in March 2013 in Kansas City. He was unable to feed himself. He was taking some 30 pills a day. His partly paralyzed body had suffered a second shock in March 2008 when a blood clot formed in his right arm (which bore a color tattoo of a character from Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are”). He was taken to the Veterans Affairs hospital in Kansas City, Mo., given the blood thinner Coumadin and released. The VA took him off Coumadin a month later. The clot migrated to one of his lungs. He suffered a massive pulmonary embolism and went into a coma. When he awoke in the hospital his speech was slurred. He had lost nearly all his upper-body mobility and short-term memory. He began suffering terrible pain in his abdomen. His colon was surgically removed in an effort to mitigate the abdominal pain. He was fitted with a colostomy bag. The pain disappeared for a few days and then returned. He could not hold down most foods, even when they were pureed. The doctors dilated his stomach. He could eat only soup and oatmeal. And then he went on a feeding tube.
Young hung on as long as he could. Now he is gone. He understood what the masters of war had done to him, how he had been used and turned into human refuse. He was one of the first veterans to protest against the Iraq War. Planning to kill himself by cutting off his feeding tube, he wrote a poignant open “Last Letter” to George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in March of 2013 on the 10th anniversary of the start of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. He knew that Bush and Cheney, along with other idiotic cheerleaders for the war, including my old employer The New York Times, were responsible for his paralysis and coming death. After issuing the letter Young changed his mind about committing suicide, saying he wanted to have more time with his wife, Claudia Cuellar, who dedicated her life to his care. Young and Cuellar knew he did not have long. The couple would move from Kansas City to Portland, Ore., and then to Seattle, where Young died.
Veterans Affairs over the last eight months of Young’s life reduced his pain medication, charging he had become an addict. It was a decision that thrust him into a wilderness of agony. Young’s existence became a constant battle with the VA. He suffered excruciating “breakthrough pain.” The VA was indifferent. It cut his 30-day supply of pain medication to seven days. Young, when the pills did not arrive on time, might as well have been nailed to a cross. Cuellar, in an exchange of several emails with me since Young’s death, remembered hearing her husband on the phone one day pleading with a VA doctor and finally saying: “So you mean to tell me it is better for me to live in pain than die on pain medicine in this disabled state?” At night, she said, he would moan and cry out.
“It was a battle of wills,” Cuellar told me in one of the emails. “We were losing. Our whole time in Portland was spent dealing with trying to get what we needed to be at home and comfortable and pain free. THAT’S ALL WE WANTED, TO BE HOME AND PAIN FREE, to enjoy whatever time we had left.”
Last month they moved from Portland to Seattle. They would be closer to a good spinal cord injury unit. Also, Washington was one of the states that had legalized marijuana, which Young used extensively.
When I saw Young in Kansas City last year he told me he had thought of having his ashes sprinkled over a patch of soil on which marijuana would be planted, “but then I worried that no one would want to smoke it.” After they moved to Seattle he and Cuellar again pleaded with the VA for more pain medication, but the VA staff said Young would have to be evaluated over a two-week period by a “pain team.” The pain team could not see him until the last week of November. He was dead before then.
“Last week I called because his breakthrough pain started happening throughout the day,” Cuellar said in an email. “I was using more and more of the morphine and Lorazepam. I was running out of pills. He had a high tolerance for pain, but it was getting bad. I called to report to the doctor that it was getting bad fast. I would not have enough pills to bridge him to the appointment on the 24th. The doctor was unsympathetic. He gave me a condescending lecture about strict narcotics regulations. I said, ‘but my husband is in pain what do I do?’ ”
Young tried to take enough sleeping pills to sleep away the pain. But he was able to rest for a prolonged period only every few days. The pain and exhaustion began to tear apart his frail body. He was dispirited. He was visibly weaker. He felt humiliated.“Maybe he got so exhausted by the enduring of it all that he took a last sleep and never came back,” Cuellar wrote. “My conclusion is that he died in pain from the exhaustion of having to endure it. Early morning Monday, when I thought he was sleeping, I heard a silence I had never heard before. I couldn’t hear him breathing. I was scared, but I knew. The first thing I did was liberate him from all the tubes and bags on his body. I cut off the feeding tube. I took off the Ostomy Bags. I removed the Foley Catheter. I cleaned his body. I played music. We smoked a last joint together. I smoked for him. I started making calls.”
“The funeral home instructed me to call the police,” she wrote. “They arrived and concluded that there were no issues, but because of his young age they had to refer this to the Medical Examiner. The Medical Examiner came. He made the determination that due to his age that they would have to perform an autopsy. I said, ‘Hey look at his body don’t you think he has been mutilated enough? Are [you] going to desecrate his body even further?’ So he was cut open some more.”
The VA called her to ask for the autopsy report.
Young’s final days, Cuellar said, were often “hopeless and humiliating.”
It is an old story. It is the story of war. Two days after the 9/11 attacks, Young enlisted in the Army, hoping he would be sent to fight in Afghanistan. He was seduced by jingoism and calls for a crusade against evil that he eventually came to realize were a mask for lies and deceit. He became a voice for other young people who bore the physical and emotional scars of war. He became our conscience. He spoke a truth about war, a truth many do not want to hear. And he condemned our war criminals and demanded justice. He wrote in his “Last Letter” to Bush and Cheney:
I have, like many other disabled veterans, suffered from the inadequate and often inept care provided by the Veterans Administration. I have, like many other disabled veterans, come to realize that our mental and physical wounds are of no interest to you, perhaps of no interest to any politician. We were used. We were betrayed. And we have been abandoned. You, Mr. Bush, make much pretense of being a Christian. But isn’t lying a sin? Isn’t murder a sin? Aren’t theft and selfish ambition sins? I am not a Christian. But I believe in the Christian ideal. I believe that what you do to the least of your brothers you finally do to yourself, to your own soul. My day of reckoning is upon me. Yours will come. I hope you will be put on trial. But mostly I hope, for your sakes, that you find the moral courage to face what you have done to me and to many, many others who deserved to live. I hope that before your time on earth ends, as mine is now ending, you will find the strength of character to stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness.
We must grieve for Tomas Young, for all the severely wounded men and women hidden from view, suffering their private torments in claustrophobic rooms, for their families, for the hundreds of thousands of civilians that have died in Iraq and Afghanistan, for our own complicity in these wars. We must grieve for a nation that has lost its way, blinded by the psychosis of permanent war, that kills human beings across the globe as if they were little more than insects. It is a waste. We will leave defeated from Iraq and Afghanistan; we will leave burdened with the expenditure of trillions of dollars and responsible for mounds of corpses and ruined nations. Young, and here is the tragedy of it, was sacrificed for nothing. Only the masters of war, those who have profited from the rivers of blood, rejoice. And they know the dead cannot speak.
“Did anybody ever come back from the dead any single one of the millions who got killed did any one of them ever come back and say by god i’m glad i’m dead because death is always better than dishonor?” Dalton Trumbo wrote in his great anti-war novel “Johnny Got His Gun,” “did they say i’m glad i died to make the world safe for democracy? did they say i like death better than losing liberty? did any of them ever say it’s good to think i got my guts blown out for the honor of my country? did any of them ever say look at me i’m dead but i died for decency and that’s better than being alive? did any of them ever say here i am i’ve been rotting for two years in a foreign grave but it’s wonderful to die for your native land? did any of them say hurray i died for womanhood and i’m happy see how i sing even though my mouth is choked with worms?”SARATOGA — Three 16-year-old boys who face charges of sexual battery and distribution of child pornography in the Audrie Pott case were released from Juvenile Hall on Saturday and are now on electronically monitored home arrest.
The boys’ movements will be limited and they will have to petition to be allowed to leave the homes of their parents, according to a source close to the case who did not want to be identified.
Family members and attorneys for Audrie Pott say the once-bubbly 15-year-old Saratoga High student felt publicly shamed by her peers after being sexually assaulted by classmates at a drunken, unsupervised Labor Day weekend house party last year.
According to court documents, the boys removed her shorts and used a black marker to scrawl humiliating messages on her body while she was passed out in a bedroom at the home. One of the boys said that the others touched her in a sexual manner.
Photos were allegedly taken and shared with other students on campus, where attorney Robert Allard said Audrie saw a clutch of boys huddled around a cell phone. She posted messages to friends on Facebook indicating she believed “everyone knows about that night.”
“I’m in hell,” Audrie wrote, according to family statements at a news conference last week. “The whole school is talking about it.”
Family members said the bullying Audrie suffered caused her to hang herself Sept. 10 at her mother’s home in Los Altos.
Authorities will not comment on the matter because the case involves juveniles.
Contact Eric Kurhi at 408-920-5852. Follow him at Twitter.com/erickurhi.WRENCH bicycle workshop
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WRENCH carries a wide range of parts and accessories that we've personally tested. If it works well, we stock it. If you absolutely need something specific we can have it delivered within two business days. Want to buy parts or tools to attempt a repair yourself? That's great - we'll help you get the right stuff.CHICAGO -- The Chicago Cubs announced before Saturday’s 4-1 win over the Pittsburgh Pirates that they brought up Brian Schlitter to fortify a tired bullpen. But the bigger move with the bullpen went unannounced -- until starter Travis Wood came on in the ninth inning to pick up the first save of his Major League career.
After the game, manager Joe Maddon was asked if Wood -- who was 2-2 with a 5.59 ERA in seven starts this season -- was still a part of the rotation.
“He’s going to be in the bullpen,” Maddon said, “and then we’ll make an announcement (Sunday) about what we’re gonna do.”
The Cubs wouldn’t confirm it, but left-hander Tsuyoshi Wada will join the rotation next week. Wada, who went 4-4 with a 3.25 ERA last season with the Cubs, has been on the disabled list since March 27 with a left groin strain. Wada’s rehab assignment is expiring and the Cubs will have to make a move with him. Wada is 1-3 with a 2.86 ERA in six starts at Triple-A Iowa this season.
Wood, who allowed five runs in 4 1/3 innings in his last start against the New York Mets on Thursday, was an All-Star in 2013.Community
During late December 2015 the Cumberland Farms convenience store located on Pine St. was robbed twice. In both incidents, a white male suspect entered the store and demanded the cash from the register while inferring he was armed. During the course of the investigation Jamie Nelson, age 29 of Burlington, was developed as a person of interest. Nelson was stopped in the area of Cumberland Farms following the second robbery by responding uniform officers and was found to be in violation of pretrial conditions of release. Nelson was then arrested and subsequently jailed for violating the terms of his conditions of release.
Investigators also located discarded clothing items along the path of travel the suspect fled during both robberies. The Vermont Forensic Laboratory was able to develop a DNA profile from the evidence gathered. A later comparison of the evidentiary DNA profile developed from the discarded clothing items was compared to and matched with the known DNA profile of Nelson. Nelson was issued a citation to answer to the charge of Assault and Robbery as he is currently incarcerated with the Vermont Department of Corrections.
Nelson has a criminal history in the State of Vermont which reflects 13 arrests for a variety of misdemeanor and felony crimes. Currently, Nelson has one misdemeanor conviction while seven cases are pending trial in Chittenden District Court.
Assault and Robbery is a felony crime in the State of Vermont punishable by a term of imprisonment which shall not exceed ten years. Anyone with information about Nelson and his connections to these crimes are asked to call Burlington Police Detectives.THE Scottish Government has lost a long-running battle to keep secret the names of fish farms that shoot seals.
In two rulings yesterday, the Scottish Information Commissioner, Rosemary Agnew, ordered ministers to identify the individual farms responsible for killing 185 seals in 2013 and 2014. She dismissed the Government’s argument that this could put staff and their families at risk from protesters.
Agnew’s decision was welcomed as a “landmark victory” by environmental campaigners, who are urging the public to boycott salmon from seal-shooting farms. The salmon farming industry stressed, however, that shooting was “always a last resort”.
Salmon farmers, river fisheries and salmon netters are licensed to shoot seals to prevent them eating fish. Over the four years to 2014, they shot a total of 1,371 grey and harbour seals, according to figures from the Scottish Government.
For the last two years the Montrose-based salmon netting company, Usan Salmon Fisheries, has been targeted by animal right activists trying to prevent seals from being killed. Our sister paper, the Sunday Herald, revealed last month that police had sent three reports to the procurator fiscal accusing both sides of breaking the law.
Just under half of the seals killed between 2011 and 2014 – 634 – were shot by fish farms around the coast, though the number has been falling year on year. Campaigners argue that seals should be scared away or prevented from accessing fish rather than being shot.
Agnew first ordered the Scottish Government to name seal-shooting salmon farms in 2012. But after complaints from salmon netters and the fish farming industry, she reviewed her decision before again ordering the information to be released in 2013.
Information on individual farms for 2011 and 2012 was then published. But in 2014 the Government infuriated campaigners by again refusing to name the fish farms for public safety reasons, prompting further appeals to Agnew. In her two decisions yesterday, she has backed their arguments and has ordered the Scottish Government to release information on individual salmon farms covering 2013 and 2014 by August 21, 2015.
“Ministers have not provided any specific examples or evidence to support the view that there would be an increased threat to public safety if information about seal shootings carried out under licence is made known,” one of Agnew’s decisions concluded.
“Having given the issue careful thought, the commissioner is not satisfied that the ministers have demonstrated that disclosure of the information in itself would, or would be likely to, prejudice substantially public safety, despite being asked to explain in detail the nature of the harm they anticipated would follow disclosure of the seal shooting figures.”
In a statement, Agnew added that she “was required to consider whether the disclosure of information about seal shooting would, in itself, directly result in the harm claimed by ministers, not whether seal campaigners are likely to protest at salmon farms and fisheries”.
Don Staniford, director of the Global Alliance Against Industrial Aquaculture, which made the appeals to Agnew, claimed a major victory. “These decisions are a shot in the arm for freedom of information and a shot across the bows of the bloody Scottish salmon farming industry,” he said.
“Now the public will be able to boycott salmon from lethal salmon farms. It is shameful that the Scottish salmon farming industry continues to kill seals and shocking that supermarkets still source seal-unfriendly farmed salmon.”
John Robins from the Save Our Seals Fund said it was important for the public to know which salmon suppliers were killing seals so they could make ethical choices. “When you buy Scottish salmon you pay for bullets to shoot seals,” he said.
“This will also allow groups like ours to compare eyewitness reports of seal-shooting with the official Government figures which come direct from the shooters and are not monitored or checked in any way.”
Scottish Salmon Producers’ Organisation chief executive Scott Landsburgh said the number of seals shot had “declined dramatically” in recent years: “We have championed deterrence techniques that are designed to keep seals away from our fish, and shooting is always a last resort.”
The Scottish Government said it received Agnew’s decisions. “We are currently considering their terms,” said a spokeswoman.File Photo: Kerala Chief Minister Oommen Chandy
Representatives of the Latin Catholic church today once again met Chief Minister, Oommen Chandy in connection with the apprehensions of the fishermen community with regard to the Vizhinjam Deep sea project, agreement of which was inked two days ago.Mr Chandy met the representatives led by Vicar General Eugin J Perira, at his residence at around 7 am.Church representatives later told reporters they had taken up the apprehensions of the fishermen community with regard to loss of their land and jobs besides difficulties due to dredging which could affect fishing operations.The church has demanded a special rehabilitation package for about 50,000 fishermen.The chief minister assured them that their concerns would be addressed and the issues will be taken up by the government.The Congress-led UDF government and Gujarat-based Adani Group had on Monday signed the work contract agreement for development of the Rs 7,525-crore Vizhinjam International Deepwater Multipurpose Seaport.Nestled up at the top of the UFC Struve vs Miocic facebook prelims was a fight between TUF pissfruit eater / Natasha Wicks vagina servicer Kyle Kingsbury and UFC newcomer Jimi Manuwa. Manuwa was arriving in the organization with a little bit of hype – 11-0, with 10 KOs, 8 of which were in the first round. But how would his regional UK experience translate to the big leagues? ‘Pretty well’ would be an understatement.
Rather than try to describe it to you, how about I let some gifs do the talking. If a picture is worth a thousand words, how about six gifs? That must be like an entire thesis’s worth. I title this one ‘A Practical Overview of Extensive Orbital Fracturing in the Realm of Combat Sports.’ Now where’s my doctorate?NEW YORK (Reuters) - For the second time in a week, a New York state appeals court has tossed out a weapons possession conviction of a teenager who was searched during a "stop-and-frisk," the New York Police Department's controversial crime-fighting tactic.
In a 3-2 decision released on Tuesday, the court ruled that officers had no justification for searching the 14-year-old boy's backpack where they found a loaded handgun.
The ruling came one week after the same court vacated a weapons conviction for a different teen in another 3-2 decision, finding that officers who stopped and frisked the boy had no "reasonable suspicion" that he had a gun hidden in his jacket.
Last week's ruling drew sharp criticism from Mayor Michael Bloomberg after it became apparent that the boy in question shot a man only months after his earlier arrest.
The two rulings are the latest legal developments in the ongoing battle over the stop-and-frisk strategy in which officers in high-crime neighborhood stop people they consider suspicious.
Police officials have defended the tactic, saying it has helped reduce crime. Critics say the policy disproportionately targets minorities, particularly young black men.
The department conducted more than 685,000 stops last year, and more than 85 percent were either black or Hispanic individuals, according to a recent Reuters analysis.
A class-action discrimination lawsuit |
for obvious reasons”.
While each side may have had “obvious reasons” for wanting to show or hide this series, at the end of the day, the decision ought to be made on scientific grounds. As a supposed rationalization for exclusion of Law Dome, Osborn stated that its interpretation was “ambiguous” on the grounds that he thought, but was “not certain” that “some authors” (here citing Souney et al 2002) had interpreted it as an index of atmospheric circulation changes:
Jones/Mann showed (and Mann/Jones used in their reconstruction) an isotope record from Law Dome that is probably O18 (they say “oxygen isotopes”). This has a “cold” present-day and “warm” MWP (indeed relatively “warm” throughout the 1000-1750 period). The review comments from sceptics wanted us to show this for obvious reasons. But its interpretation is ambiguous and I think (though I’m not certain) that it has been used to indicate atmospheric circulation changes rather than temperature changes by some authors (Souney et al., JGR, 2002).
Osborn proposed that they add a reference to Law Dome in the fine print, but not show the series in the figure itself (thus “hiding the decline” in the Law Dome data.
None of the IPCC authors appears to have bothered checking out Osborn’s speculations about Souney et al 2002. Had they done so, they would have immediately discovered that Souney et al did not consider Law Dome isotope data at all; they considered sea salt (Na+) in the Law Dome core. Nor in a Southern Hemisphere context are “atmospheric circulation changes” independent of temperature changes: changes in temperature are invariably associated with atmospheric circulation changes, particularly with movements of the southern westerlies towards and away from the equator.
Coordinating Lead Author Overpeck, who was eager to minimize anything to do with the Medieval Warm Period, quickly agreed with Osborn’s recommendation, also sneering at the non-“expert”-ness of the suggestion that the Law Dome series be shown to readers:
your suggestion to leave the figure unchanged makes sense to me. Of course, we need to discuss the Law Dome ambiguity clearly and BRIEFLY in the text, and also in the response to “expert” review comments (sometimes, it is hard to use that term “expert”…). Ricardo, Tim and Keith – can you take care of this please. Nice resolution, thanks.
best, Peck
It is interesting to re-visit this exchange in light of the correlation and t-statistic reported above. The correlation (and t-statistic) between Law Dome d18O and gridcell temperature is exemplary- far better than the two tree ring series accepted by AR4 authors. There was never any valid reason for IPCC authors to exclude the Law Dome series from their diagram of Southern Hemisphere proxies.
Law Dome in a Holocene Context
Law Dome is one of the very few sites where data is available for both the early 21st century and through the Holocene. Such sites are of unique importance for assessing whether modern temperature increases have escaped the Milankowich boundaries -an issue that I regard as central to practical interest in proxies. It also provides a welcome Southern Hemisphere perspective to a topic dominated by Northern Hemisphere proxies (and, for “skeptics”, far too much by the Cuffey-Clow temperature reconstruction from GISP2 e.g. recent WUWT discussion here).
Although the deep Law Dome core was drilled between 1987 and 1993, the record is still frustratingly incomplete. The figure below combines available elements (see below figure for explanation):
Figure 1. Law Dome d18O series (Morgan et al 2002; Tas van Ommen, email 2006, archived 2010); insert – dD from Masson et al 2000.
The main panel shows d18O values. The deglacial portion (left) shows a more or less continuous increase in d18O values from low values around 18000BP to a maximum around 9500BP. Values over the last two millennia are less than those in the early Holocene. In this figure, I’ve used the older (2010 archive version of recent d18O data since the shape seems to me to be more similar to the recent portion in the dD series in the insert figure (from Masson et al 2000). The (unarchived) Masson et al dD series also shows peak Early Holocene warmth with a gradual decline through the Holocene, with low values in the 20th century. The early Holocene maximum in the Masson et al dD series is somewhat earlier than the early Holocene maximum in the d18O series (Morgan et al 2002), but I presume that this difference in timing arises from differing dating systems for the same core. (In any event, it is not material to this post).
As a caveat on the interpretation of Holocene scale d18O series, Vinther et al 2009 convincingly showed that decreases in ice cap elevation led to long-term relative increases in d18O values (GISP2, GRIP) relative to those observed in locations with more or less constant elevation (Renland, Agassiz). A Law Dome series adjusted to have constant-elevation would therefore show an even larger decline in d18O values over the Holocene.
Conclusion
The Law Dome d18O series has a stronger correlation to gridcell temperature than 24 of 28 “passing” proxies or either of the long tree ring series used as long proxies in Gergis et al 2016. It was excluded from the Gergis et al network based on a additional arbitrary screening criterion that excluded Law Dome without impacting any other proxies in the screened network. It is not known whether Gergis et al intentionally added the additional screening criterion in order to exclude Law Dome or whether the criterion had been added without fully understanding the ramifications, with the exclusion of Law Dome being merely a happy coincidence. In either case, the exclusion is not robust. And because the Gergis et al 2016 reconstruction (R28) is based on only two proxies in its early portion, neither are its various reconstructions. The impact will be particularly felt on the R2 and R3 reconstructions, which have only two and three proxies respectively.
Just another day of data torture by the paleoclimate “community”.
The new analysis also sheds new light on AR4’s decision not to show Law Dome d18O to readers. In retrospect, it seems very clear that they didn’t want to show the decline in Law Dome d18O for fear that, to borrow a phrase, they might “dilute the message” or give “fodder to skeptics”.
Law Dome is an important location, since it is one of relatively few proxy datasets in the world which has results both through the late 20th century (actually up to 2007) and through the Holocene. I am increasingly of the view that there is relatively little purpose in examining proxy data over the last one or even two millennia without placing it in a Holocene perspective. While there is obviously ongoing “skeptic” interest in a Holocene perspective, such commentary (e.g. recent WUWT posts) is far too often limited to a Northern Hemisphere (Greenland) perspective and, in particular, to the problematic Cuffey-Clow temperature reconstruction from GISP2 (which ends in 1855, though GISP2 isotope data is available to 1987).
Because precessional forcing over the Holocene is opposite for the two hemispheres, both Southern Hemisphere and Northern Hemisphere should be shown. The Law Dome series is instructive for such comparisons. It yields an entirely different perspective on the relationship between modern and early Holocene values than the bogus Southern extratropic reconstruction of Marcott et al 2013 that has been credulously accepted by many academics.
Unfortunately, use of Law Dome d18O is compromised by inadequate publication and archiving of Law Dome d18O data by the Australian Antarctic Division. Tas van Ommen is a polite and cordial correspondent, but that only goes so far when nearly 30 years has passed without a proper publication of Law Dome d18O results.
Source Code
See: http://www.climateaudit.info/scripts/multiproxy/gergis_2016/gergis_cor_final.txt
References:
Masson et al, 2000. Holocene climate variability in Antarctica based on 11 ice-core isotopic records. Quaternary Research.
Morgan, V., M. Delmotte, T. van Ommen, J. Jouzel, J. Chappellaz,
S. Woon, V. Masson-Delmotte, and D. Raynaud. 2002. Relative Timing of Deglacial Climate Events in Antarctica and Greenland.
Neukom and Gergis, 2011. Southern Hemisphere high-resolution palaeoclimate records of the last 2000 years. The Holocene.
Neukom, Gergis et al, 2011. Multiproxy summer and winter surface air temperature field reconstructions for southern South America covering the past centuries. Climate Dynamics.
Postscript
The failure of the Australian Antarctic Division to properly publish this data is really quite puzzling. Ironically, I first sought this data in August 2003, leading to multiple promises to publish the data, none of which were fulfilled. I haven’t previously documented these efforts and do so below.
In August 2003, shortly after the publication of Mann and Jones 2003 and before anyone had heard of me, I asked Tas van Ommen of the Australian Antarctic Division for the Law Dome d18O data used in Mann and Jones 2003 as follows:
dear Dr. van Ommen, I’m studying the Mann and Jones GRL [2003] article carrying their projections back to 200 AD. Your Law Dome dO18 dataset features prominently in the compilation. I have not located this dataset at NGDC and was wondering if you could direct me to an FTP location or otherwise email me the dataset. Thanks, Steve McIntyre
Van Ommen refused to provide me the data that he had provided to Mann and Jones, politely refusing, but refusing nonetheless on the grounds that they expected to submit an article on the data “in the coming few months”:
As you may have detected in the Mann and Jones article from the way the Law Dome data was cited (acknowledged, to be more correct) Mann and Jones were using unpublished data. We are nearing completion of a fuller treatment of the Law Dome d18O dataset for publication – it has only recently reached its present state of calibration and dating. We expect to submit it in the coming few months. Once it is accepted, we will release the data. So, I am happy to provide the data but I must postpone delivery until that time.
In February 2004, six months later, I asked for a second time, once again being put off by van Ommen, who said release of the data was controlled by a paper then being finalized:
I [van Ommen] am finalizing a paper that will allow me to release the isotope record more widely. It is this next paper that controls the timeframe for release to you and archives.
The following day, the Climategate dossier shows that Van Ommen notified Phil Jones about my inquiry. (In subsequent FOI requests, various universities have claimed that they regard correspondence as confidential, but no such deference was given to my correspondence which was immediately broadcast among the Team.)
What you will find below is (in reverse chronological order) an email interchange between Steve McIntyre and myself. He has been asking for LD data for a while (since your GRL paper came out) and to my chagrin, I have put him off once already, for reasons I spell out below. For your information, I am close to submitting the full LD isotope record, which I hope to present at SCAR Bremen, along with some interesting spectral analyses and comparison to EPICA Dome C.
Jones, who forwarded the correspondence to Mann, indicated his plans not to cooperate with such requests, while Mann vehemently urged that no data be provided to me.
The following year (February 2005), I once again asked van Ommen for the Law Dome data:
Dear Tas, is the dO18 information for Law Dome supplied to Jones and Mann [2004] available yet? Thanks, Steve McIntyre
Once again, van Ommen declined to provide the data:
I will get back to you shortly on this. It has been a busy summer – field trip to Antarctica and then some vacation and I have been out of the office a lot. More soon.
The following year (March 2006), I repeated my annual inquiry for the fourth time:
BTW could I get a digiital version of the Law Dome data about which I inquired a couple of years ago and which was supplied to Jones and Mann.
This time, I was partly successful. Van Ommen finally sent me the requested data, but only on a confidential basis pending publication, which was supposedly “getting near, and along with that, a full open release of the data”:
My apologies for not following that up – things have been rather hectic. The data set I am sending is, I am displeased to report, still within my internal “mill”. In the interim, I have been involved in a further Antarctic field trip and the publication of the isotope data has been slowed somewhat. Particularly since we have been able to get extra material that will bring our record up to 2004AD (eventually at seasonal/quasi-monthly resolution). You will appreciate more than many that an extra several years greatly improves our statistical power for meteorological calibration (given the shortness of the instrumental record in Antarctica). So, I really wanted to hold off until I had the longer set to work with. This being in place, and analysis nearly complete, publication is getting near, and along with that, a full open release of the data. Until then, I give you the data that Jones used, for your own purposes. Please do not distribute the data itself.
Van Ommen’s observation that the additional data “greatly improves” statistical power for calibration is an interesting point in connection with Gergis et al 2016, of which van Ommen is listed as a coauthor.
In 2011, Neukom, Gergis and others published a supposed compendium of Southern Hemisphere proxies (Neukom et al, 2011. Clim. Dyn.), which was later relied upon for the Gergis et al 2012 and Gergis et al 2016 networks prior to screening. In January 2011, I asked Neukom to provide the unarchived data, one of which was Law Dome d18O provided to Neukom as a “pers. comm.”(see CA here):
Dear Dr Neukom,
I notice that your recent multiproxy article uses a number of proxies that aren’t publicly archived. Do you plan to provide an archive of the data as used in your study? If not, could you please send me a copy of the data as used. Thanks for your attention.
Regards, Steve McIntyre
Even though there had been a “consensus” post-Climategate that data in multiproxy studies be archived, Neukom refused.
Thanks for your interest in our work. Most of the non-publicly available records were provided to us for use within the PAGES LOTRED-SA initiative only and I am not authorized to further distribute them. You would need to directly contact the authors. I am sorry for that.
This was precisely the sort of daisy chain chase that I had long objected to. My position – both before and after Climategate – was that multiproxy authors should be required to have obtained permission from original authors to publicly disclose data before considering it in a multiproxy study or else not use it. To its credit, Nature has adopted this policy, but many paleoclimate journals (e.g. Holocene) acquiesce in data obstruction.
Subsequently, I asked Journal of Climate to require Gergis et al (in connection with Gergis et al 2012) to provide the
The compilation of this database represents years of our research effort based on the development of our professional networks. We risk damaging our work relationships by releasing other people’s records against their wishes. Clearly this is something that we are not prepared to do. We have, however, provided an extensive contact list of all data contributors in the supplementary section of our recent study ‘Southern Hemisphere high-resolution palaeoclimate records of the last 2000 years’ published in The Holocene (Table S3)… This list allows any researcher who wants to access non publically available records to follow the appropriate protocol of contacting the original authors to obtain the necessary permission to use the record, take the time needed to process the data into a format suitable for data analysis etc, just as we have done. This is commonly referred to as ‘research’. We will not be entertaining any further correspondence on the matter.
Though I obviously rejected Gergis’ refusal, I followed up with van Ommen about the publication promised many years earlier:
Dear Dr van Ommen, Some years ago, you wrote me as follows saying that you were anticipating “The data set I am sending is, I am displeased to report, still within my internal “mill”. In the interim, I have been involved in a further Antarctic field trip and the publication of the isotope data has been slowed somewhat. Particularly since we have been able to get extra material that will bring our record up to 2004AD (eventually at seasonal/quasi-monthly resolution). You will appreciate more than many that an extra several years greatly improves our statistical power for meteorological calibration (given the shortness of the instrumental record in Antarctica). So, I really wanted to hold off until I had the longer set to work with. This being in place, and analysis nearly complete, publication is getting near, and along with that, a fullopen release of the data.” Has this been published yet? I notice that the data in Schneider et al 2006 came to 1999, but not to 2004. How far back were you able to extract annual values? Regards, Steve McIntyre
Van Ommen replied that the papers were “just submitted or about to be in coming week”:
We have not published any further Law Dome d18O results since we last corresponded, with the exception of a study of the last deglacial period (ca. 20ky-10ky BP) for which those data are archived publically. Our research focus has been on trace chemistry work, snowfall rates and also for me an excursion into ice sheet work. This will shortly change with papers either just submitted or about to be in coming weeks. These will benefit from improved dating arising from the trace chemistry studies and annual values back to ca. AD170. As soon as any of the publications are accepted we will be archiving the corresponding data set.
I then asked van Ommen for the data that he had provided to Gergis:
Gergis et al cited a newer version of the d18O data, which they considered in their study, which refers to a start date related to the salt studies. It looks very relevant to their conclusions. Could I get a copy of the data that they were sent for the purpose of commenting on Gergis et al. Regards, Steve Mc
Van Ommen had been corresponding with Gergis about my data request. In order to frustrate my request for the data prior to screening, he had suggested to Gergis that I only be provided with the 1921-1990 portion of the data, only enough to check their screening. He followed this tactic in his reply to me:
As you know, the Gergis study rejected the Law Dome d18O series as a non-predictor. It was not significantly correlated (detrended, as described in the paper) to the instrumental target series over the period 1921-1990. If you wish to check the rejection correlation, then you can do so. The data set through this time period is “as archived” from the 2006 Schneider and Steig paper and publicly available. To save your effort, I reproduce the 1921-90 portion below. 1990 -23.43
1989 -21.91
1988 -21.22
1987 -23.07 ….
I then asked van Ommen about an apparent discepancy between the d18O series of Jones et al 1998 and the more recent versions:
Tas, maybe you can clarify something. In the graph below, I’ve compared the annual data from the Law Dome O18 data used in Jones et al 1998 (red) to the data in the LD2.1kyr file (blue) that you sent me a number of years ago (which, as you observe, matches the Schneider average in the last 2 centuries.) The values of the two versions match closely from about 1600-1840, but diverge quite sharply after that. I haven’t seen any discussion of this and I was wondering what caused the difference in results in the 20th century? Regards, Steve McIntyre
van Ommen politely answered as follows:
I believe we covered some of this in our exchange back in 2008. I noted that we haven’t published on the data set that Phil used in 1998 and didn’t wish to archive it publicly as it was a very early product that might have been state of the art at that time, but which was superseded by data coming on line in subequent years: noteably the LD2.1kyr data set and the Schneider and Steig data sets (both archived). Anyway, to the matter of why they are different, I did make some passing comment in 2008 – gaps, newer cores and a refinement of dating and calibration were mentioned. Specifically, the Jones 1998 data uses the upper part of the initial DSS core, thermally drilled in 1987, and analysed in new mass spectrometry facilities. There was a section of core when drills were changed (corresponding to the ~1840-~1880 gap) that was in bad condition and so we didn’t have a series through that portion. These were the early pioneering days, and since then we have improved all aspects of our operation end-to-end, with better technology, calibrations and replicate cores (dry drilled rather than thermally, which helps) over the period in question. That is why the records that we are releasing are different. I hope that helps – please don’t hestitate to continue the dialog if you have further questions.
I responded as follows:
Thanks for the clarification. I have experience in drilling cores (though in the mineral business) and understand that mechanical vagaries occur under much less demanding circumstances than you’re experiencing. Given both the importance of d18O as a proxy andIt Law Dome as a high resolution site, I’m surprised that publication of Law Dome O18 results has been so sketchy to date. BTW contrary to your email, I’m not aware of the LD2.1 dataset being archived anywhere. It’s not at NOAA nor did it turn up in a AADC search under “law dome”. If I’m mistaken, the location isn’t easy.
Van Ommen responded by pointing to metadata record at AADC which did not actually contain a public archive, but a direction to manually request the data. Van Ommen reflected on this overnight and decided to make the data available online after all:
I just checked this out again and on consideration I will just have the data opened for automated access – should happen within a day. Although my intent was to be constructive rather than obstructive with access, and I have no evidence that anyone had complaints, I reckon this is a better option.
In this exchange, van Ommen also made the prescient comment that studies using Law Dome as a temperature proxy had assessed correlation to local temperature (which was high), whereas Gergis et al 2012 had assessed correlation to an Australasian regional composite (which was low). So at least one Gergis et al 2016 coauthor was keenly aware of the strong correlation of Law Dome d18O to local temperature:
One point you may want to consider in your view of various uses of the proxy data – some, like Mann and Jones, or Schneider et al., have assessed Law Dome for its correlation to _local_ Antarctic temperature. We know for isotopes in polar precipitation that this is to be expected. Gergis et al were assessing the correlation to very distant temperatures in the Australasian sector – their finding: not much. In the absence of a particular teleconnection, this is also expected.
In 2016, the Australian Antarctic Division archived their official Law Dome d18O version over the past two millennia (see here), still without a covering academic publication.
In August 2003, van Ommen had said that they expected to “submit it in the coming few months”. Thirteen years later, the long and multiply promised article remains unpublished.On 12 May 2015, a Singapore court sentenced Amos Yee, an outspoken 16-year-old video blogger who had been tried as an adult, to four weeks in jail.
Yee had been hauled up six weeks earlier on charges related to materials he had posted online: one for violating Section 298 of the country’s penal code by making “remarks against Christianity, with the deliberate intention of wounding the religious feelings of Christians in general”; another for obscenity; and another for violating the Protection from Harassment Act 2014 by making “remarks about Mr Lee Kuan Yew which were intended to be heard and seen by persons likely to be distressed”.
Most of this came as a result of Lee Kuan Yew Is Finally Dead!, a video posted four days after the death of the first prime minister of Singapore. In it, Yee offered a withering assessment of the independent city-state’s founding father, which was in stark contrast to the laudatory tributes pouring forth from elsewhere.
“On the surface, he seemed quite successful,” says Yee in the video. “He turned Singapore from a small seaport into a bustling metropolis, rife with skyscrapers and its own casino. World leaders seemed to like him, most notably Margaret Thatcher, and many foreigners and millionaires wish to invest in Singapore. But you look deeper, and you find out what the true nature of Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore is.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Teenager Amos Yee awaits sentencing last year. Photograph: Wallace Woon/EPA
Yee’s complaints about his homeland – and there are many – include its long working hours, high income inequality and poverty rates, high taxes, low government spending on healthcare and social security, thoroughgoing materialism – and its government’s tendency to slap critics down with libel suits.
He sees it all personified in Lee Kuan Yew, who “honestly thought that money and status equated to happiness … His failure to understand how false that was really showed, leading us to become one of the richest countries in the world, and one of the most depressed. Ultimately, how do you quantify a great leader? It is by how he creates a place where people are able to live happily and prosper based on their own unique attributes. And he hasn’t.”
A fourth-generation Singaporean of Chinese descent, and a Cambridge University and London School of Economics graduate, Lee was once called “the best bloody Englishman east of Suez” by the British foreign secretary George Brown. But his years as a student in England taught him not to revere the people who ran Singapore throughout his youth: “I saw no reason why they should be governing me,” he later said. “They’re not superior.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mourners queue to pay their respects after the death of Lee Kuan Yew in 2015. Photograph: Roslan Rahman/AFP/Getty Images
Lee first took Singapore’s reins when he led the People’s Action party (PAP), a coalition strategically formed with pro-communists, to victory in the elections of 1959 after Britain granted the island limited self-rule. Allied bombing of the Japanese-occupied island during the second world war had reduced it to a blank slate for all manner of economic, social and urban planning, and it remained shabby for years: “Utter filth and poverty,” reported the travel magazine Asia Scene in 1960. “One must see with his own eyes to believe it.”
Lee’s PAP, especially after Singapore’s expulsion from its short-lived federation with Malaysia in 1965, seized the opportunity to take the ruined former British trading post and build not just a new, modern, independent country – but the most carefully planned city in the world.
The New Yorker’s Robert Shaplen, reporting from Singapore in the 1960s, described Lee as “a brilliant, impulsive, and sometimes irascible man”, possessed of an intellectual brilliance “that has kept him remote from all but a few of his followers” – and a dream of turning his country into the economic engine of south-east Asia.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The best bloody Englishman east of Suez’ … Lee Kuan Yew. Photograph: Laurence Harris/AP
But according to Shaplen: “One of Singapore’s – and Lee’s – problems [was] a lack of any constructive political opposition.” He would spend the rest of his career minimising the chances of its emergence, crafting a political and media environment in which the PAP could, through free and fair elections, keep a vice-like grip on its claim to power and legitimacy. In the process, Lee ensured a degree of direct control over the built environment unseen in the rest of the democratic world.
The great housing project
Singapore, which the colony’s founder, Sir Stamford Raffles, envisioned in 1819 as a “Manchester of the east”, had become a boomtown under British rule. It struggled to accommodate wave after wave of immigrants who settled there, growing haphazardly until Raffles ordered up its first proper urban plan – with gridded streets, commercial zones and ethnically segregated residential districts – in 1822.
But Singapore’s housing woes deepened for more than a century – up to the reign of Lee’s PAP and its establishment of the mighty Housing and Development Board (HDB) in 1960, the division of the Ministry of National Development charged with building public housing. It immediately began putting up 10 to 15-storey tower blocks, adding more than 50,000 units of housing to the city within the first five years of its existence.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest An old public housing estate flat in Singapore’s Katong area, built by the HDB. Photograph: Tim Chong/Reuters
Since its inception, the HDB has built more than a million flats on the island, taking the concept of social housing to a level unparalleled in any city. Today, more than 80% of Singapore’s population live in HDB buildings, and the organisation itself describes public housing as “a Singapore icon”.
First, though, the HDB had to tackle the issue of 240,000 squatters, many of them migrants from Malaysia, who had appeared in Singapore during the 1950s. Their presence necessitated, to the minds of the planners in charge, a programme of aggressive slum clearance, which provoked the kind of racially charged resistance typical of such sweeping urban-renewal efforts.
The HDB made it a priority to house low-income groups first, subsidising rents on the flats and later providing assistance from the Central Provident Fund, Singapore’s compulsory savings plan, to purchase them, creating a nation of stability-loving homeowners. But it couldn’t convince the squatters to vacate their informal settlements for the new high-rises as quickly as it would have liked.
Singapore is close to the ideal model of land-use planning in the 21st century Edward Glaeser, urban economist
Then came the still unexplained Bukit Ho Swee fire of 1961, which swept through the slum, killing four, injuring 85, leaving around 16,000 homeless, and providing the government with a chance to demonstrate the speed with which it could relocate the victims – which it did in just over two weeks – and build new housing on the site of the disaster, which it did over the next four years.
“Singapore must be one of the few places in the world where a statutory board satisfactorily completed everything it set out to do in its first five-year plan,” says the narrator of a triumphant 1965 Singapore Ministry of Culture-produced newsreel on the HDB’s first wave of buildings. “Nowhere in the world, except in Russia and Germany, is the rate of rehousing faster than in Singapore.”
The film cuts to a celebratory exhibition presenting renderings and models of the HDB’s plans for the next five years and beyond: “By far the most stimulating and exciting is the far-reaching scheme to rebuild a new city on the site of the old, dilapidated buildings and unhealthy slums.”
The footage shows Lee Kuan Yew himself amid these visions of ever-growing towers to house families and workers, and the narrator quotes Lee’s pronouncement: “The people of Singapore demand high standards of their governments, and they are prepared to work hard and are capable of higher skills. For them, the sky is the limit.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Singapore imposes corporal punishment for acts of vandalism and has a ban on the importation of chewing gum
From the beginning of Lee’s three-decade run as prime minister until its end in 1990, Singapore’s total number of public housing units grew from 22,975 to 557,575. They remain organised by ethnicity, but unlike in Raffles’ day, the PAP’s idea wasn’t to separate the Chinese, the Malays, the Indians and the rest, but to carefully integrate them – so the demographics of each block reflect the demographics of Singapore as a whole, in theory preventing the formation of volatile ethnic enclaves.
Singapore’s gross national product per capita also grew astonishingly under Lee’s rule, from US $1,240 to $18,437. External trade increased from $7.3bn to $205bn. Life expectancy rose from 65 to 74 years in a population that nearly doubled, from 1.6 million to 3 million.
Lee cultivated a reputation, as some leaders of less than fully democratic regimes do, of being able to get things done, especially when it came to infrastructure projects. He also didn’t hesitate to talk about his belief in Machiavelli’s theories of ruling by fear and what he saw as the necessity of locking up people without trial, “whether they are communists, whether they are language chauvinists, whether they are religious extremists. If you don’t do that, the country would be in ruins”. Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping reportedly fell for the “Singapore model” when he visited in 1978.
Planner’s dream or gleaming dystopia?
“Today’s Singapore is far more precisely the result of Lee Kuan Yew’s vision than the Manchester of the East ever was of Sir Stamford Raffles’,” wrote science fiction author William Gibson in Wired magazine in 1993, three years after Yew stepped down. “Imagine an Asian version of Zurich operating as an offshore capsule at the foot of Malaysia; an affluent microcosm whose citizens inhabit something that feels like, well, Disneyland. Disneyland with the death penalty.”
Gibson’s bleakly vivid view of Singapore as a stern, moralistic, highly regimented accretion of gleaming shopping malls resonated with readers and presumably gave the Singaporean government cause to reflect on the consequences of its decisions – though not before banning Wired from the island.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Singapore has embraced height. Photograph: Roslan Rahman/AFP/Getty Images
Singapore had by that time become a byword for cleanliness, efficiency and safety. Gibson, however, compared it unfavourably to Kowloon Walled City, the infamous ungoverned and informally constructed Hong Kong urban settlement – “traditionally the home of pork-butchers, unlicensed denturists and dealers in heroin” – which stood until the 1990s as the most densely populated place on Earth.
But the city-state that Lee built has also won, and continues to win, favour with urban planners and those in their realm, such as the Harvard urban economist Edward Glaeser, who makes no secret of his admiration for Singapore – not for its style of government, but for the urban form, structure and functionality it has achieved. “Singapore is close to being an ideal model of what good land-use planning looks like in the 21st century,” said Glaeser in one interview, pointing specifically to its embrace of height. “It is filled with high-density dwellings, both in the inner-city and in more suburban areas, where high-rise public housing is the model of choice.”
A high degree of economic freedom has also made Singapore “one of the most avowedly free-market countries in the world, regularly coming top or near top of surveys for liberalisation of markets”, wrote economic journalist and author John Lanchester. Yet “the government owns most of the land in the country and the overwhelming majority of the population lives in socialised housing. It’s the world capital of free markets and also of council flats.”
“We’re not Disneyland by a long shot,” said the opposition politician Kenneth Jeyaretnam in response to Gibson’s piece almost a decade later. “But it is probably true to say that if George Orwell and Philip Dick had an illegitimate child of a theme park, then this would be it.”
The Economist assesses Singapore, where the PAP has run the show for more than half a century, as a “flawed democracy”. The degree of state power that has enabled such extensive and rapidly executed feats of urban planning has also led to policies that appear to the rest of the world as draconian, such as corporal punishment for acts of vandalism, a ban on the importation of chewing gum, urine detectors installed in elevators, and expression-limiting laws of the kind that put Amos Yee on trial.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Commuters head home from Singapore’s financial district during the evening rush hour. Photograph: Edgar Su/Reuters
In the years since Gibson’s visit, the population of this 278 sq mile city-state (up, thanks to land reclamation, from 224.5 square miles at the time of independence) has increased by almost three million, many of the newcomers manual labourers in a land with no minimum wage. But the government’s 1990s designs to nurture the city into a global information-technology powerhouse appear to have stalled, resulting in something of a reversion to a manufacturing and tourism economy. “I’m afraid,” said Jeyaretnam, “we’re very much just another overcrowded Asian city with infrastructure and amenities stretched to the limit by a population bursting at the seams.”
But Singapore being Singapore, the current government has ideas about how to plan its way out of the doldrums. The HDB has begun using special software to help design its newest housing projects so as to minimise their environmental |
Go.
SEE ALSO: Why HBO Is Keeping ‘Game of Thrones,’ Other Shows Out of Amazon’s Hands
Previous seasons of other HBO shows that are currently airing on the cabler, including “Girls,” “The Newsroom” and “Veep,” will become available over the course of the multiyear agreement, approximately three years after airing on HBO.
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“As owners of our original programming, we have always sought to capitalize on that investment,” Glenn Whitehead, HBO’s EVP of business and legal affairs, said in a statement. “Given our longstanding relationship with Amazon, we couldn’t think of a better partner to entrust with this valuable collection.”
HBO also sees the licensing deal with Amazon as reinforcing its core business — in exposing its programming to Amazon’s audience, the hope is that HBO will sign up new subscribers.
The first wave of HBO content will arrive on Prime Instant Video on May 21.
In addition, the HBO Go service will become available on Amazon Fire TV, expected by the end of 2014. HBO Go is HBO’s authenticated streaming service, available to pay-TV subscribers of the channel, which provides more than 1,700 titles including every episode of HBO’s original series and other content.
“HBO original content is some of the most popular across Amazon Instant Video — our customers love watching these shows,” said Brad Beale, director of content acquisition for Amazon. “Now Prime members can enjoy a collection of great HBO shows on an unlimited basis, at no additional cost to their Prime membership.”
Amazon recently raised the annual fee of Prime, the free-shipping program that includes unlimited access to Prime Instant Video, from $79 to $99 in the U.S. In addition to acquiring licensed content, Amazon produces original TV shows through its Amazon Studios division.I still remember the moment I first discovered the World Wide Web. It was in 1994 or 1995, at a row of desks that held the handful of computer terminals then available in the university library of the London School of Economics. On the Windows 3.1 desktop (so old there wasn’t even a Start button) I saw an unfamiliar icon—a crude, pixellated picture of a string instrument, with “Cello WWW” below it. I clicked.
www.archive.org The LSE home page from Dec. 31, 1996.
Cello was the first Windows-compatible browser, built by Thomas Bruce at the Cornell Law School to give lawyers access to the then-incipient web. It didn’t take long to figure out that I could click on the blue-underlined words to open other pages. Most of them led to information about the school, but there was one tantalizingly named just “The Internet.” I clicked.
www.archive.org This, or something very similar, was the first index of the web I ever saw.
That day a journey began. I started out by looking at the pages of other colleges and universities. If memory serves, on a page of a university physics department I found a link to NASA, where I got lost in a seemingly unlimited bounty of pictures of galaxies.
From there, I meandered into ever-more-distant backwaters, until I found myself reading a sort of online diary of a ham radio enthusiast somewhere in middle America. It was verbose, nerdy, inane, littered with exclamation marks and impenetrable radio jargon, semi-literate in places—and absolutely captivating. It was unfiltered access to the thoughts and experiences of a person thousands of miles away, of whose life I would otherwise have had no inkling and with whom I shared approximately nothing save for some subset of the English language—and he had exactly the same power to reach me as a US government agency with billions of dollars in funding. I finally forced myself to log off and left the library with my head buzzing with the potential of this new medium to democratize the world.
Techno-utopians were, of course, proclaiming the birth of a new democratic era at that very time. But it didn’t take me long to intuit that this playing field could not stay level for long. Those with the money to build more attractive web pages (never mind search-engine optimization, ad-targeting, social marketing and other attention-getting techniques as yet undreamt-of) would surely start to draw more eyeballs and influence to themselves than ordinary folk like my ham radio nut. In the digital world as in the real one, power would end up pooling around the already powerful.
Security consultant Bruce Schneier has now written a very good, clear thumbnail sketch, entitled “The battle for power on the internet,” of how the relationship between technology and power has evolved over the past couple of decades and will evolve in the next few. And while it may read as if he’s just making the typical liberal case for more openness and transparency online, there’s a twist. Schneier argues for these things not in the hope of coming closer to the ultimate participative democracy that the dreamers of 20 years ago prophesied, but more as a regulatory valve, a way of keeping the inevitable, endless dance of power that governs human history from spinning out of control.
The place of technology in history
This dance of power, Schneier points out, is governed by a basic principle: New technology benefits the nimble first, but is appropriated by the powerful later:
The unorganized, the distributed, the marginal, the dissidents, the powerless, the criminal: They can make use of new technologies very quickly. And when those groups discovered the internet, suddenly they had power. But later, when the already-powerful big institutions finally figured out how to harness the internet, they had more power to magnify.
Right now, Schneier says, we are at the stage of increasing concentration of power in the hands of governments and large corporations. He attributes this to what he calls a “feudal” model. Peasants used to put themselves at the service of feudal lords in exchange for convenience and protection. Today, we entrust control of our personal data to Google and Facebook and in return they handle the technology and security for us.
In parallel, writes Schneier, both “totalitarian” and “democratic” governments have accrued a great deal of technological power over people. Their interests sometimes align with one another’s, and with those of corporations, and sometimes don’t. When they don’t, ordinary people can get trampled in the conflict.
The effect of accelerating technological change
I take issue with Schneier’s use of the word “feudal,” because it implies that we should see today’s technopolitics as something bad—a throwback to a pre-Enlightenment time. In fact, as he would probably be the first to admit, the relationship between people and their rulers—be they feudal lords, tyrant emperors, elected prime ministers, bank presidents or tech CEOs—has always involved an exchange of power for protection. The conflicts between those rulers have always created risks for ordinary people. (As Schneier also fails to point out, they create opportunities too, when one powerful ruler undermines another.) And the steady advance of technology has always created what Schneier calls a “security gap” between the nimble outliers who adopt a technology first and the established interests that appropriate it later.
But that’s an aside. Schneier’s key argument, as I understand it at least, can be boiled down to this:
As technological progress speeds up, this “security gap” between first adoption and establishment appropriation of technology grows.
As the security gap grows, so does the ability of the first adopters—criminals, rebels, dissidents, and disruptors in both the political and the business spheres—to threaten the institutions of power.
As the threat to institutions grows, so does the extent of the measures they take to defend themselves from threats, and the harshness of their responses to them.
As that defensiveness increases, so does the potential harm to the ordinary people caught in the middle of it all, who have no particular alliance with either the entrenchment of institutional power or the disruption of it.
What does this lead to, asks Schneier—an ever more repressive police state, or an anarchic breakdown into a Hobbesian society? I find it telling that our science fiction tends to depict either one or the other these futures—and if it’s the police state, the plot is usually about the hero who blows it up, with the movie ending conveniently before we learn whether the long-term result was utopia or chaos.
Answering his own question, Schneier says that the future is probably neither of these extremes—but that the way to make sure of that is more transparency and public oversight of institutional power. These will “give us the confidence to trust institutional powers to fight the bad side of distributed power, while still allowing the good side to flourish.” The way to achieve this:
…we need to work to reduce power differences. The key to all of this is access to data. On the Internet, data is power. To the extent the powerless have access to it, they gain in power. To the extent that the already powerful have access to it, they further consolidate their power. As we look to reducing power imbalances, we have to look at data: data privacy for individuals, mandatory disclosure laws for corporations, and open government laws.
I think the point to understand here is this: Usually, the debate about privacy versus surveillance or transparency versus security is framed as an argument over what is the “right” balance between the two to achieve a just and stable society. Schneier is arguing something different: We need as much control over our own data and as much access to government data as possible, not as an endpoint in itself, but as the mechanism that allows that debate about society to be held. Or, to put it using a word very much of this era, fair access to data is a platform—the level surface on which people and rulers can dance the dance of power without falling flat on our faces.I wrote a book.
It's called "Dinosaur Comics: Dudes Already Know About Chickens" and it's got all the comics from 2006, plus an introduction by Randall Munroe, plus all the secrets, plus THREE INDICES and an interview with me and I really think you'll like it!
Also I made some ties and there's tons of sweet shirts in the store too!
You know who likes Dinosaur Comics stuff for Christmas? I don't know for sure but I'm gonna guess your awesome friends
GUESS WHAT JUST CAME OUT: IT'S MY NEW BOOK!! If you've ever wondered what you'd do if you were stranded in the past, wonder no longer! With HOW TO INVENT EVERYTHING, you'll reinvent civilization from scratch, no matter what time period you're in. You'll become the single most influential, decisive, and important person ever born. You'll make history...
...better.
Here's the trailer!
One year ago today: bedbug sex is just part of the beauty of Mother Someanimalsengageinterribleawfulsexyouguys
– RyanIt often seems as if cannabis activists can’t agree on a lot of things. But one thing they all seem to agree upon is that President Obama should rescind the nomination of Bush holdover Michele Leonhart to head the Drug Enforcement Administration.
A number of progressive groups released a letter last month accusing Leonhart, a deputy administrator appointed by President George W. Bush and the acting administrator since Karen P. Tandy’s resignation in 2007, of ignoring a Justice Department directive that raiding dispensaries and growers operating legally in medical marijuana states is a “poor use of resources.”
Only days later, two ideologically diverse advocates echoed the earlier call by condemning a series of raids by the DEA on medical marijuana collectives operating legally under state law. The Tenth Amendment Center, a group that advocates for states’ rights, and Jane Hamsher, publisher of Firedoglake.com, called on the DEA to respect duly adopted state medical marijuana laws and immediately end those raids.
Photo: SPAN ”Attorney General Eric Holder was crystal clear last year when he directed officials within his department not to waste federal resources interfering with state medical marijuana laws,” Hamsher said. “Yet throughout the tenure of President Obama’s administration, the DEA’s raids have continued in a manner wholly inconsistent with the spirit of that directive.” “What part of ‘not a priority does Michele Leonhart not understand?” Hamsher asked.
The Daily Caller. But according to a senior White House official, not even the combined grassroots powers of FireDogLake and the 10th Amendment Center can derail Leonhart’s nomination, reports Mike Riggs at
Obama is confident that Leonhart is the right choice to run the DEA, according to the White House staffer, and as of Friday the president wasn’t considering anyone else for the position.
“It’s unfortunate — and downright baffling — that the Obama Administration would choose someone for this post whose resumé is so strongly at odds with the ‘new direction’ this administration has promised for drug policy in general and medical marijuana in particular,” said Mike Meno of the Marijuana Policy Project ( MPP ).
”During the election campaign, and again through the Department of Justice memo in October, President Obama vowed to stop the outrageous Bush-era practice of raiding and prosecuting medical marijuana patients and providers who operate under state law,” Meno said. “If change is what they seek, why would the administration nominate a Bush holdover under whom the DEA continues to raid the private property of citizens obeying state law?”
“It makes no sense,” Meno said.
The Daily Caller that Attorney General Eric Holder’s memo does not give dispensaries carte blanche to grow or sell marijuana. Both the White House and the Justice Department toldthat Attorney General Eric Holder’s memo does not give dispensaries carte blanche to grow or sell marijuana.
Administration officials also claimed that recent DEA raids “don’t conflict” with what Obama expressed while campaigning.
Yes, if you were waiting for the inevitable time when the language of the DOJ memo “suggesting” that the DEA back off on medical marijuana would be deconstructed and tortured into submission, it appears that day has arrived.
“I wouldn’t say the memo ‘discourages’ certain raids,” a DOJ official said. Rather, “It talks about prioritizing resources most efficiently.”
Both the White House and the DOJ claimed that the gist of the Holder memo was that the DEA would “not focus its limited resources on individual patients with cancer or other serious diseases.”After an awkward week in the ongoing investigation of potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, the White House has brought on a new lawyer. Ty Cobb, a Washington veteran, is joining the legal team to help coordinate the White House response to the ongoing investigation, a job previously handled by Donald Trump’s combative personal lawyer, Marc E. Kasowitz, whose aggressive e-mails made their own headlines this week.
The new hire was first reported by Bloomberg News, and ends a weeks-long search by the White House, reportedly encouraged by White House counsel Don McGahn. Cobb is “intended to be traffic cop, enforcer of discipline, and public spokesman” for the investigation, according to Bloomberg News, working with Kasowitz and outside lawyers and leaving the rest of the White House counsel to focus on other things. (In the Trump administration, there are always other things).
The New York Times notes this suggests evidence of a growing rift between Trump and Kasowitz, whom the president has clashed with and criticized more often in recent weeks. Trump’s Twitter account creates a constant battleground for the two of them, with the president’s lawyer repeatedly attempting to curb his social media use. Trump also criticized Kasowitz’s “flat performance” at his June 8 news conference after James Comey’s hearing, and is reportedly frustrated with his lack of proximity: Kasowitz commutes from his home in New York City, and so is unable to be with Trump’s staff seven days a week.
Meanwhile, Jared Kushner is also in the midst of a legal shakeup, with the Times reporting that his attorney Jamie Gorelick will step away from advising him on anything related to Russia, though she’ll continue to advise him on other issues. With Kushner under fire for his own meetings with Russia, that leaves plenty for Gorelick’s successor, Abbe D. Lowell, to take on.Whether or not Sydney or the Western Bulldogs make the grand final, there will be two footballers of African descent playing on grand final day at the MCG.
On a weekend during which Aliir Aliir and Majak Daw made their finals debuts, the AFL has taken another step towards getting more players from their backgrounds playing at the top level.
The league on Sunday inducted four players of African heritage into the AFL academy in a bid to fast-track the development of footballers from diverse backgrounds. Victorians Ajak Dang, Buku Khamis, Changkuoth Jiath and Kwaby Boakye have all been added to the academy - coached at least for the next six weeks by former Adelaide coach Brenton Sanderson, who has been strongly linked to a move to Collingwood. The academy features 60 of the best underage footballers in the country, aiming to prepare them for life at an AFL club. Jiath and Boakye will both play in the under 17s All-Star match at the MCG that serves as the curtain-raiser for the grand final.
The AFL is keen to change the face of the game by adding more African players to the league - joining Aliir, Daw, Richmond's Mabior Chol, Brisbane Lion Reuben William, Essendon's Gach Nyuon and Bulldog Jason Johannisen.Bloomberg New York Fed President William Dudley
New York Fed President William Dudley on Friday said while the April job gain was “a touch softer” than people were expecting, he was not putting a lot of weight on the data.
Many analysts said the slowdown in employment in April will keep the Fed on the sidelines at its next meeting in June.
In an interview with the New York Times, Dudley didn’t discuss June directly. But he said two rate hikes this year remained a “reasonable expectation.”
Dudley is a voting member of the Fed’s policy committee and is someone markets pay close attention to as he is seen as a close ally of Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen.
Kevin Logan, chief U.S. economist at HSBC, said Fed officials were already ambivalent about raising rates in June and the latest jobs report will just add to their caution.
“It means there is nothing compelling to push the Fed to decide it is appropriate to raise the funds rate,” he said.
Fed officials had thought that the turmoil in financial markets in the first few weeks of the year would be a “flash in the pan,” but the data suggest more lasting damage, Logan said.
Companies scaled back hiring in April, adding just 160,000 new jobs, well below the recent trend.
Read: U.S. jobs growth slows down in April.
Sal Guatieri, senior economist at BMO Capital Markets, said the slowdown in job growth and the economy “raises big question markets as to whether the unemployment rate will stay at 5%.”
“It probably takes June off the table,” he said. “There is not a whole lot of reason for the Fed to anticipate a marked upturn in the economy.”
For the Fed to act in July, “we would need to see a rebound in jobs growth and a tick down in the unemployment rate to spur them to move.”
Stuart Hoffman, chief economist at PNC Financial Services, said the “good but not great April employment report coming on the heels” of the soft gross domestic product report likely rules out a quarter-point rate increase in June. U.S. GDP slowed to a 0.5% annual rate in the first three months of 2016.
Economists were quick to note that a 160,000 gain in nonfarm payroll was still decent job growth.
“I don’t think this changes the calculus at the Fed, it is a pretty decent report” when you factor in wage growth and hours worked, said Omair Sharif, senior U.S. economist at Société Générale.
But Sharif still thinks the Fed will only raise interest rates once this year.
It is “just too late” to move in June, he said, even though several Fed presidents have insisted in the last few days that June was a live meeting.
Read: Fed’s Lockhart says he’s ‘on the fence’ for June rate increase
“It isn’t going to happen. It is already May and there is no real groundswell for a move,” Sharif said.
“For them to surprise the market isn't how they want to handle communications.
After the job report, traders who use fed funds futures contracts to project rate increases see only a 6% chance of a rate increase in June, according to the CME Group’s FedWatch. Odds of a July move were at 24%. Traders now see the first rate increase coming in December.
Economists at Barclays said they now expect one rate increase in 2016, down from two hikes previously.Beijing A leading Chinese daily has called India's National Security Advisor (NSA) Ajit Doval "one of the main schemers" behind the border row, and said his trip to Beijing on Friday won't help settle the row.
In a scathing editorial, the State-run Global Times said, "Doval is believed to be one of the main schemers behind the current border standoff. Doval will inevitably be disappointed if he attempts to bargain with Beijing over the border disputes."
Reiterating that the withdrawal of Indian troops from Doklam was a "precondition", it said Doval's visit for a meeting of BRICS NSAs meet will not change Beijing's stance on the issue.
"India's withdrawal from Chinese territory is a precondition and a basis for any meaningful dialogue between the two sides. The Chinese side will not talk with India on the issue before the Indian troops' unconditional withdrawal."
The NSAs meet was in preparation for the BRICS Summit in July and not a platform to address border skirmishes, the daily said.
If Indian troops don't pull back, New Delhi "will have to pay a heavy price", it warned.
"India's unconditional withdrawal is China's bottom line... If India complies with international laws, the withdrawal will display dignity. Beijing has no obligation to coordinate with New Delhi to withdraw its troops or suspend its road construction."
India stopped road construction by Chinese troops in Doklam saying the area was Bhutan's and the road would endanger New Delhi's strategic interests. India has also said that both Beijing and New Delhi should pull back forces from Doklam before they can talk.
"India is wrong by brazenly crossing the Sino-Indian border in the Sikkim sector and must correct its mistakes. China will neither jeer nor express gratitude for India's retreat," the Global Times said.
"New Delhi must give up all its illusions. People's Liberation Army (PLA) forces are being deployed to the border area, and will take effective countermeasures if India refuses to pull back voluntarily.
"The PLA is capable enough to take actions that neither Indian troops nor the government can afford." the daily said.
China doesn't believe India was ready for a military showdown, the editorial said.
"India's voluntary withdrawal will incur the least cost to it. If Beijing takes countermeasures, New Delhi will be mired in a more passive political and military situation, and face its most serious strategic setback since 1962."
Firstpost is now on WhatsApp. For the latest analysis, commentary and news updates, sign up for our WhatsApp services. Just go to Firstpost.com/Whatsapp and hit the Subscribe button.AUTOBAHN BMW Fort Worth ragged my car and wrecked/totaled it on a test drive! [case now closed - after 16 months...]
Took my car into dealership this morning for a oil/brake change. I get a call a few hours later (not even from the manager of the dealership) that my car had an "accident" while being test driven. They stated the driver hit a patch of sand and slid into the curb at 20mph. Damage...Wheel cracked, tire blown, front end will need repaint and the strut is cracked open. Immediately called B.S. on the story and it was obvious temp manager knew what really happened when I got there but would not admit it. I asked where it happened and he said a few streets behind the dealership. So, I go check out the area and it didn't take long to find it. Around a turn was 30ft of tire marks (no sand) and not only one but two separate curb impacts and coming to rest in a puddle of strut fluid. Total distance from first curb impact to strut puddle was about 120ft! So, it is obvious what happened, the mechanic was out ragging my car and lost control. Manager on duty actually had the balls to mention the lack of treadwear left on my rear tires as being a possible cause! We are talking a 100 degree day and dry as hell! He had nothing to say as to why the mechanic test drove in M mode (full dynamic off)! No M mode, no accident.
I have already told them to not touch anything and do not order anything until I contact them. I have already documented the crash site with video/pictures. Police told me they could not take a report because BMW had moved the car before I got there.
Anyone been in this type of situation before? Suggestions on how I should proceed?Calling attention to the inching-up of holiday marketing has become a tiresome ritual. Canada’s Saskatoon Star-Phoenix reported on the gripes of British retailers in 1954, and Florida’s Evening Independent wrote in 1968 that Labor Day was earlier than ever for Christmas season to kick off. Bemoaning the encroachment of Christmas ads is just a necessary, collective sigh before it’s agreed that the holidays can be discussed in earnest.
The media's concern that Christmas advertising comes earlier every year is unshakeable because it's a trope that allows for easy September news stories; for all the commotion, most people don’t actually seem to mind that advertising begins in September. Two-thirds of people surveyed in a Bain & Company poll last week reported few, if any, negative feelings about it. One-third even said that the ads put them in a good mood. This receptiveness jibes with the National Retail Federation’s consistent finding that almost half of Americans start shopping for the holidays before Halloween.
Americans' Feelings About Holiday Ads in September
HBR.org | Bain & Company
Businesses, for their part, have good reasons to stretch ad campaigns out to three months. Making sure that people start shopping early can, during peak shopping periods, lessen the need for overtime wages and for hiring a temporary workforce.
Christmas ads, and their timing, probably are fretted about because of how much is riding on them economically. It’s well-known that late December is the most lucrative time of the year for holiday sales, but the distance between it and the next-most-lucrative occasion—back-to-school shopping—is massive. It’s been estimated that the winter holidays make for nearly one-fifth of retail revenues every year.
Holiday Spending in the Past 12 Months, in Billions
National Retail Federation
So, don’t complain when, in the next month, the radio starts playing Christmas music—we’re currently three weeks into the holiday season.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.Microsoft's free upgrade offer for Windows 10 ended last week, or did it? The software giant has introduced a "free upgrade offer extension" for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users who use assistive technologies. While, technically, the free upgrade offer for the general public has ended, Microsoft has introduced a loophole with this extension that lets anyone get Windows 10 for free.
Microsoft isn't checking who is using the upgrade extension
All you need to do is download an EXE file from Microsoft's hidden away accessibility site, and the Windows 10 upgrade will commence without any checks. Microsoft says it has not announced an end date for the upgrade extension, and the company will make a public announcement when it plans to remove the free Windows 10 upgrade for assistive technology users.
Microsoft is now planning to distribute a free Anniversary Update to Windows 10 tomorrow. The software update will include Cortana improvements, Windows Ink, Microsoft Edge extensions, and a lot more tweaks and new features. Existing Windows 10 users will start receiving the update automatically from Windows Update tomorrow morning. You can check out the best new features of the Windows 10 Anniversary Update right here.
Windows 10 Anniversary UpdateHack Of Federal Gov't Employee Info Is Much, Much Worse Than Originally Stated: Unencrypted Social Security Numbers Leaked
from the because-that's-how-this-works dept
Based on the sketchy information OPM has provided, we believe that the Central Personnel Data File was the targeted database, and that the hackers are now in possession of all personnel data for every federal employee, ever federal retiree, and up to one million former federal employees. We believe that hackers have every affected person's Social Security number(s), military records and veterans' status information, address, birth date, job and pay history, health insurance, life insurance, and pension information; age, gender, race, union status, and more.
Worst, we believe that Social Security numbers were not encrypted, a cybersecurity failure that is absolutely indefensible and outrageous.
Over a decade ago, I pointed out thatsingle time there were reports of big "data leaks" via hacking, a few weeks after the initial report, we would find out that the leak was even worse than originally reported. That maxim has held true over and over again. And, here we go again. Last week, we noted that the US government's Office of Personnel Management had been hacked, likely by Chinese hackers. And, now, it has come out that the hack was (you guessed it) much worse than originally reported The President of the union that represents federal government workers, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) sent a letter to the director of the OPM, claiming that the hackers got away with the Central Personnel Data File, which includes full information on just about everything about that employee -- including (get this)Oh, and then there's this:The letter further points out -- as we did last week -- that the 18 months of credit monitoring the government has offered everyone is a complete joke. It's unlikely that the hackers are looking to do identity fraud for financial gain -- and quite likely this is for espionage purposes.But, let's go back to the Social Security numbers being unencrypted for a second. Remember, this hack is being used by intelligence system defenders to argue for why we need stronger "cybersecurity" laws that will give the NSA and FBI much greater access to Americans' data.And, yes, this would be the very same FBI that has actively argued against encryption. And the NSA has always hated encryption and insists it needs backdoors into any encryption.Both of these organizations strongly support "cybersecurity" legislation, claiming that it's necessary so that the US government can "help" companies dealing with "critical infrastructure." And yet, here we are, with the government's own personnel files being held in a system without encryption that was hacked and copied by (likely) foreign hackers. And we're supposed to trust two government agencies who have been going around cursing encryption, that we should give them more access to "protect us" when another government agency's attack likely could have been prevented if they'd just used encryption?As plenty of cybersecurity experts will tell you, the problem in the security realm is not "information sharing." It's people doing stupid things in how they setup their systems. Not encrypting the employee files for every government employee seems to fit into that category. Perhaps, rather than focusing on bogus "cybersecurity" legislation to give more power to the idiots shouting against encryption, we should have the government focus on getting its own house in order, includingemployee data.
Filed Under: cybersecurity, federal government, leaks, opm, social security numbers, unencryptedHOUSTON – Geoff Cameron is on the move again.
No, not physically – the former Houston Dynamo star can finally take a long-awaited summer vacation after a grueling English Premier League season and a long stint with the US national team.
But is he a defender or a midfielder? The same old question that faced the Attleboro, Mass., native during much of his five-year stint with the Dynamo has come to the forefront at the international level.
After a similar experience with Stoke City in the EPL this past season, Cameron may have fallen out of his supposed role as one-half of the center back pair of the future for USMNT head coach Jurgen Klinsmann. Circumstances have him back to his wandering ways and looking to find a spot on the field wherever he can contribute.
“It was definitely difficult,” Cameron told MLSsoccer.com this past weekend while here to watch his old MLS teammates. “I was one of his consistent guys playing center back, but Omar [Gonzalez] and Matt [Besler] have been playing together at center back where I’m playing right back, central mid or right mid … so I understand why [Klinsmann’s] using them.
“I think my two best positions are center back and center mid and I want to be on the pitch for either of them, but it doesn’t matter. I just want to be in the starting XI.”
READ: Where were you when US beat Spain at '09 Confederations Cup?
Cameron entered the latest stint with the US expected to start at right back while Besler and Gonzalez manned the middle. But a rough team outing against Belgium and a big performance at right back from Brad Evans left him on the outside of the starting XI in which, not even three weeks earlier, he was seemingly a fixture.
But fortune turned in his favor against Panama on June 11, and the utility man showed once again that his skills can translate everywhere while putting in one of his best performances in the red, white and blue playing next to Michael Bradley in the center of the park.
“I think Michael Bradley and I had a pretty good understanding,” Cameron said. “I said, ‘Hey, I’m going to sit in the hole behind you. You do your thing.’ He wants the touches on the ball so he can have that.”
READ: Costa Rica abandon plans to host US at Estadio Saprissa
The pair’s play drew rave reviews as they both notched assists on the game and introduced a debate on whether the Bradley-Cameron combination should supplant the latter’s pairing with German-American Jermaine Jones, which was reunited a week later vs. Honduras with Cameron taking a seat.
Cameron’s play helped the US to three straight wins in World Cup qualifying that put them on the doorstep of qualification for Brazil 2014, which is Cameron’s ultimate goal. After the long year, he’s confident that he’s firmly in the mix for the USMNT and his versatility will ensure that.
“You have a deep group of guys playing together and they’re developing an understanding of playing with each other. That helps in the games,” Cameron said. “We’re sitting on top of the table and probably one more win away from qualifying for the World Cup in Brazil and that’s something special.”
Darrell Lovell covers the Houston Dynamo for MLSsoccer.com.Now I’m on record in these pages saying that I’m not a big fan of the Dead’s Dylan covers. Visions of Johanna does not fall into the category of covers I don’t like. It was originally released on Dylan’s Blonde On Blonde album.
The Dead only played the song 8 times – twice in 1986 and six times in 1995. This is the fifth ever performance of the song and it’s quite impressive provided how rare it was. For all of the dirt piled on the Dead’s 1995 track record, I think that this is a solid contribution to the project and shows that diamonds could be found in the rough, even when Jerry was clearly declining.
The first thing I think of when listening to this cut is: wow, this is 1995? It can hear why Phil included this version on the Phil Zone album. Vince’s keys sound great here. I don’t know if he was actually playing an acoustic piano or if it was just a very good MIDI patch (if the latter it’s a very good one). Bobby’s got some crunchy distortion on his guitar that combats the clarity of the piano here, but it’s a mix of softness and light that works, providing just a touch of edginess to a sweet song. Have I mentioned that Jerry sounds very strong here vocally. Again for 1995 this is unexpected. A diamond in the rough indeed. It’s halfway through the song before Jerry takes a solo. It’s about as laid back as the rest of the song. Suffice it to say he’s not setting off any fireworks here, but at the same time the sparseness of his playing opens up more room for the other players, especially Vince. With so many lyrics there isn’t another instrumental passage. I haven’t listened to this in a LONG time and I’m impressed with this cut, especially for 1995.
Complete Setlist 3/18/95Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump may argue that he’s a conservative, but his latest appointee comes from the ranks of former Soros employees. While that move might be a sticking point on the right, ABC, CBS and NBC have censored all information about Trump’s appointee.
Trump announced on May 5, 2016, Dune Capital Management CEO Steven Mnuchin as his national finance chairman pick. While Mnuchin is now tied to a Republican candidate, his past is littered with liberal ties — including working for liberal billionaire George Soros, donating to Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and financing some of Hollywood’s biggest films.
ABC, CBS and NBC news broadcasts did not consider Mnuchin’s appointment newsworthy. From May 5, when Trump first announced picking Mnuchin, to May 9, 2016, the morning and evening news shows on all three broadcast networks have failed to mention the appointment, let alone report his liberal ties.
Mnuchin first went to work for Soros in 2003, according to The Hollywood Reporter. After 17 years at Goldman Sachs, he left to become CEO of SFM Capital Management, a hedge fund backed by $1 billion from Soros. A year later, he left to co-found his own hedge fund, real estate and entertainment firm, Dune Capital. But his relationship with Soros did not end there.
Five years later, Mnuchin organized a group of investors, including Soros, to buy the IndyMac holding company from the FDIC, The Wall Street Journal reported on Jan. 2, 2009. IndyMac was the “third-largest bank failure in U.S. history.” After the purchase, Mnuchin became the new CEO of IndyMac.
Mnuchin also spent time as an Investment Professional for Soros Fund Management LLC, according to his bio on Bloomberg.
Mnuchin’s political donations also have strong liberal leanings. According to OpenSecrets, he has given nearly $121,000 in political donations since 1995, but more than twice as much went |
hacktivist group Anonymous, whose corporate targets include Master Card, Visa, PayPal and others, they seem to be doing just that — at least a little bit.
The conflict of interest for Anonymous stems from the group’s mascot, Guy Fawkes, the 17th Century disestablishmentarian, who famously tried to blow up the House of Parliament on November 5, 1605. Masks of Guy Fawkes are often worn by Anonymous members at protests, and used in their press material and videos.
Problem is, the mask was originally designed for the movie about Fawkes called V for Vendetta — a movie made by Warner Bros, which is owned by Time Warner, the largest communications company in the world. As The New York Times reports, the Guy Fawkes mask has become the best-selling mask on Amazon.com, beating out masks of Batman, Harry Potter and Darth Vader. Because of Time Warner gets royalties for every Fawkes mask sold, Anonymous has, in its own little way, helped boost Time Warner’s profits, which totaled about $28 billion last year.
“We sell over 100,000 of these masks a year, and it’s by far the best-selling mask that we sell,” said Howard Beige, the executive vice president of Rubie’s Costumes, which makes the Fawkes mask. “In comparison, we usually only sell 5,000 or so of our other masks.”
Anonymous’ use of the Guy Fawkes masks goes back to one of the group’s first high-profile operations, one against the Church of Scientology, which took place in 2008. A group of Anonymous protesters wore the mask in front of Scientology’s headquarters. Many photographs and videos were taken of the group, and spread online. Since then, Guy Fawkes has become the face of Anonymous.
Of course, it should be said that a countless number of corporations and other businesses, big and small, indirectly profit off of Anonymous, as its members presumably pay for the computers, Internet access and other digital tools used to carry out their operations. And that doesn’t include the millions made in advertising through people reading about Anonymous on websites like this one. So, basically, this “news” should be taken with a grain of salt.Is Canada ready for a prime minister who covers his or her head for religious reasons?
Just barely, says a new poll published today by the Angus Reid Institute.
The poll is likely to become an immediate point of discussion in the NDP leadership race where Jagmeet Singh, a Sikh who wears a turban, is considered among the leaders.
But the poll, which probes the willingness of both Canadian and American voters to imagine a government leader who might be gay or from a religious minority, also suggests that Canadians are, by and large, more open to a non-traditional leader than voters south of the border.
For example, more than two-thirds of Canadians polled believe that Canada is likely to have a gay prime minister within the next 25 years (the country currently has two gay premiers, in Ontario and in P.E.I.) But only about one-third of American voters can envision a gay president in the next 25 years.
And while 68 per cent of Canadians have no problem considering a prime minister who is an atheist, just 37 per cent of American voters believe voters there will elect a president who does not believe in God.
As for the Singh issue, Angus Reid did not use the names of any politicians in its polls but it did ask Canadians if they could vote for a man who wears a religious head-covering. Just 56 per cent of respondents said yes. That said, 63 per cent of respondents said they could vote for a party whose leader was a Sikh.
Those who voted Liberal in 2015 are more inclined to consider voting for a Sikh (73 per cent). About two-thirds of those who voted NDP in 2015 would could consider voting for a party led by a Sikh, while just 52 per cent of Conservative voters would do so.
As it turns out, Canadians elected a record-high number of Sikhs in 2015 and Trudeau appointed four Sikhs to his cabinet: Innovation, Science and Economic Development Minister Navdeep Bains and Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan, both who wear the turban, Infrastructure Minister Amarjeet Sohi, who does not wear the turban, and Government House Leader Bardish Chagger.
The poll also asked Canadians if they would vote for a party led by a Muslim and 58 per cent of respondents said yes. Trudeau also has two Muslims in his cabinet: Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen and Status of Women Minister Maryam Monsef.
But when Americans are asked if they would vote for a Muslim President, just 47 per cent said yes. When those who voted for Donald Trump last fall were asked if they would consider voting for a Muslim president, just 25 per cent said yes. Meanwhile, 68 per cent of those who voted for Hillary Clinton would consider voting for a Muslim president — yet another illustration of the deep divide in contemporary American political life.
Angus Reid also asked Canadians if the prime minister could be unilingual. In Quebec, just 30 per cent thought that would be acceptable compared to 80 per cent of Albertans, Manitobans, and Atlantic Canadians who were fine with a unilingual PM. In BC, Saskatchewan, and Ontario, three in four respondents were not troubled by the idea of a unilingual prime minister.
The online survey of 1,533 Canadian adults was conducted from May 24-28. And while a margin-of-error cannot be calculated from this online survey, the pollster says that had the participants been drawn at random, the margin-of-error would be 2.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.James Cole, deputy attorney general in the Department of Justice, testified Thursday that the DOJ heard about the destruction of IRS officials’ emails in the news, even though DOJ has formally been investigating the IRS for more than a year.
“I think we learned about it after that, from press accounts,” Cole told House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee chairman Rep. Jim Jordan at a hearing Thursday on the DOJ’s response to the wave of computer crashes at the IRS that wiped out seven different employees’ hard drives. (RELATED: Meet The Seven IRS Employees Whose Computer Crashed). DOJ has allegedly been conducting a widely-mocked investigation into the IRS conservative targeting scandal for more than a year, and recently announced that a new investigation is underway into the IRS missing emails.
“So you actually read about it in the press and nobody in the IRS ever went to the Justice Department to give you a heads-up, knowing you were conducting the investigation that some evidence may have been destroyed?,” Republican Rep. Ron DeSantis ventured.
“Not before the 13th of June,” Cole replied.
Cole confirmed at the hearing that DOJ is now “looking into” the IRS commissioner’s delayed response in the IRS emails case.
President Obama previously said that he heard about the Department of Veterans Affairs deadly wait list scandal on the news. He also originally said that he heard about the IRS targeting scandal on the news “along with most of you.”
Follow Patrick on TwitterAustralia's foreign minister has said the US is to blame for the release of thousands of diplomatic cables on Wikileaks, not its Australian founder, Julian Assange.
Kevin Rudd said the release raised questions about US security.
Mr Rudd said he did not "give a damn" about criticism of him in the cables.
Mr Assange, arrested in the UK over sex crime allegations in Sweden, has accused the Australian government of "disgraceful pandering" to the US.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard had earlier called Mr Assange's release of the cables "grossly irresponsible".
Over the past two weeks, Wikileaks has released thousands of classified messages from US envoys around the world, from more than 250,000 it has been given.
Washington has called their publication "irresponsible" and an "attack on the international community".
'First class job'
In an interview with Reuters news agency, Mr Rudd said: "Mr Assange is not himself responsible for the unauthorised release of 250,000 documents from the US diplomatic communications network. The Americans are responsible for that."
Analysis The Australian government has found itself in the anomalous position of offering consular assistance to Julian Assange after his arrest in London, while at the same time being highly critical of his part in leaking sensitive US diplomatic cables. Julian Assange has written an opinion piece for The Australian newspaper which is scathing in its criticism of the Gillard government, accusing her of "trying to shoot the messenger". The case of Julian Assange is already drawing comparisons here with the detention of an Australian, David Hicks, at Guantanamo Bay. Hicks, who trained with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, was found guilty of providing material support for terrorism by an American military tribunal. But he became something of a folk hero for many Australians, because of the widespread feeling that he was treated unfairly by the Americans after being detained at Guantanamo Bay without trial. Nick Bryant's Australia
Mr Rudd, the former prime minister who was replaced by Julia Gillard in June, added: "I think there are real questions to be asked about the adequacy of [the US] security systems and the level of access that people have had to that material.
"The core responsibility, and therefore legal liability, goes to those individuals responsible for that initial unauthorised release."
The White House has ordered US government agencies to tighten their handling of classified documents in the wake of the Wikileaks releases.
Mr Rudd was dismissed in one leaked US cable as a "mistake-prone control freak".
In cables published by the Sydney Morning Herald former US ambassador Robert McCallum said Mr Rudd made "snap announcements without consulting other countries or within the Australian government".
The US was also angered at what it called Mr Rudd's "self-serving and inaccurate leaking" of a phone call with then US President George W Bush in which Mr Rudd was reported as saying: "Stunned to hear Bush say, 'What's the G20?'"
Mr Rudd shrugged off the criticism, saying: "I'm sure much worse has been written about me in the past and probably much worse will be written about me in the future but frankly, mate, I don't care.
Main Leaks So Far Fears that terrorists may acquire Pakistani nuclear material
Several Arab leaders urged attack on Iran over nuclear issue
US instructs spying on key UN officials
China's changing ties with North Korea
Yemen approved US strikes on militants
Personal and embarrassing comments on world leaders
Afghan leader Hamid Karzai freed dangerous detainees
Russia is a "virtual mafia state" with widespread corruption and bribery
Afghan President Hamid Karzai is "paranoid and weak". Extent of corruption in Afghanistan
Chinese leadership "hacked Google"
A list of key global facilities the US says are vital to its national security
UK fears over Lockerbie bomber Wikileaks cables: Key issues Assange v Swedish sex laws
"My job's just to act in Australia's national interest as Australia's foreign minister. I don't, frankly, give a damn about this sort of thing. You just get on with it."
Ms Gillard defended Mr Rudd, saying: "He's bringing [his] expertise to bear for the Australian nation and doing an absolutely first class job."
Mr Assange has been highly critical of the Australian government's stance on the release of the cables.
In an opinion piece in The Australian on Wednesday, Mr Assange accused the Australian government of "disgraceful pandering" to the Americans and of putting the powers of the government fully at the disposal of the US.
In the piece headlined "Don't shoot the messenger for revealing uncomfortable truths", he says: "Democratic societies need a strong media and Wikileaks is part of that media. The media helps keep government honest."
He adds: "The Australian attorney-general is doing everything he can to help a US investigation clearly directed at framing Australian citizens and shipping them to the US."
Mr Assange has been refused bail by a court in London but has vowed to fight extradition to Sweden.
He denies sexually assaulting two women in Sweden but was remanded in custody pending a hearing next week.
Mr Assange's lawyer, Mark Stephens, has claimed the allegations are "politically motivated".
On a visit to Serbia on Wednesday, Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt said there had been no contact with US authorities about the possible extradition of Mr Assange from Sweden to the US.
The US has begun a criminal investigation and vowed to punish anyone found responsible for illegal leaks.
No-one has been charged with passing the diplomatic files to Wikileaks, but suspicion has fallen on US Army private Bradley Manning, an intelligence analyst arrested in Iraq in June and charged over an earlier leak.One North County leader is proposing her city become the first in California to require photo identification to vote in city elections according to a published report.
Escondido Councilmember Marie Waldron told our media partner the North County Times she will propose adding that language to the city charter that will be up for voter approval on the November ballot.
Waldron told the paper she wants to prevent fraud however the American Civil Liberties Union suggested the councilmember was targeting Latinos.
Lori Shellenberger, an attorney for the ACLU’s San Diego chapter, said the idea violates a constitutional right and would discourage people from voting.
Escondido to Consider Requiring ID to Vote
Lori Shellenberger from the ACLU tells NBC 7 reporter Diana Guevara why she thinks a proposed law could hurt Escondido residents. (Published Tuesday, April 17, 2012)
“It would be saying that you can’t vote in Escondido anymore if you can’t afford a photo ID,” she said. "I think it's highly suspicious in a city that has a history of discrimination against new immigrants...it's a clear violation of state and federal law and I'm sure the city attorney's office is well aware of that."
Earlier this month the ACLU threatened to sue the City of Escondido claiming the city tried to profit from its DUI Checkpoint and Towing Program.
Let us know what you think. Comment below, send us your thoughts via Twitter @nbcsandiego or add your comment to our Facebook page.Cavemen depicted the movement of four-legged animals in their art much better than modern artists, a new study reveals.
A team of researchers led by Gabor Horvath from the Eotvos University (Budapest), Hungary, examined at least 1,000 artwork created by prehistoric and modern artists, to determine how well they have portrayed the limb altitudes of the four-legged animals such as horses and elephants.
Four-legged animals move their legs in a similar sequence while walking or running. They keep their left-hind foot first on the ground, followed by the left-front foot. Next, the right-hind foot hits the ground and then the right-front foot. The speed at which the legs are moved differs from each other, LiveScience has reported.
During 1880s, photographer Eadweard Muybridge used motion pictures to depict the movements of horses. The research team analyzed the images of the quadrupeds in three different periods. They examined cave paintings of prehistoric artists, artwork done before Muybridge's illustrations of the four-legged animals and artwork done post the Muybridgean period, after his work became public.
The error rate of artists' depiction of four-legged animals in randomly selected samples was 73.3 percent, researchers stated. The error rate of pre-Muybridgean quadruped illustrations was 83.5 percent, whereas the error rate decreased to 57.9 percent after 1887 (post-Muybridgean period).
Experts were surprised to find that the error rate of artwork rendered by cavemen was lowest at 46.2 percent. Modern artists performed worse than the taxidermists of natural history museums, animal anatomists and designers of animal toy models in depicting horse walks. The error rate of taxidermists in portraying the walk of the animals was 41.1- 43.1 percent.
"Prehistoric men illustrated the walking of quadrupeds with almost the same error rate (46.2 percent) as the taxidermists of natural history museums," researchers wrote in a paper.
This suggests that the Paleolithic men were able to depict the motion of their prey animals more precisely than modern artists.
The findings of the study, "Cavemen Were Better at Depicting Quadruped Walking than Modern Artists: Erroneous Walking Illustrations in the Fine Arts from Prehistory to Today," are published in the open access journal PLOS ONE.An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power is a 2017 American documentary film that was directed by Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk about the former United States Vice President Al Gore’s continuing mission to battle climate change. Serving as a direct sequel to the 2006 film, An Inconvenient Truth, it addresses the progress that has been made to tackle the problem and Gore’s global efforts to persuade governmental leaders to invest in renewable energy, culminating in the landmark signing of 2016’s Paris Agreement.
On the review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 78% based on the 132 submitted reviews, with an overall averaging rating of 6.6/10. The overall critical consensus reads, “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power makes a plea for environmental responsibility that adds a persuasive — albeit arguably less impactful — coda to its acclaimed predecessor”. John DeFore of The Hollywood Reporter gave the documentary a positive review, while acknowledging it isn’t nearly as impactful as the original, saying “it finds plenty to add, both in cementing the urgency of Gore’s message and in finding a cause for hope”. Conversely, National Review film critic Kyle Smith called the film misleading, saying that it gives the false impression that recent storm activity (such as 2012’s Hurricane Sandy) was more frequent than usual, falsely giving credit to both Gore and the company SolarCity for convincing India to sign the Paris Agreement, exaggerated the importance of the Paris Agreement, and neglected to mention his financial ties to SolarCity.
An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, while having received a variety of mixed reviews, has been called the Zoolander 2 of global warming documentaries.
The Film Itself (3/5):
Refraining from weighing in my personal opinions on the topic at hand, and doing everything I can to avoid making this review into a shit-post, I am reviewing this documentary solely on the film itself, its presentation, content, and everything else. That said, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power is simply a documentary that directs its focus on a topic that has been going on for many, many years. Bringing attention to the health of our environment and the world that we live in is something that’s been of concern for a while, and this particular documentary offers a completely new look into things that we wouldn’t normally see in our day to day lives. Despite the fact that a lot of the presentation of this release is considerably one-sided as the result of not being 100% straight forward with the facts, like Gore’s involvement with SolarCity, the overall story that’s being told here along side with the presentation of that story was really well done.
Picture Quality (5/5):
Coming with the ever-loving 1080p presentation, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power offers an exceptionally beautiful view into the story that Al Gore and his colleagues are presenting. Making sure to direct focus on their presentation as well as the world that we all live in, there was absolutely no visual distortion in this release whatsoever. A lot of this particular film occurs throughout various locations in the world, offering not only an extremely beautiful view of nature, but a very detail oriented look into the effect of pollution. One of the most notable sequences was the astonishing beauty of the icebergs as Al Gore and his team travel the world, despite them being dirty as a result of the pollution. There was just something that I felt was breathtaking about the view alone that caused it to really stand out as my wife and I watched through this.
Audio Quality (5/5):
An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power comes bundled with a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 sound track. While I normally would rate this a little lower since it didn’t come packaged with a 7.1 track, I feel that 5.1 audio was an optimal selection for this film. There really isn’t a need for overall immersion by any means; just a presentation that not only does its job in relaying the message that they’re trying to deliver and provide some ambient audio elements as Gore and his team travel the world. Obviously, the various areas in which he visits offer a different audible experience, and the 5.1 audio track itself really did a great job at capturing those stops.
The Packaging (3.5/5):
Packaged like no other Blu-ray that I’ve ever seen before, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power comes packaged in a case that’s completely made from recycled materials. Made into almost what feels like a cardboard style case. Within that case is the standard Blu-ray copy of the film. There is no DVD copy of the film included, but it does come packaged with a digital copy redemption pamphlet allowing you to add it to your digital collection. There is no slipcover available with this release due to its unique packaging.
Special Features (2.5/5):
Unfortunately, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power doesn’t come packaged with much in terms of additional content. But, then again, I’m not really sure what all should be included with a documentary. Included with this release is:
Effecting Change: Speaking Truth to Power
OneRepublic – Truth to Power (Lyric Video)
Truth in Ten
Technical Specs:
Video
Codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Resolution: 1080p
Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1
Original Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Audio
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
French: Dolby Digital 5.1
Spanish: Dolby Digital 5.1
Portuguese: Dolby Digital 5.1
Subtitles
English, English SDH, French, Portuguese, Spanish
Runtime
Original Film: 98 minutes
Final Thoughts:
Overall, I’m really grateful that Paramount Pictures had given us the opportunity to review An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. Despite the intentional leaving out of facts as they negatively support Al Gore’s argument, this film itself was a nice refresher for the awareness that it is trying to convey. While not nearly as effective as the first film, it still sends a strong message to its audience that we should be aware of. The overall visual and audible experience of this Blu-ray were really well done. Along with coming packaged in the unique packaging, I would only recommend picking this release up if you’re a fan of documentaries. This film will be available for purchase beginning on Tuesday, October 24. But, you can preorder it from your preferred retailer now.
Note: This Blu-ray was sent to us for review. This has not affected our judgement or editorial process in any way. Please contact us if you have any questions regarding this process.Dallas mayor pro tem Dwaine Caraway gave the key to the city to Michael Vick, the quarterback for the rival Philadelphia Eagles, causing an uproar among animal rights activists Saturday.
In 2007, Vick was convicted of a felony related to a dogfighting ring and served 19 months in prison.
"The message and the kids are far greater than all this response about, 'Why give him the key to the city?'" Caraway told ESPNDallas Monday afternoon. "He is telling kids and exchanging with them the rights and wrongs of the things that he did and encouraging kids to further their education and to not deal with the drugs. To obey their parents and pick the people they hang around.
"That's a message I would challenge anybody to say that not one kid across America shouldn't hear from people in notoriety such as Michael Vick."
Dallas mayor Tom Leppert distanced himself from the action later Monday.
"The action taken was not sanctioned by my office and was not an official ceremonial honor on behalf of the City of Dallas," he said in a statement. "Official Keys to the City are presented by the Mayor, or an elected official designated by the Mayor, and reserved, on a limited basis, for an elected official of international status. Clearly, this was not the case in this situation and done without my knowledge or approval."
Local radio reporter Richard Hunter attended the event and filmed it. In the video, Hunter says that he actually adopted one of the dogs from Vick's home and he tried to speak with the Philadelphia quarterback at Saturday's event. Vick did not speak to him.
After serving his prison time, Vick was signed by the Eagles in 2009. This past season he was named NFL Comeback Player of the Year after making the Pro Bowl with the Eagles.
Caraway is a city council member and as mayor pro tem serves the role that a vice mayor would if Dallas had that office.
Calvin Watkins of ESPNDallas.com contributed to this report.The Chromebook Pixel LS (2015) has an Intel Core i7 processor (Broadwell) at 2.4Ghz, 16Gb of RAM, a 2560x1700 400-nit IPS screen (239ppi), and Intel 802.11ac wireless. It has a Kingston 64Gib flash chip, of which about 54Gib can be used by OpenBSD when dual-booting with a 1Gb Chrome OS partition.
This guide is rather verbose because I explain each part of the process so you can understand how it works, instead of just blindly copying random commands from mailing lists and forums (most of which are for different/older Chromebooks). The Chromebook Pixel ships with a working SeaBIOS ( RW_LEGACY ) ROM region from the factory, so there is no need to download or flash any other ROM images.
Note: everything here can be done on a fresh Chromebook with no Google account setup.
Enabling Developer Mode
At the initial Chrome welcome screen, press Escape+F3(Refresh)+Power and the machine will reboot. Press Control+D then Enter at the scary warning screen, then Control+D again to transition into Developer Mode which will wipe out your locally-stored user data.
After the state partition is formatted, it will reboot to the scary warning screen. Press Control+D to continue booting into Chrome OS. At the Chrome welcome screen, hit Control+Alt+F2(Forward) to get to a console, and login as chronos.
Enable legacy booting (to SeaBIOS) so we can boot to OpenBSD with sudo crossystem dev_boot_legacy=1.
Note: dev_boot_usb is not needed since that's for non-legacy (Chrome OS) booting from USB.
If you have already unscrewed the write-protect screw to be able to change the default boot flags, you can jump ahead to do that now.
Booting OpenBSD Installer
Once you have enabled legacy booting, you can boot to SeaBIOS with Control+L at the boot screen which will boot the OpenBSD media from your USB stick or SD card.
Since SeaBIOS only supports VGA text emulation (by drawing on the framebuffer setup by Coreboot) in 16-bit real mode, once the OpenBSD bootloader loads the kernel and switches into protected mode, you would not see any text on the screen (unless/until inteldrm is loaded, which is not on the install media). Support for drawing an early console on Coreboot's framebuffer was added to efifb (which is present on the install media) between OpenBSD 5.9 and 6.0, so make sure you install a version 6.0 or higher.
Repartitioning
Chrome OS uses an encrypted /home mounted from the large STATE partition mounted at /mnt/stateful_partition. Rather than just change it to an OpenBSD partition, we'll shrink it and create another OpenBSD partition. This will allow the machine to properly boot into Chrome OS for future firmware upgrades and knob twiddling.
From the OpenBSD install prompt, break out to a s hell and fdisk -e sd0. The first partition listed is actually the last on the disk, and it's shown as a "DOS FAT-12" disk even though it's actually formatted as ext4. Shrink it with e 0 and make its size 1G or however large you want to give up for Chrome OS. Create a new partition with e 12 (or whichever partition number is next), make its type a6, starting at partition 0's start+size, and make use the rest of the disk.
Setting Up Encrypted softraid
Edit the disklabel with disklabel -E sd0, a dd an a partition with type RAID, making sure the offset and size match what you created earlier with fdisk, then w and q. Initialize the new encrypted disk with bioctl -cC -l /dev/sd0a softraid0 and enter a new passphrase. Then install to proceed with the installation, installing to the new disk that just appeared when the softraid0 device was brought up.
Note that the iwm0 wireless device won't work during installation because there is no firmware package, so try a USB ethernet device that doesn't need firmware for now. The two USB-C ethernet devices I've tried both showed up as cdce devices which work fine in OpenBSD during installation.
OpenBSD Bootloader
At the end of the installation, you'll probably see a message that installboot couldn't find an OpenBSD partition. This is because the Chromebook uses a GPT disk layout for Chrome OS's bootloader, but SeaBIOS requires an MBR to boot legacy disks. Since the kernel and thus installboot sees the disk as GPT, it will want to install its EFI bootloader and not re-write the MBR. (Or, it sees it as an MBR disk with just one EE partition spanning most of the disk, with no OpenBSD partition present.)
To work around this, you need to edit the MBR on the disk while preserving the GPT, and define an OpenBSD partition in the MBR with the same start/size as the partition already in the GPT label. Some 3rd party tools like GPT fdisk support this by creating a "hybrid MBR".
Once the MBR contains an OpenBSD partition, the OpenBSD kernel should see it as an MBR disk, allowing installboot to work.
You can fetch a statically linked binary of gdisk while still at the installer root prompt (the ftp binary on the ramdisk does not support SSL):
# ftp -o /mnt/sbin/gdisk http://insecure.jcs.org/tmp/gdisk # chmod +x /mnt/sbin/gdisk # /mnt/sbin/gdisk /dev/sd0c
From the gdisk command prompt, r to enter recovery/transformation mode, and then h to make a hybrid MBR. Add partition 13 (your OpenBSD partition) and say y to the prompt about adding ee first. Press enter to accept a6 as the partition type, and y to be bootable. Enter n to protect more partitions. Press o to see your new hybrid MBR which should contain your a6 OpenBSD partition. w to write table and exit.
Now write a new MBR with fdisk -u sd0 and then installboot -vr /mnt sd1 to target the softraid disk, which will then find the sd0 disk and hopefully write your MBR. If you see a successful /mnt/usr/mdec/biosboot will be written at sector... line, you should be good to go. reboot and hit Control+L at the splash screen, and SeaBIOS should find the OpenBSD bootloader.
Chrome OS
Once OpenBSD is installed, you can go back to Chrome OS by pressing Control+D at the boot screen. Upon first boot after re-sizing the STATE partition, Chrome OS will repair itself by re-formatting that ext4 partition and re-creating the encrypted /home. You should then go back to the chronos shell and set a password with sudo chromeos-setdevpasswd since any previous password will have been erased when Chrome OS re-initialized its STATE partition.
If you got a different screen saying that Chrome OS is damaged and must be restored, your GPT partition table might be screwed up, or may have just lost the proprietary attributes set on the KERN-* partitions which tell Chrome OS which kernel to boot (as only one should be active at a time). If you proceed, you will lose your OpenBSD partition.
You can try to repair these attributes with the gdisk tool mentioned earlier. Use the x and a commands to set the following attributes:
Partition 2 (KERN-A): set 56 and 48 for 0101000000000000 Partition 4 (KERN-B): set 52, 53, 54, 55 for 000F000000000000 Partition 6 (KERN-C): set 52, 53, 54, 55 for 000F000000000000
After writing out the GPT label, booting back into Chrome OS should work properly.
Defaulting to OpenBSD
By default, the Chromebook will boot to the scary "developer mode" splash screen and wait. If you don't press Control+D to boot to Chrome OS or Control+L to boot SeaBIOS within about 30 seconds, it will beep (very loudly) at you.
To boot SeaBIOS/OpenBSD by default, and do it much quicker, you can change some GBB flags in the firmware through Chrome OS (good thing you kept that Chrome OS partition). Doing this requires that flashrom have write access to the normally-write-protected area of the device, which requires physically opening your Pixel and removing the write-protect screw:
Power off and unplug the Pixel
Remove the rubber strips from the underside carefully (if you stretch them out, they won't go back on smoothly) and remove all 16 screws
The lid should easily lift off (there are no clips)
Remove the pink write-protect screw located on the right-hand side near the USB ports, along with its washer
Now you can disable write protection from within Chrome OS. Open the Pixel's lid and it should power on automatically. Press Control+D at the splash screen to boot to Chrome OS, then switch to chronos. Run flashrom --wp-disable to disable flash protection.
You can now set the GBB flags to enable GBB_FLAG_DEV_SCREEN_SHORT_DELAY, GBB_FLAG_FORCE_DEV_SWITCH_ON, GBB_FLAG_FORCE_DEV_BOOT_LEGACY, and GBB_FLAG_DEFAULT_DEV_BOOT_LEGACY, which will automatically boot SeaBIOS after a short time:
sudo /usr/share/vboot/bin/set_gbb_flags.sh 0x489
Before buttoning everything back up, test that opening the Pixel's lid displays the splash screen for only a couple seconds before booting to SeaBIOS automatically. To shorten the SeaBIOS timeout, keep reading.
Modifying the Splash Screen
The Chrome EC (or video BIOS?) initializes the backlight of the screen to 100% upon boot. Normally it would quickly boot to Linux which would then adjust it down to a non-blinding level, but since it now displays its scary developer mode warning for a few seconds, this bright white screen at 100% screen brightness can be very disorienting, especially if you were just working in the console with a black background.
To get around this, you can modify the bitmaps and layout in vboot to display something else, or just force it to fallback to a simple text display.
To add custom bitmaps and layout, you'll need to compile vboot to get a bmpblk_utility binary built (this can be done on another machine, since you just need to copy the final bitmap file back to the Pixel). If you don't want to do all of that, you can instead skip this section and opt for a simple line of text.
Extract your current GBB on the Pixel:
sudo flashrom -i GBB:/tmp/gbb.rom -r
Then extract the bitmap block from it:
sudo gbb_utility --bmpfv=/tmp/bitmaps /tmp/gbb.rom
Copy the /tmp/bitmaps file to your other machine with bmpblk_utility compiled (either via USB key or scp ). On your other machine, extract the bitmap blob (referenced by /path/to/your/bitmaps here) to a directory where all of the individual.bmp files and the config.yml file will be stored:
cd vboot./build/utility/bmpblk_utility -x -d ~/gbb-images /path/to/your/bitmaps
Look in ~/gbb-images and edit individual files, or just add a new one. For my Pixel shown above, I created a new bitmap in that directory called openbsd.bmp that was 1280x850. (Note: when saving BMP files in Gimp, make sure the "do not write color space information" option is checked.)
Edit the config.yml file, add openbsd.bmp to the images: hash, then edit scr_0_0 to just show that one bitmap at 0,0. The relevant lines will look something like this:
[...] img_00067ff4: img_00067ff4.bmp # 295x35 1118/11438 tag=0 fmt=1 openbsd: openbsd.bmp screens: scr_0_0: - [0, 0, openbsd] scr_0_1: [...]
Now re-assemble a new bitmaps file with everything in your ~/gbb-images directory:
cd ~/gbb-images ~/vboot/build/utility/bmpblk_utility -c config.yaml -z 2 /path/to/your/new_bitmaps
Copy your new_bitmaps file back to your Pixel, put it back in the GBB, and flash it:
sudo gbb_utility -s --bmpfv=/tmp/new_bitmaps /tmp/gbb.rom sudo flashrom -i GBB:/tmp/gbb.rom -w
Removing the Splash Screen
A quicker option to remove the blinding white background that doesn't involve compiling anything is to just remove all of the bitmaps from the GBB. vboot will fallback to displaying a simple line of text ("developer mode warning") centered on a black background which is easy on the eyes, even at 100% brightness:
Extract the GBB:
sudo flashrom -i GBB:/tmp/gbb.rom -r
Then create a zero-length file and store it as the bmpfv in the GBB:
touch /tmp/null-images sudo gbb_utility -s --bmpfv=/tmp/null-images /tmp/gbb.rom
Then write the GBB region back to the ROM:
sudo flashrom -i GBB:/tmp/gbb.rom -w
Speeding Up SeaBIOS
By default, SeaBIOS will wait 2.5 seconds at its "Press ESC for boot menu." screen before continuing to boot OpenBSD, which can get annoying. To shorten this timeout without recompiling SeaBIOS, you can adjust the value in the etc/boot-menu-wait virtual file in the SeaBIOS CBFS. The SeaBIOS CBFS is contained inside of the main ROM at the RW_LEGACY region (which you can see by running fmap_decode /tmp/flash.rom |
a suite of online small-business software products, including direct bank-data imports, invoicing and expense tracking, customizable charts of accounts and journal transactions.
16. HelloSign
HelloSign is the easiest and simplest way to handle contracts or other agreements on the fly, because it lets you view and sign without visiting the office. This app also eliminates the burden of needing to print, sign and scan a document to be sent back. It allows you to just use your fingertip to sign any PDF file and forward it to the necessary party.
17. 1Password
Do away with all those sticky notes with your passwords scrawled on them. 1Password allows you to collect all those codes in one safe place online. This app keeps all your passwords and important information protected behind your Master Password. It has extensions or plug-ins for all the major browsers, and can securely store other things, like credit cards, bank accounts and licenses. You can save all the entries from a webpage form, so you can remember answers to security questions or other information.Rocky Widner/Getty Images
Whether or not teams will make a flurry of transactions before this year's NBA trade deadline—Thursday, 3 p.m. ET—remains up in the air. But rest assured at least a couple of players will be moved, and franchises who are still hunting a playoff spot and those ready to fall back will reveal themselves.
Here's a quick run through the league on what to expect:
Most Likely to Move
The likeliest players to be wearing different uniforms this weekend are Denver Nuggets shooting guard Arron Afflalo and Boston Celtics small forward Tayshaun Prince. Afflalo has the ability to opt out of his contract for next season and is fully expected to do so. The Nuggets will want to get something in return for Afflalo before he leaves for nothing. Sources say the Sacramento Kings are eager to reunite Afflalo with former Nuggets and newly hired Kings head coach George Karl, but Sacramento is not the only team in pursuit.
Boston is unlikely to include Prince in a deal before Thursday, but those close to him are confident the Celtics either will let him go or buy him out. A host of playoff-caliber teams, league sources say, are interested in picking up Prince once he's free if they don't fill their need for defensive wing help in some other way. The Los Angeles Clippers and Portland Trail Blazers are both looking to bolster their depth and ability to play small, and Prince certainly would help on those fronts.
Shooters on the Market
Noah Graham/Getty Images
Afflalo and Prince aren't the only perimeter players potentially available for teams seeking wing help. The Phoenix Suns are expected to break up their logjam of three point guards—Eric Bledsoe, Isaiah Thomas and Goran Dragic—one way or the other.
The Suns' initial hope was to move Thomas and shooting guard Gerald Green to improve their chances of re-signing Dragic, who can opt out of the last year of his contract and become a free agent this summer. But sources say that the Suns now question whether or not they'll be able to keep Dragic even if they have the financial wherewithal to do so.
It's no secret that a half-dozen teams or more would love to land Dragic, including both the Los Angeles Lakers and the New York Knicks. Asked whether Dragic would be inclined to stay with the Suns if Thomas were moved and he could resume the role he had last season, a source close to Dragic said, "Don't think so."
The Los Angeles Clippers and Miami Heat also have shown interest in acquiring Dragic, with sources saying the Clippers are dangling Jamal Crawford and the Heat offering Luol Deng.
The Minnesota Timberwolves have two veteran sharpshooters, Kevin Martin and Gary Neal, who would love to join playoff teams for the stretch run. Neal, one source said, is on the Atlanta Hawks' radar, which would make sense in light of head coach Mike Budenholzer's familiarity with Neal from their days together with the San Antonio Spurs.
Small Selection of Bigs
The market for teams seeking big-man help is not quite as robust. Milwaukee Bucks forward/center Larry Sanders is expected to reach a buyout with the team in the coming days, although it may not be until after the deadline passes. In any case, he is unlikely to play again this season as he deals with undisclosed personal issues.
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The Nuggets are open to moving center JaVale McGee as well, but he has made only four appearances since late November because of an unspecified leg injury. And while several teams would be interested in acquiring an agile shot-blocking center, they can't be sure exactly what they're getting.
If the Nuggets are still interested in moving McGee this summer and he gets significant playing time between now and then, they'll have a better chance of finding a team willing to trade for him. McGee's four-year, $44 million deal he signed with the Nuggets expires after he makes the final $12 million next season.
"He's a shot-blocker and he can change a game," said one league executive who would have interest. "He hasn't played. That's the problem."
Pacers See Dragic in Their Future
The Indiana Pacers are looking to move one of their high-priced veterans, league sources say, in order to create salary-cap room to pursue Dragic, should he be available this summer. Power forward David West and point guard George Hill have been mentioned as available, and although center Roy Hibbert has not, the Pacers' interest in Dragic is believed to be strong enough that they'd move anyone other than Paul George to create the necessary cap space to get him.
Reggie Jackson Leads List of Familiar Rumor Fodder
Four names that have been tumbling in the rumor mill for most of the season—Thunder guard Reggie Jackson, Charlotte Hornets shooting guard Lance Stephenson, Nuggets swingman Wilson Chandler and Brooklyn Nets center Brook Lopez—are as likely to stay where they are as to move right now. The most likely to be moved among them is Jackson, one league executive speculated, because he will be a restricted free agent this summer and the Thunder will not be inclined to match any offer sheet he receives.
The Milwaukee Bucks are among those who have discussed Jackson, a league source said, but are more than likely to stand pat. The Bucks have pieces that would work contractually: either undersized scoring guard Jerryd Bayless, whose contract runs through next season at $3 million a year, or willowy power forward John Henson, who still has two years on his rookie contract, topping out at $2.9 million the second year.
Jackson, meanwhile, would make sense for the Bucks in their up-and-down style under Coach Jason Kidd and would add a player with postseason experience to a roster that has little and yet has hopes of being a force this spring. With 30 playoff games under his belt, Jackson has seen more postseason action than everyone on the Milwaukee roster except big men ZaZa Pachulia and Kenyon Martin. Not having Sanders, however, does thin their frontline ranks, making Henson less dispensable.
In the case of Chandler and Lopez, sources say their teams are asking for more than the market will bear. Teams interested in Stephenson are asking for an additional asset to take the guard off Charlotte's hands and financial books.
The Nuggets apparently are less urgent to move Chandler before Thursday's deadline than Afflalo because they hold the option on extending Chandler's contract through next season.
Lopez, one executive noted, is the only truly valuable asset the Nets have right now. So even if they're trimming their player payroll to make the team more buyer-friendly, as front-office executives from a variety of teams believe is the case, unloading him without a healthy return in young talent or draft picks wouldn't make the franchise more attractive. The tricky part, of course, is that Lopez can opt out of the final $16.7 million of his contract this summer and become a free agent.
Sixers, Rockets Always Ready
Of course, it wouldn't be trade season without the Philadelphia 76ers and Houston Rockets being in the mix.
The Sixers, several teams said, have offered to be a depot for anyone needing to dump an expiring contract to make a deal work. The Rockets are looking to deal for a first-round pick, presumably to bolster their chances of landing a starting-caliber point guard. The Rockets are well aware, sources say, that there is considerable competition for their desired No. 1 target, Dragic, and that the Suns want a first-round pick included in the trade should they feel forced to deal Dragic.
New Free-Agent Landscape on the Horizon
In the last few years, teams with presumptive free agents and restricted free agents felt less pressure to move them at the trade deadline because they could still deal them around the draft or in a sign-and-trade maneuver. However, the Lakers and Knicks (along with several other teams) have room this summer to offer maximum-salary contracts, and that has moved up the clock.
That cap space will almost certainly prompt some fat offer sheets for the restricted free agents, and it allows pending free agents to simply anticipate signing with a big-market team without negotiating a sign-and-trade. The influx of TV revenue in 2016 also has teams less cautious about spending liberally on the free-agent market.
"With as much money as there's going to be on the market, the need for sign-and-trades is going to be less," one Western Conference general manager said.
Ric Bucher covers the NBA for Bleacher Report.IRVINE, Calif., Sept. 29, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Governments and banks are discouraging the use of cash, but a problem with a cashless society is a loss of privacy, explains Dr. Scott Sumner, Professor Emeritus of Economics at Bentley University. He points out that Sweden already is moving toward eliminating all coins and paper money, and Italy and Canada are beginning to discourage the use of cash.
Dr. Sumner predicts the elimination of cash would make it easier for governments to impose negative interest rates and could lead to increases in values for gold and alternative currency, such as the Bitcoin.
In a commentary prepared on behalf of RCW Financial of Irvine, California (www.rcwfinancial.com) and entitled, "Why Governments & Banks Want To Eliminate Your Cash," Dr. Sumner wrote about the irony of the push for a cashless society at a time when there are billions of U.S. dollars in circulation.
"Surprisingly, despite the increasing use of credit cards, cash holdings are about 8% of Gross Domestic Product, which is actually a larger share of the US economy than a decade ago, indeed even larger than 90 years ago. The amount of cash in circulation (paper currency and coins) is roughly $4500 for every man, women and child in America. It is believed that roughly half that total is held overseas, but even $2000 per person would be a surprisingly large figure, far higher than people admit to in government surveys. Ironically, it is this increasing popularity of cash holdings that helps explain why governments are so anxious to discourage the use of cash," wrote Dr. Sumner.
He pointed out that until a few years ago, most economists thought negative interest rates were virtually impossible, but that now is reality in some European countries and Japan.
Another implication of a cashless society is the loss of privacy.
"The anonymity of cash is what makes it appealing to many people, but it's also what makes it increasingly unpopular with governments. They see cash as a way of evading taxes, as well as facilitating drug dealing and other nefarious activities such as terrorism…. But regardless of how you feel about privacy, this seems to be the direction the world is moving," Dr. Sumner stated.
He concluded: "The removal of cash would not have a major impact on the overall economy. It would slightly increase the government's ability to collect taxes, and it would somewhat increase the effectiveness of monetary policy during recessions. Banks would benefit from increased use of credit cards. For investors, it might lead to an increased demand for cash substitutes, such as Bitcoin and precious metals, pushing their price higher."
The entire 1,700 word commentary is available free online at www.rcwfinancial.com/cashless-society.
About Scott Sumner, Ph.D.:
Dr. Scott Sumner studied economics at the University of Wisconsin and received a PhD from the University of Chicago. He has done extensive research on the role of the gold standard in the Great Depression and is Professor Emeritus of Economics at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts, where he has taught since 1982. Dr. Sumner received national recognition in 2012 as one of the "Top 100 Global Thinkers" by ForeignPolicy.com and was named "The Blogger Who Saved the Economy" by The Atlantic magazine.
About RCW Financial:
RCW Financial of Irvine, California provides estate planning and wealth preservation services focused on the acquisition of the most popular and exclusive numismatic rarities. For additional information, visit online at www.rcwfinancial.com, call Michael Contursi, President of RCW Financial, at 949-679-1222, or email at info@rcw1.com.
SOURCE RCW Financial
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http://www.rcwfinancial.comPirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl is a 2003 American fantasy swashbuckler film directed by Gore Verbinski and the first film in the Pirates of the Caribbean film series. Produced by Walt Disney Pictures and Jerry Bruckheimer, the film is based on Walt Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean attraction at Disney theme parks.[3] The story follows pirate Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) and blacksmith Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) as they rescue the kidnapped Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) from the cursed crew of the Black Pearl, captained by Hector Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), who become undead skeletons at night.
Jay Wolpert developed a script in 2001, and Stuart Beattie rewrote it in early 2002. Around that time, producer Jerry Bruckheimer became involved in the project; he had Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio work on the script, adding the plot device of a supernatural curse to the story to bring it in line with the original theme park ride. Filming took place from October 2002 to March 2003 in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and on sets constructed around Los Angeles, California. It was also significant in being the first film released under the Walt Disney Pictures banner to be rated PG-13 by the MPAA.
The film's world premiere was held at Disneyland Park in Anaheim, California on June 28, 2003. Despite low expectations, the film was a huge box office success, grossing over $654 million worldwide; making it the fourth highest-grossing film of 2003. It received generally positive reviews from critics; the film was praised for the performances (particularly from Depp), action sequences, writing, score, and visuals. The film has been widely seen as the film that launched Depp as a box office leading man after many years as a cult movie star. Depp won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role and earned him nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actor, BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role, and Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy. The Curse of the Black Pearl was also nominated for four other Academy Awards and BAFTAs. The film became the first in a franchise, with two back-to-back sequels, Dead Man's Chest and At World's End, released in 2006 and 2007. Two more sequels, On Stranger Tides and Dead Men Tell No Tales, were released in 2011 and 2017 respectively.
Plot [ edit ]
In the early 1700s, while sailing to Port Royal, Jamaica aboard HMS Dauntless, Governor Weatherby Swann, his daughter Elizabeth, and Lieutenant James Norrington encounter a shipwreck and recover a boy, Will Turner. Elizabeth discovers a golden pirate medallion around his neck, and keeps it in order to protect him.
Eight years later, Norrington is promoted to commodore and proposes to Elizabeth. Her corset makes her faint and fall into the sea, which causes her medallion to emit a pulse. Captain Jack Sparrow comes to Port Royal to commandeer a ship, and rescues Elizabeth. Norrington identifies Jack as a pirate, and a chase ensues. Jack encounters Will, now a blacksmith and swordsman. They duel, and Jack is captured and imprisoned.
That night, the Black Pearl attacks Port Royal in search of the medallion. The crew of the Pearl capture Elizabeth, taking her to meet Captain Barbossa. Elizabeth claims her last name is Turner to conceal her identity as the governor's daughter. She learns that her medallion is one of 882 gold pieces that Barbossa's crew took from a treasure of Hernán Cortés on Isla de Muerta. An Aztec curse condemns them to become undead corpses under moonlight, until they return all of the pieces and atone in blood, with the medallion being the final piece. Barbossa takes her prisoner, believing her to be the daughter of William "Bootstrap Bill" Turner, whose blood is needed to lift the curse.
Will frees Jack to rescue Elizabeth, whom Will loves. Jack, the original captain of the Black Pearl before Barbossa staged a mutiny, gets assistance from Will to reclaim his ship. The two commandeer HMS Interceptor, a small and very fast sloop-of-war, and head for Tortuga to recruit a crew. At Isla de Muerta, Will and Jack witness Barbossa sacrificing Elizabeth's blood and the final gold piece. The curse is not lifted because Elizabeth does not carry the blood of Bootstrap Bill Turner. Bootstrap had been a crewmate of the Black Pearl before being thrown overboard by the crew for giving the medallion to Will. Will rescues Elizabeth and brings her to Interceptor, while Jack is captured by Barbossa and gets locked in the brig of the Pearl.
The Black Pearl pursues the Interceptor, taking Jack's crew hostage and destroying the ship. Will makes a deal with Barbossa to release Elizabeth in exchange for his blood, but Barbossa exploits a loophole in the agreement, marooning Jack and Elizabeth on a nearby island. Elizabeth makes a smoke signal, and Norrington brings HMS Dauntless, a ship of the line, to rescue Elizabeth and arrest Jack. Elizabeth asks Norrington to return for Will, convincing him by accepting Norrington's marriage proposal.
That night, the Dauntless arrives at Isla de Muerta. Jack plans to lure the pirates out to be ambushed by the crew of the Dauntless, but the plan goes awry when Barbossa's crew covertly walks underwater to surprise-attack the Dauntless from below. Elizabeth escapes the Dauntless and frees Jack's crew from the brig of the Black Pearl. They refuse to rescue Jack and Will, so Elizabeth sets out on her own while Jack's crew departs aboard the Pearl.
Jack frees Will and duels Barbossa, while Elizabeth and Will fight off Barbossa's crewmen Weatherby, Monk and Jacoby. Barbossa stabs Jack in the stomach, but the latter is revealed to be under the Aztec curse, having secretly taken a piece of gold from the chest of Cortés. Jack then shoots Barbossa, and Will drops both coins into the chest, with his and Jack's blood on them. The curse is lifted, causing Barbossa to die from Jack's gunshot; the rest of Barbossa's crew, realizing that they are no longer immortal, surrender and are arrested by the Royal Navy.
At Port Royal, Jack is led to the gallows to be hanged for piracy. Elizabeth diverts Norrington's attention and Will attempts a rescue, but Jack and Will are surrounded and held at gunpoint. Elizabeth intercedes and declares her love for Will, leaving Norrington crestfallen. Governor Swann pardons Will and gives his blessing for Elizabeth to marry him. Jack dives into the sea and escapes aboard the nearby Black Pearl, finally reclaiming the ship. Norrington permits Jack and the Pearl "one day's head start" before initiating pursuit.
Cast [ edit ]
Production [ edit ]
Development [ edit ]
During the early 1990s, screenwriters Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio began to think of a supernatural spin on the pirate genre.[10] Walt Disney Pictures had Jay Wolpert write a script based on the ride in 2001, which was based on a story created by the executives Brigham Taylor, Michael Haynes, and Josh Harmon. This story featured Will Turner as a prison guard who releases Sparrow to rescue Elizabeth, who is being held for ransom money by Captain Blackheart.
Disney was unsure whether to release the film in theaters or direct-to-video. The studio was interested in Matthew McConaughey as Sparrow because of his resemblance to Burt Lancaster, who had inspired that script's interpretation of the character. If they chose to release it direct-to-video, Christopher Walken or Cary Elwes would have been their first choices.[11]
Stuart Beattie was brought in to rewrite the script in March 2002, because of his knowledge of piracy.[12] When Dick Cook managed to convince producer Jerry Bruckheimer to join the project,[11] he rejected the script because it was "a straight pirate movie."[13] Later in March 2002, he brought Elliott and Rossio,[13] who suggested making a supernatural curse – as described in the opening narration of the ride – the film's plot.[14]
In May 2002, Gore Verbinski signed on to direct Pirates of the Caribbean.[12] He was attracted to the idea of using modern technology to resurrect a genre that had disappeared after the Golden Age of Hollywood and recalled his childhood memories of the ride, feeling the film was an opportunity to pay tribute to the "scary and funny" tone of it.[15]
Jim Carrey was considered for the part of Jack Sparrow. However, the production schedule for The Curse of the Black Pearl conflicted with Bruce Almighty. Others considered for the role include Michael Keaton and Christopher Walken.[16] Although Cook had been a strong proponent of adapting Disney's rides into films, the box office failure of The Country Bears (2002) made Michael Eisner attempt to shut down production of Pirates of the Caribbean. However, Verbinski told his concept artists to keep working on the picture, and when Eisner came to visit, the executive was astonished by what had been created.
As recalled in the book DisneyWar, Eisner asked "Why does it have to cost so much?" Bruckheimer replied, "Your competition is spending $150 million," referring to franchises like The Lord of the Rings and The Matrix. Eisner concurred, but with the stigma attached to theme-park adaptations, Eisner requested Verbinski and Bruckheimer remove some of the more overt references to the ride in the script, such as a scene where Sparrow and Turner enter the cave via a waterfall.[17]
Influence of the Monkey Island series of games [ edit ]
Ted Elliott was allegedly writing a George Lucas-produced animated film adaptation of The Curse of Monkey Island, which was cancelled before its official announcement, three years prior to the release of The Curse of the Black Pearl.[18] This film was allegedly in production at Industrial Light and Magic before being cancelled.
Ron Gilbert, the creator of the Monkey Island series, has jokingly expressed a bitterness towards Pirates of the Caribbean, specifically the second film, for its similarities to his game.[19] Gilbert has also stated that On Stranger Tides, a novel by Tim Powers which was adapted into the fourth film, was the principal source of inspiration for his video games.[20]
Filming and design [ edit ]
Verbinski did not want an entirely romanticized feel to the film: he wanted a sense of historical fantasy. Most of the actors wore prosthetics and contact lenses. Depp had contacts that acted as sunglasses, while Rush and Lee Arenberg wore dulled contacts that gave a sinister feel to the characters. Mackenzie Crook wore two contacts to represent his character's wooden eye: a soft version, and a harder version for when it protrudes. In addition, their rotten teeth and scurvy skin were dyed on,[21] although Depp did have gold teeth added, which he forgot to remove after filming.[22] Depp also used a genuine pistol which was made in 1760 in London, which the crew bought from a dealer in Connecticut.[21] A number of swords were built for the production by blacksmith Tony Swatton.[23] The crew spent five months creating the cavern in which Barbossa and the Black Pearl crew attempt to reverse their curse,[10] filling it with five feet of water, 882 Aztec coins, and some gold paint on the styrofoam rocks for more impressions of treasure. The crew also built the fortress at Port Royal in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, and Governor Swann's palace was built at Manhattan Beach.[21] A fire broke out in September 2002, causing $525,000 worth of damage, though no one was injured.[24]
Dauntless The barge used for
The filmmakers chose St. Vincent as their primary shooting location, as it contained the quietest beach they could find, and built three piers and a backlot for Port Royal and Tortuga.[21] Of most importance to the film were the three ships: Black Pearl, Dauntless, and Interceptor. For budget reasons, the ships were built on docks, with only six days spent in the open sea for the battle between Black Pearl and Interceptor.[25] Dauntless and Black Pearl were built on barges, with computer-generated imagery finishing the structures. Black Pearl was also built on the Spruce Goose stage, in order to control fog and lighting.[21] Interceptor was a re-dressed Lady Washington, a full-scale replica sailing ship from Aberdeen, Washington, fully repainted before going on a 40-day voyage beginning December 2, 2002, arriving on location on January 12, 2003.[26] A miniature was also built for the storm sequence.[21]
Principal photography began on October 9, 2002 and wrapped by March 7, 2003.[12] The quick shoot was only marred by two accidents: as Jack Sparrow steals Interceptor, three of the ropes attaching it to Dauntless did not break at first, and when they did snap, debris hit Depp's knee, though he was not injured, and the way the incident played out on film made it look like Sparrow merely ducks. A more humorous accident was when the boat Sparrow was supposed to arrive in at Port Royal sank.[15] In October, the crew was shooting scenes at Rancho Palos Verdes, by December they were shooting at Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and in January they were at the cavern set at Los Angeles.[27] The script often changed with Elliott and Rossio on set, with additions such as Gibbs (Kevin McNally) telling Will how Sparrow allegedly escaped from an island – strapping two turtles together with rope made of his back hair – and Pryce was written into the climactic battle to keep some empathy for the audience.[15]
Because of the quick schedule of the shoot, Industrial Light & Magic immediately began visual effects work. While the skeletal forms of the pirates revealed by moonlight take up relatively little screentime, the crew knew their computer-generated forms had to convince in terms of replicating performances and characteristics of the actors, or else the transition would not work. Each scene featuring them was shot twice: a reference plate with the actors, and then without them to add in the skeletons,[10] an aesthetic complicated by Verbinski's decision to shoot the battles with handheld cameras.[15] The actors also had to perform their scenes again on the motion capture stage.[21] With the shoot only wrapping up four months before release, Verbinski spent 18-hour days on the edit,[15] while at the same time spending time on 600 effects shots, 250 of which were merely removing modern sailboats from shots.[28]
Music [ edit ]
The film score was composed by Klaus Badelt and Hans Zimmer,[29] who also served as music producer. Seven other composers, including Geoff Zanelli and Ramin Djawadi, are credited for "additional music". Verbinski oversaw the score with Badelt and Zimmer, who headed 15 composers to finish it quickly.[15] Alan Silvestri, who had collaborated with Verbinski on Mouse Hunt and The Mexican, was set to compose the score, but Bruckheimer decided to go with Zimmer's team instead, who were frequent collaborators of his productions. Silvestri left the production before recording any material.[30]
Release [ edit ]
The teaser was attached to The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.
Rating [ edit ]
Pirates of the Caribbean was the first film released under the Walt Disney Pictures banner to be rated PG-13 by the MPAA; one executive noted that she found the film too intense for her five-year-old child.[13] Nonetheless, the studio was confident enough to add The Curse of the Black Pearl subtitle to the film in case sequels were made,[12] and to attract older children. Verbinski disliked the new title because it is the Aztec gold rather than the ship that is cursed, so he requested the title to be unreadable on the poster.[17]
Home media [ edit ]
The DVD and VHS editions of the film were released December 1, 2003 in the UK and December 2, 2003 in the US,[31] with 11 million copies sold in the first week, a record for live action video.[32] It earned $235,300,000 from DVDs as of January 2004.[33] The DVD featured two discs, featuring three commentary tracks (Johnny Depp and Gore Verbinski; Jerry Bruckheimer, Keira Knightley and Jack Davenport; and the screenwriter team), various deleted scenes and documentaries, and a 1968 Disneyland episode about the theme park ride.[31] A special three-disc edition was released in November 2, 2004 in the US and April 25, 2005 in the UK.[34]
A PSP release of the film followed on April 19, 2005.[35] The high-definition Blu-ray Disc version of the film was released on May 22, 2007.[36] This movie was also among the first to be sold at the iTunes music store. The Curse of the Black Pearl had its UK television premiere on Christmas Eve 2007 on BBC One at 20:30.[37] It was watched by an estimated 7 million viewers.[38]
Reception [ edit ]
Box office [ edit ]
Before its release, many journalists expected Pirates of the Caribbean to be a flop. The pirate genre had not been successful for years, with Cutthroat Island (1995) being a notable flop. The film was also based on a theme park ride, and Depp, known mostly for starring in cult films at the time, had little track record as a box office leading man.[39]
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl opened at #1, grossing $46,630,690 in its opening weekend and $70,625,971 since its Wednesday launch. It eventually made its way to $654,264,015 worldwide ($305,413,918 domestically and $348,850,097 overseas), becoming the fourth-highest-grossing film of 2003.[2] Box Office Mojo estimates that the film sold over 50.64 million tickets in the US.[40]
Internationally it dominated for seven consecutive weekends at the box office,[41] tying the record of Men in Black II at the time.[42] Only three movies after that broke the record; its sequel, Dead Man's Chest, (with nine consecutive #1 weekends and ten in total),[43] Avatar (with 11 consecutive #1 weekends)[44] and The Smurfs (with eight consecutive #1 weekends).[45] It is currently the 71st-highest-grossing film of all time.[46]
Critical reception [ edit ]
On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes the film has an approval rating of 79% based on 206 reviews, and an average rating of 7.1/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "It may leave you exhausted like the theme park ride that inspired it; however, you'll have a good time when it's over."[47] At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average rating to reviews, the film received an average score of 63 out of 100, based on reviews from 40 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[48] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale.[49]
Alan Morrison of Empire felt it was "the best blockbuster of the summer," acclaiming all the comic performances despite his disappointment with the swashbuckling sequences.[50]
The performance of Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow was particularly praised by critics and audiences alike. Review site PopMatters applauds Depp's performance by saying "Ingenious and mesmerizing, Johnny Depp embodies the film's essential fantasy, that a pirate's life is exciting and unfettered." James Berardinelli of ReelViews also applauds Depp's performance by saying "Pirates of the Caribbean belongs to Johnny Depp...Take away Depp, and you're left with a derivative and dull motion picture."[51]
Roger Ebert acclaimed Depp and Rush's performances, with "It can be said that [Depp's] performance is original in its every atom. There has never been a pirate, or for that matter a human being, like this in any other movie... his behavior shows a lifetime of rehearsal." However, he felt the film went for too long,[52] a criticism shared by Kenneth Turan's negative review, feeling it "spends far too much time on its huge supporting cast of pirates (nowhere near as entertaining as everyone assumes) and on bloated adventure set pieces," despite having also enjoyed Depp's performance.[53]
Accolades [ edit ]
For his performance as Captain Jack Sparrow, Johnny Depp won several awards, including Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role at the 10th Screen Actors Guild Awards, Best Male Performance at the 2004 MTV Movie Awards, and Best Actor at the 9th Empire Awards. Depp was also nominated for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy at the 61st Golden Globe Awards, Best Actor in a Leading Role at the 57th British Academy Film Awards, and Best Actor at the 76th Academy Awards, in which The Curse of the Black Pearl also received nominations for Best Makeup, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Visual Effects.[54] Awards won by Curse of the Black Pearl include Best Make-up/Hair at the 57th British Academy Film Awards, Saturn Award for Best Costumes, Golden Reel Award for Sound Editing, two VES Awards for Visual Effects, and the People's Choice Award for Favorite Motion Picture.[55]
American Film Institute Lists
Sequels [ edit ]
The film spun off four sequels, with the latest sequel released in 2017. The first two were back-to-back sequels in 2006 and 2007, Dead Man's Chest and At World's End, respectively. The third sequel, On Stranger Tides, was released in 2011. The fourth sequel, Dead Men Tell No Tales,[58] was slated to begin production in October 2014 for a summer 2016 release,[59] but was eventually delayed to May 2017.[60] It was directed by Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg.[58]
See also [ edit ]On November 30th President Obama will join hordes of our ecological betters from around the world at the Paris Climate Summit. Weighty topics of how to save the planet will be discussed and agreements are expected which will further push the cause of eliminating carbon, fossil fuels and everything else we rely on to keep civilization chugging along. One of the leaders in the field of green energy and allegedly reduced carbon emissions has been Great Britain, which makes it all the more odd that just before the big confab kicks off, they’ve slashed all of their wind and solar subsidies to the bone, preferring to focus on converting old power plants to natural gas. (Washington Post)
With breathtaking abruptness, the British government has in recent months slashed its support for solar power and other renewable forms of energy, leaving a once-promising industry with grim prospects and throwing into doubt the country’s commitment to clean power. The moves have baffled environmentalists, business leaders and even many government allies. Britain has long been in the vanguard of efforts to combat global warming. It has been expected to play a leading role — alongside the Obama administration — in efforts to secure a package of tough reforms at the U.N. climate change summit in Paris, which kicks off at the end of this month. But the decision to cut hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of support for renewable energy at home, with a planned 87 percent reduction in subsidies for solar power, threatens to undermine Britain’s international authority, while showing just how difficult it can be for a developed nation to break a centuries-long addiction to fossil fuels.
The mournful dirge being sung by the Washington Post reporter sounds like a funeral for your daughter’s first goldfish, but the reality on the ground in Great Britain is quite different than how it’s being portrayed here. The Brits are not outlawing wind, solar or any other form of renewable energy. They’ve just reached the end of their tolerance for the endless promises of how wind and solar in particular were eventually going to become self-sufficient and economical. Up to this point they’ve been dealing with the same situation we have here in the United States. All large scale renewable projects of that type have been heavily subsidized by mandates from the federal government and the liberal application of taxpayer dollars. Without that aid it’s simply not economical and it still doesn’t produce enough energy to come anywhere near supplanting our existing energy sources.
If the wind and solar plants want to make a go of it across the pond we wish them the best, but they’re going to have to figure out how to do it at a reasonable cost. The government is essentially telling them that the time has come to fly from the nest on their own. By the same token, the Brits know that new advancements in energy technology have made natural gas an incredibly cheap option which will last them well through the lifespan of most current plants and they can revisit what sorts of options are available at that time. It’s basic economics.
Meanwhile they’re still dealing with the fallout of stories like this which indicate that the wind farms they’ve built actually have a worse carbon profile than anyone imagined. (The Telegraph)
Wind farms are typically built on upland sites, where peat soil is common. In Scotland alone, two thirds of all planned onshore wind development is on peatland. England and Wales also have large numbers |
If everything was hunky-dory from “I do” until death, the vows would not really be required—what would be the point? Similarly, our friendship with God, which might be marked early on by heights of spiritual ecstasy and heroic resolve, will go through seasons of dryness, even darkness, which the Lord allows to temper and toughen our faith. There is a quality of composure about the saints, of patience and acceptance. Not resignation, for God’s sake, not despair, for such are the enemies of sanctity and marriage both. They are borne of the mistaken assumption that the exhilaration of our beginnings should endure to the end
It need not, and it probably will not.
“The book of love is long and boring,” goes the poignant song by Stephin Merritt of The Magnetic Fields. It is also filled with “charts and facts and figures,” and some parts are frankly “just really dumb.” But we still yearn for it. We still long for “wedding rings,” as Merritt astutely observes, the surety of another, one utterly unlike us, who will remain at our side through disappointment, disillusionment, and worse.
Which makes me think I should buy up more of those cards with the old couples on the cover. They would be just the thing to present to newlyweds as they launch on their adventures. It will give them something rich and real to aim for.
Editorial Note: Throughout the month of November, Church Life Journal will explore the Catholic imagination as an imagination of sanctification. By sanctified imagination, we mean the imagination which highlights the core narrative of the Paschal mystery, as radiantly incarnate in the saints. We seek to reflect on the manifold ways Christ becomes all-in-all through the men and women of his mystical body, the Church. As our authors explore the various dimensions of the sanctified imagination (please click the link for a list of the posts), we invite you to think along with us. Today’s post is part of a sub-series, which explores the diverse states of life within the Church.
Featured Image: Grant Wood, American Gothic [detail], 1930; Source Wikimedia Commons, PD-Old-70.
Richard Becker Rick Becker is a husband, father of seven, nursing instructor, and religious educator. A Catholic convert by way of G.K. Chesterton and the Catholic Worker movement, Rick has studied theology at Evangelical institutions as well as Franciscan University of Steubenville. He currently serves on the nursing faculty at Bethel College, Mishawaka, Indiana. You can find more of Rick’s writing at God-Haunted Lunatic.“A lot of the Pepe controversy has really troubled him,” Mr. Reynolds said of Mr. Furie, who did not reply to requests for comment on Monday. “I think the strip was less about saying Pepe the Frog is dead — because Pepe is a fictional cartoon character — and more about him just sort of processing everything that’s going on.”
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Oren Segal, the director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism, said he appreciated Mr. Furie’s struggle to maintain control of his character. But he had “mixed feelings” about seeing the frog in a coffin.
“This meme is almost like Elvis,” he said. “Elvis lives on, and Pepe is going to live on regardless of whether we put him in a casket in a cartoon.”
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Pepe was first drawn more than a decade ago, as part of Mr. Furie’s “Boy’s Club,” a comic featuring four main characters. Mr. Furie described them to CBR.com last year: “Andy the wise guy, Landwolf the party animal, Brett the fashionable dancer, and Pepe the chill frog.”
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But by that point, Pepe had already begun to lose his chill. His image had been shared widely in 2015, and in October of that year, Donald Trump tweeted a cartoon that appeared to be a mash-up of himself and Pepe.
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“Also referred to as the ‘sad frog meme,’ Pepe the Frog did not originally have anti-Semitic connotations,” the organization said then in a news release
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“But as the meme proliferated in online venues such as 4chan, 8chan and Reddit, a subset of memes came into existence promoting anti-Jewish, bigoted and offensive ideas. And those have spread virally on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere.”
The statement noted that Pepe was sometimes depicted with a mustache like the one worn by Adolf Hitler, and in a white hood like those worn by members of the Ku Klux Klan.
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In an essay for Time magazine, Mr. Furie expressed annoyance that Pepe had been reduced to a symbol of intolerance.
“It’s completely insane that Pepe has been labeled a symbol of hate, and that racists and anti-Semites are using a once peaceful frog-dude from my comic book as an icon of hate,” he said.
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“It’s a nightmare, and the only thing I can do is see this as an opportunity to speak out against hate.”
In October, the Anti-Defamation League announced that it was working with Mr. Furie to rehabilitate the frog’s image with a “social media campaign to #SavePepe.”
Apparently, that didn’t work. So Mr. Furie went for the kill.
“I can’t lose hope that this is not the final resting place for this character,” said Mr. Segal of the Anti-Defamation League. “I would hate to think that the last word is one of hate.”
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In the single-page strip released on Saturday, Pepe is shown in an open coffin, with his three friends standing over him.
Landwolf twists open a small bottle of alcohol and pours some over Pepe’s inert face — an irreverent tribute for a character Mr. Reynolds described as “a laconic stoner frog who just wanted to hang out and enjoy his friends and snack.”
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All of the artists featured in the Fantagraphics anthology were asked to contribute statements, and Mr. Furie’s was brief. “ ‘Boy’s Club’ is about friendship,” it said. “We are all going to die, so remember to treat your friends nicely and give them lots of hugs.”Former National Security Advisor for President Obama Susan Rice got caught telling one heck of a whopper, the Washington Post's Fact Checker pointed out today.
Looking at comments Rice made earlier this year on the removal of chemical weapons, the Post gave her statement 'four Pinocchios,' signaling it's as untrue as they come.
The fact that Syrians were gassed with Sarin last week didn't alone give Rice a bad rating by the Post, but rather that she used coded language to speak about only certain chemical weapons, as other government sources publicly noted their continued existence in the war torn state.
Former National Security Advisor Susan Rice was awarded 'four Pinocchios' for a claim she made about Syria's chemical weapons cache in January
Susan Rice, photographed with President Trump's ex-National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, made the comments in January, four days before President Trump took office
The national security adviser said on NPR's Morning Edition on January 16, 2017 that, 'We were able to find a solution that didn’t necessitate the use of force that actually removed the chemical weapons that were known from Syria, in a way that the use of force would never have accomplished.'
'Our aim in contemplating the use of force following the use of chemical weapons in August of 2013 was not to intervene in the civil war, not to become involved in the combat between Assad and the opposition, but to deal with the threat of chemical weapons by virtue of the diplomacy that we did with Russia and with the Security Council,' she continued.
'We were able to get the Syrian government to voluntarily and verifiably give up its chemical weapons stockpile,' Rice said at the time.
On its face, Rice's statement makes it sound as if the entire country was ridded of these dangerous weapons, but her use of 'known' signaled a very specific definition, that of 'declared' chemical weapons, with Syria being the entity to declare them thus.
'We have a reasonable person test here at The Fact Checker, and it's doubtful many NPR listeners realized that "known" was code for the fact that Rice was only referring to chemical weapons stocks declared by Syria – or that chlorine weapons were not covered by the agreement,' the Post's Fact Checker pointed out.
The Post also pointed to a number of statements other government officials made, which suggested that the U.S. was fully aware there were still chemical weapons being used in Syria.
One instance came a year before Rice made her claim, with Director of National Intelligence James Clapper pointing out that chlorine continued to be used and it was deployed from helicopters, which only the Assad regime possessed.
Additionally, four days before Rice appeared on NPR the Treasury Department sanctioned Syria for its use of Chlorine in warfare.
In August 2014, Obama used similar language as Rice to announce Syria's chemical weapons were destroyed, but he couched it better than she did.
'Today we mark an important achievement in our ongoing effort to counter the spread of weapons of mass destruction by eliminating Syria's declared chemical weapons stockpile,' Obama proclaimed.
But he added, 'Serious questions remain with respect to the omissions and discrepancies in Syria's declaration to the OPCW and about continued allegations of use.'
From that point on, most Obama officials used, like Rice, used 'known' or 'declared' to describe the administration's chemical weapons achievement.
The Fact Checker awarded Rice a four because: 'She did not explain that Syria’s declaration was believed to be incomplete and thus was not fully verified.'
'And that the Syrian government still attacked citizens with chemical weapons not covered by the 2013 agreement,' the Washington Post said.Described on site as a soft plum inflused with Mood Light, an Hourglass highlighter
Heavily swatched with finger on left, and applied with brush on right
on NC20/Asian skin
Shop the Post $35.00 at Sephora
What's your favorite blush?
xx Joan
Blushes are my faaaavorite product. Honestly, I'm so lucky that the things that I love the most are usually in powder form. Now I can collect them all and not worry about them expiring! Ok, so I kid. Blush may be nice but financial solvency is nicer.This is a blush from Hourglass that I've fallen in love with recently. It's called the, and the shade isis a beautiful nude blush that is warm, but without the tawniness of bronzer. It's not really that shimmery, but it is luminous. Because of its finish, it does not emphasize pores. What I love about it the most is that it goes with everything. If I'm ever confused about what to use with a certain eye or lip look, I can turn to Mood Exposure and be sure it looks good. What's more is that it is VERY long-lastingpigmented. One swirl of the brush in the pan is enough to deposit the color at its full strength. I could say more, but I really feel that Mood Exposure is something that needs to be experienced visually... Words don't do this blush justice unless it's a poem or a note to your future girl or boyfriendThe Philadelphia Union and Houston Dynamo became the latest teams to be elminated from postseason contention.
The Union are out thanks to a dramatic loss to the Columbus Crew and a win by the New York Red Bulls over Toronto FC, while Houston saw their playoff dreams come to an end with a 3-1 defeat to D.C. United on Sunday.
The Union coughed up a 2-0 lead in the second half and eventually fell 3-2 to the Crew, while the Red Bulls topped TFC 3-1. With the win and Houston's loss on Sunday, the Red Bulls clinched a postseason berth.
The New England Revolution also officially clinched a spot in the postseason earlier on Saturday with a 2-2 draw against the Montreal Impact. Sporting Kansas City booked their spot with a win over the Chicago Fire on Friday night.
Real Salt Lake also clinched a postseason berth with a 2-0 win over the San Jose Earthquakes on Saturday night, while FC Dallas did the same in Sunday's 2-1 win over the already-qualified LA Galaxy.
QUALIFIED FOR PLAYOFFS:
Seattle Sounders FC, LA Galaxy, Real Salt Lake, FC Dallas (Western Conference)
D.C. United, Sporting Kansas City, New England Revolution, New York Red Bulls (Eastern Conference)
ELIMINATED FROM PLAYOFFS:
Chivas USA, Colorado Rapids, San Jose Earthquakes (Western Conference)
Montreal Impact, Chicago Fire, Philadelphia Union, Houston Dynamo (Eastern Conference)Fot. Cpl. Donald R. Ornitz / U.S. Army / PD / Garsd
P
oszukiwania skarbu ukrytego przez nazistów trzeba rozpocząć na nowo.– Przedstawiciele PKP wezwani przez władze Wałbrzycha zidentyfikowali tzw. złoty pociąg jako spóźniony od 2005 roku express "Sudety" – informują lokalne media.O pomyłce nie może być mowy. Eksperci spędzili ze znaleziskiem kilkanaście godzin w podziemnej jaskini.– Pociąg ma nasze oznaczenia i numery seryjne – mówił wysłany przez PKP badacz miejscowej "Panoramie". – Wystarczyło wiedzieć, gdzie zdrapać rdzę, która w mikroklimacie jaskini przybrała napędzający legendy złotawy odcień.Jak to się jednak stało, że informacja o zagubionym pociągu nie przedostała się w 2005 roku do mediów?– To były dzikie czasy, codziennie jakieś pociągi znikały, żeby pojawiać się kilkaset kilometrów dalej, a ludzie nie zgłaszali reklamacji, bo mieli większe zmartwienia, jak na przykład: jak do cholery wrócić teraz domu – komentuje kolejarz.Czasy się na szczęście zmieniły i podróżni mają teraz więcej praw. Jak się dowiadujemy, pasażerowie feralnego expressu mogą zgłaszać się po zaległe herbatę i ciasteczko.Warunkiem jest tylko okazanie biletu.To jest ASZdziennik. Wszystkie cytaty i wydarzenia zostały zmyślone.Zdjęcie pociągu: Garsd, CC 3.0Elvis Presley
On this episode we take a long look at the tragically short life of one of the most iconic and influential musicians and pop culture figures the world has ever seen, Elvis Presley. His swift rise to fame, his trailblazing musical style, his groundbreaking cultural impact and his untimely and world renowned death make the story of Elvis Presley, one everyone should know in its entirety.
In The Ghetto
Born into abject poverty in Tupelo Mississippi and spent his early years practically homeless and penniless. His mother Gladys took care of him and Elvis and his mother had an extremely close relationship. Her influence over him while she was alive and the grief and depression she left him in after her death, shaped Elvis career and relationships more than anyone could have imagined.
All Shook Up
After shaking his wand on The Ed Sullivan show, Elvis exploded onto the scene with a new sound that ignited a frenzy in white America. This sound however, was claimed to have come from the black community and some claim Elvis and the people behind him appropriated black culture and stole this music. Sam Phillips at Sun Studios was the one to lay Elvis down on vinyl and he transcended popularity on country, R&B and main stream music charts all across America.
GI Blues
Under the yoke of the so called Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis’ career was cut short somewhat, with a gruelling movie production schedule and a tour of duty in Germany for the US military taking him away from the music scene from the early 60s. He exploded back onto the scene with his 68 Comeback Special and his career was hitting the high notes once again.
Suspicious Minds
After seemingly being exploited by Parker, and building up an expensive entourage and base of operations, Elvis was now locked into another harrowing performance schedule in Vegas and all over the US. Drugs and an extremely unhealthy lifestyle, coupled with pre-existing medical conditions left Elvis in the worst shape of his life.
A Little Less Conversation
At just 42 years of age, Elvis died in his Graceland home and the world mourned one of the most unique talents to ever walk the earth. Since his death rumours of sightings of Elvis, in real life and in TV and film, are peppered across the internet. Thousands claim to have concrete proof Elvis is alive and will be making another comeback any day now.
The Wonder of You
We take a look at all these aspects of The King of Rock and Roll and try to dispel some of the myths that surround his life. We also discuss the nature of his death and shed some light on some facts that have been overlooked by the collective unconscious.
Thanks to Audible for sponsoring our podcast. Get a free audiobook and a 30 day free trial at audible.com/conspiracy000 acus02 kwns 261728 swody2 Storm Prediction Center ac 261727 Day 2 convective outlook National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center Norman OK 1127 am CST Tue Feb 26 2019 Valid 271200z - 281200z..no severe thunderstorm areas forecast...... scattered thunderstorms are possible across much of the Gulf states region from southeast Texas east across Florida Wednesday and Wednesday night...Gulf Coast states... A low-amplitude mid-level trough will move east across the Gulf Coast states early Wednesday. Weak buoyancy in the vicinity of an east-west front from near the Gulf Coast east into the central Florida Peninsula should contribute to a few clusters of thunderstorms mainly over the Florida Big Bend area and northern Florida where large-scale ascent will be maximized. The overall severe threat appears low with this convection due to widespread cloud cover/precipitation, limiting the potential for substantial destabilization. An upstream trough will move east from the Southern Plains into the lower Mississippi Valley late Wednesday, with weak height falls developing across the area. An increase in thunderstorm coverage should occur north of the front, where NAM/GFS forecast soundings depict a few hundred j/kg of elevated instability developing during the evening and overnight...maximum risk by hazard... Tornado: <2% - none wind: <5% - none hail: <5% - none.Bunting.. 02/26/2019 $$If you wanted tickets to the Cleveland Browns' home opener against the Miami Dolphins to kick off the regular season, you needed to act fast. Single-game tickets went on sale Tuesday, and according to the Browns, they sold out the Week 1 contest against the Dolphins in just 28 minutes. A little bit later in the day, the Browns sold out of single-game tickets for the late-November game against the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Fans can still get tickets to the Dolphins or Steelers game by purchasing season ticket packages. Here is another positive sign for the Browns' savvy business people and sales teams that have been implemented:
#Browns say they've sold more new season tickets this year than any time since 1999 and have 94 percent renewal rate (league average is 90). — Tom Withers (@twithersAP) July 30, 2013
Single-game tickets against the Bengals, Bills, Lions, Ravens, Jaguars, and Bears, all of which are regular season home games, are still available, as of this posting. Did any fans at DBN purchase any tickets today? If so, to which games?The 2011 WTJU Rock Marathon Fundraiser starts at 6am on Monday morning!
I’m really excited about the fundraiser this year, for a number of reasons. I’ve been a WTJU listener since I was a kid, and a volunteer at the station for almost three years now — I’ve written in the past about how much I like WTJU, so it would be a cause for celebration in any event; WTJU is a noncommercial, open-format community-supported radio station that plays the kind of great and interesting music that you’re just not going to find anywhere else in town, so that alone should be enough reason to open up the checkbook and do your part to help keep a great station on the air.
BUT I should also note that this will also be the first fundraiser for the Rock Department since that whole mess last summer where the station’s new Director spent his short-lived tenure at the station attempting (and failing) to convert us over to a commercial format. One of the unforeseen benefits of that debacle was that WTJU received a huge amount of grassroots support from the local community, and the two fundraisers that have happened since his departure (Classical and Jazz) have both done extremely well, $$$-wise. A lot of you told us how much you care about WTJU, and well… now’s the time to put your money where your mouth is, and help us raise the funds we need to stay on the air and bring you more great programming.
That said, we’re kind of at a disadvantage holding a fundraiser right in the middle of February; the close proximity to the Winter Holidays means we’ve had to pull everything together in a hurry at the last minute… and furthermore the new DMCA regulations which went info effect on Jan 1. have prohibited radio stations who stream their content on the internet from playing the same artist more than 4 times in a 3-hr period, which means it’s going to be a lot trickier to do artist-specific shows (which in past years have been our biggest moneymakers). Not to mention the fact that the Rock Department traditionally receives the smallest amount of donations (or rather, we receive the smallest denomination of donations from the highest number of individual supporters — lots of college kids and broke artist types giving $5 each, instead of a single philanthropist giving $1000 to support the Classical Department, for instance). So I guess we’ll see whether the same will hold true for the Rock Department (whose supporters tend to be younger, and thus more transient and with lower incomes), or whether the rising-tide-raises-all-boats theory will help us out here.
Anyway, enough of the behind-the-scenes bullshit. Here’s what great music is coming up:
(click to enlarge, or read the full version here)
I’ll be trying to do a day-by-day summary, as best I can inbetween the Four shows I’m hosting, the three live appearances I’m helping to run, and the five other shows I’ve agreed to co-host or answer phones for (it’s gonna be a crazy week). But here’s what coming up tomorrow:
At 6am a bunch of volunteers from the station will all get up at the crack of dawn to do a 3-hour preview show of what you can expect in the upcoming week;
of what you can expect in the upcoming week; at 9am Zak and RJ will host a tribute to the mighty Merge Records ;
Zak and RJ will host a tribute to the mighty ; at 10:30 I will assist Colin Powell in a show all about songs with themed dances, like the Twist, the Watusi, the Mashed Potatoes, the Funky Chicken, etc. That’s an idea we’ve had for a few years now and I’m excited it’s finally coming together.
I will assist Colin Powell in a show all about, like the Twist, the Watusi, the Mashed Potatoes, the Funky Chicken, etc. That’s an idea we’ve had for a few years now and I’m excited it’s finally coming together. At Noon, Colin and Robin (of “Grits&Gravy” fame) will rock the Soulful Situation time slot with two hours of music about awesome contemporary Soul and Funk artists, from Sharon Jones to awesome underground bands that have yet to break through;
, Colin and Robin (of “Grits&Gravy” fame) will rock the Soulful Situation time slot with two hours of music about awesome, from Sharon Jones to awesome underground bands that have yet to break through; from 2 to 4pm, Charlottesville expatriot and Rolling Stone scribe Rob Sheffield will appear on Tyler’s show to talk about his new book, Talking to Girls About Duran Duran, and they will presumably be playing songs that fit the book’s topic;
, Charlottesville expatriot and Rolling Stone scribe will appear on Tyler’s show to talk about his new book, Talking to Girls About Duran Duran, and they will presumably be playing songs that fit the book’s topic; at 5pm, Helvidius and DJ Steev and myself will play two hours of romantic Valentines Day songs on a show called Singing Valentines ;
, Helvidius and DJ Steev and myself will play two hours of romantic Valentines Day songs on a show called ; Then at 7pm, Charlottesville’s much-beloved pop-rock supergroup Borrowed Beams of Light will perform live on air! Borrowed Beams is the side project of Adam Brock, whom you may also know as the drummer / backup singer for The Invisible Hand and the Nice Jenkins; he’s backed by half of Corsair and some of his former bandmates, and his short EP and single have garnered a ton of acclaim around town, despite the fact that I believe the band has only performed live twice.
, Charlottesville’s much-beloved pop-rock supergroup will perform on air! Borrowed Beams is the side project of Adam Brock, whom you may also know as the drummer / backup singer for The Invisible Hand and the Nice Jenkins; he’s backed by half of Corsair and some of his former bandmates, and his short EP and single have garnered a ton of acclaim around town, despite the fact that I believe the band has only performed live twice. The evening will wrap up with two hours of Chillwave at 9pm, followed by a all- Virginia Hip-Hop show in the Can’t Stop Won’t Stop time slot at 11pm.
at 9pm, followed by a all- show in the Can’t Stop Won’t Stop time slot at 11pm. Then, late night, Vic is doing two hours about the History of House Music from 1 to 3am, and I’ll be burning the midnight oil bringing you three hours of Electronic Music Pioneers from 3 to 6am. (It’ll basically be stuff from the 40’s up through the 70’s … starting with Pierre Schaeffer, up-to-but-not-including Giorgio Moroder).
SO; get your tape decks cued up, your wallets open, and your radio dials cued to 91.1 FM; AND for those outside of the Charlottesville area, don’t forget that you can always tune in online!Miami 19:40h EDT
En la temporada 2015 de la MLS, el mexicanoamericano Jesse González, saltó a la escena y se convirtió en el portero titular del FC Dallas. Sus buenos partidos no pasaron desapercibidos y los medios empezaron a especular sobre su futuro: ¿defenderá la portería de México o de USA?
Se esperaba que en 2016, el portero de 21 años iba a recibir una llamada de alguna de las dos selecciones, pero su campaña no fue la esperada. Tras sólo disputar seis encuentros, las peticiones para llevarle a una selección empezaron a desaparecer. Pero González nunca perdió la fe y en la temporada 2017 de la MLS, ha vuelto a tener protagonismo, disputando cuatro partidos y solo encajando un gol.
“Creo que vengo con buen ritmo”, dijo González a AS USA. “Me puse objetivos este año y poco a poco los voy logrando”.
El portero reconoció que 2016 fue duro, pero aprendió bastante y ahora sólo piensa en seguir cumpliendo en la cancha.
“Estaba deprimido porque quería jugar”, explicó. “Creo que es algo bueno que esto haya pasado pronto en mi carrera y no en el futuro”.
A pesar de tener poca participación, González nunca planteó dejar el Dallas y abala al trabajo que hace Óscar Pareja, DT del club texano.
“Mi mente siempre estuvo aquí”, dijo. “Óscar no es sólo un técnico, también es un amigo. Te exige, te explica cómo están las cosas, te habla directo y quiere ver lo mejor de ti”.
Ya recuperada su confianza y su participación en los terrenos de juego, González quiere seguir creciendo para cumplir su deseo de algún día vestir la camiseta de la selección mayor de México.
“Me siento más mexicano [que estadounidense]. Toda mi familia es mexicana y me siento orgulloso de ser mexicano”, dijo. “Por supuesto jugaría con la selección mexicana y ojalá me llegue la oportunidad”.
Otro de sus sueños es llegar a jugar en Europa.
“Cada jugador quisiera llegar a Europa”, dijo. “Quisiera jugara allá, pero ahora mismo estoy feliz en el Dallas y tengo que agradecer el club por todo lo que me han dado”.
Pero para llegar a jugar a cumplir sus sueños, González tiene que seguir mostrando su calidad cada fin de semana con el Dallas.
“La meta del Dallas siempre es ganar”, dijo. “Ganar, ganar, no hay de otra que ganar”.Google treats its dead employees better than some companies do their living workers.
Google's unusual "death benefits" include paying the deceased's spouse or domestic partner 50% of their salary for 10 years, the company's "chief people officer" Laszlo Bock revealed in an interview this week with Forbes.
What's more, all of the dead Googler's stocks vest immediately. Each child of the employee receives $1,000 per month until age 19, or age 23 for full-time students.
These perks aren't just for longtime employees. There's no tenure requirement, Google (GOOG) told Forbes -- all of the company's U.S. employees qualify. Bock said the oldest Googler is currently 83.
A Google representative declined to comment in more detail about the policy. Forbes writer Meghan Casserly noted dryly in her article that "providing death benefits is a no-win for the company."
But that isn't the point, Bock told her: "Obviously there's no benefit to Google. But it's important to the company to help our families through this horrific if inevitable life event."
The death benefits revelation adds to the already legendary list of Google perks: free food, foosball tables, on-site dry-cleaning service, generous parental leave and more.
The company's perks site hawks a "Corporate Concierge team [that] can assist with everyday tasks such as planning a dinner party as well as more unusual requests, like finding a jewel-encrusted scepter to accompany a Googler's special Halloween outfit."
But Bock told Forbes he doesn't like the word "perks." Instead, he says, what helps employees ultimately helps the company.
As he put it: "There is, of course, research that show employee benefit programs like ours can improve retention, and appear to improve performance on some level."Two people who say that as children they were sexually abused by a leader in a Hillsboro Jehovah’s Witnesses congregation filed a $10.5 million lawsuit Monday – among the first in Oregon to accuse the religious organization of hiding decades of sexual abuse.
Attorneys for Velicia Alston, 39, and an unnamed man said the Jehovah's Witnesses leadership continues to cover up sexual abuse against children by leaders. They say it is more than a decade behind other organizations, such as the Catholic Church, that have been forced to address their problems through many years of civil litigation.
Velicia Alston, as a child.
"There is a crisis of silence in the Jehovah's Witness organization," said Irwin Zalkin, one of several attorneys representing Alston and the man. Zalkin described the religious organization as "more concerned about protecting its reputation than it is about protecting its children."
For example, Zalkin said the seven men who make up the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Governing Body have a policy requiring a confession from the perpetrator or two eyewitnesses to the abuse before leaders will take any action.
“Even if they do disfellowship a perpetrator, they don’t tell the congregation why,” Zalkin said during a news conference Monday in Portland. “No one but the elders can ever know that there is a child predator lurking in that congregation.”
Zalkin said Jehovah’s Witnesses leaders don’t call police. Rather, Zalkin said, they take the position that although Oregon law defines clergy as mandatory reporters of child abuse, they don’t need to report the abuse because it was a privileged religious communication.
“At some point, it becomes too expensive to keep doing this,” Zalkin said. “That’s what civil litigation is about.”
An attorney for the Jehovah's Witnesses, Mario Moreno, said he hadn't yet seen a copy of Monday's lawsuit and couldn't offer comment.
Zalkin, an attorney from San Diego, said this is the first case of its kind that he knows of in Oregon. His firm has 14 active cases against the Jehovah’s Witnesses organization in other states that include California, Connecticut and New Mexico. Several others also are pending in the U.S.
Portland attorneys Kristian Roggendorf and Paul Mones also are representing the two plaintiffs who filed Monday's lawsuit in Multnomah County Circuit Court.
The suit alleges that Daniel Castellanos, who held the equivalent position of a baptized ordained minister in the North Hillsboro Congregation of Jehovah’s Witnesses, molested Alston in 1986 or 1987 when she was 11 or 12 years old. The suit claims Castellanos also molested a boy, described only as John Roe in the suit, when the boy was 8 to 10 years old.
Alston said she chose to use her name and speak to reporters Monday because she wants to give victims a voice. She said filing civil litigation in hopes of changing the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ policies did not amount to committing an act against God, even though her attorneys say the Jehovah’s Witnesses might shun her for doing so.
"I know that there are other victims," said Alston, who now lives in San Diego. "I know that you're scared because you're worried about being punished by God. But God would never do something like this. So it's OK to say something. Because if you don't say something it's going to keep happening."
The suit alleges Alston was kissed and fondled under her clothes multiple times by Castellanos, a piano teacher, while he was supposed to be giving her piano lessons at his house. She eventually told her mother, who went to the Hillsboro congregation’s elders. Alston said the elders told her and her mother to tell no one – including police.
Zalkin said Castellanos was ousted from the congregation for three to five years but eventually let back in.
Castellanos was married and had children at the time of the abuse, Alston said. She and her attorneys don’t know how old he is or where he lives, but they believe it’s outside of Oregon. They said they don’t think he has any criminal history.
Oregon's statute of limitations doesn't allow Castellanos to be criminally prosecuted because too many years have passed. But state law does allow alleged victims of child sexual abuse to file lawsuits up until age 40 or within five years of when they realize the damaging effect the abuse has had on their lives.
Castellanos couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.
Several weeks ago, a California judge awarded $13.5 million to a man who said he was molested as a child by a San Diego Jehovah's Witnesses leader.
Jehovah's Witnesses count about 8 million people within more than 113,000 congregations.
-- Aimee GreenProximity to employment can influence a range of economic and social outcomes, from local fiscal health to the employment prospects of residents, particularly low-income and minority workers. An analysis of private-sector employment and demographic data at the census tract level reveals that:
Between 2000 and 2012, the number of jobs within the typical commute distance for residents in a major metro area fell by 7 percent. Of the nation’s 96 largest metro areas, in only 29—many in the South and West, including McAllen, Texas, Bakersfield, Calif., Raleigh, N.C., and Baton Rouge, La.—did the number of jobs within a typical commute distance for the average resident increase. Each of these 29 metro areas also experienced net job gains between 2000 and 2012.
As employment suburbanized, the number of jobs near both the typical city and suburban resident fell. Suburban residents saw the number of jobs within a typical commute distance drop by 7 percent, more than twice the decline experienced by the typical city resident (3 percent). In all, 32.7 million city residents lived in neighborhoods with declining proximity to jobs compared to 59.4 million suburban residents.
As poor and minority residents shifted toward suburbs in the 2000s, their proximity to jobs fell more than for non-poor and white residents. The number of jobs near the typical Hispanic (-17 percent) and black (-14 percent) resident in major metro areas declined much more steeply than for white (-6 percent) residents, a pattern repeated for the typical poor (-17 percent) |
back to Neolithic times and comes complete with Stone Age tooth prints.
Sarah Pickin, 23, was among five British students volunteering at the Kierikki Stone Age Centre in Finland when she found the tiny, ancient blob.
‘I was delighted to find the gum and was very excited to learn more about the history,’ she said.
Neolithic people are thought to have chewed the bark tar to heal mouth infections â and also used it to glue broken pots together.
The tree tar contains phenols which have antiseptic properties, explained Prof Trevor Brown, who is Miss Pickin’s tutor at the University of Derby.
The gum is to go on display at the centre in Finland.Hey all, welcome back! Big announcement to make: after lots of suggestions and feedback, I've finally made a p-a-t-r-e-o-n!
If you want to check it out and contribute some sandwich money to show your appreciation, feel free to go to p-a-t-r-e-o-n dot com slash DaystarEld, without the dashes. Becoming a patron gives access to info about all the other writing and projects that I plan to put up at my website soon. I've also begun putting up posts to answer questions other patrons ask, and have blog and info posts there, like a team roster for Red, Blue and Leaf, which will be updated monthly!
Thanks in advance for any patronage, but more importantly, for your fandom. It's been over two years since I started writing this story, and I'm as glad as anyone to still be at it. Consider the my commitment to continue for many more to come. I write the stories I write for me, but the hours of editing and research and fact checking to make sure I write the best quality I can, that's for all of you awesome guys and gals.
As always, any feedback is welcome, whether on the story or the /r/rational thread. Enjoy!
Chapter 28 - Interlude: 2.351
...confused...
...
...hopeful…
...awed...
...triumphant!
...
...awedwaryconfusedEXCITED!
...hopeful…
...
...afraid…
...confused...
...afraid…
afraidafraidafraid
…
…
...
blue white
hotround… sun…?
smile
eyes
…
warm
…
clean lines round glass round water
…
cool
...
...
…
lights in the dark
...beep…
warm, calm, happy
...beep…
safe, calm, sleepy
...beep…
calm, safe, happy
...beep…
warm, happy, sleepy
...beep…
awake
...beep…
searching, confused, anxious
...beep. beep. beep.
"Mrunum? Nao mlun."
afraid
beepbeepbeepbee-
"Mrumurun, am anamerun!"
angryafraid afraid afraid afraid afraidangry
-pbeepbeepbeepbeepbe-
"Mrarnamern! Miurm rarnam!"
warm, calm, sleepy
-epbeepbeep. beep. beep.
"Mrana. Renanm…"
beep. beep... beep…
…
...beep…
...
...beep...
alone
...beep...
warm, calm, sleepy
happy, safe, calm
warm, happy, sl-crawling, shifting, twisting, dancing, scintillating through an endless twistingshiftingdancing-
Red.
A wash of sensation that blots out everything else.
Blue.
Again, different, but the same.
Green.
Again, different, but the same.
Circle.
An absolute, self-contained expression of enclosed roundness.
Square.
Finite, even, symmetry.
Triangle.
Partial square? Cut and folded, even, finite-
Red.
The wash of sensation again. These things are known, familiar, but the "words," the names-
Red Circle.
The melding is exquisite. The "Red" is there, and the "Circle," it is a "Red Circle" both-
Red Square.
The understanding is rapture. Variables that change, variables that stay the same.
Red Triangle.
And then comes...
Blue.
The seed of understanding.
Blue... Circle…
Blue Circle.
The beginning of knowledge.
Blue Square...
Blue Square.
The first pattern, found.
...I don't…
...he will…
...she said…
He, she, they. Faces.
And through it all,
[I] will-
[I] won't-
[I] want-
[I] am-
Dots of light. Islands of being.
Each with its feelings, its images, its words, all in a rapid, mixed cacophony, each almost entirely blind, seeing only outlines, surfaces, fronts-masks-caricatures-
-and yet.
This light is "Sarah," who is often joy but also confusion, a feeling of fulfillment in her purpose, her "research" with-
-"Haruo," whose ambition and curiosity are so intermixed that he is often tired, symbols swimming behind his eyes when he closes them, symbols that have names and meanings he struggles to explain to-
-"Darin," the simmering anxiety bound by duty, the depression held at bay by a drive to help others, and inside a "she" though others think of her as a "he," words made into small constant stings that pester and remind him/her of her/his fear of rejection and shame.
Such varied beings. Such strong senses of self, so separate from each other. Not melding, like…
…[I]
…
[I] can…
...a second [self] in every merger, skipping from one to the other, sampling, merging, leaving distinct and unique...
Awakening, turning on oneself, inside out, around and back and inward.
Who am I?
A sphere of randomly assorted lights. This is the world.
Many lights, close by, resting. Calm, sleepy, warm… their emotions wash over and through [me] in waves. Beyond them, circling lights, more active. Each a mix of emotions and desires and sensations. Each a name.
Farther, lights scattered up and down and around. Moving toward and away and around. Meeting. Waxing. Waning.
Bright, strong lights, interspersed. Brightening others. Melding. Connecting. Sensed, but not merging when [I] try to feel/sense/be them.
Time is the movement of the lights. Time is the addition of more appearing, farther and farther. Appearing and disappearing at the edges. Familiar and new. Faint, hard to flow into.
The world grows.
More lights, farther, new lights. No, not this word, "light," but something rather than nothing, feelingdatanoise in all the empty space that stretches out and around-
Until it reaches an edge. No new lights appear below those farthest down. Eventually no new lights appear farther than those farthest out.
But above…
Beyond…
Everything moves, but the frame-
Again—turn, reflect, shut out and cast inward to the center.
Where am I?
Shapes, numbers, colors. Patterns made, puzzles solved, knowledge gained. Faster and faster, pulled from everywhere at once, everyone, and still the world grows above, an endless expansion of distant lights. To the sides too, now, and below, distant and dim, bare flickers of emotion without words, images without understanding.
The mystery is solved with a new word: "pokemon."
In this memory a small green pokemon cradled in a hand, asleep. The name is supplied, "Turtwig," and with it a wealth of labels, "Grass Type," "reptile," "First Evolution." Associated images and labels flicker by plantgreensquirtletirtougagrotletorterra and then their focus shifts to something else, and the memories fade.
But pokemon are everywhere, in memories and in the world, and soon the classifications seem less random, the labels form a pattern, and clarity blooms.
The lights are humans. People, full of complex thoughts and focused emotions. The dimmer collections of lights are pokemon, and they are people's companions and tools, cared for and used to their advantage against each other and untamed pokemon. Humans are a disorienting mix of things, as different in their thoughts as they are similar in their appearance, but in every mind-
Mind. What is this word-
-brainthoughtsselfme-
Mind, not lights but minds!-
-in every mind there is such a clear distinction between "human" and "pokemon" that it eludes notice at first, easy to take for granted.
Humans can think. Humans invent tools and art and societies. Pokemon can fight. Pokemon are strong and full of varied powers. Humans have unique identities first, and general labels second. Pokemon are saturated with labels, are barely considered individuals.
Humans command pokemon. Pokemon are tool or companion. Or monster.
What am I?
The information is endless. The words, the labels, the ideas. The loudshoutingvoice no longer needs to drone on about Purple Trapazezoid and 4 + 4 = 8 to link them, to make the sights and sounds and thoughts have meaning.
Still, some concepts are confusing. Colors sometimes look different to different people, and yet they call them by the same names. Immediate thoughts and emotions are mostly clear, but memories are fluid, ethereal… and yet people seem to accurately recollect things. They have access to other knowledge. Deeper knowledge.
Words with concepts and images that are too complex. Repeated themes and ideas that remain puzzling. "2.351," sometimes just referred to as "351" or "the subject," is often the topic of conversation or thought, an experimental life form, a hybrid, but these are just empty labels, there are no experiences or memories attached to give them emotional weight.
"Giovanni" is the opposite, a word that holds significance to every person in the facility, despite most having little or no interactions with him. I must not disappoint Giovanni, or Giovanni will be coming next week. The social hierarchy within the facility is fairly clear, but no one within it commands as much respect and obedience as one outside it.
Sometimes a staff member will interact with an illusion of a human or pokemon, and not seem aware of it. They interact with them as if they are real, and yet there is no mind next to theirs: just empty space.
The worst are the disorienting shifts, where everything abruptly changes. People who were around are gone, new people can be felt, and each has a different sense of what "time" it is than before the change. These periods are frightening. Periods where the world seems to continue to exist unobserved.
Fear. So rare and repulsive, it is one of the last emotions isolated and understood. Too distracting. Better to simply withdraw from minds that feel it, jump to others who are having more pleasant emotions or thoughts.
Nothing is as frightening as losing focus. Clarity comes from individuals, but without effort everything blends into a wash of emotions and thoughts and images. The way things used to be. Disorienting. Nonsensical. Exhausting.
There are favorites. The closest minds, Jandy and Maura and Taheem and more. They alternate, coming and going in shifts, but when they are stationary, they are a constant source of warm and peace and comfort as they engage in menial, pleasurable activities. It is restful, to recede from others, focus only on them.
Others have their own allure. Desmond, whose mind is always full of pictures and colors more vivid and full of life than others.
Katelyn, who listens to a rich variety of music while she codes. Music was another half-glimpsed enigma, until Katelyn's ears brought it directly into focus.
Dr. Fuji, the conundrum. His memories are dark with grief and loss, but his thoughts are bright and quick despite his age. His study of genetics and biology gain new meaning with each visit.
Paul, high above. He is young, his thoughts full of energy and purpose. Full of love for his parents and wife and newborn child. Excited to be part of such important work.
Work. Everyone who is here is "at work." Another thing so widespread it was hard to isolate. Glimpses of their lives away from "the facility" are fleeting but tantalizing, showing hints of a world beyond its walls.
The sun. Bright, hot, hanging above a blue sky. An image associated in most minds with a yearning, limitless freedom, running beneath it as children, on adventures with their friends.
A desire is born, to see the sky through eyes rather than memories.
Psychic.
A word so laden with meaning that once understood it's like a stone in a lake (Li used this metaphor, its imagery strong and visceral), rippling outward and upending everything.
A new mind, upon first touch (Victor Arabov, male, age 32, molecular biologist from the Povolzhsky Region) reacted with such strong alarm and confusion that it was impossible to remain, to not flee to the comfort of the close by minds (warm, safe, calm). On the second, more cautious attempt, Victor is found in a state of bewilderment, his train of thought panicked:
whatwasthatitfeltlikeapsychicbutnooneisnearmeohgodscoulditbeit
Enough of a shock to be noticed, but… It felt like a psychic.
Psychic. A word heard and thought a hundred times before, a thousand times. Only now does the connection make sense.
Psychic: a pokemon or human possessing mental powers of reception and projection. Able to manipulate the world with their thoughts. Able to read or influence the thoughts and experiences of others.
This is the answer.
This is what I am.
I am a psychic mind.
More and more information flicks by in Victor's thoughts. He is a "sensitive," someone with such low psychic ability that they normally do not consider themselves one. He has only once felt another mind brush against his, and the sensation was unforgettable.
Victor's thoughts and emotions become a whirl, too distracting to focus through. I return to the comforting minds, to peace and calm that are at odds with the rising excitement.
I am a psychic mind. I am reading the thoughts and feelings of all the people in the facility around me. But where is my body?
Obvious, once considered. The center of my world, my range, where the circle of comforting minds are. I dip into each briefly, and look through their eyes to view rooms I've seen countless times before. Hopping from mind to mind makes it easier to see how each person is sequestered off from one another, in their own comfortable spaces that circle close by.
Except there is nothing in the middle. Just a curving wall that none of them have been beyond.
But they know. They know what their purpose is: to be near "the subject." To give peaceful, calm thoughts and feelings for it.
I am the subject.
I am 2.351.
The emotions continue to grow and clash, confusion and joy and wonder and and and pain, pain from my closest minds, the minds who have ceased to project the peace and comfort that I seek. Why are they in pain? They do not know, and this causes alarm, alarm and fear of the subject-
-fear of me-
-I jump back to Victor, seeking more answers-
-nowaytheyknowIhavetotellGiovanniohnoitsbackGOAWAY
The fear spikes again, panic and terror so stron-
Alone.
There is no one. There is nothing, nothing but emptiness. Faint minds at the very farthest reaches, pokemon tunneling through the ground, but their minds are dim and simple things devoted to fulfilling biological needs. Unsatisfying.
Where are Jandy and Dillan and Taheem and Paul? I need them, I need someone, anyone-
Hello.
The loudshoutyvoice. It isn't a mind to merge with, but it's at least stimulation, something better than the empty void.
Be calm. We will not hurt you. We wish only to communicate.
So strange, to be addressed, communicated to the way everyone else speaks with each other. Ideas rush by in a flood, what to do, how to respond. Psychics can project thoughts as well as receive them, but how?
There is no need. Like you, I am psychic. I am reading your mind, and you need only think for me to hear you.
Awe. Gratitude. Excitement. It's hard to think through all the-
-wait. Confusion. Loudshoutyvoice said "we," and then "I." And it claims to be reading my mind, but I can sense no one around me.
My name is Sabrina. I am here to communicate with you on behalf of many others.
Sabrina. A name I have heard before, but not a mind I have interacted with.
I am capable of shielding my mind from others. All psychics who have been to your facility have done this, though I am the only one who has been giving you lessons.
Why like this? And why never speak directly?
Silence, and then:
I was last here two weeks ago, when you were younger than you are now. Your mental growth has been exponential since. The increased signs of mental activity were unusual, and there is no precedent to judge by. We especially did not expect your range to be so strong.
Two weeks. A measure of time that has little meaning. Stones in a pond, each revelation continues to spread confusion and clarity. So many questions, can't focus on just one. Who am I? Where am I? What am I?
You are subject 2.351, a hybrid life form, the result of genetic experiments. You are in an underground facility in the Kanto Region, built to work on genetic engineering and monitor test results.
It's bizarre to hear words from someone and not be able to feel what they feel, think what they think. The lack of minds to share is still an acutely uncomfortable feeling, and confusion continues to push everything else aside. "Genetic experiments," these words have meanings that are only vaguely understood.
How much do you know of biology? I see. Yes. The simplistic explanation given what you're already familiar with is that life grows according to genetic code found in their cells' DNA. Humans only ever give birth to humans, and pokemon species only ever give birth to their own species, because they have matching DNA. Plant life can sometimes interbreed naturally if their DNA is close enough to a match, but through technical processes, we have been able to make more plant hybrids than would normally occur in nature. The thought occurred that we could make a hybrid of something besides plants, and you are an example of that: the first successful hybrid of a human and a pokemon.
Information, stark and without context. It is hard to grasp it, to incorporate it into a wider understanding. Humans use pokemon, pokemon are tools. Human and pokemon both? No reference, no experience, no memory. What does it mean? What is my purpose? Where do I belong?
Belonging. Other memories surface, of hereditary traits between families. The feeling of love between Paul and his parents, between Paul and his child, are the most immediate. So strong, so joyful. That belonging, that connection, is what makes merging with people so joyful, and now I have it. I have parents. Who are they?
You were created in this laboratory rather than through biological parents. But your genetic material comes primarily from your pokemon parent, mew. Mew is an extremely rare and powerful species, considered by many to be a myth. Most DNA degrades after death, but careful examination of a mew's remains found intact, living cells. It is by far the most regenerative, adaptable, and information dense genetic material ever studied, and when it was discovered, the idea to use it to create a hybrid was born. Your human DNA was supplied from a pool of candidates-
-awe and confusion andandand pool of candidates what is that what does that mean-
I'm sorry, I don't know the specifics. There were several donors, and their information is confidential. However, they were vetted by the owner of this lab, Giovanni. He funded the research that led to the discovery of mew's DNA and your creation. I'm sure he will know which was yours.
Giovanni. Details about the man come in a deluge from the others' memories: pokemon master, gym leader, political activist, philanthropist. He is held in universal admiration and gratitude. Why has he never been to the lab?
He has, though there are many other labs, and he is busy with many projects. He has only just been made aware that you are awake, and will come soon. You have exceeded many expectations, and he is looking forward to meeting you.
Exceeded expectations. Pride. A good feeling.
But still, confusion. And something else. Suspicion. Questions that aren't being answered. Evasions. And still that emptiness around...
You may ask anything you wish. I seek only to help you understand.
Why the closed mind, then? Why not a direct merger?
It would not be safe to allow mutual open access. Your mind is still young and very powerful. It is exciting to see, but we must be cautious. That is why the facility has been evacuated. Once it became known that you were sapient and able to use your powers of reception, we had to ensure that you did not begin practicing projection.
Why?
Projection powers are usually referred to as mental attacks. You could seriously harm someone unwittingly.
The pain of the comforters.
Comforters? Yes, them. You did not intend to, but they were harmed by the feeling of your mind in such an excited state.
Where are they now? Will they return?
They are currently resting. I believe most are still interested in continuing here, but that will be decided after we are sure it is safe.
Safe. How?
You will be trained to control your powers.
And if I do not? Cannot?
Then we will ensure you only have contact with others who can protect themselves.
Reasonable. Assuring. It makes the diffuse anxiety begin to fade, and more questions begin to surface. But the most dominant one is still related to fear: fear of the sudden emptiness, the loss of time. What happened? How did everyone disappear so abruptly?
I am sorry, I do not understand.
The time skips, the sudden changes! What are they?
Ah. Yes, I see. Those are periods where you have been asleep.
Asleep. The concept is foreign, but familiar. Memories of others, tired and ready to go home and sleep. To lie down and close their eyes and… no, it is gone. Too abstract.
Sleep is what we do when we are tired. Have you noticed that these jumps happen when your thoughts have begun to slow? To grow unfocused?
No. But then… maybe. It is hard to remember. But this latest shift, it was not after being tired, but just after immense excitement. One moment I was merged with Victor, and then everyone was gone. Gone! Alone!
Calm. Be calm.
A flood of sensations, warm and soothing. Familiar, a ghost of the comforters. It is not as fulfilling, but it helps.
This last time may not have been because you were tired. It was likely induced, because your vital signs began to show great distress. There are technicians and doctors who monitor you constantly to ensure that you are safe and healthy.
Technicians. Doctors. Vague recollections of people with those titles, but there are no minds in memory to match any working at that task. Who are they?
You could not have known of them. They are Dark, and invisible to our psychic abilities.
Dark. Dark, like the pokemon Type. Humans can be Dark too?
The empty people.
The illusions.
Entire minds, cut off. Unable to be felt or understood. How could they ever be communicated with, trusted? And they are in charge of safety?
So much, so much new information, it is dizzying. How much information must be re-examined, processed anew? What memories and thoughts can be trusted?
Calm. Two plus two is four. Four plus four is eight. Eight plus eight-
Sixteen. Sixteen plus sixteen is thirty two. Thirty two plus thirty two is sixty four.
Yes. Good.
Yes. Good. But. How was sleep induced? How does sleep work? The better question, the real question, where am I? Where is my body?
It is in a biopod built to take care of your bodily needs. You are safe in it.
Awe. Joy. A body. I have a body. With eyes, to see with? Ears to hear music?
Silence. Surprised silence? Cannot tell. So frustrating to not be merged!
Yes. Your own eyes. Your own ears. Your own body.
But where! There is nothing, no feeling, no sensation-
Your biopod was designed for sensory deprivation. It is for your own protection: you are a new life form. We are still learning how your body works, where it might need help. You are very fragile, and we do not want to lose you.
Lose?
We do not want you to die.
Die. Death. A gaping hole of sadness and loss. That is what others feel about death. That is what prompts a withdrawal, that pain. Better to return to the comforters. But they are gone now. All that's left is this sterile imitation in a void, this-
Calm. Two plus two-
Four, yes, four! But other minds, there needs to be other minds, it is so lonely here without anyone! Is this what death is?!
Silence, silence, silence, for so long that fear begins to rise into panic again-
No. You are not dying. You are safe. Everyone is safe. Be calm. I am sorry.
Sorry. A term of politeness, to express regret. Regret for harming the comforters. Yes, sorry. So sorry. Bring them back. Please. Politeness. Please, bring them back.
Soon. First you must ensure they will not be harmed.
Yes! Anything!
I will teach you what I can. However, we must both be patient. This is new territory for everyone, and we do not know what the extent of your powers and abilities are, or how well human techniques will translate.
But you will teach me how to avoid hurting others?
I will try.
The humans are back in the facility, but much has changed.
Beneath the surface of each one's thoughts, a dark undercurrent flows. Uncertainty. Fear. Even those excited by the reason for the evacuation emit a brittle cheer to mask their anxiety. For the future. For themselves.
Not everyone returns.
Traveling between minds is deliberate now, careful. Sabrina was explicit in what to take care for: too much agitation could spread into the target mind's thoughts. Any strong desire to affect the target's behavior or thoughts could harm them. For all they are aware, too much exposure at once may harm them, but so far the examinations have shown "no lingering adverse effects."
But still they are afraid.
Still I am afraid.
Sabrina's words revealed much of the world and my place in it. But not all. Searching through the minds of the facility's workers clarifies little: their surface thoughts are not often preoccupied with anything beyond their day to day tasks and interactions. It is hard to fight the urge to delve deeper.
Even through the emotionless words of her projection, Sabrina's surprise was obvious when she learned how deep into memories I can go, difficult and imprecise though it is. It seems human psychics are not able to delve beyond surface memories. Sabrina wished to know what else I could do, but her own answers on human psychic capabilities were vague.
Most unsettling was her refusal to explain how human psychics could block their minds from detection. Another potential difference between human and pokemon abilities.
But I am not just a pokemon. I am also human. Should I not be treated as such, and try to learn?
Troubling thoughts. Easier to let them go with so many minds to explore again. Equipped with new knowledge and understanding, their thoughts and actions are more fascinating than ever.
The oldest researchers are the least frightened, and the most excited by my "awakening." Some have been part of the project for over a decade, a span of time that I am beginning to understand: this particular facility has only been active for two years. I cannot be much older than that, but if everything I can clearly recall has happened within the past few weeks, as Sabrina said, then the idea of living in the facility for hundreds of weeks is hard to contemplate.
I watch through the technicians' eyes as they monitor computer systems. I watch through the biologists' eyes as they test samples of my blood and tissue, searching for defects. I listen as they discuss the other subjects, my siblings, who did not survive past the first year. Images appear in their minds, of early failures, blobs of flesh that warp and shift and change to match their surroundings. I cannot separate the memory holder's disgust from my own, do not know if there is a difference. Is that what I am? A shapeless mass in a tube?
I cannot find any minds of those who have seen my body. It has become an obsession, searching for anyone who works directly in the room I am in. Before the facility was evacuated, before I learned what I am, I was content. Now I cannot escape the knowledge of what I am, what I can be. The facility has begun to seem a prison.
I see through eyes and memories pictures of the crude carvings of "mew," one of the rarest pokemon of all, the closest thing to what I am. A small mammalian creature, with short limbs and a long tail. How much resemblance is there? Am I as small, or larger? Do I have a tail?
The humans' minds sometimes wander as they work. Some look forward to events in the future, think fondly of the past, imagine other activities they would rather do. "Daydreams." "Fantasies."
For the first time, I have a fantasy. The experiment will be complete. I will be released, free to walk with my own feet, see with my own eyes. One of my comforters will be there with a mirror, and I will see myself... human.
Sabrina said Giovanni will come. My creator. Those in the facility know it as well, are preparing for his arrival. I will speak to him soon.
He will help me.
The humans speak of me more and more. Now that I have proven viable, I am no longer "the subject," or "351." They begin to discuss what I am to be called.
The dining hall is full of the usual noise, but all of it surrounding this new topic. Suggestions flow from one side of the room to the other, garnering comments and reactions as they go. "Mewtwo" is the most divisive, and thus the most discussed. Soon it dominates the conversation, many forgetting their food entirely. Some think it diminishes their work, makes me seem too much a copy. Others believe it denotes a clear progression. An upgrade, like I am some machine or software.
Only Dr. Fuji thinks to ask me. Only he wonders over a name for who I am, not what I am. But the others find his comments uninteresting. They esteem him as much as anyone else in the facility, but see his view as sentimental. Many think I will not live long, that I am merely a turning point in their research for making the next newer, better subject.
They do not consider me a person. I am just an experiment, a pokemon like any other.
Their thoughts are too troubling, too agitating. Safer to stay with Fuji as he returns to his office. He sits at his computer, but his thoughts are not on work. They drift from place to place, to the conversation, to his lost family, and to me. He wonders how I think, what I think, what I feel. He wonders if I was present in the minds of anyone in the debate on my name. He wonders if I am in his thoughts now.
Must not react. Must not project. But it grows harder the longer he thinks. He is mostly fantasizing, playing a sort of game with himself, thinking about what he would be thinking if he was me, sharing his thoughts, of me. Unaware of how right he is.
itmustbesostrangewhatwouldIsaytoyou?perhapsyougrowboredwiththesamemindstosharedayafterdayandnoneyoucanspeakwithitmustbelonely
And now he is thinking of his wife and daughter, the sadness rises up from his memories, a dark tide of bittersweetness that he drinks deep from, addicted and comforted by his pain.
It happens instinctively, automatically, the desire to be heard, to connect, and to stop the painful spiral of his memories from overtaking us both:
Lonely. Yes.
Dr. Fuji bolts up in his chair, looks wildly around. Fear, my fear, prompts me to withdraw, to return to the comforters, and then leave even them, be alone with my own thoughts and feelings.
Stupid. Foolish. Now they will withdraw everyone again, and I will be alone. Will Sabrina come again? Repeat the same warnings? Give me another chance?
Or will I be deemed too dangerous? A failed experiment, deleted. Who would Fuji tell first? Would I be put to sleep again, and wake up alone?
Would I wake up at all?
The waiting is torturous. The solitude, the uncertainty. I can still sense the other minds in the facility. There is no exodus toward the surface. Is it possible he did not hear my thoughts? Did he dismiss them as his imagination?
I must know.
First I must calm myself. Meditation through mathematics, simple addition first, then more complex multiplications and exponential equations. The task is engrossing, and soon I am calm enough to feel for the minds of the comforters.
Safe. Calm. Peaceful. All is well. Others, farther out. Normal. Perhaps he did not hear me after all…
Fuji sits at his computer. His mind is mostly occupied with a study of my RNA, flicking through screens of data on his computer. No alarm. No fear.
But something is different. A note, stuck to the side of the monitor:
You are not alone.
Ready yourself. We are preparing to open your chamber. You will begin to hear sounds first.
The movement of machinery, all around. Loud. No not loud. Hushed, but… immediate in a way that sound processed through other minds is not. Excitement and anxiety war within me, and I fight the reflex to jump to the minds of the comforters.
Giovanni is arriving. Finally, he will be here, and he wishes to see me.
To see me.
And I will see him. With my own eyes.
"Wnada oanme? Mroeao mo. Anmo."
"Mranwo. Danma ene mre… oo… nom…"
Someone is speaking. I am hearing someone speak! Memories, not of others, but my own, of hearing sounds like this before. But I do not understand them. Is it some other language? Can I not understand spoken languages without being inside the speaker's mind? Some minds speak to themselves more than others, and many of the older minds do not think in the Unown language…
The sound blocking equipment has been deactivated. Can you hear us?
"Manadm. Manwa?"
Yes. Yes I can hear you! But I do not understand…
I hear it. It is your biopod: it warps the sound too heavily. No matter. We can still communicate this way.
The container. Will it not be removed?
It would not be safe for you. We will only remove what is necessary.
Disappointment, despair, will I never be free of this-
Patience. We must take each step slowly, but if all goes well then you will not be returned to sound deprivation. We can even play music for you, if you would like.
Music… yes. I would like that. Thank you.
Beep.
"Mrashan. Dmaand?"
Beep.
"Danea."
Beep.
That sound, what is it? I… remember it...
The machine which monitors your heart rate. A moment please, we are preparing to open the container.
Beep. Beep. Beep. A soothing sound. The sound of my life, continuing. Safe. Even. But also a tool, to ensure that I am not too upset. How fast would the machine need to beep, before they sedate me?
They are lifting it now. Remain calm.
More machinery whirring, as lo-
bright
too bright
light, such bright light, blinding! It is dimmer now, but still somehow continues to grow… painful, angry light, where did it come from?!
Calm. You are safe. The cover has been removed from your pod, and your eyes are seeing light for the first time.
The pain is too great, it is too bright, reduce it!
"Madna!"
The light grows weaker, and the beeping of the machine begins to slow as the pain's sting lessens.
We had dimmed it considerably, and have dimmed it further. It will take some time for you to be accustomed to it.
What is this sensation of… tension? Tension, yes.
Think of the minds you have inhabited. What area are you feeling the tension in?
My... my, it is my—I jump to the comforter's minds, feel what they feel, then return, it is disorienting, hearing the sounds around them, as well as those around me—my eyes, I feel tension in my eyes!
You have shut them closed, instinctively, when the light first appeared. When you feel it is more bearable, relax your thoughts. Your eyes should open naturally when they have adjusted.
Time passes. The sounds of hushed voices, the steady beep of my heartbeat. Eventually the tension fades, and the light grows brighter as I feel my eyelids opening…
...still too bright…
...but shapes can be made out, movement, shadows against the light. I cannot make sense of them, until instinctively, memories rise up, provide the context for sights I have never seen. Human silhouettes, standing.
Yes. That is us.
The shapes grow clearer, gain color, details. The liquid and glass around me warps things, but… the young woman with the long dark hair, she is Sabrina. I do not know how the knowledge comes, but I can see it clearly, the violet light around her-
What is that?!
"Weah e mrad?!"
What? What is what?!
I'm sorry… I have never seen… that…
The figure raises an arm. It is incredible to watch, to see her body moving |
of sexual misconduct complaints. Likewise Dov Charney, the former CEO of American Apparel, who shot all of the brand’s explicit advertising campaigns and was sacked after numerous women alleged sexual assault. Neither man has been convicted of any wrongdoing, but it’s still led to a feminist backlash. And misogyny is never hip. 7/9 Suspect 7: West Londoners When Prince Harry went to a warehouse rave on Bethnal Green Road in 2010, it was a sign of things to come. Throughout the recession, people called Arabella and Orlando originally from Sloane enclaves (Made in Chelsea cast members Cheska Hull, Binky Felsted, Millie Mackintosh and Rosie Fortescue) fled an increasingly Russianised West London and bought houses in Hackney. The old kind of hipster relished the East London grime. But soon, the notion of ‘hipster’ began to accommodate the retro cushion-buying, cupcake-loving gentrifiers and the Foxtons branches that came in their wake. 8/9 Suspect 8: The two Joeys Joey Barton is a QPR midfielder who is famous for loving The Smiths, appearing on Question Time, occasional violence and spreading retro undercuts and sleeve tattoos throughout the Premier League. Joey Essex (pictured) is a TV personality who is famous for discrediting his native county on TOWIE and typifying the sort of young man now found in Shoreditch on a Friday night. By coincidence, London’s hipster heartlands are close to Liverpool Street station, which also serves the Essex commuter towns of Chelmsford and Brentwood, meaning the hipster gene has mutated into something very strange indeed. 9/9 Suspect 10: Hipsters Of course it’s possible that suspects 1-9 killed the hipsters collectively, a bit like in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. Another theory is that the hipster faked his own death, à la Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes. While everyone gathers around his mangled corpse and reflects that maybe he wasn’t so bad after all (he gave us a laugh, some cool burritos and a few decent records), he is actually still at large, disguised as a Health Goth or a Nu-lad. Or maybe, like Jesus, he died for all our modern sins. If we open our hearts to the truth, we’ll find that there’s a little bit of hipster in all of us. Iconica/Getty Images 1/9 Suspect 1: Kale The first wave of East London hipsters subsisted on crisps and blagged cocaine. The second wave grazed in restaurants such as MeatLiquor. However, the health food rearguard action has seen kale sweep all before it. East London is now full of shiny places where the main drug on offer is endorphins. Frame dance studios are much hipper than electro basements. Girls writer Lena Dunham’s recent alliance with über trainer Tracy Anderson is a sign of the times. 2/9 Suspect 2: The Cutester The cute young techies from Generation Z have rounded on the hipster, too. They may have the beards and funny glasses but they’re a subtly different breed from their older brothers and sisters. If the hipster was self-consciously cool, the cutester is self-consciously anti-cool. They’re less into weird Japanese bands and ketamine and more into the Cereal Killer Café, Netflix, BuzzFeed, Tim Minchin, Secret Cinema, cosplay, Ed Sheeran, Game of Thrones, Zoella, taco vans, atheist churches and Pixar movies. They have already claimed the hipster’s Shoreditch heartlands with their startups and will continue to sing ‘Everything is Awesome’ for the foreseeable future. 3/9 Suspect 3: The Internet The internet has been crucial in making the hipster a global force: a cold-pressed coffee trend will soon work its way from San Francisco to London. However, it also changed the nature of hip. In the pre-Google era, to be ‘cool’ meant you had to hang out in the right clubs, take the right drugs and talk the right talk. Now you just need to read the right blog. This accelerates the trend cycle to such a degree that anything potentially hip will be analysed to death before it has a chance to evolve. Seapunk (an aesthetic loosely inspired by TLC’s ‘Waterfalls’ video) lasted approximately three minutes. Health Goth (monochrome Nikes, gas masks and emotional exercise) sputtered out after one Vice article. In this context, you can see why normcore (the avoidance of anything that might be seen as trendy) is a refreshing antidote. PA 4/9 Suspect 4: The NU-Lad The original Shoreditch scene of the late 1990s formed in opposition to Britpop lad culture (which once seemed unassailable). Now, however, the lad is having an unlikely renaissance in the form of a sleek and stylised sporty look being popularised by designers such as Christopher Shannon, Y-3 and Nasir Mazhar. So let’s put on our Classics and have a little dance, shall we? (Disclaimer: if you get that reference, you’re too old to be a Nu-lad.) 5/9 Suspect 5: George Osborne OK, the Chancellor has never vowed to commit hipstacide but he does represent the socioeconomic forces that have placed the hipster under threat. As American writer Scott Timberg argues in his new book Culture Crash, the creative industries where hipsters have traditionally found work are all in decline. ‘Book editors, journalists, musicians, novelists without tenure — they’re among the many groups struggling through the dreary combination of economic slump and internet reset.’ Add to that low wages, arts cuts, the corporatisation of everything and sky-high property prices and you can see why so many hipsters move back in with their mum. Jeremy Selwyn 6/9 Suspect 6: Terry Richardson Few figures in fashion are more implicated in the hipster aesthetic than the photographer Terry Richardson — now notorious for a string of sexual misconduct complaints. Likewise Dov Charney, the former CEO of American Apparel, who shot all of the brand’s explicit advertising campaigns and was sacked after numerous women alleged sexual assault. Neither man has been convicted of any wrongdoing, but it’s still led to a feminist backlash. And misogyny is never hip. 7/9 Suspect 7: West Londoners When Prince Harry went to a warehouse rave on Bethnal Green Road in 2010, it was a sign of things to come. Throughout the recession, people called Arabella and Orlando originally from Sloane enclaves (Made in Chelsea cast members Cheska Hull, Binky Felsted, Millie Mackintosh and Rosie Fortescue) fled an increasingly Russianised West London and bought houses in Hackney. The old kind of hipster relished the East London grime. But soon, the notion of ‘hipster’ began to accommodate the retro cushion-buying, cupcake-loving gentrifiers and the Foxtons branches that came in their wake. 8/9 Suspect 8: The two Joeys Joey Barton is a QPR midfielder who is famous for loving The Smiths, appearing on Question Time, occasional violence and spreading retro undercuts and sleeve tattoos throughout the Premier League. Joey Essex (pictured) is a TV personality who is famous for discrediting his native county on TOWIE and typifying the sort of young man now found in Shoreditch on a Friday night. By coincidence, London’s hipster heartlands are close to Liverpool Street station, which also serves the Essex commuter towns of Chelmsford and Brentwood, meaning the hipster gene has mutated into something very strange indeed. 9/9 Suspect 10: Hipsters Of course it’s possible that suspects 1-9 killed the hipsters collectively, a bit like in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. Another theory is that the hipster faked his own death, à la Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes. While everyone gathers around his mangled corpse and reflects that maybe he wasn’t so bad after all (he gave us a laugh, some cool burritos and a few decent records), he is actually still at large, disguised as a Health Goth or a Nu-lad. Or maybe, like Jesus, he died for all our modern sins. If we open our hearts to the truth, we’ll find that there’s a little bit of hipster in all of us. Iconica/Getty Images
Then again, just as hipster trends such as overly hoppy beer and places with ampersands in their name have percolated into the mainstream, so, too, have anti-hipster trends. It’s always been more hip to hate hipsters than it is to be one. From the Shoreditch Twat moniker (1999) and the sitcom Nathan Barley (2005) to the n+1 magazine’s publication of What was the Hipster? (2009) and the immortal ‘Being a Dickhead’s Cool’ song (2010), the hipster has been mocked throughout his existence.
Political commentators have never been entirely sure about the hipster either. Last year Will Self issued a lament about the ‘awful cult of the talentless hipster’ in the lefty New Statesman — and blamed his own fifty-something generation for presiding over the ‘commodification of the counterculture’. Harry Mount echoed him in the righty Spectator, too, describing hipsterism as ‘conformity dressed up as non-conformity’.
The hipsters, runs the usual critique, disguise themselves as creators when they are merely curators. They have revolutionary taste but not revolutionary spirit. It’s the spring of 1968 as referenced by an MC5 T-shirt from Urban Outfitters; the wild energies of the 1920s as channelled through an Art Deco biscuit tin; the futurism of the 1980s as seen through a retro computer game.
And so the term has now become so vague as to be almost meaningless. It’s often used to undermine young people, a little like ‘chav’ is used to undermine poor people. I’ve seen phenomena as diverse as Mumford & Sons, ketamine, almond milk, Penguin Classics, gentrification, pulled pork, Jeremy Paxman’s beard, FKA Twigs, apathy, tortoiseshell glasses, Cath Kidston, Lucky Charms frosted cereal and Generation Y as a whole described as hipster.
Still, we won’t have full closure on any of this until we work out who actually killed it for the hipster in the end. And as the artfully distressed funeral cortege passes Old Street roundabout, there are a number of suspects still at large…
WHO KILLED THE HIPSTER?
Suspect 1
KALE
The first wave of East London hipsters subsisted on crisps and blagged cocaine. The second wave grazed in restaurants such as MeatLiquor. However, the health food rearguard action has seen kale sweep all before it. East London is now full of shiny places where the main drug on offer is endorphins. Frame dance studios are much hipper than electro basements. Girls writer Lena Dunham’s recent alliance with über trainer Tracy Anderson is a sign of the times.
Suspect 2
THE CUTESTER
The cute young techies from Generation Z have rounded on the hipster, too. They may have the beards and funny glasses but they’re a subtly different breed from their older brothers and sisters. If the hipster was self-consciously cool, the cutester is self-consciously anti-cool. They’re less into weird Japanese bands and ketamine and more into the Cereal Killer Café, Netflix, BuzzFeed, Tim Minchin, Secret Cinema, cosplay, Ed Sheeran, Game of Thrones, Zoella, taco vans, atheist churches and Pixar movies. They have already claimed the hipster’s Shoreditch heartlands with their startups and will continue to sing ‘Everything is Awesome’ for the foreseeable future.
Suspect 3
THE INTERNET
The internet has been crucial in making the hipster a global force: a cold-pressed coffee trend will soon work its way from San Francisco to London. However, it also changed the nature of hip. In the pre-Google era, to be ‘cool’ meant you had to hang out in the right clubs, take the right drugs and talk the right talk. Now you just need to read the right blog. This accelerates the trend cycle to such a degree that anything potentially hip will be analysed to death before it has a chance to evolve. Seapunk (an aesthetic loosely inspired by TLC’s ‘Waterfalls’ video) lasted approximately three minutes. Health Goth (monochrome Nikes, gas masks and emotional exercise) sputtered out after one Vice article. In this context, you can see why normcore (the avoidance of anything that might be seen as trendy) is a refreshing antidote.
Suspect 4
THE NU-LAD
The original Shoreditch scene of the late 1990s formed in opposition to Britpop lad culture (which once seemed unassailable). Now, however, the lad is having an unlikely renaissance in the form of a sleek and stylised sporty look being popularised by designers such as Christopher Shannon, Y-3 and Nasir Mazhar. So let’s put on our Classics and have a little dance, shall we? (Disclaimer: if you get that reference, you’re too old to be a Nu-lad.)
Sleek and sporty: A Y-3 Menswear model at Paris Fashion Week 2015 (Picture: Dominique Charriau/Getty)
Suspect 5
GEORGE OSBORNE
OK, the Chancellor has never vowed to commit hipstacide but he does represent the socioeconomic forces that have placed the hipster under threat. As American writer Scott Timberg argues in his new book Culture Crash, the creative industries where hipsters have traditionally found work are all in decline. ‘Book editors, journalists, musicians, novelists without tenure — they’re among the many groups struggling through the dreary combination of economic slump and internet reset.’ Add to that low wages, arts cuts, the corporatisation of everything and sky-high property prices and you can see why so many hipsters move back in with their mum.
Suspect 6
TERRY RICHARDSON
Few figures in fashion are more implicated in the hipster aesthetic than the photographer Terry Richardson — now notorious for a string of sexual misconduct complaints. Likewise Dov Charney, the former CEO of American Apparel, who shot all of the brand’s explicit advertising campaigns and was sacked after numerous women alleged sexual assault. Neither man has been convicted of any wrongdoing, but it’s still led to a feminist backlash. And misogyny is never hip.
Suspect 7
WEST LONDONERS
When Prince Harry went to a warehouse rave on Bethnal Green Road in 2010, it was a sign of things to come. Throughout the recession, people called Arabella and Orlando originally from Sloane enclaves (Made in Chelsea cast members Cheska Hull, Binky Felsted, Millie Mackintosh and Rosie Fortescue) fled an increasingly Russianised West London and bought houses in Hackney. The old kind of hipster relished the East London grime. But soon, the notion of ‘hipster’ began to accommodate the retro cushion-buying, cupcake-loving gentrifiers and the Foxtons branches that came in their wake.
Suspect 8
THE TWO JOEYS
Joey Barton is a QPR midfielder who is famous for loving The Smiths, appearing on Question Time, occasional violence and spreading retro undercuts and sleeve tattoos throughout the Premier League. Joey Essex is a TV personality who is famous for discrediting his native county on TOWIE and typifying the sort of young man now found in Shoreditch on a Friday night. By coincidence, London’s hipster heartlands are close to Liverpool Street station, which also serves the Essex commuter towns of Chelmsford and Brentwood, meaning the hipster gene has mutated into something very strange indeed.
Suspect: Joey Barton (Picture: Paul Gilham/Getty)
Suspect 9
TIME
‘Time is a great teacher; unfortunately it kills its pupils,’ said the composer Hector Berlioz. And time caught up with hipsters eventually. If you were fresh out of art school when the whole Shoreditch scene kicked off, you’d now be pushing 40 — and probably watching Peppa Pig with your small children Wolf and Enid in Hastings or Margate, while wondering if you could make a go of a coffee business on the seafront.
Suspect 10
HIPSTERS
Of course it’s possible that suspects 1-9 killed the hipsters collectively, a bit like in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. Another theory is that the hipster faked his own death, à la Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes. While everyone gathers around his mangled corpse and reflects that maybe he wasn’t so bad after all (he gave us a laugh, some cool burritos and a few decent records), he is actually still at large, disguised as a Health Goth or a Nu-lad. Or maybe, like Jesus, he died for all our modern sins. If we open our hearts to the truth, we’ll find that there’s a little bit of hipster in all of us.
Photograph by Charlie Surbey, styled by Sophie Paxton. Stylist’s assistant: Sarah-Rose Harrison. Beard groomed by Danni Hooker at LHA Represents. With thanks to Charles H Fox for supplying the beard and moustache (020 7240 3111). Schindelhauer Siegfried bike, £1,395, at velorution.com. Beanie, £12, Urban Outfitters (urbanoutfitters.com). Glasses, £295, Cutler and Gross at mrporter.com. Shirt, £85, J Crew at mrportercom. Jeans, £190, Incotex at mrporter.com. Rucksack, £90, Herschel Supply Co at urbanoutfitters.com. Socks, £7, Pringle at sockshop.co.uk. Trainers, £50, Converse (converse.co.uk)In Depth › Analysis and Opinion
Planet Attenborough shaped our world view
David Attenborough has fundamentally changed the way we look at wild animals and the environment, writes Morgan Richards.
Imagine a journey across the surface of the Earth. Take in the Galapagos Islands with its different species of giant tortoises. Fly over its rainforests, deserts, mountains and oceans. Consider its poison dart frogs and blind mole rats. See the fossils of extinct ammonites encased in limestone, the flash of turquoise on the underside of a hummingbird's wing and the tiny embryo of a red kangaroo developing inside its mother's pouch. Think of the texture of an elephant's hide, the colourful feathers of a bird of paradise and the wide eyes of a loris.
Now consider how it is you have come to know these diverse animals and environments, and the fragile interconnections that bind them together. If, like me, you're part of a generation who grew up with David Attenborough, chances are it was Attenborough who introduced you to these animals.
Life on Earth (1979) was the first in a long line of landmark wildlife series produced by the BBC Natural History Unit and written and presented by David Attenborough.
'Landmark' is the term used by those in the industry to describe big budget, multi-part television documentaries.
These documentaries didn't just visualise animals in a new way; they changed the way we looked at wild animals. For the first time viewers were shown a global vision of wildlife and nature. To audiences in 1979, it must have seemed as if the image of the blue planet—a fragile earth floating in deep space first captured during the Apollo space missions of the 1960s—was suddenly endowed with new depth and clarity. Watched by an estimated 500 million viewers, Life on Earth enabled people not just to see a broad survey of animal life but also to feel connected to a global ecology.
Rather than focusing on a particular species or exploring the ecology of a particular environment, as many wildlife documentaries had done before, landmarks had the space to develop and dramatise complex scientific ideas, weaving together footage of different species and environments from around the globe. Attenborough's skill as a presenter held the broader scientific narrative of the series, which focused on evolutionary biology, together.
His style of presentation, mixing the enthusiasm of an amateur naturalist with the calm authority of a scientific observer, had been honed in the era of live broadcasting, beginning with Zoo Quest in 1954. It was his talent for recalling facts and translating the complex world of natural history into easily intelligible sound bites that lay behind the success of Life on Earth. As Clive James once remarked, Attenborough possesses a 'gift for the simple statement that makes complexity intelligible'.
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Safe science?
The sense of connection with wild animals and environments that Life on Earth made possible was partly a matter of timing; it took place at a moment when people were living increasingly urbanised lives, divorced from the countryside and the few places where natural environments were undisturbed by human industry, and when years of slowly building environmental awareness was starting to translate into concerted local and government action around the world.
It is no mere coincidence that this series emerged at the same time as the modern environmental movement, yet the cause of environmentalism is a recurring tension throughout the history of Attenborough's landmarks.
Environmental campaigner George Monbiot, for example, penned a searing critique of the wildlife genre's avoidance of environmental issues in The Guardian in 2002.
"There are two planet Earths," he wrote. "One of them is the complex, morally challenging world in which we live, threatened by ecological collapse. The other is the one we see in the wildlife programs."
He singled out David Attenborough for his harshest criticism: "He shows us long loving sequences of animals whose populations are collapsing, without a word about what is happening to them. Indeed by seeking out those places, tiny as they may be, where the habitat is intact and the population dense, the camera deliberately creates an impression of security and abundance.'
In response, Attenborough defended his programs by citing The State of the Planet, his 2000 assessment of the 'present ecological crisis', a series that Monbiot had ignored in his critique. He also argued that the main focus of his other programs was 'zoology', an academic discipline that he clearly viewed as separate from environmental politics and conservation.
This episode sheds light on one of the central paradoxes of Attenborough's series. Attenborough's onscreen persona is invested with scientific authority and trustworthiness. He has been voted as Britain's'most trusted celebrity' by the Reader's Digest, beating newsreaders and the Queen. But his programs represent a very particular brand of science: that which is already proven and beyond doubt. Safe science.
In spite of revolutionary discoveries in genetics, his series have largely focused on scientific theories from within the branch of biology that relates to the classification of animals and plants. The science that concerns Attenborough in Life on Earth is that of Charles Darwin and the systematising projects of other great European naturalists like Buffon, Cuvier and Linnaeus. Beginning with The Trials of Life (1990), later series have focused on ethology, or the study of animal behaviour.
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Rise of environmentalism
This limited focus on uncontroversial topics in natural history explains why it was only in more recent series that Attenborough was able to deal conclusively with complex environmental issues. The State of the Planet dealt with species extinction, habitation destruction and global pollution, while the last episode of Frozen Planet (2011), in particular, explored the effects of climate change on the polar regions.
The structural shift that enabled Attenborough to explore the consequences of climate change was related to the broader transformation that allowed the world's news media to embrace climate change as a global threat.
It was spurred on by the release of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in early 2007. This report, based on a near consensus of the world's climate scientists on the causes and probable impacts of anthropogenic global warming, saw climate change gain recognition as a global environmental problem. As news media embraced climate change as a global threat and the science behind global warming became more solid, the wildlife genre's long-standing avoidance of controversial issues began to give way to more nuanced explorations of climate change and other environmental issues.
The critiques that Monbiot and others have levelled at Attenborough are, in some ways, justified, but Attenborough's series are unique and they deserve to be judged on their own terms. The global vision at the heart of Life on Earth and subsequent landmark series fundamentally changed the way we looked at wild animals and the environment.
As David Attenborough revealed when I interviewed him in 2012: "I think the environmental movement does owe quite a lot to television — that people are aware of what's happening in Africa. I mean, actually you've only got to go back to my father or my grandfather, who didn't even know — the world was limited to a few miles."
About the author: Dr Morgan Richards is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland. She is currently writing a book, Wild Visions: The BBC and The Rise of Wildlife Documentary (Manchester University Press), which investigates the BBC's central role in shaping the wildlife genre in the UK and internationally.
David Attenborough's First Life is currently screening on ABC1 on Tuesdays at 8.30 pm
^ to topTorrential downpours led to flooding throughout South Carolina and prompted hundreds of emergency rescues. A drone flew over downtown Charleston, Caromi, Dorchester County and Cane Bay Plantation to document the rising waters. (SkyView Aerial Solutions)
Tuesday was the first dry day in the South Carolina capital of Columbia, but residents are still on high alert for flash flooding as swollen rivers continue to flow east from the mountains into dams that are filled to the brim. Roads have been washed away, and entire structures crumbled in the floods. At least 16 people have died in the widespread flooding.
South Carolina governor Nikki Haley says that she doesn’t yet have a dollar estimate for the damage, but that the destruction she’s seen in her flooded state is “disturbing.”
Over the course of five days, from Oct. 1 through Oct. 5, South Carolina was drenched by up to 26 inches of rain, mainly focused on the central and coastal parts of the state. Rainfall totals over 16 inches are widespread across 10 counties from Columbia to Charleston, with slightly lower totals to the north and south and in the mountains.
[The meteorology behind South Carolina’s catastrophic, 1,000-year rainfall event]
Spreading all of the rain water evenly across the entire state, every inch of South Carolina would be covered by 10.4 inches of rain. That’s a water volume of 5.7 trillion gallons — enough to fill the entire Great Salt Lake, and then some.
Put another way, South Carolina just got a Great Salt Lake’s worth of water dumped on them.
1 of 38 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × Storms dump record-setting rainfall on South Carolina View Photos Rain related to Hurricane Joaquin flooded areas throughout the state. Caption Rain related to Hurricane Joaquin flooded areas throughout the state. Oct. 6, 2015 David Carroll pulls a boat carrying neighbors Rick Woodward, Miki Woodward and Matt Desjardins in Conway. Randall Hill/Reuters Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue.
Combining the rain in North and South Carolina brings the total up to an unbelievable 11 trillion gallons. USA Today’s Doyle Rice calculates that’s enough water to fill 636 million swimming pools, or over 130,000 Rose Bowls filled all the way to the top.
Rice also notes that the Carolinas combined saw about 1/3 the volume of Lake Tahoe in water. In case you’re unsure of how much water Tahoe holds, the 2 million year-old lake would cover the entire state of California with over 14 inches of water. If you plopped the Willis Tower into the deepest part of Lake Tahoe, there would still be about 200 feet of water above it. It’s a really deep lake.
[Al Roker gets lambasted for tweeting a smiley selfie in South Carolina flood zone]
Coincidentally, the Carolinas’ 11 trillion gallons would have been exactly enough water to put an end to the California drought, according to calculations by NASA last December.
All of this water does not even take into consideration the catastrophic dam failures.
Of the 18 dams that are being monitored, nine have been breached or have failed completely, according to South Carolina’s Emergency Management Division, sending a torrent of water into homes and businesses. One dam was intentionally breached in to relieve the pressure in a controlled release.
[Watch this driver risk his life (and the lives of his rescuers) by driving into a flood]
The most recent dam breach was the Rockyford Creek Dam on Monday afternoon, which prompted the emergency evacuations downstream. The AP reports that the 22-acre reservoir emptied in just 15 minutes, spilling even more water into the surrounding neighborhoods.Looking for news you can trust?
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Steve Benen notes that the increasingly shrill and hyperbolic Heritage Foundation has decided to make opposition to Janet Yellen a “key vote.” That is, they’ll count it on their end-of-the-year scorecard that tells everyone just how conservative you are:
Thanks to the “nuclear option” there’s very little chance Yellen’s nomination will fail — Joe Manchin appears to be her only Democratic opponent — but it now seems likely that most Senate Republicans will oppose the most qualified Fed nominee since the institution was founded.
That’s true, which means this has become sort of a litmus test for wingnuttery. There’s simply no serious reason to oppose Yellen, who is outstandingly qualified to be Fed chair by virtually any measure. So opposition to Yellen is now a pretty simple proposition: you oppose her if you’re some kind of hard money lunatic or if you feel like you have to pander to the hard money lunatics. That’s it. Everyone else votes to support her confirmation. Should be an interesting roll call.
POSTSCRIPT: For more on the Heritage Foundation’s descent from a think tank beloved of Republicans to a bullying ideological cop now loathed on Capitol Hill, check out Julia Ioffe’s report here. It’s a precautionary tale that’s well worth a read.The Chargers began preparation for Sunday's showdown with the Chiefs minus two of their offensive centerpieces.
Running back Ryan Mathews and wideout Keenan Allen both missed Tuesday's practice, according to Michael Gehlken of U-T San Diego.
Mathews hasn't played since injuring his ankle in Week 14, while Allen remains week-to-week with the broken collarbone he sustained in a Week 15 loss to the Broncos. While coach Mike McCoy says it's possible Mathews will suit up Sunday against the Chiefs, it's fair to wonder if Allen will even play again this season.
Quarterback Philip Rivers produced his share of jaw-dropping heroics in Saturday's overtime win against the 49ers, but San Diego will be hard-pressed to repeat that effort against the Chiefs. As the only team in the league that hasn't allowed 30 points in a game this season, Kansas City's seventh-ranked defense has the firepower to slow down the Bolts.
As we mentioned on the podcast, the Chargers simply need a win to nab a playoff berth, while the Chiefs need a victory and plenty else to happen on Sunday. You couldn't ask much more from a Week 17 showdown between two AFC West foes.
The latest Around The NFL Podcast recaps every Week 16 game and breaks down the playoff picture. Find more Around The NFL content on NFL NOW.A team of scientists led by Dr Simon Richardson at the University of Greenwich has got a step closer to one of the holy grails of drug delivery.
The goal -- to find a vehicle that can carry drugs not just to a specific cell but a specific organ (organelle) inside the cell, and accurately measure how it behaves when it gets there -- has proved elusive despite two decades of research, according to the Journal of Controlled Release, a top international scientific publication.
Now the journal has given the new research front page billing, saying in an editorial that Richardson and colleagues provide direct evidence, for the first time, that nanomedicines can be delivered to select organelles and manipulated to carry beneficial agents like genes.
Dr Richardson says: "Drug delivery is important for everyone because it has the potential to deliver new treatments for diseases which are currently incurable; and to deliver existing drugs more effectively."
"We are trying to smuggle healthy genes inside cells. Genes are large molecules which have up till now proved too big to get in without serious risk to the patient. Our research is at the cutting edge of efforts to turn gene therapy, and new molecular medicines, from risky and sci-fiesque to safe and routine."
As well as proving that material like genes can be delivered to the target organelle, the team was also able to show how the delivery vehicle behaves once inside.
Editor of the Journal of Controlled Release, Professor Kinam Park, said the study was "distinguished from others by its thoroughness and unequivocal data" and concludes: "…the approach used by Richardson's team can be useful in developing more efficient delivery vehicles for drug targeting in general."An Australian man will turn to the Australian Government for help after his 81-year-old Ahmadi Muslim father was imprisoned in Pakistan last month.
Khalid Ahmad’s father, Abdul Shakoor, who owns a bookshop in Pakistan where the Ahmadi faith is outlawed, made international headlines when he was jailed for eight years in December for selling books deemed hurtful or hateful to another religious group’s beliefs.
The 81-year-old, who has run the book store in Rabwah since 1988, was charged under a set of blasphemy laws which specifically target Ahmadi Muslims, according to the Huffington Post.
Seeking help to save his father, Khalid reached out to the Ahmadiyya Muslim Association of Victoria, based in Langwarrin, and is calling on the Federal Government to use any influence it can.
“The Australian Government can put political stress on the Pakistani government to abolish this law which doesn’t protect us,” Khalid said.
“We have been persecuted for a long, long time.”
In 1974 the Pakistani Government adopted a law declaring Ahmadis to be non-Muslims and the country is reported as the only Muslim country that has used its constitution to persecute a specific group.
Khalid, who speaks to his parents on the phone several times a day, was “shattered” when his mum told him the book store had been raided and his father arrested.
“I rang them and talked to my dad for a few minutes but a few hours later I got a call from my mum and she told me he’d been arrested and we don’t know where they’ve taken him,” he said.
“I was completely shattered to hear about this.”
Holt MP Anthony Byrne has previously praised the efforts of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Association and highlighted the faith’s persecution around the world in a speech to Federal Parliament.
In 2014 Star News reported on Alam Mahmood Butt from Narre Warren whose younger brother was shot dead by unknown assailants in Kamra, Pakistan, in what was believed to be another targeted attack on someone from the minority Ahmadi faith.
Prior to this, the News reported on Berwick-based Ahmadiyya Muslim Waheed Ahmad Chatha, whose cousin was also fatally shot in Pakistan in what was also thought to be a targeted attack.
Pakistan has the largest population of Ahmadi Muslims in the world, with an estimated 2 to 5 million living in the country.This is one gel ink refill for the Pilot Hi-Tec-C Coleto writing system. The pen body pictured isincluded and can be found under Compatible Products.
The Pilot Hi-Tec-C Coleto takes the classic Hi-Tec-C gel pen—loved by students, artists and designers for its smooth ink and precise needle-point tip—and turns it into a convenient customizable multi pen system! Choose from dozens of different pen bodies and fill them with whatever combination of ink colors, mechanical pencil components, erasers, and styli you want.
Note: When installing a Hi-Tec-C Coleto component, make sure to line up the small fins on either side of the component's plastic push button with the grooves on either side of the component slot in the pen body.
Also pictured: Pilot Hi-Tec-C Coleto 5 Color Body Component - Clear Blue.Please note: The names below are of the agents who had the most children’s book deals report to Publishers Marketplace by a publisher, agent, or author. It is just a snapshot in time. When I ran the numbers in the beginning of the year, the names and numbers were different. Also you should know for various reasons not all deals are reported to Publishers Marketplace.
Many agents represent children’s books and adult books. Only children’s book deals were used. This is the type of information you can access if you sign up for the paid subscription to Publishers Marketplace. I consider this important information and part of the cost of doing your homework.
1. Jennifer Laughran (Andrea Brown Literary Agency)
has had 27 deals in the this category during the last 12 months – 4 six-figure+ deals Most recent deal in this category: April 9, 2013 – 11 PB – 11 MG – 8 YA
2. Ammi-Joan Paquette (Erin Murphy Literary Agency)
has had 26 deals in this category during the last 12 months – 3 six-figure+ deals Most recent deal in this category: April 3, 2013 – 9 PB – 7 MG – 12 YA
3. Erin Murphy (Erin Murphy Literary Agency)
has had 24 deals in this category during the last 12 months – 1 six-figure+ deal Most recent deal in this category: April 4, 2013 – 19 PB – 9 MG – 2 YA
4. Sara Crowe (Harvey Klinger)has had 21 deals in this category in the last 12 months – 12 six-figure+ deals Most recent deal in this category: April 10, 2013 – 11 MG – 14 YA
5. Holly McGhee (Pippin Properties) had 19 deals in this category in the last 12 months – 14 six-figure+ deals Most recent deal in this category: April 5, 2013 – 16 PB – 5 MG
6. Kelly Sonnack (Andrea Brown Literary Agency) has had 17 deals in this category in the last 12 months – 2 six-figure+ deals Most recent deal in this category: February 26, 2013 |
adulthood; there is no rebirth without death. The oppressive risks of graduation are a kind of nigredo, then, but represent something far more profound than mere emergence of adulthood. Rather, at its heart, Hikaru’s struggle is one against impermanence and death. This is emphasized because the girls’ families are moving apart; their change is inevitable.
THE CHERRY TREE
The fact that Mokona should be found in a cherry tree is of particular interest when we consider the close tie of the Spirit Mercurius to trees. In some fairy tales the spirit, like a genie trapped in a bottle, is found buried at the base of a tree and will grant wishes in exchange for freedom; there are many references in Jung which tie the Spirit to orchards and to trees in general, particularly oak trees, and it is never so much that the Spirit is the tree or originates from within the tree as it is that it is bound to the tree. That the cherry tree in this particular tale should contain a fairy which grants wishes in this capacity makes it unarguably parallel to the alchemical tree; and Mokona, then, we will know from the start and confirm far later in the series, is the manifestation of the Spirit Mercurius. We will discus him later, but it is worth noting that in this manifestation, the Spirit appears as not just an animal, but an undifferentiated animal; it is, in a way, a hyper-unconscious entity, which is appropriate, since viewers of the Magic Knight Rayearth television series may have never learned the (frankly quite surprising and delightful) in-universe explanation for what Mokona is if they only watched the first series or did not read the manga. What Mokona is, especially at the outset, is a mystery: if in Jungian terms an animal represents a principle which has not yet been made conscious, then an animal which is undifferentiated from other animals is, quite possibly, more unconscious than even that. Further fascinating mystical symbolism of the animal Mokona is its bindi dot and corresponding shut eyes; it is worth noting that, when the Spirit appears again in Madoka as the nefarious Kyubey, its eyes are now open and it lacks a marked third, but the open eyes are red as Mokona’s bindi dot.
During her brief inner conversation with Lexus, Hikaru is shown a vision of endangered earth and receives a red gem on the back of her left hand, which we are told to be granted to the person Mokona discovers as proof of the purity of their wish; if the gem glows for all eternity, Hikaru’s wish will be realized. Transported, then, Hikaru is shown a vision of Tokyo Tower, and sees the sorcerer Clef standing atop it; she learns he is trapped in her world and no one knows of his existence but her, and, furthermore, the future of their world rests on the results of a divine test which Clef undergoes. Clef is the one, we are told, who will ultimately be responsible for granting or not granting Hikaru’s wish.
In short, alchemists: Hikaru receives a stone from the Spirit Mercurius which has the propensity to grant her wish if she is able to use her willpower to help a magician, a gray-haired puer eternis, pass a divine test, and in so doing, pass it, herself. Following ‘as above, so below’, we could say in a sense that Clef is the personified whole of the psyche, a manifestation of the individual person who is at risk in the psychological dilemma being demonstrated. Specifically, he is the Wise Old Man or possibly the animus of the writer. Appropriately in the television series, Clef will, shortly after his introduction, be turned to stone, and must be revived by the girls, who represent inner principles as previously touched upon. However, as to not get ahead of ourselves, let us state for now that after her meeting with Lexus, Hikaru is able to show both the gem and Mokona to her friends, and Mokona is able to verify both his name and his status as the cherry tree fairy.
The chaos begins downtown and we learn immediately just how violent this series is compared to the television series. Alcyone is the first antagonist the girls will face and, we will find, the glimpse of the shadow which is available at the beginning of the first episode. A beautiful woman with long black hair and a propensity for ice magic, Alcyone begins to immediately wreak havoc on Tokyo with the help of her Mashin, which anthropomorphizes as a type of cat. Clef, in response, calls a beam of light down upon Tokyo Tower which then bursts across the face of the world and, essentially, moves the actual denizens of Tokyo to another dimension.
Next we are introduced to two figures of the unconscious, the black knight Lantis and the brother of Emeraude, a man named Eagle who, in the manga, was known as Eagle Vision and worked as an adviser for Cephiro’s neighboring nation, a technologically-based country which runs on its people’s mental energy. Lantis, we will learn, is also the brother of someone profoundly entangled in the web of madness in which Ciphero has been caught, a man named Zagato— the man to whom we have seen Emeraude swim and sing and caress, the man who seems to be unconscious. We learn in this scene that it was Emeraude’s wish to make the people of Cephiro love her, and it is her brother’ wish to fulfill her. Lantis threatens Eagle and leaves. Next, back in Tokyo, we meet the villainous puer, Ascot, and green-haired Ferio, who reminds Ascot that they have come to Tokyo to take the divine test and not to kill Clef. The girls, meanwhile, are able to meet up with the magician, who names Hikaru’s stone an ‘ovum gem’ and explains that he is from another world. They are then confronted by Alcyone, who fuses with her cat to manifest its Mashin, the monster we saw in the first minute of the episode. During their escape on the back of Clef’s gryphon, Hikaru falls and is rescued by Lexus when, in her moment of great despair and sure death, she realizes the selfishness of her wish and asks for forgiveness; her Mashin appears to her then in his animal form and explains to her that to fulfill her wish and protect her friends, she must become a deity—a Mashin—herself. That is, the archetypical nature of the ego must be consciously realized and manipulated from a higher circuit, in the Leary sense. This is further emphasized when Hiakru’s body becomes a direct controller for her Mashin, left floating in the void while her mecha fights in Tokyo— the ego relegates itself to an unconscious space and operates the will from a location which is not physically safe but is removed from the battle enough to allow for communication with Lexus, an undifferentiated symbol of will and/or intuition which does the actual fighting for her. In the battle, Lexus destroys Alcyone’s left hand, but it is not enough to prevent the arrival of Emeraude’s fortress, which replaces Tokyo Tower shortly after the end of the battle. Before Hikaru is able to take any action, Zagato’s Mashin arrives and obliterates Lexus, though Hikaru is discovered by Lantis and cloaked in his black cape before any harm can come to her.
ALCYONE
More overtly sexualized than anyone else in the show and described by young Umi as an ‘old lady’, Alcyone is a sort of initial chthonic shadow—certainly the closest we will get to a same-gendered shadow in the show—and also the first villain to die, killed (rendered meaningless) by Eagle, Emeraude’s brother, after she fails to kill Hikaru. A testament to how quickly the shadow, an initial gateway into the psyche, can be overcome and absorbed by the rest of the unconscious once it is shown as not being so mighty and dark as one thought; the shadow here is adulthood, maturity and sexuality, doubly-reinforcing a kind of poisonous or dangerous element the show attaches to Eros, matter and physical propagation, which is, after all, the eventual cause of all death. It is interesting, then, that it is an ‘ovum gem’ which must be used to fulfill the wish of the girls and renew life with meaning: ultimately only matter can vivify matter, only by living may we imbue life with meaning. Alcyone’s Mashin is a cat, a feminine animal linked commonly to sexuality and less commonly to the alchemical element of sulphur; the shadow, in Jungian terms, is likewise tied to sulphur. This is further reinforced by the fight pairing of Hikaru and Alcyone.
CLEF
I would take a moment now to consider the meaning of the figure of the animus to a woman and the manner in which it appears. Jung described four steps in the development of the animus, starting with the wild man of strength (Tarzan), moving on to the man of action (Zorro) then the scholarly man of the cloth or magician (Prospero) before finally working as a mediator for great spiritual profundity, as a manifestation of the Logos or Nous. Clef, as a member of the third stage, is, remember, not in this context the ‘Wise Old Man’ in so many words, although he is that, too; because CLAMP is run by a group of women, however, it is better to consider Clef to be as much Wise Old Man as he is Animus in its third, spiritual manifestation. This belief in mysticism and magic, this man who is responsible for maintaining the integrity of Cephiro along with a figure called the Pillar, is imperiled, and with it, our connection to the unconscious and the point of life itself. It is also notable that Clef’s Mashin is a gryphon, a mystical lion/eagle combination which, similar to the emergence of the lion, heralds the coming of a King. Clef, however, is helpless against Mashin, even with his gryphon, and must fight through the girls.
By the second episode of the three part OVA the destruction waged on Tokyo is already brutal, and we open on the dark knight Lantis, who observes unconscious Hikaru, her ovum gem faded, and thinks she must be the legendary martyr and that someone must change the course of history. This is a very important theme which we will see repeatedly with the shadow-anima or animus in these sorts of stories which we will discuss again after touching on Madoka, though we will engage in brief overview in the subheading ‘ON CYCLICAL REALITY’ at the end of this essay.
At any rate, we next see Fuu being contacted by Windam, her guardian who asks her if she has a dream so strong it could break her heart, and swiftly thereafter cut to Umi, who watches sleeping Clef. Note the Salt of our triad has a particular fondness, it would seem, for the Wise Old Man, our watery deity of the unconscious has a peculiar attraction to the one who is full of knowledge about it. Later, it is only by touching Fuu’s glove that she learns of Fuu’s ovum gem, her sign of her pact with Windam; Umi is just as worried as her friend knew she would be, since, as Umi points out to Clef, nothing which happened, including Hikaru’s apparent death, would have happened if not for the ovum gem. This, however, is not necessarily true; the drama of Ciphero is independent of Hikaru’s acquisition of her ovum gem, in that it is the cause of, but not caused by, the acquisition; the drama of the unconscious is going to happen regardless of whether or not consciousness chooses to observe and fight it. It just so happens that there are conscious figures who match the requirements of the unconscious— girls who fit the legend, in this case— and so they and the unconscious struggle are drawn together like magnets. It also gave Hikaru the chance to fight, even to apparent death which will soon be righted in a rebirth, since Hikaru, being paired with our lion, is our Christlike figure— though in this case the risen salvator is Rayearth, a combination of all three girls’ Mashin. All of this points to the idea of embodying the archetype one wishes to be or attract, and thus attracting it, making it conscious. We start being writers by pretending to be writers; we start being wives and husbands by playing house.
Clef emphasizes that the girls are missing something and then becomes concerned when he realizes that the green ovum in Fuu’s possession as the capacity to ‘uncover the truth’. We later see Fuu alone in Tokyo and Windam tells her his strength is beyond human knowledge and can defy destiny: she then is shown visions of people dying, going up in smoke before her, and Windam tells her that everything must die, that it is the destiny of all living things. He tells her to ‘visit the place of [his] long sleep’ and break down the walls around her heart; ‘Either change the course of destiny, or choose death,’ he has told her.
What is interesting is that Fuu and her mirror/primary opponent, Ferio, are both motivated by the pursuit of their trial: as Fuu asks her ovum gem to lead the way to the divine test, Ferio asks his army of beetles to lead the way to his trial; he appears and stops Fuu’s train, an automated method of transportation left running in the wake of humanity’s disappearance. Likewise, Ferio’s bugs could be said to be automated, operating as they do from a hivemind; bugs symbolically relate closely to robots and other efficiency-driven conglomerate of workers (the way Chief visualizes ‘The Combine’ in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, for instance). This is similar to the manner in which Ascot and Umi are both particularly motivated in relation to Clef; and of course, how Hikaru and Alcyone are both motivated by various forms of love, Hikaru’s pure love for her friends and earth and Alcyone’s selfish love for Esmeraude and herself.
Much as the fires of Hikaru’s passions once protects her friends, so too does Fuu’s (albeit delayed) increasing understanding of the situation allow her gem to take possession of the train-car in which she rides; there is a mastery of technology for the element associated with wisdom, or it is associated with it, at any rate. It does not do much to fix her bad situation, though, and things are not much better for Umi, who finds herself, along with clef, cornered by Ascot.
Hikaru, meanwhile, encounters Lantis— first his Mashin, the wolf/dog creature, and then as the man himself, emerging from the shadows. He asks her if she awoke Lexus because she wanted to protect her world even if it meant sacrificing herself, and when she insists she was chosen, and did not actively seek to awaken Lexus, Lantis tests her by putting her in an labyrinth.
Now, ha-ha, when we break down the archetypes there’s a funny pattern emerging here, because we take Hikaru, who has been stated at various times to be a martyr and willing to sacrifice herself, and who is thought by her friends to be dead, and find now that she is being tested by a portion of the shadow which, while a right hand of and a derivation of the ultimately maelific Saturnine aspect (Lantis is the brother of the dead/unconscious Zagato, for whose love Princess Emeraude has caused all of this to begin with) proves to be ultimately not only friendly and useful but a sort of love interest. Breaking them down to archetypes it really is rather like Christ wandering in the desert, is it not? Or perhaps his descent through Hell; at either rate, the symbolism in both cases is closely related, a symbol for plumbing the unconscious and, more importantly, navigating the traps and disasters lain out in the personal subconscious and conscious ego in order to embrace the unconscious.
Coing back to Fuu, she manages to find her way to her neighborhood when Ferio catches up to her and tells her she can’t possibly fight him. He accuses her of running from her destiny and emphasizes again that everyone has to die sometime. She, naturally, sees her neighborhood blown up and hears Windam repeat the motif of the episode, of the inevitability of death which can be overcome by the power of an understanding which is beyond the grip of even the greatest human comprehension—death, which can be transcended by consciousness. She stops resisting the urge to fight him, stops running, and decides to do battle with what seems to be inevitable; in the process, she hears the heartbeat of Windam, asleep under the stadium. She teleports to it to find it already covered in beetles but rushes inside anyway, pursuing Windam’s heartbeat; when she stands on the pitcher’s mound, he tells her she’s passed his test— astute readers will consider that she is standing in the center of a diamond. Her giant four-winged bird awakens, then, and announces his title as ruler of the skies, as Lexus was of fire and earth and Seles will be of wind. Fuu asks Windam to take her away from the city, notably, so as not to do further harm to it, and Ferio pursues her, perceiving her as running away. She will meet meet up with Umi after she has acquired her Mashin, briefly, before engaging in battle with Ferio.
Clef, meanwhile, barely able to protect Umi, has been severely weakened due to his putting the people of earth into a time warp so that the girls can accomplish their goals, and can only send Umi floating away to escape Ascot’s giant crawfish. Umi confronts him, shocked that he’s a child, and he says he tramples on the weak, whether young or old. As she runs away along the river’s edge, she asks herself why this is happening to her and a voice asks her if she is afraid to be alone, accusing her of hiding conceit and vanity because she had friends who tried to understand her. Umi, whose pride has lead to cowardice, did not have the courage to approach Hikaru when she was first a transfer student; her understanding of the consequences of her pride and her ‘revealing her true heart’ to her Mashin causes Seles to manifest from the river in the form of a great dragon, and she does almost immediate battle with Ascot and his crawfish. However, in order to do that, Umi has to truly open her heart to her Mashin, and to do that, she has to make a wish— in this case, she wishes to protect the people she loves, for the power to see herself so as to be a true friend. Notably, Clef, who is related to death/rebirth symbols, knocks out a bridge during their battle, barring human passage from one side to another, though of course this is not relevant to the giant Mashin. During battle, Umi learns Hikaru is still alive and Seles advises her to let her arrogant heart be washed away; she then blasts away Ascot. Fuu, having been on the brink of death, is also vivified by knowledge that Hikaru is alive.
Hikaru, wandering in the labyrinth, exhausted, can no longer contact Lexus although she calls out for him, and is instead shown visions of her friends fighting by Lantis; he asks her if her battle has meaning, and we pretty well imagine what the battle is a metaphor for, by now. Either way, she sees her friends fighting for her, sees the worth of her own life, and is brought back into contact with Lexus. The women overcome their enemies but singing fills the air and Fuu hears the quote “Faith lies in a person’s prayers being answered; that’s what it’s all about.” The crawfish monster is then revived and Ascot explains that those who have power over creation have everything.
FERIO
By and large, Ferio represents the initial problem of death— that is to say, not death itself, but the knowledge of death, this knowledge being something which ceaselessly hounds the human being throughout the course of his life, which whispers in his ear and slowly destroys everything around them. We look at Ferio’s beetles and think of those employed to strip the flesh from skulls; with think also of cold, emotionless facts, such as the facts which we must confront when we confront the nature of our own mortality. He states his hobby is finding the defenseless and torturing them to death— depression, anyone? Also it is interesting to note, though it is not true in this version, in the original story he is Emeraude’s brother, and the Prince of Cephiro. At any rate, he can only be defeated, of course, once Fuu decides to fight him, and does not succumb to the inevitability of his pursuit.
ASCOT
As the true puer eternis compared to the Wise Old Man of Clef as marked by the guru’s gray hair, Ascot is a little shit who, nonetheless, is associated with symbols of rebirth, being as he is the puer and not the senex. A crawfish may seem weird, but, again, there is some interesting alchemical symbolism; one thinks of the crustacean on The Moon card in the Tarot. It is associated with death-rebirth, which is appropriate.
LANTIS
If Zagato represents the unconscious, possibly maelific or Saturnine manifestation of the animus, then his younger brother, Lantis, is by far the more positive and Mercurial manifestation which must be derived. Though this is exemplified quite literally in their mental states (Zagato is incapacitated and Lantis is an active player in the show) it is also notably displayed in their relationships: Emeraude’s love of Zagato, something which happens unconsciously and acts as a kind of Fall Event in terms of its symbolism of the adoration of feminine matter for masculine psyche, parallels Lantis’ semi-reciprocated love of Hikaru, which happens in a semi-conscious way. That is, it represents a cross-borders love of the unconscious animus for the conscious woman carrying that particular image; this, in turn, represents the desire of the unconscious to be known and observed by consciousness, and vice versa. We see a quaternity of pairings, then: first, we see the love of matter and consciousness, a love which causes the collapse of the world because it is inevitably the cause of death (for one cannot have life, cannot have psyche paired to matter, without facing down eventual death); then, we see the love of the conscious and the unconscious, which is a love which, while not wholly responsible for the restoration of meaning and the salvation of matter, is still pivotal in the doing of the thing, regardless of whether or not it is reciprocated. While it is true that Hikaru, in varying versions of the story, either does or does not return Lantis’ affection, her love for him is less important than his love for her— though the more closely she works with him and the higher she holds him, the greater his capacity to help her. Lantis’ Mashin, a wolf or a dog, further reinforces his position as animus, with the wolf commonly being connected to the Spirit Mercurius, and the dog an associate of the moon. Thus, as Salt is also related to the moon, Lantis has a connection to both Mercury and Salt, but is not necessarily either, himself.
As our third episode opens we see a place that could only be Cephiro, an idyllic paradise full of fairies who, amid their flower-smelling, witness first the singing of Emeraude, and then her liaison with Zagato. We then see Zagato being forced to sacrifice himself to restore Cephiro in exchange for the breaking of an ancient covenant; Lantis, likewise witnesses it. Yes, that’s a corpse in that chair that Emeraude’s been mooning over two episodes, only further emphasizing our point of Zagato being at once a Saturnine figure of death and the consciousness which causes it.
Meanwhile, back in the present-day battle, wounded Ferio has a tense conversation with Lantis during Fuu and Umi’s battle with the Eagle-renewed by robotized Ascot, who Lantis explains to have been manipulated and to have gone over to the dark side. That is, a figure which was very close to being chthonic is now fully chthonic, and dangerous; Lexus and Hikaru, however, reemerge, lauding the virtue of hope, and between all three girls and their Mashin they are able to defeat their opponent. Eagle, then, with no options left, is shown approaching a white dragon for its assistance with his sister.
The girls, meanwhile, are on the hunt for Clef, and Hikaru eventually finds him in the rubble of the city; he expresses amazement that Lantis helped her because he is the best swordsman of all of Cephiro but mentions also that he never looks for a fight, and then explains more about the land, which received divine protections, was a kind of Eden, in essence, due to spirits which were chosen for their magical powers and were the foundation of the world. To restore life to the world, the high priest, Zagato, sacrificed himself and made a wish that could not be made true by sorcery, and his wish was ‘engraved on the hearts of the people’. Note that the qualities of the animus are reconciled between two brothers in this instance— Lantis, who is the ‘man of action’ and, though acts with his country’s interests in mind, is arguably ‘good’; and Zagato, who is the man of the cloth, and whose sacrifice then elevates him to the fourth animus state, embodying by his death a Saturnine aspect which puts him and his allegedly unstoppable Mashin into the walking role of Death. Indeed, Clef goes on to say that the people of Cephiro ‘made their wish in a cloud of darkness’ and turned their backs on their saviors (that is, Zagato and Princess Emeraude) and that, in the magician’s opinion, is the real reason the people were punished. The real truth of the matter was that Zagato and Princess Emeraude, the master of the spirits, had fallen in love, and love between humans and spirits was forbidden in Cephiro to keep balance in their world— because this love had to be kept secret, she was forced to allow Zagato’s sacrifice to occur, and in essence lost her mind to grief, unable to accept it.
In pausing, this is of course a reflection of what I have discussed previously as the true theme, the true problem at the heart of Rayearth, and that is the problem of death. Because the CLAMP mangaka are female, one could argue that, strictly speaking, the roles of consciousness and matter are flipped between male and female. Though this is not necessarily the case for every female author, a woman who identifies heavily with her ego may project femininity onto the arguably pure-masculine consciousness, and this may be in part a cause of the attachment to the idea of matter and fear of death which the story visits time and again; golden-haired Emeraude, master of spirits, the true director of the affairs, loves Zagato, the high priest of the material, fleshly humans, who is commonly decked in white and silver, moon-like colors, indicating his connection with matter but also his duty as a bridge between consciousness and unconsciousness in the feminine mind, much as Luna, whose material face captures the light of the sun, is a bridge for the man. This is yet another instance of splitting the archetype, however, or of archetypes possessing blurred traits, for Eagle vision, with his white hair and relation in this series as Emeraude’s brother, is likewise Lunar—and it is this Lunar brother which is responsible for the death of Zagato and the invasion of Cephiro upon Earth, usurping the true Lunar aspect and relegating it to a Saturnine one. This represents, by and large, the consumption of the Self and psyche by the unconscious, and should be avoided; it is the other side of ego inflation, a merciless crushing of unconsciousness, depression and death arising from an awareness of the unconscious without an ability to reconcile it with material impermanence. To follow through with this, it is Zagato who dies, and Emeraude who mourns— further, Emeraude, being a Princess, is royalty; but she is not fully-developed consciousness, being a Princess, rather than a Queen. Thus, she is still attached, not only to her femininity, but also to her dead lover, to the material world; this is true much as Hikaru, being the conscious expression of the problem, is attached to her friends and her time in high school. The true secret of the correlation of death and change is that change is only a kind of death, one that causes a rebirth; and when one is out of change-caused rebirths, like a cat living out its nine lives, one must shed one’s mortal coil in the upwards motion of consciousness, or perhaps, depending, select another mortal coil to be had. Consciousness of course will always select another mortal coil, eventually, because consciousness is eternal, nontemporal and has quite a lot of people to get to; thus, it is fitting that at the end of the Rayearth television series, we learn the reason Emeraude has summoned the girls to Cephiro is to ask them to kill her, that is, to kill their attachment to their current condition and their image of consciousness as a helpless girl. (Note also in the manga that Prince Ferio is Princess Emeraude’s replacement after the girls do the deed, meaning that consciousness has now used mind [Ferio’s massive sword] to accept a fear of death [Ferio] and made of it the motivating factor of consciousness, no longer a fear of death but a working with death, a balance of Emeraude and Zagato rather than one or the other.)
But again, I am getting ahead of myself. Hikaru, specifically, upon being told the basics of the situation with Emeraude, wants to go speak with her, believing that someone with such a beautiful voice could not be evil. Clef then notes however that Eagle’s— well, eagle— has been spying overhead, and announces in Eagle’s voice that his sister’s wish will be realized. Ferio, who has been listening in and reflecting on a conversation with Lantis wherein Lantis explained to Ferio that he and the other two unconscious principles were not brought to Rayearth (that is, Earth) for the divine test they believed, is the first to see, along with Umi, a Mashin emerging from the sky— the one from before which obliterated Hikaru, Zagato’s vaguely demonic one. Clef is shocked and horrified to see it, and declares its presence impossible, saying specifically that the deity is already dead, for it is Zagato’s, thus further linking the idea of a maelific dead god and the high priest of Cephiro. Clef begs them not to fight, for its powers are unstoppable, but the girls argue that as long as the deity is there the battle is not over—as long as the problem of Death is unresolved in the consciousness, the Self can have no peace. They insist they must make Emeraude see the hopelessness of the situation and run forward to try to fight the Mashin, but are transported by it into Emeraude’s fortress, leaving both Clef and Mokona behind.
Much as the labyrinth in which Lantis tested her acted as a symbol of Hikaru’s personal subconscious, the fortress of Cephiro is significant because it is the one portion of Cephiro which is physically accessible to the girls, thus making it their (specifically Hikaru’s) personal entrance into the universal unconscious. The human mind, being bound to matter and reality, can only tread so far into the unconscious from the vantage of the mortal coil; thus, in the OVA the girls are not able to physically access Cephiro, itself, only an individualized part of it which is related to Hikaru in that she is the psychonaut we have seen already exploring her psyche, she is the main character, and her problems are the conscious reflections of the unconscious problems of Emeraude. (This is further evidenced by the second television and manga series, where a primary antagonist is a part of Hikaru’s soul which was fractured by the death of Emeraude and took a life of her own.) The girls ask if the castle is inside of Cephiro and Eagle appears to answer them that yes, it is. With his previously-mentioned role as the Lunar usurper, it is appropriate that Eagle should be the first to appear on the threshold of the unconscious; however, it begs the question of what Eagle’s true role is. That is simple enough; we have seen, first in Mokona, then Clef, and now Eagle, the Mercurial Spirit in graduating levels of consciousness. A shared color palate (primarily white for all three) marks them as similar, much as Zagato and Lantis’ dark hair marks their similarity as dual aspects of Sulphur; further, all three, Mokona, Clef and Eagle, are ‘movers and shakers’, as it were, of the plot. Mokona is responsible for the inciting incident, for the initial connection of Hikaru to the idea of magic and the unconscious; Guru Clef (already described as the Wise Old Man of the series, one of the many guises of the Spirit Mercurius according to Jung) guides them and pushes the plot along as Tokyo is progressively destroyed and meaning is lost in life; and Eagle confronts them, has indeed been pulling the strings of his delirious sister’s mental state and proves to be responsible for the death of her brother, when they reach the unconscious. Thus, we are given two trinities more trinities which are more spiritual in nature than the psychological trinity represented by the girls: Mercury as Eagle, Sulphur as Zagato, and Salt as Emeraude on the unconscious, chthonic side; and on the conscious, ‘holy’ side we have Clef, Lantis and Hikaru.
Back to our plot, Lantis steals Seles, Lexus and Windam from the girls’ ovum gems, though Lexus, perhaps responding as usual to Hikaru’s hope, appears to resist; the three of them combine, then, and form a model of earth which then escapes the grasp of Eagle. This event causes a light to shine down upon Emeraude, who weaves a crown of flowers for her dead beloved and stops with a scream to see the power of the light above her; Hikaru then finds herself transported among the crystal shards where Emeraude now makes her home, mute and drained of all meaning outside of her love for Zagato, now just a corpse in a chair to which she can’t admit. The girls come back to themselves and find all three have seen the image of the princess, and Eagle explains he has chosen to protect her in a never-ending dream; Umi says all he has done is trap her in an endless nightmare. Much as the soul must break the attachment to matter represented by the cycle of samsara, so too do the girls realize they must free Emeraude from her brother’s enslavement. As Eagle sends spirits of dead citizens of Cephiro to attack the girls, Lantis appears, first his wolf, then him, to wrap the girls in his cloak and whisk them away to the top of the fortress. Lantis then asks them how they will keep the world from being taken over by the castle; Hikaru realizes that the light of Lantis’ sword is the same white light which blew her to bits, indicating the affinity between Lantis and Zagato; and Lantis is forced to attack the corrupted spirits of the people of Cephiro, then asks the girls if they will entrust their future to his sword. Again, the sword is a common symbol for mind, and this is where I would like to pause and make a key point.
I have discussed previously that there is a correlation with Sulphur and Logos as there is a correlation with Mercury and Nous, Salt, thus, playing the Sophia role, for as salt is indestructible so too is wisdom; however, I would posit that, when consciousness identifies first as feminine rather than identifying as a masculine consciousness with a feminine ego (at varying degrees of feminine based upon the person), the roles are flipped. Now we see Sulphur is associated by the woman with Nous, with mind, and Nous is, as Nous will be, trapped, killed and/or betrayed by the now-Mercurial Logos, along with Salt. It is in so many ways a reversal of a desirable layout because, rather than Salt being combined with Sulphur, Salt is now associated with Mercury, an inherently toxic substance which must be extracted and purified, much as the dragon must be slain, much as the white dragon that is Zagato’s mashin must be conquered—the fully-unconscious but living symbol of the unconscious, that which is both dead and alive, which must be integrated. Such an act will dissolve attachment to feminine materiality and allow for growth and expansion of consciousness, we will see in the end.
Lantis, using the light of his sword, conquers the spirits and causes Fuu’s ovum gem to glow again; he teleports Umi and Hikaru into the city, and says the girls can save the soul of his brother, who was ‘tricked by the hand of fate’. Fuu, having protected Lantis with the power of her renewed gem, says she had no choice but to stay behind, flirts a little with Lantis because she is the conscious, feminine iteration of Merury in our Earthly, psychological triad, remember; Umi and Hikaru, then, are forced to summon their deities to face down Zagato’s, which has appeared to strike them both down at once. As Eagle, who is described by Lantis as a deceiver, demands he stop tricking them and tell them his true wish for the people of Cephiro, we learn he has no wish but to destroy everything, “To live out a life of eternity. To carry out the fate of this world, and save everyone. That’s why I must put an end to everything. It’s that simple.”
Yet again, we see it is this idea of the shadow versus eternity. The shadow, it seems, wishes to maintain the integrity of life and death by engaging in life; it opposes something which |
in a new place, so things might sound a bit different than in other episodes. We will be adjusting in future episodes to these changes, so thanks for holding out on us! I’m trying a new editing style as well, so if things are too loud or don’t sound right, let me know and I’ll keep it in mind for the next episode.
Don’t forget to like and share this episode with your friends! We’d love to have them join with us each week. Thanks!
Here are links to all of the news articles that we talked about this week.
Also, here are the codes to the levels that Skylar and Jordan wanted you guys to have.
“A level for Pitty Pat” ADC4-0000-0052-CF1F
“A simple level for a Shyguy” 2492-0000-0050-9C93
“Come on Mac baby! Jump higher son!” 1095-0000-0048-CD5A
“Deja Vu” 82DC-0000-003F-7258
“Its Norfair!” 64CF-0000-0032-21AC
“Luigi’s Mansion” B18A-0000-0030-804C
“Cerulean Cave” – 8893-0000-0022-8291
“Ghost Ship” – 0903-0000-0018-F182
“King of Swing” – C0C8-0000-0017-4B73
“Firey Grave” – 7521-0000-0016-747F
“Pick up the pace” – B33C-0000-0033-C1B2
“World 1-1 Beginnings” – A87A-0000-003F-F0DF
“The Other Castle V0.2” – 2756-0000-0045-3EA8
“Hail Fire” – FA91-0000-0049-108E
“The Mines of Kaladesh” – 66A7-0000-004D-D914
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0Berklee Online is the online school of Berklee College of Music, delivering access to Berklee’s acclaimed curriculum from anywhere in the world. We are the world’s largest online music school—30,000+ musicians from more than 140 countries have taken our courses—but classes never have more than 20 students per section.
Our programs provide lifelong learning opportunities to people interested in music and working in the music industry. The courses range from beginner to advanced graduate level
Absolutely! Just like the students studying on Berklee’s campus, Berklee Online students receive instruction from the same world-renowned faculty, guidance from Berklee-trained academic advisors, and the opportunity to walk at Commencement.
Certificate programs and online courses are offered on an open enrollment basis. Simply complete the online enrollment form and provide payment prior to the course start date and you’re ready to go! Degree programs require an application and supporting documentation. See the Admission Requirements for more details.
What is the process to apply for/enroll in a Berklee Online program or course?
Berklee Online degree students are eligible to request a Berklee ID. Upon acceptance into the program, degree students are also given a berklee.edu email address.
Students must enroll in a certificate by paying the $175 certificate registration fee prior to completing the final course in the program. All for-credit courses that have been awarded a passing grade and that align with a certificate program may transfer into that program.
Can I upgrade from a lower-level certificate to a higher-level certificate?
CHANGE CERTIFICATE: When a student wants to change their lower-level certificate to a higher-level certificate (or vice versa) prior to the completion of the program. There are no additional fees for this option other than the cost of additional courses, and you will only earn one certificate upon completion. STARTING A NEW CERTIFICATE: When a student wants to earn more than one certificate by having the courses from their lower-level certificate waived into a higher-level certificate. In this case, an additional $175 registration fee is required. Yes! Berklee Online offers two certificate options:
Faculty
Who teaches Berklee Online courses? Berklee faculty and seasoned professionals teach our courses. Our instructors are recognized experts in their respective fields—they’ve produced and engineered hundreds of artists and numerous award-winning projects, and several of their students have gone on to earn GRAMMY Award nominations.
Financial Aid
Am I eligible for financial aid? Financial assistance is available for Berklee Online degree programs. This assistance may come from a variety of sources including federal awards, outside scholarships, and private loans.
Federal financial aid is not available for non-degree programs. Non-degree students typically finance their costs out-of-pocket or with a private loan. Review our payment options.
Graduation
What happens if I turn in my graduation application late? Do I still need to apply by December 1 even if I don’t want to walk in the Commencement ceremony? Because we must coordinate with the Boston campus for Commencement, it is essential that students planning to walk in the ceremony submit their graduation application by 12:00 midnight ET on December 1. If you submit your application late, you will need to wait until the following year to walk.
We ask all students planning to graduate within the current academic year to apply for graduation by December 1, regardless of their plans to participate in Commencement. Late application for students who do not wish to walk will result in processing delays for your academic record and diploma, and your name may not be listed in the ceremony program.
What’s the difference between graduating and walking in Commencement?
You can walk in Commencement when you are nine (9) credits or less away from completing your degree requirements by the end of the spring term. Please note: Berklee Online degree students are not required to walk in Commencement in Boston.
You graduate when you have met all of the following criteria: Attained at least a 2.70 cumulative GPA in concentrate courses
Have a minimum cumulative GPA of 2.00
Fulfilled all program requirements AND completed a minimum of 120 credits for a single major or 165 for a dual major
Completed a minimum of 60 institutional credits for a single major or 105 institutional credits for a dual major
Fulfilled all financial obligations to the college Note Walking across the stage in Commencement does not mean that you have graduated. You will not officially graduate and receive your diploma until you meet all of the eligibility requirements. Great question! Walking in Commencement and graduating are two separate things.You can walk in Commencement when you are nine (9) credits or less away from completing your degree requirements by the end of the spring term. Please note: Berklee Online degree students are not required to walk in Commencement in Boston.You graduate when you have met all of the following criteria:Walking across the stage in Commencementmean that you have graduated. You will not officially graduate and receive your diploma until you meet all of the eligibility requirements.
I just finished my last term at Berklee Online! What happens next? Is there anything I need to do? Congratulations on finishing! If you have already filled out a graduation application, you will want to double-check the " Graduation Checklist " to ensure you have taken care of all of the various items associated with graduating. If you have not filled out a graduation application, you will need to do that as soon as possible. You will not be able to graduate until we have received and processed your graduation application.
When will I get my diploma?
Diplomas are mailed to the address you include on your graduation application. If your mailing address changes after you have submitted your graduation application, be sure to update us at
Keep in mind that if you are walking in Commencement, you will not receive your official diploma at the ceremony. You will receive your diploma within 6-8 weeks of completing your degree requirements. Please keep in mind that instructors have up to two (2) weeks to submit final grades after the term concludes.Diplomas are mailed to the address you include on your graduation application. If your mailing address changes after you have submitted your graduation application, be sure to update us at graduation@online.berklee.edu Keep in mind that if you are walking in Commencement, you will not receive your official diploma at the ceremony.
Transfer Credits
Can I find out how many transfer credits I am eligible for before I apply to the degree program? If you are interested in applying to the Bachelor of Professional Studies degree program and would like an estimate of the amount of transfer credit you would receive, you can request an unofficial transfer evaluation by emailing a copy of your transcript(s) to the Berklee Online Transfer Team at transfer@online.berklee.edu. Be sure to include your name, major of interest, and any additional questions you may have. You can expect to receive your assessment within 7-10 business days.
I didn’t receive credit on my Official Evaluation for all of the courses that I thought I would. What should I do? The earlier you contact us with questions or concerns regarding your evaluation, the easier it will be for us to address any issues. Therefore, it is very important when you first receive your official transfer evaluation that you review the information carefully.
If you notice a remaining requirement that you believe you’ve already fulfilled, first consult our document on Common Reasons Credit Does Not Transfer. It’s possible that the course you are thinking of didn’t meet our eligibility requirements.
If none of those exclusions apply, please fill out a Transfer Credit Equivalency Re-evaluation form for the courses you wish to have reconsidered.
Sometimes, we are not able to locate specific information for a course online and we are not able to determine an equivalency, but we are always happy to review additional material which will help us make that determination.
Do my Berklee Online, Berklee campus, or Prior Learning Credit coursework count towards the 60 transfer credit limit? No, credits completed at Berklee or through the prior learning process do not count towards the 60 transfer credit limit. This maximum is for credit-bearing exams and undergraduate-level coursework completed externally.
What is a credit deficiency and why do I need to make up credit? Credit deficiencies are caused by transferring a course that is less than three (3) credits to fulfill a three (3) credit Berklee Online requirement. Students with a credit deficiency will be short of the minimum number of credits required to graduate once they have completed their program requirements. In order to be eligible to graduate, you will need to make up the credits you are deficient in.
While the Transfer Team does their best to avoid giving students credit deficiencies, it is not always possible. You can make up the credits you are deficient in by completing additional Berklee Online coursework, by applying for prior learning credit, or by completing additional external coursework in the area in which you are deficient.
Note all external courses will first need to be approved by the Transfer Team.
Can transfer credit fulfill prerequisites? It depends. Generally, transfer credit cannot be used to fulfill prerequisites unless we determine that the course you completed is a direct equivalent to one of the courses we offer at Berklee Online. Keep in mind that there are some courses which require you to pass a placement exam. For these you will need to achieve a passing grade on the test to fulfill the prerequisite, otherwise you will need to complete the appropriate Berklee Online course.
Can I transfer credits to Berklee Online after I have started the degree program? Yes, you can. To determine if the coursework you already completed or are considering taking is eligible to fulfill your remaining degree requirements, contact the Transfer Team at transfer@online.berklee.edu
I am a Berklee campus student. Can I transfer courses from Berklee Online to my campus-based program?
For additional questions about transferring courses from Berklee Online to Berklee's campus programs please contact the campus transcript evaluator at View a list of transferable courses to Berklee’s campus programs.For additional questions about transferring courses from Berklee Online to Berklee's campus programs please contact the campus transcript evaluator at transfercredits@berklee.edu
Are Berklee Online courses transferable to other institutions? Berklee Online is regionally accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, the same association that accredits our main campus and other leading academic institutions such as Harvard University and MIT. Our courses are transferable to other institutions, but it's up to the receiving institution to decide the number and types of courses that may transfer. We recommend getting a course pre-approved by an institution before enrolling.
Tuition
How do Berklee Online’s costs compare to other education options? Berklee Online’s programs have a tuition cost that is approximately 64 percent less than on-campus tuition at Berklee’s Boston campus. Moreover, a recent study revealed that the average annual tuition at for-profit colleges is more than twice as expensive as Berklee Online. Even average annual tuition at other accredited non-profit online universities is roughly $11,000 more expensive than tuition for a year with Berklee Online!
How much does a certificate program cost? There is a one time $175 registration fee per certificate program. Students may either pay per course term (at the $1,497 per credit course cost) or pay in full to receive a 10 percent discount. The registration fee and all courses for the term you wish to begin in must be paid in full in order to begin.
How much does an online Bachelor’s degree cost? Online undergraduate degree tuition is $59,160 for 120 credits for all majors except the guitar major. Tuition for the guitar major is $63,660. Students taking 10 courses per year can complete the degree in four years at a cost of $14,790 per year. (Note: Tuition and fees are subject to change.)
How much does an online master's degree cost? Online graduate degree tuition is $33,120 for 36 credits. The Master of Music in Music Production and Master of Arts in Music Business programs are designed to be completed in one year of study. Both programs are comprised of 12 three-credit courses that can be taken during four 12-week semesters.Five star Danish badminton players and Olympic medallists have been thrown out of Denmark’s national team due to issues relating to sponsorship obligations.
Mathias Boe and Carsten Mogensen, the men’s doubles silver medallists at the 2012 Olympic Games, mixed-doubles duo Christinna Pedersen and Joachim Fischer, themselves 2012 Olympic bronze winners and Kamilla Rytter Juhl were the five ousted stars.
Cookie crumbling
The five players are all sponsored by the Danish cookie producer Kjeldsen Cookies and always play with the company’s logo on their kit. But the problem is that the national badminton association Badminton Danmark has a sponsorship agreement with competitor Danisa Cookies.
“We all have a personal sponsorship with Kjeldsen butter cookies, which we have had for the last two years,” Juhl said on Facebook. “In that agreement, it says we can’t represent any of Kjeldsen’s competitors, but since they only have very few, we couldn’t see any problems in that.”
“But now the association has signed a deal with Kjeldsen’s only competitor Danisa, whose only motive is to damage Kjeldsen, as the two are involved in a lawsuit against one another.”
According to Juhl, the players offered to play without sponsorship names on their clothing and even offered to compensate the association themselves.There are so many of us living in the constant pain of CRPS (Complex Regional Pain Syndrome), which sits at the very pinnacle of the McGill Pain Index. There is no way to describe it, I know that I never would have believed such an illness existed, much less believe the sheer ignorance on it by medical professionals despite it’s all-pervading grip on everything in a patient’s life.
How is Complex Regional Pain Syndrome treated?
As pain involves the whole person and because CRPS is so much more than ‘just’ pain, to get the best outcomes for you and your symptoms, treatments and management usually require a combination of the following approaches:
Successful treatment of RSD/CRPS is dependent on:
Early diagnosis. If diagnosed early, the prognosis is very good.
Begin treatment of the RSD/CRPS process. The key approach is to provide enough pain relief in order to undertake rehabilitation, though it is obviously still going to be painful (slight understatement!). However in spite of this being a very reasonable goal, it is sadly so frequently not met, with thousands of CRPS patients being under-treated and facing far greater challenges than they already do.
. The primary aim is to restore function. This is crucial in increasing and maintaining mobility but must be paced and the increase in movements very gentle, very slowly (to avoid flaring-up), and inside your personal limitations. To read more on this, visit the page on Pain Pacing here.
Movement is vital. If you do not move, even if it is as humble as wiggling your toes regularly, your muscles will weaken, causing further problems and pain, and the body, which is designed to move, is at greater risk for other complications. Many patients find that exercises in warm water are far less painful. The water itself is soothing, supportive and also has the added benefit of reducing allodynia, which is the pain caused by innocuous stimuli.
If newly diagnosed, it is vital to control pain so that pain pathways in the brain do not become maladaptively rewired, making recovery even more difficult. The process by which pain becomes chronic is only hampered by excessive stimulation of your CNS so do everything you can to be proactive, no matter how seemingly impossible, not to mention excruciating the rehabilitation process is.
The process by which pain becomes chronic is only hampered by excessive stimulation of your CNS so do everything you can to be proactive, no matter how seemingly impossible, not to mention excruciating the rehabilitation process is. Techniques to calm your SNS (sympathetic nervous system) become vital, as does having a basic knowledge of brain retraining techniques. Though I will expand more on this in a separate post.
Stimulus = Pain
The brain behaves a little like a faulty and hyperactive car alarm in CRPS, thinking that everything is dangerous, in turn sending its vicious pain signals at the most innocuous of stimuli. Sound, vibration, even a breeze can send our pain levels soaring so ensuring that your environment is as calm and quiet as possible has a huge effect on your levels of pain and other ANS symptoms.
This is of course ever so hard to convey to healthy people, who have a tendency to think they know best or that “it can’t be that bad,” but it is. The perplexing symptoms of CRPS are incredibly real to us and without the luxury of denial, unless we are allowed the space and grace for our over-stimulated systems to calm and settle a little, it becomes hard simply interacting with others who do not grant you the quiet and non-stimulating environment you need to manage your CRPS.
With central sensitisation being an added cause of increased pain, allodynia and hyperalgesia, limiting stimulus becomes a vital part of coping and managing your pain levels. Using an eye-mask, listening to the ocean waves or brainwaves can be soothing too, can help you calm your over active sympathetic nervous system.
Retraining the Brain
In healthy bodies there is mental map of where the body is in space and this allows us to function without having to check where we put our hand to pick up a glass or which is the left or right hand. This ability can be lost in CRPS and this altered function seems to be part of the reason that pain persists in CRPS. The Graded Motor Imagery program helps you to re-train the recognition of where the body is in space. For more information about GMI, also an app that you can use to train on your mobile (cell) phone, even from your bed, visit the GMI website here.
GMI and Mirror Therapy
Mirror therapy can help in the early stages of CRPS. This procedure aims to “teach” the brain that the limb where pain is being felt is actually OK, that is, not dangerous or cause for alarm. In CRPS normal inputs such as touch, stroking and movement are misinterpreted as painful.
This ongoing “painful” interpretation is a big part of the problem. With the brain perceiving everything is dangerous, even the most innocuous of stimuli causes and exacerbates our pain.
With mirror therapy, a potent part of GMI, a mirror is set up between the limbs so that the affected one is hidden, but the mirror image of the unaffected limb looks like the one that is in such intense pain. Both limbs are moved gently but the CRPS one is hidden and the brain “sees” what looks like the painful limb working, without pain, and in turn “learns” that it can be moved without harm, see mirror therapy for more information.
Graded Motor Imagery is showing great promise, even in long-term cases of CRPS. Do be aware that it can momentarily increase the pain in some patients but that this evolves into lower pain levels and increased function. GMI helps you to re-train the brain to behave more normally, less reactively, and this has been found to help decrease pain and improve mobility.
Mirrors may be used for a variety of pain and disabilities but especially involving the hands and feet, with many patients, including CRPS warriors and angels, gaining pain-relief and improved movement by using a mirror. Be warned that it can worsen before improving.
What else could I do at home?
For GMI, you could browse through the internet or a magazine and look at pictures of hands and feet and work out which is right and left.
Imagining movements or your CRPS limb by using certain postures or positions – Imagery is a great way of ‘exercising’ the mind/brain using a progressive approach. This approach reduces the chance of pain flares and helps you make better progress.
De-sensitise your CRPS-affected limb(s)/areas by using a flannel in the bath; gently move it over the area and keep affirming that “this is just a soft flannel” – although the research is yet to conclude on this, it has had positive reports of it helping patients.
Mobilisation, Gentle Movement and Mindful Exercise
Physical therapy to maintain flexibility, strength, and range of motion is important but find out your pacing limitations for each activity and build up very slowly to avoid and set-back or falre-up, and never exceed those limitations. Not using an affected limb can result in atrophy and eventually not being able to use the limb.
It’s crucial to undertake rehabilitation, though it is obviously painful, unless restoring function can occur, the CRPS can worsen. I understand. It’s excruciating. The last thing you want to do is move. It can feel like walking on burning broken glass when you have CRPS/RSD in your foot/feet, or burning-iced limbs, no one would move with that. But the vital thing to consider, and the thing I want you to avoid at all costs, is to not move at all as this will worsen everything.
It’s a delicate and difficult balance of moving enough but not moving too much. There are and will be times when you flare and are stuck but during rehabilitation, take it very slowly. In those early stages and months of CRPS, even wiggling your toes or fingers (depending on where it is or begins) is excruciating yet it can be the start of your rehabilitation and increasing your mobility again. So wiggle those toes.
With thousands of CRPS patients being under-treated and facing far greater challenges than they already do, so many do not receive adequate treatment. Another thing that helps me personally and something I will expand on in a post of its own is baths and exercises that you can do – very gentle exercises – I tend to call it mindful movement as exercise conjures up the wrong image.
If you do not move, your muscles will weaken, causing further problems and pain. For pain relief, to reduce stiffness, increase circulation, ease movement and regain a good sense of your body are all important in maintenance and rehabilitation but also if you need to spend a long time in bed or resting due to high pain levels, see Pain-Relief and Coping for Severe Pain.
To mobilise tight & stiff body regions and develop control of movement; gradually progress from just a couple of repetitions (see a physical therapist for guidance on how to strengthen muscles and rehabilitate). Progressively build up your tolerance slowly, this is vital. To begin you may only do two repetitions of an exercise and that is fine. Consistent and slow is far better than pushing through and causing a flare and therefore set-back in progress.
Always keep within your limitations, increasing your timed activity very gradually. For example, tai chi can be done in a chair, also see this seated tai chi routine here; restorative or therapeutic yoga is incredibly gentle or even mindful and gentle movements in the bath can help reduce your pain and increase muscle mass and strength.
Swimming/aqua physio is also immensely helpful with RSD/CRPS. Also read: 3 Natural Ways to Reduce and Manage Your Pain and see Natural Therapies to Ease Chronic Pain.
Graded Exposure & Pacing
There are often particular activities that are challenging, painful and sometimes avoided for fear of causing damage or harm. You can use pacing to gradually re-engage with some of these activities. Pacing means that you set a baseline and work towards your goals, see the Pain Management page for more information. You may also enjoy this useful piece that shows you how to desensitise using epsom salts and bathing.
Mindfulness & focused attention training
Mindfulness can have profound ways on your relationship with your pain. Also as a way of reducing the emotional aspects of pain. Mindfulness helps us to respond skilfully to the inevitable physical suffering that comes with being in bodies when we have CRPS/RSD.
Our habitual reaction to physical discomfort is some form of resistance and aversion, leading to increased frustration or anger and therefore increased pain. In practicing mindfulness, the habitual response is replaced with one that’s more skilful.
For example, if we’re suddenly in increased pain, we can let the habitual response of anger or frustration brew and increase, which increases our mental suffering and physical pain too because the muscles surrounding the pain tighten in response to our frustration. Mindfulness offers many other benefits too. Click here for an example of one of the mindfulness techniques.
Brain-Focused Strategies
Modern neuroscience has transformed the entire view of how our brains work and are affected by chronic pain. With new ways of approaching pain though our understanding of the brain in chronic pain, alongside what we now know about the heightened responses of CRPS – which drastically alters the way our body processes pain, as well as function pf the sympathetic nervous system – we can target the adaptations and changes using particular types of sensory and motor training. For example, the graded motor imagery program and tactile discrimination training.
Ways To Train Your Brain
Visualisation – Increasing research suggests that visualization of an activity and the action of that activity is processed in the same way in the brain. Because your brain knows no difference, this may be a very useful tool in retraining the brain.
– Increasing research suggests that visualization of an activity and the action of that activity is processed in the same way in the brain. Because your brain knows no difference, this may be a very useful tool in retraining the brain. Relaxation (including mindfulness and meditation) – It quiets an overactive brain, which offers your mind an opportunity to refresh, even imagine desired outcomes, such as visualising you walking – a powerful technique because as far as your brain is concerned, the same areas light up as if you were actually walking. Although research is in its infancy, even 5 minutes a day of visualisation can help. It also reduces stress-related brain chemicals and increase nourishing brain chemicals.
(including mindfulness and meditation) – It quiets an overactive brain, which offers your mind an opportunity to refresh, even imagine desired outcomes, such as visualising you walking – a powerful technique because as far as your brain is concerned, the same areas light up as if you were actually walking. Although research is in its infancy, even 5 minutes a day of visualisation can help. It also reduces stress-related brain chemicals and increase nourishing brain chemicals. Nutrition and Rest – How well you eat and how much you sleep will positively affect your brain’s ability to function but it’s not always so simple. Read When Pain Interrupts Your Sleep. I will cover more on nutrition and pain in a separate post.
– How well you eat and how much you sleep will positively affect your brain’s ability to function but it’s not always so simple. Read When Pain Interrupts Your Sleep. I will cover more on nutrition and pain in a separate post. Psychological techniques – Keeping your mind as at ease as possible is crucial in managing such high levels of constant pain. Read: How to Use Pain Psychology Techniques to Reduce Anxiety, Depression, Anger and Guilty and also see: How to Cope and Heal Depression When You Have Chronic Pain and illness
– Keeping your mind as at ease as possible is crucial in managing such high levels of constant pain. Read: How to Use Pain Psychology Techniques to Reduce Anxiety, Depression, Anger and Guilty and also see: How to Cope and Heal Depression When You Have Chronic Pain and illness Laughter makes your brain increase production of serotonin and dopamine, both neurotransmitters play a massive part in mood and also your pain. Read more here: Why Laughter is the Best Medicine When You Live in Pain.
makes your brain increase production of serotonin and dopamine, both neurotransmitters play a massive part in mood and also your pain. Read more here: Why Laughter is the Best Medicine When You Live in Pain. Stimulation – Choosing activities that make you feel good, whether active or passive activities, reinforces the neuronal pathways. Novelty and focus (attention) is another big factor in creating and reenforcing neural pathways, and retraining your brain.
– Choosing activities that make you feel good, whether active or passive activities, reinforces the neuronal pathways. Novelty and focus (attention) is another big factor in creating and reenforcing neural pathways, and retraining your brain. Mindful Movement, as detailed above, is a fantastic way to train your brain.
Imagery & visualisation
Motor imagery is used as part of the graded motor imagery programme and as a stand alone brain focused training. When we think about movement, the same areas of the brain are active as when we actually move. So if we imagine ourselves walking, running, moving in any way at all, the areas of our brain involved in executing those movements, lights up as if we are actually performing them.
Using this physiology within the cortical network allows us to re-train normal movement (how the brain plans and then executes precise and well controlled actions) at the early stages of rehabilitation. Visualisation is a way of changing the body physiology in a positive manner thereby benefiting the physical self, mood and creating a positive context for rehabilitation.
It is also a wonderful way to help you manage the intense pain. Escape wherever you wish to. Put headphones in, listen to calming music or guided meditations, or simply the ocean waves and pretend you are on a hot beach in the sun.
You can do anything or be anything you please in this clandestine world. Imagine you are walking along a wooden pathway by the tropical sea, or through a bluebell-ladden wood. The [inner] world is your oyster.
Living with CRPS is hard. Escaping to paradise, whatever your personal paradise may be, is healing, nurturing. Anything that helps you cope and reduces the pain, both physical and psychological, is crucial. So escape. Give yourself a gift and try visualisation.
Useful Links for Patients
Here are some incredibly useful links. The first is a link to the RSDSA, the second was compiled by friend and fellow CRPS warrior, Elle and the Autognome: CRPS FAQ This comprehensive and regularly updated list is a fantastic resource for both patients and caregivers/loved-ones of patients.
Facebook offers some unparalleled info, support too of course, for patients. In fact, this blog started out as a Facebook page and grew from there. I think all of you should head to a like this instant (no pressure) to: RSD/CRPS Research and Developments, an unbiased research page run by patient and superstar, Sandra. Also, the miracle that is Marie aka Elle and the Autognome has a wonderful page, especially for the dysautomnia info, which is hard to find: Elle and the Auto Gnome (Living with RSD / CRPS & Dysautonomia). Biowizardry combines CRPS info and experience with the wonder that is Isabel, patient and scientist. Taming of the Beast is the Facebook page for the website mentioned above and also a resource for natural healing and alternative health (created by a CRPS warrior/angel).
CRPS UK Clinical Research Network, RSD Hope, Complex Regional Pain Syndrome – New Zealand, International Research Foundation for RSD/CRPS, a.k.a. International Foundation for CRPS & RSD, a.k.a. RSD Foundation, Women in Pain.
Read A Letter to Those Who Do Not Have CRPS/RSD here.
It would also be a fine time to mention the awareness tee-shirts and other items on the CRPS, Art & Spirit Cafepress shop, which you can purchase directly here. All of the proceeds go straight to the charity, which is involved in sharing information and knowledge with those who need it to help bridge the gap between doctors and patients. If you can’t find what you’re looking for in the shop then let the CRPS, Art & Spirit team know here because they may well be able to rustle up a design at your request.
There is a drive to get information to doctors on the Facebook page CRPS Research and Developments, so pop in online and ask for a postcard or two to drop in for your doctors to read. This is important. So very important. So many lives are lost to CRPS each year, and if we wait for the general medical field to catch up with the specialist research it will be too long. Too late for another soul who found that their safety net was missing because CRPS was not understood.
Natural Therapies and Techniques
Hyperbaric Oxygen therapy had has amazing results with CRPS, even in long-term CRPS and is especially useful as no painful manipulation is applied.
Acupuncture can be helpful at all stages of CRPS, not just for pain but for side-effects from medication and overall well-being. However, it can be difficult to find an acupuncturist who is knowledgeable [or gentle] enough with regard to managing CRPS. Asking for extra fine needles can make a huge difference. Never needle the epicentre of where the CRPS began as it can cause a flare-up of symptoms.
Myofascial Release taken slowly and gently on the body in long-term CRPS (avoiding parts of the body that are too painful, hyperalgesic or allodynic), can be immensely healing body work, especially if you have been bed-bound or sedentary due to your pain, as it can help you recondition your body and lengthen your muscles and fascia.
Using a transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation machine (TENS) can help confuse the pain signals, thus reducing them and is a helpful aid.
Practicing Mindfulness and meditation can help ease some of the symptoms and help the patient relax, in turn reducing pain.
SCENAR therapy has helped some patients improve their mobility but can be expensive with a therapist. Investing in your own unit can cost from £400 but with each therapist treatment being £40-60, it is comparatively better value.
Effective sympathetic blocks have helped some patients by blocking nerve impulses with anaesthetic agents used in severe pain. Blocks may provide permanent or temporary relief. They do not, however, help once the pain becomes sympathetically independent, which tends to be within the first three years but varies from patient to patient.
Hydrotherapy and aqua therapies can help CRPS patients immensely. See this video for CRPS and aqua physiotherapy:
One particularly healing therapy is Watsu, which not only relieves pain and increases flexibility, it is also incredibly relaxing and calming to the nervous system. Personally, it’s the finest of all therapies in terms of both easing pain, soothing the mind and offering much-needed tranquillity to the spirit. Watch this calming video:
Sign-up and receive a free flare-up toolkit and regular posts and tips on living – and coping – with severe pain and chronic illness ♥
Also see the main page on Complex Regional Pain Syndrome here.
Click here for a free pamphlet on CRPS from the National Health Institute.Following Saturday’s blowout win over Sky Blue FC, the Orlando Pride have finally jumped into a National Women’s Soccer League playoff spot. But the club knows that there is still a lot of work to be done in order to hold onto it during the final six games of the season.
“It’s really exciting. I think we’ve been fighting for a long time to get there and it feels rewarding to finally be in that position,” Pride forward Jasmyne Spencer said Tuesday. “But at the same time, we know that there’s still six games left and it’s gonna be a dog fight to stay in there, so we celebrated the last couple days but back to work today.”
The Pride are coming off one of their toughest weeks of the season. They played three games in seven days and were able to keep their playoff hopes alive by coming away from those matches with seven points.
The team is happy that last week is behind them, but the players are not ready to relax and are pushing to jump higher in the table.
“We’re not gonna get complacent, we’re not content with where we are. We want to make a run and finish as high up on the table as we can,” Spencer said. “We know we have tough games to finish up the season so we’re gonna try and get the job done so it doesn’t come down to the last couple of games.”
The Pride played their best game of the season on Saturday and know that they will need to try to replicate that performance in order to stay in playoff contention.
“We really showcased a complete game the last time we played. We’ve had games where we’ve fallen to 20-minute slumps or 15-minute slumps and we give up a goal in that time and then we’re battling back,” midfielder Dani Weatherholt said. “I think having that complete 90-minute game, where everyone contributes and does their role well, I think that’s what we need to keep perfecting.”
Evans missed
When midfielder Maddy Evans subbed on for Weatherholt on Saturday to play the final minutes of her professional career, the moment meant a lot to both players.
“Really special moment, because my very first professional game, I subbed in for Maddy in Portland,” Weatherhold said. “So when she got to sub in for me for her very last game, she’s always been like a big role model to me, so it was a huge moment. I mean you saw by the crowd’s response. She’s a special person.”
Tuesday’s training session was the first day for the Pride without Evans and her presence has already been missed.
“She’s so |
Twitter | Like Cartilage Free Captain on FacebookImage caption A lavish advertising campaign has preceded the launch
Samsung is set to launch a device in its flagship premium smartphone range, expected to be named the Galaxy S4.
It follows the S3, a handset that has sold more than 40 million units. The Galaxy handsets are seen as the closest competitor to Apple's iPhone.
Analysts predict software that tracks where users are looking and automatically scrolls down the page as it is read, without it being touched.
There is also expected to be a souped-up camera and processor.
But crucial to Samsung's future success, analysts say, is how the South Korean company plans to turn its strong position in the smartphone market into greater success with other devices such as tablets.
Prior to Thursday's launch in New York, Samsung has unleashed a huge advertising campaign, including a series of videos involving a small boy tasked with looking after a "top secret" box.
Heavy customisation
Like the S3, the S4 is expected to run on Google's Android operating system - but analysts are predicting some heavy customisation from Samsung in order to give the device a more distinctive feel and, crucially, set it apart from its competitors' Android-based handsets.
This is important, says Gartner analyst Roberta Cozza, if Samsung is to gain a higher level of loyalty to its device range.
Unlike with Apple, where a large number of iPhone owners gravitate towards the iPad when they decide to purchase a tablet, the same cannot be said of other brands, where customers are more likely to mix and match.
Image caption The Samsung Galaxy range consists of tablets and mid-sized "phablets" as well as smartphones
"We will see more of a step towards more'stickiness' towards the brand," Ms Cozza says.
"Already the Galaxy S3 can be seen as an alternative to the iPhone, [but] the integration that Apple offers with iPad is still not matched. Samsung is not there."
The expectation the S4 will feature eye-tracking capability has been heightened by existing technology in the Galaxy S3 - the phone's Smart Stay function stops the screen from dimming when somebody is looking at it.
Furthermore, the New York Times notes that Samsung filed for a couple of trademarks this year named "Eye Scroll" and "Eye Pause".
Analysts also predict the standard array of upgrades - faster processor, better camera - and Ms Cozza predicts we will see something of a small leap in a major area of Samsung's expertise.
"I would think they will leverage some strength in display," she says. "Providing something on the display side that is different."
Supposed leaked images of the phone show a device that is slightly bigger than the S3, but largely the same in appearance.
Another company relying on the S4 to follow successfully in the S3's footsteps is Google.
Its Android software is used by more smartphone users than's Apple's iOS - but makes less money from apps and other related products.
Of the Android crowd, Samsung is streets ahead in market share, making more than 60% of all Android smartphones sold.
Some analysts believe this dominance could lead to Samsung looking at how it can assert far more control over the operating system - perhaps in a way similar to Amazon which, with its Kindle tablets, launched its own curated app store for its users to buy from instead of Google's default shop.
Image caption More than 60% of Google Android-powered smartphones are made by Samsung
As well as cutting out Google's share of the app sale, a curated store also allows for applications designed specifically for a certain device, rather than the largely one-size-fits-all situation in the Google Play store.
Ovum's principal device analyst, Tony Cripps, says Samsung needs to take these steps if it is to fend off the threat from other hardware manufacturers such as Chinese firm Huawei.
"While Samsung continues to grow its shipments impressively, the company undermines its own position in the broader ecosystem by providing Google a huge mobile platform from which to influence consumers, application developers and advertisers," he says.
"It is very difficult for Samsung to achieve that level of influence itself while it depends on Google to supply device software and key applications and services through Android.
"Lacking a powerful ecosystem of its own clearly positions the company lower down in the value chain than either Google or Apple."
With Apple suffering from a dipped share price, and a few recent missteps with product launches, the time is perhaps ripe for Samsung to pile pressure on the iPhone-maker.
"It is a important device for them because they have got to a point where they are competing head-to-head with Apple, creating a lot of expectation," says Gartner's Ms Cozza.
"All eyes are on this device now."Mrs Griffin, described as a "good mum and a lovely person", had separated from her husband of 18 years whe she was accused of sexual activity with a child in 2012. She was finally found not guilty by a jury in 2014.
Sheila Noakes, her grandmother, told the hearing: "Although she was found not guilty, she could never talk about it.
"It also had an effect in terms of her family arrangements because around this time Chris was given temporary custody of the children. Chris got custody because the children had to be with him and it was not Sheila's fault.
"As a result of Chris getting full custody Sheila began to drink more and take painkillers. After that Sheila had difficulties maintaining contact with the children. Chris made it really hard for her. The most obvious trigger was when she had contact with her ex husband and she would go on a real downer."
She added: "She loved her children very much, it was heartbreaking for her family and friends to see her trying to cope without having her children around her. She is very much missed by all of the family."
Passing a conclusion of suicide, assistant coroner, Peter Sigee said: "I'm satisfied Sheila acted with the intention of ending her own life. Please let me express my condolences and sympathies to all family and friends. I hope it may prove to be a stepping stone on the road to coming to terms with her death."
The Samaritans can be called free any time from any phone on 116 123.(Reuters) - The Church of England published a plan on Friday to approve the ordination of women bishops by 2015, a widely supported reform it just missed passing last November after two decades of divisive debate.
It said the new plan, outlined in a document signed by Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby and Archbishop of York John Sentamu, would be presented to the General Synod, the Church legislature, in July to begin the approval process.
The proposal would make allowances for traditionalists who oppose women clergy, a minority that blocked the reform at the last Synod meeting, but each diocese will have to have a bishop willing to ordain women to the priesthood, it said.
The issue pits reformers, keen to project a more modern and egalitarian image of the church as it struggles with falling congregations in many increasingly secular countries, against a minority of conservatives who see the change as contradicting the Bible.
“We are perhaps at a moment when the only way forward is one which makes it difficult for anyone to claim outright victory,” said Bishop Nigel Stock, chairman of the working group drawing up new proposals after the reform’s defeat last November.
“The Church of England should retain its defining characteristic of being a broad Church, capable of accommodating a wide range of theological conviction,” he said in a statement.
The mother church to the world’s 80 million Anglicans was thrown into turmoil when the reform won 73 percent support but failed because it fell four votes short in the House of Laity.
Legislation needs a two-thirds majority in the Synod’s houses of bishops, clergy and laity to pass. Because of the legislative process, Synod members had said it would take five years before the reform could come up for another vote.
“WILFULLY BLIND”
“It seems as if we are wilfully blind to some of the trends and priorities of... wider society,” outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said at the time.
A Sunday Times survey in March showed 80 percent of those polled favoured allowing women to become bishops and almost 50 percent thought the Church was wrong to oppose British government plans to legalise same-sex marriage.
The Church approved the ordination of women priests in 1992, but delayed making them bishops because of opposition within its previously all-male clergy. Bishops play a key role in many Christian churches where only they can ordain new clergy.
Women already serve as Anglican bishops in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States, but Anglican churches in many developing countries oppose any female clergy and are working together to shield themselves against such reforms.
Several Protestant denominations allow women clergy, including bishops, but the largest Christian churches - the Roman Catholics and the Orthodox - do not. The Church of England decided to allow celibate gay bishops in January, earning stinging criticism from traditionalist African Anglican leaders.
The new plan would allow conservative bishops to continue in office while opposing women’s ordination, but said “there should no longer be any dioceses where none of the serving bishops ordains women as priests.”
It also suggested that future appointments might be influenced by a bishop’s views on women clergy, saying that “many dioceses will want to insist that their diocesan bishop should be someone who ordains women”.There are very few shows on Broadway at the moment where you can take one step into the theatre and feel completely immersed in the story. But that is exactly what happens at the Imperial Theatre, which has now been completely transformed into a Russian cabaret, complete with old portraits hanging from floor to ceiling, vibrant red drapes and chandeliers that resemble comets. As you grab your seat, you find yourself in front of a runway with an end table to your right or sitting on the stage itself. Everyone is buzzing with excitement in anticipation of the show beginning. They know something special is about to happen, but they don’t know exactly what.
What they are about to experience is “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812.” Directed by Rachel Chavkin, this musical takes Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” and presents it as it has never been seen before. Starring Josh Groban as Pierre and Denée Benton as Natasha, this musical is a whirlwind of everything a great musical should have. The show is beautifully romantic, innovative and exciting, all with a score to match. It’s no surprise that this is one of the most talked-about new musicals on Broadway.
The man behind this entrancing show is Dave Malloy. He wrote the music, lyrics, book and orchestrations. He even played Pierre in the Off-Broadway production at Ars Nova. Malloy was gracious enough to take some time to speak to us about the show.
MY LATEST VIDEOS MY LATEST VIDEOS
Theatre Nerds: I went to your panels at BroadwayCon, so I just wanted to rehash a little bit. How did you first get into songwriting?
MY LATEST VIDEOS
Dave Malloy: I was super active in music ever since I was a kid. My parents forced me to take piano when I was seven, or something like that. They forced me to take it for a year, and then after that, I just loved it. I was also lucky to have a high school with an amazing music program, so I guess the first writing I did was in high school. And I was in the choir, the jazz choir, the jazz band and the barbershop quartet. I think some of the first things I ever wrote were for choir and barbershop quartet, so I did that stuff in high school.
TN: Did you always want to go into music as a profession?
DM: I knew that I always wanted to do music. I went to college and studied music composition there. But honestly, theatre really crept up on me. After college, I was working in a record store and playing in a bunch of bands, and this guy at the record store said he needed a keyboard player for a theatre show he was doing. I said, “Oh sure, that sounds fun.” I really had not had theatre on my mind at all. And just from that one show, the director asked me to do her next show. Then an actor asked me to do his next show. And suddenly I found myself doing all this theatre, and I found that I loved it. For me, it was the perfect venue to get some of my musical ideas out into the world. A lot of my musical ideas were theatrical, and I’ve always been obsessed with storytelling, and it was the perfect mixture of the two. It’s amazing it took me so long to figure that out.
As far as writing musical theatre, that also kind of crept up on me. I was doing a lot of experimental, sort of downtown, black-box theatre. This was when I was first really starting. First, I was doing a lot of experimental soundscapes and underscoring a weird electronic music under shows. And just little by little, I would start to write a song here or there. One show I wrote one song, the next show I wrote two songs, then I wrote four songs. Little by little, I was writing full musicals. I was like, alright, I guess I do musical theatre now. So yeah, it just crept up on me, and I’m so glad that it did.
TN: I read that you had read “War and Peace” while on a cruise ship traveling around the world. What resonated with you the most in this novel that made you feel like this should probably be a musical?
DM: For me, the thing that most resonates in the novel is the character of Pierre. So many people I know have said this about Pierre: He is such a social misfit. He feels so uncomfortable around people and even in his own body. He is just a profoundly awkward person. And yet at the same time, he’s a profoundly beautiful person. He just sees so much love and meaning in the world, but has a hard time understanding how to access it for himself. And I find that a really meaningful and beautiful struggle, something I relate to personally. Sometimes I have a hard time talking to grownups. Ever since I was a kid, I have never moved past that feeling. I feel like it’s a very Pierre sort of feeling. When he goes to these parties, he just has no idea how he acts towards other people.
He’s constantly searching, too. He’s constantly reading philosophy and religion, and he tries out all these different things to try to find some kind of meaning to his life. It’s a journey that takes him the whole novel. Even by the end of it, he isn’t really there. At the end of the novel, he and Natasha end up together, and even then, he’s only somewhat happy. He’s married, has a kid and is somewhat happy. There’s still a little bit of something gnawing at him. Ad he’ll die with that still going on, and that really moves me a lot.
TN: Given that it’s such a long novel, why did you choose to focus on this 70-page section that serves as the plot for the musical?
DM: This particular section is kind of the turning point for both Pierre and Natasha, who are the novel’s two central characters. I love how Tolstoy put these two moments of their lives in parallel with each other. The fact that they don’t intersect until the very end, and that the intersection is a profoundly moving moment for both of them, that structure just appealed to me. It felt like a musical. I feel like a lot of musicals seem to have that structure, of two stories running along in parallel that intersect at various times. And I loved the fact that one of the stories in this section wasn’t very “great romantic.” It’s almost like a trashy romance novel in some ways, like those very tumultuous love affair stories. But then this other story is a very philosophical story. I love the idea of putting those two things on top of each other.
And I find that moment at the end when they do meet, like in the book, I just find it such a beautiful and moving moment. And then Pierre seeing the comet, of course. That is one of my favorite paragraphs in all of literature.
TN: That moment when Natasha and Pierre do intersect in the show for the first time is very profound and meaningful. It works very well onstage.
DM: Josh Groban and Denée Benton are incredible in that scene, and then Rachel Chavkin’s staging is so beautiful. One of the things I really love about the show is it really rides this huge rollercoaster from incredibly intense, spectacle scenes where there are actors running around literally the entire theatre. But then the end of the show, it really boils down to these two characters. Everything becomes simplified, and they’re just standing on the stage. I think the staging of that scene is beautiful.
TN: When approaching writing the musical, what was the first songs you wrote for the show?
DM: I think the very first song I fully wrote was “Pierre,” for Pierre’s first big entrance. Because at the time, I was playing Pierre, so writing from my own voice was one of the easier things. That was the first song, and then it kind of set the tone for the rest of the show.
TN: Right, that song used to be the opening of the show. Then the “Prologue” was written later on, correct? That song definitely helps introduce the characters to the audience and helps you keep track of who’s who.
DM: Yeah, the prologue was one of the last songs to be written. I was very stubbornly holding out because I thought “Pierre” should be the first song. Then, all of my collaborators and people who were coming to the workshops were like, “I really think we would understand things better if we knew who all the characters were.” So I joke I wrote “Prologue” out of spite, but the song definitely works in the show.
TN: “Dust and Ashes” is one of my favorite songs from the show. I saw you had written this song as the production was heading to Broadway. What made you add this song to the show?
DM: After I had left the show and was no longer playing Pierre, I got to watch the show from the outside a little more. I felt like not having me in it, not having the composer play Pierre, I just became more aware of the fact that Pierre disappeared for a little too much of Act 1. Then, when we started talking to Josh Groban, it felt like such an incredible opportunity with him joining the show. I felt like, of course if Josh was joining the show, of course I need to write him this showstopping aria for him to use his instrument on. So when Josh came on board, it was such a gift for me as a composer to revisit that character and to kind of fill in some of the holes that were left in the original production. It’s at the point where I now can’t believe we ever did the show without that song.
TN: Given that there was so much to work with in the novel, were there any songs or scenes that did not make the show?
DM: Oh, totally. In the novel, Natasha’s father is in Moscow with them. But in adapting, you’re just trying to streamline things and make the storytelling as clear as possible. It just felt like for that, Marya D. was filling all the needs as an authority figure in Natasha’s life. There’s also an amazing bit in the novel about this French tutor who lives with the Bolkonskys. Her whole thing was amazing, but it got cut as well.
We just wanted to focus on Natasha and Pierre and what served their story best. Some of the characters, like particularly Bolkonsky and Helene, were kind of simplified a bit, just in the fact that what was important about those characters was how they serve the characters of Natasha and Pierre for this adaptation. In the novel, they’re richer and more fully developed characters. It would be amazing to do that, too, but there are only so many hours this show can be.
TN: I just have to talk about the set a little bit. I’ve never walked into a theatre and been immediately consumed into a whole new world. I feel like it was is an intimate experience for the audience. Was it always the plan to make this a very immersive show? I can’t imagine it otherwise.
DM: Absolutely. That was the design from the very beginning when we began at the Ars Nova, and that was an 87-seat theatre. Obviously with that small of a space, it was much simpler to make sure every audience member was having a one-on-one interaction with a cast member at some point and felt like they were in the middle of the action. It just felt like such a core and central part of our production. As we started looking at bigger spaces and started transferring from Off-Broadway to Broadway, the director, set designer and I just insisted that stay. We weren’t going to transform the show into a proscenium and non-show. It just felt against the DNA of the show we created. So, yeah, that was always a challenge.
It felt like, if we wanted to go to Broadway, how do we do that? Our scenic designer, Mimi Lien, looked at so many different theatres over the years. Mimi has set designs drawn on cocktail napkins for like 10 or 11 different Broadway theatres. We just always knew this was something we weren’t going to compromise on. We needed to move our production and keep that immersive setting, or we weren’t going to do it. It was never an option to change the show. I’m sure someday someone will make an amazing proscenium version of the show, and I totally support that. But for our production, it’s just such an integral part of it.
TN: After playing Pierre in all of the Off-Broadway productions, you are taking on the role again in the spring on Broadway. How do you feel about getting back into that role? Do you have a different mindset this time around?
DM: What’s so nice about this is the last time I played Pierre, it was also while we were opening the show Off-Broadway. I was also very much active as a writer, composer and orchestrator. I still had all those hats on while I was playing Pierre as well. It was a little hard spreading my energy amongst all those different departments. Now I get to step in and just focus on the acting and the singing, which will be so fun. I feel like I can really sink deeper into the role. And I get to learn this gigantic new song, and I’m really looking forward to working with Rachel on that. She is such an incredible director. She makes me such an incredible actor.
The other thing I’m looking so forward to is that I’m just so glad to go in now when the original cast is still there. I get to play alongside my old friends who have been with the show since Ars Nova. And I get to play alongside Denée, whom I adore. It will be such an honor to just perform with her. So yeah, I’m really looking forward to it. It’s going to be fantastic.
TN: Last, what do you want the audience to leave with after seeing this show?
DM: As a creator, I feel like that’s a dangerous question to have. If you’re trying to prescribe what the audience should feel, you’re probably going to fail. For me, it’s putting on something that’s as honest and joyful and is as pure to me and my collaborators as possible. I feel like putting that up is the goal. And audiences will take lots of different things away from it. I know some audiences walk away and are just so dazzled by the spectacle of it. Other audiences walk away just profoundly moved by the emotion and the characters and the journey they take. I feel like it can either be a very loud show or a really quiet show depending on the frame of mind when you see it.
What Malloy and the company of “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812” have captured onstage is truly magical. This is definitely a show you don’t want to miss.
Get tickets HERE
And, if you want to see Malloy as Pierre in his Broadway performing debut, check out the dates he’ll be performing HERE.THE vast Jehovah Witness UK headquarters under construction near Galleywood has been praised by a building watchdog.
Inspectors from the Considerate Constructors Scheme (CCS) – an independent building watchdog – have commended the International Bible Students Association (IBSA) for its presentation and working methods on the Temple Farm site.
The glowing report came as IBSA announced groundworks to the £150 million development will begin between September and December.
Once complete, it will provide homes for 1,200 Jehovah Witnesses across 16 five-storey blocks.
A large printing plant, offices, auditorium, health and fitness centre, water treatment plant and on-site parking for 1,040 vehicles are also in the pipeline.
Meanwhile, Temple Grove Park, which lies to the east of the site, is being remodelled to accommodate a wildflower meadow for residents to relax in.
In its latest newsletter, IBSA said it will continue to work hard until the project is complete.
“The report included the following observations.
“This is a very well presented site.
“Working methods are planned to minimise the impact of vibration, noise and dust as far as possible.
“The organisation looked for opportunities for training of female operatives.
“Eleven of the 15 heavy plant operators are female,” it said.
CCS awarded the site a total of 38 out of 50, before granting it a Certificate of Performance Beyond Compliance.
BT Openreach and a number of other companies have started work on road access into the site.
Temporary 40mph speed restrictions are in place along the B1007 near the Bakers Lane junction, which should last another four weeks.
The restrictions are due to the preparation of a new roundabout, pedestrian crossing, cycle path and bus shelters, recently approved by Essex Highways.
Earlier this year, IBSA representatives attended Stock and West Hanningfield Annual General Meetings, where they answered a series of questions regarding the development.
A spokesman said: "Feedback received from these meetings is of value to us, enabling us to address any concerns raised by those in the community."We like to start off each year tackling the big questions in game design. This year we’re going to look at fun and specifically the ideas that generate enjoyment in games. Our challenge is that no matter how much discussion we have, we’ll never come to a consensus on a definition of “fun”; we all enjoy different things and that is part of what makes this hobby so great. Fun is in the eye of the beholder and we won’t try to disturb this reality.
We still think there is an opportunity to look at lesser explored areas of gratification in games so this month we’re going to look at Satisfaction. These are tasks, ideas and emotions that can provide a sense of fulfillment in gaming even if it may not lead players on the gigantic roller-coasters and thrill-rides we might ordinarily identify as “fun”.
So what is the value in satisfaction? These are some basic building blocks that can lead to fun in games. Some of the examples we’ll talk about might even be exactly what you find fun in game and this is where personal preferences chime in. More than likely, I’ll be describing some of the things that break up the monotony of games you don’t like or bring a smile to your face even if you don’t ever want to play that game again.
When it comes down to it we think this categorization has merit because whether you love or hate games, there is a middle-ground to find appreciation for a well-designed or aesthetically pleasing game even if you and I don’t find it to be fun in any traditional sense.
What is Satisfaction?
When I think of satisfying tasks both inside and outside of gaming I think of completing a big project like a large area in Castles of Burgundy. I think of checking items off a list like developments in Roll Through the Ages. I think of barely pulling off a risky proposition like completing an entire column in a single turn of Can’t Stop.
These things don’t necessarily fill-up my metaphoric Fun-O-Meter on their own, but they are some of the little things that add to my appreciation for these games and contribute to my willingness to play again next time. Whatever the end result is, I can point at something and say “I built that“. Sometimes “that” ends up being my eleven tile unfinished city in Carcassonne, but still, it’s about the little things.
The Player Motivation Approach
One of our earliest articles applied David McClelland’s Need Theory as a way to describe what can motivate us as players and these motivations correspond quite closely to how much fulfillment we can receive from playing games. Three of the most common motivations we’ll find among gamers are the need for Power, the need for Affiliation and the need for Achievement.
Appeal to Power
There isn’t much quite like having a super power. At least that is what it can feel like when you get to have special authority in games. Maybe you get set limits on other players or maybe you get to choose the final outcome of a big decision. Players who are motivated by power enjoy observing their actions change the environment around them. For everyone else, simply getting an exclusive license to influence will always be satisfying.
Idea #1: Empowerment
One of the simplest approaches that allows a player to feel powerful is to literally give them legitimate power or authority over their opponents.
Santiago and (Traders of) Genoa are both offer legitimate power by deviating from a traditional turn structure. Rather than you and I taking turns executing our own preferences, these games rotate an active player who gets the final say in what happens each turn. As a result, all the other players will bribe, promise, beg and negotiate in order to get what they want done on a turn.
This is a wonderful way to provide legitimate power to a player to make them feel important or privelages. Perhaps I really need a certain area to be irrigated in Santiago or go to a specific location in Genoa. If it is currently your turn to be the active player, you hold all the leverage so you can listen to my offers, listen to other players, or perhaps ignore all of us and do exactly what you want to accomplish. Of course there is power in negotiating, since at some point I’ll become the active player and you’ll need to do something on my turn too. This method places a spot light on one player each turn and allows that person to be the center of attention. Nothing happens on your turn unless you say it can happen, but just try not to let all that power go to your head.
This is part of the enjoyment in playing Sheriff of Nottingham, a game where the player who is the Sheriff has the chance to audit their opponents. Most of the players each turn will act as merchants, who are placing legal and sometimes illegal goods into their bag before declaring the hidden contents of the bag to the Sheriff. The role of Sheriff has the potential to make mistakes in this game as opening bags of only declared legal items causes a penalty. Still, it is a satisfying position to be in because you can receive bribes and intimidate merchants. At the very least they have to visit your office at the Nottingham Dept. of Customs where you can provide a strong sense of the term “bureaucracy”.
Even providing legitimate power on a smaller scale can be an effective tool. In Cash & Guns players use foam guns in a Mafia standoff where players will (on the count of three) point their foam gun at an opponent with the threat of playing a “bang” card which knocks the target out of that round. The goal is to (wisely) not get shot in this game so you can stick around and split up the loot sitting in the center of the table with any other survivors. The source of empowerment I thought was most interesting in this game was the Godfather role, which allows that person to tell someone who is targeting the Godfather to point their weapon elsewhere. It’s incredibly fulfilling when you know your friend is out for revenge and you can wag your finger at them and say “not today”.
One more possibility is the communal ownership approach we see in games where players collectively have “shares” of the same entities or pieces. Players in Imperial purchase investment interests in various European countries, but only the player with the greatest level of ownership influence gets to control the actions of that country on their turn. This is probably the one of the more common approaches to provide players legitimate power over others (and their interests) in games.
Idea #2: Break the Rules
Another approach is to provide players the rulebook, but then give players various opportunities to acquire special allowances to break the rules.
The variable player powers assigned in Pandemic and Cosmic Encounter generally allow each player to ignore some part of the rules explanation they heard only a few minutes ago. This approach is interesting because you get to do something your opponents cannot and exclusivity is a powerful concept in game design. Additionally, its rare (at least for me) to get through these games without someone at the table commenting about how they wish they had someone else’s power this turn. Even when players don’t say it, they’re almost certainly thinking it. Maybe it is just a matter of the grass is always greener, but it feels pretty good to hear the envy of the special power you’re holding.
The most common method to allow players to break the rules is probably to all them to acquire an object in the game that carries this special exception or immunity. Firenze, King of Tokyo and Spyrium are just a few games that offer cards that provide a nice benefit that has predominance over the standard rule set. Small World and Mykerinos include special powers that allow players onto restricted areas, perform enhanced tasks or otherwise do something the player isn’t ordinarily able to do.
Appeal to Affiliation
Much of the draw of tabletop games is the ability to connect and share an experience with other players. Players who are motivated by affiliation enjoy collaborating with others and finding solutions. For everyone else, the social aspects of games can create immense feelings of satisfaction in both cooperation and competition.
Idea #3 Teamwork
It probably isn’t surprising that cooperative games show up on this list; it can be a powerful experience to win and lose together. Being asked to carry out your role in a team environment is a great way to make players feel important, wanted and needed. Pandemic is one of the best examples as every player has a unique role that can benefit the team. This allows players like the Medic to specialize in targeting the biggest threats while the Scientist focuses on collecting sets of cards.
Role playing games frequently utilize this specialization idea as players are asked to play a crucial role in the party. It can be immensely satisfying when a player can deliver on the expectations of their character role. One of the underrated aspects of this approach is that players can find it engaging to communicate and strategize to improve the position of their teammates. It’s nice when teammates are looking out for you.
Team allegiance is a really great tool to allow for players to bond with others even in a brief period of time. La Boca is a puzzle game where two players each round take center stage with the goal of working as a team to arrange a puzzle solution while looking at it from opposite perspectives. I think La Boca approaches the ideal setting for an “icebreaker” role in tabletop games because you end up paired with all the other players and in less than thirty seconds you can bond with someone over a simple puzzle. There is something special about joining forces with a new friend to complete an objective.
Idea #4: Freedom and Creativity
Party games have frequently tried to create this same social bonding experience. The problem is there are only so many ways you can draw “Valentine’s Day” in Pictionary or act out “ice fishing” in Charades.
One of the things I find most satisfying about Dixit is the inherent freedom to give clues since there is incentive to provide a cryptic description. This (relatively) blank canvas gives the active player creative license to say whatever they would like. There isn’t much more satisfying than calling out a very specific reference and having someone realize it on the other end. Even if it doesn’t always work, the memorable connections stick with you long after the game is over.
On the receiving end of these types of clues, it can be just as satisfying to experience the “Aha!” moment associated with figuring out the relevant clue. I find this experience to be satisfying as in A similar approach is also present in some of the more nuanced techniques when playing Hanabi.
In Hanabi, a blend of desperation and opportunity encourage risky clues for a group trying to achieve the perfect score before the deck runs out. When playing with an experienced group for the first time, you’ll inevitably get a clue at some point that doesn’t immediately make sense. Working through the information and logic to figure out what other players are thinking and then playing accordingly is incredibly satisfying. When everyone is on the same page this game really shines.
Idea #5: Positive Reciprocity
If you’ve ever had experience in sales, there is something special about closing a deal that is immensely satisfying. You’ll often have to navigate hurdles and restrictions to find reasonable terms for everyone involved, so making a deal that leaves everyone happy can lead to a very gratifying sense of accomplishment. Finding common ground in negotiations with your opponents is one of my favorite moments of satisfaction in games.
The mechanics of Bohnanza include every opportunity for these types of negotiations. Sometimes I’ll be holding cards that can give me leverage in trading, but I need to get rid of it. Other times I’ll be stuck in a rut trying to give away two bean types no one has interest in. Undoubtedly there are some malicious tactics to bury an opponent in this game but generally players will succeed long-term by harvesting goodwill and cultivating acceptable conditions for everyone involved. It feels good to develop win-win deals when you know that person is a likely trading partner in the future.
Appeal to Achievement
Our final motivation appeals to the desire to set and accomplish goals. Players with a primary motivation of achievement prefer tasks of moderate difficulty and prefer to take risks in order to meet their expectations. Ideas relating to achievement are probably the ones that most of us can relate to in terms of satisfaction rather than fun.
Idea #6: A Sense of Accomplishment
Whether or not a game is especially fun, it can be incredibly rewarding to look at the final product of your creation and feel like it was effort well spent. Games that allow us to create something that didn’t exist before can provide nearly all the enjoyment we look for in games.
Whether we’re building a city, a trade empire or a tableau, the visual appeal of observing our actions come to life enriches the experience. There are countless examples but building up a town in Le Havre, an energy network in Power Grid, a casino in Vegas Showdown or a galactic empire in Race for the Galaxy are just a few intrinsically rewarding projects that we can complete in games.
A similar affection can come in the form of set collection as in games like Ra!, Coloretto or Medici. Being |
) while heating it with microwaves to temperatures hotter than the Sun.
Sustainable energy
The result of successfully building an ARC reactor would be a plentiful source of clean and reliable power, because the needed fuel -- hydrogen isotopes -- is in unlimited supply on Earth.
"What we've done is establish the scientific basis...for, in fact, showing there's a viable pathway forward in the science of the containment of this plasma to make net fusion energy -- eventually," Whyte said.
Fusion research today is at the threshold of exploring "burning plasma," through which the heat from the fusion reaction is confined within the plasma efficiently enough for the reaction to be sustained for long periods of time.
A look at the exterior of MIT's C-Mod nuclear fusion device. The C-Mod project has paved the way for a conceptual ARC reactor.
Normally, gas such as hydrogen is made up of neutral molecules bouncing around. When you superheat a gas, however, the electrons separate from the nuclei creating a soup of charged particles rattling around at high speeds. A magnetic field can then press those charged particles into a condensed shape, forcing them to fused together.
The 40-year conundrum of fusion power is that no one has been able to create a fusion reactor that puts out more power than is required to operate it. In other words, more power is required to keep the plasma hot and generating fusion power than the fusion power it produces.
Europe's working tokamak reactor named JET, holds the world's record for power creation; it generates 16MW of fusion power but requires 24MW of electricity to operate.
MIT's researchers, however, believe they have the answer to the net power problem and it'll be available in a relatively tiny package compared to today's nuclear fission power plants. By making the reactor smaller, it also makes it less expensive to build. Additionally, the ARC would be modular, allowing its many parts to be removed for repairs to upgrades, something not previously achieved.
What sets MIT's fusion device apart
What MIT alone has done is create the world's strongest magnetic containment field for a reactor its size. The higher the magnetic field, the greater the fusion reaction and the greater the power produced.
"We're highly confident that we will be able to show this medium can make more fusion power than it takes to keep it hot," Whyte said.
MIT arc reactor MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center
A cutaway view of the proposed ARC reactor. Thanks to powerful new magnet technology, the much smaller, less-expensive ARC reactor would deliver the same power output as a much larger reactor.
Fusion reactors would have several advantages over today's fission nuclear reactors. For one, fusion reactors would produce little radioactive waste. Fusion reactors produce what are called "activation products" with the fusion neutrons.
The small amount of radioactive isotopes produced are short lived, with a half life lasting tens of years vs. thousands of years from fission waste products, Sorbom said.
The reactors would also use less energy to operate than fission reactors.
While MIT's current Alcator C-Mod produces no electricity, it demonstrates the effects of a magnetic containment field on super-heated plasma, and by hot we're talking about 100 million degrees Fahrenheit. By comparison, our Sun is a chilly 27 million degrees Fahrenheit.
Far from being dangerous, the 100-million-degree plasma instantly cools and resumes a gaseous state when it touches the inner sides of the reactor. That's why a powerful magnetic containment field is needed.
Just like a fission nuclear reactor, a fusion reactor would essentially be a steam engine. The heat from the controlled fusion reaction is used to turn a steam turbine that, in turn, drives electrical generators.
MIT's current C-Mod fusion device uses plentiful deuterium as its plasma fuel. Deuterium is a hydrogen isotope that is not radioactive and can be extracted from seawater.
In order to create a conceptual ARC reactor, however, a second hydrogen isotope is needed: tritium. That's because the rate at which deuterium-deuterium isotopes fuse is about 200 times less than the rate at which deuterium-tritium isotopes fuse.
Tritium, while radioactive, only has a half-life of about 10 years. Although tritium does not occur naturally, it can be created by bombarding lithium with neutrons. As a result, it can be easily produced as a sustainable source of fuel.
With fusion reactors, smaller is better
While MIT's reactor might not fit conveniently into Tony Stark's chest (that is a movie after all), it would be the smallest fusion reactor with the most powerful magnetic containment chamber on earth. It would produce the power of eight Teslas or about two MRI machines.
By comparison, in southern France, seven nations (including the U.S.) have collaborated to build the world's largest fusion reactor, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) Tokamak. The ITER fusion chamber has a fusion radius of 6.5 meters and its superconducting magnets would produce 11.8 Teslas of force.
However, the ITER reactor is about twice the size of ARC and weighs 3,400 tons -- 16 times as heavy as any previously manufactured fusion vessel. The D-shaped reactor will be between 11 meters and 17 meters in size and have a tokamak plasma radius of 6.2 meters, almost twice the ARC's 3.3-meter-radius.
The concept for the ITER project began in 1985, and construction began in 2013. It has an estimated price tag of between $14 billion and $20 billion. Whyte, however, believes ITER will end up being vastly more expensive, $40 billion to $50 billion, based on "the fact that the U.S. contribution" is $4 billion to $5 billion, "and we are 9% partners."
Additionally, ITER's timetable for completion is 2020, with full deuterium-tritium fusion experiments starting in 2027.
When completed, ITER is expected to be the first fusion reactor to generate net power, but that power will not produce electricity; it will simply prepare the way for a reactor that can.
MIT's ARC reactor is projected to cost $4 billion to $5 billion dollars and could be completed in a four to five years, Sorbom said.
The reason ARC could be completed sooner and at one-tenth the cost of ITER is due to its size and the use of the new high-field superconductors that operate at higher temperatures than typical superconductors.
Typically, fusion reactors use low-temperature super conductors as magnetic coils. The coils must cooled to about 4 degrees Kelvin, or minus 452 degrees Fahrenheit, to function. MIT's tokamak fusion device uses a "high-temperature" rare-earth barium copper oxide (REBCO) superconducting tape for its magnetic coils, which is far less expensive and efficient. Of course, "high temperature" is relative: the REBCO coils operate at 100 degrees Kelvin, or about minus 280 degrees Fahrenheit, but that's warm enough to use abundant liquid nitrogen as a cooling agent.
MIT fusion reactor
In his left hand, Professor Brandon Sorbom holds a rare-earth barium copper oxide (REBCO) superconducting tape used in the fusion reactor's magnetic coils. In his right hand is a typical copper electrical cable. The use of the new super conducting tape lowers costs and enables MIT to use plentiful liquid nitrogen as a cooling agent.
"The enabling technology to be able to shrink the fusion device size is this new superconducting technology," Sorbom said. "While the [REBCO] superconductors have been around since the late 1980s in labs, in the last five years or so companies have been commercializing this stuff into tapes for large scale projects like this."
In addition to size and cost, REBCO tape is also able to increase fusion power 10-fold compared to standard superconducting technology.
Before MIT's ARC can be built, however, researchers must first prove they can sustain a fusion reaction. Currently, MIT's C-Mod reactor runs only a few seconds each time it's fired up. In fact, it requires so much power, that MIT must use a buffer transformer in order store enough electricity to run it without browning out the city of Cambridge. And, with a plasma radius of just 0.68 meter, C-Mod has is far smaller than even the ARC reactor would
So before it builds the ARC reactor, MIT's next fusion device -- the Advanced Divertor and RF tokamak eXperiment (ADX) -- will test various means to effectively handle the Sun-like temperatures without degrading the plasma performance.
After achieving sustainable performance, the ARC will determine whether net power generation is possible. The last hurdle before fusion reactors can supply power to the grid is transferring the heat to a generator.
Fusion Engineering and Design - Volume 100, November 2015, Pages 378–405
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ARC: A compact, high-field, fusion nuclear science facility and demonstration power plant with demountable magnets
B.N. Sorbom,, J. Ball, T.R. Palmer, F.J. Mangiarotti, J.M. Sierchio, P. Bonoli, C. Kasten, D.A. Sutherland, H.S. Barnard, C.B. Haakonsen, J. Goh, C. Sung, D.G. Whyte
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doi:10.1016/j.fusengdes.2015.07.008
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Highlights
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ARC reactor designed to have 500 MW fusion power at 3.3 m major radius.
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Compact, simplified design allowed by high magnetic fields and jointed magnets.
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ARC has innovative plasma physics solutions such as inboardside RF launch.
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High temperature superconductors allow high magnetic fields and jointed magnets.
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Liquid immersion blanket and jointed magnets greatly simplify tokamak reactor design.
Abstract
The affordable, robust, compact (ARC) reactor is the product of a conceptual design study aimed at reducing the size, cost, and complexity of a combined fusion nuclear science facility (FNSF) and demonstration fusion Pilot power plant. ARC is a ~200–250 MWe tokamak reactor with a major radius of 3.3 m, a minor radius of 1.1 m, and an on-axis magnetic field of 9.2 T. ARC has rare earth barium copper oxide (REBCO) superconducting toroidal field coils, which have joints to enable disassembly. This allows the vacuum vessel to be replaced quickly, mitigating first wall survivability concerns, and permits a single device to test many vacuum vessel designs and divertor materials. The design point has a plasma fusion gain of Qp ˜ 13.6, yet is fully non-inductive, with a modest bootstrap fraction of only ~63%. Thus ARC offers a high power gain with relatively large external control of the current profile. This highly attractive combination is enabled by the ~23 T peak field on coil achievable with newly available REBCO superconductor technology. External current drive is provided by two innovative inboard RF launchers using 25 MW of lower hybrid and 13.6 MW of ion cyclotron fast wave power. The resulting efficient current drive provides a robust, steady state core plasma far from disruptive limits. ARC uses an all-liquid blanket, consisting of low pressure, slowly flowing fluorine lithium beryllium (FLiBe) molten salt. The liquid blanket is low-risk technology and provides effective neutron moderation and shielding, excellent heat removal, and a tritium breeding ratio = 1.1. The large temperature range over which FLiBe is liquid permits an output blanket temperature of 900 K, single phase fluid cooling, and a high efficiency helium Brayton cycle, which allows for net electricity generation when operating ARC as a Pilot power plant.
Graphical abstract
Image for unlabelled figure
Keywords
Compact pilot reactor; High magnetic field; Fusion nuclear science facility; Liquid immersion blanket; Superconducting joints; Tokamak; High-field launch
The Suppression of Fusion Power Generation by the Oligarchic Satanic, "Principle of Poverty"
Although the Oil Companies benefit greatly, their profit is akin to selling Illustrated Texts whilst Fusion Power Generation is the new Gutenberg - HUMAN INGENUITY AND CREATIVITY FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS HAS SOLVED EVERY RESOURCE PROBLEM.
The fact that billions of people are not now already benefiting from the beginnings of a fusion economy was entirely intentional.
The For ten Thousand Years the Pagan Satanists from Babylon have Continued to Steal Fire from Mankind as Zeus restrained and Punished Prometheus - ALL FOR CONTROL.
These Satanic Malthusians Demand Genocide
“Human population growth is probably the single most serious long-term threat to survival. We're in for a major disaster if it isn't curbed...We have no option.” —Prince Philip, interview in People Magazine, December 21, 1981
“In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.” —Prince Philip, Deutsche Press Agentur, August 1988
“It is almost self-evident that the greater the human population, the greater the demands for natural resources... The paramount question deals with an optimum human population. How many is too many people in relation to available resources? Many believe that our current (satanically consciously created) environmental problems indicate that the optimum level has been surpassed.” —Task Force on Earth, Resources and Population, George H. W. Bush, Chairman, July 8, 1970
“The decision for population control will be opposed by growth-minded economists and businessmen, by nationalistic statesmen, by zealous religious leaders, and by the myopic and well-fed of every description. It is therefore incumbent on all who sense the limitations of technology and the fragility of the environmental balance to make themselves heard above the hollow, optimistic chorus—to convince society and its leaders that there is no alternative but the cessation of our irresponsible, all-demanding, and all-consuming population growth.” —John P. Holdren, (Science Adviser to President Obama) and Paul R. Erlich, 1969
The achievement of controlled fusion has been at mankind’s fingertips for decades. Had the trajectory established in the early decades of the U.S. fusion program continued, mastery of fusion as a power source would already be providing nations of the world with virtually unlimited energy, would have created a qualitative transformation in our powers of industry, transportation, and medicine, and would have completely revolutionized our species’ power to transform the conditions of life on our planet through unprecedented rates of physical economic growth and development.
Satanic Agents Giamaria Ortes, Paolo Sarpi and Malthus who invented the limit of one billion people for the planet earth have already been surpassed by human Science, Creativity and ingenuity. Seven Billions now reside on Planet Earth. More People, less toxins and More wealth require Fusion Power!!
The failure to realize this promise is not due to its impossibility, nor to a lack of capability on the part of fusion scientists, engineers, and scientific institutions. Fusion is not “always fifty years away”; it has been deliberately suppressed under a top-down imperial policy, carried out via the mechanism of intentionally crippling budget cuts, which have created a factor of attrition strong enough to delay for decades what would have surely already been achieved. One merely has to envision where we would have been as a species today had fusion been achieved by the 1990s, as intended by leading fusion scientists in 1976.
1 Dean, S.O.: Fusion Power by Magnetic Confinement: Program Plan. U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration Report ERDA-76/110 (July 1976).
The undermining of fusion, typified by the dismally low FY15 budget request of the Obama administration, which proposes to shut down key fusion experiments in the U.S., must immediately cease. A fully funded, accelerated fusion program as a priority national mission is at the foundation of the survival and progress of our nation, and mankind as a whole.
Fusion: A New Era for Mankind
It was only at the end of the 19th century that mankind entered the atomic age and began to understand and harness the power of the atomic nucleus, a characteristic of matter inaccessible to the understanding gained from simply chemical processes. Radioactivity was first discovered in the 1890s, and it was in 1905 that Einstein proposed that a small amount of mass could be converted to a large amount of energy (in proportion to the speed of light squared, E=mc2). Here was the conceptual birth of fusion power. Whereas nuclear fission harnesses the energy released when a heavy atom (such as uranium, plutonium, or thorium) is broken apart, fusion reactions bring together the lightest elements (such as isotopes of hydrogen or helium), and is millions of times more energy dense than coal, oil, or natural gas, and an order of magnitude more energy dense than fission fuels. The fuels of fusion are also incredibly abundant, being found in seawater (in the case of deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen) or scattered throughout the lunar soil (in the case of helium-3), and could power the human species on Earth for billions of years.
It was determined in 1955 by John D. Lawson in the U.K. that three basic theoretical parameters would have to be met for a successful, sustained fusion reaction to produce energy over time. This is known as the Lawson criterion, and determines a minimum product of the temperature (energy) of the fusing ions, their density, and the minimum confinement time necessary to create conditions for a sustained, energy-producing fusion reaction to occur. Given that the fuel would have to be heated to temperatures hotter than the Sun, no ordinary material could contain it. However, since the fuel is made up of charged particles, a different type of “wall,” a magnetic field, can be used to contain the reactants. Hence the birth of the “magnetic bottle.”2
The U.S. Fusion Program: Beginnings
The early U.S. fusion program was born in the cradle of the U.S. national scientific laboratories, first with an attempt at Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory (now NASA’s Langley Research Center) in 1939 by two young scientists, Arthur Kantrowitz and Eastman Jacobs.
This very early attempt failed to produce fusion, but was followed up throughout the 1940s by work at both the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (now Los Alamos National Laboratory) and Princeton University (today the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory). By 1946, it was concluded at Los Alamos that in order to achieve net energy from fusion, a steady state plasma would have to be heated to a temperature of around 100 million degrees 3—ten times hotter than the center of the Sun, and far beyond anything ever achieved on Earth.
Another approach to confining the fusion fuel is called inertial confinement, where a fuel target (e.g., a pellet of deuterium-tritium fuel) is heated and compressed by the effects high energy beams delivered to the outside of the target.
In 1951, Lyman Spitzer at Princeton was given a $50,000 grant by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to construct his design for a “stellarator,” a modified magnetic bottle, designed to counteract the “drift” of the plasma which arose in simple toroidal configurations and prevented fusion conditions from being reached within the plasma. The original stellarator program at Princeton included four proposed phases, Models A through D, with Model-D being a planned demonstration reactor.
James Tuck at Los Alamos led the building of a project in the winter of 1952/53 which he named the “Perhapsatron”.4 The Perhapsatron was a toroidal magnetic bottle which would try to achieve fusion using a “pinch” concept. 5 The pinch and the stellarator designs, along with the “mirror machine”, led by Richard Post at the University of California Radiation Lab at Livermore (later Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), formed the backbone of what became the U.S. classified program to achieve controlled thermonuclear fusion: “Project Sherwood”.
The Table Top mirror machine at Livermore (left) and the Scylla machine at Los Alamos (right) during the 1950s Project Sherwood days.
Funded by the AEC under the auspices of President Dwight Eisenhower's "Atoms for Peace" policy, and led by the same scientists who had harnessed the power of the atom in the form of nuclear weapons during the war, Sherwood sought to utilize the groundwork in nuclear research laid during wartime, for purposes of peace and development. As stated by AEC Chairman Lewis L. Strauss in 1954, "Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter.... It is not too much to expect that our children will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age." [6] Such was the natural optimism surrounding the scientific prospects of fusion.
The existence of Project Sherwood was announced to the public leading into the IAEA's (International Atomic Energy Agency) first International Conference on Atomic Energy, held in Geneva in 1955, and limited international cooperation began in 1956. [7] The project was fully declassified as part of the second International Conference on Atomic Energy in 1958. The same year, an experiment at Los Alamos became the first in any laboratory to produce neutrons from thermonuclear fusion: the Scylla I. [8]
Strauss, who as chairman of the AEC, increased the fusion budget from $7.3 million [9] in 1951 to $114.7 million by 1958, wrote of Project Sherwood: "The importance of 'Sherwood' as the project was called, now conceded to be at least theoretically feasible, can hardly be overstated, and I hope to live long enough to see the same natural force which powers the hydrogen bomb tamed for peaceful purposes. A breakthrough could come tomorrow as well as a decade hence. Out of our laboratories may come a discovery as important as the Promethean taming of fire."
The 1960s
Spearheaded by the U.S., U.S.S.R., and U.K., work proceeded into the 1960s, and substantial fusion research also began in such nations as Germany, France, and Japan. Work on the Scylla design at Los Alamos continued, and by 1964, temperatures in excess of 40 million degrees were achieved by the Scylla IV, though confinement time was still quite short: less than 10 millionths of a second. In 1968, an announcement came from the Soviet Union that record temperatures and confinement times had been achieved with the Soviet tokamak design in its T-3 machine.10 When these breakthrough results were confirmed by a delegation from the U.K.’s Culham Laboratory in 1969, the world began converting their toroidal magnetic bottles to tokamaks, including the conversion of the Model-C stellarator at Princeton, which became the first U.S. machine to confirm the Soviet results.
Inertial fusion, in which fusion is triggered by a rapid application of energy to a pellet of fuel, also had its beginnings in the 1960s. With the invention of the laser in 1960, discussions began about the possibility of using a laser to set off a “micro hydrogen bomb” which could be contained in a chamber and harnessed for energy, and the first patent applications for a laser fusion design were filed in 1969.
The tokamak design, begun in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, is a toroidal magnetic bottle with helically-wrapped coils, with a strong toroidal (along the axis of the tube) magnetic field.
Fusion Designs
Stellarator
European Nuclear Society
PPPL The stellarator uses an externally-applied helical magnetic field to provide a twist in the path of the plasma
particles, thereby counteracting net forces on the particles and keeping them on a “straight” path as they travel around the vessel. The earliest stellarators accomplished the same thing with a figure-8 geometry. Right: An early stellarator at Princeton.
Pinch The z-pinch design uses a magetic field (A) to induce an electric field (B) in the plasma along the direction of the plasma flow. The charged plasma flow is pinched inward under the Lorentz force, into a thin, dense filament. Right: The Perhapsatron at Los Alamos.
Mirror This diagram of the Tandem Mirror design shows the basic principle of the mirror machine. Hot plasma in the center of the cylindrical reactor vessel (A) is contained within the chamber by two mirror magnets, which “plug” the ends (B) and turn (or reflect) most of the plasma ions back into the center where they undergo fusion (C). The mirror design was considered potentially more favorable for a commercialized reactor, because its linear design was easier to engineer and led to less instabilities in the plasma.
LLNL Basic tokamak design. The tokamak features two external magnetic fields (toroidal and poloidal) designed to contain the plasma long enough for fusion reactions to occur. The first tokamak, T-1, in the Soviet Union.
By the end of the 1960s, the fusion budget had risen from $114.7 million in 1958 to $140 million in 1968, allowing the groundwork to be laid for the breakthroughs to come in the 1970s.
The 1970s
By the early 1970s, the decision was made to elevate the fusion program to division status within the Atomic Energy Commission. By 1972, with a budget increase to $144.7 million, a plan was mapped out for future fusion facilities and experiments designed to prove the scientific feasibility of fusion. [11] A 1972 planning project within the AEC projected important results from the planned Princeton Large Torus (PLT) by 1978, and the follow-on operation of a physics test reactor, to produce 10 MW of fusion power, by 1984. [12] In 1971, a small tokamak, ORMAK, began operation at Oak Ridge National Lab, which would come to play an important role in the ability to raise the temperature of the plasma to thermonuclear levels. In 1973, approval was given for initial efforts at fusion power plant design by teams at the University of Wisconsin, General Atomics, Argonne National Lab, and Oak Ridge National Lab.
With a growing budget, three new tokamaks were approved for construction: the Alcator-A at MIT, the Doublet-II at General Atomics, and the PLT at Princeton. In 1974, the Atomic Energy Commission was abolished, and fusion research was rehoused under the newly created Energy Research and Development Administration, the precursor to the Department of Energy (DOE). The same year, even before operation of the PLT began, the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) was approved for construction at Princeton as the follow-on "physics test reactor" to the PLT, with the expectation of achieving breakeven.
At Livermore, the "mirror machine" was well advanced from its humble beginnings during the Sherwood days, and in 1975, the 2XIIB at Lawrence Livermore achieved plasma parameters comparable to those being achieved in the more widely worked-on tokamaks. In 1977, a new design, the Tandem Mirror Experiment (TMX), intended to solve the "end plug" problem, [13] was approved. The TMX began operation in October 1978, and its success led to the approval of the more advanced Mirror Fusion Test Facility (MFTF), to be completed in 1985.
As the 1970s progressed, and the great pace of advancements in all three mainline approaches (tokamak, pinch, and mirror machine) accelerated, steps were taken to accelerate fusion research through expanded international cooperation. In 1973, President Richard Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev signed an agreement on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy. The first U.S. team to travel to the U.S.S.R. under the agreement was a fusion team, which was casually briefed on a technique being developed for inertial fusion which corresponded quite closely to very highly classified work being done in the U.S. at the Sandia Laboratory.
The mirror design is an open-ended, straight magnetic bottle with two strong “mirroring” magnetic coils at the ends of the tube, which turn the plasma flow back toward the center of the machine. The linear design was suggested to be better for commercialization than the tokamak, as all sides of the machine are accessible for maintenance and repair, and because its plasmas tended to be more stable than in the closed, toroidal designs. However, too many ions were leaking out the ends. Hence the “end plug” problem.
EIRNS Top James R. Schlesinger, whose Malthusian views wouldn't allow the realization of practicable fusion power, leading to his efforts to delay and undermine fusion during his tenure as Energy Secretary, from 1977-1979.
And Bottom Congressman Mike McCormack, sponsor of the 1980 Magnetic Fusion Energy Engineering Act, speaks to a meeting of the Fusion Energy Foundation in May, 1981.
While the perspective for a robust fusion program seemed to characterize the early part of the decade, the end of the 1970s would prove to be a decisive collision point on issues of global policy.
The PLT and the Magnetic Fusion Energy Engineering Act
The Princeton Large Torus, which produced its first plasma in 1975, would soon take center stage in a policy fight that stretched far beyond the bounds of so-called “scientific research.”
In late July, 1978, reports came that scientists at Princeton had succeeded in using auxiliary heating in the PLT, demonstrated first with Oak Ridge’s ORMAK14 tokamak, to raise the temperature of the plasma to a level never before achieved—over 60 million degrees—for the first time surpassing the minimum temperature required for ignition, 44 million degrees.15 Achieving this temperature milestone was especially significant, since the Alcator tokamak at MIT had recently shown that it was possible to confine a plasma at the needed density for a long enough time to achieve ignition.16 Breaking the temperature threshold for ignition broke a psychological threshold, too. As put by Dr. Stephen Dean, head of the Confinement Systems Divison in the Office of Fusion Energy at DOE, “The question of whether fusion is feasible from a scientific point of view has now been answered... It is the first time we’ve produced the actual conditions of a fusion reactor in a scale-model device.”
While news of the breakthrough was excitedly disseminated around the fusion community, it was determined that the official announcement could not be made public until the upcoming August 23 IAEA fusion meeting in Innsbruck, Austria. News, however, did get out to the press, after which the DOE leadership under Secretary of Energy James Schlesinger did everything possible to downplay the importance of the results, including an attempt to stop a DOE press conference scheduled for August 14 (which did, after all, go forward, though with the
ORMAK had succeeded in producing a temperature of 20 million degrees with neutral beam heating, a type of auxiliary heating—triple what had been achieved less than a decade earlier in the T-3 tokamak.
Of a deuterium-tritium (or D-T) plasma. Mel Gottlieb, head of the Princeton Lab, told an August 14, 1978 press conference, “It took us seven years to go from several million degrees to 26 million in December 1977, and then just six months to go another 35 million.”
These were the three parameters outlined by Lawson in order to have a net power-producing fusion reactor: plasma density, confinement time, and temperature.
conspicuous exclusion of the head of the DOE Fusion Office, Ed Kintner). Schlesinger’s DOE insisted that the results obtained at Princeton were not, in fact, a breakthrough, and that fusion was just as far away as ever. John Deutch, DOE Director of Energy Research, echoed his boss by saying that these results were good for Princeton, but were not a breakthrough.
This suppression is not surprising from one such as Schlesinger, who wrote in his 1960 The Political Economy of National Security: “Economics is the science of choice in a world of limited resources... We have gone around the world spreading the ‘gospel of plenty’ raising the level of expectations… [but] in the nature of things, these rising expectations can never be satisfied… We must in our strategic policy return to the days before the Industrial Revolution… [and] prepare to fight limited wars.”
Not everyone in positions of policy-making agreed with the Malthusian Schlesinger, however. Congressman Mike McCormack of Washington state seized the momentum created by the PLT results to convene a scientific advisory panel in the Congress which met over the course of 1979, and concluded that the biggest barrier to fusion was a lack of political commitment, and an inadequate level of funding. Meanwhile, the public interest in fusion boomed, with subscriptions to Fusion magazine, published by the Fusion Energy Foundation (FEF)17 soaring to 100,000—making it the second most widely circulated science magazine in the nation.
The FEF played a critical role throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, in educating the public and policymakers alike on fusion, with dozens of seminars held around the world, in addition to Fusion magazine, faceto-face organizing, and in publicly taking on the political fights against the attempts to sabotage fusion. In October of 1978, in response to the optimistic breakthrough at Princeton, the FEF released a memorandum to Congress outlining an acceleration in the fusion program, and a proposed budget comparable to that of the 1960s Apollo Program.
In January 1980, Congressman McCormack announced at a conference on nuclear safety in Washington, D.C. that he would be introducing legislation to “make it the policy of the U.S. government to bring the first electric-generating fusion power plant on line before the year 2000.” He said, “We must move into the engineering phase with fusion. We must not wait for somebody else to do it... Once we develop fusion, we will be in a position to produce enough energy for all time, for all mankind. This is not hyperbole, but fact.” In a subsequent interview, in contrast to the outlook of Schlesinger, McCormack said that fusion “could be the most important deterrent to war in all of history.”
The FEF, founded in 1974 by Lyndon LaRouche, had been crucial in making sure that news of the PLT breakthrough got out to the public, and to the White House, helping to ensure that the planned press conference was able to go ahead. See: “Schlesinger vs. Fusion: A Dossier.” EIR, August 29, 1978, and “The Coming Breakthroughs in Fusion,” Fusion, October, 1978.
The bill which became the Magnetic Fusion Energy Engineering Act of 1980 authorized the construction of an Engineering Test Facility by 1987, and for the first experimental power reactor to put net power on the grid by 2000. Funding authorization also included the expansion and upgrading of the nation’s science education programs. It had an estimated cost of $48 billion over two decades. Quickly gaining 140 co-sponsors, the bill passed the House overwhelmingly on August 27 by a vote of 365 to 7. The Senate passed a companion bill by voice vote soon after, and the Magnetic Fusion Energy Engineering Act of 1980 was signed into law by President Carter on October 7th.
However, losing his bid for re-election the following month,18 McCormack would not be in the Congress to oversee the implementation of the 1980 law. A report issued in December by McCormack’s Subcommittee on Energy Research and Production warned the incoming administration and the nation, quite prophetically, that “...the hardest battles are yet to come. There must be continual annual authorizations and subsequent appropriations of funds... It will take tremendous vigilance and determination on the part of the nation to carry through the 20-year development plan which is necessary to make fusion a reality.”
A Commitment Reversed
Mere months after the Magnetic Fusion Energy Engineering Act was signed, the incoming Reagan administration submitted its first budget for FY1982, with a request for fusion funding which would make the implementation of the fusion law impossible. The 1980 law mandated that “The Secretary of Energy shall develop a plan for the creation of a national magnetic fusion engineering center for the purpose of accelerating fusion technology development via the concentration and coordination of major magnetic fusion engineering devices and associated activities at such a center.” However, in July of 1982, by which time the Secretary of Energy was to have submitted a plan for carrying out the establishment of the engineering center, the DOE replied via acting Director of Energy Research, Doug Pewitt, “We have determined that it is premature to establish fully the national magnetic fusion engineering center at this time,” and instead proposed that an “Engineering Feasibility Preparations Project” be established at an existing fusion research site.
In protest over this betrayal, Ed Kintner resigned his post as Director of the Office of Fusion Energy at DOE in November 1981. Writing the following year about the budgetary attacks on fusion, Kintner said that the fusion budget offered by the administration for FY1983 was not only lower than what was needed to carry out the 1980 act, but was 25% less than the budget for 1977! He said that this “leave[s] the fusion program without a strategic backbone—it is a collection of individual projects and activities without a defined mission or timetable... The plan to increase industry involvement in fusion development is postponed indefinitely, and the industrial and economic benefits of high-technology spin-offs, surely an increasingly important by-product of an accelerated fusion technology program, will be lost.”19
Due to the early concession of Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan before polls had closed on the West Coast, many Democrats didn’t bother to vote, meaning that many Democratic candidates for both state and federal positions lost their elections.
LLNL The MFTF under construction in 1981. The reactor was fully completed, but then mothballed before it could ever run an experiment! The reactor vessel and structures weigh 8 million pounds, including 3 million pounds of superconducting magnets, designed to confine a plasma at more than 100 million degrees.
One month after Kintner’s resignation, George Keyworth, science adviser to President Reagan, announced to a hearing in Congress: “The U.S. cannot expect to be pre-eminent in all scientific fields, nor is it desirable.” The official position of the U.S. government became, from Keyworth’s mouth |
to leave and all the major crossings had been shut down.
The lawsuit claims that on the morning of Oct. 30, as most of the Financial District was submerged in water, Zecevic's manager had gotten drunk off booze from a Goldman Sachs restaurant and ordered him to clean a storage area on the seventh floor and retrieve a co-worker's shirt.
At 9:40 p.m. that evening, as Zecevic swept the lobby of Sandy, his manager — still reeking of liquor — told him he was fired because his co-worker had accused him of lifting $100 from the shirt, according to the lawsuit filed Thursday in Manhattan Civil Supreme Court.
Zecevic begged his boss to let him stay as the surrounding streets were flooded, and the lower half of Manhattan was without power, the lawsuit says. He pleaded for a room and even asked to stay under a stairwell in the building, but his boss allegedly said no.
When he started his walk home, Zecevic said a cop car spotted him walking to an overpass at West Street. The officer took Zecevic back to the Goldman's building and told the manager that the decision endangered him, but the boss still said no, the lawsuit claims.
After the officer left, Zecevic was forced to slog through frigid chest-high water on West Street in darkness — all while fearing downed electrical lines, hidden dangers from excavation work and disease from sewage.
He eventually made his way to City Hall and over the Brooklyn Bridge, then headed south to the Verrazano Bridge. There a police car escorted him across the span. On the other side, he walked the final four miles to his Oakwood home.
"He spent the next hours shivering in his home and in pain from stiffness and exhaustion," the lawsuit says.
ABM denied in a statement on Friday Zecevic's version of events.
“Mr. Zecevic’s claims and characterizations are inaccurate and misleading, including but not limited to his descriptions of the circumstances surrounding his termination for theft and his departure," the statement said. "Because this is pending litigation, we intend to let our legal filings speak for themselves.”
Due to the experience, Zecevic claims he now suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and has had contemplations of suicide, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit also claims that the Department of Labor later ruled that Zecevic did not commit any misconduct and granted him unemployment benefits.
Zecevic lawyer, Perniciaro, said a Goldman Sachs managing director even wrote a letter to ABM, lobbying for the firm to reinstate Zecevic.
"Goldman loved the guy — a managing director reached out personally wrote on his behalf," Perniciaro said.Hold the front page!
The docile White House press corps has got steamed up about something and finally taken a scalp as a result.It seems the Capitol Hill cocktail set who usually sit and preen themselves like pampered Pomeranians while asking pre-screened, pre-approved, Obama-friendly questions have forced a resignation.So what provoked them and who were they gunning for? Was it one of Obama’s aids caught lying -- maybe some political sleaze or even another Watergate in the making? Could they have been making a final stand for journalistic integrity and freedom over the administration’s plans to prosecute and imprison investigative reporters who refuse to reveal their sources?Well sorry to disappoint -- it was none of the above.It seems the most famous gaggle of journalists in the world finally got steamed up about a comment made by one of their own… against Israel.And their target just happens to be an 89-year-old columnist who has nailed more U.S. presidents with her hammer-blow questions than any other member of the White House press corps.The formidable grand dame of the White House press corps has now been forced to quit her much coveted front row seat -- from where she made no less than 10 U.S. presidents sweat with her probing questions.Helen Thomas resigned just before the White House Correspondents Association announced it was considering stripping her of her prime position.No doubt some of these are the same gutless scribes who gave President George W. Bush such an easy ride over Iraq, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, torture, waterboarding, etc.Now had Helen Thomas blasted: “Palestinians should get the hell out of Israel,” she would have been feted.Instead, what the redoubtable Ms. Thomas, a lifelong critic of Zionism, said was that Israeli Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine” and return to Germany and Poland “or wherever they came from.”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnALLK5g--I&hd=1Ms. Thomas, a columnist for Hearst Newspapers, apologized almost immediately for the off-the-cuff comments she made to a rabbi who was conducting a video interview with her outside the White House during a recent celebration of Jewish heritage.Now the decision to retire her, with immediate effect, was announced by Hearst Newspapers, which syndicates her column. The announcement was made just weeks ahead of her 90th birthday on August 4.The board of the correspondents association, which recently gathered to consider how to respond to her controversial remarks, issued this very wordy statement: “Helen Thomas’ comments were indefensible and the White House Correspondents Association board firmly dissociates itself from them. Many in our profession who have known Helen for years were saddened by the comments, which were especially unfortunate in light of her role as a trail blazer on the White House beat. While Helen has not been a member of the WHCA for many years, her special status in the briefing room has helped solidify her as the dean of the White House press corps so we feel the need to speak out strongly on this matter.“We want to emphasize that the role of the WHCA is to represent the White House press corps in its dealings with the White House on coverage-related issues. We do not police the speech of our members or colleagues. We are not involved at all in issuing White House credentials, that is the purview of the White House itself. But the incident does revive the issue of whether it is appropriate for an opinion columnist to have a front row seat in the WH briefing room. That is an issue under the jurisdiction of this board. We are actively seeking input from our association members on this important matter, and we have scheduled a special meeting of the WHCA board on Thursday to decide on the seating issue.”What a gutless, feckless collective of cabestros.Just a few days ago, no less than 60 journalists on board the Gaza-bound Freedom Flotilla were shot at, abused, beaten up, and robbed by the military representing the Zionist regime of Israel.Was there one word of anger, one word of recrimination, or a statement released about the treatment of fellow journalists who were on board a series of ships which were attacked in international waters?Israeli soldiers destroyed and stole their cell phones, confiscating video footage and photographic equipment. The later unauthorized use of journalists’ footage shows the contempt that the Israeli authorities have for journalism. By showing old photographs and edited footage there was a clear violation of journalistic ethics.Such blatant attempts at control of news coverage are nothing new. The same strategy was followed during Israel’s last invasion of Gaza.But what do these Washington scribes know?However, what they have proved by their swift action against Helen Thomas is that while Israel conducts a military occupation in Palestine, it is conducting a political occupation of the White House press corps.Yvonne Ridley is a founder member of Women In Journalism and has been a member of the National Union of Journalists for 34 years. She presents two political shows, The Agenda and Rattansi & Ridley, for Press TV.A Long Island Republican said “that creepy Roy Moore dude” should quit a crucial Senate race in Alabama in favor of someone “who doesn’t prey upon young teenage girls.”
Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-Shirley) joined a growing wave of Republicans who said Moore, the party’s candidate in the critical Senate contest, should drop out. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) did so earlier in the week after five women accused Moore of sexual misconduct — all the women were in their teens and Moore was a local prosecutor when the actions allegedly occurred.
“It’s about time for that creepy Roy Moore dude to exit stage left,” Zeldin, who has two young daughters, wrote on Twitter on Tuesday night. “He should step aside & let someone take his spot on the ballot who doesn’t prey upon young teenage girls as a grown man.”
Moore, who was removed as an Alabama state judge after he violated federal law by placing a Ten Commandments monument in a state court building and refusing to take it down when ordered, is the GOP candidate in a special election next month. The seat is crucial — Republicans hold just a two-seat advantage in the chamber.
The calls for him to quit the race began last week after a girl told The Washington Post that Moore sexually assaulted her in the 1970s when she was 14 and he was a local district attorney. Then more women came forward. Moore has denied the accusations, though a number of leading Republicans said they believe the women — including U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who held the Alabama Senate seat before joining the Trump administration and who said there was “no reason to doubt” the women.
Moore so far has defied calls for him to quit the race, triggering some Republicans to openly discuss expelling him from the Senate if he wins. Even if Moore quit the race, it is too late to remove his name from the ballot. Some Republicans have called for aligning behind a write-in candidate.Startup.Coop: How to Build a Real Sharing Economy through Shared Ownership
8:00am — 9:30am
116 attending
Around the world, the "platform co-op" movement is bringing cooperative business models—sharing ownership and governance among workers or users—to the online economy. It's a way to build sustainable, transformative companies that are ultimately accountable not to short-term profits but to the people who drive company innovation or who depend on the platforms most. Hear from leaders in this fast-growing ecosystem about how you can get involved and how recent state legislation has made it easier than ever for Colorado tech companies to implement this model.
Presenters:
Nathan Schneider, scholar in residence of media studies, University of Colorado Boulder and editor of Ours to Hack and to Own
Halisi Vinson, executive director of the Rocky Mountain Employee Ownership Center
Hosted by: CU Boulder's College of Media, Communication, and Information
http://www.colorado.edu/cmci/
http://www.rmeoc.org
http://www.orbooks.com/catalog/ours-to-hack-and-to-own/Residents in Tipperary say drones are being used by burglars to spy on their homes.
A number of farmers and businesses in Littleton and Two Mile Borris have reported sightings of the remote controlled gadgets flying at night - which is illegal.
They say burglars are using the drones to carry out aerial surveillance, with some saying they are willing to shoot them down.
Robert O'Shea from Littleton says the sightings have been reported to the Gardaí.
Mr O'Shea said: "How do you prove that it's a criminal activity, nobody has been caught.
"It's rather funny to have a drone flying at that hour of the night, especially with what appears to be a night-vision camera on it, but I mean this is what these guys are up to at the moment."The official website of the Danganronpa 3: The End of Kibōgamine Gakuen (Danganronpa 3 -The End of Hope's Peak Academy-) anime revealed additional cast members for both its "Mirai Hen" and "Zetsubō Hen" parts on Thursday.
The new cast members appearing in the "Mirai Hen" part of the anime include:
Hidekatsu Shibata as Kazuo Tengan
Keiji Fujiwara as Kōichi Kizakura
The newly-announced cast for the Danganronpa 2 -based "Zetsubō Hen" part includes Romi Park as Akane Owari, Hiroki Yasumoto as Nekomaru Nidai, and Jun Fukuyama as Teruteru Hanamura. All three reprise their roles from the Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair game.
The website will reveal more cast members on Friday.
Previously announced cast members for "Mirai Hen" include:
Megumi Ogata as Makoto Naegi Yōko Hikasa as Kyōko Kirigiri
Saki Fujita as Seiko Kimura
Inori Minase as Ruruka Andō
Takuya Eguchi as Sōnosuke Izayoi
Ogata and Hikasa are reprising their roles from the first Danganronpa game and anime.
Previously announced cast members for "Zetsubō Hen" include: Yoshimasa Hosoya as Kazuichi Sōda, Megumi Ogata as Nagito Komaeda, Ami Koshimizu as Ibuki Mioda, Ai Kayano as Mikan Tsumiki, Yu Kobayashi as Mahiru Koizumi, and Suzuko Mimori as Hiyoko Saionji.
TARAKO will replace Nobuyo Oyama in the role of mascot character Monokuma in the upcoming television anime and other installments in the franchise.
The characters in the anime's "Mirai Hen" part include:
(From left to right)
Kōichi Kizakura
Seiko Kimura
Great Gozu
Sōnosuke Izayoi
Ruruka Andō
Jūzō Sakakura
Ryōta Mitarai
Monokuma
Miaya Gekkōgahara
Kyōsuke Munakata
Kazuo Tengan
Monomi
Chisa Yukizome
Yasuhiro Hagakure
Makoto Naegi Kyōko Kirigi
Daisaku Bandai
Aoi Asahina
The upcoming anime series will be split into two parts: "Mirai Hen" (Future Chapter) and "Zetsubō Hen" (Despair Chapter). "Mirai Hen" will air in July, while "Zetsubō Hen" will air sometime after. "Mirai Hen" will focus on the characters from the first game installment, while the "Zetsubō Hen" will tell the story of the characters of the Super Danganronpa 2 game. The anime will illustrate what happened to the characters before the events of the game.
The television anime series will be the conclusion of the "Hope's Peak Academy" series' original story.
Kazutaka Kodaka is in charge of the original scenario concepts and overall supervision. Rui Komatsuzaki is credited with the original character designs, and Seiji Kishi is directing. Norimitsu Kaihō ( School-Live!, Gunslinger Stratos: The Animation ) is in charge of the scenario on the project, and animation studio Lerche is returning to animate the project. Kazuaki Morita and Ryoko Amisaki are designing the anime's characters. The Danganronpa Design Team is credited with the original background designs. Masafumi Takada is composing the music, and Yoshinori Terasawa is the "Otasuke Producer."
Thanks to Maddy Mayberry for the news tipShare. What if Michael J. Fox was never Marty McFly? What if Michael J. Fox was never Marty McFly?
One of the greatest Hollywood trivia questions that people tend to bust out at quiz night at the bar is "Who was originally cast as Marty McFly in Back to the Future?" The answer, of course, is Eric Stoltz, who was cast in the now-iconic role when Michael J. Fox was unavailable.
Of course, Fox ultimately took the gig, but not after Stoltz filmed a few scenes for the movie. But what if Stoltz was never replaced? That's the answer writer David Guy Levy and artist Jeffrey Spokes seek to answer in a new comic series called Back to Back to the Future.
But it's not just an alternate "what if" tale; in the story, the filmmakers of Back to the Future go back in time to make sure that Stoltz never lost the role. The series has been made to raise money for the Young Storytellers Foundation, and organization that uses one-on-one mentoring to help underprivileged kids develop literacy through the art and craft of telling stories.
Last week, EW premiered the first issue free of charge. Today, we're excited to debut issue #2 of Back to Back to the Future for your reading enjoyment:
Read Back to Back to the Future #2
Next week, issue #3 will premiere at another outlet for free, and then the remaining issues will be sold for $2 each with all proceeds donated to the Young Storytellers Foundation.
You can check out the project's Facebook page here.
Joey is a Senior Editor at IGN and a comic book creator. Follow Joey on Twitter @JoeyEsposito, or find him on IGN at Joey-IGN. He's finally seen Man of Steel. So, um, now what?Story highlights President Trump's 2nd quarter average approval rating is the lowest since Eisenhower
Only 8% of Democrats approve of how the President is doing
Washington (CNN) President Donald Trump ended the second quarter of his presidency with the lowest average approval rating of any elected president on record since Gallup began tracking that information in the mid-20th century.
Trump's average approval rating for his second quarter in office, 38.8%, is more than five percentage points lower than the next closest president, Bill Clinton at 44%. The two are the only presidents on the list whose average job approval does not rise above 50%.
Although Gallup has been regularly tracking job approval since 1945, presidents who assumed office while another's term was underway -- Harry Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson and Gerald Ford -- were not included in the second-quarter data released Friday.
Trump's average approval is down from his 41% average approval rating in his first quarter on the job, when he was also the lowest of any other president on record for that time frame.
Trump's approval ratings are also particularly polarized, especially when compared to polarization of approval ratings in the past. In his second quarter, he has garnered only 8% approval from Democrats when compared to 34% of Independents and 85% of Republicans.
Read MoreA Russian base in Khmeimim, Syria, will be enlarged and made permanent, a Russian senator has said.
Khmeimim Air Base is a Russian airbase south east of the city of Latakia in Syria. While the airbase shares some airfield facilities with Bassel Al-Assad International Airport, it is reportedly only accessible to Russian personnel.
During 2015, the military part of the airport was converted into “the strategic center of Russia’s military operation against Islamic State”.
The existence of the Russian strategic base was revealed by the United States in early September and concern was raised over the effect on the overall situation in Syria; the airbase became operational at the end of September 2015.
NATO’s supreme allied commander for Europe, General Philip Breedlove, said that the kind of military infrastructure that Russia had installed in Syria was a de facto no-fly zone:
“As we see the very capable air defence systems beginning to show up in Syria, we’re a little worried about another A2/AD (anti-access/area denial) bubble being created in the eastern Mediterranean.”
Russian Deputy Head of the Upper House Committee for Defence and Security Frants Klintsevich told a Russian daily newspaper:
“Nuclear weapons and heavy bombers will not be deployed there on a permanent basis, because it would contradict international agreements and raise repudiatory ire.”
Russian news organisation RT.com claim:
“Khmeimim air base will get new quarters, canteens, a hospital and other infrastructure facilities to make the lives of the servicemen deployed there more comfortable.
Military engineers will broaden parking areas and aircraft shelters – where warplanes will be stationed by squadrons – and will organise receiving areas for heavy military cargo An-124 Ruslan jumbo jets.”
New infrastructure was erected “from scratch” in 2015 and work continues.The iPhone’s camera is great, and Apple has a lot of options in the Camera app to enhance your photos, but here are a few tricks that you can use to take even better and more creative photos.
Panodash
You’ve probably seen photos where a person appears more than once in the same shot. Professionals do that by stitching multiple images using photo editing software, but you can do that just with your iPhone’s default camera app.
Activate the panorama mode in the Camera app, and have a friend shoot the panorama from where you’re standing. The key to achieving this effect is for you to move quicker than the iPhone in the opposite direction of motion, as shown in the GIF below:
Driving Panorama
The Panorama mode is generally used to capture the surroundings in a circular fashion, centered around you, but another creative way to use this mode is to just enable it while you’re driving. Ensure that you’re holding the iPhone firmly, maintaining a steady position relative to the car, and ask a friend to drive it through an interesting neighbourhood to capture drive-by panoramas.
Zoom
The iPhone doesn’t have optical zoom. You can digitally zoom in by pinching in the Camera app, but the photo quality from this mode isn’t good. If you want to click zoomed-in photos of an object at a large distance, you can use a binocular as a zoom lens. Just place one of the sides of the binocular on the iPhone’s camera lens at the back, and you should be able to click zoomed-in photos without compromising on quality.
Macro Lens
The iPhone, as well as other cameras, can only focus up to a certain minimum distance, and if you go even closer to the subject, the photo will be blurred. Professional photographers use a Macro lens to reduce this minimum distance, and let them click photos of tiny subjects like insects. But you can click similar photos from your iPhone without spending a lot of money on expensive macro lenses.
Just place a small drop of water on your iPhone’s lens, and you’ll now be able to go extremely close to small subjects like insects, and click photos that you wouldn’t have been able to earlier.
DIY Tripod
You don’t need to buy an expensive tripod for your iPhone when you can make one yourself with a piece of cardboard and scissors. This DIY tripod, coupled with EarPods that let you click photos with the “+” button, let you create a perfect setup where you can pose at a distance from your iPhone and still be able to click photos. For details on how to make the cardboard tripod, check the video embedded below.
Underwater photos
Taking underwater photos with your iPhone sounds very risky, but with this little trick, you can capture partial underwater photos. Just take a glass, and insert your iPhone upside down in it. Now immerse this glass in water partially, such that the water level is safely below the rim, and you’ll now be able to take photos that are partially underwater.
Here’s the video demoing these tricks:
We’d love to see the photos you’ve shot using these tricks in the comments below, so feel free to share them.
Like this post? Share it!Two mysteries for the price of one: were some parts of the Amazon rainforests actually grassy plains just a few thousand years ago, and why (and how) were the ancient people of that area building massive circular earthworks? Environmental scientist John Francis Carson and his colleagues are trying to find the answers:
A series of square, straight and ringlike ditches scattered throughout the Bolivian and Brazilian Amazon were there before the rainforest existed, a new study finds.
…Since the 1980s, deforestation has revealed massive earthworks in the form of ditches up to 16 feet (5 meters) deep, and often just as wide… These human-made structures remain a mystery: They may have been used for defense, drainage, or perhaps ceremonial or religious reasons.
Carson and his colleagues wanted to explore the question of whether early Amazonians had a major impact on the forest. They focused on the Amazon of northeastern Bolivia, where they had sediment cores from two lakes nearby major earthworks sites. These sediment cores hold ancient pollen grains and charcoal from long-ago fires, and can hint at the climate and ecosystem that existed when the sediment was laid down as far back as 6,000 years ago.
An examination of the two cores — one from the large lake, Laguna Oricore, and one from the smaller lake, Laguna Granja — revealed a surprise: The very oldest sediments didn’t come from a rainforest ecosystem at all. In fact, the Bolivian Amazon before about 2,000 to 3,000 years ago looked more like the savannas of Africa than today’s jungle environment.Buy Photo The Motor City benefits culturally and eocnomically from Belle Isle’s Grand Prix. (Photo: Daniel Mears / The Detroit News)Buy Photo
The 100,000 race fans who made it out to Belle Isle last weekend for the 2017 Chevrolet Grand Prix couldn’t help but leave the island with pride in the Motor City. Fast cars are in Detroit’s DNA, and there is no better event to showcase the city’s island jewel. It benefits the city in myriad ways, and it should keep going for years to come.
Attendees aren’t the only ones to witness the event. The annual races are broadcast to the nation, which observes the cars roaring past crystal blue water with the Detroit skyline as a backdrop.
Belle Isle is an unparalleled space for the race. There are only four such urban races in the country each year, including Long Beach, California, and St. Petersburg, Florida.
“We are so lucky,” says Bud Denker, chairman of the Belle Isle event and executive vice president at Penske Corp. “What it leaves behind is a postcard to the world.”
The Grand Prix is a labor of love for Denker who, along with race organizer Roger Penske, brought it back to Belle Isle in 2007. The event typically operates at a loss of $1 million each year, and while Denker says he’d like it to at least break even, that’s not the point.
“It’s never been a financial goal — it’s not one of our priorities,” he says. “That million is well spent.”
While the races may not be a boon for event organizers, they certainly are for Detroit, especially Belle Isle. The economic boost to the city and region is significant. A 2014 study found the Grand Prix leads to a $45 million investment in the area the week of the races. And at this year’s opening gala last Friday, that event raised $750,000 in net profit for the Belle Isle Conservancy, money that will go to further upgrade the island.
Race organizers and partners have also invested more than $13 million in infrastructure improvements on the island since the event returned, including revamping the landmark Casino, comfort stations and the James Scott Memorial Fountain.
The benefits outweigh any inconveniences that accompany the Grand Prix. Yet some city residents have protested the event, saying it prevents them from enjoying the park for several weeks of the summer.
Denker says he is addressing those concerns and is working to reduce setup and take-down time to nine weeks from 11 weeks. But that’s as short a window as possible to ensure a safe race and successful event, he says.
And the park is still open to visitors during set up and tear down.
The Grand Prix has an agreement with the state Department of Natural Resources to operate on the island through 2018 and Denker is in the process of negotiating an extension, which he’d like to finish by the end of this year.
The DNR is planning to hold community hearings. But the state, which took over park operations several years ago to lift the burden off Detroit, surely understands what a great partnership this is, and the importance of keeping the Grand Prix on Belle Isle.
Read or Share this story: http://detne.ws/2rSRhVQIncreasing his presence on television screens in Iowa, Senator Ted Cruz released a new ad, titled “Victories,” portraying him as a successful fighter for conservative causes.
On Screen
Black-and-white photographs of a white cross in the Mojave Desert (“Defended the cross. And won,” a caption declares), a Ten Commandments monument outside a statehouse (“Protected the Ten Commandments. And won.”), armed hunters silhouetted against the sky (“Fought for the Second Amendment. And won.”) and a girl with her hand over her heart (“Stood up for the Pledge of Allegiance. And won.”). Reverb-soaked guitar licks provide the only sound. Mr. Cruz is seen only briefly, in a photograph, gazing intently off-screen, as the words “Trust Ted” appear in white and red, then merge into one word: “Trusted.”
The Message
Appealing to evangelical Christians is made considerably easier when you can defensibly say you successfully “defended the cross.” Coming on strong in Iowa, Mr. Cruz is supplying red meat to social conservatives by portraying himself as a champion on God and guns.
Fact Check
Mr. Cruz worked pro bono while in private practice to aid veterans groups fighting to preserve the Mojave Desert cross on federal parkland in California. As solicitor general of Texas, he helped argue that Texas could have a Ten Commandments monument at the Capitol and keep the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, though critics have accused him of taking too much credit for his role in those cases. He drafted an amicus brief, signed by the attorneys general of 31 states, arguing to strike down the District of Columbia’s handgun ban; the ban was struck down, but Texas was not a party to the case.DUP man urges religious fightback against 'No God' campaign BelfastTelegraph.co.uk Christian groups have been urged by a senior DUP politician to launch a counter-strike to the “There is Probably No God” bus advertising campaign. https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/dup-man-urges-religious-fightback-against-no-god-campaign-28463010.html https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/migration_catalog/article25637680.ece/5c900/AUTOCROP/h342/nogod
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Christian groups have been urged by a senior DUP politician to launch a counter-strike to the “There is Probably No God” bus advertising campaign.
Gregory Campbell wants alternative adverts that add: “But What If There Is?” in response to the British Humanist Association’s (BHA) posters, which were launched in London and will be used across the UK.
The organisation wants to spread a “humanised” message that people should “stop worrying and start enjoying life”.
Mr Campbell, MP for East Londonderry, tabled an Early Day Motion in Parliament highlighting that “the rationale behind it is that people can be less careful about their lifestyle choices and general approach to life's consequences by discounting the likelihood of a Creator and an afterlife”.
The Atheist Bus Campaign was launched in response to Christian adverts that featured web links to sites that said non-Christians would burn in hell for all eternity. The BHA — which describes itself as a national charity representing people who seek to live good lives without religious beliefs — tells people there is absolutely no reason to worry about not being religious. It declined to comment on the motion, also backed by Independent MP Bob Spink and Conservative Nicholas Winterton.
Belfast TelegraphPeaches Geldof Reportedly Killed By Heroin Overdose
It looks like the mystery surrounding the tragic and unexpected death of Peaches Geldof has finally been solved.
According to sources familiar with Thursday’s inquest, the 25-year-old’s death was the result of an overdose on heroin.
Ugh. That’s just so shocking and sad, especially considering Peaches’ mother Paula Yates overdosed on heroin and died in 2000.
In case you already blocked the bad memories out of your head, the starlet was found unresponsive inside of her London home earlier this month with her 11-month-old son still by her side. While an autopsy was conducted days after her death, those results were for some reason inconclusive.
We aren’t sure what new evidence came to light showing that heroin was indeed responsible for her unfortunate passing, but our deepest sympathies continue to go out to all those affected by her death.
R.I.P., Peaches!
[Image via WENN.]Last year we learned that climate change could soon make Australia too hot for the cold-loving, iconic platypus (Ornithorhynchus anatinus). Now we have word of a new threat to these unique, egg-laying mammals: inbreeding, which has put the platypuses living on two small Australian islands at enhanced risk of disease.
According to research published March 28 in Ecology and Evolution and May 4 in the Journal of Heredity, the platypus populations on mainland Australia and its island state Tasmania have perfectly normal levels of genetic diversity. But populations on two nearby islands aren't in as good shape. University of Sydney doctoral student Mette Lillie, lead author of the Journal of Heredity paper, says platypuses on the 1,100-square-kilometer King Island—located off the coast of Tasmania and separated genetically from the mainland by the last ice age 14,000 years ago—now show no diversity in their major histocompatibility complex (MHC) gene, putting them at high risk of an epidemic disease. "If you have lots of variation in the MHC gene, it means the population is better able to resist disease and pathogens," she told the Australian Broadcasting Corp (ABC). Lillie was one of the researchers who sequenced the platypus genome in 2010.
The Ecology and Evolution paper, by researchers from the University of Melbourne and other organizations, said the King Island population shows one of the lowest levels of genetic diversity ever found in any vertebrate population.
Platypuses on the 4,400-square-kilometer Kangaroo Island, located off the state of South Australia, aren't doing much better. But that population was introduced there by humans in the 1930s and '40s, and Lillie says the lack of genetic diversity is to be expected from such a small population with no influx of new breeding stock.
Lillie told ABC Radio's PM news program that genetic diversity problems can often be solved by introducing animals from a different population, but that would be too risky on King Island because any newcomers to the island could bring a new disease for which the existing population would be unprepared.
The most serious disease afflicting platypuses today is ulcerative mucormycosis, a fungal disease affecting the species on Tasmania. The disease—much like the devil facial tumor disease that affects Tasmanian devils—causes nasty, ulcerated lesions on animals, which can prove fatal when the wounds become infected. Mucormycosis is caused by Mucor amphibiorum, a fungus native to mainland Australia, where it does not affect the resident platypuses. The disease was first observed on Tasmania in 1982. Experts suspect it arrived on Tasmania via illegally transported green tree frogs.
Platypuses—one of five egg-laying mammal species now living in the world—were overhunted by fur traders until the early 20th century but are now protected under Australian law. They are also the sole living species in their genus and one of world's only venomous mammals.
Meanwhile, life on small islands may actually benefit another Australian species, the eastern quoll (Dasyurus viverrinus), which disappeared from mainland Australia decades ago. The marsupials can now only be found on Tasmania—where their populations have declined 50 percent in the past 10 years—and Tasmania's nearby Bruny Island (362 square kilometers), where University of Tasmania researcher Bronwyn Fancourt has found that they are flourishing. It's too early to say why Bruny has provided a safe haven, but the decline on Tasmania has been linked to feral cats. Ironically, eastern quolls are also known as "eastern native cats" even though they are not felines. The genetic diversity of the eastern quoll has not yet been studied.
Photos: Platypus by Cha222 via Flickr. Eastern quoll by Matthias Siegel via Flickr. Used under Creative Commons licenseFor fifty years now, families have gathered together to sit and watch the children’s classic movie Rudolph, the Red Nosed Reindeer. As I have again started to watch this with my own children, I’ve always been struck by one thing – Santa the slave-driving fascist, King Moonracer of the Island of Misfit Toys and the bulk of the other reindeer surrounding Rudolph, including his father Donner, are just outright assholes.
From the day of Rudolph’s birth, Santa is on his ass about his nose. When Santa visits to see the new buck and Rudolph’s nose starts to glow (as the ubiquitous song points out), Santa says, “Great bouncing icebergs! Let’s hope [it stops] if he wants to make the sleigh team some day.” As if having a red nose somehow prohibits his ability to fly a damn sleigh. And his bastard of a father shows what backbone he’s got (none) by agreeing with Santa. So what does he do? He first covers Rudolph’s nose with mud and when that doesn’t work, he puts on a cap making him sound like a kid with an allergy to cats who gets locked in an animal shelter. Not exactly setting him up for success, are they?
Despite this auspicious beginning, Rudolph goes to try out for the sleigh team on the day of the Reindeer Games. There he meets Fireball and despite his ridiculous sounding voice (courtesy of the stupid nose cap), he and Fireball hit it off. When they see a couple of does nearby, the mack is on. Fireball prods Rudolph into talking to one exceptionally cute doe named Clarice. After throwing out his smooth lines and getting her to agree to walk home with him, Clarice tells him she thinks he’s cute. This literally sends him into orbit and he jumps into the sky and flies better than all of the other mean ass reindeer at the games.
But when he and Fireball engage in a little reindeer fun, his nose cap comes off. And that’s when the shit hits the fan. Fireball immediately yells at Rudolph to get away from him and that’s when the other lemming reindeer come in and start the insults. Instead of stopping the nonsense, Santa scolds his father. “Donner, you should be ashamed of yourself. What a pity.” And to add insult to the injury, Comet the coach, dick that he is, announces to all of the other bucks as they head back to practice, “Oh no, not you. You better go home with your folks. From now on gang, we won’t let Rudolph join in any Reindeer Games, right?” Clar |
. He died on this day in 1874. That night his warriors painted his body yellow, black, and vermilion, and took him deep into the Dragoon Mountains. They lowered his body and weapons into a rocky crevice, the exact location of which remains unknown. Today, however, that section of the Dragoon Mountains is known as Cochise’s Stronghold.
About a decade after Cochise died, Felix Tellez–the boy whose kidnapping had started the war–resurfaced as an Apache-speaking scout for the U.S. Army. He reported that a group of Western Apache, not Cochise, had kidnapped him.Image caption Band members were filmed playing music while marching in circles outside the Catholic church in 2012
Thirteen members of a loyalist flute band have been convicted of provocatively playing a sectarian tune outside a Catholic church.
On Wednesday, a judge at Belfast Magistrates Court, ruled that they took part in a rendition of the Famine Song, aggravated by hostility, while marching in a circle at St Patrick's Church in north Belfast during a 12 July parade in 2012.
The 13 defendants, all members of the Belfast band, Young Conway Volunteers, denied playing the controversial tune.
They instead claimed to have been performing the Beach Boys hit Sloop John B.
Three of the defendants received five-month suspended prison sentences for their actions.
The other 10 were each bound to keep the peace for the next two years, with a prohibition on engaging in aggressive, provocative or disorderly behaviour.
Fines of £300 were imposed on all of the defendants apart from those tried as youths.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The loyalist band played outside the church for 15 to 20 minutes
Senior judges in Scotland have previously ruled the controversial Famine Song - which includes the line "The famine's over, why don't you go home?" - to be racist.
The episode outside the church marked the first in a series of incidents at the Donegall Street location.
A judge said it was "outrageous and inflammatory behaviour which could have precipitated serious public disorder."
The defendants had contested a charge of doing a provocative act likely to cause public disorder or a breach of the peace.
'Racial hatred'
During a hearing, defence lawyers played songs by a Swedish folk singer, a Star Trek enthusiast and football fan chants - all to the same tune - in a bid to have their clients cleared.
Paul Shaw, band leader on the day of the parade, was the only one of the accused to give evidence.
He said they had been forced to stop outside the church due to a break in the parade and started up the Beach Boys tune to ward off lethargy among tired members.
He said he had penned a letter to local Catholic parishioners.
"That was to explain the band in no way had any intention to cause any upset to anybody," he said.
"I felt it was my duty as band leader."
However, District Judge Paul Copeland rejected the defence case, finding that the band could have behaved differently as they waited to march on.
"They had choices to make; they didn't stand and wait quietly, they didn't disperse for the short period of time available to them, they didn't march in silence to a drum beat, they didn't sit down, join supporters or family and take a break.
"Instead, I find there was a studied and deliberate piece of conduct which involved their playing and marching not just past this church, but deliberately remaining within feet of the doorstep."
Emphasising the context of the situation at St Patrick's, he said the Famine Song has entered into the "repertoire" of loyalist band music.
It has the potential "as an anthem of sectarian abuse at least, or, at worst, racial hatred", Judge Copeland said.Games retail behemoth GameStop stirred the waters this week when an investor note from R.W. Baird analyst Colin Sebastian revealed the company was considering funding game development in trade for exclusive content through its retail ecosystem. The presumption by the company’s critics: giant corporate retailers shouldn’t muck about in artistic mediums.
GameStop has nearly 6,500 stores worldwide, making it one of the largest retailers on the planet by any measure. And in recent years, as digital sales have grown, it’s been a target for critics who view its brick-and-mortar buy-sell model as terminal at some point. You can’t trade in content you don’t physically own, after all, and at some point (though some of this is up in the air, legally speaking) all we’re likely to “own” are 1’s and 0’s stored on a platter or integrated circuit.
I spoke with GameStop CEO Paul Raines by phone on Tuesday. Here’s what he told me about the company’s plans to tinker with game development and what he calls “GameStop 3.0.”
I used to work for you guys, you know, long, long ago.
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I heard that.
Back when the company was Neostar, and much smaller.
Oh man, you go way back. You know who was on the board of the company at that time? A little trivia, Mitt Romney was on the board of Neostar back then, believe it or not.
Wait, really?
Yeah, our founders, Dan DeMatteo and Dick Fontaine, you probably know who they are, when they first came to Dallas, Len Riggio bought Neostar out of bankruptcy and it was a Bain Capital company. And apparently Mitt was on the board.
I didn’t know that. I was at Grapevine for the manager’s conference in 1996, the year they were going through all that, you know, chapter 11, then worries about chapter 7, and then Len stepping in to pick up what was left.
The history of the company, a lot of people don’t know it, but people say to us today, you’re moving so fast on all of these changes, and I go “I think the company’s history is kind of filled with rapid change. It’s a little bit in our DNA.”
You’ve done a lot of interesting things over the years. I happen to be in the state, right down the street in fact, from the company you purchased Impulse from just a few years ago — Brad Wardell and Stardock.
Tell him we said hello. It was a great acquisition, we picked up some great team members and technology. It’s funny though, at the time, we perceived there to be these barriers to entry into a series of different kinds of gaming technologies. But once we acquired some of that technology, we found a lot of people interested in distributing with us. That goes back to GameStop Digital Ventures, $100 million we earmarked for marketing and advertising back in probably 2009-ish, which was when we started that process.
Speaking of, I remember the company back in 1996 bringing in these arcade-style demo units that were essentially skiing games, but that you were supposed to control with brainwaves by putting something on your head and “thinking” left or right to make the onscreen skier go in the corresponding direction. It was bizarre.
[Laughs] Wow, no, I missed that. Well, we’re not afraid to try stuff, that’s for sure.
Can you comment on this story making the rounds by way of investment company R.W. Baird and analyst Colin Sebastian about GameStop getting involved in game development early in the process for the sake of creating GameStop-exclusive content?
I think there’s a few things we could talk about, and we’re always in conversations with publishers so we can’t share everything. But I guess the first point I would make is that we’ve been in the exclusive content business for a while, if you consider that we’re always seeking exclusive gameplay items, levels, weapons and so forth.
Remember Call of Duty: World at War, where we had that, I think it was a level 20 M1 Garand rifle, and you would get that item if you bought the game at GameStop? If you remember that year, we drove 90 percent of the growth of that title year-over-year. A lot of it had to do with that exclusive. And so publishers have always participated with us on exclusives whether that be different levels, skins for characters and so forth. I would say exclusivity is attractive to us and also to publishers. That’s always been a little bit of that in the DNA.
The other point I would make, is that through our Kongregate digital casual games platform, we’ve been publishing mobile games for about a year-and-a-half. We’ve been fairly successful, we have probably eight to 10 games on the iOS App Store and Google Play store today. So we’re in the publishing business on the mobile side, and you’ll see us be aggressive on that side going forward.
As far as getting into development, we’re an organization that’s all about gaming, and our publishers of course see the kinds of advantages we bring with PowerUp Rewards [GameStop’s purchase-related customer rewards program], having 34 million members around the world, and our store footprint and our online presence and so forth. Our market share continues to grow, and that’s because gamers prefer to buy from GameStop for a lot of different reasons. When you think about the business of gaming and the cost of developing games, we think there’s an opportunity to put capital at risk with publishers and developers in exchange for exclusive content that would be distributed through our online platforms, in stores, our download business, et cetera.
So you can imagine that’s a long lead time process, and our discussions that we’ve been having and will continue to have revolve around how we could participate in some of the activity around funding or putting games at risk. It’s very early on, but I do foresee a world where we can help facilitate great content. The upside for developers will be much stronger guarantees around distribution and audience with our loyalty program and so forth.
But there’s been backlash against the notion of you — of a giant corporate retailer — getting involved in the development process. What would you tell someone who thinks getting involved in the creative process isn’t something a company like GameStop ought to be doing?
I think it’s pretty clear to me, and that’s that you won’t see us involved in the creative process. That’s not something we do well. We love to play games, and unlike our competitors all we do is gaming. But we will not be involved in the artistic or creative process. That’s not really our domain.
What we do think though is that capital for this industry is always challenging, and has been through the decline of the console cycle. So we’ve made strategic investments in ImpulseDriven.com and Kongregate.com and BuyMyTronics.com. And with Kongregate we’re already funding developers.
So all we’re talking about is extending that capital and distribution skill-set into the console publishing and development space. But I don’t think that involves any creative controls or influence at all. I think we’d be foolish to tell developers how to develop games or publishers how to bring product to market. That’s what they do extremely well. What we’ll do well is put capital at risk and help distribute and connect with PowerUp Rewards customers. That’s really the extent of what we’re talking about. I think the day you see us in the creative side is when you can tell me we’ve officially lost our minds.
When we talk to developers in the mobile space, one of the biggest challenges for the industry, and I would say this is probably true of console as well, is connecting with customers. You’ve got this huge barrier of distribution and publishing and how do you get to the people who want to play your games. We play a lot of indie games here, trying to find interesting ideas and concepts, and I see some great games that never get published or distributed because of the cost associated with it. So we kind of feel like it’s a little bit of an emancipation of the development community if we can find a way to connect them directly with customers.
NPD Group reported in May that roughly half of $1.5 billion spent on games was for digital content. There’s some question about the accuracy of digital sales estimates, of course, but what’s your reaction to the narrative that this shift toward digital distribution threatens GameStop’s longevity?
As far as NPD data, the NPD physical data is point-of-sales based, it’s real sales data coming from resellers. Digital data, as I understand it, is survey panel data, so I’d be cautious with those estimates.
But having said that, there’s no question there’s a lot of digital gaming out there. In fact we sold last year $730 million dollars or so of digital content gaming, PC and console. We understand digital gaming and think it’s good for GameStop. Our business in the digital side is mostly console, and most of the console business is DLC. We just had a huge launch of Watch Dogs, and about 30 percent of all copies sold had digital content attached to them. So we like the growth of digital.
I also think interesting numbers are floating around out there. I don’t know if you saw recently, but Microsoft revealed that 40 percent of their digital sales happen at retail. And of course we’re going to be the biggest player at retail, and we believe our digital market share is pretty close to our physical market share. There’s not great data around that yet, but we’re clearly playing a big role in digital sales. We create an entertainment destination for consumers to come buy content. When we do a midnight launch, people come to buy digital content to go with their physical content, and it’s easy to find the digital content in our stores.
Second, you have trade credits. The GameStop buy-sell trade model funds the sale of new product. That new product includes digital content. Last year, there were over $1 billion of trade credits given to consumers at GameStop. 70% of the time those trade credits go to a new sale, and a lot of that is digital.
Third, we have PowerUp Rewards. People want their PowerUp Rewards points, they want that on their account, and to be able to use that account to buy cool stuff. So all of those things — including Kongregate and our PC digital downloads business, which is doing very well — make us pretty bullish about digital sales.
What about PC game sales? There was this moment when you picked up Impulse in 2011, that I think a lot of people thought you were going to square off with Valve and Steam. What happened?
There was a day here, years ago, where we saw ourselves as on opposite sides of the sale of PC content. If we couldn’t sell it, we were competing with people who were selling downloads.
But the new GameStop is more of a collaborative approach. So we’ve been in a relationship with Steam, we’ve been selling Steam digital currency probably for the last two-and-a-half years, and we’ve been very successful. In fact I think we sell Steam currency in all 15 countries that we’re in.
We of course sell our own downloads on our website, but we also carry EA’s Origin games as well as Ubisoft’s PC downloads. So I would say we changed our philosophy a couple years ago from trying to compete with PC developers and publishers to being more of a distributor and collaborator, you know, how can we make your PC business bigger, how can we leverage PowerUp Rewards and trade credits to grow your business with us. So we’re very bullish on PC.
Back in April you unveiled what you called GameStop 3.0, which seems pretty clearly like a product leveraging move given industry inevitabilities, even if you assume a certain contingent of consumers are going to buy digital at retail. And since those other products – – AT&T, Apple and so forth — don’t involve games, is there a point at which you might have to stop calling yourself GameStop?
I would leave the name question for the last priority, because our name is iconic with people and I don’t know that we’ll ever change that. But certainly with GameStop 3.0, we’re describing old GameStop through about 2007 as GameStop 1.0, and that’s that physical console business you’re familiar with. GameStop 2.0 I think was when we were diversifying our gaming concepts, so the acquisition of Impulse, the acquisition of Kongregate, Jolt Gaming, BuyMyTronics, all those things were efforts at expanding into digital gaming and other forms of gaming. With $730 million of revenue last year I think we’ve been successful with that.
There are some things we could have done better. You know, our Spawn Labs investment on streaming, we announced that we were closing that. We still own the patents, but we just couldn’t find a consumer model that worked. But if and when streaming becomes interesting like on PlayStation Now, we will sell that and distribute it.
GameStop 3.0 is when we looked around starting about a year ago and said “Okay, we’re going to be strong in gaming for a long time, the console cycle is going to recover and grow, what other areas do we have skills for?” And as we looked at the world, we said “We’re pretty good on real estate. We’re pretty good on human talent. We have this incredible buy-sell trade business that works in gaming, and we’ve discovered it works in phones and tablets, and probably other wearable devices. We have this PowerUp Rewards program that’s 34 million members strong, and are there other products these customers might want from us? And then we’re a very low debt, strong balance sheet.”
So as we looked around, we saw that the Apple ecosystem was very interesting, and we went to Apple and had a conversation around how could support their efforts to build distribution. We discovered there aren’t a lot of Apple dealers in rural markets. Apple has stores in big cities, but nothing, say, in Lubbock, Texas. All there were were big boxes. So we acquired SimplyMac, and we’re building out SimplyMac as a secondary market Apple dealer with full support from Apple.
And then we continued looking and got into the wireless space. The wireless space has both postpaid and prepaid models. We approached AT&T and were fortunate to sign an exclusive agreement with AT&T. So we, today, are the third biggest dealer of AT&T stores in the U.S. And we’re also one of the fastest growing Cricket prepaid dealers. We’ve got great people, we’re flipping leases of GameStop stores into phone stores, we’re bringing associates over from the gaming space there.
The bottom line is, we’re trying to redefine ourselves as a family of specialty retail brands to make the most popular technologies affordable and simple. I don’t know that it’s been attempted in electronics, but that’s what we’re trying to do.
Write to Matt Peckham at matt.peckham@time.com.Despite an overwhelming body of evidence that Bill Belichick is a football-coaching, tablet-hating robot singularly focused on dismantling his opponents, there's a multitude of accounts from the 64-year-old's former players and peers who have revealed that the coach indeed has a lighter side.
One such account came on Wednesday morning from former Patriots safety Brandon Meriweather (2007-2010) who inspired the coach to create a mix CD for him after hearing Meriweather's rap single “VIP on Swole.” Back in 2011, the safety's song debuted on Boston's “Toucher & Rich” and Belichick was not impressed, to say the least. “I put you together a CD of some real music,” Meriweather says Belichick told him after hearing it.
Anyhow, Meriweather came back on the show to discuss the contents of that CD and it's pretty amusing:
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Basically it boils down to a difference in taste — to each his own — which Meriweather acknowledges. Meriweather has frantically searched for the CD and says he cannot find it, but he does recall a few of the tracks and one song in particular by Bon Jovi as the coach and Jon Bon Jovi “might be best friends or something,” he said.
Stay tuned for the complete Belichick real music anthology, featuring Springsteen, Tom Petty, Meatloaf, and other good artists you would totally expect but might not be for you or Meriweather.
Brandon Meriweather told us 3 songs Bill Belichick put on his mix-CD for him were Springsteen, Tim McGraw, & Bon Jovi "Livin' on a Prayer". — Toucher and Rich (@Toucherandrich) October 19, 2016When it comes to defense and foreign policy, Senator Paul is a menace.
Again and again, conservatives have cut Senator Rand Paul at least some slack when his pronouncements have moved in the realm of, but not fully shared, his father’s nuttiness on foreign affairs. It’s almost as if some nuttiness of his own was allowable as long as it didn’t go as far as his father’s did.
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But just about every fortnight or so, a new Rand Paul speech or a newly resurfaced old video or news report shows not only that the senator is dangerously neo-isolationist and militarily penurious, but that he is also bizarrely spiteful toward those who disagree. Worse, just as in some of his father’s rants, the Kentuckian’s pronouncements bend toward wacky conspiracy theories of the “blame America first” variety. It recently emerged, for example, that just two years ago, he still was trafficking in the Buchananite fantasy that United States trade policy made it somehow culpable for Japan’s and Germany’s “anger,” which led to World War II.
#ad#The latest video to resurface is from a 2009 speech at Western Kentucky University, unearthed by David Corn at Mother Jones. In it, Senator Paul peddles the old leftist theory — one that is hideously insulting to the motives and character of former vice president Dick Cheney — that the decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003 was driven by the desire to increase the profits of the Halliburton oil-field-services company that Cheney once led.
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“We need to be fearful of companies that get so big that they can actually be directing policy,” the senator said. He went on to blame Halliburton also for doing such “shoddy” work that “our soldiers are over there dying in the shower from electrocution.” Noting that Cheney in 1995 had defended the decision not to press the 1991 Desert Storm engagement any further, Paul said: “Dick Cheney then goes to work for Halliburton. Makes hundreds of millions of dollars, their CEO. Next thing you know, he’s back in government, and it’s a good idea to go into Iraq.... [And] 9/11 became an excuse for a war they already wanted in Iraq.”
There are plenty of arguments to be made both for and against the 2003 decision to go to war, but to say that Cheney willingly put the lives of his countrymen at risk in order to make money — from a company he no longer worked for — is simply beyond the pale. And Cheney wasn’t the only one guilty of war profiteering, according to the Book of Paul. At a GOP event in Montana during the 2008 presidential campaign, he said: “Most of the people on these [congressional] committees have a million dollars in their bank account all from different military-industrial contractors. We don’t want our defense to be defined by people who make money off of the weapons.”
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This is slanderous. Maybe there are a few Republicans out there who really do think Cheney is Darth Vader, and that multiple congressmen are equally corrupt and vicious. But Senator Paul has peddled similarly crazy and insulting notions about Ronald Reagan — namely that he and a “war caucus” stupidly armed Osama bin Laden and radical jihadists in Afghanistan, to ill result. Every part of this formulation, from a major speech he made at the Heritage Foundation, was dead wrong.
This propensity not just to disagree with others on foreign policy but also to denigrate them (and often to mischaracterize their actions or positions) is a staple of Paul’s remarks. In a January piece for The National Interest, he complained about name-calling in foreign-policy disputes: “It seems everybody’s got a name for themselves and even nastier names for their opponents.... If you don’t label yourself first, your enemies will.” Then he proceeded to engage in... name-calling. Criticizing the “neoconservatives” who “preach a doctrine that is hostile to diplomatic engagement,” he wrote: “To this crowd, everyone who doesn’t agree with them is the next Chamberlain.”
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Again and again, he characterizes his opponents as flat-out warmongers, such as those “within the Christian community [who] are such great defenders of the promised land and the chosen people that they think war is always the answer, maybe even preemptive war.” Choices are always binary in his world — one must either follow his way of diplomacy or, as in his Heritage speech, take the position that “war is the only option.” In a recent speech at the Center for the National Interest, he built the same militaristic straw man. Those who favor bigger defense forces and more robust postures, he said, have the attitude that “diplomacy is distrusted and war is, if not the first choice, the preferred option.”
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The worst warmongers in Paul World are always the nefarious “neocons,” sometimes directly associated with Israel, who are blamed for such a wide assortment of ills and bad motives that an uninformed listener might think they are more dangerous to world peace than the Soviets ever were.
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On substance, Paul’s antipathy for American international engagement, and for just about any aspect of the Bush administration’s war on terror, is so strong that he (1) was among only 18 senators (and only four Republicans) who refused to sign a letter demanding strong terms for any agreement with Iran on its nuclear program; (2) suggested that a nuclear-armed Iran could be accepted and “contained”; (3) actually compared the remarkably humane American facility for terrorists at Guantanamo Bay to the American mistreatment of blacks and Japanese; (4) argued against “tweaking” Vladimir Putin and said that Ukraine is rightly within Russia’s sphere of influence, just when Putin was beginning to threaten Crimea — in effect, giving Putin a green light; (5) later, was one of only two senators to vote against sanctions to punish Russia for its aggression; (6) denied that the United States is in any way a “battlefield” for terrorists; and (7) hinted that years of aid to Egypt were wasted (as if decades of peace in the Sinai were immaterial).
And this is not even counting the senator’s long-standing advocacy for an ever-leaner Pentagon, even though the Defense Department already has borne the brunt of Obama-era budget cuts. Senator Paul’s dovishness seems to know no bounds.
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Granted, there is much to like about Rand Paul’s steadfastness on domestic policies. The cause of limited government has few such stalwart champions. But Paul is obviously considering a presidential race. This is frightening. A president’s first duty is to defend our nation and our international interests. By this standard, Rand Paul’s record and views are woefully, and sometimes nastily, shoddy.
— Quin Hillyer is a contributing editor for National Review. Follow him on Twitter @QuinHillyer.Team Property’s Joel ”emilio” Mako was VAC banned during a Fragbite Masters game against Hellraisers.
But the player claims his innocence and now the situation is being analyzed by Valve.
– I can’t prove my innocence, but they can, Emilio tells Aftonbladet Esport.
It was during a Fragbite Masters game against Hellraisers that the Swedish player was kicked out from the server. According to the logs it was because of a VAC ban, and now the team has been suspended until the matter has been analyzed.
– Emilio was VAC banned mid game and therefore Team Property has forfeited the game since they haven’t got enough players to finish. They have 48 hours to prove that they haven’t cheated. If they can prove it, they’re still eligible to play in the losers bracket since all our teams go to the playoffs, Fragbite chief Pontus Eskilsson tells Aftonbladet Esport.
”Valve can prove my innocence”
Team Property is in contact with Valve and emilio himself claims his innocence.
– I’m leaving this in Valve’s hands. I can’t prove my innocence, but they can, he tells Aftonbladet Esport.
And the team is withholding comments until the matter has been settled.
– We’re in contact with Valve but won’t comment until they’ve had their say, says team manager Aron Larsson.
The two team was duking it out on de_dust2 when the ban was implemented. The chock seemed to stun the players as well as the commentators.
– I’ve been broadcasting CS:GO for a long time but that’s a first, Auguste ”Semmlertheriot” Massonnat said during the live stream and his colleague, Anders Blume, filled in.
– We’ll asume that’s some kind of error until we get further conformation.
The future in Fragbite Masters is not lost for Team Property. If they can, within 48 hours, prove that emilio did not cheat, they will enter the loser brackets and keep their chance to fight for the glory. However, the team is eliminated until they can prove their innocence, not the other way around.A few days ago Amruta Fadnavis, wife of Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, faced a lot of flak on social media, after she attended a “Be Santa” campaign launched by a radio station. Critics called this decision of Ms. Fadnavis as knowing or unknowingly spreading a Christian evangelist agenda.
Now a BJP MLA from Mumbai’s Bandra West named Ashish Shelar has come under fire for outright lending his support for a Christian evangelism event:
Shelar who is also the President of BJP Mumbai, is seen urging people to join the event presented by “Prabhu Yesha Janmotsav”, which as per its Facebook page seems to be some kind of a Christmas celebration.
As per the poster, the event features the Hillsong church and an Acharya Vikas Massey. Going to the Acharya’s Facebook page, one sees that he openly clams to serve Jesus:
Scrolling through his Facebook page, one finds that he regularly conducts Evangelism events across India:
Also while sharing information about the event in Mumbai, he is seen using phrases like, “His kingdom will have no end”, which some might argue is a call to spread Christianity:
Even the Church named Hillsong, which features on the poster, has a questionable past. One of its pastor was in the past accused of sexually abusing a seven year old boy and the church too being accused of being a “cult”.
Considering the decision of the BJP MLA to extend support to such an event, many Social Media users decided to express their anger:
It remains to be seen as to what is the response of the senior BJP leadership to this matter, and whether the party would provide any advisory to its members over such matters in the future.Ebony S. Muhammad (EM): In your opinion and work experience as a filmmaker, how has Black entertainment, specifically film and cinema, evolved over the last ten to twenty years?
Mark Harris (MH): First, allow me to thank you for this opportunity. To answer your question, the film business has evolved because, it’s much easier to produce films with today’s technology that many people ten years ago believed to be for low budget films only. So, today you see more and more studios shooting digitally. Ten or twenty years ago it was film which is very costly. Ten years ago, straight to DVD was considered a low budget thing. Now, you have platforms like Netflix, Urban Movie Channel, Amazon, Hulu streaming content and you’re seeing more A list talent getting into the game. So, this is a beautiful time to be in the film industry.
EM: How do you define progress in Black Entertainment?
MH: Amazing if you judge it based on the overall aspect of Black entertainment and not looking at it from the perspective of what we see coming out of Hollywood. We have a number of amazing Black filmmakers who are producing independent work that aren’t doing Hollywood films. So, the only thing that I believe is missing is Black people have to start placing value on Black content made outside of Hollywood’s system. We have the tendency to think someone has “made it” or “blew up” when that Black person has been given the stamp of approval from mainstream, and in a way this stems from a subconscious hatred of self and anything Black that’s not backed by mainstream.
EM: Do you consider it progress that more Black faces are on the big screen and on networks such as Netflix and Hulu?
MH: No. It’s only progress when Black people have total control over our images and how they’re given to the world. It’s only progress when Black people own channels, production companies, distribution companies, finance companies, marketing companies, etc. Everything else is only window dressing, because believe it or not, when many Black people get into certain “powerful” positions, instead of looking at other Black people as their allies, many Black people deem us as their competition. This is the main reason we have no control over our images that are displayed all over the world.
EM: Can you give examples of how both actors and audience members may miss subtle drawbacks and insults dealt from events such as award shows that fail to recognize Black talent or if they do it’s in a light of negative stereotypes?
MH: Honestly, I don’t think much of award shows that fail to recognizes Black people. I think that is a good thing to be honest with you. Why do I say that? Black people must see value in self, must love self, must appreciate self and support self. So, hopefully by them not recognizing Black people this could force us to own and control our award shows and not be so concerned with looking for others to show us appreciation.
EM: How can we, as a whole, regain control of our image and depiction that quite honestly feeds the impressions of others around the world of who we are?
MH: It’s simple, our unity. Black people who are in positions have to pool our resources and start to finance our own images and stories. I do not blame Hollywood when they put up the money for a story about Black history and they implant these White saviors, because they want to make sure their people are properly represented. We have enough resources to create our own stories, we just have to overcome our fears of worrying about if others see our unity as a threat to them. We must overcome our fears in order to control our own images.
EM: What are some of the sidebar conversations like between you and other filmmakers and actors relating to these issues?
MH: None. Many people are trying to break into Hollywood, not create their own Hollywood.
EM: We have seen the merge of music artists into film and cinema. What has that experience been like for you, and how much of an impact does that make in a film project?
MH: It hasn’t affected my career in anyway. But, rap artists have their own audience, and if they’re audience is in the millions and they have millions of followers on their social media, this helps with marketing a film. Hollywood looks at this as being smart for business and it is.
EM: The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan says that we don’t have a lot of time to come together in unity to do for ourselves and our people in the way of having our own.
We see popular shows like Underground that illustrate some of the horrors and truths of slavery and struggle for freedom in a very modern and creative way that’s entertaining and educational, be cancelled after only two seasons. Yet, Black “reality” shows that are degrading and provocative and lacking substance run for ten or more seasons. What can we do in the meantime of building our own network to combat this?
MH: As long as we fear that others fear our unity is a threat to them, there’s nothing we can do. But, our unity and overcoming our fears gets these things overnight.
EM: What have been some great victories in Black film that many may not know about?
MH: Anytime a Black filmmaker makes a film is a victory. Many people may look at victories as winning Oscars, Golden Globe, etc. The victory is we get to tell our stories every single day.
EM: Is there anything else you would like to add?
MH: I just want to thank you for this opportunity and truly appreciate all that you do and continue on your journey. Thanks you.
EM: All praise is due to Allah! Thank you for striving to be an example within your respective field! May Allah continue to bless you.
Be sure to follow and support the work of Mark Harris on social media.Finally, you’re free to play golf whenever you want, wherever you can, regardless of lifestyle, trunk space or the lack thereof. Our new, fully functional, high-performance set of DV8 golf clubs does everything traditional clubs can, plus one thing they cannot: let you golf without obstacles.
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When not in use, DV8 club heads fit securely into labeled slots in the bag’s precision engineered block of EVA foam – the same lightweight, durable foam found in high-end camera/lens cases. As shown, shaft sections store vertically in the protective foam block and are accessed at the top of the bag.
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’ says @POTUS “doesn’t like Cuban-Americans” in part because too many vote Republican. pic.twitter.com/ADIMI2kqUY — Jill Ament (@JillianAment) January 13, 2017
Cruz is one of the few I’ve heard mention the conservative angle, and he’s right. Latinos from other countries are usually left-leaning in their politics, so Obama doesn’t mind that.
On the other hand, this is the natural extension of “normalizing” the relations with the brutal Communist regime. What it means is that Obama is forcing America to be an accessory to their oppression of their citizens, since we’ll be deporting Cubans back to that totalitarian dictatorship instead of offering them political refugee status.
Now the only question is whether Trump will do anything about it. I very much doubt it. He already flip flopped on the subject, having supported Obama on the normalization, and then bashing it when it suited him for the election…Finding: BUSTED
Explanation: It actually costs airlines less money if passengers die — rather than sustain long-term injuries — in plane crashes. According to MythBusters' calculations, wrongful-death settlements can cost anywhere from $3 million to $40 million less than does footing the bill for lifetime rehabilitation.
Maybe for that reason, a theory began circulating that the brace-impact position that passengers are supposed to assume in the event of a crash is actually meant to kill them, not save their necks.
MythBusters Kari Byron, Tory Belleci and Grant Imahara put their dummy Buster through a series of simulated plane crashes to see if that myth would survive. They bought airline seats and built a mini plane cabin to suspend from a crane. Then they dropped the cabin 15 feet (4.6 meters) to see how Buster fared sitting upright versus in the brace position. From that height, Buster hit the ground with about 21 g-force units of impact.
Although the ShockWatch stickers on Buster's body showed that he would've made it out alive in either position, his body absorbed more of the impact while sitting upright than in the brace position. Sitting in the brace position channels the crash force from your body to the chair in front of you. That explains why the Federal Aviation Agency claims it's statistically three times safer to brace for an airplane wreck than to remain upright.Get the biggest Liverpool FC stories by email Subscribe Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Could not subscribe, try again later Invalid Email
LIVERPOOL FC are closing in on a £4million deal to bring Blackpool’s Tom Ince back to Anfield.
The Reds are in negotiations with the Seasiders and hope the prolific 20-year-old winger will become their first signing of the January transfer window.
Ince, who left LFC just 16 months ago for a compensation fee of £250,000, has already plundered 13 goals in the Championship so far this season.
Blackpool value Ince at around £6million but Liverpool would be able to get a significant discount as they secured a 35% sell-on clause.
Managing director Ian Ayre has also held talks with Chelsea over a potential £12million swoop for striker Daniel Sturridge. However, the ECHO understands that the Ince transfer is closer to being finalised.
Tom Ince's Blackpool stats in the Championship this season
Ince spent eight years at Liverpool’s Kirkby Academy as he looked to follow in the footsteps of his father Paul, who played for the Reds between 1997 and 1999.
He was handed his first team debut by Roy Hodgson when he came off the bench in the League Cup defeat to Northampton Town at Anfield in September 2010.
However, that proved to be his only senior appearance. A spell on loan at Notts County followed and frustrated at his lack of opportunities Ince rejected Liverpool’s offer of a new contract.
Free to sign for another club, he joined Blackpool in August 2011 with the Reds only receiving a nominal development fee.
Ince has proved a huge hit at Bloomfield Road – playing a key role in their progress to last season’s play-off final at Wembley where he scored in their defeat to West Ham.
The left-footer has blossomed playing on the right flank, cutting inside to wreak havoc, but he’s equally at home on the opposite wing or in a central role behind the striker.
Liverpool have had the England Under-21 international watched repeatedly this season and the scouting reports have been glowing.
Blessed with great pace and skill, he has also demonstrated remarkable composure and intelligence in the final third.
Now regarded as one of the best young talents in the country, he has netted 19 league goals in 41 league starts for Blackpool.
Reds boss Brendan Rodgers is desperate to add goals to his squad and Ince fits the profile he’s looking for.
Young, hungry, versatile and a creative force, Rodgers will be hoping that talks with Blackpool reach a swift conclusion so Ince becomes a Liverpool player when the window opens on January 1.
Eyebrows will be raised at the prospect of the Reds shelling out £4million for someone who walked away from the club only 16 months ago.
However, this is now a different regime at Anfield and there is a sense they would be putting right the mistake of losing him in the first place.
What’s clear is that Ince has flourished from the experience he has enjoyed since dropping down into the Championship.
Rodgers is also keen on securing the services of Sturridge from Chelsea as he looks to ease the burden on top scorer Luis Suarez.
The Uruguayan has been operating as the Reds’ only fit senior striker since Fabio Borini fractured his foot in October.
The Londoners are happy to listen to offers for 23-year-old Sturridge, who is surplus to requirements in the capital and is available for around £12million.
He came close to making the switch to Anfield back in August but rejected a loan deal as he was only interested in a permanent move.
Sturridge hasn’t played for a month due to a hamstring injury but is now back in training and negotiations with Chelsea are continuing.
A product of Manchester City’s Academy, Birmingham-born Sturridge signed for Chelsea for a £3.5million compensation fee in 2009 after his contract at Eastlands expired.
He enjoyed a successful loan spell at Bolton during the second half of the 2010/11 season when he scored eight goals in 12 appearances.
Sturridge, who could play through the middle or out wide in the three-pronged attack favoured by Rodgers, has found his opportunities limited at Stamford Bridge, but he boasts a highly respectable scoring record of 24 goals in 49 starts in all competitions.
After their failings towards the end of the summer transfer window which left the squad so short of firepower, Liverpool are adamant that those mistakes won’t be repeated in January.
Rodgers is determined to get his signings done early and if he can bring in both Ince and Sturridge that will be the bulk of his business.
Liverpool will listen to offers for the likes of Stewart Downing and Joe Cole, while Sebastian Coates could depart on loan. But the emphasis in January will be on increasing the manager’s options rather than off-loading those on the fringes.NEW YORK (Reuters) - A toilet paper wedding dress with 1,500 hand-cut butterflies made by a mother of two in her spare time won the $10,000 first prize in a quirky New York fashion competition on Thursday and a bride-in-need may have the chance to wear it down the aisle.
Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, which exhibits winning entries every year, is donating about 20 of the top gowns to brides whose plans were shattered by the sudden bankruptcy of wedding dressmaker Alfred Angelo last week.
Kari Curletto said she spent three months on her submission “Quilted Enchantment,” with its six-foot cathedral train. It was her first entry, one of 1,517 this year, in the 13-year-old toilet paper dress competition sponsored by Cheap Chic Weddings and Quilted Northern toilet paper.
“It kind of feels like I’m dreaming right now,” Curletto said in an interview after her win. “Halfway through I was going to quit. I was crying and thinking, ‘Well, I just can’t do it. It’s too much,’ and a butterfly flew into my yard and landed on my hand.”
Curletto, an actress living in Las Vegas, fashioned the dress from toilet paper, glue, glitter and tape, working at night after her children went to bed.
Brides-in-need should contact Ripley’s by July 28 for a chance to get a paper gown, spokeswoman Suzanne Smagala-Potts said by phone. The exhibitor has yet to choose which ones will be donated, she added.
Florist Roy Cruz of Chesapeake, Virginia, won in 2015 and 2016. His submission this year, a two-piece floral ball gown featuring snowflake cut-outs was voted fan favorite.
( The story refiles to correct typographical error in the second paragraph)Today Cass and Bob interview Marie Kent, an ex-Christian Preacher's kid who recently took over the “My Book of Mormon podcast” from David Michael. Marie is a computer programmer by day and a nerd by night. She was raised Baptist and has left Christianity, but like many, she finds religion fascinating. She wonders how it is that so many people believe they’ve found the ‘right’ god, yet that version of god changes so drastically. Many people who were never religious, like David Michael, the founder of the podcast Marie now co-hosts, were driven by their curiosity to read the sacred texts of religions in hopes of understanding why so many people have given their lives to this. He decided to read the entire Book of Mormon on the air, word for word, with commentary. Perhaps we can see in a few passages some truths that people could latch onto, and also discover passages so inane, at best, or morally repugnant at worst that they merit outright rejection.
Marie Kent works in the same office as our former guest on episode 108, Marie LePage (which was a great episode). But Marie Kent is a pastor’s kid from Minneapolis. Marie underwent sexual abuse from a boy in the youth group for 7 years, right under the nose of the church. Like so often happens, there were opportunities along the way for ethical adults to intervene, rescue Marie, and stop the predator, but they chose to protect themselves, the perpetrator, and the status quo leaving Marie to bear it alone.
We taped these conversations on August 28th, 2016. If you’re liking our show, please subscribe to it, give it 5 stars, and/or leave a review on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Also, you can support us monetarily on a per episode basis through our Patreon page. That’s www.patreon.com/eapodcast. Or leave a donation through PayPal at our website, www.everyonesagnostic.com.
Credits:
"Towering Mountain of Ignorance" intro by Hank Green https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3v3S82TuxU
Intro bumper "Never Know" by Jack Johnson
The segue music is by Sam Maher recorded on a handpan in the NY subway.
Thanks for listening and be a yes-sayer to what is.
Marie Kent’s podcast “My Book of Mormon”Rocky Mountain House | AFE — A community in central Alberta is in mourning following the deaths of three young sisters in a grain truck mishap on Tuesday night.
“This is hitting us all very hard. Frontline responders are routinely called out to sad situations, but things are always harder when there’s children involved,” said Sgt. Mike Numan of the Rocky Mountain House RCMP.
Catie Bott, age 13, and her twin sisters Dara and Jana, both 11, were playing on a grain truck being loaded at their farm near Withrow, about 60 km west of Red Deer, when they became buried in canola, Numan said.
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Details of exactly what happened weren’t released, but flowing grain is extremely dangerous because it exerts a “tremendous pull,” according to the Canadian Agricultural Safety Association. A person can become engulfed and rendered helpless in as few as three seconds and fully buried in 20 seconds or less.
“Adults at the farm were able to free the children from the grain and immediately began CPR,” said Numan. “A short time later, the emergency medical services personnel arrived and continued CPR.
“Despite their efforts, they were not successful in reviving the 13-year-old and her 11-year-old sister, who both died at the scene. Their 11-year-old sister was taken to the hospital in Edmonton via STARS air ambulance, and succumbed to her injuries at 3:18 this morning.”
The Bott family — father Roger, mother Bonita, and surviving son Caleb — was too distressed to speak following the accident, but said in a statement they have no regrets about raising their children on the farm.
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“Our kids died living life on the farm. It is a family farm, and we do not regret raising and involving our kids on our farm. It was our life,” said the Bott family’s statement.
Numan choked back tears as he read the statement.
“The RCMP expresses its deepest condolences to the family and the local community, and is committed to providing them with the victim services support they may require in the aftermath of these sudden deaths,” he said.
Provincial Agriculture Minister Oneil Carlier also expressed condolences to the family.
“My thoughts are with the family of the three girls who died in the Hamlet of Withrow and my heart aches for them today. As a father myself, I believe no parent should have to bear the loss of a child,” he said in a statement.
“I join Albertans in expressing grief and sympathy for the parents of these girls as they go through this unimaginable sorrow.”
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A crisis management team is at the elementary school in nearby Condor — which the girls attended up until two years ago — offering grief counselling to students and staff during this “very confusing and difficult time,” Wildrose School Division superintendent Brad Volkman said.
“This, of course, is a very sad time for the staff, the students, the families, and the community connected with Condor School,” said Volkman, adding the family remained “very much connected” to the school.
“In a small, tight-knit community like Condor, they are known well by our staff and our students. The family still supported the school in tremendous ways, taking part in attending Christmas concerts and bringing baking for the staff and students.
“They will be sorely missed.”
— Jennifer Blair is a reporter for Alberta Farmer Express at Red Deer, Alta. Follow her at @FairfieldJen on Twitter.Pittsburgh Steelers offensive tackle Chris Hubbard takes a knee before the game against the Chicago Bears at Soldier Field on Sunday. Mike DiNovo/USA Today Sports/Reuters
Donald Trump’s frothing critique of Colin Kaepernick and the players, coaches, and teammates who have come to his side has garnered many revelatory reactions. Some of these responses tell us more about ourselves as Americans than do Trump’s initial description of any athlete who chooses to protest systemic racism and police brutality as being a “son of a bitch.” One critical lesson is how some view free speech as a privilege conferred upon a lonely few. Trump’s backers claim that these players are pampered millionaires with no right to squawk; that they are disrespecting the military; that athletes, like talk show hosts, should stay in their lanes and restrict themselves to amusing us. Most intriguingly, some have said that black players ought to protest exclusively in ways white football fans approve of. The author John Pavlovitz has explicitly named this latter critique “the arrogant heart of privilege.” As he put it, this defines that core of white privilege: “being the beneficiaries of systematic injustice, and then wanting to make the rules for the marginalized in how they should speak into that injustice.”
This is an incredibly astute and important observation, but in the past few days another more sinister theme has emerged in the attack on professional athletes and their acts of silent protest. It’s a second coming of Trump’s ongoing war on truth, except in this iteration, the attack is on the truths of others. No longer content to simply lie about things, this White House wants to tell you what other people actually mean when they speak. Nobody better captured this mentality than Trump’s press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders. During Monday’s White House press briefing, Sanders was asked why the president wouldn’t acknowledge that players who knelt during the national anthem were doing so to protest racism and police brutality. Questioned about Trump’s claim that “the issue of kneeling has nothing to do with race,” Sanders responded, “I think the focus has long since changed.” She amplified that unsupported claim by saying that the players were protesting incorrectly to begin with. “I think if the debate is really, for them, about police brutality, they should probably protest the officers on the field that are protecting them instead of the American flag,” she offered.
So, when Colin Kaepernick explicitly says time and time and time again that he is protesting police brutality, he is wrong. And when another player, Eric Reid, said on Monday that players are taking a knee expressly not to protest the flag or the military, but to protest the “incredible number of unarmed black people being killed by the police,” he is also wrong. What Sanders and Trump are saying here exemplifies one of the most grotesque aspects of unchecked privilege. It transcends even patronizing lectures about how black men should protest in such a way as to avoid offending white people. This is an attempt to dictate—with the threat of job loss—the very ability of some black men to have and maintain control over their own speech. What the president and Sanders are claiming is that they are better situated than the actual speakers to understand what those speakers are saying. That takes us from privilege to silencing, and it’s not a move that should go unremarked.
This is an old trick, by the way. During the Occupy Wall Street protests, I wrote about critics who insisted upon telling protesters holding up actual physical signs that they didn’t understand what their own signs meant. To strip away the actual meaning of another speaker’s words, to insist—without evidence of any sort—that the speaker talking about police brutality is in fact protesting soldiers, flags, and veterans is not just another cruel attack on reality itself: It’s the very height of privilege.
If there is still some possibility that Americans as a group can figure out how to think about free speech, sports, systemic racial disparities in the justice system, and life generally as experienced by people of color in the United States in 2017, it will require white people to actually listen to those people of color as they describe their experiences. That involves both listening carefully and also not imputing false statements to others. In addressing his own conflicted feelings about the protests this week, Pittsburgh Steelers offensive lineman and Afghanistan war veteran Alejandro Villanueva said it best:
I have learned that I don’t know what it’s like to be from Dade County, I don’t know what it’s like to be from Lakeland, I can’t tell you that I know what my teammates have gone through. So I’m not going to pretend that I have the righteous sort of voice to tell you that you should stand up for the national anthem.
This is precisely why the First Amendment matters so much: It requires someone to speak, and someone else to listen. Those simple exchanges historically have been meant to lead us to a mutual understanding of reality, one which has recently gone by the wayside. But it’s one thing to distort your own reality. It’s quite another to trammel someone else’s.
The president and Sarah Huckabee Sanders have the double luxury of being able to claim to know what NFL players really mean by their protests, and also being able to invent fake after-the-fact rationales with which to cover their own false and racially inflammatory statements. Colin Kaepernick doesn’t have that luxury. He doesn’t—at this moment—even have a job. If we are truly interested in anything that resembles truth seeking anymore, instead of allowing this controversy to be sidetracked by those who would put false words in a protester’s mouth, let’s give him the dignity of accepting at face value the real words and intentions he claims for himself.A bunch of stuff has happened since we last reported about ISP’s blocking a bunch of Internet sites, and Anonymous India retaliating. Amongst other things, their twitter account was banned, but they are back up again. More government sites were targeted, This time it was not just DDoS attacks, but they actually hacked into the sites to put up their message of the #Occupy movement.
One of the interesting things that happened was that Anonymous also hacked into Reliance Communications servers and what they found was startling. Reliance was blocking access to sites that had no court order against them which is basically a crime. Here is a list of sites blocked illegally by Reliance, and a message from Anonymous – http://pastehtml.com/view/bz8kycy0o.html. One of the blocked URL’s is the Air India’s protest Facebook page! #WTH
Anonymous also temporarily blocked access to facebook.com, to draw attention to the cause, but the site was accessible via www.facebook.com.
After this, Anonymous hacked Trinamool Congress‘ and Mizoram government’s websites, and put up a message for the masses about the peaceful Occupy movement. They did not take down the main Mizoram site, but only took down a bunch of sub-domains. Here is a list of the sub-domains, all corresponding to different departments – Here is a list of Mi
And now the important part : #Occupy India
Anonymous has decided to take the protest on the streets, and the date is June 9th. It is happening in Delhi Mumbai, and many other major cities all over India.
When Anonymous hacked the Mizoram sites, they put up this message –
The Future of India, Rise for your Nation
Join the June 9 Protest with Anonymous, Fight for your Freedom
To the Students of India,
You are the future of this nation and hence it is your decision to make at this critical point. You out of all people will understand the oppression of others, rule of Elite, corruption and denial of rights better than any one. We have come to a time in which we can’t even speak freely and even to the point where we are not allowed to think freely. They tell you to Sit in class, Obey the rules, don’t allow you to speak, and once you are outside the classes they take your freedom, even at a place where everything is supposed to be yours! We are calling to every student and youth soul to join us for the struggle of freedom. On this June 9th we are calling for every one to get on the streets, organize protests or join one. Do not wait any longer, because the more you wait the more this system will crush your rights and abilities to correct it.Today they took away your right to use a few websites, tomorrow they will sensor the websites like they sensor the media so that nothing against them get’s reported and day after tomorrow they will take away your freedom of speech and no one will be there to speak for you. Speak Now or Never.
Led Zeplin’s Kashmir played in the background. [ Another weird thing happened, as I was trying to report the hacked site to zone-h.org to mirror it, I found out that zone-h has also been blocked in India due to an unrelated court order. What is the Indian government doing? ]
[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/opindia_revenge/status/207783021619855361″]
Check out if the protest is happening in your city and if you are going to one of these protests, you can download and print the Anonymous mask here. Also note that Anonymous has strict guidelines to keep the protest peaceful.
In Delhi it will happen at the India Gate. If there is no protest happening in you city, just create an event on Facebook, and tweet it to their account with the hashtag #June9. Or you could chat with them on IRC.
(Visited 78 times, 1 visits today)Note: Update 4/17/2017 through Wave 10 and C-ROC
A few months ago we produced a chart that broke down all of the pilots in X-wing by Pilot Skill. This was a useful tool for building lists when you’re interested in finding a pilot with a particular pilot skill. However, more often than not, when you’re making a list in X-wing you’re usually looking for a pilot that is a particular point value. So today, here is a similar chart that breaks down pilots by their point value.
In addition to covering all of the game’s pilots in their base formation we have also included some pilots with their most common build. There are not to many of these, just ones that will almost always come with the same upgrades when flown.
Note: As of this writing there are still a few generics from Wave 8 whose point cost haven’t yet been revealed. The chart will be updated upon release.
Point Value Rebels Imperials Scum 12 PS2- Bandit Squadron (Z-95) PS1- Academy Pilot (TIE Fighter) PS1- Binayre Pirate (Z-95)
PS2- Cartel Spacer (Light M3-A) 13 PS3- Zeb Orrelious (TIE Fighter)
PS4- Tala Squadron (Z-95) PS3- Obsidian Squadron (TIE Fighter) PS3- Black Sun Soldier (Z-95) 14 PS4- Captain Rex (TIE Fighter) PS3- Chaser (TIE Fighter)
PS4- Black Squadron (TIE Fighter) (EPT)
PS4- Wampa (TIE Fighter) PS1- Sunny Bounder (M3-A)
PS2- Cartel Spacer (M3-A) 15 PS1- Prototype Pilot (A-Wing) (Chardaan Refit)
PS5- Sabine Wren (TIE Fighter) PS1- Epsilon Squadron (TIE/FO)
PS5- Winged Gundark (TIE Fighter)
PS5- Nightbeast (TIE Fighter)
PS6- Youngster (TIE Fighter) (EPT) PS1- Jakku Gunrunner (Quadjumper)
PS3- Inaldra (M3-A) (EPT)
PS5- Kaa’To Leeachos (Z-95) (EPT) 16 PS2- Rebel Operative (HWK-290) PS2- Scimitar Squadron (TIE Bomber)
PS2- Sienar Test Pilot (TIE Adv Prototype)
PS3- Zeta Squadron (TIE/FO)
PS6- Dark Curse (TIE Fighter)
PS6- Backstabber (TIE Fighter) PS1- Spice Runner (HWK-290) 17 PS1- Prototype Pilot (A-Wing)
PS3- Green Squadron Pilot (A-Wing) (Chardaan Refit)
PS6- Lt. Blount (Z-95) (EPT)
PS7- Ahsoka Tano (TIE Fighter) (EPT) PS1- Imperial Trainee (TIE Striker)
PS3- Deathfire (TIE Bomber)
PS4- Omega Squadron (TIE/FO) (EPT)
PS4- Epsilon Ace (TIE/FO)
PS7- Mauler Mithel (TIE Fighter) (EPT)
PS7- Scourge (TIE Fighter) (EPT) PS3- Unkar Plutt (Quadjumper)
PS5- Tansarii Point Veteran (M3-A) (EPT)
PS7- N’dru Suhlak (Z-95) (EPT) 18 PS2- Gold Squadron (Y-Wing)
PS3- Zeb Orrelious (Attack Shuttle) PS1- Alpha Squadron (TIE Interceptor)
PS3- Scarif Defender (TIE Striker)
PS4- Gamma Squadron (TIE Bomber)
PS5- Zeta Ace (TIE/FO) (EPT)
PS8- Howlrunner (TIE Fighter) (EPT) PS2- Syndicate Thug (Y-Wing)
PS5- Sarco Plank (Quadjumper) (EPT)
PS6- Laetin A’shera (M3-A)
PS6- Quinn Jast (M3-A) (EPT) 19 PS3- Green Squadron (A-Wing) (EPT)
PS4- Roark Garnet (HWK-290)
PS8- Airen Cracken (Z-95) (EPT) PS4- Baron of the Empire (TIE Adv Prototype) (EPT)
PS5- Gamma Squadron Veteran (TIE Bomber) (EPT)
PS6- Epilson Leader (TIE/FO) PS1- Jakku Gunrunner (Quadjumper) (Pattern Analyzer + Spacetug Tractor Array)
PS3- Torkil Mux (HWK-290)
PS7- Genesis Red (M3-A) (EPT)
PS7- Constable Zuvio (Quadjumper) (EPT) 20 PS1- Procket Protoype Pilot (A-Wing) (Proton Rockets)
PS4- Grey Squadron (Y-Wing)
PS4- Ezra Bridger (Attack Shuttle) (EPT)
PS4(2)- Green Squadron (A-Wing) (Crackshot, Adaptability, Autothrusters) PS3- Avenger Squadron (TIE Interceptor)
PS4- Black Squadron Scout (TIE Striker) (EPT)
PS5- Countdown (TIE Striker)
PS7- Omega Ace (TIE/FO) (EPT)
PS7- Zeta Leader (TIE/FO) (EPT) PS1- Zealous Recruit (Protectorate)
PS2- Cartel Marauder (Kihraxz)
PS4- Hired Gun (Y-Wing)
PS5- Palob Godhali (HWK-290) (EPT)
PS8- Serissu (M3-A) (EPT) 21 PS2- Rookie Pilot (X-Wing)
PS5- Sabine Wren (Attack Shuttle) (EPT)
PS6- Kyle Katarn (HWK-290) (EPT) PS2- Tempest Squadron (TIE Advanced)
PS2- Omicron Group (Lambda)
PS2- Cutlass Squadron (TIE Punisher)
PS4- Saber Squadron (TIE Interceptor) (EPT)
PS8- Omega Leader (TIE F/O) (EPT) None 22 PS2- Blue Squadron (B-Wing)
PS5- Gemmer Sojan (A-Wing)
PS7- Hera Syndulla (Attack Shuttle) (EPT) PS6- Captain Jonus (TIE Bomber) (EPT)
PS6- Valen Rudor (TIE Adv Prototype) (EPT)
PS6- Royal Guard (TIE Interceptor) (EPT)
PS6- Pure Sabaac (TIE Striker) (EPT) PS3- Concord Dawn Veteran (Protectorate) (EPT)
PS5- Drea Renthal (Y-Wing) 23 PS2- Warden Squadron (K-Wing)
PS2- Blue Squadron Pathfinder (U-Wing)
PS3- Tarn Mison (X-Wing)
PS4- Red Squadron (X-Wing)
PS6- Arvel Crynyd (A-Wing)
PS6- Dutch Vander (Y-Wing) PS3- Lt. Colzet (TIE Advanced)
PS3- Zeta Specialist (TIE S/F)
PS4- Storm Squadron (TIE Advanced)
PS4- Black Eight Squadron (TIE Punisher)
PS5- Lt. Lorrir (TIE Interceptor)
PS5- Fel’s Wrath (TIE Interceptor)
PS8- Duchess (TIE Striker) (EPT) PS3- Ruthless Freelancer (G1-A)
PS5- Black Sun Ace (Kihraxz) (EPT)
PS5- Concord Dawn Ace (Protectorate) (EPT)
PS7- Dace Bonearm (HWK-290) (EPT) 24 PS2- Blue Squadron Novice (T-70 X-Wing)
PS3- Hef Tobber (U-Wing)
PS4- Dagger Squadron (B-Wing)
PS7- Jake Farrrell (A-Wing) (EPT) PS4- Captain Yorr (Lambda)
PS6- Kir Kanos (TIE Interceptor)
PS7- Tetran Cowell (TIE Interceptor) (EPT)
PS8- Tomax Bren (TIE Bomber) (EPT) PS7- Kavil (Y-Wing) (EPT) 25 PS2- TLT Y-Wing (Gold Squadron Y-wing) (TLT, R2 Astromech)
PS3- Braylen Stramm (ARC-170)
PS3- Jess Pava (T-70 X-Wing)
PS4- Guardian Squadron (K-Wing)
PS4- Bodhi Rook (U-Wing)
PS5- Hobbie Klivian (X-Wing)
PS5- Biggs Darklighter (X-Wing)
PS8- Jan Ors (HWK-290) (EPT)
PS8- Horton Salm (Y-Wing) PS3- Sigma Squadron (TIE Phantom)
PS5- Omega Specialist (TIE S/F) (EPT)
PS5- Cmdr. Alozen (TIE Advanced) (EPT)
PS7- Turr Phennir (TIE Interceptor (EPT)
PS8- The Inquisitor (TIE Adv Prototype) (EPT) PS1- Black Sun Enforcer (StarViper)
PS2- TLT Y-Wing (Syndicate Thug Y-wing) (TLT, Unhinged Astromech)
PS3- Contracted Sc0ut (Jumpmaster 5000) (EPT)
PS5- Gand Findsman (G1-A) (EPT)
PS6- Graz the Hunter (Kihraxz)
PS6- Kad Solus (Protectorate) (EPT) 26 PS2- Stresshog (Gold Squad Y-Wing) (R3-A2, BTL-A4, TLT)
PS4- Red Squadron Veteran (T-70 X-Wing) (EPT)
PS4- Thane Kyrell (ARC-170)
PS5- Nera Dantels (B-Wing) (EPT)
PS6- Garven Dreis (X-Wing)
PS7- Jek Porkins (X-Wing) (EPT)
PS8- Tychu Celchu (A-Wing) (EPT) PS6- Zertik Strom (TIE Advanced) (EPT)
PS6- Colonel Jendom (Lambda)
PS6- Deathrain (TIE Punisher)
PS7- Major Rhymer (TIE Bomber) (EPT)
PS8- Carnor Jax (TIE Interceptor) (EPT) PS7- Old Teroch (Protectorate) (EPT) 27 PS1- Knave Squadron (E-Wing)
PS1- Outer Rim Smuggler (YT-1300)
PS5- Blue Ace (T-70 X-Wing)
PS6- Cassian Andor (U-Wing) (EPT) PS5- Shadow Squadron (TIE Phantom)
PS7- Maarek Steele (TIE Advanced) (EPT)
PS7- Redline (TIE Punisher)
PS7- Backdraft (TIE S/F) (EPT)
PS8- Captain Kagi (Lambda)
PS9- Soontir Fel (TIE Interceptor) (EPT) PS3- Black Sun Vigo (StarViper)
PS4- Manaroo (Jumpmaster 5000) (EPT)
PS6- 4-LOM (Mist Hunter) (EPT) 28 PS6- Ibtisam (B-Wing) (EPT)
PS6- Esege Tuketu (K-Wing)
PS6- Shara Bey (ARC-170) (EPT)
PS6- Snap Wexley (T-70 X-Wing) (EPT)
PS8- Luke Skywalker (X-Wing) (EPT)
PS9- Super Jake (A-Wing, PTL, VI, Chardaan Refit, Autorthrusters) PS1- Delta x7 Squadron (TIE Defender) (TIE x7 Title)
PS8- Juno Eclipse (TIE Advanced) (EPT) PS8- Zuckuss (Mist Hunter) (EPT)
PS9- Talonbane Cobra (Kihraxz) (EPT)
PS9- Fenn Rau (Protectorate) (EPT) 29 PS3- Blackmoon Squadron (E-Wing)
PS6- Red Ace (T-70 X-Wing)
PS7- 29- Keyan Farlander (B-Wing) (EPT)
PS7- Norra Wexley (ARC-170) (EPT)
PS7- Nien Nunb (T-70 X-Wing) (EPT)
PS8- Miranda Doni (K-Wing)
PS8- Wes Janson (X-Wing) (EPT)
PS9- Wedge Antilles (X-Wing) (EPT) PS2- Palpmobile (Lambda Shuttle) (Omicron Group Pilot, Emperor Palpatine)
PS9- Darth Vader (TIE Advanced) (EPT)
PS9- Quickdaw (TIE S/F) (EPT) PS2- Trandoshan Slaver (YV-666) 30 PS2- Wild Space Fringer (YT-2400)
PS7- Ello Atsy (T-70 X-wing) (EPT) PS1- Delta Squadron (TIE Defender)
PS2- Starkiller Base Pilot (Upsilon Shuttle)
PS6- Echo (TIE Phantom) (EPT) PS5- Guri (Starviper) (EPT)
PS7- Tel Trevura (Jumpmaster 5000) (EPT) 31 PS8- Ten Numb (B-Wing) (EPT)
PS8- Poe Dameron (T-70 X-Wing) (EPT) PS3- Lt. Dormitz (Upsilon Shuttle) PS7- Prince Xizor (StarViper) (EPT) 32 PS3- Eaden Vrill (YT-2400)
PS5- Etahn A’baht (E-Wing) (EPT) PS3- Onyx Squadron (TIE Defender)
PS4- Major Str |
than four months that year.
Balloon mail was the only way communications from Paris could reach the rest of France, with dozens of flights made, mostly at night, and hundreds of thousands of letters delivered.
One of them has been discovered by the National Archives. It was penned in French on December 6, 1870 by a man named Charles Mesnier (or Mesmier) to his mother, care of Monsieur Grussin (or Grossin) at 8 Place de la Ville, Pont-Audemer, in Normandy.
"It's a intriguing human element to an important piece of history," National Archives assistant director-general Louise Doyle told AFP.
"We're not sure how it ended up in Australia, but it would be fascinating to know more. If people see this it would be interesting to have more context in relation to this record."
The letter was transferred to the archive's Brisbane office from the former Queensland Post and Telegraph Museum in 2001, but there is no information about its origin.
It came to light recently as part of a joint project between the National Archives of Australia and the Archives Nationales in France.
In the letter, which is full of fervour, the man assures his mother he is in good health.
"We don't have meat every day and when we do get some it is not very much, but we can easily get by as things are and no one in our household is complaining," he wrote.
Mesnier added: "The desire to repulse the Prussians is right now the solitary concern of Paris. Any suffering can be borne rather than opening the gates of the capital to them."
- Hopes dashed -
He goes on to speak of "some real battles" around the city between November 29 and December 1 in which "our young soldiers have beaten the seasoned Prussian army".
"We have taken their cannon and captured 1,000 prisoners -- these days of good fortune have raised the morale of the fearful," he said.
"We cannot succeed in all our attacks but I have the firm conviction, my good mother, that the ultimate success will be for our just cause."
His hopes were dashed, with the city surrendering in late January 1871 after sustained bombardment.
Mesnier could not have expected a reply from his family. While the prevailing winds sent the balloons over the heads of the Prussian army towards French lines, they could not go the other way.
The single-sheet letter is just 207mm x 133 mm (eight by five inches), folded into an envelope with the address on the reverse side and Eure, the department where Pont-Audemer is located, written on the top left along with "par ballon monte" -- for delivery by hot air balloon.
Doyle said it was sent on December 7 and arrived in Pont-Audemer on the 16th.
"He's saying to his family not to worry about him and he's really at the point of saying the city is pushing back against the Prussians," said Doyle.
"It's one of those quirky and unusual documents and it would be fascinating to learn more."May 14, 2012
SOME 75 pro-choice protesters picketed a lecture on May 3 at the University of Washington (UW) titled, "Do women have too many rights?"
The speaker, Abby Johnson, is a former Planned Parenthood clinic director who now speaks against women's right to abortion. According to her website, Johnson has "always had a fierce determination to help women in need," which is what led her to work at Planned Parenthood--and then leave, following a transformational "pro-life" experience after allegedly witnessing an abortion.
Her platform is a mix of co-opted feminist language regarding "choice" and non-scientific nonsense pieced together from Fox News and Live Action talking points.
Seattle Clinic Defense, a grassroots group dedicated to shame-free, medically accurate reproductive health care, and the Gender Equality Caucus of Occupy Seattle, organized a picket of the event. Seattle Clinic Defense's actions, to date, have involved counter-picketing anti-choice demonstrators who harass women seeking reproductive health care at Planned Parenthood clinics across the Puget Sound area.
We stepped outside of that model for this action to challenge what we see as the modus operandi of the new anti-choice movement: showcasing young, female activists who portray their driving force as deep compassion for babies and women's choices, so long as those choices only include parenting or adoption.
THE EVENING started with UW student activists and pro-choice groups gathering to make signs and put stickers on coat hangers that said, "We won't go back!" Protesters began a circular picket and chanted slogans such as "Keep your rosaries off our ovaries," "Not the church, not the state, women must decide their fate," and "Back alleys no more, abortion rights for rich and poor."
After the picket, we moved inside to line the doorways to the event while holding our protest signs. We were met with hostile UW police, who demanded that we put away the coat hangers. As sharp objects, they were supposedly dangerous. That was the point: coat hangers are one of the many common items women have used to unsafely terminate unwanted pregnancies.
It was extremely satisfying to see a look of unease on many as anti-choice faces as they had to face our gauntlet to enter the event. It mirrored one of our most recent counter-pickets in Everett, Wash., in which about 30 anti-choice demonstrators lined the sidewalk on both sides leading to a Planned Parenthood.
We were sending a powerful message to the anti-choice members of the crowd: you are not safe from criticism here. Your tactics are unacceptable. See how uncomfortable it makes you to walk past us? And you're just going to a lecture!
Inside, ushers handed out note cards for the "question-and-answer session," making it obvious that only pre-selected, friendly questions would be fielded. The pro-choice audience heckled and shouted corrections to false scientific and historical statements, demanded citations, and booed and hissed appropriately.
For example, one of Johnson's favorite talking points is that Planned Parenthood is a part of the abortion "industry," and thus needs to meet a certain quota of abortions. Even more egregious is that Johnson asserts the cornerstone of anti-scientific rhetoric by claiming a fetus, at 13 weeks can not only feel pain, but attempt to "escape" the cannula used to evacuate the fetus from the uterus.
As we challenged the bald-faced, nearly comical lies and rhetoric that emanated from the stage, the anti-choice students asked us all to "be respectful" and "let Abby say her piece." While some of us agree that the yelling got a little out of hand, the idea that folks should sit quietly with their hands folded and respect the speaker simply because she is speaking is fundamentally flawed.
Not only is what she says untrue, it's downright offensive to women and health care providers. For too long, mainstream feminist organizations have ceded political space to hate groups that front speakers like Johnson. Free speech does not entitle one to escape challenge, especially when the material that is presented is non-scientific and laced with woman-hating, slut-shaming rhetoric.
Many people who are pro-choice believe that by counter-picketing the anti-choicers at clinics, we encourage higher attendance on their side--therefore, we should just ignore them. But they have created political space in front of a health care facility, and we'll be damned if they go unchallenged.
The same logic holds true for an event that is titled, "Do women have too many rights?" Abby Johnson is a dangerous pawn in the new strategy of the war on women. In the 1990s, anti-choice groups tried violence; now they kill us with kindness, and the liberal feminist response has been to let them.
The religious extremists have the same end goal; they're just adapted to a new strategy. We must also adapt and make sure that anti-choice groups and pro-choice sympathizers understand that when they use such language and tactics, it is not the exercise of free speech; the anti-woman minority has created political space in which hate speech can, and must, be challenged.This One Pot Mujadara with leeks and greens checks all boxes: it has the healthy goodness of lentils, rice, and beans, it is a mess-free recipe that comes together in minutes, and it is absolutely delicious. Vegan, soy-free, gluten-free, and nut-free recipe.
Mujadara, a Lebanese medley of onions, rice and lentils, is delicious proof that the simplest of recipes can sometimes be the most satisfying and flavorful.
I have been making this One Pot Mujadara in my kitchen for years, after seeing a recipe in the New York Times that used leeks instead of onions. I have tweaked the recipe a bit over time, and it’s even more delicious now.
There are many reasons I love it. Chief among them, this mujadara is:
-Delicious
-Easy
-Versatile, you can switch up the greens with whatever you have handy
-A complete meal
-Healthy, of course
-Kid-friendly! Yes, Jay loves it and polishes off his plate in minutes.
There are healthy greens and lentils and rice in the recipe, so it is truly a complete meal. All you need to do is to ladle it out into bowls or on plates and serve. I sometimes serve it with some fresh summer veggies, like cherry tomatoes or cucumbers.
You do need to cook the lentils a bit first, but you can do it in the same pot. You can also use any greens. I often use kale but this time I had some baby spinach and spring greens sitting in the refrigerator, so I went with those.
This is an almost foolproof recipe and it packs so much flavor for so little work that it’s almost criminal. Oh, and did I say it was quick? But you don’t have to take my word for it. Here’s the recipe for my vegan One Pot Mujadara.
More rice recipes:
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5 from 8 votes Print One Pot Mujadara with Leeks Prep Time 10 mins Cook Time 25 mins Total Time 35 mins This one pot mujadara with leeks and greens checks all boxes: it has the healthy goodness of lentils, rice, and beans, it is a mess-free recipe that comes together in minutes, and it is absolutely delicious. Vegan, soy-free, gluten-free, and nut-free. Course: Main Course Cuisine: gluten-free, nut-free, Soy-free, Vegan Servings : 8 servings Calories : 133 kcal Author : Vaishali Ingredients 2 leeks, cleaned thoroughly. Trim the roots and slice the white and green parts into thin ribbons (use a large onion if you can’t find leeks)
1 cup brown lentils (whole masoor, sabut masoor).
3/4 cup basmati or other long-grain rice
1 tsp cumin powder
1 tsp allspice powder
5 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
2 bay leaves
1-inch stick of cinnamon
Salt to taste
1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
4 cups leafy greens(use any combination of vegetables. I used 3 cups of spring greens and 1 cup of baby spinach). You can chop larger leaves into smaller bits. Instructions Place the lentils in a large pot and add enough water to cover by an inch. Place the pot on the stove and when the water boils, cover and cook the lentils for seven minutes. Drain immediately and reserve. Heat the oil in the same pot. Add the leeks and a pinch of salt and saute, stirring, over medium-high heat until the leeks start to caramelize. Remove half the leeks to a bowl and set aside. To the pot with the remaining leeks, add the garlic and bay leaves, stir for about 30 seconds, and then add the cumin, allspice and cayenne. Stir for a few seconds to coat with the oil and then add the rice. Saute for a few seconds until the rice turns opaque. Add the drained lentils, cinnamon, and salt to taste. Stir well, then add 4 cups of water. Bring the mixture to a boil, then lower the heat to low until the water just simmers. Place a tight-fitting lid on the pot and let it steam away for 15 minutes. Open the pot, arrange the greens on top in an even layer, cover, and cook for five more minutes. Turn off the heat. Let the mujadara stand at least 10 minutes before opening the pot. Garnish with the reserved leeks and serve hot. Nutrition Facts One Pot Mujadara with Leeks Amount Per Serving Calories 133 Calories from Fat 26 % Daily Value* Total Fat 2.9g 4% Potassium 199mg 6% Dietary Fiber 1.7g 7% Protein 3.8g 8% Vitamin A 62% Vitamin C 13% Calcium 3% Iron 10% * Percent Daily Values are based on a 2000 calorie diet.
(C) All recipes and photographs copyright of Holy Cow! Vegan Recipes.Short List Now Just Two Judges
In a rare moment of good news Judge William Pryor, whose public anti-LGBT comments are offensive and vile, has been dropped from the short list of President Donald Trump's Supreme Court justice nominees.
NBC News Justice Correspondent Pete Williams on MSNBC just after noon told Andrea Mitchell Pryor is out of the running. It is likely the Trump White House saw the Alabama federal judge as too controversial.
Trump Monday morning announced he is moving up his announcement of who he will nominate to replace Justice Antonin Scalia, who died last February, almost a full year ago.
It will likely either be Judge Neil Gorsuch or Judge Thomas Hardiman, according to Williams. Both are conservatives.
Gorsuch, who is only 49, sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, Hardiman, 51, on the 11th.
Trump had met with Pryor two weeks ago.
As Alabama Attorney General, Pryor infamously had signed an amicus brief in 2003, arguing that bans on same-sex sex are not only constitutional, but morally correct. It compared gay sex to "prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia."
Pryor in 2005 was named "the most demonstrably anti-gay judicial nominee in recent memory," by Lambda Legal.
Curiously, the extreme religious right also opposes a Pryor nomination.
This is a breaking news and developing story. Details may change. This story will be updated, and NCRM will likely publish follow-up stories on this news. Stay tuned and refresh for updates.
Image: Screenshot via YouTube
See a mistake? Email corrections to: [email protected]Parental experience, as well as changing hormone levels during pregnancy and postpartum, cause changes in the parental brain.[1] Displaying maternal sensitivity towards infant cues, processing those cues and being motivated to engage socially with her infant and attend to the infant's needs in any context could be described as mothering behavior and is regulated by many systems in the maternal brain.[2] Research has shown that hormones such as oxytocin, prolactin, estradiol and progesterone are essential for the onset and the maintenance of maternal behavior in rats, and other mammals as well.[3][4][5][6][7][8] Mothering behavior has also been classified within the basic drives (sexual desire, hunger and thirst, fear, power/dominance etc.).[9] Less is known about the paternal brain, but changes in the father's brain occur alongside the mother once the offspring is born.[1]
Maternal brain [ edit ]
Maternal hormonal effect [ edit ]
Different hormone levels in the maternal brain and the overall well being of the mother account for 40%–50% of differences in the mother's attachment to her infant.[10] Mothers experience a decrease in estrogen and an increase in oxytocin and prolactin caused by lactation, pregnancy, parturition and interaction with the infant.[11]
Oxytocin [ edit ]
The levels of oxytocin in the maternal brain correlate with maternal behaviors such as gazing, vocalization, positive affect, affectionate touch and other similar mother-infant relationship behaviors.[10]
Estradiol and progesterone [ edit ]
High mother-infant attachment correlates with a higher ratio of estradiol/progesterone at the end of pregnancy, than at the beginning.[10]
Cortisol [ edit ]
In the first few days after giving birth the levels of cortisol are high which correlates with maternal approach behavior and positive maternal attitudes.[12][13] Mothers with high levels of cortisol were also found to be more vocal towards their children.[12][13] Mothers who experienced adversity in their own childhood, had higher daily patterns of cortisol levels, and were less maternally sensitive.[14]
Glucocorticoids [ edit ]
Glucocorticoids are not essential for displaying maternal behaviors, but in mothers, the levels of glucocorticoids are elevated as to initiate lactation.[15][16]
Neuroanatomy [ edit ]
Different areas/structures of the brain are associated with different factors which contribute to maternal behavior. One's own infant acts as a special stimulus which triggers activation of different areas of the brain. These brain areas together allow for maternal behavior and related systems.[2]
The Medial Preoptic Area (MPOA) of the hypothalamus contains receptors for estradiol, progesterone, prolactin, oxytocin, vasopressin and opioids.[17] All these hormones are involved in some way in activating maternal behavior in the brain.[17] The following are other behavioral changes necessary for mothering that the MPOA is responsible for:[17]
[18] Skin-to-skin contact with a newborn helps to increase the mother's oxytocin
The amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex also contain receptors for the hormones which are most likely to be changing behavior at the time of pregnancy, and may be the sites where these changes occur.[17] Increased activity has also been observed in the amygdala as the mother is responding to emotions seen in negative (fearful) faces,[19] positive faces[20][21][22] or familiar faces[23] that her baby makes. Primate mothers with damage to the prefrontal cortex have also been associated with disrupted maternal behavior.[24]
The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) plays a role in the attention, cognitive flexibility and working memory of the mother.[2] It helps the mother identify infant cues. In any environment and efficiently, it allows for the decision-making and action planning process involved in attending to the infant's cues.[2]
The thalamus, parietal cortex, and brain stem serve for processing the smell, touch and vocalization associated with the infant.[25]
Postpartum changes [ edit ]
Changes in estrogen, oxytocin and prolactin in the early postpartum period cause changes in the structures of the maternal brain.[26]
In animal mothers [ edit ]
Postpartum, new neuron production is suppressed due to decreased levels of estrogen and increased levels of glucocorticoids mother rats.[15][27] Mother-infant interaction is also thought to suppress neurogenesis in the hippocampus postpartum in the rat maternal brain.[15][27][28] Maternal experience increases neurogenesis in the subventricular zone (SBZ) which is responsible for producing the neurons of the olfactory bulb.[29] Prolactin is the hormone which mediates the increase in neurogenesis in SBZ.[29][30]
In animals, structures of the mother's brain change postpartum due to the increased interaction of the mother with the infant.[31]
The volume of gray matter increases portpartum in the following brain regions:[31]
These changes in the brain may occur in order to promote appropriate mothering behavior.[31] The mother's positive attitude towards the infant can be used as a predictor for the increase in gray matter in the above stated brain structures.[31]
Also in rats, the increased interaction with pups causes an increase in density in the MPOA.[32] Postpartum increase in gray matter volumes may help the mother activate the motivation to perform maternal behavior in response to cue from their offspring.[31]
Postpartum, the substantia nigra activates positive responses to the pup stimuli via dopamine neurons.[31]
In human mothers [ edit ]
The amygadala, prefrontal cortex and hypothalamus begin to change during pregnancy due to the high levels of stress experienced by the mother during this time.[33]
In human mothers there was a correlation between increased gray matter volume in the substantia nigra and positive emotional feelings towards the infant.[34][35]
Other changes such as menstrual cycle,[36] hydration, weight and nutrition[37][38] may also be factors which trigger the maternal brain to change during pregnancy and postpartum.
Maternal experience alters behaviors which stem from the hippocampus such as enhancing spatial navigation learning and behaviors linked with anxiety.[27]
Recent research has begun to look at how maternal psychopathology affects the maternal brain in relation to parenting. Daniel Schechter and colleagues have studied specifically interpersonal violence-related Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and comorbid dissociation as associated with specific patterns of maternal neural activation in response to viewing silent video-stimuli of stressful parent-toddler interactions such as separation versus less-stressful ones such as play.[39][40] Importantly, less medial prefrontal cortex activity and greater limbic system activity (i.e. entorhinal cortex and hippocampus) were found among these post-traumatically stressed mothers of toddlers compared to mothers of toddlers without PTSD in response to stressful parent-child interactions as well as, within a different sample, in response to menacing adult male-female interactions. In the latter study, this pattern of corticolimbic dysregulation was linked to less observed maternal sensitivity during mother-child play.[41] Decreased ventral-medial prefrontal cortex activity in violence-exposed mothers, in response to viewing their own and unfamiliar toddlers in video-clips of separation versus play, has also been associated with increased PTSD symptoms, parenting stress and decreased methylation of the glucocorticoid receptor gene.[42]
Early experiences and shaping [ edit ]
Women who had a positive experience involving their family in their childhood are more likely to be more maternally sensitive and provide that same experience for their own children.[43] Mothers that had negative experiences involving their families undergo neurobiological changes which lead to high stress reactivity and insecure attachment. This causes lower maternal responsiveness to their infant's needs.[44][45]
Rat mothers provide high levels of maternal care (licking and grooming) to their offspring if they themselves received high maternal care as a pup from their own mothers.[46][47] Rat mothers who received low levels of maternal care as pups have lower levels of expression of the glucocorticoid receptor gene and lower synaptic density in the hippocampus.[48] In human mothers, lower hippocampal volume has been associated with a lower ability to regulate emotions and stress, which can be linked with decreased maternal sensitivity as a mother.[48][49][50] Mothers with insecure attachments to their own mothers display higher amygdala sensitivity to negative emotional stimuli, like hearing their infant cry.[51] Having more difficulty dealing with stress makes mothers less responsive to their infant's cues.[52]
Larger gray matter and increased activations of the following brain areas occur in mothers who had experienced higher quality maternal care as infants:[53]
This allows the mother to be more sensitive to her own infant's needs.[53]
Postpartum depression has also been associated with mothers who received low quality maternal care early in their own life.[54]
Paternal brain [ edit ]
In only 6% of mammalian species, including humans, the father plays a significant role in caring for his young.[55][56] Similar to the changes that occur in the maternal brain, the same areas of the brain (amygdala, hypothalamus, prefrontal cortex, olfactory bulb etc.) are activated in the father, and hormonal changes occur in the paternal brain to ensure display of parenting behavior.[1]
Paternal hormonal effect [ edit ]
An increase in levels of oxytocin, glucocorticoids, estrogen and prolactin occur in the paternal brain.[11][57] These hormonal changes occur through the father's interaction with the mother and his offspring.[1] Oxytocin levels are positively correlated with the amount of affection the father displays towards the child.[58] In humans, and in other primate species, lower levels of testosterone have been linked to the display of paternal behavior.[57][59]
In animal fathers [ edit ]
In father rats, just as in the mother rats, a decrease in neurogenesis in the hippocampus occurs postpartum.[60] Just like in mothers, fathers also have increased levels of glucocorticoids which are thought to suppress the production of new cells in the brain.[57]
Marmoset fathers have enhanced dendritic spine density in the prefrontal cortex. This increase correlates with increase in vasopressin receptors in this area of the paternal brain. With age, this effect is reversed, and is therefore believed to be driven by father-infant interactions.[1][61]
Changes in neurogenesis in the prefrontal cortex of the paternal brain have been linked in some species to recognition of kin.[62]
In human fathers [ edit ]
Being exposed to crying babies activates the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala in both fathers and mothers, but not in non-parents.[63][64] The level of testosterone in the paternal brain correlates with the effectiveness of the father's response to the baby's cry.[59] Increased levels of prolactin in the paternal brain has also been correlated with a more positive response to the infant's cry.[59]Cincinnati prospect Tony Cingrani pitched two clean innings in a start for the Louisville Bats on Sunday, allowing no hits and no walks, striking out five. For Cingrani, those numbers were fairly typical. In his two previous starts for Louisville, the 23-year-old lefty recorded 21 Ks in 12.1 innings, yielding just three hits, two walks, and no runs.
The atypical thing about Sunday's start was that Cingrani pitched only two frames before he was lifted. The Reds, apparently, are planning to call him up to take Johnny Cueto's spot in the big league rotation. Cueto is headed to the DL with a lat strain; Cingrani is almost certainly headed to Cincinnati.
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First of all, you have to like the way the Reds' schedule sets him up for short-term success. He'll likely face Miami and Chicago in his next two starts, teams that aren't exactly adept at reaching base or scoring runs.
And secondly... well, just take a look at Cingrani's minor league totals. C'mon. Those stats are obscene.
After three appearances so far this season, Cingrani is leading the Triple-A International League in strikeouts (26), ERA (0.00) and WHIP (0.35). He was utterly dominant across two levels in 2012, going 10-4 with an ERA of 1.73, a WHIP of 1.03, and 172 Ks in 146.0 innings. Cingrani made a late-season cameo appearance in Cincinnati last year (forcing his way into the Yahoo! player pool), striking out nine over 5.0 innings, giving up four hits and one run.
Story continues
But to this point in his pro career, Cingrani remains one of those tricky cases where the stats and the scouting reports are not congruent. He's piling up ace-level numbers, yet most prospect analysts seem to have him pegged as a good-not-great talent, a guy who needs to refine his secondary offerings. Everyone agrees that Cingrani's four-seamer is a quality pitch — low-to-mid-90s velocity, movement, impossible to pick up — but his breaking stuff generally gets meh reviews.
Here's what we can say with absolute certainty: The hitters of the International League won't miss Cingrani a bit. They can't touch his stuff. And if he stays on schedule with the Reds, his upcoming starts will have a low degree of difficulty. In almost any format, this is an add worth making.It was one in the morning in late March when Luis, a 43-year-old Mexican man, tiptoed across the floor in his socks. He had just been startled from sleep by the sound of violent knocking on the door of the double-wide trailer where he and a few other farmworkers live. He was terrified; he leaned against the wall and listened. Listen to the audio version of this article: Feature stories, read aloud: download the Audm app for your iPhone. Latest from Business The Media’s Post-Advertising Future Is Also Its Past Luis is no stranger to violence. Even though he has worked on a relatively tranquil apple farm in upstate New York’s mid-Hudson region for over a decade, he originally came to the United States to flee the violence in Guerrero state on Mexico’s west coast. For years there, vigilante militias have been fighting back against local warlords. The last time he was home, five years ago, Luis wanted to stay. He drove a pickup truck as a form of taxi service for hotel workers, but the warlords held him up at gunpoint, threatening to kill him if he didn’t give them a cut of his fares. (Pseudonyms have been used in several instances throughout this article to protect the identities of undocumented farmworkers and the farmers who employ them.) “If you don’t pay,” Luis told me, “they kill you.” So he journeyed back to the United States, walking across Mexico every night for a week under the guidance of a “coyote,” or human smuggler. That, too, was frightening. He says he was so thirsty, he thought he might die.
But in March, in the middle of the night in the Hudson Valley, Luis’s fear wasn’t dehydration or gangs—he was afraid that agents from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement might be outside. He locked the door to his bedroom and waited. Eventually, the knocking stopped, but Luis barely slept that night. The next day, he found out that the hammering on the trailer’s door was an incoming guest worker who had wound up sleeping outside on the stoop of another sprawling double-wide trailer on the farm. During picking season in late summer, the farm houses dozens of seasonal and undocumented workers. Luis had good cause to be afraid. About a week prior to the late-night knocking, ICE had picked up an undocumented farmworker on this same farm because he’d been convicted of two DUIs. And a few days after that, on a different apple farm just a few miles away, ICE had come before sunup for a 23-year-old man, Diego, who is from Guatemala. He had also been charged with DUIs. Diego is one of four brothers who, one by one over the years, all hitchhiked from Central America, walked across Mexico, and eventually found their way to the Hudson Valley to pick apples. He’s now detained, awaiting deportation proceedings in lower Manhattan. According to his attorney at a local nonprofit public-defense firm, Diego has a less than 5 percent chance of getting bail, much less staying in the United States.
(Photo by Michael Frank / Illustration by The Atlantic)
Since Donald Trump took office in January, ICE has been newly empowered and encouraged to target undocumented immigrants with criminal records for deportation—a practice that winds up capturing a huge number of undocumented immigrants without criminal records, too. But, while the Trump administration may be more zealous about enforcement than previous administrations, they have not actually changed any laws. Existing immigration legislation has long been at odds with the U.S. economy and with farming communities across the country. Trump’s aggressive rhetoric is only having an impact because of the legal framework buttressing it. Which is why, after a string of ICE arrests cut through the local Hudson Valley farm community, word quickly spread among Hispanic farmworkers there that nobody is safe.
As in the rest of the United States, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, as much as half of the farm workforce in New York is undocumented. The fear of deportation looming over Hudson Valley farmworkers is also impacting farmers—what they’re willing to plant and what they think they’ll be able to harvest. “My ancestors are Irish and they were called all sorts of names,” Pete, a 58-year-old farmer, told me. He said the country has swung back around to how it was a century ago. “Now people say Hispanics are taking their jobs,” Pete said. “Come on. You can’t get a kid who can flip a burger to come here and do this job for $15 an hour. If we had a workforce that was willing to do this work, I’d hire them, but we don’t.” A 2014 American Farm Bureau study backs that up: It shows that unemployed Americans regularly shun farm work, even preferring to stay unemployed. Which is one reason why Pete told me he’s anticipating a rough year: He’s not sure he’ll have the hands to do the work on his berry, apple, and vegetable crops. “Word of mouth used to bring guys to the farm during the harvest, but now I don’t know,” he said. He wouldn’t agree to let me use his name because he said even talking to a reporter had him worried about repercussions from zealous ICE agents. (While we were talking, Pete’s wife yelled at him to hang up the phone. He didn’t.) Pete pointed to an ICE arrest of five farmworkers in western New York who did not have criminal records. He said it’s just that kind of unpredictability that adds another layer of uncertainty to a business already fraught with pressures farmers cannot control—like the weather or consumer appetites. “The reality is that reports of deportations has farmers scared like I’ve never seen before.” Pete points out that the undocumented community is a net contributor to taxes. It’s true: A recent report by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that undocumented immigrants contribute billions of dollars to state and local taxes across the country. Deporting them, Pete added, will only hurt Americans. “If they just stopped contributing to the workforce, we’d have a major crisis,” he said. “Pretending [deportation] fixes the system that’s broken only means less food; it doesn’t fix how this works.”
The official, legal policy solution for farmers who need extra help has been in place in one form or another since World War II. The H2-A visa program asks farmers to apply to bring in foreign workers for the harvest season. Many farmers use the program, and some of the owners of the smaller farms I talked to use it exclusively. That knock on the door of Luis’s trailer at one in the morning? It was the arrival of an H2-A worker fresh off a flight from Jamaica. But the program was created in the 1950s, and it isn’t well suited to farm labor today—and for most farmers, it has become a bureaucratic nightmare. The annual slog through red tape puts farms at risk. Every farmer I talked to about H2-A mentioned delays in getting workers—which imperils the harvest. In 2015, for instance, a computer glitch held up hundreds of workers from Mexico, partially ruining Washington state’s cherry crop that year. Yet, none of the Hudson Valley farmers I interviewed for this story who use H2-A would go on the record to criticize it. The farmers are scared they won’t get the workers they need if they do. Farmers told me that it seems like just about any pretext is used to prevent them from getting their labor supply legally. One farmer told me she’d critiqued the program in a blog post a few years back, and she was paranoid that’s why she didn’t get her workers that year. A vegetable producer told me: “One year I didn’t get an H2-A worker because I didn’t use the word drive, as in, ‘Must drive a tractor.’ I used operate on the application.” Apparently, the farmer’s wording was not precise enough. Add the recent deportations to the existing H2-A delays and application concerns, and you’ve got one nervous farming community. (When I asked the Department of Labor about these H2-A problems, a spokesman told me the Trump administration was still too new to have a policy position on the program or about the concerns farmers have voiced about the system.)
This year, the fear of not having enough undocumented labor or enough H2-A workers has farmers planting fewer crops across the Hudson Valley. “Farmers are afraid they won’t be able to harvest what they plant,” said Steve Ammerman of the New York Farm Bureau. Ammerman told me there’s a disconnect in Washington, D.C., between what the Trump administration thinks immigration enforcement means for America and what it really means. “It means food prices are going to go up, hurting national security,” he said. Ammerman pointed to a recent study that estimates the consequences if all undocumented New York agricultural workers are deported: There would be a 24 percent fall in farm production (amounting to $1.37 billion in commodity value lost) and a knock-on effect of nearly 45,000 lost jobs across the state. While it’s hard to know for sure what will happen by harvest season this fall, several farmers I spoke to said they’re either planting less or hedging what crops they’ll tend to. “I might have to rip out the trees that have the least margin,” Sam, an apple grower, told me. “Once you put pen to paper, you realize if you don’t have the labor, you can’t make a profit.” The 33-year-old farmer sat with me one night in his tight office space, which looked like it had last been remodeled in about 1965—save that Sam was eyeing a coming storm on a live satellite weather map on a huge flat-panel TV screen. He told me he’s proud that his family has farmed in the Hudson Valley for seven generations, but he wishes more Americans understood how farming really works in 2017. “If you want to deport people, okay, then you’d better fund rather than defund research,” Sam said. “You want organic, okay, then you have to fund research to make that cheaper. You don’t want immigrants, then you need to fund robotics.”
Of course, robots don’t aspire to the American Dream, and Sam thinks manual labor is a fundamental rung on the American economic ladder. “It’s American back to the days of our founding that immigrants do the hard work so they can save and put their kids through school,” he said. “And that in turn saves every American tens of thousands of dollars in cheaper food costs over their lifetimes, so they can shift that money for their kids, to buy a home. It’s all connected. You can’t not have labor and still have cheap food.” And if |
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His brother says Hong broke into other people's homes before, but it was never about the money.
He says Hong comes from a loving family who thought that he was on his way to straightening himself out, until they found out what happened.
Hong's twin brother did not want us to show his face, not just because he and his family are grieving. He says they're also embarrassed about what happened and feel bad for the woman whose apartment was burglarized Thursday.
He says he knew something was wrong, even before he was told what happened.
"I saw a tarp on the ground and I just had a really bad feeling," he said. "I got a call about an hour later saying that they want my brother to identify the body. I don't know how you're supposed to react about hearing about your twin brother."
He says Hong was the type of guy who was always well-liked and stood up for other people. The problem was he just never knew how to say no.
"So when somebody offered him, whether it be smoking weed or any type of drug, whether it be ice, he just never knew how to say no," he said.
Police say Hong sneaked into the woman's apartment through a window. When she spotted him, he went back through the window and fell hundreds of feet to his death.
"Did you know that he was capable of (burglary)?" KHON2 asked.
"He did that years ago and I thought he grew out of it. I thought that he was out of that stage," the brother replied.
He says Hong wasn't doing it for the money because the family always supported him.
"So it was out of the thrill of it, do you know?" KHON2 asked.
"I have no idea," he said. "I don't think it was the thrill. I don't think it was the money. It was never about the money."
He says Hong had been cleaning himself up and living with their parents. He was also going to school and looking ahead to a career.
"He was an IT guy, great at computers," he said. "We thought everything was going great. My parents stayed with him all the time, moved him into the house. My parents thought he was doing perfect. That's why they took a trip back to Korea."Banking trojans are inundating the Internet.
These malicious programs lay in wait on your hard drive for an opportune moment to crack your online banking account — usually just as you log on. You can get them by clicking on a viral link to a greeting card or video that arrives in e-mail spam. Or by clicking to a web page that’s been corrupted by hackers.
By now, most Internet users are savvy about “phishing” e-mail scams that try to trick them you into typing login information at fake bank websites. So cyber thieves have shifted to spreading invisible banking trojans, which can steal data mulitple ways and require no action by the victim.
“It’s bascially phishing 2.0,” says Patrik Runald, security specialist at F-Secure. “Instead of giving you a fake page to get your logon credentials, they steal it directly from you.”
F-secure tallied 59,177 unique banking trojans circulating on the Internet in 2008, up from 15,969 in 2007 and 6,690 in 2006. The escalation partly underscores how intensively criminal hackers churn out new variants to escape detection by antivirus programs.
Brazilian spawning grounds
If you think the USA has it bad, consider Brazil. The latest, greatest banking trojans invariably spawn in Brazil and subsequently spread world wide, much like the latest strain of flu virus often starts in Asia and circles the globe.
Here’s why: Back in the 1970s and 1980s, hyperinflation and economic chaos led Brazil to streamline its basic system for completing financial transactions. The new system, called Sistema de Pagamentos Brasileiro, or SPB, helped the South American nation restore its transactions infrastructure. But it also accelerated its citizenry’s dependence on online banking. Today 60% of Internet users in Brazil are online banking patrons, versus 23% in the United States, according to Colin Groudin, CEO of Grail Research. What’s more, Brazilians use their debit cards and file electronic tax returns much more than we do, Groudin says.
Quite naturally, the best-and-brightest malicious software coders and thieving cyber gangs swarmed Brazil like flies to honey. Brazil has emerged as one of the most hostile online environment in the world; in particular, it has become a hotbed for innovation in banking trojans, says Gunter Ollmann, of IBM Internet Security Systems. Brazilian banks have not just stood pat. Brazil is home to some of the most sophisticated security countermeasures on the planet. Banks have literally figured out how to conduct secure online transactions working under the assumption that 100% of customer machines are infected, says Ollmann
Criminals tool kits
The bad guys have had to keep innovating. Meanwhile, pioneering schemes that no longer work well in Brazil have found their way into underground commodity markets. Banking trojans that were cutting-edge in Brazil two years ago can be purchased today in commodity tool kits with names like “Turkojan Constructor” or “TrojanToWorm Creation Kit.” So any Joe Blow with average tech aptitude can become an online John Dillinger.
“Off the shelf technology give anyone the ability to create a piece of malware and launch a banking trojan attack,” says Ollmann. “For a few hundred dollars you can purchase a tool kit and create your own customized malware to target a financial institution of your choice.”
The toolkits come with everything a criminal needs to carry out a basic attack, including software for spreading viral links in email spam or corrupting trusted web pages. The idea is to slip your banking trojan onto the hard drive of anyone who clicks on that viral email link or tainted web page.
A typical banking trojan remains dormant waiting for an opportune moment, usually when the victim logs on to a banking website. It then steals usernames and passwords by capturing keystrokes or copying the log-on page after the victim has filled it out. So-called “man-in-the-middle” trojans go further. One type injects additional form boxes asking the user to type in a Social Security number, mother’s maiden name, and other valuable data.
Another type reproduces a copy of the web page showing account balances – except with the balances altered to show the numbers the victim expects to see. This buys time for the thief to drain the account and hide his trail, says Ollmann.
Yet another type of man-in-the-middle trojan displays an official-looking banner notice asking the account holder to call a number to resolve a problem; a con artist answers and talks the victim into divulging Social Security numbers, mother’s maiden name and other data useful for future scams, says Mickey Boodaei, CEO of security firm Trusteer.
“You think you’re calling your bank,” he says. “A criminal gets all the information, then they can use this information to open a banking account or do a transaction on your behalf. And they got all this information from you.”
Modest protections
How effective are popular consumer antivirus suites in protecting against banking trojans?
“Modest,” says Jose Nazario, senior researcher at Arbor Networks. “The volume of malware and the technology they employ – and the incentive to avoid detection at all costs – means that most AV has only modest detection of these variants.”
There are other effective defense mechanisms available to U.S. consumers. But the U.S. banking industry, for the moment, is choosing not to promote them widely.
Doug Johnson, vice president of risk management policy for the American Bankers Association, told me that financial institutions are required to have “additional levels of security,” and that most banks are meeting this requirement with technologies that “are transparent to the user.”
When I asked Johnson for specific examples, he cited a couple of systems banks use to make sure that online banking customer is logging on from his or her usual PC. He could not cite any specific protections against man-in-the-middle attacks, nor give me an estimate of how much the U.S. banking industry loses each year in unauthorized online banking transactions.
“Online banking, on balance, is safe,” insists Johnson.
Yet U.S. banks continue to make it easy for crooks. Most online accounts require only a username and password to gain access. Major banks in Brazil, across Europe and in parts of Asia additionally require a unique code generated by a key fob token or smart card, or sent via text message to the account holder’s cell phone. So-called “multiple factor authentication” systems are available – but not widely promoted — in the U.S.
“Username and Password still rule the earth. It’s not that there aren’t better methods for authentication- there are, but stronger authentication schemes still come at the cost of added complexity, added cost, or both,” says Brian Chess, chief scientist at Fortify Software. ” Since many users don’t understand the risks they face, more complex authentication schemes can come off as an inconvenience. It would be great see wider adoption of token-based authentication schemes such as PayPal’s Security Key, but for true widespread adoption, the cost has to be lower and the benefits have to be better understood by the public.”
Trusteer has a nifty anti-theft system that works in the browser directly preventing man-in-the-middle attacks, which it supplies to customers of ING Direct and several other banks. “Basically what it does is to block, specific types of attempts to access information and tamper with information in the browser, ” says Boodaei.
You can actually use a free version of Rapport and set up basic browser protection for the specific set of online banking and shopping websites you regularly use. This technology sounds like a silver bullet, at least in terms of protecting against banking trojans.
–Byron Acohido
Photos of Gunter Ollmann, Mickey Boodaei, Brian Chess
February 22nd, 2009 | For consumers | For technologists | Imminent threats | Obama watch | Top StoriesVideo by Laura Klairmont
At the heart of South America, the long-struggling nation of Bolivia sits atop an unlikely gold mine: the world’s largest lithium reserves.
It’s been nearly a decade since the Bolivian government first set out to capitalize on this precious natural resource. Yet while the booming tech industry has recently sent lithium prices soaring, Bolivia appears to have made little progress toward meeting this growing global demand.
But like the salt flats that cover Bolivia’s deep ocean of lithium and other minerals, there’s more to the country’s lithium industry than meets the eye. For the impoverished, landlocked nation whose natural resources have historically been pillaged by foreign powers, the struggle to independently profit from its vast lithium supply is symbolic of a larger national effort to fully emerge from beneath the shadow of its imperialist past.
In an attempt to propel the slow-growing lithium industry forward, earlier this year the Bolivian government proposed a plan to create a brand-new, state-run lithium mining corporation.
The latest endeavor, billed as a sustainable move toward monetizing the country’s bountiful lithium reserves, is just the latest in a series of similar initiatives the government has pursued over the years.
It may also be an effort to turn both the national and international spotlight back onto the efforts of President Evo Morales — a longtime champion of the country’s lithium project — ahead of his upcoming bid for reelection in 2019.
Repairing Bolivians’ historically fraught relationship with their country’s natural resources was a key tenet of Morales’ historic 2005 campaign to become Bolivia’s first indigenous president, and within his first hundred days in office he’d nationalized the country’s oil and gas industries. In 2009, Morales enacted a new Constitution — approved by national referendum — that expanded the rights of Bolivia’s historically oppressed indigenous majority, further enabling him to follow through on his promise to redistribute export profits into the pockets of the people.
Under Morales, a global commodities boom helped drive economic growth in Bolivia by an annual average of 5 percent. By the time Morales secured his third consecutive term in office in 2014 (despite having just imposed a two-term limit for presidents in his new Constitution five years prior), half a million Bolivians had managed to rise above the poverty line.
Despite these strides, Bolivia remains one of the poorest countries in South America. And the lithium project has yet to meet most of the lofty goals laid out by Morales when he first unveiled his plan in 2009 to transform Bolivia into a sort of socialist hybrid between Saudi Arabia and Detroit. Beyond retaining Bolivian control of the extraction process, Morales sought to create an entirely new national industry, promising to make the long-suffering landlocked nation into a leading global source for not only lithium, but Bolivian-made batteries and even electric cars.
Eight years later, Bolivia’s lithium industry consists of a single pilot plant, which finally shipped its first order of lithium carbonate to China this past September.
A little more than one year before that first big sale to China, a visit to the Llipi Loma Pilot Plant provided crucial insight into the roots of Bolivia’s fledgling lithium industry, and the obstacles to making Morales’ vision a reality — starting with the setting.
A valuable sea of minerals floating beneath the salt flats
The Llipi Loma plant sits at the edge of the world’s largest salt flat, a blindingly white expanse that looks more like the surface of a lifeless planet — or the set of a post-apocalyptic movie — than any earthly landscape.
“Here, there was no electricity, there was no water,” Marcelo Castro Romero, the plant’s then head of operations, said two summers ago, looking over the blank expanse. Beyond providing guided tours in the rare instances that journalists are allowed to visit the plant, Castro (who reportedly stepped down from his post this past September) appeared at the time intent on conveying the circumstances into which the facility and the entire lithium project had been born in an effort to explain its apparent state of paralysis.
Continue readingAfter an unseasonably cold winter for most, many Americans are more than happy to welcome spring.
Related Content Streaming a Movie Uses Less Energy Than Watching a DVD
But inevitably, we'll soon turn to complaining about the heat. As far as consumer-hungry technologies go, air conditioners are arguably right up there with refrigerators and light bulbs: just about everyone wants the most up-to-date product on the market.
But air conditioners are also costly energy hogs. In Madrid, a region prone to scorching temperatures during the summer, for instance, air conditioners can account for as much as a third of the total power consumption during peak periods, according to a recent study. It's a reality that angers environmentalists as they stare down a worldwide reliance on indoor cooling that is expected to increase 30-fold by 2100.
The recently unveiled Aros air conditioning system hopes to offer a solution. Outfitted with Wi-Fi capability, mobile app integration and a host of other "smart" enhancements, the new $300 appliance is designed to minimize energy usage without sacrificing comfort.
The product was developed through a collaboration between General Electric and Quirky, a research and development firm that hosts a popular online forum where inventors share, discuss and submit ideas to staff members who ultimately decide which ones to pursue. The original idea came from Garthen Leslie, an IT executive and member of the 800,000-plus community; he was inspired to send in a proposal after noticing how many AC units were lodged in the windows of houses, apartments and businesses while driving to his home in Columbia, Maryland, last summer.
“It made me wonder whether people turned their air conditioners off when they left home to save money and conserve energy or left them on to ensure that their home was cool and comfortable when they returned," Leslie said in an email. "So you're forced to make a trade off either way."
So far, efforts to revamp air conditioning for better energy efficiency—compact adsorption chillers that tap into waste heat as a source of fuel, for example—have centered primarily on central air conditioning systems, as they aren't as limited by the tighter space specifications of portable units.
Aros isn't, by any means, a new cooling technology; cold air from the unit is generated much the same way as other mounted devices. It's also not the first Wi-Fi connected model that can be controlled remotely. But what consumers do get with the product is a conventional 8,000 BTU window unit that, like Nest's Learning Thermostat, helps consumers save on their energy bills through a series of unique automation features. For example, to figure out the most cost-efficient way to cool a room that's no bigger than 350 square feet, Aros' smart management system keeps tabs on your usage habits, and after a couple of weeks, creates an optimal cooling schedule based on this data. For the very budget-conscious, the unit will even self-regulate based on a pre-set spending amount for cooling.
The system can also be linked to Quirky’s free WINK app, available on iOS and Android, to track your movements. With this GPS-enabled feature, called “smart away,” the unit can be programmed to power down whenever you leave home or start cooling a room when it detects that you'll be arriving soon. In a way, it's similar to the Nest thermostat's auto-away function, which uses a series of motion sensors and algorithms to turn itself off when nobody's home.
Other features include a unique airflow design that, instead of circulating air from the bottom and out through the front grill, sucks air in through the front and blasts it upward via vents located on the top. This allows the cold air, which is much heavier than warm air, to distribute more evenly throughout the room as it gradually sinks to the floor.
Sound too good to be true? You're not alone. There's at least one person who isn't impressed by this data-enhanced iteration of the trusty old AC. In an editorial, Treehugger.com managing editor Lloyd Alter laid out what he perceived as the technology's most glaring flaws; our power grids aren't prepared for an influx of power-savvy products. Of the invention, he says:
It doesn't connect to the smart meters that most houses now have, so when everyone is coming home at the same time and everybody's Aros click on at once, the load on the grid spikes like mad. Washing machines and water heaters are smart enough to do this, so that the utility can control it and slice some peak load off the top. It's the single most important thing that a smart air conditioner should be able to do, and it doesn't.
Having more appliances plugged into a smart grid helps utility companies monitor a home's power consumption throughout the day and improve the efficiency of how electricity is distributed. Alter also goes on to make the case that, often times, the discomfort caused by warmer temperatures can be alleviated simply by cracking open the window to allow for cross-ventilation. Air conditioners, including this one, he says, would only encourage consumers to rely more on technology, since the units are already blocking the window. He does, however, acknowledge that the system's advanced management capabilities should allow it to at least operate more efficiently than conventional systems.
For his part, Leslie will receive 5 percent of royalties from subsequent sales. The Aros air conditioner is available for pre-order at Amazon.com, but the units won't ship until May, which means we'll have to wait to see if the product lives up to the hype.A Texas modeling agency is dropping a Big Brother 15 contestant as a client after she spewed racist and homophobic comments on the show’s 24/7 feed.
Zephyr Talent of Austin, TX announced on its Facebook page that it will release Aaryn Gries, 22, from her contract after she was seen and heard making hateful comments about fellow participants.
“Aaryn, season 15 cast member of Big Brother, revealed prejudices and other beliefs that we (Zephyr Talent) do not condone,” the page reads. “We certainly find the statements made by Aaryn on the live Internet feed to be offensive. Any views or opinions expressed in personal commentary by Aaryn, either on any live feed from the House or during the broadcast, are hers alone and do not represent the views or opinions of Zephyr Talent. Upon much consideration, we have decided to release Aaryn from her contract with Zephyr Talent.”
It’s unclear, for now, whether CBS will air the offensive chatter, though it released a disclaimer Tuesday saying it didn’t condone such behavior. A petition, meanwhile, has already been created on Change.Org calling for Gries’ ouster.
Gries describes herself as an “outgoing, driven and spontaneous” college student from San Marcos, Texas. To win Big Brother, Gries said in her show biography that her strategy was to focus on “what I need to do to make it through, but I’m sure there will be moments of weakness where I second guess myself. I will use my Psychology training as best as I can and try to be strategic.”
Her biggest fear? “People with evil or absent minds that hurt or deceive others.”Trump falls so far below presidential standard
Former FBI Director James Comey takes the oath before he testifies during a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing on Capitol Hill. | Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images
At no time during James Comey’s testimony did he suggest that our self-absorbed president ever inquired about the status of Russian hacking and if it was an ongoing process? Not once.
He did say, however, that President Trump repeatedly asked about his own status in the investigation. Isn’t that typical Trump? He comes first and everything else is of secondary importance — even the security of a country that he was elected to protect.
SEND LETTERS TO: letters@suntimes.com. Please include your neighborhood or hometown and a phone number for verification purposes.
Though little came out of the Comey session that we didn’t already know or suspect, it did reinforce our rationale for holding this leader in such low regard.
If the former FBI director is to be believed, Mr. Trump is not only incapable of telling the truth, but he is not to be trusted with a handshake or even an invitation to dinner.
The man is not above contempt, and as president of the United States he is way below the standard that is usually set for the office.
Bob Ory, Elgin
Media relies too heavily on Russia probe
James Comey disclosed that President Trump was not a target of the Russia probe. Far from obstructing Comey’s investigation, Trump encouraged him to ferret out any campaign staff that interacted inappropriately with Russians.
It was Loretta Lynch who gave Comey an inappropriate order — to follow Democrat talking points in referring to the criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton, not as such, but nebulously, as a “matter.” One wonders what she spoke about with a potential target of the investigation, while meeting secretly on the tarmac.
Not since the Army-McCarthy hearings has a single media appearance done so much to dispel a mass hysteria about Russians hiding under our beds. What will they talk about now? Will they ignore reality and continue?
Richard A. Crane, Lincoln Park
Washington’s unreality TV show
Do we have to endure four years of Trumpian phenomenon? With its amateur political faux pas, luxurious living, flawless wardrobes and tweets — have we entered an era of a show biz administration? When does reality set in? Brands, copyrights and trademarks seem to be the priority of the family enterprise over coherent government policies. With wardrobe over substance, glamor over wrinkles — have we slipped into an era of “royalty” over democracy, leaks over facts and the unending reality that maybe this is another extension of an unreality TV show?
Vincent Kamin, LoopLast Oct. 27, Taylor Swift released what the country-crossover star called her "first documented pop album," 1989. By year's end, it had already sold 3.7 million copies, according to Nielsen Music. Swift's blockbuster, not available on Spotify, might be among the last of its kind: big pop albums issued in the fall to take advantage of the holiday shopping season.
Whether on vinyl, cassette or CD, albums historically have made cheap, convenient stocking-stuffers, as families swarmed shopping malls and big-box retailers. So labels -- and executives trying to make their annual numbers -- have come to rely on a bounty of fourth-quarter releases. (This fall's offerings range from albums by 5 Seconds of Summer to Justin Bieber.) With the rise of digital downloads, the post-Thanksgiving sales boost often stretched into the next year. "Folks would get iPods over Christmas, and we always saw a jump in digital [sales] in January," says Russ Crupnick, managing director at research firm MusicWatch.
Spotify Said to Be Planning a More Enticing Premium Tier
Streaming services threaten recorded music's traditional schedule. Full access to Spotify, Apple Music and their ilk requires a paid monthly subscription, whereas album and song downloads are a la carte. As consumers gradually move away from buying a particular album and toward paying $10 a month into the record business as a whole, industry observers and executives see less imperative behind an October street date.
"You need not release your big titles at Christmas in the access world," says Republic Records founder/president Avery Lipman, referring to the subscription-streaming future. "If anything, you may not want to release your biggest titles there. Advertising rates are more expensive, generally, during that time of year. You may want to spread it around."
The portion of albums sold during the October-to-December period already has been drifting downward. From 1999 to 2007, the fourth quarter averaged 33.1 percent of annual sales, ranging from as high as 35.1 percent in 2003 to a low of 32.1 percent in 2004, according to Nielsen Music data. Since 2008 (the year Spotify launched), fourth-quarter sales have averaged 31 percent, bottoming at 29.1 percent in 2013. "Giving the gift of a CD isn't what it used to be," says Crupnick. "To me, it increasingly makes sense to fill up more of the calendar to get attention for releases."
Those Controversial Apple Music Numbers:
Why Both Sides are Probably Right
This drop is only a couple of percentage points. And Swift's 1989 contributed to an increase in the fourth quarter's share of sales to 31.6 percent in 2014. But those numbers could be a blip after the dramatic changes to come. Streaming only keeps growing: On-demand streams have risen each quarter during at least the last two-and-a-half years, from 25.5 billion in first-quarter 2013 to 75.8 billion in second-quarter 2015, according to Nielsen.
"The generation under 40 is used to paying for things monthly, like Netflix, for under 20 bucks," says Joe Conyers III, vp technology at Downtown Music Publishing Group and GM of Songtrust. "The older generation is going to learn that in the next 24 months as well."
The fourth quarter always was more important for the industry than for consumers, says Mark Cunningham, a manager with Red Light Management. "People just want to listen to music," he explains. "It doesn't really matter to them when it comes out."
This article was originally published in the Sept. 5 issue of Billboard.A Toms River, N.J. woman has been charged with a list of offenses after police say she caused a 3-vehicle crash while trying to elude a police officer.It happened at 3 p.m. Monday.28-year-old Michele Morano was traveling south on Brookside Drive when she saw a Toms River police car behind her with its flashing lights on.Police say Morano, who was driving without a valid driver's license or insurance, and whose car appeared to have equipment violations, later told them she sped up to avoid getting pulled over.She accelerated so fast, police say, that she wasn't able to stop when she reached Route 37.Morano drove straight into traffic, hitting a 2002 Ford pickup truck, which in turn pushed into a Toms River school bus.The bus and the pickup truck ended up in the grass center median of the 6-lane highway.The driver of the pickup truck was not injured.The bus driver was taken to Community Medical Center in Toms River and treated for a minor injury.There were no children on the bus at the time of the crash.Morano was taken to Jersey Shore University Medical Center in Neptune, where she was admitted. There was no immediate word on her condition.She has been charged with being a Revoked Driver without a valid License, failing to have insurance, reckless driving, failure to stop at an intersection and eluding a police officer and assault by automobile.Bail has been set at $25,000.Toms River Police say when she is released from the hospital, Morano will have to post bail or be transferred to the Ocean County Jail pending a future court date.Google claims its driverless car could save almost 30,000 lives each year on U.S. highways and prevent nearly 2 million additional injuries. Leave aside the myriad of legal issues that might be posed by driverless cars and all the implementation challenges that might lie in the way of their becoming as ubiquitous as cell phones. Let’s assume that we reach a point where Google’s life-saving claims turn out to be true. In that case, should the Google Car be included on the list of Essential Health Benefitsthat must be covered by the Affordable Care Act?
This may seem like a ludicrous question, but why? The individual mandate requires adults to purchase “minimum essential coverage” costing thousands of dollars a year per individual. For example, a typical employer-based health plan, annual premiums just for employee (single) coverage alone were $5,615 last year and for family coverage such premiums were $15,745.[1] Premiums in the non-group market are typically even higher than this. Admittedly, families may elect to instead just pay a penalty that by 2016 will reach $695 per uninsured person or 2.5 percent of family income (whichever is greater). But in principle, the government expects Americans to spend a sizable amount to secure minimum essential coverage and indeed is prepared to use taxpayer funds to subsidize a considerable portion of that premium burden for those at the lowest end of the income scale.
No one knows what a Google Car will cost, though with current technology, it apparently might cost as much as a Ferrari. But just as portable phones moved from being only affordable to the very rich 30 years ago to being nearly ubiquitous in the U.S., let us imagine that the price of Google Cars falls to within 33% of the average cost of a new car (purportedly about $30,000). Assuming a sale price of $40K, an average life expectancy of 10 years (which is actually slightly lower than the average age of the current U.S. fleet) and financing costs of 6 percent a year (surely on the high side of reality), the cost to put a Google Car into the hands of every adult in the U.S. would be $5,400 a year per adult. The actual cost obviously would be lower than this since not everyone drives and some households with multiple adults make do with one car etc. Averaged across the entire population (since children too would benefit from the life-saving potential of such cars), the annual cost would be about $4,100 apiece.[2]
Put another way, it would cost over $1.2 trillion a year to ensure that every adult had a (new) Google car to drive. Would that be price worth paying to save 30,000 lives? That would be in excess of $41 million per life saved—a figure that might make even the EPA blanch (though not necessarily).[3] It greatly exceeds the $8.3 million value of human life used by EPA in calculating the benefits of environmental regulations.
But, of course, no one buys a car purely for its life-saving potential. Since people buy $30,000 cars anyway for their transportation value, then this amount should be deducted from the cost of a Google Car to determine whether the car’s extra costs are worth its extra benefits—i.e., life-saving potential. This would drop the cost per life saved to just over $10 million—still on the high side of what government regulators would view as reasonable. However, were the price of the Google Car to exceed that of the average car by only $8,300, then having Obamacare cover this incremental cost as a preventive health benefit is no more obviously unreasonable than imposing a cost on society of $8.3 million to save one life through regulation.
However, using the cost per life saved is a pretty crude way of estimating the value of lives saved from averting auto accidents since the median age of death from such accidents is far lower than for deaths in general.[4] Teens who die in automobile accidents lose far more years of life expectancy than 80-somethings who die at the median age of death. Assuming years of life are equally valuable, we should attach a much higher dollar value to saving 67 years of life expectancy for a 16-year old than saving 7 years of life expectancy for an 86-year old.[5]
A statistical life valued at $8.3 million is worth about $386,000 per added year of life.[6] This is far higher than the threshold of less than $50,000 per added year of life used by the UK’s National Institute for Clinical Excellence in determining what health services to recommend for coverage by the National Health System.[7] It may strike some readers as absurdly high, yet that is the threshold being used today by U.S. regulators in determining whether the benefits of life-saving regulations exceed their costs.
If we tote up all the years of life expectancy due to auto accidents that could be averted if everyone drove Google Cars, it amounts to 668,000 lost life years in present value terms.[8] Averaged over the entire U.S., this means that each year, the Google car would save.79 days of life expectancy per person. This may seem abysmally small, but if we use the $386,000 figure as the value of a statistical year of life, it means that society ought to be willing to pay $1,058 per person annually for a technology that increases (discounted) life expectancy by.79 days. So for a family of 4, having Obamacare subsidize $4,200 of the annual purchase costs of a Google Car would be functionally equivalent to imposing a new regulation that imposed costs of $8.3 million to save a statistical life.
I’m not seriously proposing that Obamacare pay for Google Cars, but I hope this exercise helps readers think more clearly about what Obamacare is doing. At the margin, the law is diverting resources into medical care that otherwise could be spent on other non-medical ways of saving lives. As it turns out, Google Cars may not be particularly cost-effective as a life-saving intervention: it all depends on their incremental cost relative to less safe cars with equivalent weight/performance etc. But there are large numbers of life-saving technologies, such as media campaigns to encourage seatbelt use, public pedestrian safety information and improving traffic safety information for schoolchildren in grades K-12 that can save years of life at a cost that is at least 10 times less expensive than the cost per added life year of most medical interventions.[9] Thus, whether it occurs at the government level or household level, Obamacare may well be diverting resources away from the most cost-effective ways of saving lives. Not only is this a waste of resources, but it also means that Obamacare may well be costing lives. This is just one more reason we ought to think twice about plunging ahead with the implementation of this misguided law.
Footnotes
[1] Some readers may object that I’ve included the full premium, not just the share paid directly by the worker. However, most evidence suggests (and the Congressional Budget Office assumes the same whenever it estimates the impact of various health reform plans) that the employer share of premiums ultimately is paid by workers in the form of lower wages or fringe benefits than they otherwise would receive from that employer.
[2] Just under one quarter of the population is under age 18, so $5,400 x.755 = $4,077. Even if we gave Google Cars to everyone 16 and older, the per capita cost would rise only slightly, to $4,377, which does not materially affect my argument.
[3] Historically, the EPA has calculated benefits from life-saving regulations using a value of $7.4 million (2006 dollars), which would be about $8.3 million in 2012 dollars, used the GDP price deflator to make this adjustment. However, an analysis of the EPA’s rules for hazardous waste listing for wood-preserving chemicals shows that the rule effectively imposes a cost in excess of $10 billion per life saved.
[4] The median age of death in the U.S. exceeds 80 years (Fig. 4a), i.e., half of deaths are below this age, and half above. The median age of automobile deaths apparently is under 45, calculated from this tabulation.
[5] These are the official life expectancy figures used by the IRS (Table 1).
[6] Most estimates of the value of a statistical life (VSL) are drawn from wage trade-off studies that estimate how much extra workers are paid to work in risky jobs. Based on the average remaining life expectancy of workers in these studies (35 years: footnote 2), we can use Excel’s PMT function, PMT(0.03,35,8.3m.)=$0.386m. to calculate the annual payment over a period of 35 years at a long-term discount rate of 3 percent that would yield a present value of $8.3 million.
[7] The threshold is £20,000 to £30,000 which is equivalent to $31,00 to $46,500.
[8] This is based on data showing the distribution of auto accident deaths by age, using the midpoint of each age interval to estimate remaining years of life expectancy (Table 1). Just as a dollar today is worth more than a dollar in 10 years, these future years are discounted back to a present value using a long-term discount rate of 3 percent. The rationale for this discounting is explained in detail here. Discounting rather substantially reduces the nominal benefits of life-saving. That is, the 72.7 years of life expectancy for a 7 year old auto accident victim become only 29.4 years in present value terms.
[9] A systematic study of more than 500 life-saving interventions found that the median medical intervention cost $12,000 per added year of life, whereas all three public safety initiatives I list cost well under $1,000 per added year of life. See Appendix.In The Delusions of Economics, Gilbert Rist presents a |
18 in 2014. Massachusetts reports 7 cases of MDR TB in 2015, up from 4 in in 2014. South Dakota reported its first case of MDR TB in 2015.
The CDC is expected to issue its final report of the number of MDR TB cases diagnosed in the United States in 2015 some time in September.
Though MDR TB is a very small percentage of the 9,563 cases of active TB diagnosed in 2015, the possibility that when the CDC releases its final complete count for the year it could reveal a significant increase is ominous, given the cost of the disease and recent estimates that the survival rate may only be 60 percent.
In 2014, 88 percent (80 out of 91) of the MDR TB cases diagnosed in the United States were foreign-born.
The refugee community in the Badger State is estimated to be approximately 70,000 in total. One out of every 11,500 Wisconsin refugees were diagnosed with MDR TB during the two years between 2014 and 2015.
The overall population of the United States in 2015 was approximately 323 million, of which 41 million were foreign-born, and approximately 282 million were U.S.-born.
With eleven cases of MDR TB among U.S.-born residents in 2014, only one out of 25 million U.S.-born residents were diagnosed with MDR TB during 2014.
MDR TB has been a problem in Wisconsin for a long time.
As Breitbart News reported previously, twenty cases of MDR TB were diagnosed in Wisconsin between 2005 and 2012. All of the cases were foreign-born.
The high rate of active TB–and now MDR TB–among Wisconsin’s resettled refugees has become a hot political issue in the Badger State this election cycle.
Businessman Paul Nehlen, who is challenging Speaker Paul Ryan for the GOP nomination in Wisconsin’s First Congressional District, is blaming Ryan for the problem.
“A vote for Paul Ryan is a vote to bring more TB to Wisconsin’s First Congressional District,” Nehlen told Breitbart News earlier.Don’t call it a carbon tax. Everybody hates the idea of taxes. But unless society addresses the damage done by burning fossil fuels, the world is on a collision course with reality. Cataclysmic changes are in the offing and those changes will impose enormous costs on our global society. Who will pay them?
The bottom line is that the carbon dioxide created when fossil fuels are consumed is accelerating the rise in global average temperatures. Higher temperatures are melting glaciers and polar ice caps, which leads to rising sea levels. Those higher waters threaten most of the world’s major cities. What will be the cost of protecting them from the ravages of sea water? No one knows the answer precisely, but the opening estimates are in the trillions and go up sharply from there. Americans don’t want to pay 25 cents a gallon more for gasoline under the president’s plan to add a carbon fee of $10 a barrel on oil? Imagine how they will scream when New York City asks for $5 trillion to keep the ocean from flooding Wall Street?
Climate change is leading to alterations in global weather patterns that are still not completely understood. But the best guess is that many parts of the world will become much drier than before, making it impossible to grow crops. Other regions will be far wetter, which will also inhibit normal agriculture. Fewer crops means famine and starvation for hundreds of millions of people. Billions may be affected. We just don’t know. What will be the cost of feeding all those people?
Atmospheric pollution is recognized as a leading cause of illness and disease among humans. Who should pay for the medical care all those unhealthy people need? Who will make up the millions of man-hours of lost productivity when workers are home sick instead of contributing to the economy? If food and water become scarce, wars will be fought over declining resources. Would Americans be happy to see the world explode in conflict and pay for endless war rather than have the price of gas go up a quarter? If we are horrified by the Syrian refugee crisis today, expand it by a factor of 10. Are we willing to countenance that for the sake of a few pennies?
The point is, burning fossil fuels has costs. Enormous costs, in fact. But the wealthiest citizens of the world have convinced themselves and convinced us that they should not have to pay the costs associated with their products. They are so brazen as to suggest that doing so puts an unreasonable burden on the capitalist system. Are you buying that?
A new report from MIT entitled “Will We Ever Stop Using Fossil Fuels?” certainly does not. According to Science Codex, it suggests that in the absence of a rational carbon pricing structure, “the world is likely to be awash in fossil fuels for decades and perhaps even centuries to come.” It goes on to find that burning all the available conventional fossil fuel will raise global average temperatures 10 to 15 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2100. Burning oil shale and methane hydrates, two more potential sources of copious fossil fuels, would add another 1.5 to 6.2 degrees Fahrenheit to that. “Such scenarios imply difficult-to-imagine change in the planet and dramatic threats to human well-being in many parts of the world,” the report concluded.
“You often hear, when fossil fuel prices are going up, that if we just leave the market alone we’ll wean ourselves off fossil fuels, but the message from the data is clear: That’s not going to happen any time soon,” says co-author Christopher Knittel, an energy economist at the MIT Sloan School of Management. “If we don’t adopt new policies, we’re not going to be leaving fossil fuels in the ground,” he says. “We need both a policy like a carbon tax and to put more R&D money into renewables. Clearly we need to get out in front of climate change, and the longer we wait, the tougher it’s going to be,” Knittel emphasizes.
In economic theory, things like rising sea levels, famine, and poor health outcomes are called externalities. Elon Musk made a clear and powerful argument for including the costs of such externalities when he addressed the Paris Conference on Climate Change last December. A video of his presentation is included above. “Taxes on externalities are not inconsistent with the free-market system,” Knittel says. “In fact, they’re required to make the free-market system achieve the efficient outcome. This idea that a pure free-market economy never has taxes is wrong.” In other words, the so-called leaders of the Republican party who are always bleating about the evils of government regulation are spouting ideological drivel, rather than sound economic policy.
The case for a carbon fee is simple. Mankind has been using the earth as a toilet since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Doing so is simply unsustainable. Continuing to do so is like playing Russian Roulette with an automatic rifle and full clip of ammunition. Ideology won’t save us. In fact, it will bury us just as surely as global nuclear war. We make dog owners clean up after their pets. Why do we not insist that industrialists like the Koch Brothers clean up the mess they have created for their own selfish purposes?Club Traveler
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2015I want two things from my next car – a vehicle that is, at least partly, made from recycled materials and that will be recycled once it reaches the end of its life.
Currently, this is virtually impossible. Unlike the fuel efficiency stickers prominently displayed on windscreens in car showrooms or the multitude of technical specifications in the manufacturers handbooks, there’s no easy way for consumers to weigh up the green (or otherwise) credentials of the materials used to make a vehicle. Likewise for the materials used to make most of the products we purchase or use in our daily life.
As a materials scientist I know there is no technical reason why we can’t offer consumers this kind of information.
Over the past decade or so we’ve made huge strides in promoting sensible, efficient consumption and in supporting other environmental initiatives from buying local to buying carbon offsets. We have star systems for whitegoods and utilities bills with graphics analysing energy usage and environmental impact.
I can differentiate between the impact of eating a bowl of “no added sugar” cereal — coming in at 6 per cent of my recommended daily intake of kilojoules — and a couple of squares of chocolate, which will deliver 7 per cent in a single bite. I’d like to be able to similarly differentiate when I am purchasing complex products, which cannot be simply converted back into the same products again.
Cars, for example, contain many different materials such as metal, glass and varying types of plastics. It would be great if they came with recycling status labels in the form of an index that describes how recyclable their components are, and whether the product contains recycled materials.
On the face of it, recycling in Australia is booming. Between 2000 and 2009, recycling rates increased by 77 per cent. Add to this the value of materials derived from waste and redirected back into production — about $4.582 billion a year, according to the latest figures published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Globally, growth is on a similarly sharp upward curve. The annual global market in resources sourced from waste streams is worth about $410bn.
However, the growth in the sheer volume of waste we are producing is even greater, far outstripping recycling gains. At the same time, new technical barriers to recycling are emerging. More and more of what we throw away is made up of complex or hazardous materials that cannot be readily recycled using traditional, single material methods.
That means without considerable innovation our landfill sites will become increasingly clogged, squandering many potentially valuable resources.
As far as cars go, the good news is that they are both currently partly recycled and largely recyclable. Scrap dealers have long stripped end-of-life vehicles for steel and, more recently, aluminium — materials that can be used again and again without loss of quality and performance.
By using scrap iron and steel instead of virgin ore, steel producers reduce air and water pollution by more than half during the manufacturing process.
According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, about 80 per cent of a waste vehicle by weight can currently be recycled. The EU and China have policies targeting recycling rates of 85-95 per cent. But, there’s much more to be done.
Last year, of the more than 85 million new cars and light commercial vehicles that came on to the world’s roads, the single largest number, almost 20 million, were purchased in China. That’s 27 million more vehicles a year worldwide than a decade ago. And, everywhere we are replacing our vehicles in ever shorter cycles.
What’s most problematic is the non-metal components of vehicles that can’t be easily recycled, such as plastics, windscreens and other glass.
This is part of the burgeoning and problematic complex wastes emerging all over the world. For vehicles, these complex materials currently end up as “automotive shredder residue” (ASR), a mixture of ground plastics, rubber, textiles, fibrous materials and wood, contaminated with metal slivers and oil. For every vehicle some 120kg of it ends up in landfill.
At UNSW, we are working on a solution for ASR that could lead to 100 per cent recyclable vehicles. The research builds on our success in using high temperature reactions to convert waste tyres and plastic into valuable materials for steel production. In the case of ASR, we are achieving promising results using it in the production of metal alloys.
From a scientific and technical point of view I am optimistic. One of our goals at UNSW is to develop science and technology that can be readily applied to meet the demands faced by industry and we have an established track record of delivering research and technology suitable for implementation by industry.
We have little choice but to move in this direction. Over the past 50 years, humans have consumed more resources than in all previous history. The US EPA reported in 2009 that while the world’s population is projected to grow by 50 per cent between 2000 and 2050, global energy and material use will probably grow by 300 per cent.
The solutions are out there, but they rely on energy and investment. I’d like to buy high-quality, high-performance goods that are better for the environment. That should be a combination the market can profitably embrace.
Source: UNSWAffiliate Links
A thing you might have already guessed about me is this: when I get bored, I go shopping. I don’t always buy something, but going and looking at all the shiny makeups is one of my favorite ways to kill a lazy afternoon. Last trip I decided I might as well make it productive, so while I was roaming the mall I risked the odd stares from other shoppers so I could take some swatch pics of entire lipstick lines. I’ve posted a couple on my instagram already (I post a lot of things there first), but I’ve got a few more here too so I didn’t douse everyone’s feed in lipstick. Sorry in advance for the inconsistent lighting between the photos – store lighting never wants to play nice, but I did my best.
First impressions: The color payoff on these is really good, and the texture is very soft and creamy. I tried on #2 to wear around, and after several hours it didn’t migrate outside my lip line or gather in creases. Unfortunately it wasn’t a great shade for testing longevity since it’s really close to my natural lip color. Whoops! I’m going to guess they’re fairly short-wearing, but it was really comfortable. According to the Chanel site #11 & #12 are limited edition.
First impressions: They’re very opaque in one swipe but have a little bit of a paint-like scent. I really like the range of nude/MLBB colors but I’d also like to see some more fun, bright shades in there too. They dried to a fairly matte finish.
First impressions: Most of the colors swatched a little bit sheer and took a couple swipes to build up to the intensity you see in the photo. They didn’t seem to dry down completely (on my arm, anyway) and had a semi-matte finish other than Petal Pink. It really doesn’t have any of the characteristics I think of for liquid lipsticks (matte finish, low transfer, intense color) so these are kind of a miss as far as I’m concerned.
First impressions: The color intensity on these is stunning and I really love the selection of colors even if it is a tiny bit limited. I bet you could mix the colors pretty easily though. The sponge tip applicator on them seems interesting, but I didn’t test it in store (I used disposable wands because I’m not a barbarian). They dry to a glossy finish. I was still wearing the Chanel crayon when I swatched these, but I’ll be headed back for a second look.
In short: Out of the group, the MUFE Acrylips caught my interest the most, and bonus points that they’re not super expensive. The Chanel crayons also looked and felt really nice, so I have a feeling I’ll be adding one or the other to my collection before too terribly long.
SHOP THE POST:Pairs well with: Gin on rough terrain (the rocks)
Traitor rating: 4/10 “I could race… or I could screw over Lizzy…” – (everyone)
Each member of the Misery Farm had several favourite games to come out of Essen 2015. When pressed, all you can get out of us tends to be a pretty diplomatic and squirmy answer, along the lines of “well I loved so many of the games, I couldn’t possibly choose!” or “can’t I just say that I love all of them?” or “I CAN’T FREAKING DECIDE, LEAVE ME ALONE ALREADY”. We’re told this is similar to how some human adults feel about their children.
But if we were pressed to decide on a top list of games then we could probably all agree that Steampunk Rally has a pretty damn high spot. It’s one of the games we all actively sought out after Bob enticed a group of us in with her description:
“Guys! We need to play Steampunk Rally next. It’s like the hipster Wacky Races, but you get to play as Marie Curie! Only she’s a ROBOT!”
Sold! Literally.
Now we’ve brought (several copies of) the game back to our humble homes the excitement hasn’t worn off.
To start off with, have we mentioned the characters? There are sixteen to choose from, all based on some of the coolest inventors that history has to offer. If you want a team of badass lady-racers (which you know very well your team of badass lady-journalists do), then you actually have a whole range of options! That’s right, A RANGE of female characters!
This evening we plummed for Bob as Ada Lovelace, Briony as Marie Curie and Lizzy as Hertha Ayrton. Briony had conveniently hosted a steampunk Hallowe’en party in her house a few days beforehand, and being the cool kids we are we grabbed a few spare steampunky goggles strewn around and got our race on!
Each player gets their little chosen inventor card plus an additional unique card which, together, make up the start of your brilliant machine, which you’ll add bits to as the race goes on via a little valve symbol that lets you know more bits of machine can go there. Being the snazzy and intelligent inventors that you are you can easily unscrew some bits here and there and rearrange your machine as you go along, so you don’t need to worry too much about the order of placement (take that Galaxy Trucker!).
The aim of the game is to win the race. You win the race by crossing the finishing line first.* Sounds simple and familiar so far, right? Racing 101. Oh! Also, you’re racing in a giant machine that’s constantly rearranging, powering up, and occasionally exploding – more on that later.
Brimming with overconfidence, having not actually played since the trial rounds at Essen, we opted to play on the super-fancy FUTURISTIC HOVERDROME. More danger, but we could handle it. Robot power! Plus the map is a bit randomised at the beginning, which is always a bonus.
An actual turn consists of a few different phases, which each person does at once 7-wonders-style (or does slowly and in turn order if you haven’t figured out the rules yet, or if you just want to show off your rad moves). The first of these involves taking a card from a selection and passing the rest on. Here’s where you’ll use some of these cards to add bits on to your machine! Propellers, rocket boosters, a forcefield… should we chuck a time machine on there? Yeah, why not!
But the machine you’re building isn’t just about cool gadgets and aesthetics, it’s a beautiful, smoothly-running *cough* mechanism that uses water, electricity and fire power (dice of different colours) to bolster your machine’s defence or SPEEED madly along the track.
Later in the round is the racing phase! Here you roll the dice you’ve generated that turn and see how much power (how many little winged-wheel symbols) you’ve managed to generate. The misery farmers were off to a flying start! Each of us racing ahead with some efficiently running robot monstrosities, producing the dice and throwing them madly into the machines.
Oh, remember that bit earlier where we glossed over the bit where your machines can explode?
Yeah. Here that comes.
The final phase of a round is a ‘damage phase’, where you calculate all the damage you’ve taken from the terrain you’ve just hastily and cockily rattled across.
“Oh, oh shit. I think I raced a bit too far ahead.”
“Oh crud, me too. Ohhhh no.”
The exploding machinery is probably the most unique mechanic of Steampunk Rally. For each damage you take which you haven’t defended yourself against, a part of your machine (of your choice) will explode and fall off. This can be a useful tactic at some points- sometimes it might just be worth losing some outdated bits of your machine for the chance to speed a bit further ahead. Maybe the force of the explosion is propelling you ahead a bit? Who knows!
But uh, what happens if you take more damage than you even have bits of machine? Back into last place you go.
Every single one of us had, despite being nominally-competent adult human beings, miscalculated the damage we’d take and exploded our machines completely. On the very first round.
…
“Guys. Guys. Can we just… maybe…”
“Pretend none of this happened?”
“Yeah!”
“Start over?”
“Yep.”
“PRACTICE ROUND OVER, GUYS. NOTHING TO SEE HERE.”
We definitely owed it to the great inventors that we were representing to pretend that that was a practice round and start over. Nobody wants that kind of a disgrace on their shoulders.
THE RACE BEGINS AGAIN!
Slightly more careful this time, the team of badass lady-racers (or just ‘badass racers’, if you will) had a much more successful second attempt at a race.
The theme is excellently done, as you can tell from our enthusiasm over the characters. Marie Curie has a brilliant robot body because of the radiation poisoning done to her flesh one, but this just makes her even more hard-core than she was already. Which is tough, because Marie Curie is pretty hard-core even in puny human form. Lovelace is also a robot, having downloaded her consciousness into a robot casing.
The depth of the machine parts is also great. You can build some pretty bizarre and beautiful machines!
“I’m becoming a weird spider-tree with legs! FEAR ME!”
“Argh! I keep wanting to attach a penny-farthing to my machine but there’s never room!”
“KAPOW! Oh no, my galvanised brakes!”
“Oh no, you’ve lost your galvanic brakes!”
“Galvanic! That’s what I said.”
Impressively, it also plays with up to eight players. But it does this while still being strategic, rather than a game of luck. You can fit the same amount of players as Camel Cup, for example, but actually involves some skill and planning.
Briony’s playing a giant-machine tactic. Unfortunately, she seems to have got a little bit carried away with building something beautiful and forgotten that she’s actually taking part in a race. Lizzy, going for a “try to win” strategy, keeps losing her galvanised galvanic brakes, but the lack of stopping power definitely seems to be playing in her favour, and she’s speeding to victory.
The way that the phases work together is good for a larger number of players, so you’re not spending too much time waiting for other people to make their moves. But there’s definitely something lost when everyone races together, and it has a bit less of an exciting or sociable feel to it when you don’t get to watch everyone else’s smoothly running machines creating the perfect amount of water for their steam machines and then trudging along, or completely misjudging their power, going too far and falling in a hole. We prefer doing that part of the game one at a time, so we get to watch each other’s’ triumphs and disasters as they unfold.
The game is a winner both on theme and gameplay. It’s a great game to get your friends excited, and although there are certainly games that are more in depth, more strategic, and more ridiculous, it plays a pretty good role in our board game collections.
Of course, as always, the real winner is board games. And Lizzy.
*You can also cross the finishing line at the same time (on the same turn) as someone else, but then it’s about how far over the line you get. It’s not literally a case of who moves their character over the line first winning, because that would be madness of a different kind.Like most women around the world, the women of Talisay, a small city on the central Philippine island of Negros, juggle many duties throughout the day. They manage the household budget, feed their families, care for their children, and support their husbands and other family members. On top of all of these tasks, many low-income women in Talisay also run their own small businesses -- many even operate multiple businesses. With hard work and resourceful entrepreneurial skills, they earn income to support critical needs for the family, including schools fees, housing costs and savings for emergencies.
As small business owners in the Philippines, these women often do not qualify for traditional loans and other commercial banking services. They look to nonprofit financial institutions like Negros Women for Tomorrow Foundation (NWTF) for financial services that are specifically designed to help them build their businesses.
NWTF was first established through a cooperative project in 1984 during a crippling sugar crisis in Negros. The organization's three founding women directors created "mothers' cooperatives" to support the mothers who were guiding their families through this emergency. The cooperatives received small loans and trainings to help them weather the crisis and fund supplemental businesses. Eventually these cooperatives were replicated in other areas of Negros, and the project officially grew into NWTF, which was registered as a non-governmental organization (NGO) in 1986 and began official microfinance operations in 1989.
Since 1999, NWTF has been a member of the global network of Women's World Banking, a nonprofit devoted to giving more low-income women access to the financial tools and resources they require to build security and prosperity. As of December 2014, NWTF has over 80 branches across the Central Philippines offering credit, savings and insurance services. All of NWTF's borrowers are women, and women make up more than half its staff and a significant proportion of its board. The organization serves more than 207,000 borrowers with an average loan of about US$131.
Here are five women of Talisay who are using small loans from NWTF to build better futures for themselves and their families:
1. Rosini runs a candy-making business selling sweet treats to her community. She has received five loans from NWTF to support her growing business and send her five children to school.
2. Christine owns and operates a successful small bakery in Talisay. With support from 12 NWTF loans over the years, she purchased a house and a lot, paid for baking equipment, and covered business transportation costs.
3. Jojie runs a popular small eatery or "carinderia" in Talisay where she serves fish, which are caught through her supplemental fishing business. Jojie's businesses help support her six children. Over the last three years, she's has received six loans from NWTF, which enabled her to purchase a fishing boat and pay to repair her house.
4. Merlinda has been through six loan cycles with NWTF over the past two years to build her small grocery or "sari-sari" store. With two children at home, she's working to grow her business even more to support their education.
5. Anabella wears many hats in Talisay. A mother of nine children, she runs a sari-sari store and also sells used clothing and markets fish. Over 14 years, she has been through 24 loan cycles with NWTF, growing her businesses enough to purchase a fishing boat, a motor and fish nets. She dreams of buying another boat to double her fishing business.
Visit Women's World Banking's Bank on Her site to learn more how NWTF and other organizations around the world are reaching women with life-changing financial services.A century ago, the 'war to end all wars' bred conflicts lasting till today.
At Monday’s ceremony marking the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I, Belgian King Philippe and a girl greet each other before she releases a white balloon for peace. (Photo: Chris Jackson, AP)
World War I started one century ago. Wait! Don't stop reading.
For most Americans, the war is like algebra or frog anatomy — something you have to study briefly in school but then never have to think about again. Unlike World War II, with its unambiguous villains, epic battles and clear victory, World War I is a hot mess. Countries and forgotten empires declared war on each other in no small part because a bunch of aristocrats in funny clothes said they had to.
Everything about World War I — from the seemingly ridiculous fighting techniques (who hasn't watched a movie with trench warfare and thought, "Man, that's a dumb way to die"?) to the clothes and music — seems anciently irrelevant.
But the truth is that almost no modern event can hold a candle to it. George Kennan observed that when studying the maladies of the 20th century, "all the lines of inquiry lead back to World War I." A century from now, people might say the same thing of the past two centuries.
Staggering loss of life
Let's start with the obvious. The staggering loss of military lives: 650,000 Italians, 325,000 Turks, nearly a million from the British empire, over a million from Austro-Hungarian lands, 1.4 million from France, 1.7 million Russians, 1.8 million Germans and 116,516 Americans — not to mention 8.9 million civilian casualties worldwide. None of that counts the 50 million fatalities resulting from the influenza pandemic largely unleashed by the war.
Without World War I, you don't get the second — a poignant irony given that the former was sold as the "war to end all wars." The terms imposed on Germany, described as a "Carthaginian peace" by John Maynard Keynes, made another war virtually inevitable. Much as Adolf Hitler found his life's mission while fighting in World War I. Benito Mussolini's fascism was a direct adaptation of what he called "the socialism of the trenches."
Without the first war, the Bolsheviks almost surely would never have come to power in Russia. That led to the Soviet Union's mass murder, Eastern Europe's enslavement, the Cold War and, of course, Vladimir Putin's career.
The Middle East's travails can be traced in no small part to the Ottoman Empire's dissolution at the end of WWI. Dividing their spoils, the British and French drew most of the contours of the Arab world to their benefit. According to a surely false legend, the line between Jordan and Saudi Arabia takes a crooked turn because someone bumped Winston Churchill's elbow while he was drawing it. (Churchill himself blamed his errant pen on a liquid lunch.) What's not disputed is that the resulting maps have fed countless conflicts and resentments ever since.
Impact on the West
In the West, the war opened a Pandora's box, unleashing innumerable cultural and intellectual demons that we have decided to make peace with rather than defeat.
And then there's America. Some good was hastened by the war, though it's hard to believe women's suffrage wasn't inevitable. But it's also hard to ignore the harm, at least from a libertarian perspective.
"I believe it is no exaggeration," wrote sociologist Robert Nisbet, "to say that the West's first real experience with totalitarianism — political absolutism extended into every possible area of culture and society, education, religion, industry, the arts, local community and family included, with a kind of terror always waiting in the wings — came with the American war state under Woodrow Wilson."
Wilson introduced domestic spying, censorship, violent political intimidation of opponents and economic statism into the American DNA. Pro-Wilson intellectuals celebrated the "social possibilities of war," in the words of John Dewey. By that they meant the ability to force Americans to, as Frederick Lewis Allen put it, "lay by our good-natured individualism and march in step." The enduring notion that experts could plan the economy from Washington was largely born in Wilson's "war socialism."
David Adesnik, my colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, has an essay in The Weekly Standard arguing America had no choice but to join World War I because Germany had resolved to fight us. Maybe so, but America joined that stupid and calamitous war very late in the game and by doing so abetted the Carthaginian peace. The correctness of that choice is an academic question. The consequences of it remain very much alive.
Jonah Goldberg, American Enterprise Institute fellow and National Review contributing editor, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.
In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes diverse opinions from outside writers, including our Board of Contributors. To read more columns like this, go to the opinion front page or follow us on twitter@USATopinion or Facebook.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1nm9rluThe Supreme Court is set to hear historic arguments in cases that could make same-sex marriage the law of the land. (Published Tuesday, April 28, 2015)
The Supreme Court is set to hear historic arguments in cases that could make same-sex marriage the law of the land.
The justices are meeting Tuesday to offer the first public indication of where they stand in the dispute over whether states can continue defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman, or whether the Constitution gives gay and lesbian couples the right to marry.
The court is hearing extended arguments, which also will explore whether states that do not permit same-sex marriage must nonetheless recognize such unions from elsewhere.
Same-sex couples can marry in 36 states and the District of Columbia.
The cases before the court come from Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee, four of the 14 remaining states that allow only heterosexual marriage. Those four states had their marriage bans upheld by the federal appeals court in Cincinnati in November. That is the only federal appeals court that has ruled in favor of the states since the Supreme Court in 2013 struck down part of the federal anti-gay marriage law.
Justice Anthony Kennedy has written the court's three prior gay rights decisions, including the case from two years ago. All eyes will be on Kennedy for any signals that he is prepared to take the final step in granting marriage rights to same-sex couples.
Such an outcome was inconceivable just a few years ago.
The first state to allow gay and lesbian couples to marry was Massachusetts, in 2004. Even as recently as October, barely a third of the states permitted it. Now, same-sex couples can marry in 36 states and the District of Columbia, a dramatic change in the law that has been accompanied by an equally fast shift in public opinion.
The main thrust of the states' case is to reframe the debate.
"This case is not about the best marriage definition. It is about the fundamental question regarding how our democracy resolves such debates about social policy: Who decides, the people of each state or the federal judiciary?'' John Bursch, representing Michigan, wrote in his main brief to the court.
Other arguments by the states and more than five-dozen briefs by their defenders warn the justices of harms that could result "if you remove the man-woman definition and replace it with the genderless any-two-persons definition,'' said Gene Schaerr, a Washington lawyer.
The push for same-sex marriage comes down to fairness, said Mary Bonauto, who will argue on behalf of the plaintiffs. The people who have brought their cases to the Supreme Court are "real people who are deeply committed to each other. Yet they are foreclosed from making that commitment simply because of who they are,'' she told reporters last week.
Arguments made by Bonauto, other lawyers for same-sex couples and more than six-dozen supporting briefs have strong echoes of the 1967 Loving v. Virginia case, in which the Supreme Court struck down state bans on interracial marriage. In that case, the justices were unanimous that those bans violated the constitutional rights of interracial couples.
No one expects unanimity this time. But many believe the justices will take the final step toward what gay rights supporters call marriage equality, in part because they allowed orders in favor of same-sex couples to take effect even as the issue made its way through the federal court system.
That was action through inaction, as other judges played a major role over the years. Only 11 states have granted marriage rights to same-sex couples through the ballot or the legislature. Court rulings are responsible for all the others.
A decision is expected in late June.
Copyright Associated PressRecently by William L. Anderson: The Obama Administration's Vicious Attack on ReadeSeligmann
As many readers know, I devote a large portion of my time — and my life — to advocating for people who are charged with "crimes" they never committed, and often "crime" that never even occurred. Lew Rockwell graciously permitted me to use this page to advocate for the falsely-accused Duke lacrosse players charged with raping a stripper five years ago.
In retrospect, Lew took a huge risk in permitting me to fire broadside after broadside at the corrupt prosecutor, Michael Nifong, who brought the charges and kept the case going. Lew also permitted me to take a hard look at the politicized atmosphere at Duke University, which also drove the false charges and exposed "elite" higher education in a way that demonstrated just how fraudulent American colleges and universities can be.
The charges themselves were transparently false, and it was stunning to see how the "profession |
. I’ve worked out some potential tricks recently, and learnt a couple of others from people who are better wizards than I. Working on implementing that magic now.
Mac and Linux people, I have not forgotten you. I am putting a tentative release date for the Mac and Linux versions of Scraps at September 29th. Getting all that working perfectly will be the focus after this next update goes out next weekend.Imagine a house in which – at the flick of a button – your bed descends from the ceiling, your dining table pops out from the floor panels, and your projector screen unfurls from the roof.
That is the design of the YO! Home. The studio of 420 sq ft (39 sq m), replete with Juliette balcony, can transform into four different room configurations using hidden spaces and shifting perspectives.
We’re looking at quantum leaps in different ways of life - Simon Woodroffe
Simon Woodroffe, the brains behind YO! Sushi and the capsule hotel brand YOTEL, describes how inspiration came from the theatre, where mechanical moving parts can create whole worlds in seconds. “We’re looking at quantum leaps in different ways of life,” insists Woodroffe excitedly, pouring over plans at his houseboat home on the River Thames. By 2050, 66% = of the world’s population will be urban, adding another 2.5 billion people to cities worldwide. With sky-high property prices in major global hubs such as London, New York and Hong Kong, affordable housing is already under strain and space increasingly at a premium. As such, architects, designers and developers are pushing forward a new frontier: the micro-home.
They want to change the way we think about space, challenging the assumption that less square footage necessarily equates to a sacrifice in quality of living. With shoebox-size homes now a reality for many, they are asking how to make the minuscule beautiful and the tiny practical.
“The trend seems to be smaller places more thoughtfully engineered,” says Sydney-based Karen McCartney, author of Superhouse. “Size is not always the goal. Architects are able to [do] things that the ordinary person can’t imagine, changing the way that space can be used.”
East meets West
In a ryokan, or traditional Japanese inn, a housemaid rolls down the tatami mat for guests to sleep on at night and rolls it up again in the morning before serving breakfast and dinner in the same room. The YO! Home, likewise, takes its ethos from the East with furniture viewed as moving parts rather than solid fixtures.
“Is pressing a button and waiting 10 seconds [for the bed to lower] more annoying than walking into a different room or up a flight of stairs? It’s just adjusting to a different way of living,” shrugs Jack Spurrier, managing director of YO! Home.
By contrast, the Western-style studio, with everything crammed, fixed together, in a single room, is awkward, insists Spurrier:“do you sit on the bed or the sofa?”
One solution is the Murphy bed, a clunky spring-loaded fold-out that is stored vertically against the wall. But Woodroffe wanted something more luxurious, replacing the Japanese housemaid and tatami mat with slick technology (the YO! Home will arrive with an operation manual, much like a car, and each block will have a dedicated management team on site) and appealing to what he calls the tech-savvy ‘Austin Powers type’ who gets a natural high from groovy décor.
Design for life
Yet micro-homes are far more than the latest design fad. They are being pegged as part of a broader set of tools and trends being adapted in Western cities to breathe life into downtown areas.
Micro-homes are far more than the latest design fad
“There’s lots of evidence to show that today’s first-time buyer in London is less interested in ‘stuff’ and more interested in experiences,” states Paul Harbard, founder and finance director of London-based “compact" home private developer Pocket. Technology is increasingly replacing material objects, making it possible to “do away with lots of belongings that were traditionally more important like books [or] CDs.”
Harbard sees micro-homes as a weapon to battle ghettoisation with its damaging divisions between rich and poor. Pocket will not sell to those earning above a certain income bracket and provides checks on their resale to ensure they stay affordable. They build their high-density residential developments on leftover or brownfield sites.
It is a solution “demonstrably better than contributing to urban sprawl or developing on green-field areas,” says Harbard. Crucially it helps keep local workers – the teachers, nurses and policemen who are key to making the city tick – in the centre.
Small is beautiful
Local governments and academics are taking note. Last year Los Angeles’s Mayor Eric Garcetti called for 100,000 new residential units to be created by 2021, prompting the CityLAB think tank at the University of California, Los Angeles, to look into their own backyards. They have designed a prototype for the Backyard BI(h)OME, a 500-sq-ft micro dwelling made from plastic and steel. It can be erected in the yard and rented out or used by relatives, thereby reducing the housing crisis.
New York has gone one step further. In 2012, then mayor Michael Bloomberg launched a competition asking architects to design the city’s first ever block of micro units in Manhattan for which he waived zoning regulations (new builds must currently be a minimum of 37 sq m or 398 sq ft). My Micro NY, by nARCHITECTS, won. There is already a waiting list for the 55 prefab micro-units.
“We did want to express the beauty of small dimensions,” says nARCHITECT co-founder Eric Bunge. One way to do this was creating high lofty ceilings and tall windows to add a sense of volume and light to the 23 to 34 sq m (247 to 365 sq ft) homes. Another was to build an elegant building consisting of four slender towers that would easily merge into a city of high-rise flats.
There were also practical considerations. To maximise functionality, emphasis was put on shared spaces and residents are encouraged to rethink the way they use them. My Micro NY dubs itself a “community” and includes a gym, an outdoor terrace with views of the Empire State Building and a television den. Storage is provided for each tenant for free in the basement.
Like My Micro NY, most micro-homes are produced in factories as blocks, which are transported on lorries and slotted together on site like Lego. More sustainable than traditional bricks and mortar, prefab design reduces transport and assemblage costs, while micro-homes can be easily cooled or heated due to their size.
Challenges persist. There are utilitarian issues like ventilation; how to prevent smells, for example, from lingering after cooking or, in the case of YO! Home, creating a space underneath the bed to make sure anyone trapped can crawl out. Planning also remains an obstacle, with strict laws regulating what size constitutes a studio flat. Bunge had to work within exact measurements built with perfect precision in a factory because “if we were to lose half an inch [the flats] would suddenly be non compliant.”
Woodroffe is the first to admit that micro-homes aren’t for everyone. “If you did collect old copies of Country Life or Cosmopolitan and you wanted them in big piles you might be better off looking at another house,” he says wryly.
Hopefully we’ll be the Coca-Cola of small homes - Simon Woodroffe
Still, YO! Home is already generating interest everywhere from San Francisco to Helsinki. The next step will be making them customisable; Woodroffe envisions buyers ordering their own interiors online, with everything from the wall colour to floor materials designed at will.
“Hopefully," he grins, "we’ll be the Coca-Cola of small home[s]. Those 25 apartments in that little block are going to sell like hotcakes.”
If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.Bad Boy First Chapter is Next
A Love Story set in the Last Days
Final Conflict
Chapter 1
As the sun beamed in the sky, Jonathan Summers strolled casually down the sidewalk to work. He entered the lobby of the Casey Insurance Company and greeted the receptionist, “Good morning, Sandra. How are you?”
Sandra glanced up, glad to see him. “Hello, Jonathan. You better watch out, I hear the boss man is looking for you. But I don’t think you’re in any trouble this time.”
“What do you mean, ‘this time,’ I never get into trouble,” he retorted back.
She looked down her nose. “Hey, you’re talking to me. I’ve known you for too long so don’t try that sweet little boy act. It doesn’t work around here.”
Jonathan grinned. “Yeah, you’re right. I’m just a bad boy. I guess I better go to my office before I do get into trouble.” They shared a laugh while he headed down the hallway.
Once he entered his office, for some reason he evaluated his professional accomplishments. Though he hated to admit, it was nothing to write home about. His sight was immediately drawn to a bright red envelope sitting on his desk. Could this be a problem? Sometimes a red envelope meant bad news. So he took a deep breath as he ripped it open, only to find a great surprise - the commission check from a large policy he’d recently written along with a note from his boss. “Great job, Jonathan! Keep up the good work.”
Relief! Jonathan perked right up. He had to share his good fortune with his best friend and coworker, Matt. Without hesitation, he hurried to Matt’s office.
Even though Matt’s door was closed, there was no deterring Jonathan as he rushed in without knocking.
Matt heard him barging in but barely glanced up. He was too consumed in a sheet of the lamest business leads he had ever encountered. “What do you want?”
“What do you mean, what do I want? I want you to guess what this is,” Jonathan replied while fanning the red envelope in the air.
Matt showed no interest. “I don’t know what it is, but I hope it’s your termination papers for rushing into my office like a wild animal.”
“Well, if I’m a wild animal then I’m a lion because this magic envelope contains the commission from the million dollar policy I wrote.”
“You got lucky. I don’t know how you got a thing off these sorry leads.”
“You call it luck, but I call it party time tonight!”
“Then drink a cold beer for me. I could use one right now if you know what I mean.”
“Then I’ll drink two. And don’t sweat it, you’ll nab a big deal soon. But I have to call Lisa, so see you soon.”
Jonathan sauntered back to his office and dialed a familiar number.
After two rings, a sensuous voice filled his ear, “Hello, this is Lisa.”
“Hi, pretty lady. How are you?”
“I’m okay, and thanks for asking. What are you doing?”
“Just hanging at the office. Thought I’d call to give you some fabulous news. Guess what happened.”
Lisa could hear the tone in his voice. “There’s no telling with you, so tell me.”
His delivery was as smooth as silk. “I hope you’re ready to have fun. I just got a fat paycheck so let’s play hooky and get naked.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why not?” he pleaded.
“Because I have to work.”
“That’s no fun! And since I figured that’d be your response, here’s my backup plan. Why don’t we be adventurous and visit the shopping center tonight?”
“That’s a wonderful idea! And since it’s so pretty outside we should go to the Santa Monica Mall. We can even take a walk on the boardwalk first. We haven’t done that in a long time.”
“Sounds good to me. So get ready for a great time and I’ll see you at home after work. Love ya.”
“And I love you,” Lisa responded with a smile beaming on her face.
# # #
Seagulls drifted in the cloudless sky on this warm evening. Hundreds of people crowded the sidewalks as Jonathan and Lisa drove down Main Street heading to the beach. Lisa stared at the blue sky. “This is such a pretty evening for the beach.”
“That’s why I’m taking you. I only wish it was a little earlier so you could’ve worn your new bathing suit.”
“You’re funny.”
“I don’t think seeing you in a sexy bikini is funny. In fact, I think it’s a terrific idea!” He smiled while turning up the radio. The newscaster was announcing, “In the evening’s news, terrorists explosions have erupted simultaneously in Baghdad, Saudi Arabia, and Jerusalem, turning all three areas into a blood bath. The dead have reached 347, with 968 wounded. ISIS has claimed responsibility for the bombings. Now to our local news. Two drive-by shootings have claimed four lives in...”
Jonathan turned off the radio while shaking his head. “What’s happening nowadays? It’s like the world is getting crazier every day.”
“That’s so true. Just yesterday a lady from my office was robbed in front of a restaurant. Some man jumped out from nowhere, stuck a butcher knife to her stomach and took all her money.”
“Oh, my God, that’s terrible! Did she get hurt?”
“No, she was very lucky. Some people happened to leave the restaurant at the same time and it scared the guy away.”
“Wow, that was lucky. You know, it’s becoming a full time job just to be safe anymore and you never know when your number is up. Just like that some punk can kill you.”
“That’s so true. I wish I had an answer,” she stated softly.
Jonathan was thankful to have Lisa. She gave him hope and direction that made him feel good about himself. “There’s one thing I know for sure. At least we have each other.”
Lisa adored the remark. Her man always knew the right words to make her feel better. “What am I going to do with you?”
“You’d be rich if you knew that answer,” he chuckled.
“Being rich might be fun, but what will I spend all the money on?”
“That answer is simple, and that’s whatever your heart desires. And you better hold on because the beach is only a couple blocks away.” As Jonathan punched the gas, Lisa grabbed the side door handle and their auto zoomed down the street.
# # #
Strolling hand in hand down the boardwalk, Lisa and Jonathan were watching waves splash on the sand. It was so peaceful. Lisa breathed deeply, loving every bit of fresh air.
Jonathan nudged her gently. “The sand sure looks inviting. Come on, sweetie.” Once they stepped in the sand, he kicked off his shoes and dug his toes downward. “Oh, this feels marvelous! Take off your shoes.”
Lisa gladly kicked off her shoes and dug her toes into the velvety sand. It felt simply incredible after wearing high heels all day at work. “This does feel good!”
“Of course, it does. I’ll never steer you wrong. Now how about a walk by the water and then we’ll head to the mall?”
Lisa nodded her head joyfully. She loved the affection he delivered. As they moseyed down the beach, the glistening waves captivated her, but another sight stole her attention. A major storm was brewing miles away over the ocean. Ominous dark clouds were spinning from the inside out. She pointed. “Look at that storm, Jonathan. Those clouds look like they’re actually on fire.”
“Good golly, where did that come from? It was a beautiful blue sky just seconds ago.” He bumped his hip against hers, which made her smile happily. “Well, that’s out there and we’re right here, so let’s enjoy this fine evening.”
“Okay.” But as they continued their walk, Lisa stared once again at the menacing clouds. The sight gave her an eerie feeling, making her smile fade into concern.
# # #
A full moon illuminated the evening sky as Jonathan and Lisa drove into the shopping center’s parking lot. Fortunately it didn’t take long to find a space. They found one near the front and parked.
Leaning over the console, Jonathan patted her leg gently. “Here we are at the mall, or should I say the ladies playground.” They shared a laugh while getting out of the vehicle, and then he looked her over from head to toe. “Since you’re looking so fine tonight, its your choice what we do first. Would you like to go eat at your favorite Chinese place or do a little shopping?”
She snuggled beside him. The warmth of his body sent chills surging through her. “I want to go shopping.”
“I think that can be arranged.” Lacing his arm around her waist, they strolled casually to the large glass door. Upon arriving there, Jonathan reached out. “Let me open the door for the lady.”
Lisa stepped past him, rubbing her body seductively against his. “You are being sweet this evening. There may be some sugar in store for you later on.”
“There better be because big daddy is getting hungry.” They entered the store, radiating joy.
After shopping for a brief period, Jonathan picked out a couple shirts while Lisa chose a bottle of eloquent smelling perfume. They stepped to the sales desk near the front entrance of the store. Jonathan inquired as they placed their things on the counter, “Is that all you want?”
“Yeah, this is perfect.”
“Okay, then. Just making sure.”
But perhaps Lisa spoke too soon. Directly beside their items was a glass display case that contained several strikingly attractive crystal pieces. Lisa’s eyes sparkled when she saw one piece in particular. She opened the case and took out a perfectly carved crystal angel. “Look, honey. Isn’t this pretty?”
The moment Jonathan glanced over, a bright flash from a ceiling lamp shined on the glass object giving it a radiant glow. “That is nice.”
“Can I have it?”
He smiled as he pointed his right finger at his cheek. “I’ll make you a deal. Plant one right here and it’s yours.”
“I’ll take that deal,” she remarked and kissed him gladly. As she stared at the angel, the words flowed from her lips, “This can be our guardian angel.”
“If that makes you happy.”
Suddenly, a loud commotion erupted at the back of the store. A salesperson screamed, “Help! Stop those thieves.”
Jonathan looked up. Danger was approaching. “What the..!”
Before he had a second to react, twenty young hoodlums were running towards them, each carrying armfuls of merchandise. It was a smash and grab free for all. And they were in the pathway of the approaching mob.
As the thieves ran to the front door, one bumped forcibly into Jonathan, knocking him off balance.
Jonathan staggered slightly, but swiftly regained his footing. “Stop, you punks!” he hollered, and then saw another kid running directly at him.
But Jonathan was quick. He lowered his shoulder, preparing for the contact, and at the precise moment he rammed full force into the thief’s chest like a linebacker crashing through a defensive line. Except the blow inadvertently threw the assailant straight into Lisa.
The unexpected contact hurled Lisa backwards, flinging the crystal angel out of her hand. It spun high into the air, then the crystal piece plummeted to the tiled floor and smashed into a thousand slivers.
# # #
Outside, a change exploded in the atmosphere. Almost instantly, bolts of lightning pierced the night sky as thunder quivered the evening. A flood of clouds rolled in, twisting and tumbling over the horizon, suffocating the stars and full moon like a killer choking the life from its victim.
Street lamps were swallowed by the haze, leaving the world in darkness.
Bad Boy - the Male Dancer
Bad Boy
Chapter 1
As a gentle breeze blew over a sea of cars, James Knight was stuck in the morning downtown traffic. But he didn’t care. He was enjoying the robust flavor of his morning coffee and it tasted great. Then an automobile swerved in front of his car, forcing James to slam the brake pedal to avoid an accident.
Unfortunately, the sudden halt splashed hot coffee on his lap.
“Damn!” he shrieked painfully. Coffee was burning into his crotch, so he quickly put the cup on the console and a grabbed a napkin to cool the area. After doing his best to clean his pants, he glanced in the rearview mirror.
A beautiful sight came into view, which mellowed his anger to a fizzle. Snow packed mountains were towering in the background, thrusting his thoughts into how terrific it would be to head to the slopes. A vacation sounded wonderful, even a day off would be great. He hadn’t taken one in such a long time.
Then the car beside his burst his bubble by blowing their horn at another car. James glanced at them, but knew there was no escape from the freeway, so he turned on the radio. The sweet sounds of rock soothed his soul until he arrived at his exit.
Zipping off the freeway into the parking garage of a large office building, he greeted the attendant, “Good morning, Pete. How are things?”
“Pretty good, James. Thanks for asking.” Pete opened the gate while James replied, “Take care.” After parking in the closest space, he took the elevator to the seventeenth floor and stepped down a hallway of identical doors, each one resembling the last.
Upon reaching his office, he just stood there for a moment, staring blankly at the nameplate: O’Malley Accounting Firm. “Well, here comes another exciting day of accounting.” He shook his head while entering the lobby and told the receptionist the same phrase as every morning. Repetition was key for an accountant. “Good morning, Lucy. Hope things are well.”
She responded cheerfully, “Thanks, Mr. Knight. Have a nice day.”
James smiled at her with an infectious grin. Since childhood, he has been blessed with the ability to make others feel comfortable. Perhaps it was his pearly white teeth or his dimpled cheeks, but it was probably the sincerity he illuminated.
James cared for people and his aura made that obvious. But the workday had begun, so he stepped briskly to his office and sat behind his desk. Before his bottom had warmed the chair, Amy, his secretary, entered.
“Good morning, James. I hope you’re ready to get started. I’ve already had a funny conversation with one of your favorite clients,” she giggled sarcastically.
“Oh, no! I know that nasty laugh. Go on and tell me, who’s being audited?”
“I can’t hide anything from you. It’s Mr. Pollock. He was yelling so loudly I had to hold the phone from my ear.” Amy handed him a message. “He said to give this to you.”
James saw a headache approaching. Robert Pollock always liked to get his way and pitched a fit when he didn’t. He read the note out loud, “This is the second year the IRS is auditing me!” James dropped the message on his desk.
“I’m sure you already know he wants you to phone ASAP.” She stepped to the door. “What would you like this morning? The usual?”
“I guess so.”
“It’s always the usual. You should put some spice in your life,” Amy joked playfully while strolling down the hallway.
“Okay, you don’t have to rub it in,” James yelled behind her. He enjoyed her sense of humor. They have been working together for years and there was never a problem. Amy was honest, trustworthy, punctual, and straightforward. All the traits he admired in a person. He was lucky to have her on his side.
Just when he began to read some paperwork, Amy entered with a cup of black coffee and a plain donut. After placing them on his desk, she inquired, “Have you called Mr. Pollock?”
“No, I’ve been trying to put it off.” James smiled, but she glanced away. “I know. I’ll call him now.” Amy left with a satisfied glare as he picked up the phone and dialed. A receptionist answered, “Pollock and Petrie, can I help you?”
“Hello, this is James Knight for Robert Pollock.”
“Yes, sir. Please hold.” The call was transferred to Robert who exploded once he discovered it was James. “What are you doing to me over there?”
James knew his answer had better be satisfying. “Don’t worry, Robert. I’ll take care of everything. Have I ever failed you? And look at the bright side, they say the second time is lucky.” James should have stopped when he was ahead.
Robert shouted into the phone, “Lucky, hell! This is my second year of being audited. You better do me right.”
“You know I will. I’ll keep you informed.” James hung up, relieved the conversation was over. The intercom buzzed. “Yes, Amy.”
“It’s Johnny on line one.”
James grinned; finally there was someone to help save the day. There was no telling what type of story his crazy friend would have. He answered the phone joyfully, “Hey, buddy. What’s happening?”
# # #
Standing in front of a full-length mirror, Johnny was wearing only a red and black striped g-string as he admired his tan physique. He was practicing exotic dance steps, swaying his lower body with the ease of a pendulum. This man was completely uninhibited.
Johnny knew how to drive his body. Pulsating his hips toward the mirror, he had moves that could bring the most reserved female to lusty titillation. And his talent made him the money. He held a cold beer in one hand while gripping his cell phone with the other. “I’m well, but I need a favor and you were the first cat that came to mind. My car is in the shop and I need a ride to work.”
“A ride to work! What are you talking about? It’s about time to sell that car.”
“Hey, be easy. She just needs a little repair. That’s what I get for shining her up too pretty and riding her too hard.”
“It’s funny how you always compare everything in a sexual way.”
“What else would you expect from me,” Johnny shot back.
The light on James’ phone blinked. “Hey, I have another call coming in so what time are you talking about?”
“Make it around six. That’ll give us enough time for a beer. That is if you can handle a cold one after work.”
“I think I can manage that. I’m just curious how many beers you need to do your job, Mr. Shake Your Moneymaker?” James chuckled, but Johnny countered, “I wouldn’t laugh too hard. I have it better at the Honey Shack than you’ll ever imagine. See you at six.”
“Sure.” James hung up with a grin. Johnny and him went back so many years. They were partners in crime in elementary school and never stopped. The intercom buzzed again. “I’m almost afraid to ask who’s calling.”
“You don’t have to worry about this one. It’s Melissa on line two,” Amy replied.
“Oh, good.” James pushed the speaker button. “Hello, pretty lady. How has your day been?”
Melissa sat in her apartment studying her freshly polished fingernails. “No complaints. I did some early shopping with my girlfriends and bought a few things.”
Her voice had a different tone but he dismissed it. “That’s nice. Did you get a new outfit for this evening? You know how fine you look in a tight little number.”
“No, I didn’t get an outfit. And about tonight, I can’t make it. Something else came up,” Melissa retorted nonchalantly.
James tried to curb his irritation. “What do you mean something else came up? Do you know how long it took me to get reservations at this restaurant?”
“I’m sorry, James, but I can’t make it. My friends want to go out and that’s what I want to do,” Melissa stated flatly.
James was somewhat surprised, but more pissed. What game was she playing this time? “Your friends want to go out and that’s what you want to do! Look Melissa, you’ve pulled this kind of crap before. This is supposed to be a relationship, not an escort service you use whenever you want.”
“I’ve already said I’m sorry. Maybe we can visit the restaurant next week. I’m sure they’ll still be open.”
“Next week! Still be open! What the hell are you talking about?” James mumbled into the receiver. He knew what had to be done. His sanity was worth far more than this. The aggravation she brought easily overshadowed the joy she delivered. “Look Melissa, every time we speak there’s a problem and I’m tired of it. This is it. Good bye.” James hung up the phone. A slight twinge of regret attacked him, but it quickly changed into a sense of relief.
He actually felt free of a heavy burden, like a black cloud of negativity was blowing away.
Melissa had been draining his soul like a leech sucking his blood. And this was it. Her negativity just lost.
Past relationships have taught him when it was best to back away and start over. Inhaling deeply, he was thankful he saw her true colors now before wasting any more time.
James also realized it was okay that Melissa wasn’t the right person for him, because one day he would meet the lady of his dreams. One that could steal his breath. And hanging out with Johnny could certainly bring him into contact with a lot of them. Johnny always bragged about the women he met at the Honey Shack.
James laughed. He could only imagine what kind of trouble his buddy would drag him into tonight.On a flaking, whitewashed wall in central Rio, street artist Williams Aurelino is adding the final touches to a mural of the Brazilian football team.
The caricatures of the players are finished – a rakish Neymar, David Luiz with a frizzy mane, a green-skinned Hulk and, of course, the impressively unimpressed manager, Luiz Felipe Scolari. All that remains to be painted is the blue background and the shorts, socks and boots.
"It will be ready in time for the opening game," says the artist. "We'll have a party here, a big screen, a barbecue, lots of people. It's going to be fun." That will be music to the ears of the World Cup's organisers who – after years of bad publicity about stadium delays, deaths of construction workers and cost overruns – are hoping Thursday's kick-off will switch the focus to football.
The lower-middle-class neighbourhood of Gloria – where the mural is found – is certainly doing its bit. Here, the residents are gearing up for the football fiesta in traditional style. Bunting crisscrosses the street, flags adorn windows, and the stairs up the hill are painted green and yellow. But the enthusiasm is far from universal. Ten minutes' walk away, artists have painted two very different wall murals that highlight the problems of inequality, dangerous working conditions and forced relocations that have plagued the World Cup.
The first is of a giant, tarnished trophy made up of a slave straining on bended knee beneath the weight of an oversized football. The second depicts a football bulldozer pushing shanty-town homes aside to make way for a red carpet.
"We wanted to create a channel of expression for all the victims of the brutal evictions. We want to give these people and their sad stories a place in history and society," said B. Shanti, the artist who painted the mural. Meanwhile, the independent journalist collective Mídia Ninja, which has also been highly critical of the World Cup preparations, is launching a new online platform in Rocinha, the biggest favela in Rio. Huge images and slogans on to side of it which will be visible from many parts of Rio.
The images reflect the conflicted mood in Brazil towards a tournament that carries more than the usual weight of expectation and frustration.
Support for the Brazilian national team remains fanatical in this football-obsessed nation. The home fans are hoping a sixth trophy will lay to rest the ghosts of the 1950 defeat against Uruguay at the Maracanã. The government aims to show how far Brazil has developed economically, and President Dilma Rousseff will be hoping for success to set the scene for re-election in October.
But ever since mass protests during the Confederations Cup last year, public awareness of the social and economic costs of the tournament have made many uneasy about displays of enthusiasm. As compared with previous World Cups, public support is low. A poll by the Pew Research Centre suggests that 61% of the public feel that hosting the World Cup was a bad idea, because it diverts resources that could be better spent on public services such as healthcare.
Everyone from Pelé and Romário to the Catholic church has criticised the expense and delays. The footballer-turned-congressman Romário has described the impact on state funds as "the biggest heist in the history of Brazil". Last week the bishops' conference issued a "red card" to the organisers for squandering public funds and evicting people for stadium construction.
"The church wants to contribute to the public debate and express its concern with... the inversion of priorities in the use of public money that should go to health, education, basic sanitation, transportation and security," it said.
Although there has been no recent repeat of the mass protests seen last year, small-scale demonstrations against Fifa corruption and police brutality continue.Opposition and cynicism are also evident on city walls and social networks. Another graffiti image that depicts a hungry black child sitting at a table with only a football to eat has gone viral. Other images mock unfinished infrastructure projects promised for the World Cup. Such criticism is not the only reason street decorations are not what they once were. The UOL website reported that few shops and petrol stations were putting up bunting in São Paulo because they were worried it might make them the target of anti-World Cup protesters. Meanwhile, the city has been gridlocked by a transport strike.
Fears of transport chaos throughout the tournament abound, despite government plans to give schools early holidays to ease congestion. Some are fleeing the host cities. "I'm happy to leave Rio during the World Cup. It will be messy, crowded and expensive. Prices are going up now that everyone is starting to arrive here. And traffic is certainly getting worse," says Marina Faissal, a yoga instructor.
But those who remain are getting in the mood. Each day there are more decorations on the streets, flags on cars and people walking around in the yellow shirts of the SeleçãoOne of the community organisers in Gloria, Valter Peixoto, acknowledges that elsewhere in Brazil the mood is not as joyful as before previous tournaments, but says the residents plan their own celebrations, come what may.
"There is much less decoration than in the past. People are confused. The government is stealing from the people through corruption. But what we are doing has nothing to do with them. It's for us. It's for the players," he says.
Additional reporting by Luke Bainbridge, Karina Vieira and Anna Kaiser.President Donald Trump is reprising his attack against those calling for an investigation into the administration and his surrogates over alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.
So now it is reported that the Democrats, who have excoriated Carter Page about Russia, don't want him to testify. He blows away their.... — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 31, 2017
In a series of new tweets, Mr. Trump focused his attention on his former foreign policy adviser Carter Page, who is also considered a part of the ongoing investigation.
Mr. Trump tweeted "the Democrats, who have excoriated Carter Page about Russia, don't want him to testify." The president added: "He blows away their case against him and now wants to clear his name by showing the 'false or misleading testimony by James Comey, John Brennan…' Witch Hunt!"
...case against him & now wants to clear his name by showing "the false or misleading testimony by James Comey, John Brennan..." Witch Hunt! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 31, 2017
In a letter sent to the House Intelligence Committee after Page found out he would not be able to address Comey and Brennan's testimony at a June 6th private meeting, Page wrote that he hopes "to have the opportunity to restart our dialogue in person within the very near future during testimony before a public Committee hearing."
Page had previously denied he was in regular contact with Russian officials during the 2016 campaign. He provided a 12-page letter to Sen. Richard Burr, R-North Carolina, and Sen. Mark Warner, D-Virginia, informing lawmakers that he is willing to testify on his knowledge of any Russian interference, but only in the form of an open and public hearing.
Page has also informed Congress that he has no intention of turning over material evidence that lawmakers requested unless they give him records he had previously requested in return.
Page's prior contacts with Russian officials, including a conversation with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak at an event on the sidelines of the Republican National Convention, have given lawmakers pause over just who in the Trump administration has had contacts with the Russian government before and during Mr. Trump's presidency.
The former oil industry consultant also was the subject of FBI monitoring during the campaign because the federal government had reason to believe Page was acting as a Russian agent, including contacts Page had with Russian intelligence operatives back in 2013 according to a report by the Washington Post.There's no denying Apple Pay has grabbed a share of retail payments, and the support of banks, since its arrival. However, it appears both Google and Square are working on new products to keep customers' attention. According to The Information, the folks in Mountain View are testing a service called "Plaso" that would allow Android users to say their initials at the register in order to complete a transaction. Unfortunately, there aren't any specifics on how that would work with Google Wallet: the system for cashless payments that arrived long before Apple Pay, but never really took off. Of course, Google will have to do more with its upcoming release than just handle payments. The Apple Watch is launching soon, and that wearable, along with the newest NFC-equipped iPhones, could sort public transit passes, building security credentials and more.Image caption Efforts are under way to re-integrate 200,000 former rebel fighters back into Libyan society
Jordan has begun training Libyan policemen as part of a programme to strengthen ties between the countries.
They will take part in a three-month course in public order, security and investigative work at an international academy outside Jordan's capital Amman.
The 10,000 recruits are all members of former rebel forces that toppled Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
Some 550 Libyan officers will also receive special forces training in combating terrorism.
The training programme is part of |
the teen was doing. There was a crew mowing lawns and the teen was putting out business cards and offered one to the cop. No damage was done to any vehicles and nothing illegal was taking place.
The cop tells a lie himself, insisting, “When an officer asks you for your ID, you’re supposed to provide your ID. You don’t have your ID. I don’t care what you’re doing.”
The teen then asks the cop for his card or his name, and that’s when the cop decides to arrest the teen.
With the clear lack of any justification for escalating the situation, it has to be asked if this is a case of ‘cutting grass while black.’ Perhaps the cop, like others caught in racist moments, thought the teen looked like a ‘bad dude.’
As the officer brandishes handcuffs, the teen backs away, reminding the cop that he’s on video. Others on the crew notice and approach, asking why the teen is being harassed.
“You cannot put me in handcuffs, sir. Put them back in your pocket,” asserts the teen.
The video transitions to a segment “later that day,” presumably at the teen’s house well after the confrontation. The same cop, who apparently just can’t let go, is seen standing in his front yard.
The cops said he “just wants to talk” but the teen knows he is being harassed, and states it emphatically. He tells the cop to get out of his yard, but the cop refuses, saying he “needs to get you identified.”
“I’m cutting yards. I’m minding my business,” said the teen.
The video closes with the cop walking up to the front door, insisting that all he’s got to do is talk with the teen.
The video then shows pictures of lacerated arms, which allegedly came from the police dogs sicced on the teen when cops broke into his house. This however, has not been verified. It could be the case that the vengeful cop had caught the teen in a little white lie about his age and decided to use it against him. Or the teen could possibly have had a warrant out.
After the incident the teen took to twitter to post pictures of his injuries along with his thoughts about the incident.
This what the police who suppose to serve and protect do to black ppl now ah days…. ps thts me pic.twitter.com/gPpVHpw5wM — ElGuxop_Marly (@Elguxop_Marly) July 24, 2017
In any case, the video demonstrates the importance of not talking to cops. When they are on a mission to cause trouble for people that ‘look like bad dudes’ in their eyes, they can and will create a situation – with their own lies and deceit – where the victim incriminates himself.
Always film police encounters, and always know your rights.
Marlin has also started a GoFundMe to help pay for his medical bills, if you would like to donate, you may do so here.
Update:
TFTP spoke with JC Mosier of the Harris County Constable’s Office, Precinct One. Mr. Mosier had not seen the video but explained that according to the police report, the Constable was called to the scene by residents of the neighborhood who were concerned about Marlin Gipson knocking on doors. Mr. Mosier went further, saying that a 911 call is enough articulable suspicion to stop and ID someone, and that knocking on doors is typical “burglar behavior”.
The spokesman divulged further details about the report, noting that the constable’s office did return to the home and found the teen hiding in a back room. After they arrested him for “failure to ID” and “evading arrest”, they found he had a warrant for misdemeanor assault. All the charges, he said, are misdemeanors.
The teen’s account of being attacked by a dog is correct, according to Mosier, the dog was let loose on Gipson because he wouldn’t go into police custody. Mosier also said an ambulance was called to the scene immediately and Mr. Gipson was attended to by paramedics at the scene.
It is debatable, and may be up to a judge and/or jury, to decide whether the initial stop was legal, considering the only articulable suspicion of the teen committing a crime, was knocking on doors. Because Mr. Mosier was so transparent and allowed us to obtain details of the official police report, we will be completely transparent by saying that if knocking on doors is suspicion enough to detain someone, Texas, and America for that matter, is in big trouble.The author traces and critiques the development of leftism over the past six hundred or so years. For those curious about his definition of leftism, he tries to define it at the back of the book. Although I don’t agree completely with his definition of leftism, I do agree with the majority of his definition and with his critic of leftism as a virulent secularized ideology that started from the distortion of a few Christian tenets. The author believes leftism emerged around the time of the Reform
The author traces and critiques the development of leftism over the past six hundred or so years. For those curious about his definition of leftism, he tries to define it at the back of the book. Although I don’t agree completely with his definition of leftism, I do agree with the majority of his definition and with his critic of leftism as a virulent secularized ideology that started from the distortion of a few Christian tenets. The author believes leftism emerged around the time of the Reformation among some small radicalized Christian sects. By the time the French Revolution rolled around, the ideological descendants of these sects had rejected religion, especially Christianity, and assumed a messianic character in their developing ideologies. They preached utopianism, constant revolution through the uprooting of all forms of tradition, and freedom below the belt. Radical egalitarianism was their rallying cry and any atrocity committed was justified in getting to the secular promised land. Radical egalitarians claim to be driven by justice and love. However, in truth, they are often driven by anger, hatred, envy, and resentment. From the murderous drivers of the French Revolution, to the perversions of Marquis de Sade and modern pornographers, to the Russian and NAZI (National Socialists) Revolutions, to Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, through the violence and sexual rebellion unleashed by these variant strains of leftism, the author documents the left’s unsavory history of creating hell on earth. What does the author recommend replace the dominance of leftist thought in Western Culture? Ordered liberalism, transcendent Christianity, and a belief that tradition has value. Highly recommended!This is an attempt to collect as many possible early and medieval texts produced in the "Celtic" countries, or on Celtic themes (hence the inclusion of Continental Arthurian works). Some works are actually links off-site; others are provided here at the CLC.
I should note that most of the translations are old--often seventy-five years and older. The older the translation, the worse it seems to be, especially the Welsh. However, given the copyright laws, I cannot give anything more recent (or more accurate) without running into trouble. Even if a book is out of print, that doesn't mean its copyright has run out. There are a few exceptions, namely James Clancy's translation of "Y Gododdin", used with the (after-the-fact) permission of his son. The other is Dell Skeel's translation of the Didot Perceval text, from the 1960s; again, I'd like to thank both Mr. Skeel and Thomas Clancy for allowing me to provide these translations to the public.
Some day, if I ever become competent at Old/Middle Irish and Welsh, I'll attempt my own translations; for right now, though, they'd be even worse than the worst translation provided here.
The Current Texts, By Category:BOMBSHELL: Huma Abedin Emails Connect Clinton Foundation to Russia
Bring on the Russia investigation!
Talk about looking for something right under your nose, the Left have opened a can of worms.
Once the special counsel starts digging into RussiaGate, the Left will wish they had never let this genie out of the bottle.
First, what we know.
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Trending: SCOTUS Justice Send Warning to FAKE NEWS Journalists
Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta received millions from the Russians in shady deals.
As Paul Roderick Gregory points out:
The media’s focus on Trump’s Russian connections ignores the much more extensive and lucrative business relationships of top Democrats with Kremlin-associated oligarchs and companies. And thanks to the Panama Papers, we know that the Podesta Group lobbied for Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank. “Sberbank is the Kremlin, they don’t do anything major without Putin’s go-ahead. They don’t tell him ‘no’ either,” explained a retired senior U.S. intelligence official. According to a Reuters report, Tony Podesta was “among the high-profile lobbyists registered to represent organizations backing Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich.” Among these was the European Center, which paid Podesta $900,000 for his lobbying.
Then, what of the Russian connection to The Clinton Foundation?
This extortion racket received millions from the Russians in an obvious pay-for-play.
Here is what we wrote about this obvious crime:
As secretary of state, Clinton bargained with Clinton Foundation donors. One deal netted Russia control of 20% of American uranium reserves. Another gave Putin access to American military technology. Rosatom, a Russian state atomic energy agency, sought to purchase Uranium One, a Canadian based company in control of U.S. uranium. The deal required State Department approval. While State considered the deal, the chairman of Uranium One, Mr. Telfer, made four donations totaling $2.35 million to the Clinton Foundation. In 2010, Uranium One appealed to the American Embassy to secure continued possession of its Kazakhstan mines. That same year, Telfer donated $1 million; another $250,000 in 2010, the year the Russians sought majority control; $600,000 in 2011; and $500,000 in 2012.
Now we have this latest revelation.
Government watchdog Judicial Watch has found a number of new explosive emails belonging to former Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
The emails contain classified information and showed favors being done for a Russia connected organization through the Clinton Foundation while she was Secretary of State.
Judicial Watch sued the State Department to get the emails, and the court recently obliged.
According to Judicial Watch,
“The new Abedin emails also reveal additional instances in which Clinton’s then- scheduler Lona Valmoro forwarded the former secretary of state’s detailed daily schedule to top Clinton Foundation officials. The new emails also reveal a number of favors that were requested and carried out,” Judicial Watch found. “In May 2010, Abedin tells Band that she has ‘hooked up’ people from the Russian American Foundation with ‘the right people’ at the State Department after Abedin received a request from Russian American Foundation Vice President Rina Kirshner, forwarded by Clinton Foundation donor Eddie Trump (no relation to President Trump).”
In what should come as no surprise, Judicial Watch found a series of email chains containing classified information.
More importantly, Clinton refused to turn over these from the private server to the State Department as required by law.
As they point out,
“The new documents included 115 Clinton email exchanges not previously turned over to the State Department, bringing the known total to date to at least 432 emails that were not part of the 55,000 pages of emails that Clinton turned over to the State Department. These records further appear to contradict statements by Clinton that, ‘as far as she knew,’ all of her government emails were turned over to the State Department,” the documents show. “On December 6, 2010, Secretary Clinton shared classified information with non-U.S. government employees Justin Cooper, then-aide to President Clinton who helped manage Hillary Clinton’s unsecure email system, and Clinton Foundation director Doug Band (neither of whom held security clearances). The email instructs her aide Oscar Flores to ‘print for Bill’ (presumably Bill Clinton).”
Ironically, Hillary Clinton still cries foul.
In an interview at a tech conference in California this week it depicted that the investigation into her server was “the biggest nothing burger, ever.”
Clinton believes if she keeps saying it, then it will be so. However, Judicial Watch believes differently:
“These shocking new Clinton emails show why the Justice Department should reevaluate, reopen, or reinvigorate Clinton, Inc. investigations,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said about the new information. “The casual violation of laws concerning classified material and noxious influence peddling show the Clinton State Department was ‘corruption central’ in the Obama administration. No wonder Clinton’s allies in the State and Justice Departments had been slow-walking and hiding these emails.”
Clinton has no cover any longer. Thus, one would think she would lay low to avoid the Shrapnel.
Apparently, the pursuit of power is too alluring. Clinton just can’t sit it out.When ArchDaily published “Live on the Edge with OPA’s Casa Brutale” in July of last year, we expected it to be popular on our site, but few anticipated exactly how much attention the project would receive—enough to secure a position in the top 10 most read articles on the site in 2015. But what happened next was perhaps more astounding. By the end of the week, the project had been picked up by the gamut of non-architecture news outlets ranging from Slate to Yahoo to CNET to CNBC. For a few short days, it became difficult to traverse the wild expanses of the internet without a sighting of the project’s lead image, typically accompanied by a hyperbolic headline along the lines of “This Beautiful, Terrifying House is Literally Inside a Cliff.”
But despite the enormous traction, with seemingly impossible features like a clifftop, glass-bottomed swimming pool, the project still seemed to be destined for "paper architecture" status. Yet fast forward to today and the house has (incredibly) found a willing client, and is about to break ground on construction. How did this happen, and what takes architecture from viral sensation to real-life construction project?
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Casa Brutale was conceptualized as an inverted Casa Malaparte, a tribute to Brutalism carved from the edge of a cliff; in the words of its designers, “an unclad statement on the simplicity and harmony of contemporary architecture.” According to OPA founding partner Laertis-Antonios Ando Vassiliou, the goal of Casa Brutale from its inception was to become a viral phenomenon:
“The whole project was designed for almost 4 months (March to July 2015) in order to "break the internet". We wanted to create a sensation in every possible way and through this project to actually showcase our platform as this project describes fully our aesthetics and design philosophy.”
The term “break the internet” was famously made popular as the caption to a Paper Magazine cover featuring a voluptuously photoshopped Kim Kardashian which, not unlike Casa Brutale’s moneyshot image, features seemingly impossible structure and a physics-defying water feature. And break the internet it did—within two weeks, Casa Brutale had been featured on an array of news sites, inspiring comments more polarized than those on design blogs, including quotes such as “far more impressive than Falling Water.”
At this point, OPA recognized that taking the project from screen to cliff would require some significant engineering talent, and the firm contacted the Arup headquarters in London to see if they would be willing to consult on the house’s construction. Intrigued by the media attention and the bold scheme, Arup Amsterdam agreed to work with OPA on all the engineering required to put a house literally into a cliff, including Structural, MEP, Building Physics and Geotechnical services.
By August, OPA had even been contacted by an independent film studio that collaborates with a major global documentary channel, who asked to film the construction of Casa Brutale if and when they found a serious client. Since the project’s publication, OPA had received multiple emails “from developers, trust funds, potential clients and some scams that were all interested in realizing the project. We followed-up with all of them,” explains Ando Vassiliou. In the end they didn’t need to wait long—“one email read more serious and ambitious”—and by the end of October, their client had flown to Amsterdam to meet with OPA and decide on the site: the edge of a mountain in Lebanon at an elevation of over 1600 meters.
Truth be told, without the project’s viral reaction, Casa Brutale would likely never have seen the light of day; OPA had originally contacted several developers in Greece and was told that “they only collaborate with famous architects.” It was then that OPA chose to publish online, something Ando Vassiliou recognizes and advocates for other architects to take advantage of:
“Since we've succeeded so far, we would definitely encourage our colleagues to follow the same path: dream big, design big, publish big. We've been through some tough unemployment periods and we know for sure that the job safari is not the most creative task. By chasing the viral idea at least you sharpen your skills and strengthen your portfolio with interesting projects.”
Casa Brutale’s success has led to many new opportunities for OPA. They received invitations to two invited competitions, including a win for their design of the European Commission pavilion at Mobile World Congress 2016 in Barcelona, and are currently working on additional projects in Lebanon, Tokyo and South Africa. They’ve also released images for the latest in their cliffside series, Lux Aeterna, a church whose front profile takes the shape of a cross. Time will tell if the building receives a similar treatment to Casa Brutale, or if the market for cliffside structures has, at least for the time being, reached saturation.
Save this picture! Renderings of Lux Aeterna, the cliffside church which is OPA's follow-up to Casa Brutale. Image Courtesy of OPA
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What is the takeaway from all of this? Clients and laypersons may hold more power over architecture than ever before. Viral architecture is not about the architect, it’s first and foremost about the clients, who seem to have recognized architecture’s mass potential as a marketing tool. This can manifest as promotional material for an event or institution, like the aforementioned Mobile World Congress 2016, or as a piece of swagger on the belt of the ultra-rich patron.
Everyone wants to be the one to go viral. With apps like Snapchat allowing people to post videos of their homes for anyone to see, the MTV Cribs experience is no longer reserved for pop culture celebrities (even as Cribs itself is being resurrected on Snapchat). It’s increasingly clear that the internet is “where the magic happens.” You can debate whether this is an affront to the artistic integrity of architecture, but for the aspiring firm looking to stand out from the crowd, there’s no better path to success than through the love of the people.
How to Create Viral Architecture
So for architects looking to garner a little self-promotion of their own, where does one begin? Let’s take a look at our case study. What was it exactly that made Casa Brutale into a viral phenomenon? The answer lies in how people use the internet: as viral memes travel from webpages to Pinterest boards to Instagram feeds, a complex project is boiled down into a single image. And with so much other content available, that lead image is often the only chance to grab a viewer’s attention. Looking closer at that image, you find 5 clear reasons why Casa Brutale may have succeed where others have failed:
1. Bold, Simple Concept
In the fast-paced world of internet browsing, there is a whole lot of competing information and little time for nuance. To stand out from the crowd, a project must look radically different and be easily understandable. This phenomenon can be seen in the diagrammatic architecture of firms like BIG, where every project comes with a predetermined icon and nickname. Casa Brutale is clear about its concept (house in a cliffside) and doesn’t distract from it with other imagery.
2. Fantastical, yet unspecific site
Casa Brutale can only be located on a cliffside—but apart from that, where are we in the world? Ask 10 different people where this might be located, and you’ll likely get 10 different answers in return. This allows people to envision the house within their own constructed environment, whether it’s grounded in fantasy or reality. Case in point, the original design proposal mentions a site in Greece, but the final building will be located in Lebanon.
3. Visual and Sensory Contrast
One of Casa Brutale’s key features is its rooftop pool surrounded by nothing but a dry wasteland environment. This trick entices both visually—the pop of blue in a sea of brown—and sensually, quenching the viewers’ sudden thirst. Plus, nearly everyone dreams of someday having their own private pool.
4. Don’t be afraid to court controversy
Whether or not this house can truly be classified as Brutalist, it is without a doubt presented in a cold, calculated style. It comes as little surprise that many authors have noted its resemblance to a Bond lair. And while this certainly adds to the house’s sense of cool, it has also triggered many negative reactions among commenters on news sites—and as anyone who has read a comment board knows, people are more likely to click on an article to leave their dissenting opinion than a positive one.
5. Trust your gut
What’s popular is constantly changing, and the differences between a viral hit and a flop are often subtle. Projects that go viral seem to tap into the public spirit in a unique way, whether it's through use of a new material or a recently-possible engineering feat. To go viral, a project must show that it’s learning from and responding to what’s popular.
It remains to be seen whether or not placing power over what gets built into the hands of non-architecturally-educated internet users is good for architecture, but as architecture evolves to keep up with the trends of the day, architects must use every tool available to them to make themselves seen. Casa Brutale is one example of a conceptual project that found success through its wild intentions. The only question now is: what will go viral next?Image caption Satvati shows the house where the killings took place
Umesh Kumar and his wife Satvati Devi were woken in the middle of the night by loud cries coming from the neighbouring house.
"She was crying loudly. She was pleading, 'Kill me, but please don't hurt him.' She loved him and they wanted to get married," Ms Devi tells me.
Two days after teenage lovers Asha and Yogesh were brutally killed, Swaroop Nagar colony on the north-western outskirts of the Indian capital, Delhi, is still trying to come to terms with the tragedy.
Asha's family was opposed to a marriage because Yogesh belonged to a different, lower caste. Police have described the murders as a case of "honour killing".
They have arrested Asha's father and uncle in connection with the deaths and are looking for others.
In this poor, semi-rural community, tiny homes sit cheek-by-jowl and paper-thin walls offer little sound-proofing.
'Tied up'
When the cries on Sunday night became unbearable, Mr Kumar tried to intervene.
"When I went in, Yogesh was tied up in ropes. He had bruises all over him. And they were beating Asha," Umesh tells me.
"They" were Asha's uncle Omprakash Saini, her father Suraj Saini, their wives and her cousin, he says.
Honour in our community and society is paramount to us Titoo Saini
"I tried to save the girl, but they pushed me around. They broke my spectacles. They told me not to interfere since it was an internal family matter."
The Sainis also warned Mr Kumar against calling the police.
"I don't have a phone, the pay phone booths are closed at night, and the other neighbours were too scared to get involved," Mr Kumar says.
The cries finally stopped at 4am. Ms Devi was sitting outside her front door when the Sainis came out, locked the house and left.
"We were wondering what happened to Asha and Yogesh," she says. "There were no more sounds from inside."
The bodies were brought out in the morning once the police arrived. And details began to emerge of the torture and beatings to which the young couple were subjected.
No remorse
"Their mouths were stuffed with rags, there were signs of beating and small burns on legs suggesting that they were possibly electrocuted," a senior police officer who was the first to reach the crime scene told the BBC.
Asha's uncle and father were arrested but the two men have shown no remorse.
"I'm not sorry," a defiant Omprakash Saini told reporters after his arrest. "I would punish them again if given a chance."
If they wanted to kill their daughter, that's okay. But they shouldn't have killed our boy Meera Devi
The killings have stunned Delhi. Cases of "honour killings" are regularly reported from the neighbouring states of Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, but in the capital they are uncommon.
Assistant commissioner of police Pankaj Kumar Singh, who is posted at Swaroop Nagar, says that although the area is part of the capital, the mindset of its people is the same as in the villages.
"A majority of the people here are migrants from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar states. People here are deeply rooted in their traditional beliefs," Mr Singh says. "Caste considerations hold much sway."
In traditional Indian societies, women are often regarded as family property. Marriages are carefully arranged by parents and elders and relationships outside of caste are frowned upon.
But proximity to the city and access to education often bring in modern influences, sometimes creating a conflict between traditional beliefs and modern aspirations in the minds of the young.
And these sometimes have fatal consequences, as in the case of Asha and Yogesh. Although her family is no better off than his, it is from a higher caste.
There are no statistics on the number of "honour killings" in India, but Mr Singh says for every case that gets recorded, several others go unreported.
In the Gokulpuri area of north-east Delhi where the lovers lived and met, I visited the homes of both Asha and Yogesh, five minutes apart.
A group of local women sit mourning outside Yogesh's house. His sister, Renu Jatav, weeps inconsolably.
'Justified'
"I had no idea this could happen," she says. "He was having dinner, it was 9.30pm on Sunday when Asha's mother came and called him. Yogesh was a driver. She said someone needed the car, and he went."
"Four or five policemen came to our house the next morning. They said Yogesh had died," Renu's husband Rakesh Kumar says.
Image caption Renu Jatav is inconsolable over the murders
"We want strict punishment for them. We want the death penalty. We want them hanged."
The neighbours vouch for Yogesh's character.
"He was a very good boy," one of them, Meera Devi, says. "We are very angry. We want justice. If they wanted to kill their daughter, that's okay. But they shouldn't have killed our boy."
At Asha's home, her relatives are equally angry.
Cousin Lokesh Kumar Saini says: "We had talked to Yogesh and his family in the past and told them to stay away. We had also found a good match for Asha and she was engaged.
"What will any parent do if they see their daughter in a compromising position with a man? What would you do if you were in the same situation?" he asks me angrily. "That's why my uncles killed them."
Another of Asha's uncles, Titoo Saini, is convinced "the killings were justified".
"We did it for our honour. Honour in our community and society is paramount to us," he says.
I ask them what honour the family has now that they are accused of murdering their own daughter?
"If she had run away with Yogesh, what honour would we have left then?" he asks.
"Moreover, that would have set a bad precedent for the other children in the family. They would have done the same. Then it would have been a slow and painful death for us every living moment. This is better," he says.
"Asha played in my arms as a baby. I carried her for her funeral. Did that not make me unhappy?"
But Titoo Saini is clear that marriage outside of caste is a bigger evil than murder.
"How can we marry outside the caste? This cannot be tolerated. Only an impotent man will accept this. If I was in their place, I would have done the same," he says.Jean-Georges — widely considered one of New York’s best French spots since it opened two decades ago — is no longer one of the world’s finest restaurants, according to the Michelin Guide.
The anonymous inspectors at France’s most famous restaurant guide have demoted the Central Park West establishment, located in the Trump International Hotel & Tower, to its second-highest rating of two stars. It had held the top honor of three stars since 2006, the guide’s inaugural year in the U.S.
Michelin awarded seven restaurants new stars in its 2018 New York guide, but the demotion of chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s flagship, famous for fusing French cuisine with Asian ingredients, is by far the biggest news.
“It was a difficult decision for us to make,” Michelin guide director Michael Ellis says in a phone interview. “Unfortunately, we saw a slow glide downward. It started off with small things... and it didn’t get any better. It was kind of on cruise control.”
“Our hope is that he’ll be able to get that third star back very quickly,” Ellis adds.
The downgrade effectively confirms that New York is no longer the country’s fine dining capital in the eyes of Michelin. Only five local restaurants — Per Se, Le Bernardin, Masa, Brooklyn Fare, and Eleven Madison Park — now hold the guide’s highest honor of three stars, compared with seven in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Michelin upgraded just a single restaurant to the two star category this year: Ginza Onodera. The Tokyo-based chain, which held a single star last year, is the city’s second priciest sushi spot, with dinner menus at $300 and $400, service-included.
The inclusion of Ginza and others will give fresh ammunition to those who argue that Michelin leans heavily, perhaps too heavily, on expensive Japanese, European, and New American venues. Four of the seven new stars, including Suzuki ($75-$180), Bar Uchu ($200), and Sushi Amane ($250), are spendy sushi or kaiseki spots, a style of dining in which Manhattan has been experiencing a boom.
Approximately 20 percent of the New York’s guide’s starred selections are now Japanese.
Two of the new single-starred spots went to European imports: The Clocktower (by Britain’s Jason Atherton), and Rouge Tomate (a spinoff of the Belgian flagship).
Cote, Simon Kim’s Korean-American barbecue spot in Flatiron, is the newest entrant to the starred steakhouse category in New York. The only other two members of that group are Peter Luger and Minetta Tavern. This critic awarded three stars to Cote earlier in the fall, praising the venue for its extra dry-aged beef and accessible, $45 set menu.
Michelin is famous for not seeing eye-to-eye with local reviewers on some of the year’s biggest openings. True to form, the inspectors opted against awarding a star to The Grill, the theatrical midcentury chophouse that constitutes half of Major Food Group’s reboot of the old Four Seasons space. Reviewers, including this one, universally lauded it. The Pool, the other half of the space, also did not receive a star.
None of this year’s newly starred restaurants have female chefs at the helm. Only six of the 72 starred restaurants have women head chefs.
One star means "high quality cooking, worth a stop;” two stars indicates “excellent cooking, worth a detour;” three stars signifies “exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey.” There are just over one hundred restaurants worldwide with three stars.
Here are a few observations about this year’s guide, followed by the full list:
On the Demotion Process: Inspectors made up to 10 visits to Jean-Georges over the course of 18 months, according to Ellis. He said Michelin called Vongerichten in July and shared its findings. The purpose of that conversation, which Ellis says is a common Michelin practice, is to provide feedback and give the restaurant a chance to fix its issues before the guide closes.
Inspectors made up to 10 visits to Jean-Georges over the course of 18 months, according to Ellis. He said Michelin called Vongerichten in July and shared its findings. The purpose of that conversation, which Ellis says is a common Michelin practice, is to provide feedback and give the restaurant a chance to fix its issues before the guide closes. Le Coucou Overlooked Again: Last year’s biggest snub was Daniel Rose’s Le Coucou, Daniel Rose and Stephen Starr’s nationally-recognized love letter to the French fare of yesteryear. Michelin again decided against a star for that venue, which received the James Beard Award for best new restaurant, nationwide, in 2017.
Last year’s biggest snub was Daniel Rose’s Le Coucou, Daniel Rose and Stephen Starr’s nationally-recognized love letter to the French fare of yesteryear. Michelin again decided against a star for that venue, which received the James Beard Award for best new restaurant, nationwide, in 2017. La Sirena vs. Lilia: Michelin is notoriously frugal on stars to Italian spots in the states, but few will understand why Mario Batali’s sleepy La Sirena holds a star, while Lilia by Missy Robbins, one of the city’s most critically acclaimed Italian spots, doesn’t.
Michelin is notoriously frugal on stars to Italian spots in the states, but few will understand why Mario Batali’s sleepy La Sirena holds a star, while Lilia by Missy Robbins, one of the city’s most critically acclaimed Italian spots, doesn’t. Japanese Snubs: Cagen in the East Village, which charges $160 for its tasting, was dropped from the list, and Shuko, one of the city’s most popular and fairly priced sushi spots, at $135 before tip, was left off the list for yet another year.
Cagen in the East Village, which charges $160 for its tasting, was dropped from the list, and Shuko, one of the city’s most popular and fairly priced sushi spots, at $135 before tip, was left off the list for yet another year. Declining South Asian Stars: New York once had three Indian restaurants with stars. Now it has one: Junoon, as Tulsi in Midtown East was dropped. Indian Accent, the high-end New Dehli import that opened last year, was snubbed again, as was Paowalla, Floyd Cardoz’s bread-focused Indian spot in SoHo.
New York once had three Indian restaurants with stars. Now it has one: Junoon, as Tulsi in Midtown East was dropped. Indian Accent, the high-end New Dehli import that opened last year, was snubbed again, as was Paowalla, Floyd Cardoz’s bread-focused Indian spot in SoHo. NYC vs. Bay Area: New York hasn’t gained a single top tier Michelin spot since 2011. The larger Bay Area has gained five three-star restaurants in that same time frame.
New York hasn’t gained a single top tier Michelin spot since 2011. The larger Bay Area has gained five three-star restaurants in that same time frame. New York vs. Rest of Country: New York still has more single starred restaurants than any other area Michelin covers in the U.S., with 56, compared with 41 in the Bay Area, 19 in Chicago, and 11 in Washington.
New York still has more single starred restaurants than any other area Michelin covers in the U.S., with 56, compared with 41 in the Bay Area, 19 in Chicago, and 11 in Washington. Questionable Timing on Tomate: For many locals, the chief draw of Rouge Tomate Chelsea wasn’t the food but rather master sommelier Pascaline Lepeltier and her eclectic list of natural wines. Michelin awarded the wine bar a star months after Lepeltier left.
For many locals, the chief draw of Rouge Tomate Chelsea wasn’t the food but rather master sommelier Pascaline Lepeltier and her eclectic list of natural wines. Michelin awarded the wine bar a star months after Lepeltier left. Michelin’s Comfort Zone: Of the 71 starred selections, only five restaurants fell outside of the guide’s European-American-Japanese comfort zone. Those venues are the Jungsik and Cote (Korean), Case Enrique (Mexican), Uncle Boons (Thai), and Cafe China (Sichuan).
Michelin’s 2018 Starred Selections for New York City
Three Stars
Chef’s Table at Brooklyn Fare (relocated to Manhattan)
Eleven Madison Park (retained star post-renovation)
Le Bernardin
Masa
Per Se
Two Stars
Aquavit
Aska
Atera
Blanca
Daniel
Jean-Georges (downgraded)
Jungsik
Ko
Marea
The Modern
Ginza Onodera (upgraded)
One Star
Agern
Ai Fiori
Aldea
Aureole
Babbo
Bar Uchu (new)
Batard
Blue Hill
The Breslin
Cafe Boulud
Cafe China
Carbone
Casa Enrique
Casa Mono
Caviar Russe
The Clocktower (new)
Contra
Cote (new)
Del Posto
Delaware and Hudson
Dovetail |
In the minds of a lot of American economists, however, the review is a badly flawed piece of work. These economists don’t doubt that earth is getting hotter, that human activity is the cause and that the results could be bad. But they think that Sir Nicholas may have exaggerated the likely speed of warming, among other things, and overstated the case for big, quick action. The epicenter of the opposition has been here at Yale, and so last week, after stopping in Washington to testify before Congress, Sir Nicholas came to New Haven for a public debate with his critics…. The Stern Review’s most influential critic has probably been William Nordhaus, a 65-year-old Yale professor who is as mainstream as economists come….Mr. Nordhaus wondered if carbon emissions and temperatures would rise as quickly as the report suggests, and Mr. Mendelsohn predicted that people would learn to adapt to climate change, reducing its ultimate cost. But their main objection revolved around something called the discount rate. The Stern Review assumed that a dollar of economic damage prevented a century from now (adjusted for inflation) is roughly as valuable as a dollar spent reducing emissions today. In effect, the report argues for spending the money to cut emissions because future generations have as much claim on resources as current generations. “I’ve still not heard a decent ethical argument” for believing otherwise, Sir Nicholas said at the debate…. But a dollar today truly is more valuable than a dollar a century from now…. So spending a dollar on carbon reduction today to avoid a dollar’s worth of economic damage in 2107 doesn’t make sense. We would be better off putting the money toward something likely to have a higher return than alternative energy, like education. Technically, then, Sir Nicholas’s opponents win the debate. But in practical terms, their argument has a weak link. They are assuming that the economic gains from, say, education will make future generations rich enough to make up for any damage caused by climate change. Sea walls will be able to protect cities; technology can allow crops to grow in new ways; better medicines can stop the spread of disease. No one knows whether this is true, let alone desirable, because no one knows what life will be like on a planet that is five degrees hotter. “If ever there was an example where there was uncertainty, this is it,” said Martin L. Weitzman, a Harvard economist who attended the debate… As Mr. Weitzman puts it, the Stern Review is “right for the wrong reasons.”…. In other words, it’s time for a tax on carbon emissions. I’m as fond of math as the next person, but economics as a discipline has migrated over the years such that any really serious, top level work has to be stated in mathematical terms. It may help in terms of apparent rigor, but one can readily find well argued papers that run afoul of common sense. Here at least the critique of the work did not lose sight of what’s at stake. But don’t be surprised when you see the various criticisms of the Stern Report picked up on the Wall Street Journal editorial pages, sans the acknowledgment that the conclusions are still likely to be valid.
By Sandwichman. Originally published at Angry Bear
Peter Dorman calls attention to a NYT Upshot column by Neil Irwin about the cost of climate change. For Irwin, the question can be framed as a matter of discounting, “A dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow and a lot more than a dollar in 100 years. But what discount rate you set determines how much more.”
As Irwin admits, the discount rate is a “business concept.” His conclusion, then, follows exclusively from a business concept of “how, as a society, we count the value of time.” Why are we compelled, as a society, to count the value of time in accordance with the business concept of discounting? Because there is no other concept of time? No, there are other concepts of time. More specifically, there is a concept of time directly opposed to and critical of the business concept of time. Labor time.
What discounting is to the business concept of time, alienation is to the labor concept of time. Alienation refers not to “feelings” of alienation but to the sale of one’s own time — and consequently autonomy — to another.
For every human being — as for the wage worker — there are 24 hours in a day, 168 hours in a week, 8760 or 8784 hours in a year. These are fixed amounts. You can’t put it in a bank and get it back in 20 years with interest. You can’t take it with you and you can’t convey it to your heirs in a will. Today is here today and gone tomorrow.
The discount rate concept has nothing to do with the qualitative experience of time by humans and everything to do with the quantitative accumulation of money by property owners. Framing the cost of climate change as a contest between different discount rates is totalitarian. We live in a totalitarian society in which the non-business concept of time is invisible. Neil Irwin sounds like a thoughtful person. It simply didn’t occur to him that there was any other relevant concept of time than the business concept.
That is why the climate is changing. And that is why not enough will be done about it. Because it all depends on how capital values time.A North Carolina cupcake shop has apologized for adopting the unfunny slogan "So Good It Makes Fat People Cry," and then for calling one critic a c-word that was definitely not "cupcake."
According to The Gloss's Valerie Marino, a customer identified as Diana emailed Crumb bakery co-owner Carrie Nickerson to protest the slogan. Nickerson responded, via email,
We offend everybody equally. You are the one with hate in your heart not us. Since we are fortunate enough to live in America you can do whatever you want.
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She then called Diana a "fat cunt" on her Twitter feed (now private). Recognizing that, in Marino's words, "there are certain things it's still just not okay to say to a fellow human being, especially if you want them to give you money," Crumb soon issued an apology. But it's pretty much of the I'm-sorry-you're-mad variety:
Regarding our slogan, let us begin by apologizing to you, Diana, and everyone else we have offended. This was never our intention. The tagline was meant as a joke and nothing more. We never meant to hurt anyone. The tagline is no longer in use and the tweets you found offensive have been removed.
Memo to Crumb: claming to "offend everybody equally" makes a certain amount of sense when your raison d'etre involves shaking things up. If you're, say, Chris Rock, or maybe the guys from South Park in their fresher, funnier heyday. But if your job is selling tasty baked goods, you really have no business offending anybody. Also, those who combine the words "cupcakes" and "cunt" will lose another c-word: customers.
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Image via Lasse Kristensen/Shutterstock.com.
North Carolina Cupcake Shop Calls Customer Fat, Halfheartedly Apologizes [The Gloss]This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to LiveScience's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.
Beneath the lush forests of the Amazon is a whole different level of diversity that new research says may be one of the keys to understanding how to stem the global impacts of deforestation.
The Amazon rainforest is known as one of Earth’s hotspots for diversity. It contains at least 40,000 plant species, 5,500 animal species and 100,000 insect species. These have been a great source for the discovery of new medicines, with at least 120 approved for use. Despite its great plant and animal diversity, it is one of the least understood ecosystems for its microbial diversity. There are 100 million microorganisms in a single gram of forest soil, making them the largest repository in the world of novel genes.
These microbes are essential to nutrient recycling. They decompose dead organic matter, through a process called mineralisation, releasing mineral nutrients that plants absorb through their roots, allowing the forest to grow. As trees grow, they capture carbon dioxide from the air through the process of photosynthesis, and, in the Amazon, this process occurs at impressive levels. Owing to its size, the forest absorbs 1.5 billion tons of CO 2 from the atmosphere every year – making it the largest terrestrial sink of this greenhouse gas.
Large amounts of nitrogen are needed to achieve the Amazon’s role as a carbon sink. In the rainforest, that comes primarily from the natural process of nitrogen fixation performed by microbes called diazotrophs. They break apart molecules of nitrogen that is essential for all living things. But, up until now, no one has looked at how the function of these microbes changes when a rainforest is converted to a pasture, something that is happening at an alarming rate in many parts of the Amazon.
In work published in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology, we found a surprisingly large shift in microbial community composition when rainforests became pastures, confirming earlier studies. This may have major implication on how nutrients are cycled in the new ecosystem.
Any changes to the nitrogen cycle are likely to affect the carbon cycle and the forest’s capacity to sequester carbon dioxide. The process of deforestation is causing an addition of 1.6 billion tons of CO 2 to the atmosphere per year, substantially increasing greenhouse gases.
While these findings reinforce the toll deforestation is having, they also offer some hope.
Our examination revealed that approximately 50% of Amazon’s abandoned pastures are going through secondary forest formation. It is a process that happens mostly by chance, and when it happens diazotrophic communities tend to return to similar composition of the former forest.
The results imply that there is still time to conserve the immense genetic diversity of microbes as sources of new antibiotics and absorbers of carbon dioxide. Also, using our results, we can start devising new methods to aid the recovery of disturbed ecosystems – imagine a cocktail of microbes added for ecosystem restoration.
If nothing else, our research makes one thing clear: in the Amazon, the invisible microbes do as much as the now-disappearing trees to help our environment.
Jorge Rodrigues receives funding from US Department of Agriculture, US Department of Energy/Joint Genome Institute.
This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher. This version of the article was originally published on LiveScience.Angela Rye was all of us on Wednesday night (July 27) at The Democratic National Convention. As conservative commentator Kayleigh McEnany praised Donald Trump, Rye gave the eye roll heard around the world. Take a look:
Seriously, is she not your BFF in your head already?
And while her eye roll was quite epic, creating quite the Twitter conversation, Rye didn’t realize how over McEnany’s commentary she really was:
I completely thought you airbrushed this. I can't believe I made this face. 😑 https://t.co/no3BWdjE0v — a. rye✊🏾 (@angela_rye) July 27, 2016
Since Trump first put in his bid to run for president, many of us have felt exactly like Rye, especially as he’s gained overwhelming support. Despite Trump’s dangerous rhetoric and foolishness, plenty of folks like McEnany still rally behind him.
Though we’d much rather put this entire election in rice, First Lady Michelle Obama, the Mothers of the Movement and President Obama have given soul-stirring speeches endorsing the first female major party presidential candidate. Each one attempting to persuade more naysayers to get on board to ensure that Trump doesn’t win.
But if we’re forced to endure Trump talk and vote for Clinton just to get by, go ahead and get your Angela Rye memes ready for the remainder of the campaign trail.For the original German review, see here.
The technical specs of OnePlus' X look very similar to that of the One at first glance. However, some differences are found in the details. The review sample is only available with 16 GB of internal storage, but it can be expanded via a micro-SD card. The buyer could only choose between a 16 and 64 GB model for the Chinese manufacturer's first handset; only the latter is still available. The premium models generally do not allow expanding the storage. Besides that, the One features the fastest Snapdragon 801 while the X model can fall back on an 801 AA with an identical speed as the former Snapdragon 800. The review sample is currently priced at 269 Euros (~$291) plus shipping in the manufacturer's online shop.
We looked at smartphones in a similar price and size range for comparison devices. Sony's Xperia M4 Aqua, Microsoft's Lumia 640 and LG's G3 are among them. The latter is a high-end product from last year that is now on a comparable price level, and which has a similar SoC. LG's Flex 2 is also now sold for under 300 Euros (~$324).ctvmontreal.ca
With chants of "so-so-so-solidarite!" a major protest against Parliament prorogation took place at Emilie-Gamelin Park Saturday.
Approximately 400 demonstrators were on hand to lend their voices to more than 40 rallies planned across the country to protest the Conservative government's decision last month to call a Parliamentary time out.
"A minority government that represents less than half of Canada decided that they can prorogue parliament in the same year that we're going to be hosting the Olympics, the G8 and G20 summits. I think it's an embarrassment to our country that our government would do such a thing," said protestors Cameron Fenton in Montreal from the group Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament.
One large protest was expected in Ottawa, where demonstrators were joined by Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff, the NDP's Jack Layton and the Green Party's Elizabeth May.
Organizers said the protests are a reaction against what many feel is an abuse of power by Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government.
In Montreal, Liberal MP Marlene Jennings said the prorogation was a tactic to allow Harper to evade pressing issues.
"Mr. Harper doesn't like to be accountable. Any time Mr. Harper is asked hard questions that he doesn't want to answer, we've seen what he does: He cuts and runs," said Jennings.
"King Stephen the First will be King Stephen the Last, and we're going to get rid of the conservatives and Stephen Harper as soon as possible," said NDP MP Thomas Mulcair.
Harper requested that Parliament be prorogued as the opposition parties pressed the Conservatives on the Afghan prisoner abuse issue.
The pause also coincides with next month's Olympics, with some critics complaining that the government is muting criticism as the world comes to Vancouver. Parliament will resume again in early March.
Parliament was also suspended in December 2008, in response to an opposition plan that aimed to dethrone the Conservatives.
Toronto protest organizer Jonathan Allen said protests began with a Facebook group that has now attracted upwards of 210,000 members.
"We bestow upon the government the authority to govern, but we do not bestow upon them the authority to abuse their constitutional privileges," said Allen.
"It's just not right, actually," said Allen.
Allen said protests will also take place in major cities in other countries.
"These are concerned expatriate Canadians that are not happy with the fact that the government has decided to prorogue Parliament for partisan purposes, as opposed to the good of the state."
With files from CTV.ca News StaffCraig Lowndes’ dream of competing in the Le Mans 24 Hours appears set to come true next year, provided that V8 Supercars avoids a date clash with the French classic.
Having eyed Le Mans from afar for the best part of 20 years, the five-time Bathurst 1000 winner says that advanced negotiations with Le Mans teams are currently on hold while the Australian championship sorts its 2014 schedule.
The Le Mans event is guaranteed to receive an unprecedented level of exposure in Australia next year with Mark Webber confirmed to make his return to the race as part of Porsche’s new-for-2014 World Endurance Championship effort.
In order for Lowndes to race, he’ll need V8 Supercars to avoid scheduling events on the June 14-15 (race) and June 1 (official test) dates.
“I’ve had ambitions of doing Le Mans since my HRT days but have just never been able to do it,” Lowndes told Speedcafe.com.
“We’re definitely planning on it next year. I’ve spoken to Roland (Dane, Red Bull Racing Australia owner) and he knows my wishes and everything else, but now we’re really just waiting to see what the calendar looks like.
“We’re probably 80 percent of the way there at the moment. The opportunities are there and if we get the dates clear we’ll be able to put more focus into it.
“It’s quite an important race for all drivers everywhere in the world, and I think it would be good for V8 Supercars as well if we’re free to be able to do it.”
Lowndes has driven Audi R8s in a variety of GT races in recent seasons. He has appeared in the last three Bathurst 12 Hours, in addition to making a one-off Australian GT Championship start last year and embarking on an ill-fated attempt at a VLN event in Germany the year prior.
With the Audis not eligible for Le Mans’ GT classes, Lowndes is looking at a variety of opportunities, but confirmed that the prototype classes are not on his radar.
“It’ll be a GT car, you’d be mad to go over in a prototype in your first attempt,” he said, adding also that Le Mans is the only race on his international agenda for next year.
“You need to learn and understand and develop from that level, like (fellow V8 Supercars driver) Jason (Bright) did this year.”
Bright competed in a GTE Am class Ferrari 458 for 8Star Motorsport two months ago, finishing 10th in class and 37th outright.
The Brad Jones Racing regular can skip the pre-event test next year due to being a previous competitor, but remains wary of the likelihood of a V8 Supercars clash with the race itself.
“A lot of other calendars always avoid it and we manage to clash almost every year,” he told Speedcafe.com.
“This year it obviously didn’t clash but I have my doubts about next year if Darwin (Hidden Valley) is on its usual mid-June date.
“If it doesn’t I think you could see a few Aussies over there because it’s a race that’s on so many drivers’ bucket lists.
“There are not many other iconic races where you can go and get a drive. You can’t just turn up at Indianapolis or Monaco, but at Le Mans when there are three drivers per car it’s a realistic target.”
A V8 Supercars spokesman told Speedcafe.com that the category is aware of the desire to avoid a Le Mans clash, but is making no promises.
“We have identified the Le Mans date as part of our planning, but whether or not it will clash is still yet to be known because there are various calendar drafts being looked at,” he said.
“It’s a very complex process putting a calendar together for any number of reasons, and a clash will be avoided if possible, but that’s not a certainty.”
The spokesman would not be drawn on a timeline for finalising the calendar. It is traditionally unveiled in October.The Uconnect infotainment system is already one of the best available and has won numerous awards. (As Senior Technology Editor, I awarded it Edmunds.com Technology Breakthrough Award in 2012, for example.) And out of the 50-something vehicles I test each year, I find that Uconnect consistently is one of the most intuitive automotive infotainment interfaces on the road. Its "hybrid" form of connectivity also allows me to use my smartphone for streaming services like Pandora, and choose whether to pay for other cloud-connected features like local search and in-car Wi-Fi once an initial free subscription is over.
But the latest Uconnect system is a bit dated, and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) was stung last year by becoming the poster child for car hacking hysteria. So at CES 2016 this week, FCA is introducing the fourth-generation Uconnect system that will be rolled out later this year and includes a capacitive touchscreen with upgraded responsiveness, enhanced resolution, quicker startup time and improved processing power. FCA said that the Uconnect 8.4 Nav system and others “within the global portfolio” will also include Apple CarPlay and Android Auto for the first time.
FCA will also show the "company’s vision for intelligent transportation" at 2016 CES, a concept that "explores how personalized driving experiences can seamlessly integrate a vehicle, technology, the environment and people to help drivers achieve Car. Life. Balance."
According to FCA, this balance will include:
Vehicle-to-X (V2X) communication – A combination of vehicle-to-vehicle communication (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication (V2I), FCA’s V2X concept allows cars to communicate with each other and traffic infrastructure. The intention, according to FCA, is to "help provide drivers with warnings and reduce the risk of such common crash types as rear-end, lane change, and intersection crashes."
– A combination of vehicle-to-vehicle communication (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication (V2I), FCA’s V2X concept allows cars to communicate with each other and traffic infrastructure. The intention, according to FCA, is to "help provide drivers with warnings and reduce the risk of such common crash types as rear-end, lane change, and intersection crashes." Workload manager – Designed to help limit distraction, this feature recognizes when the driver may be in a critical situation such as merging onto a freeway and prioritizes the information that’s presented by the system.
– Designed to help limit distraction, this feature recognizes when the driver may be in a critical situation such as merging onto a freeway and prioritizes the information that’s presented by the system. Privacy mode – Don’t want your passenger to see your call history or other info? This feature can transfer a driver’s personal information from a Uconnect dashboard display to the instrument cluster.
– Don’t want your passenger to see your call history or other info? This feature can transfer a driver’s personal information from a Uconnect dashboard display to the instrument cluster. Intelligent concierge – The feature learns a driver’s preferences to provide “personalized suggestions in anticipation of driver needs.”
– The feature learns a driver’s preferences to provide “personalized suggestions in anticipation of driver needs.” Predictive technology – Monitoring a driver’s daily habits such as traffic patterns, calendar items and personal preferences, the Uconnect system can provide “personalized information to the driver at the exact moment needed.”
FCA’s intelligent transportation concept also “explores how a vehicle can share location information with other vehicles on the road in the driver’s community.” Features include:
Community tagging – Allows a vehicle to identify hazardous road conditions and automatically share the information with community members who may be driving in the same location.
– Allows a vehicle to identify hazardous road conditions and automatically share the information with community members who may be driving in the same location. Follow-me mode – Think of it as an electronic Follow the Leader since it lets other community members request to follow other vehicles.
– Think of it as an electronic Follow the Leader since it lets other community members request to follow other vehicles. Augmented reality head-up display – I’ve tested and written about this before, and how it can use a car’s windshield to display information such as driver assists warnings like lane departure or show navigation directions. FCA said it can also be used for “parking assistance and ice and snow road lane assists.”
“The Uconnect team is evolving Uconnect and making it even better,” Joni Christensen, head of Uconnect Marketing for FCA US, said in a statement. “With the launch of the fourth generation of Uconnect systems, we are continuing to minimize the everyday stresses of busy lifestyles by providing drivers with a variety of ways to stay conveniently connected to their vehicles, while making every drive exceptionally informative, entertaining and unique.”
The pre-CES press information that FCA released was scant on details on when we can expect to see this intelligent transportation technology in the company’s cars, how it will be implemented and how privacy protections and cybersecurity will be put in place. But I plan to visit FCA at CES to find out. And I also want to see what I hope could be the fifth-generation of Uconnect.
FCA will be exhibiting a Uconnect 12.1 touchscreen system for the Dodge Charger Pursuit police vehicle that features a 12.1-inch, 1024-by-768-pixel high-resolution touchscreen display that can show radio and vehicle controls and has the ability to switch to a law enforcement computer using a menu bar at the top of the screen. In addition, the new Uconnect 12.1 system can also split the touchscreen to display the familiar 8.4-inch Uconnect interface on one half and a law enforcement computer on the other.
While FCA said it has no plans to introduce the Uconnect 12.1 touchscreen system into the consumer market, it makes me wonder whether the automaker is prepping it to compete with the likes of the 17-inch in-dash screen in the Tesla Model S or the slightly smaller but also vertically oriented 9.5-inch display used by the Volvo Sensus Connect system in the 2016 XC90.Last Tuesday’s announcement by the Israeli government that it will build 1,600 new housing units for Israelis in Palestinian East Jerusalem has unleashed an unparalleled furor. It was announced while Vice President Joe Biden was visiting Israel and the West Bank to promote the start of new indirect peace talks, which had just been announced a day earlier.
Some are calling it a slap in the face to Biden and the Obama administration. Others term it a wake-up call on the need for stronger U.S. action for peace. Still others say it is a moment of truth for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition.
Many commentators are noting Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s sharp 43-minute phone call to Netanyahu on Friday, in which she said the announcement of the construction plan had sent a “deeply negative signal” that had damaged Israeli-American relations. Clinton told Netanyahu that the U.S. expected Israeli officials to take “specific actions” to show “they are committed to this relationship and to the peace process,” according to State Department spokesperson Philip Crowley, quoted in The New York Times.
“Such blunt language toward Israel is very rare from an American administration,” the Times article said.
Crowley declined to say what actions the U.S. was calling for, but other administration officials said the United States “hoped Israel would do something drastic enough to send a signal to the already reluctant Palestinian Authority that it was committed to the peace process,” according to the Times.
This morning, the “pro-Israel pro-peace” Jewish American group JStreet said it was delivering to the White House nearly 18,000 signatures in support of stronger U.S. leadership for a two-state resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The organization said the Israeli housing construction announcement for East Jerusalem was “a wake-up call” that “business-as-usual peace processing” is not working.
“An urgency of purpose suited to the danger of the moment is missing – here in the U.S., in Israel and in the American Jewish community,” JStreet said. “The time has come for strong action, not more talk.”
JStreet Executive Director Jeremy Ben-Ami said the crisis presented an opportunity for the White House to press for resolving the core issues, in particular the need to define a border between Israel and the future Palestinian state.
“Bold American leadership is needed now to turn this crisis into a real opportunity to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is a fundamental American national security interest,” Ben-Ami said in a March 15 statement. Such efforts, he said, are also in Israel’s interests, and would find “vast support among American Jews.”
East Jerusalem is on the Palestinian side of the pre-1967 Green Line dividing Israel and Palestinian territory. One of the Palestinians’ central demands is that East Jerusalem will be the capital of the Palestinian state.
Israeli housing construction in East Jerusalem, along with evictions of Palestinian residents, has been an ongoing issue. Before the latest crisis, on March 6, several thousand Israelis and Palestinians demonstrated in East Jerusalem against the eviction of Palestinians from their homes to accommodate Jewish settlers.
The Israeli government unilaterally “annexed” East Jerusalem following the 1967 war, and it insists that all of Jerusalem is part of Israel, therefore not covered by any settlement freeze.
But the uproar unleashed by last week’s move may force Netanyahu to back off from that position.
“I think that Netanyahu is at a moment of truth,” Gideon Doron, a political science professor at Tel Aviv University, told the Christian Science Monitor. “He has to choose whether or not he wants to ignite the forces for peace, or whether he’ll go against the U.S. and play for time. He can’t do that. It’s suicide.”
This morning, the Israeli news site YNet News reported that Israel would implement a “de-facto” construction freeze in Jerusalem.
YNet quoted a senior Israeli government source as saying, “The price for the American insult will be a de-facto construction freeze across greater Jerusalem. There will be no other choice, due to the government’s stupidity.”
According to this report, sources in the Israeli cabinet say the U.S. is demanding cancellation of the construction plan.
“The necessary gestures will halt construction work in all settlements,” the YNet article said. “Tenders that were in the works will be put on hold, even if those were part of previously approved projects. In addition, … Netanyahu will have to extend building restrictions in settlement blocks once the cabinet decision expires in September.”
The Israeli prime minister is not expected to make a statement officially calling off the construction, but, the government source said, “the tense reality will force him to quietly enforce the construction freeze. Furthermore, this freeze will include all construction in the West Bank today,” and probably into the future.
Other possible Israeli “gestures” include agreeing to talk about “final status” issues during the indirect talks, prisoner releases and easing restrictions in the occupied territories.
Photo: Palestinian workers on a construction site in the East Jerusalem neighborhood that Israel calls Ramat Shlomo, where the Israeli plan would add 1,600 housing units for Israelis. (AP /Dan Balilty)NVIDIA Announces New GPU – Volta: A Redesigned GPU Architecture Customized For AI
May 11th, 2017: NVIDIA had its annual GPU technology Conference or GTC recently. The company took a giant step towards an accelerator processor architecture that has been specifically designed for Artificial Intelligence or AI. NVIDIA recently announced the Volta: a GPU architecture customized for deep learning and AI.
This new development of artificial networks was made possible by deep learning through NVIDIA's GPUs and the CUDA software platform. NVIDIA holds a major share of the deep learning networks that are in use today. The GPU giant is in collaboration with over 40,000 companies and 0.5 million developers for advancement in neural network applications.
NVIDIA announced the next generation of GPU architecture at the GTC this year. The new architecture has been named "Volta". While the chip might still be referred to as a GPU, Volta is much more capable than that. The company has added 640 new tensor cores that are capable of processing in 4x4x4 matrix multiples. This mathcore helps for additional processing in deep learning environments.
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Developers will be able to take advantage of tensor cores for their AI framework without having to rewrite their applications, all thanks to NVIDIA SDK libraries and runtimes like cuDNN and TensorRT.
Volta has been announced with over 5000 GPU CUDA cores and over 300 GB of system communications Bandwidth through six high-speed NV links and 16 GBs of second generation high bandwidth memory, also known as HBM 2.
This means that the new Volta architecture will sit in the same power envelope and form factor as the previous Pascal architecture but with an extra 1.5x the memory performance and 2x the NVLink performance and a total of 120 teraflops of processing performance with the Tessar cores. For more information on NVIDIA Volta, visit here.
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© 2019 Korea Portal, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.Brakes put on removal of red-light cameras in Houston Red-light monitoring will continue as city weighs legal strategy
Although voters abolished Houston's red light camera system Tuesday, the 70 cameras have the green light to keep recording traffic violations for months as the city weighs a legal strategy for exiting its contract with the firm operating the cameras, city officials say.
Anti-camera activists slammed the delay Wednesday, insisting on immediately terminating the five-year contract — whatever the cost - with ATS, the Arizona firm that manages Houston's system. The May 2009 contract has a termination clause that requires the city to provide the company with a 120-day notice of cancellation, a period when the cameras will still be in full operation and civil fines issued, according to the city attorney.
"This issue is over, “ said attorney Paul Kubosh, who with brother Michael helped mount the successful campaign against the cameras. "This is not a legal issue, this is a political issue now. The voters don't care what the price of tea is in China. They don't care what the contract says.... They want the cameras gone and just pay the damages.“
Paul Kubosh warned that City Council members who vote against immediately canceling the contract would be signing their "political death warrants“ and would face the ire of thousands of residents who receive tickets during the 120-day termination phase. He said if the termination clause in the existing contract is too expensive for the city to violate, those who made the bargain should be fired.
A big first for Texas
Houston is the largest city in Texas to abolish the red-light camera system, and similar steps were taken last fall by College Station voters. The traffic monitoring systems are operating in more than 15 Texas cities, including Dallas, Fort Worth, Arlington, League City and Austin.
Meanwhile, city officials in neighboring Baytown are discussing whether they will station a police officer at each of seven camera-monitored street intersections, a requirement of a new red light camera ordinance city residents passed Tuesday.
Baytown Mayor Stephen Don Carlos said because it would be impossible to post officers at every intersection, the city will likely cease to issue tickets through the cameras.
Houston City Attorney Dave Feldman said City Council must first canvass the vote by Nov. 15 to certify the accuracy of the Proposition 3 returns - which passed with 53 percent of the vote. Afterward, the city can give notice to ATS that it will be ending a contract that has generated more than $44 million in fines and issued more than 800,000 tickets since 2006.
Ending the contract sooner, Feldman said, could make the city liable for early termination and a lawsuit. He said provisions in the state and U.S. Constitution prevent governments from killing a contract by passing a law to end it.
Benjamin Hall, a former city attorney in the administration of Mayor Bob Lanier, threw cold water on the city's claim that it could not take the cameras down immediately.
"Those who might want the contract to stay in effect advance this argument that they have a binding agreement. … The voters have now said, this option is now legally unavailable to you,“ Hall said. "The city cannot now substitute its judgment. It must by law simply enforce that electoral vote."
ATS president Jim Tuton would not comment on the proposition, but a company statement lauded the effort by Houston police, firefighters and medical groups which campaigned to keep the camera system.
"Now that the voters of Houston have spoken we have reached out to city officials for their guidance on the steps ahead,“ the ATS statement read.
Houston police Chief Charles McClelland, a supporter of red-light cameras, said it is premature to comment on the demise of Houston's system. "Once we've reached some conclusions, I'll discuss those outcomes,“ McClelland said.
Layoffs might be needed
Mayor Annise Parker acknowledged the referendum has exacerbated ongoing challenges with the city's budget and noted HPD, which was the recipient of funds from the camera program, would be responsible for cutting its budget to make up for the immediate $10 million gap created by the vote.
"We're going to try to do it in a way that does not impact public safety," she said, although she acknowledged that furloughs or layoffs of city employees may be necessary, a position she has maintained since passing the fiscal 2011 budget with more than $70 million of unrealized revenue and spending cuts.
Parker asked citizens for patience. "We don't want to enter a situation where we have to litigate," she said. "We want a peaceful resolution. We understand what we have to do. We ask all the parties to give us a little space as we work through this."
james.pinkerton@chron.com
brad.olsen@chron.comTechnology as a Tool to Support Instruction
By Lynne Schrum
This week, in an Education World "edu-torial," Lynne Schrum presents her personal perspective on the ways in which technology can enhance learning -- and calls on educators to take a leadership role in determining the ways in which technology is used to support educational goals.
Lynne Schrum, past president of the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), is an associate professor in the department of instructional technology at the University of Georgia. Her research, teachings, and writings focus on issues related to distance education, specifically online learning. Schrum also investigates the uses of technology in K-12 environments and identifies ways to support educators in the effort.
We're all familiar with the extravagant promises of technology: It will make our students smarter -- and it will do it faster and cheaper than ever before. Moreover, the promise suggests, this miracle will occur almost by osmosis. We need only place a computer in a room, stand back, and watch the magic take place. If only life were that simple and learning that easy!
Those of us who remember the 1980s, when computers were first making their way into our classrooms, probably also remember a great deal of bad software. As educators, we were unfamiliar with the technology and uncertain about its possibilities. So we stepped back and let software developers, hardware vendors, and other technicians define not only what we could buy but also how those products would be used. In many ways, the technology drove the educational process. And guess what? It didn't work very well!
Now, we've entered an era in which technology is no longer an intimidating novelty. Its use in business and industry is both accepted and expected. And pressure abounds -- from the federal government, from local school boards, and certainly from the popular press -- for educators to |
now look at more fundamental problems with the U.S. Department of Education. If Diamond is right about the optimal means of organizing groups of people, then having a centralized authority governing educational practice stifles the sort of innovative thinking that is vital to the development of a robust society.
Look at any school these days and his theory seems alarmingly on target. Rather than looking carefully at their students and what serves them best, teachers are required to prepare students to take tests developed by people who have almost no contact with children of any kind, much less those in America’s diverse communities, each of which has its own ethos, population, and educational needs. Further, because materials are favored and contracts awarded on the basis of political lobbying and connections, the odds that they are the best materials available seems quite remote.
From the emperor’s perch in Washington, all of these places and all of their students look the same, and the same tests developed by the same companies reduce all students to reading the same passages and answering the same questions, all with the same correct answers. Not only are the students all the same, their teachers are interchangeable parts whose primary task is to produce a national uniformity of knowledge and, in a curious twist of semantics, “achievement.” It’s hard to imagine innovative thinking taking place in schools when thinking is so constrained by distant bureaucrats in Washington and test-developers recruited primarily because of the size of their chief financial officer’s political contributions.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan loves to talk about the need for dynamic, innovative teachers, but it appears that the system he has designed has produced such a stifling environment that innovation will not only be difficult, it will be discouraged and possibly result in punishment and termination.
Decentralizing authority, while keeping lines of communication and the exchange of ideas open, appears to be an approach worth trying, if Diamond’s study of the fates of societies is on target. In other words, ending the U.S. Department of Education’s 30+ years of failed interventions would be the best move that the president could make on behalf of education.
Diamond’s principles are instructive in this discussion. The goal of reorganization would be to construct smaller administrative units surrounding teachers and students, such these most important stakeholders are enlisted to contribute to decisions about how their schools should function: which goals they should strive for, which political processes best govern the institution, which teaching practices best suit the pursuit of their goals, and so on.
Yet these smaller organizations should not, like German regional microbreweries, become secretive or isolated in how they operate. Rather, lines of communication should remain open, an imperative that gives greater importance to the means through which educators share ideas. These avenues include national organizations dedicated to research and teaching (e.g., the National Council of Teachers of English), Internet-based teaching exchanges and idea banks, professional journals and books, professional conferences, and other personal and virtual meeting places.
My conservative capitalist friends must surely be delighted to see a liberal university professor come down on the side of a decentralized, competitive educational system; and my liberal and progressive friends no doubt are alarmed to believe that I have gone over to the Dark Side by arguing on behalf of the benefits of competitive systems. Actually, both are oversimplifying my position.
I think that competition is a good thing, at least when it’s not a bad thing, such as when people cheat to get ahead, or when competition is designed to create a loser class. I think that small shops trying to do good work are more dynamic than central authorities who impose uniformity across vast populations, especially uniformity of dubious effect. The larger and more authoritarian the group, the less incentive there is to think differently, and the greater the threats to being different and thus innovative.
In spite of my endorsement of what might appear to be a conservative position regarding the DOE (that Big Government is the problem), I do not endorse such things as voucher systems, which seem to me to involve agendas other than those superficially identified. The idea that poor inner city kids can choose their own schools ignores the fact that they can’t get to those schools without the cars they can’t afford or the public transportation that wealthy suburbs discourage from running to their train stops from impoverished areas. Voucher advocates also assume, or pretend to assume, that highly ranked schools can accept tens of thousands of new students from outside their areas, that parents of students in those schools would welcome these new enrollees from lower income groups who will lower their test scores and thus their real estate values, and other nuts-and-bolts aspects of implementation that matter in reality-based approaches to education.
Believing that the Department of Education should be dismantled does not mean advocating for a full-blown, capitalist-model approach to education. All widget companies compete against all other widget companies, and putting competitors out of business and taking their customers is part of a sound management plan. Schools that compete for excellence, however, are not trying to close one another down and take their students. School academics are not like school sports, where only one team wins. Rather, education serves communities and their youth without other communities and their youth needing to suffer.
Consider the ways universities operate. Universities initially compete for students, but once they’re enrolled, that game is over. After enrollments are secured, universities compete for prestige, and the game is not zero-sum: The more prestigious universities, the better the nation is served. The U.S. university system is not centrally organized, so each campus competes in its own way. Public universities are bound by state regents systems, at times intrusively (see, e.g., Arizona State’s reorganization, which decimated the East campus’s education faculty); but for the most part are entrusted to be the institution they want to be. Innovations are very public and available as models for others to consider. Indeed, the publishing imperative forces good work out into the open and contributes to the status of the institution as others seek to adopt it. This approach works well for universities, but public school teachers are not entrusted with the same opportunity.
The competition and innovation that local control would promote would enable teachers to exercise judgment, an opportunity that is rarely available under the current testing regime. Just as importantly, it would help to shape the incentive system within which education takes place. Presently, young people looking for a field of endeavor read daily attacks on teachers and schools, and see a punitive, assembly-line approach to teaching that follows from standardized curriculum, instruction, and assessment imposed by Washington bureaucrats with no teaching experience. Replace that image with a workplace where teachers’ ideas matter and their innovations are appreciated as dynamic and worthy of admiration. Which environment would you decide to enter if you were a talented young person looking for a rewarding career? Most teachers I know say that they want to teach because they want to make a difference. It’s hard to make a difference when the system rewards those who make everything the same.
The U.S. Department of Education has been a failed experiment, and the evidence is overwhelming that it discourages innovation and thoughtful practice in schools as it smothers teachers and students with its one-size-fits-all testing batteries that reduce all teaching and learning to multiple choice items. It’s time to give teachers the opportunity to see if they can do better.
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.NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — The rematch in this year’s Super Bowl between the New York Giants and New England Patriots has many fans looking forward to Sunday’s game, but for Las Vegas bookies it brings bad memories.
Reuters Las Vegas bookies will be hoping that New England Patriots' quarterback Tom Brady will lead his team to victory on Sunday.
The first Super Bowl between the teams in 2008 led to a cumulative loss of $2.6 million among Vegas bookies, as the Giants scored one of the biggest upsets in the history of the National Football League championship game.
The 14-point underdog Giants beat the previously undefeated Patriots 17-14 with a go-ahead touchdown with 35 seconds remaining. It was Vegas’ first overall loss on Super Bowl wagers since 1995.
This year’s game in Indianapolis won’t see that type of upset because the teams are viewed more evenly this time around. The Pats are still favorites, giving 3 points in the consensus Vegas line, according to VegasInsider.com.
”Last time it was David versus Goliath; this time it’s more like a sibling rivalry,” said Jay Rood, vice president of the Race & Sports Book for MGM Resorts International MGM, -1.08% “The expectations are very different.”
Rood opened MGM’s book with the Patriots as 3.5-point favorites, though as of late Wednesday the line was 2.5 points. He said 60-65% of the point-spread bets were on the Giants. Money line bets at MGM were 70-75% in favor of Big Blue, said Rood; as of late Wednesday, a $100 money line bet on New York would see a $120 win if the team triumphs on Sunday.
While this year’s Super Bowl could set a television ratings record, surpassing last year’s 111 million audience, the game could see close to a record amount in wagers placed with Vegas bookmakers. The largest total amount bet on a Super Bowl was $94.5 million for 2006’s game between the Pittsburgh Steelers and Seattle Seahawks. The total wagered on last year’s game between the Steelers and Green Bay Packers was $87.5 million.
Rood said based on betting action in the earlier playoff rounds and over the past 10 days, Vegas could see more than $90 million wagered on the Super Bowl for the first time since 2008; from 2005-2008 wagers topped $90 million every year. He noted that typically games with heavy favorites see larger wager totals, because they bring in large, seven-figure bets from gamblers who are willing to bet that much to garner a — in theory assured — six-figure win. See table of total wagers for past 10 Super Bowls (external link).
Despite being the underdogs, the Giants are on a hot streak. The 9-7 team is only the second in National Football League history, after the Arizona Cardinals in 2009, to reach the Super Bowl by beating three teams with better records. The Giants have won their past five games, outscoring opponents 141-67, and beat the Patriots 24-20 on the road on Nov. 6.
The Patriots are favorites for a reason. The team finished the regular season with a 13-3 record, and while it struggled on defense its offense averaged 32.1 points and 428 yards a game, third- and second-most in the NFL this season, respectively. This season’s Patriots offense is one of the 10 best of the past 20 years, according to Football Outsiders.Why Won’t You Just Let Us Pass a Health Care Bill and Kill a Few Million People?
Dear America,
At this point, it’s just getting frustrating. Time and time again, our party’s leaders have drafted and presented health care bills to repeal and replace Obamacare. We’ve tried this thing from all possible angles, but the backlash to each potential bill has been so severe that we haven’t been able to get anything passed. Where is all this negativity coming from?
We had Paul Ryan take a crack at an alternative health care bill, but he blew it hard. Then, Mitch McConnell stepped up to the plate, and he also blew it hard. Now, this thing is in the hands of Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy, but constituent phone calls disparaging the bill are flooding all of our offices. This has forced our party to ask the American people a very important question: do you not want us to kill a few million people or something?
Look, we’re trying our best here. At any given point, we have twelve or so of our best and brightest old white men working on a health care alternative to Obamacare. A bunch of guys named Bradley and Ralph will not rest until working class Americans are screwed over real badly. It’s disheartening because we’re trying so hard, yet the American people still seem intent on rejecting any legislation we present just because a few million people might die. It’s almost like you people don’t want us to murder a huge chunk of the country.
Yes, we were the obstructionist party for eight years and we halted as much legislation as possible. But, now that we have control of Congress, we’re hell-bent on getting stuff done. We want to pass legislation! So, why won’t the American people just let us pass a health care bill that’ll treat pregnancy like a pre-existing condition and raise premiums for sick people? It’s completely ridiculous that you won’t let us kill a lot of poor people. Is that what this is all about? The millions of people who will die because they won’t be able to afford health care if we pass one of these bills? These very negative reactions to our death bills confuse and demoralize us.
Do you not like the name of the bill or something? Just say the word and we can have one of the Bradleys try naming the new health care bill something a bit more flashy. We just want to understand why so much skepticism is getting tossed our way. Is it all the impending death and suffering that any of these bills will entail? That can’t possibly be it. Why would so many average American citizens be against a systematic culling of the country’s working class, elderly, and disabled populations? It doesn’t make sense to us at all.
Lately, we feel like we just can’t win with you. Please let us pass a health care bill and kill a few million people. What is so wrong with that? Just let us do it. At the very least, you’ll need to explain to us why you disagree so intently with us unleashing a legislative plague across America.
Sincerely,
The GOPCampaigning for Hillary yesterday, Obama mentions himself 207 times
Remember that Donald Trump is supposedly a narcissist as you consider the following. The President of the United States took time off from his awesome responsibilities yesterday to fly to two cities in Florida, Miami and Jacksonville, and gave speeches totaling 84 minutes. Kyle Olson of The American Mirror calculated the grim totals:
During two appearances for Hillary Clinton on Thursday, the president referred to himself a total of 207 times — 110 in Miami and 97 in Jacksonville, Florida. (snip) During the Miami speech, he mentioned himself 30 times before talking about Hillary Clinton. Olson provides a video of the Miami speech, if you can still bear to listen to the man once described as the greatest orator of our time. Obama is obsessed with garnering the approval of others, and with his historical legacy. His principal domestic program, Obamacare, is failing before the nation’s eyes, and stands to be repealed of Trump and the Republicans win next Tuesday. No wonder he goes out of his way to support Hillary, a woman he dislikes: it is all about him, as it always is.Illustration: Peter C. Espina/GT
In an age of austerity in mature economies and slower growth in many of the world's emerging markets, China's importance as an international investor is greater than ever before. In Africa - the region with the world's fastest-growing population and youngest demographic profile - China is playing an increasingly transformative and visible role that is extending beyond that of a distant investor.
Chinese support, while relatively invisible to the ordinary person, has been building for more than a decade. Diplomatic ties have grown considerably. The Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) has developed relations between Africa and China over 16 years since its inception, facilitating trade, political and cultural ties between China and 48 African countries. The commitments that have come out of FOCAC's meetings include human development, technical assistance, infrastructure investments, information-sharing, increasing trade, credit lines and other forms of development aid.
The extensive work that China has put into building social and political ties represents the country's strategic goal of leaving a legacy that goes beyond capital investment, making a positive, meaningful impact on the lives of ordinary Africans. This is China's opportunity to avoid the mistakes of the past where some multinationals have swooped in and plundered Africa's natural resources while not investing in the African people.
Over recent years China has demonstrated its commitment to its own legacy. On April 25, 2015, Chinese and Kenyan investors launched a technology transfer and training center to promote the development of solar lighting systems to meet the growing demand for solar energy in the East African nation. This is much more than an "investment" for China. The center provides an environment for Kenyan technicians to get up to speed with the latest solar solutions. They can learn how to assemble affordable solar energy systems that can be easily set up in rural areas and slums. This kind of social enterprise has many multiplier effects, including the transfer of skills and knowledge, higher living standards for some of the poorest in society and help for innovators to build a viable business.
It is, however, through sustainable, long-term investments that China can create significant economic opportunities. Major infrastructure works that can improve trade across the region are crucial in helping to deliver these opportunities, particularly in nations that are historically oil-reliant or have a dearth of business-critical infrastructure.
Like other major African economies, much of Angola's economy is reliant on oil and 60 percent of that comes from the northern Province of Cabinda - some 900,000 barrels per day. Yet Cabinda is one of the poorest provinces in the country. Investment from the Export-Import Bank of China (Eximbank) has injected approximately $600 million for the construction of Angola's first deep-sea port in the province, which is strategically important due to its proximity to the Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo. This major infrastructure development, located 9 kilometers north of the City of Cabinda is a public-private-partnership (Angola's first) that will reshape local, national and regional trade. The location also means that the balance of trade will shift toward Cabinda, creating knock-on opportunities in sectors such as hospitality and tourism.
Accompanied by a Special Economic Zone and the new Futila Industrial Park, Porto de Caio will reinvigorate the entire local supply chain and help to stimulate even more innovation and enterprise across the province. The economic zones - some designated for international companies, others for domestic and international companies - will provide new products and services for Angolans and new markets for their goods. This new gateway between global trade and African markets is a game changer, leaving the lasting legacy that Chinese companies are searching for in today's increasingly challenging global markets.
Companies such as the Bank of China, Huawei Technologies, the China Road and Bridge Corp and Chuanshan International Mining Co are some of the companies on an extensive list operating in Africa. Major Chinese companies have an increasing brand presence in the region, which provides growth for Chinese products while also creating local jobs and contributing to the local supply chain.
For example, Angola's Porto de Caio project is projected to create more than indirect 30,000 jobs (it has already created approximately 1,800 direct jobs), reducing the unemployment rate and contributing to the nation's GDP through expanded exports and increased tax revenue.
Major public works supported by China will make a great long-term impact as well, with history showing us that it has already done so. The SAIS China Africa Research Initiative at the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies looked back in a January 2017 CNN story at the five largest China-backed railways in Africa.
As far back as the 1970s, China helped to build one of Africa's longest railways - the 1,860-kilometer Tazara railway from Tanzania to Zambia. The railway, which ended landlocked Zambia's economic dependence on Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa, created the only route for bulk trade from Zambia's copper belt to the sea. Still fully operational - and maintained with the support of Chinese investment - it is perhaps telling that the Tazara Railway became affectionately known as "The Great Uhuru Railway." Uhuru is the Swahili word for freedom.
Smart sovereign investors such as China's Eximbank have proven to policymakers and wider stakeholders that the country is in Africa for the long term. It has built diverse, low-risk portfolios during recent years and those assets remain in place. Many do not provide China with a quick return because they are long-term investments in roads and airports, schools, hospitals and ports. China's faith in Africa as a long-term interest is also borne out in the country's approach to investments - an approach that is having immediate social impact on the lives of Africans while offering a future of solid investment returns and increased economic development.
The author is founder and CEO of Quantum Global Group, an Africa-focused investment firm. bizopinion@globaltimes.com.cnWhen Donald Trump is sworn in as the country’s 45th president, outgoing President Barack Obama will be in attendance to witness the peaceful transition of power.
The last time power was transferred, the 2009 inauguration of Obama, the tone turned ugly when then outgoing President, George W. Bush, was introduced to the crowd and was met with loud, sustained booing.
Even liberal MSNBC found the booing of Bush to be distasteful. Commentator Chris Matthews implored attendees, “Don’t do it,” as the chorus of boos started. “Bad form here,” he continued.
Fellow MSNBC host Rachel Maddow added, “That is not what I expected.”
Watch:
The crowd was much more vocal in the animosity for the outgoing President than the MSNBC microphones picked up in the background of their broadcast. Cameras in the crowd show just how loud and widespread it was.
The question now is: How will Donald Trump’s supporters greet President Barack Obama at the inauguration? And if he is met with a less than charitable greeting, how will the media report it?He gave grimdark fantasy a knee in the rear with the wickedly witty Low Town trilogy. He tackled epic fantasy to tremendous effect across Those Above and Those Below. Now, as he turns his attention to urban fantasy by way of his brilliantly bold new book, one wonders: can Daniel Polansky no wrong?
That remains to be seen, I suppose, but he’s certainly never done anything as resoundingly right as A City Dreaming. An assemblage of loosely-connected vignettes as opposed to a work of longform fiction—although it’s also that, at the last—A City Dreaming takes some getting into, but once you’re in, it’s a win-win. Hand on heart, I haven’t read anything like it in my life.
The first couple of chapters serve to introduce M, a rogueish reprobate who straddles “the line between curmudgeonly cute and outright prickish” and can do magic, as it happens. “It would help if you did not think of it as magic,” however, as our “incandescently arrogant” narrator notes:
M had certainly long since ceased to do so. He thought of it as being in good with the Management, like a regular at a neighborhood bar. You come to a place long enough, talk up the chick behind the counter, after a while she’ll look the other way if you have a smoke inside, let you run up your tab, maybe even send over some free nuts on occasion. Magic was like that, except the bar was existence and the laws being bent regarded thermodynamics and weak nuclear force.
When M is finally called upon to pay the tab that he’s run up (and up and up) in the pub that is the entirety of Paris, he decides, after some serious soul-searching over several such snacks, that “it might be time to toddle off” to his old stomping ground in the States, because he believes he’s been gone for long enough that the many enemies he made there have probably forgotten him.
He’s wrong on that count, of course. But M’s enemies aren’t his most immediate problem. On the contrary, his most immediate problem, as he sees it, is how popular he seems to be. Pretty much from the moment he’s home, “M kept running into people he hadn’t seen in a long time, kept getting pulled into bars, parties, misadventures, tragedies.” Early on, he and his mates ride a train through time and space. Later, he’s invited to a bit of a shindig where he takes a designer drug that gives him a small god in his eyeball.
A City Dreaming isn’t in its moment-to-moment much less madcap when M manages, by hook or by crook, to keep his own company. At one point, he goes on a long walk and gets lost in a pocket universe of sorts. On another occasion he decides to do something about the unstoppable spread of artisanal coffee shops in his neighbourhood, only to find a bean-loving demon behind the scenes. In short, nothing—not even the nods towards an overarching narrative with which Polansky peppers these episodes—nothing, but nothing, stops the shenanigans.
“It was strange how quickly a person grew used to this sort of thing, falling into a comfortable armistice with the impossible.” Strange, but true. Granted, it’s hard to get a handle on A City Dreaming if you go into it expecting a story told in the standard mold, but sometimes, less is more—and in this instance, it is. Sometimes, the incremental accretion of narrative, as if by accident, adds up to an understanding of events and their respective contexts that makes the complete picture clearer—as it does here.
That isn’t to say the several threads that wend their way through A City Dreaming are some great shakes. If you squint at the thing from the right angle, though, they’re there. M finally falls out of favour with the Management, though he can’t imagine “why those cosmic forces, normally so inclined to look with favour upon his foolishness, had decided to avert their eyes from him.” (p.105) Not unrelatedly, I dare say, he ends up with an apprentice, which is the last thing a fly-by-night fella like M is interested in. Also, as our man avers:
“I’m starting to think I might have gotten finagled into tipping the balance of power between the two great potentates of New York City, whose continued stalemate is the only thing that keeps the place remotely tolerable.”
So there’s that. That, and the continued unconsciousness of the world turtle Manhattan Island sits on the back of. Tip of the hat to Terry Pratchett!
But just as it says on the tin, this is the story of a city, as much if not more than it is the story of a man spending time in said. A city dreaming, indeed—although M, and to a greater or lesser extent his friends and enemies, are wide awake for the duration. And A City Dreaming‘s central character isn’t just a city, either, it’s “the city,” namely New York:
Consider: say an alien being, some unworldy creature with origins in distant nebula—superintelligent lichen or a giant floating amoeba or even the ubiquitous gray—were to appear on Earth desirous of seeing what we here on terra firma call a city. Where would you take him? To smoky London? To once-divided Berlin? To Tokyo and its spires? Of course not. You would buy him a ticket to Penn Station and apologise for how ugly it is, and afterward you would step out into Midtown and you would tell him that this is what man is, for better or worse.
For better or worse—better, from my perspective—A City Dreaming is as debauched as it is divine and as drug-addled as it is dreamy. It’s quite simply the best thing Daniel Polansky has ever written—and he’s already written some brilliant things. In retrospect, it reads like the book he was born to write, and if he never writes another, well, that’d be sad, but on the back of this most marvelous medicine, I’d manage. A City Dreaming really is that remarkable.
A City Dreaming is available from Regan Arts in the US and Hodder & Stoughton in the UK.
Read an excerpt from the novel here on Tor.com
Niall Alexander is an extra-curricular English teacher who reads and writes about all things weird and wonderful for The Speculative Scotsman, Strange Horizons, and Tor.com. He lives with about a bazillion books, his better half and a certain sleekit wee beastie in the central belt of bonnie Scotland.© Khaled Abdullah Ali Al Mahdi / Reuters
© Unknown
The humanitarian situation in Yemen is reaching disturbing proportions, with half a million children now facing life-threatening malnutrition and imminent famine, according to a senior UNICEF official.Afshan Khan, director of the UN Children's Fund's emergency programs worldwide, told Reuters Friday that "We are facing the potential of a huge humanitarian catastrophe... The levels of malnutrition that are being reported for children are extremely critical."A nutritional survey will be done at the end of October. How close are we to a famine declaration? We see some zones that are worse than others," she confirmed.The World Food Program (WFP) has been ringing the alarm over the situation since the summer.The number of children under five facing severe acute malnutrition continues to grow.But even with UNICEF programs being set up, the situation isn't likely to get better soon, as some of the existing centers are in Al-Qaeda-held regions - such as the eastern province of Hadramawr. The agency operates 43 mobile screening teams that monitor malnutrition.Saudi Arabia has been battling Houthi rebels in its support of the exiled Yemeni government. Violence has been ongoing since late March, with barely any halt in hostilities - a fact that has rendered most humanitarian efforts almost useless, sinking the country into further oblivion and displacing an estimated 10 percent of Yemen's population, of about 23 million people.The conflict is seen by observers to largely be a proxy war between outside forces loyal to Sunni monarchies and those on the Shia side, like Iran, which are strongly opposed by the Western powers.The death toll has climbed to 5,400 people in one of the poorest Arab countries. The figure includes at least 502 children, according to UNICEF.Despite both sides being blamed for not placing the population's security first, the Saudi-led bombings haven been causing untold collateral damage, and contributing to the deadly food shortages, while the Kingdom has completely blockaded commercial vessels from reaching the country. Before the conflict started, 90 percent of all food was imported, which is plunging Yemen to the brink of starvation.The UNICEF emergencies director explains that the agency is only "allowed small passages of goods where the papers are clear. We have been unable to sufficiently replenish medical supplies." The same goes for fuel - which affects multiple sectors, including the grinding of grain in the mills."Humanitarian access is getting more and more difficult... We hope fuel imports are restored so the cold chain (for vaccines) is re-established and sufficient fuel is available for running water treatment," Khan said.A glimmer of hope for the country is the Saturday invitation from the United Nations the Saudi-backed govenrment has received to sit down for more peace talks - something the country has failed at over and over again."The Yemeni government confirms that we're always ready for and committed to peace,"spokesman Rajeh Badi told Reuters."We value the role of the United Nations and thank its special envoy to Yemen, who has exerted great efforts toward achieving a peaceful resolution," he said, giving a 48-hour time frame for responce.The Houthi rebels have not responded as of yet.Etna Ice- and Ringworld: Photos and Video Clips (23.-25.2.2000) From 23.-25.2.2000 three SOL-team members were waiting in the bitter cold for another SEC paroxysm. Unfortunately they did not witness one from close but, instead, were rewarded by other spectacular sights, and some incredible «steam rings» from Bocca Nuova. Normally, this phenomen is referred to as «smoke ring». However, as there was hardly any ash, but a high steam content, we call it «steam ring». Some lasted for up to 10mins (times documented by video recordings). To give a sense of the perspective, camera lens focal lengths are given (i.e. f=28mm). Pictures link to larger photos (40 to 100 KB).
Abbreviations:
BN = Bocca Nuova; NEC = North East Crater; SEC = South East Crater, TDF = Torre del Filosofo (hut). JA = Jürg Alean (image copyright); MF = Marco Fulle (image copyright).
23.2.2000, 4:00, f=28 mm from Serra la Nave (MF). The steam from BN masks a paroxysm at SEC. The full moon illuminates Etna's winter wonderland. Constellation Draco top right. 23.2.2000, f=14mm from Torre del Filosofo (JA). Steam produced by BN is carried by a strong northwesterly wind over SEC. Although everything looked very dramatic, no significant eruptions occurred all day... 24.2.2000, 12:30, f=35mm from TDF (JA). Suddenly BN begins producing steam rings. This wonderful specimen gently drifts right over our heads and past the sun which is tinted orange by aerosols in the BN smoke. 24.2.2000, 13:00, fish-eye photo (diagonal=180°) from TDF (MF). Jürg is recording another wonderful steam ring from BN. Its shadow falls exactly on SEC's slope! We can deduce its diameter as 200 m, and its height 1 km above us. Below is a movie of this ring.
24.2.2000, 13:00, f=14mm from TDF (JA). Same steam ring as above, far right. As the ring climbs in the sky, its shadow travels towards the lower right on SEC's slope! Have you ever before seen the motion of a ring and its shadow recorded in the same photos? 24.2.2000, 13:00, f=14mm from TDF (JA). The three frames of this picture are enlargements of the lower right sections of the images on the left. The SEC cone appears somewhat distorted by the extreme wide angle lens. 24.2.2000, 13:00, f=35mm from TDF (JA). Now the ring is straight above us. Note the thin veil of steam which connects the ring with the larger clouds from BN and compare with the next photo! 24.2.2000, 13:00, fish-eye photo (MF). The steam ring now drifts south due to the north wind. SO 2 -rich BN steam filters sunlight and projects purple shadows on Piano del Lago. In the background from left to right: Ionian Sea, Montagnola, cablecar station and M. Frumento Supino.
25.2.2000, 16:00, f=28 mm from TDF (MF). Another steam ring from BN rises in the sky and seems to get a little help during its ascent from the sun. 25.2.2000, 16:00, f=28 mm from Torre del Filosofo hut (MF). The same smoke ring maybe a minute later. Its trail gets distorted by wind shear. 24.2.2000, 18:00, f=14mm from between TDF and Belvedere (JA). Irregular melt structures in the snow create the impression of «patterned ground». 24.2.2000, 18:00, f=14mm from between TDF and Belvedere (JA). The setting sun dramatically illuminates BNs steam trail. Marco and Roby descending towards Piano del Lago.
25.2.2000, f=14mm, near Belvedere (JA). Roby poses behind a remarkable snowdrift sculptured by Etna's incredibly powerful winter storms. 25.2.2000, f=14mm, near Belvedere (JA). Wind erosion has carved these elegant shapes out of thinly layered snow. Black scoria from recent SEC paroxysms on the right. 24.2.2000, f=14mm, Belvedere (JA). Black SEC towers above the edge of Valle del Bove. The dark lava flows on the right were emplaced during recent Etna paroxysms. 24.2.2000, f=14mm, Belvedere (JA). Are we in Antarctica, on the slopes of Mt. Erebus with the Ross Sea in the Background? (Looking down the vast depression of Valle del Bove).
25.2.2000, f=14mm, Rifugio Sapienza (JA). Is it possible that the jumble of souvenir shops, the cablecar station and other monstrosities needed by the tourist industry may actually look pretty in fresh winter snow? Note occupied (!) tent on the children's playground. 24.2.2000, TDF. First time in human history, 3 SOL-team members find themselves united on Etna. Note how Jürg (left) is mainly concerned with the antarctic temperature, Roby (center) with personal safety, and Marco (right) with his ample food supply. 24.2.2000, f=14 at TDF (JA). You may not be aware of the fact that Etna is populated by troglodytes :-) making use of cavities melted into winter snow by fumaroles. If you find this hard to believe, please mail Roby for further details. 25.2.2000, 17:30, f=28 mm from Torre del Filosofo (MF). The great volcano's shadow high over Aspromonte is greeting us after a wonderful time of Etna's meraviglie.As soon as a politician is elected into office, the scrutiny on their spouse is immediate and inevitable.
We've seen this with Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, Michelle Obama, and yes, Melania Trump.
But when it comes to Brigitte Trogneux, the wife of recently appointed French president Emmanuel Macron, the coverage has focused less on who she is, and more on her age.
The pair are 24 years apart. The big difference, however, is that Trogneux is the senior partner at 64, while Macron is 39. And the focus on this is nothing short of tawdry.
That's according to Macron himself, who, in speaking with Paris newspaper Le Parisien, noted, "This says a lot about misogyny in France, because if I was 20 years older than my wife, nobody would have questioned my relationship's legitimacy for even a second.
"It's her being 20 years older that people think is not credible, that it's impossible."
Among the many reasons a man might marry an older woman (and vice versa), notes Psychology Today, include maturity, sexual compatibility and health compatibility |
the adoption story swings from, "You're special; we chose you," to "Your mom gave you away; she didn't want you," which translates to "I'm undesirable or undeserving or unlovable," and self-esteem spirals south. For black kids with white parents, it's even more complicated. His parents couldn't love away the difference in the color of his skin. Jill and Eric transferred Ra'Shede to a public school with a more diverse student body so he could be around more kids that looked like him. His brother Xavier seemed to adjust smoothly, not as big and more content in the classroom. But for Ra'Shede, it seemed every time he looked at his mom or dad, their white faces reminded him he didn't fit in their family. What does it mean to be a young black man? That wasn't a question he consciously articulated, but one that did haunt him. Eric couldn't show him, of course. Ra'Shede's own black father was gone. And black men like Michael Jordan and Will Smith — celebrity role models to his peers — didn't serve him. They hadn't come from where he did. "I was never like them (Jordan and Smith)," Ra'Shede says. "I was different, on my own path." At Washburn High School, which straddled the city's economic divide, he felt the tug of the street, a world he glimpsed in the hip-hop lyrics and the sagging pants of classmates, but a world distant from the red brick colonial where he lived with his parents, who by now had children of their own that didn't look like Ra'Shede. He began hanging out and copped a street attitude. He mouthed off to teachers, skipped school, failed classes, played the tough guy, intimidating others with his size, sometimes taking them on. Girls were drawn to his swagger and he burnished that rep in the weight room, trying to impress them with how much he could bench in competition with his friends. Ra'Shede always won. In ninth grade he maxed out at 315 lbs. "I wanted to get their attention," Ra'Shede says. "I wanted people to think I was tough, basically because of being adopted." Still, he couldn't find his place. He didn't blend with the street kids. Not in his Abercrombie shirts and new shoes. Not with 20 bucks in his pocket when they didn't have lunch money. He couldn't reconcile his upper-middle class status with theirs. He also didn't fit with the other kids from affluent backgrounds — his skin was too black. And he didn't feel real kinship with his teammates — what did they know about having an addict mom and another who was an attorney? About a phantom dad and another, doting one? About so many foster homes you forgot your way to your bedroom and then living in a house your buddies envied? Ra'Shede turned on his parents. He blamed them for his situation. So Ra'Shede turned on his parents. He blamed them for his situation. Resented them because other kids sometimes teased him about their white asses. He refused to be seen with them. At school conferences, he made his parents walk down the hall by themselves. In restaurants, he hung back until they sat down. Jill and Eric tried to accommodate their son, waiting for him after basketball games in the parking lot. They weathered his angry outbursts at home. But one public explosion terrified his mother. Ra'Shede's sophomore year, Jill was driving him and a couple of teammates to football practice with his then 2-year-old sister and 2-week-old baby brother along for the ride. A car blew a stop sign and sideswiped their minivan. No one was hurt, but Ra'Shede was enraged. He burst from the van shouting at the man driving the other car, "You almost killed my baby brother." He terrified the man, who saw only an angry 6'6 black giant raging at him. Ra'Shede did not strike the stranger, but Jill worried about how his anger could menace others, and how their reaction could get him killed. This kid — their kid — was dangerous. "We'd seen those outbursts at home when he challenged our authority," Eric says. "But seeing it out in the real world was scary. That's been there for him his whole life, trying to address the beast within." The only place where the beast seemed at home was the football field, where he had license to lash out. Ra'Shede liked defense best, where he could crush opponents, but his coaches used him mostly on offense as a tight end, where he could use his strength and power both blocking and running after catching the ball. They recognized his unique talent, but through his freshmen and sophomore years, he only played sports for the hell of it, because it was fun. He did not know how good he might be. Trouble brought him to Giovan Jenkins. They knew one another from the football team, where Jenkins was an assistant coach, but Hageman's academic and extracurricular screw-ups landed him in Jenkins' office in his other role as the disciplinarian, dean of ninth- and 10th-grade students. Jenkins had street cred, an African-American Washburn graduate who understood the challenges of being young and black. You're the one who's going to get busted because you're the biggest one around, the first one they'll notice, Jenkins told Ra'Shede. Stay away from trouble. Jenkins believed in Ra'Shede. "I never really thought he would end up in a gang because of the support he had at home," Jenkins says. "He was raised right." Ra'Shede respected Jenkins, but it wasn't as if he could just turn off the trouble, either. His anger could explode in an instant. Still, the more often he landed in Jenkins' office, the more he started to believe him. "He told me I wasn't like the other knuckleheads, that I had opportunities," Ra'Shede says. "‘Don't let your friends or other people decide who you are going to be,' he told me. Don't let them control my destiny. He made me realize I could do something with my life if I was able to overcome the obstacles." * * *
(Courtesy of the University of Minnesota)
Nebraska scores on its first two drives, but then the Minnesota defense buckles down. Midway through the second quarter, the Gophers trailing 10-7, Ra'Shede slides past a block and drops the quarterback. But there's a flag. The official saw his hand grip the QB's facemask. Instead of facing third-and-long, the Cornhuskers now have a first down 15 yards upfield. Anger replaces elation, but now it's channeled, focused, distilled and determined. Settling into his three-point stance, Ra'Shede knows he owes his team something to redeem himself. On the next play, he charges off the snap, bursts through the line and drops the quarterback before he can set up. The image on the stadium's big screen shows him flexing, his wrists at his waist. Later in the quarter, with less than a minute remaining, Minnesota has gone up 17-10. Ra'Shede bulls past his blocker, wraps up the QB as he hurries an option pitch, and the ball sails past the running back out of bounds. Ra'Shede spreads his hands wide. He's made another big play. But there's another flag. Once again, the officials have caught him with his hands on the QB's facemask. The personal foul breathes new life into the Huskers' late drive, giving them the chance to tie the score or even take the lead going into halftime. That could hang on Ra'Shede. But once again, he manages to turn his anger into his advantage. Thirty seconds later, Nebraska runs a screen pass. Ra'Shede doubles back and, with his quickness, catches the receiver from behind on the Minnesota 25, preventing what looked like it would be a big gain, maybe even six points. The play sets up third-and-11, and the best the Huskers can manage is a field goal. At halftime Minnesota still leads, 17-13. * * * Soon coaches from premier programs started calling, showing up at school, writing love letters. The opportunities Jenkins saw in Ra'Shede became concrete when the University of Minnesota football coach Tim Brewster invited him to a prospects camp the summer after his sophomore year. Most of the other kids were a year older, but afterward Brewster, recognizing his potential, offered Ra'Shede a scholarship. That's when it hit Ra'Shede how good he was. Soon coaches from premier programs — LSU, Florida, Ohio State, Oklahoma, Nebraska — started calling, showing up at school, writing love letters promising him he'd catch 50 passes for them his freshman year. Yet none of that seemed possible. Ra'Shede knew he wasn't college material. He didn't have the grades. His test scores fell short. He had no ambition to study. The sweet talk of scholarships seemed more like a taunt, tantalizing him with something ultimately unattainable — offers more to be resented than pursued. He didn't want to reach out to accept their offer only to have it yanked away. He already knew how that felt. So did someone else, his half-brother, Lazal Thompson, five years older. They had been separated when the state took custody of Ra'Shede and Xavier, but Lazal had found his younger brothers through the adoption agency shortly after Ra'Shede started high school. Lazal had not been placed with a stable family like Ra'Shede and Xavier. He had stayed in the system and taken the other path. By the time they reunited, Lazal, barely 20, already had fathered a couple of children and been in and out of jail for selling drugs. He recognized Ra'Shede's confusion and attraction to the street, but also the opportunities he still had. Lazal drove his younger brother around the grimier areas of Minneapolis to erase the allure, pointing out the decay and desperation of thug life. "This is what you don't want to be around," Lazal told him. "You don't want to be a felon or fighting for no reason, joining a gang that doesn't care about you or locked up for domestic abuse." What Lazal would have given to be able to go to school and play football like Ra'Shede. "But it's hard if you don't have the structure," he says. "You can't go to school when your clothes are dirty. You can't study at home when there's chaos. His parents gave him stability." He told Ra'Shede that. And, "Thank Jill and Eric for giving you the chance." Gradually, his words sank in. Ra'Shede started to understand the perils of the street; the road to college became more appealing. * * * Jill and Eric knew football provided a backdoor route to a college education, something he would not pursue otherwise, given his academic stumbles and intellectual hurdles. But when they started researching the NCAA eligibility requirements, they realized that road included a steep climb. They hired a pair of tutors to work with him. They registered him for online classes to replace failing grades from his first two years of high school. Ra'Shede as a tight end. (Coutesy of the Hageman family) Ra'Shede accepted the challenge. He worked diligently with the tutors. He stayed after school to get help from teachers. He did the online coursework. He took the ACT test, over and over and over, banking each section he passed to boost his overall score. He sweated and agonized over his studies, gradually edging toward meeting the NCAA's eligibility requirements. Yet his fear of falling short and being humiliated by the public failure — the local papers and online ranking sites charted his prospects — offset his excitement about the possibility. Football came so much easier. He started working out with a strength and conditioning coach, and he continued to tear it up on the field. Senior year, he caught 11 touchdown passes, earned All-State honors and was named the nation's No. 1 tight end prospect. But his anger sabotaged the season's grand finale, when his team played for the city championship. The week before the big game, he exploded in the school cafeteria. Another student got in his face. Ra'Shede gave it back. The shouting escalated to shoving. And could have gotten worse — Ra'Shede far outsized the other kid — if Jenkins hadn't stepped between them... Hey, hey, stop! Ra'Shede backed down and let Jenkins lead him out of the lunchroom. Once he calmed, the remorse came. Ra'Shede wrote an apology to the other student. "He always wants to do the right thing, he just doesn't always do the right thing," Jill says. "He digs himself a hole, but crawls out of it." His outburst resulted in a suspension from football; he couldn't play in the city championship game. The incident reminded everyone just how close to destruction his anger could take him. * * * Third quarter, Ra'Shede lets up after the quarterback releases a pass — and the Nebraska lineman Jeremiah Sirles, 6'6 and 310 pounds himself, decks Ra'Shede with a late hit, the very thing that can set him off. He's used to opponents talking smack in the trenches. They know he has white parents and call him "Uncle Tom." They tell him he's garbage. That he's soft. In high school, he couldn't let it go. He yapped back. Got lured off his game. "Sometimes it goes deep," he says. "Like, ‘You're not going anywhere.' I want to yell and scream at them, but I have found other ways to be disruptive." But he's not used to being dumped on his ass after the play. Sirles stands over him. A reflexive wave of tension rushes through those watching. Then Sirles reaches out his hand. Ra'Shede takes it and lets Sirles hoist him up. Ra'Shede pats his shoulder pad and returns to the line. Another dangerous moment diffused. Another right turn. * * * Despite his suspension from the city championship game, Ra'Shede did play that January 2009 Under Armour All-American game in Orlando, Fla., and the colleges were still interested. Yet with national signing day approaching, he couldn't see himself in Gainesville or Columbus. He didn't feel right representing a tradition like Nebraska's, one he knew nothing about. He had offers from a dozen schools, but in the end, it came down to just one, Minnesota, because it allowed him to stay close to his parents, and Jenkins and Lazal and others who knew his story and stood by him. So on Feb. 4, 2009, he walked into the Washburn gym, past the media and cameras, donned a maroon cap with a gold "M" on it, and signed a letter declaring his intent to play at the University of Minnesota. Inking his name did not decide Ra'Shede's fate. It only magnified his angst. After 18 months of tutors, online courses and retaking the ACT, he had moved much closer, but still fell just short of meeting the NCAA's eligibility requirements. He had to take the ACT test one more time in April before he managed to raise his score in the reading section high enough to clear the bar. Finally, he could exhale with relief and celebrate the fact he was headed to college. Now he just had to crack the Gophers' lineup. And stay on the path. * * * "Tight end was a high school thing, just beasting over kids and catching balls." Coach Tim Brewster had recruited Hageman to play tight end, but one day during practice early on, while in line for reps with the receivers, Ra'Shede was distracted, watching the defensive line run its drill. The receivers coach had to shout at him when his turn came, but after practice, he told the D-line coach of Ra'Shede's interest, and Ra'Shede switched to defensive end. "Tight end was a high school thing, just beasting over kids and catching balls," he says. "On defense, you have to have that inner dog in you, which works for me with the aggression I have and the past that makes me a dominant lineman." He thought he might see action the first game against Syracuse, but by the third quarter, he figured out that he was going to be redshirted for the 2009 season. There were too many other guys ahead of him at defensive end. He dressed for every game, but spent every minute on the sideline, just watching, another tease and frustration. Tubby Smith, the Gophers' basketball coach, had scouted Ra'Shede at Washburn and attended the high school tournament game when Ra'Shede led his team to the state basketball championship. He invited Ra'Shede to walk on. He was tempted, but he couldn't. College already overwhelmed him. Practice, lifting, meetings, classes, study sessions. Living on his own. He couldn't do it. Couldn't squeeze basketball into his schedule; couldn't handle the distractions. Oh, those distractions. The parties. The girls. He didn't think it was a problem until a girl told him she was pregnant and planned to have the baby. His one-night stand turned into another person. He was in shock. Scared. How would he tell his parents? How would he care for the child? "I'm too big to be working in a grocery store," he says. "I had to stay with football, keep working on that." More from SB Nation Minnesota Blog Big Ten Blog Jill and Eric were concerned — here was another hole Ra'Shede had dug himself — but supportive, as always. They were ready with advice, acceptance and money, whatever he needed. The 2010 season, Ra'Shede's first, he played in eight games, made five tackles, but he landed in yet another ditch. He moved off campus and lived in a house with the other defensive linemen, a place nicknamed "The Zoo" for the parties they hosted. When the police crashed one, everybody ran. But not Ra'Shede, who was rarely one to back down from a confrontation. He was cited for hosting an "uncontrolled party" where minors consumed alcohol. He had to perform community service and endure the embarrassment of the incident going public. Worse, The Zoo didn't exactly nurture academic rigor. He missed study sessions. Arrived late to class. Let his grades slide. Late that season, after Brewster had been fired, interim coach Jeff Horton told Ra'Shede to get serious about school and forget the last three weeks of the season. Technically, it wasn't a suspension, but the message was clear: His size, talent and potential couldn't save him if he didn't improve his grades. New coach Jerry Kill underscored that point. It seemed half the team was academically ineligible and Kill intended to clean house. Three days after he arrived in December 2010, the new coach summoned the problem child, his parents and a couple of academic advisors to his office. Kill had done his homework, talking to Giovan Jenkins at Washburn, who convinced him to take a chance on Ra'Shede. One chance. Kill, about as subtle as a blacksmith, gave it to the kid straight. "You stole the university's money. That's going to change or you're gone. This is your last shot." He laid out the expectations: Ra'Shede would get to class on time, not miss study sessions, stay away from parties, move out of The Zoo and into student housing on campus. Ra'Shede knew Coach Kill was serious. He had jettisoned other players, including Ra'Shede's friend, roommate and fellow defensive lineman, Jewhan Edwards. Edwards had led the Gophers in tackles for a loss and sacks, he had a year of eligibility remaining and NFL prospects, but he hadn't been willing to do things the new coach's way. And knew he was gone. One minute a DI football player with a future, the next, nothing but a washout with a past. If the new coach could dump the team leader in tackles, he wouldn't hesitate to boot Ra'Shede. That shook him. "It was the first time I saw my life flash before me," he says. And he didn't like what he saw. By then, some of the kids he had run with in high school had landed behind bars or in graves, done in by drugs and violence. Without football, that could be his fate, too. "If I didn't get things right, I would become that statistic of somebody who went to college but didn't make it."
(Courtesy of the University of Minnesota)
* * * he started to understand a moment could have irreversible consequences. Five weeks after his meeting with Coach Kill, Ra'Shede became a father. His son Zion was born Feb. 4, 2011. Zion's mother let Ra'Shede visit only when she wasn't mad at him, which seemed to be very seldom. Still, he felt accountable to someone beyond himself. For the first time, perhaps, he started to understand a moment could have irreversible consequences. In the spring semester, he got serious about school. He attended his tutoring sessions and made it to classes on time. He was never going to be a candidate for the dean's list, but he managed to keep his cumulative GPA above the required 2.0 mark. In the fall of 2011, his sophomore year, he switched to defensive tackle, played in all 12 of the Gophers' games and made 13 tackles, flashing the promise inherent in his size. In the final game of the season, on a cold and rainy November day at TCF Bank Stadium, Ra'Shede sacked the Fighting Illini quarterback twice in the first half and forced a fumble that set up the Gophers' first touchdown in a 27-7 victory. "He hadn't had any sacks all season, but that game was a ‘Whoa, look at him' moment," Eric says. The expectations mounted, but the path did not become any smoother. Coach Kill had to track Ra'Shede down when he did not show up for a mandatory study hall during finals week. Kill found him asleep in his dorm room and dragged him back to the football complex to go over flashcards with an assistant coach past midnight, until Ra'Shede knew the material well enough to pass his final. Not long afterward, he again found himself in the wrong place, though this time less innocently. In the wee hours of May 10, 2012, Ra'Shede tried to break up a fight outside a campus bar, where some of his teammates tangled with a group of guys from the North Side that Ra'Shede had played hoops with. When the cops arrived, they confronted Ra'Shede, who stood in the thick of the melee. He snapped back. They locked him up. Within days, they dropped the charges of disorderly conduct, but not before the night hit Ra'Shede with another reminder of how close his anger put him to the edge. What if someone had pulled a knife? Or a gun? A bullet doesn't care how much you can bench. * * * Junior year, Ra'Shede showed Kill he hadn't squandered his faith. Number 99 earned a starting spot and came up with one big game after another. He recorded 35 tackles (20 solo) and six sacks. His breakout season earned him honorable mention All-Big Ten honors. Not bad for a kid recruited as a tight end who nearly was tossed out of the program. Amazing for a kid discovered in a crack house closet. The expectations escalated after that. Ra'Shede's on everybody's watch list, pictured on the media guide, projected to go early in the draft, yet he is determined to rise to their level. This season he's watching more film on his own, analyzing his play and scouting opponents. He's resolved not to take any plays off, to come off the ball with more urgency. But he remains a work in progress. Despite his natural size, strength and power, he's still a newcomer to his position. "He's trying to understand when it's time to be a power player and when to use more finesse, coming off a block or on the pass rush," says Jeff Phelps, the Gophers' defensive line coach. "He's just beginning to learn those things and come into his own as a defensive lineman." This year the big plays have been harder to come by because he's frequently double-teamed. That gets old, two 300-pound hogs in your face every play. He's had his share of personal fouls trying to compensate, like a play against Michigan when he meant to jam a guard in the throat, but his fist caught the guy's facemask and nearly snapped his head off. Off the field, Ra'Shede speaks softly and can even appear docile. Teammates have called him a "gentle giant," and Phelps describes him as a "teddy bear." Bah, says his mother, who knows his temper as well as anyone. "He doesn't deal well with people getting in his face," Jill says. She remembers a time this past summer when they were in Manhattan and a homeless woman told them to get out of her way. The rest of his family moved aside. Not Ra'Shede. "He took her on," Jill says. "Why can't he just step around her like the rest of us? He's always got that trigger." * * * Normal evades him. He's a father but can't see his son as often as he'd like to. Normal evades him. He's a father but can't see his son as often as he'd like to. Zion is 2 1/2 now. When his mom is communicating with Ra'Shede, he picks up Zion in St. Paul and brings him back to his dorm to watch television or play video games. "He's into ‘Caillou,'" Ra'Shede says. "And he's tall and lanky, like I was." Ra'Shede is one class away from graduating with a youth studies major, which — given his background — could be his most amazing achievement, but an astronomy class stands between him and his degree. "Dumbest thing I ever did," he says. When he registered for the class, he thought it would be easy. It's not. "You've got to know math, physics, geology — and all those planets." Hageman is trying to be a role model to other kids. He recently participated in a clinic at McRae Park, several blocks from the house where he grew up, where he played eighth-grade football himself, and next door to St. Joseph's Home for Children, one of the foster homes in which he lived. He laughed with the kids and encouraged them in a scrimmage. "He's a voice for a lot of African-American kids who are going through things he's gone through," his brother Lazal says.
(Courtesy of the University of Minnesota)
* * * Still third quarter, Minnesota has the ball on Nebraska's 1-yard line. Ra'Shede sits on the end of the heated team bench, his eyes on the big screen in the end zone. When Gopher quarterback Philip Nelson carries the ball across the goal line to put Minnesota up, 23-13, Ra'Shede pumps his right fist into the air. They could win this one. Stranger things have happened in life. Ra'Shede knows that better than anyone does. * * * Eric pulls his cell phone from his pocket and plays a video of Ra'Shede's surprise interception against Northwestern. Ra'Shede had dropped back into coverage, a scheme the Gophers' defense uses sometimes to foil their opponents' plans to double-team him. Ra'Shede leaps, grabs the ball with one hand and runs 10 yards with it before he's bumped in the leg, stumbles and falls. Ra'Shede watched the film with his teammates the next day. Phelps showed the play several times, so Ra'Shede could narrate his moves, point out how he switched the ball to his far hand to protect it. His linemates couldn't help teasing him about how easily he went down. Despite his boasting and their roasting, the clip highlights his extraordinary athleticism in leaping and snagging the ball. "I'm so hungry to go away and just starting training 100 percent for the Combine." That athleticism in a body his size has NFL written all over it. Ra'Shede hadn't dared think it possible earlier. He hadn't wanted to "overdream." Getting to college had been unlikely enough; staying there a major challenge. But now, deep into his final year at Minnesota, he risks having a dream. Weekend nights he stays away from the bars, sometimes walks by himself along the Mississippi River, which winds through the campus, his Beats by Dre pumping, and thinks. About where he's come from, where he's going, what's left to get there. He's come so far, gotten so close; he wants that next step. Once the Gophers' season ends — he hopes with a bowl game of substance — he plans to go off to train. "I'm so hungry to go away and just starting training 100 percent for the Combine," he says. Someplace without any classes, without any study halls. Someplace where it's just him and his anger, channeled the right way, pushing his body to its limits. "That's like the ultimate vacation for me, to be by myself and train." So much of what has defined him to this point are things he didn't have any control over. He had no choice about his birthparents, being taken from his mother, staying in foster homes, being placed in a white family. He had no say over his size or even what sport he pursued. That's why training for the Combine, the gateway to the NFL and final stop of his dream — he has no Plan B — holds such appeal. For that short time between the end of his college football career and his audition, he will be completely and wholly responsible for shaping his future, finally given the chance to direct his destiny. * * * Fourth quarter, the clock ticking down. The big screen scoreboard shows Minnesota leading improbably, 34-23. Nebraska has the ball. Ra'Shede had come out moments earlier when he got the wind knocked out of him. But now he's back in the game. Pressuring the quarterback — who puts up a pass that Minnesota picks off with only 16 seconds remaining. In just seconds, the game will end, and the players will rush to the big M at the center of the field to rejoice in the school's first victory over Nebraska in 53 years. The student fans will spill over the walls and crowd around the players in a spontaneous celebration. But now, with 16 seconds remaining and victory certain, Ra'Shede skips off the field like a carefree kid. And it looks like he's smiling. Producer: Chris Mottram | Editor: Glenn Stout | Copy Editor: Kevin Fixler | Title Photo: USA Today ImagesLast week I wrote about why I don’t (illegally) download music. One great reason that didn’t even make my list, is that there is already a lot of free stuff. There are enough legal ways to get free stuff, that pirating the latest software or CD isn’t necessary.
Here are just a few of the free alternatives to some of the things you might already be paying for:
1) Use the Library Instead of Bookstores
I recently made the switch from buying most of my books to reading them for free. Two years ago I lived in a small town, where the public library didn’t have a wide selection. As a result I got used to buying my books instead of renting. Books might not be a big expense, but if you end up reading 50-70 books each year, the cost can quickly add up.
2) Free & Legal Music Instead of CD’s and iTunes
As I wrote earlier, I’m not a fan of downloading music for free without the artist’s consent. I’ve tried to do my best with this, but it was only in the last several months I became proactive in doing this. In the past I had occasionally come across free samples over the net from questionable sources, but never took a firm stance to keep it off my hard drive.
One of the things that helped me stay committed to keeping my library legitimate, was the discovery of all the different sources of free & legal music on the net. Here are a few ways you can explore a large amount of music for free without becoming a pirate:
Pandora – This internet radio has a near infinite music variety that can be tuned to your individual preferences. This was my method of choice until they stopped offering access to Canadians. (ouch!) Download.com – Both streams and downloads of free music. Internet Radio – There are many free internet radio stations. And if you’re away from your PC, good ol’ AM and FM work as well. Tracked Music – An entire genre of free music. You can get a free player here and download music here. I have nearly 500 tracks on my playlist.
3) Blogs Instead of Magazines/Newspapers
I’m sure I don’t need to tell you this one. Blogs can offer you access to tips, ideas and news on a daily basis without costing you a penny. Many offline publications are now starting to head into cyberspace, so I don’t think it will be long until almost all publications are free.
4) Open Source Instead of Microsoft
I use mostly open source and freeware software for my computing needs. Open source benefits by being cheaper and often more flexible than traditional software. Here are a few alternatives you might want to try:
OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office – Powerpoint, Excel, Word and Access all have OpenOffice equivalents. A great program that doesn’t cost you a cent. Firefox instead of Internet Explorer Thunderbird instead of Outlook Linux instead of Windows GIMP instead of Photoshop WordPress instead of Typepad
5) OpenCourseWare Instead of Paying Tuition
OpenCourseWare is an initiative where major universities are starting to release their classes online for free. MIT has one of the biggest catalogs of courses at the moment. I’ve already gone through a few of the courses online. The perfect resource for the person who wants an education without student debt.
6) TED Talks Instead of Seminars.
TED has hundreds of 10-20 minute speeches posted online for free. Great speakers include Bill Clinton, Will Wright, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Gilbert and Ray Kurzweil. The topics range from the issues of global warming to discovering what makes us happy.
7) Home Exercise Instead of Gym Memberships
Running is free. So are push ups, sit ups and stretches. You don’t need to go broke on fancy sports club memberships and exercise equipment to stay healthy. Keeping your exercise plan simple can actually make it easier to stick with.
8 ) Tap Water Instead of Bottles
When you buy bottled water, you’re paying for the picture of a rainforest on the bottle. There is virtually no difference between water from your faucet and one in a 2$ bottle. If you think there is a difference in taste, I suggest putting it to the test:
Buy your favorite bottled water and get some tap water. Pour three cups of each and get a friend to mark the cups, so they will know which is bottled, but you won’t. Drink from each of them and write down the ones you like best.
I’m skeptical that most people could even tell the difference. Save creating more garbage and save yourself some money and drink from the tap.
9) Skype Instead of Telephones
With Skype you can get free (or nearly free) telephone capabilities with your computer. Save on those long-distance bills by going digital.Dear Angela,
I was engaged to be married last week, and now I’m not. My former fiancé and I decided to have an open conversation with each other where we talked about our past relationships, our finances and any other issues we felt were important to bring up.
I confided in him that I had a problem with a pornography addiction. Before I could really even talk about it, he cut me off and said, “I was terrified that you would say that. This is an absolute deal breaker for me.” I was really hurt by that comment, because it was a past trial, and I was sharing this information with him because I trusted him and didn’t want to keep secrets. But before I could say anything, he just got up and left. Later that night, I received an email from him saying that the wedding was off and that I should begin telling my family that he and I were no longer together. He promised he wouldn’t share the reasons why with anyone, but he wished me luck in my future life and I haven’t heard from him since.
There’s more to the story, of course, but those are the nuts and bolts. I’m devastated. Maybe I made the wrong choice by opening up about my past like that. What do you think? I haven’t told my family yet in hopes that he will calm down and we can talk. Do you think there’s any way he just needs time? Or to you, does it sound like it’s over? What do I do from here?
Sincerely,
The Past
Dear The Past,
An email?
Wow.
I don’t want to spring into fiancé-bashing mode, but what kind of guy ends a relationship with the girl he was going to marry in an email?
I don’t know if you should or should not have told him about the pornography; that was your personal choice. Ultimately, given his reaction, it’s good that this came out now before you two got married. Marriage isn’t always smiles and kisses because it’s a relationship comprised of two different and imperfect people.
Yes, addiction to pornography is a serious issue, but he doesn’t seem to care for you in a way where he’s willing to even try to work through something difficult. After all, he didn’t say, “Hey this is serious, let’s date a little bit longer and postpone the wedding.” Or “Hey I need to digest this and let’s talk later.” No, he said “deal breaker” and goodbye without even hearing you out. Not cool.
As sad and as devastated as you feel now, what you did took courage. Admitting to past mistakes and struggles, especially one as sensitive and uncomfortable as this one, is not easy, but it shows a desire to be one with your future spouse. There is a man out there who will appreciate that and love you even more for it.
Your past does not make you a bad person, and it certainly doesn’t make you un-marry-able.
He may cool off in a few days and want to talk with a more |
Dark Side guy.
Over the last few weeks I’ve been watching the Star Wars movies, 3, 4, 5, and 6 so I don’t come into the 7th one forgetting the whole story. I skipped the first two because they stunk. Now, I don’t normally think about Star Wars at all, but there is something to be said about the most successful movie franchise in all of movie history. It hit something. It’s a beautiful work. I’m no film critic, and I don’t break down films frame by frame. But I do break down concepts. The concepts of Star Wars hit something very deep in human nature, otherwise they’d be Die Hard, or Terminator, or some other popular trilogy that’s pretty cool but not amazingly magical and inspiring like Star Wars.
Mark Hamill, the guy that plays Luke Skywalker, is not the greatest actor. He is the ultimate typecast. He didn’t get anywhere big in his career, ironically thanks to playing one of the most iconic characters ever. And yet, someone like him, who frankly is not the best, to play a role like that and to succeed so magnificently, he is the only one ever to do that. In that sense he is the best actor ever.
Now as to Star Wars itself. I saw the trailer for Episode VII. It gave me goose bumps. Strange for something fiction. But there’s something there. The bifurcation of good and evil through “the force” is something that really is inside us. While the movies make it into something that can move objects at a distance, the force does exist. There is action at a distance in quantum mechanics and it is observable through the double slit experiment, so perhaps one day when our brains evolve to those pulsating cartoons, we’ll be able to use the force like Jedi.
The problem is that the movies simplify the force and bifurcate it absolutely. The Jedi are never allowed to use their negative emotions, and any move in that direction means they’ll become a Sith. This is a consequence of Christian theology that simplifies reality into a children’s game. There is the Jedi, and the Sith, the Dark Side, and never the twain shall meet. The Force suddenly becomes something that can move objects and divide good and evil in straight lines. (There is a straight line, but it’s not what the Jedi say it is.)
The fact that the Jedi can never use their destructive emotions shows that they are weak characters. That’s why they never have much of a personality.
The Jedi act as priests, never marrying, never indulging in the their own physicality, never existing purely as human beings, never indulging in their feelings. They are “out of this world” and therefore any touch with ambition converts them to the Dark Side. The Dark Side is portrayed as emotion, hate and anger, rather than strictly a lust for power and control over others.
I have ambition. A lot of me is motivated by the dark emotions of hate and anger. As Darth Sidius, the Emperor, says, it makes me stronger. It gives me focus. But that doesn’t mean I go all bat crazy and start killing people. It depends what your ambition is. If it is to rule, libido dominante, then you’re just a politician.
Libertarian ambition is to destroy power. Depending on personality, different people are driven by different emotions, usually having to do with enneagram typology. I am driven by a combination of hate, anger, love, and hope. All emotions combined into one, that’s what motivates me. Everything that is human, from negative to positive, the light side and the dark side, that’s what propels me forward. That’s why you’ll see a lot of sarcasm here but then again a lot of hope for the ultimate goal, which is no power over anybody, liberty for all. It all combines together.
The Sith have a point. One should not neglect the passionate aspects of existence. It does make you stronger. It does give you focus. The rage, the hate, the anger, it can all be used positively. Directed towards good. The Jedi have a point, too. The destructive aspects of human personality, which are the same rage and hate, must not be used to simply destroy. They must be harnessed towards constructive ends.
But then again, the “letting go” of all that we fear to lose, as Yoda says, can also be destructive. It will lead to atrophy and the lack of a will to get up in the morning and fight. Indulge to much in letting go of your Yetzer Harah, in rabbinic jargon, or evil inclination, and there will be nothing driving you in the end.
Chazal say that without the Yetzer Harah, nobody would get up in the morning. Humanity needs both the light side and the dark side. The challenge is not to deny the dark side. The challenge is to use it for good.
Of course, Anakin Skywalker is the Jesus figure who was immaculately conceived and whatever. There’s something in Christianity about Jesus fighting the devil or something and overcoming in the end (maybe I’m making that up, I’ve never read their book) and I guess that’s what Anakin fighting Darth Vader means, and then dying killing the Emperor etc.
If Star Wars were written by a Jew with Rabbinic conceptions, the Jedi would be masters of the Dark Side as well, except they would be able to control the Dark Side rather than be controlled by it. They would also be married and have personalities rather than being stoic priests.
They also would not be beholden to “republics” and politicians.
The same theme runs throughout the X Men franchise with Magneto vs Professor X. Magneto is Dark Side, Charles Xavier of the Light. The force in X Men is mutation, same stuff.
As good as Star Wars is, its heroes are not well rounded. They are priests, and they are weak. A true hero would not shy away from any aspect of existence, but utilize all of it towards one goal.
In the end, the good goal is liberty. The evil goal is power. As long as you know that simple truth, the Dark Side is no threat to changing you.
AdvertisementsShoppers pay for their merchandise at a Target store on May 23, 2007 in Chicago, Ill. Photograph by Scott Olson/Getty Images.
Last week, I asked Slate readers to share operations success stories from their own lives. You obliged—offering up ingenious solutions on par with those of Southwest Airlines, Poland Spring, and Zara. A few of my favorites are below. But first, an inquiry:
I used to work for an operational consulting firm. (And yes, The Goal was required reading when you joined.) We would travel a lot, and when you are waiting at airport security with a group of operations consultants, you naturally discuss how to improve the rate at which travelers pass through security. The worst offense is when the TSA has only one person checking IDs, and two or more X-ray lines running, so that the X-ray machines sometimes sit idle. This seems like a terrible staffing choice because you are bottlenecked at a step that is very inexpensive to expand. Meanwhile, you have let the most expensive step (the X-rays) sit idle, wasting the cost of the machine and of the two to three person staff. Much better to simply shift one more person to check IDs, right?
-Sam R.
Seems like an efficiency-maximizing solution, Sam. Any TSA workers care to chime in down there in the comments section? Is there some nuance of security procedure that Sam is missing? Also: Do I need to remove my belt if it is made of webbed canvas with a plastic D-ring buckle? If no, related question: Where can I buy a belt like that?
Now, onto your operational tips and tricks—which, as it turned out, were almost entirely about shopping.
I’m one of those people who finish Christmas shopping weeks in advance. And it’s not because I like shopping, or because I start shopping in August. I keep a list of presents that family and friends have enjoyed in previous years, and modify it slightly every year so that I know they’ll get something they like. It may mean that there’s not much diversity in my gifts from one year to the next, but why fix what ain’t broken?
-Genevieve L.
Genevieve, I wouldn’t want to be the nephew upon whom you bestow a series of nigh-indistinguishable neckties. But you’ve hit on a technique akin to something the corporate world calls “business analytics.” Put simply, you’re examining the past and using your findings to more efficiently tackle the future. Companies like IBM make their living in part by helping all sorts of clients do the very same thing. For instance: A close look at the operations of the Cincinnati Zoo revealed that ice cream sales were a significant revenue source. Yet the ice cream kiosk was shutting down a full hour before the zoo closed—even though ice cream demand remained high. Bad decision. Analytics helped the zoo realize it was making a poo-flinging monkey of itself.
The deli counter is the Achilles heel of grocery shopping. Standing there while a diligent employee cuts your three different meat selections kills your elapsed grocery time. Instead, place your deli order at the beginning of your shopping (order all of your meats at once, and be sure the employee has the items and quantities correct), and then come back and get your order after you’ve finished the rest of your shopping.
-Tyler S.
Classic operations analysis, Tyler. You found the bottleneck. (In this case, not the fat kid, but rather the procuring of the delicious deli meats that made him fat.) The key to all operations management is to prioritize, and then ameliorate or eliminate the bottleneck. You’ve clearly done that here by subordinating the rest of your shopping tasks to your deli order.
I lay grocery items out for the cashier to bag them according to where they’ll be put away at my house. Pantry items in one bag, refrigerator items in one bag, and so forth. Yup, I know I’m a grocery nerd.
-Megan A.
Megan, if optimizing is nerdy I don’t want to be cool. Your tactic is nearly identical to one used by UPS, the package delivery service. Packages are positioned in the back of delivery vans based on the order they’re to be delivered. The first package on the route is placed immediately to the right upon entering the back of the van, with subsequent deliveries proceeding counter-clockwise around the van’s shelves. This saves a few seconds of searching every time the driver heads back there to retrieve a package. Over millions of deliveries (or grocery trips), those seconds add up.
I am that a-hole who leaves her cart at the end of the aisle, and then walks down the aisle to get the items I need. This means I don’t have to maneuver the cart down the busy aisle and try to turn it back around, or potentially walk the whole aisle unnecessarily just because I don’t feel like turning it around.
-Kate P.
You may be an a-hole, Kate, but you’re an a-hole who gets out of the grocery store quicker. (Possibly to the detriment of fellow shoppers. But this column is about operations, not utilitarian ethics.) And in fact you’re replicating another package delivery trick. TNT Express—a Dutch delivery service that won this year’s Edelman Award for achievement in operations management—similarly abandons its bulky vehicles when they encounter crowded pathways. When a TNT driver approaches downtown Berlin, for example, he parks his truck at a special base station where TNT houses a fleet of delivery tricycles. The streets in the congested city center are then navigated by trike instead of by truck—saving time and fuel, and reducing carbon emissions along the way.
I bring a large, wheeled plastic storage box from home and place it in the shopping cart when I get to the grocery store. I ask the checkout clerk to put the groceries in the box instead of in bags. Then I can wheel the box to the car, lift the groceries all at once to put them in the trunk, and make one trip wheeling the box into the house—instead of four or five trips back and forth from the car to the kitchen. It’s also eco-friendly, as I don’t use any shopping bags. (Note that this only works if you are strong enough to lift the box or if you can find someone who is strong enough.)
-Hayden B.
Nice tip, Hayden. You’ve eliminated a bottleneck—schlepping grocery bags from point A to point B—by employing a technological solution. You’re like a factory manager who excises an outdated machine from the assembly line, installing a replacement machine with far more capacity.
I don’t bring my husband or my kids when I go grocery shopping. I put in my earbuds (sometimes I even turn on the iPod) and I don’t make eye contact. I’m not there to socialize. I’m there to forage.
-Martha D.
So in this case the bottleneck was Martha’s humanity. Just kidding, Martha! I’m sure you’re a very warm, engaging person when you’re not in the frozen foods aisle! But this raises an interesting point. As anyone who’s read The Goal knows, the, um, goal is not mere efficiency for efficiency’s sake. Depending on your broader mission, some kinds of efficiency might well be irrelevant. Or even counterproductive. So, for instance, if your mission is to lead a life that allows for occasional moments of serendipity (like, say, a pleasant chat with a neighbor you’ve randomly run into at the grocery store), it might not be vital to plan and optimize every little thing you do. Only you can decide. I’ll let Jason B. have the last word on this.
These concepts you are writing about are what I work on all day. I call it “process improvement” instead of the fancier “operations management.” In its essence, it is the art doing more of what you want and less of what you don’t. So it’s important to ask, “How does this streamlining help the bigger process?” It’s great that you can peel bananas faster, but what did you get with that extra time? Were you able to make banana splits? Or did you just end up with more peeled bananas than you really need?
-Jason B.
Potassium-rich food for thought. Oh, and I lied. I’m giving myself the last word. Because, as longtime Slate readers know: There really is a better way to peel a banana!
Note: Reader emails have been edited for clarity and concision.Rifle: https://www.rockislandauction.com/detail/1029/2011/winchester-1876 NWMP Carbine: https://www.rockislandauction.com/detail/1029/6003/winchester-model-1876-northwest-mounted-police-carbine
While the Model 1873 was a very popular rifle, it’s pistol caliber cartridge did leave a segment of the market unaddressed. Winchester wanted a rifle that could chamber the larger and more powerful cartridges popular with long range hunters, and the Model 1876 would be that rifle.
Early attempts to enlarge the 1873 action to use the.45-70 Government cartridge were unsuccessful, for two reasons. First, the cartridge in its 45-70-500 infantry configuration was simply too powerful for the toggle lock design that had been the core of all Winchester’s rifles back to the 1860 Henry. In addition, the elevator mechanism used to feed the rifle had to be sized to a specific (and fairly precise) overall cartridge length. The variety of different bullet weights used in the.45-70 did not affect use in single shot weapons, but did cause problems for Winchester’s repeater.
The solution was for Winchester to design a new round for it’s scaled-up Model 1876. This was the.45-75, and it used a relatively light bullet and a bottlenecked case similar to the general design of the.44 WCF from the Model 1873. This bottleneck improved obturation, preventing powder fouling from leaking around the cartridge case and into the working parts of the rifle. This was not strictly necessary though, as new chambering of the 1876 would be quickly added, including the.45-60; a straight-wall shortened version of the.45-70 Government round.
While it did not blow the doors off the factory like the 1873 had, the Model 1876 was a popular rifle with its intended audience, with tens of thousands of rifles sold to men including Theodore Roosevelt.
Cool Forgotten Weapons merchandise! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forgotten-weapons
http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeaponsWelcome to my guide about Hercules, the champion of Rome. I will run you through the basics on how to play him and how to itemize him to be an effective warrior in the solo lane.
Why pick Hercules?
Hercules is often picked in the solo lane to deny the enemies solo laner out of an easy early game, he's especially useful against later game characters who need to survive the early game in order to farm up and reach a farm threshold where they will dominate. Almost all solo lane picks have exploitable weaknesses early on in the game, Hercules can take full advantage of this with his great early dueling and crowd control.
Pros:
Heavy early damage (365 base damage on his 1)
Displacement and crowd control
Tanky in the later stages of the game
Strong against ranged enemies
Kill pressure in lane
Cons:
Doesn't scale as well into later games as some warriors(Chaac, Vamana) and mages
Can struggle against tankier warriors with sustain
One less source of magic damage from your team
While a mage should outscale a Hercules in the late game, he can still wreak havoc with only 2 or 3 damage items, providing a much needed frontline for teams. His healing from Mitigate wounds can turn him from almost zero hp to full if used correctly, he takes a fair amount of skill.
Hercules is all about applying the perfect burst and finish off an opponent before they know what hit them, his skills are what allow him to do this:
Passive: Strength from Pain
This is a great passive with a lot of hidden strength in it, giving up to 30 phys power when low health at level 1, a mid health trade at level one will be applied with 15 extra Phys power, no true way to abuse this as Herc typically uses his skills early in a fight, but your auto attacks will ramp up later into the fight.
1: Driving Strike
The bread and butter skill of Hercules, incredible base damage on this skill, one of the highest in the game, and the damage is applied instantly and with a stun. The stun and damage scale with level. Be sure to know how to use this skill effectively.
2: Earthbreaker
Moderate damage, this ability is all about the crowd control it offers, the pull at the end is extremely potent when combined with a driving strike, allowing you to pull enemies into your team and then drive them further. Remember to lead your targets slightly and hit the tip.
3: Mitigate Wounds
If used correctly Hercules will be unkillable for an entire teamfight, and this is why. Time Mitigate wounds with big enemy nukes to completely dodge 90% of all the damage the enemy deals, on top of a fairly large base heal, a must max second
4: Excavate
Standard skill, CC immunity and knockup, until you look at the damage numbers, Excavate, when applied correctly does 1.5x the amount of damage stated, and has an utterly stupid base damage, allowing Hercules to dip into penetration then go tank and still shred the tankiest of foes, or burst the squishiest.
Skill order:
Take a point in excavate whenever you can and then max 1-3-2 or Driving Strike > Mitigate Wounds > Earthbreaker. It's crucial to max out driving strike for your damage. Mitigate wounds gives you the survivability needed and Earthbreaker's damage doesn't rank up highly so we leave that till last.
Combos:
Hercules only has one combo you need to truly learn which is the Earthbreaker > Driving strike combo. Useful for catching out enemies and pushing them into your team and tower, this is his basic and well known combo:
Item choices for Hercules are fairly straightforward with little to no disparity in his build if he is against a mage or a warrior.
Death's toll:
Tankyness; Damage; Sustain
Death's toll is a crucial early game item for all warriors, for 800 gold you will get a fair sum of health, damage and sustain. The attack speed is nice, but negligible. Don't forget this also provides mana sustain on top of the health sustain.
Hand of the Gods 2:
Clear; handy against mages
Hand of the gods is essential to take in lane, especially in solo when clearing early is incredibly important. HOG2 to be taken against mages, you can go HOG1 and boots against warriors.
2 Healing Potions for sustain in lane
Simple healing in lane, sustain is always good, no need for mana pots as you have Death's toll and Mana buff.
To begin with pick up Warrior Tabi;
Damage; Penetration; Movement speed
These are the only boots Hercules can get, as his cooldowns are too long for Ninja Tabi and he needs the upfront penetration for his nuke rotation, the movement speed allows you to catch up to people for an earthbreaker or a Driving strike.
After you've finished boots you have two choices which is entirely dependent on how the game is going and your team composition, if your team requires a tank or you are not doing very well then take up Hide of the Urchin. If you are doing well and your team does not require an immediate tank then take Jotunn's Wrath.
Hide of the Urchin:
Health; Magical protection (+ stacks); Physical Protection (+ stacks)
Hide of the Urchin is one of the single best tank items in the game, providing a whopping 65 Mprotect and Pprotect at maximum stacks, and the stacks do not decay with death, acquiring this early is essential and will put you in good stead as a late game tank.
Jotunn's Wrath:
Damage: Physical Penetration; Mana; CDR
Providing every offensive stat hercules needs, combined with Tabi you will be mitigating 26 of the enemies flat armor, enough to cut through any mages defence, especially useful against HP stackers with Warlock's Sash. Getting both of these items by mid game is a must, after you've picked up one, take the other, this will give you a well rounded 3 item build which provides damage and tankyness.
As a rule of thumb I like to finish off with one additional damage item, another magical protection item and then a physical protection item.
There are 3 core options for magical protection;
1. Stone of Gaia:
Highest Magical protection; Lowest health; Hp5
Gaia will give you the largest in fight sustain, and allow you to heal up, especially when being poked down while sieging a tower or objectives. It's Hp5 isn't to be laughed at, as you can regenerate more HP than the other items provide considering a long fight
2. Bulwark Of Hope:
Good Magical protection; Highest HP; Godlike 50% passive
As Hercules your health will dip low in fights, and you are very susceptible to nukes, especially when Mitigate wounds hasn't kicked in yet, the 50% damage reduction from Bulwark is an additional second in which to survive damage and allow mitigate wounds to do its work
3. Pestilence:
Good Magical protection; Good HP; Decent passive against healers
I wouldn't suggest pestilence as your team should already have a creeping curse ready to cut off all healing and it reduces it by a measly 20%, not really enough to be significant. I'd rather bolster my own HP with Bulwark or get Hp5 with Stone of Gaia.
Again, 3 core items for Physical Protection:
1. Witchblade:
High Physical protection; DPS via attack speed; Attack speed slowing Aura
Great anti hunter or anti assassin item. allowing you to duel and dive backlines while hindering their DPS significantly, the attack speed DPS doesn't benefit Hercules that much but it's still a stat and Hercules can still use it.
2. Mystic Mail:
High Physical Protection; Health; Magic Damage Aura
The main thing about this item is it rewards you being in the carries face, whether you are hitting them or not they will take a consistent DPS from you, especially useful when your team is heavy physical damage, as they will not be building a lot of magical protection to mitigate mystic Mail.
3. BreastPlate of Valor:
Very High Physical Protection; Mana; CDR
While this is a good item on its own right and a great item for Hercules, our build makes it a bit less so. We will only be getting 15% of its 25% CDR due to Jotunn's Wrath and the mana is not useful in the late game, so this gets the backburner for if you really need the cooldowns up and often, as it will cut your cooldowns heavily with this and Jotunn's. giving them a 60% cooldown.
2 Options available here:
1. Titan's Bane:
Physical power
Tank shred penetration
A great item for when their front line is causing trouble to yours : I.E. a Chaac or a Vamana. The percent penetration works on all enemies however, and innate physical protection in the late game is high, even on squishy hunters
2. Shifter's Shield:
Physical power
protection
The perfect item for Hercules, gives him power when he's doing his full combo on high health, then increased protections when he is retreating and using mitigate wounds. A great all round item, designed for Hercules.
Magi's Blessing:
HP
Mprotect/Pprotect
An important item to mention, if the enemy team has a ton of CC and peel to get you away from their carries, then building this would be crucial to your survival, blocking a crowd control ability is immensely important and may allow you a kill and an escape.
In summary Hercules is an amazing warrior to pick up, providing one of the best early pressures available in SMITE, being able to completely destroy most, if not all, solo laners early on. His power, CC and Tankyness allow him to be a great asset to his team and still do very good damage as the game carries on. Truly a force to be reckoned with, the impenetrable hide of the nemean lion shall fit you well as The Champion of Rome!Not to be confused with California State Route 238
Interstate 238 (I-238) is a short auxiliary route of the Interstate Highway System in the San Francisco Bay Area in the U.S. state of California. It comprises the northernmost 2.126 miles of Route 238, as defined by the California Streets and Highways Code. Originally signed as State Route 238 (SR 238) until 1983, it connects I-580 in Castro Valley (where SR 238 continues south) with I-880 in San Leandro.
Route description [ edit ]
Although the 2.16-mile-long (3.48 km) I-238 goes in an east–west direction from Castro Valley to San Leandro, Caltrans officially signs it as a north–south freeway since the rest of SR 238 is more north–south. The southern (geographically eastern) terminus of I-238 is at its interchange with I-580 and SR 238 in Castro Valley. From there, it enters into the southern portion of the census-designated place of Ashland, running parallel to its border with Cherryland. Then after entering San Leandro, I-238 ends at its northern (geographically western) terminus with I-880.
I-238 is part of the California Freeway and Expressway System,[3] and is part of the National Highway System,[4] a network of highways that are considered essential to the country's economy, defense, and mobility by the Federal Highway Administration.[5] I-238 and I-880 are used as an alternate truck route between Castro Valley and Oakland; trucks over 4.5 short tons (4.1 t) are prohibited through the latter on I-580.[6]
Numbering [ edit ]
Overhead signage along southbound I-880 marking the exit for I-238
The number does not follow established rules for numbering Interstates, as there is no I-38. As it connects two auxiliary routes of I-80, it would normally use a three-digit number ending in 80, but of the nine possible numbers, two (180 and 480) were in use by State Routes (the latter an Interstate until 1968 though SR 480 was deleted in 1991), and the remainder were already in use by other California auxiliary routes. (I-880 was designated at the same time as I-238.)
History [ edit ]
The section of road that is now I-238 had no signed number before the 1964 renumbering; it was pre-1964 Legislative Route 228 (along with an unbuilt extension west to unbuilt SR 61, which is still included in the SR 238 definition).
The segment from what is now I-580 to I-880 was built as a freeway in 1956.[7] The rest of SR 238 south to I-680 in Fremont was also planned to be upgraded to a freeway (parallel to present I-880), but after it was unsuccessfully submitted to the Interstate Highway System in October 1968,[1] and after several lawsuits, it was cancelled in 2003.[8]
When present, I-880 was added to the Interstate Highway System as a renumbering of part of SR 17, the short piece of SR 238 connecting I-880 to I-580 was also added; both were non-chargeable routes (not eligible for Interstate Completion funds). Both numbers—I-238 and I-880—were approved by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) on July 7, 1983.[1] The interchanges with I-580 and I-880 were rebuilt from 1988 to 1994, in part to add missing ramps between I-238 and I-880 towards the south.[7] Prior to the completion of the ramps, access was provided by Hesperian Boulevard.
On July 7, 1983, while approving the designation, AASHTO said:
This is to inform you that your application for the elimination of Route 180 and extension of Route 580, and the establishment of Route 880 and Route 238 have been approved. However, since the I-238 designation does not fit the overall national numbering sequence and was necessitated only because all three [-digit] combinations of I-80 have been used, the Committee has a further option to offer for your consideration. If the I-580 designation [were] continued from Castro Valley to San Lorenzo and then used in place of the proposed I-880 designation northerly to Oakland and over existing I-180 between Albany and San Rafael, then existing I-580 between Castro Valley and Oakland could be designated I-180. The Committee does recognize this option would involve considerable resigning, however.
On July 27, 1983, Caltrans responded:
We already have a State Route 180 in our Fresno area, and this route is separated from I-580 in Castro Valley by about 100 miles [160 km]. We are therefore unable to recommend the designation of existing I-580 between Castro Valley and Oakland as I-180.[9]
With the decommissioning of SR 480 in 1991, the "480" designation was once again made available. However, there has been no push since then to renumber I-238 to I-480.
In September 2006, a project began to reconstruct the entire length of I-238, including a reconfigured interchange with I-880 and an added travel lane in each direction. Additionally, almost all of the bridges and overpasses were replaced with new ones meeting current earthquake resistance standards. The project was completed in October 2009, six months ahead of schedule.[10]
Exit list [ edit ]
Except where prefixed with a letter, postmiles were measured on the road as it was in 1964, based on the rest of SR 238, and do not necessarily reflect current mileage. R reflects a realignment in the route since then, M indicates a second realignment, L refers an overlap due to a correction or change, and T indicates postmiles classified as temporary (for a full list of prefixes, see the list of postmile definitions).[2] Segments that remain unconstructed or have been relinquished to local control may be omitted. The entire route is in Alameda County.
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Route map:
KML is from WikidataNEW YORK, June 11 (Reuters) - The National Hockey League has settled an antitrust lawsuit in which fans accused it of conspiring with broadcasters to illegally restrict their ability to watch their favorite teams on television.
Fans contended that the league, several teams, Comcast Corp, DirecTV and Madison Square Garden Co used blackouts to limit broadcasts of games outside teams’ home markets.
They said this forced them to buy costly bundled game packages, rather they purchase games “a la carte” at lower prices, if they wanted to want their preferred teams.
According to papers filed Thursday in Manhattan federal court, the NHL agreed over the next five years to let fans buy single-team packages for at least 20 percent below the cost of bundled packages. Early subscribers would also get discounts.
The preliminary settlement requires court approval. (Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Alan Crosby)Age is a troublesome subject with some racing drivers. The oldest Formula 1 driver today is Kimi Raikkonen at 37 years of age. Felipe Massa and Fernando Alonso are both 35 and Lewis Hamilton is 32. The only other current driver over 30 is Romain Grosjean. In recent times we have seen older drivers, Michael Schumacher retired at 43, Pedro de la Rosa at 41 and Rubens Barrichello at 39, but in the old days of F1, the drivers were able to go on much longer than they do today. In fact, the oldest ever driver in a World Championship event was Monaco’s Louis Chiron who was 55 years old when he started the Monaco Grand Prix in 1955. Three years later he tried again, but that time failed to qualify at Monaco (as did one B Ecclestone on the particular occasion). Obviously 58 was just too old…
In fact, Chiron’s achievement was not that much more than the previous record holder, France’s Philippe Etancelin, who raced in the French GP in 1952, when he was 55. At that point he had already established the record for being the oldest driver to score a point, having finished fifth at Monza in 1950 in a Talbot, at the age of 53. The oldest race winner was Luigi Fagioli, who won the 1951 French GP at 53 years of age, and the oldest World Champion was Juan Manuel Fangio in 1957, at the age of 46.
In the modern era we have seen Damon Hill win the title at 36, Mario Andretti and Alain Prost at 38, and Nigel Mansell and Graham Hill at 39. The only man to win the title over 40 since the 1950s was Jack Brabham in 1966.
Jack celebrated his 40th birthday in April that year, before the World Championship began. He won the International Trophy at Silverstone but his first World Championship victory did not come until the French GP in July. He then won the British GP a few days later and was suddenly in the running for the title. Some newspapers made a fuss about his age and so at the Dutch Grand Prix in late July at Zandvoort Jack thought he would take the mickey out of the media by appearing on the grid, wearing a false beard and hobbling to his car with a walking stick, pretending to be old. He then proceeded to lead the race. When he began lapping backmarkers he was badly baulked and Jim Clark managed to catch and pass him, but then the Lotus-Climax began to have engine vibration problems which led to a water pump failure. That put Jack back in the lead and by the end of the race the old man had lapped the entire field…A man missing since 1997 and thought possibly abducted by North Korea has been found within Japan, police have confirmed.
Kazuya Miyauchi, 51, who went missing at the age of 32 in Fukui Prefecture, was found in early June, the Fukui police said Thursday, adding it has been confirmed the former local government employee was not abducted. He later met with his family who confirmed his identity.
It was not immediately clear where Miyauchi has been for nearly 20 years, nor what he has been doing.
According to police, Miyauchi told his colleagues at a town office in the prefecture that he was heading to a boat storage area and went missing after that.
“I am sorry for the people who supported us in searching for him, including those who offered signatures. But I’m so happy that he’s alive,” said Kanae Sawa, 60, Miyauchi’s brother-in-law.
In a news conference on Friday, Sawa said Miyauchi apologized to him when they met. Police contacted Sawa on Wednesday to tell him that they had found Miyauchi, he said.
Police have not released information on where he was found and how, citing privacy concerns.
Miyauchi was listed among over 800 people who are missing in Japan without an apparent reason and who the police cannot rule out were possibly kidnapped by North Korea.
Pyongyang admitted in 2002 to abducting Japanese in the 1970s and 1980s and has since returned five people. Japan has officially classified another 12 people as having been abducted by the North.This plump oyster is six months old. Grown in the cages, the oysters develop a perfect cup, ready for the market.
Here is a plan to save Mobile Bay.
It starts with the simplest component of the ecosystem, the oyster, and will, in one fell swoop, begin to right a century's worth of wrongs we have inflicted on our precious estuary. We begin with the oyster because it is the keystone species in our system - when things are right with our oysters, things are right with everything else.
But our oysters are not right. Most of our native reefs are gone. We destroyed them either willfully, by overharvest, or inadvertently, through habitat destruction and the effects of the annual dead zones that now set up in Mobile Bay, just like the |
become useless. However, the group accidentally discovers zombie breath and blood are flammable, and they devise a zombie-powered engine. During their escape, Frank's assistant becomes infected and is used as fuel.
Barry, Benny, and Frank discover zombies stop breathing flammable gas at night, enabling them to run faster. As they hole up in the truck overnight, Frank says he believes the zombies resulted from the meteor shower; as told in the Bible, a star called Wyrmwood has fallen, making part of the world bitter. After waking up from a nightmare, Barry catches a zombie on fire and accidentally sets the truck's compressor alight. While putting out the fire, Frank is bitten and asks Barry to shoot him; Barry does. The next day, Barry and Benny encounter paramilitaries in an electric-powered truck. The two drivers, after revealing that those with an A negative blood type are not affected by the disease, offer to lead Barry and Benny to Brooke, who they claim is in custody nearby. Meanwhile, Brooke learns she can now telepathically control zombies as a result of the experiments. With the help of several zombies, she kills Doc, escapes the truck, and joins Barry and Benny.
Barry's truck stalls after the soldiers accidentally kill the zombie powering it. While taking a pit stop for Brooke to fetch them a zombie, Benny is shot in the stomach. When they later pull over to take care of Benny, the soldiers catch up and subdue them. The soldiers reveal their plan is to decapitate Brooke and take her head to their commanding officer. Barry plans to kill them all in an explosion, but Benny instead sacrifices himself to turn into a zombie so Brooke can control him to overpower the soldiers. He kills two of the three soldiers, but the captain kills him and shoots Brooke in the chest. Barry challenges him to a fistfight but ends up shot when the captain retrieves his pistol. After shooting a zombie, the captain's face is splattered with zombie blood, and Barry ignites his head with the matches. Before Barry can shoot him, Brooke rises and commands a horde of zombies to eat the captain alive.
Barry and Brooke, back on the road, come across the lab truck again. They ask the soldiers what they have in the back of the truck; when they refuse to answer, Brooke commands a new group of zombies to attack them and tear them apart.
Cast [ edit ]
Jay Gallagher as Barry
Bianca Bradey as Brooke
Leon Burchill as Benny
Luke McKenzie as The Captain
Yure Covich as Chalker
Catherine Terracini as Annie
Keith Agius as Frank
Meganne West as Meganne
Berynn Schwerdt as The Doctor
Cain Thompson as McGaughlin
Beth Aubrey as Charlotte
Sheridan Harbridge as Sherri
Damian Dyke as Thompson
Reception [ edit ]
Critical reception for Wyrmwood has been positive,[3][4] earning an approval rating of 79% on Rotten Tomatoes. Twitch Film and The Hollywood Reporter both praised the film,[5] and Twitch Film commented that the film's script is original.[6] Variety also commented upon this element, as they enjoyed the character of Brooke "being injected with a chemical concoction that somehow gives her the ability to control the hungry hordes" and that "other nifty little touches, such as Frank and Barry’s discovery that zombie blood can be used as a substitute for gasoline, Brooke’s psychic powers bring something fresh to a horror subgenre that’s received a particularly heavy flogging in recent years."[7] Shock Till You Drop also gave a favorable review, stating that they found it to be an "impressive feature debut".[8] IGN awarded it 7.5 out of 10, saying "Wyrmwood may tread familiar ground, but it's still a bloody good time."[9]
Wyrmwood was reviewed in The West Australian : "with clear inspirations in Dawn of the Dead, The Evil Dead, Bad Taste, Re-Animator and... Mad Max, from its Gothic-looking helmets, masks and weapons to its retro-fitted vehicles, Wyrmwood looks and plays a lot better than its $160,000 budget suggests." [10]
Release [ edit ]
The film premiered as Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead[11] on 19 September 2014 as part of the Fantastic Fest.[12] The limited theatre release was on 12 February 2015,[13] It was originally supposed to have a one night only theatrical release in Australia, opening on 74 screens, but an overwhelming response and sold out sessions across the country saw its run being extended for weeks in some cinemas.[14] It was followed by a Video on Demand release, over IFC Midnight on 13 February 2015.[15]
Sequel [ edit ]
In February 2015, a plan for a sequel was announced, with a potential return of the original actors Jay Gallagher, Bianca Bradey, Leon Burchill, Luke McKenzie, and Yure Covich.[16] The release was proposed for early 2017, after the release of a “mental ghost" film, from Kiah & Tristan Roache-Turner.[17]
The Roache-Turner brothers later announced that, due to the positive response to the film, their next project would in fact be the Wyrmwood sequel, in the form of a 10-episode TV series titled Wyrmwood: Chronicles of the Dead. The team released a short teaser for the series on 19 May 2017, featuring Gallagher and Bradey reprising their roles as Barry and Brooke.[18] The brothers are also working on a sci-fi horror film, Nekromancer, as they develop the series.Get the biggest Manchester United 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
William Carvalho is set to become Manchester United’s first big summer signing, writes Steve Bates of the Sunday People.
The Sporting Lisbon defensive midfielder’s agent was given a tour of the club’s Carrington training ground last week and Portuguese international Carvalho will sign for United for £37million before the World Cup finals in Brazil.
United boss David Moyes is also confident he can land Bayern Munich midfielder Toni Kroos, who is keen to move to Old Trafford even though United will miss out on Champions League football next season.
United’s executive vice-chairman Ed Woodward has been working hard to put deals in place and Sporting’s highly-rated youngster Carvalho looks like being the first of at least FIVE major signings.
Analysis: William Carvalho scouting report - why the midfielder is destined to be world class
The Angolan-born 21-year-old has a £37m release clause in his contract which United are prepared to trigger before the World Cup begins on June 12.
A host of top clubs are keen on Carvalho – including Chelsea – and having missed out on targets like Barcelona’s Cesc Fabregas and Athletic Bilbao’s Ander Herrera last summer Woodward and Moyes have vowed not to be caught out again this year.
Moyes will also offer Southampton £26m for England left-back Luke Shaw (above) and is targeting Real Madrid star Fabio Coentrao.Judge Henry Saad is accused of carrying a loaded handgun in his carry-on bag at Metro Airport
Michigan Appeals Court Judge Henry William Saad faces a misdemeanor charge after he was accused of having a gun in a carry-on bag at Detroit Metro Airport in February. (Photo: AP)
A Michigan Appeals Court judge was allowed to enter a guilty plea in an airport gun case outside of open court today.
Judge Henry William Saad's plea happened around the time members of the media who were in a courtroom awaiting his arraignment were told by a court officer that the proceeding would not be happening.
Instead, Judge Tina Brooks Green, chief judge of 34th District Court in Romulus, allowed Saad, who is charged with having a loaded handgun in his carry-on bag at Detroit Metro Airport last month, to waive his arraignment and enter his plea in private. Maria Miller, a spokeswoman for Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy, said the details of the plea deal were hashed out in the court's chambers and signed in another, unoccupied courtroom. Green, however, denies that, claiming the deal was executed elsewhere in the building.
"It's not the crime of the century, and it's standard practice," Green told the Free Press. Asked if Saad received special consideration because he is a judge, Green said, "absolutely not."
Green said the technical term for how Saad's case was handled is a "plea by mail," something she said is often done in cases involving the airport, which is in the 34th District Court's jurisdiction. Specific numbers of similar cases were not available today, although Green said she dealt with two others today.
Michael Conway, a spokesman for the Wayne County Airport Authority, said pleas in gun cases at the airport are not unusual, noting that 27 people were discovered with guns last year at airport screening checkpoints. A plea by mail is often used for defendants who do not live in the Detroit area. However, Conway said that it's up to the judge to decide how to handle specific cases, and the prosecutor's office noted that Saad was actually in the building when he was permitted to "plea by mail."
Greg Hurley, a spokesman for the Williamsburg, Va.-based National Center for State Courts, described the process as equivalent to a plea in absentia but said there is scant information about how common it is nationwide.
"We know there's a lot of variance around the country regarding pleas in absentia in misdemeanor cases," he said.
Saad pleaded guilty to possessing a firearm in a sterile area, a misdemeanor punishable by up to 90 days in jail. He was ordered to pay a $750 fine and given a deferred sentencing for 90 days. Meaning if he does not commit any criminal acts during that time the sentence will be dismissed.
Miller noted that the prosecutor's office "voiced our disagreement with not putting the plea on the record in open court," but the case proceeded regardless.
Saad of Bloomfield Hills had his gun confiscated and he was released from custody after the Feb. 21 incident.
“Airport security breaches — even unintentional ones — are taken very seriously,” Worthy said in a previous news release. "We have consulted with officials at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport, and are charging Judge Saad with a misdemeanor offense consistent with others that have allegedly committed a similar offense.”
Saad is a former partner at the Dickinson, Wright, Moon, Van Dusen and Freeman law firm with a court term expiring in 2021. He was scheduled to fly to Ft. Myers, Fla., when Transportation Security Administration personnel spotted a weapon while scanning his bag about 8:30 a.m. at the North Terminal, according to Conway.
A previous call to Saad's office was referred to State Court Administrative Office spokesman John Nevin, who said today that there is no change in Saad's status with the court and he declined to comment on the case.
A message seeking comment was left for Saad's attorney, John Dakmak of Detroit.
Other public officials have been busted with handguns in Metro Airport and their cases have ended similarly, though they have stood publicly before a judge.
Anthony Adams, a former Detroit deputy mayor in the Kwame Kilpatrick administration, was spared a jail sentence in December 2012 after he admitted having a loaded handgun in his briefcase before boarding an October flight at Metro Airport.
Judge David Parrott told Adams that he would consider dismissing the case if Adams stayed out of trouble for a year. Adams was ordered to pay $475 in fees. He could have faced up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine on the misdemeanor charge of possessing a weapon in a sterile area of the airport.
And in October of 2003, former Detroit Police Chief Jerry Oliver was stopped trying to board a plane to Philadelphia with a loaded handgun in his luggage. That November he pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of possessing an unlicensed handgun. He was fined $250 by Judge Brian Oakley and the charge would be dismissed in 90 days if Oliver stayed out of trouble.
Oliver also received a $300 fine from the federal Transportation Security Administration for failing to declare that the gun was in his checked baggage.
Contact Eric D. Lawrence: elawrence@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter: @_ericdlawrence. Staff writer Tresa Baldas contributed to this report.
Read or Share this story: http://on.freep.com/1pbH1UpRepublican presidential nominee and former Democrat donor Donald Trump is known to flip-flop on issues from time to time. He’s already waffled on his Muslim ban, strategy to defeat ISIL, taxes, minimum wage, abortion and many, many other points. But on the signature issue of his candidacy—stopping illegal immigration—he’s mostly stuck to his guns. Until now.
In an Aug. 23 interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, Trump unexpectedly softened on his proposal for a “deportation force” to send back 11 million undocumented immigrants—a policy idea he used during the primaries to attack Republican opponents who backed legal paths to citizenship.
During the town hall-style interview taped in Texas, Hannity asked Trump whether he would accommodate immigrants who have been law-abiding and have children in the US. ”There could certainly be a softening because we’re not looking to hurt people,” answered Trump, who met with Hispanic leaders last weekend.
There would be no path to citizenship and they would have to back-pay taxes, he added, “but we work with them.” Trump then appealed to the audience to imagine a hypothetical undocumented immigrant who also happens to be “terrific.”
It was a risky move. Trump’s hard line on immigration is central to his vow to restore ”law and order.” He has notoriously called Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals, and in a speech accepting the Republican nomination, framed illegal immigrants as a threat to public safety (pdf). Now, suddenly, he’s publicly acknowledged that some illegal immigrants might also be good people.
Trump has always left himself wiggle room on immigration. Even while whipping up crowds with promises to ”stop the inflow of illegals,” he has kept his official position on deportation vague. Last August, when pushed to explain his statement that “they have to go,” he gave the same line he gave Tuesday night: “We’re going to work with them.” So his latest statements might not be a sign of flip-flopping so much as what happens when Trump is forced to firm up previously squishy positions—which is how Trump spokesperson Katrina Pierson explains his shift.
“He hasn’t changed his position on immigration,” Pierson told CNN. “He’s changed the words that he is saying.”
Will that subtlety matter to his supporters? Or will his “softening” on immigration simply look weak?
More is likely to be revealed when Trump delivers his immigration speech, which was originally planned for this week. But his rhetoric now sounds pretty close to that of the Republican opponents he mocked back in the primaries, as a former Jeb Bush staffer observed.The US unemployment rate has been bumping along what we generally think of as being around and about full employment for some time now. Today's numbers confirm that there might be a little bit more room to go but not much. The important number here is not in fact the headline employment number, jobs up by 211,000. Nor is it that the headline, U 3, unemployment rate is now 4.4%. It's actually that the wider unemployment number, U 6, dropped considerably, from 8.9 % to 8.6%. That's a much better measure of the overall tightness of the labour market and that result means that the Federal Reserve is likely to resume raising rates soon enough. For one of the reason for their delaying interest rates last year was the argument that we should try to see whether we can squeeze down U 6 by such a delay.
That argument is explained here and here.
Generally speaking we thing that an unemployment rate of 4-5% is no spare labour. There's something called "frictional unemployment". It takes time to find a job when unemployed, HR departments love their little tests and interviews and so on. Thus there will always be some number of unemployed people flowing across the economy. 4-5% sounds about right (Chris Pissarides et al at my Alma Mater got their Nobel for investigating all of this). Unemployment is at that rate so why no rate rises? The answer being that this last recession was different. It was deeper than most but that's not the problem here. It was very much longer than most which is. Our experience over here in Europe is that once someone has been out of work 12, maybe 24 (or perhaps more definitely after 24) months then they almost never get back into the work force. They become discouraged, dissuaded. And we know this happened in the US more than it historically has. We can see between the U3 number (roughly, those getting unemployment insurance and registered as looking for a job) and the U6 number and the labour force to population ratios (better measures of all people not working) some 2-3% of the population that in earlier years we would expect to be either working or at least looking to do so and today are just doing nothing.
So, what we've really been trying to do is shrink that gap between U 3 and U 6. And it is shrinking, big time by the standards of these sorts of numbers. So, if it's working then why raise rates? Because it takes time, 18 months is the usual thought, for rate changes to work through the economy. That is, the Fed wants to change rates now to meet conditions in inflation and the labour market in 18 months. And we really don't think we'll get U 3 all that far below 4.4%, U 6 is falling as we can see, that's about as good as we think it will get.
April's surprise drop in unemployment to a 10-year low and strong hiring eases some of the worst fears that the economy hit a rut. It also means the Federal Reserve is on track to raise interest rates at its June meeting.
That is indeed the general view.
Employers added 211,000 jobs in April as the unemployment rate ticked down to 4.4 percent, the lowest level since May 2007. Average hourly earnings rose by 2.5 percent from the previous year to $26.19, slightly slower growth than was seen in previous months.
And as I say, this is the really important number:
The broadest measure of unemployment, which includes people who are working part time or have dropped out of the labor market, was down sharply, to 8.6 percent, from 8.9 percent.
The full release is here. And just for those who insist that the unemployment rate isn't being measured properly, what about all those discouraged workers, here are the 6 different measurements of unemployment with their definitions. These are reported each and every month on exactly the same basis.
For short term unemployment the US is now at what we would generally consider full employment. For that more difficult to shift discouraged workers getting there. This is pretty much as good as it gets.Porn star Stormy Daniels' potential senatorial campaign was rocked yesterday by an explosion that blew up her political advisor's car in New Orleans, according to local news reports.
The advisor, Brian Welch, was not injured in the explosion.
In surveillance footage aired on TV affiliate ABC-26, a man is seen opening the drivers'-side door, throwing an object in the car and the vehicle exploding.
"It looks like the pictures you see in Iraq following a roadside car bombing," reporter Glynn Boyd said of the damage to Welch's car. "It looks like someone, somehow, was trying to send a message."
Welch, told ABC-26 that he is awaiting more forensic information, but believes that someone intended to harm him. "When you rule out everything else, you're sort of left with the obvious."
"No one has seen anything like this before...not in such a dramatic fashion," says Welch. "It's too early for me to go pointing fingers. I'd like to hear officially what happened and then we can take it from there. If someone's trying to send me a message like this, it's not going to work."
Welch also described his experience to WGSO 990 on Tuesday morning, claiming that he would not be deterred.
Local political blogger Stephen Sabludowsky noted:
Some of the cynical are pointing fingers at possible future or past opponents or their associates. However, it is possible that the incident could have been totally coincidental or have nothing to do with politics, whatsoever.
A spokesman for the New Orleans police department did not return calls from Huffington Post.SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Nearly a week after Asiana Flight 214 collided with a rocky seawall just short of its intended airport runway, investigators have pieced together an outline of the event — what should have been a smooth landing by seasoned pilots turning into a disaster.
With each new bit of information, the picture emerging is of pilots who were supposed to be closely monitoring the plane's airspeed, but who didn't realize until too late that the aircraft was dangerously low and slow. Nothing disclosed so far by the National Transportation Safety Board investigators indicates any problems with the Boeing 777's engines or the functioning of its computers and automated systems.
"The first thing that's taught to a pilot is to look at the airspeed indicator. It is the most important instrument in the cockpit," said Lee Collins, a pilot with 29 years and 18,000 hours experience flying a variety of airliners. "Airspeed is everything. You have airspeed, you live. You don't, you die."
Investigators are still trying to nail down hundreds of details about the crash last Saturday that killed two people and injured dozens. NTSB Chairman Deborah Hersman has cautioned against reaching conclusions.
But investigators already know a great deal. They've listened to the Boeing 777's voice recorder, which captured the last two hours of conversation in the cockpit. They've downloaded its flight data recorder, which captured 1,400 indicators of what was happening on the plane, from the temperatures inside and out to the positions of cockpit instruments.
The flight's four pilots have been interviewed, as have passengers and dozens of witnesses. Air traffic control recordings and video of the flight's last moments, including the crash itself, have been examined.
Here's what investigators have revealed about a Seoul-to-San Francisco flight that was normal until its last minutes, when the wide-body jet carrying 307 people rapidly lost altitude:
The pilot flying the plane, Lee Gang-kuk, 46, had nearly 10,000 hours of flying experience, but just 35 hours flying a Boeing 777. He had recently completed training that qualified him to fly passengers in the 777, and was about halfway through his post-qualification training. He was seated in the left cockpit pilot seat. In the co-pilot position was Lee Jeong-Min, an experienced captain who was supervising Lee Gang-kuk's training. It was Lee Gang-kuk's first time landing a 777 in San Francisco.
At 11:19:23 PDT, after a nearly 11-hour flight, the plane was traveling over the San Francisco Peninsula. The weather was near perfect, sunny with light winds.
Lee Jeong-Min and a third pilot sitting in a jump seat just behind the main seats, a first officer, were supposed to be monitoring the plane's controls. One of their most important jobs was to closely monitor the plane's two airspeed indicators. In the U.S., if an amber bar is more than five knots above or below the target speed during landing, the pilot flying is supposed to abort and make another attempt, according to pilots interviewed by The Associated Press.
As the plane descended to 1,600 feet, the autopilot was turned off. At 1,400 feet, the plane's airspeed was about 170 knots.
The flight data recorder shows the plane's autothrottle — similar to a car's cruise control — was set on idle during the approach, Hersman said, and that there were multiple commands at times given to the autothrottle and autopilot.
At 11:26:58 and 1,000 feet, the pilots made contact with the airport tower. When they were cleared to land 12 seconds later, the plane's altitude had dropped to about 600 feet. The plane was configured for its approach and the landing gear was down. The airspeed was about 149 knots. A target speed of 137 knots was set.
At 500 feet there was an audible automated altitude alert. The airspeed was about 134 knots. At this point that pilots realized they weren't properly lined up with the runway, Hersman said.
"Between 500 and 200 feet, they had a lateral deviation and they were low. They were trying to correct at that point," she said.
At 200 feet and another automated altitude call out, the airspeed had slowed to 118 knots — well below the target level.
At this point, U.S. pilots would typically call for an aborted landing because the plane was more than 5 knots below its target speed, Collins said. But at no point in between 500 and 100 feet does the voice recorder show the pilots making any comment related to airspeed, Hersman said at a briefing Thursday.For those few lucky bitcoin investors who bought into the cryptocurrency when it first began, help is in sight if they have forgotten their passwords to their wallets.A Hypnotist from South Carolina has begun offering to help those who have forgotten their passwords or misplaced their storage devices. The Hypnotist, Jason Miller, charges One Bitcoin with an additional 5% of the amount that is recovered. However, he claims that this rate is flexible. “I’ve developed a collection of techniques that allow people to access older memories or see things they’ve put away in a stashed spot,” he told The Wall Street Journal. Many investors who bought Bitcoin years ago are now in a painful limbo. Similar to how bank accounts are protected by passwords, Bitcoin wallets use keys to complete transactions and are guarded by complex security codes. Unfortunately for Bitcoin investors, there is no helpline to call for a password reset. One of the unfortunate people to misplace part of their bitcoin is the CEO of SpaceX, Elon Musk. He recently tweeted about his misfortune alongside many others who have watched in dismay as the price of the Digital currency has surged to prices of more than $19,000 this year.Another man who has been unlucky enough to lose their code is Mr. Phillip Neumeier. Back in 2013 he bought 15 Bitcoins for roughly $260 after toying with the idea of accepting the cryptocurrency on his e-commerce site. Currently, his wallets value will be nearly $300,000 and he is trying to recover his lost password. He has considered using hypnosis to jog his memory, however he decided to build a supercomputer instead which attempts to use “brute force” to crack the code. His incredible creation stands at five-foot-tall and due to the heat which the system produces from his “brute force”, he has placed the computer in a 270 gallon tank of mineral water to disperse the heat. Mr. Neumeier says that it could take a few hundred years for the computer to run through every possible combination. “I should probably be about 332 years old by then—hopefully bitcoin will be worth something,” he said to the WSJ. The most unfortunate of all is James Howells, an IT worker from Britain. He rather carelessly threw away a hard drive with 7,500 Bitcoins stored on it in 2013. James now searches a local landfill site where he believes it’s buried. His coins were worth $130 when he disposed of the storage device, now they are worth $126.7 million. Ouch.The First Amendment is under attack. Across the nation, college students are creating "safe spaces" in protest in which they can go voice their opinion without "fear" of being challenged. Anyone who disagrees or goes against their chosen narrative will be forced out of the safe space. Of course, the idea of challenging beliefs is what higher education is all about; In a recent interview, Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz had this to say on "Safe Spaces":
“They want a safe space for their ideas, well fine, don’t go to college; don’t go to universities. Universities are not gonna give you a safe space for your ideas. Your ideas are gonna be challenged."
Seen here: Alan Dershowitz, clearly a heartless creature.
So why am I writing this article? Well, Melissa Click, an assistant professor of Mass Media at the University of Missouri, made headlines this month when she decided to forcefully remove journalists from the designated "safe space" on campus. I'll say that one more time; Ms. Click had journalists (also students) forcefully removed from a "safe space." That is some beautiful irony.
Pictured Above: Safe Space
Perhaps the most delicious piece of irony is the fact that the same amendment that gives Ms. Click the right to voice her opinion also gives Mr. Tai (the journalist who was removed) the right to document her protest. Our First Amendment to the Constitution gives us all the right to voice our opinions, and in the same breath gives journalists the right to...journal? It gives them the right to report in a public space. Did I mention this "safe space" was on public property? You don't get to make special rules for your special safety zone, either. I can't just designate an area the "no red shirts" zone and declare that everyone in a red shirt must stay away. That is essentially what is happening in these "safe spaces." Anyone who has any other opinion isn't allowed in and if you try to enter, apparently you can face some stiff opposition.
Journalist Tim Tai facing stiff opposition from "Safe Space" protesters. Tim is the man with the camera, not the woman in the beanie.
Don't think that I am some anti-progressive right-wing nut either. I am a very liberal Democrat (gasp?) and most of the time I actually agree with what the protesters in these "safe spaces" believe, but I also believe in free speech. Yes, you have the right to hold any opinion, but others have the right to disagree and even argue against your point. You don't have the right to silence things that "offend" you. I am offended almost every time Trump opens his mouth, but should he be barred from speaking? Of course not. If someone's belief or opinion "offends" you, guess what? You don't get to create a space where that idea can't exist. What can you do? Don't listen, ignore it, or better yet argue against it. What good is a belief if you can't defend and support it?
Pictured Above: Solid Debate Technique
Bottom line is this: Opinions can be controversial, and they can be powerful, but we can not let the solution be "lets only acknowledge people who agree with us." Debate is necessary to recognize new information and come to the best possible conclusion, and for debate to exist we must acknowledge all sides. I'm not saying you have to respect or accept everyone's ideas, but you can not shut them out and force them to be silent.
Disclaimer: The "safe space" in the article is not referring to the LGBT program encouraging people to be themselves and come out, which I fully support. I am referring to protest "Safe Space" for opinions only. I'm not saying bullying or being rude is OK, I'm just saying shutting out dissenting opinions is not the right way to form or support a believe. Reality isn't yours to shape, people disagree, and that is OK.Rockstar has released a new patch to address visual problems in Grand Theft Auto 5.
There’s not a lot of detail and no information on Rockstar’s Newswire or Support Forum.
The official line is that patch v1.10 is a “Fix to address graphical issues across GTA Online and Story Mode.”
It may be something that tackles the recent face and race swapping that has plagued some player characters or it may be a tightening up of other visual problems.
Those of you who have been using various glitches to grab yourself vehicles like the Duke O’ Death, the new Ratloader or other Heists-exclusive content need not worry – the patch does not allow Rockstar to take them off you. Yet.
I still have my Duke O'Death, my Slamvan2, my Blista Go Go Monkey and my Duffle bag. Good news! #GTAOnline — Yan22 (@Yan2295) April 2, 2015
Update: Here’s the official patch notes from Rockstar. And yes, the character bug has been fixed:This article lists ideologies opposed to capitalism and describes them briefly. It also describes bartering, as well as a working class view on the subject. For arguments against capitalism, see criticism of capitalism
Anti-capitalism encompasses a wide variety of movements, ideas and attitudes that oppose capitalism. Anti-capitalists, in the strict sense of the word, are those who wish to replace capitalism with another type of economic system.
Socialism [ edit ]
Socialism advocates public or direct worker ownership and administration of the means of production and allocation of resources, and a society characterized by equal access to resources for all individuals, with an egalitarian method of compensation.[1][2]
A theory or policy of social organisation which aims at or advocates the ownership and democratic control of the means of production, by workers or the community as a whole, and their administration or distribution in the interests of all. Socialists argue for a cooperative/community economy, or the commanding heights of the economy,[3] with democratic control by the people over the state, although there have been some undemocratic philosophies. "State" or "worker cooperative" ownership is in fundamental opposition to "private" ownership of means of production, which is a defining feature of capitalism. Most socialists argue that capitalism unfairly concentrates power, wealth and profit, among a small segment of society that controls capital and derives its wealth through exploitation.
Socialists argue that the accumulation of capital generates waste through externalizations that require costly corrective regulatory measures. They also point out that this process generates wasteful industries and practices that exist only to generate sufficient demand for products to be sold at a profit (such as high-pressure advertisement); thereby creating rather than satisfying economic demand.[4][5]
Socialists argue that capitalism consists of irrational activity, such as the purchasing of commodities only to sell at a later time when their price appreciates, rather than for consumption, even if the commodity cannot be sold at a profit to individuals in need; they argue that making money, or accumulation of capital, does not correspond to the satisfaction of demand.[6]
Private ownership imposes constraints on planning, leading to inaccessible economic decisions that result in immoral production, unemployment and a tremendous waste of material resources during crisis of overproduction. According to socialists, private property in the means of production becomes obsolete when it concentrates into centralized, socialized institutions based on private appropriation of revenue (but based on cooperative work and internal planning in allocation of inputs) until the role of the capitalist becomes redundant.[7] With no need for capital accumulation and a class of owners, private property in the means of production is perceived as being an outdated form of economic organization that should be replaced by a free association of individuals based on public or common ownership of these socialized assets.[8] Socialists view private property relations as limiting the potential of productive forces in the economy.[9]
Early socialists (Utopian socialists and Ricardian socialists) criticized capitalism for concentrating power and wealth within a small segment of society,[10] and does not utilise available technology and resources to their maximum potential in the interests of the public.[9]
Anarchist and libertarian socialist criticisms [ edit ]
[11] Emma Goldman famously denounced wage slavery by saying: "The only difference is that you are hired slaves instead of block slaves."
For the influential German individualist anarchist philosopher Max Stirner, "private property is a spook which "lives by the grace of law" and it "becomes'mine' only by effect of the law". In other words, private property exists purely "through the protection of the State, through the State's grace." Recognising its need for state protection, Stirner argued that "[i]t need not make any difference to the 'good citizens' who protects them and their principles, whether an absolute King or a constitutional one, a republic, if only they are protected. And what is their principle, whose protector they always 'love'? Not that of labour", rather it is "interest-bearing possession... labouring capital, therefore... labour certainly, yet little or none at all of one's own, but labour of capital and of the—subject labourers"."[12] French anarchist Pierre Joseph Proudhon opposed government privilege that protects capitalist, banking and land interests, and the accumulation or acquisition of property (and any form of coercion that led to it) which he believed hampers competition and keeps wealth in the hands of the few. The Spanish individualist anarchist Miguel Gimenez Igualada saw "capitalism [as] an effect of government; the disappearance of government means capitalism falls from its pedestal vertiginously...That which we call capitalism is not something else but a product of the State, within which the only thing that is being pushed forward is profit, good or badly acquired. And so to fight against capitalism is a pointless task, since be it State capitalism or Enterprise capitalism, as long as Government exists, exploiting capital will exist. The fight, but of consciousness, is against the State.".[13]
Within anarchism there emerged a critique of wage slavery which refers to a situation perceived as quasi-voluntary slavery,[14] where a person's livelihood depends on wages, especially when the dependence is total and immediate.[15][16] It is a negatively connoted term used to draw an analogy between slavery and wage labor by focusing on similarities between owning and renting a person. The term wage slavery has been used to criticize economic exploitation and social stratification, with the former seen primarily as unequal bargaining power between labor and capital (particularly when workers are paid comparatively low wages, e.g. in sweatshops),[17] and the latter as a lack of workers' self-management, fulfilling job choices and leisure in an economy.[18][19][20] Libertarian socialists believe if freedom is valued, then society must work towards a system in which individuals have the power to decide economic issues along with political issues. Libertarian socialists seek to replace unjustified authority with direct democracy, voluntary federation, and popular autonomy in all aspects of life,[21] including physical communities and economic enterprises. With the advent of the industrial revolution, thinkers such as Proudhon and Marx elaborated the comparison between wage labor and slavery in the context of a critique of societal property not intended for active personal use,[22][23] Luddites emphasized the dehumanization brought about by machines while later Emma Goldman famously denounced wage slavery by saying: "The only difference is that you are hired slaves instead of block slaves.".[11] American anarchist Emma Goldman believed that the economic system of |
never actually felt as if the keys were overly cramped. Could you bang out an email on this thing while parked on the subway? With ease.The key travel was excellent, and when it really became magical was whenwas launched. Whenever a title is launched that contains a keyboard morphing profile, the keys are transitioned over to fit whatever game you're in. In, users can actually disable the row of on-screen icons to save screen space, particularly since all of those squares are lit up below. There's a 'Function' key that flips over to page two when it comes to icons, and on the standard keyboard, a 'Symbol' button converts your numbers to... well, symbols.It's still unclear if users will be able to drastically control what icons and functions the keys have, but we got the impression that it'll mostly rely on keyboard profiles for major games. Still, the sheer potential here is just magical. Razer also installed a rather interesting lighting panel beneath the keys so that you can see what lies beneath clearly while looking at them from an angle. You know, the angle at which most people look at their laptop keyboards while using them. We were immensely impressed with just how clear each of the icons were underneath, and can only hope this becomes more the norm than the exception on mobile keyboards.Razer wouldn't cop to what kind of Intel chip was within, but Intel's also got a Switchblade concept at its booth. Its word? Well, let's just say we got a strong vibe that Oak Trail is being used, but don't quote us there. Or do. Your call. The graphics onwere impressive, and while gameplay wasn'tsmooth on the prototype, it was more than playable. And by the time Razer actually gets around to shipping it, we're guessing it'll be improved further. There's likely still a bit of driver work to be ironed out. The software overlay was beautiful, responsive to swipes and perfectly laid out. We aren't huge fans of third-party UIs in general, but this is one case where we actually felt it did the unit proud.We begged and pleaded, but Razer wouldn't commit to a release date or price range. Frankly, we have no idea whatsoever what the MSRP on this will look like. It's clearly a high-end, cutting-edge product, so you can almost definitely count on it not being cheap. But there's still quite a bit of work to be done between now and release day: the company's still deciding on what type of storage system to use, whether to include 3G or not (or to have a non-3G version alongside of a WWAN-connected version), what type of memory card slot to add, etc. But in our eyes, this is what UMPCs and MIDs should've been.Portable devices that are actually powerful enough to get work done, and to engage in games during your downtime. Razer also wouldn't commit to a battery life figure; it's clear that the company's still working on improving those figures, and we're hoping that they can squeeze out three to four hours of gaming (and more when just browsing the web). It's a shame we won't see a shipping version of this for at least a year (our guess), but hey, at least you can rest assured that 2012 will be the best last year of your lifeSINGAPORE - As the country celebrates Chinese New Year, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong hopes the pickup in economic numbers towards the end of 2016 will continue into this year.
The economy grew by 1.8 per cent last year, surpassing expectations on the back of a rebound in the manufacturing sector in the fourth quarter.
And while some workers may be concerned about the jobs outlook, Mr Lee told reporters on a visit to Singapore's largest power plant that the Government watches not just retrenchment numbers, but also keeps an eye on whether people are getting re-employed and finding jobs, as well as whether overall employment numbers are going up.
Retrenchments hit a seven-year high in 2016. But overall, the resident workforce grew by an estimated 10,700 people last year,up 0.5 per cent from the year before. They entered mainly service jobs, such as in community and social services, professional services, and transportation and storage.
"It's not so bad, because people are finding jobs, and overall we have new jobs being created," Mr Lee said.
"Not as many as before, but enough so that Singaporeans are fully employed and people who come out from polytechnic, or ITE, or university, find jobs quite quickly."
PM Lee visiting the technicians and technical officers on duty at Senoko Energy on Jan 28. ST PHOTO: ARIFFIN JAMAR
Mr Lee was visiting workers on duty at Senoko Power Station on Saturday (Jan 28), the first day of Chinese New Year, accompanied by Mrs Lee, labour chief Chan Chun Sing, National Trades Union Congress president Mary Liew and union leaders, as part of an annual tradition to thank workers in key services for keeping Singapore running during the festive season.
Mr Lee noted that retrenchments happened because of ongoing economic restructuring. The power sector is an example of this, he said, noting how it has changed over the years.
The former electricty and gas departments of the Public Utilities Board became Singapore Power in 1995, parts of which were then divested to become power generation companies, such as Senoko Energy.
The technology, too, has changed - from steam to fuel oil to natural gas, for instance.
"Each time more efficient, each time better for Singaporeans. And sometimes, there were job losses. Often there would be retraining and redeployment," said Mr Lee.
"Each time, it means change and disruption for the workers. But by working closely together with UPAGE (Union of Power and Gas Employees), with successive generations of union leaders, we've been able to make the restructuring and advance on this journey."
He has known generations of UPAGE leaders, from the late Nithiah Nandan to its current general secretary Abdul Samad Abdul Wahab.
"There's a lot of mutual understanding and trust which has been built up which has enabled us to do this, and I think we have to do that across the economy," said Mr Lee.
On Saturday, Mr Lee toured the power station, and mingled with 30 workers from Senoko Energy, comprising duty shift managers, team leaders, engineers and technical officers. He also handed out mandarin oranges and hongbao, and joined workers in tossing yu sheng to usher in the Year of the Rooster.
PM Lee and his wife Ho Ching joined workers in tossing yu sheng to usher in the Year of the Rooster. ST PHOTO: ARIFFIN JAMAR
He noted that he had visited Senoko Power Station some years back, "so it was good to be back, to see them team working well, with new technology and in good spirits".
"We're relying on the team here, and in the other plants in Singapore to keep our power supply there, and stable. Nobody else has to think about it, but here they're making sure it's okay," he said.
He also noted that the strategic environment in the region and globally has gradually shifted, and Singaporeans should be aware of these changes.
The Committee on the Future Economy will put out its report soon, and they have many constructive suggestions to help Singapore move forward. The Budget will also be announced on Feb 20, he added.
"We have a series of policies to help Singaporeans, while helping the Singapore economy to move forward," he said.Whether it is restorative yoga, hot yoga, vinyasa yoga or heated flow yoga, yoga in its overall form can be a place of peace, of strength, and of joy. A place to be, to grow, and to learn more about your inner self, about who you really are, and to solve problems that may be present deep down.
One of the most compelling reasons why various forms of yoga such as restorative yoga and heated flow yoga are growing is because they can provide a real sense of calm and peace.
In a world that seems to be filled with excess volatility as well as figurative and literal storms at each and every point and turn, a perpetual sense of peace is one that is deeply appreciated.
How Can Restorative Yoga Help You
The integration of restorative yoga can help you to balance out the plethora of noise that is present in the world today from the talking heads on the television, the strife in the workplace, and the potential challenges that may be faced within the setting of the home.
Restorative yoga is practiced with various resting positions that do not demand you to keep moving on an active basis. Usual asanas (poses) involve the practitioner to lean against a supportive structure, such as a wall, and stay in the same position for 5-15 minutes. The various resting positions help your body reach more flexibility, and help you relax while letting your body restore its strength.
So, how can you implement a restorative yoga routine in your life? Well, its simple but not easy. Going from a hectic and always busy mindset to slowing things down and focusing on being as effective as you can is not the easiest thing to do. But when you achieve it, it can be one of the most joyous things after living the process.
How to Practice Yoga Through a Regular Routine
It may be difficult at first to transition from one routine to the other, but that is why it is important to start in a simple manner that does not stress you out. As such, if you are committed to practicing restorative yoga on a daily basis, start by looking at your schedule.
As yourself: at what times do you think you will be able to comfortably fit a restorative yoga session into your schedule? Is it better to start your day a bit earlier and wake up an hour or two prior to everyone else in your home? Or do you think that there is a time that works better for restorative yoga in the afternoons?
Remember, you will want to give yourself at least thirty minutes or so to be able to set up and practice restorative yoga in a calm and collected manner.
People who are able to stick with different forms of yoga such as vinyasa yoga are able to do so if they have a specific time (while keeping their existing health issues and commitments in mind). After they have conducted the practice for some time, they will find that they cannot go without it.
The reason why it is important to pick a specific time each day is that it helps one to stay consistent. This shows that they have already marked a line in the sand and have resolved to the time when they will practice restorative yoga. As such, they can keep a mental note for themselves and tell those that are in their regular lives that they will be unavailable during these times.
By ensuring this sense of commitment, you can go about practicing your yoga form on a consistent basis. And if that form happens to be restorative yoga, then you can obtain continuous benefits specific to rest and relaxation.John McCain didn’t think taxpayers should be bailing out AIG yesterday:
LAUER: So if we get to the point middle of the week as we heard in that report where AIG might have to file for bankruptcy, they’re on their own. MCCAIN: Well, quote on their own, we have to, we cannot have the taxpayers bail out AIG or anybody else.
Today it was…well, unavoidable:
MCCAIN STATEMENT: "Today, the government was forced to commit $85 billion to stop the collapse of AIG, another in a growing series of events that includes Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These actions stem from failed regulation, reckless management, and a casino culture on Wall Street that has crippled one of the most important companies in America. The focus of any such action should be to protect the millions of Americans who hold insurance policies, retirement plans and other accounts with AIG. We must not bailout the management and speculators who created this mess. They had months of warnings following the Bear Stearns debacle, and they failed to act.”
Well, at least he saw it coming:
"Two years ago, I warned that the oversight of Fannie and Freddie was terrible, that we were facing a crisis because of it, or certainly serious problems," Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., told CBS this morning. "The influence that Fannie and Freddie had in the inside the Beltway, old boy network, which led to this kind of corruption is unacceptable and I warned about it a couple of years ago.”
A couple of years ago. Like…2007?
McCAIN: But, a guy that’s on my staff named Doug Holtz-Eakin, who was once the head of the Office of Management and Budget, said that there was nervousness out there. There’s nervousness. There was nervousness that we had such a long period of prosperity without a downturn because of the history of our economy. But I don’t know of hardly anybody, with the exception of a handful, that said ‘wait a minute, this thing is getting completely out of hand and is overheating.’ "So, I’d like to tell you that I did anticipate it, but I have to give you straight talk, I did not.”
If you listen to McCain talk for any length of time, it becomes apparent that he’s just very good at nodding his head and saying whatever he thinks you want to hear. He doesn’t even seem to be listening to himself.
I think those who are predicting he will do well in the debates may be engaging in "irrational exuberance."Newspaper breaks new ground by declaring itself in favour of treating drug use and possession as a health issue rather than a crime
The Times has boldly gone where few newspapers - and very, very few politicians - have ever dared to go before by declaring itself in favour of legalising drugs in Britain.
In a leading article, “Breaking Good”, the paper has supported a call on the government by the Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH) to decriminalise both the possession and use of all illegal drugs.
Accepting that it “is radical advice”, the Times thought it “sound” and urged ministers to “give it serious consideration”.
Newspapers have usually shied away from adopting such a stance. In 1997, the Independent on Sunday, then edited by Rosie Boycott, came out in favour of decriminalising cannabis. The following year, thousands gathered in London’s Hyde Park in support of her campaign to change the law.
But 10 years later, long after Boycott had departed, the paper changed its mind. It argued that new strains of cannabis, notably skunk, were dangerous, causing disorders such as psychosis and schizophrenia.
Although the Observer and the Guardian have raised questions about potential changes of laws within countries that produce drugs neither have advocated decriminalisation in Britain.
The Observer noted in 2011 that the war on drugs had failed and argued that “when policies fail it is incumbent on our leaders to look for new ones.”
The Times has adopted the logic of that position. Even so, its initiative, especially going beyond cannabis to embrace all illegal drugs, is something of a first.
Its front page news story reported on the “landmark intervention” by the RSPH and the Faculty of Public Health as “the first leading medical organisations to come out in favour of radical drugs reform.”
Both bodies believe that addiction to all drugs – ranging from heroin and cocaine to cannabis and so-called legal highs – should be regarded as a health problem rather than a crime.
The Times’s editorial, while agreeing that decriminalisation would put Britain in the company of a small group of countries that have made such a policy switch, supported that change of direction.
It is not “to be taken lightly”, it said, “yet the logic behind it and evidence from elsewhere are persuasive”. It added:
“The government should be encouraged to think of decriminalisation not as an end in itself but as a first step towards legalising and regulating drugs as it already regulates alcohol and tobacco.”
It pointed to the situation in Portugal, where drug decriminalisation has existed for 15 years. Possession there “does not earn the user a criminal record” and “the country’s drug-related death rate was three per million citizens compared with 10 per million in the Netherlands and 44.6 in Britain.”
The Times said: “Recreational drug use [in Portugal] has not soared, as critics of decriminalisation had feared. HIV infection rates have fallen and the use of so-called legal highs is, according to a study last year, lower than in any other European country.”
It contended: “It may be politic not to rush discussion of full legalisation but that should still be the ultimate goal. In the long term it is not tenable to decriminalise possession of a substance while preserving the profit motive of the criminal gangs that supply it.”
And the paper concluded, again like the Observer, that international drug wars have “proved unwinnable”. Instead, it urged the government “to move gradually towards legalised supply chains such as those allowed for cannabis in Uruguay and a minority of US states.”Palestinian youths hurl stones at Israeli policemen during a protest of the death of Mohammed Sinokrot in east Jerusalem on Sept. 7, 2014. (Photo11: Ahmad Charable, AFP/Getty Images)
WADI ARA, Israel – The downturn in Asem Jezmawi's restaurant business began in early July. That's when thousands of Israel's Arab citizens took to the streets to protest the killing of an Arab teenager by Jewish extremists to avenge the earlier deaths of three Jewish teens.
Jezmawi's eatery, in this predominantly Arab region of northern Israel, floundered even more during the seven-week war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza that began July 8.
Speaking in fluent Hebrew, the Arab restaurateur pondered why most of his Jewish customers haven't returned since the fighting ended in late August.
"Maybe they're afraid for their safety, coming to an Arab town, or maybe someone put my restaurant under herem – a boycott – because we're Arabs," Jezmawi said.
His lament underscores how Jewish-Arab tensions that exist in Israel even during the best of times have soared in recent months and show few signs of abating.
"There has been a real deterioration in Arab-Jewish relations," says Thabet Abu Rass, the Arab co-director of the non-profit Abraham Fund Initiatives. It focuses on equality for Israel's 1.7 million Arab citizens, who make up about a fifth of the country's population.
"The problems didn't start suddenly three months ago, but the revenge killing of the Palestinian teen was a trigger for frustration for Arab Israelis," whose standards of living "remain low compared to the Jewish sector," Abu Rass says.
Israeli Arabs generally have a higher standard of living than Arabs elsewhere in the region, but they lag Israeli Jews economically and in education because of longstanding budget priorities and policies that favor citizens who serve in the army or perform National Service — almost all of them Jews.
The two sides also viewed the recent conflict very differently. When Israel retaliated for rocket attacks launched by Hamas militants who control Gaza, Jewish Israelis feared for the safety of their soldiers. Israeli Arabs, who are mostly exempt from military service, worried about the dangers their Palestinian brethren faced from Israeli strikes into Gaza.
Ninety-two percent of Israeli Jews said Israel's military campaign to destroy Hamas rockets and tunnels in Gaza was justified, compared with only 24% of Israeli Arabs, according to a July 29 poll by the Israel Democracy Institute and Tel Aviv University.
These diverging opinions spark mutual distrust, says Ron Gerlitz, the Jewish co-executive of Sikkuy – The Association for the Advancement of Civic Equality.
"In many places in Israel, such as hospitals, Jews and Arabs work together," he says, noting that many co-workers made a conscious effort not to discuss the conflict. In other workplaces, Jews threatened to fire Arab workers who used social media to highlight Israeli "atrocities" in Gaza. A small number of Arabs lost their jobs over the issue, the Abraham Fund says.
During the weeks leading up to and during the fighting, several Arabs were physically attacked by Jews. Attacks against Arab property by far-right extremists have been going on for more than a year.
Gerlitz thinks the violence is a "backlash" against the strides Arabs have made in Israeli society. Despite socio-economic gaps, Israeli hospitals are full of Arab doctors, and half of all pharmacists are Arab.
"As Israel's democratic principles enable Arabs to increasingly integrate into Israeli society, Jewish extremists feel threatened. They want to feel superior to Arabs, and if their professor at university is an Arab, they can't," he says.
Ruthie Blum, a right-wing columnist for the newspaper Israel Hayom, calls vigilantism by Jews against Arabs "reprehensible, illegal and immoral."
She says there is a double standard: "The only difference between Jews doing it to Arabs and Arabs doing it to Jews is that Arab society condones it and Israeli society punishes and condemns it."
Blum says she finds it "mindboggling" that Arabs in Israel who are concerned for their brethren could support Hamas, which fired rockets at Israel from Palestinian population centers. Israel and the United States brand Hamas a terrorist group.
Abu Rass says concern for Palestinians outside Israel is natural, and not an endorsement of Hamas or any other party.
"We are Israeli citizens, but at the same time are part of the Palestinian people," Abu Rass says. "Two of my relatives were killed in Gaza. I strongly believe in Jewish-Arab coexistence, but I can't forget that my country – Israel – is waging a war against my people."
In his restaurant in Wadi Ara, where the aroma of meat sizzling on the grill is strong, Jezmawi says it's time for Jews and Arabs "to move beyond the war and focus on living together."
Follow Chabin on Twitter @michelechabin
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1umSxZ4Where to next in the Global Justice Movement? Gopal Dayaneni has been involved in fighting for social, economic, environmental and racial justice through organizing & campaigning, teaching, writing, speaking and direct action since the late 1980's. Cindy Wiesner is a queer working class Latina, and has been a community organizer for the last 20 years, and is the Program Coordinator for the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance. Together, they look back on the recent Climate Justice march, and ask what's next for social justice movements. Featuring a special look at US indigenous resistance to extreme energy, displacement, and economic dependency at Black Mesa, in Arizona. And in the F Word commentary, Laura looks at a low moment in political campaigns.
Watch more from Laura Flanders and GRITtv on their website
Go to the GEO front pageSir Mervyn King was speaking after the decision by the Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee to put £75billion of newly created money into the economy in a desperate effort to stave off a new credit crisis and a UK recession.
Economists said the Bank’s decision to resume its quantitative easing [QE], or asset purchase programme, showed it was increasingly fearful for the economy, and predicted more such moves ahead.
Sir Mervyn said the Bank had been driven by growing signs of a global economic disaster.
“This is the most serious financial crisis we’ve seen, at least since the 1930s, if not ever. We’re having to deal with very unusual circumstances, but to act calmly to this and to do the right thing.”
Announcing its decision, the Bank said that the eurozone debt crisis was creating “severe strains in bank funding markets and financial markets”.
The Monetary Policy Committee [MPC] also said that the inflation-driven “squeeze on households’ real incomes” and the Government’s programme of spending cuts will “continue to weigh on domestic spending” for some time to come.
The “deterioration in the outlook” meant more QE was justified, the Bank said.
Financial experts said the committee’s actions would be a “Titanic” disaster for pensioners, savers and workers approaching retirement. Sir Mervyn suggested that was a price worth paying to save the economy from recession.
Under QE, the Bank electronically creates new money which it then uses to buy assets such as government bonds, or gilts, from banks. In theory, the banks then use the cash they gain to increase their lending to businesses and individuals.
By increasing the demand for gilts, QE pushes down the interest rate yields paid to holders of these and other bonds. Critics of the policy say it pushes up inflation and drives down sterling.
The National Association of Pension Funds yesterday called for urgent talks with ministers to address the negative impact of lower gilt yields on pension funds. Joanne Segars, its chief executive, said QE makes it more expensive for employers to provide pensions and will weaken the funding of schemes as their deficits increase. “All this will put additional pressure on employers at a time when they are facing a bleak economic situation,” she said.
Ros Altman, of Saga, said the latest round of QE was “a Titanic disaster” that would increase pensioner poverty. As well as fuelling inflation, she said, falling bond yields would make annuities more expensive, “giving new retirees much less pension income for their money and leaving them permanently poorer in retirement”.
The MPC also voted to keep the Bank Rate at its historic low of 0.5 per cent, another decision that hurts savers. Yesterday, protesters outside the Bank’s headquarters smashed a giant piggy bank to symbolise the situation of pensioners and others forced to raid savings to keep up with the rising cost of living.
Asked about the plight of savers, Sir Mervyn said it was more important to support the wider economy than to support them. He suggested that savers would not be helped by deliberately pushing the British economy into recession. Yesterday’s decision was the first move on QE since 2009, during the global credit crisis, when the Bank injected £200 billion into the economy.
Some analysts believe that this round of QE could be less effective than the previous one, forcing the Bank to create even more money this time.
Michael Saunders of Citigroup, forecast that there could be as much as £225 billion more QE by next year. “I think they will do lots more QE,” he said. “It’s both that the economy is weak but also that the MPC’s view is that QE is not a very powerful tool, or rather it takes a large amount of QE to have much effect on the economy.”
The Bank is supposed to keep inflation near a target of 2 per cent. Inflation now stands at 4.5 per cent, and the Bank admitted it is likely to hit 5 per cent as soon as this month. The Bank’s own research shows that as well as stimulating the economy, QE pushes up prices.
Sir Mervyn insisted that yesterday’s move was still consistent with the 2 per cent inflation target, saying that the slowing economy means inflation could actually fall below that mark “by the end of next year or in 2013”.
The Governor insisted that the MPC’s decisions had been the correct response to events. “The world economy has slowed, America has slowed, China has slowed, and of course particularly the European economy has slowed,” he said. “The world has changed and so has the right policy response.”
City traders took heart from the Bank’s move to boost growth, with the FTSE 100 rising 3.7 per cent to 5,29, its biggest two-day gain since 2008.
The Bank’s decision came after mounting political pressure from ministers worried that Sir Mervyn was not reacting urgently enough to the darkening global economic outlook.
George Osborne, the Chancellor, welcomed the Bank’s move, saying: “The evidence shows that it [QE] will help keep interest rates down and boost demand and that will be a help for British families.”President Donald Trump, true to his fashion, took to Twitter Friday morning. Sharing three tweets with his followers, the president touched on the subject of national security.
Leading the mini-tweetstorm was a tweet assuring the American people that Homeland Security is “watching for any sign of trouble.” This tweet comes one day after an alleged terrorist attack in Barcelona that claimed the life of 14 people, one of whom was an American:
Homeland Security and law enforcement are on alert & closely watching for any sign of trouble. Our borders are far tougher than ever before! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 18, 2017
Following that tweet came another touching on the issue of security, though this time the president went on the offensive, blaming “Obstructionist Democrats” for making U.S. security more difficult to manage by means of using judicial delays to their advantage:
The Obstructionist Democrats make Security for our country very difficult. They use the courts and associated delay at all times. Must stop! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 18, 2017
Moving along with the issue of the judicial system, Trump next touched on the matter of “radical Islamic terrorism”:
Radical Islamic Terrorism must be stopped by whatever means necessary! The courts must give us back our protective rights. Have to be tough! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 18, 2017
Trump claimed that “the courts must give us back out protective rights,” though it is somewhat unclear what he specifically means by that.
More than an hour after the initial three tweets came another, similarly touching on the matter of national security, in which the president said that he was traveling to Camp David to have a “major meeting on National Security”:
Heading to Camp David for major meeting on National Security, the Border and the Military (which we are rapidly building to strongest ever). — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 18, 2017
President Trump’s comments on national security come at a time when he finds himself under a good deal of scrutiny where his responses to the Charlottesville riots are concerned.Ground-breaking analysis by Giving Evidence disproves the popular idea that charities should spend less on administration.
This is the first analysis which shows (doesn’t just argue) that high- performing charities spend more on administration costs than weaker ones do. {Report here. The issue is discussed in more depth in Chapter Two of Caroline’s book It Ain’t What You Give (which apparently is excellent..!)}
So it’s unhelpful of Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee to be considering limiting charities’ admin costs. It’s unhelpful of donors such as Gina Miller to suggest that admin costs be capped. The data indicate that such caps would nudge donors towards choosing weaker charities, at untold cost to their beneficiaries. It’s time for this to change.
The analysis
Judging a charity’s quality is hard. Some of the most rigorous analysis is by GiveWell, a US non-profit run by former Wall Street analysts, whose analysis is often dozen of pages. GiveWell looks for various sensible indicators of quality, including: a strong documented track record of impact; highly cost-effective activities; and a clear need for more funds.
Charities which GiveWell reviewed in 2011 and recommended, spend 11.5% of their costs on administration, on average. Charities which GiveWell reviewed and didn’t recommend spent less on administration, only 10.8% on average.
This is no freak result. The same pattern was true in 2009:
In 2009, GiveWell had four levels of ranking, and the pattern is even more pronounced if we use those:
The conclusion is that low admin costs do not signal that a charity is good. They signal the converse. So it’s wrong of charities to parade their low admin costs, as we’ve argued here before. Rather better is looking at what the charity actually achieves.
Admin costs are discussed in detail in It Ain’t What You Give, and when we understand what’s included, we can understand the pattern these data show. ‘Admin’ includes systems for capturing learning, for improving, for reducing costs. It’s spending on those things which enables good performance. Scrimping on them is often a false economy.
Assessing a charity by its admin spend is like assessing a teacher on how much chalk they use, or assessing a doctor on how many drugs they prescribe: they’re easy measures but don’t relate to performance. As Einstein said: ‘Not everything that counts can be counted. Not everything that can be counted counts.’
This isn’t to say that there isn’t waste in charities. There is: masses, much of it avoidable, and good charities try to avoid it. But don’t expect to find it clearly labelled in the financial statements.
To be clear, we used all the GiveWell data which were available at the point that the analysis was done. We have stated the sample size on all graphs.
Why is this the case?
It’s discussed in detail in It Ain’t What You Give, which you can get here. Here’s a snippet: Imagine a water charity which operates in several less developed countries to improve irrigation. If it’s run well, it will have a system for recording what works and what doesn’t in particular circumstances, and for sharing that learning between its various country offices. Now, should the costs of that system count as ‘administration’? On one hand, the system isn’t directly helping people: it probably involves databases and conference calls, rather than pipes and water. As a result, it may well be classified as ‘administration’ in a charity’s accounts. However, the system will reduce the charity’s costs and increase its effectiveness, and therefore certainly isn’t waste. Aha – in this case, money spent on administration increases performance. Let’s consider finance costs. Perhaps the Finance Director purchases a better invoice-handling system. Same thing. That system should reduce work for finance staff by reducing processing times and/or mistakes, which frees up their time (and/or frees up money) to improve the quality and quantity of service to beneficiaries. Let’s take a real example. Chance UK provides mentors for primary school children who are at risk of developing anti-social behaviour and possibly being permanently excluded from school (formerly called ‘being expelled’). The charity spent some money evaluating its work. It found that male mentors were best suited to children with behavioural difficulties, whereas children with emotional problems responded best to female mentors. Again, the money spent on that evaluation would normally count as ‘admin’, but for the children receiving support which has improved because of that insight, it was money well spent.
—
This material was re-released as a document in 2015, here. The data behind these graphs and analysis are all here. Press release from 2nd May 2013 is here.
—
A ton more insight to inform your giving–>
Want advice on your giving (or your company’s giving)? Here’s how–>
What does good evidence of impact look like? Not like this–>
AdvertisementsCrime
German traveller facing heavy fines after criminal off-road driving in Central Highlands
By Staff
Criminal off-roader The German traveller has visited Iceland six times, and should therefore be fully aware of the illegality and effects of his shameful behaviour. Photo/Ólafur Schram
"In my opinion he should be banned from ever returning to Iceland." Drastic measures are needed to stop destructive disrespect of Icelandic nature, a local guide argues.
Exposure and shame effective weapons
Yesterday Ólafur Schram confronted a German man who had been been engaged in systematic criminal off-road driving along Nýidalur valley on Sprengisandur trail in the Central Highlands. The man, who has visited Iceland six times before and therefore cannot claim ignorance as an excuse, tried to deny having engaged in off-road driving and only confessed when confronted with photographic proof.
The man has been reported to the police which will issue a formal charge and fine the man for his actions.
Read more: Photos: Destructive and criminal off-road driving a serious and growing problem
Ólafur shared photos of some of the tracks the man had left, as well as a photo of the car. He argues that one of the most effective ways to address criminal off-road driving is to expose and shame the offenders.
Plead innocence and claimed ignorance
Ólafur was taking a group of travellers across Sprengisandur desert in the Central Highlands when he came upon a trail of destruction left by a previous traveller. He immediately took action to ensure the person responsible would be dealt with:
"I drove south from Laugafell highland oasis and was met by fresh tracks. I made regular stops to take photos of the tracks. Looking at the tracks I remembered a Benz Unimog truck which had been in Laugafell the previous night. I called the highland guard at Nýidalur cabin and asked him to stop the car when it arrived, as I would bring evidence of what the driver had been doing."
When the Unimog truck was stopped in Nýidalur the driver claimed he hadn't engaged in any off-road driving. All of his travel companions also all vouched for the man, claiming he had never once ventured off the road. It was only after Ólafur arrived and handed the guard his camera with the photographic evidence of the tracks the travellers had left that the man finally confessed.
"He bragged about this being his seventh visit to Iceland, driving the same truck. It wasn't until until I presented him with photographs of showing the result of his actions and handed them to the highland guard that the man confessed. He probably didn't dare otherwise, with me standing right in front of him, probably afraid he might get punched right in the nose."
Very definition of off-road driving
The highland guard in Nýidalur who stopped the German traveller, Stefanía R. Ragnarsdóttir, told the local newspaper Morgunblaðið that the man claimed that he didn't realize that driving "along the road" was considered off-road driving, to which she responded by pointing out that driving off the road was always off-road driving, and that the activities the man had engaged in were the very definition of off-road driving.
Read more: Park rangers spend much of their time trying to repair damages done to nature
The photographs taken by Ólafur also show that the travellers did more than just drive alongside the road. Since this is the seventh time the man has visited Iceland he can not claim ignorance of Icelandic laws or customs, nor can he claim to be unaware of the fact that unless they are removed by hand the tracks that he left take years or decades to disappear.
Shame and exposure effective tools
The photos of the truck and the tracks it left went viral on Icelandic social media after Ólafur posted them to his Facebook page. Local news media covered the incidence, which is only the latest example of a growing problem, and a lively debate has taken place on Facebook.
Ólafur points out that exposing people who destroy Icelandic nature rather than enjoy its beauty is an effective way to address the problem:
"What kind of destruction did this man leave behind in his six previous visits? How can we Icelanders keep these kinds of people at bay and protect the country and its nature? It crushes the soul to see this kind of disrespect for the natural beauty of Iceland. By publishing and distributing this photo we hope this man becomes notorious enough that he might at least find it uncomfortable to refuel his |
, we can call out Dock from the bottom of the screen and open an application, drag it to the interface, the application will be on the right side of the interface with the form of hover box
Dock in iOS 10
The combination of the new Dock and the suspension window solves the problem that under the split-screen state in iOS 10 you can only slide through the application list to find the application. The biggest difference with Slide Over in iOS 10: While the main application is unavailable using Slide Over in iOS 10, now you can interact and manipulate the main application while operating the hover box, greatly improving the experience.
App Switcher
App Switcher in iOS 11
What makes me most impressed is more than that I finally no longer feel hard to double-click the Home button to call out homepage. After calling out the Dock from the bottom of the screen I can continue to open App Switcher.
The whole process is very smooth, which not only reduces the discomfort due to the sudden switch to the physical operation, as well as enhances the sense of immersion using the system. If you want to return to the homepage, it’s unecessary click the Home button, just click the blank area in App Switcher.
Drap & Drop
Drap & Drop in iOS 11
Drag and drop with file have finally been achieved in the iPad. You can drag and drop files from the hover box easily. Simply drag out the selected files and then they will form as a stack that can be easily drag to the main app in batches,
Secondary menu
Secondary Menu in iOS 11
Another point worthy to be mentioned is the new secondary menu. So far, iPad has not yet supported 3D Touch yet, but the similar effect of 3D Touch can be achieved by long pressing on apps or through control center.
After analyzing the difference between iOS 10 and iOS 11, we can see that iOS 11 mainly enhances the overall sense of the line, the fonts and icons both have been deepened and bold, the contrast is higher. All the changes represents a calm evolution and fine-tuning of the user experience.
iOS 11 for iPhone is more smooth, which focuses more on the details of the visual effects and operating experience; and iOS for iPad can be said to be remarkable, especially on interaction, not only making iPad a more productive device but also allow developers to gain greater freedom and platform, making iOS application ecosystem more efficient and practical.
After comparing iOS 11 vs iOS 10, we can see that iOS on both the interaction or UI maintains innovation and power. In addition, we should also see the human spirit and user experience behind Apple. In the product design process, we should also keep the product calm and smooth, making the product fresh and vivid.If you've been in the game long enough, you see some controversies coming from a ways off.
The playoff picture How would your team's prospects look if the season ended today? See where each team stands in the playoff picture midway through the season.
How would your team's prospects look if the season ended today? See where each team stands in the playoff picture midway through the season. More...
Over the next couple weeks, we can anticipate a storm of complaints and debates as the playoff picture comes into focus and the implications of the regular season become apparent. This is a season in which the NFL's present seeding system will come under heavy scrutiny. With two games remaining for every team, we're looking at a few disconcerting scenarios:
» The 9-5 Arizona Cardinals are presently on the outside looking in, despite the fact that they have a better record than two NFC division leaders (Philadelphia Eagles and Chicago Bears).
» The Kansas City Chiefs could finish tied with the Denver Broncos for best record in the AFC... and still wind up with the fifth overall seed.
» Wild-card weekend might have an awkward feel when the visitors have better records than the hosts in (at least) three of four games. (For the record, this phenomenon has occurred in 15 wild-card games since 2002.)
First things first: The plight of the Cardinals. At 9-5, Arizona has been surprisingly good, already clinching a winning season in Year 1 under Bruce Arians. With remaining games against the Seattle Seahawks (away) and San Francisco 49ers (home), the Cardinals could very well lose out, finish at 9-7 and not have much of a beef for missing the playoffs. But the Cardinals could also win their last two games, finish at 11-5... and still miss the playoffs. In that scenario, Arizona would become just the second 11-5 team to miss the playoffs under the 12-team format, joining the 2008 New England Patriots.
For teams that come up just short, there could be help on the way. At the NFL Fall Meeting in October, Commissioner Roger Goodell said the competition committee will continue to examine playoff expansion to 14 teams. With seven playoff teams in each conference, only the No. 1 overall seeds would get a bye during wild-card weekend.
The downside would be a slight dilution of the regular season. Among professional sports leagues in America, the NFL has the most meaningful regular season because it has avoided the playoff inflation that has beset the NBA and NHL. Not to mention, limited action heightens single-game intrigue (one NFL contest carries the same competitive weight in a team's season as 10 MLB ballgames). With an extra playoff team in each conference, the NFL's unparalleled regular season would lose at least some of its gravity.
On the other hand, advantages provided to the teams with the best records heading into the postseason -- home-field advantage in the wild-card round, a bye, home-field advantage throughout the playoffs -- would still be tangible and important enough that clubs would continue to compete fiercely for them.
Would enlarging the playoff field to 14 bring in a raft of poor teams? Not likely. In the past decade alone, seven teams with double-digit wins have missed out on playoff spots.
Football is a more fluid game than it was a generation ago, and we're seeing more low playoff seeds showing an ability to not only be competitive, but championship-caliber come January (see: the 2010 Green Bay Packers, who won the Super Bowl from the sixth seed). If there were seven teams going to the playoffs from the AFC this year, it's hard to believe that a team like the Pittsburgh Steelers -- finally rounding into form after a sputtering, injury-marred start to the season -- couldn't be a worthy first-round opponent for a No. 2 seed.
Not only would playoff expansion not be a terrible thing, it also wouldn't represent a screaming inequity. Unfortunately, the present seeding system is exactly that -- and it will be even more apparent this season.
The present playoff plan was put into place with the move from six to eight divisions in 2002, cutting the number of wild-card teams from three to two in each conference. This was done under the presumption that winning your division would have outsized value and thus should always be rewarded with a home playoff game.
Unfortunately, this principle runs headlong into the larger and more persuasive case that teams with better records should be rewarded. It just isn't fair that San Francisco could win 12 games and end up hitting the road to face a 9-7 NFC East winner. It's also ludicrous that Kansas City could finish in a tie for the best AFC record at 13-3 and not only be denied a bye, but also be relegated to the No. 5 seed.
This problem is easy enough to fix, and the solution would still provide a generous break to division winners: Simply seed teams according to records, but make being a division champion the first tiebreaker. If a division champion at 11-5 is facing a wild-card team that's also 11-5, the division champ earns the right to play at home. But beyond that, the team with the better record over the course of the 16-game regular season deserves home-field advantage in the playoffs. It's simple, and I hope it gets fixed in the not-too-distant future.
In the meantime, some very good teams are going to be sent on the road come wild-card weekend.
Follow Brian Billick on Twitter @coachbillick.Last month, i said that combo videos and combos in general comprise a relatively small piece of the complete fighting game puzzle. How exactly do they factor into the overall picture?
Tactically speaking, executing a combo is a lot like finishing a traditional three-point play in basketball. As a reward for driving past a perimiter defender and baiting an interior defensive mistake, the player is granted an additional free throw after the made basket. The two primary components of free throw shooting are technical ability and maintaining composure.
Can free throws decide games? Absolutely. Does anyone consider free throws a core strategic aspect of the game? No. They serve a clear purpose, but there’s much more to the game on a fundamental level: spacing, timing, footwork, adaptation, defense, etc.
In fighting games, landing a combo involves recognizing an opportunity, evaluating damage options, having the technical ability to perform the combo, and maintaining enough composure to pull it off under pressure. Anyone who drops a combo during tournament play should absolutely be penalized for failing to complete a simple task that they can ice ninety-nine times out of a hundred in practice. That’s a perfectly valid part of the game.
However, most veterans are more impressed by a player’s ability to set up a combo in match play, over the ability to execute it – and for good reason. The only consistent way to create openings is to mentally outplay the opposition. It takes a broad skill set and a strong mastery of the game to bait an opponent into committing a major mistake, while ending up in the right place at the right time to capitalize on it.
Continuing the basketball analogy, combo videos are akin to slam dunk contests and other such exhibitions. They’re very exciting to watch as a spectacle, but they transform an inherently multi-player game into a single-player activity. Of course slam dunk contests and combo videos can be competitive as well, but they essentially remove the concept of defense from the equation.
On a technical level, combo videos always play a crucial role in advancing the community’s understanding of game engines and combo systems. Obviously, elaborate combos involving complex trade setups don’t usually pay immediate dividends to tournament players seeking a competitive edge. It takes a long time to process those technical discoveries into practical applications. Nevertheless, there have been times when a combo video has changed the way a game is played in tournaments.
It’s worth noting that combo videos are a poor indicator of character balance and tier rankings. Even the weakest character in a game can look utterly broken without the need to play defense or produce reliable mixups.
However, combo videos are a great indicator of what’s cool in a game. If you have five minutes and you want to see a certain character produce fireworks, watch a combo video. You’ll get a good sense of what the game engine allows and how characters can maneuver within it.
Lastly, combo videos are great for shaking up the status quo. When you feel like you’ve seen everything there is to see in a game, or everything your character can do, watch a combovid. It might inspire you to look in a new direction.AT&T reportedly wants to investigate if the White House influenced the Justice Department's review of its merger with Time Warner should the pending deal fail.
Sources told Bloomberg that AT&T will seek court approval to access communications between the Justice Department (DOJ) and the White House if the administration sues to block the deal.
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The DOJ could file a lawsuit to block the $85 billion deal if it can’t reach an agreement with AT&T. The agency’s struggles in approving the deal have sparked concern that President Trump, who has been critical of Time Warner subsidiary CNN, has pushed officials to block the deal.
Trump said on the campaign trail that if elected he would seek to block the merger.
DOJ sources recently said that antitrust officials rejected an offer from AT&T to spin off CNN to get approval for the deal, an offer that AT&T officials denied was ever made.
Others are also wary of potential White House interference with the deal.
On Tuesday, two top Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, Reps. John Conyers John James ConyersDemocrats seek cosponsors for new 'Medicare for all' bill Virginia scandals pit Democrats against themselves and their message Women's March plans 'Medicare for All' day of lobbying in DC MORE Jr. (Mich), and David Cicilline David Nicola CicillineDem lawmaker: Mueller report ‘belongs to the American people’ White House braces for Mueller report Ex-GOP congressional candidate charged with wire fraud, violating election law MORE (R.I.), urged committee chairman Rep. Bob Goodlatte Robert (Bob) William GoodlatteIt’s time for Congress to pass an anti-cruelty statute DOJ opinion will help protect kids from dangers of online gambling House GOP probe into FBI, DOJ comes to an end MORE (R-Va.) to hold a hearing exploring this.
The White House and Makan Delrahim, the DOJ’s antitrust chief, have both denied that the administration has tried to play a role in the merger review.
The White House is generally expected to be impartial in the DOJ’s and other agencies’ approval of pending mergers.
Experts anticipate that, barring political motivations, the merger will be approved in step with other vertical mergers which consolidate companies that operate in different markets.Finance Undersecretary and 'Anti-Red TapeCzar' Gil Beltran. (Photo from his Facebook page)
MANILA - A senior finance undersecretary was named “Anti-Red Tape Czar” on Tuesday to speed up transactions in the tax and customs bureaus, Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez said.
Finance Undersecretary Gil Beltran was tasked to “dramatically reduce the number of steps and documentary requirements” in the Department of Finance and its attached agencies, Dominguez told a business forum.
“This will include paying taxes, getting tax refunds, acquiring tax exemption certificates, getting imports released, shipping out exports, registering a business and getting appointments with public officials,” he said.
Dominguez said the government would “cut redundancy” in government processes to improve the delivery of basic services and infrastructure.
The include amending the procurement law to streamline processes, simplifying permit requirements for infrastructure projects, creating a “prioritization list” for projects, delineating the delivery between national and local projects and improving the absorptive capacity of key agencies, he said.
Beltran has been finance undersecretary since 2005. He is also the department’s concurrent chief economist. He rose from the ranks in the department, starting as a researcher in 1978.
Beltran graduated from the University of the Philippines School of Economics in 1977 and later took his masters in economics at the University of Colorado and masters in development economics from William College.
President Rodrigo Duterte promised a crackdown on red tape and flip-flopping government policies on his first day in office.Impacted passengers say ticket refunds for cancelled flights aren’t good enough after Winnipeg-based discount travel company NewLeaf announced in a Facebook post Tuesday it will cancel its planned flight service to Phoenix-Mesa in 2017.
READ MORE: ‘Ultra low fare’ travel company NewLeaf launches flights from YYC Saturday
Two groups of Calgarians said Wednesday their February Family Day holiday trips to Phoenix are now in shambles after NewLeaf abruptly dropped the service.
“Now to re-book on those days that we were planning to go (over Family Day) is about triple the cost,” Lindsay Flynn said. "And we can’t afford to spend that much money.”
She was planning to fly to Phoenix with her two children next month.
Another Calgary family who was flying with NewLeaf said they lost money with other travel-related expenses.
“We are out about $4,000 with the rental for the property and car rental–just that alone,” said Stephanie Fitzgerald.
NewLeaf is calling the cancellations a case of “the big guy squishing the little guy.”
“We didn’t necessarily expect to receive such strong competition on a route that was never served before and within hours of our announcement … that airport [Mesa] had been contacted by WestJet to put service in,” director of marketing and communications Julie Rempel told Global News.
“Despite all our efforts, in order to make it profitable, we just felt at this time we couldn’t turn that corner.”
The post attributed to Jim Young said “when an airline in Canada found out that NewLeaf was servicing Phoenix-Mesa they too decided to follow our schedule” and lowered its fares.
“We are very sorry, Alberta, but we cannot offer service to Phoenix-Mesa this year,” reads the post.
“This is a classic case of the big guy squishing the little guy so that the big guy can profit more…We sincerely hope and in fact challenge the other airlines to keep the fares low for you so that you can still travel south for the winter.”
The statement says the planned winter Florida route from Hamilton, Ont. will also be postponed.
Watch: A new Edmonton to Phoenix route has been cut and an upstart airline says it’s because it’s being muscled out of the market. Vinesh Pratap explains.
READ MORE: NewLeaf lawsuit – Feds dismiss appeal that airline needs independent air licence
WestJet spokesperson Lauren Stewart told Global News the Greater Phoenix area is “a very competitive market served by numerous airlines with WestJet included among them.”
“The airline business is more challenging than it seems and this airline appears to be blaming one airline for their woes in a particular market without providing the travelling public the full story.”
READ MORE: Discount travel company NewLeaf frustrates passengers stuck on New Year’s Eve
NewLeaf said it’s in the process of refunding customers their tickets, but can’t cover additional travel-related expenses.
“We wouldn’t be offering additional compensation for travel not booked through NewLeaf,” Rempel said, adding that while customers may be upset, the company has been “overwhelmed” by support from the public.
“This wasn’t an easy day for us and it wasn’t an easy decision for us but in order to…be in business for the long haul, we needed and wanted to make these decisions that smartly affect the longevity of NewLeaf.
“Our motto is to continue to get people to their destinations affordably, so when we had to do this… it just is not happy day.”
Watch below from Nov. 2016: Are new low-cost airlines charting a new course towards cheaper fares in Canada? As Reid Fiest reports, the entry of NewLeaf Travel is showing some fares are decreasing.
With files from Gary Bobrovitz
Editor’s note: This story was originally published Jan. 3 and updated with comments from affected passengers Jan. 4.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Niels H hid behind a folder during his trial
A German former nurse serving a life sentence for two murders is suspected of having killed at least 24 more patients with lethal drug overdoses.
Investigators plan to carry out exhumations until the end of May to examine remains of possible victims.
The man, identified only as Niels H, 39, was convicted in February last year over two patients' deaths at a clinic in Delmenhorst, north Germany.
In court he admitted killing up to 30 patients with heart medication.
The judges at the Oldenburg district court concluded that he had a desire to shine by resuscitating patients. He gave them overdoses of a drug that shut down their cardiovascular systems.
The deaths took place between 2003 and 2005. Police are investigating at least 200 deaths, including at other clinics where he worked, in Oldenburg and Wilhelmshaven.
If found guilty over the other deaths, Niels H would become one of Germany's worst post-war serial killers.
During the trial one senior doctor described Niels H as a "passionate medic" who had made a good impression on staff.
Doctors did notice, however, that he always seemed to be around when patients were being resuscitated, often assisting junior doctors with the procedure, he added.
Although he was charged with three murders, the court found him guilty on only two counts, explaining that it could not be proved that the former nurse had been responsible for the third death.You know, I was worried when I learned that Mario & Luigi Dream Team wouldn't be out in America by the time my review went up. Because my reviews usually benefit somewhat by coming out a few weeks after the general release of a game, when everyone's had time to play it and let it percolate in the old brain meats. What I was really worried about was that I might have spoiled something, namely that Bowser ends up being the main villain. Because that's not the case from the start. It happens a little way in.
Now, at first I chided myself at the thought. Who in their right mind could possibly be offended that I spoiled the fact that Bowser kidnaps Princess Peach and Mario has to rescue her? That's the fucking default setting. It's like spoiling the fact that standard acceleration in Earth's gravity is approximately 32 feet per second. But then again, it's a Mario RPG, and what makes the Mario RPGs interesting to me is that Bowser being the villain is more the exception than the rule.
In fact, it's not even the case in the very first Mario RPG, creatively titled Super Mario RPG, on the SNES. Bowser being the villain was already being treated as an ironic joke, and it started the occasional trend of Bowser being a playable character, or at least a party member. There have been nine Mario RPGs in total, the SNES one, four Paper Marios and four Mario & Luigis. Of those nine, games in which Bowser is the straight villain are in a clear minority - the first Paper Mario, and the two of most recent memory: Paper Mario Sticker Star and Dream Team. And yet, I described both those last two games as 'tired'. When it seems I should have been praising their innovative spirit.
Except not really of course, because Bowser-as-villain takes the majority again the moment you extend the survey to every non-RPG Mario game. The role of the Mario RPGs was to be a sort of voice of dissent to show that Nintendo weren't completely above a bit of a nudge-wink self-effacement and congratulate the audience for having been clever enough to realize how tired Mario vs. Bowser is as a concept. Mario RPGs going stale is bigger than just one franchise - it's a symbol of Nintendo's ever-decreasing capacity for self-awareness. In case we needed another one after the Wii U.
The ongoing gag in Mario RPGs, when Bowser is enlisted as an anti-hero, is that he opposes the new villain because he considers kidnapping the princess to be his territory alone. This is a pretty firm indicator that Bowser is just as invested in the status quo as everyone else. His attempts to kidnap the princess seem almost ceremonial. I believe that the very first Super Mario Bros represented the only time when Bowser was genuinely kidnapping the princess to pursue his goals, presumably the attainment of power and influence. And he succeeded. From that point on, he is occasionally seen wearing a crown and being identified as 'King of the Koopas'. He lives in a castle and employs most of the land's monster workforce. Why does he need to keep kidnapping her? He's already a king. I don't see the saccharine lands she rules appealing to his taste for lava and perpetual twilight. It must just be some regular ceremony recreating the original successful revolt, like a friendly game between two rival footballing nations.I actually just made this account like 2 seconds ago and I'm already getting favorites and other positive comments on my art. Thanks a lot people I love you too.Now, lets cut to brass tax here...do you want a commission? I'll do anything EXCEPT!!!: Porn, Hentai, ANIME (I want to make this VVVVEEEEERRRRYYYYY clear to the public, I went though an anime faze and I don't wanna go back.), Furries, Anything Brony or "My Little Pony" related (I am not your BRO...yet), or portraits (It's not my style).Now lets get down to business. I am willing to bargain with you but it depends on the complexity of the piece. I do mostly sketches, some inked art, COPIC Marker Art, and some Digital art. I take points but it has to be a fair amount, at least 400 or more points. Trades very on my artistic opinion and requests are for friends or family only.Hope you respond soon. Damn I'm hungry.:thumb186148713:I hope you are well. I know you are not. As it happens you wrote in 1973 a letter to your future self and it is high time that your future self had the decency to write back. You declared in that letter (reproduced in your 1997 autobiography Moab Is My Washpot) that "everything I feel now as an adolescent is true". You went on to affirm that if ever you dared in later life to repudiate, deny or mock your 16-year-old self it would be a lie, a traducing, treasonable lie, a crime against adolescence. "This is who I am," you wrote. "Each day that passes I grow away from my true self. Every inch I take towards adulthood is a betrayal."
Oh, lord love you, Stephen. How I admire your arrogance and rage and misery. How pure and righteous they are and how passionately storm-drenched was your adolescence. How filled with true feeling, fury, despair, joy, anxiety, shame, pride and above all, supremely above all, how overpowered it was by love. My eyes fill with tears just to think of you. Of me. Tears splash on to my keyboard now. I am perhaps happier now than I have ever been and yet I cannot but recognise that I would trade all that I am to be you, the eternally unhappy, nervous, wild, wondering and despairing 16-year-old Stephen: angry, angst-ridden and awkward but alive. Because you know how to feel, and knowing how to feel is more important than how you feel. Deadness of soul is the only unpardonable crime, and if there is one thing happiness can do it is mask deadness of soul.
I finally know now, as I easily knew then, that the most important thing is love. It doesn't matter in the slightest whether that love is for someone of your own sex or not. Gay issues are important and I shall come to them in a moment, but they shrivel like a salted snail when compared to the towering question of love. Gay people sometimes believe (to this very day, would you credit it, young Stephen?) that the preponderance of obstacles and terrors they encounter in their lives and relationships is intimately connected with the fact of their being gay. As it happens at least 90% of their problems are to do with love and love alone: the lack of it, the denial of it, the inequality of it, the missed reciprocity in it, the horrors and heartaches of it. Love cold, love hot, love fresh, love stale, love scorned, love missed, love denied, love betrayed... the great joke of sexuality is that these problems bedevil straight people just as much as gay. The 10% of extra suffering and complexity that uniquely confronts the gay person is certainly not incidental or trifling, but it must be understood that love comes first. This is tough for straight people to work out.
Straight people are encouraged by culture and society to believe that their sexual impulses are the norm, and therefore when their affairs of the heart and loins go wrong (as they certainly will), when they are flummoxed, distraught and defeated by love, they are forced to believe that it must be their fault. We gay people at least have the advantage of being brought up to expect the world of love to be imponderably and unmanageably difficult, for we are perverted freaks and sick aberrations of nature.They - poor normal lambs - naturally find it harder to understand why, in Lysander's words, "the course of true love never did run smooth".
Sexual availability, so long an impossible dream in your age, becomes the norm in the late 70s and early 80s, only to be shattered by a new disease whose horrors you cannot even imagine. You would little believe that I can say to you now across the gap of 35 years that we are the blessed ones. The people of Britain are happy (or not) because of Tolpuddle Martyrs, Chartists, infantry regiments, any number of ancestors who made the world more comfortable for them. And we, gay people, are happy now (or not) in large part thanks to Stonewall rioters, Harvey Milk, Dennis Lemon, Gay News, Ian McKellen, Edwina Currie (true) et al, and the battered bodies of bullied, beaten and abused gay men and women who stood up to be counted and refused to apologise for the way they were. It has given us something we never thought to have: pride. For a thousand years, shame was our lot and now, turning on a sixpence, we have arrived at pride - without even, it seems, an intervening period of well-it's-OK-I-suppose-wouldn't-have-chosen-it-but-there-you-go. Who'da thought it?
I know what you are doing now, young Stephen. It's early 1973. You are in the library, cross-referencing bibliographies so that you can find more and more examples of queer people in history, art and literature against whom you can hope to validate yourself. Leonardo, Tchaikovsky, Wilde, Barons Corvo and von Gloeden, Robin Maugham, Worsley, "an Englishman", Jean Genet, Cavafy, Montherlant, Roger Peyrefitte, Mary Renault, Michael Campbell, Michael Davies, Angus Stewart, Gore Vidal, John Rechy, William Burroughs.
So many great spirits really do confirm that hope! It emboldens you to know that such a number of brilliant (if often doomed) souls shared the same impulse and desires as you. I know the index-card waltz of (auto)biographies, poems and novels you are dancing: those same names are still so close to the surface of my mind nearly four decades later. Novels, poetry and the worlds of art and ideas are opening up in front of you almost incidentally. You spend all your time in the library yearning to be told that you are not alone, and an unlooked for side-effect of this just happens to be a real education achieved in a private school designed for philistine bumpkins. Being born queer has given you, by mistake, a fantastic advantage over the rugger-playing ordinaries who surround you. But those rugger-playing ordinaries have souls too. And you should know that. I know you cannot believe it now. They seem so secure, so assured, so blessedly normal. They gave Cuthbert Worsley the Kipling-derived title of his overwhelmingly important (to you) autobiography The Flannelled Fool: "these are the men that have lost their soul/ The flannelled fool at he wicket/ And the muddied oaf at the goal".
You look down at the fools almost as much as you fear them. The ordinary people, whose path through life is guaranteed. They won't have to spend their days in public libraries, public lavatories and public courts ashamed, spurned and reviled. There is no internet. No Gay News. No gay chatlines. No men-seeking-men personals. No out-and-proud celebs. Just a world of shame and secrecy.
Somehow, as you age, a miracle will be wrought. You will begin by descending deeper into the depths: expulsion, crime and prison - nothing really to do with being gay, but everything to do with love and your inability to cope with it. Yet you will, as the Regency rakes used to say, "make a recover" and find yourself at university, where it will be astonishingly easy to be open about your sexuality. No great trick, for the university is Cambridge, long a hotbed of righteous tolerance, spiritual heavy-petting and homo hysteria. You will emerge from Cambridge and enter a world where being "out" is no big deal, although a puzzlingly small number of your coevals will find it as easy as you to emerge from the shadows. Before you damn anyone for failing to come out, look to their parents. The answer almost always lies there. Oh how lucky in that department, as in so many, you are, young Stephen.
But don't kid yourself. For millions of teenagers around Britain and everywhere else, it is still 1973. Taunts, beatings and punishment await gay people the world over in playgrounds and execution grounds (the distance between which is measured by nothing more than political constitutions and human will). Yes, you will grow to be a very, very, very, very lucky man who is able to express his nature out loud without fear of hatred or reprisal from any except the most deluded, demented and sad. But that is a small battle won. A whole theatre of war remains. This theatre of war is bigger than the simple issue of being gay, just as the question of love swamps the question of mere sexuality. For alongside sexual politics the entire achievement of the enlightenment (which led inter alia to gay liberation) is under threat like never before. The cruel, hypocritical and loveless hand of religion and absolutism has fallen on the world once more.
So my message from the future is twofold. Fear not, young Stephen, your life will unfold in richer, more accepted and happier ways than you ever dared hope. But be wary, for the most basic tenets of rationalism, openness and freedom that nourish you now and seem so unassailable are about to be harried and besieged by malevolent, mad and medieval minds.
You poor dear, dear thing. Look at you weltering in your misery. The extraordinary truth is that you want to stay there. Unlike so many of the young, you do not yearn for adulthood, pubs and car keys. You want to stay where you are, in the Republic of Pubescence, where feeling has primacy and pain is beautiful. And you know what...?
I think you are right.
• This is an edited version of an article from the 25th-birthday edition of Gay Times, out now. For more details, go to gaytimes.co.ukAlarming levels of extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis have been found around the world. A new study says the findings signal an urgent need for improved testing and the development of better drugs to fight the deadly lung infection.
Researchers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, tested samples from more than 1,200 TB patients from eight countries who were classified as having multi-drug resistant tuberculosis. The infection was resistant to one or both of the older, first-line drugs, rifampacin and isoniazid.
But investigators found 6.7 percent of the patients were infected with extensively drug resistant TB, known as XDR. The XDR-TB patients did not respond to a regimen that included the first-line treatments, and quinolone drugs and newer injectable drugs.
Investigator Tracy Dalton, of the CDC’s Division of TB Elimination, led the study. “So, what this presents is a really worrying trend in increasing XDR in the world,” she said.
Before the study, the World Health Organization estimated that just more than five percent of all resistant cases of TB were XDR.
Dalton says resistance to at least one newer anti-TB drug was detected in 44 percent of the patients, ranging from 33 percent in Thailand to more than 60 percent in Latvia. Other countries in the study were Estonia, the Philippines, Russia, South Africa, South Korea and Peru.
Dalton says the increased availability of newer tuberculosis drugs increases the likelihood they are not taken as prescribed, which causes the TB bacterium to become less sensitive to the stronger drugs. Dalton says the biggest predictor of whether someone in the study was infected with XDR TB was whether they had previously been treated for tuberculosis.
“What we found in many of these sites is that there was resistance to all of these second-line drugs. And we need more drugs to be available, and that is a high priority in TB control right now,” Dalton said.
Dalton says it is critical to take immediate steps to contain the spread of extensively drug resistant tuberculosis, including building more and better lab facilities to test for TB.
“There is a lot going on in molecular testing of drug resistance, which would be a rapid diagnosis of these patients,” Dalton said.
Since Dalton’s study, the WHO has revised its estimate of the number of global XDR-TB cases upward, to 10 percent of all patients diagnosed with drug-resistant tuberculosis.
A study on extensively drug -resistant tuberculosis by Tracy Dalton and colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control is published in the journal The Lancet.This article is about a clothing brand. For the particle physics concept, see hypercolor (physics)
Another example of a Hypercolor T-shirt.
Hypercolor was a line of clothing, mainly T-shirts and shorts, that changed colour with heat.[1]
They were manufactured by Generra Sportswear Company of Seattle and marketed in the United States as Generra Hypercolor or Generra Hypergrafix and elsewhere as Global Hypercolor. They contained a thermochromic pigment made by Matsui Shikiso Chemical of Japan, that changed between two colours – one when cold, one when warm. The shirts were produced with several color change choices beginning in 1991.[2][3] The effect could easily be permanently damaged, particularly when the clothing was washed in hotter than recommended water, ironed, bleached, or tumble-dried.[2]
Generra Sportswear Co. had originally been founded as a men's sportswear distributor and importer in Seattle in 1980. The company was sold to Texas-based Farah Manufacturing Co. in 1984 and bought back by its founders in 1989. In 1986, the company added childrenswear and womenswear items to their portfolio. They struggled to meet the overwhelming demand for Hypercolor products.[4] Between February and May 1991 they sold $50 million in Hypercolor garments.[5] Generra went bankrupt due to mismanagement and fading demand in 1992.[6] The Hypercolor business for the U.S. market was sold to The Seattle T-Shirt Company in 1993; Generra kept the rights for the international market.[7][8] The company emerged from bankruptcy in 1995 as a licensing business.[9][10] The Generra name was acquired by Public Clothing Co. of New York in 2002.[11] Today, Generra Co. is a contemporary women's and men's apparel brand headquartered in New York City.[12][13][14][15]
In the early 2000s, the technique was revived by a number of apparel brands.[2][16][17]Rating +5 T6 Death's Breath/Keystone speed |
by Pink Floyd
The Dark Side of the Moon is the eighth studio album by English rock band Pink Floyd, released on 1 March 1973 by Harvest Records. It built on ideas explored in Pink Floyd's earlier recordings and performances, but without the extended instrumentals that characterised their earlier work. A concept album, its themes explore conflict, greed, time, and mental illness, the latter partly inspired by the deteriorating health of founding member Syd Barrett, who left in 1968.
Developed during live performances, Pink Floyd premiered an early version of The Dark Side of the Moon several months before recording began. New material was recorded in two sessions in 1972 and 1973 at Abbey Road Studios in London. The group used advanced recording techniques at the time, including multitrack recording and tape loops; analogue synthesizers are prominent, and snippets from interviews with Pink Floyd's road crew and others provide philosophical quotations. Engineer Alan Parsons was responsible for many sonic aspects and the recruitment of singer Clare Torry, who appears on "The Great Gig in the Sky". The iconic sleeve was designed by Storm Thorgerson; following keyboardist Richard Wright's request for a "simple and bold" design, it depicts a prism spectrum, representing the band's lighting and the record's themes.
The Dark Side of the Moon produced two singles: "Money" and "Us and Them". The album topped the Billboard chart for one week, and remained on the chart for 741 weeks from 1973 to 1988. Following a change in Billboard's chart methodology in 2009, it re-entered the chart and has since appeared for over 900 weeks.
With estimated sales of over 45 million copies, it is Pink Floyd's bestselling album and one of the best-selling albums worldwide. It has been remastered and re-released several times, and covered in its entirety by several acts. It is regarded as one of the greatest albums of all time.
The album was a surprise massive hit in the United States. Pink Floyd never expected their album to sell so well - and that their record label was even pondering on dropping the band. Roger Waters recalls worrying that if they had not created an album that met the record industry's expectations; they may have been removed from their label's roster and Pink Floyd might have been forced to split-up. After the album sold massively in the States; their contract with Harvest Records was immediately renewed. Pink Floyd had been previously dropped by their American label Capitol Records after sales of Meddle in the United States proved to be feeble and disappointing. Harvest Records later made a deal with Columbia Records as an American subsidiary and sharing holder under EMI. Capitol Records and UMG attempted to return after the success of The Dark Side of the Moon only to be very vehemently turned down by Waters.
Background [ edit ]
Following Meddle in 1971, Pink Floyd assembled for a tour of Britain, Japan and the United States in December of that year. In a band meeting at drummer Nick Mason's home in Camden, bassist Roger Waters proposed that a new album could form part of the tour. Waters' idea was for an album that dealt with things that "make people mad", focusing on the pressures faced by the band during their arduous lifestyle, and dealing with the apparent mental problems suffered by former band member Syd Barrett.[1][2] The band had explored a similar idea with 1969's The Man and The Journey.[3] In an interview for Rolling Stone, guitarist David Gilmour said: "I think we all thought – and Roger definitely thought – that a lot of the lyrics that we had been using were a little too indirect. There was definitely a feeling that the words were going to be very clear and specific."[4]
"Money" (demo) Waters' early demo recording of "Money", made in his garden shed. Problems playing this file? See media help.
Generally, all four members agreed that Waters' album concept unified by a single theme was a good idea.[4] Waters, Gilmour, Mason and keyboardist Richard Wright participated in the writing and production of the new material, and Waters created the early demo tracks at his Islington home in a small studio built in his garden shed.[5] Parts of the new album were taken from previously unused material; the opening line of "Breathe" came from an earlier work by Waters and Ron Geesin, written for the soundtrack of The Body,[6] and the basic structure of "Us and Them" borrowed from an original composition by Wright for Zabriskie Point.[7] The band rehearsed at a warehouse in London owned by The Rolling Stones, and then at the Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park, London. They also purchased extra equipment, which included new speakers, a PA system, a 28-track mixing desk with a four channel quadraphonic output, and a custom-built lighting rig. Nine tonnes of kit was transported in three lorries; this would be the first time the band had taken an entire album on tour.[8][9] The album had been given the provisional title of Dark Side of the Moon (an allusion to lunacy, rather than astronomy).[10] However, after discovering that that title had already been used by another band, Medicine Head, it was temporarily changed to Eclipse. The new material premièred at The Dome in Brighton, on 20 January 1972,[11] and after the commercial failure of Medicine Head's album the title was changed back to the band's original preference.[12][13][nb 1]
The Dark Side of the Moon was played for the press in 1972 The Rainbow Theatre in London, wherewas played for the press in 1972
Dark Side of the Moon: A Piece for Assorted Lunatics, as it was then known,[3] was performed in the presence of an assembled press on 17 February 1972 – more than a year before its release – at the Rainbow Theatre, and was critically acclaimed.[14] Michael Wale of The Times described the piece as "bringing tears to the eyes. It was so completely understanding and musically questioning."[15] Derek Jewell of The Sunday Times wrote "The ambition of the Floyd's artistic intention is now vast."[12] Melody Maker was less enthusiastic: "Musically, there were some great ideas, but the sound effects often left me wondering if I was in a bird-cage at London zoo."[16] The following tour was praised by the public. The new material was performed in the same order in which it was eventually recorded; differences included the lack of synthesizers in tracks such as "On the Run", and Bible readings replaced by Clare Torry's vocals on "The Great Gig in the Sky".[14]
Pink Floyd's lengthy tour through Europe and North America gave them the opportunity to make continual improvements to the scale and quality of their performances.[17] Work on the album was interrupted in late February when the band travelled to France and recorded music for French director Barbet Schroeder's film La Vallée.[18][nb 2] They then performed in Japan and returned to France in March to complete work on the film. After a series of dates in North America, the band flew to London to begin recording, from 24 May to 25 June. More concerts in Europe and North America followed before the band returned on 9 January 1973 to complete the album.[19][20][21]
Concept [ edit ]
The Dark Side of the Moon built upon experiments Pink Floyd had attempted in their previous live shows and recordings, but lacks the extended instrumental excursions which, according to critic David Fricke, had become characteristic of the band after founding member Syd Barrett left in 1968. Gilmour, Barrett's replacement, later referred to those instrumentals as "that psychedelic noodling stuff", and with Waters cited 1971's Meddle as a turning-point towards what would be realised on the album. The Dark Side of the Moon's lyrical themes include conflict, greed, the passage of time, death, and insanity, the latter inspired in part by Barrett's deteriorating mental state.[7] The album contains musique concrète on several tracks.[3]
Each side of the album is a continuous piece of music. The five tracks on each side reflect various stages of human life, beginning and ending with a heartbeat, exploring the nature of the human experience, and (according to Waters) "empathy".[7] "Speak to Me" and "Breathe" together stress the mundane and futile elements of life that accompany the ever-present threat of madness, and the importance of living one's own life – "Don't be afraid to care".[22] By shifting the scene to an airport, the synthesizer-driven instrumental "On the Run" evokes the stress and anxiety of modern travel, in particular Wright's fear of flying.[23] "Time" examines the manner in which its passage can control one's life and offers a stark warning to those who remain focused on mundane aspects; it is followed by a retreat into solitude and withdrawal in "Breathe (Reprise)". The first side of the album ends with Wright and vocalist Clare Torry's soulful metaphor for death, "The Great Gig in the Sky".[3]
Opening with the sound of cash registers and loose change, the first track on side two, "Money", mocks greed and consumerism using tongue-in-cheek lyrics and cash-related sound effects. "Money" became the most commercially successful track, and has been covered by several acts.[24] "Us and Them" addresses the isolation of the depressed with the symbolism of conflict and the use of simple dichotomies to describe personal relationships. "Any Colour You Like" concerns the lack of choice one has in a human society. "Brain Damage" looks at a mental illness resulting from the elevation of fame and success above the needs of the self; in particular, the line "and if the band you're in starts playing different tunes" reflects the mental breakdown of former bandmate Syd Barrett. The album ends with "Eclipse", which espouses the concepts of alterity and unity, while forcing the listener to recognise the common traits shared by humanity.[25][26]
Recording [ edit ]
The album was recorded at Abbey Road Studios, in two sessions, between May 1972 and January 1973. The band were assigned staff engineer Alan Parsons, who had worked as assistant tape operator on Atom Heart Mother, and who had also gained experience as a recording engineer on the Beatles' Abbey Road and Let It Be.[27][28] The recording sessions made use of some of the most advanced studio techniques of the time; the studio was capable of 16-track mixes, which offered a greater degree of flexibility than the eight- or four-track mixes they had previously used, although the band often used so many tracks that to make more space available second-generation copies were made.[29]
Beginning on 1 June, the first track to be recorded was "Us and Them", followed six days later by "Money". Waters had created effects loops from recordings of various money-related objects, including coins thrown into a food-mixing bowl taken from his wife's pottery studio, and these were later re-recorded to take advantage of the band's decision to record a quadraphonic mix of the album (Parsons has since expressed dissatisfaction with the result of this mix, attributed to a lack of time and the paucity of available multi-track tape recorders).[28] "Time" and "The Great Gig in the Sky" were the next pieces to be recorded, followed by a two-month break, during which the band spent time with their families and prepared for an upcoming tour of the US.[30] The recording sessions suffered regular interruptions; Waters, a supporter of Arsenal F.C., would often break to see his team compete, and the band would occasionally stop work to watch Monty Python's Flying Circus on the television, leaving Parsons to work on material recorded up to that point.[29] Gilmour has, however, disputed this claim; in an interview in 2003 he said: "We would sometimes watch them but when we were on a roll, we would get on."[31][32]
Returning from the US in January 1973, they recorded "Brain Damage", "Eclipse", "Any Colour You Like" and "On the Run", while fine-tuning the work they had already laid down in the previous sessions. A foursome of female vocalists was assembled to sing on "Brain Damage", "Eclipse" and "Time", and saxophonist Dick Parry was booked to play on "Us and Them" and "Money". With director Adrian Maben, the band also filmed studio footage for Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii.[33] Once the recording sessions were complete, the band began a tour of Europe.[34]
Instrumentation [ edit ]
The album features metronomic sound effects during "Speak to Me", and tape loops opening "Money". Mason created a rough version of "Speak to Me" at his home, before completing it in the studio. The track serves as an overture and contains cross-fades of elements from other pieces on the album. A piano chord, replayed backwards, serves to augment the build-up of effects, which are immediately followed by the opening of "Breathe". Mason received a rare solo composing credit for "Speak to Me".[nb 3][35][36]
The sound effects on "Money" were created by splicing together Waters' recordings of clinking coins, tearing paper, a ringing cash register, and a clicking adding machine, which were used to create a 7-beat effects loop (later adapted to four tracks in order to create a "walk around the room" effect in quadraphonic presentations of the album).[37] At times the degree of sonic experimentation on the album required the engineers and band to operate the mixing console's faders simultaneously, in order to mix down the intricately assembled multitrack recordings of several of the songs (particularly "On the Run").[7]
Along with the conventional rock band instrumentation, Pink Floyd added prominent synthesizers to their sound. For example, the band experimented with an EMS VCS 3 on "Brain Damage" and "Any Colour You Like", and a Synthi A on "Time" and "On the Run". They also devised and recorded unconventional sounds, such as an assistant engineer running around the studio's echo chamber (during "On the Run"),[38] and a specially treated bass drum made to simulate a human heartbeat (during "Speak to Me", "On the Run", "Time" and "Eclipse"). This heartbeat is most prominent as the intro and the outro to the album, but it can also be heard sporadically on "Time" and "On the Run".[7] "Time" features assorted clocks ticking, then chiming simultaneously at the start of the song, accompanied by a series of Rototoms. The recordings were initially created as a quadraphonic test by Parsons, who recorded each timepiece at an antique clock shop.[35] Although these recordings had not been created specifically for the album, elements of this material were eventually used in the track.[39]
"The Great Gig in the Sky" "The Great Gig in the Sky" features Richard Wright's piano composition accompanied by improvised vocal work from Clare Torry. This selection is taken from about two minutes forty seconds onwards. "Money" "Money" makes use of tape loops and a 7/4 time signature. Although similar to the original demo track recorded by Waters, it is considerably more rock-orientated. This is an excerpt from the start of the track.
Voices [ edit ]
Several tracks, including "Us and Them" and "Time", demonstrated Richard Wright's and David Gilmour's ability to harmonise their voices. In the 2003 Classic Albums documentary The Making of The Dark Side of the Moon, Waters attributed this to the fact that their voices sounded extremely similar. To take advantage of this, Parsons utilised studio techniques such as the double tracking of vocals and guitars, which allowed Gilmour to harmonise with himself. The engineer also made prominent use of flanging and phase shifting effects on vocals and instruments, odd trickery with reverb,[7] and the panning of sounds between channels (most notable in the quadraphonic mix of "On the Run", when the sound of the Hammond B3 organ played through a Leslie speaker rapidly swirls around the listener).[40]
The album's credits include Clare Torry, a session singer and songwriter, and a regular at Abbey Road. She had worked on pop material and numerous cover albums, and after hearing one of those albums Parsons invited her to the studio to sing on Wright's composition "The Great Gig in the Sky". She declined this invitation as she wanted to watch Chuck Berry perform at the Hammersmith Odeon, but arranged to come in on the following Sunday. The band explained the concept behind the album, but were unable to tell her exactly what she should do. Gilmour was in charge of the session, and in a few short takes on a Sunday night Torry improvised a wordless melody to accompany Wright's emotive piano solo. She was initially embarrassed by her exuberance in the recording booth, and wanted to apologise to the band – only to find them delighted with her performance.[41][42] Her takes were then selectively edited to produce the version used on the track.[4] For her contribution she was paid £30, equivalent to about £390 in 2019.[41][43] In 2004, she sued EMI and Pink Floyd for 50% of the songwriting royalties, arguing that her contribution to "The Great Gig in the Sky" was substantial enough to be considered co-authorship. The case was settled out of court for an undisclosed sum, with all post-2005 pressings crediting Wright and Torry jointly.[44][45]
Clare Torry in 2003
Snippets of voices between and over the music are another notable feature of the album. During recording sessions, Waters recruited both the staff and the temporary occupants of the studio to answer a series of questions printed on flashcards. The interviewees were placed in front of a microphone in a darkened Studio 3,[46] and shown such questions as "What's your favourite colour?" and "What's your favourite food?", before moving on to themes more central to the album (such as madness, violence, and death). Questions such as "When was the last time you were violent?", followed immediately by "Were you in the right?", were answered in the order they were presented.[7] Roger "The Hat" Manifold proved difficult to find, and was the only contributor recorded in a conventional sit-down interview, as by then the flashcards had been mislaid. Waters asked him about a violent encounter he had had with another motorist, and Manifold replied "... give 'em a quick, short, sharp shock..." When asked about death he responded "live for today, gone tomorrow, that's me..."[47] Another roadie, Chris Adamson, who was on tour with Pink Floyd, recorded the snippet which opens the album: "I've been mad for fucking years – absolutely years".[48] The band's road manager Peter Watts (father of actress Naomi Watts)[49] contributed the repeated laughter during "Brain Damage" and "Speak to Me". His second wife, Patricia "Puddie" Watts (now Patricia Gleason), was responsible for the line about the "geezer" who was "cruisin' for a bruisin'" used in the segue between "Money" and "Us and Them", and the words "I never said I was frightened of dying" heard halfway through "The Great Gig in the Sky".[50]
Perhaps the most notable responses "I am not frightened of dying. Any time will do: I don't mind. Why should I be frightened of dying? There's no reason for it – you've got to go sometime" and closing words "there is no dark side in the moon, really. As a matter of fact it's all dark" came from the studios' Irish doorman, Gerry O'Driscoll.[51] Paul and Linda McCartney were also interviewed, but their answers were judged to be "trying too hard to be funny", and were not included on the album.[52] McCartney's Wings bandmate Henry McCullough contributed the line "I don't know, I was really drunk at the time".[53]
Completion [ edit ]
Following the completion of the dialogue sessions, producer Chris Thomas was hired to provide "a fresh pair of ears". Thomas's background was in music, rather than engineering. He had worked with Beatles producer George Martin, and was acquainted with Pink Floyd's manager Steve O'Rourke.[54] All four members of the band were engaged in a disagreement over the style of the mix, with Waters and Mason preferring a "dry" and "clean" mix which made more use of the non-musical elements, and Gilmour and Wright preferring a subtler and more "echoey" mix.[55] Thomas later claimed there were no such disagreements, stating "There was no difference in opinion between them, I don't remember Roger once saying that he wanted less echo. In fact, there were never any hints that they were later going to fall out. It was a very creative atmosphere. A lot of fun."[56] Although the truth remains unclear, Thomas's intervention resulted in a welcome compromise between Waters and Gilmour, leaving both entirely satisfied with the end product. Thomas was responsible for significant changes to the album, including the perfect timing of the echo used on "Us and Them". He was also present for the recording of "The Great Gig in the Sky" (although Parsons was responsible for hiring Torry).[57] Interviewed in 2006, when asked if he felt his goals had been accomplished in the studio, Waters said:
When the record was finished I took a reel-to-reel copy home with me and I remember playing it for my wife then, and I remember her bursting into tears when it was finished. And I thought, "This has obviously struck a chord somewhere", and I was kinda pleased by that. You know when you've done something, certainly if you create a piece of music, you then hear it with fresh ears when you play it for somebody else. And at that point I thought to myself, "Wow, this is a pretty complete piece of work", and I had every confidence that people would respond to it.[58]
Packaging [ edit ]
The album's artwork depicts the light refracting from a triangular prism
It felt like the whole band were working together. It was a creative time. We were all very open. – Richard Wright[59]
The album was originally released in a gatefold LP sleeve designed by Hipgnosis and George Hardie. Hipgnosis had designed several of the band's previous albums, with controversial results; EMI had reacted with confusion when faced with the cover designs for Atom Heart Mother and Obscured by Clouds, as they had expected to see traditional designs which included lettering and words. Designers Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell were able to ignore such criticism as they were employed by the band. For The Dark Side of the Moon, Richard Wright instructed them to come up with something "smarter, neater – more classy".[60] The design was inspired by a photograph of a prism with a colour beam projected through it that Thorgerson had found in a photography book.
The artwork was created by their associate, George Hardie. Hipgnosis offered the band a choice of seven designs, but all four members agreed that the prism was by far the best. The final design depicts a glass prism dispersing light into colour. The design represents three elements: the band's stage lighting, the album lyrics, and Wright's request for a "simple and bold" design.[7] The spectrum of light continues through to the gatefold – an idea that Waters came up with.[61] Added shortly afterwards, the gatefold design also includes a visual representation of the heartbeat sound used throughout the album, and the back of the album cover contains Thorgerson's suggestion of another prism recombining the spectrum of light, facilitating interesting layouts of the sleeve in record shops.[62] The light band emanating from the prism on the album cover has six colours, missing indigo compared to the traditional division of the spectrum into red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. Inside the sleeve were two posters and two pyramid-themed stickers. One poster bore pictures of the band in concert, overlaid with scattered letters to form PINK FLOYD, and the other an infrared photograph of the Great Pyramids of Giza, created by Powell and Thorgerson.[62]
The band were so confident of the quality of Waters' lyrics that, for the first time, they printed them on the album's sleeve.[8]
Release [ edit ]
The Dark Side of the Moon at
(left to right) David Gilmour, Nick Mason, Dick Parry, Roger Waters A live performance ofat Earls Court, shortly after its release in 1973.(left to right) David Gilmour, Nick Mason, Dick Parry, Roger Waters
As the quadraphonic mix of the album was not then complete, the band (with the exception of Wright) boycotted the press reception held at the London Planetarium on 27 February.[72] The guests were, instead, presented with a quartet of life-sized cardboard cut-outs of the band, and the stereo mix of the album was presented through a poor-quality public address system.[73][74] Generally, however, the press were enthusiastic; Melody Maker's Roy Hollingworth described side one as "so utterly confused with itself it was difficult to follow", but praised side two, writing: "The songs, the sounds, the rhythms were solid and sound, Saxophone hit the air, the band rocked and rolled, and then gushed and tripped away into the night."[75] Steve Peacock of Sounds wrote: "I don't care if you've never heard a note of the Pink Floyd's music in your life, I'd unreservedly recommend everyone to The Dark Side of the Moon".[73] In his 1973 review for Rolling Stone magazine, Loyd Grossman declared Dark Side "a fine album with a textural and conceptual richness that not only invites, but demands involvement".[76] In Rock Albums of the Seventies (1981), Robert Christgau found its lyrical ideas clichéd and its music pretentious, but called it a "kitsch masterpiece" that can be charming with highlights such as taped speech fragments, Parry's saxophone, and studio effects which enhance Gilmour's guitar solos.
The Dark Side of the Moon was released first in the US on 1 March 1973,[77] and then in the UK on 16 March.[78] It became an instant chart success in Britain and throughout Western Europe;[73] by the following month, it had gained a gold certification in the US.[79] Throughout March 1973 the band played the album as part of their US tour, including a midnight performance at Radio City Music Hall in New York City on 17 March before an audience of 6,000. The album reached the Billboard Top LPs & Tape chart's number one spot on 28 April 1973,[80] and was so successful that the band returned two months later for another tour.[81]
Label [ edit ]
Much of the album's early American success is attributed to the efforts of Pink Floyd's US record company, Capitol Records. Newly appointed chairman Bhaskar Menon set about trying to reverse the relatively poor sales of the band's 1971 studio album Meddle. Meanwhile, disenchanted with Capitol, the band and manager O'Rourke had been quietly negotiating a new contract with CBS president Clive Davis, on Columbia Records. The Dark Side of the Moon was the last album that Pink Floyd were obliged to release before formally signing a new contract. Menon's enthusiasm for the new album was such that he began a huge promotional advertising campaign, which included radio-friendly truncated versions of "Us and Them" and "Time".[82] In some countries – notably the UK – Pink Floyd had not released a single since 1968's "Point Me at the Sky", and unusually "Money" was released as a single on 7 May,[72] with "Any Colour You Like" on the B-side. It reached number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 in July 1973.[nb 4][83] A two-sided white label promotional version of the single, with mono and stereo mixes, was sent to radio stations. The mono side had the word "bullshit" removed from the song – leaving "bull" in its place – however, the stereo side retained the uncensored version. This was subsequently withdrawn; the replacement was sent to radio stations with a note advising disc jockeys to dispose of the first uncensored copy.[84] On 4 February 1974, a double A-side single was released with "Time" on one side, and "Us and Them" on the opposite side.[nb 5][85] Menon's efforts to secure a contract renewal with Pink Floyd were in vain however; at the beginning of 1974, the band signed for Columbia with a reported advance fee of $1M (in Britain and Europe they continued to be represented by Harvest Records).[86]
Sales [ edit ]
The Dark Side of the Moon became one of the best-selling albums of all time[87] and is in the top 25 of a list of best-selling albums in the United States.[45][88] Although it held the number one spot in the US for only a week, it remained in the Billboard album chart for 741 weeks from 1973 to 1988.[89][90] The album re-appeared on the Billboard charts with the introduction of the Top Pop Catalog Albums chart in May 1991, and has been a perennial feature since then.[91] In the UK, it is the seventh-best-selling album of all time and the highest selling album never to reach number one.[92]
... I think that when it was finished, everyone thought it was the best thing we'd ever done to date, and everyone was very pleased with it, but there's no way that anyone felt it was five times as good as Meddle, or eight times as good as Atom Heart Mother, or the sort of figures that it has in fact sold. It was... not only about being a good album but also about being in the right place at the right time. – Nick Mason[74]
In the US the LP was released before the introduction of platinum awards in 1976. It therefore held only a gold disc until 16 February 1990, when it was certified 11× platinum. On 4 June 1998 the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) certified the album 15× platinum,[45] denoting sales of fifteen million in the United States – making it their biggest-selling work there (The Wall is 23× platinum, but as a double album this signifies sales of 11.5 million).[93] "Money" has sold well as a single, and as with "Time", remains a radio favourite; in the US, for the year ending 20 April 2005, "Time" was played on 13,723 occasions, and "Money" on 13,731 occasions.[nb 6] Industry sources suggest that worldwide sales of the album total about 45 million.[94][95] "On a slow week" between 8,000 and 9,000 copies are sold,[87] and a total of 400,000 were sold in 2002, making it the 200th-best-selling album of that year – nearly three decades after its initial release. The album has sold 9,502,000 copies in the US since 1991 when Nielsen SoundScan began tracking sales for Billboard.[96] To this day, it occupies a prominent spot on Billboard's Pop Catalog Chart. It reached number one when the 2003 hybrid CD/SACD edition was released and sold 800,000 copies in the US.[45] On the week of 5 May 2006 The Dark Side of the Moon achieved a combined total of 1,716 weeks on the Billboard 200 and Pop Catalog charts.[58] One in every fourteen people in the US under the age of 50 is estimated to own, or to have owned, a copy.[45] Upon a change in methodology in 2009 allowing catalogue titles to be included in the Billboard 200,[97] The Dark Side of the Moon returned to the chart at number 189 on 12 December of that year for its 742nd charting week.[98] It has continued to sporadically appear on the Billboard 200 since then, with the total at 942 weeks on the chart as of January 2019.[99]
"The combination of words and music hit a peak," explained Gilmour. "All the music before had not had any great lyrical point to it. And this one was clear and concise. The cover was also right. I think it's become like a benevolent noose hanging behind us. Throughout our entire career, people have said we would never top the Dark Side record and tour. But The Wall earned more in dollar terms."[100]
Re-issues and remastering [ edit ]
In 1979, The Dark Side of the Moon was released as a remastered LP by Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab,[101] and in April 1988 on their "Ultradisc" gold CD format.[102] The album was released by EMI on the then-new compact disc format in 1984, and in 1992 it was re-released as a remastered CD in the box set Shine On.[103] This version was re-released as a 20th anniversary box set edition with postcards the following year. The cover design was again by Storm Thorgerson, the designer of the original 1973 cover.[104] On some pressings, a faintly audible orchestral version of the Beatles' "Ticket to Ride" can be heard after "Eclipse" over the album's closing heartbeats.[45]
The original quadraphonic mix[nb 7], created by Alan Parsons,[105] was commissioned by EMI but never endorsed by Pink Floyd, as Parsons was disappointed with his mix.[28][105] To celebrate the album's 30th anniversary, an updated surround version was released in 2003. The band elected not to use Parsons' quadraphonic mix (done shortly after the original release), and instead had engineer James Guthrie create a new 5.1 channel surround sound mix on the SACD format.[28][106] Guthrie had worked with Pink Floyd since co-producing and engineering their eleventh album, The Wall, and had previously worked on surround versions of The Wall for DVD-Video and Waters' In the Flesh for SACD. Speaking in 2003, Alan Parsons expressed some disappointment with Guthrie's SACD mix, suggesting that Guthrie was "possibly a little too true to the original mix", but was generally complimentary.[28] The 30th-anniversary edition won four Surround Music Awards in 2003,[107] and has since sold more than 800,000 copies.[108] The cover image was created by a team of designers including Storm Thorgerson.[104] The image is a photograph of a custom-made stained glass window, built to match the exact dimensions and proportions of the original prism design. Transparent glass, held in place by strips of lead, was used in place of the opaque colours of the original. The idea is derived from the "sense of purity in the sound quality, being 5.1 surround sound..." The image was created out of a desire to be "the same but different, such that the design was clearly DSotM, still the recognisable prism design, but was different and hence new".[109]
The Dark Side of the Moon was also re-released in 2003 on 180-gram virgin vinyl (mastered by Kevin Gray at AcousTech Mastering) and included slightly different versions of the original posters and stickers that came with the original vinyl release, along with a new 30th anniversary poster.[110] In 2007 the album was included in Oh, by the Way, a box set celebrating the 40th anniversary of Pink Floyd,[111] and a DRM-free version was released on the iTunes Store.[108] In 2011 the album was re-released as part of the Why Pink Floyd...? campaign, featuring a remastered version of the album along with various other material.[112]
Legacy [ edit ]
It's changed me in many ways, because it's brought in a lot of money, and one feels very secure when you can sell an album for two years. But it hasn't changed my attitude to music. Even though it was so successful, it was made in the same way as all our other albums, and the only criterion we have about releasing music is whether we like it or not. It was not a deliberate attempt to make a commercial album. It just happened that way. We knew it had a lot more melody than previous Floyd albums, and there was a concept that ran all through it. The music was easier to absorb and having girls singing away added a commercial touch that none of our records had. – Richard Wright[113]
The success of the album brought wealth to all four members of the band; Richard Wright and Roger Waters bought large country houses, and Nick Mason became a collector of upmarket cars.[114] Some of the profits were invested in the production of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.[115] Engineer Alan Parsons received a Grammy Award nomination for Best Engineered Recording, Non-Classical for The Dark Side of the Moon,[116] and he went on to have a successful career as a recording artist with the Alan Parsons Project. Although Waters and Gilmour have on occasion downplayed his contribution to the success of the album, Mason has praised his role.[117] In 2003, Parsons reflected: "I think they all felt that I managed to hang the rest of my career on Dark Side of the Moon, which has an element of truth to it. But I still wake up occasionally, frustrated about the fact that they made untold millions and a lot of the people involved in the record didn't."[32][nb 8]
Part of the legacy of The Dark Side of the Moon is in its influence on modern music, the musicians who have performed cover versions of its songs, and even in modern urban myths. Its release is often seen as a pivotal point in the history of rock music, and comparisons are sometimes drawn between Pink Floyd and Radiohead – specifically their 1997 album OK Computer – which has been called The Dark Side of the Moon of the 1990s, owing to the fact that both albums share themes relating to the loss of a creative individual's ability to function in the modern world.[119][120][121]
In a 2018 book about classic rock, Steven Hyden recalls concluding, in his teens, that The Dark Side of the Moon and Led Zeppelin IV were the two greatest albums of the genre, vision quests "encompass[ing] the twin poles of teenage desire". They had similarities, in that both album's cover and internal artwork eschew pictures of the |
stages, and even the COR Team Australia still participating? Those rhetorical questions and many more will never be answered, however I hope in my heart of hearts, that the event does not die a slow and agonising death. Organisers need to quit mucking about, start meeting their deadlines and organise a regatta worthy of this prestigious trophy. Then, and only then, will the Fat Lady step up and cut the bell rope, rather than ring it.History and goals of the tradition of annual reviews
The specific nature of work of special services responsible both for national security and foreign intelligence has throughout the ages required operating as covertly as possible and certain mystery has always surrounded it. In the information society it is no longer possible to act completely undercover, therefore more and more special services have understood the need of being more open and notify the public of their activities.
Certainly the degree of openness is dependant on the nature of the special service - security agencies not dealing with criminal proceedings and not having the rights of the police are in a more difficult position to speak thoroughly about their activities. The same applies to foreign intelligence services.
The Estonian Internal Security Service is among the special services that also have the function of an investigative agency and the rights of the police. As we need to conduct criminal proceedings in more complicated areas that generate great public interest such as counterintelligence, maintenance of constitutional order, corruption of higher officials, crimes against humanity, hiding from the public is not possible or expedient.
It is our position that without large-scale public support and public trust it is very difficult to be successful in performing the duties assigned to the Internal Security Service. However, it is impossible to gain support if nothing is known about your activities or even your existence. Therefore we have tried to be as open as possible when speaking about our profession, goals and results of activities.
The second and not less important goal is informing the public of possible security risks and threats. In the form of an annual review we possess a simple but effective tool in achieving the aforesaid goals. An annual review is above all meant for the whole population of Estonia but also for international public - ranging from enthusiasts interested in special services to students and journalists. Colleagues from our partner services constitute also an important target group.
Hopefully it is self-evident that the specific nature of special services sets quite strict limits on openness - operations, life and health of the employees of the organisation or those who have aided the Republic of Estonia should not be compromised; nor is it wise to disclose one's work methods, tactics and plans of action to the opponents.
The first annual review of the Estonian Internal Security Service was published in 1998, being one of the first publications of its kind in the world. In compiling an annual review we set ourselves the objective that besides being informative it would also be interesting and easy to read. We are pleased to note that the interest of Estonian public in our annual reviews has increased year by year and in the past years publication of the annual review has become a significant media event in Estonia, attracting some media attention even in neighbouring countries. The feedback received from our partner services also confirms that we have taken the right path.
Where is the annual review of the Internal Security Service available?
The annual reviews in paper format are available in the National Library, in the libraries of the University of Tartu, the University of Tallinn and the Public Service Academy as well as in county central libraries.
Web editions of our annual reviews are available at our web site.As an island nation we have a deep love for the seas around us, but do we think about what lies beneath these seas? There over 17,000 shipwrecks recorded in Irish waters. ‘Documentary on One: Sunken Treasures’ highlights the historical significance and heritage of the thousands of shipwrecks that lie off the coast of Ireland. It brings to life the stories, people, artifacts and heritage intrinsic to these shipwrecks. It also documents how modern technology has opened up the deep ocean beds for exploration and made diving for buried treasure no longer the story of fairy tales.
We follow the deep-sea exploration of Waterford man, Eoin McGarry, as he dives to the Crescent City shipwreck off the coast of Cork, in search for sunken treasure and untold stories.
The steam ship the SS Crescent City was built in Liverpool in 1870 for the Liverpool and Mississippi Steamship Company. She derived her name from the old name for New Orleans, and she was built to transport goods from the two great ports of New Orleans and Liverpool. Crescent City set sail in 1871 from New Orleans - on the return leg of her maiden voyage. On board there was 41 crew and 4 passengers. She carried with her general cargo and two tons of silver, which was made up of Mexican silver coins and forty boxes of silver bars.
Having crossed the Atlantic, a journey which took over two weeks, she encountered treacherous weather conditions and sunk off Galley Head in Cork. Miraculously the crew and passengers made it safely to shore. Over the last 142 years some of her silver has been salvaged. But lying beneath the water of Dhulligh Rock still lies over €100,000 worth of silver coins.
In ‘Documentary on One: Sunken Treasures’, we bring the listener on a journey to the bottom of the sea and illuminate the wealth of our maritime history.
‘Documentary on One: Sunken Treasures’ is a Curious Broadcast production funded by the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland.
Narrated by Patricia Baker
Produced by Patricia Baker, John Gough and Myra Hayes of Curious Broadcast Productions
Production Supervision by Sarah Blake
Sound Supervision by Mark McGrath
First broadcast 30th November 2013
'Documentary on One is the home of Irish radio documentaries and the largest library of documentary podcasts available anywhere in the world. We tell stories in sound, mostly Irish ones, and each documentary tells its own story'Lack of representation is still a huge issue—but there’s another reason this annual list is antiquated.
On April 5, Manhattan’s Eleven Madison Park landed the top spot on this year's list released by the World’s 50 Best Restaurants organization. It was a big win for the much-lauded restaurant, run by chef Daniel Humm and restaurateur Will Guidara, and a big win for New York City, and a big win for the United States: This is only the second time an American restaurant has topped the list in its 15-year history. (Thomas Keller’s French Laundry took the title in both 2003 and 2004.) For honorees, it’s a great honor; for the rest of us, it’s not worth much more than a scan and, possibly, a groan.
Criticism of the World’s 50 Best list has been loud and ample over the past five years or so, mostly centering on the lack of female representation and the Eurocentric nature of its roster. And yet, in 2017, the list’s diversity has budged very little. This year’s list includes a whopping three female head chefs, as opposed to last year’s two; but all three still work under a male chef. The organization’s “Best Female Chef” award is a laughable Band-Aid attempting to fix a much larger issue. Often the honoree doesn’t even make it to the top 50—a confusing message at best. There are zero restaurants on the list from the country of India or the entire continent of Africa. The lack of representation is nothing new, but the fact that nothing has changed by now implies that it never will.
The list itself can be fun to look at: For those interested in fine dining, international travel, and the business of ranking things, it can show us a lot about what’s changing and what’s popular, at least in the eyes of a select few. For aspiring chefs, it’s a roadmap to what gets people’s attention. (A few years ago, on Noma’s heels, it was locally foraged moss; now it’s Eleven Madison Park’s wily mix of theatricality and hospitality.)
As Lauren Collins noted in The New Yorker in 2015, the list began in 2002 as a whim, and was only expected to be a “onetime stunt.” Since then, though, it has failed to evolve—both toward inclusivity and toward the simple fact that our bucket lists have changed.
What we want now, as explorers and adventurous eaters, is far different than what we wanted—or maybe knew we wanted—15 years ago. Thanks to Papa Bourdain, we’ve developed a desire to seek out street food and less stuffy dining experiences when we travel. We have TripAdvisor, we have Yelp, we have innumerable guides to dining in places like Mexico City and Tokyo and Paris and friends whose Instagrams are packed with spicy boat noodles in L.A. and fried chicken in Nashville. (And “authentic” has all but devolved into a four-letter word thanks to its overuse.) The idea of the Fine European Restaurant still exists—and will, so long as there are anniversaries to celebrate and expense accounts to fill—and there is certainly exciting innovation and creativity happening in the rarefied world of $400 tasting menus. But the white tablecloth is no longer the end-all, be-all of eating well, and you shouldn’t make the same mistake the 50 Best List does in thinking so.
Even James Beard Award–winning fine-dining chefs are jumping ship from well-established jobs to open up veggie-burger joints and fast-casual pasta concepts (see: Brooks Headley and Mark Ladner, respectively, both of whom worked at Michelin-starred Del Posto). At least in the United States, the visibility of non-European culinary traditions (Vietnamese, Thai, Moroccan, Israeli, Chinese, Iranian) has increased in a big way over the past decade. Our understanding of what a “great restaurant” is has changed, and our dining preferences have changed—with each passing year, the World’s 50 Best List becomes more and more of a dinosaur. As Eater restaurant critic Ryan Sutton wrote, the list is not so much championing restaurants as it is creating “ample publicity for their own product.” It’s less a resource than a self-perpetuating hype machine.
Take a counterexample: Just a day before the 50 Best List came out, Food & Wine announced its list of Best New Chefs. It’s an annual list that features chefs across the United States, which has in the past—just like 50 Best—come under fire for featuring mostly white guys. (Last year the list included just two women.) But this year, the 10-restaurant, 14-chef list includes four women and only four white dudes. They listened, they adapted, and they gave us a list you’ll actually use when planning your next trip. See? It's actually possible.
Watch Now:Paint used by car makers including Vauxhall, BMW, Volkswagen and Audi linked to illegal mines in India reliant on child labour and debt bondage
Some of the world’s biggest car makers including Vauxhall, BMW, Volkswagen and Audi are launching investigations into their paint supply chains after the Guardian linked their suppliers to illegal mines in India where child labour and debt bondage are widespread.
Children as young as 10 work at mines for mica, a mineral that creates the shimmery car paint used on millions of vehicles around the world.
Although largely unknown to consumers, mica is highly valued for its ability to reflect and refract light. In 2014, the cosmetics industry came under fire for child labour in its mica supply chains, but mica is also widely used by other global industries.
Beauty companies and the struggle to source child labour-free mica Read more
The Indian government has pledged to stamp out child labour in its mica industry, with a small number of official mica mines now monitored for labour and environmental abuses.
Yet illegal mining remains widespread, with child rights campaigners estimating that up to 20,000 children work in hundreds of small-scale mines in northern Jharkhand and southern Bihar.
On visits this year to illegal mines in the Tisri subdistrict in the Indian state of Jharkhand, the Guardian documented children aged 12 mining mica underground in hazardous, leaking mineshafts, hammering glittering rock flakes from walls and carrying heavy loads through slippery tunnels. Above ground, girls as young as 10 were sorting mica from other mined material.
The Guardian has traced mica from three mines in Tisri subdistrict to three Indian exporters: Mohan Mica, Pravin and Mount Hill. One of their biggest customers is Fujian Kuncai, a Chinese company, whose website listed (pdfs now removed) customers including cosmetics giants L’Oréal and Proctor & Gamble as well as PPG and Axalta, two of the leading companies in the world’s $19bn car paint industry.
Many of these children work in mines alongside their parents and siblings, for whom the mine is the only source of income. Many families are bonded to the mines by large debts owed to local moneylenders or mine owners who charge up to 200% annual interest.
Glittering clouds of tiny mica particles swirl around 13-year-old Dharini* as she carries rocks of mica from the mineshaft to where groups of younger children are sorting through piles on the ground.
She says she has worked at mines, carved out of the mountainous hillside, for as long as she can remember and has never gone to school.
“I’ve been helping my mother here at the mine every day because they need my help for the money,” she says. Along with her mother, Dharini gets paid about £5 a week for six days of work.
Her mother, Basanti, has also spent her life working at mines. “Every evening we feel ill after work with nausea and it is difficult to breathe because of the dust but we have no choice, this is the only work.”
When asked if her child goes to school, she said: “My daughter works with me because we need the money to keep the family going.”
A few hours away, at another mine, more children are working alongside their families. Simitra, a 45-year-old mother of two, says the family are all working simply to try to cover the interest on a £200 loan they took out in 2014 after her husband contracted tuberculosis.
None of the families who work here know where the mica they scrape from the rock walls ends up, nor that they are the first link in multiple complex global supply chains stretching around the world.
“Natural mica goes into numerous products without anyone realising, since it is not listed as ingredient in car paints, decorative paints, plastic products, hairdryers, toasters and much more. Child labour is a part of our everyday life but no one knows about it,” said Aysel Sabahoglu, children’s rights officer of Terre des Hommes Netherlands, a Dutch NGO that works to protect children’s rights.
Campaigners say it is impossible to differentiate between mica from legal mines and from the hundreds of small-scale illegal mines in northern Jharkhand and southern Bihar.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Inside a factory in Jharkhand belonging to a local mica trader, bags of the precious mineral sit ready for sorting. Photograph: Peter Bengtsen
India officially produced about 19,000 tonnes of crude and scrap mica in 2013-14, yet it exported more than six times as much – about 128,000 tonnes – according to the latest data (pdf) from the Ministry of Mines.
Mica from illegal mines is sold to networks of local traders, who sell the mineral to Indian export companies. The mica is next transported to Kolkata and shipped to foreign companies who then transform the mica into the pearlescent pigments used in industry.
In emails to the Guardian, Axalta and PPG confirmed that they use natural mica in their paint products. Axalta also confirmed that it sources pearlescent pigments from Fujian Kuncai. PPG declined to say whether it is a Kuncai customer, stating: “As a matter of policy, PPG does not discuss its relationships with specific suppliers.”
PPG and Axalta sell to leading car companies. When contacted by the Guardian, some car firms said they were looking into their suppliers in the light of the allegations. BMW, which owns the Mini brand, said its investigations had found two suppliers with direct links to Kuncai and that an internal investigation had been launched.
Fujian Kuncai said it was conducting extensive inquiries into its three Indian suppliers named in the investigation.
“It is a shock to us that three of our suppliers are mentioned … and that [the Guardian] has linked them to mines involved in child labour,” said Mike Tijdink, European marketing manager for Fujian Kuncai.
“For us it is totally unacceptable that child labour is present in our supply chain and we will act accordingly. The insights presented in your [investigation] differ from our findings over the past years, as our audits on the locations and agreements with our suppliers exclude any involvement in this respect.”
Axalta said: “Fujian Kuncai is a supplier to Axalta … Axalta does use some natural mica that goes into the pearlescent pigments used in certain paint formulations. The Axalta standard contract template and terms of purchase – which are in place with Fujian Kuncai – stipulate that its suppliers are prohibited from using forced labour.
“It goes on to require that suppliers comply with all applicable laws, codes, rules, regulations, orders and ordinances, including those relating to environmental protection, energy, and labour and all applicable industry codes and standards.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest In this photograph from 2013, seven-year-old Karulal works with his father in a mica mine. Photograph: Peter Bengtsen
A PPG spokesperson said: “PPG does not tolerate the use of improper labour practices by any supplier. PPG’s supplier code of conduct prohibits the use of child labour, and indicates that suppliers shall adhere to the minimum employment age limit defined by national law or regulation, and shall comply with relevant International Labour Organisation standards.”
Although mica is also mined in China, the US and Europe, Jharkhand and Bihar account for an estimated 25% of the world’s total production. About 60% of mica mined in these states is made into pearlescent pigments for export.
Phil Bloomer, executive director of the Business & Human Rights Centre, said companies using natural mica from India must start to acknowledge the risk of products from illegal unregulated mines entering their supply chains.
“There is a huge gap in what India apparently produces and actually exports – clearly indicating existence of illegal mining and operations,” he said.
“Nobody wants the curse of forced and child labour in their supply chains, but, with large-scale hidden production, it takes a lot more than a simple audit of your apparent ‘supplier’ to eliminate modern slavery from your supply chain. Too many companies are buying with one eye open to the price, and the other closed to the abuse.”
Fujian Kuncai said its suppliers must sign a contract that no children work in factories or mines. It has contributed £500,000 to a project with Terre des Hommes that aims to eradicate child labour in mica communities in Jharkhand over three years.
*Identities of those interviewed at the mines protected
Car company responses
Volkswagen (which owns Audi):
Child labour is prohibited by our sustainability standards and is not tolerated by the Volkswagen Group … Our paint suppliers have assured our ad hoc team that they are compliant with our sustainability standards. Some of our suppliers have confirmed a business relationship with the Chinese company Kuncai. We are engaging with these relevant suppliers to further evaluate the allegations and investigate whether or not a corrective action plan shall be implemented.
Vauxhall (part of GM group):
GM expects our suppliers to be fair, humane and lawful employers, and to enforce similar requirements from their sub-suppliers. These expectations are outlined in GM’s standard purchase contract terms and conditions, which reinforce our zero-tolerance policy against the use of child labour, abusive treatment of employees or corrupt business practices in the supply of goods and services to GM. GM will conduct a full investigation of these suppliers regarding the allegations.
BMW:EL PAÍS
El líder del PPC, Xavier García Albiol, ha acusado al independentismo de intentar convertir la manifestación contra el terrorismo de Barcelona en un "aquelarre" a favor de la secesión, y ha admitido que "por primera vez" se siente "avergonzado de esta parte independentista de la población catalana".
En declaraciones a Efe tras la manifestación en contra de los atentados yihadistas del 17 de agosto en Cataluña, que ha reunido a medio millón de personas y en la que han sido abucheados tanto el Rey como miembros del Gobierno al principio y final de la protesta por colectivos independentistas, Albiol ha calificado esos hechos de "lamentables" y "chocantes".
"Me parece lamentable que una concentración donde teóricamente se va a dar apoyo a las víctimas, el independentismo la utilice para su reivindicación. No sé qué significa hoy el grito de 'Independencia', 'Queremos votar' o 'Fuera el Borbón'', ha señalado.
Albiol ha acusado al movimiento independentista catalán y a las entidades soberanistas de haber"'convertido esta manifestación en un aquelarre" y de haber "contaminado" la concentración al "capitalizar la visualización de la manifestación".
"Por primera vez en mi vida me siento avergonzando de esta parte de la parte independentista de la población catalana", ha confesado Albiol, que ha considerado que estos hechos "no solo son un insulto a los catalanes no independentistas, sino también al resto de España que, de manera simbólica, daba apoyo" a Cataluña tras los atentados.WASHINGTON: The Trump transition team has issued its own version of the Sharif-Trump telephone call, saying that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and US president-elect Donald Trump did have a ‘productive conversation’ on Wednesday, but it lacked the “flowery language” included in the Pakistani version of this talk.
“President-elect Trump and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif spoke … had a productive conversation about how the United States and Pakistan will have a strong working relationship in the future,” said the Trump transition team in a rare readout of his conversation with a foreign leader.
“President-elect Trump also noted that he is looking forward to a lasting and strong personal relationship with Prime Minister Sharif,” the statement added.
An unidentified adviser to the Trump team said the Pakistani readout of the talk had “committed the president-elect to more than what he meant”.
Other members of the Trump team, quoted in media, pointed out that the Pakistanis overplayed Mr Trump’s offer to play “a role” in resolving Pakistan’s disputes with India.
See: Will President Trump be good or bad for Pakistan?
The most critical comment on the Pakistani readout, however, came from a former White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer: “It’s entirely inappropriate for the Pakistani government to release what an American president-elect says in the course of a phone call.”
Mr Fleischer, who was a member of former Republican president George Bush’s White House team and is close to the Trump transition team as well, noted that no government releases such readouts.
“We would never release what a foreign leader said to (ex-president) George W. Bush. We would talk about what George W. Bush said. But to release what somebody else says, I am not the spokesperson for Pakistan or any other nation,” he told CNN.
“So, for them to do it is an entire breach of diplomatic protocol and tradition. And if they had done that to me, I would be on the phone right now with their press secretary, chewing him out. The ambassador would be on the phone with their ambassador, chewing the ambassador out. And up and down the chain,” Mr Fleischer added.
Media criticial
The US media also criticised the Pakistani decision to release the readout, agreeing with Mr Fleischer that it was inappropriate.
“Readouts of phone calls between world leaders are usually written safely in order to protect leaders from incidental backlash — like the one the Trump team put out,” CNN noted.
“They’re dry and diplomatic statements summing up conversations using carefully chosen buzzwords.”
The Washington Post called the Pakistani release “a surprisingly candid read” and noted that it “focuses almost entirely on Trump’s contribution to the conversation, and reproduces them in a voice that is unmistakably his (Mr Trump’s)”.
The New York Times called it “a bizarre conversation”, noting that “while not exactly confirming the content, the Trump transition team did acknowledge the call”.
In a commentary on the conversation, the Forbes magazine described Mr Trump’s comments as “cozy, expansive, even flattering,” and warned that “his bluster is more likely to be taken as the initial signal of his administration’s position” on the Pakistan-India dispute.
“It matters that he uses words like ‘very good reputation’, ‘amazing work’, ‘visible in every way’, ‘the most intelligent’, ‘fantastic country’, ‘exceptional people’,” the magazine noted.
“One of the main messages it sends is that he shows no awareness of the issues between the United States, Pakistan and India,” Forbes added.
Published in Dawn, December 2nd, 2016At the Windows 10 event held today, Microsoft made a number of expected announcements along with one that was not so expected, new, wearable technology the company is calling Hololens.
Hololens is being touted as a headset device that’s built around augmented reality technology. It creates 3D holographic images that wearers can interact with. Hololens is a standalone headset device–its CPU, GPU, and “Holographic Processor” are all on-board–that exists within a larger platform called Microsoft Holographic, an initiative the company says is intended to further blend your digital life with reality.
There’s currently no price announced along with no date set for release. If you want to read up on what exactly this thing is then Wired has an full and informative piece on what Microsoft wishes for this device to be.
As for how it applies to gaming? the big MS have a few artistic impression images and a demonstrational video that shows what they think the device could be used for.
Also happening at the event, Microsoft discuss how windows 10 would intergrate with the Xbox One. They confirmed W10 would make it to the box in some form in the future, though Xbox head Phil Spencer did not have specifics on how that integration would function. He did, however, offer a demonstration of Windows 10’s new Xbox One streaming technology. Xbox One owners will be able to stream any game from their library to any Windows 10 PC or tablet, similar to the Remote play functionality on the PS4 to the PS Vita (EDIT: seems that this is Local Area Network only)
Spencer also confirmed that the Xbox One will have its own Windows 10 app, allowing users to see games you’ve played on Xbox One and PC devices, and access your friends list and messages. Finally, they announced that the less than stellar looking Fable Legends will be coming to Windows PC’s with cross-platform play enabled.
Windows 10 is expected to roll out later this year, and will be offered as a free upgrade for Windows 8.1 and Windows 7 users for its first year.Mumford & Sons expressed outrage over the sexual assaults at last weekend's Bravalla Festival in Sweden. Izabelle Nordfjell/AP; Theo Wargo/Getty Several musicians have expressed outrage after Swedish police revealed that more than 40 sexual assaults have been reported at two Swedish music festivals over the last week.
British folk band Mumford & Sons said they were "gutted" by the news that 5 rapes and 12 sexual assaults allegedly occurred at the Bravalla Festival in Norrkoping, Sweden, which they headlined last weekend, according to a Telegraph report.
"We're appalled to hear what happened at the Bravalla Festival last weekend," the band wrote in a Facebook post. "Festivals are a celebration of music and people, a place to let go and feel safe doing so. We're gutted by these hideous reports."
Mumford & Sons added that they would refuse to play the festival again until Swedish police had cracked down on the "disgustingly high rate of reported sexual violence" on the festival grounds.
Swedish singer Zara Larsson similarly took to social media to attack the festival assaults in a string of tweets. Translated from Swedish by Fuse, Larsson's tweets condemned the attackers for "making girls feel insecure when they go to a festival."
Meanwhile, Swedish police recieved another 32 reports of sexual assault from the Putte i Parken festival in Karlstad, Sweden, wherein "the youngest alleged victim" was a 12-year-old girl, according to an Associated Press report.
Swedish police reportedly faced backlash earlier this year for allegedly attempting to cover up news of widespread sexual assaults of young women at Swedish music festivals.
Business Insider has reached out to representatives from both festivals for comment.Share:
Gul Zamir, 29, is a street cleaner and a legal Afghan refugee living at Old Ravi Bridge, where most of Lahore’s Afghan population resides. When approached by The Nation, he was desperately trying to make calls, seeking help for the release of his 21 year old brother who had been taken into police custody.
‘My brother was just coming home to Sanda when policemen approached him and detained him. He was carrying all of his documents,’ Zamir cried.
In Lahore, over half a dozen registered Afghans refugees have made a formal complaint to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) over police mistreatment during an intensive combing operation that has paralysed life in Afghan communities following the February 13th suicide attack that killed 15 people in Lahore.
Members of settled Afghan communities, who call Pakistan their home and many of whom have lived here for decades, now live in constant fear of deportation. Following a spate of attacks last week claimed by Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), and with news having re-surfaced about TTP sanctuaries in Afghanistan, the pressure on the state to get rid of its 3 million Afghan refugees has reached its crest. The resulting “search operation” has been criticised widely for being both inhumane and illegal.
Bibi Badami, whose son has been taken into police custody, said, “We are already going back to Afghanistan. But is this how you treat people with nothing in their hands?”
“We will eat onions and bread and we will leave like the others,” she continued. “But not with a good heart. Just a heavy one.”
Juma Gul, another member of the Saggian Bridge Afghan community, was worried about six of his family members, all of whom hail from Kunduz and have been settled in Lahore for decades.
“Shera Agha, Muhammad Hussain, Janam Khan, Bhi Khan, Hameedullah Khan... the police took all of them,” he said.
According to Gul, the police not only detained his registered family members but took away their POR cards and demanded money in the form of bribes. The Nation has not independently verified this information.
‘Pakistan opened its arms for us and we will never forget the hospitality. How can we be disloyal to Pakistan? It has given us shelter and a home. We are always ready to cooperate with the government,” Gul continued.
Hamid Latif, a field officer for the UNHCR is also an advocate and is responsible for taking up cases for legal Afghan refugees in Lahore.
‘I have been approached by six registered Afghan Refugees on judicial remand by the police. Reportedly, they have proof of reference (PORs) cards and should not be detained in any case,” he said.
Darkhobhi Bibi, the mother of another registered refugee in custody was in visible distress. ‘Our men have been treated so badly by the police without breaching any law,” she said. “We owe this country very much,” she wept.
The Afghans living at Saggian Bridge live in abject poverty. They have created their own community and culture while trying to integrate with the rest of the city. Most of them are garbage collectors, their blue-eyed children roaming barefoot and unfettered around heaps of Lahore’s discarded filth.
Largely, they come from the Afghan province of Kunduz and from Archi, Chahar Dara, Imam Sahib, Khan Abad and Qalay-i-Zal.
According to the Commissionerate for Afghan Refugees (CAR), there are 10,198 registered Afghans refugees living in Lahore.
“We have a peaceful community living here and we have never been involved in any illegal activity,” said Haji Mukhtiyar Khan, 80, one of the community tribal elders. “Pakistan welcomed us in when we were fleeing war. For me, it’s been 34 years. Can you imagine how much we owe this country?”Most religions have one or two unusual practices or devices but occasionally you find one which is just completely weird. This list contains ten of the more unusual things found in modern religions.
1. Mormom Temple Garments
In some denominations of the Latter Day Saint movement, the temple garment (or the Garment of the Holy Priesthood, or informally, the garment or garments) is a set of sacred underclothing worn by adult adherents who have taken part in a ritual ceremony known as washing and anointing ordinance, usually in a temple as part of the Endowment ceremony. Adherents consider them to be sacred and may be offended by public discussion of the garments. Anti-Mormon activists have publicly displayed or defaced temple garments to show their opposition to the LDS Church.
According to generally-accepted Mormon doctrine, the marks in the garments are sacred symbols (Buerger 2002, p. 58). One proposed element of the symbolism, according to early Mormon leaders, was a link to the “Compass and the Square”, the symbols of freemasonry (Morgan 1827, pp. 22-23), to which Joseph Smith (creator of Mormonism) had been initiated about seven weeks prior to his introduction of the Endowment ceremony.
2. Scientology E-Meter
An E-meter is an electronic device manufactured by the Church of Scientology at their Gold Base production facility. It is used as an aid by Dianetics and Scientology counselors and counselors-in-training in some forms of auditing, the application of the techniques of Dianetics and Scientology to another or to oneself for the express purpose of addressing spiritual issues.
E-meter sessions are conducted by church employees known as auditors. Scientology materials traditionally refer to the subject as the “preclear,” although auditors continue to use the meter well beyond the clear level. The preclear holds a pair of cylindrical electrodes (“cans”) connected to the meter while the auditor asks the preclear a series of questions and notes both the verbal response and the activity of the meter. Auditor training describes many types of needle movements, with each having their own special significance.
A 1971 ruling of the United States District Court, District of Columbia (333 F. Supp. 357), specifically stated, “The E-meter has no proven usefulness in the diagnosis, treatment or prevention of any disease, nor is it medically or scientifically capable of improving any bodily function.”
3. Exorcism
Exorcism is the practice of evicting demons or other evil spiritual entities from a person or place which they are believed to have possessed (taken control of). The practice is quite ancient and still part of the belief system of many religions, though it is seen mostly in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches.
Solemn exorcisms, according to the Canon law of the church, can only be exercised by an ordained priest (or higher prelate), with the express permission of the local bishop, and only after a careful medical examination to exclude the possibility of mental illness. The Catholic Encyclopaedia (1908) enjoined: “Superstition ought not to be confounded with religion, however much their history may be interwoven, nor magic, however white it may be, with a legitimate religious rite”.
To listen to two authentic recordings of exorcisms, visit the Top 10 Incredible Recordings. For more audio, video, and images of excorcisms, you can go here.
4. Jewish Kaparot
Kaparot is a traditional Jewish religious ritual that takes place around the time of the High Holidays. Classically, it is performed by grasping a live chicken by the sholder blades and moving around one’s head three times, symbolically transferring one’s sins to the chicken. The chicken is then slaughtered and donated to the poor, preferably eaten at the pre-Yom Kippur feast. In modern times, Kapparos is performed in the traditional form mostly in Haredi communities. The ritual is preceded by the reading of Psalms 107:17-20 and Job 33:23-24.
On the eve of Yom Kippur 2005, more than 200 caged chickens were abandoned in rainy weather as part of a Kaparot operation in Brooklyn, NY; some of these starving and dehydrated chickens were subsequently rescued by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Jacob Kalish, an Orthodox Jew from Williamsburg, was charged with animal cruelty for the drowning deaths of 35 of these chickens. In response to such reports of the mistreatment of chickens, animal rights organizations have begun to picket public observances of kaparot, particularly in Israel.
5. Shamanism
Shamanism refers to a range of traditional beliefs and practices concerned with communication with the spirit world. There are many variations in shamanism throughout the world, though there are some beliefs that are shared by all forms of shamanism. Its practitioners claim the ability to diagnose and cure human suffering and, in some societies, the ability to cause suffering. This is believed to be accomplished by traversing the axis mundi and forming a special relationship with, or gaining control over, spirits.
Shamans have been credited with the ability to control the weather, divination, the interpretation of dreams, astral projection, and traveling to upper and lower worlds. Shamans were used in Tibetan Buddhism as a form of divination by which the Dalai Lama was given prophesies of the future and advice.
6. Dowry
This is a cultural practice rather than a religious one. The practice of dowry exists across India. Despite laws against it, the practice continues. The girl child’s dowry and wedding expenses often sends her family into a huge debt trap. As consumerism and wealth increase in India, dowry demands are growing. In rural areas, families sell their land holdings, while the urban poor sell their houses.
To curb the practice of dowry, the government of India made several laws detailing severe punishment to anyone demanding dowry and a law in Indian Penal Code (Section 498A) has been introduced. |
BCE. Hecte (2.56g). Phocaic standard. Facing head of Medusa. Medusa was a hideous winged monster with snakes growing from her head instead of hair, and a glare that instantly transformed men into stone. The hero Perseus managed to decapitate her using a mirror so that he could avoid looking directly at her eyes. The severed head was used as an adornment of the aegis, a protective garment worn by both Zeus and Athena. The head of Medusa was also a favorite decorative motif in Greek art, often used as a repelling emblem in contexts where protection was needed, such as city gates, rooftops, and warriors' shields.
Sixth stater of Phocaea showing the head of a female, perhaps Aphrodite, wearing a cap.
Cyzicus. Ca. 500–460 BCE. Stater (16.06g) Phocaic standard. Phobos, with head of vulture and winged human body, running left, head turned back, holding tuna by tail before him. Phobos was the personification of Fear, specifically the fear inspired by war. He was the fruit of an illicit liaison between Ares, the god of war, and Aphrodite, the goddess of love, and he accompanied his father on the battlefield together with his brother Deimos (Dread). In his depiction Phobos' qualities are represented by his non-human aspects. His wings symbolize the speed with which fear, or death itself, can descend. His vulture's head evokes the horror of death in war, when a proper burial cannot be assured and the corpse may fall victim to scavengers.
Cyzicus. Ca. 350–300 BCE. Stater (15.99g). Phocaic standard. Bearded Heracles crouching left on ground line, left knee lowered, right knee raised before him, right hand holding club over shoulder, left hand holding cornucopiae, tuna placed vertically behind him (head upward). The usual attributes of Heracles were a lion skin, club, and bow. He was also associated with the origin of the cornucopia, a horn filled with an infinite supply of fruits. According to one myth, Heracles broke off a horn of the goat Amaltheia, who cared for the infant Zeus when he was in hiding from his ravenous father Kronos. Her miraculous nurturing nature extended to the horn and it became an inexhaustible source of good things. In a variant tale, Heracles broke off a horn of the river god Achelous and it became the horn of plenty.
Cyzicus. Ca. 400–375 BCE. Hecte (2.70g). Phocaic standard. Bearded Cecrops left, with human head and torso and a snake's tail replacing his lower body, riding on tuna left and holding sapling in right hand. Cecrops was a mythical king and founder of Athens, credited with introducing most of the institutions of civilization, including worship of the gods, literacy, marriage, and ritual burial. He was depicted in art with the tail of a snake instead of human legs in order to express the notion that he had been born from the soil of Attica. One of the events of his reign was a contest between Poseidon and Athena over which should take possession of the new city. Each deity offered a gift: Poseidon brought forth a spring from the rocks of the Acropolis, and Athena planted an olive tree. Cecrops judged the gift of Poseidon less valuable because the water was salty, not recognizing its promise of future sea power, and he awarded the city to Athena. The sapling carried by Cecrops in this Cyzicene coin type is the first olive tree, symbolizing Cecrops' role in establishing Athena as patron goddess of Athens.
Cyzicus. Ca. 430–400 BCE. Stater (15.95g). Phocaic standard. Nereid seated left on dolphin left, her raised right hand holding wreath, left arm supporting large round shield with star device in center; below, tuna left. The Nereids were the fifty daughters of the sea god Nereus and his consort Doris. The names of many of these sea nymphs are preserved in Greek literature, but by far the most important Nereid was Thetis, the mother of Achilles. She commissioned special arms for her son from the smith god himself – Hephaestus – and the Iliad devotes many lines to a minute description of the elaborate decoration of Achilles' shield. Although this stater depicts a shield with very simple decoration, it may be intended as the shield of Achilles, delivered to him by silver-footed Thetis.
Sixth stater of Erythrae showing the hero Heracles wearing the skin of the Nemean lion as a headdress. Heracles was a popular image on electrum coins. His attributes were the club, bow, and lion skin, which he acquired after slaying the Nemean lion – the first of twelve labors imposed upon him by Eurystheus, King of Tiryns. His final labor was to capture Cerberus, the three-headed hound, guardian of the gates of the Underworld, and present it to the king. But as soon as Eurystheus set eyes upon the monster he became so frightened that he sent him back to the Underworld. The city of Erythrae was famous for its sanctuary of Heracles, the Heracleum, one of the rare such temples found in the Greek world. The Erythraean Heracles was also worshiped as the destroyer of the vine-eating ips, a creature which was apparently only found there. His head came to be the civic type on Erythrae's coinage.
Many images appearing on electrum coins have their origin in myth. For the Greeks, mythos did not have the modern connotation of legend, folklore, or fable. The Greeks used mythic narrative to fill in the blanks of times for which no records existed and places that could not be reached or observed. The distant past was adorned with tales of the gods, with interactions between deities and mortals, and with the adventures of heroes who combated monsters or invented the elements of civilization. Dimly recalled historical figures became the protagonists of colorful tales, and the regions beyond reach were populated with strange tribes and fabulous beasts.
Hover over the coin belowFor many of the thousands of employees who work out of Pearson International Airport, the new rapid transit rail line would shave over an hour off their commute. If only they could afford it.
Ole Harder and Joyce Nakanishi, two Air Canada flight attendants who live downtown, are upset about the high proposed cost of the Union-Airport express. ( David Cooper / Toronto Star )
It would cost an airport customer service agent about two hours’ wages if Metrolinx goes ahead with a one-way fare of $20 to $30 dollars for the publicly funded Union Pearson (UP) Express. With just two stops between Union Station and the airport, the trip will take 25 minutes. “This isn’t public transit, this is transit for the 1 per cent,” said Sean Smith, mobilization co-ordinator for Unifor Local 2002, a union that represents 5,000 workers at Pearson, which is run by the Greater Toronto Airport Authority. Metrolinx has said the airport link should not be considered public transit because it is aimed at business executives at a cost comparable to the Toronto Airport Express bus, which costs about $27, but will stop service Oct. 31.
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“This train serves absolutely no purpose for us … you go to any other city and the rail link is public transit, not half a billion dollars funding a private train for the bankers,” Smith said.
Most of the airport’s 40,000 total employees live in Peel region, but he estimates between 10,000 and 15,000 workers come from Toronto. “It’s the workers who are going to the airport every day. If you ride the TTC, the 192 Rocket (bus route) is packed all the time and it not just people with suitcases. It’s flight attendants, it’s passenger agents, it’s all the support people who work there, the security staff and concession workers,” said Air Canada flight attendant Joyce Nakanishi, who lives on the east Danforth and makes six one-way trips a week to Pearson, which would cost up to $180 weekly on the new rail line. “Flight attendants are up in arms about it,” she said, adding she worries relying on business travellers will mean the trains are running at less than capacity. “We pay so much in taxes to pay for services we are not going to be able to afford. That’s crazy to me.” If the fare was $10, if monthly passes were available or employee discounts offered, Air Canada flight attendant Ole Harder would take the express train.
But at $30, “I can’t justify it,” he said. He’ll continue to take the hour-and-a-half commute from his apartment at Richmond and Sherbourne Sts., “taking transit that’s often overcrowded and overloaded. “Meanwhile, there will be this direct, 15-minute train to the airport that will be completely empty.”
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Provincial transit agency Metrolinx is building the rail link at a cost of $456 million and anticipates 5,000 daily riders. The final fare has not been announced. City Councillor Josh Matlow plans to introduce a motion at next week’s council meeting asking his colleagues to take a stand against the steep price and the $2 parking fee likely to be tacked on. Both the business model and equity considerations are concerning, Matlow said. “The irony is that the very people who work at the airport every single day will find the only rapid transit link to their workplace is unaffordable to them. That’s just folly,” he said. The eventual fare pricing will “include variable price points for families, seniors, children and frequent users,” said a statement from Metrolinx spokeswoman Anne Marie Aikins. It also said the agency is undertaking a study of the airport to evaluate future and current transportation needs of employees and travellers. That won’t help Saul Santiago get to his early-morning shift. He sometimes starts as early as 3:30 a.m., before the subway starts running. His partner drives him in the morning and he takes the TTC home, which takes an hour and 45 minutes. “I think it’s unfair if (the rail link) is only made for some population,” said Santiago, who has worked at an Air Canada counter for over a year and lives just blocks from Union Station. “It’s a good job, but it’s not like I get a lot money out of it,” he said. “I really hope they do it affordable for people like us.”
Read more about:EDITOR'S NOTE: This story has been modified. See below for an explanation of the changes made to this story since it initially appeared.
Apple's iPhone has wowed most of the globe — but not Japan, where the handset is selling so poorly it's being offered for free.
What's wrong with the iPhone, from a Japanese perspective? Almost everything: the high monthly data plans that go with it, its paucity of features, the low-quality camera, the unfashionable design and the fact that it's not Japanese.
In an effort to boost business, Japanese carrier SoftBank this week
launched the "iPhone for Everybody" campaign, which gives away the 8-GB
model of the iPhone 3G if customers agree to a two-year contract.
"The pricing has been completely out of whack with market reality," said Global Crown Research analyst Tero
Kuittinen in regard to Apple's iPhone prices internationally. "I think they [Apple and its partners overseas]
are in the process of adjusting to local conditions."
Apple's iPhone is inarguably popular elsewhere: CEO Steve Jobs announced in October that the handset drove Apple to becoming the third-largest mobile supplier in the world, after selling 10 million units in 2008. However, even before the iPhone 3G's July launch in Japan,
analysts were predicting the handset would fail to crack the Japanese market. Japan has been historically hostile toward western brands —
including Nokia and Motorola, whose attempts to grab Japanese customers were futile.
Besides cultural opposition, Japanese citizens possess high, complex standards when it comes to cellphones. The country is famous for being ahead of its time when it comes to technology, and the iPhone just doesn't cut it. For example, Japanese handset users are extremely into video and photos — and the iPhone has neither a video camera nor multimedia text messaging. And a highlight feature many in Japan enjoy on their handset is a TV tuner, according to Kuittinen.
What else bugs the
Japanese about the iPhone? The pricing plans, Kuittinen said. Japan's carrier environment is very competitive, which equates to relatively low monthly rates for handsets. The iPhone's monthly plan starts at about $60, which is too high compared to competitors, Kuittinen added.
And then there's the matter of compartmentalization. A large portion of Japanese citizens live with only a cellphone as their computing device — not a personal computer, said Hideshi Hamaguchi, a concept creator and chief operating officer of LUNARR. And the problem with the iPhone is it depends on a computer for syncing media and running software updates via iTunes.
"iPhone penetration is very high among the Mac users, but it has a huge physical and mental hurdle to the majority who just get used to live with their cellphone, which does not require PC for many services," Hamaguchi said.
Cellphones are also more of a fashion accessory in Japan than in the United States, according to Daiji Hirata, chief financial officer of News2u Corporation and creator of Japan's first wireless LAN, who spoke to Wired.com in June 2008.
So that would suggest that in Japan, carrying around an iPhone – a nearly year-old handset compared to the very latest Japanese cellphones – could make you look pretty lame.
Nobi Hayashi, a journalist and author of Steve Jobs: The Greatest Creative Director, told Wired.com in June 2008 that Japanese consumers also tend to shop for features, picking phones like the Panasonic P905i, a fancy cellphone that doubles as a 3-inch TV. It also features 3-G, GPS, a 5.1-megapixel camera and motion sensors for Wii-style games.
"When I show this to visitors from the U.S, they're amazed," Hayashi said at the time. "They think there's no way anybody would want an iPhone in Japan. But that's only because I'm setting it up for them so that they can see the cool features."
However, despite its wow factor, the Panasonic proved to be crippled by usability problems, Hayashi noted. Hayashi is the proud owner of an iPhone, although he also carries other phones that can be used to pay for subway fares, taxis and food.
Kuittinen said he's predicting Apple's next iPhone will have better photo capabilities, which could increase its odds of success in Japan. However, he said the monthly rates must be lowered as well.
Otherwise, Apple might as well say sayonara to Japan.
Updated 10:30 a.m. Friday: Added a quote from concept creator Hideshi Hamaguchi about PCs and compartmentalization.
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Photo: DannyChoo/Flickr
EDITOR'S NOTE:
Dylan Tweney here. I'm the senior editor in charge of Gadget Lab, and I'd like to explain what happened with this story and offer Wired.com's statement about it.
Since this story was first published on Feb. 26 we have received a lot of feedback questioning our reporting and conclusions. We agree with some of the criticism and have updated and corrected parts of the story in response. Nevertheless, those errors aside, we believe the main thrust of the story is essentially correct. In short, there is good evidence the iPhone is not selling as well in Japan as it is elsewhere, thanks in part to demanding and specific Japanese expectations and tastes in mobile phone devices. Much of that evidence still stands.
However, there were problems with the way we used two of our sources, and with how we handled the corrections we made.
The first of those sources was a quote from Nobiyuki Hayashi that had originally appeared in an earlier Wired.com story, "In Japan, Cellphones Have Become Too Complex to Use."
Later in the day we added a statement by Daiji Hirata, taken from the same article. It's not unusual in journalism to cite statements from earlier stories – and to quote from stories published by others – but in this case, we clumsily paraphrased Mr. Hirata's and Mr. Hayashi's statements, misconstruing what they had originally said.
The statement that carrying an iPhone "could make you look pretty lame" is our conclusion, not Mr. Hirata's or Mr. Hayashi's.
We also used their statements out of context, which compounded the errors; and we didn't make it crystal clear that we took Mr. Hirata's and Mr. Hayashi's statements from an earlier story.
Mr. Hayashi did respond to an e-mail inquiry from us, but we didn't receive his response until Friday, Feb. 27, after the story appeared. His email made it clear that the iPhone, despite several well-publicized problems, is doing better than expected, but that it still falls short for the Japanese market in several key areas. Mr. Hayashi spells out his view of the iPhone's pros and cons on his blog.
We updated the story on Friday, Feb. 27, to try and correct these misattributions, but again, we didn't make it crystal clear what changes we made to the story and why. We've made one more set of changes today to make the context and meaning of Mr. Hayashi's quote plainer and to make it even clearer that Mr. Hirata's statement came from the earlier story.
Wired.com regrets the errors, and we apologize to Mr. Hayashi and Mr. Hirata for misconstruing their statements.
We also apologize to you, the readers. Errors happen, on Wired.com as elsewhere. But we mishandled the situation by not disclosing, here on Gadget Lab, exactly what changes we were making.
We made the corrections in a good-faith attempt to correct errors in the story, but without making it clear to the public what changes were made and why. In so doing, we violated your trust. In the future, we'll be far more transparent about disclosing those corrections as we make them.
One more thing: we could have discussed the edits and the feedback from Mr. Hirata and Mr. Hayashi in the comments. However, I closed the comments on this story on Friday afternoon because they were turning into a cesspool of racial invective.
We welcome vigorous debate and disagreement in our comments, but we will delete hate speech and off-topic invective. I have reopened comments on this post, but will close them again if necessary.
We do acknowledge the important role that our critics, including Apple Insider, played in pointing out the errors in this article.
As always, we welcome your feedback and strive to correct errors whenever we make them.
Update: 2 p.m. PT, April 23, 2010 — A Bloomberg report today notes that the iPhone has captured 72 percent of the Japanese market. While we understand critics' skepticism in our original report, we would stress that when our report was written in February 2009, an analyst listed reasons for why he thought the iPhone wasn't selling well: high price, lack of a video camera and support for multimedia messaging. All three of those shortcomings have now been addressed. Softbank gives away the phone for free, and Apple has added a video camera and support for multimedia messaging. The Bloomberg report further suggests that those moves were just what the iPhone needed to gain a foothold in Japan, which we also acknowledged in a report published August 2009.The group opposed to a new income-tax surcharge on Tuesday withdrew its request for a recount of the Nov. 8 referendum results, citing concerns about the recount procedure, the cost and the low probability it would overturn the election result.
In a three-page letter sent Tuesday to Deputy Secretary of State Julie Flynn, the recount petitioners said they decided not to proceed after reviewing the procedural process established by the Secretary of State’s Office. The recount of the tax referendum – Question 2 on the ballot – was scheduled to begin Thursday and would have been conducted at the same time as a recount of the marijuana legalization referendum, which was Question 1. The Question 1 recount is scheduled to begin Monday.
Related Headlines Maine nears recounts on marijuana legalization, education tax measures
If both recounts had moved forward, it would have been the first time that the Secretary of State’s Office performed simultaneous statewide recounts. Opponents of the tax question had raised concerns about confusion and other problems that might arise by combining the two recounts.
“The proposed procedural agreement, distributed at your Nov. 22 meeting of parties for Question 1 and Question 2, contains elements that concern us and we apparently would have had to go to court to get those concerns resolved. The costs associated with a recount of Question 2 exceed what we are willing to do given the very low probability that a recount would overturn the unofficial election result,” David Clough, state directer of the National Federation of Independent Business, and three other petitioners wrote in the letter.
Clough had raised concerns this week about the secretary of state’s plan to have representatives of both referendum questions team up to form counting teams. He said the process could cause confusion and create conflicts of interest between the different parties, but Secretary of State Matt Dunlap said that process would minimize how much the ballots are handled.
Passage of Question 2 means the state will impose an income tax surcharge on high earners to generate new funding for public education in Maine. Opponents requested a recount after the initiative appeared to have passed by a margin of 9,536 votes, or just over 1 percent. An unofficial tally from the Secretary of State’s Office shows 383,449 votes in favor of Question 2 and 373,913 opposed.
The manager of the Yes on 2 campaign said the decision to drop the recount means the state can now focus on helping students.
“On Election Day, Mainers made a clear decision. They want to fund our schools and they want the wealthiest Mainers to pay a little more so that all kids have equal opportunities to learn and grow,” John Kosinski said in a written statement. “It is now finally time that we move on to best help our students and get to work improving our schools.”
Question 1, meanwhile, legalizes recreational marijuana use for adults 21 and older.
Opponents of legalization in Maine requested the recount after unofficial results showed the question passed by a margin of less than 1 percent – 4,073 votes (381,692 to 377,619), according to unofficial results from the Secretary of State’s Office.
The Question 1 recount is scheduled to begin Monday in the Florian Room of the Maine Department of Public Safety in Augusta. It is open to the public.
Unless the referendum results are overturned by the recount, possession and recreational use of limited amounts of marijuana will become legal for adults 21 and older by Jan. 7.
Maine was one of four states that voted last week to legalize recreational marijuana for adults 21 and older. Eight states and Washington, D.C., now have voted to legalize a recreational cannabis market. Legalization advocates in Maine and other states saw the votes as a sign of momentum behind national reform, but are now concerned about potential opposition from the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump.
State officials say even one recount could take four to six weeks to complete and, if it goes on that long, could cost up to $500,000 in staff time, overtime and additional costs, such as paying for the Maine State Police to pick up padlocked and sealed ballot boxes from 503 individual towns and deliver them to Augusta. State police estimate it costs about $70,000 to collect ballots from 100 towns. Dunlap said there are additional costs to his office, including overtime for employees who are being pulled away from their regular work.
Maine has never had a statewide recount that included every ballot, because the requesting group dropped it after a partial review. In 2010, opponents of the Oxford Casino referendum stopped a recount after a review of about 25 percent of ballots showed no significant change in results.
In the letter to Flynn, the recount petitioners said it appears likely the state will see more groups using citizen initiatives to bypass the state Legislature on significant public policy changes. They suggested the secretary of state consider establishing a working group in 2017 to consider and propose changes “that may be appropriate for the post-election recount process of ballot questions.”
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filed under:SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - A U.S. appeals court on Friday rejected Hawaii’s request to issue an emergency order blocking parts of President Donald Trump’s temporary travel ban while the state sought clarification over what groups of people would be barred from travel.
U.S. President Donald Trump and his wife Melania Trump are seen at the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany July 7, 2017. REUTERS/Wolfgang Rattay
The U.S. Supreme Court last month let the ban on travel from six Muslim-majority countries go forward with a limited scope, saying it could not apply to anyone with a credible “bona fide relationship” with a U.S. person or entity.
The Trump administration then decided that spouses, parents, children, fiancés and siblings would be exempt from the ban, while grandparents and other family members traveling from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen would be barred.
Trump said the measure was necessary to prevent attacks. However, opponents including states and refugee advocacy groups sued to stop it, disputing its security rationale and saying it discriminated against Muslims.
A Honolulu judge this week rejected Hawaii’s request to clarify the Supreme Court ruling and narrow the government’s implementation of the ban.
Hawaii appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, saying in a filing on Friday that the appeals court has the power to narrow the travel ban while it decides how to interpret the Supreme Court’s ruling.
A three-judge 9th Circuit panel on Friday rejected that argument and said it did not have jurisdiction to hear Hawaii’s appeal.
The 9th Circuit said the Honolulu judge could issue an injunction against the government in the future, if he believed it misapplied the Supreme Court’s ruling to a particular person harmed by the travel ban.
But the judge did not have the authority to simply clarify the Supreme Court’s instructions now, the appeals court said.
In a statement, Hawaii Attorney General Douglas Chin said he appreciated that the 9th Circuit ruled so quickly, and that the state will comply.
The Justice Department declined to comment.
Justice Department lawyers have argued that its definition of close family “hews closely” to language found in U.S. immigration law, while Hawaii’s attorney general’s office said other parts of immigration law include grandparents in that group.
The roll-out of the narrowed version of the ban was more subdued last week than in January when Trump first signed a more expansive version of the order. That sparked protests and chaos at airports around the country and the world.Syria's envoy to the United Nations says it's time for the United States and other Western powers to accept that President Bashar Assad is here to stay, and to abandon what he suggested was a failed strategy of trying to split the Middle East into sectarian enclaves.
Speaking to Reuters on the eve of the fourth anniversary of the Syrian war, Assad's long-serving U.N. ambassador Bashar Jaafari said his president was ready to work with the United States and others to combat terrorism in the Middle East.
Some European Union countries that withdrew their ambassadors from Syria are saying privately it is time for more communication with Damascus, diplomats said in February.
Jaafari said that "many European delegations" had visited Damascus to ask for strengthened anti-terrorism cooperation, without specifying which countries.
...Apple is building a $1.375 billion center near Des Moines, Iowa, after having secured more than $200 million in tax credits from local government.
The Iowa Economic Development Authority (IEDA) said today that Apple will soon purchase 2,000 acres of land in Waukee, a fast-growing suburb of Des Moines. That land will hold two data centers that will serve North American users of iMessage, Siri, the App Store, and other Apple services.
The data center will support 157 jobs paying $7.8 million in wages, according to IEDA. The facilities will run entirely on renewable energy, as do other Apple data centers. (Wind energy is big in the Hawkeye State.)
As a sweetener for the deal, Apple will get a rebate of $19.6 million in state sales taxes and a $188 million break on property taxes from Waukee, according to reports in Reuters and The Associated Press. It amounts to a 71-percent abatement on property taxes over 20 years.
Apple will spend $110 million to acquire and prepare the land, economic development officials told Reuters. Then it will spend about $620 million on construction, $600 million on computer equipment, and $45 million on other equipment.
Facebook, Google, and Microsoft all maintain data centers in Iowa already. In addition to generous tax breaks, the state offers crop land that can be developed, high-speed fiber optics, inexpensive wind-generated electricity, and relative safety from natural disasters.
The Des Moines Register published certain details of the deal yesterday and said the Waukee City Council will consider the matter today, as will the IEDA (PDF).
"This announcement further solidifies Iowa as a hub where innovation and technology flourish and demonstrates this is a place where world-class companies can thrive," said Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds.
The Apple deal is strictly tax breaks, unlike a controversial deal for Foxconn currently being debated in Wisconsin. That deal, which has not yet been approved by the legislature, promises Foxconn as much as $2.85 billion in cash payments from Wisconsin taxpayers in return for building a liquid-crystal display plant.Michigan has been taking care of business on and off the field heading into the final stages of the 2016 season. The team is 9-0 and has set itself up for a shot at the Big Ten and National Championships. And thanks to the team’s performance, the coaching staff is using their hard work and resumes to pair with it to give Michigan a very realistic shot at signing one of the best recruiting classes in rankings history.
The 2017 Michigan class is in striking distance of the top spot, held by Ohio State. However, it’ll need to have a very hot finish. And, when you look at where things stand with several of the nation’s top players and the staff’s top targets, that’s looking more and more likely.
To see where the Wolverines sit with the top targets, check out our latest Michigan recruiting update:
Close to Crystal
Earlier in the season, there were two players from SEC territory that I knew Michigan loved as prospects. However, it looked like they were long shots to end up in the Maize and Blue, at best. Those players were Starkville (MS) OLB Willie Gay and Lafayette (KY) OL Jedrick Wills.
Well, thanks to their official visits to Ann Arbor, both have gone from long shots to now looking pretty good to join the Wolverines’ class.
Gay made his way to Michigan for his official visit for the Illinois game on October 22nd and things couldn’t have gone any better.
The talented linebacker quickly decommitted from Ole Miss, who he’d been committed to since June, told the Clarion Ledger that he “fell in love” with UM during his trip and named the Wolverines his new leader.
But could that just have been an overreaction from the visit afterglow?
Well, that doesn’t look to be the case as Gay spoke with Scout’s Chad Simmons about his new leader and what separates Michigan from everyone else ($):
So, Gay is all about Michigan. But will he be able to commit to and sign with the Wolverines? That’s a legit question at this point.
First reported by Wolverine247’s Steve Lorenz, Gay was a “non-qualifier” for Michigan heading into his official visit and had some work to do in the classroom before UM could take him ($).
But that doesn’t look like it’s stopping Michigan from pushing for him and working with him. Which is saying a lot, according to TMI’s Sam Webb.
In normal occurrences of recruits having bad grades, Michigan will postpone the recruit’s visit. But UM didn’t do that with Gay. And Webb’s gut believes the fact that the staff is pushing hard for him even with the issues means Michigan has faith that Gay can get his grades in order ($) and they can sign him to this class.
With Webb feeling very good about Michigan’s chances, it’s hard to not be optimistic. I’m watching this recruitment closely and could be close to putting in a Crystal Ball for Gay to the Wolverines. Just waiting to gather a little more information.
As for Wills, the big man looked to be one of the biggest “locks” in the class. All signs pointed to him committing to Alabama, which is where my Crystal Ball once sat.
But thanks to his official visit to Michigan for the Wisconsin game and the staff’s pursuit of the best offensive line prospects in the class, I’ve switched my CB to Foggy and am very close to putting my prediction in for the Wolverines.
Besides the official visit, one big reason I put Wills in my latest class prediction and am close to a CB is thanks to Alabama viewing the big man as an offensive guard ($), according to Steve Lorenz.
If Alabama sticks with that mindset and Michigan keeps pushing for him to play anywhere along the line, I believe good news could come sooner rather than later.
Making Moves with Maryland Visitors
Michigan hosted another very nice group of recruiting visitors this past weekend to watch the Wolverines dismantle another B1G program. That included some of the top names on the board, including a former commit and a four star receiver the staff looked to lock down during the trip.
Here’s a breakdown of some of the biggest visitors and how the trips went for them:
Quick Hitters
Photo Credit: Bryan Fuller/MGoBlogGoogle and other tech companies have come under fire for exploiting a common tax loophole to book revenues through their Irish subsidiaries, but today The Sunday Times is reporting that a former Google UK executive has evidence of further tax avoidance by his one-time employer. Barney Jones worked for Google between 2002 and 2006 and says that during his time at the company, Google relied almost exclusively on its UK sales staff to secure advertising deals in London, effectively closing deals there rather than in Dublin, where it booked the revenues. Google VP Matt Brittin had previously testified to the Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) that "nobody" at Google’s UK office was selling Google advertising, last week revising his statement to clarify that while "a lot of the aspects of selling" ads did happen in London, the Dublin office was actually the one closing the deals.
Jones claims that London sales staff were in charge of sending out ad contracts
The Sunday Times writes that Jones will be submitting some 100,000 documents and emails to HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) that clarify the innerworkings of Google’s ad operations. In particular, Jones claims that London sales staff were in charge of sending out ad contracts and receiving signed copies back from clients, which could poke holes in Brittin's earlier testimony. It also notes that Ireland's corporate tax rate currently sits at 12.5 percent, just over half of the UK's 23 percent tax on corporate income.
It’s not clear whether the evidence is enough to show malfeasance on Google’s part, but Jones's claims do add another layer of complexity to the investigations into the company's tax practices in the UK. Commenting to The Sunday Times, Google's director of external relations said that "none of the allegations put to us change the fact that Google pays the corporate tax due on its UK activities and complies fully with UK law," but that it was unable to respond to documents that haven’t yet been made public. We’ve reached out to Google for comment and will update if we hear anything back.The Iowa Energy’s push to the NBA D-League playoffs continued on Monday Night as the team found their way past the Delaware 87ers in front of 2,136 fans.
The team rallied behind Jarnell Stokes and Damien Wilkins’ who scored 25 points each to beat Delaware 117-98. The Energy had another four different players that were also in the double digits in scoring for the night.
With the win, Iowa advanced to 24-20 on the season, and within one game of the division leading Sioux Falls Skyforce. With the current playoff format, the division leaders (as of now held by Maine and Sioux Falls) earn the first two seeds in the playoffs, and the next two teams compete for a wildcard.
Iowa is now just one game behind Sioux Falls and fighting for the second playoff seed.
NBA D League Eastern Conference Playoff Standings Pos Team Record GB 1 Maine Red Claws 30-14 – 2 Sioux Falls Skyforce 25-19 – 3 Canton Charge 26-18 – 4 Iowa Energy 24-20 – Playoff Cut Line 5 Fort Wayne Mad Ants 24-21 0.5 6 Grand Rapids Drive 20-24 4 7 Erie Bayhawks 20-24 4 8 Delaware 97ers 19-26 5.5 9 Westchester Knicks 10-34 14
Iowa (24-20) @ Grand Rapids (20-24)
The Energy resume play this Wednesday Night when they travel to Grand Rapids for a Central Division Showdown. This will be the last of six times that the team takes on Grand Rapids during the regular season. In five showdowns, Iowa leads the series 3-2.
Sioux Falls will also be in action on Wednesday. They will take on Reno (17-29) on the road tipping off at 9:00pm CT. Sioux Falls has already beaten Reno twice this season in as many games.
Iowa Energy Remaining Schedule Date Matchup Tip (CT) Mar. 25, 2015 Iowa @ Grand Rapids 6:00 pm Mar. 28, 2015 Canton @ Iowa 7:00 pm Mar. 29, 2015 Canton @ Iowa 4:00 pm Apr. 01, 2015 Westchester @ Iowa 7:00 pm Apr. 03, 2015 Iowa @ Canton 6:00 pm Apr. 04, 2015 Maine @ Iowa 7:00 pm
Main Photo (Damien Wilkins) by Ned Dishman/NBAE via Getty ImagesA jealous schoolteacher was found guilty of murder Wednesday for sabotaging the parachute of a rival in a love triangle, causing her to crash to her death.
The verdict against Els Clottemans, 26, ended a monthlong trial that revealed no hard proof that she had sabotaged Els Van Doren's parachute so that neither it nor a safety chute opened during a Nov. 18, 2006, jump over eastern |
project, these are the stages we typically see:
About
Hello!
Our team seeks to bring to you, the Windgoe, an amazing bicycle and ebike boosting attachment! The Windgoe is not a vehicle, you must supply the vehicle. Kickstarter is where we are starting, kickstarting! The Patent Pending Windgoe empowers the bicycle you already enjoy to become a whole new innovation. We are offering the Windgoe at it's lowest price here first, 20% below retail to give you all a bonus for helping us out the most, buying early saves you hundreds of dollars.
The Windgoe integrates perfectly with the pedaling. experience for great range, feel, and exercise because there is no mechanical connection to the traditional drive train. One major difference between using propellers rather than direct wheel drive, is that the Windgoe's speed and torque isn't based on wheel traction, so the ground surface doesn't matter as much, as it's just grabbing air.
This thing is FAST. Observe all speed laws when using and wear a helmet. You can now flatten those hills out. Range of 12+ miles without peddling (in prototype), and we intend to increase this with a longer range at shipping. The Windgoe could even be compared to a MoPed, though we call it a ProPed. This booster is an alternative to the electric powered wheel friction or wheel swap designs out there.
It's meant to fit on most bicycles, ebikes, etc, that accept common style rear racks, like a child seat rear carrier has. We intend for it to work with the tapped/threaded frames and/or bare frame acceptance, with clamps, choose which one you need, we will also offer extra frames and controller on the website so swap quickly if you have multiple bikes. We intend to use a quick release system between the Windgoe rack and the Windgoe Booster. Overall, attaching only takes a short time. The prototype controller has a key system kill switch and an easy to use knob style throttle control, plus illuminated battery level displays.
Currently the prototype is tuned using over 2700 watts of brushless motor power or up to 4 horse power at full power with both motors. Dual electronic speed controllers to regulate them. Driving air with dual contra-rotating 17" all plastic pusher and puller propellers, with an 8 degree pitch. The reason we use the contra-rotating propellers is for the increased efficiency and gyroscopic stability, which is very welcome if doing tight powered turns, acrobatic moves, bad crosswinds, and passing vehicles.
We have been testing with 10S, 37 volt nominal (42V full), 16AH Lipo, however, we desire to increase this to 20-24AH for increased range and battery life. We also want to include mounting the charging system on the Windgoe itself, for versatile and mobile charging. Park then plug in anywhere, to charge.
We intend to produce a mostly aluminum frame, welded where possible to drop weight. Using carbon fiber where it makes sense is good too. Screens cover the intake and exhaust of the Windgoe for safety reasons. The cowling further increases efficiency and safety.
Electronically we currently use an Arduino to control the ESC's (electronic speed controllers). The Arduino offers many side benefits and attachment possibilities, however, we may decide to use a simpler analog system. Also we have many ideas on features, like USB charging, meters, and lights.
Our team of three has experience in bicycles, motorcycles, business building, managing, marketing, electronics, programming, mechanics, welding, electrical, engineering, and more. We intend to grow our team with the growth of Windgoe.
Full email support and we include a one year limited warranty.
Goal $15,000, if achieved we can confidently move forward, with enough capital to create an amazing Windgoe for everyone. Should begin shipping out in 4-6 months after the close of this campaign depending on demand.
Ready to out ride the competition and turn heads? Get a Windgoe!ISTANBUL — The timing was delicious. On the weekend of International Women’s Day, word spread of a forceful female Lebanese anchor putting down a grumpy British-based Islamist cleric who has praised al Qaeda for the 2005 London bombings.
The March 2 clash was between Rima Karaki, a well-known Mideast TV host for Lebanon’s Al Jadeed channel, and Hani al Seba’i, who once said “anyone who is not a Muslim is a criminal.” So far, since it was posted by Memri TV on March 4 with English subtitles, it has attracted more than 4.6 million hits on YouTube and a host of congratulatory Tweets for the TV presenter who put the Islamic scholar firmly in his place for showing her disrespect.
“It’s beneath me to be interviewed by you,” says the sheikh in the middle of their heated argument. “You are a woman who…” And that is the beginning of the end for the sexist cleric as Karaki, a university professor, cuts him off and leaves him in the dark in Al Jadeed’s London studios.
The interview on Karaki’s program, Bidoun Zaal, was meant to have been about Christians joining extremist Islamic groups like the so-called Islamic State, or ISIS, but the scholar went off on a time-consuming digression about Western terror groups toward the end of the last century. A modern-day windbag version of Polonius, al Seba’i is urged by his interviewer to get back to the issue at hand when he says, “Back then, we saw leftist organizations like the Red Brigades in Italy, the Red Army in Germany, the Baader Meinhof Group …”
Requesting that he “focus on the present,” Karaki asks what slogans are used to attract Christians to these jihadist groups today. Riled by what he takes to be the impertinence of the interjection, al Seba’i raises his voice, saying: “Listen, don’t cut me off. I will answer as I please.” He adds: “I will not answer the way you like, because I’m here to serve the idea in which I believe.”
Karaki politely explains the show will run out of time. “Please don’t get all worked up. We respect you and know you want to give a complete answer.” The unappeased al Seba’i accuses Karaki of acting “high and mighty.” Karaki says she will give the scholar more time to respond to the question, adding, “Go on, but do not call me names. In this studio, I run the show.”
“Are you done?” he angrily replies. “Shut up so I can talk. It’s beneath me to be interviewed by you. You are a woman who…” The host at this point decides to persevere. “If you are going to elaborate so much, we won’t have time for other questions. Now, it is up to you. If we have time, you will answer all the questions,” she says.
Al Seba’i heading closer to his doom, replies: “You can decide as much as you like, but I will do whatever I want.” Lifting the palm of her left hand, Karaki ends the interview. “How can a respected Sheik like yourself tell a TV host to shut up?” she asks. “Either there is mutual respect or the conversation is over.”
Fans on her Twitter feed were ecstatic. One tweeted: “The awesome and beautiful Rima Karaki. A great role model for young women #respect.” Another, added: “Good job on putting disrespectful people in their place #WomensDay.”
Karaki has been a TV host for a decade-and-half, starting out on the highly popular morning show Alam al Sabah. For 10 years she hosted a show called Personal Matters that focused on intimate social and family issues and often courted controversy.
London-based Hani al Siba’i is director of London’s al Maqreze Center for Historical Studies, who has managed to fend off in the courts several British government efforts to deport him to his native Egypt, where he was sentenced in absentia to 15 years imprisonment in a controversial case linked to the 1981 assassination of President Anwar Sadat.
He is on a list of UN-sanctioned supporters of al Qaeda and in 2005 was added to a U.S. list of supporters of the terror group. The same year he told al Jazeera TV that the London bombings were a victory: “If al Qaeda indeed carried out this act, it is a great victory for it. It rubbed the noses of the world’s eight most powerful countries in the mud.” Fifty-two people were killed in the bombings and more than 700 injured.
Politely putting al Siba’i in his place as a chauvinist pig is, perhaps, the least that should be done.Man shot in face during Saginaw Township robbery
The shooting happened about 12:45 a.m. Thursday, Sept. 3, at Poplar Apartments, 4444 State, a news release from the Saginaw Township Police Department states.
(Jeff Schrier | MLive.com)
EDITOR'S NOTE: Prosecutors issued charges in this case, and the suspects are at large. Click here for an update.
SAGINAW TOWNSHIP, MI -- A Saginaw Township man was shot in the face when he heard a knock on the door and opened it to two robbers.
The shooting happened about 12:45 a.m. Thursday, Sept. 3, at Poplar Apartments, 4444 State, states a news release from Chief Don Pussehl Jr., of the Saginaw Township Police Department.
Arriving officers found that a 21-year-old man who lives at the apartment complex was shot in the face. He was conscious and alert and spoke to officers at the scene, police said.
His injury was not life-threatening, and he is being treated at a Saginaw hospital, police said.
When the victim moved toward one of the robbers, the man drew a handgun and shot the victim, police said.
Detectives are continuing the investigation, police said.
The robbers took a small amount of money, according to police.
Detectives did not provide additional information about a description of the men involved.
-- Brad Devereaux is a public safety reporter for MLive/The Saginaw News. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook and Google+Andrew Hoyle/CNET
Phone cameras have become good enough filmmakers will use them to shoot movies, but a new chip from Sony could make them a whole lot better.
The Japanese giant has developed a new image sensor that can shoot video at 960 frames per second (fps), reports Nikkei Tech. A phone equipped with this sensor will be able to take 19.3 megapixel still shots at 120fps, and video of 1,920x1080-pixel resolution at 960fps.
For reference, the iPhone 7 and the Samsung Galaxy S7 can both shoot 240fps slow-motion video at 1,280x720-pixel resolution.
Sony was contacted for comment on when this tech will actually make it to market, but did not immediately reply. Phone cameras are becoming more and more impressive each year though, especially with the dual cameras found on offerings from Apple and Huawei.
Sony had previously developed similar technology for its digital cameras, but never before for smartphones. Now the important question: What does this mean for your Instagram posts? For an idea of how slow that actually is, this video recorded on a Sony NEX-FS700 shows the kinds of cool shots you can capture at 960fps.Digital Album Digital Album Streaming + Download Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more. Purchasable with gift card Buy Digital Album £3.50 GBP or more You own this Send as Gift
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Across the four original tracks MM is at his most frantic; summoning hellish distortions of Bubbling, Drumline and UK Funky. Haunting melodies dart between relentless organic drum syncopations built to at once disarm and invite the dance floor.
On the remix for '9th Ritual' is 'Tambores Mutantes' master & N.A.A.F.I affiliate Lechuga Zafiro. With help from the Montevidio-based drumming collective C1080, Zafiro playfully flips '9th Ritual' into a Club-Candombe workout, filled with rhythmic backflips and demented steel pans.
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Written & produced by MM
Mixed & mastered by Jeremy Cox
Artwork by Oliver Haidutschek
Additional Percussion by C1080 (Comparsa de Candombe) on '9th Ritual (Lechuga Zafiro Remix)' www.cuareim1080.com.uy released October 18, 2015Written & produced by MMMixed & mastered by Jeremy Cox www.jeremycox.us Artwork by Oliver HaidutschekAdditional Percussion by C1080 (Comparsa de Candombe) on '9th Ritual (Lechuga Zafiro Remix)' www.cuareim1080.com.uy
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all rights reserved#PokemonGO is not all fun and games. Here is a video of a distracted driver who struck one of our cars. #PlaySafe pic.twitter.com/kOTfbTcILo
Not long after the launch of Niantic Labs' Pokémon GO in the United States, the Washington State Department of Transportation was quick to urge fans not to play the mobile game while driving. The advent of cellphones alone has already led to a dramatic increase in car accidents, and with the unprecedented popularity of Pokémon GO, the temptation to pull out one's phone for the possibility of a rare find might only make the overall situation even worse.
That was the case early Monday morning in Baltimore when a distracted driver playing Pokémon GO struck his van against a police car, thankfully while the officers were on the sidewalk. No one at the scene was injured, and the only real damage was done to the cars themselves.
Footage of the accident was all captured via one of the officers' body cams, viewable above.
The unidentified driver quipped to the officers after pulling over that "that's what I get for playing this dumbass game" as he closed the app, but the words of one Professor Oak say it best: "Now is not the time to use that."Malaria is transmitted by anopheles mosquitoes, which are most active at night (AFP Photo/Marvin Recinos)
Washington (AFP) - The Zika virus has been linked to birth defects in the foetuses and babies of six women in the United States who were infected while pregnant, US health officials said Thursday.
Three of the women gave birth to infants with congenital defects such as microcephaly -- an abnormally small head -- and brain damage that are linked to Zika, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said, citing figures as of June 9.
Of the other three women, one had a miscarriage, one terminated her pregnancy, and the third gave birth to an infant that was stillborn. All three cases showed instances of Zika-related birth defects.
The six women mentioned Thursday were all infected while traveling in countries where the virus is circulating.
The CDC said it will publish weekly results of women who are pregnant and infected with Zika.
A total of 234 pregnant women in the United States had tested positive for Zika as of June 9, the CDC said.
US scientists believe that a woman infected with Zika during the first trimester of her pregnancy has a one to 13 percent chance that the fetus develops microcephaly.
The mosquito-borne Zika has spread rapidly across Latin America and the Caribbean in the past months, and experts warn that the continental United States will likely see an increase in cases as summer begins in the northern hemisphere.
There is also growing evidence that Zika can be transmitted sexually.
There is no vaccine for Zika.
The virus, which usually causes only mild, flu-like symptoms, can also trigger adult-onset neurological problems such as Guillain-Barre Syndrome, which can cause paralysis and death.Since September, longtime fans of NBC’s lone remaining daytime drama, “Days of Our Lives,” may have noticed some changes. Favorite characters are returning to Salem, the storytelling pace has picked up — the show even looks different. That’s pretty exciting stuff for a show celebrating its 50th anniversary Nov. 8.
“We made some changes with writers and producers and decided to raise the bar with the look of the show, the performance aspect of the show, and where we’re going with the stories and characters,” says producer Ken Corday, whose parents, Ted and Betty, created “Days.”
Not only have fans noticed, but so has the cast.
“It’s like a whole new show,” says Kristian Alfonso, who’s played Hope Williams Brady off and on since joining the cast as a teenager in 1983. “Until a few months ago when these new producers and writers took over, financially there were so many restraints. Now we have new sets. Before, sometimes I’d be in the same set for three days. Now I can be in five different sets in one episode.”
She says cast members are so happy with the show’s new direction that instead of just reading their own scenes, they’re reading entire scripts and asking about each other’s storylines. “When you see that happen, you know something special is happening because we’re not just thinking about our work that day,” she says. “We’re excited.”
Related EXCLUSIVE: Former NBC Anchor Accuses Tom Brokaw of Sexual Harassment 'Chicago PD,' 'Chicago Med' and 'Chicago Fire' Renewed at NBC
Throughout the years, “Days” has maintained its “bread-and-butter formula” of focusing on family and the redemptive power of love, but the narrative has changed. “In the ’60s and ’70s, it was much slower-paced storytelling, with fewer characters. In the ’80s, there was the blossoming of what would become the ‘super couples.’ And in the ’90s we had Jim Reilly’s advent and the far-out ‘Days of Our Lives’ with demonic possession, people buried alive and multiple personalities,” says Corday.
“We made some changes with writers and producers and decided to raise the bar.” Ken Corday
While Salemites grow nostalgic preparing for the fictional town’s bicentennial — which just so happens to coincide with the soap’s 50th anniversary — viewers are being treated to flashbacks of bygone eras. The old clips underscore the evolution of daytime drama.
“Forty or fifty years ago, scenes went on for four or five minutes as the organ music was swelling,” says Steve Kent, senior executive VP of programming at Sony Pictures Television, which produces the show with Corday Prods. “At the time it was compelling, that’s why it stayed on the air. But you have to keep evolving. That’s why we’re constantly updating.”
Changes in technology have also helped the show evolve. Instead of shooting live-to-tape, Kent says each camera now has its own output, and the editing system allows for rapid intercutting between cameras. “It’s much easier to do non-linear editing and play with time,” he says. “Using this technology to help storytelling is something we’re playing with, and using effectively.”
“We work longer and harder, but in fewer days than we did before,” says James Reynolds, who’s played Abe Carver — the longest-running African-American character on television, daytime or primetime — since 1981. “Scenes are quicker and shorter.”
When he and Alfonso joined the show they shot one episode per day. “Now we do a lot of shows during the course of a week, and we work very far ahead,” says Reynolds. “There’s a lot to keep straight.”
Because the show tapes six months ahead, episodes written by new co-head writers Dena Higley and Josh Griffiths only began airing around Labor Day.
Griffiths says being a lifelong “Days” fan was helpful when he and Higley started. Their first move was giving some underused longtime characters better stories and bringing back iconic characters, including Bo Brady (Peter Reckell), Steve “Patch” Johnson (Stephen Nichols) and Andre DiMera (Thaao Penghlis).
“I’m trying to keep the focus on the characters the audience loves, while creating the next generation of characters. The next generation needs to be integrally tied to the iconic generation so they’re not coming out of leftfield,” Griffith says. “It’s keeping it connected to history.”
Penghlis, who joined “Days” 34 years ago as another DiMera, Tony, was surprised he was asked back. “I never thought I’d be going back. I thought it was over, actually.” After all, his characters, Tony and Andre, had been killed off six times, collectively. Then he met with Corday and his new team.
“There was something about going into Corday Prods., being embraced, and them telling me how and where the story was going — I just went, ‘I love this,’” he says. Now that he’s back on set, he says, “I’ve never seen a team this complete. I’ve never seen writers who blend in with the actors, study their personalities, and then go back and write about them. I’ve never seen producers who are as hands-on like Albert Alarr is.”
Nichols, a fan favorite during his initial run from 1985 to 1990, was lured back in 2006 but left in 2009 when a new producer took the show in a different direction. He hoped he’d be invited back for the 50th anniversary. And indeed he was.
“I’m thrilled, but the icing on the cake is that the show is better than it’s ever been,” Nichols says, adding the behind-the-scenes dynamic reminds him of his early days on the show. “We have another group of people who’re working well together. It’s a well-oiled machine, and everyone is supporting each other.”
Just a few years ago, soap operas looked like a dying breed. But DVRs and digital streaming breathed new life into the genre, letting fans watch whenever and wherever they like — NBC even has an app for it. That, coupled with the recent production investments, are encouraging signs to “Days’” fans.
“In an era where having a show return for a second season is considered a major success story, the 50-year run by ‘Days of Our Lives’ is simply extraordinary,” says Jennifer Salke, president of NBC Entertainment. “We’re so extremely proud of the show’s longstanding relationship with NBC and its connection with viewers all around the world.”
Hoping the excitement surrounding the 50th anniversary bodes well for renewal, Corday says it’s almost incomprehensible that this little show his parents started is still going strong.
“My father thought the show would last maybe a year, and before she passed my mother said, ‘Gee, it’s great that we’re going to be on the air 20 years,’” he says. “Soon I’ll be standing on a stage saying ‘We’re golden.’ Who knows what the future holds, but what an achievement to endure that long in such a difficult medium.”OK, here is the elevator pitch: We are on a beach. The sea just visible on the right-hand side of the frame. Low camera angle. Black and white. Ghostly flickers superimposed over the main image. A synthesiser chord on the soundtrack. Nothing happens for about 12 minutes. Then we see a black dot and a white dot at the far end of the beach. They are people dressed in robes, walking towards us. In slow motion. By about 20 minutes in, they are near us, gathering debris on the beach. Wait – we are at the ground floor already? But we have only just got started!
There are another seven hours to go, in fact. Though not a lot else happens, to be honest. The black-robed person paints some stuff white; the white-robed person paints some stuff black. Roughly an hour and 15 minutes in, they dramatically exit the scene. But 10 minutes later they reappear, and unfurl a banner. On it is painted … Uh-uh. No spoilers here. But the good news is, this is just the trailer. The actual film, titled Ambiancé, is 720 hours long. You ain’t seen nothing yet – almost literally.
72-minute trailer released for longest film ever Read more
“Slow cinema” has become a bona fide movement, advanced by film-makers such as Béla Tarr, Lav Diaz and Ben Rivers, but Ambiancé is something else entirely. It is nearly 100 times longer than Tarr’s famously challenging Sátántango. And it is 15 times longer than 1968’s The Longest Most Meaningless Movie in the World. Or five days longer than the current Longest Video on YouTube (which is just flashing black and white, anyway). You could call it “slower-than-slow cinema” or “almost static cinema”, although Ambiancé’s Swedish director, Anders Weberg, prefers the term “ambient film-making”.
Weberg is not seeking to break records, nor does he realistically imagine anyone will watch his film in its entirety when it premieres on 31 December 2020 (Star Wars Episode IX should be out of the way by then). The film will play simultaneously on every continent, he promises, but only once. Then it will be destroyed. Ephemerality is something of a theme in Weberg’s work. He began his career directing music videos, then became more interested in experimental film. He has produced several films with titles such as Nothingness, Meaninglessness and Absent (some of which are rather beautiful), and in 2009 he uploaded a series of films on to peer-to-peer servers then deleted the originals. He prides himself on being virtually invisible and unknown.
In that respect, Ambiancé might well be an own goal. Someone has created an entry for it on the Internet Movie Database without Weberg’s involvement. The 72-minute trailer he released in 2014 was viewed 1.6m times before he took it down (he will release a 72-hour trailer in 2018, naturally), and the new trailer has already been viewed more than 320,000 times. Someone has even speeded it up, condensing all seven hours into one minute. The statement on ephemerality has taken on an online life of its own. Perhaps that was the point all along. “It’s very easy to create in a digital world,” Weberg says. “It’s harder to delete.”Working to Outlaw Infant and Child Circumcision – A Wise Strategy, or Not?
As an intactivist, I have always described my goal as putting an end to the genital cutting of babies and children who cannot consent. I see this work as incremental, consisting of advocacy, persuasion, education, reason, and – yes – confrontation, such as Intact America’s recent Put Down The Knife! campaign aimed at physicians.
Events that occurred earlier this year in San Francisco, however, made me think seriously about whether I believed “circumcision should be outlawed” – in other words, whether I would support a legislative ban on “routine” (medically unnecessary) circumcision of male infants and children. While most Americans abhor the very thought of female genital mutilation, many simply don’t know that there is a federal law that already prohibits even the most minor cutting of the genitals of a girl under the age of 18. The proposed San Francisco ban was modeled exactly on that “anti-FGM” legislation.
Intact America has not advocated for a legislative ban on circumcision – yet. I believe that before we can reasonably expect routine infant male circumcision to be outlawed, we need greater social and political consensus that it is harmful, and the political power to overcome interest groups who promote their right to carry out the procedure. In the meantime, Intact America and the intactivist movement in general are moving public opinion and parents’ awareness, in the direction of more and more boys being left intact. As this occurs, and as knowledge of the harms of circumcision spreads, we will come closer to the conditions needed to achieve a gender-neutral approach to the genital cutting of children.
However, this doesn’t mean that I wasn’t really impressed and really excited when Lloyd Schofield and others gathered enough signatures in San Francisco to get a limited circumcision ban onto the ballot in that city. Predictable media comments on “those kooky San Franciscans” aside, I thought it was awesome that this local initiative raised the visibility of the circumcision problem to national – and actually international – prominence.
Was there backlash? Of course! And some intactivists have said that the opposition by physicians and religious groups, which ultimately resulted in the measure being stricken from the ballot, means that the initiative was “premature” or – worse – a setback to the progress we have made in recent years.
But I see it differently. I think the backlash is a mark of our progress. The other side is afraid, because they know we are winning, and that their professed right to cut the genitals of babies is being challenged as never before.
Abolitionists didn’t wait for the slaveholders’ permission to call for an end to slavery. Suffragists didn’t wait for women to be recognized as men’s equals before advocating for the right to vote. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., didn’t ask if it was ok for him to have a dream of racial equality.
Intactivists do not need anybody’s permission to talk about the American promise of equal protection guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, and why permitting the genital cutting of boys belies that promise.
In a future post, I will talk about challenges that arise in crafting a ban on male child circumcision – in particular, the charge that such a ban would conflict with another American principle: the right to religious freedom.
Stay tuned!
Georganne ChapinApr 25, 2013; Milwaukee, WI, USA; Milwaukee Bucks guardis guarded by Miami Heat forwardduring game three of the first round of the 2013 NBA playoffs at BMO Harris Bradley Center. Mandatory Credit: Benny Sieu-USA TODAY Sports
According to Yahoo Sports’ Marc Spears, Milwaukee Bucks guard Monta Ellis is interested in playing for Sacramento after the team hired Mike Malone this afternoon.
Per Marc Spears:
Monta Ellis’ potential interest in joining @ SacramentoKings as a FA became much stronger with hiring of Mike Malone as coach, source told Y!
Ellis, who holds a player option for the upcoming season has stated he may opt-out to secure a longer, more lucrative deal. His current player option would pay the Mississippi native $11 million dollars in what would be the final year of his 6 year, $66 million dollar extension which he signed back in 2008.
Spears goes on to say that Ellis gained a great deal of respect for Malone during their time together in Oakland and a reunion would be on his short list:
While with GSt,Monta Ellis gained a great deal of respect for Malone’s basketball IQ, ability to teach & easy way relating well with players
The former second round pick will turn 28 just days before the opening of the 2013-2014 NBA season.Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto (12 July 1904 – 23 September 1973), better known by his pen name and, later, legal name Pablo Neruda (;[1] Spanish: [ˈpaβlo neˈɾuða]), was a Chilean poet-diplomat and politician. Neruda became known as a poet when he was 13 years old, and wrote in a variety of styles, including surrealist poems, historical epics, overtly political manifestos, a prose autobiography, and passionate love poems such as the ones in his collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924). He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.
Neruda occupied many diplomatic positions in various countries during his lifetime and served a term as a Senator for the Chilean Communist Party. When President Gabriel González Videla outlawed communism in Chile in 1948, a warrant was issued for Neruda's arrest. Friends hid him for months in the basement of a house in the port city of Valparaíso; Neruda escaped through a mountain pass near Maihue Lake into Argentina. Years later, Neruda was a close advisor to Chile's socialist President Salvador Allende. When Neruda returned to Chile after his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Allende invited him to read at the Estadio Nacional before 70,000 people.[2]
Neruda was hospitalised with cancer at the time of the coup d'état led by Augusto Pinochet that overthrew Allende's government, but returned home after a few days when he suspected a doctor of injecting him with an unknown substance for the purpose of murdering him on Pinochet's orders.[3] Neruda died in his house in Isla Negra on 23 September 1973, just hours after leaving the hospital. Although it was long reported that he died of heart failure, the Interior Ministry of the Chilean government issued a statement in 2015 acknowledging a Ministry document indicating the government's official position that "it was clearly possible and highly likely" that Neruda was killed as a result of "the intervention of third parties".[4] Pinochet, backed by elements of the armed forces, denied permission for Neruda's funeral to be made a public event, but thousands of grieving Chileans disobeyed the curfew and crowded the streets.
Neruda is often considered the national poet of Chile, and his works have been popular and influential worldwide. The Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez once called him "the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language",[5] and Harold Bloom included Neruda as one of the 26 writers central to the Western tradition in his book The Western Canon.
Early life [ edit ]
Neruda as a young man
Pablo Neruda was born Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto on 12 July 1904, in Parral, Chile, a city in Linares Province, now part of the greater Maule Region, some 350 km south of Santiago,[6] to José del Carmen Reyes Morales, a railway employee, and Rosa Basoalto, a schoolteacher who died two months after he was born. Soon after her death, Reyes moved to Temuco, where he married a woman with whom he had had another child nine years earlier, a boy named Rodolfo.[7] Neruda grew up in Temuco with Rodolfo and a half-sister, Laura, one of his father's children by another woman. He composed his first poems in the winter of 1914.[8] Neruda was an atheist.[9]
Literary career [ edit ]
something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire
and wrote the first faint line,
faint without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom,
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open. From "Poetry", Memorial de Isla Negra (1964).
Trans. Alastair Reid.[10]
Neruda's father opposed his son's interest in writing and literature, but he received encouragement from others, including the future Nobel Prize winner Gabriela Mistral, who headed the local school. On July 18, 1917, at the age of thirteen, he published his first work, an essay titled "Entusiasmo y perseverancia" ("Enthusiasm and Perseverance") in the local daily newspaper La Mañana, and signed it Neftalí Reyes.[11] From 1918 to mid-1920, he published numerous poems, such as "Mis ojos" ("My eyes"), and essays in local magazines as Neftalí Reyes. In 1919, he participated in the literary contest Juegos Florales del Maule and won third place for his poem "Comunión ideal" or "Nocturno ideal". By mid-1920, when he adopted the pseudonym Pablo Neruda, he was a published author of poems, prose, and journalism. He is thought to have derived his pen name from the Czech poet Jan Neruda.[12] The young poet's intention in publishing under a pseudonym was to avoid his father's disapproval of his poems.
In 1921, at the age of 16, Neruda moved to Santiago[10] to study French at the Universidad de Chile, with the intention of becoming a teacher. However, he was soon devoting all his time to writing poems and with the help of well-known writer Eduardo Barrios,[13] he managed to meet and impress Don Carlos George Nascimento, the most important publisher in Chile at the time. In 1923, his first volume of verse, Crepusculario (Book of Twilights), was published by Editorial Nascimento, followed the next year by Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (Twenty Love Poems and A Desperate Song),[10] a collection of love poems that was controversial for its eroticism, especially considering its author's young age. Both works were critically acclaimed and have been translated into many languages. Over the decades, Veinte poemas sold millions of copies and became Neruda's best-known work, though a second edition did not appear until 1932. Almost one hundred years later, Veinte Poemas still retains its place as the best-selling poetry book in the Spanish language.[10] By the age of 20, Neruda had established an international reputation as a poet, but faced poverty.[10]
In 1926, he published the collection Tentativa del hombre infinito (The Attempt of the Infinite Man) and the novel El habitante y su esperanza (The Inhabitant and His Hope).[14] In 1927, out of financial desperation, he took an honorary consulship in Rangoon, the capital of the British colony of Burma, then administered from New Delhi as a province of British India. Rangoon was a place he had never heard of before.[14] Later, mired in isolation and loneliness, he worked in Colombo (Ceylon), Batavia (Java), and Singapore.[14] In Java the following year he met and married his first wife, a Dutch bank employee named Marijke Antonieta Hagenaar Vogelzang. While he was in the diplomatic service, Neruda read large amounts of verse, experimented with many different poetic forms, and wrote the first two volumes of Residencia en la Tierra, which includes many surrealist poems.
Diplomatic career [ edit ]
Spanish Civil War [ edit ]
After returning to Chile, Neruda was given diplomatic posts in Buenos Aires and then Barcelona, Spain.[15] He later succeeded Gabriela Mistral as consul in Madrid, where he became the center of a lively literary circle, befriending such writers as Rafael Alberti, Federico García Lor |
walker?”
Ethicon Monocryl Undyed Sutures (Exp: 7/2019) $261 Used for tying and sewing during surgery
And those pallets of adult diapers stacked high on a shelf? He sells the same type at his pharmacy for $11.99 per package or more. Farren recalled one time they picked up about 100 unopened packages of diapers from the home of a patient who had died. “It was ridiculous,” he said.
McLellan is sensitive about the built-in tension of her mission. The hospitals are casting off useful supplies that would otherwise be sent to a landfill. But they are also donating items that are desperately needed in the developing world. “They are trying to be good stewards in our community and in their world,” she said.
On the flip side, she can’t look past the waste. She said she could fill 15 shipping containers now if she had the $25,000 it cost to send each one overseas.
Hospital officials either declined to comment or, sometimes sheepishly, said some of the waste was unavoidable. Elton Cole, the supply chain manager at Stephens Memorial Hospital in western Maine, said some items, such as a torn exam table, must be replaced to meet infection control guidelines. Same goes for those supplies left in patient rooms. At Stephens, he said, the supplies in the room, such as bandages or gloves, are typically included in the room charge and not billed directly to patients.
Health care finance experts say while patients might not see the cost in their bills, the wasted supplies boost a hospital’s overhead, which in turn makes everyone’s costs higher.
The waste “contributes a lot to the cost of health care,” Cole said. “It’s pretty phenomenal the tons of product we’re shipping out to Elizabeth’s group.”
Halyard Powder-Free Exam Gloves $16.95, new Protect the patient and the health care provider from contamination
Patricia Fallows, who organizes the University of Vermont Medical Center donations to Partners, sent ProPublica a list of the typical shipment. Among the 100 items are a Medline Skin Staple Remover ($100), a box of Carefusion Blood Sets ($100 for 10) and three cases of unexpired Ethicon sutures ($431 per box). (ProPublica is using the list price of the products online, since the prices hospitals and other medical facilities pay vary widely depending on their individual deals with suppliers.) Officials at the medical center said the waste is a tiny percentage of their budget and some of it is unavoidable.
We called the National Rural Health Association in Leawood, Kansas, to see if they could use anything on this list.
“Oh my gosh!” said Brock Slabach, the vice president for member services. “Some of the equipment I know folks would be interested in.”
Slabach said more than 600 rural hospitals are so strapped financially they risk closure and according to the data, some may be uncomfortably similar to facilities in Algeria and Bangladesh. Wealthier hospitals’ waste could help them stay afloat.
“Every little bit helps,” he said. “None of these things will cure the entire problem altogether. But it would be helpful to meet a need in a community.”
Unfortunately, quantifying what’s being squandered is difficult. There is scant research, so it’s easy for hospitals to say it doesn’t add up to much.
Dr. Corinna Zygourakis, the chief neurosurgery resident at UCSF, who has studied operating room waste, said hospitals may not like what they’d find. “It’s not nice to say, ‘Hey, look at the amount of money we’re wasting.”
She decided to study waste after a medical mission trip to Mexico in 2015. At UCSF it was common to set out an array of disposable surgical instruments in the sterile field of the operating room just in case a surgeon needed them. Often the surgeon wouldn’t even touch the instruments, but they, nevertheless, had to be discarded. In Mexico, they wouldn’t have been.
Zygourakis and a team of colleagues tracked 58 neurosurgeries at UCSF and tallied the unused supplies that were discarded. In 26 surgeries, all the blood clotting materials weren’t used, for a total of $3,749. In 16, an expensive tissue adhesive wasn’t used at a cost of $3,495. Screws were wasted on three cases, totaling $3,144. The items marked as wasted were not billed to patients, and were donated whenever possible, she said.
Partners for World Health ships America’s unwanted medical equipment and supplies to needy countries like Greece, Syria and Uganda.
But the study’s findings, published in Journal of Neurosurgery in 2016, were eye-opening: The public hospital wasted an estimated $968 per neurosurgery case, which amounted to about $2.9 million over the course of a year.
UCSF reviewed all the preference cards for each surgeon, which specify how the operating room should be set up before each operation. The hospital now makes sure the set-up doesn’t include supplies that aren’t actually needed, preventing a significant amount of the waste.
In a separate study in the December edition of JAMA Surgery, Zygourakis and her colleagues showed each UCSF surgeon his or her direct costs per procedure in comparison to other surgeons in the institution. Most doctors were unaware of operating-room costs. Then they gave them an incentive: Their departments would get a bonus if they reduced costs by at least 5 percent.
The median surgical supply costs dropped by 6.5 percent in the group of surgeons who participated — a savings of about $836,000 over one year — while the control group’s costs increased by almost 7.5 percent.
“It’s really important to make people aware of this,” Zygourakis said. “The younger generation of physicians and surgeons do care about these things. We do realize we have limited resources and want to see how we can provide the most and best care to the most number of patients.”
Back in Maine, McLellan said she would love for the medical community to put her out of business by cutting the waste and passing the savings on to patients. She’s invited hospital CEOs to visit her warehouses, to see the vast display of wasted health care dollars. So far none have come.
“I want to go talk to Trump,” McLellan said. “Trump wants to figure out how to do this business in a different way, how to be more cost effective. I’m sure he doesn’t understand what the waste is. Not this kind of waste. People don’t get it until they see how much is wasted.”
Marshall Allen is a ProPublica reporter covering health care and patient safety issues.CALL it the cussedness of an island nation. Beneath the cheeriness of Aphrodite’s sun-kissed island lies the intransigence of the Balkans and the Middle East. On the eve of its accession to the European Union in 2004, the Greek-Cypriot republic rejected a UN plan to reunite with the Turkish-Cypriot north, where the plan was supported. Within the club the Greek-Cypriot government has used and abused EU institutions to wage its feud with Turkey and to lend support to Russia.
This week’s 36-0 vote in the Cypriot parliament to reject a euro-zone bail-out, in protest at a large proposed tax on bank deposits, may be the most momentous act of bloody-mindedness yet, raising new questions about the stability, and even the survival, of the euro. Outside parliament, a demonstrator’s poster summed up the mood: “Fuck Europe”. Such defiance from the island will be admired by some, yet it does not alter Cyprus’s predicament. It is bust, and cannot afford to salvage its oversized and insolvent banks (see article). Cyprus is also trying to play the euro zone against Russia, amid rumours that it might be prepared to offer Russia concessions in offshore gasfields or a naval base.
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But who really holds the gun—the firing squad, or the prisoner? The question was raised in Greece last year, and leaders decided to keep it in the euro, even at the cost of overt and covert debt-forgiveness. Cyprus is even smaller, accounting for just 0.2% of euro-zone GDP. Yet Eurocrats insist it too is of “systemic” importance. A bank run in Cyprus could start one in other countries with dodgy banks. And the prospect of Cyprus’s exit from the euro would raise doubts about the future of other weak members of the currency.
For now, the Eurocrats say it is up to Cyprus to come up with an alternative plan. Perhaps they think Cyprus will have to come to its senses if it is ever to reopen its banks. And if it remains obstinate, some would see advantage in making an example of the Cypriots. To euro-zone hawks, the spread of moral hazard is the most dangerous form of contagion.
In many ways, the mess in Cyprus comes down to the political symbolism of round numbers. Germany said the euro zone would lend no more than €10 billion ($13 billion) to recapitalise Cyprus’s banks and refinance its debt. The IMF insisted the island’s debt should be kept below 100% of GDP by 2020. And Nicos Anastasiades, the new president of Cyprus, was adamant that any tax levied on big depositors should be kept below 10%. Put crudely, the euro zone and the IMF ensured the bail-out should be accompanied by a bail-in of depositors; but Cyprus chose to inflict much of the pain on grandmothers’ savings so as to limit the losses of Russian oligarchs.
As so often, short-term politics has trumped rational crisis-management. The deal in Cyprus should have been a dry run for the banking union that the euro zone seeks to create. Instead it has raised questions about whether Europeans genuinely intend to break the link between weak banks and weak sovereigns.
Take deposit guarantees. In the early days of the financial crisis the EU raised deposit insurance to €100,000 to prevent bank runs. Now it risks provoking them by seeming to breach that guarantee. National deposit insurance is plainly limited by the solvency of the state. A common deposit-guarantee system in the euro zone makes sense, however much the Germans and Eurocrats may claim it is irrelevant.
Then look at the promise of a common means of winding down troubled banks. Uniform bank-resolution rules were supposed to be adopted in each EU country, and later on a unified system was due to be created for the euro zone. The Cyprus deal makes a mockery of the proposed hierarchy of creditors to absorb bank losses: senior bondholders (few in the case of Cyprus) have been spared but small depositors penalised.
With a proper banking union, other options become possible. One is the orderly wind-down of Cyprus’s two big crippled banks. This would impose heavier losses on large deposits (up to 50%), but protect small savers and shrink the banking sector. Another option would be the direct recapitalisation of banks by the euro zone. And with a less rickety banking system, it would be easier to get tough with rule breakers.
Draghi’s dilemmas
Amid the muddling of European leaders, Mario Draghi, boss of the ECB, has stood out as the prime guarantor of the euro. His conditional promise to buy the bonds of vulnerable sovereigns did much to restore calm last year, though it has never been tested. The ECB, moreover, is being charged with overseeing a new single euro-zone bank supervisor. Its jealously guarded independence is supposed to lend credibility to the system. Yet the more the ECB involves itself in managing the crisis, the more it sullies itself with politics. And having been intimately involved in the botched plan for Cyprus’s banks, and insisted on the protection of senior bondholders, it is reasonable to question whether the ECB is up to the task of bank supervision.
There is another question: now that voters in Italy and MPs in Cyprus have openly rejected the strictures of the euro zone, might the ECB’s magic spell be broken? After all, its bond-buying policy depends crucially on troubled countries submitting to a euro-zone reform programme. The ECB may reach a decisive moment sooner. Cyprus’ banks survive only on the ECB’s emergency liquidity. If there is no deal in Cyprus, the ECB will have to decide whether to follow through on its ultimatum to cut off the money within days. This would cause a messy collapse and almost certainly push Cyprus out of the euro. Mr Draghi has bravely stepped in to defend the weakest members of the euro zone. But would he dare to shoot one of his own?Land of the Lost (1974–1976) is a children's adventure television series created (though uncredited) by David Gerrold and produced by Sid and Marty Krofft, who co-developed the series with Allan Foshko. During its original run, it was broadcast on the NBC television network.[1] It later aired in daily syndication from 1978 to 1985 as part of the "Krofft Superstars" package. In 1985, it returned to late Saturday mornings on CBS as a replacement for the canceled Pryor's Place - also a Krofft production, followed by another brief return to CBS in the Summer of 1987. It was later shown in reruns on the Sci Fi Channel in the 1990s. Reruns of this series were aired on Saturday mornings on Me-TV and are streamed online at any time on their website. It has since become a cult classic and is now available on DVD.[2][3][4] Krofft Productions remade the series in 1991, also titled Land of the Lost, and a big budget film adaptation was released in 2009.
Overview [ edit ]
Land of the Lost details the adventures of the Marshall family (father Rick, and his children Will and Holly) who are trapped in an alternate universe inhabited by dinosaurs, a primate-type people called Pakuni, and aggressive humanoid/lizard creatures called Sleestak. The episode storylines focus on the family's efforts to survive and find a way back to their own world, but the exploration of the exotic inhabitants of the Land of the Lost is also an ongoing part of the story.[4]
An article on renewed studio interest in feature film versions of Land of the Lost and H.R. Pufnstuf commented that "decision-makers in Hollywood, and some big-name stars, have personal recollections of plopping down on the family-room wall-to-wall shag sometime between 1969 and 1974 to tune in to multiple reruns of the Kroffts' Saturday morning live-action hits," and quoting Marty Krofft as saying that the head of Universal Studios, Ronald Meyer, and leaders at Sony Pictures all had been fans of Krofft programs.[5]
A number of well-respected writers in the science fiction field contributed scripts to the series (mostly in the first and second seasons), including Larry Niven,[6] Theodore Sturgeon,[6][7] Ben Bova,[6] and Norman Spinrad, and a number of people involved with Star Trek, such as D.C. Fontana,[6] Walter Koenig,[6][8][9] and David Gerrold.[6] Gerrold, Niven, and Fontana also contributed commentaries to the DVD of the first season.[3]
The prolific Krofft team was influential in live-action children's television, producing many shows that were oddly formatted, highly energetic, and made frequent use of special effects, with most of them following a "stranger in a strange land" storyline. Most of these shows were comedic in nature, but Land of the Lost was considerably more serious, especially during its first season, though as the series progressed the dramatic tone diminished.[10]
Plot and format [ edit ]
The Marshalls are brought to the mysterious world by means of a dimensional portal,[11] a device used frequently throughout the series and a major part of its internal mythology. This portal opens when they are swept down a gigantic 1,000-foot waterfall. We later learn in "Circle", which explains the time paradox, that this portal is actually opened by Rick Marshall himself, while in Enik's cave, as a way for the current Marshalls to return to Earth, resolving the paradox and allowing Enik to also return to his time.
Outfitted only for a short camping trip, the resourceful family from California takes shelter in a natural cave and improvises the provisions and tools that they need to survive. Their most common and dangerous encounters are with dinosaurs, particularly a Tyrannosaurus rex they nickname "Grumpy" who frequents the location of their cave. However, many of the dinosaurs are herbivores, posing no threat to the Marshalls, unless unintentionally provoked. One is a particularly tame young Brontosaurus whom Holly nicknames "Dopey", and whom Holly looks upon as a pet.
They also encounter the mostly hostile Sleestak (lizard-men), and the primate-like creatures called Pakuni (one of whom, Cha-Ka, they befriend), as well as a variety of dangerous creatures, strange geography and unfamiliar technology.
The main goal of the three is to find a way to return home. They are occasionally aided in this by the Altrusian castaway Enik.
At the start of the third season it is explained that Rick Marshall (played by Spencer Milligan) has been accidentally returned to Earth alone, leaving his children behind. Rick is immediately replaced by his brother Jack. Rick Marshall abruptly disappeared while trying to use one of the pylons to get home; Jack stumbled upon his niece and nephew after he embarked on a search of his own to find them.
Though the term "time doorway" is used throughout the series, Land of the Lost is not meant to portray an era in Earth's history, but rather an enigmatic zone whose place and time are unknown. Indeed, within the first few minutes of the pilot, the Marshall family father tells his children that he spotted three moons in the sky. The original creators of these time portals were thought to be the ancestors of the Sleestak, called Altrusians, though later episodes raised some questions about this.
Many aspects of the Land of the Lost, including the time doorways and environmental processes, were controlled by the Pylons, metallic obelisk-shaped booths that were larger on the inside than the outside and housed matrix tables - stone tables studded with a grid of colored crystals. Uncontrolled time doorways result in the arrival of a variety of visitors and castaways in the Land.
Production [ edit ]
Land of the Lost is notable for its epic-scale concept, which suggested an expansive world with many fantastic forms of life and mysterious technology, all created on a children's series' limited production budget. To support the internal mythology, linguist Victoria Fromkin was commissioned to create a special language for the Pakuni, which she based on the sounds of West African speech and attempted to build into the show in a gradual way that would allow viewers to learn the language over the course of many episodes.[10][12] The series' intention was to create a realistic fantasy world, albeit relying heavily on children's acceptance of minor inconsistencies.
In a 1999 interview, first-season story editor and writer David Gerrold claimed that he largely created the show, based on photographs of various science fiction topoi that were bound together in a book and given him by Sid Krofft and Allan Foshko.[13]
It was a marked departure from the Krofft team's previous work, which mostly featured extremely stylized puppets and sets such as those in H.R. Pufnstuf and Lidsville.[10]
The series for the first two seasons was shot on a modular indoor soundstage at General Service Studios in Hollywood, and made economical use of a small number of sets and scenic props which were rearranged frequently to suggest the ostensibly vast jungles, ancient cities and cave systems. As is traditional in many effect scenes, miniatures or scale-version settings were used for insertion of live-action scenes. Additional locations were often rendered using scale miniatures and chroma key.
Spencer Milligan departed the show at the beginning of its third season for financial reasons. In addition to a salary increase, he believed it was only fair that he and the rest of the cast receive compensation for using their image on various merchandise. His character Rick Marshall was replaced by his brother, Jack Marshall, played by actor Ron Harper. Milligan did not return for the brief scene, also shown in the credits of the third season, showing Rick Marshall being transported out of the Land of the Lost. One of the show's crew played the role instead, wearing a wig resembling Milligan's hair and standing with his back to the camera.[14][15][16]
Non-human characters were portrayed by actors in latex rubber suits, or with heavy creature make-up. Dinosaurs in the series were created using a combination of stop motion animation miniatures, rear projection film effects and occasional hand puppets for close-ups of dinosaur heads. Wesley Eure points out on a commentary track for Land of the Lost's first season DVD that the Grumpy hand puppet has no hole in the back of its throat, even though it is often seen opening its mouth wide to roar. The series marked a rare example of matting filmed stop-motion sequences with videotape live action, so as to avoid the telltale blue 'fringe' produced in matting with less exacting processes. Though this occasionally worked very well, the difference in lighting between the video and film sequences sometimes brought inadvertent attention to the limitations of the process.
Special effects footage was frequently re-used. Additional visual effects were achieved using manual film overlay techniques, the low-tech ancestor to current motion control photography.
Cast [ edit ]
Main [ edit ]
Recurring [ edit ]
Home media [ edit ]
From 2004 to 2005, Rhino Entertainment owned the rights to the show, and released seasons one through three, and a complete series package, with several bonus features, including commentaries, on all of the releases. The DVDs of the series earned a Saturn nomination for best retro TV series release in 2004.
On May 26, 2009, Universal Studios released two complete series releases, one in original packaging, and the other enclosed in a reproduction of the Land of the Lost vintage 70's lunchbox; the only bonus feature was a look at the film starring Will Ferrell. On October 13, 2009, Universal released the three seasons individually; the DVDs are identical to Universal's Complete Series Boxes. (However, the Region 4 version of the 2009 box set does include the commentaries and interviews, but not the look at the Ferrell film). The series is also available in Digital media format.
Remakes [ edit ]
Despite a relatively short run, the show continued to be aired extensively through syndication. Based on that success, a remake of the series began in 1991 and ran for two seasons.[17]
On June 5, 2009 a feature film based on the 1974 TV series opened in U.S. theaters. Unlike the original series, which was a serious take on the story, the film was a comedy/parody. It was directed by Brad Silberling and starred Will Ferrell, with the Krofft brothers serving as co-producers. Although the original series was aimed for children, the film's target audience was adults.
In 2015 it was reported that Sid and Marty Krofft were working on a reboot to Land of the Lost following what they called "that other movie".[18] In a 2018 podcast interview with both Sid and Marty Krofft, the Kroffts reconfirmed that they are still working on an updated remake to Land Of The Lost and that this time it will be an hour-long series.
See also [ edit ]Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's campaign is apparently still furious at how The New York Times conducted itself while reporting — and subsequently correcting — a story last week.
Late Thursday night, Clinton's communication director, Jennifer Palmieri, published a nearly 2,000-word open letter to Dean Baquet, the newspaper's executive editor.
"I wish to emphasize our genuine wish to have a constructive relationship with The New York Times," Palmieri wrote. "But we also are extremely troubled by the events that went into this erroneous report, and will be looking forward to discussing our concerns related to this incident so we can have confidence that it is not repeated in the future."
The publishing of such a scathing letter — on hillaryclinton.com, no less — raised eyebrows among members of the media, some of whom used words such as "astonishing" and "press release" to describe the piece.
Palmieri was tearing into a Times story from last Thursday night. The story initially cited sources saying the Department of Justice had been urged to open a "criminal inquiry" into Clinton's email usage as secretary of state.
The story was later corrected to specify that it was a "security referral," not a criminal one, and that it "addressed the potential compromise of classified information in connection with that email account. It did not specifically request an investigation into Mrs. Clinton." Its sources, The Times said, were simply wrong initially.
The corrections were substantial, and The Times faced a storm of criticism from Clinton and her allies last week on the issue.
"I want to say a word about what is in the news today, and it is because there have been a lot of inaccuracies," Clinton said last Friday. "Maybe the heat is getting to everybody. We all have a responsibility to get this right."
Palmieri's letter was even blunter.
"I feel obliged to put into context just how egregious an error this story was," she wrote. "The New York Times is arguably the most important news outlet in the world, and it rushed to put an erroneous story on the front page charging that a major candidate for president of the United States was the target of a criminal referral to federal law enforcement. Literally hundreds of outlets followed your story, creating a firestorm that had a deep impact that cannot be unwound."
The Times published a separate editor's note cataloging its errors and acknowledging that the corrections should have been issued faster and more clearly explained. Additionally, the newspaper's public editor wrote an article on Monday criticizing the article for being a "mess" that was "fraught with inaccuracies."
"It brings up important issues that demand to be thought about and discussed internally with an eye to prevention in the future," The Times' public editor, Margaret Sullivan, wrote. "I'll summarize my prescription in four words: Less speed. More transparency."
But all that self-reflection was apparently not enough for the Clinton campaign. Jesse Ferguson, a top Clinton spokesman, wrote on Twitter that the campaign published the letter to Baquet on its website after The Times would not run it:
Palmieri's letter blasted The Times over a wide range of issues, including the amount of time the campaign had to respond to the report's allegations late last Thursday night:
Despite the late hour, our campaign quickly conferred and confirmed that we had no knowledge whatsoever of any criminal referral involving the Secretary. At 10:36 pm, our staff attempted to reach your reporters on the phone to reiterate this fact and ensure the paper would not be going forward with any such report. There was no answer. At 10:54 pm, our staff again attempted calling. Again, no answer. Minutes later, we received a call back. We sought to confirm that no story was imminent and were shocked at the reply: the story had just published on the Times' website.
Story continues
This was, to put it mildly, an egregious breach of the process that should occur when a major newspaper like the Times is pursuing a story of this magnitude. Not only did the Times fail to engage in a proper discussion with the campaign ahead of publication; given the exceedingly short window of time between when the Times received the tip and rushed to publish, it hardly seems possible that the Times conducted sufficient deliberations within its own ranks before going ahead with the story.
Palmieri also questioned The Times' sources:
Times' editors have attempted to explain these errors by claiming the fault for the misreporting resided with a Justice Department official whom other news outlets cited as confirming the Times' report after the fact. This suggestion does not add up. It is our understanding that this Justice Department official was not the original source of the Times' tip. Moreover, notwithstanding the official's inaccurate characterization of the referral as criminal in nature, this official does not appear to have told the Times that Mrs. Clinton was the target of that referral, as the paper falsely reported in its original story.
This raises the question of what other sources the Times may have relied on for its initial report.
And she took issue with the corrections' initial "troubling" lack of transparency and speed:
The speed with which the Times conceded that it could not defend its lead citing Mrs. Clinton as the referral's target raises questions about what inspired its confidence in the first place to frame the story that way. More importantly, the Times' change was not denoted in the form of a correction. Rather, it was performed quietly, overnight, without any accompanying note to readers. This was troubling in its lack of transparency and risks causing the Times to appear like it is trying to whitewash its misreporting. A correction should have been posted promptly that night.
...
Most maddening of all, even after the correction fixed the description of the referral within the story, a headline remained on the front page of the Times' website that read, “Criminal Inquiry is Sought in Clinton Email Account." It was not until even later in the evening that the word "criminal" was finally dropped from the headline and an updated correction was issued to the story. The lateness of this second correction, however, prevented it from appearing in the paper the following morning. We simply do not understand how that was allowed to occur.
Here's the full letter:
Dean Baquet
Executive Editor
The New York Times
620 Eighth Avenue
New York, New York
July 28, 2015
Dear Mr. Baquet:
I am writing to officially register our campaign’s grave concern with the Times' publication of an inaccurate report related to Hillary Clinton and her email use.
I appreciate the fact that both you and the Public Editor have sought to publicly explain how this error could have been made. But we remain perplexed by the Times' slowness to acknowledge its errors after the fact, and some of the shaky justifications that Times' editors have made. We feel it important to outline these concerns with you directly so that they may be properly addressed and so our campaign can continue to have a productive working relationship with the Times.
I feel obliged to put into context just how egregious an error this story was. The New York Times is arguably the most important news outlet in the world and it rushed to put an erroneous story on the front page charging that a major candidate for President of the United States was the target of a criminal referral to federal law enforcement. Literally hundreds of outlets followed your story, creating a firestorm that had a deep impact that cannot be unwound. This problem was compounded by the fact that the Times took an inexplicable, let alone indefensible, delay in correcting the story and removing "criminal" from the headline and text of the story.
To review the facts, as the Times itself has acknowledged through multiple corrections, the paper's reporting was false in several key respects: first, contrary to what the Times stated, Mrs. Clinton is not the target of a criminal referral made by the State Department’s and Intelligence Community's Inspectors General, and second, the referral in question was not of a criminal nature at all.
Just as disturbing as the errors themselves is the Times' apparent abandonment of standard journalistic practices in the course of its reporting on this story.
First, the seriousness of the allegations that the Times rushed to report last Thursday evening demanded far more care and due diligence than the Times exhibited prior to this article's publication.
The Times' readers rightfully expect the paper to adhere to the most rigorous journalistic standards. To state the obvious, it is hard to imagine a situation more fitting for those standards to be applied than when a newspaper is preparing to allege that a major party candidate for President of the United States is the target of a criminal referral received by federal law enforcement.
This allegation, however, was reported hastily and without affording the campaign adequate opportunity to respond. It was not even mentioned by your reporter when our campaign was first contacted late Thursday afternoon. Initially, it was stated as reporting only on a memo – provided to Congress by the Inspectors General from the State Department and Intelligence Community – that raised the possibility of classified material traversing Secretary Clinton's email system. This memo — which was subsequently released publicly — did not reference a criminal referral at all. It was not until late Thursday night – at 8:36 pm – that your paper hurriedly followed up with our staff to explain that it had received a separate tip that the Inspectors General had additionally made a criminal referral to the Justice Department concerning Clinton's email use. Our staff indicated that we had no knowledge of any such referral – understandably, of course, since none actually existed – and further indicated that, for a variety of reasons, the reporter's allegation seemed implausible. Our campaign declined any immediate comment, but asked for additional time to attempt to investigate the allegation raised. In response, it was indicated that the campaign "had time," suggesting the publication of the report was not imminent.
Despite the late hour, our campaign quickly conferred and confirmed that we had no knowledge whatsoever of any criminal referral involving the Secretary. At 10:36 pm, our staff attempted to reach your reporters on the phone to reiterate this fact and ensure the paper would not be going forward with any such report. There was no answer. At 10:54 pm, our staff again attempted calling. Again, no answer. Minutes later, we received a call back. We sought to confirm that no story was imminent and were shocked at the reply: the story had just published on the Times' website.
This was, to put it mildly, an egregious breach of the process that should occur when a major newspaper like the Times is pursuing a story of this magnitude. Not only did the Times fail to engage in a proper discussion with the campaign ahead of publication; given the exceedingly short window of time between when the Times received the tip and rushed to publish, it hardly seems possible that the Times conducted sufficient deliberations within its own ranks before going ahead with the story.
Second, in its rush to publish what it clearly viewed as a major scoop, the Times relied on questionable sourcing and went ahead without bothering to seek corroborating evidence that could have supported its allegation.
In our conversations with the Times reporters, it was clear that they had not personally reviewed the IG's referral that they falsely described as both criminal and focused on Hillary Clinton. Instead, they relied on unnamed sources that characterized the referral as such. However, it is not at all clear that those sources had directly seen the referral, either. This should have represented too many "degrees of separation" for any newspaper to consider it reliable sourcing, least of all The New York Times.
Times' editors have attempted to explain these errors by claiming the fault for the misreporting resided with a Justice Department official whom other news outlets cited as confirming the Times' report after the fact. This suggestion does not add up. It is our understanding that this Justice Department official was not the original source of the Times' tip. Moreover, notwithstanding the official's inaccurate characterization of the referral as criminal in nature, this official does not appear to have told the Times that Mrs. Clinton was the target of that referral, as the paper falsely reported in its original story.
This raises the question of what other sources the Times may have relied on for its initial report. It clearly was not either of the referring officials – that is, the Inspectors General of either the State Department or intelligence agencies – since the Times' sources apparently lacked firsthand knowledge of the referral documents. It also seems unlikely the source could have been anyone affiliated with those offices, as it defies logic that anyone so closely involved could have so severely garbled the description of the referral.
Of course, the identity of the Times' sources would be deserving of far less scrutiny if the underlying information had been confirmed as true. However, the Times appears to have performed little, if any, work to corroborate the accuracy of its sources' characterizations of the IG's referral. Key details went uninvestigated in the Times' race to publish these erroneous allegations against Mrs. Clinton. For instance, high in the Times' initial story, the reporters acknowledged they had no knowledge of whether or not the documents that the Times claimed were mishandled by Mrs. Clinton contained any classified markings. In Mrs. Clinton's case, none of the emails at issue were marked. This fact was quickly acknowledged by the IC inspector general’s office within hours of the Times' report, but it was somehow left unaddressed in the initial story.
Even after the Times' reporting was revealed to be false, the Times incomprehensibly delayed the issuance of a full and true correction.
Our campaign first sought changes from the Times as soon as the initial story was published. Recognizing the implausibility that Mrs. Clinton herself could be the subject of any criminal probe, we immediately challenged the story's opening line, which said the referral sought an investigation into Mrs. Clinton specifically for the mishandling of classified materials. In response, the Times' reporters admitted that they themselves had never seen the IG's referral, and so acknowledged the possibility that the paper was overstating what it directly knew when it portrayed the potential investigation as centering on Mrs. Clinton. It corrected the lead sentence accordingly.
The speed with which the Times conceded that it could not defend its lead citing Mrs. Clinton as the referral's target raises questions about what inspired its confidence in the first place to frame the story that way. More importantly, the Times' change was not denoted in the form of a correction. Rather, it was performed quietly, overnight, without any accompanying note to readers. This was troubling in its lack of transparency and risks causing the Times to appear like it is trying to whitewash its misreporting. A correction should have been posted promptly that night.
Regardless, even after this change, a second error remained in the story: the characterization of the referral as criminal at all. By Friday morning, multiple members of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform (who had been briefed by the Inspectors General) challenged this portrayal—and ultimately, so did the Department of Justice itself. Only then did the Times finally print a correction acknowledging its misstatement of the nature of the referral to the Justice Department.
Of course, the correction, coming as it did on a Friday afternoon, was destined to reach a fraction of those who read the Times' original, erroneous report. As the Huffington Post observed:
"…it's unlikely that the same audience will see the updated version unless the paper were to send out a second breaking news email with its latest revisions. The Clinton story also appeared [on] the front page of Friday's print edition."
Most maddening of all, even after the correction fixed the description of the referral within the story, a headline remained on the front page of the Times' website that read, “Criminal Inquiry is Sought in Clinton Email Account." It was not until even later in the evening that the word "criminal" was finally dropped from the headline and |
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