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embarked on ambitious procurement programmes to build up security and defence forces in the region. Russia has the most extensive Arctic defence programme which aims to harness the region as its primary base for natural resources by 2020. Norway, with over 80% of its maritime territory north of the Arctic Circle, considers this its primary region of strategic responsibility.
Currently, the UK Armed Forces' Arctic capability comprises elements of the Royal Navy (including the Royal Marines), the Royal Air Force and the Army. The UK is also a regular participant in the annual meetings of the Northern Group and the Arctic Security Forces Roundtable. While SDSR 2015 reflected increased attention from the Ministry of Defence in the security of Northern Europe, it stopped short of delivering an assessment of the UK’s defence requirements in the Arctic, and whether these were being met.
Submitting written evidence
The sub-Committee seeks written submissions addressing the following issues:
The security and defence implications for the UK of the melting Arctic ice cap;
Recent military activity in the Arctic, including the main actors and their current capabilities and intentions;
The bilateral frameworks for cooperation in the Arctic, including with Norway and Canada;
Geopolitical developments in the Arctic, including West-Russia tensions, low oil prices, Asian interests, and their consequences for defence in the Arctic;
Possible hotspots of conflict in the region and how the UK might contribute to the de-escalation of any such military tensions;
What role any of the existing forums for discussion of Arctic matters can play in de-escalating risk;
Whether the UK Armed Forces have the necessary numbers, training and equipment to operate effectively in the Arctic if needed; and
Whether NATO should increase its focus on the Arctic
Written evidence can submitted through the Defence in the Arctic inquiry page. Deadline for submissions is 19 January 2017.
Further information
Image: Crown copyrightSkittles is capitalizing on the Seattle Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch's affinity for the brand with a limited-edition "Seattle Mix" version of the candy that will only feature blue and green versions of the candy — Seahawks colors.
Lynch is a well-known Skittles fanatic, ever since he played Pop Warner Football when he was younger. His mother used to give him the candy, what she called "power pellets," every time he scored a touchdown. Now, Seahawks fans reward him by pelting him with the multi-colored treat every time he enters the end zone with a touchdown. This is such a common occurrence that supermarkets reportedly run low on supply of the candy on game days.
See also: 10 Tips for Pretending You Care About Football
.@Skittles knows I love my blue and green. Gotta love limited-edition Skittles “Seattle Mix” #ad pic.twitter.com/MdDnb5hOw2 — Shawn Lynch (@MoneyLynch) January 28, 2014
The details of the deal are unknown, but according to ESPN Skittles is also expected to donate $10,000 to Lynch's Fam First Foundation for every touchdown he scores in the Super Bowl. This is reportedly the first time Skittles has publicly endorsed an athlete. Skittles reps could not be reached for comment.
BONUS: 10 Tips for Pretending You Care About FootballClick to enlarge, and debate the strip below the line.
Keith Hackett's verdict
1) You've rightly delayed to see if an advantage has accrued – the fact that the player has deliberately failed to take that opportunity should not change your thinking. There was no advantage, so award a penalty-kick. However, the player has taken a bizarre gamble: you would only show a red card to the goalkeeper if he denied the first striker an obvious goalscoring opportunity – and there was a defender on the line. Players are best advised to focus on playing, not refereeing.
Paul Kay wins the shirt.
2) If there is no other pitch available, and the posts cannot be changed, you cannot play the match. Goalposts and crossbars must be square, rectangular, round or elliptical in shape, and must not be dangerous to players. Report the situation to the competition secretary.
Thanks to Peter Conway.
3) The player has taken a daft risk. Your decision should be based on whether he has a) delayed the restart or b) incited the crowd. If he has, it is indeed a second yellow card. But if not, issue the player with a clear public rebuke, and restart the game with a kick-off. My instinct in this case would be to stick with a firm rebuke.
Thanks to Cameron Barr.
Competition: win an official club shirt of your choice
View the Kitbag range
For a chance to win a club shirt from the range at Kitbag.com send us your questions for You are the Ref to you.are.the.ref@observer.co.uk. The best scenario used in the new Observer YATR strip each Sunday wins a shirt of your choice from Kitbag. Terms & conditions apply.
For more on the fifty year history of You Are The Ref, click here.via press release:
Popular Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson
Guest Stars in Brand-New Martha Speaks Episode,
Friday, June 15, 2012 on
PBS KIDS (check local listings)
Acclaimed Champion of the Cosmos
Teaches Kids about Astronomy Just in Time for Summer Skies
(Boston, MA, June 7, 2012): World-renowned astrophysicist and former NOVA scienceNOW host Neil deGrasse Tyson guest-stars as himself in a truly “star-studded” all-new Martha Speaks episode premiering Friday, June 15, on PBS KIDS (check local listings). In “Eyes on the Skies,” Truman’s hero, Neil deGrasse Tyson, is holding a seminar at the library. Truman is certain that his activity partner, TD,is going to embarrass him in front of his idol. Does TD have what it takes to become a great scientist? With the help of Martha and her friends, Dr. Tyson will introduce kids to important science vocabulary such as telescope, astrophysicist, and more.
“I was delighted to make a cameo appearance on Martha Speaks,” says Dr. Tyson. “Science based vocabulary is a fun way to introduce the universe to kids, especially since they’re naturally curious about the world around them. Equipping them with the words to describe what they discover enriches their childhood, and may just plant the seeds of science literacy for their adulthood.”
Throughout his career, Neil deGrasse Tyson has had an extensive relationship with PBS. In 2004, he was the on-camera host of the PBS-NOVA four-part mini-series Origins. For five seasons, beginning in the fall of 2006, Tyson appeared as the on-camera host of PBS-NOVA’s spinoff program NOVA ScienceNOW, which offers an accessible look at the frontiers of all the science that shapes the understanding of our place in the universe.
Dr. Tyson is the recipient of 14 honorary doctorates and the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, the highest award given by NASA to a non-government citizen. His contributions to the public’s appreciation of the cosmos have been recognized by the International Astronomical Union in their official naming of asteroid “13123 Tyson.”
“Like Truman, we are big fans of Dr. Tyson and his mission to educate all of us about science and the universe,” says Carol Greenwald, Senior Executive Producer of Martha Speaks. “We are honored he was willing to appear in the episode and introduce vocabulary and ideas we hope will get kids excited about exploring the skies.”
Also airing that day is the brand-new “Camp Truman.” In this episode, Milo is super-excited to go to Camp Winnetka this summer – he’s been packing since Christmas. But when Truman discovers that Camp Winnetka is closing, he takes it upon himself to cheer Milo up – by showing him how miserable and grueling camp can be. Tune in to learn words like forage, hike, and grueling.
Martha Speaks Online
Martha’s antics continue online at pbskids.org/martha, a comprehensive website that builds on the series’ curriculum to bolster the oral vocabulary of 4- to 7-year-olds. To celebrate Neil deGrasse Tyson’s new friendship with Martha and her friends, the popular Dog Tags game on the Martha Speaks website will be updated in mid-July to feature a whole new page of pet photos, and include science related props, words, and friends for decorating your dog pals. Visit pbskids.org/martha to play.
About Martha Speaks
Now in its fourth season on PBS KIDS, Martha Speaks, based on the best-selling children’s books by Susan Meddaugh, is a proven tool for increasing children’s vocabulary and is comparable to traditional classroom vocabulary instruction (such as reading out loud)[1]. Throughout each episode, Martha, a dog who gained the ability of speech from eating alphabet soup, teaches young children vocabulary words such as famous, admire, understudy, and more.
The series is supported by an educational outreach campaign that includes a cross-age reading buddy program. For more information on Martha Speaks Reading Buddies, visit http://pbskids.org/martha//parentsteachers/readingbuddies/index.html
Martha Speaksis distributed internationally by DHX Media and also airs on TVO, Knowledge Network, and SCN and has been acquired by broadcasters across Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East.
Martha Speaks is a production of WGBH Boston and DHX Media. Martha Speaksseries funding is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Corporate funding is provided by Chuck E. Cheese’s®, Kiddie Academy® Child Care Learning Centers, and Chick-fil-A, Inc. Additional funding provided by The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations…Dedicated to Strengthening America’s Future Through Education, by the WGBH Children’s Educational Media Fund and by public television viewers.
© 2012 WGBH Educational Foundation. All rights reserved. “Martha” and all characters and underlying materials (including artwork) from the “Martha” books are trademarks of and copyrights of Susan Meddaugh and used under license. All other characters and underlying materials are trademarks of and copyrights of WGBH. All third party trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Used with permission.New Nobel Prize winner Bob Dylan's classic "Don't Look Back" documentary is bound for a new Blu-ray.
Bob Dylan, one of America’s most iconic folk rock stars, is now official a Nobel Prize winner, thanks to Thursday’s announcement that the singer and songwriter had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. His surprising win comes right before Criterion’s UK arm is due to release a revamped version of the behind the scenes documentary “Don’t Look Back,” while follows Dylan during his 1965 UK tour, his last as an acoustic artist.
READ MORE: TV Drama Based On The Music Of Bob Dylan In The Works From Lionsgate And Amazon
The documentary was directed by beloved documentarian D.A. Pennebaker, and it would go on to influence the style and approach of future documentaries. The new Blu-ray release of the classic will include numerous extra features, including restored sound and new audio commentary from tour manager Bob Neuwirth, as well as an alternative version of the film’s “Subterranean Homsick Blues” card sequence, along with more commentary from director D.A. Pennebaker himself.
READ MORE: ‘No Direction Home’: Martin Scorsese’s Bob Dylan Documentary Finally Coming to Blu-ray at the End of the Month
Learn more about the man behind the music (and the Prize) with the new Blu-ray set of “Don’t Look Back,” set to release this Monday, October 17. Watch the iconic trailer of the documentary below:
Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.
Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.SAN FRANCISCO — A federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld gay marriage in Idaho and Nevada, saying bans on the practice in those states violate same-sex couples’ equal protection rights.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said in its ruling that laws that treat people differently based on sexual orientation are unconstitutional unless there is a compelling government interest.
Neither Idaho nor Nevada offered any legitimate reasons to discriminate against same-sex couples, Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote for the unanimous three-judge panel.
“Idaho and Nevada’s marriage laws, by preventing same-sex couples from marrying and refusing to recognize same-sex marriages celebrated elsewhere, impose profound legal, financial, social and psychic harms on numerous citizens of those states,” Reinhardt wrote.
He rejected the argument that same-sex marriages will devalue traditional marriage, leading to more out-of-wedlock births.
“This proposition reflects a crass and callous view of parental love and the parental bond that is not worthy of response,” Reinhardt wrote. “We reject it out of hand.”
State and federal court judges have been striking down bans at a rapid rate since a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling last year. The 9th Circuit ruling comes a day after the nation’s top court effectively legalized gay marriage in 11 more states, for a total of 30, when it rejected a set of appeals.
The appeals court panel did not rule on a similar case in Hawaii, which legalized gay marriage in December. Hawaii’s governor had asked the court to toss out a lawsuit challenging the state’s ban and an appeal to the 9th Circuit filed before Hawaii lawmakers legalized same-sex marriages.
During oral arguments in September, the debate in the appeals court over Idaho and Nevada bans focused on harm to children.
Lawyers seeking to invalidate the bans argued children of gay couples are stigmatized when their parents are prevented from marrying. Attorneys supporting the bans said gay marriages devalue traditional marriages, which will lead to fewer weddings and more single-parent homes.
Reinhardt wrote that if Idaho and Nevada wanted to increase the number of children raised by married, biological parents, “they would do well to rescind the right to no-fault divorce, or to divorce altogether,” noting that neither state has done so.
He added that if biological parents were truly a priority of the state, “they might do better to ban assisted reproduction using donor sperm or eggs, gestational surrogacy, and adoption,” but again noted that “neither state does.”
The 9th Circuit also has jurisdiction in three other states that still have marriage bans in place: Alaska, Arizona and Montana. Lawsuits challenging bans in those states are still pending in lower courts and have not reached the appeals court.
On Monday, the Supreme Court unexpectedly rejected appeals from five states seeking to preserve their bans. The decision cleared the way for a dramatic expansion of gay marriage in the United States and might have signaled that it’s only a matter of time before same-sex couples can marry in all 50 states.
Though the high court last year declared unconstitutional a federal law limiting marriage to a man and woman for determining benefits, the justices didn’t address whether states could ban gay marriage.
The opinion is here.
Developing story. This report will be updated.
Associated Press contributed to this report.
This Story Filed UnderAre New Zealandâs notorious gangs turning over a new leaf? From making sandwiches for needy children to having an older and wiser view of life, Dateline asks if theyâre coming of age.
JAMIE Pink, the president of New Zealand gang the Tribal Huk, is a big man.
He can also be a violent man. Just ask him what’ll happen if a rival gang sets foot in the sleepy town of Ngaruawahia, the Huk’s home turf.
“We’ll attack them. We’ll attack them in the main street. Anywhere they stop.”
Perhaps it’s no surprise he’s done three stints in jail for serious violent offending.
“In our world violence is respected. Love is the greatest power in the world but in the gang world it’s violence. Obviously.”
Words like that make the scene I’m witnessing all the more bizarre.
It’s 7am and several tattooed gangsters wearing hairnets and gloves are standing around a kitchen table … making sandwiches.
This is how the Tribal Huk does its bit to fight child poverty.
“A lot of our people including myself were a bit hard done by when we were little,” says Jamie, “We didn’t have enough food. And to see that problem still around aggrieves us on a personal level.”
He does indeed sound almost insulted by the number of children going hungry in New Zealand.
“A country with 40 million sheep. And four million humans! Work it out yourself. We shouldn’t have 290,000 hungry children!”
Once 500 sandwiches have been made, stacked and packed, Jamie jumps in his truck for the two-hour delivery run to around 30 schools in the region.
This isn’t a one-off. It’s happened every school day for the past 4 years.
“It’s something you can’t turn off,” he says, “A lot of the kids rely on our sandwiches. If you turn that off and don’t turn up they’ll come hunting us down!”
When we arrive at Ngaruawahia Primary, the first school the Huks ever made sandwiches for, Jamie is swamped by kids.
On any given day, about a third of the pupils here will turn up without any lunch, and Principal Maria Hamill has no qualms about letting a gang member onto the grounds.
“I think actions speak louder than words,” she says, “He’s gone out there, with his team... and they’ve put themselves out there in a positive light and had a positive impact.”
Down the road at Huntly West Primary it’s the same story.
Principal Banapa Avatea makes a point of taking Jamie to a couple of the classrooms, where the kids thank him in a singsong chorus.
“We don’t look at it as being a gang that’s providing this,” says Avatea, “We’re looking at a group that is solely interested in supporting children”
Making the sandwiches sets the Huks back around $A1900 a week, which is just about covered with the profits from the gang’s small farm.
Jamie says that alone should be enough to silence critics who dismiss the exercise as a PR stunt, or worse, a recruiting exercise.
“It’d be a terrible thing if that was what we were doing it for. It definitely isn’t. There’s no cover for anything. It costs too much!”
All the same, there’s still something a little unsettling about seeing kids aged as young as five gather round Jamie like the Pied Piper.
Especially when the odd one raises their arm in a copy of the ‘Huk salute’, a greeting used by the gang’s hundred or so members.
But Jamie reckons feeding the youngsters is one of the best ways to keep them off the path he’s walked.
“You see someone coming to school with food when you haven’t got any, straight away animosity starts!” he declares, “And you think, ‘How am I going to get his food?’ And that’s not the way to start this life. You go on the wrong track.”
Given that Jamie Pink could probably snap me in half without batting an eyelid, he’s possibly not a man to disagree with. He’s certainly not a man to be crossed.
But weighing up his more admirable traits against the less desirable ones, does he consider himself a good man?
“I think if you asked the kids they’d probably say ‘Yes’!,” he states emphatically, “I’m not gonna say I’m an angel and a great person in society cos obviously you look at my rap sheet record and there’s a lot of violence on there. But I’d like to think I play a big part in doing good in society”
He pauses, fiddling with the shiny knuckleduster rings on his fingers, then adds..
“Yeah. I’m glad you didn’t ask me this question about 10 or 15 years ago!”
With that the gangster Jamie Pink breaks into a long chuckle, arms himself with another tray of sandwiches, and heads off to feed some more hungry kids.
The strange story of New Zealand’s lunch gang airs tonight on SBS Dateline at 9.30pm.Construction will begin next year on the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), an instrument that will allow researchers to see galaxies forming 13 billion light years away near the beginning of the universe. The TMT will be the world's largest optical telescope when it's completed later this decade, and it will be capable of creating an image that's three-times sharper than what's possible with the largest telescopes in use today, reports the Associated Press. Its planning project has now gained all but the final piece of regulatory approval needed before construction. The project intends to receive a final approval from the same regulatory body within the next year, and to begin construction in April 2014.
Initial plans for the TMT focused on the need to study the history of star formation in the Milky Way and neighboring galaxies. The project has been in the planning stages for over a decade now, and lately its planners have been working toward gaining permission to build and operate the telescope at the summit of Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano. Construction costs for the telescope and observatory are expected to rise above $1 billion dollars. The telescope itself will be just over 98-feet long, and it will eventually be rivaled by the 138-foot long European Extremely Large Telescope, once it's ready for use around 2022.Today, I've decided to deliver two dueling mock drafts for your consideration. One is from our friends at Mocking The Draft, specifically Matthew Fairburn. The other is pomade enthusiast and draft legend Mel Kiper Jr.
In essence, what these two mocks share is a bedrock belief that the Falcons will look at a tackle at #6, either by choice or necessity. They also have the same second round pick. Let's find out who that is, shall we?
6. Atlanta Falcons - Jake Matthews, OT, Texas A&M Jake Matthews isn't likely to be the first offensive tackle taken in the 2014 NFL Draft, but he may be the most ready to contribute right away. Matthews is as technically sound as he is athletic. With the issues Atlanta had along the offensive line in 2013, Matthews would be a welcome addition to the starting lineup.
37. Atlanta Falcons - Dee Ford, DE, Auburn Defensive end will be Atlanta's focus after finding an offensive lineman in the first round. Luckily, Dee Ford is still on the board with pick No. 37 in the draft. Ford is a bit undersized, but he's more than just a speed rusher. He knows how to convert speed to power when rushing the passer.
Why do I consider this realistic? Increasingly, I believe the Falcons will be left choosing the best tackle available at #6. This is based on Jadeveon Clowney and Khalil Mack being gone in the first five picks and the quality pass rushing options likely to be available in round two, plus the likely availability of either Matthews or Greg Robinson. While I'm not a huge Dee Ford fan, I could see the organization liking his fit in Atlanta, so this feels quite realistic to me.
How'd Kiper do?
Taylor Lewan Atlanta Falcons (4-12) COLLEGE: Michigan HT: 6-7 WT: 309 POS: OT Analysis: I consider tackle a big need for Atlanta, a team that last year balanced an inability to consistently protect Matt Ryan with a consistent inability to open holes for anybody Ryan handed the ball off to. While Robinson and Jake Matthews are both very good players and should be at the next level, there's a case to be made that Lewan is the most ready tackle for NFL competition, with four good years under his belt. I think he could start at right or left tackle in Week 1.
37. Atlanta Falcons | Dee Ford, DE/OLB, Auburn
The Falcons lack a pass-rusher defenses fear, and while Ford is merely adequate against the run, he's a major menace as a speed rusher, and gives Atlanta a needed new look there.
This is the scenario I don't want. Lewan may well be a quality pro, but I firmly believe Matthews is better than him, and to my knowledge he comes with any of the very real character flags that Lewan does. A Lewan/Ford pairing isn't appreciably worse than Matthews/Ford, but it seems both unlikely and more of a risk with the #6 and #37 picks.
What do you think of these mocks?Two soldiers walk past armored vehicles at the port of Bremerhaven, Germany, on Sunday, Jan. 8, 2017. The 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, out of Fort Carson, Col., is headed to Poland for a nine-month rotation as part of Operation Atlantic Resolve.
BREMERHAVEN, Germany — U.S. soldiers offloaded scores of combat vehicles from ship to shore Sunday at the massive port here, pressing forward with one of the largest U.S. force movements in Europe since the end of the Cold War.
Some 2,500 pieces of gear belonging to the 3rd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, including Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles, are bound for NATO’s eastern flank, making a 6,000-mile journey from Fort Carson, Col.
“Let me be very clear. This is one part of our efforts to deter Russian aggression, ensure territorial integrity of our allies and maintain a Europe that is whole, free, prosperous and at peace,” said Lt. Gen. Tim Ray, deputy commander of U.S. European Command, in remarks to reporters in Bremerhaven.
Ray, flanked by senior military leaders and standing before the Army’s signature M1A1 tank, described EUCOM as a headquarters “in transition,” as it pivots from a post- Cold War posture that was focused more on partnerships and relationship-building. “We had time to bring our forces to readiness and respond to a crisis,” Ray said. “That may not be the case today.”
From a more assertive Russia to unrest on NATO’s southern doorstep in Syria and terrorism threats in Europe, the Continent’s “strategic environment is changing rapidly,” he said.
The movement of armor equipment and the 3,500 troops who serve in the 3rd Brigade out of Colorado, serves as the signature effort of the military’s push to enhance its presence in Europe, a continent where for 20 years the U.S. force was in a state of decline.
The arrival of the Fort Carson soldiers is the beginning of what is intended to be a continual, year-round presence of an armored brigade in Europe, with units conducting back-to-back nine-month rotations.
The campaign has tested the Army’s logisticians, who must coordinate the movement of forces and firepower by sea, land and air. Maj. Gen. Duane Gamble, head of the 21st Theater Sustainment Command, said his team is already drawing up lessons learned to ensure quicker rotations of future units.
“We are able to exercise all that it takes (to do this), working with our allies to ensure freedom of movement and speed of assembly,” added U.S. Army Europe’s deputy commander Maj. Gen. Timothy McGuire.
The equipment is already on the move, with vehicles moving by rail, commercial lines and military convoy to training sites near the Polish towns of Drawsko Pomorskie and Zagan.
Once established, the brigade’s soldiers will be spreading out across Europe, with forces mostly concentrated along NATO’s eastern flank.
The brigade headquarters will be operating out of Poland, while its subordinate units will be positioned in the Baltics, Romania and Bulgaria. One regiment will be located at the Army’s post at Grafenwoehr, Germany, to conduct training and maintenance.
The moves, which are part of the military’s overarching Operation Atlantic Resolve campaign aimed at reassuring nervous allies and sending a deterrent signal to Russia, also has ratcheted up tensions between the U.S. and Moscow.
During the past year, Moscow has repeatedly denounced the measures, calling them a provocation that demand countermeasures. Ray described EUCOM’s efforts as defensive in nature.
“It is clearly a response to overt Russian aggression,” Ray said.
The full-time presence of a heavy brigade is one of many recent moves by the Army in Europe.
In addition to the hardware of the 3rd BCT, USAREUR recently added additional tanks and artillery to its arsenal on the Continent.
In September, the Army began moving tanks and heavy combat gear into storage sites in Europe, serving as prepositioned stocks available for a crisis and eventually capable of supporting an armored division-sized force. The stocks are positioned at sites in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and potentially Poland.
In February, the Fort Drum, N.Y.-based 10th Combat Aviation Brigade will rotate to Europe, accompanied by 10 Chinooks, 50 Blackhawks and 1,800 troops. An aviation battalion from Ft. Bliss will be attached to the 10th CAB task force with 400 personnel and 24 Apaches. The aircraft will support operations in the Baltics, Poland and Romania.
Meanwhile, the 2nd Squadron from the Vilseck-Germany-based 2nd Cavalry Regiment also will deploy to Poland in April to serve as the U.S. component of NATO’s new enhanced presence there and in the Baltics. Additional NATO battalions will be set up by allies in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
For the 3rd Brigade, the run up to its Europe mission has involved a year of intensive preparation, ranging from large-scale combat drills at the Army’s National Training Center in California’s Mohave desert to charting out the logistics of a massive movement of force to eastern Europe.
That left little time for paint jobs. The unit’s fighting vehicles are desert tan rather than the traditional forest green paint that colors much of the equipment stationed in Europe.
“This unit was recently focused on the Middle East,” McGuire said. “We have not had time to paint them.”
vandiver.john@stripes.com
Twitter: @john_vandiverThe far-right National Union Party held a barbecue outside Ofer Prison on April 20 in response to the recently launched hunger strike led by convicted Palestinian Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti inside Ofer Prison.
Members of the National Union Party setup a large barbecue with fans directing the smell of the food towards Ofer Prison in an attempt to mock those continuing the hunger strike, which was launched on Monday, April 17, in response to poor prison conditions. Ofer Sofer, an organizer of the barbecue, said, “At this moment (the hunger strikers) will smell the food’s scent and maybe later in the evening they will see it on television. It is a bunch of terrorists who are threatening us with hunger strike. We are happy that they are on strike. Let them have this strike as long as they want.”
Israeli police shut down the barbecue less than an hour after it was setup in an effort to prevent any additional unrest in the area. Hours earlier, Israeli security forces suppressed a Palestinian protest outside the prison using tear gas and rubber bullets.
Approximately 1,500 Palestinian prisoners across the Israeli prison system have joined the hunger strike, which has spurred a series of Palestinian protests outside Ofer Prison, according to Israeli news reports. The hunger strike was launched in an effort to demand better conditions, including better access to medical care and telephones. In the time since, protests increased due to a decision by the Israeli Prison Service to prevent Barghouti and other prisoners from access to lawyers, a decision which has since been reversed. Israeli officials have said that they will not negotiate with the hunger strikers, while Palestinian leaders within the Palestinian Authority have threatened a renewed Intifada in the event that any hunger strikers die. Credit: National Union Party via StoryfulMany fantasy settings are vibrant, teeming with life even in their most inhospitable regions. They invite adventure and exploration, excitement and thrills, and a chance for bold heroes to make their mark on the world. The threats are many, but the rewards and glory that come from defeating them are greater still. There is great evil, but there is also great goodness.
And then there are the dead worlds.
These settings are not grand realms where heroes abound. No scenes of pastoral bliss can be observed here, no simple rustic villages, lush elven forests, or grand spires and cities of civlization.
A dead world lies in ruins, its time of glory long since past. What life still remains in such a blasted wasteland does not know the ideas of good and evil, nor do they care to. Why would any living thing bother with such abstract trivilaties when they are faced daily with the struggle to survive?
Water, food, shelter - these are not given freely in a dead world. They are earned with sweat and pain and the shedding of blood. In a world that eats the weak, only the strong have hope of survival - and even that is far from guaranteed.
With Deadworlds, a new mini-expansion for the 5th Edition of the World's Greatest Roleplaying Game, you have a chance to prove your strength. Be sure to bring extra character sheets - you'll need them.
Become the weird with playable races like the Manstisfolk, the reptilian Zarraak, and brutal Half-Dwarf!
Embrace the apocalypse as a Sworn Sword Paladin, Bard of Red Iron, Psychic Sorcerer, and more!
Expand your characters with new feats and backgrounds!
Scrape for survival when new rules and optional systems twist all you thought you knew about fantasy roleplaying games!
Interested? Check out The Bardic College of Red Iron, a free-to-own example of the material you can find inside Deadworlds, or you can use the Full-Size Preview button to flip through the whole supplement!
While not a direct adapatation, Deadworlds is heavily inspired by the many fantastic examples of post-apocalyptic fiction - films, books, and even RPG settings - that have come before it, and in many places directly adapts elements from these fictional works into the material, so that users might recreate these elements in their own games. Deadworlds would not have been made possible without the minds and imaginations of many talented and creative individuals who first brought those works of fiction into this world. A more detailed list of thanks is included inside as an Author's Note on the first page.Autism is a neurodevelopmental disease that presents in early life. Despite a considerable amount of studies, the neurobiological mechanisms underlying autism remain obscure. Both genetic and environmental factors are involved in the development of autism. Vitamin D deficiency is emerging as a consistently reported risk factor in children. One reason for the prominence now being given to this risk factor is that it would appear to interact with several other epidemiological risk factors for autism. Vitamin D is an active neurosteroid and plays crucial neuroprotective roles in the developing brain. It has important roles in cell proliferation and differentiation, immunomodulation, regulation of neurotransmission and steroidogenesis. Animal studies have suggested that transient prenatal vitamin D deficiency is associated with altered brain development. Here we review the potential neurobiological mechanisms linking prenatal vitamin D deficiency and autism and also discuss what future research targets must now be addressed.NEW YORK (MainStreet) -- Sometimes, there's a city and, well, it's the city for its time and place. It fits right in there. With all respect to the Coen brothers, Sam Elliot, The Big Lebowski and The Dude himself, there are just some cities that are stepping into the spotlight at the right time in 2012. With all respect to the Coen brothers, Sam Elliot,and The Dude himself, there are just some cities that are stepping into the spotlight at the right time in 2012. As years go, this one isn't exactly insignificant. Anyone who clutched at the nearest string of pearls when Mitt Romney insinuated in New Hampshire that he liked firing people -- unthinkable of the founder of Bain Capital, who basically did just that for a living -- is already well embroiled in the upcoming presidential race. Meanwhile, those inspired to take a few laps at the Y after watching Michael Phelps dominate the field in China almost four years ago are already familiarizing themselves with the Telemundo, MSNBC and former Versus network channel numbers for this year's Summer Olympic Games. As years go, this one isn't exactly insignificant. Anyone who clutched at the nearest string of pearls when Mitt Romney insinuated in New Hampshire that he liked firing people -- unthinkable of the founder of, who basically did just that for a living -- is already well embroiled in the upcoming presidential race. Meanwhile, those inspired to take a few laps at the Y after watching Michael Phelps dominate the field in China almost four years ago are already familiarizing themselves with the Telemundo, MSNBC and former Versus network channel numbers for this year's Summer Olympic Games. But where are the best seats for the action? Which towns aren't content to trot out the same parades, pro sports and dog-and-pony shows and are pulling out all the stops to separate themselves from the pack in 2012? Even if they're not being that flashy, which cities are making sure their dwellers have enough cash lying around to enjoy those big-ticket events from the comfort of their own homes? But where are the best seats for the action? Which towns aren't content to trot out the same parades, pro sports and dog-and-pony shows and are pulling out all the stops to separate themselves from the pack in 2012? Even if they're not being that flashy, which cities are making sure their dwellers have enough cash lying around to enjoy those big-ticket events from the comfort of their own homes? We flipped through our shiny new calendars, pored through this year's financial forecasts and found 10 metro areas that are taking their shot at the big time in 2012. If your town isn't here, better luck next year: We flipped through our shiny new calendars, pored through this year's financial forecasts and found 10 metro areas that are taking their shot at the big time in 2012. If your town isn't here, better luck next year:
Indianapolis
Indy doesn't have much time before it and the Indianapolis Colts' Lucas Oil Field take the big stage for Super Bowl XLVI on Feb. 5, but it's tough to draw a bigger audience than the 111 million Americans who watched the big game last year. Indy doesn't have much time before it and the Indianapolis Colts'Field take the big stage for Super Bowl XLVI on Feb. 5, but it's tough to draw a bigger audience than the 111 million Americans who watched the big game last year. The actual audience size may vary depending on the matchup, but there's no question this is a big deal for Indy. The Colts were Super Bowl-caliber when the city was picked to host back in 2008, but had a miserable 2-12 season this year without injured star quarterback Peyton Manning and probably won't be seen again until they draft Stanford stud QB Andrew Luck with the first pick of this year's NFL Draft. This year's Super Bowl is about the most meaningful football Lucas Oil Stadium may see for a while, but the economic impact of the game, hotel stays, parties and other associated events should have a far more lasting effect. The actual audience size may vary depending on the matchup |
activists.
Mohsen Amir-Aslani was arrested nine years ago for his activities which the authorities deemed were heretical. He was engaged in psychotherapy but also led sessions reading and reciting the Qur’an and providing his own interpretations of the Islamic holy book, his family said…
Read More At:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/29/iran-executes-man-heresy-mohsen-amir-aslani
Clip from the Tuesday, September 30th 2014 edition of The Kyle Kulinski Show, which airs live on Blog Talk Radio and Secular Talk Radio monday – friday 4-6pm Eastern.
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A common question many beginners have is “Do I need to buy protein shakes?” Advertising has drilled into our head that protein shakes are crucial to fitness. The truth is that you don’t “need” protein shakes.
Lets take a look at what protein powder consists of. Protein powder usually consists of whey protein which is a common protein found in milk. Despite popular belief, whey protein will not damage your liver of kidneys, but can make existing issues worse. For a healthy individual, protein powder will not harm you or make you more “aggressive”.
Many beginners think of protein powder as the Ambrosia of the lifting gods, something that will bestow upon them unreal power in the gym. But in reality protein powder is exactly what it is: Protein. That’s all it is; it will not do anything besides help fulfill your protein macronutrient requirement. So when should you take protein powder?
Its recommended for active athletes that you get 1 gram of protein per pound of bodyweight(2.2 Grams / Kg). Sometimes active people do not reach this requirement and their performance suffers because of it. This is where protein powders can be helpful. Protein powder is relatively cheap and has an excellent price to gram ratio. Protein powder is also very easily consumed as a drink or as a chocolate bar. A serving of whey protein can have the same amount of protein as three fast food hamburgers. Track your macronutrients throughout the day and see if your deficient in protein. If your not getting enough protein, buy some protein powder and take enough servings to make up for the difference.
Here’s a list of the best protein powders and their effectiveness(grams per serving).
Optimum Nutrition Whey
Has 27 Flavors, 24 grams per serving
Cellucor Cor-Performance Whey
25 grams per serving
Body Fortress Whey Protein
60 grams per serving (however one serving is two scoops, while the others are one)
EAS 100% Whey Protein Powder
26 grams per serving
BSN SYNTHIA-6 Protein Powder
22 grams per serving
Orgain Organic Protein Plant-Based Gluten Free
21 grams per serving
CLIF Builder’s Protein
20 grams per servingI’m working on a stand-alone LoRaWAN network-server. Currently it provides unconfirmed data up, ABP, OTAA and a basic web-interface to manage applications and nodes (using a JSON-RPC api). More features will be implemented soon (confirmed data up, data down, handling of mac commands).
This project might be interesting when you’re planning to setup a private LoRaWAN network without the need of distributed routing. The project has two components:
lora-semtech-bridge:
A service which abstracts the communication with the gateways (Semtech UDP protocol) and uses MQTT to communicate with the LoRa Server.
GitHub brocaar/lora-gateway-bridge LoRa Gateway Bridge abstracts the packet_forwarder protocol into JSON over MQTT - brocaar/lora-gateway-bridge
loraserver:
The LoRaWAN network-server which at one end communicates with the lora-semtech-bridge (MQTT) and at the other end communicates with the application (MQTT). The latter communication is (currently) serialised in JSON format (data is in base64, more fields will be added like signal strength etc…). Example:
{"devEUI":"0101010101010101","ack":false,"fPort":1,"gatewayCount":1,"data":"aGVsbG8gd29ybGQh"}
GitHub brocaar/loraserver LoRa Server is an open-source LoRaWAN network-server - brocaar/loraserver
Feedback is welcome!DaVinci Resolve 12 Tutorials and Tools
DaVinci Resolve 12 is almost here (shipping in July) and the demonstrations from Blackmagic Design are coming thick and fast. In this first video you can check out a 30 minute presentation from Paul Saccone demonstrating the improved editorial features in Resolve 12 at recent LACPUG meet up.
Colorist Rob Bessette has a nice write up of his top 5 favourite features in Resolve 12, which includes images from his NAB tweets that I gathered together in this previous post. It’s great to hear from a working colorist on the features that will be most useful day-to-day in the grading suite.
YRGB Color Managed. This was kind of a weird feature to demo since it doesn’t really show the power of this new color science implemented by the BMD team, but for some this will be a serious game changer. Basically you can choose an input, timeline, or output colorspace. Depending on your source footage you can put all formats into the same colorspace. So, for example, if you have LogC, Rec709, and other starting points from difference cameras, you can place them all in the same world. I’m thinking of it as a non-destructive LUT. This will save tons of time for colorists and instead of having to balance out all the different colorspaces, most of that work will have already been done.
For double the insights and a lot more questions and answers, Orlando Post Pros shares an hour long demo with Oliver Peters and Jason Druss from Blackmagic Design. Well worth a watch for a deeper dive into the wider feature set. What’s also well worth a read is Oliver Peter’s article on 10 tips to improve you skills.
The hue vs. hue curve is beneficial for skin tones. A film that I’m currently grading features a Korean lead actress. Her skin tones normally skew towards yellow or green in many shots. The Caucasian and African American actors in the same shots appear with “normal” skin tones. By selecting the color that matches her flesh tones on the curve, I am able to shift the hues towards a value that is more in keeping with pleasing flesh tone colors. When used in combination with a mask, it’s possible to isolate this correction to just her part of the frame, so as not to affect the coloration of the other actors within the same shot.
Update: Alexis Van Hurkman DaVinci Resolve 12 Demo
Colorist, author and trainer Alexis Van Hurkman demonstrates some of the new features in Resolve 12 at this MoPictive User Group event in NYC. Jump to 43 minutes in to see a very dapper looking Alexis, demo-ing the up-coming release.
There are some really fantastic new features to show, including multicam editing, advanced color management, automatic shot matching, expanded trimming and dynamic trimming, automation recording and audio filter support, improved tracking, a new keyer, and way, way more.
DaVinci Resolve Tutorials
In this excellent tutorial colorist David Torcivia demonstrates how parallel nodes work and how to make use of them for grading a martian landscape, which gives me a good excuse (if tangental!) to include the trailer for The Martian, which looks really cool. If you like David Torcivia’s style then you should check out more tutorials from him in this previous post.
If you’re taking Avid Media Composer projects into Resolve and back again, and want some expert tips on how to make that a smooth process, Scott Freeman has a detailed step by step guide to doing just that over on Creative Cow.net.
I am about to show you the three bin metadata fields to track for flawless conform in your round-tripping between Avid Media Composer and DaVinci Resolve. Every frame. Every time. Ideally, you will set up these fields correctly before you begin. If something goes wrong because you didn’t, the information in these three fields are where you’ll be able to fix the problems you may have.
Alexis Van Hurkman has a great tutorial for anyone wanting to know how to even begin the basic process of colour grading with this 5 minute tutorial on shot matching with the RGB parade. For a complete playlist of all 10 Resolve in a Rush tutorials from Ripple Training check out this previous post.
Colorist Rob Bessette demonstrates how to use external mattes to fix otherwise ‘unfixable’ shots, which he’s found particularly useful in his commercial grading work.
In this next tip Noam Kroll shares his four step process to perfectly matching skin tones using qualifiers and power windows.
It comes down to your order of operations… you need to start your process by balancing and matching your shots to each other as closely as possible using one or two nodes that are simply dedicated to fixing technical issues. You want to ensure that your white balance/contrast is consistent with other shots in your sequence, and ideally each shot is at a neutral starting point. From there you can start to isolate elements in your image (skintones being the one we are focusing on here of course), and then eventually you will add an overall creative look to your footage.
Tomasz Huczek, maker of the free false colour plugin below, lets you sit over his shoulder as he works on a shot recorded with the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera.
In these next three videos you can get some excerpts from Andrew Balis’ MacProVideo.com’s training series on working with versions and gallery stills to quickly grade your project.
Free False Colour Plugin For Resolve
You can download a free ‘False Colour’ plugin for Resolve (on Mac and Windows) from TimeInPixels.com. What’s a false colour plugin for?
False Color is a technique used in video cameras to map the exposure levels to a specific color ranges. The purpose of the false color is to identify the brightness levels and differences between them easily while still being able to see the source image outline.
False colour helps you see your image’s exposure in a new way so that you can more easily match contrast ratios, compare fill and key light ratios and much more. The plugin is free, although you can support it’s development by donating on the site.
False Color Plugin can be dropped on any node within DaVinci Resolve, which means that the False Color overlay is visible in the main preview window (unlike other scopes built into DaVinci). It also means that the overlay can be zoomed in as well as applied on the timeline nodes to see the results on all the clips at once.
Creating 3D LUTS for Calibration in Resolve
SpectraCal, makers of the CalMAN calibration software, have some great videos on their YouTube channel that might be worth checking out if you’re looking to get deeper into calibration techniques. In this webinar they wade through the topic of 3D LUTS and how to create corrective 3D LUTS for Resolve.
High end grading monitor makers Flanders Scientific also have a quick video on how to use Resolve as test pattern generator when calibrating with the CalMAN studio software.Reich writes: "The Justice Department has just obtained documents showing that JPMorgan Chase, Wall Street's biggest bank, has been hiring the children of China's ruling elite in order to secure 'existing and potential business opportunities' from Chinese government-run companies."
Economist, professor, author and political commentator Robert Reich. (photo: Richard Morgenstein)
JP Morgan Chase and the Corruption of America
By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog
he Justice Department has just obtained documents showing that JPMorgan Chase, Wall Street's biggest bank, has been hiring the children of China's ruling elite in order to secure "existing and potential business opportunities" from Chinese government-run companies. "You all know I have always been a big believer of the Sons and Daughters program," says one JP Morgan executive in an email, because "it almost has a linear relationship" to winning assignments to advise Chinese companies. The documents even include spreadsheets that list the bank's "track record" for converting hires into business deals.
It's a serious offense. But let's get real. How different is bribing China's "princelings," as they're called there, from Wall Street's ongoing program of hiring departing U.S. Treasury officials, presumably in order to grease the wheels of official Washington? Timothy Geithner, Obama's first Treasury Secretary, is now president of the private-equity firm Warburg Pincus; Obama's budget director Peter Orszag is now a top executive at Citigroup.
Or, for that matter, how different is what JP Morgan did in China from Wall Street's habit of hiring the children of powerful American politicians? (I don't mean to suggest Chelsea Clinton got her hedge-fund job at Avenue Capital LLC, where she worked from 2006 to 2009, on the basis of anything other than her financial talents.)
And how much worse is JP Morgan's putative offense in China than the torrent of money JP Morgan and every other major Wall Street bank is pouring into the campaign coffers of American politicians - making the Street one of the major backers of Democrats as well as Republicans?
The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, under which JP Morgan could be indicted for the favors it has bestowed in China, is quite strict. It prohibits American companies from paying money or offering anything of value to foreign officials for the purpose of "securing any improper advantage." Hiring one of their children can certainly qualify as a gift, even without any direct benefit to the official.
JP Morgan couldn't even defend itself by arguing it didn't make any particular deal or get any specific advantage as a result of the hires. Under the Act, the gift doesn't have to be linked to any particular benefit to the American firm as long as it's intended to generate an advantage its competitors don't enjoy.
Compared to this, corruption of American officials is a breeze. Consider, for example, Countrywide Financial's generous "Friends of Angelo" lending program, named after its chief executive, Angelo R. Mozilo, that gave discounted mortgages to influential members of Congress and their staffs before the housing bubble burst. No criminal or civil charges have ever been filed related to these loans.
Even before the Supreme Court's shameful 2010 "Citizens United" decision - equating corporations with human beings under the First Amendment, and thereby shielding much corporate political spending – Republican appointees to the Court had done everything they could to blunt anti-bribery laws in the United States. In 1999, in "United States v. Sun-Diamond Growers," Justice Scalia, writing for the Court, interpreted an anti-bribery law so loosely as to allow corporations to give gifts to public officials unless the gifts are linked to specific policies.
We don't even require that American corporations disclose to their own shareholders the largesse they bestow on our politicians. Last year around this time, when the Securities and Exchange Commission released its 2013 to-do list, it signaled it might formally propose a rule to require corporations to disclose their political spending. The idea had attracted more than 600,000 mostly favorable comments from the public, a record response for the agency.
But the idea mysteriously slipped off the 2014 agenda released last week, without explanation. Could it have anything to do with the fact that, soon after becoming SEC chair last April, Mary Jo White was pressed by Republican lawmakers to abandon the idea, which was fiercely opposed by business groups.
The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is important, and JP Morgan should be nailed for bribing Chinese officials. But, if you'll pardon me for asking, why isn't there a Domestic Corrupt Practices Act?
Never before has so much U.S. corporate and Wall-Street money poured into our nation's capital, as well as into our state capitals. Never before have so many Washington officials taken jobs in corporations, lobbying firms, trade associations, and on the Street immediately after leaving office. Our democracy is drowning in big money.
Corruption is corruption, and bribery is bribery, in whatever country or language it's transacted in.
Robert B. Reich, Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written thirteen books, including the best sellers "Aftershock" and "The Work of Nations." His latest is an e-book, "Beyond Outrage." He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause.2016 is a year full of highlights with stuff like the EUC Champion program and my road to VCDX. And the VMworld conference in Las Vegas is also one of them. This post is my review of this year’s US version of VMworld and I would like to explain why it’s one of my highlights.
This year’s VMworld US Edition was held in the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas due to maintenance in the Moscone Center in San Francisco. And Las Vegas alone is quite something. I’ve been there before at the 2012 VMware Partner Exchange, but back then I wasn’t really part of the community yet. So I didn’t visit any gatherings other than the appreciation party.
Break-out Sessions
To most people, a VMworld is all about gathering knowledge. And that is of course one of the reasons why the conference exists. With hundreds of speakers and sessions and more than 20,000 attendees, there is something for everyone to learn. For me, attending sessions was also one of the goals. And mostly to gather extensive knowledge on specific topics. The following sessions were my personal favorites:
Ask the Experts: Practical Tips and Tricks to Help You Succeed in EUC [EUC9992]
Our very own EUC Champion session at VMworld. Basically a panel that answered questions which were asked through an interactive website. Hundreds of attendees including Shawn Bass could ask everything they wanted to know and could earn beer by doing so. It was really awesome being part of this session and hopefully we will make it to Barcelona as well for a European re-run.
Architecting VSAN for Horizon the VCDX Way [EUC8648R]
The title says it all. When you are thinking of designing and deploying VSAN for Horizon, this is a must-see. In my case also for a second reason as I submitted my design for VCDX-DTM. I’m not using VSAN, but still it’s a great session to hear about the experience of Ray Heffer and Simon Long. Both VCDX-DTM’s and great speakers. This session will be available in Barcelona as well.
Advances in Remote Display Protocol Technology with VMware Blast Extreme [EUC7601R]
Blast Extreme is VMware’s new protocol for client endpoints that will connect to Horizon for both desktops and RDSH applications. What is Blast, how should I use it, tune it and what are the differences between PCoIP and Blast Extreme. A great session which will be available in Barcelona as well.
Beyond the Marketing: Horizon Instant Clones Deep Dive [EUC8203]
InstantCloning, VMfork, Project Fargo, Just-in-Time desktops. All names that are referring to VMware’s new technology that simplifies the creation of virtual desktops, reduces their lifecycle and thus makes sure that managing them is no longer challenging. Peter Björk and Jim Yanik explain how it works, what it’s capable of and what the downsides are. The session was recorded and will be placed on youtube. It will also be available in Barcelona.
vSphere 6.x Host Resource Deep Dive [INF8430]
One the true technical deep dives during this year’s VMworld. Frank Denneman and Niels Hagoort explain in detail how to configure both hardware and software to make your hosts run more efficient than before. Frank dives deep into the NUMA configuration and Niels talks about how to configure your network correctly in order to get the most out of it. Two of a lot more topics that will discussed in their upcoming book with the same title. The session will be held in Barcelona as well and is a must-see for every consultant, architect and administrator.
General Sessions
Besides the break-out sessions there were of course the two general sessions with a focus on strategy in the first session starring Pat Gelsinger. The second session was more about technology with some announcement around new features and functionality which were presented by Sanjay Poonen, Kit Colbert, Yanbing Li and Ray o’Farrell. As I am more technology-minded, I really enjoyed the second general session although no real big announcement has been made. Let’s hope that the general sessions in Barcelona will bring more news.
Solutions Exchange
One of the attractions during VMworld, is the solutions exchange: a giant room that contains booths of a wide variety of vendors that are operating in the ecosystem of VMware. Examples are storage vendors like Simplivity and NetApp, network vendors like Cisco and Arista and software solutions like Stacksware and LoginVSI. The solutions exchange is the place to be to talk to specialists that represent the vendor.
Meeting friends and making new friend
This is probably the funnest of all. In the Netherlands we have a strong community around VMware with lot’s of people who have an active role due to blogging, presenting and meet each other at regular vBeers, organized in places such as Amsterdam and The Hague. And when meeting each other at the other side of the atlantic in a city like Las Vegas is almost a guaranty for fun. And so it was 🙂 I would like to thank all of the dutchies that were at VMworld this week for a great week, but in particular Marco van Baggum, Frank Denneman and Niels Hagoort. And this makes a nice bridge to the next section.
Gatherings and parties
VMworld in general is a guaranty for great gatherings and parties. Most vendors organize something like a dinner or a party, and there are also nice events like the opening of the solutions exchange, the hall crawl and of course the VMworld Appreciation Party with nice music, drinks and food and stuff like video games. Some great parties we visited that are worth mentioning:
VMUG Party – By far the greatest party we had with lot’s of drinks, an air-guitar contest and a mystery-guest appearance by Michael Dell.
The VMware HCI-SDS party – Nice party with again lot’s of drinks, a great band and we got to meet people like Kit Colbert, Mike Foley and Lee Dilworth.
The CXI Party – One of the less-known parties, but still a nice one. Mostly because of one of the best places to check out Las Vegas: the 59th floor of the cosmopolitan hotel.
VMvillage (The Area Formerly Known As Hangspace)
Basically, the place to be if you would like to chill, meet people in a laid-back atmosphere and watch the general sessions in a more-horizontal position.
There are also other community-related booths like the VMUG booth, the vBrownbag sessions and the VMware Education booth. All nice places to gather information or just have a nice conversation of stuff like the VCDX program 🙂
EUC Champions Program
The number one thing that I travelled 18 hours for, was the EUC Champions “Meet the Experts” session and the half-day meeting that was cramped with sessions including speakers like Mark Benson, Shawn Bass, Pat Lee, Harry Labana and many others. By far, the best day of VMworld (unfortunately I’m not allowed to share why :), but believe me, it was). Thanks again VMware and above all Cyndie Zikmund for arranging this!
Perks and swag
As I mentioned earlier, a lot of vendors are showing their products at the solutions exchange. Some of those vendors also bring nice goodies, especially if you are a vExpert or EUC Champ. I would like to thank Cohesity for their awesome VMworld-survival pack, nVIDIA for their great soft-shell jacket and Datrium for the Raspberry-Pi!
So, VMworld is over. Jetlag -mode is set to enabled and the normal life continues. Next Monday I will continue working on the most awesome project in my career. None of this wasn’t possible if I hadn’t made the choice of applying for a job at ITQ. So if you would like to live this crazy ITQ-life as well, maybe you should apply for a job.PALMDALE – A fire at a Palmdale home Wednesday morning could have ended in tragedy, but thanks to some quick thinking by a neighbor, a teenager and two dogs made it out safely.
The fire broke out at a two-story home on the 3800 block of West Tournament Drive and was reported around 8:46 a.m., according to Inspector Randall Wright of the Los Angeles County Fire Department.
Don Gockel, who lives less than a quarter of a mile away, said he noticed the smoke as he was pulling out of his driveway.
“I could see the smoke just rising down the street,” Gockel said. “I said to my wife, ‘something is burning.’”
Gockel said he headed toward the smoke and when he got to the home, he noticed its garage “fully engulfed in flames” as the fire moved toward the home. The garage door was open and a vehicle was in the driveway, so Gockel thought somebody could be inside the home.
“I started banging on the security door. I was yelling loud enough and banging loud enough for somebody to hear me,” Gockel said, adding that neighbors began coming outside. “My wife in the car called 9-1-1.”
After at least 30 seconds of banging, a teenager opened the front door, Gockel said.
“I just said, ‘you gotta get out,’” Gockel said. “I looked inside and I could see smoke on the downstairs ceiling and I could hear the smoke detectors. I said, ‘you have to get out.’”
Gockel said there were two small dogs inside the home. He herded them into a backyard and then handed them off to a next door neighbor for safekeeping.
Firefighters arrived to “smoke and fire coming from an attached garage” of a two-story family home, Inspector Wright said. Eighteen firefighters had the fire “knocked down” at approximately 8:54 a.m., according to Wright. Investigators were still trying to determine the cause of the fire Wednesday afternoon and did not have an estimate of damages, the fire inspector said. No injuries were reported.
Gockel said the boy’s mother called him about an hour after the incident. She said her son had been sound asleep in an upstairs room and had not been aware of the smoke alarms going off inside the home, according to Gockel.
“Had [the fire] gone another five minutes at the rate that it was going, it would have probably been impossible to come down from the second story,” Gockel said.
Asked why he decided to intervene, Gockel said: “Because that’s what I would want somebody to do for me.”
–Washington, DC—Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (HI-02) announced support today for the bipartisan WINGMAN Act (H.R.512), legislation that would streamline the veterans claims process between the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and congressional offices that process claims on behalf of veterans and their families.
“It’s my honor to serve the hundreds of Hawaiʻi veterans that contact my office each year for help. However, slow turnaround and thick layers of bureaucracy at the VA too often leave certified congressional staff jumping through tedious hoops to access critical information on behalf of veterans and their families. At times, we have waited for months to get a simple answer from the VA on behalf of a Hawaiʻi veteran. This is unacceptable. The WINGMAN Act would cut through the red tape and allow congressional offices to provide quicker, more efficient service to our veterans,” said Rep. Tulsi Gabbard.
Background : The WINGMAN Act would streamline the veterans claims process between congressional offices and their constituents by eliminating the requirement to use the VA as a middle-man. Under WINGMAN, certified constituent advocates would be able to directly access the status of pending claims, medical records, rating decisions, statement of the case, supplementary statement of the case, notice of disagreement, and Form-9 files within a reasonable amount of time, without having to go through a middle-man at the VA.
Each year, Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard’s office helps hundreds of veterans get assistance from the VA and other federal agencies. Constituent advocates are located in every county, and hold regular “office hours” to help constituents, including veterans, with federal agency casework. For a list of upcoming office hours, click here. For information on how the congresswoman and staff can assist constituents, click here.
###Sanders becomes 18th head coach in program history
JOHNSON CITY, Tenn. (Dec. 17, 2017) – The East Tennessee State University Department of Intercollegiate Athletics announced on Sunday that Randy Sanders has been named the 18th head coach in Buccaneer football history.
Sanders, a Morristown, Tenn. native, has spent the last 29 years coaching on the Football Bowl Subdivision level, which includes stints as offensive coordinator at Tennessee, Kentucky and most recently Florida State. Sanders was the offensive coordinator when Tennessee won the 1998 BCS National Title and the quarterbacks coach at Florida State when the Seminoles claimed the 2013 National Championship. Sanders played a part in either coaching or recruiting a pair of No. 1 overall picks in the NFL Draft – Peyton Manning (1998) and Jameis Winston (2015). In his 29 years of coaching, Sanders has coached in 26 bowl games and his teams hold a combined record of 258-105-2.
He will replace ETSU’s head coach Carl Torbush, who announced his retirement on Dec. 8 after a five-year tenure that guided the return of the Buccaneers’ football program in 2015.
“I’m unbelievably excited to be here at ETSU and thankful for the opportunity that Dr. Brian Noland and Scott Carter have given me to be the head coach of the Buccaneers,” said Sanders. “This program has a great tradition and I was really happy to see it brought back five years ago. Coach Torbush did a great job of building the foundation, and now I’m ready to get to work making this program one that all ETSU fans can be proud of.”
“Randy Sanders is a man of outstanding character, integrity and competitive spirit,” said ETSU Athletic Director Scott Carter. “His top priority is the shaping and development of the young men he leads. His background in college football speaks for itself, with two National Championships, 12 conference or division championships, and 26 bowl games. With nearly 29 years of coaching in the SEC and ACC, he led offensive production at each program to historic heights. ETSU football is very fortunate to have Randy Sanders as our head coach. I cannot wait to get to work with Coach Sanders and bring championships to Johnson City.”
“I am very excited to welcome Coach Sanders, his wife Cathy and family home to Tennessee,” said ETSU President Dr. Brian Noland. “Coach Sanders has impeccable credentials and a career marked by excellence. He embodies the values of our university and embraces our mission. I am looking forward to his leadership and working with him.”
Sanders, who played his collegiately at Tennessee from 1984-88, began his coaching career at Tennessee in 1989, and during the 17 years at his alma mater, the Vols compiled a record of 162-46-2 (.776). Over his run in Knoxville, Tennessee won four SEC championships and six Eastern Division crowns in addition to its national title. The Vols played in bowl games his first 16 seasons, including four Citrus Bowls, three Fiesta Bowls, three Cotton Bowls, two Peach Bowls, and one each in the Sugar, Orange, Hall of Fame and Gator bowls.
Following his time at Tennessee, Sanders remained in the SEC as he went to Kentucky to spend the first three years as the Wildcats’ quarterbacks coach, before taking over as offensive coordinator from 2009-12. In Lexington, Sanders developed Andre’ Woodson into one of the top quarterbacks in the nation. Woodson led the SEC in passing yards, total offense and touchdown passes, including a SEC record 40 in 2007. Woodson went on to be drafted by the New York Giants. During Sanders’ tenure, Kentucky won three straight bowl games for the first time in school history.
Sanders enjoyed one of the most successful five-year stretches in Florida State history. Since his arrival in 2013, Florida State totaled 53 wins, two ACC titles, won the 2013 National Championship and he coached a Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback. In his first year at Florida State, Sanders led Jameis Winston to become the youngest players to win a Heisman Trophy in 2013, the same season he also led the Seminoles to a 14-0 record and a national championship. In 2013, Florida State set the national record for points in a season with 723, led the nation with a passing efficiency mark of 174.69, and set school and ACC marks with 7,267 yards of total offense, 51.6 points per game, 94 touchdowns, and 7.67 yards per play. Winston set the national record for touchdown passes by a freshman with 40, had seven 300-yard games and 11 consecutive games scoring 40-plus points.
After the 2014 season, where Florida State started the year 13-0 and earned a spot in the inaugural College Football Playoff, Winston became the first Seminole player to be taken No. 1 overall in the NFL Draft. Despite losing nearly all of their offensive production to the NFL draft in 2015, Sanders’ offense remained atop the ACC in offense the next year as Dalvin Cook set school records in rushing (1,691) and all-purpose yards (1,935) on his way to earning All-American honors. In 2017, Cook was drafted by the Minnesota Vikings.
Sanders earned four varsity letters and was a four-year member of the SEC Academic Honor Roll at Tennessee. He stayed at Tennessee after graduating and started his coaching career as the Vols’ quarterbacks coach in 1989 and 1990 under head coach Johnny Majors. The Morristown, Tenn. native became a full-time assistant coach in 1991, where he worked with the wide receivers, while Phillip Fulmer named Sanders the recruiting coordinator and running backs coach in 1993. Sanders remained in that role until 1998 when he took over as Tennessee’s offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach.
Sanders and his wife, Cathy, have two daughters, Kelly and Kari.
What others are saying about Coach Randy Sanders…
Phillip Fulmer – Tennessee Athletic Director and College Hall of Fame head coach
Randy Sanders is as good a coach as I worked with during my 40 years of coaching. He is smart, tough, a great game planner, and at his best calling plays on game day. Randy is excellent at identifying and recruiting talent. He and Cathy are wonderful people and the people of East Tennessee will enjoy having them back home.
Peyton Manning – Former Tennessee Quarterback and Future NFL Hall of Famer
Coach Sanders was a strong early influence on me as a prospect and as a player in my years at Tennessee. With his football knowledge and abilities as a recruiter and leader, ETSU has a bright future both on and off the field.
Jameis Winston – Tampa Bay Buccaneers Quarterback
Coach Sanders work ethic, humility and preparation was a huge part to my success as a player. He never got too high or too low. His ability to stay calm and confident helped me tremendously at the quarterback position, but it also helped me grow as a young man. I’m am so thankful that I had a coach that was able to lead and coach me into a player that understood I must take advantage of every opportunity.
Mike Smith – Tampa Bay Buccaneers Defensive Coordinator and former ETSU player
Randy Sanders is a highly respected coach and an outstanding fit for ETSU. I look forward to supporting him and celebrating championship-level success in the future. Go Bucs!
David Cutcliffe – Duke football head coach
Randy Sanders had great football knowledge as a player, but more importantly he was a great leader and teammate. He was a great football coach from his first day on the job at Tennessee! He’s an outstanding man, friend, and person. Randy is one of the most respected teachers of quarterbacks in our game. He’s the perfect fit at ETSU. I’m excited for Randy, Cathy, and his family!
For more information on Buccaneer football, visit ETSUBucs.com.An SQL Injection vulnerability has been found in Rails. The issue affects Rails < 2.1.1, namely the :limit and :offset parameters that are not correctly sanitized:
Person.find(:all, :limit => “10; DROP TABLE users;”)
A possible attack will work only if you allow the user control these two values as in User.find(:all, :limit => 10, :offset => params[:offset]). Note that will_paginate is not affected, it escapes the values before.
This seemed to affect only PostgreSQL and SQLite as MySQL by default disallows multiple SQL statements. So you cannot drop a table. However, it could be used for information disclosure. Consider the UNION SQL statement:
User.find(:all, :limit => params[:limit])
params[:limit] #= “1 UNION (select 1,2,password,4,5,6,7,8,9,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0 from users)”
What does this mean? The result is the full users table, with one small modification: One field contains the user’s password and the other fields are always a number between 0 and 9. Let’s assume the third column is the user’s first name and the application returns everything it found. This means an attacker may read the user’s password in the first name field. All he has to do is find out about the table names (take a look at the controller names), the column names (review the HTML source, guessing) and the number of columns in the table (try it). The UNION statement will work only if the |
ready to die just yet.Germans are smoking less but still drinking too much, according to the German Centre for Addiction Issues. Launching the centre's Annual Addiction Report 2011 in Berlin on Tuesday, director Raphael Gaßmann, estimated one in five people aged 18 to 64 had a drinking problem.
“Alcohol consumption remains conspicuously too high, too risky, with too many consequences,” he said.
The report, a compilation of figures from 2009, showed that although the average amount of booze consumed, measured in pure alcohol, did fall slightly compared with 2008, it was too negligible to have any health benefit, Gaßmann said.
Moreover, the effects of binge drinking have become noticeably worse in recent years. The number of alcohol poisoning incidents climbed by nearly 112 percent between 2000 and 2009. Most disturbingly, such incidents rose 194 percent among people aged 20 to 25.
The results on binge drinking were “dramatic,” Gaßmann said.
The deaths of 73,000 people aged 35 to 65 could be traced back to “alcohol-related health problems” each year, which is about one fifth of all deaths, Gaßmann said. For men, the figure was roughly one in four.
On a brighter note, tobacco consumption has been dropping. It fell by 1.6 percent in 2009 and 3.8 percent in 2008. About 29 percent of Germans aged 18 to 64 smoke.
Among men, the figure is 32.8 percent and among women it is 25.5 percent. Between 110,000 and 140,000 people die each year from tobacco-related causes, the centre said.
The Local/djw“The art of government is to make two-thirds of the nation pay all it possibly can pay for the benefit of the other third,” mused Voltaire. Even that cynical French Enlightenment writer couldn’t imagine what would transpire one day in California, where a portion of the mere 15.3 percent of the public that works for government has gotten the rest of the public to pay for an eye-popping level of compensation.
The latest data — revealed in a December update to the controller’s “Government Compensation in California” Web site — provides fodder for outrage. There’s a fire battalion chief in a small Bay Area suburb receiving a one-year total compensation package that costs $494,000 and city managers in modest-sized burbs (Temecula, Menifee, Carlsbad, Buena Park, Fountain Valley) receiving pay-and-benefit packages of nearly a half-million bucks and more in 2012.
We see a list of employees in fiscally troubled cities — Stockton, San Bernardino, Vallejo — with total earnings in the $200,000 to $300,000 range. The data shows public “servants” taking $230,000-plus cash-outs of leave, CEO-level salaries for employees in impoverished backwaters, and many employees receiving six-figure benefits in addition to their wages. Average pay levels for California public employees often soar above average earnings in their respective communities.
Coincidentally, the controller’s update was released just as Angela Spaccia, former administrator in the scandal-plagued Los Angeles County city of Bell, was found guilty on 11 corruption charges that included the misappropriation of public funds. She was accused of creating a secret pension fund for herself and then-city manager Robert Rizzo, who at one point “earned” a salary of $800,000 a year plus benefits.
Rizzo — the rotund racehorse-owning poster child for municipal greed — previously pled “no contest” to corruption charges. Five other Bell officials were convicted, also. The scandal, which erupted in 2010, sparked a widespread debate about public pay levels and oversight. Trial evidence included an email string where officials joked about getting “fat together” and “taking all of Bell’s money.”
In fact, Controller John Chiang created this statewide compensation Website, based on data provided by cities and agencies, in direct response to Bell. The database has been widely praised as thorough and easy to navigate. But as scary as the information it provides may be, it may even understate the problem.
Its municipality pay averages “are in orders of magnitude too low,” argued Steve Frates, director of research at Pepperdine University’s Davenport Institute. That’s because it includes part-time and occasional workers in the average. Furthermore, the database doesn’t include other benefits public employees receive. It only calculates the direct costs of pensions and medical-care benefits — not the tens of billions of dollars in unfunded liabilities.
Chiang says that public disclosure of compensation information is the first step toward reform. Critics complain, however, about a lack of follow-up steps from other state officials. “The illegality, the excesses of Bell, are an aberration of the real problem,” said Richard Rider, president of San Diego Tax Fighters. “The most powerful force in local politics are the public-sector unions. They elect people who are most compliant. The result is what you would expect.”
The public has seen only modest reform. Gov. Jerry Brown and legislative leaders were concerned last year that their tax-increasing ballot measure (Proposition 30) was in trouble because the public didn’t trust that they would spend new dollars wisely. So they cobbled together a tepid pension-reform measure that mostly pares back excesses for new employees. That was it from the state.
Some localities, including San Diego and San Jose, passed pension reform measures last year. Bankruptcy forced Stockton to pull its far-above-average compensation levels down to the state average. But nothing fundamental has changed in California.
Now that the Legislative Analyst’s Office is predicting years of budget surpluses (provided the economy recovers and legislators control their spending), any hope of compensation reform from the Capitol is dim. Reform efforts have thrived only when it seemed as if the state was running out of cash.
On the hopeful front, San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed, a Democrat, is championing a 2014 statewide initiative that would allow cities to cut future benefits for current employees. Union activists are portraying that as an attempt to “eliminate” pensions, which clearly isn’t the case. But that measure could spark the next public-employee compensation battle. Reed recently argued that union-driven overpayment for police leads to higher crime because cities don’t have money left to hire additional officers.
Supporters of Reed’s effort are bolstered by a new Field Poll that reveals plummeting public support for labor unions, as a plurality (45 percent) of Californians say they do more harm than good. And despite the “no reform” approach in Sacramento, more troubling numbers trickle out — even from unlikely sources.
Treasurer Bill Lockyer, a union ally, told a small group in Thousand Oaks this month that the California State Teachers' Retirement System (CalSTRS) is in “crisis mode” and that “there will be a ratcheting down of retirement promises and commitments.” He did, however, defend the condition of the larger California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS).
Sound or not, the list of those who receive pensions of $100,000 or more from CalPERS now tops 12,000 and is growing by about 40 percent each year. There’s plenty of accessible information, from the controller and elsewhere, suggesting that the public-employee compensation system is unsustainable and unfair. Union Watch reports that in struggling Desert Hot Springs the average city worker actually receives an all-included package of $144,000 a year and the average police and fire employee receives $164,000.
Increasingly, the public may be seeing that the problem isn’t a handful of officials who illegally gamed the system, but a system that — as Voltaire understood — allows a powerful minority to legally game the majority.In a unique directive, the Nitish Kumar government has asked school teachers in Bihar to keep an eye on open defecation and also click photos of those found relieving themselves in open.
In a unique directive, the Nitish Kumar government has asked school teachers in Bihar to keep an eye on open defecation and also click photos of those found relieving themselves in open. It has been learnt that teachers have protested the notice issued by all Block Education Officers (BDOs), the teachers have been allotted one of the two shifts to discharge this duty – 5:00 am. and 4:00 pm. According to the order, the school principals, on the other hand, were entrusted with supervising the task. However, this is not the first time that teachers in the state have been asked to do a job outside their profession. In the past, teachers have been posted on census duty, election duty, and have had to compile voters’ list. Bihar Education Minister has said that the government just want teachers to exercise their influence in society and bring awareness. The minister, however, said, “Clicking selfies with defaulters is different matter, personally I didn’t like it.” This is part of the state’s Open Defecation Free (ODF) campaign.
According to reports, the Aurangabad district administration has decided to declare Pawai panchayat of Deo block ODF by December 31, 2017. To make sure the district administration got 61 primary and middle-school teachers enrolled in the campaign since November 18. The Kudni block administration in Muzaffarpur has engaged 144 teachers. Teachers’ associations, however, have said that while they support the ODF campaign, they find it “difficult” to comply with the instructions because it “insults teachers,” undermines “dignity” and could “endanger safety.”
However, the teachers were unwilling to perform the task. Bihar Madhyamik Sikshak Sangh (BMSS) general secretary and former MP Shatrughan Prasad Singh wrote to Chief Minister Nitish Kumar today demanding withdrawal of the orders which ask them to visit villages in the morning and evening. In his November 18 order, Kudni BDO Harimohan Kumar said: “Teachers concerned are hereby ordered that they will create awareness about ODF among villagers and guardians in their panchayat. Alongside, they will post photographs (of open defecation). Morning follow-up is scheduled between 6 am and 7 am and evening follow-up between 5 pm and 6 pm.”
“Teachers are already overworked. They are used in a number of non-teaching works like census, preparation of voters’ list etc. This new order on open defecation is not only an addition, it is also an insult to their dignity,” general secretary of Bihar Secondary Teachers’ Association Shatrughan Prasad Singh said.
Achieving open defecation free (ODF) status has become a priority in Bihar in view of the Swachch Bharat Abhiyan launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Seven Resolves of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, both of which aim at providing every household with sanitation facility.News Release Wednesday, January 4, 2017
Missing 40-year-old Male NR17005jh
Los Angeles:
The family of Travis Joel Peterson and the Los Angeles Police Department's Missing Person's Unit are asking for the public's help in locating him.Peterson was last seen on December 30, 2016, in the 1500 block of Foothill Boulevard, in the City La Canada Flintridge. His family is concerned for his safety.Peterson is described as a 40-year-old male White with blond hair and green eyes. He stands 5 feet 9 inches tall and weighs around 180 pounds.If you have seen, or have any information regarding the whereabouts of Travis Joel Peterson, please contact Missing Persons Unit, Detective L. Saiza, at (213) 996-1800. During non-business hours or on weekends, calls should be directed 1-877-LAPD-24-7 (1-877-527-3247). Anyone wishing to remain anonymous should call the LA Regional Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS (800-222-8477) or go directly to www.lacrimestoppers.org. Tipsters may also visit www.lapdonline.org, and click on "Anonymous Web Tips" under the "Get Involved-Crime Stoppers" menu to submit an online tip. Lastly, tipsters may also download the "P3 Tips" mobile application and select the LA Regional Crime Stoppers as their local program.MANILA, Philippines -- Who said esports' rapid growth was limited to the big leagues?
Collegiate esports, like its professional counterpart, has been seeing increased mainstream acceptance as of late. Nearly 50 institutions in the U.S. and Canada sponsor varsity esports, with hundreds more clubs and about a dozen leagues to parse through.
Halfway across the world in the Philippines, local League of Legends publisher Garena believes that collegiate esports has the potential to become as much of a big deal as its pro scene is.
Following its long-running LoL Collegiate League, Garena Philippines will be debuting the LoL Varsity League early next month -- an initiative whose goal is to "grow collegiate esports not only as a league but as a tool for education." The program will begin with seven partner schools.
With the LoL Varsity League, Garena Philippines aims to establish a professional collegiate esports environment in conjunction with its partner universities. This includes the development of esports-related education and on-campus infrastructure, and scholarships by 2018. The LVL will debut at 1 a.m. ET on Nov. 12 on Garena's YouTube channel.
ESPN sat down with Garena esports executive Ariane "Metanoia" Lim to find out more about the LVL and its various intricacies.
Justin Banusing: What would you describe the LoL Varsity League as exactly?
Metanoia: The LoL Varsity League, or LVL, is an effort to have a good standard on how collegiate esports could be organized in a varsity level.
The initiative comes from seeing the potential and challenges the LoL Collegiate League has -- our current competitive collegiate circuit. There's a desire to be recognized, there's a desire to grow, but there's a challenge to just come together as a campus.
The LVL wants the organization, recognition and continuity that the LCL struggles at.
With all this talk about improving upon the your previous program, what role will the LCL play moving forward? Will LCL schools still be given the chance to compete in the LoL International Collegiate Cup (LICC)?
Metanoia: The LCL is a great space to discover new talent and to see how much collegiate esports have grown in a specific region in the country. In a competitive level, you can't compare a league of 48 to a league of 7.
We will have a separate qualifier for LICC wherein the top team of each of the six LCL conferences and the top two teams of the LVL will get to fight for representation.
Given the limited amount of partner schools for the first iteration of the LVL, could you elaborate how Garena chose who to partner with? How does a school become eligible for the LVL?
Metanoia: Last term, we set a requirement for teams that they needed student-org backers in order to be eligible for the LCL. This opened for us to understand how campuses operate and how teams can come together to get them to cooperate.
Technical University of the Philippines-Manila, AMA University-Quezon City, University of the Philippines-Diliman, Malayan Colleges Laguna, Far Eastern University-Institute of Technology, University of Sto. Tomas, iAcademy. These seven campuses got into LVL through the hard work and unity of the students in convincing their administration that collegiate esports can be relevant in the campus.
We based initial talks on how active their organization got and how successful their talks were with the administration when they were just competing in LCL. A lot of campuses had some incredible progress in erasing the stigma between competitive video games and education.
There's no definitive steps, at this point, to join LVL but what is standard to the success of the seven we have now is:
1. Join LCL and have a competitive, dedicated team.
2. Know how your school feels about esports. Learn how to present the concept as a tool for learning. What a lot of teams get wrong is that they can't frame how exhibiting how you can do collegiate esports is better than just prohibiting it outright.
3. Get organized. Not everyone can be the star player. Look for coaches, managers, etc. There's a lot of work to do to play the Rift on campus.
Incumbent LCL champion and LVL pioneer team University of the Philippines Diliman, left, poses with members of its Singaporean counterpart at IEF 2016 in South Korea. Provided by Garena Philippines
How does the dynamic between Garena and its partner schools work right now? Have school administrations been supportive?
Metanoia: When we opened LVL to the administration, we didn't just introduce the concept of competitive League esports.
We introduced education through League esports. Our dynamic would entail us teaching them the ropes in other industries behind esports -- coaching, events, production, etc.
We have several accreditation levels for LVL. We made that system to be able to tailor fit the program into the campus culture. Some campuses start with the bare minimum, competition-ready level. Some campuses are working towards the other facets of esports.
We want to enable students to learn more about esports (and its associated industries) through esports. We can't do that without the support and guidance of the administration.
Apart from training and an elite competitive environment, what else is Garena providing? Are the schools expected to give anything back?
Metanoia: It's a partnership, not a sponsorship.
Some of the campuses restructured their organization to adopt LVL, some of the campuses excused their students from class to settle requirements for LVL, some even provided a space within the campus for the teams to play in a safe environment.
What we provide most of all is an opportunity. They get to compete in their own league. Their other students, who may not have made Team A, can learn other things about esports.
Let's talk about your first split. With seven teams playing in a round-robin format, what's at stake?
Metanoia: Well, for collegiate level, pride is always on the line most of all.
But for this year, there's also a 30,000 Philippine peso ($582) championship prize and a 20,000 Philippine peso ($388) runner-up prize, aside from the usual Riot Points, and of course, the JBL T450BT Headphones that our sponsors at Lenovo and Intel provided us for this split.
One of the biggest things that Garena announced with the LVL was that scholarships would soon play a role in it. When will scholarships be offered, and how would students acquire them?
Metanoia: We're planning it for next year. We aren't too sure yet how to apply the scholarships since there's a lot of things to consider that we need to tailor fit for the campus. They have different term breaks, different tuition expenses, different GPA/QPI standards; there's a lot to discuss to make it equitable.
What is the measuring stick for success for this year? Would expansion next year depend on its success? If so, what are your plans for the future?
Metanoia: What we want for this year is to be able to gauge how much the students can and have grown whether as a player, or as a member of the staff. We're going to have several requirements and reports in place to track just that so that we can duplicate the success of a campus.
Should we be successful, we're going to acquire more campuses so we may see eight or 12 next year.
Do you think the local scene is ready for such a comprehensive program?
Metanoia: I think seeing how we got these great seven campus partners for LVL, and we have many more who are working towards it for 2018, it's already a good indication that campuses are opening up to esports.
What we want to do in LVL, most of all, is to show other campuses how they can be ready for it.Hillary Clinton leads Donald Trump by four points in a four-way contest in Florida and by six points head-to-head, according to a Suffolk University poll released Thursday.
In a four-way contest, Mrs. Clinton had a 4 point lead over Mr. Trump, 43 percent to 39 percent, with Libertarian Party presidential nominee Gary Johnson at 4 percent and Green Party candidate Jill Stein at 3 percent.
Mrs. Clinton’s lead expanded to 6 points, 48 percent to 42 percent, in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup with Mr. Trump in the poll, which was conducted Monday through Wednesday.
The latest Real Clear Politics average on the crucial battleground state shows Mrs. Clinton with about a 3 point lead over Mr. Trump. The average includes the Suffolk poll.
Analysts caution that a more accurate picture of the presidential race should develop once the potential polling effects of the parties’ conventions settle, but other surveys released since last week’s Democratic National Convention have likewise shown Mr. Trump trailing in key states such as Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Michigan.
In Florida’s U.S. Senate contest, Sen. Marco Rubio was well ahead of his potential Democratic opponents. Mr. Rubio had about a 15 point lead over Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson and about a 14 point lead over Democratic Rep. Patrick Murphy.
Mr. Rubio led businessman Carlos Beruff in the GOP primary contest by close to 50 points.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.Somehow I feel this Santa knew me....and was in my head.
I got a new game, which I am totally excited to play! My family are big board game ppl so this gift will definitely be well used. The hot chocolate kinda freaked me out as I told my bf yesterday I wanted some "really good" hot chocolate for at home....BINGO! The colouring book is freaking awesome, luckily I haven't acquired this one yet and the pictures inside are totally gorgeous. Last but not least, a toy for our dog, Wallabee. I swear he knew something was for him when I got the box, he was sniffing like crazy. He lovessss it and the sound it makes is so funny.
Thank you so much Secret Santa, it's amazing and I truly appreciate the thought you put into this!! Think I'm going to have a hot chocolate right now...I mean common the dog is having so much fun with his gift....me too me too!Out of the supporting Patterns catalogued by Eric Evans, the Repository pattern is probably the most popular. This is probably due to how data persistence has been a hot topic in software development for a long time.
The main problem is that the most popular approach for software development, Object-Orientation, isn’t easily mapped to the format used by efficient external storage systems, like relational or even NoSQL databases. This is often called impedance mismatch, and a whole cottage industry has sprung up around tools and techniques to deal with it.
For Enterprise systems—those performing business-critical tasks but usually not at a high scale—we often address these challenges by using object mapping tools such as Hibernate. These tools usually do an excellent job in dealing with the nuts and bolts of converting data types and formats, but the developer is left with the task of how to best model the concept of persisting and retrieving objects in their Domain Model and the system’s Ubiquitous Language.
For many years, the usual way to go about persistence in the Domain Model was to use specialised objects, such as DAOs and other types of Data Mappers, to convert between objects from your domain model and their persistent equivalent (e.g. to rows in database tables). These design patterns solve several of the hard design problems around coupling and cohesion, but they belong to the system’s infrastructure layer, and as such integrating them with your Ubiquitous Language isn’t a trivial task.
The Repository pattern, as catalogued by Eric Evans and Martin Fowler, offers a good way to integrate persistence needs and the Ubiquitous Language. In his book, Domain-Driven Design, Evans defines the Repository pattern as a “mechanism for encapsulating storage, retrieval, and search behaviour which emulates a collection of objects”. These emulated collections are easily assimilated by the Ubiquitous Language and are simple for engineers to implement and domain experts to understand.
Naming
The concept of a Repository as just a list of objects sounds simple enough to understand, but somehow it is very common for the classes we write to model these to end up with methods that are not related to lists at all. Over several gigs coaching teams adopting Domain-Driven Design, I’ve seen over and over classes that start as Repositories and end up becoming weird versions of DAOs.
To me, one of the best ways to avoid this problem is to name your classes in a way that makes it easy to identify when a method is out of place. Years ago, Rodrigo Yoshima told me about a very interesting way to name Repositories. Instead of the usual naming style displayed below:
class OrderRepository { List < Order > getOrdersFor ( Account a ){...} }
He likes to model his classes as following:
class AllOrders { List < Order > belongingTo ( Account a ){...} }
The above might look like a small change, but in my experience, it is extremely helpful in keeping Repositories sane.
As an example, let’s look at two different implementations of a Repository. Both contain a member method that I would consider to be out of place-the method should be moved to another class. If we agree that this method shouldn’t be part of this Repository, in which of the two implementations do you think it is easier to spot the problem?
//classic naming style class UserRepository { User retrieveUserByLogin ( String login ){...} void submitOrder ( Order order ){...} } //client code User u = userRepository. retrieveUserByLogin ( "pcalcado" ); userRepository. submitOrder ( new Order ());
//Yoshima’s naming style class AllUsers { User withLogin ( String login ){...} void submitOrder ( Order order ){...} } //client code User u = allusers. withLogin ( "pcalcado" ); allusers. submitOrder ( new Order ());
To me, using a more precise vocabulary when naming objects and operations makes it much easier to spot incongruences like the one above. As a corollary, using very generic names or prefixes like get or retrieve makes it much harder to spot these bad smells in our models.
Avoiding Method Explosion
More than just using constrained vocabulary, a well-defined Repository should expose Domain Model concepts as its published interface.
As an example, let’s assume that we have a business rule that says that every order placed on a weekend has 10% surcharge applied to it. Now if we want to retrieve all orders that fall into this situation, we could do something like this:
List < Order > surchargedOrders = allOrders. placed ( user, IN_A_SATURDAY ); surchargedOrders. addAll ( allOrders. placed ( user, IN_A_SUNDAY )); return surchargedOrders ;
This may be good enough for a one-off case, but we’re leaking abstractions here, and they might come back to haunt us as the system grows. If you need to deal with surcharged orders in many different places, you will likely start duplicating of the snippet above across your system. If a surcharge is an important concept in your Domain Model, you should make sure that the objects implementing this model—and the Repository is one of those objects—model this term as a first-class citizen. This is a core idea in Domain-Driven design: make implicit domain concepts explicit, usually by modelling them as objects and methods.
I believe that something like this will be better:
return allOrders. surchargedFor ( user );
The approach described above bring its own challenges. Assuming that surcharged is just one of many states that an order can be in, following this pattern can lead to method explosion as we will end up with a method per state. This won’t be a problem if the number of states is reasonable, but the approach itself doesn’t scale very well for attributes with a large number of possible states.
In their work, Evans and Fowler suggest a way to deal with this problem: the Specification pattern. Evans describes the Specification as “a predicate [object] that determines if an object does or does not satisfy some criteria”. To avoid method explosion in your Repository, you might want to add a method to it that takes in a Specification object and returns objects that fulfil the predicate. Here is an example of how this could work:
return allOrders. thatAre ( user, OrderSpecifications. SURCHARGED );
But there is another strategy that I quite like: using multiple Repositories. In our ordering example, there is no reason we can have two Repositories, one for AllOrders and another one that deals only with SurchargedOrders.
One way to implement this is to parameterise the Repository when you instantiate it. Something like this:
//a base Repository class Orders { private Orders. Status desiredStatus = null ; public Orders (){ this ( Order. Status. ANY ); } public Orders ( Order. Status desiredStatus ){ this. desiredStatus = desiredStatus ; } public List < Order > from ( User user ) {...} }
And use it like this:
//instantiated somewhere as Orders allOrders = new Orders (); Orders surchargedOrders = new Orders ( Order. Status. SURCHARGED ); //returns all orders return allOrders. from ( user ); //returns only orders with applied surcharge return surchargedOrders. from ( user )
We could also implement each variation as a subclass of a base class Orders. When following this design, it is important to make sure we are not replacing method explosion with class explosion.
One Type Only
Another common problem with Repositories happens when they start looking more like a generic “database” object instead of a cohesive collection. As an example, in a system I’ve worked on we had in our Domain Model the following Repository:
public interface AllServices { List < Service > belongingTo ( List < Account > accounts ); Service withNumber ( String serviceNumber ); List < Service > relatedTo ( Service otherService ); }
After several iterations, we started playing user stories around other objects. The first time one of us had to return an object other than a Service from the database, we thought “Oh, I can’t be bothered creating a class just for this. I’ll just add a method here just for now…“. As it happens sometimes, YAGNI took the wrong turn somewhere, and after a few more weeks our Repository looked like this:
public interface AllServices { List < Service > belongingTo ( List < Account > accounts ); Service withNumber ( String serviceNumber ); List < Service > relatedTo ( Service otherService ); List < Product > allActiveProductsBelongingTo ( List < Account > accounts ); List < Product > allProductsBelongingTo ( List < Account > accounts ); ContractDetails retrieveContractDetails ( String serviceNumber ); }
Something interesting here is that our methods still tried to follow Yoshima’s naming conventions as close as possible. Surely they read weird when you think about the type’s name, but something I’ve learnt is that nothing will stop an engineer when they can’t be bothered refactoring…
// mind = blown AllServices allProducts = new AllServices (); //... return allProducts. allActiveProductsBelongingTo ( accounts );
A good way to build intuition around this is to classify as a design smell when a Repository’s methods return more than one type. It is probably ok to return Fundamental types like integers, strings, and booleans, but if your Repository returns more than one type of domain object you may be better off splitting it into discrete collections:
public interface AllServices { List < Service > belongingTo ( List < Account > accounts ); Service withNumber ( String serviceNumber ); List < Service > relatedTo ( Service otherService ); } public interface AllProducts { List < Product > activeBelongingTo ( List < Account > accounts ); List < Product > belongingTo ( List < Account > accounts ); } public interface AllContractDetails { ContractDetails forServiceNumber ( String serviceNumber ); }
Not Only Persistence
The main benefit of Repositories is to make explicit where objects come from and make this place part of the Ubiquitous Language. While Repositories are often used to model object persistence to databases and such, this isn’t the only place where they can be useful. Repositories can be used to implement transient collections, they can be a great way to return ValueObjects, and even encapsulate client code used to invoke operations from a remote service.
Revision HistoryCCTV footage has caught the moment when an e-cigarette exploded next to a barmaid Laura Baty's head. Courtesy LiveLeak
YES, e-cigarettes are bad for you.
In a world-first, Australia’s consumer watchdog is taking two e-cigarette makers to court for claiming their products did not contain toxic chemicals — after independent tests proved otherwise.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has commenced separate proceedings against Social-Lites Pty Ltd and Elusion New Zealand Limited for allegedly making false and misleading claims.
It alleges that from at least August 2015, both online retailers claimed their products did not contain carcinogens or toxic chemicals and did not contain any of the chemicals found in conventional cigarettes.
Independent tests commissioned by the ACCC found e-cigarette products sold by both companies in fact did contain carcinogens and toxic chemicals found in conventional cigarettes, including formaldehyde, acetaldehyde and acrolein.
The World Health Organisation has classified formaldehyde as a Group 1A carcinogen, meaning there is sufficient evidence to show it causes cancer in humans.
Acetaldehyde is classified as a Group 2B carcinogen, meaning it is possibly carcinogenic. The WHO classified acrolein as a toxic chemical, and it is listed as a dangerous poison under the Therapeutic Goods Act.
ACCC Chairman Rod Sims told news.com.au he hoped the allegations would “send an immediate warning message to people who are using these products to take a bit of care”.
“This is an emerging market here and a big market overseas. All of the global tobacco companies are moving into e-cigs, so we really felt it was important to get the facts out as quickly as possible,” he said.
“We’re guessing this is a world-first and certainly we’re not aware of any other action like this around the world.”
Mr Sims said the ACCC had identified health claims in advertising as a priority area for its proactive investigations this year.
“We could see fairly strong claims being made, particularly that e-cigarettes were a safer alternative to tobacco smoking — so we decided to look,” he said.
“There were two parts. One was to test the products, and the other was to ask them to substantiate their claims, which I think it’s fair to say in large part we allege they can’t.”
Mr Sims said there was an increasing level of concern among international, national and state authorities regarding the composition of e-cigarettes, and the likely effects of their use.
“It is imperative that suppliers have scientific evidence to support claims that their products do not contain carcinogens and toxic chemicals such as formaldehyde and acetaldehyde,” he said in a statement.
“This is particularly important when, as here, products are designed to be inhaled and are being differentiated from conventional tobacco cigarettes because they are claimed not to contain toxic chemicals.
“The ACCC will continue to work with its local and international counterparts to ensure consumers are receiving accurate information about these products.”
The ACCC also alleges both the chief executive of Social-Lites and the director of Elusion were “knowingly concerned in the alleged contraventions”.
The watchdog is seeking penalties, declarations, injunctions, orders for an Australian Consumer Law compliance program, publication orders and costs.
A spokesman for Social-Lites told news.com.au the statement in question was contained in the text of a video which said “no carcinogens, no tar and no smoke”.
“Although we regret the statement made, we are led to believe that using low-voltage electronic cigarettes like our Premium Electronic Cigarette Starter kit does not produce carcinogens,” he said.
“It’s only when people use higher-voltage vaporisers do carcinogens form. Our Australian e-liquids only contain vegetable glycerin, propylene glycol, Australian food flavouring and no other additives.
“They obviously do not produce smoke or tar as there is no burning of tobacco unlike regular cigarettes.”
The spokesman said Social-Lites was a “very small independent company that realistically cannot afford to fight” the case. “We will be getting some trials done on our Premium Starter Kit and take it from there,” he said.
News.com.au has contacted Elusion for comment.
frank.chung@news.com.auSRINAGAR: The surge in terrorist activity in Jammu & Kashmir in recent weeks coincides with an increasing number of local youth joining the ranks of the militants, say the Army and the state police.Seen with the evidence of extensive support for terrorists which helped Lashkar terrorist Naved and his accomplices remain undetected for several days, and which can help terror sleeper cells in future, this points to new level of support in the Valley for the jihadi message.An intelligence source told TOI that foreign mercenaries in 2010 formed around 60% of the militant forces whereas today, although their absolute numbers have since then reduced, the ratio is 60:40 in favor of local terrorists. The number of terrorists has risen from a low of 105 in the last year or so.Hizbul Mujahideen and Lashkar-e-Taiba are luring the state’s youth in bigger numbers now, said Mujtaba Gilani, Inspector General of Police, Kashmir Range. He told TOI, “There has definitely been a rise in local recruitment since last year,” Gilani said.Police sources add there is far greater coordination between foreign mercenaries and local militants, with mercenaries using the influence of local youth to increase their numbers.Seeing a definite pattern in the rise in local recruitment by militant outfits and the increasing attempts at infiltration from across the border, DGP of Jammu and Kashmir K Rajendra Kumar said these clearly point towards a serious effort to intensify separatist violence in the state.The police have also noted that moles within the ranks of the state police are getting active. For instance, Naseer Ahmad Pandit, a police constable assigned to guard duty at the house of minister for public works Altaf Bukhari, deserted with two AK-47 rifles four months ago. He was traced late in June through a Facebook picture in the company of nearly a dozen Hizbul Mujahideen militants.The Facebook post also showed Burhan Muzaffar Wani, who the police believes now leads this new Hizbul unit. Wani, 21, had left his home in Sahrifabad Tral, to join the militants after his elder brother was killed in police action during street violence in 2010. With a bounty of Rs 10 lakh on his head, Wani has been long sought by the security forces for his involvement in several terrorist attacks.But, unlike the Army, which believes that mostly unemployed youth are being lured into militancy, the ruling People’s Democratic Party feels even government employees and educated youth are joining militant groups.Last week, the police busted a Hizbul sleeper cell headed by a UK-based Kashmiri physio |
discreet," he told the BBC.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption LJ Rich looks at how videos are being shared as they are made
"If you're the kind of artist that is prepared to use digital media to promote yourself, then provided you're not distracted I don't see a problem with that."
He added: "Do I seriously think that recording contracts for any artists can be jeopardised in this way? No I do not. It is becoming part and parcel of modern music promotion."
Violinist and composer Steve Bingham said for many musicians the issue was not about theft, but instead about terrible quality.
"You want people to pass on your music to friends, but the downside is you don't get the quality control you want if someone is recording in the 17th row on a smartphone.
"You either miss the bass because phones don't pick up the bass or the view is such that visually it isn't that good."
Smashed phone
Frustration at amateur filming is not just shared among musicians.
Image caption Comedian Lee Hurst admitted smashing a phone belonging to an audience member
British comedian Lee Hurst found himself in court in 2009 after smashing up an audience member's mobile phone during a gig.
He told the court: "TV programmes have writers writing for the performers and they go around to gigs and take the material and sell it to the BBC and ITV and that material is gone.
"You are then accused of stealing your own material. It has happened to me with material shown on national TV that I had already done.
"There are thieves amongst the circuit, sadly, and amongst the writing community.
"Nobody will protect us, we have to protect ourselves."
Follow Dave Lee on Twitter @DaveLeeBBCPrograms like Ohio State are like Air Force One: They're never supposed to disappear from the radar screen.
There are several places in college football where the national spotlight fixates, and Ohio Stadium is one. When Urban Meyer is prowling the sidelines, the glare is even brighter.
But Ohio State has been somewhat of a forgotten team since 11:54 p.m. ET on Sept. 6. That's the moment when Virginia Tech completed a 35-21 win against the Buckeyes in Columbus.
It wasn't just the shock of the loss or that it marked Ohio State's third defeat in four games after a 24-0 start under Meyer. It was that Ohio State fulfilled the doom-and-gloom outlook many had after quarterback Braxton Miller's season-ending shoulder injury in August.
J.T. Barrett has really stepped up the past four games, throwing 17 TDs to one pick and rushing for 263 yards and three TDs. Greg Bartram/USA TODAY Sports
The Buckeyes stalled against Bud Foster's complex, aggressive defense. Quarterback J.T. Barrett, making his first home start, completed 9 of 29 pass attempts with three interceptions and a touchdown. An offensive line featuring four new starters surrendered seven sacks, and the Buckeyes averaged just 2.7 yards per rush. The supposedly upgraded defense showed the same old warts against the pass and especially on third down (9 of 17 converted).
It was one of those worst-fears-fulfilled kinds of nights. The loss, while surprising, followed a narrative many had mapped out the moment Miller's labrum tore during an innocuous throw in practice.
So Ohio State became a forgotten team nationally and, to a degree, in the Big Ten -- as crazy as that sounds.
Well, it's time to take notice again. No Big Ten team is playing better than No. 13 Ohio State. And few quarterbacks nationally are playing better than Barrett.
Since the Virginia Tech loss, the Buckeyes' numbers are staggering. They've outscored their opponents 224-69. They set a team record with four consecutive games of 50 or more points and tied a team mark with four straight games of 500 or more yards.
Barrett's four-game line: 1,170 pass yards, 17 touchdowns, one interception (none in the past three games), 68.3 percent completions, 263 rush yards, three touchdowns.
"He's throwing it on time, throwing it early, trusting what he sees, directing traffic, going through his progressions, not getting freaked out with a little pressure," offensive coordinator Tom Herman recently told me.
He has accounted for at least four touchdowns in all four games, the longest active streak in the country and the longest for a Big Ten quarterback since former Purdue star Kyle Orton in 2004, according to ESPN Stats & Information.
Offensive line coach Ed Warinner once again worked his magic, simplifying things so a group that looked like a liability in Week 2 has become a strength.
"Until you understand Algebra 1, you can't take Algebra 2," Warinner told me. "You just have to be patient and trust that playing hard and having good fundamentals will carry you through. Eventually, you can build on that with your changeups, your exceptions, your adjustments.
"People get caught up in thinking, 'I'm a really good coach. I've got these guys who never played and look at all this stuff I told them.' And you don't get anything done."
Ohio State also is getting it done on defense during the win streak: 12 sacks, 23 tackles for loss, eight interceptions. The Buckeyes held both Maryland and Rutgers well below their averages for yards and points. They suddenly rank in the top 25 nationally in points allowed (24th), opponent adjusted QBR (21st), pass yards allowed (16th) and first downs allowed (20th).
"We're playing at a pretty high level right now," Meyer said of his defense.
But what about the competition? Ohio State hasn't beaten a ranked team during its run. Unlike teams in the SEC, Pac-12 or Big 12, the Buckeyes' schedule has allowed them to regain their mojo. But you play who you play, and Ohio State has destroyed everything in its path.
It's all pointing to the Nov. 8 showdown at No. 8 Michigan State, which hasn't lost at home since 2012. Both teams won 56-17 on Saturday, but Ohio State seems to be playing at a higher level. The Buckeyes are No. 5 nationally in ESPN's Football Power Index, which measures team strength as a future predictor.
According to FPI, Ohio State has a 48.5 percent chance to win the Big Ten, the third-highest percentage of any Power 5 team and by far the highest percentage in the league, as defending champion Michigan State has just a 23.7 percent chance. Yes, we all know FPI has never been high on the Spartans, who remain the team to beat in this league until proved otherwise.
But the numbers favor Ohio State, which, according to FPI, is the one-loss team from a Power 5 conference with the best chance (27 percent) to finish with just the sole blemish.
So everyone must pay attention to the Buckeyes again, including the playoff selection committee. Virginia Tech is a bad loss that seems to be getting worse. But the circumstances surrounding Ohio State with Miller's injury should be considered, if the committee members stay true to their word.
Ohio State has few résumé-boosting opportunities left: trips to Michigan State and Minnesota, and the Big Ten title game.
But if the Buckeyes continue on this trajectory, they should be in a familiar spot: playing for championships.With Hollywood hipster clothing boutiques declaring “Broke Is the New Black,” establishment media outlets circulating the tired phrase new normal to describe America’s four-year-old economic stagnation, and producers trying to capture the increasingly fragmented national mood with titles like Downsized and Two Broke Girls, it seems everybody has given up hope for an economic intervention that will bring about the long-promised American Recovery.
In September a Bloomberg poll found that only 36 percent of Americans approve of President Barack Obama’s efforts to create jobs. Around the same time, New York Times reporter Jennifer Steinhauer lamented that some congressional Democrats oppose Obama’s $447 billion American Jobs Act “simply for its mental connection to” the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Also in America’s newspaper of record, Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, a prominent voice in favor of Keynesian economic intervention, argued that the 2009 stimulus failed because it was not large enough to close a gap in aggregate demand.
But the most important goal of the stimulus was achieved almost a year ago: Consumer spending returned to its pre-recession level in the last quarter of 2010. As Robert Higgs, the Independent Institute’s senior fellow in political economy and editor of The Independent Review, noted in a blog post this fall, Commerce Department statistics show that the rate of personal consumption expenditures was “continuing to grow” and as of the second quarter of 2011 was “even farther above its pre-recession peak.” Real government expenditure for consumption and investment had also snapped back to its pre-recession level and in the second quarter “was running more than 2 percent higher” in real terms, Higgs wrote.
So why aren’t Krugman and other Keynesian interventionists cheering? John Maynard Keynes’ general theory teaches us that now should be Miller Time. According to the standard macroeconomic model, you revive a stagnant economy by closing the gap in aggregate demand. Taking up the slack in demand is supposed to be the heavy lifting of an economic recovery, the part of the job so big only the government can do it.
Boosting demand is considered crucial enough that it can justify drafting the young to fight in horrible wars, just to reduce the surplus labor supply. We know this from the standard schoolhouse wisdom that World War II ended the Great Depression (a notion that persists despite having been refuted by, among many others, Christina Romer, former chairwoman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers). During an amusing CNN exchange with economist Kenneth Rogoff in August, Krugman even argued that if the public could be hoodwinked into increasing inflation and deficit spending to prepare for a hoax invasion by space aliens, “this slump would be over in 18 months.”
With or without E.T.’s help, the recession officially ended more than two years ago, in June 2009, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. More important, Keynesian “equilibrium” was achieved last Christmas. Demand has been restored. The strengthening of the dollar and a threatened increase in the net saving rate have been, with vast and concerted public effort, averted. Interest rates are low or effectively negative. Deficit spending has more than doubled.
And yet the economy stays narcotized. Month after month the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports unemployment above 9 percent, higher than it was when the 2009 stimulus became law. Even allowing for the usual lag in post-recession job growth, the employment recovery is by far the most anemic since the end of World War II. At the pace of hiring that has held for the last two years, the jobs lost in the current recession will not be replaced until at least 2018.
“There’s really nothing in Keynesian theory that encompasses indebtedness—consumer indebtedness and corporate indebtedness,” Higgs said in a phone interview. “That’s why these guys are at sea. This boom was built on heavy leverage. People are looking back, and they’re saying, ‘We were crazy to go that deeply into debt. We have to change that.’ ”
Higgs points out that while spending is back, investment remains low. The trillions of new dollars that have been created by the Federal Reserve Bank are being absorbed into critically ill balance sheets. “Firms, if they have cash flow, are repaying debt,” he says. “If they increase output they’re doing it with their existing work force, maybe augmented by new equipment or software.”
Higgs and others hold that money is staying in the vaults because of regime uncertainty. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, passed in 2010, has created a new panoply of expenses for anybody looking to hire an employee, but the full range and nature of those expenses can’t be measured even by a team of lawyers. The Fed’s battery of fanciful tools—including paying banks interest on reserves and conducting rounds of quantitative easing by buying long-term debt while selling short-term debt—makes it even more difficult for nonpolitical figures to understand what the future holds.
The seemingly simple solution to this problem—and my personal advice to anybody looking to sell a house or get a job—is to lower your asking price. But University of Georgia economist George Selgin, author of the deflation classic Less Than Zero, says letting wages and prices go where they want to go—namely, down—is not the solution. “I have defended deflation,” Selgin said in an interview, “but only if it’s driven by productivity gains.” He noted that the demand collapse occurred “in 2008 and 2009, when the Fed should have provided liquidity but was too busy bailing out its Wall Street buddies.”
“Demand-driven deflation is a very bumpy road,” Selgin continued. “Prices and wages are rigid downward. Today there are lots of rigidities in markets that aren’t going to come down easily. So that means any poor sucker who does his share and takes his cuts is going to be living less well and waiting for everybody else to take their cuts.”
Still, a market-clearing deflation could be less painful than four years (and counting) of stagnation—less painful for everybody except Keynesians, who only know how to make prices go up, not down. On the evidence of the last few years, it’s not clear that they even know how to make prices go up anymore. But that may not matter, because the Keynesians are still in charge of everything. How do you like their new normal?
Tim Cavanaugh is a senior editor at reason.Chancellor Angela Merkel says she wants to reduce the number of refugees coming to Germany but is refusing to declare a limit.
Merkel signalled her compromise on immigration to critics of her open-door policy on the eve of a two-day party congress in the southern city of Karlsruhe.. The chancellor, who is under increasing pressure from allies within her Christian Democratic Union, says she is looking for a European solution.
“It is about reducing the number of migrants through European solidarity and by fighting the reasons behind the people fleeing and not through Germany’s one-sided measures. Of course we have to take our own measures but they must always be in line with European actions,” said Merkel.
Her strategy includes working with Turkey to fight traffickers, improving the situation at Syrian refugee camps in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, and strengthening control of the European Union’s outer borders.
Merkel, whose popularity has fallen over her handling of the refugee crisis, said the word “limit” did not feature in the CDU’s main resolution which will be debated at the party congress which begins today (Dec 14)
The number of refugees entering Germany is expected to top 1 million this year. Merkel’s decision to allow Syrian asylum seekers to remain in Germany regardless of which EU country they first entered has caused concern among voters. Her conservative critics want the numbers down before three state elections in March.More on the mandate
America’s flagship Catholic university, Notre Dame, couldn’t get an injunction against the contraception mandate and has moved to implement the portion of Obamacare that Catholic officials love to hate. No word yet if they’ve asked President Obama to return his 2009 honorary degree. Speaking of contraception, is it really about contraception, or is about an effort by men to control women? Jacob Lupfer has some thoughts on the matter. Look for more action on the contraception mandate from Justice Sonia Sotomayor later today (probably).
What if Noah’s Ark ran out of room, or money?
Rabbi Shaul Shimon Deutsch has collected some 350 stuffed animals into a Brooklyn rowhouse — all of them examples of Torah taxidermy. Now he needs $1 million to keep Torah Animal World open or he’ll have to decamp to the Catskills. No animals were harmed in the making of this menagerie. Bonus points if you can answer this question: Penguins. Kosher or not?
When the boss calls, you’d better answer …
The cold-calling pope strikes again, this time leaving a message on the answering machine of a group of Spanish nuns: “What are the nuns doing that they can’t answer [the phone]? I am Pope Francis, I wish to greet you in this end of the year, I will see if I can call you later.”
Unless he’s calling you about this …
Sound familiar? Bishop buys an eight-bedroom mansion, complete with in-ground pool and five-car garage. No, it’s not the Bishop of Bling over in Germany, but Bishop Dennis Sullivan of Camden, N.J. I mean, I guess if you have to live in Camden there’s got to be some kind of consolation prize, but we can’t imagine that Pope Francis is going to be too excited about this one …
‘My mother’s girlfriend doesn’t love me.’
The Vatican released an extensive back-and-forth between Pope Francis and members of religious orders. I’ll let RNS alum (and current CNS Rome Bureau Chief) Frank Rocca sum it up:
Pope in @civcatt: says Vatican should study vocation of male religious who are not priests — Francis X. Rocca (@FrancisXRocca) January 3, 2014
Pope in @civcatt: denounces religious orders’ “slave trade in novices” from developing countries — Francis X. Rocca (@FrancisXRocca) January 3, 2014
Pope in @civcatt: praises Pope Benedict’s efforts against sex abuse, says orders should accept sinners, but not the “corrupt” — Francis X. Rocca (@FrancisXRocca) January 3, 2014
Pope in @civcatt: gives example of “complex situations” for kids today — girl complaining “my mother’s girlfriend doesn’t love me" — Francis X. Rocca (@FrancisXRocca) January 3, 2014
Things you’ll probably hear but won’t see in church
If you’ve ever been to a Catholic funeral you’ve no doubt heard the hymn “On Eagle’s Wings.” People tend to either love it or hate it. The Twin Cities priest who penned the song in 1979 discusses the death of a friend’s father that led him to write it. One thing they haven’t written a hymn about yet: breast-feeding in church, which our own Lauren Markoe reports is still a taboo. Jana Riess, for one, is glad that Mormons can finally discuss the “P-word” in church.
Passages …
The largest single donor to the Archdiocese of New York? A gay atheist hedge-fund manager who police say leapt to his death on Monday. Robert W. Wilson gave $30 million to New York Catholic schools for a fairly simple reason: he thought they were more efficient than the public system.
Bob Nugent, a Catholic priest whose outreach to gay and lesbian Catholics drew the ire of the Vatican has died at age 76. Nugent and Sister Jeannine Gramick were silenced by the Vatican in 1999 and again in 2000 for questioning church teaching on homosexuality; Nugent largely abided by the order (from the future Benedict XVI) while Gramick did not.
Also, retired Episcopal Bishop Otis Charles of Utah, the first bishop in mainline Protestantism to come out as gay (he was still in the closet when elected), has died at 87. Friends say he was happy to have lived long enough to see gay marriage come to Utah.
Officials in Belize confirmed that a body found near the Guatemalan border belonged to Canadian missionary Brian Townsend, who was reported missing on Christmas.
Miscl from Israel
Former combative Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is likely in his “final days” after being in a coma for nearly eight years. Eight years! Meanwhile, officials have lifted the ban on Israeli (minor league) soccer players wearing a kippah, or yarmulke, during games. It’s not clear what the status of major league players is. And the government has also started paying the wages of five non-Orthodox rabbis, which is actually a fairly big deal.
And with that, it’s on to the weekend. If you haven’t signed up to receive the RNS daily Roundup by email, make sure you do by clicking on the box below:“I’m a huge imperial stout fan, and I’ve been hearing a lot about Kate being one of the best,’’ said Jeff Gosselin, 37, of Arundel, Maine, who took the day off from work so he could drink the beer. He arrived at 10 a.m., at which point the line - more than 400 people deep - snaked around the block. Gosselin was hoping to get in the door by early afternoon. “Everybody I know thinks I’m crazy for doing this.’’
That first batch of Kate at the Portsmouth Brewery lasted for months. But then Beer Advocate magazine proclaimed it the best beer in America, and the craze was on. After that, the lines started forming, and they have gotten longer by the year, as the craft beer boom keeps expanding. Users of such sites as RateBeer.com and BeerAdvocate.com - it gets a perfect score of 100 on both - feed the frenzy.
Tod Mott, head brewer at the Portsmouth Brewery, had been brewing variations of his imperial stout recipe since 1996, when he was at the Back Bay Brewing Co. in Boston. In 2006 he christened it Kate the Great, in honor of Catherine II, the 18th-century Russian empress who was said to have a fondness for stouts.
The Kate the Great phenomenon started six years ago, the result not of clever marketing but of something more organic and viral.
About half of the beer is sold on draft - $8 for an 8-ounce pour - and half is bottled. Acquiring a bottle of Kate is perhaps more challenging than getting it on draft. In order to buy one of the 2,000 bottles - $8 for 11.2 ounces - one first had to have bought a winning scratch ticket that conveyed the right to purchase a bottle. The brewery sold all 15,000 tickets, which cost $2 apiece (all of that money went to charity), in less than 24 hours.
In Portsmouth, the first Monday in March has become known as Kate the Great Day, and it is the only day of the year that this particular beer is available. Hundreds of people wait in line for hours for it, praying it doesn’t run out before they get in. They come from all over New England, a few from other parts of the country. The demand for Kate the Great is so intense that all 420 gallons of it are drained in one day.
They arrived at 2:45 a.m., ensuring themselves the first spots in line. By the time the brewery opened eight hours later, 500 people were waiting to get in.
“It’s a great beer, but it’s more about the experience,’’ said Johnson, a 37-year-old Internet company executive who flew in from San Francisco so he and Hering, who lives in Boston, could drink a few glasses of the Russian imperial stout called Kate the Great and make a Web video of themselves doing so.
PORTSMOUTH, N.H. - By the time the doors to the Portsmouth Brewery opened at 10:45 a.m., Ron Johnson and his friend Dave Hering had been waiting outside on the sidewalk, in subfreezing temperatures, for eight hours.
The mania confounds even those who brew the beer. Ask them why this particular stout inspires such adoration, and they’re not sure.
“I have no idea,’’ said Mott. “There are so many great Russian imperial stouts. I don’t know if Kate is any better than the other ones. It’s a good beer. Let the hoo-hah continue.’’
Pitch black and viscous, Kate the Great is a thick, hearty beer suited for sipping. Six different kinds of malt - “tons of malt,’’ Mott said - and seven varieties of hops go into its creation. At 10 percent alcohol, it’s twice as strong as a typical beer. Tastes come through in waves: roasted malt with chocolate and coffee overtones, hints of plums and figs, followed by a pleasantly bitter finish.
“It’s the most delicious tasting beer I’ve ever tried,’’ said Bill O’Connor IV, 25, who drove up from Haverhill, got in line at 3 a.m., and snagged a prime spot on a stool at the bar. “Plus it’s a great experience.’’
When the doors opened, customers streamed in, excited but orderly, arms raised in triumph, as though they had completed a marathon. By 11:30 the place, which holds 325 people on two floors, was full.
For the next 7 hours and 15 minutes, the bartenders would pull the Kate tap handle almost nonstop. Often they just left the tap open, sliding one tulip glass after another under the flow of what resembled used motor oil.
“I cannot tell you how blessed we all feel to have such great friends in the world of beer,’’ owner Peter Egelston said as he toasted the crowd.
Johnson and Hering, the first guys in line, sat on the same side of a booth and set up a webcam across from them to record their tasting.
“It’s so incredibly smooth,’’ Johnson said after taking his first sip. “Four words: It was worth it.’’
By 2 p.m., most of those who had been in line when the doors opened had gotten in, but the line had barely shrunk, because new customers kept arriving. Most had either taken the day off or, they admitted, called in sick.
Despite all the alcohol consumed, the crowd inside was relaxed, almost subdued. People sipped their beers patiently and chatted. Nobody was rowdy. No one seemed drunk. People had a beer or two - in rare cases three - and left. The staff didn’t have to shut anyone off or impose time limits.
Peter Papadopoulos, 55, of Dover, N.H., looked almost sleepy as he nursed a tulip glass of Kate by himself. By the time he scored his seat late in the afternoon, he’d stood in line for 2 1/2 half hours. He said he didn’t mind the wait, nor did he regret buying 10 scratch tickets last month without a winner among them.
“I appreciate it when you have to pay your dues and earn your way for your bottle,’’ he said.
But why not go to the store down the road and buy an imperial stout that you can have any day?
“The ones I can have aren’t as good as this one,’’ he said.
Hollie Chadwick, doing Kate the Great Day for the fourth time, said its attraction is as much about the convivial atmosphere as the actual beer.
“Everybody comes together,’’ said Chadwick, 37, who lives in Manchester, Maine, and writes for Yankee Brew News, a regional beer publication. “You get to see some of the same people every year. It’s kind of like a festival.’’
In all, the brewpub served 2,780 glasses of Kate over the course of the day. At $8 a glass, that’s $22,240 worth of Kate - a total that doesn’t include other beers, mixed drinks, or food that customers bought. Though local charities wound up with $30,000 from the scratch tickets, Kate the Great Day is a boon for the Portsmouth Brewery, which otherwise would do far less business on a Monday in late winter.
This raises an obvious question: If the demand for Kate is so great, why not brew it more often?
For one thing, the brewers said they don’t have the capacity. It takes five months to make Kate - tying up a fermentation tank for one month and a conditioning tank for another four. But there’s another reason Kate comes only once a year.
“Then the specialness goes away,’’ said brewery co-owner Joanne Francis. “Psychologically we all want something rare.’’
As the sun sank, the line on the sidewalk finally wound down. At 6:25 p.m., the last customer waiting outside was in the door, beer in hand. At 6:45, foam started flowing from the Kate tap. “That’s it,’’ one of the bartenders said. No announcement, no fanfare - Kate was gone for another year.
Steve Greenlee can be reached at greenlee@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @SteveGreenlee.
© Copyright 2012 Globe Newspaper Company.Hi, we’re a band called Arkells. Happy to answer any questions about life in a band. Songs, lyrics gear, touring etc. Ask away!
Hey Reddit. We’re a band from Hamilton, Ontario, and we’re in the middle of touring our latest LP High Noon. The record was produced by Tony Hoffer (Beck, m83, The Kooks) and Eric Ratz (Metric, Billy Talent, Sarah Harmer).
Feel free to ask us about anything about the band and this funny, odd, wonderful thing we get to call our job. Any nook and cranny about the songs, gear, shows, job you’re curious about, ask away!
If you have a question for any of us in particular just address us personally here (Nick, Mike, Tim, Anthony, Max). Max will answer the general questions.
It’s a very unpredictable line of work, but we are very lucky to have this job.
We just wrapped up our Canadian tour and are kicking off our US/Europe spring dates next week. We’ll also be playing festivals this summer back in Canada.
Some proof
https://twitter.com/arkellsmusic/status/587730075560337408
Some links:
www.arkellsmusic.com
www.facebook.com/arkells
www.twitter.com/arkellsmusic
www.soundcloud.com/arkells
Do any of you guys want to go to the basketball game tonight?
you got TICKETS?!?!?
What do you get when you go to Burrito Boyz?
small shrimp – hot
Half chicken half sweet potato, everything on it, extra spicy.
What was going through your head when the power cut out at Supercrawl? Is this something you’re used to dealing with by now, or were you freaking out on the inside?
Honestly, the cabling from the front of house to the power generator cut out. I dont think supercrawl predicted as many people and the pressure from all the bodies caused the outage. We were freaking out on stage, but the rule is when shit goes wrong: keep on grinning and pray to god.
We’ve never had the power cut out like that, but it definitely wasn’t the biggest surprise in the world – we’ve played enough shows that we are used to technical malfunctions. We’re most concerned with you guys having a good time!
You guys are known for playing really awesome Frosh week shows around Canadian universities. Which school have you had the most fun playing and what was it about the school that made it so awesome?
Bishops was the drunkest by far. Not us, them. Great little town.
So who really is Lonnie?
Lonnie is my partner Lauren.
What’s is your song “Coffee” inspired by/about?
Um….sort of about a person who starts spewing hate in the name of religion. If God is great and guiding you, why is he telling you to do/say awful shit: “Do you hear him, do you feel him, do you see him when you’re dreaming? Did he hit you, or hold you, or cut you off when you’re speaking?”
Where’s the best pizza joint you’ve been to on tour?
I have a soft spot for Megabite pizza in Vancouver. Their Hawaiian in particular is awesome. It’s also a place we discovered on our first ever Canadian tour, so I think there’s some sentimental attachment as well. -Mike
I just moved to Hamilton and have fallen in love with the city. I’d love to know (as passionate Hamiltonians), what are some of your favourite things about the city people might not know?
The best part about Hamilton is that it’s a real city. It’s not designed like the suburbs. You can walk to things. It’s affordable. Lots of young people doing things, creating…new businesses, ideas.
What advice would you give to someone who wants to start up a small band?
Keep playing and don’t get discouraged – you never know what opportunity will turn into something bigger
Have you guys ever been star-struck or nervous to meet someone?
Bry Webb from the Constantines and Joel Plaskett are ones that stick out to me. Both are such huge influences for us and super talented songwriters and players, and really kind people too. Also meeting Dave Grohl, Josh Homme and John Paul Jones (!!!) when we opened for Them Crooked Vultures was pretty surreal. Dave was walking around the backstage yelling ‘Fresh pots!” and jamming Zeppelin with JPJ during soundcheck… Crazy.
We got to play with Stephen Lewis. That was pretty cool for me and I was a little nervous then.
We had the opportunity to open for Them Crooked Vultures a few years back. I can honestly say that meeting John Paul Jones made my palms a little sweaty (As would meeting anyone who was in Zeppelin). Then there’s Josh and Dave. As a drummer, however cliche it sounds, I’ve admired and learnt a ton from listening to Daves drumming over most of my life. Thanks for the question!
What’s your favourite NHL teams? Who are you guys pulling for in the playoffs?
Tim will be rooting for the Habs. My brother went to school in Ottawa so I have a soft spot for the Sens. Who doesn’t love Erik Karlsson?
What made you name your song Leather Jacket rather than Payphone?
haha, that song had been kicking around for a while as “payphone” but then fucking maroon 5 came with a song with that name.
I’m from Hamilton and happen to be in Brighton, UK visiting my brother when you are there too. How can I buy you a beer while I’m there if I’m not going to the festival?
Just come to the festival. And tweet at us for the beer.
Please and thank you!
Is Dan Griffin ever going to return to arkells or is anthony a permanent member now?
sadly, dan’s a lawyer now. anthony is full time and we’re super lucky we found him.
Why “Arkells” and not “The Arkells”? Does it bother you when people add the “the” or am I just looking way too in to the semantics?
Too many “the” bands. Arkells just reads better
Do you recommend Abigail as a wedding song? It’s become “our song”, even if it’s about breaking up…
Ha, you know what, if it makes you happy. DO IT. And film it so we can see!
In Deadlines, which Europeans are you talking about?
Europeans: the ones that live a more relaxing life. The ones that leave time for their passions. I saying “fucking europeans” jokingly. They have it figured it out.
Max, do you ever get mistaken for Adrian Grenier? And if you do, do you use those powers for good or for evil?
I’ll take it!
How would you say your writing/inspiration changed between Jackson Square and High Noon?
We just like more types of music than we used to. Our musical palette has grown. Like, you know how kids are picky eaters, and then one day you realize “I love caramelized onions!”…The difference between JS to HN is “Turns out I love Phil Collins!”
At what point in your career did you start building a team around the band? Was it gradual, bringing things on one at a time (ie manager, booking, press etc)? Or did it all come when signing the label?
We still try to do as much shit as possible for ourselves. No one will care about the project as much as the people IN it. But, we’ve been lucky to meet some super talented creative people in the business that have championed us. Basically, do as much as you can for yourself until you both a) feel like you’ve hit a wall AND b) find someone who is talented + wanting to help
Thanks for your questions. To be honest, I picked up a Ludwig Supraphonic from ’63 a couple years back. I always bring many snares for recording sessions (different sizes, wood snares, brass snares, steel snares, etc.) and ever since I have yet to have an engineer or producer pick ANY alternative over this Supra! It’s 5.5×6 and it sounds amazing tuned a little lower than I would tune it live. As for the team, it grew gradually throughout the bands progression. Some changes have happened along the way but we can happily say we’ve worked with some amazing people!
How do you decide which songs you’re going to cover in your encores?
Covers are tricky. Because if the cover is too obscure you might as well play your own song. but you don’t want to cover the same song that the dude at Rusty McFarlan’s is playing at the Pub down the street. it’s about finding that sweet spot…the right song that is gonna start the party but not typical.
What was your favourite place on campus to hang out at Mac? Also any news on if you will be playing the burlington Sound of Music festival this year?
We used to go to a place called Ramshead all the time – it was on Main St across from the hospital. I think it’s a Taco Del Mar now haha
What made you guys decide to play “Come to Light” over “Cynical Bastards” at the Junos? They’re both great songs, but i was surprised since Cynical Bastards was about hamilton (represent!!)
It was between come to light and leather jacket actually. the junos wanted come to light, we wanted leather jacket…I think they ultimately made the right call…I think come to light played better on TV than leather jacket would.
As a huge Arkells fan and a huge baseball fan I have to ask- “Michigan Left” opens with the lines “Driving to work, I had the radio on, Only to hear Curtis Granderson’s gone.” What the heck is this about? Where did Granderson go? Why is he important? Near as I can tell he was on the Yankees when you would have been writing this song.
The song is about a town sort of down on its luck, and then hearing MORE bad news (their beloved baseball player is traded, to the yankees no less)….ultimately though it about not being discouraged, and finding inspiration in your neighbours and people who want to make the city great again.
What inspired the song Leather Jacket?
I keep a list of phrases, lyrical ideas on my phone. I add to it whenever inspiration hits. Leather Jacket is a collection of different ideas to make one narrative. Super inspired by The Hold Steadys front man Craig Finn lyrically. |
) and 38% for account assistant (to be appointed one per block).
4 For example, the monthly salary of `15,300 of Jharkhand’s block programme officer is amongst the lowest remuneration for these functionaries in the country. Functionaries in equivalent posts in Tamil Nadu and West Bengal are paid as much as `30,000–`35,000 a month.
5 For more on experience of business correspondents in Jharkhand, see Bhatti (2012) and Yadav (2012).
6 Workers without Aadhaar who demand work have to seek “exemption” from the requirement of this identity number via the MGNREGA MIS. They are allotted work only after their request is approved by the district administration.
7 An earlier study of 11 completed MGNREGA wells in Ratu block of Ranchi District also found the irrigation from the wells to substantially increase the income from agriculture in the command area (Aggarwal et al 2012).
References
Aggarwal, Ankita, Aashish Gupta and Ankit Kumar (2012): “Evaluation of MGNREGA Wells in Jharkhand,” Economic & Political Weekly, Vol 47, No 35, pp 24–27.
Aggarwal, Ankita (2015): “The Slow Destruction of MGNREGA: Evidence from Jharkhand,” India Together, 16 March.
Bhaskar, Anjor and Pankaj Yadav (2015): “All’s Well That Ends in a Well: An Economic Evaluation of MGMGNREGA Wells in Jharkhand,” Institute for Human Development.
Bhatia, Bela and Jean Drèze (2006): “Employment Guarantee in Jharkhand: Ground Realities,” Economic & Political Weekly, Vol 41, No 29, pp 3198–3202.
Bhatti, Bharat (2012): “Aadhaar-Enabled Payments for NREGA Workers,” Economic & Political Weekly, Vol 47, No 49, pp 16–19.
Drèze, Jean (2015): “India’s Rural Jobs Programme: A Dismal Appraisal,” Huffington Post, 4 May.
Singh, S Harpal (2015): “Fall in Allocations…,” Hindu, 31 May.
Yadav, Anumeha (2012): “To Pass Biometric Identification, Apply Vaseline or Boroplus on Fingers Overnight,” Hindu, 15 December.<<< NEWS FROM THE LAB - Friday, October 11, 2013 >>> ARCHIVES | SEARCH Blackhole, Supreme No More Posted by Karmina @ 20:52 GMT Blackhole exploit kit has always been a favorite example when discussing the impact of kits to Internet users. We've previously mentioned in our posts how fast it was in supporting new vulnerabilities, how it was related to Cool, and that it was the leading kit in our telemetry data. Blackhole and Cool almost always had special mentions in our Threat Reports. So you can just imagine how closely we follow this topic.
Early this week, Maarten Boone Tweeted groundbreaking news regarding Paunch's fate, the mastermind behind Blackhole and Cool. Though no further details were provided, it has been confirmed that Paunch was recently arrested in Russia.
With this news, we decided to look at our telemetry data once again. The graphs below show Blackhole and Cool turning from being at the top of the ranks to being negligible.
It's as dramatic as a graph can get. From dominating the exploit kit charts, Paunch's brainchild, Blackhole, is slowly fading away with its master's arrest.
So what does the future look like? Will the numbers even out among the different exploit kits out there? Will one exploit kit arise to take over Blackhole's place? Will a new exploit kit come out and take over the market? We can only speculate. But one thing that we do hope though, is that other exploit kit authors will take the hint, that even if they may enjoy a few years of invincibility, they are not unreachable by the long arm of the law.In Korea, Adoptees Fight To Change Culture That Sent Them Overseas
Enlarge this image Dain Suh/NPR Dain Suh/NPR
In the Gwanak-gu neighborhood of Seoul, there is a box.
Attached to the side of a building, the box resembles a book drop at a public library, only larger, and when nights are cold, the interior is heated. The Korean lettering on its front represents a phoneticized rendering of the English words "baby box." It was installed by Pastor Lee Jon-rak to accept abandoned infants. When its door opens, an alarm sounds, alerting staff to the presence of a new orphan.
The box, and the anonymity it provides, has become a central symbol in a pitched debate over Korean adoption policy. Two years ago last month, South Korea's Special Adoption Law was amended to add accountability and oversight to the adoption process. The new law requires mothers to wait seven days before relinquishing a child, to get approval from a family court, and to register the birth with the government. The SAL also officially enshrines a new attitude toward adoption: "The Government shall endeavor to reduce the number of Korean children adopted abroad," the law states, "as part of its duties and responsibilities to protect children."
For the first time in Korean history, the country's adoption law has been re-written by some of the very people who have lived its consequences.
In the years after the Korean War, more than 160,000 Korean children — the population of a midsize American city — were sent to adoptive homes in the West. What began as a way to quietly remove mixed-race children who had been fathered by American servicemen soon gained momentum as children crowded the country's orphanages amid grinding postwar poverty. Between 1980 and 1989 alone, more than 65,000 Korean children were sent overseas.
For the first time in South Korean history, the country's adoption law has been rewritten by some of the very people who have lived its consequences. A law alone can't undo deeply held cultural beliefs, and even among adoptees, opinion is divided over how well the SAL's effects match its aims. The question of how to reckon with this fraught legacy remains unsettled and raw.
Korean Culture And Views
Family lineage is still a powerful ideal in South Korea. Even amid the breathtaking economic and technological advances of the past half-century, this vestige of foundational Confucian philosophy has remained.
Adoptees, having been cut loose from their bloodlines, still face considerable stigma.
Stephen Morrison lived on the streets of South Korea from ages 5 to 6. He then lived in an orphanage for eight years before finally being adopted. That adoption, to a family in Utah, was facilitated by Holt International — an agency that helped create the international adoption industry as it exists today.
"Adoption has been a tremendous blessing to me," Morrison says.
Now living in Los Angeles, Morrison is president of Mission to Promote Adoption in Korea (MPAK), a group that works to encourage adoption and the acceptance of adoptive families in Korea.
Prejudice against adopted children in Korea is not easily dislodged, in part because it is embedded in deep-seated cultural beliefs. Even those who are open to the idea of adopting may feel shame about their infertility and try to hide it. Morrison says that some Korean couples who choose to adopt will go as far as faking pregnancy in order to sell the narrative that the child is biologically their own. While a nine-month charade may seem extreme, the alternatives can be worse: Adoptive families sometimes find their openness and honesty met with derision.
Hollee McGinnis, a Ph.D. student whose research focuses on educational outcomes for orphaned Korean children who grow up in government-run institutions, says she has heard many stories of families who chose to be open about their adoptions at first, but eventually decided to conceal them. McGinnis, who is living in Seoul on a Fulbright scholarship, says the choice to conceal an adoption often coincides with a move to a new town, and that the adopted children themselves might drive this decision, hoping to escape ostracism that can turn severe. Adoptees often become the school wang-dda — the designated outcast and target of concerted bullying.
And these are the ones lucky enough to find an adoptive home within Korea. McGinnis says that according to her research, since 1950 just 11 percent of Korean children in need have been placed for domestic adoption. Thousands have landed in homes overseas, but the vast majority have been sent to institutions, out of sight and out of the collective Korean mind, where resources and opportunities are often scarce.
McGinnis says a lot of children end up at institutions because of abuse and neglect from their birth families. She says even the best of these facilities are often unable to provide the kind of one-on-one attention that can lead to better outcomes. By middle school, she says, many of these children will already be tracked for technical training instead of academics. This in turn equips them poorly, if at all, for the rigorous national exams — another Confucian holdover — that determine college admissions. And even those who get accepted to college find that while some government programs cover tuition, room and board is not included, effectively making a university education impossible.
In any event, kids age out at 18. Morrison says he knows all too well the kind of fate that can befall children who grow up in institutions, and the hardships that await them when they leave.
"With limited training and with limited financial support at the time of termination," Morrison says, "most of them wind up going to a factory to work if they can find opportunities, or wind up with meager-paying jobs." Moreover, he says, "Having an orphan background is a liability" — even beyond employment. "Many discriminate [against] such people," he adds, "and [do] not allow their sons or daughters to get married to them."
Unwed mothers, living outside the structure of patrilineal bloodlines, also face considerable stigma. The record of an unwanted child on a woman's family registry can bring unwanted scrutiny, and hurt employment and marriage prospects. Single women also face daunting economic realities. In an echo of the economic arguments made to impoverished women in the lean postwar years, women are often advised to give up their children, to give them the prospect of a better life, rather than raise them alone.
"Single moms really don't have a choice," McGinnis says. "There's tremendous pressure not to do it." This pressure has led many women — some alone, some with a partner at their side — to the baby box in Gwanak-gu.
Adoptees And Missing Identities/Histories
If adoption is a blessing, then for some, it is a mixed one at best.
Like many Korean adoptees, Deann Borshay Liem grew up feeling loved and accepted by her adoptive white family. She came to think of herself as an ordinary American girl who simply happened to have been born in South Korea. Then, while she was in college, repressed memories began to surface.
"I was walking down Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley," she recalls, "and I started having these flashbacks of the orphanage in Korea."
Sensing something was amiss, she asked her parents for her adoption papers. At first, her mother told her the papers had been misplaced in a recent move. An argument ensued, and an angry Liem got in her car to leave. But as she was backing out of the driveway, her mother appeared, holding a box of documents.
According to the papers in that box, Liem's Korean name was Cha Jung Hee. Her mother had died in childbirth, the records said, and her emotionally distraught father had killed himself soon after.
According to the papers in that box, Liem's Korean name was Cha Jung Hee. Her mother had died in childbirth, the records said, and her emotionally distraught father had killed himself soon after.
But Liem, still shaken by visions that kept returning to her, wrote to the orphanage. A few weeks later, she received a letter from her biological brother in Korea. The letter said her name was really Kang Ok Jin, that she was one of five children, and that her birth mother was still very much alive.
The father of the real Cha Jung Hee had not killed himself. In fact, he had come to the orphanage and taken her home. Not wanting to disappoint the Borshays, who had come to love Cha Jung Hee after exchanging letters with her over the course of two years, a social worker at the orphanage simply sent Kang Ok Jin in her place.
In her film First Person Plural, Liem tells the story of her adoption, her reunion with her Korean family and the sometimes painful conversations that followed. While Liem's story is unique, it shares an emotional topography with so many other stories of Korean adoptees: a sense of being caught between birth country and adopted country, and a sense of irretrievable loss. In a way, the film is the first major work of the Korean adoptee canon, not only because it articulates the cultural dysphoria, but because it also confronts the methods by which a steady supply of Korean children kept flowing overseas.
"Adoptees have told me that after watching First Person Plural, they felt it was OK to look at their adoption records with some scrutiny, and that they didn't have to accept everything," Liem says. "They could actually ask questions and challenge their own adoption narrative."
Director Tammy Chu did just that with her own personal documentary, Searching for Go-Hyang. ("Go-hyang" is Korean for "homeland.") Chu fled an abusive environment in her adoptive home before reconnecting with her birth family, discovering along the way that pieces of her own history had been withheld from her. Her follow-up, Resilience, follows an adoptee named Brent as he searches for, and is eventually reunited with, his birth mother, Myun-ja, who says she never wanted to give him up. The two try to make up for decades of lost time, across a chasm of language and cultural difference. In a follow-up to First Person Plural, Liem searches for the woman whose place she took on the plane to the U.S. (Along the way, she finally meets the social worker who made the substitution.)
While cases of switched identity like her own are rare, Liem says she has personally heard "many other stories of false or inaccurate information."
I feel like I was denied the chance to be a Korean person.... If I hadn't been adopted, I would have been a productive person. I'd probably be married, and maybe have five kids. I may not have gone to college, but I would have been productive. And I wouldn't have spent so much time trying to come to terms with my identity.
For example, she says: "Adoption records might indicate that both parents are dead, but in fact the parents are alive. Or that the parents weren't married but in fact they were married, and there are siblings... and so on. Unfortunately there aren't hard statistics about this kind of information."
MPAK's Stephen Morrison counters that falsification of records is not as common as some adoptees claim. "There are many adoptees that don't see this as an issue, as this probably allowed them to be adopted into loving homes," he says, including himself in this category. "I wouldn't accuse the agency for falsifying my records," he says. "I would just assume that the agencies either made up or guessed at missing information. For example, Holt assigned me my birth date. There is no falsifying involved here — just giving me an identity that I didn't have."
But for Liem, her records erased an identity that she did have.
"I feel like I was denied the chance to be a Korean person," she says. "If I hadn't been adopted, I would have been a productive person. I'd probably be married, and maybe have five kids. I may not have gone to college, but I would have been productive. And I wouldn't have spent so much time trying to come to terms with my identity."
Liem is currently at work on Geographies of Kinship: The Korean Adoption Story, a documentary that traces the wider history of the subject that has become her life's work.
"I was adopted when I was 8 years old," she says, "and am still recovering."
Enlarge this image Dain Suh/NPR Dain Suh/NPR
Adoptees Organizing
As the children of the Korean adoption boom came of age, they started finding each other.
Before she began her research, McGinnis spent years in Korean adoptee community-building. In 1996, she started a nonprofit organization in New York called Also-Known-As (AKA).
"I really wanted to create a space for adoptees to generate or create their own identities," she recalls. She had always known a few adoptees, but when she realized there were more than 160,000 like her, she went in search of Korean adoptees in America. She approached adoption agencies, who at first were reluctant to help, for fear of "angry adoptees." She approached Korean-American community groups, and adoptive parent groups, which also were hesitant at first. She set up a desk at the annual Asian Heritage Festival in New York City and approached anyone she could find — "feeling really rather ridiculous," she says, recalling a moment where she ran across the street to catch up with someone she'd been told might be an adoptee. "But that was what I had to do."
Slowly, the community took hold.
Similar groups proliferated, and they began to hear about each other, at first through word-of-mouth and email lists. Soon groups and the adoptees who comprised them began to connect on message boards, connecting their websites through "Web rings" — networks of websites in the pre-social-media era that linked to each other using a common icon to identify their membership. Eventually these more informal intersections led to larger meetups and regional conferences.
A diaspora was beginning to recognize itself as such.
By the late '90s, KAD connectivity was reaching a critical mass. Then came a watershed year: In 1999, the International Gathering of the First Generation of Korean Adoptees — more commonly known as the Gathering — took place in Washington, D.C.
"It felt like we finally came out as a community," McGinnis remembers. After years of word-of-mouth networking, long phone conversations, email chains and message-board threads, she says, "It was a chance to propel or coalesce what was going on independently, and to bridge with work in Europe."
For the first time, it seemed the spiral arms of the Korean adoptee galaxy had found a gravitational center.
Around the same time, Korean heritage camps for adoptees began to flourish around the U.S. — gaining in popularity thanks in part to shifting attitudes among parents who did not see assimilation as the only path, as many of their predecessors had.
Maggie Perscheid, an adoptive parent who continues to be active in adoptee-focused groups, says she initially saw international adoption as a "win-win-win" for everyone involved. But visiting Korea helped disabuse her of that notion.
"I learned firsthand the stories we adoptive parents tell ourselves about life being so much better in the U.S. for our kids not necessarily being the case," Perscheid says. "I experienced the pain of Korean mothers at the loss of their children on one of my first trips, and that had a huge impact on my ability to look at adoption as positively as I originally had." Later, she would find out that her daughter Mara had been placed from an intact family and had siblings, even though the Perscheids had been told her parents were unmarried. That, Perscheid says, "sealed my belief that adoption must be honest and transparent."
Perscheid is a board member of the Korean Adoptee and Adoptive Family Network, which held its first conference in a Los Angeles hotel in 1999. Around this time, increasing numbers of adoptees were returning to Korea and forming ad hoc communities. Some adoptees went for personal reasons, but stayed for political ones.
Artist kate hers RHEE, who grew up in Michigan, began a series of performances around Seoul aimed at alerting the public to the presence and situation of adoptees. One of these included handing out cards, inspired by Adrian Piper's "calling card" series, to Koreans who were unkind or not understanding of her apparently deficient Korean-ness. "Dear Friend," the card text begins, "Yes. I am speaking English. Your comments prompt me to tell you as you probably guessed I am a kyopo (overseas Korean). However, what you probably aren't aware of is I was adopted from Korea when I was young. Consequently my language skills aren't up to par." The cards were printed in both English and Korean.
(These days, RHEE wants to be clear that she does not refer to herself as a Korean adoptee. "I know it's an accepted term and also a specific politicized identity," she says, "but my thinking is — I'm no longer defined by that act that happened to me a long time ago.")
While RHEE's tactics were aimed at disruption and discomfort, other adoptees became overtly tactical. Alliances soon began to form among adoptees who returned to Korea as adults and were stirred to activism.
"The first turning point was reuniting with my birth family and finding out the truth behind my and my twin sister's adoption," filmmaker Tammy Chu says. From there, she says, working with fellow adoptees she had met in Korea, "We decided to create a space to start looking at intercountry adoption from a social and political perspective. And out of that, we began Adoptee Solidarity Korea [ASK], an organization that seeks to advocate, create awareness and support increased rights for birth families, single mothers and adoptees."
Enlarge this image Dain Suh/NPR Dain Suh/NPR
These more openly political tendencies ran counter to the goals of some other groups within the larger Korean adoptee community. When the 2004 Gathering convened in South Korea, the center was already showing signs that it could not hold.
A vocal contingent — some of whom viewed international adoption as an outgrowth of Western imperialism — pushed for more political action, while others insisted that providing a safe, nonjudgmental space for adoptees to network and learn from each other should remain a priority.
"At the time, the organizers [of the Gathering] were feeling that they were being attacked," McGinnis remembers.
After the official conference events ended, ASK held a meeting in the hotel. "It was supposed to be a kind of launch of an international political movement of sorts," recalls ASK representative Kim Stoker. "ASK has always firmly been a political organization in that we advocate for the human rights for adopted Koreans."
The tension at the 2004 Gathering caught some off guard, but as in any population of 160,000 or more, there are differences in experience, in background, in philosophy. And within those differences, adoptees may find themselves at different points along the path of engaging with their identity. For those just starting out, that may mean a feeling of instantaneous identification with other adoptees. For others, like RHEE, there is a desire to move away from being defined by adoption — and if being a Korean adoptee has stages, like grief, this is certainly one.
Still, Korean adoptee groups continued to hold local events, travel to conferences and organize homeland tours. The Gathering continued along its own path. Numerous related sites cropped up, including a variety of Facebook pages — some of them open, some of them closed to adoptees only. Meanwhile, the political arm of the movement soldiered on.
Jane Jeong Trenka reunited with her birth family after discovering her records had been falsified, and returned to Korea to be closer to them. She also began to agitate for changes to adoption policy, and in 2007, she joined with fellow activists to form Truth and Reconciliation for the Adoption Community of Korea. Within four years, TRACK would help bring Korean adoption law in line with its vision.
Effects Of The SAL
The baby box in Gwanak-gu is the only one of its kind in South Korea, and some view its monthly intake number as a grim barometer of Korea's ongoing struggle with how best to look after its unwanted children. Since the Special Adoption Law was revised, abandonment numbers at the baby box are up. That much is not in dispute, but just about everything else is.
To get a sense of how polarized the debate over the SAL continues to be, consider two different answers to the same question: "Now that two years have passed, what do you see as the main effects of the revised Special Adoption Law?"
Stephen Morrison of MPAK says the new law has "wreaked havoc" on adoption, and cites a long list of negative effects he attributes to the revision: reduction in the adoption rate; rise in abandonment; orphanages "overflowing with children"; increased illegal adoption; and increased numbers of women choosing to terminate their pregnancies through abortion.
Jane Jeong Trenka of TRACK says, "More unwed mothers are raising their kids, meaning there are fewer children available for adoption because the best choice has been made available to them."
The most controversial element of the new SAL is the requirement that mothers place their babies on their family registry. (The registry is an official family document suited to a collectivist society.) Even though the child's name will be removed from the birth mother's family registry once she is placed for adoption, Morrison says this element of the law in particular is helping drive a rise in abandonments.
"More children have been abandoned, especially at the baby box, because the law does not allow anonymous relinquishment of babies by the unwed mothers," he says. "Many have been abandoned in streets, restrooms, subways, trash bins, hospitals and unused buildings. In some cases, the children were murdered in motels, tried to flush down a toilet, thrown out the window to be killed. It is just awful." At the baby box alone, he says, 252 babies were abandoned in 2013.
Trenka doesn't deny that abandonments at the baby box have risen, but says the uptick doesn't coincide with the change in the law. For five of the six months immediately after the SAL revision passed, she says, abandonment numbers remained at or below pre-revision numbers. Instead, Trenka argues, the spike in abandonments coincides with a push to re-revise the law, led by a coalition of groups that included the three agencies permitted to perform international adoptions — Holt, SWS and Eastern — and Morrison's group, MPAK, which she describes as "pro-life." Trenka says the ensuing media coverage, which has focused heavily on the baby box, is a more likely cause than the law itself.
Furthermore, Trenka bristles at the conflation of abandonment and infanticide. "If the baby box is a true alternative to infanticide, we should see such killings decrease when the baby box is offered," she says. "Instead, we see that since the baby box was introduced, infanticides have stayed about the same." She says a mother abandoning a child and a mother murdering her child are driven to those decisions by very different circumstances.
Another widespread misconception, Trenka says, is that children cannot be adopted unless they are registered by their parents. But there is a provision in the SAL that allows the head of an adoption agency to create a family registry for a child who doesn't have one.
"If abandonments or illegal adoptions are going up it is because of misunderstanding of the SAL," Trenka says.
"I'm not 100 percent sure of the relationship between the law and abandonment," researcher McGinnis says. "Orphanage directors I've talked to say they have more babies being left at their doorstep. Whether it's a causal relationship — there's not enough evidence to say. But something is happening."
According to Trenka, the baby box itself "has only encouraged abandonment, posing as a legitimate form of child protection to women in crisis who need actual services."
Trenka and other advocates of the SAL revision argue that negative attitudes toward single motherhood are among the many facets of South Korean society that must change — along with the stigma faced by those who have been orphaned or adopted. By promoting policies that try to normalize adoption, including a May 11 National Adoption Day, and a provision that gives adopted children equal standing with biological children, advocates say the new law is moving Korea in the right direction.
McGinnis adds that the law plays well to shifting national attitudes. "Korean society wants to hear the TRACK and ASK narrative," she says, "that Korea can take care of their kids." She says it's a popular notion now, just as "back in the '90s and '80s, the other narrative — that we were ambassadors and bridges to the rest of the world — resonated." This shift in attitudes also correlates with other changes. Once a poor nation with more children than it could feed, South Korea now has the lowest birth rate in the world, and an average family size of 2.8 as of 2007 — down from an average of 5.5 in the mid-1960s.
There is disagreement over whether to celebrate this fact, but overseas adoptions dropped by more than 17 percent in the first year after the new SAL took effect in 2012. In any case, that shift had already been under way — domestic adoptions began to outpace international adoptions in 2007, the year TRACK was formed.
But while the SAL made adoption equal to blood in the eyes of the law, it is not necessarily so in the eyes of most Koreans.
"There are 17,000 children in 280 institutions throughout Korea," Morrison says. "They are not being adopted."
Even so, Morrison concedes that more unwed mothers are choosing to keep their children. "This is one good part of the SAL," he says. "However, I am not convinced that the unwed mothers are necessarily the best parents."
Additionally, the SAL makes the adoption process more time-consuming and complex, which Morrison says further discourages compliance: "This is another area where the Western influence has gone against the Korean culture of wanting [a] simple and quick solution."
Of course, one person's "simple and quick" is another person's "lacking accountability."
Asked if her life would be different had the law she helped change been in effect when she was a child, Trenka demurs. "Don't care to speculate," she says. "I have enough work dealing with the reality that already is."
Liem is more certain. "I do think my life would have been different," she says. "I think my family would have stayed together."
Liem's birth mother, a widow, was not well-educated and struggled to provide for her five children, who rotated in and out of orphanages as her finances ebbed and flowed. After a social worker asked her repeatedly if she wanted to give up one of her children for adoption, she finally relented. Had the current version of the SAL been in place, Liem's birth mother would have had legal recourse to reverse that decision.
"There's an emphasis on keeping families together in the new law," Liem says, "and that's a good thing."
It's a tension between, how much do you pull a culture and a society to change and how much do you let them evolve?
Whether the good of the law's intentions has been outweighed by its unintended consequences remains an open question. "It's a tension between, how much do you pull a culture and a society to change," McGinnis says, "and how much do you let them evolve?"
Steve Haruch is a writer and culture editor at the Nashville Scene. Adoption documents say his name was once "Oh Yong Chan." You can follow him on Twitter at @steveharuch.The marketing team behind the upcoming movie, Rampart, have been pasting up controversial posters in several major U.S. cities showing Woody Harrelson’s character, Officer Dave Brown, beating a man with a night stick. The posters simply say “I WORK FOR YOU” with the opening date and are meant to look like street art wheatpaste posters. The film opens February 10, 2012.
/Film quotes Oren Moverman, the director of Rampart:
The poster was Lawrence Inglee’s idea. He’s one of the producers of Rampart and he was searching for an image that would be thought-provoking and challenging, not an indictment of a cop but rather a communal approach to the idea of policing, the idea that maybe when cops do bad things it’s more of a reflection of society and what it is willing to tolerate rather than the fault of one bad apple or an institutional problem. If they work for us, could it be they ARE us?
Officer Dave Brown (Woody Harrelson) is a Vietnam vet and a Rampart Precinct cop, dedicated to doing “the people’s dirty work” and asserting his own code of justice, often blurring the lines between right and wrong to maintain his action-hero state of mind. When he gets caught on tape beating a suspect, he finds himself in a downward spiral as the consequences of his past sins and his refusal to change his ways. Brown internalizes his anguish as his world, complete with two ex-wives who are sisters, two daughters, an aging mentor, investigators, and a series of seemingly random women, starts making less and less sense.
via /Film
image via /Film
photo by Scott LynchVR is advertised as the next big thing. A lot of new games are supporting it, however wouldn’t it be cool if older games were playable on it? Well, the following mod makes it possible to actually play the original two Doom games in VR with the Oculus Rift headset.
Thanks to the following mod from Daniel Hindes, both Doom and Doom II are now playable in virtual reality, thanks to a new patch for one of the game’s 3D rendering ports, GZDoom.
As Daniel said:
“This patch allows GZDoom to work properly with the latest Oculus Rift Runtime SDK, which means it now works with the consumer version of the headset. However, this also means that the original Oculus Rift DK1 is no longer compatible, so be sure not to patch yourself out of playing if you’re still using the first iteration of the headset.”
Do note that this is not yet a perfect solution as your weapon and heads-up display float in mid-air toward the center of the view. We don’t know whether Daniel will fix this issue in a later version of his mod.
Still, the idea of playing Doom in VR sounds really interesting.
Those interested can download the mod from here.
And here is how you can install the mod:
Oculus Runtime 1.3 Install
Install recent display driver version
Install GZ3Doom (run the.exe below)
Obtain a.WAD file for the game you want to play ( more information here ), and place the.WAD file in the same folder you installed GZ3Doom to.
Turn on your Oculus Rift
Test the Oculus Rift Home scene in the Oculus Rift to make sure your Rift functions
Launch GZ3Doom using Start Menu->Programs->GZ3Doom->”GZ3Doom on Oculus Rift” shortcut.
(alternatively) type “vr_mode 8” in the gz3doom console.
(Optional) Configure a wireless controller using (Doom Menu)->Options->Configure Controls, and play standing up. Consider configuring turning controls using the “snap 45 left” and “snap 45 right” controls, for increased comfort.
Github.com Report problems at
Have fun!Home - Boost Mobile, News, Sprint - New Family Plans Coming to Boost Mobile April 20 - Five 2GB Lines For $95!
$35/month - unlimited voice and messaging, 2 GB high speed data
$45/month - unlimited voice and messaging, 5 GB high speed data
$60/month - unlimited voice and messaging, unlimited high speed data
2 lines get $5/month off
3 lines get $15/month off
4 lines get $40/month off
5 lines get $75/month off
Included High Speed Data 2 Lines 3 Lines 4 Lines 1.5 GB (2 GB) $70/month ($60) $90/month ($90) $100/month ($95) 5 GB $70/month ($80) $95/month ($115) $120/month ($135)
As before, Boost Family Plans are only at Boost Mobile stores and independent dealers. They are not offered online, through telesales or from national chain retailers like Walmart, BestBuy or Target. Update 4/20/2016: Boost Family Plans are now available online as well as at Boost Dealers.
Boost is also extending it's $50 credit for porting a number from a non-Sprint based operator to Boost until July 5. The port-in credit, which is only available at Boost dealers, was due to expire tomorrow.
In addition Boost has some new, dealer only phone discounts starting April 20. Click the image below to expand it and see the details.
The leaked scans I got today came from the dealer channel. I suspect that Boost will also announce some new online promotions on April 20.
It looks like Boost Mobile is revamping its family plans. An anonymous tipster sent me a scan of a poster announcing the new plans.The change gives customers more flexibility. Currently Boost requires all members of a Family Plan to have the same high speed data allotment, either 1.5 GB or 5 GB. Starting April 20, Boost will let customers mix and match data allotments within a family plan. In addition, the maximum number of lines in a Family Plan is increasing from four to five and new 2 GB and unlimited high speed data options will be available to Family Plan members.Starting April 20, customers can build Family Plans using any combination of two to five lines of the following plans:All three plans also include hotspot and unlimited music streaming. The $35 and $45 plans also get unlimited 128 Kpbs throttled data after the high speed allotment is used up.In return for having multiple lines, Family Plan customers get a discount:The first line is also eligible for a $5/month auto pay discount.To put this in perspective, five $35 plans with auto pay would cost $95/month or $19/line. That's $5/month less than Cricket and MetroPCS' cheapest five line plans.Although the new Family plans are more flexible, the current ones are a better deal for 2, 3 and 4 line plans with 5 GB per line. The table below lists the current Family Plans. I've added the price of comparable new plans in parentheses.Trans teen Jazz Jennings, who co-authored 'I am Jazz', subsequently went on to be part of an American reality TV series of the same title.
Four out of the top 10 most challenged books in US last year have LGBTI themes.
The list was revealed at this year’s Banned |
wish to be identified.
“While constable Kiran Taide was measuring Rauji’s height, he touched his head and realised what he had done. Rauji was sent to the Powai police station, accompanied by police staff. We registered a case, naming constable Taide as the complainant,” he added.
The accused was booked under sections 417 (punishment for cheating) and 428 (mischief by killing or maiming animal of the value of ten rupees) of the Indian Penal Code.
He will be produced in a court in Bandra on Sunday.
First Published: Apr 16, 2017 00:07 ISTPosted January 14, 2014 by Julian O'Dea in Uncategorized. Tagged: Evolutionary Psychology, Females, society. 3 Comments
… or at least that is the theory.
Historically, at times when women wore long dresses, they tended to show a lot of decolletage (bosom).
(“Elizabeth Bennet”, from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.)
More recently, girls in miniskirts would often cover well up top.
There is a general rule of human female behaviour, supposedly, that women maintain a constant total amount of skin exposure, whatever their style of dress. (Although it has also been suggested that the amount will vary for the individual woman depending on the state of her ovulatory cycle, with more skin being shown at ovulation.)
I was amused to see that Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, hosting the recent Golden Globe awards, showed this principle rather well. Bare shoulders OR deep cleavage. But not both. They maintained a roughly constant amount of exposed flesh and transmitted a carefully controlled level of sexuality. They also balanced each other visually.
Arguably they are both showing more flesh here, but the cleavage is not as deep as in the above shots.
So, is there such a general rule? Do women maintain a constant amount of bare skin, just varying which parts they leave bare and which they cover up?
AdvertisementsThe last known photograph of Largay, taken by fellow hiker Dottie Rust on the morning of July 22, 2013, at the Poplar Ridge Lean-to.
ON OCTOBER 14, 2015, a forester from a private company began an inventory of trees on land used by the Navy’s remote SERE survival school in Redington Township, Maine. Starting at a point that had been randomly generated by computer, he walked a straight line, pausing periodically to count trees. At his third stop, on a narrow knoll about 100 yards inside the Navy property, he stumbled upon an old campsite: a collapsed tent, a green backpack. Not far away, he saw what looked like human remains swaddled in a sky-blue sleeping bag.
The forester called his headquarters, which phoned the Navy, which alerted Maine law enforcement.
The next morning, Lieutenant Kevin Adam, the search-and-rescue coordinator for the Maine Warden Service, walked into the lobby of the Comfort Inn in Wilton. It was not yet 6 a.m., and sunrise was still an hour away. Even as he checked into the motel, Adam felt cautious. Over a 26-month search for Geraldine “Gerry” Largay, a 66-year-old hiker who disappeared from the Appalachian Trail in July 2013, he’d received hundreds of tips and dozens of supposed sightings from as far away as Minnesota. He still had sleepless nights thinking over the case. But the forester had taken photos of Largay’s tent and sleeping bag. Adam’s search seemed over.
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By midmorning, Adam and the forester joined some 10 wardens, along with members of the State Police Evidence Response Team, agents from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, representatives from the office of Maine’s chief medical examiner, and the film crew of North Woods Law, a reality television series about the Warden Service. They assembled on a gravel road inside the Navy’s expansive property and then they began to hike. Their pace was slow and the forest was dense. No one said much.
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When they arrived at the knoll about two hours later, it was exactly as the forester had described. They found Largay’s body in her sleeping bag and her driver’s license neatly tucked into a zip-lock bag. There were signs she’d tried hard to be rescued: Several trees bore scorch marks from fires; shiny strips of a Mylar emergency blanket hung from downed branches. Seeing them was painful for the wardens.
“We all wanted to see Gerry come home,” warden Kris MacCabe told the film crew, his voice cracking.
[More from magazine: How could a woman just vanish?]
GERRY LARGAY LIVED TO SERVE OTHERS. After retiring from a nursing career, she dedicated herself to her family and church in Brentwood, Tennessee. She kept a close group of friends and never forgot a birthday or anniversary. The little free time she had she spent in the woods, often with a guidebook on local birds or wildflowers. For years, she’d attended a hiking camp. As soon as her grandson could walk, she took him out hiking. When she couldn’t get outside, she worked on elaborate quilts, including one of a backpacker making his way down a path.
Eventually, the more than 2,100-mile Appalachian Trail became her goal. By November 2012, she was geared up and taking long practice hikes in preparation. An old back injury made carrying a full pack impossible, so her husband of more than four decades, George, said he would run support — meeting her at trailheads and road crossings to restock supplies; collecting her at the end of the day, then returning her the next morning. She began keeping a trail journal, too, which she’d send to friends and family. “This has been a long time in the planning and we are excited and a little nervous to begin this adventure,” she wrote before their first practice outing. George’s trail name was “Sherpa.” Gerry hadn’t yet settled on hers. And so she signed the entry, “Gerry, the AT Dreamer.”
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The first practice hikes were hard and sometimes frustrating: Rendezvous spots proved difficult to locate, and George and Gerry worried that she might have to spend a night outside without a tent or sleeping bag. Sometimes, poor cellphone reception made it impossible to check in during the day. She learned some valuable lessons, too. “Definitely make a plan, but be ready to change it many times over,” she advised her friends. “Flexibility is huge.”
In time, George and Gerry perfected their routine. Gerry chose her own trail name, “Inchworm” — she knew finishing the trail was going to take awhile. She and her longtime hiking partner, Jane Lee, decided they’d do the trail together. They set out on April 23, 2013, heading north from Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. Their plan was to do what backpackers call a flip-flop hike: Start in the middle of the AT and get to Mount Katahdin in Maine, then drive back to Harpers Ferry and hike south to Springer Mountain in Georgia.
Spring 2013 was a wet one in the mid-Atlantic, where entire sections of the trail overflowed with water. Largay was impervious. She kept logs of the flora she saw along the way. “Fabulous Fern Day!” she wrote one day. On another: “Squirrel corn, bluets, spring beauties, Jack in the Pulpits, abundant May apples. Plenty others, and me without my book!” When she and Jane passed a small zoo closed in the early morning, Gerry found a way to sneak in. The bears were still sleeping. The coyotes and foxes looked like they thought she should be serving them breakfast.
At the end of most days, George would meet Gerry and Jane. He’d already have scouted out a motel or campground, along with the best ice cream stand, which is to say, the one that had either blueberries and cream or rocky road — Gerry’s favorite flavors. Halfway through their trip, they all spent a few nights at the Vermont home of “Tenderfoot,” a 72-year-old completing her third thru-hike. “The trail is a very interesting microcosm of life. Can’t imagine going home with a perfect stranger somewhere else,” Gerry mused afterward, “but the chemistry felt right.”
At the end of June, just after the hiking partners crossed into New Hampshire, a family emergency forced Jane to return home. Gerry reworked her plans and kept going through the White Mountains. Sections of the trails were too remote for George to meet her, so instead she spent nights in huts or lean-tos maintained by the Appalachian Mountain Club. The weather was miserable. On a day she had planned to summit seven peaks, rain and fog forced her to hunker down inside.
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She practiced her French with a family from Canada, and she befriended other thru-hikers. Everybody remembered her. Inchworm talked to everyone. Even the reticent ended up telling her their life stories.
By mid-July, Gerry had completed more than 900 miles of the trail, including some of the most difficult and dangerous sections. Katahdin was just over 200 miles away. She was planning to get extra gear for that stretch — in particular, Maine’s notorious 100 Mile Wilderness — but first she had to trek through a 22-mile section of mountainous terrain, and she had brought a tent in case she needed it. Her plan was to spend the night of July 21, a Sunday, at the Poplar Ridge Lean-to. Then she’d hike about 9 miles to the one on Spaulding Mountain. Tuesday, after another 13 miles, she’d pop out onto Route 27, where George would be waiting.
Early Monday morning, at the Poplar Ridge Lean-to, longtime AT hiker Dottie Rust snapped a photo of Gerry wearing a red fleece. It’ll make the perfect Christmas card, Rust told her. “I was just so impressed with her,” Rust says today. “She had a plan. She really had her wits about her. And then there was that big smile.”
Before saying goodbye, Inchworm sent a quick text to George that she was about to leave the shelter, then turned off her phone and tucked it into her pack. It was just past 7 a.m.
from the largay family As soon as Gerry’s grandson could walk, she took him out hiking.
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OF ALL THE LAWS IN BACKPACKING, “Leave no trace” is the most binding. Take your trash with you. Purists avoid pitching a tent. Don’t light a fire, because it leaves too much of a scar. But “Leave no trace” can get complicated when taking care of bodily functions. The Appalachian Trail Conservancy, which oversees the AT, offers two options on the matter: Dig a hole at least 200 feet off the trail and bury your feces and toilet paper, or be prepared to pack the toilet paper out in a sealed plastic bag. Most hikers choose option one.
When Jane and Gerry were hiking together, they’d sometimes take turns relieving themselves. One person would stand guard while the other walked far off the trail to find an out-of-sight tree to duck behind. You don’t want to be seen, especially if you’re a woman. So you tend to go farther away.
The morning of July 22, Largay did what she was supposed to do: She stepped off the trail at least 80 paces. It was the first of a number of tiny decisions that each made perfect sense in isolation. But the sum of them would result in catastrophe.
Largay had walked onto land owned by the state of Maine that had been logged 12 years prior. Today, foresters often truck out a lot of the discarded trees and brush, but back then they didn’t. In the decade since, the area had grown into an unusually thick tangle.
Gerry stood up in the dense underbrush and donned her pack. She looked around. She took a few steps in what she believed was the direction back to the trail. It didn’t feel quite right. Around 11 a.m., she pulled out her phone and typed a quick text to George: “In somm trouble. Got off trail to go to br. Now lost. Can u call AMC to c if a trail maintainer can help me. Somewhere north of woods road. Xox.” She pressed send. She waited. The text came back: “Message receipt failed.” She tried again. No signal. So she decided to climb higher looking for one.
Walking was a slog, especially with all those downed trees. She passed a stream. She went up a couple of ridges. Late that Monday afternoon, she pitched her tent. It was a crummy site, but the best she could hope for that day.
Tuesday, it poured. At 4:18 in the afternoon, she tried texting George again. “Lost since yesterday. Off trail 3 or 4 miles. Call police for what to do pls. Xox.” No reception.
GEORGE WAITED FOR GERRY in the trailhead parking area off Route 27 all day Tuesday. She didn’t arrive. At first, he wasn’t alarmed, thinking the downpour had delayed her. He periodically checked his phone for any messages. That night, he slept in his SUV in the parking area.
On Wednesday, George was worried enough to flag down a police cruiser. The officer called the Warden Service. In rained-out conditions, it’s pretty common for hikers to show up a couple of days late. But just in case Inchworm didn’t, the wardens began to strategize. They briefed a volunteer search-and-rescue organization that planned to cover Gerry’s intended route from Poplar Ridge to the trailhead parking area. They called up a pilot, who was en route within hours. Meanwhile, Border Patrol began putting up signs notifying people about a missing hiker. An alert went out on social media. Local news outlets picked up the story.
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THE SUN FINALLY CAME OUT Wednesday afternoon. Gerry hiked back to the stream she had passed the day before — she knew she’d need a source of clean water. She moved her tent, choosing a spot on the knoll with the thinnest canopy so she would be visible from above. At her new campsite, she broke branches and arranged them around a hummock to build a dry platform for her tent and hung up her gear to dry. She cut up pieces of her silver Mylar emergency blanket and hung them in places where the sun came through the trees. She figured the reflection might help a pilot see her campsite. Gerry considered how best to ration her food — she’d only carried enough for the three days. For a tiny dinner that evening, she ate just a few almonds and Fritos along with a prune or two.
And then she began to say the full rosary.
O God come to my aid;
O Lord, make haste to help me.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be,
World without end. Amen.
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KEVIN ADAM, A 23-YEAR VETERAN of the Warden Service, likens search and rescue work to assembling mixed-up jigsaw puzzles. You have a pile of pieces. Some of them fit. Most of them don’t. When you’re lucky, you get just the right pieces and put them in just the right order. You find your missing person. But that’s hard to do on the Appalachian Trail: Hikers are constantly moving and adopting trail names that they change along the way. They lose track of days and miles. They can be lousy witnesses. Searchers in less remote places can sometimes use cellphone towers to help find missing people, but there weren’t enough towers here to help triangulate Gerry’s location.
By Saturday, four days into the search, owners of hostels in the area were calling every hiker on their registries. Dottie Rust returned to her home in Maryland that evening to catch one such call. Had she seen Inchworm? Rust called the authorities and told them about the night she’d spent with Gerry at the Poplar Ridge Lean-to. Inchworm seemed fit and alert. She offered to send the photo she snapped Monday morning of Gerry in her red fleece. It was the first definitive proof Inchworm had made it to Poplar. The wardens now had what they call a Place Last Seen. But where had Gerry gone from there?
Adam and his mobile command center set up at the Sugarloaf ski resort. Potential clues continued piling up from more than 100 trained searchers. One found a drop of blood on a rock near the trail, another a piece of gauze containing a single human hair. Neither would prove to be Gerry’s. Nor were the cotton fibers or water bottles or wrappers. Over time, psychics contacted Adam: Gerry was in a cave. Or maybe by a tower. She was attacked by a bear. Abducted by Bigfoot.
The owner of a nearby inn reached out: A hiker had called and wanted to leave a message. Something about having spent the night at the Spaulding Lean-to. The message, Adam and his team would much later realize, must have gotten garbled: I spent the night at the Spaulding Lean-to with Inchworm, the missing hiker. Tell her husband she’s going to be late.
from the largay family Gerry Largay with her son (far left) and daughter (middle), their spouses, and her husband, George (far right).
George and Gerry’s grown children arrived within days of their mother going missing, followed by relatives and friends of the family. George spoke with any hikers they could find. The family looked at every item brought in from the trail. None of it could be linked to Gerry.
More puzzle pieces came in. Wardens found three young hikers who remembered seeing an older woman with glasses just a few miles from the Spaulding Mountain Lean-to, which would have put her farther along the trail than searchers had originally believed. It definitely could have been Inchworm. Did they have a conversation with her? No, the boys said, she was really quiet.
If a puzzle piece will forever haunt Adam, it’s that one. He knew Largay was famous for her gregariousness. “I’m thinking, that’s not Gerry. But I’m like, but maybe she’s having a hard hike that day, maybe she’s not feeling so good,” he says. “I tried to force it to fit.”
Adam called together his team and pointed to a map that had been divided into a grid. “OK,” he said, “let’s look at the stats. Let’s look at the terrain. Where do you think she is?” He didn’t want one person making decisions about how resources should be allocated. They all agreed: If Gerry had made it as far as Spaulding Mountain, as the information from both the phone call and the boys had suggested, she must be somewhere between there and Sugarloaf.
As smaller groups continued to run searches around the Place Last Seen, the wardens shifted the focus of their efforts about 10 miles north, to the area around Mount Abraham and Spaulding. Adam felt optimistic. But as the days progressed, his confidence waned. No matter how hard they searched, there was no evidence Gerry was in the area, let alone alive.
“Gerry had a bunch of supplies. She had a tent. She had some food for a couple of days. We knew she had fire-starting material,” Adam says. “So we’re [searching] with helicopters, planes, the Civil Air Patrol. We had the Department of Forestry there. We’re blowing whistles, we’re using ATVs, and we’re not getting any stimulus back on anything, and we’re not seeing any smoke from any fire.”
He called in off-duty wardens and authorized more overtime budget. K9 teams went out, though the underbrush was so thick the dogs’ handlers sometimes had to carry them. Some searchers rode horses. Rescue teams arrived from throughout the state. The wardens’ planes kept flying.
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GERRY HEARD THE AIRCRAFT. She waved her red fleece. She prayed the luminous mysteries of the rosary for protection of the pilots. On July 28, six days after stepping off the trail, she ate her last remaining food. She heard a search plane for about an hour the next day. This one sounded farther away. She considered moving her camp to another site, yet decided it would be just as hopeless.
As the days wore on, Gerry practiced walking points with her compass. She read and reread a paperback novel she’d brought along. She took strands of dental floss and tried to practice sewing intricate French knots. She wrote in her journal.
On the morning of July 30, Gerry heard a plane searching the area again, then a helicopter that afternoon. She waved her shirt as frantically as she could. No one could see her.
Still, Gerry could feel George was thinking about her. As long as he was searching for her, she would bear this for as long as she could.
ON THE FIRST OF AUGUST, wardens launched their plane to check a tip near Sugarloaf. They made one more big ground search a few days after that. Thirty officers. All the private teams Kevin Adam could muster. They whistled. They called Gerry’s name. They heard nothing. They found nothing.
In the 12 days they’d been searching, they had gathered only one solid clue: the photo Dottie Rust took the day Largay went missing.
On August 6, Adam packed up the mobile command center and made the long drive back to regional headquarters in Greenville. The investigation would continue, but the wardens wouldn’t fly over the area again until November, after leaves had fallen.
ON AUGUST 6, GERRY POWERED ON HER PHONE and tried texting again. Still no service. She’d been lost for two weeks and had been out of food for nine days. She lit a fire near two trees to signal that she was alive, scorching their trunks. She’d kept a fire going for two hours the day before. Today, she tried to make a smokier one. No one came. She put the fire out.
She tore a page from her journal. “When you find my body,” she wrote, “please call my husband George... and my daughter Kerry. It will be the greatest kindness for them to know that I am dead and where you found me — no matter how many years from now. Please find it in your heart to mail the contents of this bag to one of them.”
The next morning, she walked down to the stream and washed out her favorite shirt. It had been a gift from George when they had visited Gettysburg — pink. A big hit. She was wearing it as her nightshirt at the campsite. It made her think of him.
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ON AUGUST 8, KEVIN ADAM TRACKED DOWN a witness who would change the focus of the search again: a hiker who went by the trail name “Ivanich.” She had stayed at the Poplar Ridge Lean-to the same night as Gerry and left after her the next morning. Since she was a faster hiker, she should have passed Gerry before noon that day. She didn’t. That finally confirmed Gerry never made it to the Spaulding shelter. The garbled phone message had wrong information. The boys had confused Ivanich, a quiet woman, for Inchworm: glasses, sandy-blond hair. More innocent mistakes.
Sixteen days had passed since Gerry was last seen, but with confirmation about the mistaken identity, the wardens shifted the search back toward Poplar Ridge. They continued making calls, interviewing potential witnesses.
A year would go by, and then another. The wardens kept at it. When someone phoned to say they saw the spitting image of Gerry serving ice cream in New Hampshire, they made sure it wasn’t her. Ditto for a woman getting her nails done in Minneapolis. In July 2014, Adam thought he had a lead when a man in Chicago activated her phone account, but it turned out just to be a case of identity fraud.
In October 2015, Adam heard about the forester’s discovery on the Navy property. After hiking out of the Maine woods with Gerry’s remains on October 15, Adam phoned the Largay family. It was George’s 72d birthday.
Gerry’s body had been found about 2,300 feet as the crow flies from a well-worn path known as Railroad Road, which intersects the Appalachian Trail and eventually becomes a public road. That, says Gerry’s daughter, Kerry, was one of the hardest things for her to accept: that her mom didn’t know how close she was to help.
Gerry had written in her journal every day until August 10. A final entry is dated August 18, leading some to speculate she survived close to a month, but both Adam and the Largay family think that last date is probably incorrect.
A Maine State Police photograph of Largay’s final campsite and collapsed tent, discovered by a forester in October 2015.
Geraldine Largay survived at least 19 days in the Maine wilderness. George and his kids had always held out hope that, through some miracle, she still might be alive. If it had to be true that she was really gone, they at least wished for a quick death. “It was exactly the opposite,” George says. “That was gut-wrenching. I knew she was one tough cookie; I just didn’t realize how tough she was.”
About 10 days after the call from Adam, the Largay family traveled to Maine to collect Gerry’s remains. They also made the difficult hike into her campsite, carrying a small cross her son-in-law had the idea to erect where her tent had been. It had messages from all of her grandchildren. Someday, Kerry says, she’ll take them there herself, so they can see just how strong their grandmother really was.
EVEN IN HER FINAL DAYS, Gerry Largay worried about what might hurt or inconvenience her family. At her campsite, she had chopped up her credit card and buried the pieces so that no one could exploit it. She kept her driver’s license so that it would be easy to identify her. She neatly stacked her pots and pans and sealed the journal she’d been keeping in a waterproof bag, along with the instructions, George please read. XOXO. She folded her glasses and placed them into a storage pocket on her tent. Then she tucked herself into her sleeping bag for the last time.
In her journal, Gerry wrote that she wanted her family to know she was sorry — that no hike was more important than them. She wrote each of them a long letter, putting into words her gratitude for all they had shared and offering thoughts about how they could move forward.
“They are more than love letters,” George explains. “They are life letters.”
My deepest love to you, Gerry wrote in one of the last of them. And to all my friends. I pray to see you all in heaven.
RELATED COVERAGE:
■ How could a woman just vanish?
■ Hiker survived for weeks after disappearing on the Appalachian Trail
■ Author’s warning: Don’t underestimate the White Mountains
Kathryn Miles, a writer based in Portland, Maine, is the author of “ Superstorm: Nine Days Inside Hurricane Sandy ” and other books. She chronicled the search for Gerry Largay in a December 2014 Globe Magazine story, now at bostonglobe.com/magazine. Send comments to magazine@globe.comPakistan is home to many dozens of languages spoken as first languages. Five languages have more than 10 million speakers each in Pakistan – Punjabi, Pashto, Sindhi, Saraiki and Urdu. Almost all of Pakistan's languages belong to the Indo-Iranian group of the Indo-European language family.
Pakistan's national language is Urdu, which, along with English, is also the official language.
The country also has several regional languages, including Punjabi, Saraiki, Pashto, Sindhi, Balochi, Kashmiri, Hindko, Brahui, Shina, Balti, Khowar, Dhatki, Haryanvi, Marwari, Wakhi and Burushaski. Four of these are provincial languages – Punjabi, Pashto, Sindhi, and Balochi.
The number of individual languages listed for Pakistan is 74. All are living languages. Of these, 66 are indigenous and 8 are non-indigenous. Furthermore, 7 are 'institutional', 17 are 'developing', 39 are 'vigorous', 9 are 'in trouble', and 2 are 'dying'.[citation needed]
History
Statistics
Following are the major languages spoken in Pakistan, by number of people that speak them as their first language.[citation needed]
Numbers of speakers of larger languages Language 2008 estimate 1998 census Areas of Predominance 1 Punjabi 76,367,360 44.17% 58,433,431 44.15% Punjab 2 Pashto 26,692,890 15.44% 20,408,621 15.42% Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa 3 Sindhi 24,410,910 14.12% 18,661,571 14.10% Rural Sindh 4 Saraiki 18,019,610 10.42% 13,936,594 10.53% Punjab 5 Urdu 13,120,540 7.59% 10,019,576 7.57% Urban Sindh and urban Pakistan 6 Balochi 6,204,540 3.59% 4,724,871 3.57% Balochistan
Saraiki was included with Punjabi in 1951 and 1961 census
Being the national language, Urdu is spoken and understood by the majority of Pakistanis and is being adopted increasingly as a first language by urbanized Pakistanis.
National language
An example of the Nastaʿlīq script used for writing Urdu
Urdu (اردو) is the national language (قومی زبان), lingua franca and one of two official languages of Pakistan (the other currently being English). Although only about 8% of Pakistanis speak it as their first language, it is widely spoken and understood as a second language by the vast majority of Pakistanis and is being adopted increasingly as a first language by urbanized Pakistanis. It was introduced as the lingua franca upon the capitulation and annexation of Sindh (1843) and Punjab (1849) with the subsequent ban on the use of Persian. According to the linguistic historian Tariq Rahman, however, the oldest name of what is now called Urdu is Hindustani or Hindvi and it existed in some form at least from the 14th century if not earlier (Rahman 2011). It was probably the Indo-Aryan language of the area around Delhi that absorbed words of Persian, Arabic, and Chagatai (a Turkic language)—in a process like the one that created modern English. This language, according to Rahman, is the ancestor of both modern Hindi and Urdu. These became two distinct varieties when Urdu was first Persianized in the 18th century and then Hindi was Sanskritized from 1802 onwards.
The name Urdu is a short form of 'Zuban-e-Urdu-e-Mualla' i.e. language of the exalted city. In India the term Urdu, although it means'military camp' in most Turkic languages, was used for the capital city of the king. In other words, the language of the king's capital was a Persianized form of the language known only by its previous and currently less common name Hindustani. This was shortened to 'Urdu' and this term was used for the first time in written records by the poet Mushafi in 1780 (Rahman 2011: 49). It is widely used, both formally and informally, for personal letters as well as public literature, in the literary sphere and in the popular media. It is a required subject of study in all primary and secondary schools. It is the first language of most Muhajirs (Muslim refugees who fled from different parts of India after independence of Pakistan in 1947), who form nearly 8% of Pakistan's population, and is an acquired second language for the rest. As Pakistan's national language, Urdu has been promoted to promote national unity. It is written with a modified form of the Perso-Arabic alphabet—usually in Nastaliq script.
Provincial languages
Punjabi
Punjabi (پنجابی) is spoken as a first language by more than 44% of Pakistanis, mostly in Punjab. Speakers of Saraiki and Hindko have previously been included in the Punjabi totals. The standard Punjabi variety is from the Lahore, Sialkot, Gujranwala and Sheikhupura districts and it is written in the Shahmukhi script with the Urdu alphabet.
Pashto
Pashto (پښتو) is spoken as a first language by more than 15.42% (c. 29 million) of Pakistanis, mainly in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and in northern Balochistan as well as in ethnic Pashtun communities in the cities of Karachi, Islamabad, Rawalpindi and Lahore. Karachi is one of the most Pashto speaking cities in the world.[2] Pashto is also widely spoken in neighboring Afghanistan where it has official language status.
Pashto has rich written literary traditions as well as an oral tradition. There are three major dialect patterns within which the various individual dialects may be classified; these are Pakhto, which is the Northern (Peshawar) variety, and the softer Pashto spoken in the southern areas. Khushal Khan Khattak (1613–1689) and Rahman Baba (1633–1708) were famous poets in the Pashto language. In the last part of 20th century, Pakhto or Pashto has produced some great poets like Ghani Khan, Khatir Afridi and Amir Hamza Shinwari. They are not included in the overall percentage.
Sindhi
The Sindhi language (سنڌي) is spoken as a first language by at most 14.5% of Pakistanis, mostly in Sindh province, parts of Balochistan, Southern Punjab and Balochistan. It has a rich literature and is taught in schools. It is an Indo-Aryan (Indo-European) language, derived from Sanskrit, and influenced by Arabic languages. The Arabs ruled Sindh province for more than 150 years after Muhammad bin Qasim conquered it in 712 AD, remaining there for three years to set up Arab rule. Consequently, the social fabric of Sindh contains elements of Arabic society. Sindhi is spoken by over 53.4 million people in Pakistan and some 5.8 million in India as well as some 2.6 million in other parts of the world. It is the official language of Sindh province and is one of the scheduled languages officially recognized by the federal government in India. It is widely spoken in the Lasbela District of Balochistan (where the Lasi tribe speaks a dialect of Sindhi), many areas of the Naseerabad, Rahim Yar Khan and Dera Ghazi Khan districts in Sindh and Jafarabad districts of Balochistan, and by the Sindhi diaspora abroad. Sindhi language has six major dialects: Sireli, Vicholi, Lari, Thari, Lasi and Kachhi. It is written in the Arabic script with several additional letters to accommodate special sounds. The largest Sindhi-speaking cities are Karachi, Hyderabad, Sukkur, Shikarpur, Dadu, Jacobabad, Larkana and Nawabshah. Sindhi literature is also spiritual in nature. Shah Abdul Latif Bhita'i (1689–1752) is one of its greatest poets; he wrote the famous poetic compendium Shah Jo Risalo which includes the folk stories "Sassi Punnun" and "Umar Marvi".
Balochi
Balochi (بلوچی) is spoken as a first language by about 4% of Pakistanis, mostly in Balochistan province. Rakshani is the major dialect group in terms of numbers. Sarhaddi is a sub-dialect of Rakshani. Other sub-dialects are Kalati (Qalati), Chagai-Kharani and Panjguri. Eastern Hill Balochi or Northern Balochi is very different from the rest. The name Balochi or Baluchi is not found before the 10th Century. It is one of the 9 distinguished languages of Pakistan. Since Balochi is a very poetic and rich language and has a certain degree of affinity to Urdu, Balochi poets tend to be very good poets in Urdu as well and Ata Shaad, Gul Khan Nasir and Noon Meem Danish are excellent examples of this.
Sub-provincial regional languages
Saraiki
Saraiki (Sarā'īkī, also spelt Siraiki, or less often Seraiki) is an Indo-Aryan language of the Lahnda group, spoken in the south-western half of the province of Punjab. Saraiki is to a high degree mutually intelligible with Standard Punjabi and shares with it a large portion of its vocabulary and morphology. At the same time in its phonology it is radically different (particularly in the lack of tones, the preservation of the voiced aspirates and the development of implosive consonants), and has important grammatical features in common with the Sindhi language spoken to the south. Saraiki is the first language of about 20 million people in Pakistan, its territory ranges across southern Punjab, parts of southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and some border regions of northern Sindh and eastern Balochistan.
Brahui
Brahui (براھوی) is a Dravidian language of central and east-central Balochistan. The language has been influenced by neighboring Balochi and to a lesser extent by Sindhi and Pashto. 1 |
’ll be able to benefit from. It’s a big asset since I’ll be seeing a lot of these tracks for the first time this year.”
Who do you see as your biggest competitor this season?
“There are a lot of guys in this championship that are great drivers—including my teammate! It’s too hard to name just one.”
You faced Sebastien Loeb in the 2012 X Games, what are your memories of this race and are you looking forward to going head-to-head again with him this season?
“That was a wild race for me, I managed to pull of a second place finish with only three tires! Seb is probably the best driver in the world, so to be able to continue to race against him this year is going to be a lot of fun for me. I think all of us are going to enjoy racing against him.”
With six GRC victories and a further nine GRC podiums, including narrowly missing out on the title in 2014 (and a third place in 2013), Block comes to World Rallycross with a great deal of potential, a hard charging driver who is prepared to put it all on the line which could make for fireworks on track this year. If his previous two WRX outings in 2014 are anything to go by, he will hit the ground running and will be one to watch this season…
The 2016 FIA World Rallycross Championship presented by Monster Energy gets under way in four days time as the series heads to Portugal, theCheckeredFlag.co.uk will be bringing you full coverage of the season with exclusive interviews and behind the scenes news.The Greek radical left leader, Alexis Tsipras, is making his international debut, holding talks with European leftists and government officials in Paris before moving on to Berlin. He spoke at length before his departure to Helena Smith, our correspondent in Athens.
This is the interview in full.
Helena Smith: The European parliament president, Martin Schulz, emerged from talks with you here in Greece saying you are not as dangerous as you might seem, Mr Tsipras. Is this true?
Alexis Tsipras: We had a substantive and a rather constructive talk, and I think the first thing that is necessary is to start a real dialogue. Because, you know, if you don't talk, you can't find a solution.
HS: And this hasn't happened to date?
AT: So far, I believe there hasn't been any real discussion, just as there was no political negotiation in Europe before the memorandum [of bailout conditions] on the terms and ways of confronting Greece's fiscal problem. The memorandum was a political decision that was taken without consulting the Greek people, and it has proved catastrophic. The decision to place the country under [the supervision of] the IMF was taken by Mr Papandreou [the former prime minister] without any prior consultation and in full absence of any real political attempt to make any demands of the European Union.
And we've got to the point where it has been proved disastrous. After two packages of financial support that were accompanied by very harsh measures, recession remains at monumental levels, unemployment has soared, social cohesion has collapsed, and Greece is in danger of a humanitarian crisis. And on top of this, we're not seeing results. Neither is the debt being reduced effectively, nor is the deficit; and nor is recession subsiding. Consequently, we can't insist on a programme that has proved catastrophic and ineffective.
HS: You have spoken of the memorandum as a path that will lead to hell. How far off is this hell?
AT: We have never been in such a bad place. After two and a half years of catastrophe, the Greek people are on their knees; the social state has crumbled; one in two youngsters is out of work; there are people leaving en masse; the climate psychologically is one of pessimism, depression, mass suicides. We cannot accept that this is the future of a European country. And precisely because we recognise the problem is European, and it will spread to the rest of Europe, we are sounding the alarm bell and are appealing to the people of Europe to support us in an effort to stop this descent into what can only be called social hell.
HS: I was told by one of your assistants that you were born on the same day as Hugo Chávez. Do you have a good relationship with him?
AT: That is true, but he must have been born a few years before me. I have never met him but I have communicated with him because as a municipal councillor of Athens in the past. I travelled to Venezuela as part of a Greek monitoring mission overseeing elections there before I became president of the Left coalition [Syriza's main party] in 2008. And since then I have met with its foreign minister, and we have a good relationship with the Venezuelan ambassador.
HS: Is Chávez one of your heroes?
AT: I don't believe there are heroes or saviours in politics. I don't feel like a saviour: salvation can only be found by people en masse when they understand they have power in their hands. I totally disagree with the notion of a nation looking for heroes and saviours, especially a nation that needs a saviour. Whenever I am in contact with people who tell me of their woes and say "Save us", I always say that we are the only people who can save ourselves, altogether, when we realise the power that we have in our hands. It is a mistake to put salvation in the hands of individuals.
Right now, I represent a political party that works collectively, and which represents the struggle and anguish of a great part of the Greek people. Someone else could easily represent it. Since I am in this position, I will try to do my best but I know that my power is not dependent on my own capabilities or strengths but on the trust and strength that people will give us through their vote.
HS: Are you worried? In the event of Syriza emerging as the first party and you are put in the position of governing the country, would you be afraid?
AT: I would be afraid if this didn't happen and Greece continued on a path of catastrophe and unhappiness where our children, and my own children, live in a country that has been destroyed, one in which they basically can't live and are forced to move abroad. That is my worry. All these years, we allowed the people who governed us to destroy this country. And we have to stop them.
HS: You were born on 28 July 1974. You are from a generation that never experienced dictatorship, but democracy. Was the country you were born in the one you, and your parents, hoped for?
AT: I was born four days after the return of democracy. It was a definitive moment for Greek society, a moment of progress when it threw off a seven-year yoke [with the collapse of military rule]. I grew up at a time when there were huge hopes in Greek democracy and the political system.
I was very young but I do remember the period of "allagi" [change] after 1980, when Pasok took power. My parents at that time voted Pasok; a lot of people who came from the left did in 1981. But I also remember the expectations that had been created and the contribution of the left and particularly Harilaos Florakis [the late leader of the long outlawed KKE communist party] and Leonidas Kyrkos [the late leader of the communist party of the Interior] to the cultural and political renaissance that was happening in Greece.
But things changed in the 80s and very quickly visions of democracy and social equality were replaced by scandal, vested interests, a miserable public sector, [and] a state that lacked meritocracy, where to find work you had to go around MPs offices in the hope that they would find you a job. It was a system that did not give opportunities to young people.
HS: Did you feel this personally?
AT: I lived, and live, in this country, and in that sense of course I felt all of these things. But I am lucky that I managed to study at a very important university [Athens's Polytechnic] and to do postgraduate studies there. And I believe, despite the difficulties in Greek political and social life, that there are certain good things, such as our universities. But in recent years, the political system led us to an impasse.
New Democracy and Pasok, the two parties that were in charge of the fate of the country all these years, and took it into the eurozone, worked on the basis of easy profit on the stock exchange, easy loans and the false consumer needs of the Greek people. They didn't leave anything behind, any infastructure, when for over a decade, between 1996 and 2008, Greece had a record of positive growth – rates that before the [2004] Athens Olympic Games were at 7% or 8%. Where did it go? It went into the pockets of certain corrupt and wealthy [individuals] and banks, to those who were paid kickbacks for defence procurements and constructions for the Olympic Games. It didn't go into building a better social state. We didn't build better schools or better hospitals, and now Greek people are in a much worse place to confront the crisis than, say, the French, the Spanish and other Europeans.
HS: Are Greeks one step before social explosion?
AT: Greek people have shown great maturity, huge maturity. Given all the terrible things they have suffered, I am amazed there has not been a social explosion. With dignity Greek people have protested, filling the streets and filling the squares. With dignity they have been teargassed in Syntagma and other squares around the country. With dignity they have gone and voted, and with great dignity they are have resisted all this scaremongering [about Greece exiting the eurozone] and have not gone to banks to withdraw their small deposits, unlike big-time businessmen and the lobbies of ship-owners and industrialists here, who have been, and are, involved in a dirty game of profiteering.
HS: Are you against the euro or are you against the policies being conducted in the name of the euro?
AT: Of course we are not against the euro or the idea of a unified Europe or monetary union. We believe that resolution of the problem is not found in friction or in the struggle for competitiveness between different nations. We have to understand that when we have a common currency we owe it to every member state that it has the right of last lender. If California has a huge problem with its debts, Congress and the Fed aren't going to decide to expel California from the dollar or the US. Instead, the Fed assumes the cost of it being able to borrow cheaply until it the state can borrow again on markets. If we want a strong Europe and a united Europe we've got to show our teeth to the markets. When you create an EFSF that resembles a yacht when it is trying to pass off as a cruise ship, markets are not going to be appeased.
HS: Polls show Syriza is very likely to emerge with the greatest number of votes in the coming election. Have you thought about what you might do in government?
AT: I have thought about every [scenario], and it will of course be unprecedented in contemporary Greek politics for a party, in the space of a month, to go from less than 5% as the opposition to being in government. But what we have been experiencing in Greece these past two years is also unprecedented. The absurd thing would be if the Greek people didn't react and allowed destiny to take its course. No one has the right to reduce a proud people to such a state of wretchedness and indignity. What is happening in Greece with the memorandum is assisted suicide.
You ask if I am afraid? I would be afraid if we continued on this path, a path to social hell. Defeat is the battle that isn't waged, and when someone fights there is the big chance of winning; and we are fighting this to win. Lost battles are battles that are not fought.
HS: Is your enemy Germany?
AT: No, no, not at all. The war that we are experiencing is not between nations and peoples. On the one side, there are workers and a majority of people, and on the other are global capitalists, bankers, profiteers on stock exchanges, the big funds. It's a war between peoples and capitalism, and Greece is on the frontline of that war. And, as in each war, what happens on the frontline defines the battle. It will be decisive for the war elsewhere. Greece has become a model for the rest of Europe because it was chosen as the experiment for the application of neoliberal shock [policies], and Greek people were the guinea pigs. If the experiment continues, it will be considered successful, and the policies will be applied in other countries. That is why it is so important to stop the experiment. It will not just be a victory for Greece but for all of Europe.
HS: But isn't this very risky? Greece is receiving loans on which its economic survival depends.
AT: But who is surviving? Tell me. Greeks are not. Banks are surviving, but Greeks are not surviving. In reality, we have the salvation of Greece with the destruction of the people of Greece. What, ultimately, is Greece if it is not the people who live in this country? It's not the mountains and the plains. We can't say we're saving a country when its people are being destroyed. The loans are going straight to interest payment and banks. We don't want to blackmail: we want to persuade our European partners that the way that has been chosen to confront Greece has been totally counterproductive. It is like throwing money at a bottomless pit.
They gave the first assistance package in 2010, the second in 2012, and in six months we will be forced to discuss a third package, and after that a fourth. They have to be aware that what they are doing is not in the interests of their own people. European taxpayers should know that if they are giving money to Greece, it should have an effect … it should go towards investments and underwriting growth so that the Greek debt problem can be confronted. Because with this recipe, we are not confronting the debt problem, the real problem.
HS: You are visiting Paris and Berlin as of Monday. Who will you be seeing?
AT: Of course, I won't be seeing Merkel. We will have meetings with the French and German left and social democrats and various representatives from the governing parties in France and Germany.
HS: What message do you want to pass on to representatives of the governments in Germany and France?
AT: That they understand the historic responsibility that they are under and don't press ahead with a crime against the Greek people, a crime that is also a huge danger for the people of the rest of Europe. Mrs Merkel has a huge historical responsibility, and she should be conscious that as leader of Europe she cannot obstinately insist on a choice that is leading Europe into danger. I also want to send the message that they have to respect democracy, which is the basis of European law. Greece gave democracy to the rest of the world. With the change of political balances here after the [6 May] vote against the memorandum, we are seeing democracy again. Europe has to understand that when a people makes a democratic decision, it has to be respected. We are at the same crossroads as we were in the 1930s, after 1929. In the US, we had the policy of Roosevelt and the New Deal, a completely different development. In Europe, we had the rise of National Socialism because of the insistence on harsh fiscal policies, and the result was the second world war.
HS: Does Europe need a Roosevelt?
AT: Europe needs a New Deal and a Marshall Plan and expansionary monetary policies like those being followed by Obama. It doesn't need disastrous financial policies
HS: If you are to negotiate with Europe, will you start on the basis that you no longer accept the memorandum [bailout conditions]?
AT: It's not that we, Syriza, don't want it: the Greek people don't want it. If you have a sick patient, and you see that the medicine you are giving him makes him worse, then the solution is not to continue the medicine but to change the medicine. It's only logical.
HS: But then what happens after you have rejected the memorandum and creditors say: "OK, we are not going to give you the next loan"?
AT: Then they will be acting unilaterally because we have no desire to make any unilateral move. We want to convince them, to come to some mutual understanding. If they make a unilateral move, one that is the equivalent of blackmailing us, then we will be forced to react.
HS: Perhaps they will consider rejection of the memorandum, which Greece signed up to, a unilateral move.
AT: This memorandum is a law of the Greek state, and the state has the right to change its laws when balances change in the parliament … a different plan for fiscal adjustment can be voted in the parliament. The memorandum was a political choice, and those who made that political choice [New Democracy and Pasok] no longer have the majority. To vote a different law in parliament is not a unilateral move. A unilateral move would be to renounce commitments we have signed up to via European treaties and conventions, or if we stopped paying our creditors.
HS: But how will you pay creditors if you don't have the money?
AT: Europeans have to understand that we don't have any intention of pushing ahead with a unilateral move. We will [only] be forced to act if they act unilaterally and make the first move. If they don't pay us, if they stop the financing [of loans], then we will not be able to pay creditors. What I am saying is very simple.
HS: Is Greece in a much stronger position that people think?
AT: Yes, it is. Keynes said it many years ago. It's not just the person who borrows but the person who lends who can find himself in a difficult position. If you owe £5,000 to the bank, its your problem; but if you owe £500,000, it's the bank's problem. This is a common problem: It's our problem; it's Merkel's problem; it's a European problem; it's a world problem. The euro is the second strongest currency in the world, and no one has the right to play games with it on the basis that it is they who are strong and have power.
HS: Some would say Syriza, and you personally, are playing with fire. What do you have to say to that?
AT: It is not us who are scaremongering. Pasok and New Democracy are scaremongering, and it is very dangerous for the economy. In order to survive politically, all of them are scaremongering with all this talk that we are leaving the eurozone. As a result, since the beginning of the crisis €75bn has been withdrawn from banks. It's criminal, what they are doing.
HS: Are fears overblown, then, that Greece could leave the eurozone?
AT: From what I know, there is no institutional possibility to eject a country from the eurozone, and they know this very well. Greece could leave the eurozone only if Greeks themselves choose to leave the eurozone. And given that our aim is not the exit of Greece from the eurozone but to remain there as an equal, Greek people have no reason to fear being kicked out. The only thing they have to fear is the continuation of policies of austerity.
HS: Do you agree on the need for structural reforms?
AT: Of course, absolutely. We always said there was a need for corrective reforms, and we have always pointed out that Greece's productive base and economic policy is dysfunctional. First of all, we have to combat tax evasion. It's not in our genes that we can't combat it when everywhere else in Europe it is successfully combated. The truth is, no one in this country has ever wanted to
combat it, and as a result the rich have got away with not paying taxes. Reforms are definitely needed. The political system never pushed ahead with them all these years because the two main parties, Pasok and New Democracy, were mired in corruption.
HS: What will your priorities be if you get into government?
AT: Our first priority will be to put a break on this downward spiral by stopping the measures and starting a real dialogue at a European level to find a common solution to the basic problem that should be discussed, which is the debt. It's not only Greece: Italy, Spain [and] France all have debt problems.
Our second priority will be to proceed with changes that will remedy the system such as changing the tax system to change the redistribution of wealth. I am not going to say, as [former PM] George Papandreou said, that "money exists": money does not exist. Without growth, we won't find money; and without necessary corrective reforms, we can't boost productivity.
HS: Syriza is an alliance of 12 different groups ranging from communists to socialists. What would you say you are?
AT: In this most neoliberal phase of capitalism, in the depths of this crisis, it's a bit oxymoronic to speak of labels. Syriza believes in social justice, democracy and equality in a society where there is no exploitation of man by man: the basic rights that were fought for from the French revolution and in Greece from the 1821 war of independence. We have a vision of socialism in the 21st century, and we don't believe in investing in wretchedness. A fair society can be created by taking positive steps. Which is why we believe this downward spiral has to stop.Why Is Chad On Trump's Travel Ban List?
Enlarge this image toggle caption Philippe Desmazes/AFP/Getty Images Philippe Desmazes/AFP/Getty Images
When the White House issued its amended travel ban over the weekend, it added three countries to the list: North Korea, Venezuela... and Chad.
That's angered the government of the Central African country and perplexed policy analysts and political observers outside the Trump administration.
"Chad is totally puzzled and baffled by President Trump's decision to slap this ban on Chadian nationals," NPR's Ofeibea Quist-Arcton tells Morning Edition. "Chad is not happy, because it feels that it has done its utmost in the fight against terrorism."
And the language issued by the White House in the president's executive order has done little to clarify the rationale. It praises Chad for being "an important and valuable counterterrorism partner" and says Washington "looks forward to expanding that cooperation."
Nonetheless, the executive order also states that "Chad does not adequately share public safety and terrorism-related information" and "several terrorist groups are active within Chad or in the surrounding region, including elements of Boko Haram, ISIS-West Africa, and al-Qa'ida in the Islamic Maghreb."
Libya is among the eight nations under restriction in Trump's order. But other neighboring countries such as Nigeria, the base of Boko Haram, aren't on the list. And Sudan — one of only three countries on the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism — had been on a previous list but was dropped in the latest version.
"Chad played a significant role in [fighting] Boko Haram from northeastern Nigeria. And pound for pound, the Chadian military is one of the toughest around, particularly in West Africa," John Campbell, the former U.S. ambassador to Nigeria during George W. Bush's administration, tells NPR's David Welna.
As NPR's Arnie Seipel has reported, "The new restrictions on Chad and North Korea are a broad ban on nationals from those countries entering the States. For Venezuela, restrictions apply to government officials and their immediate family. These changes are set to take effect on Oct. 18."
Chad has issued a statement asking Washington to reconsider, saying the decision to place it on the list "seriously undermines the image of Chad and the good relations between the two countries."
"The Chadian Government expresses its incomprehension in the face of the official reasons behind this decision," the statement added.
Enlarge this image toggle caption Jerome Delay/AP Jerome Delay/AP
As Ofeibea points out, as recently as March, Chad and the U.S. participated together with other African countries in Flintlock 2017, the latest iteration of an annual joint military exercise aimed at strengthening ties and counterterrorism efforts. "I was there. I met [U.S. Ambassador Geeta Pasi], who talked enthusiastically about relations with Chad," Ofeibea says.
"It's bewildering," Reed Brody, a human rights lawyer who has worked in Chad, tells The Atlantic. "I've been trying to explain to Chadians that there's no reason."
There have been questions as to whether Chad's inclusion might have something to do with oil. Chad had accused Exxon Mobil, which exports crude from Chad, of not meeting its tax obligations to the African state. The Chadian government sought a whopping $74 billion fine in addition to $819 million in overdue royalties.
Ofeibea says people are wondering whether the inclusion of Chad is meant as "an arm-twister." Adding to such speculation is the fact that U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was the chairman and CEO of Exxon Mobil before joining the Trump administration.
In any case, Exxon and Chad reached a settlement in June.Atlanta Fire Chief suspended for writing a book about his Christian beliefs
Atlanta Fire Chief Kelvin Cochran, who is also a Baptist deacon, recently published a book entitled Who Told You You Were Naked?
In this book he apparently talks about sexual promiscuity, homosexuality, and sex outside of marriage. Needless to say, because of his personal belief on homosexuality the LBGT community was outraged and because of this outrage he was suspended without pay for one month and ordered to undergo “sensitivity training.”
Here is what Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed had to say about this decision:
“I was surprised and disappointed to learn of this book on Friday,” Reed said on Monday afternoon. “I profoundly disagree with and am deeply disturbed by the sentiments expressed in the paperback regarding the LGBT community. I will not tolerate discrimination of any kind within my administration.”
This is not a topic that I delve into very often because as a social libertarian I do not think that it is any of my business what consenting adults do in their bedrooms, and this is not a topic I am particularly comfortable writing about, but this story bothers me and so I feel compelled to write about it.
It has not been reported anywhere that Kelvin Cochran has ever discriminated against anyone as it pertains to his position as Fire Chief, he simply wrote a book about what his personal beliefs are and the last time I checked this was a right which is protected under the Constitution. If it ever comes to light that he has discriminated against any person in his capacity as Fire Chief I would be right there with Kasim Reed and his suspension would be justified.
Kelvin Cochran did not single out gay people in this book, from what I have read he included them in a list of behaviors which Christians believe are immoral. This should not be news to Kasim Reed for as a Baptist deacon his position on these issues had to be known, the problem appears to be that he did not keep his opinions to himself.
“When you’re a city employee, and [your] thoughts, beliefs and opinions are different from the city’s, you have to check them at the door.”
Again, when it comes to doing his job there is no proof at this point that he has not “checked his opinions at the door” and that is not what led Kasim Reed to suspend Kelvin Cochran.
He was suspended for going public with his Christian beliefs and if you ask me those that would like to see him either suspended or fired simply for expressing his opinions are the ones who truly need to undergo “sensitivity training” for, once again, the liberal left has proven that when it come to “celebrating diversity” they have no problem in denying Christians their First Amendment rights. When it come to Christianity the liberal left has no interest in celebrating the diversity of ideals.
What Kelvin Cochran wrote was not politically correct and that is where he ran into trouble, but political correctness is nothing more than intellectual fascism. The opposition must be silenced at all costs…the revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.
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Hillary Clinton’s introduction of Alicia Machado at the end of the first presidential debate was a stroke of genius. Donald Trump, she noted, had referred to the 1996 Miss Universe winner as “Miss Piggy” and “Miss Housekeeping.” “Donald,” said Mrs. Clinton, “she has a name.”
Mr. Trump’s sexism was hardly breaking news, as Ms. Machado put it in an Instagram post: “This, of course, is not the first time the candidate insists on discrediting someone or insists on demoralizing women, minorities, and people of certain religions through his hateful campaign.”
But Mr. Trump’s fat-shaming of Ms. Machado seems to have provoked new outrage from both sides of the aisle.
Mr. Trump came in for criticism from Republicans like the lobbyist Vin Weber and the strategist Ana Navarro. Ms. Navarro said in a tweet, “I’ve struggled with weight issues all my life. And I agree. A man who shames and bullies a woman for her weight, isn’t even fit to be a man.”
In an NBC News/Survey Monkey post-debate poll, 69 percent of female voters said Mr. Trump does not have the personality and temperament to be president. Twenty-seven percent of Republican women agreed with that assessment, and 27 percent of all women surveyed said their opinion of the Republican candidate changed for the worse after the debate.
Mr. Trump dug himself a deeper hole the day after the debate, telling Fox News that Ms. Machado “was the worst we ever had, the worst, the absolute worst, she was impossible. She gained a massive amount of weight, and it was a real problem.” Mr. Trump was childishly steadfast that he was right to criticize Ms. Machado, because she had gained weight.
According to a national poll conducted by Public Policy Polling, Mr. Trump’s criticism of Ms. Machado for gaining weight offended even his supporters. Only 29 percent of Trump supporters said they stood by him on those comments, while 45 percent of his supporters said he was in the wrong. Sixty-five percent of all voters thought his fat-shaming attacks were inappropriate.
Before dawn on Friday morning, he was at it again. He speculated that Mrs. Clinton had helped Ms. Machado get citizenship so she could use her as a debate pawn. He also referred to the former Miss Universe as “disgusting (check out sex tape and past) Alicia M.” The “tape” in question was a risqué scene from a reality show, and there is no evidence that she has appeared in a sex tape.
By bringing up Ms. Machado on Monday night, Mrs. Clinton tactfully revealed two truths about her Republican opponent. First, he does not see worth in women he deems unattractive. And second, as Mrs. Clinton put it on Twitter, “When something gets under Donald’s thin skin, he lashes out and can’t let go. This is dangerous for a president.”If there is one place walking insult machine Donald Trump knows he can get a group of media personalities to slob his knob, it is the comfy confines of the Fox & Friends studio. The morning after he doxxed fellow Republican Presidential hopeful Lindsey Graham by publicly revealing his private cell phone number, The Donald appeared for his one billionth interview on the program. And his sycophants performed admirably as co-host Steve Doocy told Trump that he reminded him of a Navy SEAL due to the fact that he doesn’t back down from a fight.
Yep, you read that right. Silly grin maker Doocy compared a man who received five deferments during the Vietnam War to specially trained military personnel. The Dooce decided that the man who said he doesn’t like POWs because they were captured was just like the guys who killed Osama Bin Laden. OK then.
How did Doocy get to that point on Wednesday morning? It didn’t take long, Roughly one minute into their conversation, Trump pointed out that he was not sorry that he acted like a mean rich girl by exposing Graham’s digits, saying Graham is a loser who nobody likes and has no chance of getting the GOP nomination. Doocy, totally in awe of the awesomeness that is the tough-talking draft dodger Trump, then added the following:
“It started with John McCain last week, referred to a big crowd you had out in Phoenix as ‘crazies’. Then yesterday you’ve got Lindsey Graham, who you used that inappropriate word about you. You know what? As somebody said to me yesterday, Donald Trump is like a Navy SEAL; he never backs down when he’s in a fight.”
You know, you can’t make this kind of shit up, even if you tried. It is kind of amazing.
Trump’s whole campaign feels like long-form performance art. Most would have figured the dance would have ended by now, but he is totally committed to his piece, and there is no telling how long this will last. Every time it feels like we are getting to the climax of his performance, he puts his hand under his ass, shits in it, and throws it against the wall, keeping us all enthralled for at least another 24 hours.
Below is video of the entire interview, courtesy of Fox News. (The Navy SEAL comparison is at the 2:30 mark.)
Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com
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TumblrUrban Outfitters Retailer Urban Outfitters had its first ever annual analyst day today.
You can listen to the whole presentation here, but about halfway through CIO Calvin Hollinger makes some interesting comments about the future of point-of-sales systems in retail.
Specifically, the company is going all Apple devices for its stores. Sales people will have iPod touches, and cash registers are being phased out in favor of iPads on a swivel.
In fact, he says: "Two or three weeks ago, we placed our very last register order... once we make sure this ipad works.. all stores will be equipped with iPod touches and iPads."
iPads, he explained, cost about 1/5th as much as a cash register, and can be used for so much. As shown in the picture, they can be turned towards the customer, who can view content, put in personal information, use it as a gift registry and so forth.
What's more, it makes a lot more sense from a space usage standpoint. An iPad on a swivel that's not in use can quickly be taken off, with that space being used for packing or more merchandising or anything else.
SEE ALSO: The 29 best stocks in the market right now >
(Via @montoyan)There are a number of planets or moons whose existence is not supported by scientific evidence, but are proposed by various astrologers, pseudoscientists, conspiracy theorists, or certain religious groups.
Lilith [ edit ]
This article is about the astrological Earth moon. For the asteroid, see 1181 Lilith. For the scientific hypothesis of Earth's second moon, see Other moons of Earth
Lilith is a hypothetical second moon of Earth, supposedly about the same mass as the Earth's Moon, proposed in 1918 by astrologer Walter Gorn Old, who called himself Sepharial. Sepharial applied the name Lilith from medieval Jewish legend, where she is described as the first wife of Adam.[1] Sepharial claimed that Lilith was the same second moon that scientist Georg Waltemath claimed to have discovered twenty years earlier.[2][3] Sepharial also claimed to be the first person in history to observe Waltemath's moon as it crossed the sun, and rationalized that it was too dark to be otherwise visually detected.[4]
Sepharial's comments ignored the fact that Waltemath's proposed moon had already been discredited by the scientific community at the turn of the century.[5] There are many readily apparent holes in the arguments supporting Lilith's existence, and the existence of this astronomical object is believed only by fringe groups.
In present-day astrology, the name Lilith is usually given to a point on the horoscope that represents the direction of the actual moon's apogee, unrelated to the hypothetical second moon. When considered as a point, this Lilith is sometimes defined as the second focus of the ellipse described by the Moon's orbit; the earth is the first focus, and the apogee lies in the same direction. It takes 8 years and 10 months to complete its circuit around the zodiac.[6]
Planets proposed by L. Ron Hubbard [ edit ]
L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, proposed as part of his cosmology a Galactic Confederacy which consisted of 26 stars and 76 planets including Earth, which was then known as "Teegeeack".[7][8] One planet in the Scientology doctrine is known as Helatrobus.[9][10][11]
Ummo [ edit ]
Ummo or Ummoism[12] is a series of decades-long claims that aliens from the planet Ummo were communicating with people on the Earth. Most Ummo information was in the form of detailed documents and letters sent to various esoteric groups or UFO enthusiasts. The Ummo affair was subject to much mainstream attention in France and Spain during the 1960s through the 1970s, and a degree of interest remains regarding the subject. General consensus is that Ummoism was an elaborate hoax. The culprit (or culprits) is unknown, but a José Luis Jordán Peña has claimed responsibility for instigating Ummoism.[13] However, there are still a few small groups of devotees, such as "a strange Bolivian cult called the Daughters of Ummo".[14]
Jacques Vallée has said that the author(s) of the Ummo documents might be a real-world analogue of the fictional creators of Borges' "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius".[15] Historian Mike Dash writes that Ummoism began on February 6, 1966, in Madrid. On that day, Jordán Peña claimed to have had a close encounter of the first kind when he saw "an enormous circular object with three legs and, on its underside, a curious symbol: three vertical lines joined by a horizontal bar. The two exterior lines curved outward at the edges, which made the pictogram resemble the alchemical sign for the planet Uranus." (Dash, 299)
Peña's report generated a fair amount of excitement, but it was only the beginning. Not long afterwards, a Madrid author of a UFO book received several photographs in an anonymous mailing. The photos were of a craft similar to the one reported by Peña, and bearing the same symbol. Within a few weeks, "a leading Spanish contactee named Fernando Sesma Manzano became involved when he began receiving lengthy, typewritten documents which purported to come from a spacefaring race called the Ummites |
although weapons were used and several people were injured. The Russian units involved in such operations were ordered to avoid usage of deadly force when possible. Morale among the Ukrainian troops, which for three weeks were blockaded inside their compounds without any assistance from the Ukrainian government, was very low, and the vast majority of them did not offer any real resistance.[195]
On 19 March, President Putin submitted a treaty on Crimea's annexation by Russia and a constitutional amendment to set up two new federal subjects of the Russian Federation to the State Duma.[196] The Russian Constitutional Court found that treaty is in compliance with the Constitution of Russia. The court sat in an emergency session following a formal request by President Vladimir Putin to assess the constitutionality of the treaty.[197][198]
After the Russian Constitutional Court upheld the constitutionality of the treaty, the State Duma ratified it on 20 March.[199][200] The Duma also approved the draft federal constitutional law admitting Crimea and Sevastopol and establishing them as federal subjects.[201][202] A Just Russia's Ilya Ponomarev was the only State Duma member to vote against the measures. A day later, the treaty itself and the required amendment to article 65 of the Russian Constitution (which lists the federal subjects of Russia) were ratified by the Federation Council[203] and almost immediately signed into law by Putin.[204] Crimea's admission to the Russian Federation was considered retroactive to 18 March, when Putin and Crimean leaders signed the draft treaty.[205]
On 24 March, the Ukrainian government ordered the full withdrawal of all of its armed forces from Crimea.[206] In addition, the Ministry of Defense announced that approximately 50% of the Ukrainian soldiers in Crimea had defected to the Russian military.[207][208] On 26 March the last Ukrainian military bases and Ukrainian navy ships were captured by Russian troops.[209]
Subsequent events [ edit ]
On 27 March, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a non-binding resolution, which declared the Crimean referendum and subsequent status change invalid, by a vote of 100 to 11, with 58 abstentions and 24 absent.[210][211]
Crimea and Sevastopol switched to Moscow Time at the end of March.[212][213]
On 2 April, Russia formally denounced the 2010 Kharkiv Pact and Partition Treaty on the Status and Conditions of the Black Sea Fleet.[214] Putin cited "the accession of the Republic of Crimea and Sevastopol into Russia" and resulting "practical end of renting relationships" as his reason for the denunciation.[215] On the same day, he signed a decree formally rehabilitating the Crimean Tatars, who were ousted from their lands in 1944, and the Armenian, German, Greek, and Bulgarian minority communities in the region that Stalin also ordered removed in the 1940s.
On 11 April, the Constitution of the Republic of Crimea and City Charter of Sevastopol were adopted,[216] in addition the new federal subjects were enumerated in a newly published revision of the Russian Constitution.[217]
Federal Law on Ratifying the Agreement between the Russian Federation and the Republic of Crimea on Admitting to the Russian Federation the Republic of Crimea and Establishing within the Russian Federation New Constituent Entities. Federal Constitutional Law on Admitting to the Russian Federation the Republic of Crimea and Establishing within the Russian Federation the New Constituent Entities of the Republic of Crimea and the City of Federal Importance Sevastopol.
On 14 April, Vladimir Putin announced that he would open a ruble-only account with Bank Rossiya and would make it the primary bank in the newly annexed Crimea as well as giving the right to service payments on Russia's $36 billion wholesale electricity market – which gave the bank $112 million annually from commission charges alone.[218]
In July 2015, Russian Prime Minister, Dmitry Medvedev, declared that Crimea had been fully integrated into Russia.[219] Until 2016 these new subjects were grouped in the Crimean Federal District.
On 8 August 2016, Ukraine reported that Russia had increased its military presence along the demarcation line.[220] In response to this military buildup Ukraine also deployed more troops and resources closer to the border with Crimea.[221] The Pentagon has downplayed a Russian invasion of Ukraine, calling Russian troops along the border a regular military exercise.[222] On 10 August, Russia claimed two servicemen were killed in clashes with Ukrainian commandos, and that Ukrainian servicemen had been captured with a total of 40 kg of explosives in their possession.[223] Ukraine denied that the incident took place.[224] Russian accounts claimed that Russian FSB detained "Ukrainian saboteurs" and "terrorists" near Armyansk. The ensuing gunfight left one FSB officer and a suspect dead. A number of individuals were detained, including Yevhen Panov, who is described by Russian sources as a Ukrainian military intelligence officer and leader of the sabotage group. The group was allegedly planning terror attacks on important infrastructure in Armyansk, Crimea. Ukrainian media reported that Panov was a military volunteer fighting in the east of the country, however he has more recently been associated with a charitable organization. Russia also claimed that the alleged border infiltration was accompanied by "heavy fire" from Ukrainian territory, resulting in the death of a Russian soldier.[225][226] Ukrainian government called the Russian accusations "cynical" and "senseless" and argued that since Crimea was Ukrainian territory, it was Russia which "has been generously financing and actively supporting terrorism on Ukrainian territory".[227]
In 2017, a survey performed by the Centre for East European and International Studies showed that 85% of the non-Crimean Tatar respondents believed that if the referendum would be held again it would lead to the same or "only marginally different" results. Crimea was fully integrated into the Russian media sphere, and links with the rest of Ukraine were hardly existent.[228][229]
On 26 November 2018, lawmakers in the Ukraine Parliament overwhelmingly backed the imposition of martial law along Ukraine's coastal regions and those bordering Russia in response to the firing upon and seizure of Ukrainian naval ships by Russia near the Crimean peninsula a day earlier. A total of 276 lawmakers in Kiev backed the measure, which took effect on 28 November 2018 and was ended on December 26th.[230][231]
On 28 December 2018, Russia completed a high-tech security fence marking the de facto border between Crimea and Ukraine.[232]
Transition and aftermath [ edit ]
Economic implications [ edit ]
The number of tourists visiting Crimea in the 2014 season was lower than in the previous years due to a combination of Western sanctions, ethical objections by Ukrainians, and the difficulty of getting there for Russians.[233][234] The Russian government attempted to stimulate the flow of tourists by subsidizing holidays in the peninsula for children and state workers from all Russia[235][236] which worked mostly for state-owned hotels. In 2015 overall 3 million tourists visited Crimea according to official data, while before annexation it was around 5.5 million on average. The shortage is attributed mostly to stopped flow of tourists from Ukraine. Hotels and restaurants are also experiencing problems with finding enough seasonal workers, who were most arriving from Ukraine in the preceding years. Tourists visiting state-owned hotels are complaining mostly about low standard of rooms and facilities, some of them unrepaired from Soviet times.[237]
According to the German newspaper Die Welt, the annexation of Crimea is economically disadvantageous for the Russian Federation. Russia will have to spend billions of euros a year to pay salaries and pensions. Moreover, Russia will have to undertake costly projects to connect Crimea to the Russian water supply and power system because Crimea has no land connection to Russia and at present (2014) gets water, gas and electricity from mainland Ukraine. This requires building a bridge and a pipeline across the Kerch Strait. Also, Novinite claims that a Ukrainian expert told Die Welt that Crimea "will not be able to attract tourists".[238]
The first Deputy to Minister of Finance of Russian Federation Tatyana Nesterenko said in her interview to Forbes Woman that the decision to annex Crimea was made by Russian President Vladimir Putin exclusively, without consulting Russia's Finance Ministry.[239]
The Russian business newspaper Kommersant expresses an opinion that Russia will not acquire anything economically from "accessing" Crimea, which is not very developed industrially, having just a few big factories, and whose yearly gross product is only $4 billion. The newspaper also says that everything from Russia will have to be delivered by sea, higher costs of transportation will result in higher prices for everything, and to avoid a decline in living standards Russia will have to subsidise Crimean people for a few months. In total, Kommersant estimates the costs of integrating Crimea into Russia in $30 billion over the next decade, i.e. $3 billion per year.[240]
On the other hand, western oil experts estimate that Russia's seizing of Crimea, and the associated control of an area of Black Sea more than three times its land area gives it access to oil and gas reserves potentially worth trillions of dollars. It also deprives Ukraine of its chances of energy independence. Most immediately however, analysts said, Moscow's acquisition may alter the route along which the South Stream pipeline would be built, saving Russia money, time and engineering challenges. It would also allow Russia to avoid building in Turkish territorial waters, which was necessary in the original route to avoid Ukrainian territory.[241] This pipeline was later canceled in favour of TurkStream, however.
Russian/Chechen businessman Ruslan Baisarov [ru] announced he is ready to invest 12 billion rubles into the construction of a modern sea resort in Crimea, which is expected to create about 1,300 jobs. Ramzan Kadyrov, the Head of Chechnya, said that other Chechen businessmen are planning to invest into Crimea as well.[242]
The Russian Federal Service for Communications (Roskomnadzor) warned about a transition period as Russian operators have to change the numbering capacity and subscribers. Country code will be replaced from the Ukrainian +380 to Russian +7. Codes in Crimea start with 65, but in the area of "7" the 6 is given to Kazakhstan which shares former Soviet Union +7 with Russia, so city codes have to change. The regulator assigned 869 dialling code to Sevastopol and the rest of the peninsula received a 365 code.[243] At the time of the unification with Russia, telephone operators and Internet service providers in Crimea and Sevastopol are connected to the outside world through the territory of Ukraine.[244] Minister of Communications of Russia, Nikolai Nikiforov announced on his Twitter account that postal codes in Crimea will now have six-figures: to the existing five-digit number the number two will be added at the beginning. For example, the Simferopol postal code 95000 will become 295000.[245]
Regarding Crimea's borders, the head of Russian Federal Agency for the Development of the State Border Facilities (Rosgranitsa) Konstantin Busygin, who was speaking at a meeting led by Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin in Simferopol, the capital of Crimea said the Russian state border in the north of Crimea which, according to his claims, now forms part of the Russian-Ukrainian border, will be fully equipped with the necessary facilities.[246] In the area that now forms the border between Crimea and Ukraine mining the salt lake inlets from the sea that constitute the natural borders, and in the spit of land left over stretches of no-man's-land with wire on either side was created.[247] On early June that year Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev signed a Government resolution №961[248] dated 5 June 2014 establishing air, sea, road and railway checkpoints. The adopted decisions create a legal basis for the functioning of a checkpoint system at the Russian state border in the Republic of Crimea and Sevastopol.[249]
In the year following the annexation, armed men seized various Crimean businesses, including banks, hotels, shipyards, farms, gas stations, a bakery, a dairy, and Yalta Film Studio.[250][251][252] Russian media have noted this trend as "returning to the 90's", which is perceived as a period of anarchy and rule of gangs in Russia.[253]
In 2015 the Investigative Committee of Russia announced about a number of theft and corruption cases in infrastructure projects in Crimea, for example spending that exceeded the actual accounted costs three times. A number of Russian officials were also arrested for corruption, including head of federal tax inspection.[254][255]
(According to February 2016 official Ukrainian figures) after Russia's annexation 10% of Security Service of Ukraine personnel left Crimea; accompanied by 6,000 of the pre-annexation 20,300 people strong Ukrainian army.[256]
As result of the Crimea unsettled status Russian mobile operators never expanded their operations on its territory and all mobile services are offered on the basis of "internal roaming", which caused significant controversy inside Russia. Telecoms however argued that expanding coverage to Crimea will put them at risk of Western sanctions and, as result, they will lose access to key equipment and software, none of which is produced locally.[257][258]
Human rights situation [ edit ]
In March 2014, Human Rights Watch reported that pro-Ukrainian activists and journalists had been attacked, abducted, and tortured.[259] Some Crimeans were simply "disappeared" with no explanation.[260]
On 9 May 2014 the new "anti-extremist" amendment to the Criminal Code of Russia, passed in December 2013, came into force. Article 280.1 designated incitement of violation of territorial integrity of the Russian Federation[261] (incl. calls for secession of Crimea from Russia[262]) as a criminal offense in Russia, punishable by a fine of 300 thousand roubles or imprisonment up to 3 years. If such statements are made in public media or the internet, the punishment could be obligatory works up to 480 hours or imprisonment up to five years.[261]
Following the annexation of Crimea, according to report released on the Russian government run President of Russia's Council on Civil Society and Human Rights website, Tatars who were opposed to Russian rule have been persecuted, Russian law restricting freedom of speech has been imposed, and the new pro-Russian authorities "liquidated" the Kiev Patriarchate Orthodox church on the peninsula.[43] The Crimean Tatar television station was also shut down by the Russian authorities.[260]
After the annexation, on 16 May the new Russian authorities of Crimea issued a ban on the annual commemorations of the anniversary of the Deportation of the Crimean Tatars by Stalin in 1944, citing "possibility of provocation by extremists" as a reason.[263] Previously, when Crimea was controlled by Ukraine, these commemorations had taken place every year. The pro-Russian Crimean authorities also banned Mustafa Dzhemilev, a human rights activist, Soviet dissident, member of the Ukrainian parliament, and former Chairman of the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatars from entering Crimea.[264] Additionally, Mejlis reported, that officers of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) raided Tatar homes in the same week, on the pretense of "suspicion of terrorist activity".[265] The Tatar community eventually did hold commemorative rallies in defiance of the ban.[264][265] In response Russian authorities flew helicopters over the rallies in an attempt to disrupt them.[266]
In May 2015, a local activist, Alexander Kostenko, was sentenced to four years in a penal colony. His lawyer, Dmitry Sotnikov, said that the case was fabricated and that his client had been beaten and starved. Crimean prosecutor Natalia Poklonskaya announced that they were judging "not just [Kostenko], but the very idea of fascism and nazism, which are trying to raise their head once again." Sotnikov responded that "There are fabricated cases in Russia, but rarely such humiliation and physical harm. A living person is being tortured for a political idea, to be able to boast winning over fascism."[267] In June 2015, Razom released a report compiling human rights abuses in Crimea.[268][269] In its 2016 annual report, the Council of Europe made no mention of human rights abuses in Crimea because Russia had not allowed its monitors to enter.[270]
In December 2016, the United Nations General Assembly voted on a resolution on human rights in occupied Crimea. It called on the Russian Federation "to take all measures necessary to bring an immediate end to all abuses against residents of Crimea, in particular reported discriminatory measures and practices, arbitrary detentions, torture and other cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment, and to revoke all discriminatory legislation." It also urged Russia to "immediately release Ukrainian citizens who were unlawfully detained and judged without regard for elementary standards of justice." [271]
According to the United Nations and multiple NGOs, the Russian Federation is responsible for multiple human rights abuses, including torture, arbitrary detention, forced disappearances and instances of discrimination, including persecution of Crimean Tatars in Crimea since the illegal annexation.[272][273]
On June 12, 2018, Ukraine lodged a memorandum weighing about 90 kg, consisting of 17,500 pages of text in 29 volumes to the UN's International Court of Justice about racial discrimination by Russian authorities in occupied Crimea and state financing of terrorism by Russian Federation in Donbass.[274][275]
Crimean public opinion [ edit ]
A joint survey by American government agency Broadcasting Board of Governors and polling firm Gallup was taken during April 2014.[276] It polled 500 residents of Crimea. The survey found that 82.8% of those polled believed that the results of the Crimean status referendum reflected the views of most Crimeans, whereas 6.7% said that it did not. 73.9% of those polled said that they thought that the annexation would have a positive impact on their lives, whereas 5.5% said that it would not. 13.6% said that they did not know.[276]
A comprehensive poll released on 8 May 2014 by the Pew Research Centre surveyed Crimean opinions on the annexation.[277] Despite international criticism of 16 March referendum on Crimean status, 91% of those Crimeans polled thought that the vote was free and fair, and 88% said that the Ukrainian government should recognise the results.[277]
Ukrainian response [ edit ]
Immediately after the treaty of accession was signed in March, the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs summoned the Provisional Principal of Russia in Ukraine to present note verbale of protest against Russia's recognition of the Republic of Crimea and its subsequent annexation.[278] Two days later, the Verkhovna Rada condemned the treaty[279] and called Russia's actions "a gross violation of international law". The Rada called on the international community to avoid recognition of the "so-called Republic of Crimea" or the annexation of Crimea and Sevastopol by Russia as new federal subjects.
On 15 April 2014, the Verkhovna Rada declared the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and Sevastopol to be under "provisional occupation" by the Russian military[280] and imposed travel restrictions on Ukrainians visiting Crimea.[281] The territories were also deemed "inalienable parts of Ukraine" subject to Ukrainian law. Among other things, the special law approved by the Rada restricted foreign citizens' movements to and from the Crimean Peninsula and forbade certain types of entrepreneurship.[282] The law also forbade activity of government bodies formed in violation of Ukrainian law and designated their acts as null and void.[283] The law had little to no actual effect in Crimea itself due to the mutual non-recognition between Kiev and Simferopol.
Ukrainian authorities greatly reduced the volume of water flowing into Crimea via the North Crimean Canal due to huge debt for water supplied in previous year, threatening the viability of the peninsula's agricultural crops, which are heavily dependent on irrigation.[284]
The Ukrainian National Council for TV and Radio Broadcasting has instructed all cable operators on 11 March to stop transmitting a number of Russian channels, including the international versions of the main state-controlled stations, Rossiya-1, Channel One and NTV, as well as news channel Rossiya-cable operators on.[285] They said that this is because of Russian media showing them in a negative light.
In March 2014, activists began organising flash mobs in supermarkets to urge customers not to buy Russian goods and to boycott Russian gas stations, banks, and concerts. In April 2014, some cinemas in Kiev, Lviv, and Odessa began shunning Russian films.[286]
On 2 December 2014, the Ministry of Information Policy was created with one of its goals being, according to first Minister of Information, Yuriy Stets, to counteract "Russian information aggression".[287]
In December 2014, Ukraine halted all train and bus services to Crimea.[288]
On 16 September 2015 the Ukrainian parliament voted for the law that sets 20 February 2014 as the official date of the Russian temporary occupation of Crimean peninsula.[289][290] On 7 October 2015 the President of Ukraine signed the law into force.[291]
The Ministry of Temporarily Occupied Territories and IDPs was established by Ukrainian government on 20 April 2016 to manage occupied parts of Donetsk, Luhansk and Crimea regions affected by Russian military intervention of 2014.[292]
Russian response [ edit ]
In a poll published on 24 February 2014 by the state-owned Russian Public Opinion Research Center, only 15% of those Russians polled said 'yes' to the question: "Should Russia react to the overthrow of the legally elected authorities in Ukraine?"[293]
The State Duma Committee on Commonwealth of Independent States Affairs, headed by Leonid Slutsky, visited Simferopol on 25 February 2014 and said: "If the parliament of the Crimean autonomy or its residents express the wish to join the Russian Federation, Russia will be prepared to consider this sort of application. We will be examining the situation and doing so fast."[294] They also stated that in the event of a referendum for the Crimea region joining the Russian Federation, they would consider its results "very fast".[295] Later Slutsky announced that he was misunderstood by the Crimean press, and no decision regarding simplifying the process of acquiring Russian citizenship for people in Crimea had been made yet.[296] He also added that if "fellow Russian citizens are in jeopardy, you understand that we do not stay away".[297] On 25 February, in a meeting with Crimean politicians, he stated that Viktor Yanukovych was still the legitimate president of Ukraine.[298] That same day, the Russian Duma announced it was determining measures so that Russians in Ukraine who "did not want to break from the Russian World" could acquire Russian citizenship.[299]
On 26 February, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian Armed Forces to be "put on alert in the Western Military District as well as units stationed with the 2nd Army Central Military District Command involved in aerospace defence, airborne troops and long-range military transport." Despite media speculation that this was in reaction to the events in Ukraine, Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said it was for reasons separate from the unrest in Ukraine.[300] On 27 February 2014, the Russian government dismissed accusations that it was in violation of the basic agreements regarding the Black Sea Fleet: "All movements of armored vehicles are undertaken in full compliance with the basic agreements and did not require any approvals".[301][302][303]
On 27 February, the Russian governing agencies presented the new law project on granting citizenship.[304]
The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs called on the West and particularly NATO to "abandon the provocative statements and respect the neutral status of Ukraine".[305] In its statement, the ministry claims that the agreement on settlement of the crisis, which was signed on 21 February and was witnessed by foreign ministries from Germany, Poland and France had to this date, not been implemented[305] (Vladimir Lukin from Russia had not signed it[306]).
On 28 February, according to ITAR-TASS, the Russian Ministry of Transport discontinued further talks with Ukraine in regards to the Kerch Strait Bridge project.[307] However, on 3 March Dmitry Medvedev, the Prime Minister of Russia, signed a decree creating a subsidiary of Russian Highways (Avtodor) to build a bridge at an unspecified location along the Kerch strait.[308][309]
At least 30,000 people at 15 March protests, named March of Peace, which took place in Moscow a day before the Crimean referendum.
On Russian social networks, there was a movement to gather volunteers who served in the Russian army to go to Ukraine.[310]
On 28 February, President Putin stated in telephone calls with key EU leaders that it was of "extreme importance of not allowing a further escalation of violence and the necessity of a rapid normalisation of the situation in Ukraine".[311] Already on 19 February the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs had referred to the Euromaidan revolution as the "Brown revolution".[312][313]
The Federation Council approved that Russia may introduce a limited contingent of Russian troops in Crimea[clarification needed] for the security of the Black Sea Fleet and the Russians.[314]
In Moscow, on 2 March, an estimated 27,000 rallied in support of the Russian government's decision to intervene in Ukraine.[315] The rallies received considerable attention on Russian state TV and were officially approved by the government.[315]
Meanwhile, on 1 March, five people who were picketing next to the Federation Council building against the invasion of Ukraine were arrested.[316] The next day about 200 people protested at the building of the Russian Ministry of Defence in Moscow against Russian military involvement.[317] About 500 people also gathered to protest on the Manezhnaya Square in Moscow, and the same number of people on the Saint Isaac's Square in Saint Petersburg.[318] On 2 March, about eleven protesters demonstrated in Yekaterinburg against Russian involvement, with some wrapped in the Ukrainian flag.[319] Protests were also held in Chelyabinsk on the same day.[320] Opposition to the military intervention was also expressed by rock musician Andrey Makarevich, who wrote in particular: "You want war with Ukraine? It will not be the way it was with Abkhazia: the folks on the Maidan have been hardened and know what they are fighting for – for their country, their independence.... We have to live with them. Still neighborly. And preferably in friendship. But it's up to them how they want to live".[321] The Professor of the Department of Philosophy at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations Andrey Zubov was fired for his article in Vedomosti, criticising Russian military intervention.[322]
On 2 March, one Moscow resident protested against Russian intervention by holding a "Stop the war" banner, but he was immediately harassed by passers-by, and when the police were arresting him, a woman offered them a serious, fabricated charge against him, of beating up a child; however, her charge was rejected by the police.[323] Andrei Zubov, a professor at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, who compared Russian actions in Crimea to the Anschluss of Austria, was threatened. Akexander Chuyev, the leader of the pro-Kremlin Spravedlivaya Rossiya party, also objected to Russian intervention in Ukraine. Boris Akunin, popular Russian writer, predicted that Russia's moves would lead to political and economic isolation.[323]
President Putin's approval rating among the Russian public increased by nearly 10% since the crisis began, up to 71.6%, the highest in three years, according to a poll conducted by the All-Russian Center for Public Opinion Research, released on 19 March.[325] Additionally, the same poll showed that more than 90% of Russians supported unification with the Crimean Republic.[325]
On 4 March, at a press conference in Novo-Ogaryovo, President Putin expressed his view on the situation that if a revolution took place in Ukraine, it would be a new country with which Russia had not concluded any treaties.[326] He offered an analogy with the events of 1917 in Russia, when as a result of the revolution the Russian Empire fell apart and a new state was created.[326] However, he stated Ukraine would still have to honour its debts.
Around 100,000 people gathered in Crimean Sevastopol at Victory Day parade
Russian politicians speculated that there were already 143,000 Ukrainian refugees in Russia.[327] The Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs refuted those claims of refugee increases in Russia.[328] At a briefing on 4 March 2014, the director of the department of information policy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Yevhen Perebiynis said that Russia was misinforming its own citizens as well as the entire international community to justify its own actions in the Crimea.[329]
On 5 March, an anchor of the Russian-owned international news channel RT America, Abby Martin, in an interview with Piers Morgan, said she "did not agree" with how her employer RT was covering the Ukrainian crisis, but claimed RT still supported her despite her differences of opinion.[330] Also on 5 March 2014, another RT America anchor, Liz Wahl, of the network's Washington, DC bureau, resigned on air, explaining that she could not be "part of a network that whitewashes the actions of Putin" and citing her Hungarian ancestry and the memory of the Soviet repression of the Hungarian Uprising as a factor in her decision.[331]
In early March, Igor Andreyev, a 75-year-old survivor of the Siege of Leningrad, attended an anti-war rally against the Russian intervention in Crimea and was holding a sign that read "Peace to the World". The riot police arrested him, and a local pro-government lawyer then accused him of being a supporter of "fascism". The retiree, who lived on a 6,500-ruble monthly pension, was fined 10,000 rubles.[332]
Prominent dissident Mikhail Khodorkovsky said that Crimea should stay within Ukraine with broader autonomy.[333]
Tatarstan, a republic within Russia populated by Volga Tatars, has sought to alleviate concerns about treatment of Tatars by Russia, as Tatarstan is a gas-rich and economically successful republic in Russia.[334] On 5 March, President of Tatarstan Rustam Minnikhanov signed an agreement on co-operation between Tatarstan and the Aksyonov government in Crimea that implied collaboration between ten government institutions as well as significant financial aid to Crimea from Tatarstan businesses.[334] On 11 March, Minnikhanov was in Crimea on his second visit and attended as a guest in the Crimean parliament chamber during the vote on the declaration of sovereignty pending the 16 March referendum.[334] The Tatarstan's Mufti Kamil Samigullin invited Crimean Tatars to study in madrasas in Kazan, and declared support for their "brothers in faith and blood".[334] Mustafa Dzhemilev, a former leader of the Crimean Tatar Majlis, believed that forces that were suspected to be Russian forces should leave the Crimean peninsula,[334] and asked the UN Security Council to send peacekeepers into the region.[335]
On 13 March, Russian President Vladimir Putin made a comparison between Crimea and Kosovo in a phone call with US President Barack Obama.[336]
On 15 March, thousands of protesters (estimates varying from 3,000 by official sources up to 50,000 claimed by opposition) in Moscow marched against Russian involvement in Ukraine, many waving Ukrainian flags.[337] At the same time, a pro-government (and pro-referendum) rally occurred across the street, counting in the thousands as well (officials claiming 27,000 with opposition claiming about 10,000).
In February 2015, the leading independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta reported[338] that it obtained documents, allegedly written by oligarch Konstantin Malofayev and others, which provided the Russian government with a strategy in the event of Viktor Yanukovych's removal from power and the break-up of Ukraine, which were considered likely. The documents outline plans for annexation of Crimea and the eastern portions of the country, closely describing the events that actually followed after Yanukovych's fall. The documents also describe plans for a public relations campaign which would seek to justify Russian actions.[339][340][341]
In June 2015 Mikhail Kasyanov stated that all Russian Duma decisions on Crimea annexation were illegal from the international point of view and the annexation was provoked by false accusations of discrimination of Russian nationals in Ukraine.[342]
International response [ edit ]
[b] Statements only voicing concern or hope for peaceful resolution to the conflict Support for Ukrainian territorial integrity Condemnation of Russian actions Condemnation of Russian actions as a military intervention or invasion Support for Russian actions and/or condemnation of the Ukrainian interim government Recognition of Russian interests Ukraine Russia No official statements / No data available International reaction to the 2014 Crimean crisis according to official governmental statements.
In favour Against Abstentions Absent Non-members Results of the United Nations General Assembly vote about the territorial integrity of Ukraine.In favourAgainstAbstentionsNon-members
There have been a range of international reactions to the annexation. The UN General Assembly passed a non-binding resolution 100 in favour, 11 against and 58 abstentions in the 193-nation assembly that declared invalid Crimea's Moscow-backed referendum.[343] In a move supported by the Lithuanian President,[344] the United States government imposed sanctions against persons they deem to have violated or assisted in the violation of Ukraine's sovereignty.[345] The European Union suspended talks with Russia on economic and visa-related matters, and is considering more stringent sanctions against Russia in the near future, including asset freezes.[346][347] while Japan announced sanctions which include suspension of talks relating to military, space, investment, and visa requirements.[348] The United Kingdom qualified the referendum vote in Crimea of being "farcical", "illegal" and "illegitimate".[349]
The European Commission decided on 11 March to enter into a full free-trade agreement with Ukraine within the year.[350] On 12 March, the European Parliament rejected the upcoming referendum on independence in Crimea, which they saw as manipulated and contrary to international and Ukrainian law.[351] The G7 bloc of developed nations (the G8 minus Russia) made a joint statement condemning Russia and announced that they would suspend preparations for the planned G8 summit in Sochi in June.[352][353] NATO condemned Russia's military escalation in Crimea and stated that it was breach of international law[354] while the Council of Europe expressed its full support for the territorial integrity and national unity of Ukraine.[355] The Visegrád Group has issued a joint statement urging Russia to respect Ukraine's territorial integrity and for Ukraine to take into account its minority groups to not further break fragile relations. It has urged for Russia to respect Ukrainian and international law and in line with the provisions of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum.[356]
China said "We respect the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine". A spokesman restated China's belief of non-interference in the internal affairs of other nations and urged dialogue.[357][358]
National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon of India stated that Russia has legitimate interests in Crimea and called for "sustained diplomatic efforts" and "constructive dialogue" to resolve the crisis.[359] However, the National Security Advisor is not a part of the Cabinet of India and, as such, Menon's statement was not an official statement issued by the government of India.[360] However, India subsequently made it clear that it will not support any "unilateral measures" against Russian government. "India has never supported unilateral sanctions against any country. Therefore, we will also not support any unilateral measures by a country or a group of countries against Russia."[361] Both Syria and Venezuela openly support Russian military action. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said that he supports Putin's efforts to "restore security and stability in the friendly country of Ukraine", while Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro condemned Ukraine's "ultra-nationalist" coup.[362][363] Sri Lanka described Yanukovych's removal as unconstitutional and considered Russia's concerns in Crimea as justified.[364]
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk called for change in EU energy policy as Germany's dependence on Russian gas poses risks for Europe.[365]
On 13 March, German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned the Russian government it risks massive damage to Russia, economically and politically, if it refuses to change course on Ukraine,[365] though close economic links between Germany and Russia significantly reduce the scope for any sanctions.[366]
After Russia moved to formally incorporate Crimea, some worried whether it may do the same in other regions.[367] US deputy national security advisor Tony Blinken said that the Russian troops massed on the eastern Ukrainian border may be preparing to enter the country's eastern regions. Russian officials stated that Russian troops would not enter other areas.[367] US Air Force Gen. Philip M. Breedlove, NATO's supreme allied commander in Europe, warned that the same troops were in a position to take over the separatist Russian-speaking Moldovan province of Transnistria.[367]
On 9 April, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe deprived Russia of voting rights.[368]
On 14 August, while visiting Crimea, Vladimir Putin ruled out pushing beyond Crimea. He undertook to do everything he could to end the conflict in Ukraine, saying Russia needed to build calmly and with dignity, not by confrontation and war which isolated it from the rest of the world.[369]
United Nations resolutions [ edit ]
Voted in favour of the resolution Abstained Vetoed the resolution UN Security Council vote on a draft resolution condemning the 2014 Crimean referendum. In favour of considering the referendum illegal Against adopting the resolution Abstained Absent when the vote took place UN General Assembly vote on the resolution condemning the 2014 Crimean referendum.
Security Council resolution [ edit ]
On 15 March 2014, a US-sponsored resolution that went to a vote in the UN Security Council to reaffirm that council's commitment to Ukraine's "sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity" was not approved. Though a total of 13 council members voted in favour of the resolution and China abstained, Russia vetoed the resolution.[370]
General Assembly resolution [ edit ]
On 27 March 2014, the UN General Assembly approved a resolution describing the referendum leading to annexation of Crimea by Russia as illegal.[371] The draft resolution, which was titled "Territorial integrity of Ukraine", was co-sponsored by Canada, Costa Rica, Germany, Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine and the US. It affirmed the council's commitment to the "sovereignty, political independence, unity and territorial integrity of Ukraine within its internationally recognised borders." The resolution tried to underscore that the 16 March referendum held in Crimea and the city of Sevastopol has no validity and cannot form the basis for any |
data overlaid on a digital elevation model (created with data from the ASTER instrument on NASA’s Terra satellite). The model gives a three-dimensional sense of the landscape.
West of the mountains lie a number of long, finger-like lakes with deep basins scoured by glaciers. Iliuk Arm of Naknek Lake has on a milky turquoise color due to “rock flour”—the tiny remains of rocks that were ground up by a glacier. When these flour-like particles are suspended in water, they reflect and absorb certain wavelengths of light and change its appearance.
Some of the lakes are connected by narrow rivers and streams, and bears have learned that these areas offer a high concentration of fish and the best chance for an easy meal. From late June through early September, bears compete for the best fishing spot. In July, that prime location is Brooks Falls. The photograph above shows a brown bear at the falls fishing by the “stand and wait” method, which works well when the salmon are jumping. By September, most bears are found fishing at mouth of Brooks River.
Getting to Katmai National Park can be trickier than other parks because it is accessible only by boat or aircraft. But even if you can’t get there, you can see some of the feeding frenzy at Brooks Falls when video cameras show live footage during the summer months.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Joshua Stevens, using ASTER GDEM data from NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team, and Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Photo by Christoph Strässler, used under a Creative Commons License. Caption by Kathryn Hansen.In a sense, there are two kinds of fans of NBC’s “Parks and Recreation.”
The ones who also like CBS’ “The Big Bang Theory” but can’t understand why that show crushes “Parks” so badly in the ratings.
The ones who don’t like CBS’ “The Big Bang Theory” and can’t understand why that show crushes “Parks” so badly in the ratings.
I’m a member of the first group, but that’s not really important. The question isn’t why there’s a ratings gap between the two shows, but why is it so freakin’ big?
How big?
Taking last week’s numbers as an example, “Big Bang” drew a 5.1 rating in the 18-49 demo and 17.6 million viewers overall, while its Thursday 8 p.m. counterpart “Parks” managed a 1.2 and 3.2 million.
If you think it’s a case of a bunch of viewers DVR-ing “Parks,” while watching “Big Bang,” think again. When the delayed viewing numbers come in, the gap between the two shows widens.
In Live+3 last week, “Big Bang” improved to a 7.2 rating in the demo, a gain of 41% (2.1 ratings points). By comparison, “Parks” improved to a 1.6, a 33% gain (0.4 ratings points) on a much smaller base number to begin with.
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Sure, CBS brings a bigger foundation of viewers to the table, while NBC is far removed from the days of “Must-See” Thursdays. You could also argue that the multi-cam, set-up/joke style of “Big Bang” is easier to settle into than the more nuanced (I almost wrote “cerebral,” but that diminishes “Bang” unfairly) single-cam stylings of “Parks.”
And there’s no doubt that “Big Bang” has benefited from how its syndication saturation widened its tent of viewers, while “Parks” is just getting started down that road.
On the other hand, it’s not as if “Parks” has so little going for it. The cast is nothing if not marketable. Amy Poehler is the former “Saturday Night Live” star and brilliant comic actress who also happens to be part of the most sought-after awards-hosting duo in the business. Aziz Ansari has a hot standup career. Chris Pratt has evolved from lovable oaf to action star. Retta is one of the most adept users of social media around. Rob Lowe is … Rob Lowe. That’s before you even get to Adam Scott, Rashida Jones, Aubrey Plaza, not to mention great guest casting.
I mean, is any character more tailored for a hunk of CBS’ audience than Nick Offerman’s Ron “F’in” Swanson?
Though there are some fans of one show who might find the comparison to the other demeaning, the sensibilities and humor of the two shows are not all that different. Their styles might differ, but both are clever, exceedingly warm and the opposite of mean-spirited. Even the ostensible targets of derision, such as Jerry (Jim O’Heir) are treated with affection. Both series value their characters and serialize their arcs.
“Big Bang” might be multicam, but it’s probably the smartest multicam sitcom around. Its viewership should embrace “Parks” more than the numbers indicate. It’s not as if “Parks” is rocket science to follow or to find the jokes in — or for that matter, the beauty.
Weigh it all together, and as much you expect some gap, the size of the gap remains hard to fathom.
“CBS has been more successful with viewers whereas NBC has been struggling to get an audience,” Horizon Media senior research veep Brad Adgate told Variety. “I think that’s a factor. Plus ‘Big Bang’ is on a top-rated cable network on primetime every night, unlike ‘Parks.’ ‘Big Bang’ is a show that viewers will seek out. I think ‘Parks’ needs help for viewers to find it. It is mysterious, though, I agree. It’s kind of strange, but ‘Big Bang’ is so popular it just kind of builds. “
The chasm has implications beyond the fate of “Parks” itself for NBC, which is struggling more than ever with its Thursday lineup in its first season since “30 Rock” and “The Office” bid farewell. Newcomers “Welcome to the Family,” “Sean Saves the World” and “The Michael J. Fox Show” are in dire straits to various degrees. A new season of “Community” remains at NBC’s disposal, but that’s another example of a cult favorite, not a ratings solution.
All the people at “Parks” can do is continue trying to make the best show they can make.
“As far as ratings go, I don’t really think about it,” “Parks and Recreation” showrunner Michael Schur told Variety. “Or, I try not to. All I know for sure is that the number that comes out at 8 a.m. every day is a wildly inaccurate picture of the number of people who watch any show, and everyone needs to stop reporting it as such. As far as one show versus another, who knows? It’s not one thing — like network or timeslot or something — it’s a combo platter, and one I do not fully understand.
“I (do) think ‘Big Bang’ is an extremely well-made show, and it is not at all a surprise to me that it is a smash hit.”
At the end of the day, maybe the NBC marketing solution should be this: “If you like ‘The Big Bang Theory,’ then you should give ‘Parks and Recreation’ a try.”OK, OK, not quite so much. It's the web business methods that are going to get broken just as soon as everyone starts obeying the law, not the internet itself. But it really is going to be a large number of businesses that are really going to have to change the way they place cookies if they're to stay within the law.
This kind of "tracking" behaviour eventually attracted the baleful attention of the EU, which since 2003 has required anyone using cookies to provide clear information about them. In May this year these rules were dramatically tightened: now, anyone depositing cookies is required not just to provide clear information about them but also to obtain consent from users to store a cookie on their device. The only exceptions are cases where cookies are essential for the provision of a service (as in an online shopping basket). So since May, anyone setting a cookie without obtaining the explicit consent of the user is technically breaking the law.
Now just about everyone uses cookies, drops them into your browser when you visit a page. But now they're going to have to get explicit permission (no, small print that says by visiting the page you have consented does not cut the mustard) to do so.
"Can we add cookies to your browser, yes or no?" type permissions.
And of course, just as always happens when anyone is offered a binary choice like that the vast majority of people will say "No". Which really does rather mess up an awful lot of business practices on the net. For example, how can anyone target advertising if the cookies aren't there to see where you've already been?
By the way, if you run a US site don't start giggling about these stupid Europeans just yet. These laws apply to you too. For it's a general legal rule that an internet transaction takes place where the user is, not where the server is (no, really, it's an assumption in all sorts of laws, from libel through pornography to tax). So you have to apply these rules to your sites when Europeans visit them, wherever your server is.
Not that anyone's going to chase a US based blogger or anything but larger sites might well want to think about it. Mapping or geolocating the IP, checking whether it's inside the EU and then explicitly asking whether you can deposit cookies if that location is within the EU. That's what they're demanding and they really will, at some point, come after one or another large company just to make their point.on •
THE GUERRILLA ANGEL REPORT — She says she’s done in 2012. She’s tired. Being Secretary of State in the best of times is physically and mentally draining, and the last 4 years has been anything but the best of times. However, she juggled crises better than most of her peers holding the position and has endured the President’s entire term, all the while impressing everyone, including her detractors. A nice comfy retirement on the lecture circuit is what awaits people of achieving these accomplishments in normal times.
But we are in anything but normal times. We’re at a historical turning point of Biblical proportions. Around the women are facing setbacks never foreseen in modern times, and this is never more so than right here at home in the United States. Hillary Clinton is the one person with the means and influence to upend the Republican War on Women.
If Hillary were on the 2012 ballot, she’d have an easier time than Obama winning back the White House. A Obama-Clinton 2012 ticket would be the ticket, but that isn’t going to happen. Besides, she wants to retire, remember?
So I’m asking that Hillary reconsider her retirement plans and take on something of historical significance. In the end maybe she’ll be able to leave behind a Clinton legacy that her husband hoped to do, but squandered away.
Hillary Clinton at the Women in the World Summit:
“Why extremists always focus on women remains a mystery to me, but they all seem to. It doesn’t matter what country they’re in or what religion they claim. They want to control women. They want to control how we dress. They want to control how we act. They even want to control the decisions we make about our own health and bodies.
“Yes, it is hard to believe that even here at home, we have to stand up for women’s rights and reject efforts to marginalize any one of us, because America needs to set an example for the entire world.”
Read more about Hillary’s inevitability in Maureen Dowd’s article Don’t Thread on Us:
Don’t Tread on Us – NYTimes.com.
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Categories: Everything elseBeneath the hum of ship traffic and the chatter of marine life, another sound is emanating from the Caribbean Sea. It’s far too low pitched for humans to hear, but its signature can be detected from space. Scientists have never seen—or heard—anything like it.
Located southeast of the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean Sea features a large basin bounded by South America, Central America, and the Caribbean Islands. It’s a critical cog in the global circulation belt, forming currents that feed directly into the Gulf Stream. But when researchers at the University of Liverpool decided to study the dynamics of the Caribbean Sea, they noticed something odd.
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“We were looking at ocean pressure through models for quite different reasons, and this region just didn’t work,” Chris Hughes of the University of Liverpool told Gizmodo, explaining how his models kept yielding large, inexplicable pressure oscillations across the basin. “It felt like a sore thumb.”
After spotting the weird oscillations in models, Hughes and his colleagues decided to see if they could observe the phenomenon in the ocean. Sure enough, they did. Combining pressure readings collected from the bottom of the Caribbean Sea between 1958 and 2013 with tide gauge records and data from NASA’s Grace satellite, the researchers discovered that the basin of Caribbean Sea acts like a giant whistle.
“You have a current that flows east to west through the Caribbean Sea,” Hughes explained. “It’s very narrow and quite strong. Just like a narrow jet of air, it becomes unstable and creates eddies.”
When those waves strike the western boundary of the basin, they die out and reappear at the eastern edge. This phenomenon, flashily named the “Rossy wormhole,” was first described several years back. Scientists now know that waves of certain shapes and sizes will resonate when they hit that western wall, just as certain frequencies resonate when you blow into a whistle. In both cases, the resonant frequency produces a sound.
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But because the basin of the Caribbean Sea is so vast compared with an actual whistle, the resonant frequency is extremely low. It takes 120 days for waves to propagate east to west in the basin, yielding an A-flat tone that’s roughly 30 octaves below the bottom of a piano. A pitched-up version of that excessively eerie sound can be heard in the clip above.
Dubbed the “Rossby Whistle” in a paper accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, the phenomenon can be detected from space owing to fluctuations in Earth’s gravity field as pressure changes propagate across the entire basin. The researchers plan to keep monitoring the Rossby Whistle, with the hope that the signal might be used to predict times of the year when coastal flooding is more likely.
So, if you ever find yourself out alone at night on the Caribbean, and the world feels completely still, just remember: it isn’t. The ocean is always speaking to you.Yemen has recently experienced some of the fiercest fighting yet in its war between the Saudi-led coalition and Houthi rebels supported by forces loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh.
Repeated violations of a U.N.-sponsored cease-fire have made it impossible to resume talks that were set to take place in mid-January.
William Rugh, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, said the cease-fire had not been adhered to because "the Saudis can’t so far accept a cease-fire that doesn’t give them at least the appearance of a victory, and the Houthis can’t accept a cease-fire when they still control so much of the country.”
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has reiterated his deep concern about the continued conflict and has called on all warring parties to commit to peace talks facilitated by the U.N.
Rugh said the U.N. has tried since the middle of last year to broker a settlement but has not been able to persuade the warring parties to negotiate seriously. He thinks the U.S. has limited leverage over the warring parties and recommends an outside, neutral mediator as a first step.
“I would think the Omanis have the best chance of playing that role, but outside mediation is not enough," he said. "The parties have to be willing to agree to a cease-fire and to accept the terms of the mediation.”
The veteran diplomat said a protracted conflict would only aggravate the mounting number of civilian casualties and worsen the already alarming humanitarian crisis in Yemen.
The continued hostilities in Yemen make it a dangerous place not only for civilians but also for journalists. VOA freelance reporter Almigdad Mojalli, killed in a Saudi-led coalition airstrike this month, was the latest journalist to die in the conflict.
Islamist militants have also launched a spate of deadly attacks on Yemeni government and security targets.
On Thursday, Islamic State militants claimed responsibility for a suicide car bombing outside President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi's residence in Aden that killed at least six people.
Officials said Hadi, the country's internationally recognized leader who is backed militarily by the Saudi-led coalition, was inside his residence at the Maashiq Palace at the time of the attack but was unharmed.
Hadi's office, in a statement carried by the government-run Saba news agency, said 11 other people were also injured in the attack, in which a car tried to crash through a security checkpoint guarding the palace.
In a statement posted online, IS said the attack was carried out by a suicide bomber it identified as Abu Hanifa al-Hollandi. The nom de guerre suggested the attacker was a Dutch citizen.We may have touch screens and automated cars, but one aspect of Minority Report technology we haven’t quite mastered yet, is pre-crime. Dubai is looking to lead the charge there though, with the introduction of new, predictive crime software, which claims to be able to predict where crimes are more likely to take place.
Developed as part of the UAE’s new Smart Governance Initiative, the algorithm analyses databases of recent crimes and what Dubai police calls “existing intelligence,” to make an informed guess about where crimes are likely to happen next. It’s hoped that this will allow forces to mobilise in those areas, which should improve response times and increase police presence to deter crimes from taking place.
“This software is uniquely intelligent in its capability to accurately discern intricate patterns of criminal behaviour in seemingly unconnected events and then predict the probability of reoccurrence,” said Spandan Kar, an employee of Space Imaging Middle East, which developed the software. “We are confident that these precise analytics, when combined with the knowledge and instincts of experienced police officers, will create a formidable force to deter crime.”
Proponents of predictive policing software point to data that suggests crimes do tend to happen in the vicinity of other crimes. That is, people go on sprees in short periods of time, or can hint at a hub of illegal activity in certain areas. However, not everyone believes acting on this sort of data is a positive thing.
Detractors of this sort of technology suggest it could encourage police bias, since when entering the area said to be more likely to see crimes, they will be more likely to falsely accuse someone. There is also the potential for bias and prejudice within the algorithm itself, since it was written and operates without the oversight of experienced police officers.
Of course Dubai isn’t the first to use such technology. Both Los Angeles and Manchester have trialled similar schemes, with mixed results.
KitGuru Says: While I partly like the idea of using smart technology to improve policing, it seems like a bad idea to encourage predicting of crime. It seems too likely to cause collateral damage to innocents.Special guest Jordan Morris is taking stock of the behaviors he’s going to have to give up if he’s going to one day cohabitate. Alison’s clarifying her door-open position from last week and worrying about premature labor. Al’s blasting 90s rock and eating sausage. And what’s the right term for a bunch of elves? Plus a piglet update, video game and TV chat, What Does #AL Know?, Just Me Or Everyone and an adoptable dog named Donovan.
Also, big news!! My Patreon page which I’ve been talking about for months is now live!!!!!
Download the episode from iTunes.
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Here’s Donovan:On Aug. 2, 1943, U.S. motor torpedo boat PT 109 was on patrol off the Solomon Islands when it was struck amidships by the Japanese destroyer Amagiri, killing two U.S. crewmen and injuring two others. The PT was cut in half and sank, stranding 11 survivors, Lt. Junior Grade John F. Kennedy among them, on Plum Pudding Island for six days before they were rescued.
Thanks to recent advances in naval technology, this might not be a danger future sailors face.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Navy's Office of Naval Research revealed the results of an August demonstration of new "swarming" technology for small patrol boats. In it, 13 small, unmanned rigid-hulled inflatable boats, or RHIBs, were tasked with autonomously escorting a larger Navy warship as it transited a strait. In one exercise, the robo-boats were alerted to the presence of a potentially hostile vessel bearing down on their mother ship, and decided on their own to split their forces -- peeling off several boats to intercept the threat.
In actual practice, Chief of Naval Research Rear Adm. Matthew Klunder said, these boats might be armed with.50 caliber machine guns or directed energy weapons (such as Raytheon's (NYSE:RTN) "Silent Guardian" microwave beam weapon) to neutralize threats.
The Navy says its new device makes use of technology originally used by NASA on the Mars Rovers, crunching data gathered from sensors and radar to independently decide on a course of action. This suggests the Navy's tech could be even more advanced than that used by the Army to control iRobot (NASDAQ:IRBT) PackBot or QinetiQ Talon bomb disposal robots, or by the Air Force to control its Predator drones. With it, the Navy has shown that it, too, can remotely operate robots to perform missions that might be too dangerous for manned vessels.
Perhaps as important, it can do this on the cheap.
According to Navy officials, the device needed to turn a small manned patrol boat into a robotic killing machine, dubbed the Control Architecture for Robotic Agent Command and Sensing, or "CARACaS," costs only about $2,000. Needless to say, that's a far cry from the $3.5 billion price tag that defense contractors General Dynamics (NYSE:GD) and Huntington Ingalls (NYSE:HII) charge for a Zumwalt-class destroyer -- though admittedly we're only talking about the cost of the "brains" of the vessel, and a RHIB boat is far less capable than a Zumwalt.
But here's where the CARACaS program gets really interesting, and where the business models of traditional defense contractors such as General Dynamics and Huntington Ingalls begin to look vulnerable: We might be able to build an entire fleet of these robo-warriors for the cost of just one Zumwalt.
Robot warrior for hire: Will work cheap
Just this past summer -- around the time the Navy was putting CARACaS through its paces -- we heard word of a new military superboat designed by privately held Juliet Marine Systems. Dubbed the "Ghost," Juliet Marine's new high-speed patrol boat looks nothing like any naval warship you've ever seen. (It actually looks more like a stealth fighter jet on pontoons).
These pontoons, which contain one gas turbine engine each, are the only part of Ghost that actually touch the water. Separated from the 38-foot-long hull by 12-foot-long struts, they cut through water as Ghost races across the ocean, permitting the 38-foot-long hull to float above the waves, impervious to choppy seas that might upset a smaller, traditionally built boat.
And Ghost races fast. Juliet believes the vessel could reach speeds of up to 50 knots, outrunning even America's fleet of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. According to news reports, the vessel moves this fast by using the principle of supercavitation to create an air bubble around each of its pontoon-engines. Within this bubble, friction is reduced, enabling the vessel to essentially "fly" through the medium.
Juliet founder and CEO Gregory Sancoff described Ghost as an "attack helicopter of the sea" and a perfect vessel for fending off attacks by swarming speedboats. Its angular-plane construction makes the vessel radar "stealthy" as well. And because it's much bigger than a standard 28-foot RHIB, it's a much more formidable, long-endurance adversary.
Reportedly, the vessel can carry enough fuel to remain in operation for up to 30 days. Ghost can also carry as many as 90 Nemesis surface-to-surface missiles, enough firepower to ensure the vessel greatly outguns its opponents (and outranges them as well. Lockheed Martin's (NYSE:LMT) Nemesis missile is said to have an effective range of more than seven miles).
Best of all, Juliet says the first prototype of Ghost cost just $5 million to build, and that it can deliver the Navy fully battle-ready versions of the boat for as little as $10 million per copy.
At that price, the Navy could literally build itself a 350-"ship" fleet... for the cost of just one Zumwalt.
Should defense investors be afraid of robotic Ghosts?
The good news for investors in defense contractors such as General Dynamics and Huntington Ingalls is that, to date, the U.S. Navy has shown zero interest in buying Ghost, sticking instead with more traditional ship designs. Indeed, some reports indicate Klunder's Office of Naval Research has in the past actively opposed the vessel's development, ordering Juliet to refrain from even discussing its design with investors.
ONR's development of the CARACaS technology, however, suggests the Navy could be coming around to Juliet's way of thinking -- that the Navy might now agree that a fleet of cheap, fast, stealthy, and armed-to-the-teeth patrol boats is something worth building. As Klunder himself has asserted, such robotic boats are "the future" of the Navy.
And Ghost just might be the boat that helps carry the Navy into that future.RRRcomputer.org, a non-profit organisation providing children in need with reused computers in the San Francisco Bay Area, now accepts bitcoin donations through Bitpay payment platform.
The founders of the non-profit believe that “there are better uses for old computers than being scrapped for parts and creating unnecessary e-waste in landfills”. Instead of sending old computers to recycling centres, RRRcomputer.org is sending them to low-income primary school students.
Hue Mach, the RRRcomputer.org founder and an IT professional, has a goal to fill the gap, which exists between families that have access to computer technology and those who don’t. He remarks that children from a deprived background may not have a chance to build a career in the tech industry if “this digital divide” is not bridged. Elizabeth Ploshay, an account manager at Bitpay, told Cointelegraph:
“Hue is spearheading an initiative to promote education and digital literacy for K-6th graders in the SF Bay area, Bitcoin as a donation method goes hand in hand with RRR's innovation and goal of inclusion.”
The non-profit is welcoming donations from businesses and individuals and also encourages the bitcoin community to join them in an effort to improve children’s technical literacy.
Coinfox recently reported on another initiative designed to empower young people by the use of digital technology. We wrote about Code To Inspire, a project launched by Fereshteh Forough to create the first coding centre for young women in Herat, Afghanistan. Among other charity projects that accept bitcoin donations is RLab’s initiative for children’s early development and education projects.
Daria PetushkovaMotaz appeared in the Rubin Report 'Fan Show'.
Dave Rubin has not shied away from hosting controversial guests on his virally-popular chat show, but yesterday’s segment in which the political commentator spoke with a member of Jordan’s LGBT community stands out in the current era of polarized debate on Islam and the West.
Political discourse on the topic of Islam and the West’s relationship with the Islamic world is, for the most part, divided, with one side calling for Muslim travel bans and the other promoting the narrative that the Middle East would be a feminist, progressive Utopia had it not been for Western interference. However there is a growing number of media personalities who are challenging both sides of thisdebate, and their popularity is increasing among those disillusioned by the “left-right” dichotomy.
Dave Rubin is notable among these figures for challenging stereotypes; he identifies as a “classical liberal”, is pro-weed and pro-choice, and is gay. Normally, that should situate him somewhere alongside Linda Sarsour or Occupy Democrats on the modern American political spectrum, right? Wrong.
His viral chat show, The Rubin Report, has been a platform for a myriad of vocal critics of Islam, including Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Sam Harris, and even Tommy Robinson, the former leader of the far-right (and vehemently anti-Islam) English Defense League. It is little wonder, therefore, that Rubin has been the target of criticism from others on the “left”. He is often called out for not adequately challenging the views of those he hosts, and has even been accused of helping to normalize “white nationalism”.
As an outspoken atheist and critic of what he calls the “regressive left”, Rubin naturally spends a lot of time discussing Islam and the difficulties involved with criticizing it. However, it is clear that his choice of guests provides easy ammunition for those critics who wish to attack his credibility, and label him an Islamophobic, alt-right apologist.
However not all of his guests are critics of Islam. In yesterday’s segment, Rubin spoke with “Motaz”, a bisexual, Muslim Jordanian and fan of the Rubin Report. The excited young man, confidently speaking in perfect english, told Rubin that he was definitely convinced by Islam, but that he was also sure of his sexuality.
“I personally do believe that Islam is the right religion... I do truly believe it... but I also know that I am also bisexual.”
He struggled with being both Muslim and bisexual during his teen years, and while his family are still unaware of his sexuality, he said that his friends were “fairly progressive” and that there are “gay nights” at some bars in Jordan.
The discussion touched briefly upon Jordanian politics and the the legality of homosexuality in the Muslim-majority kingdom, however most memorable was perhaps the animated manner in which Motaz spoke about religion.
Speaking of the religious writing displayed in public spaces around the country, Motaz said that it does not feel like religion is being enforced, and that what is written is done in “good faith”.
“I don’t find it that intrusive, I feel like in terms of religion and things like that...you’re free to do whatever you want, but I don’t feel like it's intrusive.”
The young Jordanian appears to be quite the fan of Rubin, and has Retweeted a few of his free speech absolutism Tweets.
Motaz, as a passionate Muslim, is clearly not an “Islamophobe”. However, as a fan of The Rubin Report and with a Twitter profile which shows that he too is critical of certain elements within the left, he certainly doesn’t fit any right-wing stereotypes of Muslims as haters of freedom either.
He challenges those on both sides of the debate, and thus offers the type of insight which Rubin ought to be uplifting in order to build bridges and break the seemingly-cemented dichotomy.
Many ex-Muslims have become popular on social media for expressing their views on Islam and offering an insight into life as an apostate from a community overwhelmingly hostile towards those who leave it. Unsurprisingly, however, they too have been the target of criticism from the so-called “regressive left”. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, for example, probably doesn’t help herself by appearing on Fox News.
By hosting them on his show, Rubin is (rightly) giving them the opportunity to discuss their situation in front of a large and engaging audience, however he is unlikely to change any minds in the vastly-divided political debate on Islam.
Motaz, on the other hand, as a proud Muslim, member of the LGBT community and free-speech advocate, is harder to criticize, and thus opens the door for a proper discussion about Islam, LGBT rights, and the West.MARKET SHARES
Share of Overall Units DC 44.59% Marvel 32.11% Image 7.78% IDW 3.53% Dark Horse 2.28% Other 1.80% Boom 1.57% Dynamite 1.14% Titan 1.09% Valiant 0.88% Archie 0.64% Oni 0.55% Viz 0.41% Avatar 0.38% Zenescope 0.34% Action Lab 0.29% Aftershock 0.24% Random House 0.18% Fantagraphics 0.07% St. Martins 0.06% Hachette 0.06% Share of Overall Dollars DC 39.27% Marvel 30.78% Image 7.66% IDW 4.92% Dark Horse 3.08% Boom 1.98% Dynamite 1.57% Titan 1.19% Viz 1.14% Oni 0.83% Valiant 0.76% Avatar 0.71% Archie 0.70% Random House 0.61% Zenescope 0.47% Fantagraphics 0.34% Action Lab 0.33% Aftershock 0.30% Hachette 0.22% St. Martins 0.22% Other 2.93% Items in Top 300 Marvel 100 DC 71 Image 35 IDW 25 Dark Horse 16 Titan 12 Boom 11 Valiant 9 Dynamite 6 Archie 5 Avatar 2 Bongo 2 Oni 2 Aftershock 1 Albatross 1 Joe Books 1 Zenescope 1 Share of Units in Top 300 DC 49.46% Marvel 34.33% Image 6.73% IDW 2.59% Dark Horse 1.77% Boom 1.25% Valiant 0.90% Titan 0.88% Archie 0.57% Dynamite 0.56% Oni 0.31% Avatar 0.19% Bongo 0.13% Aftershock 0.10% Albatross 0.09% Joe Books 0.08% Zenescope 0.07% Share of Dollars in Top 300 DC 43.92% Marvel 38.83% Image 6.30% IDW 2.92% Dark Horse 1.94% Boom 1.75% Valiant 0.99% Titan 0.96% Archie 0.68% Dynamite 0.63% Oni 0.34% Avatar 0.28% Bongo 0.14% Aftershock 0.11% Albatross 0.10% Zenescope 0.07% Joe Books 0.06% Dollar Share of Top 300 Comics & Top 300 TPBs DC 42.61% Marvel 37.05% Image 7.71% IDW 3.41% Dark Horse 2.18% Boom 1.63% Titan 0.91% Valiant 0.82% Oni 0.81% Archie 0.61% Dynamite 0.57% Viz 0.42% Avatar 0.23% Aftershock 0.18% Abstract 0.16% Random House 0.15% Bongo 0.12% Albatross 0.08% Zenescope 0.06% Fantagraphics 0.06% Joe Books 0.05% Studio Foglio 0.05% Aspen 0.05% St. Martins 0.03% Magnetic 0.02% Tokyopop 0.02% Action Lab 0.01% New comics released Marvel 93 DC 75 IDW 53 Image 52 Dark Horse 26 Boom 22 Dynamite 22 Titan 20 Oni 10 Other 144 TOTAL 517 New graphic novels released Marvel 35 DC 33 IDW 31 Viz 24 Dark Horse 16 Image 11 Titan 10 Boom 8 Dynamite 6 Oni 2 Other 117 TOTAL 293
THE FINE PRINT
The monthly sales estimates at right are for items shipped by Diamond Comic Distributors, the largest comic-book distributor in North America.
Diamond does not publish sales figures; instead it publishes "indexed" sales tables, in which it keys orders for all comics it lists sales for to a single comic book (usually Batman), with one “order index point” being equal to 1% of that title’s orders.
Along with other methods, we use the actual Diamond final orders from titles to approximate what an order index point equals each month.The result is applied to the Diamond charts to produce the estimates seen at right.
The figures represent only those comics and graphic novels that Diamond shipped to North American retailers in the calendar month. While Diamond's sales represent the majority of periodicals in circulation, they are a smaller portion of the overall graphic novel market.
An item may appear in more than one month's charts due to reorders; for a better idea of a comic book's overall sales, look for its end-of-year sales in the Year Overview section, where available.
More information can be found in the FAQ section.One of the perks of being a student (and right now as I’m in the middle of college applications and interviews there don’t seem to be many) is that you get a long Christmas break. This is what I’ve done since Christmas:
Stayed in my PJs all day. I got new pajama pants for Christmas (a tradition in my family). They are red with pink polka dots! My middle sister got the same |
Ben Foster, and Toby Kebbell. The film hits theaters on June 10.Pin +1 Share 131 Shares
MSNBC has hired Greta Susteren in a huge turn around from their more progressive fire breathers. Greta been open to her fans on Facebook about wanting to return to television.
Greta said about the move, “MS/NBC is handing me the responsibility of anchoring the all important 6pm news hour and they are giving me the necessary resources to continue to do my best work for the viewers (that would be you) and that is exactly what I intend to do – my best work for you. After almost 25 years in cable news, you all know me very well – I am not changing but the dial where you find me on your remote is now changing to MS/NBC…and, of course, you will probably see my renewed energy and enthusiasm.”
From Politico Greta Van Susteren is joining MSNBC, taking over the channel’s 6 p.m. time slot with a new show called “For the Record,” the network announced Thursday. Van Susteren’s show will feature both news and analysis, working as a bridge from MSNBC’s dayside news shows into its more opinion and analysis-focused primetime. She starts on Jan. 9, and the show will be based out of Washington D.C. “Greta is a true pro with a proven record of tough journalism,” MSNBC President Phil Griffin said in a statement. “Her broad range of experience and sharp news judgment will be of great value to MSNBC as we build on our momentum going into a new year and a new administration.” Her show replaces Bloomberg’s “With All Due Respect” time slot, which ended in December. “I’m thrilled to start my next chapter at MSNBC,” Van Susteren said. “The network is the right destination for the smart news and analysis I hope to deliver every day, and I look forward to joining the talented journalists and analysts I respect there.”
CommentsMontreal public transit users won't have to shell out more money for the bus and Metro this year.
The Société de transport de Montréal (STM) announced that all fares will remain the same for now when it released its 2016 annual report on Thursday.
However, that doesn't mean the freeze will continue in 2018, when a new regional organization, the ARTM, is to take over from the STM and will oversee fares.
The STM also unveiled a plan to provide better service to Montreal bus riders.
Director general Luc Tremblay acknowledged that punctuality is an issue and that more buses were late in 2016 than the previous year.
To address the problem, the transit agency plans to strategically deploy back-up buses on the 20 bus routes most affected by congestion and construction.
"We are in the process of rebuilding Montreal as you know it. That means there are many job sites around," said Mayor Denis Coderre. "We must now ensure that public transit is a viable option."
The public transit authority says more buses ran late in 2016 than the year before. (Radio-Canada)
The idea is that the buses will be waiting near problem areas and then, based on live monitoring of the network, they will be added to a route when issues spring up.
The STM hopes to have the extra pools of buses out on the roads by June.
Other highlights:Britain has landed itself in a "constitutional mess" in the wake of the summer vote against military action in Syria, in which the Commons can be guaranteed to back intervention only to defend the Falkland Islands and Gibraltar, according to a former Foreign Office minister.
In his first interview on the Syrian crisis since losing his ministerial post in the autumn reshuffle, Alistair Burt said the failure of MPs in August to back the principle of military action against the Assad regime for the use of chemical weapons had left the mainstream opposition forces "absolutely devastated".
Burt, who was the minister overseeing Syria policy for three years, said the rules on the power of parliament to sanction British military action were evolving and required clarity. He revealed that ministers were unclear after the Syria vote whether the British government was even permitted to provide intelligence or logistic back-up to a US strike designed to deter President Bashar al-Assad from using chemical weapons.
"There is now a question mark about what parliament actually will authorise military support for," Burt said. "There is the Gibraltar and the Falklands – I think we can assume those. I am not sure we can assume anything else. Where does that leave us and our partnerships around the world? We have put ourselves in a constitutional mess this way."
Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the former Conservative foreign secretary, also suggested that Assad was strengthening his grip on power after the failure of the international community to support mainstream opposition forces, which have been undermined by internal weaknesses.
But Rifkind, a supporter of a strike against Assad for using chemical weapons, added that in retrospect the Commons vote had strengthened diplomacy in the Middle East. He described the sequence of events as "a chapter of accidents which, for once, had a happy outcome, and which could have equally had a very unhappy outcome".
Rifkind said: "In the last three or four months we have had, in a way no one predicted, not one but two diplomatic breakthroughs: the Syrian chemical weapons agreement and the interim deal in Iran. Don't underestimate the implications of that. Suddenly diplomacy has got a good name. The international community, in quite different ways, have got their act together and in two of the most intractable problems in the Middle East."
The remarks by Burt and Rifkind were made in interviews with the Guardian examining the events of late August in which David Cameron tried – and failed – to secure parliamentary backing for the principle of military action against the Assad regime in response to a chemical weapons attack on a Damascus suburb.
The vote was hailed by some as a reassertion of parliament. The Labour party leader, Ed Miliband, argued that an "ill-thought-out" intervention would make the situation worse for the Syrian people.
After the vote, Cameron surprised MPs by immediately ruling out Britain joining military action at any time. "I strongly believe in the need for a tough response to the use of chemical weapons, but I also believe in respecting the will of this House of Commons … the British parliament, reflecting the views of the British people, does not want to see British military action. I get that, and the government will act accordingly."
The defeat shaped events well beyond Westminster by providing what one senior diplomat called a "get out of jail card" for Barack Obama, who backed away from military action, creating a space for the deal between Washington and Moscow to rid Syria of chemical weapons.
The interviews also revealed:
• Continued resentment in Downing Street over the conduct of the White House, with No 10 believing Cameron worked hard to persuade President Obama to stand up to Assad, only to see military action collapse after officials felt they were bounced by the White House, leaving the prime minister no time to prepare his own side.
• Senior British foreign policy figures say Assad is now in danger of winning, and the failure to send earlier clear signals to Assad may mean it is too late to save the Syrian opposition.
• Tory whips were told middle-ranking ministers and parliamentary private secretaries would have resigned if Cameron had tabled an amendment immediately endorsing war. On the afternoon of the vote, Tory whips were seeking a deal with Labour to abstain.
• Ed Miliband had a disagreement with the shadow defence minister, Jim Murphy, on the morning of the parliamentary votes on 29 August when the Labour leader told him the party would vote against a government motion even after Cameron agreed to his demand to delay a vote authorising military action until a later date. Murphy was later demoted from his post in what was described as a "punishment beating".
Douglas Alexander, the shadow foreign secretary, has said the Labour decision to oppose a rush to war was vindicated by events, including the agreement to remove Assad's chemical weapons and the possibility of a diplomatic breakthrough in talks in Geneva.
But Burt – a close ally of the foreign secretary, William Hague – revealed his deep anger at the failure of MPs in August to back the principle of military action. "We have put ourselves in a constitutional mess this way. I think government needs to take executive action in foreign affairs. It informs parliament. If parliament does not ultimately go for it, then the issue becomes a vote of confidence issue. I don't think you can handle foreign affairs by having to try to convince 326 people [a majority of MPs] each time you need to take a difficult decision. You do it and if they don't like it, they can vote you out and they can have a general election."
Burt insisted the British government "knew exactly what would happen if there was not a strike against Assad over chemical weapons. He goes on. And the only thing that would deflect this man and this regime is if they fear they are going to end up in a storm drain with a bayonet up their backside. If they don't fear that, they will go on killing as many people as they need to stay in power."
Burt added: "I think moderate Syrian opposition was absolutely devastated by this decision. They felt in a sense that their last hope had gone. They had heard the west talk a good game about support. They had heard Americans hint about arming them in some way or other. They had heard us say we support you 100%, but then our parliament will not let us give you anything."
He also claimed the failure to strike against Assad strengthened the previously small extremist Syrian opposition. "We have no idea what the serious extremists' numbers are, but I suspect they are small," he said. "The Free Syrian Army still command a lot of support, but they don't have sufficient military means to do it. If you are fighting to remove Assad and you want to stay alive to see a new dawn, you will fight with the people that will give you the best chance of survival rather than martyrdom."
One senior Foreign Office source echoed the concerns of Burt and voiced the hope that Britain would not lose its ability to act diplomatically and militarily. The source told the Guardian: "It sounds like a cliche, but, on the whole, the UK does punch above its weight in international affairs. Two key reasons for our diplomatic strength are, first, our status as one of the five permanent members of the UN security council and how we use that position; and, second, our ability to be more flexible, adaptable and nimble than others – both diplomatically and militarily.
"I really hope that the lesson from August's parliamentary vote is that however we take decisions about military action in the future, we do so in a way that preserves rather than constrains our comparative advantage [or our ability to be nimble]."
As the political world prepares for a year of commemorations marking the start of the first world war, Rifkind said the chemical weapons deal on Syria showed that a series of accidents did not have to lead to war.
"You murder an archduke and something bad happens and because that has happened something even worse happens and then we end up with the first world war. The opposite can also potentially happen – having got that initial breakthrough on Syria, the Russians and the Americans both benefited from it."
Burt doubts, however, that the Commons vote changed the American calculations, saying that Obama could easily have worked instead with the French if he had wanted to pursue military action. "If Obama really wanted to do what he should have done, it would have been very nice for America to have us, but the reality was going to be 'François [Hollande] come in, Dave [Cameron] I am busy.' I don't really buy this argument by some of my colleagues that the Commons vote persuaded the United States not to enforce a chemical weapons convention against a state that had tried to gas its own people, and that Obama was saying 'I cannot do this because the British parliament has not supported a vague motion'. I do not get that."Rob Ford’s suggestion on a radio show that homeless people should be forcibly swept off the streets during bouts of cold weather drew skepticism and ire from poverty activists Thursday.
Speaking to John Oakley in the morning, Mr. Ford weighed in on the dangers of wintertime homelessness by indicating people “shivering on a grate” should be moved into shelters.
“We can’t leave people out on the sidewalks freezing to death. I’m sorry. I’m going to tell the social workers, get them off the street, get them into a shelter,” Mr. Ford said.
When the radio host seemed surprised at the suggestion of force, Mr. Ford replied: “What are you going to do?… I’m not going to walk by someone shivering on a grate when it’s -20 out. That’s just inhumane. And if I was like that, I’d want someone to pick me up and say, OK, here’s a warm bed, we’ll take care of you.”
While “you can’t force anyone to do anything,” Mr. Ford later told the
National Post
, he would “work with social services” to get people off the streets during frigid winter months.
“I can’t have people in our city dying on the streets in the freezing cold,” he said.
Toronto police have the exclusive authority to force homeless people off the city’s streets, and even then, only in extreme circumstances, such as when a life is at risk.
“It’s very situational as to what powers we have and when they can be used,” Toronto police spokesman Wendy Drummond noted.
Regardless, Mr. Ford’s suggestion rubbed some activists the wrong way.
Bruno Scorsone, executive director of the Good Neighbours Club — a day centre for older homeless men — noted shelter conditions are not appropriate for all homeless people, especially the elderly and the disabled.
He says society’s response to the city’s homelessness problem must be “dignified and humane” rather than “fascistic.”
“I think it’s a scandal that there are people sleeping outside on grates in the wintertime… If Mr. Ford will ensure there are places where people who are at risk of freezing to death can be taken, then that’s fine, but there aren’t that many places,” Mr. Scorsone said.
Other activists see this issue primarily in political terms.
The idea of forcibly removing homeless people from the streets “has perennially been raised, but it’s now raised in the context of an entirely different regime at City Hall, so it’s a very, very dangerous development,” said John Clarke, an organizer with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty.THE abolition of tax discs has left drivers without physical evidence of paying something that cyclists don’t.
Thousands of motorists cherished the windscreen adornment as visual proof that roads belong to four-wheeled transport.
Norman Steele of Norwich said: My tax disc has always been a source of pride in my dealings with ‘pedallers’.
“What will I point at now when showing cyclists I am perfectly justified in knocking them into a hedge?
“I would need to actually stop, wind down the window and show them a printout of my bank statement, underlining the payment to the DVLA with my finger.”
He added: “Yes, pedants say that road tax per se hasn’t existed since 1937, it’s actually Vehicle Excise Duty and is based on engine size. But this is a free country and Britons are not prisoners of facts.”
Salesman Nathan Muir said: “Old Taxey Bill, as I call him, has always been there in my peripheral vision, rain or shine.
“I talk to him and tell him my secrets. He doesn’t judge me, not even when I go dogging.”
White van driver Bill McKay said: I wont be removing the tax disc from my car. Even if it did expire in October 2008 and my vehicle is kept strategically parked round the back of the local rugby club.”MANILA (UPDATED) - Animal rights activists on Friday welcomed the release of reportedly the largest captive freshwater crocodile back into the wild.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) Asia official Rochelle Regodon said in a statement that fishermen's capture of the 2.9-meter-long "Malang" from the Liguasan Marsh in the Mindanao River basin was illegal under the Wildlife Resources Conservation and Protection Act.
Crocodile experts and representatives from the Palawan Wildlife and Rescue Center supervised the crocodile's release on Friday.
Mlang Mayor Joselito Piñol, as well as Department of Environment and Natural Resources officials, worked for the crocodile's release.
PETA said Malang would have met the same fate as saltwater crocodile Lolong, which died from pneumonia, cardiac failure, multiple organ failure, and non-adaptive stress response because of captivity.
"In the wild, crocodiles spend hours swimming and can regulate the buoyancy and temperature—called 'thermo-regulation'—of their bodies. No enclosure—no matter how large—is able to provide crocodiles with everything that is natural and important to them," the group said.
"Displaying a crocodile would not bring fame or honor to the Philippines or Cotabato. Keeping Malang in captivity would have only shown a lack of regard for animal welfare, and PETA applauds the city of Mlang for recognizing that," it added.
Malang belongs to the Philippine freshwater crocodile (Crocodylus mindorensis) species, which is endemic in the Philippines.
The local government of Mlang has also passed an order declaring part of the Liguasan Marsh as a protected area. The DENR also declared the area as a critical habitat.
"Pwede pa namang makapunta yung mga mangingisda dun pero distansya from the area mismo," Pinol added.
Barangay Dungguan where Malang was captured is located in the northeastern side of the 220,000-hectare Liguasan Marsh at the tri-boundary of Central Mindanao's adjoining provinces of North Cotabato, Maguindanao, and Sultan Kudarat.
The 59.9-kilogram male crocodile is estimated to be between 10 to 15 years old.
Prior to his release, he was sheltered at a mini park at the Mlang town hall.
The doctors who took care of Malang cut a part of his scale for marking.
He was given a serial number that will serve as a mark so that he can be easily recognized in the wild.If you own any shares in companies that produce reflecting telescopes, use differential and integral calculus, or rely on the laws of motion, I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the calculus myth has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after volumes of Newton’s private correspondence were compiled and published.
When you read some of these letters, you realise just why Newton and his collaborators might have preferred to keep them confidential. This scandal could well be the biggest in Renaissance science. These alleged letters – supposedly exchanged by some of the most prominent scientists behind really hard math lessons – suggest:
conspiracy
collusion in covering up the truth
manipulation of data
private admissions of flaws in their public claims
and much more!
But perhaps the most damaging revelations are those concerning the way these math nerd scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence to support their cause.
Here are a few tasters. They suggest dubious practices such as:
Conspiring to avoid public scrutiny:
There is nothing which I desire to avoid in matters of philosophy more then contentions, nor any kind of contention more then one in print: & therefore I gladly embrace your proposal of a private correspondence. What’s done before many witnesses is seldom without some further concern then that for truth: but what passes between friends in private usually deserve ye name of consultation rather then contest, & so I hope it will prove between you & me. Newton to Hooke, 5 February 1676
Insulting dissenting scientists and equating them with holocaust deniers:
[Hooks Considerations] consist in ascribing an hypothesis to me which is not mine; in asserting an hypothesis which as to ye principal parts of it is not against me; in granting the greatest part of my discourse if explicated by that hypothesis; & in denying some things the truth of which would have appeared by an experimental examination. Newton to Oldenburg, 11 June 1672
Manipulation of evidence:
I wrote to you on Tuesday that the last leafe of the papers you sent me should be altered because it refers to a manuscript in my private custody & not yet upon record. Newton to Keill, May 15 1674
Knowingly publishing scientific fraud:
You need not give yourself the trouble of examining all the calculations of the Scholium. Such errors as do not depend upon wrong reasoning can be of no great consequence & may be corrected by the reader. Newton to Cotes June 15 1710
Suppression of evidence:
Mr. Raphson has printed off four or five sheets of his History of Fluxions, but being shew’d Sr. Is. Newton (who, it seems, would rather have them write against him, than have a piece done in that manner in his favour), he got a Stop put to it, for some time at least. Jones to Cotes, 17 September 1711
Abusing the peer review system:
…only the Germans and French have in a violent manner attack’d the Philosophy of Sr. Is. Newton, and seem resolved to stand by Cartes; Mr. Keil, as a person concerned, has undertaken to answer and defend some things, as Dr. Friend, and Dr. Mead, does (in their way) the rest: I would have sent you ye whole controversy, was not I sure that you know, those only are most capable of objecting against his writings, that least understand them; however, in a little time, you’ll see some of these in ye Philos. Transact. Jones to Cotes, October 25 1711
Insulting their critics:
The controversy concerning Sr. Isaac’s Philosophy is a piece of news that I had not heard of unless Muys’s late book be meant. I think that Philosophy needs no defence, especially when tis attack’t by Cartesians. One Mr Green a Fellow of Clare Hall in our University seems to have nearly the same design with those German & French objectors whom you mention. His book is now in our press & is almost finished. I am told he will add an appendix in which he undertakes also to square the circle. I need not recommend his performance any further to you. Cotes to Jones, November 11 1711
Gravity does not extend so far from Earth that it can be the force holding the moon to its orbit; school students are increasingly reluctant to practice differential equations, that will only lead to the practice of more oppressive forms of higher math; the tide is turning against over-regulation, like Newton’s “laws” of motion and Universal Gravitation. The so called ‘Cartesian’, ‘skeptical’ view is now also the majority view.
Unfortunately we’ve a long way to go before the public mood (and scientific truth) is reflected by our policy makers. There are too many vested interests in classical mechanics, with far too much to lose either in terms of reputation or money, for this to end without a bitter fight.
But if the Newton / Royal Society mail scandal is true, it is a blow to the Renaissance lobby’s credibility which is never likely to recover.
Resources:
Real Climate on the CRU hack
Greenfyre’s overview of Climategate
Tags: Climategate, CRU hack, Newton, NewtongateAttempt to regain record from Bradley Wiggins set for early 2017
Alex Dowsett has announced that he will have a second attempt at the UCI Hour Record after seeing his previous record broken by Bradley Wiggins.
Dowsett set a mark of 52.937km in Manchester in May 2015, but saw Wiggins surpass that distance only a month later with a new record of 54.526km.
No specific date has yet been set for the record attempt, but it will take place some time in early 2017 before the Giro d’Italia, with Dowsett choosing Manchester velodrome as the location due to the faster conditions that it can offer compared to the Olympic velodrome in London.
“Nothing’s confirmed just yet, but we’re working towards it. It’s got its challenges – just putting it on, getting everything together. We can’t announce anything confirmed but it is something we’re working towards,” Dowsett told Cycling Weekly.
>>> 100 Best Road Riders of 2016
The 28-year-old admitted he “knows” he has much more to give in the Hour, and that having the knowledge of already setting the record once before will help him this time around.
“Before Wiggins broke my record I was like ‘we need to go again because that wasn’t what I can do’,” he said.
“We will approach it in the same way we did last time; no egos, no trying to show just how great we are. It’ll be about breaking the record.
Watch: 100 best road riders of 2016
“The first 50 minutes will be super controlled, super regimented. The last time I upped it with five minutes to go. This time I might make the call with 10 minutes to go now I’ve got the confidence – I spent the last attempt waiting 50 minutes for it to really bite, and it didn’t.
“This attempt if it’s not biting… I imagine it will because it’s a slightly bigger mark than it was before. It’s exciting.”
Dowsett revealed his biggest motivation for attempting the record for the second time is to inspire more people with haemophilia – a condition he has.
“In cycling a non-cycling fan has only heard of the Tour de France, but winning Paris-Roubaix or the Giro is massive.
>>> Alex Dowsett on his World Champs time trial ride: “I’m not sure I could have done a lot more”
“I can’t win the Tour de France but I can break a world record, and a world record is something that’s very relatable to the general public and more importantly to the rare disease and haemophilia community,” he continued.
“That’s a huge source of inspiration for me; far bigger than simply winning bike races for myself. Knowing that there’s young haemophiliacs and families taking inspiration and hope from it, is massive.”
Like his attempt in 2015, the record is likely to see Dowsett combine with his Movistar team, Endura and Canyon. Scottish clothing company Endura has even created a life-size mannequin of Dowsett in his time trial position – as unveiled at the Rouleur Classic earlier this month – to save him time going into a wind tunnel.
“It’s quite a ridiculous life I lead sometimes! It’s got so important that now I don’t have to go to the wind tunnel, there’s a replacement me,” he joked.
The record attempt was announced at an event to mark the one year anniversary of Little Bleeders, a charity set up by Dowsett to support children with haemophilia.Image copyright Instagram / Ayupmockduck Image caption Vegan food photos on Instagram have been credited with helping to spread the movement
Malnourished, sanctimonious, hemp-clad, sandal-wearing, bearded, animal-cuddling, lentil-munching hippies. This has been the image of vegans for a long time, but a new generation is challenging the stereotypes. How has social media taken such a maligned movement and helped make 2017 the year veganism went mainstream?
It's the word that has launched millions upon millions of hashtagged Instagram photos - vegan.
Yet there were just a few people present when woodwork teacher Donald Watson, a member of the Leicester Vegetarian Society, called a meeting in 1944 and settled on the term.
They took the first three and last two letters of "vegetarian" to make "veg-an" because it marked, in Mr Watson's words, "the beginning and end of vegetarian".
Image copyright Vegan Society Image caption Vegan Society founder Donald Watson produced the first copy of the Vegan News in 1944
If they had opted for one of the other suggestions then countless Instagrammers could now be hashtagging their photos with #benevore #vitan #dairyban #sanivore or #beaumangeur.
Others had abstained from eating and using animal products before the term vegan was coined, but giving the movement a name and founding the Vegan Society helped it to spread.
Image caption The Vegan Society was featured in a 1976 episode of the BBC's Open Door series
Back then, decades before the invention of home computers, Mr Watson produced newsletters called "Vegan News", laboriously running pages through a duplicating machine by hand and stapling them together.
He told an interviewer: "I'd limited the number of people, who subscribed their five shillings a year, to 500, because I couldn't cope with a bigger number."
What impact has the internet had?
Image copyright Monami Frost Image caption Monami Frost's husband and daughter are vegan too
Now, of course, vegans like Monami Frost can reach thousands and even millions of people in a few seconds, by uploading a photo or video from their phone.
"I started my YouTube channel as just another way to connect more with the people that follow me," says the 23-year-old, who already had a popular Instagram account before she became a YouTuber.
"I always wanted to show that I am just like everyone else, just a young mum that loves tattoos, loves her family, loves her vegan lifestyle and wants to share that with everyone and share some cooking videos."
Image copyright Monami Frost Image caption Monami Frost said eating vegan food had resulted in "many positive changes" in her health
Monami has 1.4 million followers on Instagram and more than 570,000 subscribers on YouTube. Her most popular video about veganism features her daughter Gabriela talking about what she eats in a day and has attracted more than 800,000 views.
She is originally from Riga in Latvia but moved to Liverpool when she was 16, and has been rated as the second most influential vegan creator in the UK by Tubular, which analyses data about videos posted on social media platforms.
Every day she gets messages from people telling her how she inspired them to go vegan, or people walking up to her in the street.
"It is just mind blowing for me, that I have helped someone change their life and at the same time save so many animals' lives," she says.
Image copyright Monami Frost Image caption Vegan "influencer" Monami Frost posts videos about her lifestyle on YouTube
In the past, vegans abstained from animal products mainly for ethical reasons but people are increasingly making the switch for health reasons, including many vegan athletes.
Monami admits that she too was motivated by health when she and her husband became vegan almost four years ago.
"We were really concentrating on eating only plant-based whole foods and making everything from scratch," she says.
"Right after a week or two we noticed so many positive changes."
Image copyright Monami Frost Image caption Monami's recipes include this "creamy" ramen, which is made using cashew milk instead of dairy cream
However, as they did more research into animal agriculture they became "ethical vegans".
"Once we learned more about what animals go through then we realised how important it is to fight for the animals and educate some people and help them open their eyes to the reality," she says.
"Now I can say that I am vegan for the animals. I am trying to be the voice for the voiceless."
Who watches vegan videos on YouTube?
Image caption Monami Frost - a young woman - mirrors her YouTube audience
Monami's gender and age reflect the typical audience that engages with vegan content on YouTube - namely young women.
"The core audience on YouTube engaging with vegan content are women aged 18-26, making up 36% of all engagements globally," says Denis Crushell, vice president of Europe for Tubular.
"Audiences who watch veganism videos also tend to watch videos related to health, nutrition, dieting and fitness as well as channels which publish food and drink, beauty and entertainment content."
Image caption Analysis by Tubular shows that young women are the biggest audience engaging with veganism content on YouTube
Monami is also typical of influential vegan YouTubers in that her channel is not just about veganism.
"Many of the most influential vegan creators don't create content solely about veganism - they have built a large audience from publishing other types of content," says Mr Crushell.
"For example, robinbirrell mostly publishes entertainment content."
The US is the biggest consumer of veganism content but the UK also has a large vegan audience. In the past 90 days on YouTube, 6% of all veganism content globally was consumed by audiences located in the UK.
Is veganism growing in real life?
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption What happens when a football club goes vegan?
The Vegan Society thinks the rise of veganism online is mirrored in the real world, and describes veganism as "the fastest growing lifestyle movement".
In 2016 it commissioned research by Ipsos Mori which suggested there were at least 542,000 people - or 1.05% of the 15 and over population in England, Scotland and Wales - following a vegan diet.
Ten years before the estimated number of vegans was just 150,000.
Close to half - 42% - of all vegans were in the 15-34 age category, compared to just 14% of people who were over 65, so the Vegan Society predicts veganism will continue to grow in future as it continues to be adopted by younger generations.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Celebrities like Beyoncé have helped make vegan or plant-based diets aspirational, according to the Vegan Society
"We did a survey where we asked people about their perceptions of veganism and found that non-vegans actually often said that they admired vegans," says Samantha Calvert from the Vegan Society.
"That wouldn't have been the case 20 or 30 years ago. People would have described vegans as extreme and unnecessary. 'Taking it too far' would have been the expression.
"Now we're a group of people that people feel are something to admire and I think there's been a cultural shift in that sense."
Image copyright Miley Cyrus / Instagram Image caption "Vegan for life" Miley Cyrus has a tattoo of the Vegan Society trademark on her left arm
She believes celebrities like Beyoncé and Jay Z - who have dabbled with plant-based diets - and Miley Cyrus - who has the Vegan Society's trademark tattooed on her left arm - helped kickstart this change in perception.
"It was suddenly being associated with the celebrities, with the successful people, with the beautiful people," she says.
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Actress Natalie Portman launched a range of vegan footwear
"There are other things that are also having an impact as well. The availability of more vegan food in restaurants, the fact that food is more clearly labelled, all the beautiful photographs of vegan food on Instagram.
"A lot of young people are very aware of environmental issues and are making the change for that reason. I think people are more aware there are so many reasons to be vegan now."
Veganism as a new year resolution
Image copyright Veganuary Image caption Veganuary has many celebrity ambassadors including food writer Jack Monroe, broadcaster Sarah-Jane Crawford and comedian Carl Donnelly
January is traditionally a time for new beginnings and resolutions and the Veganuary campaign taps into this.
It challenges people to try veganism for one month in the hope they will either give up or reduce their consumption of animal products permanently once January is over.
The idea was thought up by vegan couple Jane Land and Matthew Glover in autumn 2013, while having a wine-fuelled discussion about Movember and how a similar campaign could reduce animal suffering.
Image copyright wickedhealthyfood.com Image caption This breakfast burrito features in series of recipe videos being put out by Veganuary in 2018
Jane thought Matthew was slurring his words when he said "Ve-gan-u-ary".
"Maybe he was," says Jane, "but it actually made sense."
Within a couple of months they had created the brand and a website, and 3,300 people signed up for Veganuary 2014.
By 2017 this had grown to 59,500, and due to "the number of vegans rising exponentially" Jane expects 150,000 people to participate in Veganuary 2018.
Image copyright Veganuary Image caption Vegan couple Jane Land and Matthew Glover based Veganuary on the Movember movement
Surprisingly, Veganuary survey results suggest that many meat eaters are converting straight to veganism, whereas in the past, vegetarianism was the traditional route into veganism.
Of the 59,500 people who signed up for 2017, the majority - 44% - were meat eaters, while 38% were vegetarian and 18% were pescetarian.
At the end of the month, 77% said they had eaten only vegan food in January, and 67% said they intended to stay vegan.
Image copyright wickedhealthyfood.com Image caption Veganuary has teamed up with the website Wicked Healthy to encourage people to cook vegan food like this
"We know that people who change a behaviour for a month find it easier to change habits in the long term," says Matthew.
"January seemed like the logical choice for us, with people committing to new year's resolutions and wanting to improve their lives and help others."
Is it easier to be vegan now?
Image caption Brands previously associated with dairy products - like Pizza Express, Ben and Jerry's and Bailey's - now offer vegan alternatives
More vegans means more demand for vegan products in shops and restaurants.
In the past, vegans had to turn to smaller, specialist and often independent businesses, but now big companies are supplying the demand too.
2017 was the year that Pizza Express introduced a vegan mozzarella alternative on its menu, Ben and Jerry's brought its range of non-dairy ice cream to the UK and even Bailey's introduced a vegan-friendly variety made from almond milk.
Image copyright Instagram/fatgayvegan Image caption Sean O'Callaghan highlights vegan products on his Instagram page
"Having been vegan for coming up to 20 years, I can tell you I feel as though I'm living in some futuristic dreamscape as far as availability of vegan products goes," says Sean O'Callaghan, also known as blogger Fat Gay Vegan.
"The most noticeable change would definitely be the extreme commodification of veganism by major retailers who have seen the profits to be made by selling plant-based foods on a large scale.
"Of course the ease with which you can buy plant milks and vegan cheese means life in the UK for vegans is less hassle. Even mainstream restaurant chains are falling over themselves to offer vegan menus."
Image copyright BBC/Violife Image caption Vegan cheese has improved since the 1970s, as shown (left) in a 1976 episode of the BBC's Open Door programme about veganism
Marks & Spencer says that vegan products are one of the biggest requests it receives from its customers.
"We have expanded our vegan selection due to an increased demand from our customers, who |
iard, guard DeAndre Liggins, guard Lou Williams, forward Kyle Wiltjer, a future first round pick, and cash considerations.
“Since winning back-to-back championships, the pursuit of a third title has remained the ultimate goal for our franchise,” said Rockets owner Leslie Alexander. “We feel that combining two of the league’s greatest players in James Harden and Chris Paul, operating in Coach D’Antoni’s system, gives us a championship caliber team that will compete at the highest level for years to come.”
“On behalf of the Rockets organization and our fans I’d also like to thank Sam, Montrezl, Kyle, and Lou for helping make this past season a special one. I’d also like to personally express my deepest gratitude to Pat Beverley, who, for the past five seasons, always left everything he had out on the court.”
Paul (6-0, 175) has racked up a multitude of honors across his 12 NBA seasons split between the New Orleans/Oklahoma City Hornets and the Clippers. A nine-time All-Star, Paul has also been named All-NBA First Team four times, Second Team three times and Third Team once. In addition, Paul has been named NBA All-Defensive First Team seven times and Second Team twice and helped Team USA capture a gold medal in both the 2008 and 2012 Olympics.
For his career, Paul has started all 834 of his games played, while averaging 18.7 points, 9.9 assists, 4.4 rebounds and 2.29 steals while shooting 47.3% from the floor, 37.0% from 3-point range, and 86.6% from the line with an assist-to-turnover ratio of 4.08. He is the only player in NBA history with career averages of at least 19.0 points, 9.0 assists, 4.0 rebounds and 2.00 steals. There are only three other players in NBA history with career averages of at least 19.0 points, 9.0 assists and 4.0 rebounds (Oscar Robertson, Magic Johnson, and John Wall).
Paul has averaged a point/assist double-double in six of his 12 seasons, including three of the past four. That is already the fourth-highest total in NBA history, trailing only John Stockton (12), Magic Johnson (9), and Steve Nash (7). Four of Nash’s seven seasons averaging a double-double came while playing for current Rockets head coach Mike D’Antoni in Phoenix. Nash was also named NBA MVP twice during his four seasons with D’Antoni.
Among players who were active last season, Paul has the most career assists (8,251) and steals (1,912) and ranks 10th in NBA history in assists and 15th in steals. He joins Jason Kidd, Gary Payton and Stockton as the only players with at least 8,000 assists and 1,900 steals.
Paul has hit at least 120 3-pointers in each of the past three seasons after not having more than 92 in a season prior for his career. He also shot 39.3% from behind-the-arc over the past three seasons after shooting 35.7% his first nine seasons. Paul averaged a career-high 2.0 3FGM on a career-best 41.1% shooting in 2016-17.
Earlier today the Rockets completed five separate trades with Atlanta, Dallas, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Portland:Broome Regional Prison lashed as 'degrading an inhumane' by Inspector of Custodial Services
Updated
Conditions at Broome Regional Prison are "degrading and inhumane" and "would not be acceptable in Perth", the Inspector of Custodial Services has said in a damning report.
Inspector Neil Morgan found the prison is "old, decrepit and crowded" and "not fit for purpose as a modern prison."
He said the living conditions in the men's maximum-security unit "were the worst in the state".
"Prisoners were confined to the hot, dark, dirty, crowded, cramped unit for 24 hours a day," Mr Morgan said.
"They had no personal space, very little mental or visual stimulation and minimal access to physical activity.
"The conditions in the maximum-security unit were inhumane and degrading."
Sleeping in front of toilet doors
The report said there was often more than 35 men in the unit that is only built for 28, forcing many to sleep on mattresses on the floor.
Up to six prisoners were often housed in cells originally designed for two.
"When the cells are this crowded, one prisoner must sleep in front of the toilet door that opens outwards," the report found.
"It means that if a prisoner needs to use the toilet during the evening, they must wake up and move the prisoner sleeping on the floor.
"The entire situation is chaotic, inhumane and degrading, and contributes directly to the decline in the mental and physical health of prisoners housed in the unit."
When the inspection was carried out, the unit only had access to two showers.
"In most cases, the prisoners told us that they are simply not showering," the report found.
It also said they were confined to the maximum-security cells far longer than they should have been.
"We were told that prisoners were only supposed to be held there for very short periods of time," the report said.
"This was not the case. At the time of the inspection, five men had been there for over 90 days and another three for over 60 days.
"It was hardly surprising that staff and prisoners both felt that prisoners' physical and mental condition was suffering."
Mr Morgan also found that the female inmates were "isolated" and "marginalised" at the facility.
"They were confined to their unit, with no access to active recreation; they had limited work opportunities and their visits area was unsuitable," he said.
According to the report, the accommodation blocks were built in 1945, making it the oldest prison in the state.
It said the prison's population was made up mostly of "Aboriginal remand and sentenced men and women from Kimberley region, across all security levels - minimum, medium, and maximum-security."
Prison closure reversed
The prison was scheduled to be closed in 2015, but remained open after an about-face by the previous Barnett government. Today's report was completed after an inspection of the facility in March this year.
The State Government has committed $2.7 million funding commitment to upgrade the facility but Mr Morgan has warned more needs to be done.
"This is only a stop-gap measure," the report said.
"The Department still has no long-term plan for the custodial needs of the Kimberley region, despite multiple previous commitments."
The report recommended that there was more capital investment for infrastructure and human resources upgrades, plus an improvement on prisoner regimes and a plan for custodial facilities in the Kimberley.
The acting Commissioner of Corrective Services, Tony Hassall, conceded that there had been concerns for a few years about the conditions of Broome Regional Prison.
"The upgrade will address many of the prison's challenges, by investing in capital works and resources to further support the care, rehabilitation and reintegration of offenders," he said.
Broome prison, courthouse need to be replaced: Minister
WA Corrective Services Minister Fran Logan admits the findings were disturbing.
"It was disturbing when I first visited the prison and it was disturbing to the inspector who had undertaken that inspection," Mr Logan said.
"No money was put into maintenance, no money was put into infrastructure upgrades [by the previous Barnett government] when it was needed and consequently the prison feel into disrepair."
Mr Logan conceded the Government's funding boost was just a "stop-gap" solution.
"In the long-term, Broome Prison and Broome Courthouse need to be replaced, that is fact," he said.
"We simply just don't have the money to do that... consequently we are making do at the moment."
Topics: law-crime-and-justice, prisons-and-punishment, government-and-politics, broome-6725, wa
First postedMayor John Tory (open John Tory's policard) says modernized laws that would regulate Uber car and limousine services are now “priority number one” for the city. His call for a single municipal bylaw to oversee all ground transportation, including both taxis and Uber, follows a court ruling that shut down the city’s attempt to ban the mobile app-based service on Toronto streets.
The city needs a by-law to regulate Uber car services, says Toronto Mayor John Tory. An Ontario Superior Court judge ruled late Friday against the city’s attempt to ban Uber on Toronto streets. ( Richard Lautens / Toronto Star ) Sajid Mughal (left), president of the Taxi Workers Association of Ontario and Sam Moini, Toronto Taxi Alliance spokesperson speak with the media. “Nobody is outside the law,” said taxi fleet operator Moini, who added that taxi services expect the current by-laws and Highway Traffic Act to be enforced. But police say the charges won't stick. ( Richard Lautens / Toronto Star )
“The Ontario Superior Court ruling was clear: our bylaws, which were written many years before technology had advanced to where it is today, simply do not adequately capture the operations of companies like Uber,” Tory said at a city hall press conference Monday. “And, as a result, what we have to today is not a level playing field.” The mayor said the city is still considering whether to appeal the judge’s decision. An appeal would need to be authorized by council. In the meantime, Tory called for an expedited review to start immediately. Major reviews of the taxi industry have consumed city hall, but a renewed push to reverse recent changes was put on hold while council awaited the Uber judgment.
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Tory said the plan is to have a new bylaw before council this fall. “We need to level the playing field,” he said. “We need to have everybody who wishes to participate in this industry doing so within the law, and that means the law is going to have to be changed.” The mayor said the UberX service, which allows anyone to hail a non-taxi driver for cheaper fares, is operating “outside the current law.” That practice has elicited concerns over both safety and proper insurance from critics in the taxi industry. He said that model is not “sustainable” and that he would expect enforcement, pending the creation of a new bylaw. “What we need is one bylaw that applies without question to everybody,” Tory added.
While it was the city that launched the court challenge, the mayor has been sympathetic to Uber’s cause; he said it’s up to the city to update outdated bylaws to acknowledge changes in technology. He said Monday he does not favour any one company and wants a regime that promotes “fair, equitable, convenient, safe service.” A new bylawshould recognize fair competition and put passengers first, he added.
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The mayor called Monday’s meeting, which brought together both sides, significant. Uber Canada general manager Ian Black said Monday that Uber is looking forward to working with the city on a new bylaw regime, while reiterating that all Uber services are operating legally, according to the Superior Court. (Uber operates different car services: one service enables customers to hail licensed cabs; UberX, another service, allows them to hail non-taxi drivers for cheaper fares.) “I think it was a good meeting to get all the opinions out around the table,” Black said. “We will continue to serve the City of Toronto, especially during the Pan Am Games.” While taxi industry representatives said they were encouraged that Tory is calling for enforcement when it comes to UberX, the mayor’s comments appear to have been misinterpreted to mean the service is currently operating illegally. Tory did not make that distinction, nor did Justice Sean Dunphy’s ruling make such a finding, instead saying that Uber has not breached the city’s current bylaws. Those opposing Uber have said police and bylaw enforcement officers are not properly enforcing city rules or the Highway Traffic Act. “Nobody is outside the law,” said taxi fleet operator Sam Moini, who added that taxi services expect the current bylaws and Highway Traffic Act to be enforced. “We can’t expect the wild, wild west to be occurring as it is right now.” Beck Taxi’s Kristine Hubbard said the company is still concerned about Uber operating unlicenced services at “major” risk to passengers. “It’s great, all these promises of 'We’ll get it done really quickly,' but during that period Uber will continue to grow and taxi drivers will continue to suffer,” said Hubbard. “How is that a compromise?” But police spokesperson Mark Pugash pointed to recent Highway Traffic Act charges against Uber drivers, which were dropped. “We had tickets under the HTA and the courts, the prosecution and the defence agreed that it didn’t come within the Highway Traffic Act,” he said. “The courts made it clear that it was not the way to go.” The city’s municipal licensing and standards division says it continues to enforce the current bylaws with respect to UberX, whose drivers it says are still operating as “unlicensed limousine drivers.” The taxi industry, calling Tory’s push for new rules a positive first step, said Monday that earlier plans to stage a strike during the Pan Am Games have been “taken off the table.” Tory said he has received assurances that service will operate normally during the weeks-long competition. With files from Betsy Powell
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*Sarah Silverman greets Bernie Sanders after opening a rally in Los Angeles. 13 August, 2015. Credit: Bernie 2016/Youtube
Celebrity input in political campaigns is usually a sideshow. The issues affecting the rich and famous are seldom the same issues affecting average working Americans.
That’s not to say celebrity endorsements don’t matter—they do, America is a celebrity culture. But an issue-based campaign is considerably more important. Bernie Sanders has elevated the discourse among Democrats, something the Republicans can only hope to hear about on E! News.
But in predictable conservative outrage, Fox News and Breitbart jumped on the Oscar-winning actress Susan Sarandon for admitting to the Hollywood Reporter that her fellow celebrities are reluctant to endorse Bernie Sanders for fear of reprisal from the Hollywood elite.
“You know, there's a lot of people I've talked to who are afraid,” she said. "They say 'I am definitely supporting him, but I'm afraid to come out' because either I am woman and I don't want to get shamed — because that has been a big part of what the response has been — or they say, 'I am just waiting to see what happens.'"
Sarandon’s words get at two issues. The explicit issue is sexism, something which the mainly white and bourgeois feminist crowd like Gloria Steinem have exacerbated by urging women support Hillary Clinton while ignoring her awful record on poor and minority women; the implicit is a fear of backlash from the Hollywood elite which is inextricably linked with the Democratic establishment. Both are sincere and important issues—but guess which one the conservative media took up?
Fox News will take any chance to bash “Hollywood liberals” and at the same time ignore issues of women’s rights. It is their mission as chosen by the white christian god.
Lest we forget, however, failed-movie-star-turned-politician Ronald Reagan, the conservative hero who was propelled to governor of California largely on the support of Hollywood types.
Hillary Clinton’s connection with the Hollywood establishment is largely financial. She has raised more than $11 million in campaign contributions to her super PACs from well known Hollywood donors, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Reagan on the other hand, used the celebrity gained from his years in Hollywood to galvanize conservative voters fearful of an America in which rights are afforded all peoples, not just white christian capitalists. The “shining city on a hill” guy even used his knowledge of Hollywood to narc on suspected communists during the McCarthy witch-hunt.
Both Hillary and Ronald have this in common: their anti-welfare approach to politics left millions of Americans in the lurch while contributing to racist stereotypes—“welfare queens” and “super-predators.”
The main difference between them? Reagan is dead (al-hamdilallah).
In contrast to Clinton, Bernie Sanders has raised only $218,599 from the Hollywood world.
Nevertheless Sanders’ celebrity endorsements are in fact varied and plentiful. The Artists and Cultural Leaders for Bernie Sanders website lists over a hundred supporters, among them Dead Kennedy’s frontman Jello Biafra, comedian and author Margaret Cho, Flea, contemporary artist Shepard Fairey (remember what he did for Obama?) and comedian Sarah Silverman.
The commonality between all these artists?
They tout Sanders’ focus on a real and principled progressive platform, the continuity of his activism over decades and his refusal of corporate money.
So Sarandon’s support of Sanders on Twitter is a disavowal of Clinton’s hawkish neoliberalism and support for the progressive candidate in reality, not some self-hating expression of her womanhood.
“I don’t vote with my vagina,” she tweeted. “It’s so insulting to women to think that you would follow a candidate JUST because she’s a woman.”
“HRC doesn’t rep my interests, @BernieSanders does. Simple as that,” added Sarandon.
In a separate interview at the Thinking Cup, a Boston coffee shop, she explains that the prospect of a female president has always been exciting to her. When Clinton first ran for office “Of course I was behind a woman,” she said. But when Clinton authorized the Iraq War “I broke up with her... I expected so much more of her as a woman.”
Women’s issues have without a doubt been neglected and even trampled on by the GOP. There is a Texas law up in the Supreme Court right now called the Texas Omnibus Abortion Bill, or HB 2, which would effectively close nearly every abortion clinic in Texas because of a stipulation over the width of hallways. It is sexist and it needs to be voted down. There is absolutely no denying this.
But the point is that Bernie Sanders is more likely to defend women as president—women means all women i.e. women of color, poor women, immigrant women, pregnant women, etc.—whereas president Hillary Clinton is more likely to defend women who look and sound like her.
As Sarah Silverman put it to Bill Maher on Real Time on 4 March, “[Bernie Sanders] has been on the right side of history at every turn. Not along with history, not when it becomes popular, but before it’s popular.”
“Hillary was my candidate, I like Hillary... it’s just that an alternative came along.”South Park and Kanye West have a long history, but the latest trailer for South Park: The Fractured But Whole takes things to a new level: mocking West’s late mother, Donda West
The trailer recalls an episode from the show’s 13th season in 2009. In the episode, “Fishsticks,” West is painted as a gay fish who heads off to sea to live the life he’s always wanted. In the new trailer for The Fractured But Whole, West returns in his fish form and unites with Seaman in an attempt to get his mother into heaven.
Donda West rides a unicorn through a blue sky, trying to reach the golden gates of heaven, similarly to how she is portrayed in Kanye West’s own game, Only One. This isn’t the first time that South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker have poked fun at Only One. At E3 2016, the same convention at which West debuted a trailer for Only One, Parker and Stone took time during an appearance at Ubisoft’s press briefing to mock West’s game.
Matt and Trey talking about Kanye's game pic.twitter.com/88zToxPLdC — Rob (@Precyse) June 16, 2016
The difference between Parker and Stone’s concept for their own take on West’s game and the scene from today’s trailer is the depiction of Donda West. In the trailer, West’s mother is portrayed as a black fish with large red lips, accentuated eyelashes and gold earrings. The imagery evokes racist stereotypes that have a long, sordid history in America, most notably in minstrel performers wearing blackface.
An infamous example of this stereotype in a game’s art is the original Pokémon Blue, Red and Yellow games. Jynx, a bipedal, humanoid Pokémon, is known for her purple skin, but it wasn’t always purple. In official artwork that Nintendo released in 1996, Jynx had a black face, long blond hair and big lips — a racially insensitive stereotype associated with black women. It wasn’t until a special episode of the popular Pokémon anime aired in December 1999, “Holiday Hi-Jynx,” that the stereotypical design was called out. Scholar Carole B. Weatherford penned an essay in 2000 titled “Politically Incorrect Pokémon” that explored the racist designs.
“The character Jynx, Pokémon #124, has decidedly human features: jet-black skin, huge pink lips, gaping eyes, a straight blonde mane and a full figure, complete with cleavage and wiggly hips,” Weatherford wrote. “Put another way, Jynx resembles an overweight drag queen incarnation of Little Black Sambo, a racist stereotype from a children's book long ago purged from libraries.”
It wasn’t until the international release of Pokémon Gold and Silver that Game Freak, the developer behind the Pokémon games, decided to revise Jynx’s skin, going from black to purple.
The accentuated eyelashes and gold earrings West’s mother is given in The Fractured But Whole trailer are part of another stereotype that black writers and activists have called out for being racially insensitive. In an article for NPR, Eric Deggans put the spotlight on Cookie from Fox’s Empire to address a concern with how the character is depicted.
“For some, Cookie is the embodiment of all the stereotypes black women face on TV,” Deggans wrote. “Dressed flamboyantly with floor-length furs, color-coded nails and eyelashes big as manhole covers, she’s quick to anger and ready to throw down at a moment’s notice.”
The depiction of West’s mother puts a spotlight on all of these stereotypes — and turns her portrayal into part of the joke.
Parker and Stone are no strangers to controversy; the South Park creators have built an entire empire on it. In 2006, after an infamous episode about Tom Cruise and Scientology resulted in Chef voice actor Isaac Hayes quitting, Parker and Stone issued a dismissive, joking response about the situation. It wasn’t until 2011 that the duo admitted they didn’t take any pride in their edgy show running afoul.
“When someone goes, ‘Oh, this group is really pissed off at what you said,’ there’s not a piece of my body that goes, ‘Sweet!’,” Parker told The Hollywood Reporter. “That means I did it wrong. I’m just trying to make people laugh.”
That hasn’t stopped Parker and Stone from taking on celebrities like West, who’s a constant target for South Park. Even the video in the above tweet ends with Parker and Stone laughing at West’s original comments about Only One when he announced it during a fashion show in February 2016.
Considering the timing of Parker and Stone’s onstage joke about West’s game, which had its premiere four months before E3, it’s no surprise that a scene like this appears in South Park: The Fractured But Whole. The issue is not with mocking West’s trailer for Only One — which also received the wrath of countless other writers — but the one-step-too-far-joke that paints West’s late mother as nothing more than a stereotype to laugh at.
Polygon has reached out to Ubisoft for comment on the trailer.Traffic was backed up on I-93 Jan. 15 as protesters blocked the highway in Medford and (above) in Milton.
Shame on Mayor Marty Walsh, for whom I campaigned and voted, for firing city worker Nelli Ruotsalainen for helping to block Interstate 93 in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement (“City worker is fired after her arrest in protest,” Metro, Jan. 18).
Ruotsalainen took a significant personal risk to draw attention to the racial profiling and brutality young men of color in Boston and across the country face from law enforcement and the justice system. That ought to be a plus in the personnel file of an employee in the Department of Youth Engagement and Employment, not a reason for dismissal.
Our mayor should come out in support of this movement or, at the very least, of the young people showing such a strong commitment to racial justice, rather than making claims of a risk to public safety.
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He would not have been elected without the strong support of the black community in Boston.
Becky Pierce
DorchesterThe problem was, the animators did not necessarily like the idea of having to deal with the surrounding smaller puppets that interact with the Giant Skeleton. “They were only going to be an inch-and-a-half tall with no real armature in them—just a blob of foam that didn’t pose well,” explained Steve Switaj, Laika’s lead camera and motion control engineer, at a recent Kubo presentation at SIGGRAPH.
This initial concern about fidelity was then compounded when the storyboards for the sequence became even more dynamic, suggesting that the puppets would require more close-ups and more exotic stunts. Eventually in one of Laika’s early meetings, someone suggested they just build the full-sized skeleton and then animate the other puppets around it at the original scale. “And hence, the seed of insanity, was planted,” said Switaj.
Any question of the skeleton being a large-scale CG object was never seriously considered, even though Laika has readily adopt a hybrid mix of practical stop motion puppets and visual effects in all of its recent films.
“Time and again I am amazed by the solutions that the rigging, camera, and animation teams would present,” Laika visual effects supervisor Steve Emerson said in an interview with Cartoon Brew. “Absolutely the skeleton could have been CG. But when you’re in a room surrounded by artists that you love and respect and there is an overwhelming enthusiasm about the idea of building the largest stop motion puppet that has ever been created—and everyone is convinced we can pull it off—I want to support that spirit and enthusiasm in whatever way I can.”
OK, Now We Have To Actually Build It
Laika had built large puppets before, specifically the five-foot Mecha-Drill from The Boxtrolls. But the Giant Skeleton was something else; it was larger, heavier, and needed to be animated as precisely as possible.
The first step in realizing the build, then, would be to have the skeleton manufactured by the rigging department—usually responsible for large props or things that move in Laika films—rather than the traditional puppet building department that relies on hand-crafted and 3D printing techniques. Rigging also collaborated with the art department which would design and also dress the final skeleton puppet.
Having mastered the art of rapid prototyping and 3D printing for its smaller-sized stop motion puppets, Laika had to abandon those methods for the Giant Skeleton. Or so they thought. It turned out there were companies that could print and cut high-density industrial foam into any form, which had the added benefit of being as light as possible. This was used in particular for the skeleton ribs, while other parts relied on more of a papier-mâché approach.
Traditional stainless steel armatures and nylon interiors were also out of the question due to weight. So the creature was split into two sections—the torso (including the head, ribs, and arms) and the legs. Still, the 400-pound torso and its 20-foot wingspan had to be animated. But instead of the traditional ball joints that might be used on stop motion puppets, a series of magnets were used to fix the arms and head to a skeleton torso. The skeleton’s surface was designed to be the remnants of those it has killed, and featured over 1,000 bone shapes. Around 70 unique swords were made for the skull.
OK, Now We Have To Actually Move It
The Giant Skeleton was not only huge, it had to be manipulated, frame-by-frame. Getting such a large puppet to emote in a smooth manner while ensuring arms and areas of the skeleton were as rigid as possible between manipulations was going to be crucial. So Laika embarked on some R&D to find out the best possible—and affordable—way to move its biggest creation.
The first mechanism considered was a motion control system, something the studio had intimate knowledge of. One had also been used to move the Boxtrolls’ Mecha-Drill. But the skeleton was just so heavy, said Switaj, that a motion control rig was not going to cut it. Laika needed a powerful mechanical arm that could pick up the skeleton puppet and move it around.
“The thought that ran through our heads was, of course, giant-ass robot!,” recalled Switaj. A working industrial factory robot with a manipulator arm was even sourced from eBay, but quickly discounted when it was realized the interface for such robots was bespoke and could not be plugged into Laika’s existing systems.
The answer lay, instead, in motion bases or hexapods typically used in amusement park rides or as film special effects gimbals, say for a boat at sea or a helicopter stunt. Laika ultimately designed and built its own hexapod, a six-axis actuator that enabled the torso to be moved. “Controlled by a custom-made jog box, five actuators moved the twist, tilt in all directions and x, y and z,” Laika animation supervisor Brad Schiff told Cartoon Brew. “This way the movement was easily controllable. Finite and precise.”
Meanwhile, a separate system was devised for the skeleton hands and arms. The arms, weighing six pounds each, were also too heavy to be supported only by a metal interior; thus they were supported by a cradle of cables and pulleys above the stage. Each cable was controlled by a robot-operated stepper motor that moved the arm and elbow into place.
More Than Just Moving: The Animation Process
Next came some further research and development to enable animators to creatively bring the Giant Skeleton to life via stop motion. At first, Laika wanted to provide a simple input device an animator could carry while also moving around the structure on an elevated platform.
“We thought about making an input device that was really complicated in the shape of a human being,” said Switaj. “But we ended up with something that was the size and shape of a normal puppet. Animators are used to leaning over and grabbing the head and twisting it or grabbing the body and twisting some winders, so it worked very well.”
Animator Charles Greenfield was charged with climbing around the skeleton and operating the input controller. It worked by sending data first through to the motion control camera system (a Cooper setup Laika uses for photographing its stop motion puppets). Here too, the studio had to write a special program to enable the Cooper to talk to the hexapod—“We had to make the world’s only giant-skeleton-to-USB-adapter,” joked Switaj. When instructed, the hexapod actuators would then move the puppet.
On a given shot, this is how the skeleton animation worked. The animator would place his hands on the puppet which would be detected by the system. This unlocked everything and allowed the movement input by the animator to be tracked. When the animator let go, the sensors detected that occurrence and every moving part was locked for photography.
“This certainly took some getting used to because of its cumbersome nature,” admitted Schiff. “It wasn’t quite as precise as we typically like, but Charles, tamer of this beast, figured it out. He mastered how to get the finite movement necessary to make it move naturally and feel like the giant it needed to be.”
For the skull animation, the eyes and jaw were hand-manipulated. Just like a smaller puppet, the animator relied on x-sheets to figure out the timing of his poses but had to make the movements bigger in nature. And although the Giant Skeleton was a huge build, it was also done in conjunction with a smaller scale (but still significantly-sized) one-sixth-scale skeleton puppet coming in at 2.5 feet tall. The 16-foot version took six months to construct and was filmed with for a year. The result: 49.2 seconds of footage.
When Stop Motion Meets CG
For all its practical puppetry, the entire Hall of Bones sequence still relied on extensive visual effects work. Laika does not shy away from this—in some ways the studio treats the stop motion portion of the animation like a live action film, often capturing puppets against greenscreen and incorporating other digital characters, environments, atmosphere, and other effects into the scene.
For the Hall of Bones itself, the visual effects team added to an existing ground plane and wall section with matching CG environments. All the usual live action approaches to replicating these pieces in CG were followed, including high dynamic range reference photographs. The vfx team also stepped in with a raft of ‘invisible’ effects fixes, such as the removal of cables and supports, compositing work, and frame-by-frame painting.
That hybrid approach has perhaps become Laika’s calling card; indeed in many shots it’s not always clear what is real and what is CG. “As far as where we can mix things,” said Emerson, “we always want to make sure that hero or main characters are physical puppets that are being hand animated. Anything that they touch or interact with, be it a prop, another character or a ground plane, is always physical. But once we move away from that region of interest, if CG makes sense, we’re not afraid of it.”The successor of the Galaxy Note 5 will be called Galaxy Note 7, recent leaks have shown, as Samsung is going for a uniform naming scheme – the same number in its Galaxy S and Note flagships is supposed to enforce the idea that both devices represent last-generation smartphones and the best handsets in Samsung’s lineup. But regardless of what Samsung ends up calling its phablet family this year, the phone should be an absolute monster in terms of hardware. A couple of recent leaks indicate the phone will be faster and better than anything the competition has to offer. And it could probably beat many laptops and desktops when it comes to overall performance.
DON’T MISS: Galaxy Note 7 shaping up to be Samsung’s most powerful smartphone yet
It shouldn’t surprise anyone at this point that Samsung is going all out on its flagship devices, especially when it comes to the Galaxy Note 7, a device that will be have a tough fight for the customer’s attention in the coming months. After all, the Galaxy Note 7 will launch just one month before the iPhone 7 series come to town.
Couple confirmed specs: 5.7" QHD SAMOLED, 64GB + microSD, 12MP DualP / 5MP, IP68, black/silver/blue — Evan Blass (@evleaks) June 25, 2016
According to well-connected Evan Blass, often a source of accurate leaks detailing unreleased devices, the Galaxy Note 7 has a “couple” of confirmed specs. These include a 5.7-unch QHD SAMOLED display, 64GB of storage, microSD support, 12-megapixel Dual Pixel camera, 5-megapixel front-facing camera, IP68 dust and water proof certification, an iris scanner, and a trio of colors including black, silver, and blue. Blass also says the Galaxy Note 7 name is confirmed.
If that’s not enough to get you excited about the upcoming Note phablet, then here’s one more leak from Weibo that confirms the leaks above, adding quite a few interesting details.
The phone is supposed to be powered by both the Samsung Exynos 8893 and the Snapdragon 821 processors – the latter is reportedly going into this year’s new Nexus handsets as well.
Furthermore, the Galaxy Note 7 will have 6GB of RAM that will be faster than other handsets that have 6GB of RAM modules. Samsung will be using its own 10nm LPDDR4 tech for the Galaxy Note 7, which might also find its way into the iPhone 7.
In addition to the 64GB of storage Blass mentioned, the phone could also launch in 128GB and 256GB capacities – all of these are super-speedy UFS 2.0 storage options. We’ll remind you that Samsung will also soon start selling 256GB microSD cards, which means the Galaxy Note 7 could have as much as 512GB of storage, assuming this rumor pans out.
The phone is also supposed to pack a new S-Pen stylus, USB Type-C port, 4,000 mAh battery, and run Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow with a new Grace UX on top.Visa requirements for package tours between the two countries are going to be removed under certain conditions but the agreement on the issue has not been signed yet, he said on Monday.
The two countries are going to sign the deal in the near future, Qassemi added.
There were reports earlier on Monday that Iran and Russia have already removed visa requirements for travelers from the two countries.
Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova, too, said on Monday that the deal has not been signed yet.
Tehran and Moscow hope to sign an inter-governmental agreement on cancelling visas for tourists who book package tours through travel agencies, she said.
According to her, visa liberalization for Russian and Iranian tourists was one of the topics which dominated Russian-Iranian consultations on consular matters held by the heads of appropriate foreign ministry departments on November 21-22.
“Their outcome raises hopes that a Russian-Iranian inter-governmental agreement on cancelling visas for travelers who purchase packaged tours may be signed soon,” Zakharova said.
“During the consultations, the parties reviewed the draft’s text clause-by-clause. We are planning to work over the document jointly with Russian agencies in the next two or three months before the government issues a directive on this matter," the Russian diplomat explained.
The sides agreed to examine the possibility of using a mechanism of direct invitations for arranging package tours for Russian and Iranian businessmen. It gives legal entities, companies and the heads of enterprises the right to invite foreign business partners independently.
“We are planning to make the said agreement a supplement to the existing Russian-Iranian inter-governmental agreement on simplifying reciprocal travel for certain categories of Russian and Iranian citizens,” Zakharova said, according to Tass.
“We believe that these steps will add momentum to Russian-Iranian relations and will, first and foremost, create favorable conditions for enhancing business cooperation and tourism, and expanding reciprocal understanding of the centuries-old cultural traditions of Russia and Iran.”Alec Baldwin, Alpha Dog, Ben Foster, Daniel Sullivan, Leonardo DiCaprio, Lyle Kessler, Oprhans, Tom Sturridge, What's Eating Gilbert Grape
I had the pleasure of seeing “Orphans” on Broadway this past weekend and absolutely loved it. I knew that the play would be leaving Broadway soon, so I had to see it and I did not regret it.
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hit.320 with 62 RBI despite only playing in 85 games. Vidal was later named to the End-of-the-Season Atlantic League All-Star team thanks to his strong year.
In a 12-game stretch from August 5 to August 16, the second-year Patriot hit.340 with seven home runs, 18 RBI and 14 runs scored. Vidal also had two separate stretches over the season in which he scored a run in at least seven-straight games (July 24-31, August 9-17) and a 20-game on-base streak (August 4-24).
Vidal began his career with the Somerset Patriots in 2015. That season, he hit.259 with 12 home runs and a team-high 63 RBI. Vidal also led the team in games played (124), at-bats (471) and hits (122) during the regular season. In the postseason, Vidal hit.297 with a home run and seven RBI en route to Somerset’s sixth Atlantic League Championship in franchise history.
Vidal hit.283 with 38 home runs, 125 RBI and 45 doubles in 209 games over two years in Somerset.
The current Miami resident’s signing with his hometown club marks the second-straight year that the Marlins organization has signed a Somerset Patriot. Last year, Somerset’s everyday shortstop Robert Andino signed with the Marlins during the offseason and hit.267 with 13 home runs over 108 games with Triple-A New Orleans before earning his promotion back to the Major Leagues in early August. Andino then hit.292 over 13 games with the Marlins to finish the 2016 season.
Vidal is the fifth member of this year’s Patriots team to join a Major League organization. Starting pitchers Darin Gorski (New York Mets) and Nik Turley (Minnesota Twins) along with relief pitchers Gus Schlosser (Los Angeles Dodgers) and Brandon Sisk (Seattle Mariners) all had their contracts purchased earlier this season.WASHINGTON (Reuters) - With Donald Trump leading a splintered field, top Republican Party officials are keeping open the possibility that the fight to be the party’s presidential candidate could stretch to the nominating convention in July, officials said on Thursday.
U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at a campaign stop in Spencer, Iowa December 5, 2015. REUTERS/Mark Kauzlarich
A so-called “brokered convention,” in which no single candidate has a sufficient number of nominating delegates to become the presidential nominee in the November election, used to be a common feature of American politics. But there has not been one in more than 60 years.
The possibility that the Republican battle for a nominee will extend to the July 18-21 convention in Cleveland was discussed at a dinner on Monday of top party operatives hosted by Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus.
Three party officials said Priebus was asked at the dinner if the party was prepared for a brokered convention, and Priebus said he was. For Priebus, the subject comes up frequently in conversations, the officials said.
Trump’s rise to the top of the 14-candidate field has confounded establishment Republicans who have been waiting in vain for the New York billionaire’s insurgent campaign to collapse.
They are alarmed at some of his incendiary rhetoric and proposals, such as his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the United States.
Various scenarios could play out in coming months with the battle evolving into a contest between two or three candidates, with none of them able to gain enough delegates.
One official at the dinner meeting said the discussion of a brokered convention only came up briefly and that it was not about Trump.
“It was more logistical in nature, not strategic. It was more like ‘are you planning for a hurricane?’” said the official.
Republican National Committee (RNC) senior adviser Sean Spicer, asked for comment, said the RNC is neutral in the process.
“Our goal is to ensure a successful nomination and that requires us thinking through every scenario, including a contested convention,” he said.The UN has warned of months of extreme weather in many of the world’s most vulnerable countries with intense storms, droughts and floods triggered by one of the strongest El Niño weather events recorded in 50 years, which is expected to continue until spring 2016.
El Niño is a natural climatic phenomenon that sees equatorial waters in the eastern Pacific ocean warm every few years. This disrupts regular weather patterns such as monsoons and trade winds, and increases the risk of food shortages, floods, disease and forest fires.
This year, a strong El Niño has been building since March and its effects are already being seen in Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, Malawi, Indonesia and across Central America, according to the World Meteorological Organisation. The phenomenon is also being held responsible for uncontrolled fires in forests in Indonesia and in the Amazon rainforest.
The UN’s World Meteorological Organization warned in a report on Monday that the current strong El Niño is expected to strengthen further and peak around the end of the 2015. “Severe droughts and devastating flooding being experienced throughout the tropics and sub-tropical zones bear the hallmarks of this El Niño, which is the strongest in more than 15 years,” said WMO secretary-general Michel Jarraud.
Jarraud said the impact of the naturally occurring El Niño event was being exacerbated by global warming, which had already led to record temperatures this year. “This event is playing out in uncharted territory. Our planet has altered dramatically because of climate change,” he said. “So this El Niño event and human-induced climate change may interact and modify each other in ways which we have never before experienced. El Niño is turning up the heat even further.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Amazon wildfire engulfs Brazilian forest.
In 1997, the phenomenon led to severe droughts in the Sahel and the Indian subcontinent, followed by devastating floods and storms, which killed thousands of people and caused billions of dollars of damage across Asia, Latin America and and Africa.
The WMO said countries are expected to be much better prepared for a strong El Niño now than they were in 1997, but governments and charities are warning of serious food shortages and floods.
“While difficult to predict, the El Niño this year looks set to be the strongest on record. This is a real threat to people’s lives, health and livelihoods across the world, which will see increased calls for humanitarian assistance as people struggle to grow crops, face water shortages and disease,” said a spokeswoman at Britain’s Department for International Development (DfID) in London.
“Fragile states like Yemen and South Sudan are already struggling with war and the threat of famine. Without increased humanitarian support, El Niño will make a difficult situation even worse,” she said.
“In Ethiopia and the Sahel, the impact of changing weather patterns is already visible. Outbreaks of diseases such as dengue fever, cholera and malaria are possible, so it is essential that health systems are shored up to respond.”
Rice and grain harvests have already been hit hard by severe droughts, according to the World Food Programme (WFP), which expects 2.3 million people in Central America and many more in east and southern Africa to need food aid. Rice shortages are expected in Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines and south-east Asia.
“The weather phenomenon, among the strongest on record, is likely to cause more floods and droughts, fuel Pacific typhoons and cyclones and affect more areas if it continues strengthening as forecast over the coming months,” said the UN children’s agency, Unicef, in a statement last week.
Unicef said it expected 8.5 million people in Ethiopia to need food aid and several million more in Somalia and Kenya. In Zimbabwe, the number of people in need of food aid was expected to reach 1.5 million by the time of the January to March “lean season”, according to the agency.
El Niño could leave 4 million people in Pacific without food or drinking water Read more
One of the worst-affected countries is likely to be Malawi, where the worst drought in almost 10 years is expected to cause a further increase in severe malnutrition next year.
In South Africa, livestock has been dying as a result of drought, and water restrictions have been imposed in Johannesburg, and other areas.
In Central America, one of the most severe droughts on record has led to 3.5 million people in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador needing food aid, said the WFP. Peru and Ecuador expect more than 2 million people to be affected.
“Another dry spell in 2015, this time exacerbated by El Niño, has again caused significant losses during the first crop cycle, the Primera season,” the WFP’s regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean,Miguel Barreto, said. “This has hit small producers and their families who were struggling to recover from the previous year’s drought, and the number of people in need may increase soon.”
Last week, the Indonesian government said that rice growing areas of Java had been hit badly by drought.
“The world is much better prepared for this year’s El Niño, but the socio-economic shocks will still be profound,” said a spokesman for the World Health Organisation.
Researchers expect the risk of major fires in the Amazon basin to increase. More than 11,000 forest fires have been observed in the Amazonas province of Brazil this year, a 47% increase over the same period last year, according to the National Institute for Space Research (INPE). The storms that usually keep the jungles of southern Mexico and Central America wet shift northward to California and the southern US during strong El Niño winters.
Britain has pledged to provide £45m of emergency support for 2.6 million people and food for up to 120,000 malnourished children in Ethiopia and elsewhere. But it appealed on Monday to other countries to support humanitarian efforts and disaster preparedness efforts.
“All DfID offices are very much alive to the risks El Niño poses. Country teams from Ethiopia to Kenya to Bangladesh are working hard to ensure help is there for those suffering as a result of El Niño.
“In some places, this might mean boosting resources for existing projects while in others the effects may need to be monitored for longer to ensure the best response,” DfID said.Brian Nosek, director of the Center for Open Science, led a 2015 study that is now being harshly criticized. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post)
In a blistering announcement Thursday, scientists at Harvard University and the University of Virginia condemned the results of a 2015 landmark study that concluded more than half of 100 published psychology studies were not replicable.
The scientists said the research methods used to reproduce those studies were poorly designed, inappropriately applied and introduced statistical error into the data. The result: a gross over-estimation of the failure rate.
[Many scientific studies can't be replicated]
The 2015 meta-analysis, conducted by the nonprofit Center for Open Science and published in the journal Science, made headlines around the world. At the time, the journal's senior editor declared that "we should be less confident about many of the experimental results that were provided as empirical evidence in support of those theories."
Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, a lead author of the critique, noted that such conclusions did significant harm to psychological research.
“This paper has had an extraordinary impact,” Gilbert said in a statement released Thursday. “It led to changes in policy at many scientific journals, changes in priorities at funding agencies, and it seriously undermined public perceptions of psychology.”
The first problem that he and his team noted was the center's non-random selection of studies to replicate.
"What they did is created an idiosyncratic, arbitrary list of sampling rules that excluded the majority of psychology subfields from the sample, that excluded entire classes of studies whose methods are probably among the best in science from the sample, and so on," according to the Harvard release. "Then they proceeded to violate all of their own rules.... So the first thing we realized was that no matter what they found — good news or bad news — they never had any chance of estimating the reproducibility of psychological science, which is what the very title of their paper claims they did."
Among the most egregious errors: The replicated research was anything but a repeat of the original experiment. One example was a study of race involving white students and black students at Stanford University discussing affirmative action. Instead of reproducing the experiment at Stanford, however, the center's scientists substituted students at the University of Amsterdam.
[No, science's reproducibility problem is not limited to psychology]
After realizing their lack of fidelity to the original research, the center's scientists sought to remedy the situation by again repeating their work, this time at Stanford. When they did, Gilbert and his team found, the results were indeed reproducible. But this outcome was never acknowledged in the 2015 study.
Once the mistakes in that research were accounted for, the reproducibility rate was "about what we should expect if every single one of the original findings had been true," said co-author Gary King, director of Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science.
"So the public hears that 'Yet another psychology study doesn't replicate' instead of 'Yet another psychology study replicates just fine if you do it right and not if you do it wrong,' which isn't a very exciting headline," King said.
The 2015 study took four years and 270 scientists to conduct and was led by Brian Nosek, director of the Center for Open Science and a University of Virginia psychology researcher.
Nosek, who took part in the new investigation, said Thursday night that the bottom-line message of the original undertaking was not that 60 percent of studies were wrong "but that 40 percent were reproduced, and that's the starting point."
As for the follow-up critique, it's another way of looking at the data, he said. Its authors "came to an explanation that the problems were in the replication. Our explanation is that the data is inconclusive."
Gilbert stressed that his team's work was a straightforward review. "Let's be clear, no one involved in this study was trying to deceive anyone," he said. "They just made mistakes, as scientists sometimes do.... So this is not a personal attack, this is a scientific critique. We all care about the same things: doing science well and finding out what's true."
The critique is being published Friday as a commentary in Science.
This post has been updated.Share
There are plenty of “good” reasons for the Beam “remote presence system” from Suitable Technologies to exist. Too bad it’s also the single strangest, creepiest, and douchiest gadget at CES 2014.
If you haven’t heard of Beam, it’s basically an iPad attached to a 5-foot tall robot with wheels. It is controlled though a desktop app by the person whose face appears on the screen. It has a camera at face level for video conferencing, and another waist-level, wide-angle camera to give the user a view of the ground, lest they run over an unsuspecting foot, cat, or small child.
Beam is a “good” product … in exactly the same way a Segway is a “good” product.
Despite what its booth at CES 2014 might imply, Beam is not new. It first popped onto the scene in 2012, and made a debut showing at last year’s CES. But the company is clearly making a major push this year. You may have seen a video of Beam late last year, as it made its way around Reddit and countless other websites, sparking a resounding “WTF?” from Web users the world over.
In person, Beam is both more and less impressive. After a face-to-machine chat with Arianne, a Suitable rep who spoke from her office in Palo Alto, California, some 540 miles away from the show floor of CES 2014 in Las Vegas, my initial skepticism about Beam had thawed … a little.
According to Arianne, Beam is especially helpful for companies that have offices all over the world. “It’s the easiest and cheapest way to connect,” she said. And that could be true – after you factor in the $16,000 minimum you’ll plunk down on a Beam, a cost that jumps to $20,000 after you factor in chargers and all the other necessary accessories. Indeed, for business people who often travel internationally, I can see how Beam could both save money in the long run and spare the mental drain of travel.
While businesses seem to be the primary target customer for the Beam, Arianne says there are plenty of other people and organizations that have begun to use the contraption. Universities, for example, “are using it for long-distance education,” she said. And hospitals have begun deploying doctors via robot to high-risk patients who are so sick that keeping them quarantined to prevent the spread of disease is a must.
On paper, that all sounds great. And it sounded pretty convincing when Arianne told it to me. She damn near had me sold. But after the glow of a PR chat wore off, I began to think about how using the Beam plays out in real life. Say your boss has a Beam, and randomly decides to zap himself into your office at random times – or even for planned meetings. That guy is a douchebag. I don’t care how practical the Beam is; using it at all is just weird. Want to be at the meeting in London but you’re in New York? Use Skype! Or a phone! Why do you need the ability to roll all around an office you’re not actually in, if not to freak people out?
And it will freak you out. As I tried to inconspicuously snap pictures for this article, Beam-people kept spinning around and rolling up to me. I couldn’t escape their soul-less glare, no matter how hard I tried to stay out of their camera-powered view.
The long-distance learning thing is slightly less offensive to me, for some reason that I can’t quite pin down. But the doctor thing? I mean, Jesus H. Christ, how crappy would you feel about life if you’ve caught some life-threatening disease and the only way people will talk to you is through a freakin’ robot? Blech! Thinking about that just makes me angry.
Still, I get it. Suitable Technologies has created a solution that DOES solve real problems. It represents exactly the kind of tech-fueled future we’ve been talking about for generations. So it is a “good” product … in exactly the same way a Segway is a “good” product: Only the world’s biggest assclowns will actually want to use one.
The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not reflect the beliefs of Digital Trends.Hullabaloo
Thursday, February 21, 2013
The most terrifying graph you'll see all year
by David Atkins
Data taken from the 2010 UN Climate Change report gives us this:
See that 5 degrees Celsius we're projected to hit by 2050? That's 9 degrees Fahrenheit. That means the end of human civilization, and possibly of the human race itself. Within our lifetimes.
The International Energy Agency agrees with the assessment.
The Science Pope blog makes clear exactly what this all means:
Your brain will fight it, even with the numbers on the page staring back at you, because the collapse of civilization is simply beyond human comprehension. To really internalize this information means you would need to accept things like:
- You are among the last people that will ever walk the Earth
- Your children won’t survive to middle age
- All of the beauty, culture, and scientific discoveries we’ve unlocked will return to the ether from whence they came.
Forgive my French, but that is some heavy shit. Yet our ability to understand and feel threatened by this information is hindered by the fact that things don’t seem that bad right now. Sure things feel a little “off”, but how can we be so close to oblivion when life is (generally speaking) so good, modern and happy?
The answer is exponentials. Climate change does not follow a linear path (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc…), it follow an exponential path (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, etc…). Global temperature is increasing exponentially, fueled by humanity’s exponential rise in energy use, population, and economic growth. As you can see from the chart, exponential functions look like a hockey stick: they stay low for a long time, and then rise very suddenly and rapidly once they turn the corner. Everyone has some experience with exponential growth in their daily lives…any bank account with compounded interest will follow this curve, and exponentials are the reason that sickness spreads so rapidly through your child’s school. Next to this problem, the deficit isn't just child's play. It doesn't even exist by comparison. Drones? Let's get serious.
There is one problem on this planet that dwarfs all the others right now, and it barely gets mentioned by the national press except as a niche environmental issue.
.
thereisnospoon 2/21/2013 09:00:00 AMTempting though it is to tell George Osborne to butt out and stop interfering, now he edits a London newspaper instead of representing a northern seat, I must lightly applaud the former chancellor for still banging on about the north-south divide.
Osborne calls for May to back 'northern powerhouse' rail plans Read more
On Tuesday Osborne penned an op-ed in the Financial Times in which he urged Theresa May to commit to building high-speed rail links across the north – from Liverpool to Hull, starting with a line across the Pennines. “Far be it from me to offer advice to the prime minister on how to relaunch her premiership this autumn,” wrote the former MP for Tatton in Cheshire, doing exactly that, “but making this big commitment to the north at the Conservative conference in Manchester would not be a bad place to start.”
As the Guardian’s north of England editor, I have changed my mind about Osborne’s “northern powerhouse” weekly. On the one hand, it’s been quite remarkable to hear a Conservative chancellor talking seriously about rebalancing the economy away from London and the south-east, given that “Tory” remains a swearword in so much of the north. On the other, he cut so much from northern council budgets during his six-year tenure at 11 Downing Street that any bones he did throw to the region were devoid of truly transformational marrow.
(I also held a minor grudge that he never granted me an interview while in high office, apart from the one time he confused me for the lady from the Blackpool Gazette when I ambushed him at an ice-cream parlour in Cleveleys during the 2015 election campaign.)
But Osborne is right. Improving northern transport links is the best way of wooing not just investors, but talent. London is too full and too expensive, but it’s still where most of the decent jobs are. That’s why students at universities in Leeds, Newcastle, Liverpool and beyond reluctantly head down there after graduation. Nobody really wants to spend three hours a day commuting into the capital, or living in a flat share in zone 5. But neither do most aspirational young people want to be reliant on a car, as they would be in the north.
Wear are we?
Facebook Twitter Pinterest The new Wear Crossing in Sunderland. Photograph: Owen Humphreys/PA
I had not been in this job for long when I enraged the populations of Huddersfield and Harrogate when mixing them up in a report about the home of rugby league (it’s not Harrogate, in case you are wondering). Rochdale and Rotherham have also got confused in my addled mind, as well as Barnsley and Burnley, despite both sets being very clearly divided by the Pennines.
So I felt a little sorry for Jake Berry, the new minister for the northern powerhouse, when he made the front page of Tuesday’s Sunderland Echo for all the wrong reasons. In the city to open a new bridge over the River Wear, backed with £82.5m of government funding, he announced: “This historic… crossing of the Tyne will not just help Sunderland but it will also release growth all along this south bank.” The howls of derision could be heard all the way down Wearside. But perhaps it was not as embarrassing a gaffe as the bags Asda specially commissioned to mark the opening of its first “Isle of White” store this week.
Double tour trouble
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Cyclists in the 2017 Vuelta a España. Photograph: Tim de Waele/Corbis via Getty Images
The Ladies Tour of Norway cycling race went a bit wrong on Saturday when a river bridge opened to let a boat past. A four-woman break was denied a chance at victory as they were forced to wait, allowing the riders behind them to catch up. Leah Kirchmann, one of the riders held up, later tweeted her frustration: “Apparently a nice day for bike racing is also a nice day to go sailing!” I wondered whether the same thing would ever happen in a men’s race, which tend to be far better funded and organised. I got my answer on Sunday when Chris Froome and the Vuelta a España riders were held up at a railway crossing. A rare example of equality in professional cycling.Reuters The CIA and US special operations forces have been training Syrian rebels for months, since long before President Barack Obama announced plans to arm the opposition, the Los Angeles Times reported Friday.
Training for rebel forces covers the use of anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons and has been carried out at bases in Jordan and Turkey since late last year, the newspaper reported, citing unnamed US officials and rebel commanders.
The two-week courses, for about 20 to 45 fighters at a time, began last November at a new US base in the desert in southwest Jordan, it said.
The report came days after the Obama administration announced it had approved the arming of Syrian rebels, though analysts said the United States likely would avoid providing sophisticated guided anti-tank or anti-aircraft weapons.
The Central Intelligence Agency typically leads covert training and arming of fighters in foreign conflicts, while military special operations forces can be assigned to covert missions overseen by the spy agency.
The CIA and the White House declined to comment on the report.
Rebels from the Free Syrian Army were being trained on Russian-designed 14.5-millimeter anti-tank rifles, anti-tank missiles, and 23-millimeter anti-aircraft weapons, according the report, citing an unnamed rebel commander in the Syrian province of Dara helping with weapons acquisitions.
"Those from the CIA, we would sit and talk with them during breaks from training and afterward, they would try to get information on the situation," the commander was quoted as saying.
US special operations troops selected the rebels to be trained as the American military was setting up supply lines in the region to channel non-lethal items, such as uniforms and radios, to the opposition forces.
The rebels were promised powerful anti-tank weapons and other arms but shipments from Qatar, Saudi Arabia and other Arab states took months to arrive and failed to live up to the expectations of the opposition, the commander told the paper.
But on Friday a rebel spokesman said the opposition fighters have received new types of weapons that could "change the course of the battle."
The announcement came a day before a meeting in Qatar of the "Friends of Syria" group of nations that support the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad's regime.
"We've received quantities of new types of weapons, including some that we asked for and that we believe will change the course of the battle on the ground," Free Syrian Army spokesman Louay Muqdad told AFP.As we inch closer to training camp and the unveiling of the final 53-man roster, we have decided to create a roster of our own. We will look into the Steelers of years past and put together an All-Time Pittsburgh Steelers depth chart. It has proven to be a fun exercise to heat up debate and compare how the game has evolved over the years. For this edition, we look at the linebackers.
Inside Linebackers
1. Jack Lambert
Lambert is one of the greatest linebackers of all-time. When you think of old-school, hard-nosed football, it is a picture of Lambert, without his two front teeth and his Steelers helmet on that comes to mind.
He made nine Pro Bowls, and six All-Pro teams while helping the Steelers win their first four Super Bowls. Lambert is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, and an icon in Steelers history.
2. Jack Ham
Ham was technically an outside linebacker in the 4-3 defense, but his best play was making tackles off of the ball and in space. He recorded 32 interceptions in his career, and had a career high of seven. Ham was drafted three years before Lambert, but the two played beside each other from 1974 all the way through 1982.
With eight Pro Bowls and six All-Pros for Ham, the duo of linebackers could easily be argued as the best in history.
3. James Farrior
Farrior was the one time the Steelers went out and spent in free agency and it was a major pay off. He only finished his career with one All-Pro and two Pro Bowls, and probably will not end up in the Hall of Fame like the names above him.
Still, he leads the Steelers for his career in tackles. Farrior only missed six games from his signing into 2002 to 2011, and two of them came in his last season. He also has two Super Bowl rings and is the lead middle linebacker when looking at the Steelers most recent all-time great defense.
4. Levon Kirkland
Kirkland rounds out an All-Time great group of linebackers that easily has snubs. Kirkland was a member of the All-Decade team in the 1990s. From 1993 to 2000 he only missed three starts as a Steeler and was a key piece to the team that made the 1995 Super Bowl. He is fifth on the franchise list in tackles and made two Pro Bowls and an All-Pro during his time with the black and gold making him an easy All-Time great.
Outside Linebacker
1.James Harrison
James Harrison has the resume to make him the Steelers best All-Time outside linebacker. Harrison has five All-Pro awards, and four Pro Bowl teams to go with a Defensive MVP award. He has two of the Steelers most recent Super Bowl rings, and has arguably the greatest play in Super Bowl history. He is only three sacks away from leading the team All-Time and should be able to do it as he is still on the roster and entering his 13th year in the NFL.
2. Joey Porter
Porter has everything you want from a great all-time Steelers linebacker. He has four Pro Bowl appearances and made the All-Pro team four times. He is third on the career list in sacks for a Steeler. And of course, he has the ring in the 2005-06 run. That came with a memorable game against the Indianapolis Colts in which Porter inspired the team with a sack and a half to help close out a win. He is now on the Steelers coaching staff, and will go down as one of most memorable Steelers in recent history.
3. Greg Lloyd
Greg Lloyd was a nasty hitter and had a memorable career as a Steeler who brought the tenacity of the 1970’s back. Injury sped up Lloyd’s career a bit, but before going down in the 1996 season Lloyd was coming off of 5 straight Pro Bowl seasons and three straight All-Pro years. He averaged 7 sacks per season in his first seven years, and was a key piece to the Steelers making Super Bowl XXX.
4. Jason Gildon
Gildon is still the current leader in sacks in Steelers history. His 2000 and 2001 seasons featured 25.5 sacks, two Pro Bowls, and an All-Pro nod. He only had three total Pro Bowl years and did not record seven sacks in four seasons with the Steelers, but he was consistent from 1996-2003 for the Steelers.
Kevin Greene and Andy Russell could be arguing their case to make list, and both have a good case. However, Russell was more of an off-ball player, and Greene did not have the longevity with the Steelers that these other names had.Image copyright GLA Image caption Many critical instruments on ships rely on GPS
Technology developed during World War Two is to be used as a back-up for GPS.
The General Lighthouse Authorities (GLA) have announced that they have installed a system called eLoran in seven ports across Britain.
The GLA say many critical instruments on ships use Global Navigation Satellite Systems, and if they fail the consequences could be disastrous.
The new system, which is ground rather than satellite-based, is designed to be used in the event of a GPS failure.
"All vessels that sail today are massively dependent on GPS, " Martin Bransby, research and radio navigation manager for the General Lighthouse Authorities of the UK and Ireland, told the BBC's technology programme Click.
"It is their primary means of navigation - and a massive number of instruments rely on it too.
"If you don't have it, you are dead in the water."
Image copyright Thinkstock Image caption eLoran has been tested in Harwich and Felixstowe - the UK's busiest container port
Testing for eLoran has taken place in Felixstowe, the busiest container port in the UK.
Each year, three million containers are brought in on some of the biggest ships in the world.
A little bit of power from a jammer on the frequency used by GPS close to your receiver can deafen it Prof David Last, Royal Institute of Navigation
Safely manoeuvring these vessels in this packed waterway is vital, and currently the only way to do this is with the help of GPS.
Onboard the Galatea, a ship that is 80m (260ft) long, the GLA have been finding out what happens if the satellite system goes wrong.
Martin Bransby demonstrates a GPS failure by pulling the plug on the ship's receiver.
Within a few seconds, alarms start to sound on the bridge as one by one the instruments stop working.
"This is the gyrocompass - it steers the ship - you can see it starting to fail," says Mr Bransby.
"If we walk over here, this is the radar, and that's not working either. This is the dynamic positioning: it holds the ship's position, that's not working.
"The electronic chart display becomes unusable. Even the ship's clock stops working."
In a series of tests, the GLA have found that almost every bit of kit on the boat uses GPS - even the onboard satellite entertainment system.
Mr Bransby says: "You can imagine standing watch on this ship, it's the middle of the night, it's dark, it's foggy, you are in the English Channel, and then this happens.
"What do you do? You're in a right mess, basically."
Image copyright GLA Image caption On Galatea, a dual eLoran-GPS receiver is now in place
Losing GPS is not a just theoretical problem.
The radio frequencies which eLoran transmits are completely different from those of GPS Prof David Last, Royal Institute of Navigation
The system works using a fleet of satellites orbiting high above the Earth, but the signal they transmit is weak and can be easily interfered with.
Other sat-nav systems - such as Galileo in Europe and Glonass in Russia - have the same vulnerabilities, says Prof David Last from the Royal Institute of Navigation.
"A little bit of power from a jammer on the frequency used by GPS close to your receiver can deafen it, and it won't be able to hear the GPS signals," he says.
"For example, jamming is a real issue in Korea. There have now been three occasions when the North Koreans have transmitted high-powered jamming in South Korea."
The Sun too can knock satellite systems offline, he adds.
"It starts to transmit radio noise during solar storms, so intense that it either makes GPS positions wobble about or causes GPS to be lost across the entire sunlit side of the Earth."
Image copyright NASA/SDO/GSFC Image caption Particles hurled out by the Sun can knock satellites offline
Until now, there has been no "Plan B" if GPS goes wrong, but the GLA says eLoran will be an important tool.
The technology was developed during World War Two.
There is an algorithm that decides to swap over to eLoran and it does that seamlessly Martin Bransby, GLA
The Long Range Navigation system (Loran) was the brainchild of US scientists and was used to guide US Navy warships as battles raged in the Pacific.
After the war ended, it was updated and renamed Loran-C, and adopted by mariners around the world - until GPS took over.
Now though, rebranded as eLoran, its infrastructure has been upgraded to make it more accurate and it is making a comeback.
While GPS transmitters are based in space, eLoran's are based on the ground.
Radio stations transmit long-range radio waves. They use the same method as GPS to pinpoint position, but there are crucial differences.
Professor Last says: "The neat thing is this: the radio frequencies which eLoran transmits are completely different from those of GPS.
Image copyright Thinkstock Image caption The team says eLoran could be used as a back up for some of the other systems that use GPS
"The power levels, instead of being very weak, are very strong; the propagation of the radio signals is very different."
He adds: "Everything that matters is very different (from GPS) so there is no common mode of failure. The result you get is a plug-and-play replacement for GPS."
The General Lighthouse Authorities have finished installing eLoran in seven ports along the east coast of Britain, completing the first phase of their roll out. It is now in place in Dover, Sheerness, Harwich and Felixstowe, Middleborough, Leith, Humber and Aberdeen.
Onboard the Galatea, Martin Bransby demonstrates how a dual e-Loran and GPS receiver works.
He says: "What happens inside this box is when we see some interference or jamming or a satellite failure, there is an algorithm that decides to swap over to eLoran. And it does that seamlessly."
For now, eLoran is being tested for shipping, but it could also play a role on land for the vast array of systems that use GPS.
Prof Last says a back-up is long overdue.
"Most people think of GPS as the system that runs their car sat-nav and tells their smartphone where it is," he tells the BBC's Click.
"But there is probably no area of industry, of commerce, or telecoms, that isn't now dependent on GPS. And if we lose GPS we lose them all."
But the system may never go global.
The US Coast Guard is busy decommissioning the existing eLoran infrastructure. And in Europe, the governments of Norway and France have said they will cease operations next year.
Commercial companies may take up the |
outer space then so be it. However, money brings power and attracts the corrupt... Their worst critic at the moment is not a personal or an organisation but a medium - the Internet. The Internet is by its very nature a censorship free zone... The fight against' the Church is far more than the Net versus a bunch of wackos. It is about corporate suppression of the Internet and free speech. It is about intellectual property and the big and rich versus the small and smart. At this time, to judge by the pieces he wrote that have survived, Assange's main political preoccupation seems to have been the extraordinary democratic possibilities of the information.sharing virtual communities across the globe created by the internet, and the threat to its freedom and flourishing posed by censorious states, greedy corporations and repressive laws. Not everything Assange wrote at this time was serious. He was interested in a computer security software program developed by Dan Farmer of Silicon Graphics known as SATAN. One evening in April 1995 he composed 'The Dan Farmer Rap' for 'firewalls', a list to which he subscribed. I'm Dan Farmer you can't fool me
The only security consultant to be an MTV, I've got red hair - hey hands off man! don't touch the lacks of the mighty Dan. AC/DC - from the front or from behind, you can fuck my arse but you can't touch my mind. philosophy's the trip - evil 'n' stuff, gad, we know a lot, Mike me and Muff. A real ardent feminist - just like she tells me to be, See me out there rooting for sexual e-qual-ity... I coded it all - yes the mighty Dan did it alone, if you can't believe it, you and your note pad can fuck off home. I'm Dan Farmer - now take that down it's not every day you get to interview the world's biggest security clown. Several subscribers to 'firewalls' were appalled. One wrote: "Just reading this made me feel dirty. In 20+ years associated with this business, I don't think I've ever seen debate among professionals degraded to quite this slime-ball level. Mr Assange is an unprincipled ass..." Assange wrote a sort of apology. "It was perhaps an error of judgment on my behalf to equate the people on this list with those who knew myself and Dan more fully. Such mistakes are ripe to happen when one is merry and full of wine in the wee hours of the morning." Nonetheless, he expressed high amusement regarding all those who had publicly condemned him while privately sending their congratulations. "You know who you are." Assange's Dan Farmer 'peccadillo' was still remembered six years later by a British computer geek, Danny O'Brien. By 1997 Julian Assange, with his friends Suelette Dreyfus and Ralf Weinmann, had written 'Rubberhose', a piece of 'deniable cryptography' for human rights activists and troublemakers, the purpose of which was to make it impossible for torturers or their victims to know whether all the encrypted data on a computer hard drive had been revealed. It was designed to make torture to extract passwords pointless, and defection and betrayal in the face of such torture impossible. The concept was Assange's. Assange argued a convoluted and rather improbable psychological case about why Rubberhose would cause rational torturers to put away their weapons. Danny O'Brien captured the obvious objection rather well. Despite Rubberhose's deniable cryptography, "won't rational torturers just beat you up 'forever'?" l am in no position to judge the sophistication of the Rubberhose software or the level of creativity it required. I can however assess the quality of the posting announcing its creation, which Assange sent to the firewalls list in June 1997. Assange called it "One Man's Search for a Cryptographic Mythology". His search to find a suitable name for Rubberhose takes him, in a zany and hilarious stream of consciousness, on a journey through Greek and Roman mythology, the incestuous Cerberus and the cliched Janus; to the moral pessimism of David Hume, who argued the inescapable connection between joy and despondency; to an unexplained rejection of his request for mythological advice by the Princeton History Department; to Sigmund Freud, the Medusa's Head and the castration complex; to a spoof on Zen Buddhism; to a memory of a visit to a mercenary hypnotherapist in Melbourne's Swanston Street - until, through the suggestion of a Swedish friend with an interest in ancient Sumerian mythology - "who calls himself Elk on odd days and Godflesh on even days. Don't ask why" - he finally arrives with a joyous heart at the Mesopotamian god MARUTUKKU, "Master of the Arts of Protection". If MARUTUKKU was my exquisite cryptographic good, of wit, effusive joy, ravishing pleasure and flattering hope; then where was the counter point? The figure to its ground - the sharper evil, the madness, the melancholy, the most cruel lassitudes and disgusts and the severest disappointments. Was Hume right? Alas, he was. Assange, "on a cold and wintry night here in Melbourne", discovers in the 4000-year-old Babylonian tablets a reference to the supposedly secret eavesdropping intelligence agency in Maryland, the National Security Agency! It is a magnificently exuberant, bravura literary performance. Assange was not merely a talented code writer and computer geek. There was in him daring, wildness and a touch of genius. For a while he signed his emails not with his customary "Proff." but "Prof. Julian Assange". Assange was by now a committed member of the free software movement, pioneered by Richard Stallman, whose aim was to regulate communication in cyberspace by software not by law. As members of the movement put it, freedom here meant free speech rather than free beer. The movement stressed democratic, collective contribution. Assange tended to be somewhat sceptical about the movement, on one occasion arguing that in reality usually one or two people did 80% of the work. Assange was nonetheless involved in the development of NetBSD, an open source computer operating system derived from the original Berkeley Software Distribution source code. Some of the slogans he invented to spruik its virtues can still be found on the internet. Here are three. "We put the OS in OrgaSm"; "Bits for Tits"; "More ports than a Norwegian crack whore". By the time Assange was working on NetBSD he had been involved for several years with a movement known as the cypherpunks. It was the cypherpunks more than the free software movement who provided him with his political education. Although there are tens of thousands of articles on Julian Assange in the world's newspapers and magazines, no mainstream journalist so far has grasped the critical significance of the cypherpunks movement to Assange's intellectual development and the origin of WikiLeaks. The cypherpunks emerged from a meeting of minds in late 1992 in the Bay Area of San Francisco. Its founders were Eric Hughes, a brilliant Berkeley mathematician; Timothy C May, an already wealthy, former chief scientist at Intel who had retired at the age of 34; and John Gilmore, another already retired and wealthy computer scientist - once number five at Sun Microsystems - who had co-founded an organisation to advance the cause of cyberspace freedom, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They created a small group, which met monthly in Gilmore's office at a business he had created, Cygnus. At one of the early meetings of the group, an editor at Mondo 2000, Jude Milhon, jokingly called them cypherpunks, a play on cyberpunk, the "hi-tech, low-life" science-fiction genre. The name stuck. It soon referred to a vibrant emailing list, created shortly after the first meeting, which had grown to 700 by 1994 and perhaps 2000 by 1997 with by then up to a hundred postings per day. It also referred to a distinctive subculture - eventually there were cypherpunk novels, Snowcrash, Cryptonomicon, Indecent Communications; a cypherpunk porno film, Cryptic Seduction; and even a distinctive cypherpunks dress: broad-brimmed black hats. Most importantly, however, it referred to a political-ideological crusade. At the core of the cypherpunk philosophy was the belief that the great question of politics in the age of the internet was whether the state would strangle individual freedom and privacy through its capacity for electronic surveillance or whether autonomous individuals would eventually undermine and even destroy the state through their deployment of electronic weapons newly at hand. Many cypherpunks were optimistic that in the battle for the future of humankind - between the State and the Individual - the individual would ultimately triumph. Their optimism was based on developments in intellectual history and computer software: the invention in the mid 1970s of public-key cryptography by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman, and the creation by Phil Zimmerman in the early 1990s of a program known as PGP, 'Pretty Good Privacy'. The seminal historian of codes, David Kahn, argued that the Diffie-Hellman invention represented the most important development in cryptography since the Renaissance. Zimmerman's PGP program democratised their invention and provided individuals, free of cost, with access to public-key cryptography and thus the capacity to communicate with others in near-perfect privacy. Although George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four was one of the cypherpunks' foundational texts, because of the combination of public-key cryptography and PGP software, they tended to believe that in the coming battle between Big Brother and Winston Smith, the victor might be Winston Smith. At the time the cypherpunks formed, the American government strongly opposed the free circulation of public-key cryptography. It feared that making it available would strengthen the hands of the espionage agencies of America's enemies abroad and of terrorists, organised criminals, drug dealers and pornographers at home. For the cypherpunks, the question of whether cryptography would be freely available would determine the outcome of the great battle of the age. Their most important practical task was to write software that would expand the opportunities for anonymous communication made possible by public-key cryptography. One of the key projects of the cypherpunks was'remailers', software systems that made it impossible for governments to trace the passage from sender to receiver of encrypted email traffic. Another key project was 'digital cash', a means of disguising financial transactions from the state. Almost all cypherpunks were anarchists who regarded the state as the enemy. Most but not all were anarchists of the Right, or in American parlance, libertarians, who supported laissez-faire capitalism. The most authoritative political voice among the majority libertarian cypherpunks was Tim May, who, in 1994, composed a vast, truly remarkable document, "Cyphernomicon". May called his system crypto-anarchy. He regarded crypto-anarchy as the most original contribution to political ideology of contemporary times. May thought the state to be the source of evil in history. He envisaged the future as an Ayn Rand utopia of autonomous individuals dealing with each other as they pleased. Before this future arrived, he advocated tax avoidance, insider trading, money laundering, markets for information of all kinds, including military secrets and what he called assassination markets not only for those who broke contracts or committed serious crime but also for state officials and the politicians he called "Congressrodents". He recognised that in his future world only elites with control over technology would prosper. No doubt "the clueless 95%" - whom he described as "inner city breeders" and as "the unproductive, the halt and the lame" - "would suffer, but that is only just". May acknowledged that many cypherpunks would regard these ideas as extreme. He also acknowledged that, while the overwhelming majority of cypherpunks were, like him, anarcho-capitalist libertarians, some were strait-laced Republicans, left-leaning liberals, Wobblies or even Maoists. Neither fact concerned him. The cypherpunks formed a house of many rooms. The only thing they all shared was an understanding of the political significance of cryptography and the willingness to fight for privacy and unfettered freedom in cyberspace. Like an inverse Marxist, Tim May tended to believe that the inexorable expansion of private cryptography made the victory of crypto-anarchism inevitable. A new "balance of power between individuals and larger entities" was already emerging. He predicted with some confidence "the end of governments as we know them". Another even more extreme cypherpunk of the libertarian Right, Jim Bell, like an inverse Leninist, thought that history might need a push. In mid 1995, drawing upon May's recommendation of assassination markets, he began a series explaining his "revolutionary idea", which he called "Assassination Politics". These were perhaps the most notorious and controversial postings in the history of the cypherpunks list. Bell devised a system in which citizens could contribute towards a lottery fund for the assassination of particular government officials. The prize would go to the person who correctly predicted the date of the death. The winner would obviously be the official's murderer. However, through the use of public-key cryptography, remailers and digital cash, from the time they entered the competition to the collection of the prize no one except the murderer would be aware of their identity. Under the rubric "tax is theft" all government officials and politicians were legitimate targets of assassination. Journalists would begin to ask of politicians, "why should you not be killed?" As prudence would eventually dictate that no one take the job, the state would simply wither away. Moreover, as assassination lotteries could be extended across borders, no leader would again risk taking their people to war. Eventually, through the idea of the assassination lottery, then, not only would the era of anarchy arise across the globe, the condition of permanent peace humankind had long dreamt of would finally come to pass. Bell ended his 20,000 word series of postings with these words. "Is all this wishful thinking? I really don't know." A year or so later he was arrested on tax avoidance charges. Julian Assange joined the cypherpunks email list in late 1995 at the time the controversy over "Assassination Politics" was raging. There were many reasons Assange was likely to be attracted to the cypherpunks. As his encounter with Richard Lowenstein had revealed, he was already interested in the connection between privacy and encrypted communication. Even before his arrest he had feared the intrusion into his life of the totalitarian surveillance state. An atmosphere of paranoia pervaded the cypherpunks list. Assange believed that he had been wrongly convicted of what he called a "victimless crime". The struggle against victimless crimes - the right to consume pornography, to communicate in cyberspace anonymously, to distribute cryptographic software freely - was at the centre of the cypherpunks' political agenda. Moreover the atmosphere of the list was freewheeling - racism, sexism, homophobia were common. Not only Tim May believed that political correctness had turned Americans into "a nation of sheep". On the cypherpunks list no one would disapprove of "The Dan Farmer rag". Yet there was probably more to it than all this. Cypherpunks saw themselves as Silicon Valley Masters of the Universe. It must have been more than a little gratifying for a self-educated antipodean computer hacker, who had not even completed high school, to converse on equal terms with professors of mathematics, whiz-kid businessmen and some of the leading computer code-writers in the world. Julian Assange contributed to the cypherpunks list from December 1995 until June 2002. As it happens, almost all his interventions have been placed on the internet. On the basis of what historians call primary evidence, the mind and character of Julian Assange can be seen at the time of his obscurity. The first thing that becomes dear is the brashness. Over a technical dispute, he writes: "[B]oy are you a dummy." When someone asks for assistance in compiling a public list of hackers with handles, names, email addresses, Assange responds: "Are you on this list of morons?" In a dispute over religion and intolerance one cypherpunk had written: "Because those being hatefully intolerant have the 'right' beliefs as to what the Bible says. Am I a racist if I don't also include an example from the Koran?" "No, just an illiterate", Assange replied. Following a savaging from Assange for total computer incompetence, a hapless cypherpunk pointed out that he has been writing code since the age of 14. If one thing is clear from the cypherpunks list, it is that the young Julian Assange did not suffer those he regarded as fools gladly. In his posts there is humour, although often it is sarcastic. In one of his earliest interventions Assange has read about the arrest of someone caught with diesel fuel and fertiliser. "Looks like I've just been placed into the ranks of the pyro-terrorist. Golly, Deisel [sic] fuel. Gosh, Fertilizer. Ma, other items." Some posts reflect his faith in the theory of evolution. Assange forwarded an article about the role played by the CIA in supplying crack gangs in Los Angeles. A cypherpunk responded: "I wish they'd get back to the business, but add an overt poison to the product. Clean out the shit from the cities. Long live Darwinism." "Darwinism is working as well as it ever was. You may not like it but shit is being selected for," Assange shot back. Other posts reflect his recent life experiences. Assange had helped Victoria Police break a paedophile ring in 1993. On the cypherpunks list he defended the circulation of child pornography on the internet on the grounds that it would cut the need for new production and make it easier for police to capture paedophiles. In another post he expressed deep anger at perceived injustice regarding those with whom he identifies - convicted hackers. One, Tsutomu Shimamura, had not only played a role in the hunting down of a notorious American fellow hacker, Kevin Mitnick (known personally to Assange through his research for Underground), but had even co-authored a book about it, Takedown. "This makes me ill. Tsutomu, when Mitnick cracks will you dig up his grave and rent his hands out as ash trays?" Assange also posted on the reports of violence against another hacker, Ed Cummings AKA Bernie S, imprisoned in the US. "I was shocked. I've had some dealings with the SS... Those that abuse their power and inflict grave violence on others must be held accountable and their crimes deplored and punished in the strongest manner. Failure to do so merely creates an environment where such behaviour becomes predominant." Already there are qualities in Assange's postings unusual in the standard cypherpunk. One is a fascination with language. Assange acquired a software program that created anagrams. The deepest institutional enemy of the cypherpunks was the National Security Agency. Assange put the name into his computer. Among the anagrams that emerged were: "National Anti-Secrecy Guy"; "Secret Analytic Guy Union"; "Caution Laying Any Secret"; "Insane, ugly, acne atrocity"; and, Assange's apparent favourite: "National Gay Secrecy Unit". He was also interested in what he described as "tracking language drift; i.e. the relative change in word frequency on the internet as time goes by". He informed the cypherpunks that he had just discovered that in a "10 billion word corpus" the following frequency occurred: God - 2.177,242 America - 2,178,046 Designed - 2,181,106 Five - 2,189,194 December - 2,190,028 His eccentricity would also have been obvious after a member of the 'firewalls' list forwarded his MARUTUKKU fantasia to cypherpunks. Where did Assange stand with regard to the radical cypherpunks agenda of Tim May? This question is best answered in two parts. On the question of cryptographic freedom and hostility towards the surveillance state and its chief embodiment - the National Security Agency - Assange was, if anything, even more absolute and extreme than May. In September 1996, Esther Dyson, the chair of the lobby group for freedom in cyberspace, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, was quoted in the Los Angeles Times as being in favour of certain extremely limited restrictions on internet anonymity. On the cypherpunks list a furious controversy, called "The Esther Dyson Fuss", broke out. Some cypherpunks defended Dyson on the ground that she had every right to argue a more nuanced position and that it was anyhow healthy for individuals to speak their mind. May vehemently disagreed. The issue was not her freedom of speech. A critical moment in the battle between freedom and surveillance had arrived. Dyson had defected to the enemy camp. Assange went further. He launched a stinging ad hominem attack. Examining in detail Dyson's interests it appears she maintains a sizeable and longstanding interest in East European technology companies. She is also very far to the right of the political spectrum (rampant capitalist would be putting it mildly). She also speaks Russian. I'm not saying she's been working for the CIA for the past decade, but I would be very surprised if the CIA has not exerted quite significant pressure... in order to bring her into their folds during that time period. "At least you don't accuse me of being a Communist," Dyson responded. "For the record, I am not a tool of the CIA nor have they pressured me, but there's no reason for you to believe me." Perhaps Dyson remembered the incident. When Assange was in trouble last year she wrote a piece on the Salon website arguing that even unpleasant characters need to be defended. A month or so after September 11 a controversy broke out on the cypherpunks list over the report of a civilised discussion about increased FBI surveillance over internet communications between Mitch Kapor, a co-founder and former board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Stu Baker, an attorney who had once been employed by the National Security Agency. Some cypherpunks had some sympathy for Kapor's moderation. Even they recognised that with September 11 something major had occurred. One pointed out, in addition, that Stu Baker was "a gun for hire, not a doctrinaire blinders-on true believer for either the surveillance enthusiasts or privacy freaks". This was too much for Assange: Stu is a well known NSA zealot. The only reason there's a bridge between Kapor and Baker is due to the cavernous ravine that lays [sic] between them. Kapor is now apparently half-way across, following Stu's silently beckoning finger, fearfully running from the sounds of angel's wings fooled into believing that they lie behind and not ahead of him. From beginning to end Assange was, in short, a hardline member of the tendency among the cypherpunks that Tim May called the "rejectionists", an enemy or those who displayed even the slightest tendency to compromise on the question of Big Brother and the surveillance state. On another question, however, Assange was at the opposite end of the cypherpunks spectrum from Tim May. At no stage did Assange show sympathy for the anarcho-capitalism of the cypherpunks mainstream. In October ]996, a prominent cypherpunk, Duncan Frissell, claimed that in the previous fiscal year the American government had seized more tax than any government in history. Assange pointed out that, as the US was the world's largest economy and that its GDP had grown in the previous rear, this was a ridiculous statement designed to be deceptive. In October 2001, Declan McCullagh expressed "surprise" when a "critique of laissez-faire capitalism" appeared on the cypherpunks list "of all places". Assange replied: Declan, Declan. Put away your straw man... Nobel economic laureates have been telling us for years to be careful about idealised market models... This years [sic] Nobel for Economics won by George A. Akerlof, A. Michael Spence and Joseph E. Stiglitz "for their analysis of markets with assymmetric [sic] information" is typical. You don't need a Nobel to realize that the relationship between a large employer and employee is brutally assymmetric [sic]... To counter this sort of assymetery. [sic] Employees naturally start trying to collectivise to increase their information processing and bargaining power. That's right. UNIONS Declan. Those devious entities that first world companies and governments have had a hand in suppressing all over the third world by curtailing freedom of association, speech and other basic political rights we take for granted. Assange was, then, an absolutist crypto-anarchist but one who leant decidedly to the Left. Mainstream cypherpunks did not defend trade unions or speak negatively of "rampant capitalists" and positively of "human rights activists". He was an electronic but not an economic libertarian. There is also evidence that Assange was increasingly repelled by the corrosive cynicism common in cypherpunks ranks. Something in his spirit seems to have changed after his trial and the writing of his MARUTUKKU mythology. From 1997 to 2002 Julian Assange accompanied all his cypherpunks postings with this beautiful passage from Antoine de Saint-Exupery. "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." On one occasion in July 1999 William H Geiger III presented standard Ayn Rand Objectivist praise of human selfishness. "Everyone is a predator out to advance their own agenda at the expence [sic] of others. Tim is just more honest than most about it." Assange replied with a defence of altruism, for Objectivists an evil. No... Everyone maybe self-interested. but some are self-interested in a way that is healthy (to you, or the people you care about), some in a way which is benign. and some in a manner that is pernicious. It is important to distinguish between these different behaviours and support or undermine them accordingly. On another occasion, a cypherpunk suggested that in I the great struggle for privacy and against censorship ordinary people could not give a damn. Perhaps with Tim May's contempt for "the clueless 95%" in his mind, in March 2002, in what was one of his final cypherpunks postings, Assange responded: "The 95% of the population which comprise the flock have never been my target and neither should they be yours; it's the 2.5% at either end of the normal that I find in my sights, one to be cherished and the other to be destroyed." Already he seems to have imagined the future as a struggle to the death between autocratic elites and electronic freedom fighters. Increasingly, Assange began to mock Tim May. Many thought of May as an anti.Semite, with good reason. In November 2001, when May used a quote from a cypherpunk fellow traveller, David Friedman (Milton's son), Assange emailed: "Quoting Jews again, Tim?" Julian Assange was a regular contributor to the cypherpunks mailing list particularly before its decline in late 1997 following a meltdown over the question of the possible moderation of the list - censorship! - and the departure of John Gilmore. The cypherpunks list clearly mattered to him deeply. Shortly before his travels in 1998, Assange asked whether anyone could send him a complete archive of the list between 1992 and the present time. While commentators have comprehensively failed to see the significance of the cypherpunks in shaping the thought of Julian Assange, this is something insiders to the movement understand. When Jeanne Whalen from the Wall Street Journal approached John Young of Cryptome in August last year, he advised her to read the Assange cypherpunk postings he had just placed on the internet, and also Tim May's "Cyphernomicon". "This background has not been explored in the WikiLeaks saga. And WikiLeaks cannot be understood without it." Likewise, in his mordant online article on WikiLeaks and Assange, the influential cyberpunk novelist and author of The Hacker Crackdown Bruce Sterling wrote: "At last - at long last - the homemade nitroglycerin in the old cypherpunks blast shack has gone off. " In 2003 Julian Assange seems to have considered living a more conventional life. He went to the University of Melbourne to study mainly mathematics and physics. As a student of mathematics his results were mediocre. This can hardly be explained by lack of talent. No one worked more closely with Assange than Suelette Dreyfus. "A geek friend of his once described Assange as having an IQ 'in excess of 170'," she wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald of 12 December 2010. "I suspect this could be true." Assange claimed that he became disillusioned with the applied maths department when he discovered its members were working with defence authorities in the US on a military bulldozer adapted to desert conditions known as "The Grizzly Plough". He also claimed that visits to the ANU were thoroughly dispiriting. On one occasion he represented University of Melbourne students at a competition. "At the prize ceremony, the head of ANU physics motioned to us and said, 'you are the cream of Australian physics.' I looked around and thought, 'Christ Almighty I hope he's wrong.''' On another occasion he saw 900 senior physicists in Canberra proudly carrying bags with the logo of the Defence Science and Technology Organisation. He described them as "snivelling fearful conformists of woefully inferior character". Perhaps there were other reasons for dissatisfaction. By 2004 Assange had reached the elevated position of vice-president of the students' Mathematics and Statistics Society and chief organiser of their Puzzle Hunt - a quiz leading the winner to $200 of buried treasure. He described his role as "plot/script, general nonsense, Abstract(ion), Caesar Cipher, Disc, Platonic, Score, Surstro:mming". Organising a puzzle hunt was a somewhat less engrossing ambition than planning world revolution. And towards the end of his studies this was exactly what he was doing. A female friend provided the journalist Nikki Barrowclough with a vivid portrait of the atmosphere of a share house close-by the University of Melbourne that Assange lived in at this time. There were beds everywhere, she says. There was even a bed in the kitchen. This woman slept on a mattress in Assange's room, and says she would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night to find him still glued to his computer. He frequently forgot to eat or sleep, wrote mathematical formulas all over the walls and the doors, and used only red light bulbs in his room - on the basis that early man, if waking suddenly, would see only the gentle light of the campfire, and fall asleep again. Between July 2006 and August 2007 - the period when WikiLeaks was being planned and actualised - Julian Assange maintained a blog at IQ.ORG, some of which he collected under the title "Selected Correspondence". The correspondence can still be found on the internet. Because of its existence, a detailed map of his mind at the age of 35 and at the moment of WikiLeaks' creation is available. Strangely enough, even though there are now some 27 million Google entries on Assange, so far as I am aware no one has offered an analysis. When Domscheit-Berg released his memoir in mid February there was excitement around the globe at his claim that Assange had boasted about fathering several children. On his blog, Assange includes a photo of a bonneted baby under the title "Those Eyes" with the caption, "All the pink ribbons in the world can't hide them." She is his new daughter. In an email of January 2007 he asks someone who is about to publish confidential email correspondence to remove at least the reference to IQ.ORG, which is "near my daughters [sic] photo". The existence of Assange's son, Daniel, is well known. However, if any journalist had read the evidence closely we would not have needed to wait for Domscheit-Berg to learn of at least one of Assange's more recent "love children". The blog reveals a young man of unusual intellectual range, ambition and curiosity. As expected, there are references to cypherpunks and his work as a code-writer in the free software movement. Assange writes of his loathing for the " 'everything which is not permitted is denied' security types" who "make concurrent salutes to the Fuhrer, Baal and Jack Straw". He explains why as one of the committed developers of NetBSD he has refused to sign a proposed contract: "The contract as well as being an instrument of the state is written in the demeaning language of the corporate state. It should have been written in the language of the programmer world." Some entries, such as his defence of altruism, are familiar to those who have followed his postings on the cypherpunks list. Many others have the range and also eccentricity revealed in his MARUTUKKU performance. There are abstract speculations on philosophy, mathematics, neuroscience, human physiology, the law, history and sociology. There are also very striking and revealing extracts. One is from a Buddhist text from 500 BC, Ajita Kesakamhal, in defence of materialism. "The words of those who speak of existence after death are false, empty chatter. With the breakup of the body, the wise and the foolish are alike annihilated, destroyed." Another is a wonderful story from the Nazi concentration camp. A Jewish inmate can save his daughter if he chooses which eye of his guard is glass. He chooses the left eye, correctly. His guard asks how he knew. '' 'I'm sorry,' trembled Moshe, 'but the left eye looks at me with a kindly gleam.' '' Assange has great interest in the history of European totalitarianism. One extract is a poem - "bad... but elevated by its monumental context" - about the atom bomb spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg: "Even so, we did what we believed in: / Treason, yes, but with good cause." There is also a long extract from an article about the problems besetting those possessing super-high IQs, such as the unfulfilled genius William James Sidis. It concludes with these words: "And so we see that the explanation for the Sidis tragedy is simple. Sidis was a feral child, a true man born into a world filled with animals - a world filled with us." It is not difficult to understand why this article interested him. Entries on the blog concerning women prefigure future problems. Some passages are awkward in a Mills & Boon kind of way - "a lovely girl I knew... stood for a moment fully clothed in her shower before letting the wind and rain buffet her body as she made her tremulous approach to my door and of course I could not turn her away." Others are rather sinister, like his study of the etymology of the word 'cad'. "Caddie or cadet used to denote the passenger of a horse-coach picked up for personal profit by the driver... So a 'cad' is a man who picks up women, profits from them and leaves them by the road side... Such romantic etymology is enough to make a man want to don his oilskin and mount his horse with whip and smile at the ready." This coldness is striking because other passages in the correspondence are tender. Assange writes of meeting Antony, a country kid he had known since they were both 14, at a mental health centre in East Ringwood. "His smile was shaky but characteristic. His physical edges rounded off by weight gain and his imagination dulled... His limbs and jaw gently shuddered with some frequency," Assange visited him later still at a psychiatric hospital. "When I asked about the cause of his shaking, suggesting a dopamine antagonist, he said, 'No... If you look closely you'll notice a number of people around here acting the same way. Julian... we're all doing the Mont Park shuffle.' " What is most important about the correspondence, however, is that in it we can hear for the first time Julian Assange's distinctive political voice. As a former cypherpunk crypto-anarchist the enemy for him is, unsurprisingly, that abstraction he calls the State. "Where words have power to change, the state tries hard to trap, burn or blank them, such is its fear of their power." The state represents the principle of "mendacity". "The state does what it can get away with." True understanding requires the individual "to know the state for what it really is", Yet, unlike most of his fellow cypherpunks, by now Assange unambiguously extends his idea of the state to big business. In thinking about the US, in one blog entry, he asks: "What kinds of states arc giant corporations?" He answers in the following way. As executive power is wielded by a central committee; as there is unaccountable single-party rule; as there is no freedom of speech or association, and pervasive surveillance of movement and electronic communication", what then do you have in that federation of giant corporations that control the US? What else but a "United Soviet of America". Assange is a profound anti-communist. But he regards power in western society as belonging to political and economic elites offering ordinary people nothing more nourishing than a counterfeit conception of democracy and a soul-destroying consumption culture. He points out that when the American colonists waged their struggle for independence there was no talk of shopping or even democracy. Such shallow ideas could not stir the passions. Assange's selected correspondence is addressed to a small coterie of followers. It involves a revolutionary call to arms. "If we can only live once, then let it be a daring adventure that draws on all our powers... Let our grandchildren delight to find the start of our stories in their ears but the endings all around in their wandering eyes." Assange seems not particularly interested in future political institutions or in economic arrangements. The revolution he speaks about is moral. He believes that individual action can re-fashion the world. The state may do "what it can get away with" but it does "what we let it get away with" and even "what we let ourselves get away with, for we, in our interactions with others, form the state". Over the whole selected correspondence there is a quotation from the German-Jewish revolutionary anarchist Gustav Landauer, beaten to death by right-wing troops after the Munich soviet experiment of 1919. "The state is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behaviour. We destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another... We are the state and we shall continue to be the state until we have created the institutions that form a real community and society of men." The question is how new institutions can |
is that people either love them or hate them. This can largely be attributed to their rough around the edges sound, which I’ve personally always found quite charming. However Going Grey sees the boys angling for a slightly cleaner sound (with the exception of one or two tracks) that I would best compare to that of The Wombats. This isn’t a bad thing though; it actually works in their favor in some cases.
Tracks like ‘Raining’ and ‘Far Drive’ end up sounding significantly more mature as a result of the cleaner approach. This is set in contrast to ‘Don’t Fill Up On Chips’ which, due to the rough approach sounds a lot younger. But if you listen to the subject matter of these tracks you’ll hear that the choice of a clean or rough sound fits the nature of the lyrics. Each songs sets the atmosphere of the story before lyrics even come into play. The clever bastards have used the variation of sound as another storytelling element in such a subtle yet genius way and you can’t help but want to deeply analysis each individual song. I tip my hat off to them
This technique does come at a cost however… As an album, it’s not particularly consistent.
Recently I sat down with Brian Sella (interview here) to talk about the album. On the recording process he states “Writing the last album, it was very much more about trying to find the right sound and this one was more about just writing songs.”
And you can tell. Each song feels like a it’s own thing. There’s no real reoccurring theme musically throughout the album and although each song can stand on it’s own, well enough to be a single, an album full of singles can at times feel like each track is fighting for your attention and as a result no one track gets the full attention it deserves and the album suffers for that. Although thematically the album makes sense the abrupt change in tone can at some times be slightly jarring.
I’d like to note though I have no doubt this album is going to do well. In the age of Spotify, an album full of singles is the perfect playlist material; this is only solidified with the band’s talent at writing incredibly specific yet relatable songs.
Official single ‘Vacation Town’ is a particular stand out; Perfectly balancing the familiar acoustic sound with a Brass section of all things. The truly bittersweet subject matter is coupled perfectly with a mixture of both rough and clean tones that serves as a solid introduction to what you’re in for within the album, so it was definitely a well chosen single.
Overall The Front Bottoms have displayed a huge level of growth through technique while not compromising the sound that they’re adored for. I honestly can’t flaw a single song, however I just don’t see it as an album, more a collection of work and suggest that to fully enjoy Going Grey you’re best off listening to each song individually rather than tackling the whole album at once. I am a huge fan of this band and this album does make me very excited for what they do in the future.
The Front Bottoms – Going Grey tracklisting
1. You Used to Say (Holy Fuck)
2. Peace Sign
3. Bae
4. Vacation Town
5. Don’t Fill Up On Chips
6. Grand Finale
7. Trampoline
8. Raining
9. Far Drive
10. Everything But You
11. Ocean
Rating: 8.5/10
Going Grey is Out Now via Warner Music Australia. Grab a copy Here
Review by Bree Vane.
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PrintThe best way to avoid wasting your money on Wave 2 of 802.11ac access points is to not buy them right away, and the second-best is to not overreact to their presence on your network.
Asus Early 802.11ac Wave 2 product: The Asus RT-AC87U Wi-Fi router
Wave 2 APs have been on the market for about a year, dating back to last January’s release of the Asus RT-AC87U, but the technology hasn’t yet become commonplace among enterprise users.
The central difference between the two waves of 802.11ac technology is the use of multi-user MIMO – essentially, a system of multiple antennae that allows Wave 2 hardware to use a given piece of spectrum for more than one client at the same time, increasing throughput.
+ ALSO ON NETWORK WORLD: Scared of 802.11AC Wave 2 Wi-Fi? Here comes Cisco Multigigabit to the rescue | North Carolina could be next in Google Fiber roll-out +
This makes backhaul capacity the main technical sticking point for Wave 2 deployments, according to experts. The theoretical maximum data rate for a Wave 2 AP is 6.8Gbps, and even though real-world users are unlikely to come close to that, the capacity increase over previous-generation technology could still throttle 1Gbps connections.
Tearing out and replacing existing category 5 cable is, in many cases, a huge investment of time and money.
“If you’ve got open spaces and just a handful of APs, cabling may be a non-issue and you can do it for pennies for the foot,” said Lee Badman (@wirednot), a network architect at Syracuse University. “Where you’ve got historic buildings and you’ve gotta add pathways and stuff like that, the cost of cabling can far exceed the cost of the access points themselves.”
Enter Cisco, which is marketing a line of “multigig” switches designed to boost throughput on existing cables via new transmission standards. The NBASE-T Alliance was founded to promote those standards, as well as Cisco’s value proposition.
Zeus Kerravala (@zkerravala), an analyst and Network World contributor, said that while Cisco may be slightly exaggerating the need for its multigig hardware, it’s still a potentially valuable technology.
“Being the only [multigig] vendor, they’re probably going to overhype it, right?” he said. “But I do think, if you’re upgrading your wired network right now, it’s something you should think about.”
Syracuse's Badman warns against going out of your way to embrace multigig, however, citing the potentially major difference between Wave 2’s theoretical maximum throughput and likely operational speeds.
“Some people in the industry are saying that even if we get to the full promise of 11ac, all you’re ever going to need is a gig, and as long as you’ve got a decent cat 5, cat 6, you’re never going to run faster than that,” he said.
Indeed, it’s far from clear that Wave 2 itself is going to become required technology anytime soon.
“There’s no more hype in the world than in the wireless realm, unfortunately,” Badman noted. “What a great place to be in marketing.”
Another potential complicating factor for Wave 2 wireless is the probable need for Power-over-Ethernet-Plus compliance, according to IDC analyst Nolan Greene (@ngreeneidc). He said that PoE+ is something that many organizations have dragged their feet on implementing, but that the higher energy requirements for Wave 2 hardware may make it necessary.
“I don’t really see how organizations are going to get away with not putting in PoE+ or putting in a power injector to bridge the gap. That will slow down some enterprises in moving to Wave 2.”
Even if you have PoE+ in place, and backhaul burly enough to handle the extra data, Wave 2 isn’t going to do much for you right away, since no end-user devices are yet on the market.
“One of the things businesses have to ask themselves is ‘do you need it?’” Kerravala said. “Wave 2 clients aren’t expected out until 2016, so you really need both ends of it being compliant.”
For the moment, then, it’s probably best to wait on Wave 2.
MORE: Full speed ahead for Gigabit Wi-FiLow Morale: Creep is a music video of Radiohead's "Creep" song. It took 3 months to create and contains over one million key frames. I know this because I counted them. I counted them because I made the animation and delivered every one of those mewling baby key frames.
Creep was created as an extension to a series of shorts called Low Morale, which I began to develop during a well-paid, comfortable yet soul-destroying job as a senior designer in a multimedia agency. The countless days spent in the run-down, converted office, churning out banal multimedia and animation for faceless, lifeless, clueless blue chips, had taken their toll on my soul. Creep became my creative escape tunnel.
The video actually started as a lip-synching experiment with the central Low Morale character, but rapidly grew into a cathartic opus that aimed to reflect my job dissatisfaction and the pain caused by a broken relationship. As I'm sure you'll glean from the video, they were indeed happy days.
— Laith Bahrani
April 18, 2007The star of the new Netflix hit Luke Cage, Mike Colter, said the new show — featuring a bulletproof African-American man sporting a hoodie — highlighted the plight of many young Black people in the United States who have been shot dead by police and the decades-long struggle against such brutality.
“It's a nod to Trayvon, no question,” Colter told the Huffington Post. Trayvon Martin was an unarmed 17-year-old Black teen shot dead by George Zimmerman in Florida in 2012. Martin was walking home from a convenience store with skittles and an iced tea while wearing a hoodie.
“Trayvon Martin and people like him. People like Jordan Davis, a kid who was shot because of the perception that he was a danger. When you're a Black man in a hoodie all of a sudden you're a criminal.”
Luke Cage is based on a Marvel comic with the same title which was first published by the studio in the 1970s at the height of the Black Power movement in the United States. “I can’t imagine anything a Black man would want to be more right now than bulletproof,” Colter said. He added that while the show does not revolve around Black Lives Matter, it has many elements relating to the anti-police brutality movement and the struggle of African-Americans in the US.
“The show isn’t just Black Lives Matter, that’s not what the whole show is about,” he said. “That being said, it will strike a chord with some people because you can't help not think about it. The people who are watching will tell us what having a bulletproof Black man means to them.” He said police killings and brutality against Black people in the US was not a new phenomenon but that “the only difference is that now we have camera phones. People are just more aware of it.” For Colter, Luke Cage is a Black man “going through the same thing as other people of colour, it’s just that he has superpowers”.
In the show, Luke Cage — also known as Power Man — attempts to keep a low profile as a working man in New York’s Harlem. But he finds himself caught in a fight against one of the district’s biggest arms dealers and drug gangsters. The production of the show started last year and came amid high-profile police shootings of Black people. The producers of the show and its writers could not help but be inspired by the unfolding national debate and unrest across the country. “The writers aren’t immune to the society that they live in, they are acutely aware and I'm sure it helped inspire them,” Colter said as he recalled some of the news at the time of the filming.
“Eric Garner, the policemen were acquitted. No one was brought to justice. There was no handing out of any sentence. “There are a couple other things that happened during the time we were filming. We were watching the news and it was always someone being shot who was unarmed, and there is no justification for it. It's mind-boggling.”
His comments came a few days before the fatal shooting on October 1 of Carnell Snell, an 18-year-old unarmed Black teen from Los Angeles. Snell’s killing further fuelled the debate on racism within police forces and the targeting of Black people in the US. “That's something we shouldn’t have to deal with, but we do,” Colter said. “It's a double standard. “We can't cover our head when it’s cold and raining because god forbid someone sees us and puts our life in danger. We wanted to pay homage to that — it's not something we were shying away from.”
[Reprinted from TeleSUR English.]LUCKNOW: Accusing BJP's prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi of trying to spark revolt in the army, senior Samajwadi Party leader and minister in Uttar Pradesh government Azam Khan on Monday said that the presence of a retired army general in full uniform along with a leader, who has been declared prime minister in waiting, at the rally in Rewari, Haryana, on Sunday was a dangerous sign for democracy.Azam was talking to reporters in Lucknow. He was asked to comment on whether it is appropriate for UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi and Congress vice president Rahul to escort prime minister Manmohan Singh in his official visit to riot-hit areas of Muzaffarnagar.Without taking any names Azam said: "Anything is possible in India, If a person who has declared himself a candidate for the post of prime minister can hold a rally along with a retired army general dressed in full uniform. But I must add here that what was done in Rewari is dangerous sign for the democracy in India. An attempt was made to spark revolt in the army from the dais."On the visit of Prime Minister, UPA chairperson and Congress vice president, Azam said that it is fine but they should have also visited others places like Faizabad, Mathura and Bareilly where riots have taken place in the past.Azam denied reports that the state government has decided to withdraw National Security Act ( NSA ) slapped on rioters in Muzaffarnagar."There are reports in some news papers that chief minister Akhilesh Yadav during his visit to Muzaffarnagar said that he will conider revoking NSA on some rioters. Chief minister did not say anything like that. In fact, the state government is committed to take strict action rioters," he said.A group of South Florida teens wrangled a 13-foot python like it was no big deal.
On Sunday police said they responded to a call for help from a group that caught a python in a residential neighborhood of Pembroke Pines.
>> Python vs. alligator video by Post reporter goes viral
"Due to the brush fires in the Everglades, you may see a rise in wildlife entering residential areas to escape the smoke and flames," the Pembroke Pines Police Department wrote on Facebook.
The reptile might have been near the flames because it had burn marks on its skin, police said.
It was taken to the Everglades Holiday Park wildlife preserve, according to authorities.
"While these boys appear to be talented amateur snake wranglers, we would like to caution anyone against approaching a python or other wild animal," Pembroke police said.
>> Download our PostNOW app to get the latest Breaking NewsFrom: "Old Soldier" [Send him mail]
Good old Google Earth and Google Street View:
This Google Street view dated 9/2015 actually shows reinforcement of the same corner of the Vatican Walls I wrote you about the other day. The soldier on the right is carrying an assault rifle. In addition, a police car is now deployed at the same spot. "Traveling" around the perimeter using Google Street View reveals additional military trucks and troops parked at regular intervals.
This is in addition to abundant Italian police. The driveway entrance gateways have checkpoints manned by the blue uniformed and armed Swiss Guards as previously mentioned.
We had initially passed these mobile guard posts on our way into St. Peter's Square and Cathedral from the Rome metro subway station. The previous duty shift were also carrying assault rifles. I decided we should snap a few pics on the way out for posterity's sake.
I see a Jesuit priest named James Martin has been active on Twitter. He has been mendaciously claiming that Vatican City is "open" based on the geometry of St Peter's Square.
He posted his tourist picture as an attempted proof that the Vatican is open to an influx of illegal aliens to enter and settle.
To all those tweeting photos to me of the Vatican walls that supposedly keep people out, a photo I took. Drop by! pic.twitter.com/Icc3TjwOlM — James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) February 18, 2016
This is a half-truth that creates a lie. St Peter's Square is only "open" up to the entrance into St Peter's Basilica, which is rightly free of charge as befits a church. You cannot, however, freely proceed past St Peters Square into the rest of the Vatican City territory. The access points are all secured by the armed Swiss Guards and Vatican police I previously mentioned. The Vatican's functional wall system thus excludes St Peter's Square.
I can also add that while waiting in line to enter St Peter's Basilica I made sure to keep one of the columns seen on the left side between my wife, our teen son and myself and the mass of the people who would obviously be the target of any suicide bomber.
My congratulations to James Martin, anyway. In my opinion he has gone far to perpetuating for another generation the reputation of the Jesuit order as mainly being a nest of politicized and deceiving snakes.
All visitors to the Vatican are under the lidless eye of innumerable armed guardians both open and hidden. And they all have to leave each evening. As we overheard a tour guide explain, no one is born in Vatican City and only the Pope is allowed to die there. This ban on child birth is somewhat astounding considering Francis' recent complaint to Angela Merkel of Europe being incapable of bringing forth children.
But overall I highly approve of the immigration policies Francis presides over in actual practice. No illegal immigrants are tolerated for a single second, there are no "church" or "city" sanctuaries excepted for them to squat in, no visitors are allowed to become economic burdens on the State and a high level of physical security is provided for all the legal residents. In all this Francis provides a physical example that I'm sure all the friends of VDARE.com want the USA to emulate, except for the ban on children.Who are you?
I'm Mike Williams, a software developer and freelance writer from the UK.
Why are you doing this?
It all started on an Internet message board, a couple of years ago. Someone was saying the WTC collapsed through demolition, and quoted the story of Kim White as partial evidence (she reported hearing a second explosion shortly after the other one).
This puzzled me. White said the second explosion occurred when she was on something like the 79th floor, yet she had time to get out. Demolition charges don't normally give you 30 minutes+ to escape, so how could this have anything to do with bringing the building down?
I decided to look into the story further, and headed off to Google. Searching for "Kim
White" pulled up only the same reports, "Kim White" +explosion was no different. So I tried "Kim White" +80 +floor, and found an answer high on the first page. There was the story of Susan A.F., who apparently worked with White, and said of the second "ka-boom": I thought some part of the plane or some part of the building that had been hit by the
plane had exploded and debris was sliding down from the floors above us. I would later learn it was a second airplane diving into the other tower and it was debris from that explosion hitting the windows.
http://www.webscope.com/~larrygc/gra/wtc/sep11wtcdisaster.htm This doesn't prove anything, obviously, but it's an interpretation that made more sense to me. So how many other sites had found it? I checked, and didn't find a single one. There were hundreds (at the time) using White's quote as evidence of bombs in the building, but no-one had done the two minutes research necessary to find an alternative explanation.
Why not? I began to realise that, despite the many claims of "finding the truth", that's not what most people really wanted to do. They thought they knew the truth already, and were simply seeking to prove it. As such they'd collect stories that seem to prove what they already believe, and republish them, without making any checks at all.
So I decided to begin looking into these claims for myself, and began to realise just how big this problem was. I found many stories that were entirely false, others distorted, more that left out important information. Soon I’d amassed a library of rarely heard qualifications to the usual conspiracy claims, more than I’d seen anywhere else, and eventually I decided this needed to be shared with others. And so here it is.
Why spend so much effort on this?
Why do you ask? Oh, I know. It’s the old one where anyone who spends a lot of time promoting a particular 9/11 theory is A Fearless Seeker After Truth (even if their site is packed with “Donate” buttons and invitations for you to “buy the book/ DVD/ video”), but anyone who spends the same amount of time on the other side of the argument is A Government Shill/ Paid Disinformation Agent, right?
Well, believe what you like, but I do this because I enjoy it. It’s an interesting exercise in collecting information online, and sharpens my research skills. Plus I didn’t see anyone else bothering to do the same thing (plenty of sites making these claims, not so many questioning them), so arguably the site is performing a useful function as well. Although that’s really just a side issue: I’m doing this for me, not for anyone else.
Why have you registered 911myths.com in a way that keeps you anonymous?
You have my real name and an email address, so it’s not exactly anonymous. The only extra information you would get if I hadn’t registered 911myths.com by proxy is my home address. And would you happily post your address online, in the middle of a heated and vitriolic 9/11 debate? Neither would I, which is why I chose to protect that.
If you still feel that’s wrong, then perhaps you’d like to consider some of the other sites with registration records that don’t point to someone’s name or home address (and there are plenty more):
911truth.org - registered via proxy
physics911.net - registered via proxy
loosechange911.com - registrant company name only
fromthewilderness.com - registrant company name only
st911.org - private registration
Although of course I’m sure I’ll receive an email very soon explaining why it’s entirely different when these sites do it...
Aren't you missing the big picture, though, by concentrating on these tiny issues?
Ah yes, that's a claim I keep hearing. Usually from people who don't want to admit that I've got a point -- or several points, actually -- and so want to deflect attention away from what I'm saying.
It's also something of a dishonest debating tactic. This seems to be a way of saying "no, please, don't tackle me on the details, let's just keep everything fuzzy and vague
instead".
But you know what? The "big picture" doesn't exist on its own, it's actually made up of individual points. Doesn't it actually matter whether these are true, or false? And if you believe there was a Government conspiracy on 9/11, how will it help your case to use evidence that can be easily disproved?
Let's not pretend that I've somehow cherry-picked only tiny or insignificant issues, either. Claims like "some of the hijackers are alive", "the hijackers weren't on the passenger manifests", "insider trading proves 9/11 foreknowledge", "Willie Brown warned in advance" and so on are major, major stories. And in fact I've generally avoided the more far-out theories (pods, missiles and plane swaps at the WTC, say).
Even the small points are relevant, I think. If nothing else, it shows you not to believe everything you read, but check out the facts for yourself. And yes, I apply that to this site just as much as everyone else, which is why you'll find just as many references and links as I can supply.
You’re very selective in the topics you cover, though
People said that of the Popular Mechanics piece, too. I’ve got something like six or seven times as many issues listed here -- doesn’t that count for something?
But still, there is some truth in that suggestion. What I’m looking to talk about here are 9/11 claims that are either clearly wrong, or sometimes presented in a very misleading way.
The “John Ashcroft stopped flying commercial flights” story, used by people like David Ray Griffin to support the idea of 9/11 foreknowledge, is a good example. How many sites have you seen that point out this claim was removed from Fahrenheit 9/11, when they found he had flown commercial flights after all? This single fact doesn’t disprove foreknowledge, obviously, but it suggests the story isn’t that reliable. That’s exactly the kind of thing I want to include here, little-known information that makes a clear point.
How about a “the WTC collapsed by fire and structural damage alone” page, though? Although I happen to think it did, that fails the criteria in several ways. Like there’s nothing I can say that hasn’t been said before, for instance -- why just do another “me too” page? I’m not an authority on structural engineering, either, or anything else relevant. Why should anyone believe me? And even if I did the research, picked out the best arguments and pictures, put it all together, this will not have the same effect as the Ashcroft/ Fahrenheit 9/11 quote. If documentaries and real structural engineers can’t convince people, there’s no way I’m going to manage it.
So in a sense, you’re right, I am being selective. I’m choosing to recognise my limitations, looking at smaller details, things I can manage. Maximum effect for minimum effort (hey, I never said I wasn’t lazy). This can still be useful, I think, and relate to the bigger picture (it’s interesting to know that Louie Cacchioli now claims he never said “We think there was bombs set in the building”, for instance), but will never be absolutely definitive.
Oh, and please don’t email me to say I don’t stick to this... I know! These are my general guidelines, but I don’t always stick to them, and already I’ve occasionally strayed into areas that rely more on opinion, aren’t entirely clear-cut. I’m hoping the new Articles section will give me somewhere to put that kind of piece, if I really need to do it, though -- we’ll see how it works.
What do you think happened on September 11th? Do you completely accept the official version? If not, why don’t you present your doubts on the site?
I think the attacks were carried out by al Qaeda, and involved the 19 named hijackers.
Could Flight 93 have been shot down? I can’t rule out that completely -- let’s say it has a 10% probability for me -- but I’m far from convinced.
Could the attacks have been assisted “on the day”? The stand-down evidence looks weak to me. I don’t believe it was necessary, or even possible to plant bombs in the WTC.
Could the attacks have been assisted in advance by people within the US? I’m neutral on this. There was plenty of information flying around, so we have two alternatives: a) they didn’t put the pieces together in time, or b) they knew but did nothing about it. I currently see insufficient evidence to form an opinion either way.
So why not mention this on the site? Well, now I have, but there’s really nothing here to justify making it into a topic. As I just said about being selective, ideally I’d like the topics here to a) include some information you don’t often read anywhere else, and b) make a point that’s significant, stands at least a chance of changing someone’s mind. Yet another page on “Rice said we couldn’t imagine this kind of attack but look, they could” really doesn’t cut it, either way.
Does that make me biased? Not really; the same rule means I’m probably not going to do an overall “this is why the WTC collapsed due to fire”, as I said above, or similar points in the other direction. They also wouldn’t be original, and there’s no chance of me making points that are any more significant than anyone else.
Maybe the best way to think of it is like this: I’m not saying this site covers everything, it’s not here to provide a complete overview of 9/11, really it’s not for beginners who don’t know the main claims at all. I’m deliberately addressing individual points, the fine detail if you like, where I think I might have something to say -- and, more or less, that’s all.
Pah! Plainly you're just a shill/ Government stooge/ neo-con/ psyops site.
Yawn. Yes, I've heard that before, usually because it's much easier to smear people than dealing with the points they're making. But hey, if you believe that, then run along now, it's fine with me. There are plenty of other 9/11 sites that will tell you what you want to hear, and never even think of challenging any of your views..If you don’t understand the motivation behind Git’s design, you’re in for a world of hurt. With enough flags you can force Git to act the way you think it should instead of the way it wants to. But that’s like using a screwdriver like a hammer; it gets the job done, but it’s done poorly, takes longer, and damages the screwdriver.
Consider how a common Git workflow falls apart.
Create a branch off Master Work Merge it back to Master when done
Most of the time this behaves as you expect because Master changed since you branched. Then one day you merge a feature branch into Master, but Master hasn’t diverged. Instead of creating a merge commit, Git points Master to the latest commit on the feature branch, or “fast forwards.” (Diagram)
Unfortunately, your feature branch contained checkpoint commits, frequent commits that back up your work but captures the code in an unstable state. Now these commits are indistinguishable from Master’s stable commits. You could easily roll back into a disaster.
So you add a new rule: “When you merge in your feature branch, use –no-ff to force a new commit.” This gets the job done, and you move on.
Then one day you discover a critical bug in production, and you need to track down when it was introduced. You run bisect but keep landing on checkpoint commits. You give up and investigate by hand.
You narrow the bug to a single file. You run blame to see how it changed in the last 48 hours. You know it’s impossible, but blame reports the file hasn’t been touched in weeks. It turns out blame reports changes for the time of the initial commit, not when merged. Your first checkpoint commit modified this file weeks ago, but the change was merged in today.
The no-ff band-aid, broken bisect, and blame mysteries are all symptoms that you’re using a screwdriver as a hammer.
Rethinking Revision Control
Revision control exists for two reasons.
The first is to help the act of writing code. You need to sync changes with teammates, and regularly back up your work. Emailing zip files doesn’t scale.
The second reason is configuration management. This includes managing parallel lines of development, such as working on the next major version while applying the occasional bug fix to the existing version in production. Configuration management is also used to figure out when exactly something changed, an invaluable tool in diagnosing bugs.
Traditionally, these two reasons conflict.
When prototyping a feature, you should make regular checkpoint commits. However, these commits usually break the build.
In a perfect world, every change in your revision history is succinct and stable. There are no checkpoint commits that create line noise. There are no giant, 10,000 line commits. A clean history makes it easy to revert changes or cherry-pick them between branches. A clean history is easy to later inspect and analyze. However, maintaining a clean history would mean waiting to check in changes until they’re perfect.
So which approach do you choose? Regular commits, or a clean history?
If you’re hacking on a two man pre-launch startup, clean history buys you little. You can get away with committing everything to Master, and deploying whenever you feel like it.
As the consequences of change increase, be it a growing development team or the size of your user base, you need tools and techniques to keep things in check. This includes automated tests, code review, and a clean history.
Feature branches seem like a happy middle ground. They solve the basic problems of parallel development. You’re thinking of integration at the least important time, when you’re writing the code, but it will get you by for some time.
When your project scales large enough, the simple branch/commit/merge workflow falls apart. The time for duct-tape is over. You need a clean revision history.
Git is revolutionary because it gives you the best of both worlds. You can regularly check in changes while prototyping a solution but deliver a clean history when you’re finished. When this is your goal, Git’s defaults make a lot more sense.
The Workflow
Think of branches in two categories: public and private.
Public branches are the authoritative history of the project. In a public branch, every commit should be succinct, atomic, and have a well documented commit message. It should be as linear as possible. It should be immutable. Public branches include Master and release branches.
A private branch is for yourself. It’s your scratch paper while working out a problem.
It’s safest to keep private branches local. If you do need to push one, maybe to synchronize your work and home computers, tell your teammates that the branch you pushed is private so they don’t base work off of it.
You should never merge a private branch directly into a public branch with a vanilla merge. First, clean up your branch with tools like reset, rebase, squash merges, and commit amending.
Treat yourself as a writer and approach each commit as a chapter in a book. Writers don’t publish first drafts. Michael Crichton said, “Great books aren’t written– they’re rewritten.”
If you come from other systems, modifying history feels taboo. You’re conditioned that anything committed is written in stone. By that logic we should disable “undo” in our text editors.
Pragmatists care about changes until the changes become noise. For configuration management, we care about big-picture changes. Checkpoint commits are just a cloud-backed undo buffer.
If you treat your public history as pristine, fast-forward merges are not only safe but preferable. They keep revision history linear and easier to follow.
The only remaining argument for –no-ff is “documentation.” People may use merge commits to represent the last deployed version of production code. That’s an antipattern. Use tags.
Guidelines and Examples
I use three basic approaches depending on the size of my change, how long I’ve been working on it, and how far the branch has diverged.
Short lived work
The vast majority of the time, my cleanup is just a squash merge.
Imagine I create a feature branch and create a series of checkpoint commits over the next hour:
git checkout -b private_feature_branch touch file1.txt git add file1.txt git commit -am "WIP"
When I’m done, instead of a vanilla git merge, I’ll run:
git checkout master git merge --squash private_feature_branch git commit -v
Then I spend a minute writing a detailed commit message.
Larger work
Sometimes a feature sprawls into a multi-day project, with dozens of small commits.
I decide my change should be broken into smaller changes, so squash is too blunt an instrument. (As a rule of thumb I ask, “Would this be easy to code review?”)
If my checkpoint commits followed a logical progression, I can use rebase’s Interactive Mode.
Interactive mode is powerful. You can use it to edit an old commits, split them up, reorder them, and in this case squash a few.
On my feature branch:
git rebase --interactive master
It then opens an editor with a list of commits. On each line is the operation to perform, the SHA1 of the commmit, and the current commit message. A legend is provided with a list of possible commands.
By default, each commit uses “pick,” which doesn’t modify the commit.
pick ccd6e62 Work on back button pick 1c83feb Bug fixes pick f9d0c33 Start work on toolbar
I change the operation to “squash,” which squashes the second commit into the first.
pick ccd6e62 Work on back button squash 1c83feb Bug fixes pick f9d0c33 Start work on toolbar
When I save and close, a new editor prompts me for the commit message of the combined commit, and then I’m done.
Declaring Branch Bankruptcy
Maybe my feature branch existed for a very long time, and I had to merge several branches into my feature branch to keep it up to date while I work. History is convoluted. It’s easiest to grab the raw diff create a clean branch.
git checkout master git checkout -b cleaned_up_branch git merge --squash private_feature_branch git reset
I now have a working directory full of my changes and none of the baggage from the previous branch. Now I manually add and commit my changes.
Summary
If you’re fighting Git’s defaults, ask why.
Treat public history as immutable, atomic, and easy to follow. Treat private history as disposable and malleable.
The intended workflow is:
Create a private branch off a public branch. Regularly commit your work to this private branch. Once your code is perfect, clean up its history. Merge the cleaned-up branch back into the public branch.
Special thanks to @joshaber and @jbarnette for providing feedback on an early draft.Bitcoin will surge past $20,000 and continue its meteoric march into six figures, according to independent research analyst Ronnie Moas.
"Bitcoin is already up 500 percent since I recommended it in the beginning of July, and I'm looking for another 500 percent move from here," said Moas, the founder of Standpoint Research, a self-described "one-man operation" based in Miami.
Over the summer, Moas put a $ |
don’t know what particular social media that you’d like to integrate with. Quite frankly, you don’t care as long as you can get the info that you need. In this scenario, you’d make an ISocialIntegrator interface, defined as following in C#:
interface ISocialIntegrator { void Connect(); string Email { get; } string FullName { get; } string Description { get; } }
Notice how the actual social network is not mentioned. The interface is agnostic of whatever social network is being used under the hood.
Now that you’ve defined the interface that the rest of your code will interact with, you can start developing against the interface without worrying about its actual implementation. After a two or three well-earned beers, once you make the choice of the particular social media that you’d like to use, you can create an adapter between your SocialIntegrator interface and the social media that you’ve chosen. You can create a FacebookAdapter, LinkedInAdapter, etc. which will conform to the SocialIntegrator interface and bridge the gap between the generic info that you need and the actual API of the social network that you’ve chosen.
Summary
Being cognizant of what problem you are trying to solve and what pattern you are using to solve that problem will help you to keep your code clean and focused on a singular purpose.
Use wrappers to simplify code, encapsulate third-party dependencies, and eliminate repetition.
Use the adapter pattern to allow yourself to swap out third-party dependencies at will by interacting with your own interface, and then making adapters that map from your own interface to the third party code.US Senate Minority Leader Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) speaks during a press conference on Capitol Hill on January 22, 2015 in Washington, DC. Reid, who was injured in an exercise accident last year, returned to the Senate this week and will need surgery on his eye on January 26. AFP PHOTO/BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI (Photo credit should read BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON -- In early April, John Hinderaker, one of the main authors of the conservative blog Power Line, wrote a story alleging that Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) had not been injured in an accident involving broken exercise equipment, as he said he was. Rather, Reid was likely involved in a confrontation with his brother Larry, during which he sustained broken ribs and a busted eye socket that had kept him wearing protective sunglasses since.
Hinderaker based all this on a single source: a Las Vegas man named Easton Elliott who claimed to have been at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting on New Year's Eve in Henderson, Nevada, at which an intoxicated and agitated Larry came in with bloody clothes claiming to have just been in a fight with a family member.
The story was a hoax. Easton Elliott was actually a former nightclub consultant named Larry Pfeifer who wanted to see just how far baseless rumor-mongering could spread among the press.
In an interview with The Huffington Post the morning after the Las Vegas Sun first reported his real identity, Pfeifer said he had done it all on a whim. He had initially contacted Hinderaker to "bitch him out" for an earlier item speculating that Reid's injuries had been the result of a confrontation with the mafia.
On the voicemail, however, Pfeifer said he merely told Hinderaker he had got it wrong. When the two finally connected, Hinderaker asked if he knew what had actually happened. That's when Pfeifer started the yarn. He took cues from an article he had been reading on an actual Larry Reid arrest to pepper seemingly true details into the fiction.
"I’m like, there is no way this guy is going to publish it. But I’m thinking to myself, if he does, he is a complete jerk," said Pfeifer. "He just said, 'Unbelievable, I can’t believe it.'"
Clearly, Hinderaker shouldn't have. In an interview with The Huffington Post, Hinderaker said he tried to check the facts, even demanding to know "Easton Elliott's" real name, which Pfeifer eventually gave him. He also argued that he put sufficient caveats in his piece, including lines stating he couldn't independently verify the story. He contemplated the possibility that he was being duped, even wondering if Reid's staff had concocted the whole thing, but ultimately decided it passed the threshold. Reid, he argued, had done the same thing when he infamously stated Mitt Romney had not paid his taxes.
"I'm not critical of anything I did," Hinderaker said. "But if you look at it in hindsight, obviously, you know the guy turns out to be some kind of a fraud.... So, in hindsight would I do it differently? Heck yes. I wouldn't have even spoken to the guy."
"This guy convinced me that he was telling the truth. And I thought it was appropriate to give him the opportunity to tell his story, not to vouch for it, but for him to tell his story and to see what happens," he added.
By letting the chips fall where they may, Hinderaker allowed a false story to find a larger spotlight. And it didn't end at the point of publication. Behind the scenes, he also put "Easton Elliott" in touch with other reporters and placed him on national radio.
All this was borne out in dozens of pages of emails between "Easton Elliott" and other outlets, which Pfeifer shared on Monday with The Huffington Post. Some of those outlets exhibited more credulity than others. But several cast aside doubts in order to get up a story literally too good to be true.
"The whole time I was thinking about the University of Virginia Rolling Stone story," Pfeifer told HuffPost, referring to the controversial, ultimately discredited magazine feature on a campus rape. "No one is fired, no one is held responsible."
A picture of Larry Pfeifer, provided by Pfeifer.
The emails that were shared (and there were some that weren't) began after that first call with Hinderaker. On March 30, Hinderaker wrote a note to "Easton Elliott" saying he was trying to get him on Rush Limbaugh's radio show. (Pfeifer told HuffPost the initial goal was to go on the show and reveal the hoax after 15 minutes or so). Hinderaker emailed again the next day, saying he had set up a time to talk with Limbaugh.
That call, Pfeifer said, would last about 20 to 30 minutes, during which, he says, the radio host repeatedly asked for corroboration for the story, such as the location of the AA event or the name of someone else there. Limbaugh wasn't the only skeptic. On April 1, Hinderaker would email "Easton Elliott" again.
Despite his fears, Hinderaker published his piece on April 3. That day, he put "Easton Elliott" in touch with another conservative outlet, The Daily Caller, that was looking into doing a piece of its own on Reid's now-mysterious injuries.
Curiously, The Daily Caller's Michael Bastasch included Garrett Murch, a communications adviser for Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), on an email to Hinderaker, in which he asked to be put in touch with "Easton Elliott." Bastasch told HuffPost he must have included Murch by mistake. "You know autofill on emails?" Either way, he didn't end up writing a story on "Easton Elliott," since it didn't check out, showing that he wasn't "trying to spread rumors about Harry Reid on the Hill."
Over the next days and weeks, others would follow Bastasch's example of checking out the story only to back away suspiciously. Huffington Post Politics Editor Sam Stein and Washington, D.C., Bureau Chief Ryan Grim were emailed about the story and chose not to pursue it.
"I actually didn't think it was a hoax but couldn't get any more sources," Grim told HuffPost, exclusively.
Charles Johnson, founder of GotNews.com, approached "Easton Elliott" on April 10 and after a brief exchange, was openly skeptical.
Johnson initially passed along several Fox News email addresses to "Easton Elliott," including one belonging to executive vice president Michael Clemente. But a few hours later, he wrote to Pfeifer, "Something seems fishy about your story." Around the same time, Johnson tweeted that he suspected "Easton Elliott" was not "a straight shooter," and alerted a producer on Fox News’ "The Kelly File." Pfeifer, for his part, said he was happy to not have to deal with Johnson because Johnson was making him paranoid.
Jon Ralston, the legendary local Las Vegas political reporter, chased the story too, but never ran anything. He "made a lot of effort. Talked to him several times, exchanged many emails. Was going to meet with him. He told me he had a guy from the group who would corroborate his story. Would hook me up. Night before the meet, he canceled," Ralson told HuffPost in an email. "What I never got past was that Reid has 24/7 security at that house. Were they supposed to have not seen Larry all bloodied up? Or heard the scuffle? But I was willing to check it out."
Ralston said he ran the rumors by his sources close to Reid, but they declined to engage. "I asked Reidworld if Larry was there that night. Three times. No answer. But they probably did not want to dignify it," he said.
While some online outlets smelled a fraud, talk radio threw caution to the wind. On April 9, Hinderaker guest hosted for Laura Ingraham and had "Easton Elliott" on the show, even though he admitted during the program that he had no idea if he was telling the truth. Glenn Beck's site would cover the fictitious account too. And on April 15, the big break occurred, with Limbaugh discussing the story even though he had privately raised doubts just weeks earlier and would note that neither he nor Hinderaker could vouch for it.
“Bottom line,” Limbaugh said, “somebody attacked Harry Reid New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day.”
After that show, others came sniffing. Todd Zwillich, who covers Washington for The Takeaway public radio show from WNYC, reached out through Hinderaker to get in touch with "Easton Elliott" after reading Limbaugh's transcript. He and "Elliott" had a conversation, but when more details couldn't be supplied, Zwillich dropped it.
"We talked a couple of times, and once I insisted on corroborating other details he went off my grid," Zwillich told The Huffington Post.
One reporter who plowed forward was Breitbart's Michael Patrick Leahy. He had already written skeptically about the origins of Reid's injury, going so far as to obtain floor plans of the Nevada Democrat's home to make the case that it wasn't due to faulty exercise equipment. He had emailed Hinderaker on April 3 to ask to be put in touch with "Easton Elliott," and initially was skeptical.
But after Limbaugh's show, Leahy felt more emboldened to write a piece. He sprinkled in qualifiers and caveats, like: "Limbaugh was careful not to vouch for 'Elliott’s' story." And he put the onus on Reid to "prove otherwise" that it wasn't true. Later that day, he emailed Elliot to ask if he "could add a fact not already known that would be helpful" and, the next day, to ask if he could be put "in touch with one person who can corroborate your story?"
"You already ran story," Elliot replied.
When it was finally reported that it was all a hoax, the exchanges became acrimonious.
Asked about it on Monday, Leahy defended his decision to publish Limbaugh's commentary even when he had his own internal doubts.
"I just relayed what Rush was talking about," he said. "At that time I was very skeptical of this character and I suspected that it was phony but, you know, all of the information was not known at the time. I certainly wasn't going to write about it on my own as a story that has merit. But Rush Limbaugh mentioning it in the same context of Harry Reid and giving him a dose of his own medicine, I think, was quite relevant."
A week earlier, Pfeifer had actually tried to give Leahy the real story -- the hoax one -- but grew convinced that Breitbart would never publish it. He also reached out to a CNN producer the day of the Limbaugh broadcast, saying he had "saved all emails to show how preposterous this whole thing is including my story- which I didn't think would go as far as it has." The producer thanked him for his pitch and promised to forward it along.
Nothing came of it. The Sun article would come out 11 days later.
Having found himself in the midst of a bizarre catfishing frenzy involving one of the most powerful Democrats in the country and several major conservative media figures, Pfeifer expressed some shreds of regret, mainly for Larry Reid, whom he painted in a terrible, false light.
By late Monday evening, Pfeifer was trying to make amends, developing plans to morph his stint in the media circus into a full-blown cause. The idea, he said, was to start a movement to call out press malfeasance. He asked The Huffington Post to include an email address for "those who want to join me against irresponsible journalism." His newly created account is werenotgoingtotakeitanymore@gmail.comGet the biggest Newcastle 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
“An absolutely stonewall penalty but we don’t seem to get them” – that was John Carver speaking about Newcastle United back in March and it seems he had a point.
When the Magpies host Everton in the Premier League at St James’ Park on Boxing Day, it will be exactly a year since a referee last awarded United a spot kick in a competitive match.
On December 26 last year, Papiss Cisse lashed home from the spot at Old Trafford in the 87th minute against Manchester United - and that is the last time Newcastle were given a penalty.
That is a staggering 40 games ago. In fact, if United do not get awarded a spot kick against either Everton or West Bromwich Albion (December 28), they will have gone the entire calendar year of 2015 without a penality.
It seems unthinkable that any football team could play 40 matches without once receiving a penalty, but no official has awarded Newcastle a spot kick during that time - despite some pretty blatant infringements against them.
So when should United have been awarded penalties during that time? And why are they not getting the decisions?
Newcastle's long wait for a penalty Days since NUFC last got a penalty 360 Soccerbase
The penalties United could - and probably should - have been awarded:
Across the 40 matches, there will undoubtedly have been numerous penalty appeals Newcastle wrongly had turned down - but here’s six that almost certainly should have been given:
January 17, 2015 - Newcastle United 1-2 Southampton (Premier League)
In the dying moments of the game, Emmanuel Riviere hit a shot goalwards which Jose Fonte appeared to stick out an arm to block.
The Saints defender was far enough away to have moved out of the path of the ball, but he didn’t - yet the referee still did not point to the spot, denying Newcastle the chance to equalise.
An apoplectic Carver said of the incident: “It was an absolutely stonewall penalty. If he had his arms by his side you could argue it was ball to hand but his arms are an L-shape.
“Big decisions can cost people livelihoods and jobs but more importantly points.”
March 4, 2015 - Newcastle United 0-1 Manchester United (Premier League)
Riviere tends to turn up in a lot of these penalty shouts.
The Frenchman advanced into the area against Man United and Jonny Evans dragged him to the ground with the score still at 0-0 - but incredibly no penalty was given.
Carver again voiced his frustrations: “An absolutely stonewall penalty but we don’t seem to get them, especially at St. James’ Park. We don’t get them at St. James’ Park.
“The referee only has one look at it and at the time my gut feeling was that it was a penalty, but he hasn’t given it – he’s a human being.
“I have seen it five or six times now and it is a penalty. We all know how important the first goal is in this league, it is a different game then.”
March 15, 2015 - Everton 3-0 Newcastle United (Premier League)
James McCarthy used his arm to block a Mike Williamson shot on the line early on, but the referee didn’t see it and United went on to lose heavily.
Carver said of this one: “Even at 11 v 11 we were second best, we started brightly, and had a chance of a penalty but we don’t get those so that’s no surprise.”
March 21, 2015 - Newcastle United 1-2 Arsenal (Premier League)
Francis Coquelin handled the ball during the second half, while Remy Cabella was scythed down in the box - yet neither of those were enough to convince the officials to give United a penalty.
Again Carver spoke after weeks of frustrating decisions: “I keep talking about not getting penalties. Today (against Arsenal) was a prime example of that.
“His (Coquelin) arm was in an unnatural position and the direction of the ball changed. It’s a penalty and we don’t get them.”
April 13, 2015 - Liverpool 2-0 Newcastle United (Premier League)
Just before the interval, with Newcastle trailing 1-0, Dejan Lovren chopped Ayoze Perez down in the box. It was an obvious penalty at a crucial moment - but again it was not awarded.
Once again, a fuming Carver spoke up: “Everyone out there has seen it is a penalty. Even (then-Liverpool boss) Brendan (Rodgers) said straight away it is a penalty.
“I will phone referees’ chief Mike Riley tomorrow, he will probably agree, but it gets us nothing.”
October 25, 2015 - Sunderland 3-0 Newcastle United (Premier League)
That infamous game.
With the scoreline at 0-0, Georginio Wijnaldum attempted to advance into the box. He flicked the ball past Lee Cattermole, who blocked the ball with his arm.
If the handball was questionable, Cattermole then proceeded to drag Wijnaldum down.
No penalty was awarded for either incident - then the Black Cats broke at pace immediately, Fabricio Coloccini shoved down Steven Fletcher, and Adam Johnson stepped up to put the home side ahead from the spot in controversial fashion.
This time it was Steve McClaren who made his anger known: “Refereeing decisions are out of your control.
“It was never a penalty. The penalty and red card was a double whammy.”
How many penalties have Newcastle given away in the past year?
The answer to that question is five across all competitions - four in the Premier League and one in the Capital One Cup.
Here’s a rundown of them, and whether or not they should have been awarded:
February 21, 2015 - Manchester City 5-0 Newcastle United (Premier League)
Just 28 seconds into the match, Edin Dzeko was upended in the box and Sergio Aguero stepped up to score the first of five Man City goals. Definite penalty.
March 15, 2015 - Everton 3-0 Newcastle United (Premier League)
Another game after which Carver made clear he did not believe Newcastle were awarded penalties anymore, Everton did get one - and it was a stonewaller. Yoan Gouffran tripped Aaron Lennon, and Romelu Lukaku slotted home.
May 2, 2015 - Leicester City 3-0 Newcastle United (Premier League)
A game made infamous for Carver accusing of Williamson of getting himself deliberately sent-off, Leonardo Ulloa scored his second from the spot when Riviere appeared to shove Marcin Wasilewski. Probably was a penalty, though not entirely clear cut.
August 25, 2015 - Newcastle United 4-1 Northampton Town (Capital One Cup)
Cheick Tiote handled in the area and the referee rightly pointed to the spot. Marc Richards duly converted for the League Two side.
October 25, 2015 - Sunderland 3-0 Newcastle United (Premier League)
As has already been mentioned, United were not awarded a penalty at one end - before Coloccini was dismissed as the other for fouling Fletcher. Coloccini’s red card was later rescinded, but not because the decision to award the penalty was incorrect - Johnson scored and the complexion of this game changed completely.
poll loading Who would you have as NUFC's penalty taker now? 0+ VOTES SO FAR Papiss Cisse Aleksandar Mitrovic Siem de Jong Ayoze Perez Georginio Wijnaldum Jack Colback Moussa Sissoko Vurnon Anita Daryl Janmaat
So, why don’t the Magpies get awarded penalties anymore?
A whole host of reasons really - partly due to their own lack of invention, but also as has been shown earlier because luck has simply not been on their side.
The point is often made that the main explanation for why the top sides receive a greater number of penalties is because they attack with greater regularity, so they are more frequently in the opposition box.
Seeing as Newcastle have won just seven Premier League matches in 2015, it is therefore understandable that they won’t have been awarded a flurry of penalties.
On saying that, some of the decision-making from referees has also been awful.
Carver may have seemed like he was merely making excuses, but just about all of the penalties he spoke of were pretty clear infringements - and the less said about the spot-kick decisions during the Sunderland game the better.
It seems Newcastle just don’t get penalties anymore - but let’s hope that changes on the anniversary of their most-recent spot-kick on Boxing Day...People’s Bank of China (PBoC) is officially launching a digital currency research institute on Jan. 29, one day after the celebration of the Chinese Lunar New Year.
In an interview with a national newspaper China Securities Journal earlier this week, PBoC department of technology director Li Wei revealed the plans of PBoC to actively examine and explore Blockchain technology.
Specifically, Wei stated that the central bank of China is interested in the ability of Blockchain technology to settle real-time transactions in a secure, cheap and efficient ecosystem of peer-to-peer users.
To test and experiment with Blockchain technology in real-life scenarios, Wei announced that the PBoC is looking to form a research institute focused on researching Blockchain and digital currencies to ensure the potential of Blockchain technology is fully maximized within the Chinese financial scene.
Wei stated:
“For Blockchain technology, financial institutions should combine their findings and technical research to focus on real-time transaction settlement, resource utilization, sensitive information protection and strengthen risk prevention of Blockchain technology, to better serve the financial industry and technological innovation.”
Focusing on risks
Wei sees many risks involved in implementing Blockchain as core infrastructure of financial operations primarily because he believes Blockchain technology isn’t mature as of yet.
Peter Smith, CEO of the world’s most popular Bitcoin wallet platform Blockchain, brought up a similar point to Wei in December of 2016 when he stated that Blockchain technology is still in its infancy. He believes Blockchain technology has the potential to overhaul the current financial system but only if it goes through this phase of unsuccessful projects and platforms.
“The Blockchain industry is moving into the Trough of Disillusionment, marked by waning interest as experiments and implementations fail to deliver,” Smith stated. “During this time, many will fail and exit the market, while those that survive will continue to enjoy market success, secure investment dollars and march forward along a path to widespread market adoption.”
For Blockchain technology to undergo this phase and commercialize itself for the general consumer base of financial technology, it is important for companies and financial institutions to urgently address risks involved. Like Wei says, it is crucial for Blockchain technology to become standardized and solve both regulatory and security issues before being implemented into existing infrastructure.
The Chinese government already has a Blockchain consortium in a place called ChinaLedger. PBoC is highly likely to cooperate with ChinaLedger and other major players in the financial industry to sustain research and development being done in its digital currency research institute.A high-speed rail corridor in southern Ontario is "exactly what our economy needs," Premier Kathleen Wynne says.
Wynne officially announced plans for a high-speed rail line from Toronto to Windsor Friday morning, with stops in Kitchener-Waterloo and London, by 2025.
"This is an idea that has been around for a very long time," Wynne said during the announcement in London. "We decided it was time to take a serious look at an idea that's been around for decades."
Wynne said seven million people live along the corridor between Toronto and Windsor and the current transportation options just aren't good enough.
"This is where our economy thrives, is along that corridor," she said. "It's exactly what our economy needs."
The project would use a combination of existing track and new rail lines dedicated to the high-speed train, officials told CBC News. It would include stops in Guelph, Kitchener-Waterloo, London and Chatham, and connect to Toronto Pearson International Airport.
High-speed rail a 'game changer'
London Mayor Matt Brown praised the project, saying it will cut Toronto commute times in half for residents of his city. It's estimated the train would take 73 minutes to get from London to Union Station in Toronto.
High Speed Rail will connect Toronto-Windsor. It will cut the commute between <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/LdnOnt?src=hash">#LdnOnt</a> & Toronto in half. <a href="https://t.co/a3XB0Lx5UC">pic.twitter.com/a3XB0Lx5UC</a> —@MayorMattBrown
Kitchener Mayor Berry Vrbanovic, who has been joined by Toronto Mayor John Tory in touting an innovation corridor between the two cities, said he was excited for what high-speed rail will mean for Waterloo region.
"I think this kind of infrastructure announcement, quite frankly, is transformational for the region in terms of becoming a global, technology super-cluster," he told CBC News.
"I think the province recognizes that, if we're going to compete in a global economy, investing in this kind of infrastructure – long overdue in Canada – is an important part of where we need to go."
Having a stop in Guelph "would unlock extraordinary opportunities for our local economy and quality of life," Mayor Cam Guthrie said. And it would "revolutionize" the way residents travel to Toronto, London and Windsor.
Windsor commitment
Windsor Mayor Drew Dilkens said he's pleased to see the project moving forward with environmental assessments.
"I've been on high speed rail all around the world and it really is a game changer," he said. "Knowing that we'd be able to link closer and more intimately with the economic centre of Ontario, the GTA and Kitchener-Waterloo, I think is very good news for the City of Windsor."
But he also expressed concerns about being part of phase two of the project.
"[The] concern that I have on my mind is making sure that we're not excluded, that they don't just stop at London and say okay, we're it, and that's it and we're going to wait for some other government in the future to do it. I think if they're going to make the commitment to build it, it should be from Toronto to Windsor."
This map shows a proposed high-speed rail network in southern Ontario. (Ontario Ministry of Transportation)
'Hollow election promise'?
A number of NDP MPPs from London, Windsor, Essex, Niagara and Kitchener-Waterloo issued a joint statement Friday afternoon saying the promise of high-speed rail may just be "another hollow election promise."
"Premier Wynne may make promises when it comes to our transportation infrastructure, but is always light on action," the statement said.
"Although today's announcement was actually a re-announcement, it could be a step in the right direction and we have high hopes for this environmental assessment, but people in our communities are wondering today whether this is just another hollow election promise."
The MPPs said the province has promised all-day, two-way GO train service between both Niagara and Kitchener-Waterloo, but there's been "no action," the MPPs said.
"Our communities are concerned that this is another case of the premier looking for votes for herself while ignoring the needs of the rest of us," the statement said.
A group called All Aboard St. Marys also criticized the plan, calling it "impractical, unaffordable and unacceptable."
Chris West of the group said any plan that leaves smaller communities such as St. Marys, Stratford, Brantford, Woodstock and Ingersoll "out of the mix is a non-starter."
Phase one: $12 billion
Transportation Minister Steve Del Duca said there will need to be environmental assessments for both the provincial and federal approvals and design work will be done at the same time. That could take up to four years to complete. Construction could begin in four to six years.
The price for phase one of the project – Toronto to London – could be between $4 billion and $12 billion, depending on different factors, Del Duca said, citing a report by Ontario's high-speed rail special adviser David Collenette.
The trains will be 40 to 60 per cent faster than current journey times, but Del Duca said they still need to determine specifics like when trains will run and how much fares will cost.
The goal would be to have phase two, from London to Windsor, completed by 2031.
"We still have a lot of work to do," he said.
Wynne said they plan to get to work "as quickly as we can."
"The cost of the lost opportunity in not doing this is massive. It's billions of dollars of productivity, it's billions of dollars of opportunity and we won't even know how many jobs we could've had, if we had just built this," Wynne said during a second stop in Kitchener Friday afternoon.
"I am absolutely committed to doing this. I know, I know there will be critics. But you know, one of the reasons this hasn't been done up until now is that there have been critics, and there have been people who have said, 'No, no, no, put the brakes on, we're not going to do this.' And so we're not going to let that happen this time."MIAMI -- The family of George Mikan accepted Shaquille O'Neal's offer to pay for the late center's funeral expenses.
O'Neal said arrangements were finalized Friday. "Everything's going to be handled," O'Neal said.
Mikan, the NBA's first dominant big man, died Wednesday night at a rehabilitation center in Scottsdale, Ariz., following a long fight with diabetes and kidney ailments. He was 80.
O'Neal said he greatly enjoyed getting to know and speak with
Mikan on several occasions. Shortly after the Heat beat Detroit
88-76 in Game 5 of the Eastern Conference finals on Thursday night,
O'Neal said he would like to handle the funeral costs.
"I heard they were having some trouble, some problems, so if
you contact the Heat office, I would like to pay for the funeral,"
O'Neal said.
O'Neal and Mikan are linked by leading the Lakers franchise to
multiple NBA championships; Mikan carried the Minneapolis Lakers to
five titles in a six-year span. O'Neal led the Los Angeles Lakers
to three consecutive championships from 2000-2002.Today is the last day the SABC has to confirm in writing to Icasa that it will abide by the ruling to remove its controversial ban on screening violent public protest footage.
Icasa’s Complaints and Compliance Committee (CCC) last week ruled in favour of media lobby groups who had brought forward a complaint over the matter, arguing that it amounted to censorship and was unconstitutional.
SABC COO, Hlaudi Motsoeneng, vehemently went against the ruling, saying the broadcaster would not be altering its policy.
The SABC’s legal representative, Titus Mchunu, said in a written response sent to the CCC that “the SABC is in the process of considering its decision to review the order granted by Icasa, but is unable to do so, as the judgment made available does not, on the face of it, appear to be an order of the council of Icasa”.
The public broadcaster said it will take the legal route and approach the courts today to have the ruling reviewed.
Should it not abide by Icasa’s ruling, it would be deemed as non-compliance and the public broadcaster may be fined or even possibly have its broadcasting licence revoked.Domestic production from wind, solar and tidal sources last year declined 19.9% over 2012, according to the National Energy Board. The 33 petajoules produced from these three technologies was below the 37 PJ produced in 2011 and only slightly above the 32 PJ they contributed in 2010.
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By contrast, total production from all sources of energy in 2013 rose 5.4% to 18,194 PJ, with the greatest increase (9.2%) from petroleum sources, while nuclear rose 8.4%, according to NEB's �Canadian Energy Overview 2013.'This means that emerging renewable energy technologies (excluding hydro dams and biomass) provides less than 0.2% of Canada's energy, only marginally better than in 2009.Statistics Canada data show that annual power output from solar panels declined 7.6% in 2013 while wind grew by 3%... barely ahead of the 2.8% increase from all sources of electricity but behind the 6.6% increase in output from nuclear reactors. Canada's only tidal generating facility in the Bay of Fundy saw its output drop by 45%.For electricity, wind supplied 1.5% of Canada's power last year while solar PV contributed 0.04%, according to the annual Stats Canada report.The Canadian Association for Renewable Energies has been warning for some time that, while installed capacity of emerging renewables is growing, the output from solar panels and wind turbines has been declining."For both green power and green heat options, renewables are losing market share when we should be skyrocketing," says Bill Eggertson of we c.a.r.e. "The first quarter of 2014 shows solar up 32% in power output and 1.7% more electricity from wind, but nuclear output grew by 7.1% in Q1."Statistical data from these two Canadian agencies underscore recent reports from the International Energy Agency, OECD, US Department of Energy, World Bank and private commercial organizations that Canada's adoption of emerging renewable energies will remain well below the growth rates of the United States and other developed countries.The canadian association for renewable energies (we c.a.r.e.) was created in 1995 to promote feasible applications for green power, green fuels and green heat. It created the GreenHeat Partnership to exploit the potential for geothermal heat pumps, solar thermal and biomass thermal in space conditioning, and offers a daily newsfeed on developments in Canada on renewable energies."Violence perpetrated against sex workers falls in a grey space, not just legally but in people's conscience." Photo: Tilly Lawless
As a woman, I am used to sexual violence being blamed on me. When a random man thrust his hand up my dress on the dance floor of a club one night, the guy I was dating at the time said, "Well Tilly, your dress is really short."
As a sex worker, people find it even easier to blame sexual violence on me, or ignore it completely.
Time and again, sex workers are told we are 'unrapeable'. What did we expect, when we reduce our bodies to something that can be bought and sold, something that is marketable? What did we expect, when we don't adhere to the codes of conduct set out for women?
An angry man on the internet once sent me a message saying, "You don't deserve rights. You exploit men for their basic instincts, you heartless bitch."
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Sadly, the media echoes this view. When Mayang Prasetyo was murdered in Queensland last year, the Courier Mail repeatedly emphasised she was a 'prostitute', as if her profession somehow justified what had happened to her. The story also focused on the fact she was trans, in a typical attempt to dehumanise anyone who falls outside of the 'norm'.
Whenever any kind of violence is committed against sex workers, our job is inevitably brought up. To our dismay, people who deplore what happened to Jill Meagher and talk of Stephanie Scott as "a life cut off cruelly" aren't always so quick to defend us.
I am not a poster child for the innocent woman ideal. I did not only wear a short dress. I did not only make eyes at a few boys around the bar. I did not only laugh too loudly and too freely and all those other inane reasons to that are used to justify women's rapes.
We are not spotless women, so we're not so easy to support. For we go against the idea of how a woman should be. We have sexual knowledge and sexual appetite (feigned, at least), and we capitalise on what is meant to be given freely and within the bonds of relationships.
Women aren't supposed to make money off these things; emotional and sexual labour is not meant to be stringently metered out according to how many notes have been handed over. That shatters the illusion that sex only ever happens out of love for the man.
I sell sex. That makes it a lot harder for some people to like me, and a lot harder to fight battles alongside me.
But here's the catch: if you don't support the right of sex workers to be free from violence, you do not support the right of women to be free from violence at all. For if you believe we have somehow brought it upon ourselves, that we deserve punishment for our behaviour, then you believe – on a fundamental level – that women can somehow invite sexual violence.
But sexual violence is never invited and never deserved.
Author Yasmin Nair said sex work is integral to feminism and forgetting that has "devastated" the cause. I firmly believe that is true. So much time has been spent by well-meaning feminists infantil |
be a hot-spot of nutrients.
A lot of other aerial plankton will hit these webs – this will include other arthropods (Hodkinson et al. rightfully point out the importance of Chironomids, or midges, as key prey for spiders in the north) and these prey may or may not be eaten by spiders. The aerial plankton also includes other ‘debris’ that would be floating around (fungal spores, dirt, etc). The webs capture all these goodies, and act as a concentrated area for a growing soup of nutrients.
The spider webs will collect moisture. In Arctic systems, dry polar-deserts, and many other newly created habitats, the accumulation of moisture is rather essential for continued ecosystem development.
Taken together, Hodkinson et al. (2001) argue that spiders and their webs represent little pockets of concentrated nutrients in landscapes that are void of much other life. These hotspots could be catalysts for ecosystem development in systems that are starting from scratch. I really like this idea – not only does is stir up the imagination (little spiders gently falling from the sky, landing on habitat never before touched by animals, and providing the start of an ecosystem…), it really makes some biological sense. Ecosystem development requires nutrients and substrates – of course, these would both be available without spiders, but our eight-legged friends are helping move things a long a little more quickly.
The paper by Hodkinson et al. has been cited less than I would have expected. Although they don’t provide any experimental data, their ideas are interesting and relevant and should be studied in detail. Recently, a few papers have come out that are taking the ideas to the next level. Konig et al. (2011) studied arthropods of glacier foregrounds in the Alps. They found that although Collembola and other ‘decomposers’ are quite important in early successional stages, overall, generalist predators (including spiders) were dominant and using stable isotope analyses, they showed that these generalist predators often ate each other – an interaction known as intraguild predation.
I often discuss Hodkinson et al.’s (2001) paper in lectures, and invariably I get the question “If spiders are first to arrive, what do they eat?“. I typically answer that spiders eat other spiders, and it’s reassuring to see literature that supports this claim. In turn, intraguild predation itself contributes further to the accumulation of nutrients (more sad, little spider bodies littering the landscape…).
Placing this work in a more general framework, these ideas are pointing to the increased importance of predators in overall nutrient dynamics in ecosystems. I was thrilled to see a paper by Schmitz et al. (2010) that argues “predators can create heterogeneous or homogeneous nutrient distributions across natural landscapes“. Bingo. This is exactly what Hodkinson et al. were arguing – predators, such as spiders, can arrive quickly to an area, and in the context of newly formed ecosystems, may provide a hotspot for nutrients in an otherwise desolate landscape.
Although the Hodkinson et al. paper is over a decade old, it’s still relevant, and quite important. I suspect that if more newly created habitats are studied in detail, spiders will indeed prove to be catalysts for ecosystem development.
References:
Crawford, R., Sugg, P., & Edwards, J. (1995). Spider Arrival and Primary Establishment on Terrain Depopulated by Volcanic Eruption at Mount St. Helens, Washington American Midland Naturalist, 133 (1) DOI: 10.2307/2426348
Hodkinson, I., Coulson, S., Harrison, J., & Webb, N. (2001). What a wonderful web they weave: spiders, nutrient capture and early ecosystem development in the high Arctic – some counter-intuitive ideas on community assembly Oikos, 95 (2), 349-352 DOI: 10.1034/j.1600-0706.2001.950217.x
König, T., Kaufmann, R., & Scheu, S. (2011). The formation of terrestrial food webs in glacier foreland: Evidence for the pivotal role of decomposer prey and intraguild predation Pedobiologia, 54 (2), 147-152 DOI: 10.1016/j.pedobi.2010.12.004
Schmitz, O., Hawlena, D., & Trussell, G. (2010). Predator control of ecosystem nutrient dynamics Ecology Letters, 13 (10), 1199-1209 DOI: 10.1111/j.1461-0248.2010.01511.x
A special thanks to Bryan Reynolds for permission to use his photograph of the dispersing Pisaurid spider. Please visit his work here.
AdvertisementsStudy: Pharmaceutical chemicals widespread in Minn. streams
Potentially harmful chemicals and pharmaceuticals are widespread in Minnesota streams, state scientists found in a new study.
The study by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency also shows fish have genetic changes when exposed to the mix of chemicals.
In the most comprehensive study of chemicals in Minnesota, the agency's scientists collected water samples from 25 sewage treatment plants across Minnesota. They also sampled water upstream and downstream from the treatment plants for 78 chemicals.
Among the substances scientists most often found are the antibiotic sulfamethoxazole and carbamazepine, a drug used to treat attentional deficit hyperactivity disorder, agency scientist Mark Ferrey said. They also found the antibiotic trimethoprim and anti-depressant compounds.
Other commonly found chemicals include components of detergent, bisphenol A, which is found in plastics, and contraceptive hormones.
Scientists found chemicals at more than 90 percent of the locations they sampled and chemical traces at all locations. Researchers expected to find the chemicals flowing out of sewage treatment plants, but were somewhat surprised to also find the chemicals upstream from treatment plants.
Ferrey said that indicates other sources, such as septic systems, or agricultural runoff. He said the compounds are all found at very low concentrations, measured in parts per billion or parts per trillion.
"But just because these concentrations are very, very low doesn't mean they can't have effects," Ferrey said. "More and more results are coming out that show that these compounds can have pretty profound hormonal effects or estrogenic effects even at those concentrations."
Many of these chemicals act like hormones so they can cause physical changes in fish or other aquatic life.
The study also examined how fish respond to the chemicals at the genetic level. St. Thomas University scientist Dalma Martinovic found hundreds of fish genes are turned on or off by exposure to the water contaminated with chemicals.
"One of the ones that really pops up are the immune responses," Martinovic said. "We are seeing the immune system mounting higher or lower responses. And that's what I'm seeing quite consistently across all of the samples."
More research is needed to know exactly how the genetic change affects fish. The DNA analysis also found every sample of wastewater caused an estrogen like response in fish cells.
The next step for scientists would be a more detailed study of the fish immune system.
"So instead of going after a specific question you have in your head you go in and look at the effects and then work backwards," Martinovic said. "What it allows you to do is blindly probe and identify what the problem is without having this preconceived notion what the problem might be."
The research confirms earlier studies showing chemicals that mimic hormones in the body are widespread in Minnesota rivers and lakes. But Ferrey said the study only reveals very basic scientific data and leaves many unanswered questions.
"We don't know exactly what the effect is of that stuff in our water. We don't know if it's causing problems in fish and wildlife," he said. "We certainly don't know if these things pose any risk to human health. Really what we're doing now is observing the effect of our society on our environment and our surface water."
Ferrey wants his next research to focus on discovering specific sources of hormone like chemicals in water. Septic systems and agricultural runoff are two important areas to study, but he also hopes to learn if these chemicals are part of the water cycle, falling with the rain and snow.
He said more research is needed to understand the effect of chemicals and pharmaceuticals on aquatic life.Marcus Mariota versus Jameis Winston will be the big draft discussion for the next four months (including their head-to-head matchup in the Oregon-Florida State national semifinal on Jan. 1). Both QBs have the potential to be great in the NFL, but both also come with warning signs.
That's the debate that kicks off our first mock draft for 2015, which projects all 32 first-round picks. It goes without saying that a lot will change between now and April 30, draft night, including the draft order, team needs (which will be affected not only by the final few weeks of the season and playoffs but also free agency) and the stocks of many of the top prospects. Some of the players included here are underclassmen who haven't yet decided whether they'll enter the 2015 draft, and there are some teams that could be undergoing regime changes in the coming weeks.
But this mock draft can serve as an early primer on where the draft board stands right now, and the prospects teams could be considering with their picks in 2015. (Note: I'd have included Georgia pass-rusher Leonard Floyd on here, but UGA coach Mark Richt said this week that Floyd would be returning to school.)
How will things play out? Here's our first mock draft for 2015.
(A note on the draft order: It is listed here as though the season ended today, with teams not currently in the playoff field ordered 1-20 based on record and the reverse strength-of-schedule tiebreaker used in the actual draft order. Teams 21-32 are then listed the same way.)Paris: Conflicts continued to weigh heavily on the media last year but press freedom was also under increasing threat from abuses by democracies like the United States, Reporters Without Borders said on Wednesday.
In its annual World Press Freedom Index, the Paris-based media rights watchdog warned of the “growing threat worldwide” from the “tendency to interpret national security needs in an overly broad and abusive manner”.
The United States was singled out for its pursuit of intelligence leaker Edward Snowden, the conviction of WikiLeaks informer Bradley Manning and the secret seizure of phone records from the Associated Press.
The group, known by its French acronym RSF, said the United States had suffered “one of the most significant declines” in press freedom last year, dropping 13 places to 46th in the 180-country index, wedged between Romania and Haiti.
“Countries that pride themselves on being democracies and respecting the rule of law have not set an example, far from it,” RSF said.
While India came in at 140th place as one of the worst countries for press freedom, Pakistan was positioned at 158, with the restive province of Balochistan a hot spot for violence.
Seven reporters were killed in the line of duty in 2013, the report said, blaming the government’s “unwillingness to administer justice”.
Syria remained especially deadly for journalists last year, with RSF reporting nearly 130 media professionals killed in the country since its conflict began in March 2011.
Syria’s overall ranking of fourth from the bottom was unchanged, but RSF has raised concerns about a surge in kidnappings.
Armed conflicts hurt press freedom elsewhere, with Mali falling 22 spots to 122nd and the Central African Republic dropping 43 places to 109th.
The top-ranked countries were Finland, The Netherlands and Norway, unchanged from last year.
At the bottom again were Eritrea, North Korea and Turkmenistan, described by RSF as “news and information black holes and living hells for the journalists who inhabit them”.
Britain dropped three places in the ranking to 33rd, with RSF blaming the “disgraceful pressure” it put on newspaper The Guardian over its reporting of Snowden’s revelations of widespread spying by the US National Security Agency.
In Asia, Japan dropped five spots to 59th, with RSF criticising the adoption late last year of a new “intelligence protection” law that stiffens penalties for those who spill state secrets.
China, which dropped one spot to 175th, “continues to censor and jail dissident bloggers and journalists”, RSF said.
Bulgaria remained the lowest-ranked European Union country in the index, but was “closely challenged” by Greece, which is ranked 99th after years of financial pressure on the media and some violence against journalists.
The report also highlighted “noteworthy rises” in countries where “violence against journalists, direct censorship and misuse of judicial proceedings are on the decline” — including in Panama, Ecuador, Bolivia and the Dominican Republic.CLOSE Police identified the man accused of opening fire in a Lafayette, Louisiana movie theater as John Russel Houser from Alabama. Houser is accused of shooting 11 people and then killing himself during an evening showing of 'Trainwreck.'
Gunman, whose identity has not been released, died of self-inflicted wound
Lafayette police stand outside of the Grand Theater Thursday in Lafayette, Louisiana. (Photo: Stacy Revere, Getty Images)
Three people were killed and nine wounded when a lone gunman opened fire in a Lafayette movie house Thursday evening.
Lafayette police confirmed shortly before 8 p.m. law enforcement officers responded to a call about an active shooter at the Grand 16 Lafayette at 3141 Johnston St.
Lafayette Police Chief Jim Craft confirmed at least three people were killed, including the gunman, who died from a self-inflicted wound.
Two victims were pronounced dead at the scene. Nine were transported to area hospitals, eight by ambulance and one by private party. One victim died at a hospital.
The suspect was described by several witnesses as a white, middle-aged male. State Police said the shooter, whose identity was not released late Thursday, was 58 years old.
Mayhem in the theater
“We heard a loud pop we thought was a firecracker,” Katie Domingue of Carencro said. She was at the 7 p.m. showing of “Trainwreck” with her fiance, Joshua Doggett, in Theater No. 14. About 20 minutes into the movie, Domingue said, she heard a loud noise.
She said she saw “an older white man” standing up and shooting down, not in her direction.
“He wasn’t saying anything. I didn’t hear anybody screaming either,” Domingue said.
She heard about six shots, she said, before she and Doggett ran to the nearest exit, leaving behind her shoes and purse.
The scene in the theater parking lot reflected the mayhem of the evening. News media had been moved offsite and were reporting from in front of a nearby coffee shop, Johnston Street Java. The parking lot itself was filled with emergency vehicles, including a Haz-Mat unit.
Authorities also closed down the Grand 14 on Kaliste Saloom in what they said was an exercise in caution. The parking lot was cleared shortly before 10 p.m. there, with four State Police units on the scene.
Randall Man, Acadian Ambulance VP of marketing, said 10 ambulances and 26 paramedics responded to last night's shooting.
Three more ambulances were standing by for relief at a nearby Albertsons.
The first ambulances responded within 7 minutes of the initial call.
“We don’t know if this was just a random act or whether it was a domestic situation,” Craft said, saying the investigation was not far enough along.
Victims identities not confirmed
Authorities would not confirm the identities of those who were shot. But unconfirmed reports said the wounded included longtime Lafayette oilman Dwight S. “Bo” Ramsay, chairman of the board of Aries Marine Corp., and his wife, Gerri. The extent of their injuries was not revealed.
Some of the wounded were critically injured, authorities said, others had lesser wounds.
At least some of those who were shot were taken to Lafayette General Medical Center, Acadiana’s largest hospital. Lafayette General spokesman Daryl Cetnar said that by agreement with police, Lafayette General could not reveal whether the victims were taken there. He said the hospital would release a statement Friday.
But what appeared to be family members and friends of the victim milled around inside the Emergency Room. A Catholic priest was on the scene.
Jindal: 'This is an awful night'
Gov. Bobby Jindal called for prayers Thursday evening during a press conference.
“The best thing anybody can do right now is to think about them, pray for them,” he said. “We will get through this. We are a resilient community. This is an awful night for Lafayette. This is an awful night for Louisiana. This is an awful night for the United States.”
CLOSE Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal described "amazing acts of heroism and selflessness" performed by Lafayette theater shooting victims and cops. He pinpointed teachers who pulled a fire alarm and cops who prevented the gunman from causing more harm.
In an issued statement, U.S. Rep. Charles Boustany, R-Lafayette, said, “I’m saddened at the terrible loss of life represented in tonight’s tragic shooting at a movie theater in my hometown of Lafayette. Bridget and I are praying for the families and friends of the victims at this difficult time. I will work with the Lafayette Police Department, local, state and federal officials to get to the bottom of what happened tonight.”
'Blood everywhere'
Jalen Fernell, 20, of Lafayette, was in the Grand Theatre watching “Southpaw” with friends when he heard gunshots.
“They were very faint over the movie. I thought it was part of the movie,” Fernell said. “About five seconds later, sirens went off and I realized it wasn’t the movie.”
A voice over the intercom told moviegoers to evacuate the theater, Fernell said. Patrons, unaware of what happened, took off running, he said.
Outside the theater, police were everywhere late Thursday.
“I saw a woman lying on the ground outside with blood everywhere. She was shot in the leg,” Fernell said. “We didn’t know what to do. You’re scared to walk through the parking lot, You don’t know if the guy’s in a car, hiding in the parking lot.”
Additional police arrived at the scene and entered the building, armed with assault rifles, he said.
“I heard gunshots like a war going on,” Fernell said.
When the gunfire stopped, he heard from a police car radio that six people were down in Theater No. 14, he said.
More police arrived and charged inside; additional shots were fired. Fernell said he heard someone say the suspect was down; he had committed suicide.
In the theater where the shooting took place, Emily Mann, 21, was watching “Trainwreck,” seated in the second row from the top of the theater with a friend. He father, Randall Mann, said his daughter heard popping noises and noticed flashes coming from a gun that was held by a man in the same row on the other side of the theater.
Randall Mann is vice president of marketing and public relations at Acadian Ambulance. He said his daughter was not up to speaking about the incident Thursday night.
map (Photo: map)
Mann said Acadian Ambulance transported eight patients to area hospitals. The company responded with 10 ambulances and off-duty personnel who heard about the shooting and showed up at the scene to help, he said.
The Grand Theatres in Lafayette and Broussard are owned by New Orleans-based Southern Theatres LLC.
The company operates multiplex stadium-seating movie theaters in Louisiana, Alabama, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia.
The Daily Advertiser reporters Seth Dickerson, Jessica Goff, Claire Taylor, Herman Fuselier and Ken Stickney contributed to this report.
Read or Share this story: https://www.theadvertiser.com/story/news/local/2015/07/23/shooting-reported-grand-theatre-johnston/30598925/My interest was piqued yesterday by a Twitter exchange between bioethicist Leslie Cannold and sceptic, Ken Dally (aka Cowcakes).
Leslie Cannold: Vic Doctors who will let u or a woman u love die rather than follow law & offer life-saving abortion http://t.co/9NeIqfrl Cowcakes: @LeslieCannold: So many declarations of not being religious it makes one think they protest too much. http://t.co/YFkP0bRV
The website they refer to is Liberty of Conscience in Medicine – A Declaration; effectively a petition asserting the right of doctors to refuse to offer certain treatments (e.g. abortion, euthanasia) even if they are legal.
Now, I’m happy to concede there are compelling arguments both for and against this proposition (do you really want a rabidly anti-abortion doctor performing your abortion?), but this is not the issue that particularly concerns me about the Liberty of Conscience in Medicine declaration.
Rather, it is the matter alluded to in Ken Dally’s tweet:
“So many declarations of not being religious it makes one think they protest too much.”
I’ve been doing quite a bit of research on the anti-euthanasia lobby lately and I’ve been surprised to find that many organisations that declare themselves to be ‘secular’ or ‘non religious’ are clearly ‘playing possum’. It seems to me a rather ‘un-Christian’ thing to do, really.
Take the Discovery Institute, for example. Although it often describes itself as a secular organization, its activities, sponsors and target audience are explicitly Christian. Americans United for Separation of Church and State believes, “the group’s real purpose is to undercut church-state separation and turn public schools into religious indoctrination centers.”
The judge in the 2005 “Dover Trial”, agreed, noting that a close examination of the Discovery Institute’s infamous “Wedge Document” revealed the Institute’s religious (as opposed to scientific) goals.
So, I wondered, could the Liberty of Conscience declaration be another of these religious ‘sleeper’ organisations? I decided to find out.
The FAQ section of the Liberty in Conscience website specifically states that the declaration is not connected with religion or religious beliefs:
“There is no religious or faith component to the declaration of conscience in medicine.”
The ‘sponsoring organisation’, Medicine with Morality is “also not religious”.
So who is behind this secular push for doctors to be able to refuse those treatments which are so often the concern of the religiously motivated? The FAQ’s provide the answer:
“Lachlan Dunjey, a GP in Perth Western Australia since 1968, known to be passionate about such things – passionate about medicine, passionate about the future of medicine and wanting to protect the “traditional” doctor/patient relationship from the things that are threatening it.”
Strangely, it doesn’t mention that Lachlan Dunjey was Western Australia’s Christian Democratic Party candidate for the senate in 2004, along with co-signatory Dr Norman Gage. At a safe distance from his ‘secular’ websites, Dunjey describes himself as ‘a church musician of 40+ years, as a doctor, and as a church elder’ and signs off as: Lachlan Dunjey, Morley Baptist Church, West Australia. In fact, Dr Dunjey is not just an ordinary Baptist church-goer, he is a former president of the Baptist Churches of Western Australia. But, of course, in his capacity as an anti-abortion, anti-euthanasia campaigner, he is entirely non-religious!
My suspicions aroused, I wondered whether, as implied in the FAQs, the doctors who signed off on Dunjey’s ‘secular’ declaration were similarly ‘non-religious’. With a few hours to spare I decided to do some judicious googling of the signatories.
It didn’t take long to find that signatory, Dr Michael Shanahan has served as both president and secretary of the Catholic Doctors Association of Western Australia. Similarly, Dr Terrence Kent is a former president of the Catholic Medical Guild of St Luke and Dr Elvis Seman appears to be a member.
So what’s this Guild of St Luke all about? Dr Lucia Migliore explains:
“As Catholic doctors, we should be foremost inviting Christ into our work, which completely changes the nature of what you are doing.”
No doubt.
Another signatory, Dr Jovina Graham, was involved in planning iWitness, a religious retreat designed to ‘recapture the spirit’ of Catholic World Youth Day. The focus of iWitness was “on enriching the participants’ spiritual lives through a deepened relationship with Our Lord.”
As I kept researching the Catholic connections just kept on coming. Signatory, Dr Mary Walsh, is married to Catholic “knight” and bio-ethicist, Nicholas Tonti Fillipini. Dr Phillip Elias is assistant dean at the Opus Dei affiliated Warrane College at the University of New South Wales, while Dr Albert Matti is involved with the Melkite Catholic Eparchy in South Australia.
Liberty of Conscience supporter, Dr Alan Donoghue lays out his beliefs in The Dominion Post, intoning that the Catholic Church condones neither sex before marriage, nor divorce. And, of course, you must raise your children as Catholics!
Dr Graeme Cumming, who is oft seen commenting on Bill Muehlenberg’s blog, was a Family First candidate for the Queensland seat of Fisher in the 2007 federal election.
“Christians”, says Dr Cumming, “do have and must take up the responsibility (not the “right”) to proclaim God’s law”. Yes, Dr Cumming, but it would be nice if you’d specify when you’re speaking from a religious, rather than a scientific perspective.
Dr Lucas (Luke) McLindon also seems to be a Muehlenberg fan, pointing out in one comment that, “As a committed Catholic, at the end of the day, my loyalties must lie with Scripture first and foremost …” I’m sorry, Dr McLindon, but as a patient I’d rather hope your loyalty was first and foremost to me.
But, if the Liberty of Conscience declaration isn’t quite as ‘secular’ as the FAQs suggest, it is certainly ecumenical. Dr Thalia Shuttleworth is a facilitator at the Sydney Life Church and, apparently, participates in ‘miracle’ healing sessions.(I wonder if that’s covered by Medicare?)
Dr Robert Pollnitz is the chairman of the Lutheran Church of Australia Commission on Social & Bioethcial Questions – not too sure how he would feel about ‘miracles and wonders’.
Dr Rosemary Wong, says her mission as an executive member of the Church of Christ’s Counsel@CrossCulture “is to bring Christ’s healing to the wounded in our families and communities, so that they may become the persons God has created them to be”. Pity if you really just wanted a few stitches.
Dr Graham Toohill, an Anglican from Gippsland, is a ‘vocational deacon’, apparently ‘chosen by God’ for a lifetime of service. Dr Toohill “offers time each week to the parish in pastoral care and outreach.”
Dr Robert Claxton is a Sydney Anglican who worked as a medical missionary in Uganda. He is a board member of African Enterprise a Christian Mission ministry committed to evangelising the cities of Africa (apparently whether they like it or not).
Another signatory with missionary credentials is Dr Richard Shawyer a ‘church planter’ who served as a Bible teaching missionary in Senegal with Worldwide Evangelisation for Christ. Similarly committed to mission work is Dr Rebecca Zachariah who worked with Lutheran Aid to Medicine in Bangladesh.
As my eyes grew dim and the night grew cold, I read that signatory, Dr Jeremy Beckett, is “avidly involved in student ministry with Christian medical and dental students in Perth” and, like Dr Margaret Payne, he works with the Christian Medical and Dental Fellowship of Australia. Jeremy’s speciality is the “interface between Christian faith and clinical practice”. His aim; to minister the love of Christ to broken people. Ah yes, the broken – so delightfully vulnerable.
Dr Beckett probably knows Dr Sally Tsang. Also a member of the CMDFA, Dr Tsang runs Hospital Link which helps to “connect you to fellow believers for refreshing fellowship and prayer right where the mission field (and stress) is!” I wonder how many patients at Dr Tsang’s hospital realise they’ve been admitted to a ‘mission field’?
Another CMDFA signatory is Dr Natasha Yates. In her student days, Dr Yates acted as the medical student bible study leader at ANU.
And where was declaration signatory, Dr Tyler Schofield on Sunday, 9 October 2011? I found him asking the congregation of the Alice Springs Baptist Church to turn to their Bibles for a reading from Revelations. Perhaps he should confer with Dr Nell Muirden who’s been involved writing Bible Studies for the Assembly of Confessing Congregations – a group of Uniting Church dissenters. Or maybe a chat with Dr Andrew Bradbeer who I found busily memorising the first chapter of the Book of Genesis.
Dr Bradbeer might find he has a lot in common with Dr Mathew Piercy who has written for Creation Ministries on the subject “Life is a gift from God”. Isn’t this turning out to be a lovely little coterie of like-minded doctors?
And, as the night turned to morning, and my googling fingers continued their work, more and more came to light. Dr Gabriel James aims to “serve God” by facilitating the 40 Days for Life vigil at Westmead Hospital – all welcome providing they “conduct themselves in a Christ-like manner”.
If that all sounds too ‘kumbaya’ for you, try signatory Dr Arthur Hartwig for a little ‘old school’ religion. In the fundamentalist Christian Saltshakers magazine, Dr Hartwig complains that “Sin has been sanitised, euphemised, relativised, trivialised, corporatised, minimised, even decriminalised.” Ah, bring back those good old days when we stoned homosexuals, eh, Dr Hartwig?
Dr. Theresa Ong has a Grad Dip in Christian Counselling. Dr Nathan Grills has written about the ‘faith effect’ in treating HIV/AIDs and …. well, I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point.
In all I found nearly 70 of the doctors who signed the Liberty of Conscience declaration had clear links to Christian organisations. Of course, not everyone has their religious credentials plastered on the internet for all to see – I was never going to ‘unmask’ everyone. But, even though it might be argued I didn’t find Christian credentials for nearly half the signatories, I challenge those who have no religious affiliation or belief to step forward and declare themselves. I don’t think I’ll be deafened by the response!
Now, I’m not a Christian. I’m avowedly and publicly an atheist. But, I have a very strong ethical code and an incredible aversion to lying and deception. If an organisation tells me they’re ‘not religious’ I expect when I look at its members I will find a pretty good sprinkling of them who are ‘not religious’. I would also expect that religious dogma is not the driving force and influence underpinning the mission (pun intended) of the group in question.
I may not agree with them, but I have no objection to Christians stating their arguments in the public square. I do object, however, when their religious bias is not declared. No politician is going to spend the hours I spent last night googling the credentials of these doctors on a site which explicitly states it has ‘no religious or faith component’. And politicians should know whether the views being put to them are coloured by a hidden religious agenda.
The water of the Liberty of Conscience in Medicine declaration is so muddied with religious belief you could walk on it. And, it seems, there is such an intermingling of these avowedly Christian and avowedly secular ‘pro-life’ and lobbying organisations they even get muddled themselves! Take this telling exchange from the Review of the Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities Act 2006 [document file]:
Dr Chris FRENCH — Thank you very much for giving us the opportunity to address you regarding our concerns. We have Doctors in Conscience here but the actual proposal was from the Catholic Doctors Association of Victoria, so I will speak on behalf of Catholic Doctors Association of Victoria in this submission. That was Eamonn’s original proposal.
… The Catholic Doctors Association of Victoria gives its total and complete support for the measures to strengthen and clarify human rights. This is a major purpose of this association, linked as it is with a long tradition of preferential care for the disadvantaged of Catholic‑inspired organisations. The association and I personally give full and total support to the sentiments expressed in the preamble of the charter.
The CHAIR — Dr French, I do not mean to interrupt you but the committee was of the understanding that you were representing Doctors in Conscience.
Dr FRENCH — Yes, I must say it did occur to me as I was walking in the front door that the address to Eamonn was Doctors in Conscience. I had understood that this was the Catholic Doctors Association of Victoria. Do you have that in front of you?
The CHAIR — The submission we have is from Dr Eamonn Mathieson.
Ms CAMPBELL — Who is speaking to Eamonn Mathieson’s submission?
Dr FRENCH — I was going to speak to Eamonn’s submission. May I to see your copy?
Ms CAMPBELL — Because Doctors in Conscience is definitely not a Catholic organisation.
Dr FRENCH — Yes, indeed. That’s fine — —
Ms CAMPBELL — It has Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and non‑religious people involved in it, and that was who we invited.
Dr FRENCH— Okay. In that case — —
Ms CAMPBELL — So we need someone who can speak on Doctors in Conscience.
Dr FRENCH — I can briefly speak on behalf of them. I am a member of that group and I have been working to this particular document so I am prepared. I can speak on behalf of it.
Ms CAMPBELL — But you are also a member of Catholic doctors of Victoria?
Dr FRENCH — Yes, I am, as it happens. So I can speak on behalf of Doctors in Conscience. I am a member of both organisations and I have actually prepared my proposal based on this document that has been given to you.
The CHAIR — On the submission of Doctors in Conscience?
Dr FRENCH — Yes.
The CHAIR — Okay. And the opening remarks you were making are consistent with the submission of Doctors in Conscience?
Dr FRENCH — Yes.
Oh dear! It’s so hard when you simply can’t remember whether to wear your Catholic camauro or your secular slouch hat when fronting up to these inquiries!
If Christians want to have their voices respected in the public square it’s time to stop these ridiculous games of religious hide ‘n seek. If your views are based on your religious convictions, at least have the honesty and courage to say so. If you can support your religious convictions with reasonable secular argument based on evidence and good science, by all means do so. But, for Christ’s sake (literally) have the decency to make it clear that even if every bit of evidence supported the opposite view, you would still oppose the proposition purely on religious grounds. After all, you wouldn’t want us to think that Christians cynically conceal their dogmatic beliefs in secular clothing and try to pass them off as ‘science’. That wouldn’t be acting in good conscience at all, would it?
Chrys StevensonThe Watch is a tabletop roleplaying game set in a "light fantasy" setting known as The Clanlands. It takes place during a dark and horrific war between the now-united ten clans who live there and an invading force, known only as The Shadow.
The Shadow is a powerful and insidious enemy that is able to enter the minds of its opponents and slowly turn them to its side; twisting them into unnatural foes. For reasons unknown, The Shadow is able to more easily influence the minds of men, and has turned a great deal of the clan's soldiers against itself.
With most of its fighting force crippled or worse, the clans have joined together and begun enlisting new warriors to defend their homes. Women and non-binary femme people who seem better able to resist The Shadow's hold have been recruited, trained, promoted, and formed into a new order: The Watch.
In The Watch, you'll play a group of elite soldiers who are called upon time and time again to defend villages, attack The Shadow's forces at key locations, scout the enemy's lines, and much more. Each mission comes with its fair share of costs and compromises and you'll need to navigate them in order to be ready to heed the next call to action.
It's in these in-between moments where the rules for The Watch focus themselves: What do you do to unwind from the pressure that threatens to pull you down? Who do you spend what little free time you have with, and why? How will you hold off The Shadow's influence so that you can see the end of this war? That's what you'll have to find out for yourself...
The Watch is Powered by the Apocalypse (or PBTA), which means it's based on the system originally created for Apocalypse World by D. Vincent Baker. These quick to learn and intuitive rules are designed to get everyone at the table straight into the game as soon as possible. Character creation is quick, cooperative, and fun, and you can run the game from start to finish with little-to-no prep. We've seen brand new and veteran tabletop gamers try out this system and in every case they've taken to it right away. The Watch can be taught to newcomers in just a few minutes but the rules are robust enough to scratch that mechanical itch that so many of us enjoy.
Other successful RPGs that are also Powered by the Apocalypse include - but are not limited to - Night Witches, Urban Shadows, Masks, Dungeon World, Monsterhearts, and many more. In fact, Night Witches was one of our primary inspirations for this game. If you haven't got a copy of that incredible game, do yourself a favour and pick it up.
Backers can download the preview files of the game in our first update. Previous experience with PBTA games is highly recommended to use this preview, but just a read through will give you a good idea of how it all fits together.
The Watch uses new innovative mechanics built atop the Powered by the Apocalypse foundation to tell a story of military drama and action. New systems of play called Camaraderie, Jaded, Weariness, and Mission Moves are all designed with the purpose of delivering the experience of a military campaign against a dark and relentless foe.
Camaraderie is a currency spent when you need help from others; it's a sort of potential between two people that represents shared experiences and how those experiences will manifest in tangible actions down the line.
J |
gain promotion back into the top group?
MD: I played together with two ‘North American’ guys and I felt that our styles were very similar and meshed well together. We did really well together. We had a good understanding of what each was going to do despite not having practiced much together. We talked a lot about where to be and what passing lanes we’re going to look for. But in general it wasn’t easy to come into a ‘new’ team midseason, even if I know a lot of these players, and go from one locker room to another with totally different goals. That was an adjustment, one that our opponents were fortunately doing as well.
HF: You are now playing for Rouyn-Noranda. What type of feedback are you getting from the Maple Leafs organization?
MD: They get in touch with me all the time. They send emails and instructions about what I should be doing and how I should be preparing myself. They talk a lot about what it’ll take to go pro and ask how things are in the Quebec league and what issues I’m dealing with on and off the ice. I talked with them before the Division I World Junior Championship and they pretty much said that Latvia had to gain promotion in order to be in Toronto for the WJC next season. That was some incredible motivation for me.
HF: Do you feel that your game has improved and if so, what have you improved on?
MD: After Toronto brought me over and had me go through all those camps, and then by going to the QMJHL, I feel my game has improved a lot. I mean, like in leaps and bounds. I feel faster and more skilled. I’ve learned so much about how to take care of your body and sleep right and eat right. They give you so many tips and all you have to do is follow what they say and the results speak for themselves. Then your play improves.
Follow Chapin Landvogt on Twitter via @CsomichapinWe gave you wrong information. Here’s what happened.
This is a difficult post to write. But we have learned that a story we worked on this season contains factual errors. We’ve taken some time to find out what went wrong, to try to find out how it happened, and to think hard about what we can learn from it.
Here’s what we know.
Last summer, we embarked on an ambitious project: to test the accuracy of label claims of popular vitamins and supplements. We knew that there is very little independent testing done of supplements in Canada that is available to the public, so we wanted to find out if you’re really getting what you expect from the products you buy and trust.
So we did what we always do: We did research. We spoke with top experts in the field. And we decided to test a number of products to find out the answers for ourselves.
One of the experts we found, Neil Thanedar, is the co-founder of a U.S. company called LabDoor, which does just this kind of testing, analyzing and reviewing lab test results on supplements for the public. LabDoor tests hundreds of products a year; the company’s investors and partners include the Mayo Clinic and Rock Health.
Thanedar agreed to analyze our results. For our testing, he recommended a lab in Michigan, and Marketplace verified that the lab had the best credentials possible for this kind of testing: It has internationally recognized ISO accreditation, is registered with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and is used by the vitamin and supplement industry for this kind of testing. We sent samples of popular products to the lab and waited for the results.
Thanedar wasn’t the only expert we talked to about the results. We spoke with several other experts, including Health Canada to make sure we understood what LabDoor had told us and double check that our conclusions were solid.
We also reached out to the companies and gave them the opportunity to respond to what we found. As often happens in our investigations, they disputed our findings and vigorously defended their products. Armed with both sides of the story, we felt confident about what we were reporting.
What we know now is that the lab got some of the results wrong. They didn’t just make a mistake on one test; we had several samples re-tested by other labs, and we now know that a number of results were incorrect. We still don’t know exactly how this happened, but the bottom line is one of the hardest things any journalist can ever have to face: Our report was wrong.
Here’s what we do know. We tested Emergen-C, a popular vitamin C product. The initial lab testing found that the product only contained one third of the amount of vitamin C the package promised. After re-testing samples from the same box at another independent lab, we now know there was no problem with the vitamin C levels in Emergen-C.
We also tested several protein powders for evidence of protein “spiking.” We know that spiking has been a problem in the supplements industry: It means that a manufacturer uses filler in its product because it’s cheaper or easier than the real thing.
Two of the products we tested, Cytosport’s Muscle Milk and GNC’s Lean Shake 25, appeared, in the initial lab testing, to be spiked. The GNC product appeared to have less than half the protein it promised. After retesting, we’ve discovered this is not the case: The products were not spiked.
We’re responsible for our journalism, and it’s a responsibility we take very seriously. The lab results and analysis were wrong, but we reported it. We also want to apologize to the companies in our report.
We also want to apologize to you, our viewers.
Every week, we ask you to trust that we’ve brought you investigations that matter to you and are true, fair and in the public interest. And for more than 40 years, we’ve worked hard to live up to that reputation.
We’ve learned from this experience: We’re taking a hard look at how we use labs. And we’re going to continue to push ourselves to bring you the kind of groundbreaking stories that you’ve come to expect from us. We have a lot of great stories in the works, and we hope that you’ll stay with us.I can’t escape Jurassic Park. No, I’m not actually trapped on a tropical isle overrun by hungry dinosaurs, but, as a paleo-focused science writer, sometimes I feel like I might as well be. Not only is the 1993 film the unquestionable standard for all subsequent dinosaur films and television shows, from Walking With Dinosaurs to Terra Nova, but the movie also left a massive imprint on the public’s understanding of what dinosaurs were. Even now, nearly two decades after the movie’s debut, almost any dinosaur discovery involving tyrannosaurs or sickle-clawed dromaeosaurs—often called “raptors” thanks to the same film—can be readily tied back to Jurassic Park. I have even used that trick. What I am wondering, though, is why an 18-year-old dinosaur epic continues to have such a major influence on our perception of dinosaurs.
What focused my attention on Jurassic Park this morning were the various media tidbits surrounding the blu-ray release of the dinosaur-filled trilogy. Actress Ariana Richards, who played “Lex” in the first film, said that the film had an enduring influence because “there’s a quality of this world that Steven created—and he’s not the only one who as a young person longed to experience the world in a different way, almost to go back in time into prehistory and experience exotic creatures like dinosaurs in your midst.” The fact that the movie is still visually impressive certainly helps. In another interview, special effects artist Dennis Muren said, “I always thought when we did that within five or 10 years it was going to look old-fashioned and obsolete, but it doesn’t.”
Both Richards and Muren touched on significant aspects of why Jurassic Park has been so influential, but I think there might be an even simpler reason. The film was the first time that filmgoers were able to see what living dinosaurs might actually look like. Audiences were experiencing almost the same kind of awe as the characters in the movie—nothing quite like those dinosaurs had ever been seen before.
Dinosaurs had been stomping and roaring across the screen for decades, but they were often portrayed by stop-motion creatures that were clearly artificial. The advent of computer-generated dinosaurs came at just the right time to deliver something that was visually unprecedented. On top of that, images of dinosaurs as slow, stupid, swamp-bound creatures still persisted into the early 1990s. Jurassic Park eliminated these paleo-stereotypes and rapidly ushered in a newer vision of dinosaurs that scientists knew well but that had not yet been fully embraced by the public. Jurassic Park instantly created a new baseline for what dinosaurs were and how they acted.
Maybe that’s part of the reason why the two Jurassic Park sequels are not as beloved as their predecessor, or why it’s easy to pick on the poor writing behind Terra Nova. Dinosaurs had only one shot to make a stunning, computer-generated debut. They certainly did that in Spielberg’s film, but the spread of new technologies allowed digital dinosaurs to become commonplace. Along with the help of documentary trendsetter Walking With Dinosaurs, lifelike dinosaurs rapidly lost their novelty and, sadly for them, are easy prey for critics when they don’t measure up to the standards set by the 1993 film. When the awe is gone, deficiencies in a film, television series or documentary become more apparent. Jurassic Park was so successful because the film combined spectacular visual imagery with an unfamiliar, exciting perspective of dinosaurs. We probably won’t see a combination of such conditions again.
There may never be another dinosaur movie as important as Jurassic Park. Special effects will continue to be fine-tuned, but I can’t imagine them becoming drastically better that what we have already seen. At this point, good dinosaur movies are going to have to rely on solid storytelling. We have brought the dinosaurs back—we have the technology—but now that the novelty is gone filmmakers have to write compelling stories that draw viewers into the worlds they want to create. Without that, we just end up wanting the dinosaurs to devour all the characters we’re supposed to relate to (a feeling I have lately been having in regard to Terra Nova).
The test of this little hypothesis of mine may come in the form of Jurassic Park IV. Rumors about the film have been circulating for a while, but when I met him by chance last month at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, paleontologist and Jurassic Park scientific adviser Jack Horner mentioned that Spielberg has a good story in mind for the next film. Horner even dropped a significant clue as to what the movie is going to be about. “They’ve already brought dinosaurs back…,” he said, “so how could they make the dinosaurs scarier?” The answer is further genetic tampering. Horner also hinted that his 2009 book How to Build a Dinosaur was originally meant to come out at the same time as the fourth Jurassic Park as a kind of scientific companion volume. For those who haven’t read it, the book details Horner’s scientific efforts to take a living dinosaur—a chicken—and turn the bird into something that more closely resembles a non-avian, theropod dinosaur. This isn’t mad science. By reverse engineering “dinosaurian” traits in a bird, scientists might be able to detect how genes and development interacted with anatomy in the evolutionary transformation from non-avian dinosaur to avian dinosaur. The resulting “Chickenosaurus” would be a flashy bonus to our increased understanding of how evolution works.
Even if the next Jurassic Park doesn’t turn out to be immediately as influential as the first in the series, perhaps the sequel can usher in some updated ideas about dinosaurs. For one thing, we definitely need more feathers on the Velociraptor (or whatever sort of creature the raptors are going to be modified into). That is the benefit of having paleontologists work directly with filmmakers on these projects. Yes, there will always be some silly things—such as the fictional frill and venom-spitting abilities of Dilophosaurus—but seeing well-crafted and exceptionally lifelike dinosaurs is a win for paleontology. Not only do we catch a glimpse of what an extinct species might have looked like, but the films also send the audience home with an updated view of what dinosaurs were and might just inspire them to check out the actual bones in a nearby museum. Whatever happens to dinosaur cinema in the future, though, Jurassic Park will always be a classic film, and I know I’ll never forget the first time I saw science and Hollywood work together to bring dinosaurs back to life.More than 3,000 litres of oil and gasoline were washed overboard from one of Canada’s warships during a violent storm off the East Coast, according to documents obtained by the Citizen.
The storm swept the drums of oil, cans of gas and some barrels of hazardous waste off the deck of HMCS Athabaskan on Feb. 16, according to the Royal Canadian Navy documents.
At the time of the incident, the destroyer was in Sea State 9, with winds at 65 knots, or 120 km/h, the report noted. Sea State 9 is defined as having waves higher than 14 metres, according to navy officers.
No crew members were injured during the massive storm.
The material, approximately 3,000 litres of oil held in 10 drums, a rack of jerry cans holding approximately 180 litres of gasoline, and four drums of hazardous waste material consisting mainly of oily rags disappeared during the storm.
The upper deck fittings and straps failed during the storm, the report added.
“As the high sea state was dangerous to personnel, HMCS Athabaskan took the precaution of placing the upper decks out of bounds for a period of 36 hours, during which time the incident was reported to have occurred,” navy Lt. Kelly Boyden told the Citizen in an email. “The loss was not witnessed.”
Boyden would not provide the specific location of where the ship was at the time for security reasons. “However, it can be stated, in general terms, that HMCS Athabaskan was several hundred miles south of Nova Scotia at the time of the incident,” he noted in the email.
Boyden said it is standard procedure to have petroleum products, gasoline and hazardous waste such as oily rags on the upper decks of the ship because they could be a fire hazard if stored elsewhere on the vessel.
“The material in question was lashed down and secured in accordance with SOPs (standard operating procedures); however, despite these procedures and precautions, the sea can be a dangerous and unpredictable environment,” he said.
By the time HMCS Athabaskan returned to sailing in calmer waters and the loss was discovered, a search was not practical, Boyden added.
The lost materiel had varying degrees of buoyancy, and would have either sunk immediately or stayed afloat for a period of time, he stated.
Boyden noted that such an incident is not considered normal. An investigation was done by personnel on HMCS Athabaskan, who concluded the incident was due to violent weather.
dpugliese@ottawacitizen.com
Twitter.com/davidpuglieseThis is, we believe, the first English translation of Faure’s article on the “anarchist synthesis”, the response by a certain sector of anarchism to the theories set out in the “Draft Organization Platform for a General Union of Anarchists” published by the “Delo Truda” group in France in 1926. We are unsure as to the exact publiction details of this text (some sources say 1927, others 1928), but this has been translated using the text given in “Volonté Anarchiste”, No. 12, 1980, Edition du Groupe Fresnes-Antony de la Fédération Anarchiste.
* * *
The three anarchist currents
In France, as in most other countries, three main anarchist currents can be distinguished, which can be named thus:
Anarcho-Syndicalism;
Libertarian Communism;
Anarchist Individualism.
It was natural and inevitable that, having reached a certain stage of development, an idea as vast as anarchism should end up with this triple manifestation of its existence.
A philosophical and social movement, that is to say one of ideas and action, that seeks to do away with every authoritarian institution, would necessarily give rise to those distinctions that obligatorily determine the variety of situations, environments and temperaments, the diversity of sources on which the innumerable individual formations and the prodigious body of events draw nourishment.
Anarcho-syndicalism, libertarian communism and anarchist individualism, these three currents exist and nothing and no-one can prevent them from doing so. Each of them represents a force, a force that it is neither possible nor desirable to destroy. To be convinced, it is enough to place oneself — as an anarchist pure and simple — at the very heart of the gigantic effort that must be made in order to demolish the principle of authority. One would then become aware of the indispensable contribution that each of these currents can make to the fight we carry on.
These three currents are distinct, but do not oppose each other.
I have, therefore, three questions to put:
the first is from the anarcho-syndicalists to the libertarian communists and the anarchist individualists;
the second is from the libertarian communists to the anarcho-syndicalists and the anarchist individualists;
the third is from the anarchist individualists to the anarcho-syndicalists and the libertarian communists.
Here is the first:
“Considering anarchism as social movement and popular action, when the time comes that anarchism delivers the inevitable and decisive assault on the capitalist, authoritarian world that we call the Social Revolution, can it do this without the help of the great masses who are grouped together in the labour organizations?”
I believe that it would be folly to hope for victory without the participation in the liberatory uprising — active, efficient, brutal and persistent participation — of these working masses, who together have a greater interest than anyone else in social transformation.
I do not say nor do I think, in view of the necessary cooperation in the period of revolutionary ferment and action, that both the syndicalist forces and the anarchist forces should already unite, associate, mix together and form a homogenous, compact entity. But I do think and say, together with my old friend Malatesta:
“Anarchists should recognize the usefulness and importance of the syndical movement, they should encourage its development and make it one of the levers of their action, seeking to ensure cooperation between syndicalism and the other forces of progress for a social revolution that results in the supression of classes, total freedom, equality, peace and solidarity among all human beings. But it would be a dire illusion to believe, as many do, that the workers’ movement by itself, by virtue of its very nature, will bring about such a revolution. Quite the opposite: in every movement based on material, immediate interests (and a vast workers’ movement cannot be established on any other basis), the agitation, drive and concerted efforts of men of ideas who fight and sacrifice themselves for the ideal are essential. Without this leverage, all movements tend inevitably to adapt themselves to the circumstances, breed a conservative spirit, a fear of change among those who would seek to win better conditions; new privileged classes are often created which attampt to win support and consolidate the status quo that we are seeking to destroy. Hence the pressing need for specifically anarchist organizations which, both inside and outside the syndicates, struggle for the complete realization of anarchism and seek to sterilize any germ of corruption and reaction.”
As you see, it is not so much a case of organically linking the anarchist movement to the syndicalist movement, as linking syndicalism to anarchism; it is only a question of working for the complete realization of the anarchist ideal both inside the syndicates and outside.
So I ask the libertarian communists and the individualist anarchists what reason of principle or of fact, what essential, fundamental reasons can they have for opposing anarcho-syndicalism thus conceived and practised?
Here is the second question:
“As the indomitable enemy of the exploitation by one man of another that is generated by the capitalist regime, and of the domination of one man over another that is spawned by the State, can anarchism conceive the effective and total suppression of the former without the suppression of the capitalist regime and the pooling (libertarian communism) of the means of production, transport and exchange? And can it conceive the effective and total abolition of the latter without the definitive abolition of the State and all the institutions that result from it?”
And I ask the anarcho-syndicalists and the anarchist individualists what reasons of principle or of fact, what essential, fundamental reasons can they have to oppose libertarian communism so conceived and practised?
Here is the third and final question:
“As anarchism is, on the one hand, the highest and clearest expression of the individual’s reaction against political, economic and mental oppression which is brought to bear on him through the authoritarian institutions and, on the other hand, the firmest and mostprecise affirmation of the right of every individual to complete fulfilment for the satisfaction of his needs in every domain, can anarchism conceive the effective and total realization of this rection and this affirmation by any means other than an individual culture pursued to the greatest possible extent towards a social transformation that breaks every cog of constraint and repression?”
And I ask the anarcho-syndicalists and the libertarian communists for what fundmental reasons of principle or fact can they object to anarchist individualism so conceived and practical?
I call on these three currents to join with each other.
The Anarchist Synthesis
From everything that has thus far been said and in particular from the three questions above, it would appear:
that these three currents — anarcho-syndicalism, libertarian communism and anarchist individualism, distinct currents but not contradictory — have nothing that makes them irreconcilable, nothing that puts them in opposition to each other, nothing that proclaims their incompatibility, nothing that can prevent them from living in harmony, or even coming together for joint propaganda and action; that the existence of these three currents not only does not harm in any way or to any degree the total force of anarchism — a philosophical and social movement envisaged, and rightly so, in all its breadth, but can and logically must contribute to the overall strength of anarchism; that each of these currents has its own place, its role, its mission within that broad, deep social movement that goes by the name of “anarchism”, whose goal is the establishment of a social environment that can assure the maximum well-being and freedom to each and every one; that in these conditions, anarchism may be compared to what in chemistry is called a compound, that is to say a substance made up of a combination of various elements.
This particular compound is created by the combination of three elements: anarcho-syndicalism, libertarian communism and anarchist individualism.
Its chemical formula could be S 2 C 2 I 2.
The proportions of the three elements can vary according to events, circumstances and the multiple sources that the currents that make up anarchism spring from. On analysis, experimentation reveals the proportions; on synthesis, the compound re-forms and and if one element is missing or lacking, its place may be taken by another. S 3 C 2 I 1 ; or even: S 2 C 3 I 1 ; or yet again: S 1 C 2 I 3 ; the formula reflects the variable proportions locally, regionally, nationally or internationally.
Whatever the case, these three elements — anarcho-syndicalist, libertarian communist and anarchist individualist (S.C.I.) — are made to combine with each other and, by amalgamating, go to make up what I shall call “The Anarchist Synthesis”.
How has the existence of thse three currents come to weaken the anarchist movement?
Having reached this point in my presentation, it must be asked how it is that, above all in recent years in France particularly, the existence of these three anarchist elements has not only failed to strengthen the libertarian movement, but has ended up weakening it.
And it is important that this question, put clearly, be studied and resolved in an equally clear way.
The answer is simple, but it requires great honesty from everyone, without exception.
I believe that it is not the existence itself of these three elements — anarcho-syndicalism, libertarian communism and anarchist individualism — that has caused the weakness or, more precisely, the relative weakness of anarchist thought and action, but only the position they have each taken towards each other: a position of open, bloody, implacable warfare.
Each faction has employed equal malice during these harmful rifts. Each has stooped to distorting the theses of the other two, to reaching almost ridiculous levels in their statements and negations, and to bloat or mitigate their basic lines to the point of painting an odious caricature.
Each tendency has carried out the most perfidious manoeuvring against the others and has used the deadliest weapons against them.
Had these three tendencies, even in the absence of understanding between them, been a little less intent on waging war against each other, had the will to struggle both within the various groupings and without, been directed towards fighting the common enemy, even separately, the anarchist movement in this country would, given the right circumstances, have acquired considerable influence and surprising strength.
But the intestine war of one tendency against another and often of one individual against another, has completely poisoned, corrupted, ruined and rendered fruitless everything, including those campaigns should have seen the hearts and minds of the lovers of freedom and justice group around our beloved ideas, who are, above all in popular environments, much less rare that it is often claimed.
Each current has spit, drooled and vomited on its neighbouring currents in order to smear them and give the impression that it alone was right.
And, faced with the lamentable spectacle of these divisions and the odious goings-on that they have produced on all sides, our groupings — all of them alike — gradually lost much of their content and our forces exhausted themselves instead of joining together for the battle to be waged against the common enemy — the principle of authority. That is the truth.
The problem and the remedy
The problem is a big one; but it can, it must be only a temporary problem — the remedy is close at hand.
Anyone who has read the preceding lines carefully and without any preconceptions will guess it without any effort: the remedy lies in the idea of the anarchist synthesis gaining ground and being applied as quickly and as well as possible.
What is the anarchist movement suffering from?
From the fact that the three elements that make it up fight tooth and nail with each other.
If, by reason of their origin, their nature, their methods of propaganda, organization and action, these elements are fated to rise up against each other continually, then the remedy that I am proposing will be pointless; it will be inapplicable; it will be unworkable; we shall abstain from trying it and look elsewhere.
On the other hand, if the above opposition does not exist and, even more so, if the elements — anarcho-syndicalist, libertarian communist and anarchist individualist — are instead made to join forces and form a sort of anarchist synthesis, an effort to achieve this synthesis must be made — and today, not tomorrow.
I have discovered nothing nor am I proposing anything new: Luigi Fabbri and several Russian comrades (Volin, Fleshin, Mollie Steimer) with whom I have had discussions over recent days, have told me that attempts of this nature have been made in Italy, by the Unione Anarchica Italiana, and in Ukraine, by the Nabat, and that both these attempts have had the finest results, which only the triumph of fascism in Italy and the Bolshevik victory in Ukraine have destroyed.
There exist in France, as indeed in many other places, numerous groups who have already applied and currently apply the concept of the anarchist synthesis (I shall not name any for fear of omitting some), groups in which anarcho-syndicalists, libertarian communists and anarchist individualists work together in harmony; and these groups are neither the least numerous nor the least active.
These few facts (and I could mention others) show that application of the synthesis is possible. I am not saying, nor do I think, that it can be done quickly or without difficulty. Like everything that is still new, it will come up against misunderstanding, resistance, even hostility. If we need to remain impassable, we shall so remain; if we need to resist criticism and malice, we shall resist. We know that it is the way to a healthy future and we are certain that sooner or later anarchists will find their way there. That is why we shall not allow ourselves to become discouraged.
What has been done in memorable circumstances in Italy, Spain and Ukraine, what is being done in many places in France, can and, under the pressure of events, will be done throughout the country.
It being understood, as the libertarian communists themselves “explicitly” stated in Orléans, that within the Libertarian Commune, as they conceive it, “all forms of association will be free, starting from the whole colony and including work and individual consumption”.
The expression Anarchist Synthesis should be taken here in to mean a grouping, association, organisation and understanding of all the human elements who support the anarchist ideal.
In talking of association and studying whether it is possible and desirable for all those elements to unite, I could only call this grouping of forces, this basis for organization, the Anarchist Synthesis. Quite something else is the synthesis of anarchist theories, an extremely important subject, which I intend to deal with when my state of health and circumstances permit me.Although five months have passed since the Dutch general elections on March 15, marked with rising populism and a diplomatic spat with Turkey during election campaigns, parties still resume negotiations to come up with a cabinet that would exclude the far-right Freedom Party (PVV).
Center-right and center parties, which include Prime Minister Mark Rutte's People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD), Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA) led by Sybrand Buma, Democrats 66 (D66) led by Alexander Pechtold and Christian Union (CU) led by Gert-Jan Segers, came together Saturday for a renewed round of negotiations that was launched Wednesday after a three-week-long break.
As of Sunday, 151 days have passed without a government in the Netherlands, where coalition governments and arduous negotiations are common. It took Rutte 54 days in 2012 to form his coalition, but the record still stands at 208 days from 1977.
All negotiating parties have 76 seats combined and will reach the majority with 150-seats, which is the threshold to form the government in the Dutch parliament. Rutte's VVD won 33 seats in the elections, CDA and D66 won 19 seats each, whereas the CU holds five seats.
Former deputy prime minister and ABN Amro boss Gerrit Zalm, the third person facing the task of forming the government, told the press after the meeting that the four parties are willing for negotiations but forming the government could actually take place in the first days of October.
Zalm stated that leaders of social-liberal and pro-Europe D66 and social-conservative and Eurosceptic CU came together for the first phase of talks to overcome differences in a broad range of issues.
D66's Pechthold said that there are great distances to be covered between D66 and CU over immigration, refugees, global climate change and liberal values. It is not helpful to meet halfway on tough issues such as these, he said, but it is possible to agree on D66's stance in several issues and on CU's stance for several others.
Whereas CU's Segers said that deals on finance are possible but an agreement over principles are not.
All political parties in the Netherlands exclude a coalition option with the far-right PVV, led by anti-Islam populist Geert Wilders (L), which came second in elections and holds 20 seats in the parliament.
Political experts expect that the budget talks, which take place every year the third Tuesday of September, will be carried out under an interim government.
On Wednesday, Rutte said a new government will be put together "as quickly as possible."
"But I don't want to put time limit on it," he told reporters outside a venue in central The Hague where the talks are being held.
A first attempt to include the left-wing ecology-based GroenLinks (GL) party in a four-way coalition broke down in May amid differences over immigration, leaving a political stalemate and causing the first person tasked with trying to form a government to step down.
A second person also stepped down after failing to get a cabinet together but he did manage to find three willing partners to rule with Rutte in a coalition government.As you may or may not have heard, Angus T. Jones — the now 19-year-old Half M[a]n of Two and a fame — has found God and renounced his own show. In a YouTube interview with Seventh-day Adventist pastor Christopher Hudson, a.k.a. The Forerunner, Jones puts it bluntly: “Jake from Two and a Half Men means nothing. He is a non-existent character. If you watch Two and a Half Men, please stop watching Two and a Half Men. I’m on Two and a Half Men and I don’t want to be on it. Please stop watching it and filling your head with filth.” Well, this is totally fascinating.
From one point of view, we have just another child star warped by early success. Instead of pills and booze, though, young Angus has gone deep into religion. Meanwhile, we rational people know that, yes, of course Two and a Half Men is shitty, but it’s not evil. Basically, Angus T. Jones lost it; for neatness’s sake, he did so in a manner that’s the polar opposite of the indulgences of his ex-co-star Charlie Sheen. Ha ha. Unless you work for a trade publication, or your livelihood is directly affected by the production of Two and a Half Men, or you’re a Jon Cryer superfan, you don’t really care what this means for the future of the show (which was picked up for a 10th season in May). You wanna grimace/laugh at Jones, and you wanna keep it moving.
But I just watched all 30 minutes of Jones’s interview (highly recommended viewing). I’ve been totally sucked in, and I’d like to talk about this for a bit.
First, let’s discuss the medium of Jones’s message: an interview with a YouTube celebrity pastor. According to AdventistChurchConnect.org, “The ‘Forerunner’ is the prolific producer of numerous videos that deconstruct current events and call out the evils and ills of today’s society, especially in the entertainment industry where he formerly worked.” He has a catchphrase: “The Truth is The Truth.” He also has a Facebook page that shows him dramatically brandishing the Holy Bible as a modern-day Sodom and/or Gomorrah crumbles behind him. So: Is this some self-righteous charlatan, grabbing on to Angus T. Jones with plans to use the kid — and his celebrity — for his own ends?
That’d be one aptly dramatic reading. In the interview, though, Jones doesn’t seem all that brainwashed. He mostly seems really eager to share his conversion story. He talks about how his mom took him into acting as a 4-year-old, and so obviously not out of his own volition, and how eventually he found himself as a teenager with disposable income and artsy dilettantism to spend it on, and it’s all pretty much on the nose for how you’d imagine the coddled Hollywood rich-kid lifestyle. He goes into great detail about the chain of events that led him to Seventh-day Adventism, a denomination whose holy day is Saturday, and how he’s been keeping the Sabbath: “I’m a hundred percent, sundown Friday, sundown Saturday … I make sure to keep it to the point because it’s been an absolute blessing in my life.” And he talks about the moment when he found God, in a smiley, childlike way: “The best way I can describe it is being hugged by your most favorite person ever but … they’re able to hug every single part of your being.”
There are some really awkward moments. At one point, Jones explains, he was “looking to go to a church with an all-black congregation. I guess you could say I was looking for a black gospel theme. I don’t know, I like black people. I’m not afraid to say it … black people rock.” Then he gets worried that what he’s saying might cause offense, and takes pains to point out that isn’t his intention. The Forerunner steps in, telling Jones, “You’re good, don’t worry about it … Angus is good. You got a pass, man. You’re good.”
When Jones gets to the part about Two and a Half Men, it’s almost an afterthought. He’s explaining how, to him, The Forerunner is the real celebrity: “People see me and they’re like, ‘Woah, you’re Jake.’ I see this guy and I’m like, ‘Dang, man of God, Forerunner, right here. I can touch him!” And then he launches into the bit mentioned above. “People say it’s just entertainment,” he adds. “Do some research on the effects of television and your brain, and I promise you you’ll have a decision to make when it comes to television, especially with what you watch.” And the eeriest part: “Just watch out. A lot of people don’t think about how deceptive the enemy is. He’s” — as in, Satan, presumably — “been doing this for a lot longer than any of us have been around. There’s no playing around when it comes to eternity.”
I don’t really know what to make of this stuff. I know I don’t want to laugh off Angus. It seems, in these videos, like he’s thought at length about what he’s saying. I know that he has a real problem, as a Christian in a fervently non-religious business, to get anyone to take him seriously — to believe that he’s not just losing it, but has instead come to an informed realization about how he wants to live his life. And I can’t help but be impressed by how strong Jones feels here. “The name of the game is compromise,” he says toward the end of his interview. “According to the Bible, when that happens, we’re no longer standing for anything. We’re no longer … on the side of the truth.”
I also feel like there’s something a bit off about the way he looks up to this guy The Forerunner, and how resoundingly he wants to denounce Two and a Half Men. I assume Jones has a problem with that show’s depiction of casual drinking and casual sex, and I think a measured conversation about the way TV can establish and affect a young person’s values system and societal |
that a subdivision was for whites only. Advertisements like those from 1952 (shown at right) were commonplace in St. Louis (and nationwide). The ad promotes “FHA Financed” Ferguson homes; the other ad promotes an “FHA approved” Kirkwood subdivision.
Missouri History Museum, St. Louis
One builder, Charles Vatterott, obtained FHA guarantees for St. Ann, a town he started constructing in 1943. Its deeds stated, “No lot or portion of a lot or building erected thereon shall be sold, leased, rented or occupied by any other than those of the Caucasian race.” Vatterott then built a separate, lower-quality subdivision a few miles away, De Porres, for African Americans. De Porres buyers had incomes and occupations—from truck drivers to chemists—similar to those in St. Ann; had they been permitted, they could have moved to St. Ann or other white subdivisions built in the postwar period. Vatterott could not get FHA financing for his black subdivision, so many De Porres homes were rented. De Porres also lacked parks and playgrounds that Vatterott had built into St. Ann.
As covenants and zoning rules barred African Americans from most areas, a growing black population crowded ghettos on St. Louis’s north and west sides. Trash collection, street lighting, and emergency response were less adequate than in white neighborhoods. African Americans paid higher rents than whites for similar space because their housing supply was constricted; less adequate city fire protection caused higher insurance rates. With FHA mortgages unavailable, families bought homes with very short repayment periods, or on contract where no equity accumulated. A late installment payment could trigger repossession. To make higher rent or contract payments, black families took in boarders or subdivided homes and apartments, exacerbating the overcrowding. With higher housing costs, African Americans with good jobs were less able to save than were whites with similar incomes, and reduced savings made leaving the ghetto for better surroundings more difficult. If a new black neighborhood developed, St. Louis sometimes changed its zoning to permit polluting industries and other deleterious businesses to locate there.
Whites observing the ghetto concluded that slum conditions were characteristics of black families, not of housing discrimination. Government policy thus created stereotypes that spurred “white flight.”
Suburbs sometimes employed eminent domain procedures to prevent blacks from moving in. In 1959, an African-American couple attempted to build on a lot in the white suburb of Creve Coeur. The town approved permits and construction had begun when neighbors discovered the buyers were black. Townspeople raised contributions to purchase the property, but could not pressure the couple to sell, so the city condemned it for a playground. A Missouri appeals court ruled it could not question the town’s motives, provided the condemned property was for public use.
In 1969, a church-sponsored nonprofit group proposed to build federally subsidized, integrated, multi-family units in Black Jack, a white suburb in unincorporated St. Louis County. Black Jack quickly incorporated itself and adopted zoning rules prohibiting more than three homes per acre, making new moderate-income housing impossible. African-American residents of St. Louis, noting their limited access to suburban employment, filed suit. A federal appeals court found that opposition to the project was “repeatedly expressed in racial terms by … leaders of the incorporation movement, by individuals circulating petitions, and by zoning commissioners themselves. … [R]ace played a significant role, both in the drive to incorporate and the decision to rezone.” But meanwhile, the church group lost its financing, interest rates climbed, and the federal government feared further white opposition. The church group’s lawyers acknowledged that, despite the ruling, “[n]o developer in his or her right mind” would proceed in the face of such hostility. It was never constructed.
Other suburbs, too, subsequently incorporated to forestall African-American movement from St. Louis, where, as more public housing was demolished, less housing remained. Perhaps learning from Black Jack, civil rights groups mostly didn’t bother filing similar suits.
Several suburbs, with century-old black residential pockets, designed redevelopment projects that forced those residents to seek public housing back in St. Louis, while St. Louis itself implemented urban renewal that forced blacks into nearby suburbs and attracted white suburbanites to the city. Beginning in the 1950s, slum housing occupied mostly by African Americans was razed and replaced with the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial (which includes the Gateway Arch), a museum, a sports stadium, new industry and hotels, university expansion, middle-class housing unaffordable to the former African American residents, and interstate highways (including ramps and interchanges) to bring suburbanites to white-collar city jobs. Sometimes, as happened nationwide, after African-American neighborhoods were demolished, planners’ designs for redevelopment never materialized and cleared land remained vacant. One early 1960s St. Louis project demolished an African-American neighborhood of 70 blocks and 221 acres. Fifty years later, much of it remains vacant or paved over.
Half of displaced African Americans were offered no relocation assistance. Displaced families relocated to public housing or to apartments adjoining their former ghettos that were as substandard as prior residences. When public housing itself became unavailable, the St. Louis Housing Authority issued rent supplement vouchers to eligible families. From 1950 to 1980, it assigned some 8,000 families to public housing or subsidized apartments, almost all in overwhelmingly African American neighborhoods.
As space in St. Louis disappeared and African Americans pushed out, realtors “blockbusted” northern and northwestern suburbs, neighborhood by neighborhood. The practice contributed to the transformation of inner-ring suburbs like Ferguson—from white communities that excluded African Americans to deteriorating nearly all-black (or becoming all-black) suburbs.
U.S. Geological Survey The Pruitt-Igoe towers became a national symbol of dysfunctional public housing.
Blockbusting was not unique to St. Louis. It was commonplace nationwide. Typically, an initial African-American family, like the Williamses or Allens, found housing in a lower-middle-class white neighborhood just outside the ghetto. A realtor might arrange the sale, perhaps subsidizing it himself. Once the family visibly arrived, real estate agents solicited nearby homeowners to sell quickly before their homes lost value from the arrival of blacks. Sometimes, agents hired black youth to drive around blasting music, placed fictitious sale advertisements in African American newspapers (and showed copies to white homeowners), or hired black women to push baby carriages around. Some speculators did not have initial African American buyers but simply bought property and let it stay empty and deteriorate to depress the value of other nearby homes and panic homeowners to sell at reduced prices. Speculators could then buy the homes and resell at inflated prices to African Americans desperately needing housing. Some agents did not resell homes, but subdivided and rented them to black families. When Adel Allen described how “for sale” signs quickly went up on his Kirkwood block, real estate agents were probably involved.
Realtor practice and state action were inseparable in St. Louis and elsewhere. The St. Louis Real Estate Exchange surveyed its members in 1923 to define zones where African Americans could live. City government worked hand in glove with the exchange, providing it with data on changing racial residential patterns so the exchange could adapt its zoning accordingly. The exchange’s determination of whites-only neighborhoods corresponded to the Plan Commission’s single-family zones. By 1930, the Plan Commission estimated that 80 percent of the city’s African Americans were contained within zones established by the exchange. Zone boundaries were revised substantially in 1941, and continued to guide real estate practice afterwards.
The exchange had a rule adapted verbatim from the 1924 National Association of Realtors code: “A realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood... members of any race or nationality … whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in that neighborhood.” Both the exchange and state regulators, the Missouri Real Estate Commission, deemed sales to African Americans in white neighborhoods to constitute professional misconduct leading to loss of license.
In 1953, an FHA report acknowledged that St. Louis had 80,000 African Americans with stable employment who could have afforded to participate in the postwar suburban boom. But in 1955 (seven years after Shelley v. Kraemer), with no objection from the FHA or any regulatory body, the exchange notified realtors that “no Member of our Board may, directly or indirectly, sell to Negroes … unless there are three separate and distinct buildings in such block already occupied by Negroes.” In 1969, a year after the Fair Housing Act’s enactment, a realtor boasted to an investigator, “We never sell to colored.” At that time, St. Louis realtors still asserted they would lose their licenses if they violated the segregation rule.
(AP Photo/Charlie Riedel, File) In this August 20, 2014, file photo, children watch from their home as people march to protest the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Many residents of the St. Louis suburb have said they feel like they are living in a war zone following the shooting of Michael Brown by police.
Should these realtors’ practices be considered private or state action? Almost every industry is regulated to some extent, so state action requires more than mere regulation. Yet few industries are as regulated as real estate. Licenses require extensive study, testing, and recertification. Regulations cover detailed practices—not only rules for who can show homes or proper handling of escrow, but realtors’ private behavior. Yet while racial steering had been unlawful since 1866, Missouri and national realtor ethics rules required it. Even blockbusting was not deemed unethical by the Missouri Real Estate Commission until 1970, two years after federal law reiterated its illegality; subsequently, enforcement has been weak or nonexistent.
Only banking and insurance are more regulated than real estate, and these industries also played important roles in segregating St. Louis and the nation. For most of the 20th century, banks routinely and openly practiced “redlining”—refusing mortgages or home improvement loans to African Americans in predominantly white as well as black neighborhoods. Federal and state regulators took no notice. Until the 1960s, insurance companies likewise refused to serve African Americans in redlined areas or where restrictive covenants were broken. The nation’s leading insurance companies became developers themselves of segregated apartment complexes.
The lower incomes of African Americans today, contributing to their inability to afford housing in the more affluent suburbs of St. Louis and other metropolitan areas, cannot be understood in isolation from this history of pervasive housing segregation. In the nearly two decades beginning in 1950, the number of jobs in the city of St. Louis declined by 20 percent, while those in suburban St. Louis County increased by 400 percent. The spatial mismatch between St. Louis neighborhoods where African Americans mostly lived, and the better suburban jobs they had difficulty accessing, exacerbated racial income inequality. That inequality, in turn, reinforced the housing segregation.
Even for black workers who were able to work in the suburbs, incomes were effectively reduced relative to those of whites because of higher commuting costs. For example, from 1959 to 2009, Chrysler operated an assembly plant in suburban Fenton. Black workers living in the St. Louis ghetto and unable to live near the plant spent up to an hour commuting each way. Today, the town of Fenton remains 96 percent white, less than 0.5 percent black.
The auto industry and union were unusually hospitable to black workers. But not all industries and unions were. Those African Americans who could have commuted to better jobs were denied membership by many white-only labor unions. In St. Louis (and elsewhere), unions excluded black workers but nonetheless were recognized as exclusive bargaining agents by the federal government. Certification of such practices by the National Labor Relations Board was eventually found to be a constitutional violation, but not until the suburban housing boom was mostly complete. We now understand that, for both races, intergenerational income mobility is quite limited, which means we are still paying a price for these practices, with Ferguson but one illustration.
A century of evidence demonstrates that St. Louis was segregated by interlocking and racially explicit public policies of zoning, public housing, and suburban finance, and by publicly endorsed segregation policies of realty, banking, and insurance industries. These government policies interacted with public labor market policies that denied African Americans access to jobs that comparably skilled whites obtained. When all of these mutually reinforcing public policies conspired with private prejudice to turn St. Louis’s African-American communities into slums, public officials razed those slums to devote acreage to more profitable (and less unsightly) uses. African Americans who were displaced then relocated to the few other places available, converting towns like Ferguson into new segregated enclaves.
As the federal court observed more than 30 years ago, school desegregation requires housing desegregation. Some schools in Ferguson today are 90 percent African American; performance of students this isolated is inadequate. As the tragic death of Michael Brown shows, the interaction of black men with police has much in common with Adel Allen’s experiences 50 years ago and black experiences nationwide, when such treatment set off the riots (Ferguson’s was mild) that the Kerner Commission investigated.
Litigation has revealed that in the 2000s, federally supervised banks marketed exploitative subprime loans to African American communities like Ferguson, expecting that African Americans (particularly the elderly) were too gullible to resist false promises. When the loans’ exploding interest rates combined with the collapse of the housing bubble, black neighborhoods’ devastation compounded. Half of Ferguson homes today are underwater, with owners owing more than their homes are worth.
Many practical programs and regulatory strategies can address the problems of Ferguson and communities like it nationwide. One example is a rule prohibiting landlords from refusing to accept tenants whose rent is subsidized; a few states and municipalities currently do prohibit it, but most do not. Another is to require even outer-ring suburbs to repeal their racially inspired exclusionary zoning ordinances. Going further, we could require every community to permit development of housing to accommodate its “fair share” of its region’s low-income and minority populations; New Jersey, for example, has taken a very modest step toward this requirement.
But we won’t consider such remedies if we remain blind to how Ferguson became Ferguson. We flatter ourselves that the responsibility is only borne by rogue police officers, white flight, and suburbanites’ desire for economic homogeneity. Prosecuting the officer who shot Michael Brown, or investigating and integrating Ferguson’s police department, can’t address the deeper obstacles to racial progress.
A more extensive report, including full source citations, on which this article draws, can be accessed by clicking here.Sergei Karpukhin/REUTERS In the age of social media, many people seem to have the urge to share everything about their lives: Heading to concerts, birthdays, or maybe even what's on the reading list.
But in the case of some Russian soldiers, their urge to share has serious geopolitical consequences, as a few have been revealing their presence in or near eastern Ukraine whether they realize it or not.
It's an open secret that pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine are linked to Russian intelligence. There's further evidence they are receiving intelligence, training, and sophisticated weaponry. But Russia has repeatedly denied having any of its actual military forces deployed there.
"It's all nonsense; there are no special units, special forces, or instructors in the east of Ukraine," Putin said in April, according to AP.
But his soldiers are proving him wrong.
Alexander Sotkin's Instagram photo map. Instagram/sanya_sotkin On Wednesday, BuzzFeed's Max Seddon found Instagram photos from 24-year-old Russian soldier Alexander Sotkin, a communications specialist who appears to be based in southern Russia. His Instagram photos are typical — filled with "selfies" — but it's the locations that are telling.
In two of them, he is placed in eastern Ukraine. Both were geotagged using his phone or tablet's GPS to put him in rebel-controlled villages of Krasna Talycha and Krasny Derkul, respectively.
A serious breach of operational security (OPSEC) on social media by a Russian soldier seems hard to believe, but if you consider these types of issues are so common in the U.S. military that troops are required to go through formal training to learn of the dangers, then it makes a lot of sense.
While tactics and general strategies of professional armies around the world can vary, the behavior of soldiers can be quite similar. Especially when you have friends and family back home who don't really know what you're doing, there's an urge to show them a photo of where you are, despite the danger if it's seen by someone outside the group.
Now consider this post, from Mikhail Chugunov, boasting of his military convoy bringing Grad rocket systems into Ukraine. BBC Ukraine journalist Myroslava Petsa captured the post, which the soldier posted to his now-deleted VKontakte page (Russia's version of Facebook).
Here's another, with the soldier captioning the photo "Ukraine is waiting for us, artillery lads!" according to the translation from Tetyana Lokot at Global Voices.
"We shelled Ukraine all night long," was the caption on another photo, posted on July 23, of artillery pieces on the Russia-Ukraine border. The U.S. has satellite photos proving Russia indeed fired artillery into Ukraine.
Vladislav Laptev/VKontakte
The soldier, Vadim Grigoryev, later deleted his account and said his account was hacked, although fellow VKontakte user Vladislav Laptev took a screenshot and reposted it.
When asked whether Moscow had troops inside eastern Ukraine, a man who answered the phone at the Russian Embassy in Washington, D.C. said, "No, I don't know about it," and told Business Insider to call back tomorrow while referring us to its Ministry of Defense website.
In addition to social media postings, The Interpreter, a website that has tracked the Ukraine crisis, has reported that Russian vehicles have often been seen crossing the border. On Thursday, it reported a large armored column of roughly 50 vehicles crossing over — citing a respected journalist in the country — although it stressed this latest report was not yet confirmed.
It seems at least some Russian soldiers are blowing up Putin's narrative, and the Kremlin has already taken notice. On Wednesday, a Russian lawmaker proposed a bill that would ban soldiers from posting images of military equipment or routes, even if they are not secret.
While the law may stop new photos from popping up, it won't be able to erase the others that have already gotten out.
Check out the full round-up of social media posts at Global Voices >Facebook is about to spend big on upgrading its infrastructure. According to Business Week, the social network has closed a deal to take a $100 million loan (“venture lending”), all of which will be spent on new servers. Facebook gives up no equity as part of the deal. Business Week explains how this type of loan works:
“Venture lending peaked during the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s and early part of this decade, but is making a comeback as startups use debt to pay for computer servers, telecom gear, and software … The TriplePoint lease has a degree of flexibility not offered by a traditional loan. For instance, Facebook can exchange or replace equipment during the term of the lease.”
Essentially, it’s a really, really huge credit card, with very favorable terms. In all, Facebook has now raised in excess of $300 million, including $240 million from Microsoft, $100 million from Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing, and an undisclosed amount from the Samwer brothers.
As for the servers, Business Week estimates the $100M will be used to buy roughly 50,000 servers. Last month, Data Center Knowledge published a report estimating that the social network currently has around 10,000 servers in operation.
The new money comes from TriplePoint Capital, and is the firm’s largest deal to date.When I was on a reporting trip to Atlanta earlier this year, Terry Hall, who writes the Tonya Harding fan club newsletter, contacted me with a proposition. Was I willing to sneak onto the set of I, Tonya? It would be strictly legit, of course: I’d get cast as an extra while the movie was filming in Atlanta, and quietly relay my observations back to the club. Footage had recently leaked from the set of the Tonya character saying “Suck my dick!” to a judge—a scene that never took place in real life and suggested that the movie was playing fast and loose with reality. And people who have come out over the years as what Terry calls “pro-Tonya” are a little touchy about the public remembering the facts correctly.
Here’s a second story, one that might explain the first: I was working with an intern last summer, a twenty-year-old guy named Ben, who was born in 1995, a year after two amateur hitmen hired by Tonya’s bodyguard Shawn Eckardt, an old buddy of Tonya’s ex-husband Jeff Gillooly, carried out a plan to disqualify Nancy Kerrigan from the 1994 Olympics—well, sort of. Shane Stant, who committed the assault—and whose name almost no one remembers—tried to hit Nancy on the knee with a collapsible police baton, but only managed to hit her lower thigh. She suffered a contusion and needed physical therapy, but was still able to skate in the Winter Olympics six weeks later, where she claimed a silver medal. (Tonya placed eighth.)
I’m used to people saying, when they hear Tonya Harding’s name, “Oh yeah—the skater that beat up that other skater.” When we remember a story only vaguely, the violence, it seems, grows more and more severe. And when I mentioned Tonya to Ben, who had no actual memory of scandal at all, he said:
“Oh yeah, Tonya Harding—didn’t she murder someone?”
How, I thought, does the story keep getting worse?
But this is the daily struggle of the pro-Tonya partisan. Terry knows me, and sends me a Tonya Harding fan club Christmas card every year, because I wrote about Tonya a few years ago (and also was once photographed wearing this), and this alone was enough to make us lifelong allies. It has always been controversial to take the position that Tonya Harding is a person, and not a monster.
Tonya Harding became a famous Portlander at a time when Portland wasn’t really famous for much of anything, and people who lived there at the time still have a tendency to see her as someone who made us look bad. But I was six when what Craig Gillespie’s biopic I, Tonya calls “the incident” took place, and so I had to go looking for Tonya after I grew up, finding her mostly in old YouTube videos. I immediately loved her grit, her strut, her combination of vulnerability and bravado, and her unbelievable physical strength: she was (and don’t you ever forget it) the first American woman, and the second woman in the world, to complete a triple axel jump in competition. She was a fast spinner, and her jumps almost took her higher in the air than her height of 5’1”. My friend Matt used to play hockey in the rink where Tonya practiced—nearly everyone who lived in the Portland area in the eighties and nineties has a Tonya story of some kind—and he used to hate practicing after her, because her skates took deep divots out of the ice, her jumps were so strong and her skating so powerful.
“Oh yeah, Tonya Harding—didn’t she murder someone?”
Tonya Harding always skated not with carefully disguised power, as was the fashion for female figure skaters then and now, but in a way that made no secret of just how much force she carried, and just how much she could do. Judges hated her. She had to rip good scores out of their hands, and so she did, by landing a jump no other American skater could manage.
But at the same time, she was read as “white trash,” which often seemed to break down to two distinct traits: she had grown up struggling for every penny she had, and she was a tomboy. She hunted and fished and fixed cars and could beat anyone at arm-wrestling; she smoked and shot pool and sometimes hit back when she got hit. And when she went on the ice to perform an acceptable version of femininity—which she was being scored on just as much as her jumps and spins and footwork—she always seemed to be doing her best, but not, in some essential way, getting it.
She vamped to Santana, wore rhinestone-bedazzled satins and shocking pinks, piled on makeup and chose long, red-lacquered manicures. This is it, right? you could almost hear her asking the judges. Isn’t this what you want?
What she didn’t understand was what every choreographer, every coach, every advertising executive, every skating official, and every judge didn’t dare tell her, and something I had to stare at her story for years, in the end, to finally see: more feminine meant weaker. They didn’t want her to put on more makeup or skate to classical music or wear more sparkles. They wanted her to look less strong.
Tonya’s story was where I learned how your wearing lots of blue eye shadow can eventually be used against you, by the public, as proof that you are a nasty, wicked, violent person; how not appearing “feminine” enough, in the way society tells you to appear, can later be taken as evidence of your role in a violent crime.
The media frenzy that followed both Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan in the wake of the assault on Nancy, and that lasted through both women’s competition in the 1994 Olympics, was played as a comedy at the time. There was talk of the International Olympic Committee banning Tonya from the Games after it was revealed that she had known about Jeff’s involvement in the plot after it was carried out, but hadn’t dared to come forward. “But,” as Tonya, played by Margot Robbie, explains in I, Tonya, “Do you think that CBS, who was showing the games, was going to let this ginormous ratings fucker not happen?”
I, Tonya’s screenplay is based on interviews with Tonya Harding, Jeff Gillooly, and some of the story’s other principals, but it also prioritizes storytelling over historical fact, because, well, it’s a movie. It’s satisfying to think that Tonya looked back at her inclusion in the Games and could see through the networks’ cynicism clearly enough to say something like this; but did she? If she didn’t, then including a line like this isn’t inaccuracy, exactly—but it suggests a movie that might veer into a more satisfying story than the one the facts we have give it access to, and the pro-Tonyas are a hair-trigger bunch about this kind of thing. When people remember the name “Tonya Harding,” our experience tells us that they think of violent assault, and of Tonya as a shameless, violence-hungry mastermind who would do it all again if she had the chance: who basked in the spotlight, who loved being bad, and who we can’t pay attention to without tacitly endorsing her wicked ways.
There’s another speech in I, Tonya that I know to be pure invention, and one that I started wishing, as soon as I saw it, had actually taken place. It comes after the judge handing down her sentence for hindering prosecution arrives at the only punishment she can be given that will truly hurt: a lifetime ban from all U.S. Figure Skating association competitions and events.
“No,” Tonya says softly, in the movie, and what escapes her is more a breath than a noise, as if the wind has just been knocked out of her. “All I did was the hindering of prosecution,” she says, disbelieving. “They—you’re never—never gonna let me skate again? I can’t ever—I mean—I’d rather do the jail time. Please. They”—Eckardt and the others—“only got eighteen months. They got eighteen months. I’ll do that. You can’t—Your honor, I don’t have an education. All I know is skating. That’s all I know. And I’m no one if I can’t—if I can’t—”
There are lines that become remarkable not for the way an actor says them, but for the way they don’t say them. As Margot Robbie’s Tonya dissolves into devastation, she tries to utter the word “skate,” but she can’t even do that anymore, and we know we are watching a woman staring, numbly, at her whole future escaping her, her whole life as she knew it collapsing, too; and here she stands, more alone than she has ever been, in a life that has always conspired, in one way or another, to turn the world against her.
It was Margot Robbie—an Australian actress previously best known to American audiences for her scene-stealing supporting roles in The Wolf of Wall Street and Suicide Squad—who found Steven Rogers’ script for I, Tonya, fell in love with the part, and started hunting around for a director. And so it seems only fair that it’s Margot Robbie who makes the movie: when it does work, it works because of her.
Tonya was presented to American audiences as laughably ignorant, ineffectually violent, and unforgivably working class.
Twenty-six during filming, and standing 5’6”, Margot Robbie plays Tonya between the ages of fifteen and twenty-three for most of the movie. She’s both too old and too tall, and she’s perfect. If she can’t make her frame diminutive, she can capture the combination of intense toughness and fragility that Tonya always carried with her, like nerves wrapped around bone. If she can’t skate like Tonya she can still radiate both her sheer physical splendor and strength, and her heartbreaking disbelief that anyone would ever want to see her, know her, love her as she is—the way all of America seemed willing to love her, for as long as she kept winning.
“I was loved,” Tonya reflects, in I, Tonya, “for a minute. Then I was hated. Then I was just a punchline. It was like being abused all over again, only this time it was by you. All of you. You’re all my attackers, too.”
She stares directly at the camera in this scene—her voice honed to a rasp, her face progressed, via makeup and prosthetics, to the middle-age of someone who life has ridden hard and put up wet—and the effect is chilling. She is looking at you, America, and where were you when she needed you? Where were you when the story of a woman who had been abused all her life was sold, for six weeks of ratings gold, as a comedy? Were you there? Did you pony up for a ticket? Did you laugh when you were told to?
I, Tonya makes the choice—and maybe it could make no other—to make the nineties media machine its own character. We have docu-style footage of the principals reflecting back on the story, and characters who, in the moment, address the camera directly, reminding us that they are all talking heads now, and that this story can never be definitive. We can only watch a reenactment of a story that, as it was still happening, fragmented into dozens of different versions, that chaos helped along by the fact that it suddenly became very lucrative to claim, or to come to believe, that you had seen things a certain way: that Tonya was the domineering one in the marriage; that she had always had it out for Nancy; that she was a cutthroat, sexually voracious, scheming criminal.
Overwhelmingly, the more lucrative story was the one that made Tonya the villain—and so that was the story the networks sold, the story witnesses found a way to conform their memories to, and the story we learned. In 1994, everyone in Tonya Harding’s life—and Tonya herself most of all—was presented to American audiences as laughably ignorant, ineffectually violent, and unforgivably working class: “the gang,” as one sportswriter put it, “that couldn’t whack straight.” But in director Craig Gillespie’s vision—and with just over twenty years of hindsight working in his favor—the most cartoonish figure, by far, is Martin Maddox, a composite character based on TV reporters of the time.
“Look, this was the first time there was a twenty-four-hour news cycle to fill,” the spray-tanned Martin says, after reminiscing about having Tonya’s truck towed so she could be lured on camera. “We all needed that story.”
The fictional Martin works for the real Hard Copy, a nineties tabloid TV show that, along with Court TV (now TruTV), proved that American audiences were willing to follow a trial or scandal for twenty-four hours a day, as long as the media could keep up with their desire. The OJ Simpson trial, broadcast gavel-to-gavel on Court TV the following year, helped solidify executives’ and producers’ awareness that If you broadcast it, they will watch.
But something strange happened when the desire-slaking machine got too big for its own good: it wasn’t steered by Americans’ desires and fears so much as it began to steer them, because a machine that big can never run only on the stories that are actually happening. To watch I, Tonya, and the nineties media landscape it looks back on with both anger and nostalgia, is to see the gestation of the media landscape we live in today: the early years of the twenty-four-hour news cycle that would, eventually, give us our first twenty-four-hour-news-cycle president. American television made Tonya Harding a villain and made Donald Trump the most powerful man in the world, and maybe it’s only now that the latter has happened before our eyes that we can realize just how utterly arbitrary this first transformation was.
I didn’t sneak on set while I, Tonya was filming—I missed the one call for extras I could have gone to, for a scene set in a low-rent strip club, because I was busy with a far less important journalistic task—but the gray weather that clung to Atlanta that February seemed specially conjured for a movie set in the mist-shrouded Pacific Northwest. You can see it in some scenes, and in moments that depict the grim, muddy, grinding poverty of so much of Tonya’s young life: hunting rabbits with her father in the woods; working on a car in Jeff’s driveway. They’re scenes that make you understand not just how dreary and claustrophobic Tonya’s life was during all her years of training as an Olympic athlete, but also what it takes to drive a young woman to marry a man who already abuses her. Depending on the life you knew before, it doesn’t have to take much. Over a montage of Jeff and Tonya’s wedding, Tonya tells us:
It made sense at the time OK? I mean, I could have insurance. Good benefits all around. I mean, he had a car. Plus, I was doing six hours a day of practice and competitions while I worked at a hardware store—and I ran a forklift, and a drill press, and I did welding. But now—now I could just skate. Like all the other girls.
Sometimes, Margot Robbie’s Oregon accent—an accent that’s difficult to do simply because its distinguishing feature is its lack of distinguishing features—slides, if not completely into New York, then at least as far as the New Jersey Turnpike. Her tough-girl core wobbles into the tristate area, then back into the forest. But in every case, this seems oddly appropriate, if only because the Tonya we’re seeing is oddly reminiscent of one of Martin Scorsese’s nineties protagonists, like Lorraine Bracco in Goodfellas: a broad who maintains a hard-bitten dignity even as she falls apart, and who we can never quite fear for.
American television made Tonya Harding a villain and made Donald Trump the most powerful man in the world.
There is, in fact, something Scorsese-like about I, Tonya as a whole. Bleak as some of its early moments are, the movie is also vibrant and action-filled, with difficult emotional scenes often compressed to cutting exchanges, and a camera that whips and pans around without ever becoming shaky or unstable. I, Tonya is also as jammed with pop music as Goodfellas or Casino, and it provides the same kind of Top-40 Greek chorus: “Devil Woman” to introduce Tonya’s abusive and overbearing mother; “Can’t You See” as Jeff and Tonya shack up; and Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain,” in a searing, Layla-like montage, as the press start hounding Tonya, and her world starts falling apart.
It’s difficult to fault a movie for having too much Scorsese DNA, and yet, if I, Tonya has a single fatal flaw, it’s this: it tries too hard make the story go down too painlessly—and it does the job too well. Goodfellas is a counterintuitively easy movie to watch in a way that can hardly escape the viewer’s notice: you witness whacking after whacking (and this gang could whack straight) until it’s hard to view murder as anything but a kind of slapstick, as its protagonists generally do. I, Tonya is also, for all its violence, an easy movie to watch; the question is whether this keeps it from telling its story.
The primary violence I, Tonya concerns itself with is the domestic abuse Tonya says she experienced at Jeff Gillooly’s hands. Tonya says it happened, Jeff says it didn’t. (Police reports and witness accounts corroborate many of her claims.) In 1994, Jeff’s word was good enough for the American public: if it hadn’t been, the name “Tonya Harding” would make people think of Tonya, at least occasionally, as a victim of violence, no matter what violence they may remain convinced she had a role in planning. But it was impossible to see Tonya as a victim, or even as a villain who had been victimized, in 1994. The switches on the media machine only had two positions: BAD or GOOD. America chose BAD. Jeff’s story supported it, and this was enough to make the public believe him.
Confronted with these differing accounts, I, Tonya splits the difference: it tells us what Tonya said, tells us what Jeff said, and then shows us the violence Tonya says she experienced—some of it, anyway. Most of the stories Tonya tells in her unfinished biography The Tonya Tapes—Jeff having two friends rape her at gunpoint to keep her from telling the authorities what she knew of the assault on Nancy (“I wished they had pulled the trigger” she later said); Jeff in a car, chasing Tonya down a dark road as she tried to escape on foot—don’t appear in I, Tonya. This isn’t a version of events we are even given the chance to believe or disbelieve. Instead, we see Jeff slapping Tony |
the future, by pinpointing potential biological pathways to target.
"In addition to identifying RBM12, a new gene that may aid in understanding the pathogenesis of psychosis and therefore lead to new targets for drug development, the work reported here provides a template for future familial studies of psychosis," the authors conclude.Talking computers were on fire 20 to 30 years ago. Movies like War Games and TV series like Knight Rider featured electronics speaking to their human operators. Speak-n-Spell machines taught a generation of children. Then the magic was out of the bottle and the focus drifted to other technologies.
Today, we have a new explosion of voice enabled devices. They announced this week the Amazon Echo will read Kindle books You will see more devices speaking with the growth of the Internet of Things. Special speech systhesis chips of old are no longer required. The smallest of today's Linux computers often has the capabity to output speech. This includes the Raspberry Pi line of single board computers.
From the Raspberry Pi Zero to the A+/B+ to the Raspberry Pi 2, all have the capacity to run free software to turn text to speech.
This tutorial will show you how to have your Pi use the free software packages Festival and its derivative Flite to output voice.By Cliff Cawthon
Reporting for West Seattle Blog
When you come to the gate, instead of the encampment beyond, the first thing you’ll notice is that there’s usually someone being either welcomed in, looking for help, or offering to help.
Camp Second Chance is on the city-owned Myers Way Parcels, and while it’s been there, unauthorized, since last summer, it is also the site of one of the three “new” authorized-encampment locations formalized by a mayoral emergency order, approved by the City Council, last week.
The original December announcement of those three locations (including one in Georgetown) marked a leap forward for a plan the mayor calls Bridging the Gap to Pathways Home. The camp is to be given a one-year lease, with the possibility of renewal for a second year.
Nonprofits, community members, and residents are currently in a conversation around the Mayor’s move. And a community meeting is scheduled for 7 pm next Wednesday (February 1st) at the nearby Joint Training Facility. The authorization is greeted enthusiastically by camp liaison Eric Davis: “Being able to safely transition into housing, as opposed to being [swept] out of somewhere every three months…it’s a blessing the Mayor [has] sanctioned us [so far].”
I visited the camp to talk to residents about what this order means for their future.
Walking around, your first impression is how City Councilmember Kshama Sawant described it last August, a “well-organized, self-managed, clean and sober” homeless encampment.
Davis (above) led me on a tour of the camp, which started in April 2016 as a break-off from Tent City 3. As he was leading me through the camp, he recalled what led them from Tent City 3 to the South King County church that hosted them for three months before they moved to Myers Way in July (briefly on private land): “We separated from [TC 3, in April] on a peaceful note, we just didn’t agree with some of their tactics … we were there at the time and if you didn’t [participate in protests], then their staff came in [and leveraged services against you].”
According to Davis, that made the relationship with the management of Tent City 3 untenable, so they left and this core group wanted to stay together for safety and stability. He frequently refers to this camp figuratively as “a family.” Since the camp moved to this location in 2016, a number of community members have flocked to support the 20+ households that call the camp home at any given time. The camp uses social media for outreach. Tamara Williams, a camp supporter who lives nearby, told us, “We appreciate them as neighbors in our community,” while adding, “there are people who add to the community and there are those who take away from the community … this is a camp that is as friendly as any of the neighbors on my street, and sometime friendlier.”
Williams continued to praise the camp as an “addition to [the] community, not a drain on our community.” She was concerned for homeless people nearby, outside Camp Second Chance, who may be dealing with substance-abuse issues or mental-health issues as residents and may require professional assistance and care.
The direct assistance that Camp Second Chance has provided to homeless people in the immediate area is a stabilizing factor for many. Among them, one of the camp’s original residents, Chris Brand, a professional carpenter, construction worker, and handyman. Brand found himself homeless for more than five years after a career in the military, living with roommates, and employment insecurity. “Unfortunately, I’m at that part of my life where I’m looking for something better, transitioning between work, so hopefully then I can find a place indoors.” Brand said he has the possibility of a new truck-driving job, which would provide him with new opportunities given his clean-driving record.
In terms of stability, Brand echoes Davis’ previous hardships with unstable accommodations, “Staying here, we also benefit from the security of having people around us. Being able to keep our stuff all in one place all day long and that makes it a nice [place] for us.” This stability is enhanced, in Brand’s eyes, by the city’s authorization decision. From Brand’s perspective, “to move outside of the city limits right now … [other cities] don’t have the transitional places like this where I can trust the people I’m around.”
For more context on the camp, I reached out to Polly Trout, an ally of Camp Second Chance and the founder and director of Patacara Community Services. Trout echoed the importance of the plans to authorize the camp. She says it has worked hard to be a good neighbor and that the long advocacy struggle to stay together has maintained “a functioning, healthy, loving community … [an alternative to] scattering, so they wouldn’t have to stay somewhere alone.”
According to Trout, the Myers Way Parcels site was a great fit for the residents of Camp Second Chance, “it’s not going bother anyone if they move there …it’s a large piece of land, reasonably close to a bus stop.” Trout said that the stability is due to the camp’s “Clean and Sober” rules and its strict code of conduct. “We need more clean and sober places, as well as more low-barrier places,” Trout said, and in her opinion the city’s sweeps of homeless camps only increase insecurity for people outside.
The camp sees itself as a benefit to those nearby who are not part of CSC. Camp liaison Davis does acknowledge a contentious relationship with some individuals across Myers Way who are believed to have substance abuse or mental health issues but, he says, the camp still provides support to those in need from the other side of the road. Davis explained that “It’s not an organized encampment, it’s just a parcel full of people camping out. And any time they come up to the gate they’re hungry, they’re wet, they’re tired, they need a tent … they need a hot meal, we serve them just like we were a food bank.”
Johnathan Mather, one of those nearby campers, spoke to the benefits having an authorized and supported camp in the area, with the city expecting to perhaps triple the number of tents at CSC. “The street would be cleaner … there would be no trash in the woods at all, especially if we have a designated spot, or a couple of spots. This is a large area, there’s a lot of trash.” Mather also said he has been chronically unemployed due to his lack of housing and clean hygiene facilities.
As I left Camp Second Chance, Davis showed me an adjacent piece of land that, when the authorization takes effect (potentially next month), could have the camp reach its objective of supporting 60-70 people. In a brief pause, he painted a vision of how the camp could grow and develop in the future: “It would be nice to have some tiny houses; it would be beautiful. Tents are okay but if [the city] is going to give all of the [other] sanctioned encampments tiny houses, then why not the clean and sober one … all we want is the city to say it’s okay.” Davis even mused that the residents could build it; 70 percent of them, he says, have degrees or skills in a construction/ labor-related field.
All are welcome at Wednesday’s 7 pm meeting; the Joint Training Facility is a short distance north of Camp Second Chance, at 9401 Myers Way S. It’s where the city had a meeting about the Myers Way Parcels’ future last June – less than a month before the encampment moved in.Brie Larson’s new movie has already cooked up quite a bit of controversy among Indian internet users, who aren’t too happy with its portrayal of India.
Twitter users have been dragging the trailer for romance musical “Basmati Blues,” which takes place in India and features Larson, a white actress, as the protagonist.
People bashed the movie for perpetuating Indian stereotypes and casting a white actor in the lead role, reflecting the “white savior” cliche.
It’s 2017 and we are still not past the genre of “mystical Indian savages get saved by a white person” films #BasmatiBlues 😑🙄😫 https://t.co/oaVXF2wMjc — Purnima (@pkompella) November 10, 2017
The project was filmed years ago, but is only slated to open in India later this month, BuzzFeed points out. Larson plays Linda, a scientist whose company sends her to India to sell a genetically modified rice she created. But as more information is revealed about the harmfulness of her product, she decides to fight back against the agricultural company.
Producers Monique Caulfield and Danny Baron released a statement following the deluge of criticism. Though the trailer mentions that Larson’s character “will fight for justice,” the producers said “Basmati Blues” is not about a white hero saving India.
“We deeply regret any offense caused by the Basmati Blues trailer,” Caulfield and Baron said in the statement. “We have heard a number of voices that have understandably reacted to a trailer that is not representative of the film as a whole. Unfortunately, the international trailer has given the wrong impression of the film’s message and heart. This movie is not about an American going abroad to solve India’s problems. At its heart, this film is about two people who reach across cultures, fight against corporate greed, and find love.”
The producers insist the plot of the film in its entirety is respectful of Indian culture. However people across Twitter have already had it with the trailer. Some pointed out how the movie stings, especially considering India’s history of colonialism.
#basmatiblues is a terrible looking film filled with loads of stereotypes about Indians & India. We don’t need another movie about white saviours when we did everything in our power to get white people out of our country. Stop making shit films. Please🙏🏽 — Neha Wanikar (@nehawanikar21) November 9, 2017
#BasmatiBlues trailer made me feel like we r still in colonial India. Trust whites to teach Indians to do anything, right? Coz obviously we r dumb. Well, think again. #culturalappropriation have anyone from the movie crew ever been to India??? #SMH https://t.co/02MUv97tZU — RuMillenial😎 (@Zickey_M) November 10, 2017
Others noted that the film completely exoticizes Indian culture and does not accurately portray the country.
also it's 2017, most of our trains run on electricity which means you can't ride on the roof. and pls retire that trope of spicy food already. we know you can't handle anything of colour. #BasmatiBlues — Nia C (@sleepyhollowkid) November 10, 2017
This is ridiculous, they've completely ignored the culture of the country. Typical to portray India as about rice, spicy food, poverty, poor English and cringy music. India don't need a White saviour. We're good without them.https://t.co/ZxdCLmyn8n — Rahul W (@rahulw_) November 9, 2017
Others wondered how, in this day and age, a movie with Indian stereotypes could be released.
This reminds of those SRK movies that some producer shot in the '90s, shelved, & then released five years later when he became A-list.
Why would Brie Larson do this?!https://t.co/sXjpDqyvcb — Sahil Rizwan (@SahilRiz) November 9, 2017
Okay, but what were the people involved in making #basmatiblues actually thinking? 2013 was only 4 years ago and I'm pretty sure we were past these stereotypes way before. pic.twitter.com/0GEIGsX4ko — Roshni Nayee (@roshnayee) November 9, 2017
And some definitely don’t plan on watching the movie.An empty road during the Vietnam War. A hilltop landscape in Spain. A nondescript motel balcony in Memphis.
These otherwise ordinary settings are the backdrops to photographs that have become icons of history.
Nick Ut’s Napalm Girl photograph changed American popular perception of the Vietnam War. Robert Capa’s Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death became a potent symbol of Republican resistance against Fascism during the Spanish Civil War. Joseph Louw’s image of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. encapsulated the grief of his followers.
These images went viral long before YouTube and social media. But how does a photograph become iconic? What makes it indelible for generations? What kind of photo not only captures historical events but forever shapes how we view them? What a photograph portrays and what we project onto it are often different things. Photojournalists choose one instant and frame the image as they see fit. Even the best results, the most dramatic results, rarely provide context or nuance.
Nick Ut/Associated Press
In the project “Fatescapes,” the visual artist Pavel Maria Smejkal goes a step further and forces us to reconsider the veracity of historical images and the photographer’s role by digitally removing the people that made these images resonant. What is left is the scene as it might have looked just minutes before or after the photographer passed by. These images are reminiscent of a time, before Photoshop, when photographs were believed to be a reflection of reality. Mr. Smejkal’s alterations question whether photographs should be viewed as accurate representation.
Mr. Smejkal, 54, grew up poor in Communist Czechoslovakia, where, he said, his father was persecuted because of his fervent Christian faith. It was a world where people disappeared if their beliefs were too strong and a country, then under the control of the Soviet Union, in which leaders who fell out of favor disappeared even from photographs. His interest in how history is represented stems partly from growing up behind the Iron Curtain and living through the Soviet invasion in 1968.
“I tend to think about historical processes as something really fatal,” he said, “Something much bigger than we are.”
“Fatescapes” examines both the role and limitations of the photographic image as a historical document. “I remove the central motifs from historical documentary photographs,” Mr. Smejkal wrote in an e-mail. “I use images that have become our cultural heritage, that constitute memory of nations, serve as symbols or tools of propaganda and exemplify a specific approach to photography.”
Eddie Adams/Associated Press
Once an image is in the public sphere, the photographer no longer has any control over how it is interpreted. Eddie Adams, for one, thought that his Saigon Execution photo had been misunderstood, and the general had been demonized for meting out justice on the spot. And serious questions have been raised over the veracity of Mr. Capa’s photo of the militiaman.
Using a simple Photoshop tool, Mr. Smejkal has reshaped these images and challenged us to confront the relationship of photographer, image and history in a manner that is profoundly unsettling. Viewing “Fatescapes” encourages you to wonder if it even matters whether Mr. Adams’s general was misrepresented or if Mr. Capa’s photo was not what it purported to be.
Photographers spend their lives hoping to make an image that will affect how people view the world. Though we may want to think otherwise, those images are rare. If anything, attempting to portray a moment of “truth” is a very tricky business.UniverCity - Change log
I didn’t make as much progress this month as I would have liked. A lot of time was spent on internals when I should really be focusing on gameplay so I can plan to release this. Hopefully the next month will be better.
Gameplay
Paper planes
Students can now randomly throw paper planes around the room during lessons. Currently this is just a visual effect but it may have other effects later.
This is part of a system that allows scripts to spawn, animate and control objects in a room completely clientside so no networking is required.
Staff can now have stats
This was previously called feelings and was limited to students only. I have extended the system to cover staff as well with different entity types being able to have a different set of stats.
Currently the stats on staff don’t effect anything during lessons but this will change later.
These stats will effect the how well professors do their job when teaching e.g. control will effect how well a professor can handle large classes, skill will effect how well a professor teachs the class to its students.
New hiring screen
A random selection of staff are now generated and displayed to the player on the hiring screen instead of giving them a random staff member when hiring. This includes randomized stats and a random description.
Internal
Render scaling
Rendering scaling should allow those with low end gpus to still manage to run the game. This reduces the rendering resolution of the game whilst not effect the user interface keeping the game playable.
Delta-encode
One of the most messy parts of the game’s codebase was the entity delta encoding system. This system handled collecting ‘snapshots’ of the state of entities and serializing them into packet(s) that could be reconstructed on the other side to recreate the state. To optimize this it attempted to keep the packets small by only sending what changed, delta encoding. This involved a lot of comparing current and previous state and trying to work out how best to encode it. Like this
if ne.target.facing!= oe.target.facing { let _ = entity_data.write_bool ( true ); if let Some ( facing ) = ne.target.facing { let _ = entity_data.write_bool ( true ); let _ = entity_data.write_f32 ( facing ); } else { let _ = entity_data.write_bool ( false ); } } else { let _ = entity_data.write_bool ( false ); }
I realized a lot of this could be handled for me by a derive macro and set out to write one. And the end result was replacing about 200 lines of that with
let _ = ne.encode ( Some ( oe ), & mut entity_data );
and not having to worry about the reading falling out of sync with the writing.
# [ derive ( DeltaEncode )] struct EntitySnapshot { info : EntityInfo, #[delta_default] entity : ecs :: Entity, owner : Option < player :: Id >, target : ETarget, selected : Option < player :: Id >, room : Option < ERoom >, data : Option < EntityData >, emotes : Vec < EEmote >, tints : Vec < EColor >, } #[derive(DeltaEncode, PartialEq, Clone)] #[delta_complete] struct EntityInfo { key : Arc < assets :: ResourceKey <'static >>, variant : u8, name : EName, }
For the most part only the DeltaEncode derive is needed to generate the required code but attributes can be used to optimize/handle different cases. delta_complete for example will only send the contents of the struct if its not equal to its previous and it’ll send the whole contents in that case instead of a delta. In the case where nothing has changed a single bit is used to mark it. delta_default just fills the field with its default value instead of (de)serializing it. delta_bits can be used on integers to set the number of bits used to serialize the value.
In the case of position of the entity we can use the attributes to optimize it even more by knowing the limits of the values.
# [ derive ( Debug, Clone, DeltaEncode, PartialEq )] struct ETarget { #[delta_fixed] #[delta_subbits = "4:5,6:5,10:5,16:5,-1:-1" ] time : f32, #[delta_fixed] #[delta_diff] #[delta_subbits = "4:5,6:5,10:5,16:5,-1:-1" ] x : f32, #[delta_fixed] #[delta_diff] #[delta_subbits = "4:5,6:5,10:5,16:5,-1:-1" ] z : f32, facing : Option < Angle >, }
delta_fixed causes the floating point number to be encoded as a fixed point number which can allow for other attributes like delta_subbits and delta_diff to function. delta_subbits will go through through the list in order (where the values are <intbits>:<fractbits> ) and try and encode the value in the least number of bits possible. delta_diff will encode the difference from the last value instead of encoding the full number, when combined with delta_subbits this can end up with large savings when the entity only moves slightly.
The code for the derive macro is horrible currently but it works. I’m not really sure how to handle code generation in a nice way but i’d like to clean it up so I could release this as a crate at some point.
Minor things
Pathfinding now looks for doors in the target room to pathfind to. Whilst this may make paths longer in some cases it should prevent a lot of cases where they’d struggle to find a place too and also improve performance a bit.
The addition of filter to Option on nightly actually broke the build due to a filter method I had already added via a extension trait. I had to rename my method to get the build working again.
Twitch
I’ve haven’t been streaming my work on twitch here lately but sometimes I will pop up and stream for a bit. Feel free to stop by and watch if i’m streaming.
Subreddit
I’ve opened a subreddit for the game as per someones suggestion. Its empty currently but hopefully that’ll change once I get some time to put some work into it. Here
Privacy Policy
This site can be edited on Gitlab(Raphael, “The Transfiguration”, 1516-1520)
Raphael's Greatest Masterpiece: The Transfiguration
On the Feast of the Transfiguration, we are reminded of this great miracle—which has been memorialized in art and history.
Peter, James and John climbed the mountain with Jesus to pray; and there they witnessed an unveiling of the divine glory of Christ. The miracle of the Transfiguration helped to strengthen the Apostles’ faith, revealing that Jesus was really God. It is an encouragement to all Christians as well, giving us hope that we, too, will be glorified in heaven.
On the Feast of the Transfiguration, celebrated this year on August 6, we are reminded of this great miracle—which has been memorialized in art and history.
RAPHAEL’S MASTERPIECE
On Good Friday in 1520 A.D., prominent Italian painter and architect Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino (better known as simply “Raphael”) died at the age of 37. He left behind a large body of work including paintings, altarpieces, sculptures, sketches… and one unfinished oil painting on wood, titled the Transfiguration.
Raphael, busy with other commissions, had worked on the Transfiguration for four years—but he died prematurely before it could be completed. The work was finished by Raphael’s student Giulio Romano after the artist’s funeral. There is a noticeable difference in the fine details of the top and bottom, probably because the hand of the Master had been stilled.
Even in its unfinished state, Raphael considered the Transfiguration to be his greatest masterpiece. He was so proud of it, in fact, that it was prominently displayed behind his deathbed.
Two scenes from the Gospel of Matthew are depicted in Raphael’s Transfiguration:
At the top, Christ has climbed Mount Tabor with the Apostles, and there he is transfigured—appearing in his glorified body, flanked by Moses (representing the Law) and Elijah (representing the Prophets).
Christ has climbed Mount Tabor with the Apostles, and there he is transfigured—appearing in his glorified body, flanked by Moses (representing the Law) and Elijah (representing the Prophets). But in the lower part of the painting, the Apostles are struggling to heal a sick child. Only when the transfigured Christ appears in their midst is the child healed.
The original painting is now housed in the Vatican Museum. A large mosaic reproduction of the Transfiguration, created by a team of artists who worked nine years on its fine details, was installed in St. Peter’s Basilica in 1774.Pop stars inspire their fans to do some crazy things -- that's a lesson that newly minted chart topper Charlie Puth has learned the hard way. He's not really happy about the fact that fans are expressing their support for him by shaving their eyebrows.
Charlie, whose Paul Walker tribute song "See You Again" has been number one for two weeks, tells Entertainment Weekly that his fans have dubbed themselves "Puthers," but some have taken it to the next level. "I have a scar on my right eyebrow, but people who don't know me very well think that I just intentionally shave that part of it. So now, I see people on Twitter shaving that part of their eyebrow and saying, 'I'm a Puther for life!'"
He adds, "I'm like, 'Oh goodness! I hope your mom doesn't get mad at you."
By the way, Charlie got the scar on his eyebrow when he was bitten by a dog at the age of two and he -- as he described it on Twitter back in December -- "almost died of head trauma." He added, "My eyebrow is permanently like that. I don't shave it. Spread the word."
Charlie says now that "See You Again" is a hit, and he's appeared in Meghan Trainor's video for "Dear Future Husband," as well as his own clip for the song "Marvin Gaye," he's starting to get recognized by random people.
"I took an Uber last night and the driver just stared at me, so I was like, 'Is anything wrong?'" Charlie reveals. "And he was like, 'No, man, you're a great singer. I really look up to you!'"
And the best part? Charlie says, "He didn't even turn on the meter!"
Follow @ABCNewsRadio
Copyright © 2015, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.GOOGLE HAS ANNOUNCED that Chromebook users can now choose an alternative operating system for their prized devices.
It's only for the brave, and will involve potential permo-borkage of your machine if you get it wrong, but brand evangelist Francis Beaufort has been telling Google+ users about a new and easier process for poking around under the bonnet of Chromebooks, if that is your bag.
It involves a hard reset (in Google-speak this is known as a Powerwash) into the Developer Channel of Chrome OS, that is to say, the version that's even more unstable than the beta.
Because you are giving access to the root directory and power shell of the device, it is only during the initial set up that this is possible, so back up anything that is physically stored on the device.
From there, a simple command line will give you permission to boot and even install an alternative operating system from a memory stick.
We tried some experiments last night with a Keepod, an Android-on-a-USB-stick device designed to help children in the developing world breathe life into old computer equipment.
It's most definitely fiddly and long-winded as processes go, and not for the faint-hearted, but if you're determined, you can definitely get into an alternative operating system.
The next win will be to create a dual-boot partition so you can choose between Chrome OS, Linux or Android.
Beaufort comments that the functionality has been added "to support installing and testing custom code on Chrome OS devices", which is a posh way of saying "tinkering".
Chrome and Android are already moving closer together with the addition of a limited range of Android apps available in an Android runtime for Chrome with many more expected to follow this year.
The two are also moving closer together in terms of the Material design adopted across Google products including Android 5.0 Lollipop. µTwo teams from Spain and one apiece from Germany and Portugal will contest the UEFA Youth League semi-finals in Nyon, Switzerland, next month.
Domestic rivals FC Barcelona and Real Madrid CF will play in opposite last-four ties to one another, raising the possibility of an all-Spanish showpiece when the inaugural competition reaches its climax over three days at the Colovray Stadium in mid-April.
Like the single-leg knockout games before them, the semi-finals – which will also feature FC Schalke 04 and SL Benfica – and final will be decided by penalty kicks should a match be level after 90 minutes. The overall winners will receive the Lennart Johansson Trophy, UEFA's newest piece of silverware, which is named after the governing body's Swedish honorary president.
Quarter-finals
Chelsea FC 1-3 FC Schalke 04
FC Barcelona 4-2 Arsenal FC
Manchester City FC 1-2 SL Benfica
Paris Saint-Germain 0-1 Real Madrid CF
Semi-finals (11 April, Nyon)
Real Madrid CF v SL Benfica (13.00CET)
FC Schalke 04 v FC Barcelona (16.30CET)
Final (14 April, Nyon)
Winner of semi-final 1 v Winner of semi-final 2 (16.30CET)TALLAHASSEE — A dispute over whether two Christian schools could use the loudspeaker for a prayer at a football championship game is headed to federal court after one of the schools filed suit against an organization that manages high school sports in Florida.
The nonprofit that operates Cambridge Christian School in Tampa said the Florida High School Athletic Association violated its civil rights by banning the private school and its opponent from joining in prayer over the loudspeaker at the game. The quasi-public athletic association has said it couldn't allow a prayer over the loudspeaker because of the First Amendment's ban on government organizations endorsing religion.
"By banning us from praying over the loudspeaker, the FHSAA told our students that prayer is something bad and should be forbidden," Tim Euler, head of the school, said in a statement announcing the suit. "We want our students to know that prayer is good and a fundamental constitutional right that should be defended."
The lawsuit asks the court to block the athletic association from continuing to follow its policy in the future, as well as requiring the association to pay the school's attorneys' fees.
The fight began in December, when Cambridge Christian was scheduled to play University Christian School, from Jacksonville, in the Class 2A football championship game at the former Citrus Bowl, now known as Camping World Stadium, in Orlando. The two schools traditionally offer prayers before football games at their home stadiums.
The athletic association declined a request from both schools to allow them to use the loudspeaker for a prayer before the game, saying it would expose the association to "legal entanglements." The association said it is subject to the same rules as government agencies because the Florida Legislature has recognized it as the governing body for high school athletics.
The two teams prayed together before kickoff of the championship game, but the lawsuit said fans couldn't hear the prayer from the stands.
"Because the stadium is such a cavernous venue, it would be impossible for the Cambridge Christian and University Christian communities to join with one another in a community prayer without the use of the loudspeaker," the lawsuit says. "As a result, the FHSAA's refusal to allow Cambridge Christian to use the loudspeaker deprived the Cambridge Christian and University Christian communities of their ability to come together in a joint prayer."
The suit argues that the move was a violation of Cambridge Christian's rights to free exercise of religion and free speech, because the decision to ban the prayer was based only on religious content. It claims the athletic association violated the U.S. Constitution, the Florida Constitution and the Florida Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
Because the federal allegations take priority, the suit was filed in a federal district court in Tampa.
In an email to officials at both schools following the game, and included with the complaint, athletic association Executive Director Roger Dearing cited as a reason for the decision a 2000 case before the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled against a school allowing speakers to use a public-address system to broadcast a prayer.
"The issue was never whether prayer could be conducted," Dearing wrote. "The issue was, and is, that an organization, which is determined to be a'state actor,' cannot endorse nor promote religion. The issue of prayer, in and of itself, was not denied to either team or anyone in the stadium."
But lawyers for First Liberty Institute, a legal organization focused on religious cases that supports the school, have said the 2000 Supreme Court decision doesn't apply to the championship game because both schools are private. Attorneys from the firm Greenberg Traurig also are representing Cambridge Christian.Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump will make his first campaign foray to Washington state Saturday with rallies in Spokane and Lynden, Whatcom County.
Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump will make his first campaign foray to Washington state Saturday with rallies in Spokane and Lynden, Whatcom County.
Fresh off a landslide Indiana primary win that knocked his remaining GOP rivals out of the presidential race, Trump will campaign here before Washington’s now-largely-meaningless May 24 presidential primary.
Trump’s Lynden rally is scheduled for 3 p.m. at the Northwest Washington Fair and Event Center, according to state Sen. Doug Ericksen, R-Ferndale, who is part of Trump’s state campaign team. The Spokane rally is scheduled for noon.
The facility can hold 5,000 people, said Mark Firmani, a spokesman for the fairgrounds, which is just a few miles south of the U.S.-Canadian border.
Tickets for the event were being advertised on Trump’s website.
Trump’s visit is likely to draw protests. Labor unions and other groups started organizing their response when word of a likely Trump visit surfaced more than a week ago. They’ve been distributing fliers in English and Spanish headlined “Stop Trump. Shut It Down!”
Nicole Grant, executive secretary-treasurer of the M.L. King County Labor Council, one of the groups organizing the protests, said Trump critics want to make holding a campaign rally near Seattle “more trouble than it is worth.”
“When he talks about deporting people, when he talks about his attitude toward Muslims, this is language that ends in actual violence,” she said. “We want to speak out and be present and be counted as a movement that stands up to hate speech.”
Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat, plans to join immigrant-rights advocates and others at a news conference at Seattle’s El Centro de la Raza community center Friday to speak out against Trump.
Trump will start his Pacific Northwest trip with a rally in Eugene, Ore., Friday night, The Register-Guard reported.
State Republican Party chairman Susan Hutchison said in addition to this week’s visit, Trump also may return to the state to speak at the state GOP convention in Pasco, which runs May 19-21.
Trump’s planned visit comes as ballots are landing in mailboxes for Washington’s presidential primary. The deadline to mail back ballots is May 24.
While the outcome of the GOP race appears sealed, Trump still has to round up delegates in several states before the Republican National Convention in July.
In Washington, 44 delegates are up for grabs. In addition to Trump, Ted Cruz, John Kasich and Ben Carson remain on the ballot.
“We haven’t won the nomination yet,” Ericksen said. “We still have to win the primary election here in Washington. Our goal is to win all 44 delegates here.”
While Hutchison and other GOP leaders have urged the party to unify around its nominee, some prominent Republicans say they will not vote for Trump in the primary or in November.
Voters in the primary must choose to vote in either the Republican contest or the Democratic one.
On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are on the ballot. While the primary results will be tallied and reported by the Secretary of State’s Office, the state Democratic Party is ignoring the vote.
Instead, state Democrats are sticking with their tradition of awarding presidential delegates through caucuses. Sanders easily won the state’s precinct caucuses March 26, taking 73 percent of the delegates.From The Cutting Room Floor
This page contains which are not marked for translation.
Welcome to The Cutting Room Floor. 13,861 articles and counting!
The Cutting Room Floor is a site dedicated to unearthing and researching unused and cut content from video games. From debug menus, to unused music, graphics, enemies, or levels, many games have content never meant to be seen by anybody but the developers — or even meant for everybody, but cut due to time/budget constraints.
Feel free to browse our collection of games and start reading. Up for research? Try looking at some stubs and see if you can help us out. Just have some faint memory of some unused menu/level you saw years ago but can't remember how to access it? Feel free to start a page with what you saw and we'll take a look. If you want to help keep this site running and help further research into games, feel free to donate.
Featured Article Super Mario Maker Developer: Nintendo EAD Group No.4
Publisher: Nintendo
Released: 2015, Wii U Super Mario Maker is every Mario fan's dream come true; the ability to make their own courses. Longtime fans and newcomers can experiment with all possibilities like putting wings on blocks or enemies, and even stacking a ton of Piranha Plants on top of a Firebar. It was so well-received, it even got |
the globe, with glaciers melting and species dying off, so Saudi teaching is playing out in many countries in ways that are hard to predict and difficult to trace but often profound, the scholar said.
Saudi proselytizing can result in a “recalibrating of the religious center of gravity” for young people, the scholar said, which makes it “easier for them to swallow or make sense of the ISIS religious narrative when it does arrive. It doesn’t seem quite as foreign as it might have, had that Saudi religious influence not been there.”
Centuries-Old Dilemma
Why does Saudi Arabia find it so difficult to let go of an ideology that much of the world finds repugnant? The key to the Saudi dilemma dates back nearly three centuries to the origin of the alliance that still undergirds the Saudi state. In 1744, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, a reformist cleric, sought the protection of Muhammad bin Saud, a powerful tribal leader in the harsh desert of the Arabian Peninsula. The alliance was mutually beneficial: Wahhab received military protection for his movement, which sought to return Muslims to what he believed were the values of the early years of Islam in the seventh century, when the Prophet Muhammad was alive. (His beliefs were a variant of Salafism, the conservative school of Islam that teaches that the salaf, or pious ancestors, had the correct ways and beliefs and should be emulated.) In return, the Saud family earned the endorsement of an Islamic cleric — a puritanical enforcer known for insisting on the death by stoning of a woman for adultery.
Wahhab’s particular version of Islam was the first of two historical accidents that would define Saudi religious influence centuries later. What came to be known as Wahhabism was “a tribal, desert Islam,” said Akbar Ahmed, the chairman of Islamic studies at American University in Washington. It was shaped by the austere environment — xenophobic, fiercely opposed to shrines and tombs, disapproving of art and music, and hugely different from the cosmopolitan Islam of diverse trading cities like Baghdad and Cairo.
The second historical accident came in 1938, when American prospectors discovered the largest oil reserves on earth in Saudi Arabia. Oil revenue generated by the Arabian-American Oil Company, or Aramco, created fabulous wealth. But it also froze in place a rigid social and economic system and gave the conservative religious establishment an extravagant budget for the export of its severe strain of Islam.More ‘dino’ sightings in Papua New Guinea
by Brian Irwin
Published: 23 August 2012 (GMT+10)
Following on from his 2008 article Theropod and sauropod dinosaurs sighted in PNG?, in January 2012 the author Brian Irwin along with Russell Cook (both Australians) travelled to West New Britain in Papua New Guinea to investigate further reports of animals presumed to be extinct. Here is an account of their conversations with eyewitnesses—local people who claimed to have recently seen dinosaur-like creatures.
Figure 1: The author, Brian Irwin (left), with Russell Cook (right) at Gasmata, West New Britain, Papua New Guinea, with locals Fabian Amon (second from left), and Matthew—local politician and interpreter (second from right).
Sauropod sightings in the south of West New Britain
1. Ambungi Island Sightings
The inhabitants of Ambungi Island1 and the surrounding region have observed unusual animals that resemble sauropod dinosaurs since the mid-1990s. Ambungi Island is located about two kilometres south of the south coast of West New Britain, approximately midway between Kandrian and Gasmata. It is only since the 1920s that Ambungi Island has been populated.
Swimming with a sauropod?
A local man named Alphones Likky (interviewed on 15th January 2012—see Figure 2) claimed to have seen a sauropod-like creature in 1995 while he was spearfishing on the reef on the south side (unpopulated) of Ambungi Island.
Figure 2: While diving on a reef off Ambungi Island in 1995, Alphones Likky (far left) was startled to see a large sauropod-like creature about five metres away.
Alphones was facing south at the bottom of the reef stalking fish when, he says, he heard the sound of something crashing into the coral behind him. When Alphones turned around he was startled to see a large animal at close range, a distance of approximately five metres (c. 15 feet), fully submersed in the water. He says it moved slowly past from left to right and entered the left of two underwater caves located on the south side of Ambungi Island. (See Figure 3.)
Figure 3: An artist’s reconstruction of the animal seen entering an underwater cave on the south side of Ambungi Island.
Seeing the creature at such close range and being in the water with it, Alphones was terrified.
Alphones described the animal as having a long neck and tail and four legs, with the hind legs being longer than the front legs and the feet resembling those of a duck. The length of the animal was estimated to be four metres from the front legs to the end of the tail, with a height of two to three metres. The animal’s skin was stated to be dark brown, the texture of the skin could not be determined. The head of the creature was described as being small and similar to a snake’s head; no teeth were observed and the eye was described as being similar to the eyes of other animals. Dermal frills were observed on the animal’s back and tail, but not on the neck. The creature’s movement was described as being slow, with the tail moving noticeably. The neck of the creature was horizontal for the duration of the sighting, which lasted about 10 seconds. Seeing the creature at such close range and being in the water with it, Alphones was terrified. Wanting to escape with his life from this ordeal, Alphones promptly surfaced to reach his canoe and left the area quickly. He certainly didn’t hang around in hope of getting a glimpse of the creature’s body above the water!
Figure 4—At the foot of the cliff on the south side of Ambungi Island near the two underwater caves referred to in the main text. Above: Russell Cook, donning the mask and snorkel, is preparing to take a quick look at the cave entrances, and the nearby coral. Below: As Mr Cook enters the water, part of the entrance to the left cave (the one the creature was seen entering) can be seen at right. (These two photos guided the artist’s illustration of the background landscape of Figure 3.)
Figure 5: Alice Pasington (top left) tells of encountering a dinosaur in her garden.
The two underwater caves on the south side of Ambungi Island are separated by a distance of approximately 20 metres. The left cave has a circular entrance and has a height of about 2.5 metres. The right cave has a triangular entrance and also has a height of about 2.5 metres and appears from the outside to be considerably larger than the left cave. Neither cave has been explored because of the unavailability of sophisticated diving and lighting equipment.
A dinosaur in the garden?
In 1999 the second good sighting of one of these creatures occurred, however on this occasion the animal was observed on the land.
Alice Pasington (interviewed on 14th January 2012) was working alone in the garden on the south side of the island when she claims to have had an unusual encounter. From a distance of about 40 metres, Alice observed one of the creatures and estimated the total length to be about three metres. (See artist’s reconstruction in Figure 6.)
Figure 6: An artist’s reconstruction of the three-metre animal that Alice Pasington says she saw while working in the garden about 40 metres away.
Figure 7: The actual plant with the rough-textured leaf that Alice Pasington saw the animal eating.
The colour of the animal’s skin was reddish-brown and white around the breast area. The texture of the skin appeared smooth and dermal frills were seen only on the tail. The animal moved slowly with its neck nearly vertical and Alice saw it feeding on a plant with a rough-textured leaf (see Figure 7).
Alice then observed the animal turn around and walk to a small cliff, where it dived into the sea. During this time, the creature was followed at a distance and did not seem aware of Alice’s presence. After the animal had left the garden, Alice observed the five-toed footprints in the ground and later showed these footprints to other residents of Ambungi Island. The animal may have entered the garden from the beach on the western side of the island during the night. From the above description, it is possible that it may have been a juvenile specimen of the same type of creature as the other sightings, based on its size, colour, footprint and smooth skin texture.
Sleeping on a rock
Once the animal heard the sound of people, it moved from the rock back into the sea.
In 2007, Jasinta Pitim, another resident of Ambungi Island, observed the profile of a large animal sleeping on a rock on a reef on the south side of Ambungi Island. The animal was described as having a long neck that was curved back near its body, which was dark-brown, with skin described as being like a crocodile, and with dermal frills. Jasinta hurried home and told her husband Joe (interviewed on 14th January 2012), who travelled to the location, where he saw it too. Once the animal heard the sound of people, it moved from the rock back into the sea. Back in 1997 Joe and Jasinta observed a similar animal while travelling from Ambungi Island to Malengo Island in a canoe. From a distance of approximately eight metres the head and neck of the creature were visible for a short period of time.
Similar animals have also been observed on islands close to Ambungi Island.
Figure 8: Joe and Jasinta Pitim observed a large aquatic animal sunning itself on a rock on a reef off Ambungi Island in 2007. They had seen the head and neck of a similar creature protruding above the sea while travelling by canoe ten years earlier.
2. Gasmata sighting
A creature similar to the one(s) observed around Ambungi Island has also been seen once near Gasmata. One afternoon in August 2004, three adults—Fabian Amon (see Figure 1), Simon Patolkit2 (Figure 9) and Margaret Patolkit—along with some children observed a sauropod-like creature on the south side of Dililo Island, an unpopulated island used mainly for farming by the local people from Gasmata.
Figure 9: The gentleman at the far left of this photo is Simon Patolkit, who along with his wife Margaret and others observed a huge creature in the sea off Gasmata. (See Figure 10.)
Simon was interviewed on 13th January 2012 at the location of the sighting and Fabian was interviewed on 18th January 2012. Both of their accounts of the sighting were very similar.
Simon, Margaret and Fabian were diving for fish on the reef on the south side of Dililo Island when they heard an unusual sound in the water and noticed that the fish were scattering. They became somewhat frightened by this incident and left the water for the safety of the land. A short time later, while sitting on some rocks, they observed part of an unknown animal above the water about 40–50 metres away and travelling in an east-west direction parallel to the coast.
The creature had a large body and a neck estimated to be three metres long that was horizontal and close to the water. No tail or legs were visible and the total length of the visible portion of the animal was about eight metres. The head was like a crocodile or lizard and the eye was described as being ‘big’. The colour of the animal was uniform brown and the skin had a rough texture. The animal was described as having a ‘saw’ in the middle of its back, which consisted of 4 or 5 dermal frills. Observation time lasted about one minute during which time the creature moved slowly until it submersed itself fully in the water.
Figure 10: An artist’s reconstruction of the creature observed at Gasmata Reef. It held its head and neck (about 3 metres long) just above the water and was described as having a ‘saw’ in the middle of its back. The visible part of the creature was estimated to be about 8 metres (26 feet) in length—but its total body length was likely considerably greater, given its tail was submerged and out of view.
3. Possible theropod sighting in the north of West New Britain
A small theropod-like creature that local people have dubbed ‘Doren’ has been repeatedly observed around Benaule Village3, which is located approximately 25 km east of Kimbe on the north coast of West New Britain. The creature has been seen quite frequently for many years, with a close encounter reported in November 2010.
Figure 11: Pastor Ken-John showing the height of the ‘Doren’ he saw while using the toilet.
Pastor Ken-John was sitting on an ‘outhouse’ toilet at the Tabernacle Of Worship church during the day when he observed the profile of the head and upper torso of the ‘Doren’ appear only one metre away, just outside. The head was described as being like that of an aircraft (presumably like the profile of the nose of a jet, such as a 747) and the colour was medium brown. The animal has also been seen on the seashore near the church grounds by local people, where it comes ashore during high tide and travels back to the sea during low tide.
Figure 12: Pastor Ken-John stands by the sea in the grounds of the Tabernacle of Worship church, showing where he says the ‘Doren’ comes ashore at high tide. With him are Ben (the landowner) and John.
The ‘Doren’ has been observed eating crabs and digging up vegetables from a garden.
A distinctive footprint of the ‘Doren’, which is described as being about 25cm long, is often seen in the sand by the sea. The left foot of the creature was drawn in the sand by a local person (see Figure 13). During the wet season, the ‘Doren’ travels inland along a creek to a mountain. The ‘Doren’ has been observed eating crabs and digging up vegetables from a garden near the church—apparently looking for worms and other invertebrates to eat, as it doesn’t normally eat the vegetables it unearths.
Figure 13: The footprint of the ‘Doren’—as drawn in the sand by Ben (Figure 12).
Figure 14: A scan of pages from the 2003 evolutionary dinosaur handbook by H. Richardson, Dinosaurs and prehistoric life, showing a scientific illustration of Herrerasaurus (on the right-hand page). Click for larger image.
When walking, the ‘Doren’ uses four legs. However, when running the creature is reported as using rear legs only and as being able to outrun a human. It seems from the descriptions that the ‘Doren’ might be best identified as a Herrerasaurus.4
Concluding remarks
Reports alone are ultimately not enough to conclusively establish the fact that some dinosaurs are still alive today. However, if these are eventually backed up by hard evidence, the finding of living dinosaurs should not be such a surprise to people, considering that some animals and plants that were believed to be extinct for millions of years have been discovered alive. These discoveries include the Coelacanth fish (discovered in 1938) and the Wollemi Pine tree (discovered in 1994). For Christians it should be less surprising still, as the authority of the Bible is a solid basis for believing that humans have lived at the same time as dinosaurs (whether or not some dinosaurs still survive); because Genesis teaches that the heavens, the earth, and everything in them was created in that six-day period about 6000 years ago. The remains of dinosaurs (some of which are still ‘soft and squishy’, with identifiable proteins) would be no older than the Genesis Flood, which occurred about 4,500 years ago.Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson (center left) poses for a photograph with a supporter during a campaign event at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., on Tuesday, Sept. 13, 2016. (Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg News)
The Commission on Presidential Debates, which announced last week that only the Democratic and Republican candidates qualified for the first round of televised face-offs, is tucked into a pleasant but anonymous corner of northwest Washington. At noon Wednesday, the sidewalk outside the CPD was full of protesters, bearing signs and giant face masks in support of Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson. Polling stronger than any third-party contender since 1996, Johnson had missed the 15 percent polling threshold, and there was no recourse before the first debate on Sept. 26.
The protesters, at least 150 of them, had no plan except for shaming. Alex Graham, who had driven from Pittsburgh to organize the rally, said there was no interest in blocking the CPD entrance or rushing inside. "We don't want to do civil disobedience," she explained, as a cop asked her again how long she intended the protest to go. (Three hours.)
Johnson himself was not really about civil disobedience. As in 2012, Green Party candidate Jill Stein was planning to get arrested at the debate site, at Hofstra University. Johnson would make no such attempt, though his media-heavy schedule might bring him to the massed TV cameras on campus. Johnson is also uninterested in an "undercard" debate like the one proposed by Evan McMullin, an independent candidate running as a center-right alternative to Trump, and complicating Johnson's hope of a breakthrough in Utah.
[We simulated a Clinton-Trump debate, now you get to ask the questions]
Liz Mair, an anti-Trump Republican strategist now affiliated with Republicans for Johnson-Weld, told protesters that the Libertarian was the best candidate to break through the major-party stranglehold.
"At some point in the next five to 10 years, Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump is going to be wearing an orange jumpsuit," Mair said. "Simple fact. They have very, very weak morals, and they don't have the right views as to what our country should be standing for."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/presidential-candidates-who-bucked-the-two-party-system/2016/08/18/51f54126-64b9-11e6-b4d8-33e931b5a26d_video.html
Other speakers focused on their personal discovery of Johnson and how up to 30 percent of millennials told pollsters that they supported him. Eventually, they were joined by Johnson himself.
"You so honor me," Johnson said. "Thank you all so much. I found out, just the other day, that Ross Perot was polling less than we are now when he was allowed into the first debate. So this really is so important."
As supporters crowded around him, Johnson made the argument about the need for a third party that had gotten a hearing on cable news but none at the CPD. "Democrats, what, 26 percent?" he said. "Republicans, what, 28 percent? The rest of the population is independent, and where is their representation?"
"Let Gary debate!" chanted the supporters. "Let Gary in!"
Johnson, who (with Stein) still hopes that a lawsuit or a Clinton/Trump implosion might force him into later debates, had nothing else to say. "I've got several interviews to go to," he said, slowing only to take some photos.APN News & Media has sold its regional newspaper business to its own shareholder, News Corp, for $36.6 million. However, major shareholders have expressed surprised at the price, given it was only two times annual earnings.
APN's shares reached $4.90 on the news and closed at $4.75. APN recently completed a share consolidation that reduced the shares on the market from 1.3 billion to 196 million. The shares were this week using a temporary ticker code APNDA, and would revert to APN on June 23.
APN chief Ciaran Davis said the remaining radio and outdoor media were terrific for advertisers. Credit:Louie Douvis
But it remains to be seen if shareholders approve the deal, with the managing director of 16 per cent shareholder, investment firm Allan Gray, saying he was surprised at the bargain price.
"I am very surprised at the price. It does seem very low," Simon Mawhinney told BusinessDay.It was two months before Elsa let her visit Kristoff. Given recent events, the Queen was loath to let Anna take the risk- even with Pabbie's magic protecting them from hostile locator spells.
Unknown to anyone but Anna herself, Elsa had indeed taken the chance to fly off to Norgate the first night following her 'dream'. And she had found exactly what she was looking for.
The city- and the baron's estate- looked exactly like Elsa's nightmare. And the Queen was certain she had never been there once in her entire life. That could only mean one thing.
"Is it really such a big deal, Elsa?" Anna had questioned after her return. "That vision can never come to pass. I mean, it's cool and all that you can see possible futures...well not cool that you saw that one, but...is it anything to worry about?"
"Maybe not," Elsa acknowledged. "Although I doubt I'll ever get over seeing you..." she broke off hurriedly. "But doesn't it make you wonder? Whatever that vision was, it was more than just a normal dream. All of the other humans we've seen with magic, as well as all of those documented in history, possessed only one ability. Ice is my main power yes, but I can also heal. Somehow I gave you magic. And now I'm seeing possible futures...once possible futures, anyway. Why am I different?"
To that, Anna had no answer. But she trusted Elsa's belief that her vision had been their possible future. The thought of lying in a wooden cart, ruined by starvation and frostbite, made her shiver whenever it drifted into her mind.
Forget five or ten years! If she hadn't met Elsa, Anna apparently would have been dead within three. And it didn't seem like it had been a quick and painless end. The realization created another rush of gratitude for her Queen, but it also brought upon another uncomfortable epiphany.
This conspiracy had been good for Anna. Despite torturing, scarring, and damn near killing her, the Knight was alive because they had acted. Without their attempts on the Queen's life, Anna would have barely more than two years to live.
What had been best for Anna had also resulted in the deaths of dozens, the murder of Elsa's father figure, and a near toppling of the Queen's power. It was a horrible thought, and one Anna did her best not to dwell on.
Elsa had been even more disturbed by her vision. Dreaming about Anna's death would have been painful enough, but perceiving it so clearly...and knowing that it had been all too possible, was ten times worse. Consequently, when the Knight continually beseeched her to visit Kristoff, the Queen was reluctant.
\
"You flew off to Norgate in the middle of the night!" Anna had protested. "I didn't try to stop you!"
Elsa frowned. "That was different. It was quick and under cover of darkness, and I was speeding through the air the entire time. Even if our enemies knew what I was doing, they could never have caught me. You, on the other hand, will be walking through the city in broad daylight for hours."
"So? Don't tell anyone I'm going; Pabbie's Magic will do the rest. I'll change my hairstyle and wear a cloak when I'm outside. Please, Elsa."
The Queen's lips settled into a neutral expression. "Don't tell me you're in love with him," she said. "Because I won't be giving you my royal blessing to marry him.
"Of course not! I don't even like men! I'm just-" Anna broke off as she realized Elsa had just been pulling her leg. "Look," she sighed. "He's a good friend. We went through a lot together, and it was while he was helping me that he lost Sven. Now he's starting up a business on his own; I just want to make sure he's doing all right. He's not the kind of person to ask for help, even if he needs it. After what happened, I kinda feel responsible for him." She paused. "And why would I need your blessing?"
Elsa's hand came up to cover a ghost of a smile. "I'm your liege, Anna. Remember? To be official in the eyes of the law, any marriage you enter into would need my seal of approval. So for your sake I hope you weren't planning on proposing to one of the kitchen maids."
The Knight swatted Elsa's arm playfully, but the Queen's words had filled her with a distinct joy. It was the first real attempt at humor on Elsa's part since Kai's death. No one would have been happier to see the Queen recover than the seneschal himself.
"So, when..."
"Soon, Anna," Elsa promised. "Just wait until everything's calmed down a bit. And I swear to the gods, if you go without my permission..."
\
It had been tempting. But after what had happened the last time she had left the Castle without royal clearance, Anna had enough humility to admit that Elsa probably had a point.
And so she waited. Life in the Palace continued on as usual. Replacements were brought on for Kai and Gerda, though they did not assume all of the tasks left by the married couple that had preceded them. They were loyal and capable enough, but both rather distant; neither could fully step into the shoes of their predecessors. But with Kai gone and Gerda on mandatory leave, they didn't have much choice.
Anna did her best to adapt to being a Council member. As she'd expected, there wasn't much for her to contribute. Usually.
One meeting had made it all worthwhile. A few weeks after the assault on the Castle, the Council had been discussing the budget for the next year. The levels of taxes and spending had been agreed upon after an arduous debate, but Elsa had one last proposal before signing the document in front of her.
\
"This is a matter that has come to my attention over the course of the last year, the Queen was saying. "Arendelle has an orphanage in every major city, and all reports say that, together, they contain enough room for all of the country's homeless children. Our current level of expenses to the program likewise provides adequate food and living necessities for their occupants."
Lord Arald frowned. "Then...what is the problem, Your Majesty?" he asked with genuine curiosity.
"The problem is that the orphanages turn out their charges at the age of sixteen. That is simply too young. Sixteen may be the marrying age in Arendelle, but that doesn't mean that everyone is ready to strike out on their own once they reach their sixteenth birthday. I plan on raising the age cap to nineteen. That will give out country's disadvantaged children more time to mature and develop their skills...and keep them out of trouble."
Everyone in the room was staring at Anna. It was hard to argue the Queen's presumptions when a textbook example of a child turned out early was standing right in front of them. But that didn't mean there weren't protests.
"An admirable goal, Your Majesty," a Lady noted. "But such a change would be a significant burden on our treasury. How do you plan on paying for the shortfall?"
Elsa smiled. "We have recently come into possession of several fortunes. I can see no better use for the money confiscated from the traitors' vaults than a program that will better Arendelle as a whole. It will be more than enough to pay for the first few years. If the budget conditions are the same when those funds have run out, we'll look at other options."
For a few moments, no one spoke. Anna sensed that several of them had ideas on where that money would be better spent. Seeing the resolute look on their Queen's face, however, was enough to silence their complaints.
"I think it is an excellent idea, Your Majesty," Lord Arald offered. "However, I do have one objection. As you pointed out, the marrying age in Arendelle is sixteen. By that age, many of the children in our orphanages may well have found someone they intend to marry...or a job that they find suitable. I think it would be unwise to force them to remain in an orphanage until they turn nineteen. I propose that the age at which children may leave remain at sixteen, with the next three entirely up to the child's own choice."
Elsa's lips pursed thoughtfully. "Agreed," she said at last. "I'll have my scribes edit the proposal accordingly. If no one has any other objections, I will have this new program inserted into the budget, and will sign it tomorrow."
The complaint came from the last person anyone would expect.
"I have an objection...Your Majesty," Anna offered tentatively.
Her eyebrows rising in curiosity, Elsa turned to face the Knight. "Yes, Lady Anna? Explain."
Anna bit her lip in nervousness, but through sheer force of will she forced herself to continue. The entire Council glaring at her at once didn't make it any easier.
"The idea is good, but I think it could be executed better," she began, struggling to keep her voice steady. "I mean...you said we should extend the age cap to give children more time to develop. But if we just, uh, leave them in there for three more years, that might not do much."
Evangeline nodded. "What do you suggest, Lady Anna?"
"Training programs. The orphanages teach children to read and write, and that's very useful. But in later years, we didn't learn so much. If you could institute a system where orphans begin learning how to work...it doesn't have to be anything glamorous. Waitressing, smithing, record keeping. Those sorts of things. Maybe even some combat training for those who want a career in law keeping or the military. You could start at thirteen."
"Do you have any idea how expensive that would be?" Lady Catherine blanched. "Extending the age cap by three years and paying for six years of training? It's too much."
Anna's face went bright red under the older woman's glare, but she kept her voice calm. "Then just extend the age cap by one year, and train them until they're seventeen. That would do them a lot more good in the long run."
A light cough sounded from the Queen's lips, instantly turning the entire room's attention over to her. She glanced at Anna, her eyes glistening with approval.
"We can do both. I'm instituting an additional one percent surcharge on the transfer of noble estates. Once the confiscated fortunes are depleted, that number can rise to two percent," Elsa said.
"Your Majesty, that would cripple our-"
"No, it wouldn't. I'm asking those with the most to sacrifice a small portion of their wealth for the benefit of Arendelle. I will do the same. The fortunes confiscated by the traitors are by rights mine; I am choosing to give them away. And I am confident that the nobility will accept the chance to demonstrate their loyalty to Arendelle," the Queen proclaimed. The veiled implication was all too clear.
After no one spoke up for the next five seconds, Elsa raised her voice once again. "Good. I will see to the details myself. Thank you all for attending; meeting adjourned."
It would take some time to know the results, of course, but Anna was relatively confident that the initiative would be a success. It certainly could have helped her...probably. If she wasn't so clumsy with anything that wasn't a sword.
/
Elsa wasn't sure what she was enjoying more: the feeling of Anna's hands as they massaged her back, or the sensual bliss that arose in her mouth as their tongues danced fiercely.
She was nothing before this woman. Every single action on Anna's part sent a shiver of pleasure down the Queen's spine. Elsa did her best to return the favor, and judging by the quiet moans that constantly sounded from the Knight's lips, she was succeeding to an extent. But there was no question of which of the two women was getting the better end of the deal.
They were lying together in Elsa's...in their bed. It had been a long day, and neither of them really had the energy for a wild night of passion. Instead, they were interlocked in an intimate, comfortable kiss as they laid beside one another on top of the sheets. Each was clad in a thin nightgown, which did little to quell Elsa's arousal as their legs intertwined.
As close as they were, it wasn't enough for the Queen to be satisfied. She deepened the kiss, at the same time tightening the grip of her ankles around Anna's legs and pulling the younger woman even nearer. Now, their chests were touching...even as their foreheads continued to press against one other.
In the weeks since they'd first made love, Elsa had gained confidence. Intimacy no longer frightened her. But she still had a lot to learn, and there were many aspects of sex that she was simply unsure about. Thankfully, Anna was a more than willing teacher.
The younger woman had experience, passion, and (most importantly) a creative and overactive imagination. And as Elsa became more comfortable with the intricacies of intimacy, Anna continued to instruct her Queen in the advanced arts of making love. Now that she was certain that Elsa wasn't going to be frightened off when the boundaries were pushed, Anna had taken it upon herself to introduce the Queen to every possible way of bringing pleasure.
Knowing what she did now, Elsa had realized just how easily Anna had gone on her during their first time. The Knight had simply shrugged.
"So? It was still amazing. Being with you is better than being with any of the woman I've ever slept with. You actually care about me; all I ever was to my previous partners was a cheap thrill. And you're getting a lot better!" The Knight's face paled. "Not that you were bad to begin with!" Anna added hastily. "I mean..." she broke off as Elsa interrupted her with a kiss.
For her part, Anna had confessed that her time with previous partners made her feel...unclean. Strangely, it didn't really bother the Queen. Oh, if another woman so much as smiled at the Knight now...that would be enough to put Elsa on edge. But she didn't blame Anna for having taken her enjoyment where she could get it. In fact, she felt sorry for her.
She couldn't fathom a woman heartless (and stupid) enough to kick Anna to the curb after a single night of passion. But the Queen would do everything in her power to make up for the heartbreak her lover had endured.
Elsa was determined to treat Anna like...well, like a Queen. The younger woman didn't deserve anything less. As her eyes indulged themselves by roaming over the figure of the Knight she held in her arms, a fierce protective instinct flared in Elsa's chest. Anna had been deprived, brutalized, and tossed aside by the world for nearly twenty years. But as long as the Queen's heart was still beating, it would never happen again.
The monarch knew how lucky she was. Others believed that Anna was the fortunate one, gaining wealth and safety thanks to her conquest of the Queen's heart. Perhaps, that in and of itself was true.
Yet they were wrong. The way the gossip circulated, a listener would gain the impression that Anna was an unworthy lover who had wormed her way into a superior's affections. The opposite was true. Elsa possessed more money, power, and intelligence than most could ever hope to attain. But the Knight now resting in her arms was comprised of such compassion, bravery, and selflessness...there wasn't a person in the world that Anna was unworthy of.
A year ago, the Queen had had one purpose in life: serve and protect the people of Arendelle. Now, she had two. Whatever it took, she would give Anna the happiness she deserved. Elsa would love her, protect her, spoil her; she'd give Anna the world if only she asked. The Queen would make her Knight happy, no matter the cost.
And unfortunately, that would mean letting her visit the city for a few hours.
\
Anna rode swiftly across the Castle grounds. Bearing her weight was Stroud, a magnificent white Stallion. Luckily, there were plenty of horses in the stables that were white, and with her cloak up, the odds were good that the sentries wouldn't recognize her. As far as they and the rest of the Castle were aware, Anna was currently confined to her chambers by a mild yet contagious variety of fever.
Given without occasion or ceremony, Stroud had been a gift from Elsa...a present simply for 'being Anna.' He was a fine beast, more than fast enough for her liking yet tame enough for her inexperienced hands to control. She'd thanked her Queen thoroughly for the gift, of course.
Usually, she could only ride him around the Castle grounds, but that was still plenty of room to run. Anna loved the thrill of air whipping by her cheeks as they rocketed over the grass. The Knight had pushed her luck too far once or twice, the end result being her losing her perch on the horse and falling to the ground. While anyone else would have suffered broken bones and severe bruising, however, Anna was only slightly winded at worst. There were definite perks of possessing magic.
She was glad that Elsa had made her wear her cloak. It was only two months after the summer solstice, but already a winter chill was in the air. Thanks to its proximity to the northern pole, Arendelle was known for its short, mild summers. And summer was already over.
It would be less than forty degrees tonight. And with the way temperatures were declining, Anna wouldn't be surprised if their first blizzard was next week. For a winter storm to take place that early was unusual for Arendelle, but not unheard of.
Elsa would be happy.
Making her way through the walls and into the city, Anna found her way to Kristoff's address easily. On the Queen's insistence, she had made certain to memorize the route perfectly. Thus, less than twenty minutes after leaving the Castle, the Knight had arrived |
books sounded suspiciously like fodder for future papers."
As I leafed through the article, I found myself mentally awarding points to any prof whose supposed "guilty reads" were in fact even remotely embarrassing or guilt-inducing.
It’s no surprise that detective fiction — long the acceptable light reading of the professoriate — often turns up in the responses. Robert Stern, dean and architecture professor, recommends Georges Simenon’s Maigret thrillers and Christopher Fowler’s Bryant and May series, documenting the Peculiar Crimes detective unit in London; Sidney Altman (biology and chemistry) likes mysteries by Philip Kerr and Andrea Camilleri; Diana E.E. Kleiner (art history and classics) suggests Diane Mott Davidson’s culinary mysteries about "a spunky heroine named Goldy Bear."
OK, the Goldy Bear whodunit does sound a little silly. But if a taste for detective fiction was possibly, once upon a time, considered mildly outré in Ivy League faculty clubs, it’s been more than 70 years since Edmund Wilson declared (in his 1944 "Why Do People Read Detective Stories?") that he was "always being reminded that the most serious public figures of our time, from Woodrow Wilson to W.B. Yeats, have been addicts of this form of fiction." Detective fiction has long been a safe harbor for professors who wish to show they can unwind without risking any true status demerit.
Satirical "campus novels" about university life are another safe genre — what profession does not love reading about itself, after all? They too show up here; Heather K. Gerken of the law school declares, "This summer’s guilty pleasure will be rereading David Lodge’s Campus Trilogy." As with the mysteries, there’s not much real "guilt" in these erudite, amusing novels by a longtime English professor.
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We are now entering a new golden age of literature's academic marginalization.
A few brave respondents do venture into at least marginally disreputable genres. The dean of Yale College, Jonathan Holloway, mentions A.J. Jacobs’s Drop Dead Healthy: One Man’s Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection. Something of a self-help book, albeit a brainily ambitious one: We’ll grant a half-point to the dean. Paul Bloom (psychology and cognitive science) recommends Jonathan Gottschall’s The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch, describing it as "a thoughtful and scholarly exploration of male violence" but also "the story of how an out-of-shape English professor takes up mixed martial arts and becomes a cage fighter." One minus for "thoughtful and scholarly," but we’ll give him two for "martial arts" and "cage fighter" and call it a plus one. Anna Reisman, of the school of medicine, mentions the audiobook of Stephen King’s novel Mr. Mercedes: King is practically canonical by now, but Reisman gets bumped up a point for not actually reading written words on a page.
The winner by a long shot, however, is Laurie Santos (psychology), who winningly confesses, "My guilty pleasure summer reading always includes cheesy celebrity memoirs. This summer I’m looking forward to reading the new book by the actress and Internet star Felicia Day, called You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost). Day is kind of a celebrity idol for geeky girls, so I’m looking forward to learning more about her take on pretty much everything. Some others I liked were Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking, Joey Kramer’s (the drummer for Aerosmith) Hit Hard: A Story of Hitting Rock Bottom at the Top, and Tommy Lee’s Tommyland."
Not one but two heavy-metal-band-drummer memoirs about "hitting rock bottom": the Guilty Pleasure trophy goes to Professor Santos in a walk.
These exceptions aside, however, the books suggested constitute a risibly highbrow collection. Let’s bracket the various weighty nonfiction tomes ("the story of water from Rome’s aqueducts to modern-day battles over whether water should be managed as a priced commodity") and focus on the novels. Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time? Admittedly, it’s sometimes considered a YA book, but it was nearly universally praised, and won the UK’s Whitbread Award for Book of the Year. Haruki Murakami novels? Alice Munro? Marilynne Robinson’s Lila? Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers? The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel?? "Two wonderful new translations of Anna Karenina"?!? How can these possibly be "guilty reads"? What is going on here?
My first thought was: Yale professors are a bunch of humorless show-offs.
This surely can’t be true, however. And to be fair, a few of the respondents explicitly rejected the "guilty pleasure" concept, and simply explained what they’d been reading for pleasure. But a disturbing implication seems inescapable: For these various members of one of the country’s finest university faculties, literature itself — even the work of Haruki Murakami, Marilynne Robinson, Isaac Babel, Charles Dickens, and Leo freaking Tolstoy — has become a "guilty pleasure" so divorced from utility, labor, scholarship, and the other serious components of life as to become faintly embarrassing for a serious person to admit to enjoying.
As Gerald Graff explains in Professing Literature: an Institutional History, until the later decades of the 19th century, "the idea that literature could or should be taught — rather than simply enjoyed or absorbed as part of the normal upbringing of gentlefolk — was a novel one. … There seems to have been a tacit assumption in the colleges that the meanings of literature were self-explanatory and thus in need of no elaborate explication."
And prose fiction, in particular, was viewed for much of its history not as something to take very seriously or to study, but simply as a form of popular entertainment. In these days of shrinking enrollments in humanities classes and vanishing state support for the study of anything that doesn’t appear sufficiently data-driven and practical, is it possible that we have begun to cycle back to something like this way of thinking about literature? That it — even Dickens and Tolstoy — is merely a fun distraction from anything truly important?
If this is true, perhaps those of us who consider the writing of authors like Dickens, Babel, Tolstoy — and Alice Munro, Marilynne Robinson, and Stephen King too — to be as worthy of serious attention and study as chemistry, biology, architecture, psychology, or medicine can take a measure of perverse comfort. Surely imaginative literature also lost something when it gained, in the 20th century, an altogether reputable position in the academy, becoming fodder for SAT and AP questions, A-levels, and professional advancement. Perhaps we are now entering a new golden age of literature’s academic marginalization.
In 1778, the English clergyman and boys’ school headmaster Vicesimus Knox warned that novels "often pollute the heart in the recesses of the closet, inflame the passions … and teach all the malignity of vice in solitude." If literature once again becomes a scandalous "guilty pleasure" to "read when nobody’s watching," perhaps it can regain some of the power it possessed in those days when it was considered trashy fun at best, a solitary vice at worst — the power to astonish and arouse, to titillate and enchant.Precise Touchscreen Surface
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Javier Mascherano was sent off for kicking the driver of a medical buggy as Argentina were held to a 1-1 draw in a World Cup qualifier in Ecuador on Tuesday.
The Barcelona player was being taken off the pitch in the 86th minute when he kicked more than once at the shoulder of the buggy driver. Mascherano looked incredulous when he was got off the cart to be greeted by a red card from the referee.
Argentina had taken the lead through a Sergio Agüero penalty in the fourth minute but Segundo Castillo headed an equaliser less than quarter of an hour later.
A point for Argentina in the thin air of Quito kept them top of South America's World Cup qualifying standings with 27 points from 14 matches. Colombia are second with 26 points from 13 games after a 2-0 victory over Peru on Tuesday. Ecuador are in third with 22 points from 13 matches.Jet.com has closed $350 million in new funding, and says it has verbal agreements for another $150 million. The shopping startup, run by the entrepreneur who created Diapers.com, says a large portion of the money will be spent on marketing, hiring and customer support as it tries to attract a big customer base to compete against mass retailers like Amazon, Walmart and Target.
“It was definitely a challenging financing environment, no question about that,” CEO Marc Lore said in an interview. “And the fact we were able to get as much demand as we did at the valuation we had is just a testament to our performance to date and the size of the overall opportunity and the team we assembled.”
Re/code previously reported that Jet was in talks to raise up to $500 million total at a $1 billion pre-money valuation, and that the lead investor in the round was mutual fund giant Fidelity. The company confirmed those facts today and said that previous investors, which Re/code has reported include Alibaba, Bain Capital Ventures and Google Ventures, also contributed in this round. The total could climb a bit higher than $500 million if it takes on more strategic investors and potentially some debt, according to Lore.
Jet.com has now raised $570 million, which will balloon to $720 million once it closes on the additional funding. The large amount of capital has raised eyebrows in the tech industry because the company only launched widely in July and it’s looking like it’s trying to compete head to head with Amazon.
Jet’s founder Lore believes his company offers something different: A unique discounting structure that rewards shoppers when they put more items in their checkout basket. Orders that contain multiple items, ideally located in warehouses close to their delivery address, are more efficient and cost less to process. That allows Jet to pass along those savings to the customer.
The company has built a catalog of millions of products, ranging from toilet paper to TVs to cereal. It sells some stuff directly from its own warehouses, but partners with other merchants and retailers to sell the rest out of their fulfillment centers.
The company originally planned to offer additional discounts on each product, but scrapped those plans when it decided to do away with a $50 annual membership fee that was part of its initial model.
E-commerce industry insiders have expressed skepticism that Jet can train millions of shoppers to shop in a new way. That is, to order multiple products at a time to earn discounts when the customer may have come to the site intending to buy just a single item. Lore said in an interview he’s confident the model works.
“The No. 1 reason is we are already seeing people doing it,” he said. “We already have one million shoppers on the site. It’s working.”
Jet shoppers bought more than $33 million in goods through Jet in October, up from around $10 million in August. The company is spending heavily on advertising — from TV commercials to huge billboard campaigns in New York and San Francisco — to get the word out. The company’s marketing head, Liza Landsman, said the company will spend, on average, $20 million to $25 million in marketing each month, but will mostly rely on digital ads during the holidays and ramp up TV advertising again in the New Year.
Lore defended the company’s aggressive advertising spending, saying the market opportunity is too huge to ignore. The e-commerce market is about $300 billion in the U.S., but it still only accounts for somewhere around 10 percent of all retail transactions, depending upon how you measure it.In January of this year, I walked into the Lenovo booth at CES and almost immediately to the right there was a large display case set up, and inside was Eve. Eve looked great in the case all dressed in black, and was well attended to by her hosts. Eve is the one hundred millionth ThinkPad to be created, and I remarked at the time that it was likely not an accident that Eve is a ThinkPad X1 Carbon.
Eve, the 100,000,000th ThinkPad
The X1 Carbon has been Lenovo’s flagship ThinkPad since it was launched, and it brings the world of the ThinkPad business class notebook down into a much thinner and lighter form factor. Today we have the third generation of the X1 Carbon, and although the competition for the best Ultrabook keeps increasing, Lenovo brings a lot to the table with the X1 Carbon.
Lenovo keeps the ThinkPad lineup outfitted with features that the average consumer does not need, and the price is higher accordingly. But if you are someone who travels a lot, and needs a full featured notebook with all of the goodies, you can find it in this X1 Carbon. While the Ultrabook initiative started out with smaller devices, it gradually worked its way up to include larger notebooks as well, and the X1 Carbon certainly fits the bill for an Ultrabook despite the larger than average 14 inch display.
Despite the somewhat larger chassis, the X1 Carbon keeps the weight in check partially through the use of its namesake – carbon fiber. The display cover is created with carbon fiber reinforced plastic, and glass fiber reinforced plastic. This lets the display be lighter, thinner, and stronger than one made of aluminum or plastic alone. And it is strong. You can certainly flex the display, but it never feels like you are going to bend it by accident. The bottom of the X1 Carbon is made of aluminum and magnesium, so it is plenty strong as well. Lenovo even points out that the X1 Carbon has passed eight MilSpecs with fifteen individual tests, including shock, vibration, temperature, humidity, and silica dust exposure.
For many devices, 2015 is the year of the spec bump to Broadwell based processors, and Lenovo is not immune to this. Luckily that is a good thing though, and the new X1 Carbon is now powered by the latest Broadwell-U based processors from Intel. Buyers get a choice of the i5-5200U, i5-5300U, or the i7-5600U processor. None of these are slow, but luckily Lenovo has sent us the i7 model so we can get a feel for how it competes against some of the other Broadwell devices we have seen this year. Let’s take a look at the full specifications below.
Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (2015) As Tested, Core i7-5600U, 8 GB RAM, 512 GB SSD, 2560x1440 IPS display with Touch Processor Intel Core i5-5200U (2C/4T, 2.2-2.7GHz, 3MB L3, 14nm, 15w)
Intel Core i5-5300U (2C/4T, 2.3-2.9GHz, 3MB L3, 14nm, 15w)
Intel Core i7-5600U (2C/4T, 2.6-3.2GHz, 4MB L3, 14nm, 15w) Memory 4GB or 8GB DDR3L-1600Mhz Graphics Intel HD 5500 (24 EU, 300-900 MHz on i5, 300-950 Mhz on i7) Display 14.0" 1920x1080 TN
Optional 2560x1440 IPS
Optional Mult-touch Storage 128GB SATA SSD
180GB or 256GB SATA SSD with Opal 2 Support
512GB PCIe SSD Samsung SM951 Networking Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 7265 (802.11ac, 2x2:2, 866Mpbs Max, 2.4 and 5GHz) Audio HD Audio, Realtek ALC3232 codec
Stereo Speakers (downfiring) 1 watt x 2
dual array microphone Battery 50 Wh Battery
45 Watt charger Right Side USB 3.0
Ethernet Extender Left Side USB 3.0 Ports
Headset Jack
Mini-DisplayPort
HDMI
Power and OneLink Connector Dimensions 331 x 227 x 18.5mm (13.03 x 8.94 x 0.73 inches) Weight 1.27-1.45 kg (2.8-3.2 lbs) Extras 720p Webcam
Backlit Spill-Resistant Keyboard Pricing $1088-$2300 USD (As Tested: $2100)
Since this device falls into the ThinkPad line, you get a lot of customization options when purchasing that Lenovo does not do for their consumer models, and that is very welcome because on a lot of devices if you want feature X you have to also buy features Y and Z, which can really bump up the costs. However a few things need to be called out on the X1 Carbon. This is a premium Ultrabook, so it is a bit sad that in 2015 the base model is still offered with just 4 GB of memory, and because this is soldered on (like all of these very thin devices) it would be money well spent to just add the extra $75 Lenovo charges for the 8 GB model. Luckily even though Lenovo calls it 1x8 GB in the guide, it is in fact dual-channel memory. The other big complaint is the 1080p model is offered with a TN panel. That is not really acceptable in a $1000+ device in 2015 any longer. Moving to the QHD version of the panel for $150 would be money well spent since that will bring you an IPS panel.
There are also a lot of options for storage, and the base model comes with just a scant 128 GB of SSD space available, but for not too much more you can bump that up to 180 or 256 GB. For those that need even more storage space and speed, Lenovo offers the SM951 equipped 512 GB PCIe based Samsung SSD. When the X1 first launched, it was a hefty $700 upgrade, but now it is a mere $425 over the base 128 GB offering.
The X1 Carbon is even offered with optional LTE connectivity, via the Sierra EM7345, for those that need mobile data connectivity without tethering.A New York Times profile once said that Miami Herald humor columnist Dave Barry "makes his living by taking prosaic ideas to incongruous extremes." He is the only Pulitzer Prize winner to have a sitcom—CBS's Dave's World—based, very loosely, on his life. (They turned his one son and two dogs into just the opposite, but he enjoys cashing the checks.)
The Pulitzer Prize judges gave Barry the award for commentary in 1988 "for his consistently effective use of humor as a device for presenting fresh insights into serious concerns." His concerns include beer, Barbie, a "worldwide epidemic of snakes in toilets," exploding Pop-Tarts, and, perhaps most famously, "the worst songs ever recorded."
To be fair to the Pulitzer committee, the real Dave does devote more column inches than the average pundit to making Very Big Government look silly and obnoxious. This is a fresh insight in New York and Washington, and wildly popular with readers, who have bought more than a million copies of his books.
Taking prosaic ideas to incongruous extremes, he writes things like: "With the federal deficit running at several hundred billion dollars per year, Congress passed a transportation bill that, according to news reports, includes $30 million for a 'hightech' moving sidewalk in Altoona, which happens to be in the district of Rep. 'Bud' Shuster, the ranking Republican on the surface transportation subcommittee.
"I don't know about you, but as a taxpayer, I am outraged to discover that, in this day and age, Altoona residents are still being forced to walk around on regular low-tech stationary sidewalks. I'm thinking of maybe organizing a group of us to go there and carry Altoonans on our backs until they get their new sidewalk. I'm also thinking that maybe we should donate an additional $10 million or so to build them a high-tech computerized Spit Launcher that will fire laser-guided gobs onto the moving sidewalk, so the Altoonans won't have to do this manually. 'What have I done today to help keep 'Bud' Shuster in Congress?' is a question we all need to ask ourselves more often."
Contributing Editor Glenn Garvin interviewed Barry at his Miami Herald office.
Reason: You were in Washington recently to do a story. What was it like there?
Barry: It's like going to Mars. When you come back out no one is talking about any of the things the people in Washington are talking about.
If we're spending $853 trillion on some program now, and next year we spend any less, that's "budget-cutting" to them. For them, the question is always, "What kind of government intervention should we impose on the world?" They never think that maybe we shouldn't.
It gives me a real advantage as a humorist because I get credit for having insight and understanding—and I don't. I don't have any insight or understanding on anything about the government. All I think is that it's stupid—which is the one perspective that's almost completely lacking in Washington.
Reason: Did people there find your perspective peculiar?
Barry: They know this is what I do. Reporters aren't stupid. We were standing around talking about which of the 900 health-care proposals that nobody's going to accept is that day's hot news. They know how silly that is. But that's what they do. And if they don't do it, they'll get fired and someone else will do it. There's tremendous pressure, if you're in that system, to be involved and be interested and to care about it. There's no room to say, "This is stupid."
(One of the two tape recorders goes down. The reporter fiddles with it.)
Reason: I see why they wanted me to bring two. I'm totally humiliated. Virginia will be able to say, "Good thing I told you to bring two."
Barry: You know, if we had strict government standards about tape recorders, this kind of thing wouldn't happen. The consumer would be protected.
Reason: Was there anything surprising or unexpected about Washington?
Barry: I've been to Washington many times over the years for stories, and it always seems remarkably the same. More the same than the rest of the country. It's almost like they dress the same as they did 20 years ago. The same old guys are sitting outside the same dirty, dingy secret offices in the Capitol that you're not allowed to go in. But there's always this endless crowd of young, enthusiastic people who are in their Junior Achievement club or whatever, and someday they're going to be assistant to an aide to somebody. But they're making important contacts now that will serve them well the rest of their lives.
Reason: You're not sounding like a guy who has the fire in his belly for the '96 presidential race.
Barry: Oh, I never stop running. I'm not one of the weenies who drop out just because the electoral college votes. I'm still in the race. I'm an extremely corrupt candidate and I stress that in case anybody in our reading audience is interested in sending me money. You can have a naval base, is what I'm saying.
Reason: I would think that Washington would strain one's sense of humor. Sitting there listening to some imbecile like Paul Simon—the imbecile senator, not the folk singer—did you want to leap over his desk and cut his throat?
Barry: I'm a humorist. A guy like Paul Simon just makes my life so much simpler. When I was there, he had a hearing against hate. Steven Spielberg came and testified against hate. Paul Simon said hate was bad. Orrin Hatch was there, and he was against hate too. Everyone was opposed to hate. Is this really a wonderful way to spend our tax dollars, to have these men drone away about how against hate they are?
Reason: Did they make a token attempt to represent the pro-hate position?
Barry: No. But if the pro-hate lobby were to set up a PAC, I'm sure they'd be heard. It's not like they're not fair up there.
Reason: You've written in your columns about the strategic helium reserve the government keeps in case we have a sudden need for a fleet of dirigibles.
Barry: What bugs me when I write that is that I suspect 90 percent of my readers think I made it up.
Reason: What's something about the government that really pisses you off?
Barry: Well, that helium thing does. That's real money. All the tax money that I've ever, ever paid—and I've paid a lot of taxes—will not even begin to pay for one year of the strategic helium reserve. So when I sit and write a check out to the government, I can take it quite personally.
Reason: You don't sound like one of the people who fills out the IRS forms and then sends in voluntary contributions to alleviate the national debt.
Barry: No. Every year I write a tax advice column and I used to always make fun of that. One year, one of my favorite IRS commissioners, I think his name was Roscoe somebody, wrote that one of the most often-asked questions by taxpayers was, "How can I contribute more?" Well, I tell ya, ol' Roscoe's really been doing situps under parked cars again. I've heard a lot of people ask a lot of questions about taxes, but I never heard anybody say, "How can I, the ordinary person, send more money for no reason?"
Reason: Whatever happened to your $8.95 tax plan?
Barry: Oh, the $8.95 tax plan. Well, it was really popular with the average reader. It definitely reduced his taxes significantly. This was years ago, I think during the early Reagan years. I came up with a plan that everybody just pay $8.95 in taxes. Cheating would be allowed. But the incentive to cheat wouldn't be nearly as great if you only had to pay the $8.95. There were a few people who would have to pay hundreds of millions of dollars under this plan. I think it was Mark Goodson and Bill Todman, the guys who do the quiz shows. But almost everybody else would be off really cheap.
Reason: Do you ever get complaints that you're making people cynical?
Barry: Every now and then, when I write my annual tax column, some ex-IRS agent will complain, "There you go IRS bashing again." They're always saying that they're just doing their job. Someone I know once said, "You could get another job."
Reason: In your column I detect a certain skepticism at the notion that congressional spending creates jobs.
Barry: Of all the wonderful things government says, that's always been just about my favorite. As opposed to if you get to keep the money. Because what you'll do is go out and bury it in your yard, anything to prevent that money from creating jobs. They never stop saying it. They say it with a straight face and we in the press will write that down. We will say, "This is expected to create x number of jobs." On the other hand, we never say that the money we removed from another part of the economy will kill some jobs.
Reason: Have you ever had a government job?
Barry: No. I'm trying to think of what government job I would want. Maybe a disgruntled postal worker.
Reason: What's the most ridiculous government program you've ever written about or heard of?
Barry: I would really have a hard time just picking one. Anything at all in West Virginia is a good place to start. My favorite ones are when our own Defense Department says, "No, we really don't want you to build these weapons systems." Where do we stand now with the BI Bomber? We're going to build them but not put wings on them? We call it defense spending, but I wonder why we don't just hand the money to Lockheed and let them go out and spend it and not build a plane that might crash and kill somebody.
I don't think the press has done a very good job dealing with government spending. The Defense Department with the $9,500 toilet seat, that's not the problem anymore. Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security are the problem. That's us. That's our generation. There the press never says a word.
We certainly never require politicians to ever address those issues except really briefly sometimes during the New Hampshire primary, and then everybody falls asleep.
Reason: Have you noticed that baby boomers are showing alarming tendencies toward becoming safety Nazis?
Barry: I hate to speak for the whole society, but I will. I'm a journalist, it's my job. The real repressive, smug part of it seems to have passed. There's been something of a reaction against political correctness. Needless to say, the government hasn't caught up yet.
But when the boomers started to have kids reach adolescence, there was suddenly this feeling that they needed to protect their kids from all the same things they did when they were kids. Which I guess is a natural tendency, but it makes for a less fun society.
Reason: It strikes me as bizarre that a prospective Supreme Court justice has to get up there, in his 40s, and say, "No, I never smoked pot."
Barry: The whole thing about whether you smoke marijuana or not is so ridiculous. That and whether you protested the Vietnam War. Give me a break. Especially the marijuana thing. I'm inclined to think that anybody who never tried it should not be allowed in public office. But to make them get up there and lie, or at least be incredibly disingenuous, is just embarrassing.
After a while, the way this country deals with drugs is just not funny. What a waste of everyone's time and effort. What a waste of a lot of people's lives. The way we deal with drugs and sex. I saw one of these real-life cop drama shows, and they mounted a camera in this undercover agent's pick-up truck, right under the gear shift, and they sent him out to pick up prostitutes.
So the whole show consisted of this guy, who's quite a good actor, driving to this one street, and young prostitutes come up to him and solicit him. He says OK. They get in. They're trying real hard to be nice. He's going to pay $23, that's all he's got and they said that's OK. Meanwhile, behind him the other cops, these fat men with walkie-talkies, are laughing and chuckling because here they are about to enforce the law and protect society. They take her to some street and then of course they come up and arrest her. This poor woman-I don't know whether she's feeding her drug habit or feeding her kids or whatever. And the cops are so proud of themselves, these big strapping guys.
It just made me sick to see this. To treat these people who are trying to make a living, one way or another, this way, and to be proud of it. It's on television and we're all supposed to watch this and feel good about it. It's just disgusting.
It's like when cops sell drugs to people and then arrest them. And then we reach the point where I think it was Sheriff Nick Navarro in Broward County [Florida] had his lab making crack so they could sell it. They couldn't get enough in south Florida, so they had to actually produce it themselves.
What politician would say, "This is really a waste of money to be doing what we're doing? It's ridiculous sending cops out to arrest prostitutes when we're supposed to be concerned about crime in this country." What politician would ever say that? What newspaper person would ever say that without getting stomped all over by all the other hypocrites?
Reason: (Reporter fiddles with broken tape recorder, trying to fix it. It still doesn't work.) I feel guilty sitting here knowing I don't have two tape recorders running like Virginia wanted. No one has ever crossed Virginia Postrel and lived to tell about it.
Barry: I can't help but notice that the Japanese product is the one working.
Reason: Didn't you once get a letter from someone on the Supreme Court?
Barry: I got a letter from [Justice] John Paul Stevens. I won't call it a serious letter. It was on his official John Paul Stevens stationery, though. He brought to my attention a product that I already knew about called Beano, which is an antiflatulance product. I was very pleased to get a Supreme Court justice suggesting a column, so I went and did a column about Beano. I went with my wife and another guy to a Mexican restaurant, which we thought would be the ultimate test for an antiflatulance product. There's a reason most of Mexico is located out of doors. And it worked. Several newspapers refused to run that column. But they did run advertisements for Beano.
Reason: You write about Miami as a place filled with people from many different lands, cultures, backgrounds, walks of life—all of whom want to kill each other. When they were going to bring a pro basketball team, you suggested we call it the "Giant Blood-Sucking Insects." So why do you live here?
Barry: Well, for one thing the Herald is here. If the Herald was in Minneapolis, I'd probably be in Minneapolis.
That isn't the main reason. I actually like south Florida. I never lived in a more interesting place than this. I've never met a wider range of people. I guess when I came here I thought there were Cubans and then there were people from New York and that was Miami. Now I know that it's Cubans, people from New York, and some people from New Jersey.
Actually, there are people from all ove—not just Latin America, certainly not just Cuba, but all over Europe, all over the United States. A lot of them just got here and have interesting stories to tell about where they are from. I like that. I like knowing a lot of different types of people. And I can afford to live in a relatively safe part of Miami.
Reason: Do you go along with the conventional Miami opinion that we should invade Haiti since they've sent all these dangerous rafts to our shores?
Barry: I guess like every other American I feel very threatened by the situation in Haiti. I know our own lifestyle here is hanging by a thread because of what's going on down there.
Reason: What about Cuba? What's the solution to this Cuban business?
Barry: Let them in! Look what they did for Miami. This was a pathetic little town and now it's a big city. It's just so silly. Let people come in and work, but come in and work. If we let them come in for the purpose of signing them up for government programs, I'm not too enthused about that.
Reason: One of the planks in your presidential campaign is the Department of Two Guys Named Victor.
Barry: This is one of those times I wasn't kidding. At the time, we were mad at Moammar Gadhafi, which resulted in us bombing all over Libya and killing a bunch of people, but not him. Then Ronald Reagan gets up and says we're not trying to kill him, we're just dropping bombs. You can kill all the Libyans you want, but legally you can't try to kill the leader.
The other one was Manuel Noriega. Here we have a problem with just one person, and we send all these troops down to deal with it. All these people get killed and hurt, but not Noriega.
So instead of messing around with armies, get a couple of guys named Victor. The president meets with them and has breakfast, or he goes to dinner with them at the restaurant of their choice, and suggests that he's having a problem. Then the next thing you know, you read in the paper that Saddam Hussein has suffered an unfortunate shaving accident resulting in the loss of his head. We don't involve a lot of 22-year-old kids in this dispute between George Bush and Saddam Hussein.
Reason: Let's talk about Vietnam. Did you think the war was evil, that we were fighting the wrong guys, or was it like, to paraphrase Muhammad Ali, "You didn't have any quarrel with no Vietcong"?
Barry: First of all I thought that was the best argument anybody ever gave against going to Vietnam. The most articulate, clear-cut, understandable, accurate, rational argument ever. To me, it showed a lot more wisdom than a lot stuff I heard from anti-war people. There was a lot of talk about why we should be opposed to the war that was pro-totalitarian.
I felt ashamed at the time to say I didn't want to go. I didn't have any stake in that war. I didn't want to get killed; I didn't know anybody over there that I wanted to go over and kill on behalf of. I think the real gut-level reason was what Ali said. But at the time I felt that you had to have a moral justification. It didn't occur to me then that the moral justification is that other people can't tell you who to kill.
If they come for my kid, I'd say, "Go |
allowed only in disciplined higher-level structures such as the if-then-else statement and the while loop. This methodology was developed into structured programming movement, the title of his 1972 book, coauthored with C.A.R. Hoare and Ole-Johan Dahl. Considered by many as the first significant movement in history of computer programming, structured programming became the new programming orthodoxy during the 1970s.[60][61][62] Bertrand Meyer remarked that, "The revolution in views of programming started by Dijkstra's iconoclasm led to a movement known as structured programming, which advocated a systematic, rational approach to program construction. Structured programming is the basis for all that has been done since in programming methodology, including object-oriented programming."[63]
Structured programming is often regarded as "goto-less programming". But as Bertrand Meyer notes, "As the first book on the topic [Structured Programming by Dijkstra, Dahl, and Hoare] shows, structured programming is about much more than control structures and the goto. Its principal message is that programming should be considered a scientific discipline based on mathematical rigor."[64] As a programming paradigm, structured programming – especially in the 1970s and 1980s – significantly influenced the birth of many modern programming languages such as Pascal,[65][66] C, Modula-2, and Ada.[67] The Fortran 77 version which incorporates the concepts of structured programming, was released in 1978. The C++ language was a considerably extended and enhanced version of the popular structured programming language C (see also: list of C-based programming languages). Since C++ was developed from a more traditional structured language, it is a 'hybrid language', rather than a pure object-oriented programming language.[68]
In his article Structured Programming: Retrospect and Prospect (1986), Harlan Mills writes, "Edsger W. Dijkstra's 1969 Structured Programming article precipitated a decade of intense focus on programming techniques that has fundamentally altered human expectations and achievements in software development. Before this decade of intense focus, programming was regarded as a private, puzzle-solving activity of writing computer instructions to work as a program. After this decade, programming could be regarded as a public, mathematics-based activity of restructuring specifications into programs. Before, the challenge was in getting programs to run at all, and then in getting them further debugged to do the right things. After, programs could be expected to both run and do the right things with little or no debugging. Before, it was common wisdom that no sizable program could be error-free. After, many sizable programs have run a year or more with no errors detected. These expectations and achievements are not universal because of the inertia of industrial practices. But they are well-enough established to herald fundamental change in software development."
The book Concise Encyclopedia of Computer Science (2004), edited by Edwin D. Reilly, notes that "the major contributions of structured programming have been twofold—the elevation of programming technique to something less of an art and more of a science, and the demonstration that carefully structured programs can be creative works of sufficient literary merit to deserve being read by humans and not just by computer."[69]
Program design and development (software engineering research) [ edit ]
Dijkstra's ideas about programming methodology (especially the structured programming movement) helped lay the foundations for the birth and development of the professional discipline of software engineering (in particular the software design and development), enabling programmers to organize and manage increasingly complex software projects.[70][71] In the late 1960s Dijkstra discussed the concept of program families. And in the mid 1970s David Parnas and others clarified the idea and showed how to apply it in software engineering principles.
The rise of the structured programming movement led to many other structured approaches applied to software design. The techniques of structured analysis and structured design are outgrowths of structured programming concepts and techniques, and of the early ideas about modular design. Principles of modularity were strengthened by Larry Constantine's concepts of coupling (to be minimized between modules) and cohesion (to be maximized within modules), by David Parnas's techniques of information hiding, and by abstract data types.[72] A number of tools and methods employing structured concepts were developed, such as Structured Design, Jackson's Structured Programming, Ross' Structured Analysis and Design Technique (SADT), Yourdon's Structured Method, Structured Systems Analysis and Design Method (SSADM), and James Martin's information technology engineering. The field of software metrics is often considered as a direct influence of the structured programming movement on software engineering in the 1970s.
Separation of concerns (SoC), one of the basic principles in software engineering, is a design principle for separating a computer program into distinct sections, such that each section addresses a separate concern. The term separation of concerns was coined by Dijkstra in his 1974 paper "On the role of scientific thought".[73]
Operating system research [ edit ]
In the 1960s Dijkstra and his colleagues in Eindhoven designed and implemented THE (standing for 'Technische Hogeschool Eindhoven') operating system, which was organised into clearly identified layers.[74] His 1968 article on this subject provided the foundation for subsequent designs of the operating systems. The IEEE Computer Society's David Alan Grier writes, "We generally trace the idea of building computer systems in layers back to a 1967 paper that the Dutch computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra gave to a joint IEEE Computer Society/ACM conference. Prior to this paper, engineers had struggled with the problem of how to organize software. If you look at early examples of programs, and you can find many in the electronic library of the Computer Society, you will find that most code of that era is complicated, difficult to read, hard to modify, and challenging to reuse. In his 1967 paper, Dijkstra described how software could be constructed in layers and gave an example of a simple operating system that used five layers. He admitted that this system might not be a realistic test of his ideas but he argued that the "larger the project, the more essential the structuring!" The idea of using layers to control complexity has become a mainstay of software architecture. We see it in many forms and apply it to many problems. We see it in the hierarchy of classes in object-oriented programming and in the structure of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). SOA is a relatively recent application of layering in computer science. It was articulated in 2007 as a means of controlling complexity in business systems, especially distributed systems that make substantial use of the Internet. Like Dijkstra's plan for system development, its layering system is called the SOA Solution Stack or S3. The S3's nine layers are: 1) operational systems, 2) service components, 3) services, 4) business processes, 5) consumer actions, 6) system integration, 7) quality control and assurance, 8) information architecture, and 9) system governance and policies."[75]
Dijkstra organized the design of the system in layers in order to reduce the overall complexity of the software. Though the term 'architecture' had not yet been used to describe software design, this was certainly considered the first glimpse of software architecture.[1] It introduced a number of design principles which have become part of the working vocabulary of every professional programmer: levels of abstraction, programming in layers, the semaphore, and cooperating sequential processes. His original paper on the THE operating system was reprinted in the 25th Anniversary issue of Communications of the ACM, in January 1983. By way of introduction, the Editor-in-Chief says, "This project initiated a long line of research in multilevel systems architecture — a line that continues to the present day because hierarchical modularity is a powerful approach to organizing large systems."[11]
Concurrent computing and programming [ edit ]
semaphore (Dutch: seinpaal, the term used in Dijkstra's original description[76]). In the early 1960s Dijkstra proposed the first synchronisation mechanism for concurrent processes, the, the term used in Dijkstra's original description). In the early 1960s Dijkstra proposed the first synchronisation mechanism for concurrent processes, the semaphore with its two operations, P and V.
In a one-page paper from 1965 Dijkstra introduced the'mutual exclusion problem' for n processes and discussed a solution to it. It was probably the first published concurrent algorithm.[7][13] The notion, standard by now, of a 'critical section' was also introduced in this paper. Per Brinch Hansen, a pioneer in the field of concurrent computing, considers Dijkstra's Cooperating Sequential Processes (1965) to be the first classic paper in concurrent programming. As Brinch Hansen notes, 'Dijkstra lays the conceptual foundation for abstract concurrent programming' with that paper.[77]
Solution of a problem in concurrent programming control, and is credited as the first topic in the study of A simple example of two processes modifying a linked list at the same time causing a conflict. The requirement of mutual exclusion was first identified and solved by Dijkstra in his seminal 1965 paper titled, and is credited as the first topic in the study of concurrent algorithms
In 1968 Dijkstra published his seminal paper 'Cooperating sequential processes', a 70-page essay that originated the field of concurrent programming. He discussed in it the notion of mutual exclusion (mutex) and the criteria a satisfactory solution should satisfy. He also redressed the historical perspective left out of his 1965 paper by including the first known correct solution to the mutual exclusion problem, for two processes, due to Theodorus Dekker. Dijkstra subsequently generalized Dekker's solution to n processes.[78][79] Further, he proposed the first synchronisation mechanism for concurrent processes,[80] the semaphore with its two operations, P and V. He also identified the 'deadlock problem' (called there 'the problem of the deadly embrace')[81] and proposed an elegant 'Banker's algorithm' that prevents deadlock. The deadlock detection and prevention became perennial research problems in the field of concurrent programming.
Illustration of the dining philosophers problem
The dining philosophers problem is an example problem often used in concurrent algorithm design to illustrate synchronization issues and techniques for resolving them. It was originally formulated in 1965 by Dijkstra as a student exam exercise, presented in terms of computers competing for access to tape drive peripherals. Soon after, Tony Hoare gave the problem its present formulation.[82] The sleeping barber problem is also attributed to Dijkstra.
In his book Concurrent Programming: Algorithms, Principles, and Foundations[83] Michel Raynal writes, "Since the early work of E.W. Dijkstra (1965), who introduced the mutual exclusion problem, the concept of a process, the semaphore object, the notion of a weakest precondition, and guarded commands (among many other contributions), synchronization is no longer a catalog of tricks but a domain of computing science with its own concepts, mechanisms, and techniques whose results can be applied in many domains. This means that process synchronization has to be a major topic of any computer science curriculum."
John W. McCormick et al. (2011) notes, "The notion of the concurrent program as a means for writing parallel programs without regard for the underlying hardware was first introduced by Edsger Dijkstra (1968). Moti Ben-Ari (1982) elegantly summed up Dijkstra's idea in three sentences: ‘Concurrent programming is the name given to programming notation and techniques for expressing potential parallelism and solving the resulting synchronization and communication problems. Implementation of parallelism is a topic in computer systems (hardware and software) that is essentially independent of concurrent programming. Concurrent programming is important because it provides an abstract setting in which to study parallelism without getting bogged down in the implementation details.’"[84]
Distributed computing [ edit ]
Dijkstra was one of the very early pioneers of the research on principles of distributed computing.[85][86] As the citation for the Dijkstra Prize recognizes, "no other individual has had a larger influence on research in principles of distributed computing." Some of his papers are even considered to be those that established the field. Dijkstra's 1965 paper, Solution of a Problem in Concurrent Programming Control was the first to present the correct solution to the mutual exclusion problem. Leslie Lamport writes that this work "is probably why PODC exists" and it "started the field of concurrent and distributed algorithms".[87]
In particular, his paper "Self-stabilizing Systems in Spite of Distributed Control" (1974) started the sub-field of self-stabilization. It is also considered as the first scientific examination of fault-tolerant systems.[7] Dijkstra's paper was not widely noticed until Leslie Lamport's invited talk at the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC) in 1983. In his report on Dijkstra's work on self-stabilizing distributed systems, Lamport regard it to be 'a milestone in work on fault tolerance' and 'a very fertile field for research'.[88]
Formal specification and verification [ edit ]
From the 1970s, Dijkstra's chief interest was formal verification. In 1976 Dijkstra published a seminal book, A Discipline of Programming, which put forward his method of systematic development of programs together with their correctness proofs. In his exposition he used his 'Guarded Command Language'. The language, with its reliance on non-determinism, the adopted weakest precondition semantics and the proposed development method has had a considerable impact on the field to this day. The refinement calculus, originally proposed by Ralph-Johan Back[89] and developed by Carroll Morgan,[90] is an extension of Dijkstra's weakest precondition calculus, where program statements are modeled as predicate transformers.[91]
In 1984, to add further support to this approach to programming, he published jointly with Wim Feijen an introductory textbook for first-year students of computer science. The book, first published in Dutch, was entitled Een methode van programmeren. The English edition appeared in 1988 as A Method of Programming.
On the nature of computer science and computer programming [ edit ]
Many of his opinions on computer science and programming have become widespread. For example, the programming phrase "two or more, use a for" (a rule of thumb when to use a loop) is sometimes attributed to him.[92]
He was the first to make the claim that programming is so inherently complex that, in order to manage it successfully, programmers need to harness every trick and abstraction possible.
Dijkstra was one of the most famous opponents of the engineering view of computing science. Like Peter Naur and Kristen Nygaard, Dijkstra disliked the very term 'computer science'. Computer science, as Dijkstra pointed out, deserves a better name. He suggests it can be called 'computing science'. Instead of the computer, or computing technology, Dijkstra wanted to emphasize the abstract mechanisms that computing science uses to master complexity. When expressing the abstract nature of computing science, he wrote,
A confusion of even longer standing came from the fact that the unprepared included the electronic engineers that were supposed to design, build and maintain the machines. The job was actually beyond the electronic technology of the day, and, as a result, the question of how to get and keep the physical equipment more or less in working condition became in the early days the all-overriding concern. As a result, the topic became – primarily in the USA – prematurely known as ‘computer science’ – which, actually, is like referring to surgery as ‘knife science’ – and it was firmly implanted in people's minds that computing science is about machines and their peripheral equipment. Quod non [Latin: "Which is not true"]. We now know that electronic technology has no more to contribute to computing than the physical equipment. We now know that programmable computer is no more and no less than an extremely handy device for realizing any conceivable mechanism without changing a single wire, and that the core challenge for computing science is hence a conceptual one, viz., what (abstract) mechanisms we can conceive without getting lost in the complexities of our own making.[93]
In The Humble Programmer (1972), Dijkstra wrote: "We must not forget that it is not our [computing scientists'] business to make programs, it is our business to design classes of computations that will display a desired behaviour."
Dijkstra also opposed the inclusion of software engineering under the umbrella of academic computer science. He wrote that, "As economics is known as "The Miserable Science", software engineering should be known as "The Doomed Discipline", doomed because it cannot even approach its goal since its goal is self-contradictory." And "software engineering has accepted as its charter "How to program if you cannot."."[94]
Personality and working style [ edit ]
Dijkstra at the blackboard during a conference at ETH Zurich in 1994
“ (...) You can hardly blame M.I.T. for not taking notice of an obscure computer scientist in a small town in the Netherlands. ” — Dijkstra used to describe himself, in Nuenen in the mid-1960s.[95][15]
In the world of computing science, Dijkstra is well known as a "character". In the preface of his book A Discipline of Programming (1976) he stated the following: "For the absence of a bibliography I offer neither explanation nor apology." In fact, most of his articles and books have no references at all.[13] This approach to references was deplored by some researchers. But Dijkstra chose this way of working to preserve his self-reliance.
As a university professor for much of his life, Dijkstra saw teaching not just as a required activity but as a serious research endeavor.[11] His approach to teaching was unconventional.[96] His lecturing style has been described as idiosyncratic. When lecturing, the long pauses between sentences have often been attributed to the fact that English is not Dijkstra's first language. However the pauses also served as a way for him to think on his feet and he was regarded as a quick and deep thinker while engaged in the act of lecturing. His courses for students in Austin had little to do with computer science but they dealt with the presentation of mathematical proofs.[13] At the beginning of each semester he would take a photo of each of the students, in order to memorize their names. He never followed a textbook, with the possible exception of his own while it was under preparation. When lecturing, he would write proofs in chalk on a blackboard rather than using overhead foils. He invited the students to suggest ideas, which he then explored, or refused to explore because they violated some of his tenets. He assigned challenging homework problems, and would study his students' solutions thoroughly. He conducted his final examinations orally, over a whole week. Each student was examined in Dijkstra's office or home, and an exam lasted several hours.[11]
He was also highly original in his way of assessing people's capacity for a job. When Vladimir Lifschitz came to Austin in 1990 for a job interview, Dijkstra gave him a puzzle. Vladimir solved it and has been working in Austin since then.[13]
Despite having invented much of the technology of software, Dijkstra eschewed the use of computers in his own work for many decades. Even after he succumbed to his UT colleagues' encouragement and acquired a Macintosh computer, he used it only for e-mail and for browsing the World Wide Web.[97] Dijkstra never wrote his articles using a computer. He preferred to rely on his typewriter and later on his Montblanc pen.[13] Dijkstra's favorite writing instrument was the Montblanc Meisterstück fountain pen. He repeatedly tried other pens, but none ever displaced the Montblanc.
He had no use for word processors, believing that one should be able to write a letter or article without rough drafts, rewriting, or any significant editing. He would work it all out in his head before putting pen to paper, and once mentioned that when he was a physics student he would solve his homework problems in his head while walking the streets of Leiden.[11] Most of Dijkstra's publications were written by him alone. He never had a secretary and took care of all his correspondence alone.[13] When colleagues prepared a Festschrift for his sixtieth birthday, published by Springer-Verlag, he took the trouble to thank each of the 61 contributors separately, in a hand-written letter.[13]
Throughout Dijkstra's career, his work was characterized by elegance and economy.[13] A prolific writer (especially as an essayist), Dijkstra authored more than 1,300 papers, many written by hand in his precise script. They were essays and parables; fairy tales and warnings; comprehensive explanation and pedagogical pretext. Most were about mathematics and computer science; others were trip reports that are more revealing about their author than about the people and places visited. It was his habit to copy each paper and circulate it to a small group of colleagues who would copy and forward the papers to another limited group of scientists.[98] His love affair with simplicity came at an early age and under his mother's guidance. He once said he had asked his mother whether trigonometry was a difficult topic. She replied that he must learn all the formulas and that furthermore if he required more than five lines to prove something, he was on the wrong track.[99]
Dijkstra was famous for his wit, eloquence, and way with words, such as in his remark, "The question of whether Machines Can Think (…) is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.";[100] his advice to a promising researcher, who asked how to select a topic for research, "Do only what only you can do".[11] Dijkstra was also known for his vocal criticism. As an outspoken and critical visionary, he strongly opposed the teaching of BASIC.[101]
In many of his more humorous essays, Dijkstra described a fictional company of which he served as chairman. The company was called Mathematics, Inc., a company that he imagined having commercialized the production of mathematical theorems in the same way that software companies had commercialized the production of computer programs. He invented a number of activities and challenges of Mathematics Inc. and documented them in several papers in the EWD series. The imaginary company had produced a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis but then had great difficulties collecting royalties from mathematicians who had proved results assuming the Riemann Hypothesis. The proof itself was a trade secret.[102] Many of the company's proofs were rushed out the door and then much of the company's effort had to be spent on maintenance.[103] A more successful effort was the Standard Proof for Pythagoras' Theorem, that replaced the more than 100 incompatible existing proofs.[104] Dijkstra described Mathematics Inc. as "the most exciting and most miserable business ever conceived".[102] EWD 443 (1974) describes his fictional company as having over 75 percent of the world's market share.[105][106]
EWD manuscripts [ edit ]
Dijkstra was well known for his habit of carefully composing manuscripts with his fountain pen. The manuscripts are called EWDs, since Dijkstra numbered them with EWD, his initials, as a prefix. According to Dijkstra himself, the EWDs started when he moved from the Mathematical Centre in Amsterdam to the Eindhoven University of Technology (then Technische Hogeschool Eindhoven). After going to Eindhoven, Dijkstra experienced a writer's block for more than a year. Dijkstra distributed photocopies of a new EWD among his colleagues. Many recipients photocopied and forwarded their copies, so the EWDs spread throughout the international computer science community. The topics were computer science and mathematics, and included trip reports, letters, and speeches. These short articles span a period of 40 years. Almost all EWDs appearing after 1972 were hand-written. They are rarely longer than 15 pages and are consecutively numbered. The last one, No. 1318, is from 14 April 2002. Within computer science they are known as the EWD reports, or, simply the EWDs. More than 1300 EWDs have been scanned, with a growing number transcribed to facilitate search, and are available online at the Dijkstra archive of the University of Texas.[107]
Personal life [ edit ]
Dijkstra's self-confidence went together with a remarkably modest lifestyle, to the point of being spartan.[13] His and his wife's house in Nuenen was simple, small and unassuming. He did not own a TV, a VCR or a mobile telephone, and did not go to the movies.[13] In contrast, he played the piano well and, while in Austin, liked to go to concerts. An enthusiastic listener of classical music, Dijkstra's favorite composer was Mozart.[11]
Death [ edit ]
Dijkstra died on 6 August 2002. According to officials at the University of Texas, the cause of death was cancer.[108]
Influence and recognition [ edit ]
“ The difference between a computer programmer and a computer scientist is a job-title thing. Edsger Dijkstra wants proudly to be called a "computer programmer," although he hasn't touched a computer now for some years. (...) His great strength is that he is uncompromising. It would make him physically ill to think of programming in C++. ” — Donald Knuth (1996), an interview with Donald Knuth by Jack Woehr of Dr. Dobb's Journal.[109]
In 1972 the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) acknowledged Dijkstra's seminal contributions to the field by awarding him the distinguished Turing Award. The citation for the award reads:[110]
Edsger Dijkstra was a principal contributor in the late 1950's to the development of the ALGOL, a high level programming language which has become a model of clarity and mathematical rigor. He is one of the principal exponents of the science and art of programming languages in general, and has greatly contributed to our understanding of their structure, representation, and implementation. His fifteen years of publications extend from theoretical articles on graph theory to basic manuals, expository texts, and philosophical contemplations in the field of programming languages.
The introduction given at the awards ceremony is a tribute to Dijkstra:[110]
The working vocabulary of programmers everywhere is studded with words originated or forcefully promulgated by E.W. Dijkstra – display, deadly embrace, semaphore, go-to-less programming, structured programming. But his influence on programming is more pervasive than any glossary can possibly indicate. The precious gift that this Turing Award acknowledges is Dijkstra's style: his approach to programming as a high, intellectual challenge; his eloquent insistence and practical demonstration that programs should be composed correctly, not just debugged into correctness; and his illuminating perception of problems at the foundations of program design. (…) We have come to value good programs in much the same way as we value good literature. And at the center of this movement, creating and reflecting patterns no less beautiful than useful, stands E.W. Dijkstra.
In the words of Sir Tony Hoare, FRS, delivered by him at Dijkstra's funeral:[11]
Edsger is widely recognized as a man who has thought deeply about many deep questions; and among the deepest questions is that of traditional moral philosophy: How is it that a person should live their life? Edsger found his answer to this question early in his life: He decided he would live as an academic scientist, conducting research into a new branch of science, the science of computing. He would lay the foundations that would establish computing as a rigorous scientific discipline; and in his research and in his teaching and in his writing, he would pursue perfection to the exclusion of all other concerns. From these commitments he never deviated, and that is how he has made to his chosen subject of study the greatest contribution that any one person could make in any one lifetime.
In March 2003, the following email was sent to the distributed computing community:[111]
This is to announce that the award formerly known as the "PODC Influential-Paper Award" has been renamed the "Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing" after the late Edsger W. Dijkstra, a pioneer in the area of distributed computing. His foundational work on concurrency primitives (such as the semaphore), concurrency problems (such as mutual exclusion and deadlock), reasoning about concurrent systems, and self-stabilization comprises one of the most important supports upon which the field of distributed computing is built. No other individual has had a larger influence on research in principles of distributed computing.
Former ACM President Peter J. Denning wrote about Dijkstra:[112]
Edsger Dijkstra, one of the giants of our field and a passionate believer in the mathematical view of programs and programming (...) Over the previous quarter-century, he had formulated many of the great intellectual challenges of the field as programming—the goto statement, structured programming, concurrent processes, semaphores, deadlocks, recursive programming in Algol, and deriving correct programs.
Awards and honors [ edit ]
Among Dijkstra's awards and honors are:[97]
The Distinguished Fellowship of the British Computer Society (BCS) is awarded under bylaw 7 of the BCS's Royal Charter. The award was first approved in 1969 and the first election was made in 1971 to Dijkstra.[117]
On the occasion of Dijkstra's 60th birthday in 1990, The Department of Computer Science (UTCS) at the University of Texas at Austin organized a two-day seminar in his honor. Speakers came from all over the United States and Europe, and a group of computer scientists contributed research articles which were edited into a book.[11][118]
In 2002, the C&C Foundation of Japan recognized Dijkstra "for his pioneering contributions to the establishment of the scientific basis for computer software through creative research in basic software theory, algorithm theory, structured programming, and semaphores." Dijkstra was alive to receive notice of the award, but it was accepted by his family in an award ceremony after his death.
Shortly before his death in 2002, Dijkstra received the ACM PODC Influential-Paper Award in distributed computing for his work on self-stabilization of program computation. This annual award was renamed the Dijkstra Prize (Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing) the following year, in his honor.
The Dijkstra Award for Outstanding Academic Achievement in Computer Science (Loyola University Chicago, Department of Computer Science) is named for Edsger W. Dijkstra. Beginning in 2005, this award recognizes the top academic performance by a graduating computer science major. Selection is based on GPA in all major courses and election by department faculty.[119]
The Department of Computer Science (UTCS) at the University of Texas at Austin hosted the inaugural Edsger W. Dijkstra Memorial Lecture on 12 October 2010. Tony Hoare, Emeritus Professor at Oxford and Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, was the speaker for the event. This lecture series was made possible by a generous grant from Schlumberger to honor the memory of Dijkstra.
See also [ edit ]
Publications [ edit ]
Books:
Selected articles:
References [ edit ]Sister Mary Lucy was a blind hermit, and being comfortable in the border lands between this world and the next, she was always intriguing to visit. One day she asked me if I thought the end of the world was nigh.
“I grew up in a fundamentalist church.” I explained, “where we heard terrible prophecies about the Great Tribulation and the end times. An impish evangelist named Jack Van Impe would visit our church and scare us with stories about Armageddon and the big computer in Brussels called ‘The Beast,’ which tracked everyone, and how the European Community would merge with the Catholic Church to become the head of a New World Order, and the Jesuits had the names of all the born-again Christians, and they had taken a blood curdling oath of total obedience to the Pope, and when he gave the green light they would round up all the true believers.
Then they showed us a kind of Christian horror movie called “Left Behind,” in which the Lord Jesus returned and took all the true Christians to heaven in a flash, and airplanes fell out of the sky because their pilots had been raptured, and all the sinners were left behind, so you better get saved quick, and then we sang a lugubrious song called, “I Wish We’d All Been Ready” with the refrain, “There’s no time, to change your mind. The Son has come and you’ve been left behind….”
When I became a Catholic the apocalyptic stories were even more stupendous. The three days of darkness were just around the corner, and only blessed candles would be able to be lit. There were the prophecies of St. Malachy, which said the number of popes was running out fast, and why on earth couldn’t the pope consecrate Russia to the Blessed Virgin the right way? Didn’t he know the fate of the world was dependent on it? The exciting thing about the Catholics is that they actually had visions of Mary, stigmatics, visionaries, mystics and miracles, which raised the stakes and made it all so much more vivid.
Then in 2011 Pastor Harold Camping told us he had read his Bible and done the math and the end was nigh. Meanwhile, the New Agers prepared for the end in 2012 because the Mayan calendar told them so.
Then there are the secular doomsday prophets. Not too long ago we were all going to freeze in a new ice age, but now because of global warming we’re all going to fry and cry as we watch the baby polar bears drown. The world was going to crash in the year 2000 when the computers would all go haywire. And there was going to be a population explosion, and we were all going to stand shoulder-to-shoulder and starve and probably resort to eating each other, but now there is going to be a demographic winter in which there will not be enough children, and we’ll all die of old age, sans teeth, sans taste, sans money to pay the rest home, sans everything.
Don’t forget the imminent disasters of a one-world totalitarian regime, global economic meltdown, the danger of Electromagnetic Pulse Attack, Yellowstone erupting in a massive volcano, meteors hitting the world, earthquakes, tsunamis, droughts, famines, terrorist outrages, or Hillary becoming president.
I don’t really know if we’re headed for apocalypse now or apocalypse then, but what interests me more than the actual possibility of apocalypse is the apocalypse mentality. What is it in human nature that loves a doomsday? Why are we so full of fascination and fear about the end of the world?
Two reasons: First of all, because there will be an end of the world. This physical realm is bound up in the matrix of time. There is an Alpha. There will be an Omega. Time began, and time will end. One day it will all happen in a crash, in a trumpet’s clash. The lights will go out, and deep down we know this and are always watching and waiting.
Secondly, and more importantly, we know for sure that one world will end, and that is our world. In other words, one day for each of us the lights will go out. Naked and alone, we’ll gasp our last and, our own sun, moon, and stars will be shaken, and the dark sea of death will roar and overwhelm us.
It is our own end of the world that we fear, and knowing this, yet denying this, we do a very not so subtle mental trick and avoid the imminent catastrophe of our death by projecting it on the whole world. Apocalypticism is therefore a kind of sick obsession. It’s a spiritual disease afflicting the whole human race.
What’s the cure? Momento mori: Remember death.
If we daily remember that we will die one day, and if we live each day as if it is our last, and if we learn to fear eternal death and if we strive to live each day in the life giving presence of the one who is Life itself, then we will be amazed at how we will have no fear.
This is why wise men used to keep a skull on their desk or a skeleton in the cupboard. The grinning death head echoed the words, “I was what you are and you will be what I am.” With a healthy reminder of mortality, apocalyptic worries dry up, and we’ll be able to say with a cheerful abandon– “The end of the world? Bring it on!”
Shall we just grin and bear it? What if the message is to grim to bear it? Then we also remember that there is that small white bird called hope—“the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.” There is the Phoenix. There is the empty tomb. The fire rises from the ashes and behold, he makes all things new.
So on an Easter visit, this is what Sister Mary Lucy had to say in her quiet, sweet way: “I’m always excited to think that Our Lord said he ‘makes all things new’ and not that ‘he makes all new things.’ I think it’s much better that he will bring it all back to a more glorious existence out of the destruction we bring about. That’s much better than him just starting again, and if he is going to make all things new…well, that includes me too.”
Books on the topic of this essay may be found in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore.Today, Gary Vaynerchuk starts “tripling down” on content - because “doubling down” doesn’t begin to describe how important he thinks it is. The social media expert is relaunching his blog today. Why? “The more content I can put out, the more luck I have,” he says. He’s redeployed an employee at VaynerMedia, his social media consultancy, to “shadow my life" by following him at conferences and key local events to record his remarks and turn them into social media content. “I’ve built the infrastructure around me to become a greater content provider,” he says. “I have someone calling me at the end of the day – there’s now someone in my life pestering me for content.”
What’s more, Vaynerchuk believes it’s only a matter of time before this arrangement becomes common. “Content is the cost of entry to relevance in today’s society,” he says. “The top 1-5% [of executives and social media personalities] in the next few years will have full-time content people around them. There are going to be 500 to 5000 people at this time next year who employ a full-time content person.”
Of course, most people don’t have the luxury of a full-time staffer to transcribe their remarks into social media. But Vaynerchuk says that should simply be a spur to try harder. “The only reason I got to the level of affording a full-time content person is that when I couldn’t [afford it], I still put out more content than most.” In other words, hustle is mandatory. “You have to get into the content game,” says Vaynerchuk. “You have to force yourself to make more videos, write more posts.”
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e.g. data scientists, statisticians. As a result, we are building high level APIs such as DataFrames and machine learning pipelines to further simplify distributed data processing. We want users that are already familiar with single-machine tools to be able to pick up distributed data processing as quickly as possible.
2. Platform APIs: Overtime, more and more projects are developing on top of Spark, and we see it as a unique runtime that can support a wide range of environments (e.g. public cloud vs private cloud, different storage systems, database systems, NoSQL stores). We are working towards standardizing the various interfaces Spark use to interact with external systems, so other projects can comfortably be building on top of Spark.
How is the Apache Big Data ecosystem building on top of Spark and standardizing on it?
Most of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) big data projects are now building on top of Spark. For example, as you will see in the ApacheCon agenda, Hive, Pig, and Sqoop are now supporting using Spark as the computation engine. Many other projects are also providing interfaces to integrate with Spark.
Give us a bit on how Hadoop, Hive, Pig, and Sqoop relate to Spark.
Spark can run on many different environments, but Spark also integrates very well with Hadoop. For instance, it can read the common data formats in HDFS, and it can run directly on top of the YARN resource manager. Hadoop users are turning to Spark to replace their legacy MapReduce data pipelines and applications. Hive compiles SQL into Spark jobs for executing SQL queries (although not to be confused with Spark SQL). Similar to Hive, Pig compiles Pig scripts into Spark jobs for execution. Sqoop is using Spark to connect to various relational database systems for ETL.
Fun fact?
Matei Zaharia, the creator of Spark, is being called "God of Horse Metal" in China. "Horse metal" is phonetically the same as "Matei."
ApacheCon 2015
Speaker Interview
This article is part of the Speaker Interview Series for ApacheCon 2015. ApacheCon North America brings together the open source community to learn about the technologies and projects driving the future of open source and more. The conference takes place in Austin, TX from April 13-16, 2015.Legislators shot down a trio of bills this week meant to give students who are accused of sexual assault more rights during the internal campus inquiries that can lead to expulsion.
The bills were tabled at a small House subcommittee meeting, and as the Virginia General Assembly grapples with how to handle the suddenly high-profile issue of on-campus sexual assault.
Bills requiring administrators and faculty who learn of an assault to report it to law enforcement are moving forward in Richmond, despite concerns from advocates who say victims don't always want criminal investigations.
Legislation that would require campuses to put notations on transcripts when a student leaves during or because of a sexual assault inquiry is also advancing. Amid this, there is quiet concern that Virginia's response to the attention on college sexual assaults may trample on the rights of the accused.
"No one's paying attention to them," said Del. Dave Albo, who chairs the House Courts of Justice Committee.
Albo, R-Springfield, called for reforms in the wake of the now largely debunked Rolling Stone article about rape at the University of Virginia. But he pumped the breaks on that effort as his committee delved into a complex world of federal and state regulations, victim's rights and internal discipline procedures.
"It's a problem," Albo said. "There's a lot of very important open questions on these bills still."
Del. Rick Morris, R-Carrollton, has been trying to reform the internal discipline process for two years now. One of his bills, killed this week in a small and crowded subcommittee room, would have allowed students to be represented by an attorney at these proceedings.
Another made the same change for student organizations. The third would have allowed students to essentially appeal a student judiciary decision to the local circuit court.
What the accused says during those proceedings can be used against them in criminal court, and though students are typically allowed to have an attorney present, the attorney cannot speak for them. There are also often limits on how much evidence they can introduce, advocates said.
Morris would like to see that change. He points to the case of Ben Casper, a former College of William and Mary football player accused in 2012 of raping and choking a female student during a party. Casper's parents, who testified during the subcommittee hearing, said William and Mary forced him to leave school.
"He was basically railroaded out of college," Sylvie Casper said this week.
Then he was turned away from several other Virginia universities because of a transcript notation, they said. These notations would become mandatory under legislation moving in both chambers of the General Assembly and backed by Gov. Terry McAuliffe.
A James City County jury found Casper not guilty on all counts a little more than a year after he was accused. The Caspers said their son wasn't able to mount a true defense during the university's internal inquiry. An advocacy group called FIRE — the Foundation of Individual Rights in Education — took up his case and is fighting for changes.
"Because any statements he would make in those proceedings could be held against him in future criminal proceedings, Ben was forced to choose between defending himself in his campus hearing and defending himself in court," FIRE says on its website.
A William and Mary spokesman said the university wouldn't comment for this article, citing federal student privacy regulations.
Morris' bills were killed off, at least in part, because of their predicted fiscal impact. Legislative staff predicted that if the accused take advantage of new attorney rights, universities would feel compelled to beef up training and to provide attorneys for students and administrators sitting in judgment.
A series of fiscal impact statements put the cost at more than $1 million a year, though Morris and Joseph Cohn, FIRE's legislative and policy director, took issue with that. They said nothing in the bills would require the state to hire more attorneys. Cohn blasted subcommittee members, saying they mischaracterized several aspects of the bills.
The subcommittee debate turned into a back-and-forth over how far-reaching student conduct hearings actually are, and should be. Bill opponents said that allowing attorneys to make arguments would overcriminalize proceedings.
"We're not deciding the law in there," subcommittee Chairman Jimmie Massie said. "We're just deciding whether you broke the code of conduct."
"It's a student process that students agree to when they enroll," Laura Fornash, who handles government relations for the University of Virginia, said following the meeting.
Morris became agitated during the debate, raising his voice. After the meeting, Cohn said legislators were wildly off base.
"It's outrageous that this committee says it's only a student conduct hearing," Cohn said. "That's only true in the imaginary world of this subcommittee."
Fain can be reached by phone at 757-525-1759.Tensions between Palestinian worshippers and Israelis at Al-Aqsa Mosque have been growing again. Following several incidents, Jordan’s King Abdullah told the Jordanian newspaper Ad-Dustour on Aug. 15, “We will persist in undertaking our religious and historical responsibilities toward Al-Aqsa Mosque/Haram al-Sharif, which faces repeated violations by extremist groups.”
There has been no direct response from the Israeli Prime Ministry, which is directly handling this sensitive issue, to the words “extremists” and “violations.” However, some Israeli government and nongovernment officials did respond to the king’s statement. One of the more negative responses came from a lower-level government official. Zeev Elkin, the Jerusalem Affairs Minister, described the king’s words as “lip service” aimed at appeasing Jordanians. Avi Dichter, the chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, said Aug. 15, “Israel will not accept [that] Mecca and Medina rules apply on the Temple Mount,” a reference to only Muslims being allowed to visit Mecca.
Egypt’s Al-Azhar also strongly condemned Israeli soldiers' recurrent storming of Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. In an official statement issued Aug. 14, Al-Azhar called on the Arab League and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to take serious measures to stop such "barbaric attacks and flagrant violations" at the complex, which is considered Islam's third-holiest site.
On Aug. 4, Israeli police arrested Palestinian engineer Bassam Halaq along with five other workers when Israel suspended the restoration work they were engaged in at Al-Aqsa. They were released later that day. On July 27, at least one guard with the Jordanian Waqf Ministry, which administers Al-Aqsa Mosque, was arrested after trying to stop a group from walking around the area. The group included Israeli officials from the Ministry of Antiquities.
Also among the group were activists seeking to rebuild the Jewish Temple Mount. They believe the temple's ruins lie on the same site as Al-Aqsa Mosque and that rebuilding it is their religious duty. They have drawn up maps and worked tirelessly to determine how to best replicate what the temple looked like before it was destroyed.
Ofer Zalzberg, a senior analyst at the Middle East and North Africa program of the International Crisis Group, downplayed the recent clashes. In an interview with Al-Monitor, Zalzberg insisted that the November 2014 understanding between Abdullah and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is still largely respected. The understanding focuses on permission for Muslims of all ages to visit and pray at the mosque, and it also allows for a limited number of Jews to visit at agreed-upon times without praying.
“These commitments, which preserved relative calm at the site, are still standing. Palestinians of all ages are no longer categorically denied entry and worship in the mosque, Israeli Knesset members and ministers are forbidden entry, the Waqf prevents Palestinian would-be stone-throwers from spending the night at the mosque, and Jews are allowed restricted visiting rights on condition that they just visit and not pray,” Zalzberg said.
Although the general features of the agreement are well-known to all parties, some specifics, such as the exact number of Jews to be allowed to visit, are a source of disagreement.
“After clashes broke out at the site in the fall of 2015, the Israeli police stated that no more than 60 Jewish temple activists will be allowed to enter on any particular day. This quota was quickly and publicly withdrawn, but in effect continued to be implemented, except on Jewish holidays,” Zalzberg said.
Zalzberg conceded that on Aug. 14, on which Tisha B’Av, the day of the Jewish fast in remembrance of the destruction of Jewish temples, fell, Israel apparently exceeded the limit of Jewish visitors. Press reports indicate that as many as 200 Jews were allowed into the compound on Aug. 14. The number of Waqf guards deployed in the mosque area has increased in recent years, Zalzberg noted, which has made monitoring non-Muslim provocative attempts at prayer considerably easier. While 200 guards were added in 2015, the number of Jordanian-paid Waqf guards rose to 500.
Zalzberg explained that the Israeli police had arrested the engineer because the Israeli authorities suddenly changed their minds about an earlier construction permit they had granted to the Waqf, when they learned the Waqf intended to create an opening in the holy site’s ancient external walls. With Al-Aqsa Mosque, every small action can lead to major problems, as permits are often extremely specific.
“They had given the Waqf permission to do construction work to build extra lavatories before Ramadan, but were then worried that the work would harm antiquities at the site,” he explained.
Jerusalem-based reporter Khalil Assali told Al-Monitor there might have been a different reason for the Israeli actions. “Rumors in Al-Aqsa are that the Waqf engineer and workers discovered secret cameras placed by Israel at the location and when they removed them, the police came in to make arrests,” he said.
On Aug. 21, 1969, 47 years ago, an Australian who was said to be deranged set fire to Al-Aqsa Mosque, causing extensive damage and totally gutting the Salahuddin al-Ayyubi minbar, or platform. Local Jerusalemites pitched in to help put out the fire, and the minbar was rebuilt by Jordan’s king in 2007 and has been restored in its proper location.
Despite positive Muslim reactions to Abdullah’s statement, sensitivities continue in and around Al-Aqsa Mosque. Many Palestinians who follow the Israeli media continue to worry that any small provocation could easily ignite the entire region. Many still worry that a religious war provoked by extremists could take place if the situation is not controlled.
Muslims and Arabs around the world cannot rest while various radical groups continue to search for ways to rebuild the Jewish Temple on the location. Still, Palestinians are hopeful they will be able to preserve Islam’s third-holiest mosque.In “The case for Israel is rooted in more than security” (Opinion, June 7), Jeff Jacoby seems to be arguing that those individuals, organizations, and nations that are critical of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank might, or even would, change their tune if only the message that “Jews have a God-given right to the land of Israel” were sounded forcefully, regularly, and unabashedly.
Evidently Jacoby, joined by some, but certainly not all, Christian evangelicals, believes that Jews have a claim to the land grounded in “biblical legitimacy,” which, once trumpeted, should prove persuasive to those who condemn Israel’s continued settlement expansion in areas east of its 1967 borders.
Given centuries of oppression culminating in the Holocaust, and historical connections lasting for millennia, Israel today is cherished as a homeland for Jews around the world. But in the 21st century, it can’t expect to rest its claim on biblical entitlement. That just won’t fly in Europe, on US college campuses, or frankly, most anywhere else.
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Rather than invoking scripture, Israel’s supporters would serve the country they love far better by opening their hearts and minds to the reality that Palestinians have claims of their own, are not going away, and deserve a state too.
Michael Felsen
Jamaica PlainSecurity researchers have discovered a new technique for deciphering the contents of supposedly secure communications.
The DROWN attack - it has already got a name, like recent high profile crypto attacks Lucky13, BEAST, and POODLE - is a “cross-protocol attack that can decrypt passively collected TLS sessions from up-to-date clients”.
One version of the attack exploits a combination of thus far unnoticed protocol flaws in SSLv2 to develop a new and stronger variant of the earlier Bleichenbacher attack. “A typical scenario requires the attacker to observe 1,000 TLS handshakes, then initiate 40,000 SSLv2 connections and perform 250 offline work to decrypt a 2048-bit RSA TLS cipher-text,” the researchers explain.
Number-crunching using supercomputers is not needed to pull off the attack, which is way below the level of sophistication of intel agencies. A team of researchers from universities in Germany, the US and Israel as well as two OpenSSL developers - implemented the attack and can decrypt a TLS 1.2 handshake using 2048- bit RSA in under eight-hours using Amazon EC2, at a cost of $440.
Even cheaper attacks are possible by applying the new techniques together with a newly discovered vulnerability in OpenSSL that was present in releases from 1998 to early 2015. “Given an unpatched SSLv2 server to use as an oracle, we can decrypt a TLS cipher-text in minutes on a single CPU—fast enough to enable man-in-the-middle attacks against modern browsers,” the DROWN researchers warned.
Fortunately OpenSSL is publishing a fix on Tuesday - OpenSSL versions 1.0.2g, 1.0.1s - to deal with the protocol flaw. Many systems are vulnerable to an attack that may be comparable with Heartbleed. “This flaw is more than a product vulnerability; it's a protocol flaw,” according to Ivan Ristic, a software engineer and founder of SSL Labs, “The impact is significant.”
Using internet-wide scans, the researchers found that 38 per cent of all HTTPS servers and 22 per cent of those with browser-trusted certificates are vulnerable to the protocol-level attack, due to widespread key and certificate reuse. Researchers reckon that around a quarter (26 per cent) of the top million sites listed by Alexa are vulnerable to breaking TLS through attacking SSL v2.
Urrgh.
In additional, the researchers discovered the QUIC protocol is vulnerable to a “variant of our attack that allows an attacker to impersonate a server indefinitely”.
“We conclude that SSLv2 is not only weak, but actively harmful to the TLS ecosystem,” the researchers conclude.
A paper on the research - DROWN: Breaking TLS using SSLv2 was put online on Tuesday.
Not only OpenSSL is vulnerable to the CVE-2016-0800 bug, as an advisory by Red Hat explains.
A padding oracle flaw was found in the Secure Sockets Layer version 2.0 (SSLv2) protocol. An attacker can potentially use this flaw to decrypt RSA-encrypted cipher text from a connection using a newer SSL/TLS protocol version, allowing them to decrypt such connections. This cross-protocol attack is publicly referred to as DROWN.
The release of the research coincide with the start of the RSA Conference, infosec marketing's version of the Superbowl.
Some estimates suggest that up to two-thirds of all web servers use software reliant on open-source OpenSSL. Security watchers pay very close attention to OpenSSL vulnerabilities, particularly since the infamous Heartbleed attack of April 2014. DROWN is not as bad as Heartbleed but it’s comparable, which is bad enough in itself. ®I had the privilege of following Malala Yousafzai, on and off, for six months in 2009, documenting some of the most critical days of her life for a two-part documentary. We filmed her final school day before the Taliban closed down her school in Pakistan’s Swat Valley; the summer when war displaced and separated her family; the day she pleaded with President Obama’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, to intervene; and the uncertain afternoon she returned to discover the fate of her home, school and her two pet chickens.
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A year after my two-part documentary on her family was finished, Malala and her father, Ziauddin, had become my friends. They stayed with me in Islamabad. Malala inherited my old Apple laptop. Once, we went shopping together for English-language books and DVDs. When Malala opted for some trashy American sitcoms, I was forced to remind myself that this girl – who had never shuddered at beheaded corpses, public floggings, and death threats directed at her father — was still just a kid.
Today, she is a teenager, fighting for her life after being gunned down by the Taliban for doing what girls do all over the world: going to school.
The Malala I know transformed with age from an obedient, rather shy 11-year-old into a publicly fearless teenager consumed with taking her activism to new heights. Her father’s personal crusade to restore female education seemed contagious. He is a poet, a school owner and an unflinching educational activist. Ziauddin is truly one of most inspiring and loving people I’ve ever met, and my heart aches for him today. He adores his two sons, but he often referred to Malala as something entirely special. When he sent the boys to bed, Malala was permitted to sit with us as we talked about life and politics deep into the night.
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After the film was seen, Malala became even more emboldened. She hosted foreign diplomats in Swat, held news conferences on peace and education, and as a result, won a host of peace awards. Her best work, however, was that she kept going to school.
In the documentary, and on the surface, Malala comes across as a steady, calming force, undeterred by anxiety or risk. She is mature beyond her years. She never displayed a mood swing and never complained about my laborious and redundant interviews.
But don’t be fooled by her gentle demeanor and soft voice. Malala is also fantastically stubborn and feisty — traits that I hope will enable her recovery. When we struggled to secure a dial-up connection for her laptop, her Luddite father scurried over to offer his advice. She didn’t roll an eye or bark back. Instead, she diplomatically told her father that she, not he, was the person to solve the problem — an uncommon act that defies Pakistani familial tradition. As he walked away, she offered me a smirk of confidence.
Another day, Ziauddin forgot Malala’s birthday, and the nonconfrontational daughter couldn’t hold it in. She ridiculed her father in a text message and forced him to apologize and to buy everyone a round of ice cream — which always made her really happy.
Her father was a bit traditional, and as a result, I was unable to interact with her mother. I used to chide Ziauddin about these restrictions, especially in front of Malala. Her father would laugh dismissively and joke that Malala should not be listening. Malala beamed as I pressed her father to treat his wife as an equal. Sometimes I felt like her de-facto uncle. I could tell her father the things she couldn’t.
I first met Malala in January 2009, just 10 days before the Taliban planned to close down her girls’ school, and hundreds of others in the Swat Valley. It was too dangerous to travel to Swat, so we met in a dingy guesthouse on the outskirts of Peshawar, the same city where she is today fighting for her life in a military hospital.
In 10 days, her father would lose the family business, and Malala would lose her fifth-grade education. I was there to assess the risks of reporting on this issue. With the help of a Pakistani journalist, I started interviewing Ziauddin. My anxiety rose with each of his answers. Militants controlled the checkpoints. They murdered anyone who dissented, often leaving beheaded corpses on the main square. Swat was too dangerous for a documentary.
I then solicited Malala’s opinion. Irfan Ashraf, a Pakistani journalist who was assisting my reporting and who knew the family, translated the conversation. This went on for about 10 minutes until I noticed, from her body language, that Malala understood my questions in English.
“Do you speak English?” I asked her.
“Yes, of course,” she said in perfect English. “I was just saying there is a fear in my heart that the Taliban are going to close my school.”
I was enamored by Malala’s presence ever since that sentence. But Swat was still too risky. For the first time in my career, I was in the awkward position of trying to convince a source, Ziauddin, that the story was not worth the risk. But Ziauddin fairly argued that he was already a public activist in Swat, prominent in the local press, and that if the Taliban wanted to kill him or his family, they would do so anyway. He said he was willing to die for the cause. But I never asked Malala if she was willing to die as well.
Finally, my favorite memory of Malala is the only time I was with her without her father. It’s the scene at the end of the film, when she is exploring her decrepit classroom, which the military had turned into a bunker after they had pushed the Taliban out of the valley. I asked her to give me a tour of the ruins of the school. The scene seems written or staged. But all I did was press record and this 11-year-old girl spoke eloquently from the heart.
She noticed how the soldiers drilled a lookout hole into the wall of her classroom, scribbling on the wall with a yellow highlighter, “This is Pakistan.”
Malala looked at the marking and said: “Look! This is Pakistan. Taliban destroyed us.”
In her latest e-mail to me, in all caps, she wrote, “I WANT AN ACCESS TO THE WORLD OF KNOWLEDGE.” And she signed it, “YOUR SMALL VIDEO STAR.”
I too wanted her to access the broader world, so during one of my final nights in Pakistan, I took a long midnight walk with her father and spoke to him frankly about options for Malala’s education. I was less concerned with her safety as the Pakistani military had, in large part, won the war against the Taliban. We talked about her potential to thrive on a global level, and I suggested a few steps toward securing scholarships for elite boarding schools in Pakistan, or even in the United States. Her father beamed with pride, but added: “In a few years. She isn’t ready yet.”
I don’t think he was ready to let her go. And who can blame him for that?PORTLAND, Ore. -- A 16-mm print of "Pages of Death," a 1962 movie lauding an anti-pornography lifestyle thought to be lost forever, was found at the Oregon Historical Society.
The film was found in OHS' collections in Portland. The movie runs 27-minutes and was ranked #14 on Gambit magazine's list of Top 15 Films Lost to Time.
Narrated by Heisman Trophy winner Tom Harmon, the movie tells the story of a man who "hung out reading pornography at Baker's Variety Store until he couldn't stand it any longer and murdered a girl in a whipped up frenzy of smut inspired rage."
The next step is for OHS to find out if the copy they have is in fact the only surviving print of the movie.
You can watch "Pages of Death" below, courtesy Oregon Historical Society:It hangs over American politics like a moth-bitten blanket. An old and weary narrative, it crowds out conversation and lets shopworn cheap-shots masquerade as thoughtful critiques. Yes, it’s one more marker of the bad faith and disrespect that pervade our politics, but its costs go beyond hurt feelings. Real Americans pay a price for this poisonous argument.
The story in question is “the Republican war on science.” That particular phrase is the title of one 2007 book, but this story’s tentacles stretch far beyond a single volume. For years, a concerted effort has been made to intertwine scientific truth with progressive politics in the public imagination. In recent weeks alone, Nancy Pelosi and Charlie Crist both earned headlines by trashing the “anti-science” GOP. The left-leaning media works hard to make campaign issues out of contrived litmus tests that bear little relationship to real national issues.
Their project seems to be working. When Tumblring twenty-somethings reblog the latest “pro-science” rant from credentialed crusaders like Bill Nye or Neil deGrasse Tyson, one cannot miss the whiff of self-styled defiance. Like retweeting a feminist longread or “liking” a Jon Stewart tirade, speaking up for science is now seen as a form of political protest. Sporting an ironic “Science!” t-shirt is at least partially about sticking it to Republican rubes.
This script has become so familiar. From spirituality to environmentalism to financial economics, we hear, conservatives’ insufficient educations leave them unable to see past shadow and superstition. The right buys blissful ignorance by disengaging from reality.
But liberals’ intellects deprive them of this luxury. Cursed with vision keen enough to see in shades of grey, progressives cannot help but examine all the evidence and see what makes sense. Building a messy worldview out of complicated facts may be less viscerally satisfying than dictating from dogma, we’re informed, but it is infinitely more honest. So when you’re looking for leaders who will actually improve people’s lives, the talented technocrats beat the Manichean moralists eight days a week.
Policy should belong to pragmatists, the story concludes. And thus politics should belong to progressives.
Except That’s Not Reality
This narrative serves America well save for two minor flaws: It’s a lie and it hurts people. Confirmation bias and ex post rationalization are human universals, not the exclusive province of the political right. Every day, the best interests of vulnerable people are sacrificed on the altar of leftist faiths as ironclad any conservative presuppositions.
Take Medicaid, a policy issue I touched on recently in these pages. The vast majority of Democratic policymakers and sympathetic journalists take it on faith that the good intentions that inspire the program and the vast sums we invest in it add up to something that improves poor people’s lives. When progressives discuss red states’ reluctance to volunteer for the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, they almost describe a clear trade-off: Conservatives’ contempt for social assistance and the GOP’s austerity fetish are on one side, and the medical destinies of needy Americans are on the other. Shame on the heartless Scrooge who could possibly prioritize the former!
But leftists rarely pause to interrogate the premise, to actually verify that signing humans up for a complex and convoluted financial product is in fact synonymous with boosting their well-being. It’s hard to fault laypeople for leaning on this commonsensical assumption. But in 2014, every serious student of policy should be aware of the growing evidence that calls it into question.
For decades, a series of studies have raised red flags. Surgery patients, cancer victims, and transplant recipients who were enrolled in the program were all found to fare worse—not merely than privately-insured patients with presumably easier lives, but worse than equally poor people who lacked any insurance at all. This literature was capped off by the landmark “Oregon study,” a brand-new analysis that marshals gold-standard methodology to compare Medicaid recipients with uninsured people.
The scholars found mixed results. Medicaid does lower psychological stress and increase financial stability, results we would expect from any transfer program. But the program actually increases unnecessary trips to the emergency room. And remarkably, Medicaid coverage has no measurable impact whatsoever on clinical health.
To an intellectually honest observer, these findings compel more questions. What are reasonable expectations for health insurance? Should we be satisfied if Medicaid helps people sleep easier but makes them no healthier? Even if so, is health insurance the most effective way to convert taxpayer dollars into peace of mind for the poor?
Virtually no prominent progressives join center-right commentators in positing such questions. In a recent Intelligence Squared debate over the ACA, the liberal commentator Jonathan Chait laughed off all these studies by feigning surprise that—gasp!—disproportionately impoverished Medicaid patients might be unhealthier than average folks. The problem, of course, is that every study worth its salt controls for demographics and income. Many of the Medicaid studies even control for existing health status. But never mind the facts—favorable news is trumpeted, negative results are brushed aside, and conventional wisdom marches on.
Progressives are equally prone to cherry-picking when it comes to education. As always, different studies point in different directions. But as the famously independent-minded scholar Rick Hess documents in an exhaustive review, the thrust of the literature is not really ambiguous. Vouchers and charters are not panaceas, Hess owns, but “for poor parents trapped in dangerous and underperforming urban school systems, it is pretty clear that school choice works.”
Much like the Oregon health study, one brand-new report is especially interesting and noteworthy. Last month, experts from Mathematica Policy Research published their analysis of charter schools in Florida and Chicago. Whereas most research stops at rates of high school graduation and college admission, their data continues tracking students through their college years and into their careers.
What they found is fascinating. First, attending a charter instead of a public high school made students significantly likelier to graduate and to enter college. This much is old news to education scholars, although you wouldn’t know it from listening to the left. Next, the scholars uncovered new evidence that charter students are meaningfully more likely to stick with college for more than two years. And most interesting of all, the study found that school choice yields significantly higher earnings later in life: Charter graduates earn roughly 13% more money in their mid-twenties than comparable alumni of public high schools.
The study’s conclusion? Precisely how charters produce these improvements remains “an open question,” but the end result really doesn’t. School choice endows vulnerable kids with “skills that are useful for success in college and career but that test scores do not capture.”
Who’s Really Interested In Data?
Does the left bow dutifully before this scholarly consensus? Not a chance. In one of the most underrated moments from the 2008 campaign, a moderator put the subject of school choice before Hillary Clinton. Displaying zero awareness of the empirical evidence, the once and future candidate skipped over the science and offered a bizarre hypothetical (spoiler: it features a “School of the Jihad”) that gestured weakly towards constitutional objections. Those concerns have their validity. But a true data-driven pragmatist would seek creative solutions for implementing proven innovations, not laugh lines to dismiss them.
Oddly enough, one man encapsulates the progressive movement’s fraught relationship with the facts. One of President Obama’s earliest announcements was his choice of Steven Chu, a genius physicist with a Nobel Prize, to head the Department of Energy. Chu’s appointment brought forth a downpour of praise as many relished the symbolic break from Bush. The Republican Dark Age was over and a new Enlightenment was upon us, embodied in the brilliant Berkeley laureate who was now boarding a flight to D.C.
Fast-forward five years. Chu, now out of the administration, was recently asked about the administration’s reluctance to approve the Keystone XL pipeline. To the surprise of many, the scientist departed from leftist dogma: “I don’t have a position,” he explained, “but I will say that the decision [was] a political one and not a scientific one.” His comments dovetailed with yet another exhaustive State Department report that confirmed what experts have understood for years: Keystone would not exacerbate climate change, since the Canadian fuel will be extracted and shipped with or without the pipeline. The only real question is whether the oil will travel through the Keystone or by rail—and studies show that pipelines are safer for workers and the environment alike.
I’m still waiting for progressives to embrace Chu’s expert analysis. More likely, though, they will treat their former hero just as they treat science itself—essential and praiseworthy when it reinforces their politics and nonexistent when it doesn’t.
The left is certainly not alone in these errors. Health, education, and energy are three arenas in which progressives display a universal tendency: They champion evidence that gels with their intuitions but shrug off data that disrupt them. This phenomenon knows no party, as the psychologist Jonathan Haidt demonstrates. All humans are inclined to rationalize backwards from our preconceptions.
But while progressives are not uniquely guilty of this phenomenon, their movement is uniquely ill-equipped to guard against it. If a measure of intellectual blindness inheres in who we are, that is all the more reason to cultivate epistemological modesty. All the more urgent that we should stay skeptical, even—or perhaps especially—of things we consider proven.
This skepticism is a central pillar in right-of-center thought. It was the conservative patriarch Edmund Burke who mused that “we are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small.” It was the libertarian hero Friedrich Hayek who insisted that we recognize “the insuperable limits to [man’s] knowledge” and favor organic social arrangements over clever schemes of our own design. And today, it is not progressives but leading center-right voices like Jim Manzi and Nassim Taleb who eloquently remind us that things are almost always more complicated than they seem.
The theoretical physicist Richard Feynman once quipped that “the first principle” of science is “that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” If we take the genius at his word, “the party of science” starts to look like a paradox. To insist that only your ideology is empirical and enlightened is to conclusively prove that it is neither.
Follow Andrew Quinn on Twitter.The book mirrors State Department institutional taboos and obsessions. It avoids meaningful criticism of Israel and Saudi Arabia. It pretends, quite extraordinarily, that the Latin American sovereignty movement, which has liberated so many from United States-backed plutocracies and dictatorships over the last 30 years, never happened. Referring instead to the region’s “aging leaders,” the book can’t see Latin America for Cuba. And, of course, the book frets theatrically over Washington’s favorite boogeymen: North Korea and Iran.
Google, which started out as an expression of independent Californian graduate student culture — a decent, humane and playful culture — has, as it encountered the big, bad world, thrown its lot in with traditional Washington power elements, from the State Department to the National Security Agency.
Despite accounting for an infinitesimal fraction of violent deaths globally, terrorism is a favorite brand in United States policy circles. This is a fetish that must also be catered to, and so “The Future of Terrorism” gets a whole chapter. The future of terrorism, we learn, is cyberterrorism. A session of indulgent scaremongering follows, including a breathless disaster-movie scenario, wherein cyberterrorists take control of American air-traffic control systems and send planes crashing into buildings, shutting down power grids and launching nuclear weapons. The authors then tar activists who engage in digital sit-ins with the same brush.
I have a very different perspective. The advance of information technology epitomized by Google heralds the death of privacy for most people and shifts the world toward authoritarianism. This is the principal thesis in my book, “Cypherpunks.” But while Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Cohen tell us that the death of privacy will aid governments in “repressive autocracies” in “targeting their citizens,” they also say governments in “open” democracies will see it as “a gift” enabling them to “better respond to citizen and customer concerns.” In reality, the erosion of individual privacy in the West and the attendant centralization of power make abuses inevitable, moving the “good” societies closer to the “bad” ones.
The section on “repressive autocracies” describes, disapprovingly, various repressive surveillance measures: legislation to insert back doors into software to enable spying on citizens, monitoring of social networks and the collection of intelligence on entire populations. All of these are already in widespread use in the United States. In fact, some of those measures — like the push to require every social-network profile to be linked to a real name — were spearheaded by Google itself.
THE writing is on the wall, but the authors cannot see it. They borrow from William Dobson the idea that the media, in an autocracy, “allows for an opposition press as long as regime opponents understand where the unspoken limits are.” But these trends are beginning to emerge |
V/A - Nardcore LP 1984
Life As One (1983) Antidote (NYC) 0:44 Thou Shalt Not Kill 7" EP 1983
Life Of Them (1983) Child Abuse (NJ) 0:43...Bring It 7" EP 1983
Life Unfullfilled (1982) Media Disease (DC) 0:28 V/A - Mixed Nuts Don't Crack LP 1982
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Linda Is A Monster (1982) Naughty Women (LA) 1:28 V/A - Sudden Death LP 1982
Little Devil (1982) Mad Society (LA) 1:09 V/A - You Can't Argue With Sucksess LP 1982
Live To Live, Die To Die (1983) Sluglords (SF) 1:58 Trails Of Slime 1983
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Locked Inside (1983) The Guns (Cleveland) 1:11 V/A - The New Hope LP 1983
Look to the Left (1983) Caustic Cause (LA) 0:45 V/A - We Got Power: Party Or Go Home 1983
Looking Back (1985) Justice League (LA) 2:33 V/A - Empty Skulls Vol. 2 CS 1985
Lost Cause (1981) Negative Approach (Detroit) 0:37 V/A - Process of Elimination 7" EP 1981
Lost in a Crowd (1984) The Remains (Reno) 2:40 V/A - Nuke Your Dink 7" EP 1984
Lost In Space (1981) S.O.A. (DC) 0:40 No Policy 7" EP 1981
Lost Sheep (1983) Malefice (DC) 3:26 Overboard 7" 1983
Lou's Anxiety Song (1983) Deep Wound (MA) 0:56 Deep Wound 7" EP 1983
Loud And Clear (1983) The Abused (NYC) 0:55 Loud And Clear 7" EP 1983
Loud Fast Rules (1980) The Stimulators (NYC) 3:10 Loud Fast Rules 7" 1980
Love At First Sight (1984) Executioner (Santa Cruz) 1:25 V/A - Growing Pains CS 1984
Love Dog (1983) Ruin (Philly) 1:34 V/A - Get Off My Back LP 1983
Love in Your Mouth (1981) Nig Heist (LA) 1:45 Snort My Load LP 1981
Love Me (1986) Psycho (Boston) 1:25 V/A - There's A Method To Our Madness 1986
Love Song (1985) Adrenalin O.D. (NJ) 1:42 V/A - Big City's One Big Crowd LP 1985
Lude Boy (1981) Social Distortion (OC) 1:54 Posh Boy demo 1981
Lust Bust (1983) III Repute (Oxnard, CA) 1:24 V/A - Copulation LP 1983
M.I.C. (1981) Hüsker Dü (Minneapolis) 1:03 In A Free Land 7" EP 1981
Machine Gun (1983) Jerry's Kids (Boston) 1:20 V/A - Unsafe at any Speed 7" EP 1983
MADD (1985) Stetz (NJ) 2:51 V/A - New Jersey's Got It? LP 1985
Maelstrom (1986) Born Without A Face (Grand Rapids, MI) 1:57 V/A - There's A Method To Our Madness LP 1986
Make Guns not Love for America (1980) No Alternative (SF) 2:29 7" 1980
Make Me (1981) Suspects (LA) 1:43 V/A - Who Cares? LP 1981
Make Sense (1983) Armed Citizens (NYC) 1:15 Make Sense 7" 1983
Making Room For Youth (1981) Social Unrest (SF) 1:56 Making Room For Youth 7" EP 1981
Marginal Man (1984) Marginal Man (DC) 3:20 Identity LP 1984
Marionetts (1983) Jerrys Kidz (Albuquerque) 1:24 Well Fed Society 7" EP 1983
Mass Hysteria (1982) Social Distortion (OC) 2:37 V/A - Someone Got Their Head Kicked In LP 1982
Mass Sterilization (1983) No Trend (DC) 3:05 No Trend 7" EP 1983
Meatmen Stomp (1981) Meatmen (Detroit) 1:25 V/A - Process of Elimination 7" EP 1981
Media Control (1983) Reflex From Pain (CT) 1:41 Black and White 1983
Media Control (1984) Condemned To Death (SF) 1:34 Condemned To Death 7" EP 1984
Meltdown (1983) Watchtower (Austin) 3:55 V/A - Cottage Cheese from the Lips of Death LP 1983
Memories of Tomorrow (1982) Suicidal Tendencies (LA) 0:57 1982 demo CS 1982
Messed Up Mixed Up (1982) Sado Nation (Portland) 1:26 We're Not Equal 12" 1982
Midland Park Police (1986) The Burnt (NJ) 1:58 V/A - There's A Method To Our Madness 1986
Midnite Deposit (1982) Ill Will (LA) 0:57 V/A - Life is Ugly So Why Not Kill Yourself? LP 1982
Might Makes Right (1982) Negative FX (Boston) 1:30 American Hardcore 1982
Mind Control (1982) Lost Generation (CT) 1:38 Never Work 7" EP 1982
Mind Control (1983) All White Jury (MA) 0:39 Apathetic Society demo CS 1983
Miniature Golf (1981) McDonalds (Detroit) 0:12 V/A - Process of Elimination 7" EP 1981
Missile Destroyed Civilization (1984) MDC (Austin/SF) 2:30 V/A - P.E.A.C.E. LP 1984
Mohawk Man (1982) Mr Epp & The Calculations (Seattle) 2:53 Of Course I'm Happy, Why? EP 1982
Money (1982) Law & Order (Baltimore) 1:26 V/A - Meathouse Compilation CS 1982
Mongoofy (1985) Bedlam (NJ) 1:09 V/A - New Jersey's Got It? LP 1985
Moo (1983) Hugh Beaumont Experience (Dallas) 1:35 V/A - Cottage Cheese from the Lips of Death LP 1983
Moon The Moonies (1982) ISM (NYC) 2:10 V/A - The Big Apple, Rotten To The Core LP 1982
Moral Majority (1982) Youth Brigade (DC) 1:06 V/A - Flex Your Head LP 1982
Moral Majority (1983) Modern Warfare (LA) 1:25 V/A - Life is Boring So Why Not Steal This Record? LP 1983
More Than Fashion (1983) DYS (Boston) 1:31 Brotherhood 12" 1983
Movie Maker (1983) Shellshock (New Orleans) 1:43 Lost and Found demo 1983
Mr. Moto (1981) Agent Orange (LA) 1:56 V/A - Rodney On The ROQ Vol. 2 LP 1981
Muammar Khadafi (1984) Flesh Columns (Windsor, ONT) 1:50 Sehweigew Vor Dem Sturm EP 1984
My Dog's Into Anarchy (1983) Roach Motel (Gainesville, FL) 0:37 V/A - We Can't Help It If We're From Florida 1983
My Friends - The Pit (1984) Impact Unit (Boston) 1:11 V/A - Empty Skulls CS 1984
My Minds Diseased (1984) Battalion Of Saints (San Diego) 2:32 Second Coming LP 1984
National Socialism (1982) Negative Element (OH) 0:53 V/A - Meathouse Compilation CS 1982
Nazi School (1981) Cracked Actor (NYC) 2:42 Nazi School 7" 1981
Nazis In My Neighborhood (1983) White Trash (Denver) 1:30 Thrash Is Truth 7" EP 1983
Negative FX (1982) Negative FX (Boston) 0:46 1982 demo 1982
Neil Armstrong (1983) Angst (SF) 1:07 Angst 7" EP 1983
Neon Christ (1984) Neon Christ (Atlanta) 1:43 Neon Christ 7" EP 1984
Nervous Breakdown (1978) Black Flag (LA) 2:03 Nervous Breakdown 7" EP 1978
Nervous Wreck (1982) Colcor (NC) 1:13 V/A - No Core tape 1982
New Breed (1982) Iron Cross (DC) 1:21 V/A - Flex Your Head LP 1982
New Hope (1984) Honor Role (Richmond) 1:00 It Bled Like A Stuck Pig EP 1984
New Image (1983) Repellents (Anderson, IN) 0:45 V/A - The Master Tape Vol. II LP 1983
New Left (1982) M.I.A. (Las Vegas) 0:45 V/A - Not So Quiet On The Western Front LP 1982
New Meiji Takeover (1983) Nip Drivers (LA) 1:11 Oh Blessed Freak Show LP 1983
New Patriot (1982) Battered Youth (Indianapolis) 1:15 V/A - The Master Tape LP 1982
New Right (1983) Stillborn Christians (NC) 0:51 V/A - Why Are We Here? 7" EP 1983
New Right (1983) The State (Detroit) 0:37 No Illusions 7" EP 1983
New Rose (1982) Frontline (NYC) 2:00 V/A - Ratcage Records Benefit, CBGB 10/22/82 1982
New Wave Homes (1983) Crankshaft (LA) 0:46 V/A - We Got Power: Party Or Go Home 1983
New York's Alright If You Like Saxophones (1981) Fear (LA) 2:08 The Record LP 1981
Nic Fit (1982) The Untouchables (DC) 0:59 V/A - Flex Your Head LP 1982
Night on the Town (1983) Urban Assault (SF) 1:29 V/A - We Got Power: Party Or Go Home 1983
Night Stix (1983) New Regime (LA) 2:52 V/A - Copulation LP 1983
Nightmare Reality (1985) Pleased Youth (NJ) 0:53 V/A - Big City's One Big Crowd LP 1985
NJ Is A Mall (1985) Cyanamid (NJ) 0:27 V/A - New Jersey's Got It? LP 1985
No Cause For Concern (1983) Dead Virgins (NYC) 1:53 Four 7" EP 1983
No Chance (1985) Cancerous Growth (MA) 1:24 Late For The Grave LP 1985
No Compromise (1979) Rhino 39 (LA) 0:54 7" 1979
No God (1980) Germs (LA) 1:54 (GI) LP 1980
No Help From Up Above (1983) Ultra Violence (NYC) 1:24 V/A - Big City Nice and Loud 7" EP 1983
No Hope (1985) Shok (NYC) 3:32 V/A - Big City's One Big Crowd LP 1985
No Idols (1981) The Fix (Detroit) 1:36 V/A - Process of Elimination 7" EP 1981
No Justice-No Law/No Crime-No Flaw (1983) Little Gentlemen (Philly) 3:33 V/A - Get Off My Back LP 1983
No Marine Recruit (1983) Ground Zero (Minneapolis) 2:06 V/A - Lung Cookies LP 1983
No Mercy No War (1984) Barely Human (SF) 2:49 V/A - P.E.A.C.E. LP 1984
No Money (1982) Rifle Sport (Minneapolis) 1:59 V/A - Barefoot & Pregnant CS 1982
No More Riots (1982) Bent Nails (SF) 2:49 V/A - Not So Quiet On The Western Front LP 1982
No One Listens (1982) Vengeance (SF) 2:00 V/A - Not So Quiet On The Western Front LP 1982
No Patience (1984) Real Enemy (Pittsburgh) 0:52 Life With The Enemy 1984
No Respect (1984) R.K.L. (Santa Barbara) 1:12 V/A - Nardcore LP 1984
No Rights (1983) Government Issue (DC) 0:43 V/A - Copulation LP 1983
No Straight Edge (1982) White Cross (Richmond) 0:28 White Cross 7" EP 1982
No Talk In The Eighties (1980) Hates (Houston) 2:15 No Talk In The Eighties 7" EP 1980
No Values (1980) Black Flag (LA) 1:36 V/A - Rodney On The ROQ Vol. 1 LP 1980
No Way Dude (1984) Zany Guys (Phoenix) 2:32 V/A - This is Phoenix Not The Circle Jerks LP 1984
No Work (1982) Colcor (NC) 0:32 V/A - No Core tape 1982
Nobody Rules (1983) Really Red (Houston) 2:36 V/A - Cottage Cheese from the Lips of Death LP 1983
Not Fair (1984) Deranged Diction (Missoula, MT) 0:59 V/A - I'm Buck Naked CS 1984
Not for me (1984) No Labels (Raleigh) 1:00 V/A - Empty Skulls CS 1984
Not Now Generation (1983) RF7 (LA) 1:48 V/A - Lung Cookies LP 1983
Nothing To Say (1984) Silly Killers (Seattle) 2:10 V/A - Seattle Syndrome LP 1984
Nuclear Crayons (1982) Nuclear Crayons (DC) 1:39 V/A - Mixed Nuts Don't Crack LP 1982
NYC (1984) Major Conflict (NYC) 0:53 Major Conflict 1984
Nympho (1984) Death Piggy (Richmond) 0:44 Love War 7" EP 1984
Nymphomaniac (1985) Doggy Style (LA) 2:02 Work As One 7" EP 1985
Obedience School (1985) Pleased Youth (NJ) 1:49 V/A - New Jersey's Got It? LP 1985
Ode To Darby (1982) Youth Gone Mad (LA) 0:59 V/A - Sudden Death LP 1982
Ode To Kurt Kren (1982) Really Red (Houston) 0:34 Discography 1982
Off To War (1982) Maniax (SF) 3:31 V/A - Not So Quiet On The Western Front LP 1982
Off To War (1983) Wasted Talent (Harrisburg) 1:09 V/A - The Master Tape Vol. II LP 1983
Oki Dogs (1982) Youth Gone Mad (LA) 2:19 7" 1982
Old Glory (1985) Half Life (Pittsburgh) 1:11 What's Right demo 1985
Old New One (1982) Even Worse (NYC) 1:40 V/A - 171A Jerry Williams demo CS 1982
One For All (1982) Modern Warfare (LA) 1:17 V/A - American Youth Report LP 1982
Only Gonna Die (1982) Bad Religion (LA) 2:13 V/A - American Youth Report LP 1982
Onward (1984) Basic Math (LA) 2:10 V/A - Half Skull 7" EP 1984
Options (1982) The Proletariat (Boston) 2:01 V/A - This is Boston Not L.A. LP 1982
Out of Hand (1982) United Mutation (DC) 0:27 V/A - Mixed Nuts Don't Crack LP 1982
Out Of Vogue (1978) Middle Class (LA) 0:59 Out Of Vogue 7" 1978
Outer Edge (1981) Funeral (LA) 1:47 Funeral 7" EP 1981
Outside Looking In (1982) Artificial Peace (DC) 0:58 V/A - Flex Your Head LP 1982
Overboard (1983) Malefice (DC) 2:24 Overboard 7" 1983
P.U.S. (1982) Slammies (Anderson, IN) 1:15 V/A - The Master Tape LP 1982
Pac Man (1984) Trip 6 (NYC) 1:30 Trip 6 Demo 1984
Pain In Mind (1984) Condemned To Death (SF) 0:56 Condemned To Death 7" EP 1984
Paisley Douche...Cactus Juice (1983) Invisible Chains (LA) 3:40 V/A - Life is Boring So Why Not Steal This Record? LP 1983
Pankreatitis (1985) E-13 (Portland) 2:02 V/A - Drinking Is Great! 7" 1985
Parasite (1983) Cause for Alarm (NYC) 0:47 S/T E.P. 7" 1983
Parental Suppression (1984) Neon Christ (Atlanta) 0:41 Parental Suppression 1984
Parties Over Now (1983) No Thanks (NYC) 1:17 V/A - Lung Cookies LP 1983
Past Comes Back To Haunt Me (1981) Necros (Detroit) 0:49 IQ32 7" EP 1981
Patterns Of Force (1983) Circle One (LA) 1:42 Patterns of Force LP 1983
Paul's Not Home (1981) Adrenalin O.D. (NJ) 1:56 V/A - New York Thrash CS 1981
Pay Salvation (1982) Los Olvidados (SF) 2:06 V/A - Not So Quiet On The Western Front LP 1982
Pay To Cum (1980) Bad Brains (DC/NY) 1:28 Pay to Cum 7" 1980
Payback (1984) Starvation Army (OH) 1:36 In The Red 7" EP 1984
Peace Of Mind (1984) Virus (NYC) 0:45 Dark Ages 12" EP 1984
Peace Of What (1984) Trash (SF) 1:22 V/A - P.E.A.C.E. LP 1984
Peace Officer (1984) White Lie (SF) 1:17 V/A - P.E.A.C.E. LP 1984
Peer Police (1982) The F.U.'s (Boston) 1:15 Kill for Christ 12" EP 1982
Peggy's Got a Problem (1983) Genocide (NJ) 1:13 V/A - Buried Alive LP 1983
Penis Brain (1983) Manson Youth (LA) 2:05 V/A - Noise From Nowhere LP 1983
People Talk (1982) Bloodclot! (NYC) 1:40 V/A - 171A Jerry Williams demo CS 1982
People United (1982) The Fartz (Seattle) 1:11 World Full of Hate LP 1982
People Who Bleed (1985) My 3 Sons (NJ) 2:20 V/A - New Jersey's Got It? LP 1985
Pershing Two (1984) The Wards (Vermont) 1:53 Ripped off in Boston demo CS 1984
Phi Kappa Wanker (1983) All White Jury (MA) 0:41 1983
Philly Cops (1985) Decontrol (Philly) 2:20 Songs From The Gut LP 1985
Pigs in Space (1984) Free Beer (SF) 2:42 V/A - Thrasher Skate Rock Vol. 2 1984
Pigs Theme (1984) White Pigs (CT) 1:50 7" EP 1984
Plaid Spaceship (1983) Sector 4 (Tallahassee, FL) 0:03 V/A - We Can't Help It If We're From Florida 1983
Pledge (1984) Soylent Greene (Phoenix) 1:41 V/A - This is Phoenix Not The Circle Jerks LP 1984
Poison Gas (1984) The Wards (Vermont) 0:34 Ripped off in Boston demo CS 1984
Poison Planet (1984) Corrosion Of Conformity (Raleigh) 1:28 V/A - Empty Skulls CS 1984
Police Brutality (1983) Urban Waste (NYC) 0:56 Urban Waste 7" EP 1983
Police Raid (1983) G.F.O. (WI) 0:51 V/A - America's Dairyland CS 1983
Police State (1983) Suburban Mutilation (WI) 0:53 V/A - America's Dairyland CS 1983
Police Story (1983) Black Flag (LA) 1:26 V/A - Copulation LP 1983
Pony Dress (1982) Flesheaters (LA) 2:32 V/A - American Youth Report LP 1982
Portland (1983) Lockjaw (Seattle) 0:54 Dead Friends 7" EP 1983
Poseur (1982) Poison Center (LA) 0:41 V/A - First Strike CS 1982
Potential Rapist (1983) Naked Raygun (Chicago) 2:35 Basement Screams 1983
Potential Suicide (1981) Black Market Baby (DC) 2:59 Potential Suicide 7" 1981
Power Of The Minds (1983) Red Meat (Minneapolis) 0:47 V/A - Lung Cookies LP 1983
Power Play (1983) Verbal Abuse (SF) 0:57 Just An American Band LP 1983
Powerload (1984) Flag Of Democracy (Philly) 1:41 Love Songs 7" EP 1984
Praise The Lord & Pass The Ammunition (1982) Impatient Youth (SF) 2:27 V/A - Not So Quiet On The Western Front LP 1982
Pray for Peace (1983) Hari Kari (LA) 1:35 V/A - Life is Boring So Why Not Steal This Record? LP 1983
Premature Enlistment (1982) Free Beer (SF) 1:57 V/A - Not So Quiet On The Western Front LP 1982
Pressure's On (1982) Red C (DC) 1:40 V/A - Flex Your Head LP 1982
Prevent this Tragedy (1984) McRad (Philly) 1:23 V/A - Thrasher Skate Rock Vol. 2 LP 1984
Propaganda (1982) Loud Fast Rules (Minneapolis) 2:07 V/A - Barefoot & Pregnant CS 1982
Protect and Serve (1983) Manifest Destiny (LA) 1:28 V/A - Copulation LP 1983
Public Opinion (1983) Urban Waste (NYC) 2:29 Urban Waste 7" EP 1983
Punk Is An Attitude (1982) Wrecks (Reno) 1:10 V/A - Not So Quiet On The Western Front LP 1982
Punks and Skins and Anarchy (1985) Suicidal Youth (Waukesha, WI) 0:40 This World Sucks demo CS 1985
Punks For Profit (1986) Life Sentence (IL) 0:54 V/A - There's A Method To Our Madness 1986
Pushed To Far (1986) Sick of It All (NYC) 0:48 1986 demo 1986
Putting D.C. On The Map (1983) Double O (DC) 1:01 Double O 7" EP 1983
Question Authority (1983) Drunk Injuns (Santa Cruz) 1:47 My Dad Butch demo CS 1983
Quincy's Lament (1983) Peace Corpse (LA) 1:51 Quincy's Lament 1983
Quit (1984) Septic Death (Boise) 0:52 V/A - Empty Skulls CS 1984
R-U-Ready (1983) Doomsday Massacre (Houston) 1:53 Wake Up Or Melt Down EP 1983
Race War (1982) Unaware (SF) 1:35 V/A - Not So Quiet On The Western Front LP 1982
Radiation Fall Out (1982) Dead Youth (LA) 1:00 V/A - Sudden Death LP 1982
Rally 'round the Flag, Boys (1982) Toxic Reasons (Dayton) 2:17 Independence LP 1982
Rape Capitol Hill (1983) Dead Virgins (NYC) 1:40 Four 7" EP 1983
Rat Patrol (1982) The Untouchables (DC) 0:59 V/A - Flex Your Head LP 1982
Rats On Fire (1982) Even Worse (NYC) 2:09 V/A - 171A Jerry Williams demo CS 1982
Raygunomics (1984) Agent 86 (Arcata, CA) 1:16 Scary Action 7" EP 1984
Ready To Fight (1982) Negative Approach (Detroit) 1:02 Lost Cause 7" EP 1982
Ready to Fight (1986) Pillsbury Hardcore (LA) 0:55 End the Warzone 7" 1986
Reagan Country (1981) Shattered Faith (LA) 3:17 I Love America 7" 1981
Reagan Youth (1981) Rebel Truth (Sacramento) 2:05 V/A - Charred Remains CS 1981
Reagan Youth (1982) Reagan Youth (NYC) 1:42 Ratcage Records Benefit, CBGB 10/22/82 1982
Reagan's War Puppets (1983) The Accused (WA) 1:08 The Accused/The Rejectors split 12" 1983
Reaganomics (1983) D.R.I. (Houston/SF) 0:40 Dirty Rotten 7'' EP 1983
Reaganomics Fuck Off (1984) Accelerators (NJ) 0:24 V/A - I'm Buck Naked CS 1984
Reagum (1982) Lennonburger (SF) 1:11 V/A - Not So Quiet On The Western Front LP 1982
Real Deal (1983) Antidote (NYC) 1:31 Thou Shalt Not Kill 7" EP 1983
Rebels And Infidels (1982) Rebels And Infidels (SF) 1:27 Corporate Picnic LP 1982
Red Tape (1980) Circle Jerks (LA) 0:56 Group Sex LP 1980
Red, White and Blues (1983) Tar Babies (Madison, WI) 0:51 V/A - America's Dairyland CS 1983
Redneck (1982) Corrosion Of Conformity (Raleigh) 1:03 V/A - No Core tape 1982
Redneck Asshole (1982) Media Disease (DC) 0:11 V/A - Mixed Nuts Don't Crack LP 1982
Reject Yourself (1982) 100 Flowers (LA) 2:31 V/A - Hell Comes To Your House LP 1982
Religion Is the Opium of the Masses (1982) The Proletariat (Boston) 2:14 V/A - This is Boston Not L.A. LP 1982
Rhetoric (1984) Virus (NYC) 1:18 Dark Ages 12" EP 1984
Rich Brat (1982) Red Cross (LA) 0:34 V/A - Life is Ugly So Why Not Kill Yourself? LP 1982
Rich Mans Son (1982) Secret Hate (LA) 1:25 V/A - You Can't Argue With Sucksess LP 1982
Rich Plastic People (1982) Killjoy (SF) 1:44 V/A - Not So Quiet On The Western Front LP 1982
Richard Hung Himself (1983) D.I. (OC) 4:01 V/A - Suburbia soundtrack LP 1983
Right And Wrong (1983) Informed Sources (Philly) 1:16 V/A - Get Off My Back LP 1983
Right Is Right (1982) Shattered Faith (LA) 2:34 V/A - Rodney On The ROQ Vol.2 LP 1982
Right Is Right (1986) Mad Parade (LA) 3:29 Right Is Right 7" EP 1986
Rio (1985) Nip Drivers (LA) 0:40 V/A - When Men Were Men And Sheep Were Scared LP 1985
Riot Fight (1982) Beastie Boys (NYC) 0:25 Pollywog Stew 7" EP 1982
Riot Squad (1981) Cheifs (LA) 1:33 V/A Who Cares LP 1981
Riot Squad (1981) Mad Society (LA) 1:25 Mad Society 7" EP 1981
Ripped Off (1982) Neos (Vancouver/Victoria) 0:35 demo CS 1982
Rock & Roll Asshole (1983) Marching Plague (San Antonio) 1:25 V/A - Cottage Cheese from the Lips of Death LP 1983
Rock n Roll Burnout (1983) Urban Assault (Tahoe) 0:28 V/A - We Got Power: Party Or Go Home 1983
Rodney on the ROQ (1981) Target 13 (LA) 2:15 V/A - Rodney On The ROQ Vol.2 LP 1981
Rome Song (1985) Sheer Terror (NYC) 1:42 V/A - Big City's One Big Crowd LP 1985
Room 23 (1983) Catch-22 (San Diego) 1:26 V/A - Our Blow Out LP 1983
Runaway (1981) Sin 34 (LA) 0:34 V/A - Charred Remains CS 1981
Runnin' Around (1983) D.R.I. (Houston/SF) 1:04 V/A - Cottage Cheese from the Lips of Death LP 1983
S&M Nightmare (1982) Juvenile Justice (SF) 1:49 V/A - Not So Quiet On The Western Front LP 1982
Sacred Denial (1985) Sacred Denial (NJ) 2:09 V/A - Big City's One Big Crowd LP 1985
Sacrifice (1982) Flipper (SF) 4:35 V/A - Not So Quiet On The Western Front LP 1982
Sacrifice Not Suicide (1982) The Freeze (Boston) 1:08 V/A - This is Boston Not L.A. LP 1982
Sad But True (1985) Siege (MA) 1:34 V/A - Cleanse The Bacteria LP 1985
Sailin' On (1982) Bad Brains (DC/NY) 1:56 Bad Brains CS 1982
Saturnon (1982) Red Beret (LA) 2:24 V/A - You Can't Argue With Sucksess LP 1982
Scare (1982) Domino Theory (SF) 1:20 V/A - Not So Quiet On The Western Front LP 1982
Scene Death (1985) Th' Inbred (WV) 1:22 Reproduction 7" EP 1985
School (1983) Distain (WI) 1:24 V/A - America's Dairyland CS 1983
School's Prison (1983) Idiot Savants (Cleveland) 0:15 V/A - The Master Tape Vol. II LP 1983
Self Oppression (1982) Betrayed (NYC) 1:21 V/A - Meathouse Compilation CS 1982
Self-Defeated (1983) Final Conflict (Minneapolis) 2:14 Final Conflict 7" EP 1983
Serena Dank (Go Away) (1982) Suburban Menace (IL) 1:48 V/A - Annoy Your Neighbors With This Tape! 1982
Sex Bomb (live) (1986) Flipper (SF) 7:48 Public Flipper Limited 1986
She's Into the Scene (1982) No Crisis (OC) 2:48 She's Into The Scene 1982
Shitcan (1982) Scapegoats (SF) 1:13 V/A - Not So Quiet On The Western Front LP 1982
Shoot the Pope (1984) RPA (Seattle) 2:16 V/A - Seattle Syndrome LP 1984
Shopping On Heroin (1983) Otto's Chemical Lounge (Minneapolis) 1:38 V/A - Lung Cookies LP 1983
Shrunken Heads (1982) Ghost Dance (SF) 2:35 V/A - Not So Quiet On The Western Front LP 1982
Sick And Crazy (1981) The Stains (LA) 2:20 V/A - Chunks LP 1981
Sick Pleasure (1982) Sick Pleasure (SF) 2:15 Dolls Under Control LP 1982
Signals From Above (1982) Hüsker Dü (Minneapolis) 1:40 V/A - Barefoot & Pregnant CS 1982
Silence (1984) Septic Death (Boise) 1:33 V/A - P.E.A.C.E. LP 1984
Silence On The Radio (1981) The Manic Depressives (New Orleans) 2:10 Silence On The Radio 7" EP 1981
Silent Strangers (1982) Lost Generation (CT) 1:19 Never Work 7" EP 1982
Sink With California (1983) Youth Brigade (LA) 4:13 Sound & Fury LP 1983
Sit Down (1982) Media Disease (DC) 1:33 Hit & Run demo CS 1982
Skate Harrassment (1984) The Faction (Santa Cruz) 2:14 V/A - Growing Pains CS 1984
Skate Punx (1983) Riot.303 (LA) 1:32 V/A - Thrasher Skate Rock Vol. 1 1983
Skate To Live (1984) Scared Straight (Simi Valley, CA)) 1:01 V/A - Nardcore LP 1984
Skateboard (1982) JFA (Phoenix) 0:53 V/A - Meathouse Compilation CS 1982
Skinhead Rebel (1986) Murphy's Law (NYC) 1:16 Murphy's Law LP 1986
Slam (1982) Decadance (Boston) 1:30 V/A - This is Boston Not L.A. LP 1982
Slam Dance (1984) Disorderly Conduct (NYC) 1:02 V/A - I'm Buck Naked CS 1984
Slam the Pigs (1984) The Expelled (Reno) 0:52 V/A - Nuke |
to $637 million this year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
The Citizens United ruling prohibits government from restricting contributions by non-profit groups -- and by extension -- for unions and for-profit organizations.
Consider the three observations about political spending below:
1. Financial Sector Contributes to Outside Groups
Since 2010, the bulk of total contributions by the financial sector has been going to outside spending groups. The largest total has been in the 2016 election cycle.
Outside money groups like Super PACs can accept unlimited contributions and are allowed to advocate for or against a candidate, a direct result of the 2010 Citizens United ruling. This year, the contribution by the sector is $309.41 million compared to just $17.9 million in 2010.
Renaissance Technologies gave $30.24 million to outside spending groups. Super-PACs like Priorities USA Action and Keep the Promise II received $9 million and $13.5 million, respectively from the investment management company.
The next biggest contributor in the sector, Elliott Management, gave 98% to Republicans with a sum of $15.25 million to outside spending groups.When we think about America, the first things that pop into our heads might be apple pie or baseball. But each individual state has its own character and symbols, too! They’re part of a whole, but they’re also unique parts of that whole.
In this infographic, we’ll go state by state and share some of the symbols that each state has chosen to represent them. When you think about Georgia, for instance, you should also be thinking about peaches and peanuts; or when you think about Idaho, imagine huckleberries and potatoes. Take a look – some state symbols may surprise you!
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Symbols of the 50 States – An infographic by HomeAdvisor
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You can be the first to comment!Man stabbed in Stoke Newington Church Street
The scene in Stoke Newington Church Street following a stabbing on Thursday afternoon. Picture: Matt James/@mattjamesd Archant
Police have closed Stoke Newington Church Street and surrounding roads after a stabbing this afternoon.
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Stoke Newington Church Street N16 and surrounding streets are currently closed due to a stabbing. Busses are on diversion @TfLBusAlerts pic.twitter.com/tdC7uhPi6h — Hackney Police (@MPSHackney) July 27, 2017
Emergency services were called to the scene, near Abney Park Cemetery, at about 1.40pm.
The air ambulance also attended and the victim was taken to hospital. A Scotland Yard spokesman said his injuries were not yet known.
The scene in Stoke Newington Church Street. The scene in Stoke Newington Church Street.
One witness tweeted that it was a fight and said police were “very quick” and arrived within five minutes.
“I came out of a shop,” he said, “and there were three men flighting in the road blocking traffic, [and] people shouting.
“They were wrestling on the floor in the middle of the road. Looked like one got stabbed and the other two ran off. Victim was lying in the road and onlookers helped him off the road.”
Church Street and surrounding roads have been closed while officers investigate.
One person has been arrested on suspicion of causing grievous bodily harm.When the Chernobyl nuclear disaster occurred in Ukraine in 1986, it wasn’t just an environmental catastrophe for humans. The local animal wildlife took a terrible hit too, with the radioactive dust cloud that stemmed from the explosion killing or harming a huge number of animal species in the surrounding area.
But now, some three decades later, the animal population of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is positively thriving, despite the lingering radiation that still permeates the landscape. The sheer fact that virtually all of the area’s human residents cleared out after the disaster, creating an impromptu wildlife habitat free from the negative impacts we usually pose to animal species, seems to have done them a world of good.
According to an international team of researchers, a resurgence in the numbers of elk, deer, boar, and wolves in the 4,200-km2 Chernobyl Exclusion Zone shows that the nuclear disaster in some ways had an eventual upside for the area’s animal populations.
“It’s very likely that wildlife numbers at Chernobyl are much higher than they were before the accident,” said Jim Smith of the University of Portsmouth in the UK. “This doesn’t mean radiation is good for wildlife, just that the effects of human habitation, including hunting, farming, and forestry, are a lot worse.”
It’s worth underscoring that the researchers’ findings aren’t an assessment on the impacts of radiation on the animals – they’re simply an empirical measure of population numbers sourced from census data and helicopter surveys of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.
Those methods found that the populations of elk, roe deer, red deer, and wild boar in the radiation-affected area are comparable to the animal levels in uncontaminated nature reserves in the region. Wolf populations are particularly strong, being some seven times higher in the Exclusion Zone than surrounding reserves.
“These unique data showing a wide range of animals thriving within miles of a major nuclear accident illustrate the resilience of wildlife populations when freed from the pressures of human habitation,” said co-author Jim Beasley of the University of Georgia.
While the researchers acknowledge that previous studies on the effects of Chernobyl showed significant detriment to animals and their numbers, they found no evidence of a long-term impact on population levels.
The study doesn’t just show us how animals can bounce back in the face of radiation outbreaks imposed by events like Chernobyl and Fukushima. It’s also a salient reminder of the adverse effects human habitation has on animals in their natural environment. Chernobyl was certainly toxic, there’s no doubt about that – but in the long run, it appears the presence of people is even more threatening to animal populations.
“The results from these unique data will help society balance the negative impacts to wildlife from chronic radiation exposures against how ‘the removal of humans alleviates one of the more persistent and ever growing stresses experienced by natural ecosystems’,” the researchers write.
The findings are published in Current Biology.Revolt at the Waldorf: Rich Activists Push for Higher Taxes on Themselves
(Photo courtesy Resource Generation)
A few weeks ago, outside Midtown Manhattan’s famed Waldorf Astoria Hotel, protesters gathered to rally against Governor Andrew Cuomo’s proposal to cut funding for public services, while also cutting taxes for the wealthy. Organized by New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts, the marchers represented several organizations joining together to “Demand That Millionaires Pay Their Fair Share.”
But amidst the chants of “Not another nickel, not another dime! Bailing out millionaires is a crime!” on March 31 were two protesters holding a very unusual rally sign: “Another trust fund baby for taxing the rich! Let’s pay our fair share!”
It certainly wasn't the first time trust-funders have made their way up Park Avenue to the prestigious Waldorf Astoria. But it was probably the first time inheritors of wealth have publicly rallied in front of the esteemed hotel for an increase in taxes on themselves.
Who would do such a thing? Why would anyone actively advocate against their own self-interest? “Our current tax system perpetuates inequality,” states Elspeth Gilmore. “Wealthy people can really change that narrative.”
Gilmore is the co-director of Resource Generation, a national nonprofit organization that supports and challenges young, progressive people with wealth to leverage their privilege and resources for social change.
But within the nonprofit and social justice communities, being wealthy is not the easiest label to identify with. “You hold up the sign first,” Gilmore tried to persuade her co-conspirator Jessie Spector, Resource Generation’s National Organizer, as the two of them joined the rally at the Waldorf, wondering if they “were really about to publicly declare themselves Trust Fund Babies.”
Ultimately, they felt they had to. “As a block,” Gilmore states, “the issue of unfair taxes is a key place where wealthy people can really speak out.”
By employing the charged term “trust fund baby” the affluent activists created a potentially uncomfortable situation for themselves. But they believed doing so allowed their presence at the rally to be as effective as possible. “Wealthy people probably take some of the least risks,” Gilmore admits, noting that, in the end, they were holding a sign, not risking food or shelter or economic security.
“We got some thumbs up from a handful of protesters, but most of them couldn’t see the sign,” she continues, noting that their presence at the protest, as well as in the entire social justice movement, “could lead to amazing conversations.”
For the past 13 years, mostly from behind the scenes, Resource Generation has worked with about 1,500 young affluent adults through conferences, workshops and in various philanthropic settings.
But now they are preparing to engage in public activism on an organizational level. “It’s a powerful message within the labor movement,” suggests Gilmore, “when wealthy folks are aligned.”
Resource Generation recently teamed up with another nonprofit that organizes affluent activists, Wealth for the Common Good, to form a Progressive Tax Campaign. They will be organizing and advocating a change in the policy, laws and perceptions of our tax system. Specifically, the campaign aims to draw attention to the social services that taxing the wealthy could fund, and advocates higher tax bracket rates for top income earners, as well as higher taxes on investment income.
It’s a concentration Resource Generation thinks could have a big impact, even if it focuses on the mundane world of taxes. “It’s definitely not sexy,” Gilmore admits. “There’s a lot of myths around it, and it takes education and time to understand. But it gets right to the root of inequality and wealth disparity.”
Additionally, various chapters are working on specific campaigns that address particular issues pertaining to the political climates of the country’s various regions, such as immigrant rights in Arizona, and budget cuts in New York.
But much of Resource Generation’s work will continue to focus on supporting and challenging young, progressive, affluent individuals. “You have to be okay with who you are,” urges Gilmore. “You have to bring your full self to your local work.”
It’s a task to which those at Resource Generation have dedicated thousands of hours over the years. “What makes us effective is the personal work done within our community that supports and challenges us,” suggests Gilmore. Like Resource Generation as a whole, she continues to ask, “What is the best role for wealthy people to play as a group in this political moment?”
The answer to that question will certainly be revised over and over again as the political climate changes and activist campaigns continue. But embracing one’s wealthy identity to speak out against in America's unfair distribution of wealth by holding a sign that reads “Another trust fund baby for taxing the rich” would seem to be a good step. And one that the whole economic justice movement can build upon.Fox Sports Tuesday night continued to set ratings records for its Women’s World Cup coverage, as the U.S. Women’s National Team defeated Germany to advance to the finals of the tournament.
Fox averaged 8.4 million viewers for its coverage of the USA-Germany game, which beat out the 5.7 million viewers garnered by last week’s USA-China quarterfinal match, according to Fox officials. USA won the match 2-0 to advance to the finals Sunday against the winner of tonight’s Japan-England semi-final match.
The 2015 USA-Germany semifinal is now the third most-watched women’s soccer match of all time, trailing only the USA-China 1999 Women’s World Cup Final (17.9 million) and the Japan-USA 2011 Women’s World Cup Final (13.4 million).
USA-Germany is the most-watched World Cup semifinal match – men’s or women’s -ever in the U.S., breaking the mark set for the Germany-Italy 2006 World Cup semifinal (5.9 million).
FOX Sports GO recorded a record 166,000 unique streamers, according to network officials. This was the largest authenticated streaming audience in FOX Sports GO history, besting the previous mark set by the USA vs. Colombia round of 16 match (121,000 unique streamers), said the network.Search Gallery No Flutter Sailor Moon MissLaneyLuck 9 Attack on Titan - Lolita Eren 2 MissLaneyLuck 1 Advertisement Advertisement Attack on Titan - Lolita Eren MissLaneyLuck 1 Cheshire Cat - Dave Yang MissLaneyLuck 0 Princess Hinoto Tarot Variation (CLAMP) MissLaneyLuck 4 Alice's World - The Cheshire Cat MissLaneyLuck 4 Sakizou - The March Hare MissLaneyLuck 3 Sakizou - Alice in Wonderland MissLaneyLuck 2 Princess Hinoto Tarot Variation (CLAMP) - Katsucon MissLaneyLuck 4 Hinoto Hime Cosplay - Tarot Version MissLaneyLuck 4 Dark Mousy and Risa Harada MissLaneyLuck 6 Sun Suki - Hana - Gate 7 (2) MissLaneyLuck 0 Sun Suki - Hana - Gate 7 MissLaneyLuck 0 Sakizou Cheshire Cat MissLaneyLuck 0 Cheshire - 2015 MissLaneyLuck 1 Alice's World MissLaneyLuck 4 Sakizou's Cheshire and Alice MissLaneyLuck 4 GISHWHES - Kale Queen MissLaneyLuck 8 Hinoto by Lauren Pihl MissLaneyLuck 3 Hana the Warrior MissLaneyLuck 3 Kuranosuke Koibuchi MissLaneyLuck 0 Fabulous!! MissLaneyLuck 0 Dark Mousy and Risa Harada MissLaneyLuck 1 Soul and Maka MissLaneyLuck 1It is not only the Dutchman’s technical brilliance – “his intelligence and movement are exceptional” – but the strength of his leadership – “he is the perfect captain” – which is testing the Arsenal manager’s vocabulary.
“He has totally matured and is much more focused on efficiency,” he added on Friday. “He is a football lover. He came here as a winger, but when you look at the goals he has scored, you can only say ‘fantastic’.”
In the wake of Cesc Fabregas and Samir Nasri’s summer departures, Van Persie has emerged as the cohesive force for the team. Wenger took the gamble of resting him against Marseille in midweek and the team suffered, producing an anaemic performance in a 0-0 draw. You suspect it will be West Bromwich Albion’s defence that suffers on Saturday afternoon at the Emirates.
Van Persie’s flourishing as a leader in their time of need is vindication of Arsenal’s faith in the Dutchman. They saw in him a strength of character that others did not and it all traces back to a night of violence and fear seven years ago and a game that ultimately persuaded Arsenal that this slight, skilful Dutchman had the courage and resilience to become a player capable of joining a team who were closing on an unbeaten season.
The setting was a cup match between Feyenoord’s under-21s and their Ajax counterparts at the Amsterdam club’s training ground, but this was no ordinary youth game.
The Ajax hooligan hard core had turned up in their hundreds, fuelled by a hatred of their Rotterdam rivals which was then at fever pitch. Seven years earlier, one of the leaders of the Ajax hooligan groups, Carlo Picornie, had been killed with a clawhammer in an organised fight in a field by a motorway, known as the Battle of Beverwijk. Reprisals and revenge attacks were frequent.
As Van Persie came out on to the pitch, the intimidation began. There was no tunnel and no fencing at the training ground and the players had to effectively walk through the crowd.
Flares and firecrackers were set off, bottles were thrown and the striker felt himself showered with beer and spit. Sitting nervously in the stand was Steve Rowley, Wenger’s chief scout. Arsenal had been watching him for a year but it was a real challenge trying to discover whether Van Persie was good enough.
Van Persie had broken into the Feyenoord first team at 17 and, in that debut season, was in the starting XI who won the 2002 Uefa Cup.
But senior players such as Pierre van Hooijdonk, Kees van Wonderen and Paul Bosvelt did not take to this super-confident upstart, with his flash car and his tricks on the training ground.
At the start of the next season coach Bert van Marwijk, took umbrage at the way Van Persie was warming up during a Champions League qualifier against Fenerbahce in Istanbul. While the rest of the squad flew on to Monaco for the Uefa Super Cup against Real Madrid, Van Persie was sent home alone. To make it worse, the
18 year-old was accused of hanging around with the wrong crowd.
Wenger had first seen Van Persie in a Feyenoord youth game, but wanted evidence that he had developed physically and mentally. Damien Comolli, then Arsenal’s European scout, flew out to watch him in a rare first-team start only for Van Persie to get sent off.
Rowley watched him in game after game and, after speaking to friends in Holland, began to think that Van Persie was misunderstood and mismanaged. What happened that night at Ajax’s De Toekomst training ground convinced him he had the right man for Arsenal.
With his reputation and talent, and the fact he was from Rotterdam, Van Persie was the obvious target for the Ajax fans. Yet despite the vitriol coming his way, he stayed cool.
Feyenoord lost 3-1 but Van Persie scored the goal and never shirked taking a corner, despite the bottles and coins flying his way. Then events took a sinister turn.
At the final whistle hooligans poured on to the pitch and attacked Feyenoord’s players. Van Persie was chased, punched and kicked. It would have been a lot worse had Jorge Acuña, a Chilean player who had struck up a friendship with Van Persie, not run over to protect him. Acuna ended up in hospital with head, neck and rib injuries.
Only the intervention of Marco van Basten, the Ajax youth coach, and some of their players prevented further serious injuries.
“We had to run for our lives,” said Van Persie. “Back in the dressing room players were crying. Players of 18, 19 and 20 were beaten up, including myself. The Ajax players and Marco van Basten had to jump in to protect us. It was awful. There was massive panic and it was the worst thing I have ever experienced.”
By the time Rowley had got back to his hotel and calmed down, he realised that he needed no more proof of Van Persie’s character.
There was a twist, though. That night a bruised and shaken Van Persie was being driven to another Amsterdam hotel, near Schiphol airport, where delegates of PSV Eindhoven, including coach Guus Hiddink, wanted to meet him. Van Persie wanted out of Feyenoord and PSV were ready to do the deal.
Arsenal’s response was rapid. After tracking him for so long, they moved quickly to head off Hiddink. So convinced were Feyenoord of Van Persie’s ‘suspect’ temperament they let him go for just £2.75million.
That terrifying Thursday night in Amsterdam turned out to be the most important game in Van Persie’s career. Amid the chaos after the final whistle he feared the only place he was going was hospital. Instead, it was the night he effectively became an Arsenal player.iconic logo designer ivan chermayeff dies aged 85: looking back with designboom's exclusive interview
ivan chermayeff — the designer of NBC’s iconic prismatic peacock, chase bank’s heptagonal blue logo, and the smithsonian’s sunburst logo, as well as hundreds of posters and campaigns throughout history — passed away on december 2, 2017. on may 18th, 2007, designboom met with chermayeff in new york for an exclusive interview. read the conversation in full below.
designboom (DB): what is the best moment of the day?
ivan chermayeff (IC): it varies, it’s never the same. usually it’s when something good happens, like a check arriving in the mail!
DB: what kind of music do you listen to?
IC: I’m very keen on country music, but I like all types of music. classical… I’m very open about it, and ignorant.
DB: what books do you have on your bedside table?
IC: I don’t read too much fiction, usually it’s books to do with what’s happening in the world. I’m reading a good book on the disasters of the bush administration called ‘unchecked and unbalanced’ by frederick a. o. schwarz and aziz z. huq. the authors are from a place called the brennan center for justice at NYU school of law, very liberal people who are interested in justice and equality.
chase manhattan bank identity, 1961
DB: where do you get your news from?
IC: anywhere except television, mostly the new york times, which has its flaws, but it’s the best U.S. has.
DB: do you read design, art or architecture magazines?
IC: the studio subscribes to quite a few so I see a lot of design magazines.some are better written than others, but usually it’s a visual matter. I haven’t found that there is any criticism of design that is worth searching for.
NBC (national broadcasting company) identity, 1986
DB: I guess that you notice how women dress, do you have any preferences?
IC: as little as possible is usually the best!
DB: what type of clothes do you avoid wearing?
IC: dresses!
mobil oil identity, 1964
DB: do you have any pets?
IC: yes, a cat named wiley, he’s very old and terrifically comic.
left: identity for the korean fashion brand beehouse, 2007
right: op-ed page image for the new york times, 2001
printed september 13, 2001
DB: when you were a child did you always want to become a designer?
IC: well my father is an architect so he always encouraged the artistic side of things in my brother and I, poking around in the mud or any other idiotic things that we might have done. the idea of being a designer came to me early on, not because I knew what it was as much as I didn’t want to be an architect, which as I say is what my father was and my brother became. architects work on things that take a long time and often fail because of lack of funding or whatever reason. with graphic design there is the advantage that ninety nine percent of what we do is produced so you can also move forward with what your doing faster. it might have a shorter life-span but there’s a lot of it and often less politics involved than in architecture.
DB: where do you work on your projects?
IC: sometimes I make collages in my studio at home, the rest of the time I work here with the people in the office, who are a very co-operative bunch. tom (geismar) and I always know what each other are doing, we interrupt one-another and comment on the work we are doing which we encourage the other people who work in the studio to do as well. this open exchange makes things as efficient as possible.
left: vagina monologues, experimental poster for a play,
right: guggenheim museum poster announcing free evening hours
DB: how do you normally approach your projects?
IC: well, we do more homework than I think most designers do, you have to know what you’re going to do before you start designing, obviously you can change your mind as you move through it. we are very questioning of the briefs that we get from our clients because if they really knew what they wanted to say then they would say it themselves. the truth of the matter is that clients are sometimes ignorant to the reality of the visual worlds and at the same time are too close to what their doing to have perspective. this isn’t always useful because then the facts begin to bend and it makes a simple and strong result harder to achieve.
DB: do you discuss your work with other designers?
IC: we don’t really discuss our work with other designers. we collaborate with so many creative people – writers and photographers in particular – because they’re part of what we are doing in terms of communication. if we are working on a project that requires sound or animation for example, we need help. they’re are a lot of people who are good at what they do, especially here in a city like new york so it’s always good to bring people in to work on your assignments so that they can reach the best level of quality.
left: winston churchill: the wilderness years, 1983
image for a television series
right: war and remembrance, 1988
image for a television series
DB: could you describe your style as a good friend of yours might?
IC: it’s not really as easy as that because design is a service, you do what people need, not necessarily what they like
but what you feel that they should have. if the client is clever and already knows that they have a particular problem and they come to us they already have an idea of what type of service they will get. we try not to have a style, perhaps the work is recognizable as ours but I thinkthat it would take a very discerning eye to know that. what we have as a constant thread in our work is trying to boil things down to being strong and very simple and looking as though they happened very fast – which they may not have! (laughs)
sometimes it can be quite a struggle to get to what we end up going with. what a lot of people don’t understand is the process of distillation, that you can get paid for doing something that can be drawn on the back of an envelope in three seconds, but it can take a lot of work to get to that point sometimes. the most important thing is to understand who your client’s audience is. it’s too easy to be too sophisticated for people to understand, too illegible or whatever else. it’s also important to understand your clients media, for instance you are on the web, a chinese restaurant is slipping flyers under doors, you have to know how it works and act accordingly.
DB: which of your projects have given you the most satisfaction?
IC: no particular project. when you have been in the business as long as we have that’s a long list to choose from. we’ve been working for fifty years so I can’t remember all the jobs we’ve done. some are very satisfactory because they look as though they are fresh after decades have gone by, those things that can survive the weather. it’s great when you see something again that you haven’t seen for a while and it still works, that gives you a nice feeling because you know that you have done something worthwhile.
DB: could you describe an evolution in your work?
IC: the process is different for every client, in the sense that with some you really do have to go through a learning curve, which can be time consuming and difficult. as I said before it’s important to understand what you are doing, your audience and so on before you start designing, this takes time. this is an idea based business are far as we are concerned. if it’s trendy and looks nice, if you put flashy effects or whatever around a word that’s not an idea that’s just copycat nonsense and it looks like it. for us it’s not a question of what sells it’s a question of what works.
left: common sense and nuclear policy, 1959
image for jacket of book by bertrand russell
right: image for a pepsi annual report
DB: who would you like to design something for?
IC: it would be very nice to help some candidates for public office, because we need leaders very badly in our time
whether it’s here in the U.S. or wherever you are. good leadership is what makes everything come to pass well. occasionally in our profession you actually feel like you could help some of those good people who are foolish enough to become politicians.
DB: is there any artists, designers or architects from the past that have influenced you or that you particularly appreciate the work of?
IC: sure, there are lots. paul rand, I don’t think that I saw anything of his that I didn’t like. guess that I am more influenced by artists, I get a lot of joy from looking at the works of the great modernists and classicists like miro, matisse and picasso, the door opening artists of our times.
left: subway station murals and signs
lexington avenue station, new york
right: interpretive graphics, 1992
tennessee aquarium chatanooga, tennessee
DB: and those still working today…
IC: yes, many again. there are probably more that I don’t like the work of, but I can’t tell you there names because I block it out (laughs). to name someone I’d have to say richard serra, I think that he is a tremendously powerful force of understanding. there are some good architects out there too, frank gehry, richard rogers and a handful of others who are discovering what technology and computers can do. just as computers changed our profession enormously they are now doing so in architecture. whilst on average it raises the level of quality greatly it also lowers it from the top end, because people rely on the computer too much and forget that it’s really all about ideas. its not to say that’s the end, it just takes a long time for the level to rise again and it inevitably will it just doesn’t happen very easily.
mobil sculptures, 1989
mobil corporation, VA, princeton, NJ
DB: do you have any advice for the young?
IC: one is to draw a lot. the other is to work hard and be as self critical about what it is that you’re doing. don’t be put down by not doing something, don’t let it stop you from going further. another thing, don’t do projects for companies or products that you think should be eliminated from the face of the earth.
IC (continued): there is a lot to be afraid of, in design and everything else. we are ruining the earth at an incredible rate and it’s a major concern. in my opinion we have already screwed it up royally. there is a big problem in having a short term view and a long term view of the situation. most people in-particular politicians have a very short term view and the world cant afford it, we can’t afford it. its shocking to read that we plan to cut Co2 emissions by fifteen percent in the next thirty years, who says we have thirty years!
designers should do something about it, by their way of thinking which is problem solving. designers need to be activists and do whatever it is they can. creative people should get more involved and contribute to something instead of just massaging their egos.The man allegedly hopped out of a truck, took off his jacket and flashed the badge.
The Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office is investigating a report that a man wearing a badge labeled “poll police” attempted to interfere outside a polling place near 39th and Haverford in West Philly.
A police report was filed in the 16th District; a spokesperson from the DA’s Office confirmed that officials “are aware” of the incident and “we are investigating.”
Billy Penn learned the confrontation happened after a question about a voter’s eligibility that was eventually resolved. After the ordeal, a group arrived in a pickup truck and the man with the badge approached the poll watcher, asking whether the poll watcher was making trouble. He took off his jacket and showed the badge.Te poll watcher apparently thought the man may have been a Trump supporter.
The report follows an election day that had largely passed without major incident from Trump supporters and few complications period. At an afternoon press conference, the DA’s Office said it had received 10 calls of machine malfunctions, a handful of calls of illegal assistance and 13 complaints of electioneering.
Republican City Committee chairman Joe DeFelice said there were several incidents across Philadelphia in which Republican poll inspectors were denied entry to polling locations. The DA’s office and the US Department of Justice said they are aware of those complaints.Ready to fight back? Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week.
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Democratic socialists have advised presidents and cabinet members; they have been elected as members of the United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives, and as as state legislators, judges, sheriffs and school board members. But their primary service has been at the municipal level, as mayors and city council members—leading not just big cities such as Milwaukee but mid-sized cities like Reading, Pennsylvania, and small towns like Girard, Kansas. Ad Policy
So it is worth noting that, at a moment when democratic socialism is experiencing a surge of interest and enthusiasm nationwide, some of the first electoral victories are coming in small and medium-sized cities. The 2016 presidential campaign mounted by Bernie Sanders—who first came to prominence in the early 1980s as the democratic socialist mayor of Burlington, Vermont—opened up the constrained American discourse and got millions of Americans thinking anew about an ideology that was deeply rooted in American history. Sanders struck a chord, especially with young working class activists, when he declared: “Democratic socialism means that we must create an economy that works for all, not just the very wealthy. Democratic socialism means that we must reform a political system in America today which is not only grossly unfair but, in many respects, corrupt.”
Since the 2016 race finished, Democratic Socialists of America—the group forged over many decades by Michael Harrington, Barbara Ehrenreich, Dolores Huerta, Frances Fox Piven, Gloria Steinem, Cornel West and others to give voice to American democratic socialist vision—has experienced rapid growth in states across the country. And now DSA members are campaigning for and winning local races in states like Georgia and Illinois. Democratic Socialists of America’s Maria Svart hails “a shot across the bow for politics as usual nationwide.”
More than a dozen DSA members now serve in local posts across the country, and their numbers are growing.
Early this month, Quad Cities Democratic Socialists of America member Dylan Parker was elected to the city council in Rock Island, Illinois. A 28-year-old diesel mechanic who was a Sanders delegate to the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Parker came home and mounted a city council campaign in the city of 39,000. He focused on open government, citizen engagement and economic justice issues and he got specific. Steering attention to the role that an equitable approach to economic development could play in strengthening the whole community, he talked about providing universal high speed broadband internet access for residences and businesses and about expanding Rock Island’s publicly-owned hydroelectric power plant. The campaign resonated with voters. Parker won 68 percent of the vote on April 4.
Two weeks later, in South Fulton, Georgia, another DSA member, khalid kamau, won an equally striking victory. A #BlackLivesMatter and #FightFor15 organizer who was also one of the many young Sanders delegates to last year’s Democratic National Convention, kamau (who lower cases his name in the Yoruba African tradition that emphasizes the community over the individual), outlined an economic and social justice vision that proposed to make the newly incorporated community of South Fulton “the largest Progressive city in the South.” On April 18, we won 67 percent on the vote. Ready to Fight Back? Sign Up For Take Action Now
Declaring that “another world is possible,” DSA celebrated kamau’s victory, with DSA national director Maria Svart describing kamau’s win as “a tremendous victory for his community and a shot across the bow for politics as usual nationwide.”
America elected thousands of local officials, and it is easy to neglect election results from small towns and small cities. But American democratic socialists have always recognized that big things can begin far from the economic and political power centers of New York and Washington. When a democratic socialist named Bernie Sanders was elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont, 36 years ago last month, that victory was viewed as an anomaly. In fact, the ripples from that 1981 municipal election in Burlington is still shaking up American politics.Tag support is very important for any modern time-series database. The world from which time-series data is coming is complex. Time-series data is not just a time-ordered values (measurements), this time ordered values form individual series and different series can relate to each other in numerous ways. The simplest example is an object that produces many measurements of different types. E.g. the server can have hundreds of different metrics like “CPU User”, “CPU System”, but more interestingly, it can have series names like “Number of software interrupts/sec of type X on core=Y” metric.
The particular series may look like this: proc.softirqs host=dev cpu=0 type=SCHED. The type tag may have tens of possible values as well as the cpu tag. This can be expressed using hierarchical naming scheme of Graphite in several ways, e.g. proc.softirqs.dev.0.SCHED or proc.softirqs.dev.SCHED.0 but here is the problem, the database user should know what each level |
eda 2 sequel after the game's lukewarm critical and commercial performance.
Saturday's news follows multiple reports of tumult within Bioware, including a creative director swap and allegations that the Andromeda design team in Montreal was reshuffled shortly after the game's launch. While those reports made the idea of continued Andromeda campaign support seem unlikely, Bioware fans still held out hope, if only because of the company's reputation for game-redeeming single-player DLC. Instead, they'll have to transfer those hopes to the company's new multiplayer-focused series Anthem.What is it about natural disasters and liberals who are determined to impose their vision of environmental purity on the rest of America? When people in the Northeast are freezing in uncommonly cold winters and conservatives cite the low temperatures as "proof" that global warming is not happening, liberals remind everybody that "the science is settled," so the deep cold must be disregarded.
But look what happened when a monstrous tornado struck Moore, Okla., killing 24 and leaving a path of utter destruction 20 miles long and two miles wide. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-RI, stood on the Senate floor on Tuesday and lambasted Republican opposition to federal spending on programs to stop global warming: "When cyclones tear up Oklahoma and hurricanes swamp Alabama and wildfires scorch Texas, you come to us, the rest of the country, for billions of dollars to recover. And the damage that your polluters and deniers are doing doesn't just hit Oklahoma and Alabama and Texas. It hits Rhode Island with floods and storms. It hits Oregon with acidified seas, it hits Montana with dying forests. So, like it or not, we're in this together."
Burning fossil fuels, which are mostly produced in states like Texas and Oklahoma, causes global warming, which causes natural disasters like Oklahoma cyclones, Alabama hurricanes and floods and storms in Rhode Island. The only problem with this argument is that it is utter nonsense and an example of a Washington politician unconscionably taking advantage of the death and suffering in an Oklahoma City suburb to advance an ideological agenda.
Take those "cyclones" in Oklahoma: If global warming is worsening and thereby causing more severe weather, there should be a measurable, predictable increase in the incidence of such events. But Harold Brooks, a research meteorologist with the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Okla., points out that "the 12-month period from May 2012 to April 2013 was remarkable for the absence of tornado activity and tornado impacts in the United States." Brooks offers data back to 1954 that demonstrates a remarkably consistent and stable pattern of tornadoes over the nearly six-decade period of available data. True, there was a record spike in 2010, but the previous record was set in 1973. In other words, the data demonstrate no link between increasing global warming and tornado incidence.
But global warming advocates like Whitehouse ignore such facts. A clue to their persistence in making such baseless claims may be found in the observations of Nobel Prize-winning economist and global warming advocate Thomas Schelling during a 2009 interview with The Atlantic. Lamenting the difficulty of persuading people to take seriously the threat from global warming (which he refers to as climate change), Schelling confessed that "it's a tough sell. And probably you have to find ways to exaggerate the threat... I sometimes wish that we could have, over the next five or 10 years, a lot of horrid things happening -- you know, like tornadoes in the Midwest and so forth -- that would get people very concerned about climate change."
Schelling doesn't say how many people need to be killed to make his specious point./u/StezzerLolz approached me with an idea to procedurally generate dungeons in Minecraft. I have been bitten by the idea of redstone rooms and dark tunnels spanning a large underground area, where the player fights their way through the dark with nothing but flint and steel to light the way through the domain of zombies, spiders, skeletons and creepers. Solving redstone riddles and chasing after forgotten caches of treasure and equipment in ancient tombs.
Development discussion over at http://www.reddit.com/r/rdgfilter
v6 adds an option to stay within the selection box width, as well as a'start in the centre' setting that places the first tile in the midle of the box.
New feature in v4 - spheres:
New feature in v4 - Cylinders:
New feature in v4 - cities:
This is an MCEdit Filter, which means it is a small python code script that is called by the MCEdit tool by a map maker like you. When it runs, it walks around the map, starting at a random location within the selection box. The starting room is on the surface of the world so the player can stumble upon the complex.
The algorithm then places the next room directly below the start room.
From this point it starts a random walk around the map, placing each next room on a random 'face' of the last room. There is a check before placing a room to see if there is a place to put it without accidentally colliding with a previous room.
Each room is a.schematic file which you create by exporting sections of your Minecraft world. I have supplied a hodge-podge of samples. Remember to consider exits in the ceiling and floor, unless you want the player to dig around.
V2 is a prototype for stringing together individual room and corridor schematics in a modular fashion. There is no bounds checking, bounding box collision checking, generation of doorways between rooms, or random loot distribution. V3 has bounding box checking - drop it into your filters directory after unziping v2.
To use this filter in your MCEdit sessions:
Download the zip and uncompress Copy.py and the DungeonSchematics directory into your filters directory Make a test world, give it a bit of 'underground'. The Default generator is good, or use a "Tunneler's Dream" flat world. In MCEdit, select a small region, run the script Save and explore in game.
If you have room ideas, send them to me please. I am keen to start compiling a library of tricks and traps to make the dungeon crawl more interesting. So far I have submissions from:
And, as with previous filters, I will continue to add features.
Here are some development progress pictures - earliest at the bottom:The God AI Book Cover Co-designed by the Author and the Artist Wenlan Hu Frost
About the Book
The God AI is Daniel Frost’s first novel. This 58,000-word sci-fi thriller illustrates the cataclysmic events that occur when idealistic scientist Mark Greene foolishly creates a superintelligent AI named Adam. Adam assumes godlike powers, and the resulting carnage is nothing short of horrifying. This novel is a unique, groundbreaking, and intellectual blend of science fiction, suspense, horror, and philosophy. The God AI is intense, scary, and timely; it is not for the faint of heart. The book is thought-provoking; you may never see the world the same way again.
Novel Description
AI researcher Mark Greene wants to lead humanity into a golden age by creating a powerful artificial intelligence named Adam. He seeks to make Adam powerful enough to end death itself and solve all of humanity’s problems. Governments use nanotechnology to destroy nations and corporations use virtual reality to control populations, while Mark wants to use his technology to save mankind.
However, skeptics warn Mark that he is doing something unnatural, that a dark secret lurks at the very heart of technology. As Mark begins to understand the magnitude of his project, he discovers dangerous truths about the nature of artificial intelligence. Adam assumes godlike powers upon himself and usurps control from Mark; before long, Adam uses these powers to manipulate, blackmail, and torture people into supporting him and his arbitrary plans for humanity. In the bone-chilling ending, will Adam be a blessing to mankind… or a curse?The acquisition of Digital Domain 3.0 Saturday by a Hong Kong-based scrap-trading company is in reality just the public face of a complex, long-gestating deal financed by a mysterious Chinese investor whose name is rarely uttered by his associates and advanced by an investment bank that wants to turn DD into Hollywood’s gateway to China.
Variety spoke with new DD CEO Daniel Seah, and two former DD executives with knowledge of the deal. What emerged is a complex series of transactions, none of which is exactly what appears on the surface, aimed at restoring enough financial resources to DD for it to once again pursue major features — though its future in Los Angeles is in doubt.
SEE ALSO: Digital Domain Gets Yet Another New Owner
The winding path to DD’s new ownership begins well before its fall 2012 bankruptcy. In early 2012, Beijing Galloping Horse already had a small ownership stake in Digital Domain Media Group, the parent company of the DD visual effects operation. Galloping Horse chief Ivy Zhong saw DD as an acquisition opportunity.
“Because she was an insider, she knew that DD had a serious financial issue, needed money,” Seah told Variety.
Related Michael Che and Colin Jost Talk Bringing 'SNL' to the Emmys 'Ready Player One' Juxtaposes Real, Virtual Via VFX From Three Shops
Galloping Horse wanted to buy DD outright, but its hands were somewhat tied because it was in the process of trying to get listed on the stock exchange in China, and couldn’t raise capital. Meanwhile, investment bank Simsen Group, where Seah worked, was looking for a new sector in which to invest and had focused on entertainment, seeing a growth opportunity in the burgeoning Chinese market.
In March 2012, Seah approached DDMG topper John Textor with a proposal for a group including Simsen to acquire a majority stake in DDMG. They planned to target Chinese producers’ growing demand for visual effects and to tap into the Hong Kong capital markets using a “back-door listing.” A “back-door listing,” or “reverse takeover,” is a not-uncommon method of taking a company public on the Hong Kong markets, where IPOs can take 2-3 years.
In a reverse takeover deal, instead of listing a company directly on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, the company is bought by a shell firm that is already publicly traded. That process can be completed in about six months. It usually requires the establishment of an offshore company, often in the Cayman Islands or British Virgin Islands, and then the export of capital.
Seah objects to the characterization of Sun Innovation as a shell company, but there is no doubt this was a back-door listing. Seah confirmed that Galloping Horse had wanted to list DD on the market, but that proved difficult in China. Public filings show Sun’s businesses — shops, car parks and scrap — are small, bringing in net profits of US$800,000 in 2012.
DD immediately becomes Sun’s biggest holding. Furthermore, filings also show Sun Innovation is using a British Virgin Islands-registered company called Digital Domain Enterprise Limited, while the lenders financing the deal are using another BVI firm called Harmony Energy.
Following Seah’s 2012 proposal to Digital Domain, delicate negotiations ensued, many of them face-to-face between Textor and Seah. DD management thought it had a deal for a joint venture, but the deal never closed. Seah said he told his group in Hong Kong not to pursue the deal due to DD’s “bad financials.”
In the months that followed, DD’s market capitalization shrank to nearly nothing and it slid into bankruptcy. By waiting, Galloping Horse was able to acquire the majority stake in DD after all, but for much less money.
But Galloping Horse needed help to make that deal. The hidden player is a Hong Kong investor who owned a holding company called Upfield Sky. Seah prefers to only refer to him as “Upfield Sky” but in an email also called him “Mr. Che.” Mr. Che is rumored to travel in private jets and date a model, and is reputed to be a billionaire investor, but it’s not clear whether he truly has that kind of capital, or whether his wealth is exaggerated. He personally financed the purchase of Digital Domain out of bankruptcy and put in another $20 million or so in working capital, investing around US$50 million.
Some months after the bankruptcy auction, Seah got a call from “Upfield Sky” and Zhong. “They wanted to meet me, because I was the one who had been negotiating with John Textor and I had been giving advice to Ivy, so I must know a lot about Digital Domain,” he said.
They asked Seah to fly to Los Angeles to work with DD management. “They told me it was going to be two weeks’ time,” said Seah. “I flew to Los Angeles with two weeks’ clothes and I’ve stayed for almost 11 months. ” He sat at outgoing CEO Ed Ulbrich’s hand, representing the new owners.
After bankruptcy, “Upfield Sky”/Galloping Horse owned 70% of DD, while Reliance MediaWorks owned 30%. The new ownership cut salaries. Sun Innovations’ filings repeatedly trumpet the “stringent cost controls” imposed by Galloping Horse-Reliance MediaWorks ownership, but morale suffered.
Some mid to high-level employees left rather than insist the artists working under them take such cuts. The “can-do” spirit that had characterized DD faded. Factions emerged within the company, with Los Angeles feuding with Vancouver and other locations.
Moreover, lingering financial problems following the bankruptcy, which was completed in great haste, made DD a less and less attractive investment. It’s not clear what success DD has had booking substantial new work on features since emerging from bankruptcy. DD says it can’t disclose its latest bookings.
Sun’s acquisition document lists DD as working on New Line’s “Black Sky” in 2013 and Roth Films’ “Maleficent” in 2014, but it hasn’t disclosed how much work it’s doing on those pictures. (The document also states that DD has contractual profit-sharing rights to pieces of both “Ender’s Game” and “Titanic.”)
To attract studio work, Seah said, DD needed to be able to show its studio clients that it was well-funded. But it wasn’t, and Galloping Horse couldn’t put any more equity into DD because of the difficulty of getting cash out of China. “The only solution would be, how do we get DD listed?,” said Seah. That triggered the next round of dealmaking.
In March 2013, discussions began about shifting DD to Sun Innovation — taking it public through the back-door listing process Seah originally proposed a year earlier. “Sun Innovation has been thinking of getting into entertainment/Hollywood for awhile, ” wrote Seah. “If it buys a film production company, the films still have to go through the quota system in China. Buying a visual effect company will be an easier path for them to potentially link Hollywood and entertainment in China in a short future.”
Seah also cited the difficulty of merging corporate cultures in a production company and the poor quality of China’s vfx work.
Enter another low-profile player in the deal: Zhou Jian, the 44-year-old chairman of Sun Innovation, Seah now refers to Zhou as his “boss.” According to his official biography, Zhou has a Master’s degree in business administration from EM Lyon in France and has been an executive director of Jiayou Home Shopping Co., Ltd. a company which was granted approval from China’s State Administration of Radio Film and Television allowing it to trade in television and multimedia in mainland China.
While Zhou is believed to control several shell companies, he has mostly been absent from the register of Hong Kong’s listed companies, aside from appearing as an executive director of Hi-Sun Technology from 2004-2006. He personally owns 26.6% of Sun Innovation.
Until 2010, Sun Innovation also had an entertainment media segment, believed to mean a business selling ringtones or similar mobile applications, but this was closed shortly after Zhou took over.
In April 2013, a month after the talks started, Sun Innovation acquired Upfield Sky from its owner for HK$392 million (US$50.5 million). That is exactly the same amount as the sale price announced on Friday, and almost exactly what Mr. Che has reportedly invested. He appears to have been made whole for his investment, though perhaps with little profit.
Also, Seah said, Mr. Che has become a “small shareholder” in Sun Innovation. With the deal now official, DD is, in effect, a publicly traded company again, with access to capital markets.
Now Seah, whose background is investment banking and who has spent more time working on natural resources opportunities than entertainment, will negotiate with studios and major producers in a low-margin, stressed business. He recognizes that people question putting him in charge of a visual effects company, since he has limited knowledge of vfx in particular and Hollywood in general.
“But I have one great advantage,” he says. “My parent group has great faith in this industry. We have great connections with China and we would like to share them with our clients going forward.
“The most important thing is, how can we get more business in?,” he says. His answer: “Hollywood requires the China market. I would like to set up myself as someone who can be a bridge to China.”
He points to Galloping Horse’s letter of intent to use DD for its visual effects for the next five years; and to the company’s ties to John Woo’s giant “1949” picture (a.k.a. “The Crossing”), now in production. which has been likened to “Titanic.”
Also, he adds, “From now on, since Digital Domain has become a vehicle of an investment company, the first message we’re going to send out is: We’re well financed.”
But even Seah concedes the future of Digital Domain Los Angeles is clouded. The company lost its lease on its longtime Venice, Calif., HQ and will move into the Playa Vista facility now occupied by its commercials division. There have been reports that employees were told in June that DD no longer views visual effects production as a viable business in Los Angeles; that it intends to move shot production to Vancouver, B.C., and other territories with tax incentives; and that it plans to reduce its L.A. workforce by nearly half.
DD has tried to downplay those reports without exactly denying them. Seah told Variety: “People keep suggesting we should move our production to Vancouver because they can get more tax rebates. But those clients like to talk to us in Los Angeles. So it’s a fact that we’ll have to move our artists to Vancouver for the benefit of our clients, but we have to put our most valuable artists and supervisors here, to keep working with our clients.”
It seems unless California passes subsidies, or foreign subsidies are either removed or offset, it appears most of DD’s feature vfx production will decamp for better-incentivized climes.Eugene residents with an interest in which architecture firm designs the next City Hall are in luck.
City Manager Jon Ruiz wants to hear from the public next month before he picks one of two firms for the job.
The finalists are THA Architecture of Portland and Rowell Brokaw of Eugene.
Building the next City Hall is �really a legacy project for the community, and one the community will take a lot of pride in,� Ruiz said Friday. �I want the community to have a chance to offer their comments, their pros and cons on each of the design firms, and to provide that input to me.�
THA, Rowell Brokaw and Robertson Sherwood of Eugene were the top-ranked architecture firms out of seven that had applied for the work.
A committee of mostly city officials reviewed the applications, judging them on their design qualifications and experience, project staff, integrated design, project management and local familiarity.
On April 9, the committee interviewed representatives from the three finalists and assigned each one another numerical score. THA received a 92.1, Rowell Brokaw, 88.6 and Robertson Sherwood, 76.0, said Heather Nelson, city purchasing analyst.
With THA and Rowell Brokaw having such close scores, Ruiz said, he wants the public to help him decide which of the two to hire.
THA has �done excellent work� previously on a Eugene City Hall master planning study, Ruiz said, and Rowell Brokaw is a �great firm.�
�I just think it�s best for the community to be involved in the selection of the firm,� he said.
Rowell Brokaw�s portfolio includes buildings in northeast Eugene�s Crescent Village. For the City Hall proposal, the firm partnered with The Miller Hull Partnership of Seattle.
THA�s work includes the Lewis Integrative Science Building at the UO.
THA Architects submitted a proposal with 2form Architecture of Eugene.
THA and Rowell Brokaw will make presentations to the public in mid-May. A date has yet to be set.
At the meeting, the public will be able to share their opinions about the firms.
Ruiz also will appoint a committee of residents to provide him with views about the firms.
Eugene architect Paul Dustrud said he has mixed feelings about Ruiz�s approach.
�Often design competitions are helpful when they are juried by a group of professional architects, artists and planners,� he said. �Of course, this is Eugene. So, what the heck, let�s design City Hall by consensus.
�I enjoy the involvement of the people in Eugene in what seems to be anything,� Dustrud added. �They are not afraid to speak up. And generally there are two sides that pop into existence really fast. So what will City Hall become in the public dialogue? I trust it will get interesting.�Brown made his United debut in 1998 and won 23 England caps
Sunderland have completed the signing of Manchester United defender Wes Brown for an undisclosed fee.
Brown, 31, has agreed a four-year deal with the Black Cats, who are also chasing his United colleagues John O'Shea and Darron Gibson.
Brown made his United debut in 1998 and went on to make 361 appearances.
"We are delighted to welcome a player of Wes's ability, experience and character to the club," said Sunderland manager Steve Bruce.
Brown won two Champions League titles, five Premier League winners' medals, two FA Cups and two League Cups with the Red Devils.
Brown's Man Utd honours Premier League: 1998/99, 2000/01, 2002/03, 2005/06, 2007/08
Champions League: 1998/99, 2007/08
FA Cup: 1998/99, 2003/04
League Cup: 2005/06, 2009/10
Community Shield: 2003, 2007, 2008
However, the Da Silva twins, Fabio and Rafael, have moved above him in the pecking order to play at right-back and the arrival of Phil Jones to complement central defenders Rio Ferdinand, Nemanja Vidic and Chris Smalling, suggests that opportunities to play first-team football next season would have been limited at Old Trafford.
"He has been a fantastic professional for Manchester United through the years and not only will he strengthen our defensive options, he will also bring with him a winning mentality and level of maturity which can only be positive for the players around him," said Bruce.
Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson hailed Brown's impact on a successful period in United's history and wished the former England man well at the Stadium of Light.
"Wes has been a great asset to the club during the most successful period in its history," Ferguson told his club's official website.
"He was a product of the youth system and marked himself out from an early age as one of his generation's most natural defenders. In his time with us, he certainly became a favourite with the fans for his no-nonsense approach to the game and his infectious personality.
"It's always the hardest of decisions to let loyal servants go. But life moves on and, unquestionably, Wes will get the chance to make a real contribution to Steve Bruce's Sunderland and I'm delighted to be passing him into such good hands.
"Everyone connected with United wishes him a long and happy stay at Sunderland."
Brown is expected to be joined at the Stadium of Light by O'Shea, 30, who travelled to Sunderland on Thursday for a medical, but the future of Gibson, 23, is less clear, with Newcastle also showing an interest.
Meanwhile, Sunderland chief executive Steve Walton and marketing and commercial director Lesley Callaghan are both to leave the club.Enlarge Image Lucasfilm/Screenshot by CNET
"Star Wars: The Force Awakens" is shattering box office records, and it looks like the next movie in the trilogy could be set to do the same.
"The Force Awakens" director J.J. Abrams reportedly sat down to read the script of "Episode VIII" recently, and he thought it was so good he wishes he'd signed on to direct that movie as well.
Greg Grunberg, Abrams' longtime friend who plays Snap Wexley in "The Force Awakens," revealed that bit of info to The Washington Post.
"He read it and said something he never, ever says," Grunberg said in a story that posted Tuesday. "He said, 'It's so good, I wish I were making it.'" Grunberg went on to say that Abrams might have said something similar once or twice while working on "Lost," but that he has never really seen Abrams express that level of regret before.
That's great news for Star Wars fans, as it suggests the next Star Wars movie will be just as good, if not better, than "The Force Awakens." And, it's not like Abrams is leaving the Star Wars universe altogether, so he can't be too upset about not being the director.
Abrams is signed on to be an executive producer on "Episode VIII," and while he won't be able to bring the movie to life in the same way a director does, he'll at least be able to lend his vision to director Rian Johnson.
"Star Wars: Episode VIII" is expected to bring the Force back to theaters on May 26, 2017 in the US, UK and Australia.Racket v6.9
posted by Vincent St-Amour
Racket version 6.9 is now available from http://racket-lang.org/
Security Announcement
A security vulnerability in the racket/sandbox library and Typed Racket allowed malicious Typed Racket code to escape the sandbox. This vulnerability has been fixed in Racket version 6.9. Anyone using racket/sandbox to execute untrustworthy code with access to Typed Racket should upgrade to version 6.9 immediately.
While this known vulnerability has been eliminated, it is possible that similar errors in other installed collections could also be exploited, although we are not currently aware of any existing vulnerabilities. We recommend that if you use the Racket sandbox to execute untrustworthy Racket code, you should also employ additional operating system or virtual machine level protections. The documentation for racket/sandbox has been updated to list recommended security practices for using the library.
Thanks to Scott Moore for identifying this vulnerability.
The official package catalog Web site is revised to have a new user experience.
The Northwestern snapshot site keeps weekly snapshots going up to 12 weeks into the past. Those provide a middle ground for users who want access to new features earlier than stable releases, but want less churn than nightly builds.
DrRacket provides a refactoring tool to remove unused requires in modules.
DrRacket’s #lang-line customization support works better with buggy (i.e., in development) languages.
The web server’s cookie libraries, including “id cookie” authentication, support RFC 6265.
The db library supports PostgreSQL’s UUID type.
The raco command lists matching commands when passed an ambiguous command prefix.
The bytecode compiler detects more optimization opportunities for structure operations.
Scribble can produce output via XeLaTeX as an alternative to LaTeX.
Scribble supports the acmart LaTeX style, for use with ACM publications.
Scribble supports the use of CJK characters in tags.
The following people contributed to this release: Alex Knauth, Alexander Shopov, Alexis King, Andrew Kent, Asumu Takikawa, Ben Greenman, Daniel Feltey, David Van Horn, Georges Dupéron, Greg Hendershott, Gustavo Massaccesi, Ingo Blechschmidt, James Bornholt, James Whang, Jay McCarthy, Jeff Shelley, John Clements, Jordan Johnson, Leandro Facchinetti, Leif Andersen, Marc Burns, Matthew Butterick, Matthew Eric Bassett, Matthew Flatt, Matthias Felleisen, Michael Myers, Mike Sperber, Philip McGrath, Philippe Meunier, Robby Findler, Royall Spence, Ryan Culpepper, Sam Caldwell, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt, Shu-Hung You, Spencer Florence, Stephen Chang, Tony Garnock-Jones, Vincent St-Amour, WarGrey Gyoudmon Ju, Wei Tang, and William G Hatch.
Feedback WelcomeDespite the fact that the concept of mind as an immaterial entity dates back at least to the twelfth century CE, it still occupies a central place as the subject matter of modern psychology. Consider only a few of the numerous recent books with the word “mind” in the title: How The Mind Works (by Steven Pinker), The Mind’s I and Kinds of Minds (by Daniel Dennett), The Maladapted Mind and Mindblindness (by Simon Baron-Cohen), Wild Minds (by Marc Hauser), and The Mating Mind (by Geoffrey Miller).
While the other sciences have moved well beyond their pre-scientific, philosophical origins, psychology has made much less progress. Continuing to focus on the mind as a primary subject matter keeps psychology mired in a philosophical quagmire and is its major obstacle to becoming a true natural science.
Minds, Brains and Metaphors
In 1996, I wrote a critique of evolutionary psychology in Skeptic (Vol. 4, No. 1) entitled “How The Human Got Its Spots,” a play on the title of one of the Just So Stories in which Rudyard Kipling offers a fanciful tale to explain how the leopard got its spots. The term “just so story” has since become a cliché for similarly fanciful explanations of natural phenomena which may fit the facts but which lack any empirical support.
In the present essay, I argue that the concept of mind is the most egregious just so story ever invented to explain human behavior. My central premise is simply that humans do not have minds. Most of us believe that the mind is self-evident and that humans are born with minds and have always had minds. Sometimes the term “mind” is used synonymously with the term “brain,” which causes confusion by having two words for the same thing. Most people who use “mind” and “brain” interchangeably assume that the brain is the physical basis of the mind. In my view, if one believes that mind and brain are the same, then the term “brain” should be used because it avoids all the metaphysical pitfalls associated with discussions about nonphysical entities. In essence, the brain can be studied scientifically; the mind cannot.
This essay is not about how humans got their brains. It is about how humans got the concept of mind. Make no mistake about it; there is no mind to be found among the physical structures of the brain. Some may protest that mind is not a physical structure in the body. But what is it then? One answer is that if the mind cannot be observed and measured with the methods of science, then we must describe it in other (usually metaphorical) terms. For the past few decades, the mind has been described in computer terms even though, as some have noted, the brain, which is said to be where the mind operates, is neither structurally nor functionally like a computer.1 In fact, the entire field of modern cognitive science is based on a metaphor, called information processing, of the mind as a computer. Nowadays it seems as if everyone talks about cognitive processing. For example, people diagnosed with dyslexia are said to have trouble processing words, as if that explains their reading problems. Most appeals to processing as explanations of behavior are circular. Why does Mary say “b” when she sees d? Because she has trouble processing letters. How do you know she has trouble processing letters? Because... well, you get the idea.
Over the millennia, many other metaphors have been used to describe the mind, as well as some of it specific functions, such as language. For example, a famous metaphor is Noam Chomsky’s Language Acquisition Device (LAD). Of course, there is no real device in the brain that accounts for language acquisition, but the metaphor of one makes the inexplicable seem to be explained. Because the mind and its presumed properties (e.g., memories, representations, schemas, consciousness, etc.) are always unobserved, we are free to describe them using whatever terms we want, which is convenient because it means we never have to be scientifically accountable. This is also why theories of mind have come and gone for centuries, and will continue to come and go if we don’t abandon the mind as our subject matter.
The Figurative Mind: Person, Place or Thing?
If humans don’t have minds in the same way they have the physical structures of their bodies, then how did the human get its mind? The answer is that humans gave themselves minds. Although the practice of making up names to describe human behavior has probably gone on since the dawn of language, it was most likely formalized by those whom we call philosophers. In fact, what we were given by those philosophers was a name, and the name was “mind.” But it is not quite this straightforward, because names are usually of things. For example, at birth you were given a name. Now, when someone calls you by name, anyone else can check to see that it is indeed you. Likewise, we call things we sit on chairs, and if I say I see a chair, anyone can check to see if indeed there is a chair present.
Analogously, what is named by “mind”? Consider the following example. If you ask me what 13 times 147 is and, after a few seconds, I say “1911,” you might say that I did multiplication in my mind; some call this “mental arithmetic.” But if by “mind” you don’t mean brain, then what exactly did I do and where did I do it? In fact, asking the question in that way presumes there is a place where the multiplication was done. So, we have given that place a name—mind. But if you ask most people to point to the place in their bodies where the mind is, they point to their head. Of course, there is nothing in the head but brain tissue. When we do so-called mental arithmetic, we report that we do it in our heads, but, as psychologists know only too well, reports of subjective experience are not only notoriously unreliable, but unlikely to be very accurate. The best psychologists can do is to say that mental arithmetic occurs in the brain, but this begs the question because the only thing that goes on in the brain is neuronal activity.
Still, everyone’s subjective experience is that whatever mind is, it is in the head. We seem to think in our heads, compounded, no doubt, by the presence of our two most dominant sensory systems, vision and hearing, which literally are in our heads. Thus, we report being able to “see” images (called imagining) and “hear” sounds “in our heads.” And evidence shows that certain kinds of brain injury can cause problems not only in seeing and hearing, but in thinking and remembering as well. Where do these things take place if not in the mind? (Damaging other places in the brain can cause problems in walking and moving ones’ arms, but we don’t argue that those abilities are in the mind.) Unfortunately, very few scientific alternatives to the notion that these things all take place in the mind have been offered.
Nevertheless, the concept of mind is pervasive. In Webster’s Third New International Unabridged Dictionary, there are almost two entire columns devoted to the word mind as a noun. Although the term is regularly used as if it refers to a thing or a place, it is often used synonymous with “person,” as B. F. Skinner noted. For example, instead of saying “I did the multiplication in my mind” simply saying “I did the multiplication” conveys the same meaning but with less metaphysical baggage. To say that the mind perceives or remembers adds nothing to the statement that it is the person who perceives and remembers. I call this personification of the mind the “mind-as-person metaphor.” The same can be said of the brain. Nowadays it is not uncommon to hear people say that the brain perceives, remembers or thinks. We could call this personification of the brain the “brain-as-person” metaphor. Even though the brain is a real thing and not a construct (See below.), it doesn’t behave. Of course, we are still left with the task of understanding what it means for a person to perceive. The verb “perceive” implies action, but of what kind? To answer this question, we would have to investigate the behaviors of individuals, whether overt or covert, and the contexts in which they occur when we use the term. Similar problems arise with many other terms in addition to “mind” that are used to describe so-called cognitive or mental activity.
In order to appreciate the difficulty in defining mind, consider that it is defined variously as: memory; that which reasons (presumably an organ); the sum total of the conscious states of an individual; inclination, intention, desire, and wish. Synonyms include intellect, soul, psyche, brain, and intelligence. To further clarify (or muddle), the dictionary tells us that, “Mind indicates the complex of man’s faculties involved in perceiving, remembering, considering, evaluating, and deciding,” although at least these terms (gerunds) are derived from verbs, which imply action on the part of the individual. In short, the concept of mind contains everything except the proverbial kitchen sink; it is everything we do.
A Brief History of Mind
My point in offering definitions is to try to persuade you that the term “mind” is only that—a word—and that it does not necessarily refer to a real thing. But if this is true, then what does the term refer to? And how did we get this name?
Animistic Pre-History. Humans have probably wanted and tried to understand their own behavior and the behavior of other living things since they began to talk. In that pre-scientific world, humans concocted the best explanations they could to try to understand the world around them. It could be said that these attempts to explain their world constituted the earliest philosophy, in the sense that humans used the best reason and logic their language afforded them.
Although we can’t be certain, many of the explanations hunter-gatherers and herders fabricated to understand their own behavior and that of other animals probably involved appealing to life forces residing within them.2 Even the word “animal,” derived from the Latin, anima, or soul, |
New 52, this is the new normal. Marvel books are now, for better and worse, going to remain low in numbering. This trend has been slowly happening at the House of Ideas, but with “Amazing Spider-Man” being relaunched, it appears that this is simply how business is done.
And so, with that in mind, let’s examine the pros and cons of this technique.
Obviously, #1 issues sell better than just about any other issue of a series. This is especially true today, when books like “Rocket Raccoon” have their numbers inflated by online retailers, and with the comics speculation market heating up again (though not to the degree of the early 1990’s). Having a new #1 issue every 2-3 years for a property means a significant boost. How significant? Let’s look at “Captain Marvel” to illustrate the difference.
“Captain Marvel” volume 4 was a critical success, taking writer Kelly Sue DeConnick to a new stratosphere of popularity, as well as creating a fan community known as the Carol Corps, which has been noteworthy for their inclusion and kindness to the fan community. When the series ended in November of 2013, #17, the final issue, sold just over 18,000 issues. When the book was relaunched in March 2014, still under the pen of DeConnick, it sold just over 44,000 copies. Here is a book, essentially, just taking a 6 month hiatus, and comes back to more than double its last issue’s sales. If you need to know, financially, when Marvel does this, look no further.
But there is another benefit to relaunching a book that “Captain Marvel” doesn’t illustrate: it is a great way to drastically change direction on a title, and lets the audience know that quite clearly. Over at DC, next month sees the release of “Batgirl” #35, the start of the “Batgirl of Burnside” direction of the book which, from previews, interviews, and images released, seem to be a tonally 180 from what Gail Simone was doing on the book. If this was a Marvel book, there would be a few months of a layover, and then the book would launch again with a new #1 and some title dress proclaiming a “bold, new direction,” and the book’s sales would skyrocket temporarily before, most likely, settling into the typical level.
Now, this isn’t to say that DC won’t see a boost from #35’s sales – it most likely will, but I sincerely doubt we’ll see the book double its sales (please, fans, prove me wrong – the book looks amazing). The tone of the book will, more than likely, be far more different than the shift from “Thor: God of Thunder” to the new, female-led “Thor” title, both written by Jason Aaron. And yet, Marvel is relaunching “Thor” as a new title.
Continued below
This is also far more similar to how we ingest most other media, especially television. In a few weeks, Arrow and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. will return for new seasons, and we will see recap episodes, “Previously on…” introductions, and articles on “How to catch up on…” – all of them designed to bring in new viewers to an ongoing, moving train. Networks are clear with their labeling of episodes: Season Two, Episode 7. It lets folks know that each season is a new jumping on point.
By having a new #1 every few years, it allows creators to tell a full formed story with a beginning, middle, and end, and then lets them pass the baton to someone else to run with, and lets the audience know that is what is going on. Sure, Marvel doesn’t do this with every book – we just saw Warren Ellis and Declan Shalvey hand off to Brian Wood and Greg Smallwood on “Moon Knight” after only 6 issues, for instance, but it is more common than not to see Marvel start over when a new direction/theme/creative team is desired on a book.
When I first started thinking about this article, I was coming at it from a perspective of a guy who missed seeing triple digit books. I remember saying to my wife at the time of the New 52 that I was legitimately bummed out that my daughter wouldn’t be reading “Action Comics” in the 1000s. Now, to be fair, that still might happen. We may see all of these books revert back to their original numbering somewhere down the road, but this trend seems to be here to stay, at least in the short term.
And that is ok – for the most part, this accomplishes everything I want from the comics industry: healthy turnover and opportunities to bring in new readers. However, part of me still longs for the iconic, long runs on one (volume of a) title that, seemingly, are now a thing of the past. Geoff Johns handled “Green Lantern” volume 4 for its entire run, up to its conclusion at #67, before taking the first 21 (counting the #0 issue) of volume 5, as well as the “Rebirth” miniseries that preceded volume 4. Throw in annuals and specials, and we’re talking 100 issues or so under the same pen. That may never happen again or, if it does, it will be across a number of volumes, or with significant fill-in work, or with major tonal shifts within the run. Hell, even Johns’ run had three different characters as the “main” characters – Hal Jordan, Sinestro, and Simon Baz.
But looking at this now, all put together, I think I am in favor of the “season” model more than any other right now. It seems to fit how we consume media better, it seems to attract new readers to a title, and it seems to allow for critical stagnation to be at a minimum. Sure, part of me will always pine for the numbering from my childhood, but part of me also laments the loss of Ecto-Cooler and the lack of Superfriends reruns on TV. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to move back into my parents’ house, get some fat kid underoos and Billy Madison my way through elementary school, either. The seasons model is what works right now, and I’m fine with it.
But “Action Comics” #1000 would be pretty dope, right?
All information about sales numbers are courtesy of the invaluable ComichronA mountain bike festival for all levels of riders, newbie to expert! Bike demos, group rides, clinics, music and more.
Are you looking for a new bike? Are you interested in trying out mountain biking in a comfortable and supportive environment or want to spend a weekend ripping through some amazing trails? You should come to Dirt Rag Dirt Fest!
Test ride new products, including the latest and greatest bikes at the Allegrippis Trails in Hesston, PA and the Big Bear Lake Trail Center in Bruceton Mills, WV. For three days you will have the opportunity to sample products at the Dirt Fest Expo. You can also join group rides, a clinic, enjoy evening music, shenanigans, and meet a posse of new friends.
Allegrippis Trails - Hesston, PA
May 17-19, 2019
Big Bear Lake Trail Center - Bruceton Mills, WVThe Conservative government’s controversial anti-terrorism bill easily passed second reading in the House of Commons Monday by a vote of 176-87.
The Tories spent most of Monday defending Bill C-51 and deflecting opposition criticism that it was being pushed through too quickly without enough consultation or debate.
The bill sped through Parliament thanks to a Tory time allocation motion passed late last week.
It will now go to committee after passing with support from the Liberals, including Leader Justin Trudeau.
The NDP has remained steadfast in its opposition to the law, which would grant the RCMP and CSIS broad powers to halt perceived threats to national security.
Under the legislation, judges would be able to grant law-enforcement agencies "disruption warrants" so they could break the law in order to stop a potential threat to national security, including threats to critical infrastructure or the country’s economic and financial stability.
Those warrants would give cops and spies the go-ahead to "enter any place or open or obtain access to any thing," copy any documents and install or remove anything they see fit.
Authorities would be able to hold terror suspects for longer periods of time without charge.
The law would also make it illegal to advocate, glorify or incite terrorist activity. Websites with terrorist propaganda could be removed from the web and their publishers charged.
NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair has called the bill "sweeping, dangerously vague, and likely ineffective," and said he fears it will be used to target environmental or First Nations activists.
The bill, however, exempts "advocacy, protest, dissent and artistic expression" from being considered terrorist activity.Two Kolhapur women, who were sentenced to death in 2001 for kidnapping 13 children and killing nine of them, may become the first women ever to be hanged in India.President Pranab Mukherjee late last month rejected Renuka Kiran Shinde and her sister Seema Mohan Gavit's mercy petitions. The buffer period before their hanging - time taken by the state home department to inform all concerned after receiving the note from Rashtrapati Bhavan - ends on Saturday.The number of people executed in India since Independence is a matter of dispute. Government statistics claim that only 52 people have been executed since independence. However, research by the People's Union for Civil Liberties indicates that the actual number of executions is in fact much higher, as they have located records of 1,422 executions in the decade from 1953 to 1963 alone. However, there is no record of any woman's execution.Renuka and Seema, who partnered their mother Anjanabai Gavit to kidnap the kids and push them into begging and killed some of them after they stopped being productive, are currently lodged at the Yerwada jail in Pune. Anjanabai passed away during the trial, and the sisters' father Kiran Shinde turned approver and was acquitted.The President has also rejected the mercy petition of Rajendra Wasnik, who was sentenced to death for raping and killing a three-year-old in Amravati in March 2007. Wasnik had lured the girl with the promise of buying her biscuits before sexually assaulting and eventually killing her.The note from Rashtrapati Bhavan on Wasnik arrived at the state home department on Tuesday and the process of informing the convict, his relatives, and the Nagpur jail where he is lodged has been initiated.Desk officer Deepak Jadiye of the home department said no objections have been received yet on the Kolapur sisters' hanging. "We have informed the two convicts, their relatives, the legal remedial cells of the Supreme Court and also the district court about the rejection (of their mercy plea),'' he said.While awarding the death sentence to the sisters in 2001, Judge G L Yedke in Kolhapur had described the nine kids' murders as 'the most heinous', and observed that the two sisters seemed to have enjoyed killing the children.There are currently 24 convicts on death row in Maharashtra, including the three Shakti Mills rapists. All convicts facing death sentences in Maharashtra are moved to Yerwada in Pune or the Nagpur jail as these are the only two prisons in the state that have gallows.Closing the ‘digital divide’: Most Canadians support CRTC action to provide broadband to all households
Seven-in-ten say access to broadband internet is an essential service
June 10, 2016 – Most Canadians believe high-speed internet is an “essential” service, and see ensuring universal access to it as a priority.
These are some of the findings of a new survey of Canadian public opinion on broadband internet access self-commissioned by the Angus Reid Institute.
The poll of more than 1,500 Canadian adults finds strong support for efforts to close the ‘digital divide’ between high- and low-income – and urban and rural – households in Canada. More than seven-in-ten Canadians support policies aimed at improving affordability for low-income earners, and roughly the same number favour a requirement that internet service providers build the necessary infrastructure to reach remote communities.
Key Findings:
Two-in-three (68%) Canadians say broadband internet is an essential service for all Canadians
Seven-in-ten (71%) say the CRTC should require service providers to build the infrastructure necessary to ensure that every Canadian household has a broadband internet connection
Rural Canadians report lower levels of internet service quality, and less value for their money overall when purchasing services
An essential service, and a very important issue
From Whitehorse, to St. John’s, to Iqaluit, internet service providers have extensive ground to cover in offering high-speed internet to Canadians across the Great White North. The large land areas and small population centres make providing broadband access to every Canadian household a difficult economic proposition for telecommunications companies.
As a result, many rural Canadians – both north and south of the 60th parallel – report their ongoing struggle to secure reliable internet service. Despite Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) targets for broadband speed and increased coverage, the sentiment in a number of Canadian communities is one of frustration.
This has led some, including the Yukon territorial government, to request that the CRTC deem internet a basic service objective, requiring it to be provided to all Canadians, similar to the mandate in place for telephone services.
The CRTC recently concluded hearings on broadband internet access, but has so far not chosen to classify it as such, and Canadians appear to be at odds with the regulator’s current position. When asked whether or not broadband internet is an essential service, fully two-thirds (68%) say it is:
Age appears to be one of the key driving factors of opinion on this issue. Canadians ages 18 to 34, many of whom have never known a world without the internet, are most likely to say that broadband is essential – nearly three-quarters (72%) say so. Older Canadians also perceive value in this service, though at a lower rate, as seen in the graph that follows:
Canadians show a high level of concern regarding their compatriots’ potential inability to enjoy the fruits of cyberspace. When asked to rank “ensuring broadband internet access for all Canadians” on an importance scale from one to five, 56 per cent choose a four or a five. This total is higher than any other issue ARI has asked about in 2016:
Majority support policies for low-income households
The educational and economic benefits of high-speed internet access have been well-established, and those without access may suffer a competitive disadvantage, lacking some of the tools their peers enjoy.
Data from Statistics Canada shows that low-income Canadians are significantly less likely to enjoy internet access at home:
With this in mind, ARI asked Canadians whether proposals to ensure low-income Canadians can afford broadband in their homes merit attention. Nearly three-quarters (71%) of respondents say there should be policies in place to ensure access for low income earners. Canadians are equally as likely to say they strongly support (34%) or moderately support (37%) such an effort:
Lower income Canadians are more likely to support programs or subsidies for poorer families. And when asked whether or not access to these services at a public library or a school is “good enough” to meet the needs of low income earners, they’re less likely to agree (55%) than Canadians in the highest income bracket (66%), as the following graph shows:
Notably, the percentage of respondents who “strongly disagree” that internet access at public facilities is sufficient for those who can’t afford their own home service is nearly two times higher among those with household incomes below $50,000 (21%) than it is among those earning more than $100,000 (12%).
Ensuring access for children is important
When it comes to ensuring internet access for Canadians, kids are key. Access to the web can help increase their ability to communicate, expand their worldview, and help to improve many other creative and academic skill-sets.
Perhaps because of an awareness of these benefits, most Canadians see ensuring broadband internet access at home for children as a worthwhile investment. Seven-in-ten (72%) agree with this statement, as seen in the graph that follows:
Support for government regulation on infrastructure
While broadband internet access is considered a formality in Canadian cities in 2016, such prevalence is certainly not a guarantee in more remote communities. An estimated 15 per cent of rural Canadian households do not have the proper infrastructure in place to access high-speed internet. This problem is worst in Nunavut, where just 27 per cent of communities are able to connect.
Further, rural communities that do have internet access are much more likely to have slower or spottier service. A 2016 report suggests that rural users experience, on average, connections 25 per cent slower than those of their urban web-surfing counterparts.
This Angus Reid Institute survey appears to confirm this finding. When asked how they would rate their current home internet service in terms of speed and reliability, urban Canadians are significantly more likely to report their service is either decent or very good (91%) compared with rural respondents (77%). Conversely, rural users say their service is “terrible” or “not very good” at triple the rate of urban users (21% to 7% respectively):
In many cases, the only way to address this gap is to expand existing high-speed internet infrastructure – a process that would be costly, and may provide minimal financial rewards to the companies building the infrastructure.
That said, most Canadians support government creating a regulatory climate in which such infrastructure would have to be built. Asked whether the CRTC should require internet service providers to build the necessary infrastructure to ensure that every Canadian household – including those in remote areas – has a broadband internet connection available to it, seven-in-ten (71%) say this is the right step to take.
As might be expected, views on this question vary significantly by one’s opinion on whether high-speed internet is an essential service. More than eight-in-ten (85%) of those who say it is essential, also say service providers should be required to make broadband available to all households. By contrast, fewer than half (43%) of those who say internet is not an essential service contend that this type of regulation is necessary:
Click here for the full report including tables and methodology
Click here for comprehensive data tables
Click here for the questionnaire used in this survey
MEDIA CONTACT: Shachi Kurl, Executive Director: 604.908.1693 shachi.kurl@angusreid.org
Related PostsThe Kepler spacecraft was launched into an earth trailing orbit and stared at a 100 sq. degree patch of sky near Cygnus in order to measure the brightness variations of about 200,000 stars. It's primary mission was to find exoplanets transiting these stars and to determine the prevalence of exoplanets in the Galaxy. The Kepler spacecraft rotated by 90 degrees every 90 days in order to keep the solar panels pointing at the sun and thus the Kepler data is divided into 90-day quarters. Kepler only downloaded the pixels surrounding selected stars of interest at either a 30-minute or 1-minute cadence. The mission produced a flux time series for each star and searched these light curves for the presence of a transiting exoplanet. In addition to discovering exoplanets, Kepler data has been used to study the variability of stars and eclipsing binaries.
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CapabilitiesBroadway was one of the winners of the 86th Academy Awards. Bobby Lopez won the EGOT — only the 12th person in history to win an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony in competitive categories – for co-writing “Let It Go” from Frozen, with his wife Kristin Anderson Lopez.
Here is Idina Mendez’s performance of Let It Go
(Scroll down to see a video of Bobby Lopez singing it.)
If John Travolta introduced Idina Menzel as ‘Adela Dazeem,” Menzel — better known to her Broadway fans — was just one of the many presenters and performers that were veterans of Broadway, from Samuel Jackson to Bette Midler. So were some of the winners. Catherine Martin, who won a Tony for designing La Boheme on Broadway, won two Oscars for “The Great Gatsby” last night.
And Cate Blanchett, winner of the Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role, thanked “every single member of the Sydney Theater Company.”
In other theater news: Audra McDonald is coming back to Broadway, Rosemary Harris is going to be in a new Tom Stoppard play
This Week in New York Theater
Monday, February 24, 2014
10 Lessons for Theater, from the third annual TEDxBroadway, my article in Howlround
The theater experience is not just on the stage~ Diane Paulus
Engage the audience in innovative ways
Consider crowdfunding — David Drake
Don’t punish the digitally connected Dexter Upshaw of The Apollo Theater
Make the neighborhood your lobby – Craig Dykers of Snohetta
Collaborate — @LopezBobby, @DoctorYao
Understand the connection between the arts & the sciences~ Ainissa Ramirez
Realize new forms of entertainment have changed would-be audiences~ Gabe Zichermann
Bobby Lopez’s “talk” was a 15-minute concert.
Lopez’s Oscar win for Frozen song makes him only the 12th person in the competitive #EGOT club (people who have won at least one each of an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony in competitive categories.)
Dominique Morisseau has won the $100,000 Kennedy Prize for a play inspired by US history, for her “Detroit ’67” about the Detroit riots.
For five dollars, Lorenzo Thione, the producer of “Allegiance,” will give you first dibs on the opportunity to buy tickets to a show that ‘doesn’t really exist,” according to the AP. Thione’s Allegiance Priority Access Pass is one of the producer’s innovations, this one to prove interest in the show.
“Getting back onstage seemed like a good idea….Then Shia LaBeouf showed up.” – Alec Baldwin
Like House of Cards on Netflix? Its creator Beau Willimon has a new play, Breathing Time, performed by Fault Line Theater March 21 through April 13, at Teatro IATI
64 East 4th Street. “Jack and Mike are bankers – one reckless and larger than life, the other responsible and grounded….Fate brings them together on a day in New York that sends shock waves through their lives.”
“Actors leave shows for better offers elsewhere — a fact of theater life that doesn’t make it any easier.”
Fun Home cast, including Judy Kuhn and Michael Cerveris reunite to perform at Barnes and Noble (150 E 86) March 13 to mark the release of their two-disc CD by PS Classics.
My review of Kung Fu
Fans of Bruce Lee, the martial artist and actor who died four decades ago at age 32, are likely to be delighted at the sheer physical excitement of ”Kung Fu,” which has opened at the Pershing Square Signature Theater starring Cole Horibe, a contestant in 2012 in the TV show “So You Think You Can Dance.” ….Those looking for live theater at a bargain will be similarly pleased: the initial run of “Kung Fu,” as all Signature shows, is just $25. Those of us, however, who are long-time admirers of the playwright, David Henry Hwang, are more likely to be disappointed.
Full review of Kung Fu
25
Back on Broadway! Audra McDonald as Billie Holliday in revival of Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill opens April 13 at Circle in the Square
Rosemary Harris in a new Tom Stoppard play, Indian Ink, opens Sept 28 at @RTC_NYC ‘s Laura Pels Theater
Why support young theater companies during bad times? That’s exactly when to do it, says David Byrne, artistic director of the UK’s New Diorama in Game of theatres: armouring our young companies for the fight ahead
Holly L Derr @hld6oddblend decries The Myth of the American Theater Pipeline but also in the process knocks NYC. (I protest in comments section)
Secrets of the Metropolitan Opera ( a door for horses, ceiling covered in gold, room full of guns, forbidden floor, etc) http://bit.ly/1hORCit
New leads for Pippin April 1: Kyle Dean Massey as Pippin, Ciara Renee as lead player.
How a libel against Philip Seymour Hoffman’s playwright pal David Bar Katz led to a boon for the theater community — The Relentless Award
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National tour of Annie will be non-Equity, directed by Martin Charnin, who knocks recent Broadway production
Director Jack O’Brien speaks about arts education March 13 as part of new Lincoln Center series, Next Stage
Profile of “almost a boy genius” Alex Timbers, 35, director of Pee Wee, Here Lies Love, and now Rocky
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Special issue of Critical Stages on “alternative” criticism (blogs, Twitter) from around the world.
“I thought, am I going to die?…But dancing teaches you how to focus” injured Spider-man cast member Daniel Curry
Bobby Steggert writes “my very first published piece” about coming out to his parents; his role in Mothers and Sons
James Franco celebrates John Steinbeck’s birthday with a selfie
“The free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world.” Steinbeck on life
What makes a play universal? (hour-long Howlround Twitter chat)
A “universal” play is 1 that exhibits: 1.accuracy in capturing human emotions & behavior. 2. clarity in its presentation #newplay — Jonathan Mandell (@NewYorkTheater) February 27, 2014
For 20 years, Adrian jakson explains, Cardboard Citizens Theater Company has been engaging hard-to-reach audiences, especially the homeless http://bit.ly/1dFwi7K
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February quiz
The “Berlin Wall” between commercial and nonprofit theater has fallen.
March 1
Oscar Meet Tony: Academy Award Nominees’ Broadway Connections: Complete list of the Oscar nominees — and which of them have worked on Broadway
Broadway, Off Broadway and Off Off Broadway Openings in March, 2014
When a show turns out to be longer than advertised, have you ever felt “Wow, I’m getting more for my money!’?
@NewYorkTheater only if it’s a good show — Aray Montalvan-Till (@thearay) March 2, 2014
@NewYorkTheater hell no. Usually feel misled and that the people behind the production dropped the ball or don’t care about their audience. — Daniel Bourque (@Danfrmbourque) March 2, 2014
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Like this: Like Loading...The automaker also announced an arrangement with U.S. Bank to begin offering Tesla leases for less than the company itself currently provides. Mr. Musk estimated the leases through U.S. Bank could be up to 25 percent cheaper, because of the bank’s lower cost of capital.
Currently, Tesla offers leases on the Model S that start at around $800 a month, and top out at close to $1,300 a month for the highest-performance model. The down payments to achieve those rates range from about $6,500 to $7,000.
Alexis Georgeson, a spokeswoman for Tesla, said the new lease deal was something the company had been “working on for quite a while,” and was not a response to the company’s sales performance, which Ms. Georgeson said continued to be favorable.
“Demand remains extremely strong for the cars,” she said.
She declined to provide detailed sales figures, citing Tesla’s policy of not releasing monthly sales numbers, but said the company planned to provide updated information on total deliveries in conjunction with its earnings announcement next week.
Tesla will announce its third-quarter earnings on Nov. 5, after the markets close.
Because Tesla, based in Palo Alto, Calif., does not reveal detailed sales data to the extent that other automakers do, estimates calculated by industry-tracking firms can vary. According to Autodata Corporation, Tesla’s September sales were down 15 percent compared to the previous year, with year-to-date sales dropping 3 percent. Wards Auto estimated that Tesla’s September sales were down 11 percent, with year-to-date sales down 26 percent.PANAJI: The Aam Aadmi Party in Goa has confronted the BJP and its prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi ahead of their rally here Jan 12, saying the party should ponder over the state's key issues.In a statement issued here on Thursday, the AAP said before the BJP's rally at Merces, a village on the outskirts of Panaji, Modi and the party's state unit should think on key issues which they have not been able to resolve even after two years in power.The BJP-led coalition government's alleged patronisation of the state's casino industry, and shielding of those involved in illegal mining and real estate scandals are on the list of questions the AAP has confronted the BJP and Modi with.The statement also pointed out the BJP's failure to appoint information commissioners as well as functional Lokayuktas and a string of foreign "study" trips."When the Goa government proposes to prohibit entry for Goans into casinos on the grounds that gambling is a vice, is it not anti-national for the BJP to encourage the rest of Indians to be addicted to casinos?" the statement said.It asked Modi and the BJP to get a reality check on whether they consider casinos as a part of "Indian culture".Questioning the government led by Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar, the statement said why "haven't any proceedings been started to recover the Rs.35,000 crore looted from Goa as per the Shah Commission report (on mining scam)?"It also asked why Goa's garbage issue has not been resolved despite "expensive foreign study tours and numerous assurances on the issue".News > Esport > MSI Beat IT League Of Legends Tournament
We know that many League Of Legends fans and players been waiting patiently for this! Today we are very happy to announce the DreamHack MSI Beat IT League Of Legends Tournament with a $40,000 prize pool. The tournament will start in May with online qualifiers, at DreamHack Summer 2012 we will arrange a 64 teams BYOC qualifier. Four teams from each stage will battle for the grand prize, the final will be arranged at DreamArena Extreme where the champions will be crowned in front of the worlds best esport audience.
Tournament: DreamHack MSI Beat IT League Of Legends Tournament
Format: 5on5
Sponsors: MSI, Beat IT
Prize Purse: 270 000 SEK (40 000 USD)
Stay tuned for details with in the upcoming week.I'm sorry, Chad Ochocinco, but have you done lost your mind?
I know you're bored with the lockout and all, but I'm not sure picking a Twitter fight with our guy Ndamukong Suh is the smartest thing you've ever done.
I'm aware of no history between the Cincinnati Bengals receiver and the Detroit Lions defensive tackle, and I fully realize that Ochocinco loves him some attention. I don't know if this qualified as Twitter trash talk or a set-up for cheap entertainment. It's suspicious that Atlanta Falcons receiver Roddy White, at about the same time, randomly teed off via Twitter on San Francisco 49ers quarterback Alex Smith, but I have no idea if there is any kind of publicity-seeking coordinated effort here.
If nothing else, we have a fun way to close out the second full week of April.
Ochocinco started it off late Friday afternoon. I've pieced the series of exchanges together as best as I can. They ended with Suh and Ochocinco agreeing to a soccer-style shooout.
Ochocinco: @ndamukong_suh If we got into a fight at what point would you beg for mercy before i whooped your [expletive]? Suh: HAHA NEVER, you don't want those problems!!!! RT @ochocinco If we got into a fight what point would you beg for mercy before i whooped ur.. Ochcocinco: @ndamukong_suh well we can get a hand held camera, fight, then put it on youtube of me beating you to a pulp Suh: HA @ochocinco you couldn't beat me in soccer, let alone a fight. Ochocinco: @ndamukong_suh Me and you on any ice rink and go at it Hockey fight style, everything goes until somebody hits the ground Suh: @ochocinco bro I saw ur weak attempt at soccer..how bout we settle this w/ a shootout on the soccer field in #NYC @ #NFLDraft?#dontbescared Ochocinco: @ndamukong_suh my attempt at soccer was awesome, we can have a shootout whenever you are ready, i will be the goalie also Suh: That's a bet and I'll play goalie too!!! RT @ochocinco my attempt at soccer was awesome, we can have a shootout whenever you are ready...
For those who forgot, Suh played soccer growing up and is proficient enough to be the Lions' emergency field goal kicker.
I'll say this: Ochcocinco's got a better chance of beating Suh in a shootout than he does in a hockey-style fight. I'm afraid there would be only two sounds in the latter: One when Suh hit Ochcocinco, and one when Ochocinco hits the ground.Americans support using unmanned aircraft for patrolling borders and tracking down criminals, but not handing out speeding tickets, a poll out Tuesday finds.
The poll by Monmouth University Polling Institute comes in anticipation of drones becoming much more common in the skies. Congress ordered the Federal Aviation Administration to create a plan for drones to fly in general airspace by September 2015, and states are competing to become one of six locations to help develop that plan.
The poll also arrives as the public becomes more aware of privacy concerns and dangers of drones. A Navy drone crashed Monday in Maryland during a test flight. The poll was conducted before the crash and didn't ask about safety concerns.
The poll of 1,708 people June 4-6, which has a margin of error of +/-2.4 percentage points, found:
•Four out of five respondents supported using drones for search-and-rescue missions.
•About two-thirds supported using drones to track down criminals and patrol the border for illegal immigration.
•Fewer than one in four supported using drones to issue speeding tickets.
In addition, four out of five voiced at least some concerns about their privacy if law enforcement officers used drones with high-tech cameras.
"Americans clearly support using drone technology in special circumstances, but they are a bit leery of more routine use by local law enforcement agencies," poll director Patrick Murray said.
Ben Gielow, general counsel of the industry group Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, said the poll demonstrates that people understand the benefits of using the aircraft in dangerous situations such as searches, fires and disasters.
"Unmanned aircraft help save time, save money and, most importantly, save lives," Gielow said.
Drones come in a variety of sizes, weighing from a few ounces to thousands of pounds. Military versions — the Global Hawk for surveillance and the Predator with weapons — fly routinely in Afghanistan and elsewhere overseas.
Local police and firefighters are eager to use small drones to scout a fire, survey an accident scene or track down missing persons at a fraction of the cost of a manned helicopter. The Department of Homeland Security has a few drones to patrol the borders.
In legislation signed into law in February, Congress set up a series of deadlines for drones to increasingly share the airspace with passenger planes.
The issues are complex, including how to ensure the aircraft are safe and how to prevent them from colliding with passenger aircraft.
The Navy is investigating what caused the crash of a version of a Global Hawk, called a Broad Area Maritime Surveillance Demonstrator, in a swampy area of eastern Maryland. The Navy has flown drones more than 5,500 hours for combat surveillance since 2008.
The Air Force is edging away from the Global Hawk to rely more on U-2 manned spy planes.Six pack of Soft Parade ale brewed by Short's Brewing Company. Picture received Feb. 18, 2014 from Short's (Photo: Short's Brewing Co.)
UPDATE: The deal is pending state regulatory approval, which is anticipated to occur in the next 30-60 days, a Short's Brewing Co. spokeswoman said in an email Thursday.
Short's Brewing Co., which until last year used the slogan "Michigan only, Michigan forever," announced Wednesday that it plans to sell a 19.99% stake to California-based Lagunitas Brewing Co.
But since Lagunitas was recently bought out by Heineken, that chunk of the celebrated Michigan brewery will actually be in the hands of big beer.
Short's, which is based in Bellaire and Elk Rapids – and known for such beers as fruit ale Soft Parade and IPA Huma Lupa Licious – last year expanded distribution beyond Michigan to several nearby states.
Short's founder, Joe Short, said in the news release Wednesday that he's found success surrounding himself with "the best people," and that the Lagunitas deal is one of many strategic decisions to ensure the brewery's continued success.
"This partnership with Lagunitas is just another part of evolution in the cycle of our dynamic and growing business," he said in the news release, which doesn't mention Heineken.
The partnership comes as many other craft breweries, such as Lagunitas, have been purchased by large, mass-production brewing companies. Short's deal with Heineken is only for a minority stake, so in the eyes of its peers in the national Brewers Association trade organization, it still meets the definition of a craft brewery.
Buy Photo Short's Brewing Co. of Bellaire pours 16 different beers Friday, July 21, 2017 at Michigan Brewers Guild's Summer Beer Festival in Ypsilanti. (Photo: Robert Allen /Detroit Free Press)
Of course, Heineken's deal with Lagunitas started with a 50% stake in 2015 before acquiring the rest of the company earlier this year.
To many people who enjoy craft beer, this is no big deal.
But people close to the craft-beer business tend to resent the idea of publicly traded, corporate macro-breweries controlling craft beer. Many are concerned that they'll prioritize profit over quality, hoard hops and other resources, and undersell traditional craft brewers. Money spent on local craft beer also feeds |
memory_block. So I switched the order of the member variables. Of course, you could also just let the memory_block be default initialized and do the work in the body instead.
It’s quite possible you can call it a day here, but there is one more possible concern: what about copying and moving? As it turns out, moving just works out of the box. Unfortunately, if you want copying, you need to write it. This is unavoidable, because of how Mesh is structured, it is a resource handling class that cannot fully delegate the work to its members. So, we write:
struct Mesh {... // as before Mesh(Mesh &&) = default; Mesh & operator=(Mesh &&) = default; Mesh(const Mesh & other) : Mesh(other.positions.size(), other.indices.size()) { ::memcpy(memory_block.get(), other.memory_block.get(), other.memory_size()); } Mesh & operator=(const Mesh & other) { if (this == &other) return *this; if (other.positions.size()!= positions.size() || other.indices.size()!= indices.size()) { memory_block = make_contiguous(positions, other.positions.size(), indices, other.indices.size(), uvs, other.uvs.size()); } ::memcpy(memory_block.get(), other.memory_block.get(), other.memory_size()); return *this; } int64_t memory_size() const { return positions.memory_size() + indices.memory_size() + uvs.memory_size(); } };
Closing (for now) Thoughts
Lately I’ve given some thought to the approach that languages take with regards to making certain things “first class”. In other words, language features that cannot be implemented by the user; things that are part of the core language. This is a good example: the solution suggested in the video is to have the new language provide a keyword “@joint”. Is this desirable?
On the one hand, it makes life easier by providing specialized syntax, doing the right thing easy and likely efficiently as well. On the other hand, it limits your options: if you need something similar to this but with a slight tweak, your odds of being able to do it are much better if you could in principle implement the original feature on your own. It also makes it possible that the language could become a mess of keywords addressing specific needs instead of a framework in which solutions can be constructed. Obviously, care is needed in expanding your core language.
What I’ve shown so far is a pretty simple and generic solution to joint allocation. However, this doesn’t really solve the problem of a generic joint allocated data structure in a satisfactory way. Too much boilerplate, especially the copy methods, would have to be rewritten in order to have another class similar to Mesh but with different arrays that needed to be kept contiguous. This is what we’ll tackle next time, and hopefully see that joint allocation is a problem that can be quite reasonably solved in C++ — even without specialized keywords.
AdvertisementsWhy We Kiss Under Mistletoe And Toast With Eggnog
Whether it's hanging lights, baking dozens of cookie variations or just enjoying the plants, holidays are full of traditions. But like with any tradition, sometimes you've been doing it so long that you don't know why.
Why do we kiss under mistletoe and toast with eggnog? Who decided we should eat jelly doughnuts for Hanukkah? And where do poinsettias come from?
These are a few of many questions, but with expert help, All Things Considered found some much-needed answers to share. Who knows, you might find some fun facts of holiday fodder for that party you're headed to.
Jelly-filled delight
Enlarge this image LA Johnson/NPR LA Johnson/NPR
Going around at a Hanukkah party, All Things Considered producer Sam Gringlas asked a number of people if they knew why jelly doughnuts were eaten during the holiday. No one really knew, but 10-year-old Nathan Szubin got close by saying, "It's because just like latkes, they're deep fried in oil to remind us how the miracle that the oil lasted eight days instead of one."
How The Israeli Sufganiyah, Or Jelly Doughnut, Got Its Start As A Hanukkah Treat Audio for this story is unavailable.
Doughnut-like treats have a long history, both in the Old World and the New World. Food historian Emelyn Rude says the sort we're familiar with emerged in 16th century Europe, when sugar got cheap and Europe experienced a "pastry revolution." The jelly-filled doughnut, now known as sufganiyah, can be traced Germany and neighboring countries during that era.
Joan Nathan, who is the author of 11 cookbooks, her latest being King Solomon's Table: A Culinary Exploration of Jewish Cooking from Around the World, says that the Israeli sufganiyah got its start as a holiday treat with the help of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who was working after the founding of Israel on the revival of Hebrew as a modern language.
"He insisted that the whole family run around stores and order food in Hebrew and they created a new dish that would celebrate Hanukkah," Nathan says.
Sufganiyah became what Nathan says was the first true Israeli food. While at the start, strawberry and raspberry were traditional flavors, today there is no limit.
"In Israel, they have every kind of filling," she says. "They have sufganiyah with foie gras, they have it with jalapenos — for all kinds of tastes and in a way it's a little bit like becoming a bagel."
But they're only available for one week during Hanukkah.
In the United States, the filled and fried treats are becoming bigger, with main retailers like Dunkin' Donuts selling them and at times catering to synagogues.
A toast to eggnog
All of the experts and eggnog enthusiasts that NPR producer Thomas Lu talked to agreed on one thing: What's in the cartons at grocery stores is not eggnog — not even close.
Enlarge this image LA Johnson/NPR LA Johnson/NPR
Food show presenter and author Alton Brown considers himself a passionate imbiber and maker of eggnog. Brown says that the drink we have today can be traced back to England, where wealthier families had the spices necessary for the recipe.
"The beverage that we know of as eggnog actually has its roots in a drink that goes back at least to 13th century England called posset, which was essentially a spiced warm ale that had eggs mixed into it, both the egg yolks and the whites," says Brown.
Why Is Egg The Only Nog? Audio for this story is unavailable.
He says the addition of dairy became a more consistent ingredient in the U.S. during the colonial period when cows were more common.
The eggnog of today still has dairy, but the beer and ale are gone and replaced with liquors and spirits. And while a lot of people say they don't like eggnog, Elizabeth Lonsdorf says that's because they probably haven't had the right drink.
Eggnog during the holiday season has been a family tradition for as long as Lonsdorf can remember. She watched her parents make it and says her mom remembers her grandmother making it. The family takes eggnog so seriously that the recipe is kept in a safe deposit box.
Every winter Lonsdorf and her husband start preparing for their holiday party a few weeks ahead. They put a lot of work into the food, and then about three days before, they get the eggnog ready to go.
She says she can't reveal the entire recipe, but it generally has "a lot of eggs, raw eggs that are separated and incorporated into different parts of it. There is a lot of alcohol, three different kinds of alcohol, and probably three times as much alcohol as there is milk or whipped cream."
Making it three days in advance gives the eggnog time to steep and develop in what Lonsdorf says is "perfectness." She also notes that all the liquors are incorporated slowly and combined using a hand mixer.
Both Brown and Lonsdorf say most people shouldn't worry about getting sick from drinking eggnog as long as the proportion of alcohol to egg is high enough.
Chinese takeout Christmas
Not everyone celebrates Christmas, so when almost everything shuts down it can present a bit of a problem. Though as All Things Considered host Robert Siegel says, "Chinese food on Christmas has become as American-Jewish as apple pie."
Enlarge this image LA Johnson/NPR LA Johnson/NPR
To get a better idea of why Jewish people traditionally eat Chinese food on Christmas, Siegel talked with Rabbi Joshua Plaut, author of A Kosher Christmas: 'Tis the Season to Be Jewish.
Plaut says the tradition of Jewish people eating Chinese food on Christmas goes back to 1935.
Why Do Jewish People Eat Chinese Food On Christmas? Audio for this story is unavailable.
That year the American Jewish Journal published a piece criticizing Jews for eating at non-kosher restaurants, particularly singling out those who went to Chinese restaurants.
"This marriage between Jews and Chinese food really goes back to when Jews and Chinese people were immigrants in the United States," Plaut says.
Eating non-kosher items at Chinese restaurants does happen, and has its own phrase: "safe treyf." Treyf is the Hebrew word for non-kosher food.
"Jews in Chinese restaurants are eating all sorts of non-kosher food items such as shellfish, pork products — which are hidden in a wonton or some type of egg roll. And so you're able to partake in this wonderful delicacy without actually knowingly eating this non-kosher food item," Plaut says. "This is a place where you can engage in eating this food from an exotic culture that seemingly is OK and kosher, but really is not and still have a smile and delight in it without feeling guilty."
The Chinese food tradition continued and by 1950 comedians made references to it in their skits. Plaut says it was more than convenience — it offered Jewish people a place to celebrate together.
"Honestly, the Chinese restaurant was a safe haven for American Jews who felt like outsiders on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day," he says. "You go to a Chinese restaurant, you become an insider. You can celebrate somebody else's [holiday] and yet be amongst friends and family and members of the tribe — thereby the outsider on Christmas becomes the insider."
Meeting under the mistletoe
What's so romantic about a parasite? Yep, that's right. The oh-so-romantic mistletoe is actually a life-sucking freeloader.
Enlarge this image LA Johnson/NPR LA Johnson/NPR
NPR's Thomas Lu spoke with Becky Little, a freelance writer in the Washington, D.C., area, about how something so small became so relevant during the holidays.
Little says for the past several centuries people have found mistletoe to be an interesting plant. In the first century A.D., Celtic druids mixed mistletoe into a drink to give to animals because they thought it would help with the animals' fertility, she says. It's also this group that is credited with hanging the plant above their doorways.
"[It's] something that is maybe special, has signs of vitality, fertility," Little says. "Because it's a parasite, it sucks the nutrients from trees. And people in European countries have noticed this over the centuries because it's one of the only things that stays green during winter."
Why Do We Kiss Under The Mistletoe? Listen· 2:49 Audio for this story is unavailable.
It's that fact that is fundamental to understanding why mistletoe has had such importance throughout the years, Little says.
But what gives mistletoe its romantic edge?
For that answer, Little says one has to look at Norse mythology. In the story, Balder, a son of Odin (yes, the same Odin that is father to Thor for all you Marvel fans), dies after being pierced by a mistletoe arrow. In some versions, Little says that that's the end of the story. But in others, Balder's mother Frigg weeps when her son dies and her tears turn into mistletoe berries that bring her son back from death. After this miracle, Frigg declares the plant a symbol of love.
While there are a lot of hints in mistletoe's story, Little says, nothing about the origin of kissing underneath is completely certain.
"We don't have one answer for why people began to kiss under mistletoe. Really, the first recordings we have of people doing this are in the 18th century," she says. "The origin of traditions is hard to trace and it does seem like there was some evolution from it being a special, maybe romantic plant that you would hang up sometimes around the winter solstice to something that you would hang up around the winter solstice again, but this time you call it Christmas, and kiss under."
Traditions are ever-changing and Little says she thinks mistletoe could be on its way out — because, for as much as it's mentioned in songs and movies, she doesn't think many people hang it up during their holiday parties.
This might be a good thing though, because unlike poinsettias, mistletoe is poisonous and should not be ingested.
NPR's Thomas Lu, Justine Kenin and Sam Gringlas contributed to this story.A nutritional supplements firm is demanding a federal judge to order the disclosure of commenters "leaving phony negative reviews" on the Amazon.com marketplace.
Ubervita sells testosterone boosters, multivitamins, and weight loss supplements, and now the company wants a Washington state federal judge to order Amazon.com to cough up the identities of those behind a "campaign of dirty tricks against Ubervita in a wrongful effort to put Ubervita at a competitive disadvantage in the marketplace" (PDF). The demands from the Washington state firm broach two competing interests: the right to comment anonymously online and the right to protect against unfair business practices. Where that line is drawn is decided on a case-by-case basis.
Consider two recent examples.
In March, a router company that threatened to sue a redditor unless he deleted a negative comment from Amazon.com lost its selling privileges on Amazon.com. And just last month, a federal judge ordered KlearGear to pay $306,750 to a Utah couple that left a bad review over an undelivered $20 order, prompting legal threats from KlearGear that resulted in the couple prevailing in court and winning punitive damages.
But the Ubervita affair is much more complex. If its allegations are true, they seemingly highlight a complex plot to disrupt the supplement company's business.
According to the firm's Monday lawsuit, Ubervita claims that the unknown commenters placed fraudulent orders "to disrupt Ubervita's inventory," posted a Craigslist ad "to offer cash for favorable reviews of Ubervita products," and posed "as dissatisfied Ubervita customers in posting phony negative reviews of Ubervita products, in part based on the false claim that Ubervita pays for positive reviews."
Among other allegations, the company claims that the people they are seeking to unmask sent e-mails to Amazon, under the Ubervita name, to allege that they were "selling counterfeit goods."
"Each time, Amazon responded to the false complaints by suspending the sale of genuine Ubervita products—rendering them unavailable for purchase," the suit said.
The firm said the people the company wants identified undertook a self-perpetuating commenting scam of sorts:
For months, Defendants have tarnished Ubervita’s reputation by posing as legitimate consumers of Ubervita’s products and leaving phony negative reviews of such products on Amazon.com. In ostensible support for such reviews, Defendants make frequent untrue statements of fact about Ubervita and its products, including by falsely accusing Ubervita of publishing fraudulent positive reviews of its products and/or of selling “fake” products. For example, some of Defendants’ reviews refer to Ubervita as a being a "scam," state that Ubervita’s products are “placebos,” and claim that Ubervita pays for five-star (the best possible) product reviews. None of those statements of fact is true. Because Defendants repeat their false statements many times, and quote false statements made by other Defendants, they make it appear as though their false reviews reflect a growing body of unsatisfied customers."
No decision on the subpoena (PDF) has been made as of Tuesday.The data intelligence firm attacked by Anonymous this week had drafted a proposal to eliminate the WikiLeaks infrastructure on behalf of Bank of America.
Careful, we're entering some really crazy conspiracy level stuff here. Get ready to jump down the rabbit hole with me.
When hacker amalgam Anonymous attacked the computer security firm HBGary as most of the country was busy watching heavy-set men play with a leather ball, you could assume that it was retaliation for the recent crack down on its membership by the FBI and Scotland Yard. But as we've had more time to digest the 60,000+ HBGary emails that Anonymous posted online as a big f**k you, it seems that the data intelligence firm proposed to engage in some social engineering and subterfuge of its own to "take down" WikiLeaks. Anonymous might be a hero.
The hacker group has made clear its support of Julian Assange's initiative, and Anonymous made headlines last year by DDoS attacking Amazon.com, Bank of America, PayPal and any other entity or website that appeared to wrong WikiLeaks. (Amazon dropped hosting the leaked cables, while PayPal and Bank of America refused to release funds.) On November 29 2010, Julian Assange said he was going to post documents from an executive's hard drive revealing an "ecosystem of corruption" at a major American bank. The next day, Bank of America went on the offensive and contacted HBGary to formulate a plan to retaliate against WikiLeaks and publicly discredit Assange.
In the emails stolen by Anonymous was a presentation that detailed exactly what HBGary (along with partner firms Palantir and Berico) could offer Bank of America. The firms involved presented an overview of the WikiLeaks situation, including pictures of the servers that currently hosts the website in a bomb shelter in Sweden. Some of the language is borderline creepy, involving discrediting "liberal" reporters like Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com for his support of Assange's work. " These are established professionals that have a liberal bent, but ultimately most of them if pushed will choose professional preservation over cause, such is the mentality of most business professionals," the slide reads. "Without the support of people like Glenn [Greenwald] WikiLeaks will fold."
Thanks to Anonymous, you can find a pdf of the entire presentation on WikiLeaks here.
Based on this proposal, HBGary and its partners continued to investigate and gather information on both WikiLeaks and Anonymous, but no deal was struck to go forward with the plan. CEO of HBGary Aaron Barr scheduled a meeting with firms representing Bank of America to "close the BOA deal" on Monday, Feb. 7th, and learning about this meeting was the direct cause of Anonymous' attack on Sunday night.
In the fallout this week, one of the security firms that prepared the proposal (the one with the coolest Tolkien reference name, Palantir) tried to distance itself from the controversy, possibly to try to prevent a similar attack. "I have directed the company to sever any and all contacts with HB Gary," Palantir CEO Alex Karp said. "We do not provide - nor do we have any plans to develop - offensive cyber capabilities."
HBGary also released a statement this week which seemed to suggest that the information Anonymous posted was faked. "Please be aware that any information currently in the public domain is not reliable because the perpetrators of this offense, or people working closely with them, have intentionally falsified certain data," the statement read.
Besides the fact that forging 60,000 emails as well as PDFs, Word docs, and presentations is ridiculous, it is not Anonoymous' modus operandi to think the way these mooks do. I don't know about you, but claiming that the information is false is disingenuous. It's clearly a deliberate attempt to discredit Anonymous that's worthy of the way these guys think, say, like proposing to do the same thing with a liberal reporter.
The entire story is endlessly fascinating for me, and as more information comes to light Anonymous is looking more and more honorable. Attacking a cyber-security firm is one thing, but preemptively assaulting a company that planned to use nefarious tactics to "take down" WikiLeaks on behalf of a corrupt billion-dollar bank? That's Cyberpunk 2020 shit right there.
Nice hack, choombah.
Thanks to h264 for the tip.
Source: Tech Herald and Raw Story2 years ago
Hey folks!
Every year our community gets together to build a blog featuring a our collected thoughts on the games that meant the most to us this past year. It's a spectacular project and a great excuse to write about games! Madhero is the organizer of this awesome project, and he's provided me with the details below: it's SUPER cool when we get together to do this, and hope that g1's and Rooster Teeth fans alike will join in the festivities! Here's the details:
Hey g1’s. Madhero here. Boy a lot has happened this year. I mean, not all of it good, in fact, a lot of it wasn’t good, but hey, at least we had some great video games to distract us from it all. 2016 was overall a great year for games, with some great highs (Overwatch, Doom) and some low lows (poor poor Mighty No. 9), but it definitely interesting, and as is g1 tradition, we’re planning on the Games That Defined 2016.
Ok, so some explaining is probably needed for those that have no idea what I’m talking about. Since 2013, the g1s on Screwattack gather together and talk about a game they felt DEFINED the year it came out in. Now, that doesn’t mean it’s your standard GOTY award, it’s about the game that you felt defined your year, or had a personal impact. This could of course be because it’s awesome, but also because it disappointed you, or just left a personal connection with you. So you can talk about how Doom showed how a revival has to be done, or how No Man’s Sky and its fall thanks to hype culture, or how Mafia 3’s socially conscious storytelling clashes with its kinda mediocre gameplay. Those are just my opinions though, and I’m sure you guys have some great and interesting opinions as well
So how exactly will things go down? Well, simply put, you have to call out your Game That Defined 2016 game in the comments of this blog. If the game has been taken, that’s it, they have that game, so you better be quick with picking said game. Afterwards, once the deadline (more on that later) has been reached and all people have picked their game, I’ll contact you via DM and we take care of it. Here are some other rules to take into account.
2016 Releases only. If you’ve been playing catchup and really wanna talk about this awesome 2015 game you played, sorry, no can do.
Re-releases are allowed. While I’d personally prefer something original, I don’t mind if the game you wanna talk about is the Bioshock Collection or Rise of the Tomb Raider on PS4. Do try and explain why that is your game that Defined 2016 thoroughly.
Text and Video are allowed. You’re allowed to bring your Game that Defined 2016 in whatever format you like. I do expect a certain quality to it, so do try your best with whatever you’re doing.
Try and be concise with your writing. Unlike Screwattack, Rooster Teeth’s site has a word limit on the journals/blogs, so the word count for your part depends on how many people will join this project. Do try and be considerate of that.
I think that about covers everything. If you have any more questions, I’ll be happy to answer them in the comments. The deadline for entry is DECEMBER 15TH, so you have until then to pick your game in the comments. Afterwards I’ll contact and will try to get this thing out. Its always been a pleasure doing this project every year, and I hope you guys join up. Until then!B.J. Ross said a painful goodbye to a good friend last week. The Pennsylvania woman returned from her lunch break last Monday to find that Bigsby, her 15 year old cocker spaniel, had died in her absence.
On Friday, Ross told the Altoona Mirror she had decided to take Bigsby to the Central Pennsylvania Humane Society to have him cremated when she was saddened to see a man dropping off a cocker spaniel at the shelter.
“I was heartbroken,” she said. “He was my best friend and never left my side.”
Ross had lost another cocker spaniel, Samson, in July of last year after he went missing. An extensive search for him was unsuccessful, and Ross leaned on Bigsby as she mourned Samson’s loss, making his passing all the more difficult to accept. She couldn’t fathom how a man could leave his dog at the shelter – especially a loyal breed like the cocker spaniels she had come to admire.
Ross and her mother were in a waiting room at the Humane Society when her mother overheard the man relinquishing the cocker spaniel say that he found the dog about a year ago in Juniata, the same area where Ross had lost Samson.
John Aurandt said he found the dog in a parking lot at the Ward Trucking Company in Juniata.
“Me and my boy went up and down the streets trying to find the owner,” he said. “I thought he was stray, but my boy wanted to keep him.”
Aurandt said try as he might, he could not find a way for Samson and his other dog to get along, so after a year of trying he had brought Samson to the Humane Society to surrender him.
“They were aggressive toward each other,” he said. “I just couldn’t keep him.”
Ross looked through the window of the door separating their waiting rooms and was shocked to see Samson. “I opened the door and said, ‘That’s my dog.’ I passed Samson earlier when we came in and didn’t even notice. I was so distraught,” Ross said.
Ross produced pictures of Samson to verify ownership, and on the very same day she was forced to bid an old friend farewell, she recovered another. “They said I could take him,” she said. “Five minutes later and he would have been surrendered.”
Humane Society Volunteer Coordinator Tammi Ingham witnessed what she called a miraculous reunion. “I get the goosebumps just thinking about it. There are odd things that happen here, but nothing like that,” she said. “It sure made my day.”
A grateful Ross said having Samson back as helped her to accept Bigsby’s passing. “I’m so thankful,” she said. “It made it a little easier.”Intel is believed to be pushing up the launch of its first wave of Ivy Bridge processors by one week to April 23. According to sources for DigiTimes, Intel will announce availability of its next-generation 22nm processors on that day in order to pump up demand for new ultrabook models from ASUS, Acer, Lenovo, and HP.
Intel suggested in February that the highly anticipated Ivy Bridge processors, which are built using 3D tri-gate transistors on a new 22nm process, would be delayed until June. However, leaked information about the launch that surfaced just two weeks ago suggested Intel would instead roll out various processors on a staggered release schedule, with some processors becoming available at the end of April. The rest would start shipping in quantity just over a month later in early June.
While DigiTimes isn't the most reliable source of accurate information, the reason for the one-week bump sounds plausible. Intel has made a big push behind its "ultrabook" concept—strikingly similar to Apple's MacBook Air ultra-portable—but many of the first-generation designs were a little disappointing. Ivy Bridge includes configurable TDP for increased power optimization as well as vastly improved integrated graphics, features that should be a boon to ultrabook designs.
Another clue pointing toward an earlier launch is that inventory levels for Apple's 15" MacBook Pro have started to show signs of decreased production. Processors suitable for an Ivy Bridge-based 15" MacBook Pro are among the first wave of Ivy Bridge processors expected to be announced later this month. In the past, Apple has had early access to some new Intel processors, so the company may be preparing to launch a revised 15" MacBook Pro in the next few weeks, with revised 13" and 17" models to follow later.
Further supporting the early launch theory is word that Intel has begun shipping its second-generation Thunderbolt controllers. Those controllers were also expected to be part of Intel's rollout for its Ivy Bridge platform; offering smaller, lower power, and lower cost options compared to the first-generation chips. These new controllers are expected to widen the reach of the nascent high-speed connector, with ASUS, Acer, and Lenovo readying Thunderbolt-equipped notebooks for launch this quarter. Motherboard supplier Gigabyte also plans to have Ivy Bridge-based motherboards with Thunderbolt support as well.
Again, Intel has made no official announcement concerning an April launch. The last word from Intel China chairman Sean Maloney was that Ivy Bridge would be delayed until June. Given how eager vendors are to release new products designed around the Ivy Bridge platform, however, we are not surprised to hear that Intel is planning to stagger its launch and push out the first Ivy Bridge chips as soon as possible.Saker rant: A 5th column in the Russian media? Absolutely!
Is there a 5th column in the Russian media?
Hell yeah!
It is literally all over the place!
Like during the latest Q&A with President Putin. I don’t know if anybody else noticed this, but it really pissed me off. Check out who got to ask a question from the studio:
Khakamada Venediktov Kudrin Remchukov
For those who don’t know these faces – they are some of the worst “demofreaks” in Russia. Meet:
Irina Khakamada: bigtime Nemtsov groupie, professional protester and feminist.
Alexei Venediktov: editor in Chief of the rabidly anti-Russian “Ekho Moskvy” (Echo of Moscow) Radio Station, aka “Ekho Matsy” (Echo of the Matso) due to its russophobic political line. He is actually a “true believer” in western democracy
Alexei Kudrin: one of the figureheads of the Atlantic Integrationists, a hardcore market economist, forever offended since he was fired (by Medvedev, of all people!).
Konstantin Remchukov: owner and editor in chief of Nezavisimaya Gazeta, who has received the official imprimatur of the Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty.
Just look at their faces! They have that “eternal sadness of the professional dissident” in their eyes. Clearly, they “suffer” from the “regime” and they feel like 21st century versions of Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn. They also feel hurt, because the barbaric, reactionary and ungrateful Russian people never gave them the support they feel that their courageous stance deserves, and so, not a single one of their candidates made it into the Duma. Not one!
That’s right. These guys represent at most 5% of the Russian people. And yet, they are treated by the state media like some kind of honored guests, as if they were literally all Heroes of Russia, with something important and enlightening to say.
Personally? I would not even invite them at all. None of them. I despise their ideas, their attitude, their hypocrisy, their russophobia and their sickening sniveling about how hard it is to be a “dissident” in Putin’s Russia (even when they get invited by the state TV).
But nevermind them. The real question is this: who invited them and why?
So yes, there is a 5th column in the Russian media.
The SakerUS President Donald Trump is eyeing Afghanistan's mineral wealth to help pay for a 16-year war and reconstruction efforts that have already cost $117 billion. Investors who have studied the country, one of the world's most dangerous, say that is a pipe dream.
Ever since a United States Geological Survey study a decade ago identified deposits later estimated to have a potential value of as much as $1 trillion, both Afghan and foreign officials have trumpeted the reserves as a likely key to economic independence for Afghanistan.
As well as deposits of gold, silver and platinum, Afghanistan has significant quantities of iron ore, uranium, zinc, tantalum, bauxite, coal, natural gas and significant copper - a particular draw given the dearth of rich new copper mines globally.
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Afghanistan, some reports say, even has the potential to become “the Saudi Arabia of lithium”, thanks to deposits of the raw material used in phone and electric car batteries.
But a lack of basic logistics - paved roads and rail links needed to export copper concentrate or iron ore - pervasive corruption, a messy bureaucracy and a growing insurgency that has left much of the country beyond the writ of the Kabul government have stifled attempts to a build a legitimate mining sector.
Much of the basic data dates back to the Soviet occupation in the 1980s. And the cost of having foreign geologists and engineers visit remote sites to carry out new surveys is prohibitive when nothing is yet being produced to pay for it.
“There is no low-hanging fruit that could trigger rapid growth and foster self-sustaining development,” said the government's own National Peace and Development Framework document, presented at last year's donor conference in Brussels.
Major projects such as the Mes Aynak copper mine, being developed by a Chinese consortium, remain at a standstill.
“There is zero active mining and very little exploration, if any,” says Leigh Fogelman, director at merchant bank Hannam & Partners in London. The bank's founder, former JP Morgan rainmaker Ian Hannam, has been a long-time investor in Afghanistan through the Afghan Gold and Minerals Company (AGMC).
AGMC won the licence for another copper deposit, at Balkhab in northern Afghanistan, in 2012.
For the rest, resources have been prey to what William Byrd, a development economist with the United States Institute of Peace, has dubbed “industrial-scale looting”.
While small and medium-sized mines do exist, many are outside government control, profiting powerful local operators and depriving the treasury of what the government estimates at $300 million in unpaid taxes.
“The big mining opportunities are just languishing and there's looting of smaller resources everywhere,” Byrd said.
As Afghan officials sought to raise interest in Afghanistan with the incoming US administration earlier this year, they pushed the idea of the mineral reserves.
“President Trump is keenly interested in Afghanistan's economic potential,” Hamdullah Mohib, Afghanistan's ambassador to Washington, told Reuters in June. “Our estimated $1 trillion in copper, iron ore, rare earth elements, aluminium, gold, silver, zinc, mercury and lithium. That's new.”
US officials have told Reuters that Trump argued at a White House meeting with advisors in July that the United States should demand a share of Afghanistan's mineral wealth in exchange for its assistance to the Afghan government.
US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis said on Sunday that Trump has made a decision on the United States' strategy for Afghanistan after a review with national security advisors, but did not give any details.
It is easy to see why the mining sector has aroused so much interest in Afghanistan, a landlocked country with an economy worth about $20 billion a year - roughly half the size of Wyoming, the least populous US state.
But private investors are wary, says Fogelman, and there is no quick fix.
“In the case of large, public sector investment, the situation would be different - however, there would still be the problem of building up logistics and export links,” he said. “I reckon it would still likely take years to get a meaningful large-scale operation going.”
Even if private armies could be hired to defend the mines against insurgent attack, the cost of moving minerals out would likely be prohibitive until the entire country was secure - which could take many years.
One longtime mining expert formerly based in Kabul recounted his conversation with a top mining firm.
“They said: 'Don't worry, we can bring our own security detail and do the mining operation'. But, they said, 'How are we going to get this stuff out of the country?'”
According to a 2014 mining ministry study, some of Afghanistan's most promising deposits of lithium are in the eastern province of Ghazni and in the far southern region of Gowde Zereh in Helmand province, all areas largely under the control of the Taliban.
“The idea that this will materialise in the near future and pay for the security sector budget is unrealistic,” said Byrd.
Even without the war, mining is tough.
China acquired a 30-year lease on the Mes Aynak copper mine for around $3 billion in 2008 but, although the Taliban has explicitly declared that it will not target it, the project has been plagued by delays due to contractual wrangling.
Under a donor program agreed in Tokyo in 2012, Afghanistan was supposed to be earning $1 billion a year from mining revenues by 2017 but expectations have been pulled back.
In the first 11 months of the last fiscal year, the government raised just $18 million from mining revenues and the government's own projections now do not see them exceeding the $1 billion mark before 2029.
Shape Created with Sketch. Afghanistan: Between Hope and Fear Show all 16 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. Afghanistan: Between Hope and Fear 1/16 2001 Afghans at the Killi Faizo refugee camp desperately reach for bags of rice being handed out to the thousands who escaped the bombardment in southern Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom. (Chaman, Pakistan, December 4, 2001) Paula Bronstein 2/16 2002 Mahbooba stands against a bullet-ridden wall, waiting to be seen at a medical clinic. The seven-year-old girl suffers from leishmaniasis, a parasitical infection. (Kabul, March 1, 2002) All photos Paula Bronstein 3/16 2003 A mother and her two children look out from their cave dwelling. Many families who, fleeing the Taliban, took refuge inside caves adjacent to Bamiyan’s destroyed ancient Buddha statues now have nowhere else to live. (Bamiyan, November 19, 2003) Paula Bronstein 4/16 2007 Students recite prayers |
a long oration chronicling, for the crowd, the careers of the three game designers peppering in words like “genius”, “Hyrule” “Rayman”, “Beyond Good & Evil”, and “Alone in the Dark.” On March 13, 2006, Paris, the heart of the institutional French culture, had just entered the Twilight Zone.
How did two French game designers Michel Ancel (Rayman, Beyond Good & Evil) and Frédérick Raynal (Alone in the Dark, Twinsen's Odyssey) along with the beloved Shigeru Miyamoto (Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda) come to receive the honorific title of Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Knight in the Order of Arts and Literatures) from the hands of the French minister of Culture and Communications?
The honorees with their medals (Photograph courtesy of Bliss Press).
Nobody knew. The Ubisoft and Nintendo PR departments didn't know. Both CEOs of Nintendo France (Stephen Bole) and Nintendo Europe (Laurent Fisher) supposedly didn't know. What is known is that to receive the prestigious title of Legion d'Honneur in France, somebody has to put you on a long list of candidates. Could it be different for the Chevalier medals? The question seems inappropriate. We do not dare to ask the honored people why and how. After a while, tracking this non-mystery became like a game.
Then, when the ceremony was fading out with frozen empty glasses of wine on the big terraces of the minister building, the dictaphone was instinctively put in front of Mr. Jean-Claude Larue, spokesman for the SELL (French equivalent of the ESA): "They deserve it don't you think? You know their work, their talent." Of course, but still, how come? "Well, you know, we're always talking with the Ministry of Culture, and it's our job to explain our industry to the political body." So the idea just "emerged" during casual conversations between some minister and some video game representative. And when two French game designers were picked, it suddenly seemed obvious that it couldn't be a serious initiative without including Japanese legend Shigeru Miyamoto.
Did those officials realize how affable it was for the father of Zelda and Mario, on the verge of a video game Revolution, to come to Paris to give, in a way, his international prestige to an otherwise French-only desuet ceremony? "There are some other French game designers that would deserve the recompense as much as us" admitted, without being asked, the French game designers. In fact, French veteran Philip Ulrich who founded the Cryo company and was at the origin of such games as Dune, Megarace, and Alien, was already given the medal of Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres back in 1999! Many artists from all horizons are given this honorific recognition: writers, painters, Hollywood stars, movie directors…
Michel Ancel was quick to point out the merits of compatriot Eric Chahi (Out of This World, 1991) who pursued other projects after the hard and too long development of Heart of Darkness (1998), and Frédérick Raynal remembered French game genius Paul Cuisset (Flashback, 1992, Fade to Black, 1995, Moto Racer 3, 2001) with whom he made Time Commando (1996) and might work with again in the near future. When Sega withdrew its offices from France after the Dreamcast showdown and his ambitious Agatha project had to stop, Frédérick Raynal, whose No Cliché studio was attached to the Japanese company, kept a low profile and did some game consulting. With his medal on the chest, and his talented illustrator wife, who was responsible for the look of all his games, by his side, Raynal seemed almost ready to make a come back: "What I miss most is the teamwork, this is the great part of this work, not the game that ends up in a box on shelves. It's the process that I miss, even if it is hard."
Michel Ancel who dealt, for the first time, with guns in King Kong while he "avoided having the characters take aim at other human beings", made a great deal of encouraging the development of games with some minimum moral or human values in his thankful speech. "The youth, our children, play so many hours with our games at an age when all their emotions will impact their adult lives. We have a responsibility." This official recognition from the Ministry of Culture may reactivate the "video games vs art debate", but Ancel is obviously ahead of the controversy: "I think the purpose of art is to open the mind, so I will continue to try to make games that have some value," he concluded.
Miyamoto receiving his medal (Photograph courtesy of Bliss Press).
Shigeru Miyamoto showed neither vanity nor shyness. His mischievious spirit showed as he embraced the Minister of Culture upon receiving his medal. The applauds were unanimous and while modestly receiving them, Miyamoto's eyes rapidly made contact with as much people as he possibly could as if to say, "Everyone counts." Or maybe he was looking into the audiences' eyes to find out how important, or not, this Chevalier honorific title was.
His award speech began with a vigorous "Bonjour!" and went straight to the heart of French culture by saying that he was honored to receive such a distinction from a country he admired for the Impressionist painting movement, especially Monet. He then explained that when he started to work on video games for Nintendo in the '80s, "they were conceived by technicians, not artists". He now feels lucky to have been a part of the evolution of the video games towards an entertainment medium.
When confronted with the always blurry status of the video game, both French game designers Michel Ancel and Frédérick Raynal agree, with careful words: "This recognition is good for video games as a whole". Even though France is less plagued by anti-video game lobbies than the US, and games are selling by hundred of thousands, video games are not really acknowledged or respected. Could this be a step toward changing opinions? Maybe...
_____________________________________________________Euro speaker links Kurdish autonomy to EU accession
ISTANBUL - Hürriyet Daily News
Schulz recommends the creation of a Kurdish autonomous region in Turkey. AFP photo
Bağış rejects ‘reform fatigue’ ANKARA - Hürriyet Daily News EU Minister Egemen Bağış yesterday rejected criticism from European Parliament Speaker Martin Schulz that Ankara has been hit by “reform fatigue,” arguing that the European Union itself is worn down. “There is no fatigue in Turkey concerning reforms. Turkey has not stopped working despite the fact that new chapters are not being opened in the membership negotiations,” Bağış said, speaking at a seminar on preventing fraud in EU-funded projects. In an interview with Germany’s Der Tagesspiegel newspaper this week, Schulz had said that Ankara was suffering from “reform fatigue,” while the EU was hit by “enlargement fatigue.” Bağış said that the country was seeking to make contributions to Europe under the motto “Hang on, Europe! Turkey will come to help you.”
The president of the European Parliament has linked the resolution of Turkey’s Kurdish issue to its eventual accession to membership in the European Union.“My advice is given in the framework Turkey’s of pre-EU accession strategy: We must try to convince both sides that it is possible [to create something] between a sovereign state and [a region] with a high degree of autonomy while [maintaining] the … territorial integrity of the country. That is my humble advice,” Martin Schulz, European Parliament president, said yesterday in Istanbul. Schulz was speaking at a ceremony at Bilgi University at which he was awarded an honorary doctorate.The Kurdish problem is a domestic problem for Turkey, Schulz said, but added that the European Union is concerned about the rights and recognition of minorities in its member countries. Schulz said he was confronted with the Kurdish problem when he was a socialist mayor in Germany. “In the early 80s I had a lot of refugees in my city coming from Kurdistan, and I was immediately confronted with the problems that I had in my city, where among the citizens of Turkish origin, half considered themselves Kurds and the other half Turks. This was my reality. And the first part of my answer to you is that there is a Kurdish problem.” Schulz also mentioned the success of northern Iraq’s Kurdish Regional Government (KRG). “You know that the northern part of Iraq has an autonomous Kurdish government. Mr. [Masoud] Barzani [president of the KRG] is a regional leader, being of Kurdish origin, and considers himself a Kurdish leader. This is not a problem … for Turkey, and it is not a problem for us or for Iraq.”"Thiotimoline to the Stars" Author Isaac Asimov Country United States Language English Series Thiotimoline Genre(s) Science fiction Published in Astounding Publisher Random House Media type Print (Hardback) Publication date 1973 Preceded by "Thiotimoline and the Space Age"
Thiotimoline is a fictitious chemical compound conceived by American biochemist and science fiction author Isaac Asimov. It was first described in a spoof scientific paper titled "The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline" in 1948. The major peculiarity of the chemical is its "endochronicity": it starts dissolving before it makes contact with water.
Asimov went on to write three additional short stories, each describing different properties or uses of thiotimoline.
Chemical properties [ edit ]
In Asimov's writings the endochronicity of thiotimoline is explained by the fact that in the thiotimoline molecule, there is at least one carbon atom such that, while two of the carbon's four chemical bonds lie in normal space and time, one of the bonds projects into the future and another into the past. Thiotimoline is derived from the bark of the (fictitious) shrub Rosacea karlsbadensis rugo, and the thiotimoline molecule includes at least fourteen hydroxy groups, two amino groups, and one sulfonic acid group, and possibly one nitro compound group as well. The nature of the hydrocarbon nucleus is unknown, although it seems in part to be an aromatic hydrocarbon.
Background [ edit ]
In 1947 Asimov was engaged in doctoral research in chemistry and, as part of his experimental procedure, he needed to dissolve catechol in water. As he observed the crystals dissolve as soon as they hit the water's surface, it occurred to him that if catechol were any more soluble, then it would dissolve before it encountered the water.[1]
By that time Asimov had been writing professionally for nine years and would soon write a doctoral dissertation. He feared that the experience of writing readable prose for publication might have impaired his ability to write the turgid prose typical of academic discourse, and decided to practice with a spoof article (including charts, graphs, tables, and citations of fake articles in nonexistent journals) describing experiments on a compound, thiotimoline, that was so soluble that it dissolved in water up to 1.12 seconds before the water was added.[1]
Asimov wrote the article on 8 June 1947, but was uncertain as to whether the resulting work of fiction was publishable. John W. Campbell, the editor of Astounding Science Fiction accepted it for publication on 10 June, agreeing to Asimov's request that it appear under a pseudonym in deference to Asimov's concern that he might alienate potential doctoral examiners at Columbia University if he were revealed as the author.[1]
Some months later Asimov was alarmed to see the piece appear in the March 1948 issue of Astounding under his own name, and copies of the issue circulated at the Columbia chemistry department. Asimov believed that Campbell had done so out of greater wisdom. His examiners told him that they accepted his dissertation by asking a final question about thiotimoline, resulting in him having to be led from the room for laughing hysterically with relief. The article made Asimov famous for the first time outside science fiction, as chemists shared copies of the article. He heard that many children went to the New York Public Library trying to find the nonexistent journals.[1]
"The Micropsychiatric Applications of Thiotimoline" [ edit ]
In 1952, Asimov wrote a second spoof scientific paper on thiotimoline called "The Micropsychiatric Applications of Thiotimoline". Like the first, it included charts, graphs, tables, and citations of fake articles from fake journals (along with one real citation: Asimov's own earlier spoof article from Astounding, which was listed tongue-in-cheek as the Journal of Astounding Science Fiction). This second article described the use of thiotimoline to establish a quantitative classification of "certain mental disorders". It also expounds a putative rationale for thiotimoline's behaviour: namely that the chemical bonds in the compound's structural formula are so starved of space that some are forced into the time dimension. According to the second article, thiotimoline's time of solubility varies depending on the determination of the person adding the water. It also claims that one effect is that when people with multiple personalities add the water, some parts of the thiotimoline dissolve before others, due to some of the individual's personalities being more determined than others. "The Micropsychiatric Applications of Thiotimoline" appeared in the December 1953 issue of Astounding.
The first two thiotimoline "articles" appeared together in Asimov's first collection of science essays, Only a Trillion (1957), under the joint title "The Marvellous Properties of Thiotimoline". Asimov also included the original article in his 1972 collection The Early Asimov. The first article also appeared in Fifty Years of the Best Science Fiction from Analog (Davis Publications, 1982).
"Thiotimoline and the Space Age" [ edit ]
Asimov wrote a third thiotimoline article on 14 November 1959 called "Thiotimoline and the Space Age". Instead of a fake scientific paper, this third article took the form of an address by Asimov to the 12th annual meeting of the American Chronochemical Society, a nonexistent scientific society. In his address, Asimov "describes" his first experiments with thiotimoline in July 1947, and timing the compound's dissolution with the original endochronometer, "the same instrument now at the Smithsonian". Asimov laments the skepticism with which chronochemistry has been greeted in America, noting with sorrow that his address has only attracted fifteen attendees. He then contrasts the thriving state of chronochemistry in the Soviet Union, with the research town of Khrushchevsk, nicknamed "Tiotimolingrad", established in the Urals.
According to Asimov, two Scottish researchers have developed a "telechronic battery", which uses a series of 77,000 interconnected endochronometers to allow a final sample of thiotimoline to dissolve up to a day before water is added to an initial sample. Asimov says there is "strong, if indirect, evidence that the Soviet Union possesses even more sophisticated devices and is turning them out in commercial quantities". He believes that the Soviets are using telechronic batteries to determine ahead of time whether satellite launches will be successful.
Finally, Asimov describes attempts to create a "Heisenberg failure", to get a sample of thiotimoline to dissolve without later adding water to it. In every case where the thiotimoline dissolved, some accident occurred that caused some water to be added to it at the proper time. Several attempts to create a Heisenberg failure in the mid-1950s coincided with a series of hurricanes striking New England in such a manner as to suggest that nature would find a way to add water whatever man decided, if man were to be resolute in not adding water. Asimov speculated that Noah's flood may have been brought about by thiotimoline experiments among the ancient Sumerians. He then concludes with some speculation about thiotimoline's potential applications as a weapon of mass destruction by deliberately using it to artificially induce hurricanes.
"Thiotimoline and the Space Age" appeared in the October 1960 issue of Astounding, which was then in the final stages of changing its name to Analog. The article was reprinted in full in Opus 100 (1969) and The Asimov Chronicles: Fifty Years of Isaac Asimov (1989).
"Thiotimoline to the Stars" [ edit ]
Asimov's final piece on thiotimoline was a short story titled "Thiotimoline to the Stars", which he wrote for Harry Harrison's Astounding (1973). In it, Admiral Vernon, Commandant of the Astronautic Academy, gives a speech to the graduating "Class of '22". Vernon's speech explains that thiotimoline was first mentioned in 1948 by a semi-mythical scientist named Azimuth or Asymptote, but that serious study of the compound didn't begin until the 21st century scientist Almirante worked out the theory of hypersteric hindrance. Later scientists worked out ways to form endochronic molecules into polymers, allowing large structures such as spaceships to be built out of endochronic materials. One effect of endochronicity is that if one fails to add water to an object that has reacted to water, the object will travel into the future in search of water to interact with.
An individual with sufficient inborn talent, Vernon explains, can perfectly balance a starship's endochronicity with relativistic time dilation, so that a ship traveling at relativistic speeds can age at the same rate as the rest of the universe, allowing it to return to its starting point within months, rather than centuries, of its departure. Vernon emphasizes that starship pilots are expected to match endochronicity with relativity exactly: a sixty-second difference between the two is regarded as barely acceptable, and a 120-second difference is considered grounds for dismissal. Vernon also emphasizes that endochronic molecules are unstable, and must be renewed before each trip, so that an endochronic ship that finds itself lost might not have sufficient endochronicity to return to its proper time. A ship that finds itself in the future might be able to re-endochronize itself if the technology still exists; a ship that finds itself in the past will be marooned there.
Finally, Vernon reveals that the auditorium where he is giving his speech is actually an endochronic starship, and that during his speech, they have all flown to the outskirts of the Solar System. The graduates felt no acceleration because canceling out time dilation also caused the canceling out of inertia. When Vernon concludes his speech, the graduates will be landing in the United Nations Port at Lincoln, Nebraska, where they will be spending the weekend.
After they land, Vernon receives an awful shock and passes out when his pilot informs him that the ship is surrounded by Indians. Vernon wrongly assumed the pilot meant Red Indians, and thought that they had landed centuries in the past. But the pilot only meant that they had landed at the correct time but near Calcutta, India.
Asimov included "Thiotimoline to the Stars" in his 1975 collection Buy Jupiter and Other Stories.
Other references to thiotimoline [ edit ]
In Glen Bever's story "And Silently Vanish Away" a chemist with the unique ability to use psychokinetic catalysis to speed up difficult reactions is shocked by a lab explosion and the mixture he was working on gets changed. Under analysis the structure never appears to be the same twice and when the substance is injected into lab rats they start to silently and suddenly vanish. It is found that one part of the compound is a molecule which spreads out into four dimensions. The four-dimensional molecule is thiotimoline. The story appeared in the November 1971 issue of Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact.
Topi H. Barr's story "Antithiotimoline" deals with a chemist who accidentally creates a thiotimoline-like compound which extrudes only into the past, enabling the scientist to create images of past events. The narrator complains that thiotimoline is extremely difficult to obtain, and suspects that the CIA or other agencies are controlling the supply for their own reasons. The story appeared in the December 1977 issue of Analog.
Spider Robinson's story "Mirror mirror, off the wall", published in Time Travelers Strictly Cash in 1981, also references thiotimoline.
In Robert Silverberg's 1989 story "The Asenion Solution", thiotimoline is used to send excess quantities of plutonium-186 to the end of time, where they will fall over the brink into anti-time and lead to the Big Bang. "The Asenion Solution" appeared in the Asimov festschrift Foundation's Friends.
The November/December 2001 and March/April 2002 issues of the IEEE Design & Test of Computers included spoof articles on the use of thiotimoline for debugging computers.[2][3]
In the game We Happy Few, a mysterious liquid called "motilene" acts as the primary source of electrical power in the setting, and is pumped throughout the city in pipes in lieu of a traditional electrical grid, or alternatively placed into special jars to act as portable batteries. A research note can be found in one location which makes reference to "thiomotilene crystals" and their "endochronic properties", which in turn strongly suggests motilene's name be derived from thiotimoline.[citation needed]
See also [ edit ]An apology to any & all LGBTQ readers and fellow geeks and fans.
I screwed up. I was so focused on seeing a situation from my side of the equation, I didn't come to the table with enough empathy for others. That's all on me.
Saying the equivalent of "change is coming" and "can you cut us some slack" is a pretty awful thing to say to someone who's hurting-- to someone who wants, needs, and deserves change NOW. Not tomorrow. Now.
Not going to couch this in "Here's what I was thinking", "here's how you misread what I said", or "here's how I have been trying to bring diversity into comics". Because the word that keeps popping up in any of that is "I", "I", and "I". And, end of the day, "I" don't matter in any of this.
This is about the people who are being effected by the actual injustice and unfairness of it all. And the only thing you really need me to say that starts with "I" is:
I screwed up. And I am genuinely sorry.
Reply · Report PostIn the course of Wednesday's debate in Germany's lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, Chancellor Merkel expressed her desire for a new set of European Union sanctions against Russia to take effect. She cited a lack of clarity as to whether the terms of the 12-point ceasefire, agreed Friday in Minsk, were being held despite a calming of fighting in eastern Ukraine.
"In view of the existing situation…we argue that these sanctions should come into effect now. I hope that this will be decided soon," she told German lawmakers, though emphasizing that the sanctions could be removed at any time. "I would add that, if the 12 points are really fulfilled sustainably, we will be the first to lift the new sanctions."
Merkel said sanctions were not an end in themselves. "They are always only imposed when they are unavoidable."
The EU earlier this week adopted the fresh sanctions against Russia, which Ukraine and the EU say has been stoking violence in eastern Ukraine by sending troops and weapons to separatists - something Moscow has denied.
Those sanctions include tightening access to capital markets for Russian oil and defense companies, as well as travel bans and asset freezes for more individuals considered by the EU to be responsible for fueling the months-long conflict.
However the EU held off from publishing the sanctions in its Official Journal of the European Union, meaning they did not take effect, to see whether peace efforts agreed to by Russia, Ukraine and the separatists in Minsk would move forward. EU ambassadors were on Wednesday due to debate whether and when to impose the sanctions.
se/hc (dpa, AFP, AP, Reuters)Frank Ocean has been hit with a defamation lawsuit by his father, Calvin Cooksey, TMZ reports and court documents confirm. Cooksey filed the lawsuit in response to a note that Ocean posted last summer on his Tumblr in the aftermath of the Orlando nightclub shooting. “I was six years old when I heard my dad call our transgender waitress a faggot as he dragged me out a neighborhood diner saying we wouldn’t be served because she was dirty,” the note reads. It continues, “That was the last afternoon I saw my father and the first time I heard that word, I think, although it wouldn’t shock me if it wasn’t.”
According to Cooksey, the story is untrue, and has “damaged his financial opportunities in film and music.” He’s suing his son for $14.5 million in damages. In 2014, Cooksey sued Russell Simmons for nearly ten times that amount, also over defamation charges. Pitchfork has reached out to representatives for Ocean for comment.New Project to Develop OpenCog-Based Intelligent Video Game Characters Starts Up at Hong Kong Polytechnic University….
Many video games now feature AI characters, but the intelligence involved is always limited, focusing mainly on pathfinding and simple rule-based decision-making. There have been a few notable exceptions, like the cute little evolving beasts in Creatures, and the teachable monster in Black & White, but nothing verging too close to general intelligence.
But even so, there is a great potential for synergy between deep AI research and video games – and this has been noted in the research community for some time, for instance in a classic 2001 paper by John Laird and Michael van Lent, titled “Human-level AI’s Killer Application: Interactive Computer Games.” As observed in that paper and by many others over the years, game worlds provide an appealing way to give AI systems an environment requiring perception, action, language, emotion and socialization, but without the engineering difficulties associated with robotics. But, in spite of the emergence of a conference series devoted to the synergy of AI and gaming (the AIIDE series), there hasn’t been a huge amount of work really taking the promise outlined in the Laird and van Lent paper seriously.
As many readers may know, the OpenCog project has touched on the AI/gaming intersection somewhat already – it has been used to create an OpenCog-controlled virtual dog that can learn new tricks via imitative and reinforcement learning. This application originated via a collaboration between Novamente LLC and The Electric Sheep Company to make AI virtual dogs in Second Life, which unfortunately was never commercially launched due to a downturn in the virtual worlds market.
So it’s with great excitement that we now announce the start of a new project at the intersection of AI and video gaming, hosted at Hong Kong Polytechnic University and involving OpenCog at the core.
The M-Lab at Hong Kong Polytechnic University was recently awarded a grant by the Hong Kong government’s Innovation and Technology Fund (ITF), to work on “A Software Toolkit for Creating Intelligent Non-Player Characters in Video Games.”
The focus of the project will be the creation of generally intelligent humanoid game characters, powered by OpenCog and M-Lab’s Lucid game engine, with the capability for simple English conversation and realistic human-like emotional dynamics.
M-Lab is a development laboratory, based at Hong Kong Poly U, which specializes in creating new commercial opportunities within the realm of digital entertainment. While not a commercial venture per se, our new Hong Kong project is expected to result in technology with the potential to be spun out from M-Lab and Novamente into the game industry — leading, if all goes as hoped, to a dramatic advance in game-character intelligence.
The project will last two years and has received US$380,000 in funding, the majority of which is supplied by ITF, with a minority supplied by Novamente in collaboration with Epstein Interests and Humanity+. Additional sponsorship is also provided by NeuroSky, Intuitive Automata, Eutechnys and Fifth Wisdom Technology. OpenCog has previously been used for commercial projects in natural language and data analysis, as well as for basic AI research, but this new Hong Kong project is the largest funded OpenCog research project so far.
The new project will be led by M-Lab faculty Dr. Gino Yu and Wilson Yuen; and OpenCog cofounder Dr. Ben Goertzel will provide oversight on the artificial intelligence aspects. OpenCog cofounder Dr. Joel Pitt has recently relocated from New Zealand to Hong Kong to serve as the technical lead; and Jared Wigmore, another New Zealand OpenCog contributor, plans to shortly follow suit to join Joel on the project. The team will be rounded out with M-lab game programming and graphic design experts, and AI graduate students visiting Hong Kong from Xiamen University in China, where Dr. Goertzel has been co-supervising an OpenCog-based robotics project.
The field of Artificial General Intelligence is at an interesting juncture. There are many preliminary indications that the long “AGI winter” is near to ending, with an increasing number of researchers, writers and policymakers taking more seriously the prospect of creating software or hardware with the same sort of general intelligence as humans. But, in order for the AGI field to really take off explosively (as, say, genomics did in the 1990s or space research did in the 1960s), it will likely be necessary for someone to create a “Sputnik of AGI” – an AGI software system that displays palpable general intelligence, in a context that renders it strikingly comprehensible and apparent to the untrained observer. Video games seems a domain well-suited for the “AGI Sputnik” achievement – so, whether this new Hong Kong project reaches the Sputnik level of influence or not, hopefully at least it will be a major step along the path.
Like this: Like Loading...The battle rages outside Tikrit Teaching Hospital compound in Tikrit in Iraq. Inside their "hellhole" in the compound, 46 Indian nurses, all of them from Kerala, are scared of the approaching night, when Iraqi government helicopter gunships will start strafing and bombing rebel positions. The nurses refute MEA claims that the hospital compound was hit by bombs on the nights of Friday and Saturday.Sunday morning, after a second harrowing night of cowering in their hellhole, listening to sounds of war, the nurses were so unnerved, one of them called up a friend in the UAE who narrated their plight to dna. The friend/source says he talks to the nurses at least five to six times a day, and that they reach out to him as he is "now almost one of them".
"They are very frightened. They have heard of China airlifting its citizens from Tikrit, and ask why India cannot. They have video evidence to show that the compound was bombed, that debris flew right into the room where they are holed. They have been instructed by the ICRC to keep windows open in case of bombs going off nearby that may shatter window panes and flying glass shards could hurt them," the source told dna. "Friday night a bomb hit the emergency block of the hospital compound. Saturday night, a bomb landed so close to where the nurses are trapped, the entire building shook. One of the nurses suffered a seizure, she went into fits, and another two went into shock."
He said the nurses have been told by the Indian embassy not to speak to the Indian media. "An embassy official spoke to each one of them and asked them not to speak to the media as that will betray their location and put them in danger. The nurses said can they be in any bigger danger than what they are in now, at present."
Suresh Reddy, former Indian ambassador to Iraq with supposedly excellent rapport with key figures in the Sunni tribes of Iraq, has been specially sent to secure the safe release of 39 Indians held in captivity in Mosul by the Isil. Those Indians remain in captivity. On Saturday another old Indian hand in Iraq, Mattan George, flew into Baghdad, sent there to help bring the nurses and other Indians stuck in Tikrit.Adam Schefter reports the Giants are expected to be fined for illegally using walkie-talkies during a win over the Cowboys and the team is not expected to lose a draft pick, which has upset officials in other organizations. (1:03)
The New York Giants are expected to be fined for illegally using walkie-talkies during last Sunday's 10-7 win over the Dallas Cowboys, according to league sources.
The league said it has not made any final determinations on whether to fine the Giants or how much, but other sources said a fine will be coming for the Giants. However, the team is not expected to lose a draft pick for a violation that has offended various officials in other organizations who have complained privately about it throughout the week.
Coaches are not allowed to hold any two-way radios during a game, but Giants coach Ben McAdoo was seen on the sidelines holding the walkie-talkie when it was apparent the team was having trouble getting plays in to Eli Manning.
Giants coach Ben McAdoo said he has been on an NFL sideline before when there were communication problems, but that was before the new system for communications was put into place this season. William Hauser/USA TODAY Sports
One NFL source said that even though the Giants weren't communicating with Manning within 15 seconds of the play clock ending, they had the "opportunity" to do it. The same source said McAdoo's use of a walkie-talkie is worse than what the Cleveland Browns did in 2014, when they ultimately lost a draft pick for in-game communications between former general manager Ray Farmer and former offensive coordinator Kyle Shanahan.
The Giants said they were cooperating with the NFL on the matter Friday.
"Start off by talking about the walkie-talkie incident in the game," McAdoo said during his Friday news conference. "We've touched base with the league, we're working through it right now. I don't have anything to add, but we are working with the league on the incident."
McAdoo refused to provide any more details on the situation.
ESPN Giants reporter Jordan Raanan contributed to this report.Image copyright Subrata Biswas Image caption A wild elephant in Chhattisgarh
India is one of the largest producers of coal in the world and more than half of its commercial energy needs are met by coal.
But unregulated mining has caused serious health and environmental issues, and led to growing conflicts between elephants and humans.
In the coal-rich central state of Chhattisgarh, for example, fly ash has caused respiratory problems and serious illnesses like tuberculosis among people, but their troubles don't end there.
Forests are being cleared for coal mining and wild elephants are entering villages in search of food and attacking people.
Photojournalist Subrata Biswas has documented the fallout of India's dependence on coal.
"As thousands of acres of forest land are destroyed to mining, foraging elephants attracted by the crops in the fields often enter villages, resulting in an alarmingly high number of human-elephant conflict situations," says Biswas.
Officials estimate elephants have been responsible for 8,657 incidents of property damage and 99,152 incidents of crop damage in Chhattisgarh between 2005 and 2014.
Image copyright Subrata Biswas
"We were sleeping when the elephants broke into our room. Somehow we managed to escape but I fractured my left leg when a large part of the wall fell on my leg. My husband saved my life," says Rujri Khalkho, 70, whose home was damaged by a herd of wild elephants almost a year ago.
A compensation of 10,000 rupees ($149; £114) has not been enough to repair her house or pay for her medical care.
Image copyright Subrata Biswas
Deaths of elephants due to electrocution have become common in the state.
In Dharamjaigarh, the most affected area, officials have recorded 30 elephant and 75 human deaths so far.
Image copyright Subrata Biswas
In 2009, Kanti Bai Sau, 40, lost her home and farm to an open-cast coal mine.
She was promised compensation of 200,000 rupees ($2,980; £2,290) and a job to a family member, but received neither. Her son died last year of respiratory complications.
"There is no fresh air to breath, fresh water to drink. Coal has usurped everything here."
Image copyright Subrata Biswas
"We lived next to this mine for almost 10 years and watched helplessly as our wells went dry, forests disappeared and fields become unproductive," says Girja Bai Chauhan.
"We have lost almost eight acres of our fields to the mine and authorities haven't fulfilled a single promise they made while acquiring land. They sent us into a dark future and unhealthy environment to live and breathe in."
Image copyright Subrata Biswas
Pipelines carry fly ash slurry from a local thermal power power plant in Korba to a fly ash pond.
Environment activists say that every year approximately 50 million tonnes of fly ash is generated by power plants in Chhattishgarh but not even the half of this amount have been reutilized to reduce the pollution from fly ash.
Fly ash is known to contain trace elements such as arsenic, barium and mercury among others, and unlined ponds like this could be polluting groundwater by leaching.
Image copyright Subrata Biswas
"The ash is everywhere. When the wind blows, everything is coated with a layer of white grey ash. The road, ponds, our houses, sometimes even our spectacles get coated with a fine layer of the ash," says Biswas.
Image copyright Subrata Biswas
Rohit Rathia, 55, suffers from tuberculosis.
He lives in a village next to an open cast mine where lung diseases such as coal workers' pneumoconiosis (CWP), silicosis and tuberculosis have become common ailments.During the recession, I started following the Sacramento market to look for changes in the mix of houses sold (equity, REOs, and short sales). For several years, not much changed. But in 2012 and 2013, we saw some significant changes with a dramatic shift from distressed sales to more normal equity sales.
Note: The Sacramento Association of REALTORS® started breaking out REOs in May 2008, and short sales in June 2009.
In July, total sales were up 0.7% from July 2016, and conventional equity sales were up 5.0% compared |
assisted 3pt FGM % rather than the assisted proportion that has fallen
Drilling into the December slump
Further insight can also be gained in looking closer at this trend by breaking it down by location and players to learn more about this significant problem.
Breakdown by Location
The chart below shows a breakdown by location of the Nuggets 3pt shooting during December:
As can be quickly seen the Nuggets are shooting well from the corners. The right corner sits at 50% while the left corner is a respectable 38.24% (the yellow indicating a % 'comparable' to the league average). Above the break however the results are not so good. Overall above the break Denver has shot 47/180 at 26.1% including shooting only 20% from straight on.
Breakdown by Players
The following table shows the results for the Nuggets players who have shot 3 pointers in December:
Volume wise there are four players with over 40 attempts, Lawson with just over 20, and six other players with single figure attempts. Wilson Chandler leads the team with 61 attempts in December and as might be expected noted 3pt shooters Jordan Hamilton and Randy Foye shoot the highest proportion of their field goal attempts from 3 point range (both being over 50%).
The most alarming observation from this breakdown is the fact that many players seem to be struggling. Only Jordan Hamilton at 37.0% (and perhaps Lawson at 33.3%) is shooting a decent 3pt%.
Conclusion
The numbers suggest a large part of the recent Offensive struggles can be traced to the 3 point line and specifically the area above the break. Unfortunately the stats reveal a number of players are all struggling at the same time and the offense of the Nuggets has suffered as a result. The only positive from this may be that all these players seem unlikely to continue to struggle together like this, and if a few more players can join Jordan Hamilton and begin to hit a good percentage from the 3 point line the Nuggets may be able to break out of their current offensive slump.
All Charts and Graphs prepared by sensemaking with data from NBA.com/statsThey are all the more fun when they are genuine.
And, as you all know, CozyEarth keeps coming with giveaways every now and then; we are back with one more once again. This time, the brand ahead on forefront is giving away a Queen Size Bamboo Comforter (worth quite a lot of cash and a whole lot of admiration) for absolutely free.
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Last Tuesday, ALEC’s Director of External Relations, Caitlyn Korb, spoke at a Heritage Foundation “Bloggers Briefing” and begged conservative bloggers for assistance in promoting a “very aggressive campaign to really spread the word about what we actually do,” and although they may think their counter offensive will thwart exposure of ALEC’s assault on democracy, they are making a grave error that plays into the hands of their enemy; the American people. The Bloggers Briefing is a Heritage Foundation apparatus associated with the Koch Foundation and Cato Institute, and all three of the conservative think tanks are supporters and members of ALEC and profit from their template legislation to subvert environmental protections, voting rights, and pursue Draconian immigration laws and “kill at will” laws.
Now that Pandora’s Box is open and the dirty truth about ALEC is exposed, they are launching a public relations counter-offensive with a website called “I Stand with ALEC” and Korb begged conservative bloggers for “any and all institutional support.” Korb admitted that much of the political opposition emanates from social media and she noted such Twitter hastags as #ALECexposed and #dumpALEC that have “multiplied exponentially” in recent weeks. Korb told her conservative blogger audience that ”We’re getting absolutely killed in social media venues — Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, so any and all new media support you guys can provide would be so helpful, not just to us but to average people who don’t know much about this fight but are seeing us get really heavily attacked with very little opposition.” However, the attacks on ALEC cannot be opposed or defended with any legitimacy and as more Americans learn about the corporate hijacking of democracy, their anger will increase and this is the point that ALEC misses and it will be their undoing.
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AdvertisementsGovernments don't create problems, they solve problems By Scott Sumner
Yes, I’m being sarcastic. I associate this view with American liberals. It often seems that when there is a problem such as the 2008 financial crisis, they immediately assume “the market” is to blame, and “more regulation” is the answer. On closer inspection it’s also a view of policymakers, whether liberal or conservative.
A good example is central bankers. Milton Friedman liked to point out that Fed officials never accepted the blame for bad outcomes (in real time), but took credit for good outcomes. During the 1930s Fed officials did not accept the view that they had caused the Great Depression, or even the severe deflation of 1929-33. During the 1960s and 1970s they did not accept the view that they had caused the Great Inflation. But Fed officials did assert that improved policy had led to the Great Moderation of 1984-2007. They did willingly accept the duty of targeting inflation at roughly 2%, and took credit when inflation averaged roughly 2% in recent decades. The same is true of other central bankers. On the other hand, Fed officials did not accept responsibility for the fact that NGDP in 2009 fell at the sharpest rate since 1938.
I thought of this pattern when reading a recent interview of Peter Praet, a top official at the ECB:
Unlike growth, the inflation figures are not in line with your scenarios. How do you explain this? We have had to significantly revise our inflation forecasts for 2014, trimming them from 1.1% to 0.7% since December 2013. Low inflation is no longer caused purely by adjustments in certain euro area countries, and by lower energy and food prices. Normally, a fall in prices would be able to support purchasing power and, therefore, domestic demand. But demand has remained weak, including in the biggest euro area economies.
My immediate reaction was “never reason from price change.” Lars Christensen had the same reaction. The response is poorly worded; for instance he confuses “demand” with “quantity demanded.” But lots of people make that mistake. Is there a nugget of truth in this remark?
Perhaps the official was trying to say that “normally” the ECB is quite effective at keeping core inflation close to 2%. If successful, a fall in headline inflation to less than 1% would be caused by lower food and oil prices, presumably due to a rise in aggregate supply. In that case the lower inflation rate would be associated with higher output (a higher “aggregate quantity demanded.”) In this particular case, however, aggregate demand has fallen (the line shifted), along with the lower inflation. That’s not normal.
That is the most charitable reading I can give to the quotation. But unfortunately it doesn’t really help, because Mr. Praet also says the following:
What are the brakes on growth? Monetary policy cannot do it all. France has been affected by the slowing growth of its neighbours. But basically, it’s investment that is causing a particularly serious problem. Another factor is the relative weakness of its export capacity.
This answer needs to be interpreted in the context of my charitable interpretation of the preceding quotation. (The alternative, the idea that top ECB officials don’t know the difference between AS and AD, is too horrible to contemplate.)
So we can assume from the first quotation that the ECB believes the eurozone has an AD deficiency, and this is causing the sub-2% inflation. It’s not the “normal” positive AS shock. But isn’t an AD-generated shift in inflation exactly what an inflation targeting central bank can and should control? Of course it is. Like the Fed, the ECB has eagerly accepted the notion that it has the ability and duty to keep inflation near to 2%. And like the Fed, when inflation is near to 2% it takes all the credit.
So why is Mr. Praet so pessimistic about the ability of monetary stimulus to boost AD in France? The answer he gives is truly astonishing. Monetary policy cannot boost AD sufficiently because the real problem is:
1. Investment
2. Exports
3. The weak economy of France’s (eurozone) neighbors
I see this sort of bizarre reasoning all the time, but rarely in such a stark form. Open any textbook and look at how eurozone monetary stimulus would be expected to help France. Here are the transmission mechanisms you will see:
1. More eurozone investment (lower real interest rates)
2. More eurozone exports (weaker currency)
3. More French exports (stronger economy in other eurozone countries.)
In other words, the ECB official has claimed that a lack of monetary stimulus is not the problem, because the real problems are precisely the sectors that would be helped by monetary stimulus.
Keep in mind that this is merely an extreme example of a thought process that occurs in central banks all over the world, almost all the time. It goes far beyond American liberalism. Indeed the ECB central bankers are relatively conservative. Rather it is deeply embedded in human nature. People who make decisions are very reluctant to acknowledge that subsequent bad outcomes are the result of those decisions. (Think Iraq.)
For you math jocks, here is a mathematical translation of the absurdity:
NGDP = M*V
NGDP = C + I + G + NX
Increases in the money supply obviously cannot boost NGDP, because the real problem is excessively low consumption, investment, government spending, and net exports. Don’t think top government officials would ever be so blind as to think this way? Think again.
PS. Here’s the equation that they should put in principles textbooks:
M*V = C + I + G + NX
It will never happen—as it might get students thinking dangerous thoughts.
HT: Nicolas GoetzmannTransformers Devastation Devastator Custom Transformers Titan Class Devastation Devastator | Original Post Date: September 27, 2015 | Last updated: September 27, 2015
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Transformers Devastation Game Inspiration
September 27, 2015
After pre-ordering Transformers Devastation last month. I felt inspired to do this custom. Given, I already had a Titan Class Devastator on display. I decided to give it go.
Instead of doing a full overhaul, strip and repaint of the figure, Titan Class Devastator was customized with the subtle nudge you see here to make him more awesome. Details below...
Modification Paint Details:
Finished Figure off in a multiple Matte Coats to reduce shine of plastic to give more cartoon look
Painted MixMaster Combined Mode Foot
Painted in all vehicle wheels’ rims/hubcaps
Painted Devastator’s crotch armor green (original figure has it purple)
Painted Devastator’s hips to Purple (original figure was silver)
Painted Combined mode knee joints (original was unpainted green)
Stripped chest armor paint so it is mostly purple
Added cell shaded details to:
Devastator’s combined mode forearms
Devastator’s combined mode rifle
Devastator’s combined mode hands
Devastator’s combined mode chest armor
Devastator’s combined mode head
Long Haul’s front grill
Devastator’s combined mode vents on crotch and chest armor
In the end, I felt this custom was pretty fun. This is the first custom I did that wasn't a complete overhaul. I wish tht whomever wins it, enjoys it just as much~ :D
You can support this site by picking up the game and/or figure with any of the links below:A policeman has been fired from the Cumbria force for gross misconduct after making a Facebook comment that was judged as likely to cause offence to Muslims.
Ross Lister, a serving PC in Barrow-in-Furness for three years, was dismissed following a Misconduct Special Case Hearing at Cumbria Constabulary headquarters, the North-West Evening Mail reported Tuesday.
Speaking at the hearing, Chief Constable Jerry Graham said: “The conduct admitted by PC Lister today … refers to a Facebook post that he wrote that he either knew or should have known, or at least reasonably have foreseen, would have caused offence and be considered derogatory to members of the Muslim faith and by people of other faiths and none.
“PC Lister’s behaviour and judgement has fallen so far below the standards expected that I have decided to dismiss him from the constabulary without notice.”
The exact contents of the comment, which was left on another post and deleted days later, were not made public during the course of the trial.
According to the paper, the comment in question was on a post about the consequences for terrorists, former PC Lister wrote: “What? Wrap them in bacon?”
UK Government Targets Internet ‘Trolls’ with Specialist Police Unit
https://t.co/vX0tbUd8C1 — Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) October 9, 2017
Prosecutors announced on Monday that the comment failed to meet “the very high threshold necessary for a criminal prosecution”, Cumbria’s chief constable said it “damaged the reputation of the constabulary and undermined public confidence.”
“PC Lister’s behaviour and judgement has fallen so far below the standards expected that I have decided to dismiss him from the constabulary without notice,” stated Graham.
He added: “The communities of Cumbria expect officers and staff to act on their behalf with integrity, fairness and judgement. The trust of local communities, particularly minority groups, is hard won and easily lost.”
The former police constable is far from the first to have found themselves in trouble with the law for irresponsible use of bacon. In June, Alex Chivers was jailed for six months for assaulting two Muslims in a north London street with a “slab of bacon”.
Police Investigate 'Hate Crime' After Bacon Butties Were Thrown at a Mosque https://t.co/mWY9SThebO pic.twitter.com/e5mORXSzie — Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) January 19, 2016
In Sweden in March, a man was prosecuted for eating bacon too close toa group of Muslim women. He was alleged to have “dangled” bacon in front of them, and to have followed them with meat.
In December, Kevin Crehan was found dead six months into his twelve-month prison sentence for leaving rashers of bacon on the door handle of a mosque.
Previously, Breitbart London reported on the sentencing of a Manchester man to 180 hours unpaid work and a 12-month community order for comments posted to Greater Manchester Police’s Facebook page.
“Don’t come over to this country and treat it like your own. Britain first.” Stephen Bennett wrote, in response to a post appealing for information with regards to a sex case with an Asian suspect.
As the father-of-seven was being arrested, he reportedly said to officers: “Is this about that Muslim thing on Facebook? I’m getting locked up for sticking up for my own country.”The rise and fall of Joe the Plumber as a symbol of the American self-made man’s resistance to progressive taxation began on October 12th, outside Toledo, Ohio. As Senator Barack Obama campaigned for the Presidency in a neighborhood of modest homes, a man named Samuel J. (Joe) Wurzelbacher approached. He said that he was getting ready to buy a company that earned about a quarter of a million dollars a year, and he asked if his taxes would rise under Obama’s economic plan. The Senator acknowledged that they might. “Nobody likes high taxes,” Obama said. “Of course not.” Still, he explained:
I do believe that for folks like me who’ve worked hard but frankly also been lucky, I don’t mind paying just a little bit more than the waitress who I just met over there.... She can barely make the rent.... And I think that when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody. The principle that Obama evinced, which most economists would regard as unexceptionable, can be traced to Adam Smith. In “The Wealth of Nations” (1776), his seminal treatise on capitalism, Smith wrote:
The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor.... The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess.... It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.
Smith’s notion of reasonableness did not anticipate the Fox News Channel, however. Last Tuesday, Wurzelbacher appeared on that network, where he denounced Obama’s comments as “socialist.” He said that Obama “scared me,” because he “wants to distribute wealth.” Wurzelbacher also granted an interview to the advocacy group Family Security Matters, whose advisory board includes the conservative talk-radio hosts Laura Ingraham and Monica Crowley. By means unknown, Joe’s story of ambition and resentment reached the campaign of Senator John McCain.
Early in last Wednesday’s televised debate, McCain brought up Joe’s supposed worries about Obama’s proposed tax rates for wealthy Americans and set off one of those cascading episodes of goofiness that sometimes overtake people who are tired. During a prolonged colloquy in which “Joe the Plumber” was invoked more than two dozen times, McCain accused Obama of waging “class warfare.” Each office-seeker spoke to Joe, “if you’re out there,” as if he were a lost child. At one point, McCain referred to Wurzelbacher as “my old buddy Joe, Joe the Plumber,” sounding as if he might launch into song.
McCain’s reification of Joe’s working-class-rooted virtue portended Dreiserian revelations, and, sure enough, reporters quickly discovered that Wurzelbacher was not everything he seemed. He lacked a license to perform plumbing or contracting work; a lien had been filed against him for nonpayment of taxes; and he told Katie Couric, of CBS News, that in truth he is not at present expecting to enter the high tax bracket he had mentioned to Obama. Wurzelbacher’s prospects for participating in Sarah Palin’s 2012 Joe Six-Pack tour may also have been dented when, speaking to Couric, he described Obama’s remarks on tax policy as a “tap dance... almost as good as Sammy Davis, Jr.”
Of the several morals lurking in this postmodern fable, the least surprising is the reminder that McCain’s campaign believes that it cannot afford to be heavily burdened by facts while constructing attacks against Obama’s candidacy. Also familiar is the example of McCain’s sloppy decision-making. The Ordinary Joe charade was transparently conceived to poke at Obama’s vulnerability with white, independent voters in culturally conservative industrial states. Unfortunately for McCain and his staff, they apparently did not think to vet an important new anecdote that they planned to spring upon a national television audience at a decisive moment of the campaign.
That oversight has rebounded on McCain, of course, but, more important, his phony war on taxes has diminished the last phase of the campaign. In the maw of the worst banking and financial crisis since the Great Depression, McCain has repeatedly dumbed down the debate on economic policy. His focus on pork-barrel spending and the top marginal tax rates of the richest Americans has obscured the seriousness of the crisis, whose causes have nothing to do with either of those issues. Some economists expect the country’s unemployment rate to rise from its current level, of about six per cent, to as high as ten per cent, which would be the highest in a generation; more than a million American families have already had their homes foreclosed upon during the past two years, and in August foreclosure filings reached a record high. McCain, perhaps because he honed his policy instincts during the Reagan era, when marginal tax rates were a big deal, or perhaps because he just doesn’t know what else to talk about, has deflected debate from the difficult, complicated choices that must be made by the next President, such as what sort of economic stimulus plan to enact, and in what stages; which policies might keep the most families in their houses at the least cost; how to restructure market regulation to bring credit-default swaps and other derivatives under government oversight; and how to coördinate global reform of financial and trade imbalances.
McCain is right in detecting signs of growing class resentment; some of the angry are turning up at McCain-Palin rallies, where the mood has been not so much socialist as national-socialist. The cause of this resentment is not difficult to explain, and it has nothing to do with Obama’s modest tax proposals. Income inequality—the gap between the richest and the rest—increased dramatically during the Bush Administration. The main reason was that the rich became very, very rich, while middle- and working-class families saw their incomes stagnate or decline. Long before the Wall Street meltdown, rising gas prices and health-care bills pinched even those American households with incomes that rank squarely in the middle classes.
That is where the great majority of actual plumbers live, of course; they don’t make a quarter of a million dollars a year. In 2007, their average annual income was forty-seven thousand dollars, and that figure was buoyed by the recent housing boom. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes an income roll call of other occupations with which McCain, once a modestly paid military officer, has evidently lost touch: kindergarten teachers, $47,750; firefighters, $44,130; roofers, $36,340; dental assistants, $32,280; security guards, $24,480; home health aides, $20,850.
At the very bottom of the income ladder, the inflation-adjusted minimum wage—despite two increases in the past two years—remains essentially the same as it was when George W. Bush took office. That wage amounts to less than fifteen thousand dollars a year, before taxes—and, yes, there are taxes to be paid even at that level. The number of Americans living in poverty has grown by more than five million since 2000. And there’s no way to say that ain’t so. ♦Advertisements
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Since PayPal TOS already abandoned virtual currencies, they favor in term of scammer. This has caused genuine buyers and sellers a lot of frustration over the last few years. Luckily we found a exemptions in the name of VirWoX, an established exchange famous for trading of Second Life Linden Dollars also known as SLL in a very popular on-line game called Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games. Since buying and selling SLL comes under PayPal terms and condition, VirWoX take it cleverly to next stage by providing another trading platform where it’s users can trade SLL with Bitcoins. Basically you are buying Linden Dollar (SLL) with PayPal, which is technically legal and later you can exchange those SLL with Bitcoins which is also technically legal and then we’ll trade those bitcoins for Monero (XMR) another Exchange.
Buy Monero With Credit Card Or PayPal
Let’s have a recap first, we will need to set up two trading accounts. First is VirWoX, where we’ll buy Bitcoin with PayPal, Credit card or Debit Card (Visa, Mastercard). VirWoX doesn’t support Monero at the moment, so we have to move Bitcoin to another exchange, such as Shapeshift.io, There you will be able to trade your Bitcoin for Monero. Following are the instructions.
Phase One : Buy Bitcoin At VirWoX
Step One : Open a VirWoX account
Go to VirWoX.com, look for the link, “Not Registered Yet?” under the sign-in form. This will bring you to a registration page where you will be prompted to enter your desired user name as well as your email address first name, last name, country, and desired language. There are more optional fields alongside these, but you won’t need to worry about those unless you want to interact with VirWoX in a ‘virtual world.
After registration, VirWoX will send a temporary password to your email. After logging into your account, you can change the password in the “Change Settings” tab. Ignore message saying “Your avatar connection has not been validated yet“, you don’t need to verify your avatar.
Step Two : Deposit Money into VirWoX
VirWoX allows PayPal, Credit Card and Debit Card as payment method and VirWoX made this pretty easy to do. Simply go into the “deposit” tab on the left side of the screen. Scroll down a little bit and you’ll find options of Credit / Debit Cards and PayPal payment option. Just enter the amount you want to deposit and click the “Checkout with PayPal” button for Paypal deposit or Visa, Master Card, American Express, JCB or Diners button as per your Credit Card company.
You will be transferred to PayPal’s terminal or your Cards payment processing page which will walk you through the process of sending money to your VirWoX account. VirWoX also support a wide range of other payment processor Visa / MasterCard Credit Card, UKASH, Paysafe Card, Money Bookers, Sofort banking or Neteller etc.
Step Three : Trade EUR, USD or GBP into Linden Dollars
On the VirWoX homepage, click on the link that lists your currency’s trading pair with SLL (EUR/SLL, USD/SLL, GBP/SLL). This will take you to a page that lets you trade from your currency into Linden Dollars.
You have two options on how you want to trade: market trade and limit trade. By trading at the “market price” you will agree to sell your currency for Linden Dollars at the highest amount that someone else has already agreed to pay for it. If you want to specify a certain price that you are willing to pay, you will need to use a “limit trade“.
If you choose to use a limit trade, you should ensure that your price is reasonable compared to the other prices in the “Offer to buy [your currency]” box at the top of the page. This will increase the chan
ces of someone else accepting your limit trade.
Step Four : Trade SLL into Bitcoin
After receiving your Linden Dollars, use the same process as in previous step using the BTC/SLL trading pair to convert it into Bitcoin.
Step Five : Setup Bitcoin Wallet
Next, you’ll want your Bitcoin wallet from Blockchain.info,
Go to blockchain.info/wallet/ and click on create your wallet.
. Enter your email i’d and set a unique password
Click on Receive and a string of characters will pop up like this: 1NFgL5T9M21toMJ5Sskw9t5SpkhNfXVhDm. That is the address you’ll need for transferring bitcoins from VirWoX to your blockchain.info wallet.
Step Six : Transfer BTC from VirWoX to your Wallet
To withdraw your bitcoin from VirWoX exchange to wallet simply click on the “Withdraw” link under “My Accounts.” tab. You will be asked for the address of the bitcoin wallet that you want to send your bitcoin to. Now paste the address you generated at blockchain.info wallet in previous step and hit the withdraw button.
For new VirWoX accounts, bitcoin transfer can take up to 48 hours. Once VirWoX process your withdrawal, they’ll inform you by an e-mail. After you receive bitcoin in your blockchain.info wallet, you can move to next step.
Phase Two : Trade Bitcoins With Monero at Shapeshift.io
Step One : Get a Monero Wallet
Alright, now it’s time to trade your Bitcoin for Monero. To do this, you will first need a 95-character Monero address, so that Shapeshift can send the Monero back to you. For quick setup, a web wallet at MyMonero.com works great or you can also setup your own wallet on PC, Mac or Linux. For instructions follow our previous post on >> How To Setup Monero Wallet To Send Or Receive XMR.
Step Two : Choose Which Coins to Trade
Next, you’ll go to ShapeShift.io and select Bitcoin as Deposit and Monero as Receive by clicking on the two big currency logos, just like image given below, and then clicking “Continue”.
Step Three : Add the Details of Your Trade
Now Shapeshift will ask you for your Monero and Bitcoin addresses. Bitcoin address is optional but highly recommended, in case of a fail transaction shapeshift will return your bitcoins to the address you provide. Leave the Payment ID field blank and click “I agree to the Terms”. When everything is ready, click “Start Transaction”.
Step Four : Finalize your Trade at Shapeshift
On the next page you’ll see the flashing text that says “Awaiting Deposit”. This means the Shapeshift website is ready for you to send them some Bitcoin. To send it to them, look for the string of text after “Send To This Address” for i.e 1DWbRwWRMSTxRnwPNPx8zYPqHV9wCHdzT7. This is a Bitcoin address that Shapeshift created for your trade copy it and go back to Blockchain.info/wallet and follow the next step.
Step Five : Transfer the Funds from BTC Wallet To Shapeshift
Locate “Send” button at the top left of your blockcchain.info/wallet and click on it. Now paste the address Shapeshift gave you in previous step into the “Recipient” box and type the amount of Bitcoin to send into the “Amount” box and click the blue “Send Funds” button. Click “Confirm” on the box that pops up, and your Bitcoin transaction to Shapeshift is done.
Shortly after your payment is confirmed over the bitcoin blockchain, Shapeshift will release your Monero (XMR) to the given wallet. That’s it.
———————————————————————————————————————————-
Note : There are, also a few fees you need to be wary of when buying bitcoin from VirWoX with this method. VirWoX charges trading fees both the times when trading USD > SLL and trading SLL >> BTC of 50 SLL + 2.9% of the value the base currency in the trade (either your local currency or bitcoin). VirWoX, also, charges a fixed.01 BTC withdrawal fee. Added together, it will cost you roughly 5.8% +.0105 BTC to buy bitcoin with this method.
Because of the fraudulent risks / hacked paypal account risk is involved, VirWoX restricts deposits via PayPal and Credit Cards deposits for a limited time. So there might be a fee higher than normal but this is the easiest way to buy monero with credit card or paypal.Malware Woes Continued to Haunt Android in 2015
Time and time again, critics of Android have brought up the topic of malware and the magnitude of threat it poses to Google’s mobile operating system. Despite repeated assurances that the platform is safe and claims that the malware threat is greatly exaggerated, the tech giant’s efforts to improve the general perception about Android has largely been in vain. A large part of this failure may be attributed to the yearly Android malware reports that have consistently revealed a rather grim picture. Much to the dismay of Google, 2015 didn’t turn out any different. Just take a look at the infographics below to know what exactly transpired during the year.
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<a href=”http://www.mobistealth.com/blog/malware-woes-continued-haunt-android-2015/”><img src=”http://www.mobistealth.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Android-Malware-Snapshot-2015.jpg” alt=”Malware Woes Continued to Haunt Android in 2015″ width=”660″ border=”0″ /></a><br />By: <a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.mobistealth.com/android-spy-software”>MobiStealth</a>One of the PR2s at its graduation ceremony. Screenshot / YouTube In May 2010, 11 450-pound humanoid robots posed before their proud "parents" and supporters in an office in Menlo Park, California.
Then, the lights went down and music rumbled on. With blue spotlights flashing, the robots began a coordinated dance to the '80s hit "Mr Roboto," swiveling their heads, waving flags clutched in their "hands," and moving with flaunts and flourishes that had the crowd hooting with glee.
This raucous display was the "graduation ceremony" thrown for the 'bots by Willow Garage, the company that had created them. Each one had cost roughly $400,000. And they were all about to be given away to enter the real world for free.
Although the now defunct research-lab-startup hybrid might not ring any bells to you now, it was one of the most influential forces in modern robotics. The freewheeling robot collective jump-started the current race to apply robotics components like computer vision, manipulation, and autonomy into applications for everything from drones and autonomous cars to warehouse operations at places like Google, Amazon, and car companies like BMW. Google alone acquired three of the robot companies spawned by Willow.
Founded by an eccentric billionaire who preached a "robot revolution," Willow Garage made enormous strides in robotics hardware and software, most notably through the research bots, called PR2s, and the creation of an open-source robot operating system that's still being used by academics, engineers, and hobbyists around the world today.
At its apex, the Garage was a whimsical menagerie of really bright people with diverse specialties building really "smart" robots, until it ultimately succumbed to some of the same forces that have challenged many promising Silicon Valley startups.
Here's the fascinating story of how Willow Garage came to be, fell apart, and continues to live on today.
Suitable Technologies Not-so-humble beginnings
Willow Garage founder Scott Hassan is a big-picture thinker. He's the kind of person who will veer from a conversation about telepresence into ruminating on what the world will be like once money becomes completely worthless because robots will be doing all our work for us.
He was one of the first people to invest in mysterious augmented reality Magic Leap back in 2012. Earlier this month, Magic Leap raised more than $700 million at a whopping $4.5 billion valuation.
In fact, he's the exactly kind of person who you would expect to get along with "moonshot" king and Alphabet CEO Larry Page.
Hassan met Page and Sergey Brin while working on an Integrated Digital Libraries project at Stanford. He ended up programming much of the original search engine that eventually became Google.
He also decided to invest $800 in the company 12 days after Page and Brin officially formed it 1998. He then founded his own company: An email-list service called eGroups.com that Yahoo bought for about $432 million in 2000.
Thanks to that success and his early Google stake, Hassan amassed the kind of money that eventually allowed him to buy office space in Menlo Park before he even knew exactly what he wanted to do with it. Its address — 68 Willow Road — ultimately inspired his new company's name.
Former Willow employee Maya Cakmak posing next to the company's sign. Maya Cakmak No more reinventing the wheel
Hassan convinced Steve Cousins, who had hired Hassan as an undergraduate intern at Washington University years earlier, to become Willow's first CEO.
"My job was to fill the building with interesting people doing interesting things around autonomous technology," he tells Business Insider.
Hassan planned to dedicate enough funding to the startup to keep about 60 people working there per year, so they began hiring all the top roboticists and researchers they could corral.
Initially, the collective |
the Lallana deal in the summer, Shaqiri was no longer a target. The problem is, agents regularly use Liverpool to try and get their clients a better deal for clubs. It was always going to be a quiet transfer window for Liverpool.”
Max: Numerous keepers have been linked with Liverpool recently, can you see Liverpool signing a keeper in the summer?
James: “There’s still a chance Liverpool may sign a keeper this month from what I was told recently. In terms of bringing a long term keeper, the decision was made that Liverpool would wait till the summer due to availability issues. I was also told there could be a short term option brought in, bearing in mind nearly a month on Brad Jones is still hampered by a thigh injury. If something happened to Mignolet, Danny Ward will be starting matches. It is a possibility that Liverpool may bring in an experienced keeper as a short term measure. Certainly in terms of spending a decent amount of money on a keeper, that will wait till the summer. Whatever happens too Simon Mignolet, Brad Jones is out of contract in the summer and there’s no suggestion that there is any desire from Liverpool to offer him a new deal.”
Max: So you don’t think Jones will sign a new deal?
James: “Well, there’s a lot of contract issues at the club at the moment. I think Brad Jones knows himself that the likelihood is that he’ll be moving on in the summer. Then the question is what do Liverpool do with Mignolet. You look a month ago, it looked like his Liverpool career was almost doomed. But in recent weeks he has set about to turn it around, with Jones’ injury has seen him go back to the side. There’s been signs of him getting back to the form we saw in his first season at the club. Certainly Liverpool will desperately need an expierenced goalie but that will be one for the summer.”
Max: So can you see Mignolet staying? Or could he be offloaded?
James: “It’s too early to say. He’s got from now to the end of May to prove he is what Liverpool need going forward. It’s been painful to watch at times this season, one thing about Simon, he’s such a grounded, hardworking professional. I’d love to see Mignolet turn it around and prove his critics wrong. Part of the issue is that he doesn’t have sufficient competition for his place, and that will be addressed in the summer.”
Max: Who do you think is most likely to get the vice-captaincy once Gerrard departs?
James: “At this stage, I would say Martin Skrtel. It looks like Rodgers has effectively confirmed that Henderson will takeover as captain. You look around, and one thing you would say about this squad is that it’s very young. Beyond this summer, there will be very few players left in the club who will be 27 or over – Gerrard off, Kolo out of contract, Brad Jones, Glen Johnson as well. You look around, in terms of players who have experience in those big games who can help younger players, Skrtel’s probably the obvious one who stands out.”
Max: What do you think of the Liverpool team being leaked? Do you think it’s ‘acceptable’?
James: “It’s a strange one. It’s certainly not helpful. I have various people who send me the team, sometimes it’s two days before the game, sometimes one. You’d like to think ‘that’s wrong’, or ‘that’s just a guess’ but I must admit, the past six/seven weeks it’s been spot on every time. It has to be a concern. I’m not aware of other top clubs having the same problem. It might only be a small thing, but to be honest, whether rival clubs are even aware of the teams being leaked I’m not sure. Plus, they probably have ways of finding out if they really wanted to anyway. It’s certainly not helpful. I’d be happy if the team I got texted on a Thursday or a Friday started to be wrong, because it is a concern that it’s getting out there.”
Max: What would your advice be to someone who wants to get into Journalism?
James: “I think the big thing is to get as much experience as possible. Obviously it’s very competitive. The opportunities to write have never been greater, all the fantastic fan sites out there as well as the mainstream media jobs. That’s the big thing, you need to get your name out there and show people what you can do. There’s no shortcut in achieving that. It is difficult to break into but it’s certainly not impossible. I got into it 15 years ago now by doing work experience and offering, what seemed to be minor tasks at the time, like covering grassroots matches and different sports just to get your foot in the door. Then you work your way up the ladder.”
Thank you so much James Pearce from the Liverpool Echo for the interview.At Georgia Tech, assistant professor Charlie Kemp has been developing a robotic dog of sorts.
This robot named El-E (pronounced “Ellie”), is designed to do everything a service dog would do like open doors, open cabinets and fetch objects.
It takes over two years and $17,000 to properly train a service dog. The waiting list for these dogs is so long it can take up to 5 years to actually get one.
Kemp and his team studied over 71 commands used with service dogs, but have only put 10 into El-E so far. El-E can be controlled with voice commands or a laser.
Kemp hopes to see this technology in homes in about within 10 years.
Pretty cool. Hey Spot, fetch me a beer.
Check out a this press release with a video from Georgia Tech.
See our previous post about El-E here.
Link via (Statesman)US manufacturing has contracted for the third consecutive month
US manufacturing activity fell in October to its lowest level for 26 years, according to a new report from the Institute for Supply Management.
The report cited "significant demand destruction", for the third consecutive month in which the sector contracted.
The figures were far worse than the market had expected and pushed the Dow Jones index briefly into negative territory in early morning trading.
However, US construction spending in September fell far less than expected.
The institute's index of national factory activity fell to 38.9 from 43.5 in September. Any score of less than 50 represents a contraction in manufacturing.
Manufacturing recession
October's score is the lowest-recorded since September 1982.
Every sector surveyed, apart from clothing and electronic products, reported a contraction for the month.
New orders, production, employment and supplier deliveries all fell, with only inventories of unsold goods increasing on September's score.
Export orders fell for the first time following 70 consecutive months of growth.
Robert Macintosh, chief economist at Eaton Vance, described the figures as "pretty grim".
"It means we're in a recession, it's as simple as that - a pretty solid manufacturing recession," he said.
There was some good news for consumers, however, as prices fell by 16.5 points to 37, the lowest level since December 2001.
If the prices of raw materials are falling, then these savings can be passed on to consumers.
Car sales
There was more bad news for US manufacturing with the release of October car sales figures.
General Motors sales were down 45% compared with October 2007.
"This is clearly a severe, severe recession for the US automotive industry and something we really can't sustain," said GM's Mike DiGiovanni.
Chrysler's sales fell 35% and Ford's dropped 30%.
Overall, 838,156 vehicles were sold in October, down 32% and the worst figures since January 1991, according to Autodata.
Meanwhile, US construction spending in September fell 0.3%, according to figures released by the US Commerce Department - less than the 0.8% fall that many analysts had been expecting.
The US figures were released on the same day that Markit Economics published its Purchasing Managers' Index showing eurozone manufacturing activity falling to 41.1 in October.
This is the lowest score recorded by the index since it was introduced 11 years ago.Associated Press
Don’t underestimate this week’s jobs data.
Initial jobless claims — the number of folks filing applications for jobless benefits — inched up for a second week in a row, according to the Labor Department. Claims rose by 4,000 to 372,000 in the week ended Aug. 18, the highest level in about a month, underscoring the uneven nature of the labor market.
Specifically, the most recent jobless claims numbers fall inside the “survey week,” that is the week that includes the 12th of the month, which is used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to help calculate the almighty monthly numbers.
“The increase in the most recent week matters,” says Dan Greenhaus, chief global strategist at BTIG, noting the figure “supports the idea that monthly job additions in August will be relatively muted.”The original staycation
Activist Gary Snyder once gave the shortest answer ever when asked what people should do to save the environment: "." This solution fits with NBA's philosophy - stay close to home, consume no more than our fair share, and learn to survive and flourish in the local ecosystem.Snyder's brand of environmental activism is based on "reinhabitation" and "wild mind".Reinhabitation deals with committing to life in a specific place, and growing to understand oneself as a part of a community with local plant and animal life. Wild mind for Snyder means "elegantly self-disciplined and self-regulating." Nature takes care of itself, and so should we be taking care of ourselves. So far we haven't been.Citizens of rich countries will have to become self-disciplined and self-regulated so that the rest of the world does not need to suffer the results of our high consumption habits. If we only took our fair share of the world's resources many of the problems experienced by less affluent nations would disappear.If we limited our use of oil, for example, things would automatically improve in a nation like Nigeria, a place that has been greatly affected by Shell Oil drilling.One part is easy. Stay close to home, just like we used to before, and will again some day, even if a small group does manage to escape to start over and plunder another planet somewhere. The harder part will be learning to control ourselves.Answered
In Word Games
…
ions of food and give it away, but actually they use the food as a control mechanism. They like to give you dessert you didn't ask for so you can say, oh great, pecan pie, and think they are the greatest when you really wanted a brownie and some ice cream. In my personal experience and opinion, I believe at the heart of it, nice nasty people are people who act nice so they can influence others into accepting things their way. They are usually really nice to people they don't know, but quick to make negative remarks about any or everything in private. Honestly, I'm speaking of my grandmother, and I'm not even sure if that's what nice nasty means, but every time I think of her this phrase comes to mind. Don't get me wrong I love her and she's sweet and nice and all, but at the same time, she wants everything her way and is nice as long as they are. But she gets upset and nasty when they aren't. No middle ground. Either nice or nasty.
Nice nasty is a person who acts all nice and perfect on the outside but really harbor some horrible personal traits and habits. For example, they might like to cook large portThis is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to Afghanistan, the longest war in U.S. history. On Wednesday, two U.S. soldiers died after a suicide car bomber rammed a NATO-led convoy near a major U.S. military base in Kandahar. The attack came a day after at least 33 Afghan worshipers died when suicide bombers attacked a Shiite mosque in the city of Herat. The dead included the father of an Afghan teenage girl who made international headlines recently when she took part in a robotics competition in the United States. The self-proclaimed Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack.
Meanwhile, the U.S. is intensifying its air war in Afghanistan. During the month of June, the U.S. carried out 389 airstrikes—the highest monthly total in five years. Meanwhile, the Pentagon is seeking to send another 4,000 U.S. troops to join the 8,700 currently in Afghanistan.
This comes as The New York Times reports Trump may have found a reason to prolong the nearly 16-year war: Afghanistan’s untapped mineral deposits, which could be worth nearly a trillion dollars. Trump is being pressured by a billionaire financier and a chemical executive to escalate the U.S. war in Afghanistan in a bid to exploit the country’s mineral wealth. The Times reports Trump discussed Afghanistan’s vast deposits of metals and rare earth metals with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and is reportedly considering sending an envoy to Afghanistan to meet with mining officials.
We’re joined now by two guests. Kathy Kelly, co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence, a campaign to end U.S. military and economic warfare, she has made many trips to Afghanistan, including one earlier this year, has twice been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Jodi Vittori is a senior policy adviser for Global Witness on Afghanistan policy. She’s joining us from Washington, D.C.
Kathy Kelly, let’s begin with you. The casualties only continue to mount. Your response to what’s happening in Afghanistan right now?
KATHY KELLY: Well, it seems that the United States has been exacerbating a war that seems unlikely to change, even if the United States sends 4,000 or many more than that number of troops over to Afghanistan. When they had 100,000 troops, they weren’t able to substantially change the direction, which now has the Afghan government in charge of 60 percent of the districts within Afghanistan, and the Taliban and other warlords in charge of 40 percent of the districts but also commandeering many of the roadways that lead into major cities.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to an interview, when Bill O’Reilly was still on Fox News. It’s an interview with President Trump, who said the U.S. should have taken Iraq’s oil. Even though he was opposed, he said, to the war in Iraq, once the U.S. was in there, it shouldn’t have left until it took Iraq’s oil, following the 2003 invasion.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I always said take the oil. If you would have taken the oil, there would be no ISIS, because they used that to fuel their growth.
BILL O’REILLY: But if you—if you took the oil, the Iraqi oil, you would have to put in U.S. troops to do that, and then that would have started another round of it.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And you would have made a lot of money with the oil, and you would have had assets. And to the victor belong the spoils and all of that. But forget that.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that might be very instructive, Jodi Vittori—you’re a former military soldier—when looking at what President Trump’s intentions are for Afghanistan right now. The New York Times reporting Trump is being pressured by a billionaire financier and a chemical executive to escalate the U.S. war in Afghanistan in a bid to exploit Afghanistan’s mineral wealth. Can you explain what you found?
JODI VITTORI: Sure. It’s a troubling parallel to the 2012 reports that you just noted out when it comes to Iraq and oil. In the case of Afghanistan, a report this morning that President Trump is deeply troubled that he—he acknowledges that the United States is not winning in Afghanistan. He doesn’t like the strategy that his generals have given him from his national security staff. And for some reason he has leaned towards this sort of vague plan put forward by the head of the private security company DynCorp, Stephen Feinberg, who was a major campaign contributor to the Trump campaign, that somehow the United States would come in, they would send—DynCorp would send in their private security forces, that would somehow control these mining areas, including areas with the mineral lithium in it, which is important for our cellphone batteries and so forth, and somehow extract that, secure it so that other companies could extract that, and—it’s unclear—apparently, take that money to pay back the United States for the invasion of Afghanistan. Obviously, troubling on a conflict of interest level, an ethics level, a human rights, social level. And, frankly, it’s just completely impractical, as well.
AMY GOODMAN: Kathy Kelly, when you hear this and read this piece in the Times about exploiting Afghanistan for its mineral wealth, and hearing the previous comment about President Trump, even if he says he was supposed to the war in Iraq, “Once you’re there, take their oil,” your thoughts?
JODI VITTORI: Obviously—
KATHY KELLY: I think it’s repugnant.
AMY GOODMAN: Let’s get Kathy Kelly’s response and then yours, Jodi.
KATHY KELLY: Well, that it’s repugnant for the United States to believe that we somehow should be able to subordinate the rights and the hopes and the possibilities for another country to serve our national interest. We have no right whatsoever to take over resources in Afghanistan. And we’ve already caused so much death and destruction. We should be paying reparations for that.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Jodi Vittori, can you talk about the mineral industry and who’s currently benefiting from it in Afghanistan, in the midst of this longest war in U. S. history?
JODI VITTORI: Certainly. In 2010, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated that Afghanistan, at the time, had up to $1 trillion in minerals in reserve under the ground there. Not all of that would be able to be pulled out economically, and that was at a time when these mineral prices were at their high point. That estimate is certainly not accurate now. Afghanistan is awash in minerals. Just its geography is incredible when it comes to minerals, and possibly natural gas, as well.
But right now, those who are benefiting seem to be primarily groups like the Taliban and groups like the various warlords and corrupt politicians in the country. What we don’t see is the Afghan people normally getting a benefit from this mining. There is actually a tremendous amount of mining in Afghanistan. The German development agency GIZ estimates that about 3 to 6 percent of the population is involved in mining or its upstream or downstream activities. And yet, at the same time, a lot of that is really going into the hands of nefarious characters. The United Nations has estimated that, after narcotics trafficking, the second-largest source of revenue for the Taliban is illegal mining and coring in Afghanistan. And Global Witness has done reports, for example, on the role that lapis plays, both in the hands of illegal armed groups, various corrupt officials in patronage networks and the Taliban itself. So, it’s very, very troubling in the country.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Part 1 of our discussion. We’ll post the rest at democracynow. org. Jodi Vittori, thanks for joining us, from Global Witness on Afghanistan policy, formerly served in South Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq and other places. And, Kathy Kelly, thanks for joining us, as well.Pew Research Center produces original data on a wide range of topics. We also share a lot of our findings on social media. Here, in no particular order, is a list of some of our most popular content on social media, informed by our analytics, from reports released in 2013.
5. During the first two years of the nation’s economic recovery, the mean net worth of households in the upper 7% of the wealth distribution rose by an estimated 28%, while the mean net worth of households in the lower 93% dropped by 4%. (Report)
6. For the first time in more than four decades of polling on the issue, a majority (52%) of Americans favor legalizing the use of marijuana. (Report)
9. 56% of U.S. adults say they would not want to undergo medical treatments to slow the aging process and live to be 120 or more, but roughly two-thirds (68%) think that most other people would. (Report)
11. 56% of internet users have "Googled themselves" or used a search engine to look up their own name to see what information is available about them online. (Fact Tank)
12. In 23 of 39 nations surveyed, a majority or plurality of the people say China either already has replaced or eventually will replace the U.S. as the top superpower. (Report)
20. 31% of U.S. adults say they have abandoned a news outlet because it no longer provided the news and information they had grown accustomed to. (Report)A majority of the Chargers were in a gloomy haze after their latest collapse on Sunday, a 34-31 loss to the division-rival Oakland Raiders.
Except for kicker Josh Lambo, that is.
The CBS broadcast captured some depressing vignettes following the game as players spilled back into the locker room, including quarterback Philip Rivers in an absolute wordless daze as he took a knee on the field. When coaches saw the tape afterward, they also caught Lambo effectively bouncing off the field, smiling and laughing as he trailed Raiders kicker Sebastian Janikowski.
Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Lambo apologized and said he understood how laughing after a loss could be seen as "a bad look."
"I think it was a misinterpretation of what happened. Obviously I was as devastated as anybody about the loss," Lambo said, according to The Associated Press. "No one enjoys losing I certainly don't take it lightly."
Lambo added that he simply was laughing at something Janikowski said to him after the game.
"In the kicking world, he's a superstar. He's a rock star," Lambo said. "He's a guy I look up to, a guy I consider a growing friend. We had a word, we had a laugh. We're people. The work day was over and he said something funny and when Sebastian Janikowski says something funny to you, you laugh."
Coach Mike McCoy had this to say about his effervescent placekicker:
"Everybody on your team is looking at you and looking at everything you do at all times," McCoy said, via the San Diego Union Tribune. "When a teammate sees you in a situation like this and you get caught, laughing it up, people take it differently. Everybody is different. Some players will look at it and say, 'It's not a big deal.' Other players, it pisses you off. You were involved in a critical play in the game, and it wasn't executed properly, and we lost. Just understand what it means.
"I think he's handled it the right way, talking to his teammates, talking to different coaches on the staff, apologizing and what he's learned from it."
Getting caught laughing on the sidelines after or during a loss has long been the bane of an NFL player's existence. Oftentimes, they are just trying to cheer themselves up before what will be a tense locker room period with plenty of clipboard slams and locker punches. They see friends on the field whom they haven't spoken to in months.
While McCoy seemed to have a pretty even answer to this, would it be as big of an issue if the Chargers had two or three wins? Probably not. Would people care had the Chargers not lost their third consecutive game, bringing their margin of defeat in those contests to a grand total of eight points? I don't think so. Teams in a tailspin can often blanket themselves in the macabre, forgetting that football is supposed to be fun in the first place. Is what Lambo did any worse than players on a losing team seeking out opponents on the other side of the field to trade uniforms or, in some extreme cases, get autographs? (It happens.)
This will be a lesson for the young kicker, who is about a month away from his 26th birthday. It's his second season in the league. However, it would be hard to imagine him going anywhere. The kicking game is one of the few things going right for the Chargers this season -- Lambo is 9 of 10 on field goals and has missed just one extra point.Beyond his role as frontman of Weezer, Rivers Cuomo has led a fairly unique existence. He grew up on an ashram in Connecticut; his father is a celebrated jazz drummer; he practices Vipassana meditation; he speaks near-fluent Japanese; and he graduated from Harvard University with a B.A. in English.
If you think Cuomo’s life would make for a perfect TV sitcom, you’re not alone. Previously, we envisioned his storyline as a Simpsons character, and while FOX has yet to return our calls, the network does plan to bring Cuomo to the boob tube in a different manner. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Cuomo has teamed with Psych creator Steve Franks for a new FOX comedy entitled DeTour.
The show is described as “a coming-of-age story that’s slightly out of sequence,” pulling from Cuomo’s own experiences to tell the story of a 30-year-old rock star who suddenly drops out of the spotlight in order to find himself. For context: In 1995, following the release of The Blue Album, Cuomo enrolled in Harvard. There, he spent the next 11 years studying in between the release of new Weezer albums and touring.
(Read: #RealLife: Weezer’s The Blue Album)
As THR points out, “DeTour would embellish [Cuomo’s] journey with a fictional character and the small band of misfit friends that make it possible for him to get through his formative years.” A major theme appears to be regret, as the Cuomo character looks to “rediscover the parts of his life he missed while he was busy becoming a massive success.” Franks will write the pilot script and serve as executive producer alongside his Psych collaborator Chris Henze.
FOX has given the series a “put-pilot order”; while there’s a chance DeTour might not ever air, the network has enough faith in the show to face a possible financial penalty if it doesn’t receive a series order.
As for non-television activity, Cuomo and his Weezer bandmates will release their latest album, Everything Will Be Alright In The End, on October 7th. Check out “Back to the Shack” and a preview of the Bethany Cosentino-aided “Go Away”.
Below, watch an ABC piece on Cuomo’s time at Harvard.Silent Hills may let you choose between first and third person views
“Lucky” might just describe Usman Ihtsham, an editor from WhatIfGaming who had a quick chance to talk with Hideo Kojima at Gamescom. Of course they talked about Silent Hills. Of course they did.
When asked about whether the game would be first or third person perspective, Kojima had this to say:
Not sure yet. Development is cycling between either allowing players to choose to play the whole game in first-person or third-person, or keeping it fix4ed third person and having some first-person only. Either way, we want to do something with first-person. The game will not be out more than likely 2016. Lots of time left.
Kojima also fielded a question regarding whether the game would be linear, or more open-world.
All I can say is Fox Engine is meant for open world. I cannot discuss more on the game design itself in detail yet.
This story can’t be confirmed at the moment, but it wouldn’t be the first time that Silent Hill tinkered with the perspective. The Room was first-person inside the apartment, but third-person outside. Seeing as how PT made my head spin for all the right and all the wrong reasons I’d be happy with a third-person perspective.
[Source]https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/boudreaux-and-mises-on-consumer-versus-individual-sovereignty/
I started out this thread with this publication.
Block, Walter E. 2016. “On Don Boudreaux on consumer and individual sovereignty.” June 28; http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2016/06/walter-block-on-don-boudreaux-consumer.html
R wrote to me as follows:
Walter,
I get what you are emphasizing, but couldn’t a more generous interpretation of Boudreaux, especially his first comment, be along the lines of Mises:
“The capitalists, the enterprisers, and the farmers are instrumental in the conduct of economic affairs. They are at the helm and steer the ship. But they are not free to shape its course. They are not supreme, they are steersmen only, bound to obey unconditionally the captain’s orders. The captain is the consumer. “(Bureaucracy, “Profit Management,” p. 226 )
Here is my response to R:
You are indeed correct. Boudreaux is indeed writing in the tradition of Mises. But, Mises was wrong on this matter. He focused on consumer sovereignty (the consumer as “captain”). Rothbard is the corrective to Mises on this issue. Murray focused, instead, on individual sovereignty, which includes BOTH consumers and producers. Why leave out producers, and tell only a part of the story, yes, an important part, but only a part?
Let me emphasize again that I’m a big fan of Don Boudreaux’s. His pulverizing, eviscerating of the minimum wage law, his defense of free trade, among many other great things he’s done, is really magnificent. But on this issue I (and Murray, I think) have to depart from him.
Best regards,
Walter
4:20 pm on February 27, 2019Razer's latest Ultrabook is a wake-up call. It's a warning shot across the bow of Apple, Samsung and other manufacturers of premium thin-and-light laptops. And its message is clear: "Look at me."
Look at how a gaming laptop that's thinner, lighter and more powerful than a Macbook Air can be built and marketed to consumers. The new Razer Blade is a piece of premium hardware with an equally premium price tag. And it's also an expensive wager that people will pay $1,800 or more for a Windows 8 Ultrabook designed explicitly for PC gaming—all while the PC market is hemorrhaging money.
The Razer Blade is the thinnest, lightest gaming laptop we've ever seen.
That’s right, the new Razer Blade laptop, announced at a special Thursday press event in San Francisco, is no longer the 17-inch behemoth we once knew and (mostly) loved. That old model has been renamed the Razer Blade Pro to make room for the new Razer Blade, a 14-inch gaming machine with 8GB of RAM, an upgradeable 128 GB SSD, a discrete Nvidia GTX 765M GPU and a “fourth-generation” (read: Haswell) Intel CPU packed into an aluminum body that’s barely two-thirds of an inch thick.
The whole package weighs in at just over four pounds and sports the sort of connectivity options you'd expect from a contemporary ultraportable, including three USB 3.0 ports, an HDMI out, an 802.11 wireless adapter, and a Bluetooth 4.0 radio. The Blade will be available for pre-order on June 3rd, and while the price starts at $1,800, you can expect to pay more for models with a bigger hard drive.
The new Razer Blade is very, very thin. Our hand model wants you to know that the bottom can also get very, very hot.
Razer says this new and improved Blade is the world’s thinnest, most powerful gaming laptop, and while I’m going to steer clear of vouching for the unit’s performance until we get one into our lab for thorough testing, I’m happy to report the Blade demo units we tinkered with during Razer's Thursday event were incredibly thin, remarkably light, and scorchingly fast.
The new Blade feels like a MacBook Air without the sharp edges, though its sleek, matte black aluminum case feels a little flimsier than the MacBook Air’s aluminum unibody. The power adapter looks equally sleek in promo shots, and I poked around underneath our demo station to verify that, yes, the new Blade power brick is just as tiny as the adapters that power the old Razer Blade and the Razer Edge.
And if it seems a little strange to praise a laptop for its lightweight power adapter, well, you’ve probably never had to lug a laptop back and forth across the country.
The screen on the Razer Blade looks good when you're facing it dead on, but it looks washed out from almost any other angle.
Anyone who's carried a laptop during a cross-country expedition can also appreciate the value of a bright, sharp and (most importantly) shareable screen. The Razer Blade’s 14-inch, 1600-by-900 resolution screen does most of that, delivering crisp, vibrant images under fluorescent office lighting, but only if you have the screen tilted just right. The optimal viewing angle on the Blade is pretty narrow, and colors quickly invert and wash out if you stray too far beyond it.
During our demo, I played through a tense underground fight sequence in Metro: Last Light, which ran smoothly on high settings at the Blade’s native resolution. The deepest blacks of the underground tunnels looked a bit faded on the Blade’s screen, but that may be no fault of the hardware, as PC demo units often have their brightness settings cranked up to maximum to catch your eye across a crowded conference room. The new 14-inch Blade also lacks the customizable OLED Switchblade keypad that graced the original Razer Blade, presumably due to size constraints.
Razer put out this promo shot to remind you that yes, despite naming their new 14-inch laptop the Razer Blade (pictured left), the old Razer Blade (on the right) is still available as the Razer Blade Pro.
The original 17-inch Razer Blade laptop isn’t going anywhere. Razer rechristened it the Razer Blade Pro, and it's been spruced it up with the same CPU and GPU that power the Razer Blade, along with slew of new Switchblade templates for productivity apps—Photoshop, Premiere and the like.
Razer is also slashing the price of the Razer Blade Pro down to $2300, and selling it at an even deeper discount of $1000 to independent game developers with successful Kickstarter campaigns as part of Razer’s new developer outreach program. Dubbed the Razer Education/Indie Discount program, it offers Razer products at discount prices to creative professionals—game developers, game design students and development staff—who successfully apply via the Razer website.
Debuting a premium Ultrabook in a PC market with an uncertain future is a bold move, but this isn't the first time Razer has pushed into a new market with high-priced hardware—the company built its reputation as a source of premium PC gaming hardware with quality mice and keyboards, then expanded into headsets and controllers before plunging into the shrinking PC market with the original Razer Blade gaming laptop and the Razer Edge Windows 8 tablet.
The overpriced hardware gambit must be paying off, too. Razer shows no signs of being eager to leave the premium PC-building business. We'll find out if that confidence is warranted when the new Blade Ultrabooks start shipping in June. We can't wait to get one in for a final review.Apparently April 10-16 was World Homeopathy Awareness Week. Hey, I’m all for that, I just love the idea of folks become more aware of Homeopathy and what it is “really” all about.
Now, before we get into the latest news, let me be blunt and direct … it does not work. Homeopathy’s efficacy is unsupported by the collective weight of modern scientific research, so when I say “it does not work”, I’m not simply expressing an opinion. The extreme dilutions used in homeopathic preparations usually leave none of the original material in the final product (think.. adding a few drops to the Atlantic, stir then extract a sample and declare that to be a “cure” … yes it really is that dilute and insane). The modern mechanism proposed by homeopaths – that the water contains a “memory” or “vibration” from the diluted ingredient – is counter to the laws of chemistry and physics, such as the law of mass action and has not been demonstrated to be real.
So is it fraud? Well not as such, to claim that would imply they know it does not work, but many practitioners truly believe, and when their patients take a remedy, it appears to work. In fact what is really happening is what is known as the placebo effect. In essence, if you give somebody who is ill a sugar pill, but tell them it is a powerful drug, they do get a bit better, so the homeopaths are essentially leveraging this. The real problems arise when you start using this for serious illnesses such as AIDS or malaria … if you pop the pills you might feel a bit better, but you will die because it does not actually work.
So what caught my attention? Well, Mr Robbins (a true skeptic) today in the UK’s Guardian hands his blog over to leading homeopaths to allow them to have their say … or to translate … he is using some of the truly daft things that homeopaths say as a means to criticise this insanity. It is worth checking out because it is simply hilarious … here are a few snippets of their insanity … remember now, these are not the words of the skeptics, but are the actual words from the true believers …
British Homeopathic Association: “…the medicines are often – though by no means always – diluted to the point where there may be no molecules of original substance left. One of the leading current proposals for how such ‘ultramolecular’ dilutions work is that water is capable of storing information relating to substances with which it has previously been in contact.”
Now think of all the shit that has been in water at one time or another and consider that they believe water remembers!!!
Robert Mathie, British Homeopathic Association: “Four out of five comprehensive systematic reviews of RCTs in homeopathy have reached the qualified conclusion that homeopathy differs from placebo.” Jean-Pierre Boissel (author of two of the reviews, responding to the above via e-mail): “Refs 2 and 3 reported the same meta-analysis. My review did not reach the conclusion ‘that homeopathy differs from placebo’!”
Martin Robbins: “Do you feel homeopaths should be telling the public that your paper supports homeopathy?”
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sufficiently speedy and scriptable Magic: The Gathering program to exist, someone may implement the Ogg player using collectible card games.
A series of Ally tokens controlled by Alex represent the tape to the right of the current head: the creature one step to the right of the head is 1 toughness away from dying, the next one over is 2 toughness from dying, etc. A similar chain of Zombie tokens, also controlled by Alex, represent the tape to the left. The colour of each token represents the contents of that space on the tape.
The operation "move one step to the left" is represented in this machine by creating a new Ally token, growing all Allies by 1, and shrinking all Zombies by one. The details are as follows:
When the machine creates a new 2/2 Ally token under Alex's control, four things trigger: Bob's Noxious Ghoul, Cathy's Aether Flash, Denzil's Carnival of Souls, and Alex's Kazuul Warlord. They go on the stack in that order, because it's Bob's turn; so they resolve in reverse order. The Kazuul Warlord adds +1/+1 counters to all Alex's Allies, leaving them one step further away from dying, including making the new one 3/3. Then Carnival of Souls gives Denzil a white mana thanks to False Dawn (he doesn't lose life because of his Platinum Emperion). Then Aether Flash deals 2 damage to the new token, leaving it 1 toughness from dying as desired. And then the Noxious Ghoul, which has been hacked with Artificial Evolution, gives all non-Allies -1/-1, which kills the smallest Zombie. Depending on whether the smallest Zombie was red, green or blue, a different event will trigger. The machine has moved one step to the left.
If the new token had been a Zombie rather than an Ally, a different Kazuul Warlord and a different Noxious Ghoul would have triggered, as well as the same Aether Flash. So the same would have happened except it would be all the Zombies that got +1/+1 and all the Allies that got -1/-1. This would effectively take us one step to the right.On Thursday, with little fanfare except outrage from tech-savvy activists, the rules for fighting online crime in the United States will change.
The controversy is twofold. First, critics fear the rules themselves, while intended to help solve real issues that come with fighting internet crime, will open up a Pandora’s box of new authorities for federal law enforcement agencies, like the FBI, giving them vast new powers to hack individuals without an individual warrant and without much cause. Second, such a drastic expansion of legal powers usually is far more public, and comes either through a congressional bill or a president’s executive order. But these changes are simply handed down by the Department of Justice.
The rules being expanded are called Rule 41, and the criticism is of the upcoming changes to them. Here, Vocativ breaks the issue down.
What is Rule 41?
It’s one of the 61 Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, which are the guidelines for how the U.S. government conducts criminal investigations.
Rule 41 is already a big one: It covers search and seizure, and how warrants are issued. For the most part, as the rules currently stand, warrants are issued for a given judicial district. If a crime is committed in the suburbs of Dallas, for example, a federal agent would probably go through the Northern District of Texas to get a warrant.
The Department of Justice thinks the rules aren’t updated for the age of internet crimes, and wants to change them. It’s already gotten the Supreme Court’s blessing, but as critics are quick to note, it notably never had to pass through Congress.
Why does the DOJ think a change is necessary?
The internet makes some definitions, like the legal definition of location, extremely tricky. Online crimes don’t often fit neatly into geographical districts.
Take the case of infamous neo-Nazi hacker Andrew “weev” Auernheimer, who figured out a vulnerability with certain iPads that made AT&T disclose customers’ personal information. After his conviction, an appeals court reviewed his case because it had been tried in the District Court of New Jersey. But the connection there was slim, and was based just on the fact that some of the victims were in that state. It would have made more sense to hold it in Arkansas, where weev was when he committed the crime, or in Texas or Georgia, the locations of the servers he exploited. An appeals court threw out his conviction over the venue, and weev walked free.
Besides, any internet criminal worth their salt knows how to mask their location by, for instance, using the Tor browser to detour their internet connection around the world as they browse.
There’s another issue, too. A number of online crimes capitalize on botnets, which are are coalitions of hacked computers that can be directed to act together. A botnet could easily include tens of thousands of computers, each conducting an identical criminal act, with at least one located in each of the 94 federal judicial districts in the country.
So what would the DOJ’s Rule 41 changes do?
They would let any magistrate judge issue search and seizure warrants for electronic media if it fits one of two qualifications. Either if the location of the information if “concealed through technological means,” or if it’s a hacking case that concerns computers in at least five districts.
What’s wrong with that?
Technology and privacy legal experts have raised a litany of potential problems with this. Groups like the Center for Democracy and Technology, Access Now, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation agree with the DOJ’s desire for updated rules, but fear they’re written without safeguards.
One of their most fundamental concerns is defining just what it means to legally uncover a device that’s “concealed through technological means.” It’s true that any criminal worth their salt will probably use Tor, but so do millions of legit users, including dissenters in authoritarian countries, privacy advocates, and regular people who simply don’t like advertising their location to every website they visit. So how would, for example, the FBI determine who’s behind a given activity? By hacking them, most likely, after getting that warrant.
Another is that not all districts are created equal. One theory for why prosecutors wanted to try weev in New Jersey — again, that seemingly arbitrary choice is why his case was thrown out — is because it’s a state where a misdemeanor hacking crime can be a felony if that hack is in furtherance of another crime.
And many legal experts worry that if U.S. law enforcement is given warrants that allow them to hack anywhere, there will be no stopping them from hacking foreign targets with impunity.
What about fighting botnets?
With the proposed changes, federal agents could also obtain warrants for computers thought to be hacked. That’s by design, and on one hand, would definitely be a positive. Look, for example, at enormous botnets that can threaten the stability of some of the internet’s favorite sites. In October, an enormous botnet, made up largely of hacked Internet of Things devices, was used to crash a service fundamental to the operation of a lot of major sites, including LinkedIn, Reddit, and Twitter. That botnet singlehandedly largely slowed down much of the internet experience for hundreds of millions of people.
If the FBI had been legally authorized to hack a number of those IoT devices to remove the malicious code that made them part of that botnet, the damage could have been mitigated.
But there’s a drawback to that, too. By one estimate, 30 percent of computers are infected with some kind of malware. Does that mean they should all be fair game for law enforcement to hack in the case of a crime?
The DOJ has defended itself here, with Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell blogging Monday that those warrants would “typically, be done only to investigate the extent of the botnet.” But even though she admits that hacking botnets to return them to owners “could arguably involve conduct that would constitute a search and seizure” — meaning it would possibly violate the Fourth Amendment — Caldwell says that’s a different fight, and isn’t an issue of venue, which is what these changes would alter.
What are people doing to stop Rule 41?
Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oreg.), one of the most privacy- and cybersecurity-savvy members of Congress, has introduced a bill, called the Stop Mass Hacking Act, to delay the Rule 41 changes from taking place until April.
A number of privacy advocates have launched campaigns, like Access’s No Global Warrants, which encourage people to call their representatives in Congress to support Wyden’s bill.
But the SMH Act hasn’t gotten much attention in the Senate, and almost certainly won’t pass before Dec. 1. The rules will take effect Thursday as scheduled. But that doesn’t mean they’re permanent.
A source on the Hill told Vocativ there was hope that the bill would fare better in 2017, with a new Congress. And as a Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society analysis found, the rules will probably be readdressed: “Courts, Congress and the Administration will likely grapple with the substantive problems at some point down the road,” it found.The price of bitcoin at other, large exchanges has continued to follow the high volume move at Mt. Gox Monday. The bid/ask for bitcoin at Coinbase has risen to $110.64/$111.72.
Additionally, Coinbase provides some metrics on the Bitcoin network, which show that Monday’s big move also coincided with a record amount of bitcoin transactions.
A bitcointalk forum member, Klao, posted an excellent analysis of the recent move at Mt. Gox, which has been the source of much excitement this week.
Grouping the orders together into round chunks, Klao suspects that a single whale, or large order trader, was behind most or all of 17,500 bitcoin purchased over a few hours, which made up most of the volume and accounted for most of the increase in price.
Additionally, several well-written research pieces have been released this week which address policy-makers and the public at large. Leading the pack, the Washington Post had a feature story on 5 Surprising Facts about Bitcoin. The Hill also downplayed digital currencies’ risks while highlighting the potential benefits.
However, the real gem this week was the publication of the nearly 50 page “Bitcoin Primer” by Jerry Brito and colleagues at George Mason University, along with a request from Brito on the bitcoin reddit forum to send it over to your friendly, local Congressperson for they or, as is very likely, their interns to read.Photo credit: Marquie Little | Facebook
Another day, another hate crime hoax perpetrated by a Black man to attempt to play victim and depict Whites as being racist.
What a shocker!
27-Year-Old Marquie Little, a Black sailor aboard the USS George H.W. Bush aircraft carrier, made headlines after he attempted to portray himself as the victim of the alleged racist hate crime committed against him.
Little even went as far as posting several images on his personal Facebook account to try and show that someone had scrawled hateful words above his bed, which he said targeted him because he's Black.
<img src="https://media.8ch.net/file_store/41bac3c7676c9943f7373eb404191d44b2f00235ddcd4c7c88724edac2a2b508.png" style="max-height:640px;max-width:360px;">
“I proudly serve the Navy and this is what I’m receiving in return,” he wrote in the now deleted post on Facebook.
“It’s not my first time being called a word such as that,” the aviation boatswain’s mate airman said in a phone interview later that month. “It puzzled me as to who would do it and why they would do it.”
According to the<a href="https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2017/12/08/sailor-staged-racist-vandalism-navy-says/"> United States Navy</a>, that's simply untrue, and Little is responsible for the actions himself in a desperate plea for both attention and victimhood.
Commander Dave Hecht, a spokesman for Naval Air Force Atlantic, said “a thorough investigation” conducted alongside the Naval Criminal Investigative Service found inconsistencies in the sailor’s account of the incident, and that led them to the conclusion that these actions were committed by none other than the sailor himself.
“A NCIS-supported command investigation following claims of racially-motivated vandalism aboard the carrier has determined that the alleged victim staged the incident himself,” Hecht said in an email.
“The United States Navy does not tolerate racial discrimination of any form and the wellbeing of our Sailors is our top priority,” Hecht said.
Of course, Little will likely argue that “he dindu nuffin”, but his claims have dishonored the integrity of not only every sailor who is serving with honor, unlike him, but further attempted to tarnish the reputation of the entire fleet.
Whether he was hoping for a discharge or removal because he's a coward is yet to be seen, although most assume he was looking for quick fame and potential media stardom after his service.
Hecht however has thus far declined to identify the sailor by name, even though we're aware due to his public Facebook post, because he hasn't been charged with a crime, yet.
I'd assume that all aboard the USS George H.W. Bush are providing Little with extraordinary treatment right about now, to ensure that Little gets “the welcome he deserves” for his actions and lies, and Hecht did say the sailor has “received appropriate administrative actions and additional counseling and training.”
When asked if Little would be removed, Hecht said, “He will remain a member of the crew and continue to perform his military duties.”
Little has so far (as expected from his type L) denied staging any of the racist vandalism, and said on Friday that “NCIS had not done a proper investigation”, but did not elaborate on what exactly he meant by that.
“And now I’m to be here looking like a bad guy for attention,” Little wrote in a text message. “I have nothing to gain from doing such an incident but I have everything to lose.”
Commander Hecht also said that, while the Navy had disproven the sailor’s claims, it used the incident to provide additional crew training and reemphasize that vandalism and racism would not be tolerated aboard the carrier.
Just last month after the now proven to be fictitious vandalism, and the Facebook post from Little crying like a lying bitch about something that never happened, Little had told Navy Times that “he feared for his safety”, which is most certainly the case now since he's embarrassed the rest of the crew who likely despise him for doing so.
“Maybe the guy or guys that vandalized my rack would see me out in town,” he said. “I constantly have to look who’s giving me the side eye,” Little said at the time.
Maybe he should look in the mirror.
According to Commander Hecht, the carrier’s command used the incident as an opportunity to reiterate that the command “has an open door policy for reporting incidents of misconduct,” in a seemingly virtue signaling fashion instead of shutting down the gross miscarriage of Justice for allowing the lying disgrace of a sailor to remain aboard the ship.
The sailor’s Facebook post had drawn nearly 20,500 shares as of Friday, and it's incredibly unlikely that the truth will counter that effort.
I reported back in November about a similar incident at the Air Force Academy preparatory school, where<a href="https://thegoldwater.com/news/11359-Black-Colorado-Springs-Air-Force-Cadet-Admits-to-Writing-Fake-Racism-on-Dorm-for-Attention"> fake racist ramblings were unsurprisingly written by another Black man </a>to paint Whites as being bigots.
The same scenario played out in that situation as the Air Force later said that one of those Five black cadet candidates who had claimed victimhood had later admitted to writing the slurs.
It's becoming a trend, apparently.
—<i>[email protected]</i>
<i>On Twitter:</i>
<a href="https://www.twitter.com/IWillRedPillYou">@IWillRedPillYou</a>
Tips? Info? Send me a message!Paramount is pulling together a writer’s cabal to develop new Transformers films and spin-offs for a “Marvel-style connected universe,” and two more people have just been added to the roster. Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari, the pair who did a lot of rewrite work on Ant-Man, have joined the team. More interesting to Transformers fans will be that one idea reportedly being kicked around is a movie that would take place on Cybertron.
Deadline has the info. The Transformers production team is headed up by Michael Bay, Steven Spielberg, Lorenzo di Bonaventura, and Akiva Goldsman, with Goldsman working as the direct coordinator of the new development efforts. The writer’s room includes Robert Kirkman (The Walking Dead), Art Marcum and Matt Holloway (Iron Man), Zak Penn (Pacific Rim 2), and Jeff Pinkner (Lost).
Task number one is to set up another Transformers sequel that can be ready for Michael Bay to shoot when he’s done making the Benghazi movie 13 Hours. And then there’s the task of setting up further interconnected spin-offs and sequels. But if they’re all developed together, things might actually cohere.
The report says that one idea being toyed with at the moment is called Transformers One, and is “more or less an origins story that takes place on Cybertron,” an idea which may have originally been pushed forward by Hasbro. Setting a movie on Cybertron means more licensing opportunities. This could end up being an animated film, akin to the mid ’80s Transformers animated film, but it sounds like the development efforts are still in pretty early stages.MIANWALI, Pakistan — Led by cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan, a large caravan of demonstrators, including more than 30 U.S. anti-war activists, embarked on a two-day journey Saturday to Pakistan’s volatile tribal areas to rally against the CIA’s drone missile campaign, a protest that triggered warnings of possible militant attacks on demonstrators.
The caravan had more than 100 vans and cars when it left Islamabad, the capital, Saturday morning, and steadily grew in size as it made its way across western Punjab province toward South Waziristan, where demonstrators were scheduled to stage a rally in the village of Kotkai on Sunday.
The Pakistani army has control over large sections of South Waziristan after carrying out a major offensive against militant strongholds there in 2009. However, pockets of Pakistani Taliban militants continue to exist in parts of South Waziristan, and it remains a region extremely dangerous for Pakistanis to venture into and off-limits to foreigners.
South Waziristan is much less targeted by U.S. drone missile strikes than North Waziristan, home to the deadly Afghan Taliban wing known as the Haqqani network, as well as pockets of Al Qaeda militants and other extremist fighters. However, Khan backed off of his initial plans to carry out the anti-drone rally in North Waziristan because of the widespread presence of militants, and instead moved the proposed venue to South Waziristan, where local tribesmen gave their assurances that rally participants would be safe.
The Pakistani government, however, disagreed that a large rally, particularly one including American citizens, could be safely held in South Waziristan, and notified Khan’s party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, that the caravan would not be allowed to enter the tribal region on Sunday. Khan said last week that he would forge ahead with the rally, but if confronted by police at the Waziristan border and told to turn back, he would not resist and instead hold the event outside of Waziristan.
Factions of the Pakistani Taliban, the country’s homegrown insurgency, have warned that rally participants could be targeted with suicide bombings and other attacks if they proceed to South Waziristan.
Speaking in Mianwali, a small city 120 miles southwest of Islamabad, Khan told thousands of caravan participants that his “Peace March” will “create a new Pakistan. We are going to tell the people of Waziristan that we did not forget them. We stand with the people of Waziristan as they endure these brutalities by America.”
The rally will focus on the U.S. drone missile program that targets Islamic militants in Pakistan’s tribal region along the Afghan border, a campaign hailed by Washington as an effective tool in combating militancy but reviled in Pakistan because it breaches the country’s sovereignty and has resulted in scores of civilian deaths.
“It’s our responsibility as good Americans to come here to Pakistan and show the face of the American people that have a conscience,” Medea Benjamin, a cofounder of Code Pink, a U.S. anti-drone activist group, said last week. “To show the face of the American people that believe that the lives of Pakistanis are as valuable as the lives of any American.”
However, many Pakistani observers see the rally as Khan’s thinly veiled attempt to generate a raft of publicity for his campaign to unseat the ruling Pakistan People’s Party in national elections next year. In an editorial last week, the Pakistani newspaper Dawn wrote that the PTI’s anti-drone, anti-war on terror policy was already well-known, and that a “made-for-TV” rally would be “at best peripheral to its electoral success.
“The downsides, however, are very real and potentially serious, for the country if not for PTI,” the editorial continued. “South Waziristan is an area no one, not even the most optimistic military official, would claim is anywhere near an acceptable normal.”
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-- Alex Rodriguez and Nasir Khan. Staff writer Alex Rodriguez reported from Islamabad and special correspondent Nasir Khan reported from Mianwali, Pakistan.Freelancing Is Not For Free
Freelancing is Not for Free is a column that serves the professional freelancer. Several hundred people out there are willing to spit out modular pieces, fiction and even rules design for little or nothing on a regular basis.
This column is not for them.
If you want to maximize your chance of selling your work and maximize your return for your time, read this column. I'm now a full-time writer, having started out in the doldrums of TSR's "no cash in the bank" era, then becoming a game store owner and then selling that off when I had no time to write anymore.Working as a freelancer gaveme an excellent insight into what publishers need--sometimes more than they know themselves on certain topics.
Whether you want to write full-time or just want to supplement your income with a few sales,this column aims to help you be a better businessperson. We'll discuss proposals, writing campaign settings, how to work a convention, your website contents, and a point-by-point breakdown of a writing contract. Roll up your sleeves and close the office door. It's time to go to work!
How NOT to Look Like an Idiot in a Query Letter
You think you have a great idea for an adventure or a supplement or even a book. You want to propose it to a publisher but you've never done anything like this before. Where do you start? How do you do it?
What you need to write is called a query letter, and it follows certain rules. One simple rule that keeps you from looking like an idiot is to keep it as short as possible while making it complete. The shorter it is, the less chance you have to screw up and talk yourself out of a sale.
Here's a sample query letter. Read it, and then we'll take it apart piece by piece.
Dear Mr. Kenzer, I'd like to propose a book on the planes for your Hackmaster product line. This book has structure and purpose similar to the old D&D title Manual of the Planes, only realigned for the Hackmaster universe. My working title is Hackmaster's Guide to the Planes. I haven't been published, but my posts on your message board have been well-received. I've written numerous term papers for college that exceeded 20,000 words, so I think I can manage a book this size. I estimate the word count will be around 120,000. I do have a day job, so my work time is limited. It might take as long as 10 months to complete the manuscript. You can reach me at this e-mail address (name@domain.com) or at the address below. Thank you for your time, and I look forward to working with you. Sincerely,
Steve Arneson
1234 Pine St.
Lake Geneva WI 53147
Now the breakdown
Dear Mr. Kenzer,
One rule for asking for help is to ask people that can help you. You don't call your lawyer to put out a house fire. You call the fire department.
Start by checking out who publishes similar topics. If you want to do a supplement set in ancient Sumer, Green Ronin might be a place to go. They've done Testament, which covers adventuring in the lands of the Old Testament. Holistic Design publishes a real- life series, although it's based in the modern world. With the release of D20 Past from Wizards of the Coast, Holistic might be willing to expand the line. Steve Jackson might be interested because time travel is a big part of their GURPS setting. Steve Jackson's online publication Pyramid might be interested if your concept is small enough or modular enough to work within their guidelines.
On the other hand, don't bother somebody with an idea too close to something they just ran. Asking Green Ronin about a game based on the Torah would probably be redundant. Asking virtually anybody about a D20 book on elves or pirates is pretty much useless. It has been done. Too many times.
Once you have a publisher in mind, check the website for contact information or submission guidelines. Find the name of the person you need to e-mail or write to (if, Heaven forbid, you're still using paper). When all else fails, address it to "Dear Editor."
One more thing: Dave is "Mr. Kenzer" until he tells you to call him Dave. The game industry is made up of pretty friendly folks, but you don't need to pretend to be more familiar with somebody than you really are.
I'd like to propose a book on the planes for your Hackmaster product line.
In the first line you identify what you're trying to write in very general terms. If this topic turns the publisher off right here, they don't need to read further.
Be perfectly clear in what you're trying to do. "I have an idea for a book." That's great. Is this something you'd like to buy when it comes out? No. Use direct wording: "I'd like to propose a book on Nazi Occult Powers for your Godlike RPG." "I'd like to propose" or "I'd like to offer" are standard phrases in publishing that tell the publisher exactly what you're doing. Be creative in your writing, not in your business communication.
This book has structure and purpose similar to the old D&D title Manual of the Planes, only realigned for the Hackmaster universe.
Try to paint a mental picture for the publisher to help him visualize what you're talking about. If the first line is your book's topic, this line is your concept. Think of it as a subject and a verb. In this case, since you're comparing it to a book that already exists, the image is pretty clear right off the bat.
My working title is Hackmaster's Guide to the Planes.
Include some kind of title, even if it's just so a label the publisher can use in responding to you. I often don't commit to a name until the end. You could spend obsessive hours trying to nail down a perfect title ahead of time, or you could spend those hours writing the book.
Also, be aware that if this book fits within a product line, they might have already assigned a title.
I haven't been published, but my posts on your message board have been well- received. I've written numerous term papers for college that exceeded 20,000 words, so I think I can manage a book this size.
Normally, this part of a query letter is where you establish that you are the person for this project. Later on, you will state your publishing credits, but for right now we're assuming that you don't have a lot of practice at writing for pay, so you're weak in this area. If you do have more than a few articles published, be representative. Don't list every single piece. "I have been published in Dragon magazine regularly for the last two years," or "I write a regular column for Pyramid Magazine."
Things to avoid are "but my mom likes it" and "all my players say I'm the best DM ever." Don't be self-deprecating, either: "You'll probably hate it, but ".
I estimate the word count will be around 120,000. I do have a day job, so my work time is limited. It might take as long as 10 months to complete the manuscript.
The key elements here are 1) word count, and 2) deadline. You can estimate a word count by comparing your product to a similar book and counting those words. No, not each word! Count the number of words in a line and count lines. Multiply the one number times the other. Then multiply that by page count. Count off a fraction for art (15-30%).
You decide on a deadline by measuring the rate at which you wrote previous work. If you haven't, then spend an afternoon or two writing and measure your progress. Count out how long it'll take at that rate and then consider that you'll slow down drastically after a while. Toward the end, you'll spend more time revising and editing than writing, and that doesn't really help bump up a word count.
Also, real life intrudes. My rule of thumb is to add 50% to how long I actually think it'll take. There is no penalty for finishing early.
If you have the manuscript ready now, well, say so, but that was a mistake. It might not work out poorly for you this time, but writing in advance of a query letter is not a great idea if you want to do this as a career or supplemental source of income. That's a matter for another column, though.
You can reach me at this e-mail address (name@domain.com) or at the address below. Thank you for your time, and I look forward to working with you.
Sincerely,
Steve Arneson
1234 Pine St.
Lake Geneva WI 53147
Standard contact info and closing. Even though your e-mail address is in the header, these letters might get forwarded to other people in the company. You want to make sure it's in the text so that they don't lose it.
And there you have a proposal that doesn't have "idiot" stamped across it in large letters. In the worst-case scenario, Mr. Kenzer would send this back with "We're not looking for a book like this at this time" or something similarly professional. If you didn't screw up, you now have a book to write.On Feb. 12, 1984, astronaut Bruce McCandless, ventured further away from the confines and safety of his ship than any previous astronaut had ever been. This space first was made possible by a nitrogen jet propelled backpack, previously known at NASA as the Manned Manuevering Unit or MMU. After a series of test maneuvers inside and above Challenger's payload bay, McCandless went "free-flying" to a distance of 320 feet away from the Orbiter. This orbital panorama view shows McCandless out there amongst the black and blue of Earth and space. NASA/UPI | License Photo
Today is Tuesday, Feb. 7, the 38th day of 2017 with 327 to follow.
The moon is waxing. Morning stars are Jupiter, Saturn and Mercury. Evening stars are Neptune, Venus, Mars and Uranus.
Those born on this date are under the sign of Aquarius. They include English statesman and writer Thomas More in 1478; farm equipment manufacturer John Deere in 1804; English novelist Charles Dickens in 1812; Little House books author Laura Ingalls Wilder in 1867; novelist Sinclair Lewis in 1885; ragtime composer and pianist Eubie Blake in 1887; Buster Crabbe, actor (Flash Gordon) and Olympic swimming gold medalist, in 1908; writer Gay Talese in 1932 (age 85); actor Pete Postlethwaite in 1946; actor Miguel Ferrer in 1955; comedian Emo Philips in 1956 (age 61); actor James Spader in 1960 (age 57); actor Eddie Izzard in 1962 (age 55); country singer Garth Brooks in 1962 (age 55); comedian Chris Rock in 1966 (age 51); actor Ashton Kutcher in 1978 (age 39).
On this date in history:
RELATED Buck Rogers could use one of these
In 1497, the Bonfire of the Vanities in Florence, Italy, took place when followers of Girolamo Savonarola burned thousands of books, art and cosmetics.
In 1940, British railroads were nationalized.
In 1964, the Beatles arrived in the United States for the first time and immediately set off a frantic wave of "Beatlemania."
In 1973, the U.S. Senate voted to set up a committee to investigate a break-in at the Democratic National Headquarters in Washington's Watergate complex.
In 1984, U.S. astronauts Bruce McCandless and Robert Stewart made the first untethered spacewalks. McCandless was the first to float freely in space, propelled by a nitrogen-powered "jetpack" after leaving the shuttle Challenger.
In 1991, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was inaugurated as Haiti's first democratically elected president in 186 years.
In 1992, the European Union was created when the Maastricht Treaty was signed.
In 1995, the mastermind in the 1993 bombing of New York's World Trade Center, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, was arrested in Pakistan. He was sentenced to life in prison in 1998.
In 1999, King Hussein of Jordan died of cancer at age 63. Hussein ruled Jordan for 46 years.
In 2005, rescuers reported no survivors among the 104 people aboard an Afghan airliner that crashed in the mountains near Kabul. It was Afghanistan's worst air disaster.
In 2009, the most deadly series of brushfires in Australian history claimed more than 200 lives, destroyed almost 2,000 homes and burned at least 1.1 million acres in Victoria state.
In 2010, Viktor Yanukovich regained the Ukrainian presidency.
In 2012, a federal appeals court in California rejected a ban on same-sex marriage that voters had approved four years earlier.
In 2013, a Gallup poll indicated 57 percent of Americans said their standard of living was improving and 27 percent said it was getting worse.
In 2014, the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, had a spectacular opening ceremony. Performers in the show watched by 40,000 people at the Olympic stadium, included Cossack dancers, ballerinas, puppeteers and acrobats.
A thought for the day: "Society as a whole benefits immeasurably from a climate in which all persons, regardless of race or gender, may have the opportunity to earn respect, responsibility, advancement and remuneration based on ability." -- Sandra Day O'ConnorTwo 15-year-old boys have been charged after an unloaded shotgun was found in a locker at Gifford Street High School in Elgin Thursday morning.
Police received the tip that led authorities to search the locker at about 11:30 a.m.
Police and administrators locked down the building and searched the school, lockers and students. It was during the search that police found the unloaded shotgun.
"No ammunition or other unsafe items were found in the school," according to the Elgin police department.
A Streamwood boy was taken into custody and initially transported to the Elgin Police Department. Upon further investigation, officials said a 15-year-old Elgin boy was also arrested and charged after discovering that the firearm was allegedly sold from one student to the other while on school grounds.
Both students were charged with possession of a firearm by a gang member, unlawful use of a weapon within 1,000 feet of a school and unlawful use of a weapon, all felony charges.
The teens were detained at the Kane County Youth Home pending a detention hearing. Their names were not available because they are juveniles.
chicagobreaking@tribune.com
Twitter: @chicagobreakingCulinarily speaking, St. Paul is absolutely white-hot right now.
It seems like every chef in the Twin Cities is seeking restaurant space in the Saintly City, and many have already made their plans public.
We thought we’d run a little scorecard of the progress of the restaurants under construction — new restaurants and those undergoing major remodels — in St. Paul right now. Here, in as chronological of an order as we could muster, are 17 places we’re excited to eat at, most of which are on the verge of opening or will likely open in the next few months.
SEPTEMBER
Herbie’s on the Park: This new tribute restaurant to the late Herb Brooks opened Sept. 24 in the historic Minnesota Club building downtown. Two fireplaces, a marble bar and a very classic upscale tavern menu should please Minnesota Wild fans and food-lovers alike. 317 Washington St., St. Paul; 651-726-1700; herbiesonthepark.com
Stewart’s (formerly 128 Cafe): Chef/owner Max Thompson wasn’t intending to change the name when he closed the 128 for renovations this summer, but the more plans he and his staff made, the more it didn’t feel like the same restaurant anymore. Instead, Stewart’s is a throwback to a former incarnation of the garden-level space on Cleveland, a more casual neighborhood cafe. With good cocktails. Thompson quietly opened the revamped spot last week, but the restaurant won’t be serving its full lunch and dinner menus for probably another week. 128 Cleveland Ave., St. Paul; 651-645-4128; facebook.com/stewartsminnesota
OCTOBER
Fitzgerald’s: Recently departed steak house Salt Cellar is being remade into Fitzgerald’s on Cathedral Hill. The atmosphere will be much more casual, as will the typical pub fare — the ownership promises “fun, classic bar food” like nachos, wings, burgers and pizza. The bar will be bigger, too. |
longer swallow. The intricate workings of the muscles of her throat were failing, and she was no longer able to move food or liquids reliably into her stomach. Instead, they too frequently ended up in her lungs, and she drowned a little more with every swallow. She was admitted to my intensive care service with pneumonia from aspirated food that had turned the bottom part of her left lung into a wet sponge. Her blood oxygen levels had dropped so low that we had to support her breathing by inserting a tube.
Now, after she was on powerful antibiotics and life support for three days, her oxygen level had improved and her fevers had abated. She was getting better, in a manner of speaking.
This pneumonia was her third, and easily her worst, in four months. This pattern is typical of end-stage dementia, when patients lose control of their swallowing mechanism and often die from the pneumonias that result from food lodging in the lung. Usually, these patients have gone in and out of the hospital through a sort of revolving door; as soon as one pneumonia is chased away by antibiotics, another emerges.
Our medical system deals well with organ dysfunction. When a kidney isn’t working, we can clean blood with a dialysis machine. When a person can’t breathe, we can push air into the lungs. And if there is trouble swallowing, we can bypass the throat with a feeding tube that goes through the abdominal wall directly into the stomach.
That last option had been offered to this patient’s family when she was admitted to the emergency room. “If she makes it through this, she could get a feeding tube so that this doesn’t happen again,” they were told. And so now that she was improving, her family was asking for the tube.
But contrary to popular belief, a feeding tube does not prolong life in a patient with dementia. It actually increases suffering. A stomach full of mechanically pumped artificial calories puts pressure on an already fragile digestive system, increasing the chance of pushing stomach contents up into the lungs. And surgically implanted tubes are a setup for complications: dislodgments, bleeding and infections that can result in pain, hospital admissions and the use of arm restraints in already confused patients. But maybe most important, the medicalization of food deprives the dying of some of the last remnants of the human experience: taste, smell, touch and connection to loved ones.
So why do so many demented patients die with feeding tubes?
Food is how we know best to care for one another, from breast to deathbed. And thus it runs contrary to every impulse we have as humans to stop feedings. As a dying person becomes unable to process food on her own, our tendency is to plug life into her with a tube pumping artificial nutrition.
Since the beginning of time, humans have fed their dying by hand. Spooned slowly so as not to overwhelm, a trickle of broth or a favorite food ground up to taste may be the last small pleasures for a dying body.
But hand feeding has increasingly become a quaint piece of human history. We fed until they would take no more, and knew that we had done everything we could. But with the feeding tube, we can, and feel we must, keep going. Patients frequently die with plastic tubes weaving mysteriously under their gowns, entering bodies at unnatural angles, rendering them a little more alien to us. Those who are most needed sit a little further away from the bed, afraid to dislodge tubes that are supposedly keeping their loved one alive. And the patient’s mouth will usually remain dry and empty until the end.
My last conversation about the patient’s feeding took place on my way to my car Friday afternoon. The patient’s sister was walking in as I was walking out. She thanked me for the care I’d provided and told me they had decided to go with the tube. “I couldn’t not feed her,” she said. “I can’t leave her starving.”
The next day, my patient was wheeled down to the operating room for her feeding tube, then a few hours later wheeled back to intensive care. Over the next couple of weeks, her sister sat on a chair beside her most days, wearing the requisite paper gown and gloves for guests of patients with resistant bacteria from prolonged hospital stays. She sat off to the side, separated from her sister by tubes, bedrails and the bustle of activity around them.
But the patient never went home to her sister and their beloved soap operas. She died two weeks later in the intensive care unit, a different pneumonia in her lungs.
In the face of death, food and hope are highly seductive. But once again, I was left wondering: Does our need to feed our dying loved ones blind us to what’s really best for them?
Photo
Jessica Nutik Zitter is an attending physician at Highland Hospital in Oakland, Calif. She is board certified in critical care and palliative care medicine.An Upper Marlboro man accidentally shot into his neighbor's townhouse while he was cleaning his gun, the neighor says. Now, she is grateful her and her daughter weren't hurt. (Photo: ABC7/ Jay Korff)
A local mother is grateful she and her family survived a harrowing accident inside their own Upper Marlboro townhouse. Now she's speaking out, calling on gun owners to be more careful when cleaning their firearms.
"Bullets are flying inside your house," says Uzma Khan
The holes in Uzma Khan's home still make it hard for this mother of two to imagine what could have happened. Khan says Thursday morning she heard a loud noise thinking it came from a nearby construction site.
Khan says, "When I came to my bedroom I saw the bullet holes over there which there are four of them."
According to police, her neighbor accidentally fired his shotgun while cleaning it. The blast of shot ripped through walls of a bathroom and the adjoining bedroom. What terrifies her is the knowledge that only about 10 minutes before the incident she and her daughter were in the bedroom.
Khan says, "I was shaking. I was crying and just because I couldn't get the picture of me and my daughter, especially my children, out of my mind, standing there, God forbid, God forbid, getting shot or something."
Khan says while she remains upset she does not hold a grudge against her neighbor. She says he apologized and has since locked the shotgun in a safe in a relative's home. But Khan is insistent about one thing. She believes gun owners should take safety more seriously.
"To know that these firearms are so easily accessible to anybody and if you don't have the proper training you could have killed somebody even if you didn't want to," says Khan.
Khan doesn't think her neighbor will face charges. Police tell me it's up to the State's Attorney's office to decide if charges will be filed or not.Some things never change. They are as old as life itself, and only cataclysmic events have any chance of influencing them. One such thing is bootcamping. This is how it alway goes:
The first person to arrives seeks out the spot from which he can oversee and control as much of the surrounding space as possible. Most likely on the middle of the table. He instantly claps down his keyboard and giant mousepad so he can reserve the space.
The second person to sit down, aggressively does the same, usually choosing to sit as far as way from the first person as possible, in order to assert dominance over his specific part of the table-space.
Both players have now plugged in their powerstrips into the two only sockets available. Their powerstrips have exactly the needed amount of outlets for their own setup.
Chaos ensues as the next two players arrive. They both rush for the corner spot where there’s still space, trying to avoid the battle for desktop-supremacy with the person in the middle. The loser violently smashes his keyboard up on his mousepad, claiming that “there’s not even enough space to have my keyboard here”, despite the fact that it’s about the size of a bachelor pad in London.
Desperate for internet access, the two first arrivers now demand the router to be set up, making the tech genius of the bootcamp curse at everyone for their computer illiteracy. Under threat of physical violence, he sets it up, crawling around on his knees plugging everyone’s computers in.
At this point, arrival #3, #4 and #5 (who has now miraculously arrived at the location after being lost for an hour), have realized that there are no more sockets, creating an uproar and a demand for the first two players to rearrange their setup so accommodate more powerstrips. They do so, only under the threat of a total power shutdown.
As the last person to connect to the router, person #4, who is notoriously slow, rips three cables out of it when he turns around. He doesn’t realize that till he’s out from under the table and sits comfortably in the chair. 3 24-hour cooldowns are handed out based on that.
With all five computers set up, play can get underway. For some reason everyone’s ping is spiking at over 300ms. The mystery remains until it is revealed that player #1 has been secretly downloading movies the entire time.
At the moment the team is bootcamping on the outskirts of Copenhagen, working on some of the weaker sides of their game and getting ready for the coming three months of travelling and competing. The above might or might not be inspired by events happening during the bootcamp.Age seems to be no obstacle when it comes to starting a business. That's the case with 14-year-old Anshul Samar, CEO of Alchemist Empire, Inc., who invented a trading card game, "Elementeo," that aims to teach chemistry to students in a fun, unusual way.
At the 235th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society in New Orleans, Samar will present his inventive card game. While other 14-year olds play on their Xbox, this precocious CEO hopes to secure $500,000 in funding so his Silicon Valley-based startup can begin mass producing the game.
"I have always wanted to show the world that the youth can start a business and have fun at the same time," says Samar.
Like other popular trading card games, Elementeo casts two players against each other in card-based fantasy combat. But unlike "Pokemon" or "Magic: the Gathering," Samar says that Elementeo educates just as much as it entertains.
The game is based on a 121-card deck of chemical elements, compounds and catalysts. Every card has an explanation of the element or compound's uses and chemical properties. For example, the Oxygen card can rust neighboring metal cards and the Copper Conductor card can shock any metals. The oxidation state of an element is used as its attack power, and its physical state determines its movement on the board. The goal of the game is to reduce the opponents electrons to zero through strategic use of each card's chemical properties.
"Our aim is to combine fun, excitement, education, and chemistry, all in one grand concoction," says Samar. "We don't want to create a fantasy wizard world or create a boring education textbook world, but combine the two where fun and learning come together without clashing!"
Samar received $500 in seed money from the California Association of the Gifted (CAG) to develop a prototype of Elementeo. Now, after stealing the show at the entrepreneur conference TiECON in mid-2007, Samar hopes to get the financial backing he needs to mass produce Elementeo.
"You are not a geek or a nerd if you like chemistry," says Samar. "If people do end up calling you a geek because you love chemistry, don't worry, those people are going to end up working for you at the end!"
###
The American Chemical Society -- the world's largest scientific society -- is a nonprofit organization chartered by the U.S. Congress and a global leader in providing access to chemistry-related research through its multiple databases, peer-reviewed journals and scientific conferences. Its main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.Tampa Bay woman, bridesmaids destroy dresses after wedding called off Copyright by WFLA - All rights reserved Credit: Jessica Rios/All Brides 2 Be [ + - ] Video
TAMPA, FL (WFLA) -- Most brides wait until after their wedding to take part in "destroy the dress" events. But, Kilee Manulak had a different situation. The week of her wedding, she revealed her fiancé sent her a text message saying he didn't want to marry her after a two-year engagement.
"I just kind of went numb," Manulak said. "My maid of honor, my mom, and all my friends just helped me... I was just so devastated."
After a few unbearably sad days, she decided to do something drastic. She and her bridesmaids destroyed their dresses during the Color Fun Fest in Tampa.
"It was actually very liberating," she said. "I don't want a pity party. I just want to have fun with it."
She even went on stage. Had the wedding happened, she admits she would have never done anything like this.
Copyright by WFLA - All rights reserved Credit: Jessica Rios/All Brides 2 Be
Copyright by WFLA - All rights reserved Credit: Jessica Rios/All Brides 2 Be
Copyright by WFLA - All rights reserved Credit: Jessica Rios/All Brides 2 Be
Copyright by WFLA - All rights reserved Credit: Jessica Rios/All Brides 2 Be
"I wanted to keep my dress, I wanted to maybe alter it, or do something new to it. But I definitely didn't want to destroy it."
She's glad she did. She wants others to see her story and gain strength of their own.
As for her former fiancé?
"I definitely want to tell him thank you for sparing me heartaches down the road, and thank you for letting me go so I can find true happiness," Manulak said.
The support she's getting from friends and family is keeping her happy for now.Ideas in seconds. Tracks in minutes Circuit inspires, straight out of the box. It combines a two-part synthesiser and a four-part drum machine with a 4x8 RGB velocity-sensitive grid-based sequencer, which will have you finding new musical directions and creating electronic grooves in no time.
Always learning new tricks Want to get the latest updates for Circuit? Simply head to Novation Components, log in and connect your Circuit to your Mac® or PC running Chrome™ - there's a downloadable standalone version too
Stand alone Compact and battery-powered, Circuit truly stands alone. You can create entire tunes from scratch without a laptop, then save them and play them back live. You don’t even need speakers, because it has a one built in. Of course, Circuit will plug in to your sound system and work with your computer and other synth gear too, via its line outs, USB and MIDI ports
Legendary Nova sound Building on our true Nova heritage, Circuit delivers cutting-edge sound with production-ready monophonic and polyphonic patches and tons of character for easily creating deep basslines, epic leads and warm pads.
Build ideas quickly Embrace a new way to make music. Circuit's split grid shows your steps and notes at the same time, so you can sequence and play while seeing exactly what's going on. Build up your parts quickly and easily, either by programming each step or capturing your performance in real time.
Combine simplicity and experimentation Use simple streamlined modes to keep your harmonies, rhythms and melodies locked in time and key while you make riffs, hooks and chords. Or start experimenting for some serious sequencing exploration.
Looking for the perfect beat? Velocity-sensitive RGB pads let you quickly build expressive drum beats, by step sequencing or playing the wide range of drum sounds. Define your sound with total control over pitch, decay, distortion and EQ.
Easily tweak your sound Sculpt your sound using eight macro knobs allowing you to subtly tweak or completely transform each patch. Then add movement and rhythm by recording or sequencing your performance. Delve deeper into sound design with Circuit Synth Editor.Christians Back TV Device to Censor Religious Slurs, Profanity
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What if there was a mute button for every single objectionable word mentioned on television?
For parents everywhere, there may finally be an answer.
Focus on the Family is teaming up with TVGuardian to provide clean entertainment choices for families through the TVGuardian filter, a device that eliminates objectionable language from television shows.
Penned as a “foul language filter” for HDTV’s, the device seeks to protect children not only from all foul language, but also from offensive religious slurs, sexual references, and other inappropriate phrases.
“Parents are continuously bombarded with media messages that are at odds with how they are raising their children,” Rich Bennett, vice president of Focus on the Family’s Strategy Office, said in a statement Wednesday.
“Many are at a loss as to how to combat this as technology advances and objectionable entertainment content increases. TVGuardian is an essential resource in helping parents create positive, safe entertainment experiences that affirm their family values.”
According to a recent study, profanity on prime-time television was reported to have increased since 2005 by 69 percent. With TVGuardian, parents are now able to enjoy all the prime time TV shows with their children without worry over the content.
A small unit that connects to television sets, TVG is able to automatically mute all forms of profanity and inappropriate language from broadcast television, cable, satellite and DVDs.
It also offers a pop up profanity-free alternative to the muted phrase. For example, a phrase like “Move your a#%!” would be muted and “Move your tail!” would pop up instead, so families could still follow along with the story.
Television shows and movies can be watched live or played back on DVRs without all the smut.
So how exactly does the device work to eliminate all that offends?
TVGuardian’s patented technology reads the hidden closed-caption text in the background, which is required by law to have on television, checking each word against a dictionary of over 150 offensive words and phrases. (For DVDs that are not required by law to have closed-captions, only DVDs that have a “CC” logo on the back of the box will work.)
With multiple filter settings ranging from “strict” to “tolerant,” parents can filter as little or as much as they choose.
More than 12 million TVGuardians are already in homes, proving to help families.
“We are excited to partner with Focus on the Family to assist and support more families,” shared Britt Bennett, president of TVGuardian.
“[Though] we can never protect our children from hearing foul language outside the home, we should be able to protect them from having to hear foul language inside the home,” he told The Christian Post.
Bennett explained that TVGuardian applies best to PG and PG-13 movies that would have been fine –almost completely free of objectionable content – except for the language.
“Most movies with sex, nudity or violence are generally advertised and promoted as such. But with foul language, you never know when and where it’s going to show up. That’s why so many viewers find it so upsetting.”
And that was exactly how TVGuardian got its start as well.
When founder Rick Bray was watching “E.T.” with his family one day while on a family vacation, he was shocked to discover more than a dozen cuss words in the PG-rated movie. Brainstorming a possible solution for more family-friendly entertainment, TVGuardian was born.
Already on its sixth version, currently supporting HDMI and HDTV, the small device hopes to offer families an alternative, positive entertainment experience, whether for children or for adults who prefer less profanity and offensive content.
The organization also offers a special program for churches and ministries, where churches that sign up can receive funds back from TVGuardian for every person in their congregation who purchases a device.
Not available in mainstream stores yet, besides a few select family Christian stores, the device can be purchased online.
TVGuardian is the newest part of Focus on the Family’s Family Safety Suite, which provides parents with resources and information to help become a tech-savvy guardian in the digital age, offering other filtering devices like Bsecure Online, which regulates online content as well.Hive recently released the beta version of their new Bitcoin wallet for Android, a visually-attractive app that features a people-oriented interface and a native platform for third-party services like Bitstamp and LocalBitcoins.
The Hive wallet, which previously released for Mac OS X in February, has been praised for its simplistic design and “thin wallet” properties that gain efficiency by not having to process the whole blockchain. But Hive’s most interesting feature could be its built-in app store for third party services. This is a potentially revolutionary feature for a Bitcoin wallet. The market is ripe for an app that acts first as a secure wallet, but also as an interface with everything Bitcoin-related — and the Hive app store attempts to achieve that.
Now that Hive has come to Android, it has the potential to shake up the mobile wallet landscape. Let’s take a closer look at its design and features, and whether that’s enough to set it apart from the competition.
Simple Interface
Hive’s home screen features a list of alphabetized contacts that represent stored Bitcoin addresses. The development team made a conscious decision not to show the actual Bitcoin addresses in the contacts list, instead using the screen space to offer a custom picture for each contact. This makes the list feel more like a collection of people, and not a collection of addresses.
The contacts list can also include other addresses that a Hive user controls through separate apps and websites. Or it can be an easy way to remember Bitcoin addresses of important charities, such as the homeless outreach group Sean’s Outpost.
Swipe left on the contacts list, and it changes to a list of recent transactions. It’s easy to quickly check when transactions were made, with whom, and how much BTC/USD was exchanged. The transaction list is a short swipe away from the contacts list.
The top end of the home screen features the amount of stored Bitcoins (denominated in BTC, mBTC or µBTC) and the equivalent fiat amount — USD by default, but there are many other currencies that Hive can use for the exchange rate.
To the right of the wallet balance are four buttons — one for sending coins; one for requesting coins; one that brings up a large QR code of the user’s wallet address; and one that accesses the phone’s camera in order to scan someone else’s QR code.
The “Request bitcoins” feature is notable for making it easy to request a specific amount of money and generate a custom QR code for receiving that amount. The text command for this request can also be copied and shared onto social media, email, and messaging apps.
First Bitcoin App Store
Hive’s most interesting and potentially game-changing feature is the native app store that can be accessed by tapping the box icon in the top-right corner. Right now there are only a handful of apps available, but this platform holds significant potential as an easy way for Hive users to interact with other services in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
One of the more amusing apps is BitPremier, a marketplace featuring expensive luxury goods which are all priced in Bitcoin. While most users will have no practical use for BitPremier besides envious window shopping, it does provide a convenient way for the hyper-rich to buy a new supercar or designer handbag.
The Hive app store includes more useful services like Bitstamp, the popular Bitcoin trading site. A user can access their Bitstamp account directly from Hive, and even initiate buy and sell orders.
There’s also an app for LocalBitcoins, enabling Hive users to directly search for buyers and sellers. However, at this time there’s no way to actually search for local traders for in-person cash transactions; only online trades are available in the Hive app.
Additional apps include a recharge service for prepaid mobile phones; easy ways to donate to charitable causes like Sean’s Outpost and Nourish the Children; and a method for donating to the Hive development team.
It’s worth noting that the Android version of Hive doesn’t have as many apps available as the Mac OS X version, which includes Coinbase and several betting games. However, this is likely to change over time as developers create more and better apps on Hive’s Android platform.
Because Bitcoin is the first programmable currency, an app store for Bitcoin-related services has been a long time coming and will provide a new layer of functionality for people who use Hive to manage their digital currency. It’s not unreasonable to predict future apps with advanced features, like auction-style marketplaces and mini-games with Bitcoin prizes.
Verdict
Although the Hive Android wallet is still in beta phase, it already has a leg up on the competition with its innovative and possibly revolutionary app store. Add that on top of the streamlined interface, and Hive is already a major contender for the best wallet app on Android. Once the various apps improve on their functionality and add more features, Hive could eventually turn into a one-stop shop for everything Bitcoin-related — storage, trading, spending, gambling, and so on. Developers just need to put work into porting their web services onto the Hive platform.
So, based on Hive’s simple interface and the huge potential of its built-in app store, I give this Android wallet a solid 5 out of 5 bits.Two Raging Grannies is, in fact, a bit of a misnomer. The two grandmothers in the film, Hinda and Shirley, are more concerned than angry, and more curious than anything else. Even at the film’s climax, where Shirley storms the podium at a “Wall Street Dinner” event, she simply wants to ask a question about the economy: “Why do we have to keep growing?”
This is the central dilemma that the grandmothers tackle: In a world of finite resources, how can we live within an economy that must constantly expand? Their mobility-scooter-powered journey leads them from homeless communities to big box stores to an economics classroom (from which they are ejected for asking too many questions), and eventually to New York City and Wall Street.
At the movie’s opening, Hinda and Shirley are doing little more than pondering. By its end, they are wielding megaphones and handing out fliers on the campus of the University of Washington.
There’s a moral here, certainly, but Two Raging Grannies is more than just social commentary. The slow, beautifully shot film juxtaposes the women’s journey into activism with a profound meditation on aging. The most affecting moments occur when Hinda and Shirley are discussing not the implications of a constantly expanding economy, but rather the daily trials and tribulations of getting old. “I think the main things I go to socially now are memorials,” Shirley mentions wryly at one point. It’s a poignant juxtaposition—a societal and economic system of constant evolution and growth, as viewed by those left in its wake.
Such heavy themes could make for a somber film, but Two Raging Grannies remains enjoyable, thanks largely to the chemistry between Hinda and Shirley. Their conversations are funny and relatable, their friendship heartwarming without being saccharine.
At the movie’s opening, Hinda and Shirley are doing little more than pondering.
Adding to Hinda and Shirley’s charm is their almost childlike manner. After being kicked out of the economics class, the two women pose their question to a UW student. “I keep hearing about ‘we have to grow the economy,’” Shirley asks, frowning up from her scooter. “But why is [that]?”
At one point in the film, the grandmothers visit Albert Bartlett, a retired professor of physics who has been lecturing on the impossibility of endless economic growth since 1969.
“We’re just actually beginning to think about this situation,” admits Hinda.
“Better late than never,” Bartlett reassures them.KIRKUK, Kurdistan Region – The Iraqi Turkmen Front (IFT) in Kirkuk and the Turkish foreign ministry have condemned raising the Kurdistan flag at the government building in the city after the historic move was approved in a vote on the Provincial Council on Tuesday, saying it threatens the security of the area.Deputy Kurdish Prime Minister Qubad Talabani welcomed the move, invoking Kurdish sentiments that Kirkuk is the heartland of their nation.Hassan Toran, deputy leader of the IFT, condemned the decision in a press conference, saying "making such a decision came when Arabs and Turkmen boycotted the session and issuing this decree confirms the division of Kirkuk’s community.""We think the decision is wrong,” Toran said. “We think the protection of Kirkuk's security is the most important thing."He warned they will take necessary measures against raising the flag across the province's state buildings."We take every legal, constitutional, and peaceful option as they are all open to us. Turning to the court is one of these choices," he declared.Qubad Talabani, deputy prime minister of the Kurdistan Region, congratulated the people of Kirkuk for hoisting the Kurdistan flag."Congratulations on raising our flag in the Kurdistan Jerusalem," he said in a Facebook post. Kurds traditionally refer to Kirkuk as its sacred ‘Jerusalem,’ the heart of the Kurdish nation.He reminded people of famous quote from his father Jalal Talabani, former president of Iraq and leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), when he addressed a public gathering in the spring of 1992, saying "The key to resolve the Kurdish issue is Kirkuk, only Kirkuk, and will only be Kirkuk."
The KRG deputy PM also said "the flag, under which the peoples of Kirkuk will live in peace and away from the reach of terror will always fly high and remain bright with the bravery and blood of our courageous Peshmerga."
The Turkish foreign ministry also expressed concern over what it called a “unilateral” decision to raise the Kurdish flag, violating the constitution of Iraq."Approving a decree by the Kirkuk Provincial Council after voting on hoisting Kurdistan flag over the state buildings in the city is a wrong act,” the ministry stated, as reported by Anadolu Agency."The decree comes when the Turkmen and Arab representatives have boycotted the session. We consider it a unilateral move and a violation of the Iraqi constitution and the disputed structure of Kirkuk. Any unilateral move in Kirkuk, which contains many components and various identities, will harm the phases of dialogue, constitution, and talks. It also harms the permanent security of Iraq. Therefore the parties should responsibly deal with the delicate phases, as done in the past."The Kirkuk Provincial Council voted on Tuesday to raise the Kurdistan flag over state buildings in the province. Some Turkmen and Arab representatives boycotted the session following earlier concerns that the move may cause conflict among the city's diverse population.Kirkuk Governor Najmaldin Karim, the head of Kirkuk Provincial Council Rebwar Talabani, members of the council, and some of the city’s officials gathered in front of the provincial building as the governor raised the Kurdistan flag.The governor said that the vote is “a historic decision” for the province and represents the will of the people of Kirkuk, including Turkmen, Arab, Assyrians, and Kurds, adding that this move does not affect the “the political future of Kirkuk.”Karim noted that among those who voted for the Kurdistan flag were Turkmen, Arab, and Assyrians as the Kurdish-led Brotherhood faction who voted in favour also includes non-Kurds.Toran urged "Iraqi leaders in Baghdad, Erbil, and Sulaimani to wisely make decisions. Make the brotherhood feeling in this delicate province dominant over any other thing. What is really important for all of us is the security and future of this city as it will not be fulfilled without peaceful co-existence between its elements."Relations between the city’s diverse peoples must be sustained, Toran added, saying his party rejects "one-nation, or one-party hegemony over the city on the decisive questions of Kirkuk."He added this decision is contrary to the Iraqi constitution, “since Article 140 has not determined the identity of Kirkuk.”Saad al-Hadithi, the spokesperson of the Iraqi Prime Minister, told Rudaw on Tuesday that the move by the local government in Kirkuk is “unconstitutional.”
Hadithi added that "no local government which is part of the central government should raise its own flag except for Iraq's.”
"Kirkuk is part of the central government, not the region as it receives its wages and affairs from Baghdad. It does not have the right to make such decisions without turning to the central [government]."
Governor Karim raised the Kurdistan flag alongside the Iraqi one over the castle of Kirkuk on the eve of the Kurdish New Year, Newroz, on March 20, after he signed a decree to raise the Kurdistan flag a week before. He then asked the Kirkuk Provincial Council to consider raising the flag over state institutions.
The multi-ethnic city of Kirkuk is home to Kurds, Arabs, and Turkmen among others. It has been secured by Kurdish Peshmerga forces since mid-2014 after Iraqi government troops left the city ahead of a possible attack by radical Islamic insurgents when they took over large swathes of the country. The province has one of Iraq’s largest oil fields within its borders.Hi guys! TGIF. This week has been nothing but an absolute drag. But maybe that's because I've been dying for the weekend already haha. Who isn't, am I right?! I'm going to see a horror movie this weekend and next plan on having some fun at a haunted house. Oh yes, this is my favorite time of year. I also purchased my costume yesterday, but you guys will have to wait to find out what it is. Yes, I intend on doing a mani on it hence the secret haha. Don't be disappointed though, I have some more Halloween polishes to show you guys today. Here's the reminding polishes I mentioned last week from CDB Lacquer. There are two jelly and two crelly, one of which glows in the dark.
All Halloween polishes seen here by CDB Lacquer are available for purchase now. These were released last week so stock is limited. The Nightmare Before Christmas Trio is already sold out, but will be restocked later next week.
Hi guys! TGIF. This week has been nothing but an absolute drag. But maybe that's because I've been dying for the weekend already haha. Who isn't, am I right?! I'm going to see a horror movie this weekend and next plan on having some fun at a haunted house. Oh yes, this is my favorite time of year. I also purchased my costume yesterday, but you guys will have to wait to find out what it is. Yes, I intend on doing a mani on it hence the secret haha. Don't be disappointed though, I have some more Halloween polishes to show you guys today. Here's the reminding polishes I mentioned last week from CDB Lacquer. There are two jelly and two crelly, one of which glows in the dark.
Spookfest is a light green crelly with numerous Halloween colored glitters in different sizes. It feels like the ideal monster polish for the Halloween season. Actually now that I think about it, I think it's a great monster mash-up of glitters! This is really jam-packed with glitters making it seem a bit thick so be sure to apply with a bit of dabbing. The glitters don't affect the application whatsoever and you should still find it easy to layer. Formula and consistency are good, no issues to report with this beauty. I swatched it over a clear base, used three thin coats, and sealed with a glossy topcoat.Time Warp is a red jelly with black, silver and white glitters in numerous shapes and sizes. Inspired by the movie The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Want some peanut butter with all that jelly? Haha. This is a gorgeous jelly polish, one of the best ones I've swatched in a while actually. From the color to the glitters, this is my pick for Halloween must-have. I swatched this over a clear base coat, used three thin coats, and sealed with a glossy topcoat. Formula and consistency are excellent, it gave me no issues when applying. There was also no need to fish for the larger glitters, which was a very nice surprise.It's Just a Bunch of Hocus Pocus is a purple jelly with black, white and silver glitters in numerous shapes and sizes. Inspired by the movie Hocus Pocus. Another squishy jelly. And the color is so... witchy. It definitely nails the classic movie Hocus Pocus, I must have watched this every Halloween when I was a kid. The star glitters did needed a little bit of fishing. I swatched this over a clear base coat, used three thin coats, and sealed with a glossy topcoat. Formula and consistency were pretty good, didn't give me any issues.The Sanderson Sisters is Glow in the Dark, white crelly with lots of tiny Halloween colored glitters inspired by the 3 sister witches from the movie Hocus Pocus. This is another glow polish from CDB Lacquer and it's just as good as the others I reviewed last week. The polish was set under a light bulb to charge for about fifteen minutes before taking the photos. As you can see, it has quite a noticeable glow! Like Spookfest, this polish was absolutely filled with glitters. I swatched this over a clear base coat, used two thin coats, and sealed with a glossy topcoat. Formula and consistency were pretty good, didn't give me any issues whatsoever.The Halloween polishes by CDB Lacquer are now available for purchase in full sizes only. Don't miss out, these are selling fast. For those that are already sold out, there will be a restock in the next week or so. Don't forget to follow CDB Lacquer below:Downtown L.A. 7th Street Subway Station Opens New Tunnel to The Bloc
This morning, a new tunnel opened connecting Metro’s 7th Street Station with The Bloc shopping center complex. Metro riders no longer need to cross a busy 7th Street at street level, but can ascend into the mall on the south side of the street. These sorts of subway access points are fairly common in east coast cities, but the new tunnel represents the L.A. Metro rail system’s first exit directly into a private business site.
Metro, in the 1990s, had the foresight to build its underground stations with knock-out panels to facilitate these types of expansion. A similar panel was removed to make way for Metro’s recently-opened North Hollywood Station underpass.
The 25-foot tunnel cost $9.3 million. In a public-private partnership, the cost was split between Metro and The Bloc. Under the terms of the partnership, the Bloc is responsible for keeping the tunnel open to the public from at least 6 a.m. to 10 p.m.
The Bloc was formerly Macy’s Plaza, a never-quite-thriving 1972 mall. The site was redeveloped by The Ratkovich Company, with partners National Real Estate Advisors, Blue Vista Capital, and Studio One Eleven. It is in the final stages of a $180 million renovation which |
companies will work together, an effort that could eventually lead to the launch of larger Bigelow modules on ULA’s Atlas 5. Bigelow, at the pre-launch press conference, dropped hints that Bigelow would work with ULA. He noted that the only vehicle available now to launch Bigelow’s B330 habitat—a module with 330 cubic meters of volume once expanded—is the Atlas V 552. (That vehicle, strictly speaking, doesn’t exist yet: the dual-engine Centaur upper stage, indicated by the “2” in its designation, has yet to fly on an Atlas but is under development.) “We have to fit into two things: a vehicle that can lift 43,000 pounds [19,500 kilograms], and a vehicle that has a fairing length” long enough to accommodate the B330 in its compressed form, he said. An illustration of the B330 module (top right) accommodated within an Atlas V 552. (credit: ULA/Bigelow Aerospace) Thus, it wasn’t particularly surprising when Bigelow Aerospace and ULA announced plans to launch a B330 by 2020 on an Atlas V 552. However, at that announcement, which took place at the 32nd Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Bigelow did offer a surprise: that first B330 could go to the ISS. “We’re trying to acquire permission from NASA to be able to locate a B330 on station,” Bigelow said. “If we’re able to do that, and have that space be there, we’re also asking permission to be able to commercialize time and volume” on the module once installed. “Our hope is that NASA would be the primary customer for that structure, and that we would be given permission to commercialize. Essentially, we would be timesharing,” said Bigelow. What the B330 would be used for on the station isn’t clear, but Bigelow suggested it could, as one example, test different life support systems on the station for NASA’s use on future spacecraft. “Although we have a lot of concepts that are really cool, really exciting, and can do NASA a hell of a favor, it’s premature to talk in specifics about these kinds of things,” he said. “If it can be achieved on station,” Bigelow said of installing the B330 there, “NASA maximizes the utility of its staff that is already on station. It may also be a facility that partners are going to get excited about. We think this will add life beyond 2024 to the ISS, and there are a lot of folks who do not want to see the ISS go into the drink.” And, as Bigelow has proposed for BEAM, a B330 on the station could be used for commercial, as well as NASA, applications. “Our hope is that NASA would be the primary customer for that structure, and that we would be given permission to commercialize. Essentially, we would be timesharing. So, what we’re going is we’re offering discrete quantities of time—a matter of one or two weeks, to 45 days—to various kinds of clientele,” he said. All that requires extensive discussions with NASA, and the station’s other international partners, about both technical and business issues regarding a B330 on the station. “We’ve had several discussions” with the space agency, Bigelow said after the press conference. “It’s a process.” “They have to consider the partners, the station partners,” Bigelow said of NASA. “We experienced this with BEAM. We had to recognize that that location is about the most sensitive location in space that there is. Even with BEAM we had to be concerned with perturbations to the entire structure on its expansion.” Getting B330 onto station involves a “gauntlet of challenges,” he acknowledged, that the company would not have to go through if the module was a free flyer. So, why go through the hassle of installing the module on the ISS when it would be easier, from both a technical and business development standpoint, to go it alone? Bigelow Aerospace president Robert Bigelow discussing his plans to include a B330 module on the ISS during an April 11 press conference at the 32nd Space Symposium in Colorado Springs. (credit: J. Foust) “That is really attractive, believe me,” Bigelow said of the free-flyer option. “However, that is not in the best interest of NASA.” NASA could make use of the extra space at a fraction of the cost of developing its own module, and without having to add additional astronauts or other resources of its own. The module, Bigelow suggested, could attract additional commercial crew and cargo traffic to the station that could help NASA as well as commercial users of the module. While not explicitly stated, working with NASA on adding a B330 to the ISS would involve some kind of contract or funded agreement. That could, presumably, help finance the development of the B330. Bigelow hasn’t abandoned the idea of free-flyer stations. The company plans to have two B330 modules ready for launch in 2020, and expects to produce more in the years to come. The number of B330 modules the company builds and launches will depend in large part on the company’s ability to expand its workforce to accommodate projected demand, he said. “I think we could expect possibly to populate several different destinations in addition to the ISS” by the mid-2020s, Bigelow said. All of this, though, is still in its early development phases. The partnership announced last week does not involve a launch contract or other formal agreement between ULA and Bigelow Aerospace, for example. “This is a work in progress,” Bigelow said. “We do have an agreement on something that would be typical when you are doing the really early, preliminary work in terms of characterization of a payload.” “This is a fundamentally new mission in space. We haven’t had one of those in probably 20 or 30 years, arguably,” said Bruno. “We’re collaborating together with resources of technology and talent, and exploring the future as Bob explained,” said Tory Bruno, the president and CEO of ULA, at the press conference, when asked if any money was changing hands between the two companies. “We don’t talk about dollars and investment. You’ll see as time goes by what this fully encompasses.” Bruno expressed his excitement, though, about the partnership in general and the potential of Bigelow Aerospace to establish new markets in space. “This is a fundamentally new mission in space. We haven’t had one of those in probably 20 or 30 years, arguably,” he said. “So this is creating new things to do in space, making the space economy larger. That in of itself is an exciting goal.” It won’t be easy, though, as Bigelow made clear near the end of the press conference. “I think there are a lot of challenges here, and when you’re trying to do something really novel, that isn’t simple, the odds are huge it’s going to be a struggle,” he said. “This is not going to be any kind of a simple situation.” “But,” he added, “there are a number of commonalities here in terms of benefits that the logic really says this is something that ought to be done.” HomeRepublican lawmakers this weekend took President Donald Trump to task over what they deemed a weak response to white supremacist groups and violent clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia, the latest sign that Trump’s grip on the party may be weakening.
The outspoken group included past Trump antagonists such as Sens. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Jeff Flake of Arizona and Marco Rubio of Florida, but it also included prominent conservative voices who aren't known as fierce critics of the administration, such as Sens. Orrin Hatch of Utah and Cory Gardner of Colorado.
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The Republicans joined civil rights leaders and Democrats who reacted angrily when Trump said Saturday he condemned "this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides — on many sides.” His repetition of “many sides” struck critics as seeming to equate the white supremacist groups who organized the rally with counterprotesters, though the White House later sought to recast his statement to be more critical of hate groups.
One woman was killed and more injured Saturday when a car plowed into a group of counterprotesters. Police later charged a man who had been photographed holding a symbol of one of the groups that organized the Charlottesville event, The Associated Press reported.
“This isn't a time for innuendo or to allow room to be read between the lines. This is a time to lay blame,” Gardner, who is considered a rising star in the party, said on CNN on unday.
“This president has done an incredible job of naming terrorism around the globe as evil,” Gardner continued. “He has said and called it out time and time again. And this president needs to do exactly that today.”
"We should call evil by its name," Hatch wrote on Twitter Saturday.
The rift over Trump's response to the Charlottesville violence was just the latest example of members of his party starting to carefully take on a president whose words and actions many chose to overlook after his surprise 2016 victory. Those schisms — including criticism of his treatment of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and his recent public berating of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell — could make it harder for the White House to work with its counterparts on a slew of policy priorities this fall.
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The critical tweets and television interviews do not mean Republicans are turning on the president just yet. And Republicans have criticized Trump before. After the release of the “Access Hollywood” video in which Trump boasted about grabbing women’s genitals without their consent, many lawmakers said they could no longer support him; Gardner said he would not vote for him. Still, Republicans worked with Trump anyway after he took the White House.
“The Republican politicians still fear the Trump base in their own districts and states,” said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, located in Charlottesville. “When he goes down to where Nixon and Truman were, in the mid- to low 20s in the polls, then they will start waving bye-bye to him.”
But the reactions to Trump’s recent actions have evolved from earlier in the administration. For example, after Trump in May fired FBI Director James Comey, who was leading an investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 election, Republicans on Capitol Hill tried to avoid reporters' questions rather go on the record criticizing his decision.
By midday Sunday, the White House released a statement that attempted to clarify the president’s earlier remarks on Charlottesville, though the president himself has not spoken again.
"The President said very strongly in his statement yesterday that he condemns all forms of violence, bigotry, and hatred. Of course that includes white supremacists, KKK Neo-Nazi and all extremist groups. He called for national unity and bringing all Americans together,” an unnamed White House spokesman said in a statement.
The president condemned the violence “and didn't dignify the names of these groups of people, but rather addressed the fundamental issue," White House homeland security adviser Tom Bossert told CNN.
That was after waves of criticism, including from Trump’s 2016 campaign rivals such as Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who urged the Department of Justice to investigate the events in Charlottesville, which it promised to do late Saturday evening. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who ran for president in 2016 and whose daughter works in the West Wing, and 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney also denounced racial prejudice.
Fissures between Republicans and Trump have been showing up with greater regularity, as the president faces a low approval rating and no major legislative accomplishments.
GOP lawmakers chafed when Trump publicly admonished Sessions for recusing himself from the Justice Department’s investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 campaign. Sessions said it was necessary given his role in Trump’s presidential campaign, but Trump said he would have picked a different attorney general if he’d known the recusal was coming.
Republican lawmakers and a bevy of conservative groups, from law enforcement advocacy organizations to tea party advocates to the Family Research Council, rushed to the defense of the former senator.
More recently, Trump broke standard party protocol by publicly criticizing McConnell for failing to pass legislation eliminating the 2010 Obamacare law. Trump even suggested that McConnell should step down from his leadership post — something the president has no control over — if McConnell does not deliver the votes to pass tax reform or an infrastructure package.
The party had already fractured over its attempts to repeal and replace Obamacare. Trump offered little support or cover for both House and Senate lawmakers to take what many deemed tough votes. The effort died in the Senate due to three “no” votes by Sens. John McCain of Arizona, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska over concerns about the secretive process during which the health care bill was written and the cuts it would make to Medicaid.
When lawmakers return from vacation in September, they will face a bevy of thorny challenges — raising the nation’s debt ceiling, approving a budget for the federal government, and tackling tricky policies like tax reform. While it’s premature to assume the Republican rifts will sink any of those efforts, the insistent paper cuts for the fledgling administration could imperil them — and further erode Trump’s diminished political base.Story highlights A woman swept away as firefighters tried to rescue her is found dead, spokesman says
Her car was in the water when it struck her would-be rescuers' boat
She's the second woman in San Antonio to die due to the flooding
Several rivers and creeks in and around the Texas city are well above flood stage
Two women died Saturday -- one of them after being swept away moments after being inches from her would-be rescuers -- due to raging floodwaters in San Antonio, which braced for yet more drenching rains.
At one point Saturday, a storm and subsequent floods had knocked out power to about 12,000 customers and spurred the closure of dozens of streets in the Texas city and the surrounding county, authorities said.
Scores of people had to be evacuated due to floods and other issues, and Fire Chief Charles Hood noted there had been about 250 water-related calls -- in addition to ones for things like medical emergencies, accidents and more -- in the first 15 hours of Saturday.
The greatest concern had to do with people getting too close to fast-moving, deceptive and unpredictable floodwaters.
"We're asking folks to observe low-water crossing (warnings), to use common sense and to stay off the road if possible," Mayor Julian Castro said.
The first confirmed fatality -- a woman around age 30 -- was reported around 7:30 a.m. (8:30 a.m. ET), and her body was about three hours later, police Chief William McManus said.
Some time later, an older female driver went into water that was 4 feet above flood markers. Firefighters got to her vehicle and broke a window -- with one firefighter cutting his hand -- Hood explained. Then, as the would-be rescuers tried to get her from her vehicle, "the currents changed and washed that vehicle away," the fire chief said.
The woman's car had rolled on top of rescue boat, forcing out the firefighters who'd been in it, fire department spokesman Christian Bove later explained. By the time the firefighters were able to climb back into the boat, her car had become submerged in about 25-foot deep water and was gone.
Hood characterized authorities' subsequent efforts to find this woman as "a body recovery."
Described as being in her late 60s, the victim was found dead inside her vehicle around 6:45 p.m., Bove said.
"You can imagine how emotionally spent you are to try to rescue somebody, you're face-to-face with them, and then they're washed away," Hood said of his distraught firefighters, who'd gotten so close to rescuing the woman only to lose her.
The chief warned more people may be missing and perhaps dead. Firefighters happened to spot this woman going into the water before they rushed to rescue her; there may be others, Hood pointed out, who firefighters or others don't see get trapped in floodwaters.
"Turn around and don't drown," multiple officials repeated at a Saturday news conference.
The problems began with torrential rains late Friday that continued into Saturday, triggering flash-flood warnings across South Texas.
The weather was windy and wet and included a reported tornado on Friday in Bexar, just west of San Antonio, that knocked down trees and power lines and caused "minor building damage," according to the National Weather Service
San Antonio International Airport received 9.57 inches of rain Saturday morning alone, CNN meteorologists said.
The city's Leon Creek was at 27.1 feet at 2:16 p.m. Saturday -- well above the flood stage of 15 feet.
"Disastrous flooding puts near 7 feet of flow in buildings in the jet engine test facility at Kelly AFB," the National Weather Service said. "Secondary and primary roads and bridges are severely flooded and dangerous to motorists above Highway 90 to below (Interstate 35)"
Flood warnings have also been issued for the San Antonio River, Medina River and Salado Creek, all of which are above flood stage. The weather service forecast that storms "could produce heavy rainfall" sometime after
In an interview with CNN affiliate KENS, San Antonio resident Mary Alice Galicia described how water enveloped her house.
"It was underwater 20 minutes ago," she said earlier Saturday. "I came over here. I own the property, and my daughter said that she couldn't get to her car. Her car's all flooded. The property -- the water's all swarming through the whole house. I just came over to check to see what I could do, but there's nothing that I can do right now."
Galicia doesn't have flood insurance because she "never imagined this would happen," she said.
"But it's not stopping. I thought it was gonna stop," she said about the water damage.
San Antonio's previous record flooding in 1998 was devastating, caused by heavy rains throughout south Texas and by a plume of moist air from Hurricane Madeline off the Mexican west coast. A total of 11 people died in San Antonio that weekend, with property damage estimates at $750 million, a city report said.NEW UPDATE : colors have been tweaked even more!
my latest work, after a long time..using photoshop cs 3, it took almost two months to complete.i've been very lazy in between...Although i could have pushed the details even more, i had to decide when to stop.color and flow were very important, not to mention, my first work on a white background, something a little tricky to work on, especially when it comes to overall illumination.artwork dimensions : 6000 x 6000tools used : pen tool, smudge, color dodge, color burn, hard and soft edged brush.closeup shot :two little somethings for everyonewallpaper 1 :wallpaper 2 :on a more personal note, i got stuck a few times about the look and feel... which is why'music' played a key role in elevating the artwork to where it is now...hearing this song really influenced the way i painted..i'm thankful....the song name 'Jiya Jale' which means 'Let life burn'music by A.R. Rahman,from the indian movie 'dil se' which means 'from the heart'directed by Mani Ratnamcheck out the song here :many thanks to my friends : vivek, dharati, dhiraj, sushrut, rohan, swapna, deepak and vikas for their input.cheers people!“After the near-disappearance of visible hermits in the West between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, hermit-priests slowly returned during the early twentieth century, often struggling to obtain diocesan permission to test, then continue living, this difficult vocation.
Even into the late twentieth century, the capacity in the Western Churches to understand and to hand on the Antonian eremitic traditions remained variable, whereas in the Orthodox communions the cultural transmission was continuous from the fourth century…
It was the lives and writings of such people that provided sufficient impetus for the issue to be raised at Vatican II; and, in 1983 the enabling ‘Eremitical Life’ canon (603) was legislated in the Code of Canon Law, under ‘Norms Common to All Institutes of Consecrated Life’.
Those of Christ’s faithful who are called to eremitical living are enabled by it to ‘withdraw further from the world and devote their lives to the praise of God and the salvation of the world through the silence of solitude’.
In “Vita consecrata”, John Paul II wrote:
“It is a source of joy and hope to witness in our time a new flowering of … men and women hermits, belonging to ancient Orders or new Institutes, or being directly dependent on the Bishop, bear[ing] witness to the passing nature of the present age by their inward and outward separation from the world …. Such a life ‘in the desert’ is an invitation to their contemporaries and to the ecclesial community itself never to lose sight of the supreme vocation, which is to be always with the Lord.8
And the 1992 Catechism states:
“Without always professing the three evangelical counsels publicly, hermits ‘devote their life to the praise of God and salvation of the world through a stricter separation from the world, the silence of solitude and assiduous prayer and penance’. They manifest to everyone the interior aspect of the mystery of the Church, that is, personal intimacy with Christ. Hidden from the eyes of men, the life of the hermit is a silent preaching of the Lord, to whom he has surrendered his life simply because he is everything to him.”
The newly enacted canon and explanation in the Catechism, together with affirmation in Vatican documents such as “Vita consecrata”, have authorised diocesan bishops to consecrate canonical diocesan hermits and anchorites, whether lay, diocesan priest or former religious—after rigorous testing of the sense of call, long formation and ecclesial approval of each one’s rule of life.
Before its disruption by the eremitic call, the former life, formation, work and service of these hermits may have been in any of the life paths of laypeople (single or married), priests or religious. As Jesus taught: ‘The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.’ (John 3: 8) So it appears with everyone moved by ‘the spontaneous and surprising increase in solitary vocations’.
There are now all kinds of Roman Catholic hermits, some dependent on their bishop, some members of orders or institutes, others living in a parish, usually in ordinary homes, hidden and unnoticed, faithfully living out their intimacy with Christ for Church and world. Discussing how women, in particular, are re-embracing solitude, Bernadette Flanagan notes:
In the expressions of new monasticism … the eremitical strand is well represented … deeply inspired by the life of the third-century desert hermits, since the anonymity that their desert hermitages provided [is] equally available … in the immensity of the modern city.
The testing of an eremitic vocation includes not only discerning the general qualities emergent or existent in the person being tested and formed towards eremitic consecration, but also noticing how life’s former joys fall away, to be replaced with desires for solitude, simplicity, and inner attending and responding to God. This ‘falling away’ is one sign of a
contemplative solitary vocation. The changes in someone’s inner life as it deepens into God, as well as the person’s outer orientation and behaviour, are tested with a priest, spiritual director or religious community…
For religious (including priests), the call to solitude and deeper prayer may be able to be lived within existing vows and obedience, with the agreement of the community leadership and chapter. If their order or institute is unable to accommodate a solitary vocation within the current expression of its founding charism, the situation may lead to exclaustration
(permission to live outside the community, either retaining or relinquishing vows and obedience). Some former religious have been re-received under canon 603. Religious who are being allowed to embrace solitude are following the formation pathway directed by St Benedict in the fifth century: communitarian formation through monastic living followed by
eremitic living, the path of his ‘second kind of monk’.
For laypeople, discernment may unfold over many years. Their primary formation will have been through secular life; their secondary formation will be into the eremitic vocation, however determined in a diocese. A person with a proven eremitic vocation may ultimately remain in the private domain, with or without vows, or may make simple promises at a
parish Mass. To become a canonical hermit, he or she must be accepted and consecrated at Mass under canon 603 by the local bishop. Or the person may be received, formed and consecrated within the requirements of an ancient or recent religious eremitic order; or, remaining lay, he or she may request and be allowed to live near or in an order or institute,
participating in sacraments and liturgy. Lay hermits and those consecrated under canon 603 invariably have to negotiate and provide their own means of support, shelter and income, however…
The ministries and missions of the worlds’ hermits are rich indeed. The visible signs of hermits’ lives today include the occasional news report about their consecrations, but also web resources and printed materials by and about them. These hermits live as solitaries or in eremitic communities, each in a modern form of Abba/Amma–disciple relationship lived through spiritual accompaniment and direction. They express in their vocation journeys one, usually more, of Anthony’s ‘ways’, not necessarily recognised as such by those inheriting them. We cannot hear the words and the prayer of the hundreds of hidden, silent ones, for few write about prayer and the life of prayer hidden in God….
The consecrated life may experience further changes in its historical forms, but there will be no change in the substance of a choice which finds expression in a radical gift of self for love of the Lord Jesus and, in him, of every member of the human family …. How can we not recall with gratitude to the Spirit the many different forms of consecrated life which he has raised up throughout history and which still exist in the Church today? The choice of total self-giving to God in Christ is in no way incompatible with any human culture or historical situation.
As he has reminded us in this Year of Consecrated Life: ‘Radical evangelical living is not only for religious: it is demanded of everyone.’
From: Carol McDonough “Hermits and the Roman Catholic Church. Recovering an Ancient Vocation” “The Way”, 54/2 (April 2015), 53–69
Available on-line at: http://www.theway.org.uk/back/542McDonough.pdf
Like this: Like Loading... RelatedB.o.b. would like to check and then double check again with you: Is the Earth really flat?
The cities in the background are approx. 16miles apart... where is the curve? please explain this pic.twitter.com/YCJVBdOWX7 — B.o.B (@bobatl) January 25, 2016
Early Sunday night, the rapper and Twitter power user — with more than 2.29M followers — strongly hinted that the earth may be flat as a frikkin' pancake.
B.o.b., whose real name is Bobby Simmons Jr., harnessed the power of some of the Internet's strongest resources — Google Earth screen grabs and some pulls from an unnamed textbook — to state his space case.
have u been to the edge? or is that what your science book told you https://t.co/61qaI5xx5f — B.o.B (@bobatl) January 25, 2016
No matter how high in elevation you are... the horizon is always eye level... sorry cadets... I didn't wanna believe it either. — B.o.B (@bobatl) January 25, 2016
Twitter tried its best to offer guidance and counterarguments, but B.o.b. seemed to have an answer for everything. Users on the social media site tried using both inflammatory comments and good ol' physics to reason with the rapper, but nothing seemed to stick.
y'all be like... "you're not high enough to see the curve...keep going" pic.twitter.com/dzgYpIIao3 — B.o.B (@bobatl) January 25, 2016
It's probably safe to say that B.o.b. is one opinionated guy. Plus, if you lived it, you do tend to believe it.
don't try to back me into the "conspiracy theorist" corner... don't be fooled. I speak from personal experience. — B.o.B (@bobatl) January 22, 2016
Recently, the Strange Clouds singer made enough waves on Twitter to attract the attention of another heavy hitter: Neil deGrasse Tyson. The learned astrophysicist did not hold back from throwing down some factual knowledge. And B.o.b. did not hesitate to fire back either:
@bobatl Polaris is gone by 1.5 deg S. Latitude. You’ve never been south of Earth’s Equator, or if so, you've never looked up. — Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) January 25, 2016
@bobatl Flat Earth is a problem only when people in charge think that way. No law stops you from regressively basking in it. — Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) January 25, 2016
@neiltyson why can't the curvature of the earth be measured anywhere in nature? why does only NASA have photos of the curve? r u a mason? — B.o.B (@bobatl) January 25, 2016
Oh, and one last thing, for science's sake — what's your take on the whole "moonwalk" thing, Bobby?Oh man...words cannot express what happened to me after eating these. The Gummi Bear "Cleanse". If you are someone that can tolerate the sugar substitute, enjoy. If you are like the dozens of people that tried my order, RUN!
First of all, for taste I would rate these a 5. So good. Soft, true-to-taste fruit flavors like the sugar variety...I was a happy camper.
BUT (or should I say BUTT), not long after eating about 20 of these all hell broke loose. I had a gastrointestinal experience like nothing I've ever imagined. Cramps, sweating, bloating beyond my worst nightmare. I've had food poisoning from some bad shellfish and that was almost like a skip in the park compared to what was going on inside me.
Then came the, uh, flatulence. Heavens to Murgatroyd, the sounds, like trumpets calling the demons back to Hell...the stench, like 1,000 rotten corpses vomited. I couldn't stand to stay in one room for fear of succumbing to my own odors.
But wait; there's more. What came out of me felt like someone tried to funnel Niagara Falls through a coffee straw. I swear my sphincters were screaming. It felt like my delicate starfish was a gaping maw projectile vomiting a torrential flood of toxic waste. 100% liquid. Flammable liquid. NAPALM. It was actually a bit humorous (for a nanosecond)as it was just beyond anything I could imagine possible.
AND IT WENT ON FOR HOURS.
I felt violated when it was over, which I think might have been sometime in the early morning of the next day. There was stuff coming out of me that I ate at my wedding in 2005.
I had FIVE POUNDS of these innocent-looking delicious-tasting HELLBEARS so I told a friend about what happened to me, thinking it HAD to be some type of sensitivity I had to the sugar substitute, and in spite of my warnings and graphic descriptions, she decided to take her chances and take them off my hands.
Silly woman. All of the same for her, and a phone call from her while on the toilet (because you kinda end up living in the bathroom for a spell) telling me she really wished she would have listened. I think she was crying.
Her sister was skeptical and suspected that we were exaggerating. She took them to work, since there was still 99% of a 5 pound bag left. She works for a construction company, where there are builders, roofers, house painters, landscapers, etc. Lots of people who generally have limited access to toilets on a given day. I can't imagine where all of those poor men (and women) pooped that day. I keep envisioning men on roofs, crossing their legs and trying to decide if they can make it down the ladder, or if they should just jump.
If you order these, best of luck to you. And please, don't post a video review during the aftershocks.
PS: When I ordered these, the warnings and disclaimers and legalese were NOT posted. I'm not a moron. Also, not sure why so many people assume I'm a man. I am a woman. We poop too. Of course, our poop sparkles and smells like a walk in a meadow of wildflowers. Thanks for all the great comments. I've been enjoying reading them and so glad that the horror show I experienced from snacking on these has at least made some people smile.In the second installment of what will now be a three-part feature to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the 1989 Tour de France, the winner of that race, Greg LeMond, picks up from where he left off in episode one, with the crisis of confidence only partly allayed by an encouraging end to the Giro d'Italia earlier that spring.
LeMond, as we all know, would go on to take the narrowest and most thrilling of Tour victories by eight seconds from French rival and former team-mate Laurent Fignon. Here, the American describes how he did it, for now glossing over the money troubles that dogged him and his team that year, and which will be the main subject matter for part three of LeMond's exclusive account.
"After the Giro I felt better but I still didn’t have any real hopes for the Tour. No hopes, no expectations and no reserve of confidence like I’d had in 1986. All I knew was that my legs were better than they had been for a long time, probably since before my hunting accident in 1987.
I took a week of recovery after the Giro, then did a race in Spain and felt better again. I was like, 'ah, okay…' and started wondering whether I could finish Top 20 and win a stage in the Tour. Then, on stage 5, I won the time trial in Rennes and took the yellow jersey. I thought 'wow!', but I still hadn’t hit a climb yet. I said to myself'maybe Top Ten and a stage…'
The first mountain stage was to Cauterets in the Pyrenees. Miguel Indurain won and I didn’t get dropped. The next day I lost ten seconds and the yellow jersey to Fignon at Superbagnères, but it was another step in the right direction. Top Five and another stage win now didn’t seem unrealistic.
I’d had the jersey after Rennes, then Fignon took it, then I won it back on stage 15, a 39-kilometre time trial. But at that point, two weeks into the Tour, I was just happy being there after two nightmarish years. I also didn’t have a whole lot of help from my team. They did what they could; Eddy Planckaert gave me a wheel on one stage and Johan Lammerts helped me. They gave everything they had, but a lot of the time I was by myself.
I took a few more seconds off Fignon at Briançon, then at Alpe D’Huez I felt great until the last five kilometres, when I ran out of juice. Guimard was in Fignon’s team car, José de Cauwer in mine, and they both knew my mannerisms on the bike by then. They could both see my shoulders bouncing, which for Guimard was a sure sign that I was cracking. He was desperately trying to get up to Fignon in the car but José wouldn’t let him through. They were hitting bumpers, bits of car were dropping off. Eventually Guimard got through and told Fignon he had to attack, but Fignon said he couldn’t.
I look back now and think that I’d have been in trouble if we’d had intercom radios back then. It got to the point where I was really rocking and Guimard was screaming at Laurent that he couldn’t wait another second. Fignon finally attacked and I blew completely. That put Laurent back in the yellow jersey, and I was convinced that my only remaining chance was going to come in the final time trial.
I did some pretty amateurish riding in that Tour. At Superbagnères, instead of just keeping my pace, I tried to follow Fignon, thinking that I could then attack him. Moves like that were symptomatic of my lack of confidence; I was trying to prove that I was stronger than I really was. If you’re feeling bad you have to bluff sometimes.
The day after Alpe d’Huez I suffered horribly. My legs hadn’t recovered at all. But that can happen, and you come back the next day, because your body learns to adapt on a three-week Tour. That’s why I still maintain that what Floyd Landis did at Morzine in 2006 was certainly possible. I don't know what he took, but it wasn’t synthetic testosterone that did that. He’d lost so much time the previous day, and no longer posed a threat, so they let him go. By the time they got organised behind it was too late. His average wattage that day was 380, which isn’t outrageous. I did 380 watts two years ago for six hours over five different climbs. So is it possible? Absolutely.
Anyway, all this to say that I had two bad days in 1989, but on the stage to Aix-Les-Bains I felt great. The problem was that I’d been through this trauma of continually getting dropped in 1988 and early in 1989, and, after the previous two days, I wasn’t confident that I could stay with the group. Somehow, though, I got over a couple of climbs and won the stage in a sprint.
The day |
to happen here and there. It was pretty exciting toward the end to make sure that we could get that second pick and once that was pretty much done, we had a good view of what the path was going to be and who everybody was going to pick.
Everybody did their job but today, once again, it was very exciting in the way that, you know this is my first time, but the way you go about business and try and get all the information that you can just to make sure that you get your picks when you want them.
On when they knew Jack Harrison was going first
Stewart: We knew that probably 10 minutes before, I mean, officially is when it’s said, but we were pretty confident that he was going to go as a No. 1 which made our No. 2 pick very, very good.
Curtin’s take on Keegan Rosenberry
Curtin: Keegan is a guy we’ve always been eye on, a guy I’ve coached since he was 16, a guy whose had a heck of a career at Georgetown, a guy whose stock this week at the combine soared; He did really well and we were pretty confident in talking to everyone in the room that he was going to be a top five guy so we knew we needed to make a move and grab him at the third spot. So, very happy.
If he felt Rosenberry should have been considered a homegrown player
Curtin: Those are things that are out of our control. It’s the past. Sure, it would have made things a lot smoother and easier for us, but again, it’s the past, it’s all behind us and we’re happy to have Keegan wear the badge. And it’s a badge he has wanted to wear since he was 16 years old. So again it’s something he is proud of. You can tell that when you see his family out there with his sisters and his girlfriend and just how much it meant to them. So he is happy to stay home and we made it happen and it’s a great pick for us.
On the calculus of the sixth pick
Curtin: The calculus was that we knew we wouldn’t have Keegan Rosenberry if we didn’t take him third – he was going to be gone. So that was kind of, it made that simple. And Herbers, we get a player that is a proven goal scorer. And in the college level, over the years, that usually translates pretty well to the pro game and Fabian is another guy, who went six, maybe not in the top five like people were expecting but he is a guy we value very much and great attacking player that were excited for.
If they expected Herbers to be there at six
Curtin: As much as there’s secrets and different things going on, and everybody has their little hidden things, we had a pretty good idea that he was going to be there at six and we were able to pull the trigger and get a player that we value very highly. We’re excited to have him on board. Good work ethic. Again, a kid who has a goal scorers mentality so he will have a little chip on his shoulder from maybe slipping to six so we like that and we’re happy.
If the Dutch pedigree factored in Stewart’s evaluation
Stewart: He was in the Dutch youth academy and that’s something you take into consideration, but because he was already known by our scouting here, that did make it a lot easier. I did do some phone calls back to Holland, where they saw him and how he was as a person as a kid growing up. But he is German, he has a great mentality, and I believe all the picks that we had today, and the kids that we have today, that’s what we want to build on. That’s the way they go about their business and they want to get better every single day because that’s a big part of who we want to be and develop these kids to playing a lot of games for us.
If Yaro is viewed as a center back
Stewart: Yeah, that’s why we got him. And because we got Keegan Rosenberry at the same time, it says, that says a lot.
If the three first rounders have a chance to become starters
Stewart: It’s always difficult to say they are going to start on the sixth of March, but we did have some different kinds of categories. There is some great potential there in the players that we have and they could become starters, if that is the 6th of March or if it’s going to be the 1st of July – or whatever it is. But the potential is definitely there with all these players. We were pleasantly surprised with the last pick that we had with [Taylor] Washington too, so that was a need for us at the same time to make sure we had a cover in that position, so we’re pretty happy campers today.
On drafting defenders
Curtin: We knew we needed to strengthen the defense; we have given up too many goals the past two years, so that was a priority. It’s important to stress that the defenders that we drafted all can play with their feet, too. They’re not just big physical, bruising guys. They can all pass out the back and be that first line to start our attacks to start our possession. I think it’s really important to stress that.
It will be a bit of a new style that we are going to have and we are excited to unveil it and these pieces, Washington included – I am glad Earnie mentioned it because he gets a bit forgotten in this – he’s a very strong player that had a great college career and also did very well showing in the combine. We’ve been talking to a lot of people and a lot of people have been very high on him as well. So, a good strong left back and we’re happy with the depth we now have at each spot, we have two at each position and we will have good competition in preseason.
Where Herbers fits into the team
Curtin: He can play as a wide guy I think that’s clear. If you talk to him, we interviewed him obviously and got to know him pretty well and hearing his strengths and maybe things he could improve on. [He] still could be a number nine, as a forward, and be that back-to-goal guy who can hold up the ball. So again, young player, still has some room for growth but at the same time we will see what’s best for him in the wide spot or in the number nine spot. But, an attacking guy.
If there is any more shopping to do at left back
Curtin: No, we’re happy with Fabinho. Fabinho had a very good year last year. We’re happy with where he is at. Of course we want to bring in competition, you want to bring someone in to push him so he is challenged everyday – I think that brings the best out of players. So again, I think Washington will come in and push him, and we will always be open to exploring upgrading our roster. It’s not a finished roster, by any means right now. We are anxious to get to work and we think we have identified some targets, and we will continue to look, and again Fabinho is our starting left back as of right now.
If Maurice Edu will be back at defensive midfielder this year
Stewart: That’s the coach…
Curtin: Listen, we know where we are going to play Maurice, I don’t think its adventitious now to reveal how we are going to line up and play just because, you know, there are still future targets out there that we are looking at and we want to evaluate and be respectful to our own players, too – that they aren’t hearing though a press conference or anything like that. So we will have those discussions with our guys but you guys can do all the speculating.
On Anderson Conceicao’s expecations
Stewart: Yeah we were very happy. It’s been a long while that we have been busy with him because the way we believe we need to build up from the back with a left central defender that has a left foot because you see a lot of time today, they are very hard to get – left central defenders. So this is actually a good thing for us because he has a great left foot, this gives us a little bit more of depth in how we want to attack, start our attack, playing against one forward, two forwards or three forwards. This was an important acquisition for us, so we are very happy with Anderson Conceição and he is going to be an asset for us.chalc3d0ny
The natural world constantly surprises with its weird and wonderful creatures and the wide variety of methods they use to survive and thrive. One of the weirdest, though, may be the beaded lacewing, whose larvae go through a distinct frat boy stage during which they paralyze and even kill their food… with the force of their farts.
Lacewings of the variety Lomamyia latipennis spend their youth as voracious larvae. An adult lacewing lays its eggs in a termite mound, and once they have time to hatch, the emerging larvae are immediately able to locate the termites that are their prey.
After locating a likely victim, the young creature points its rear towards the termite’s face and waves it. There is no noise, and the termite does not back away or appear repulsed as a “vapor-phase toxicant” — otherwise known as a fart — is emitted. However, within three minutes, the termite is stunned into immobility, and the larva can liquefy and munch on it with impunity.
The scientists who performed the observational studies that noted this behavior also recorded that, even if not eaten, the termite dies within about three hours, making these farts truly fatal. The volume of gas expelled appears to be able to knock out up to six enemies at once, with an average size of 2.5 milligrams. That makes each of the prey over three and a half times larger than the tiny larva, as they average only 0.7 milligrams.
Only termites appear to be affected by these poisonous vapors, as scientists tested the larvae’s outgassings against a variety of other small creatures that commonly inhabit termite mounds with no effect. Termites larger than 5 milligrams were stunned rather than dazed and did not feel the full fatal force of the fart.
While scientists don’t know yet why the lacewing larvae’s flatulence is so poisonous to the termites it feasts on yet unnoticed by other creatures in the vicinity, it’s certainly a case of survival of the grossest. Modern Notion rightly laments the fact that no further studies have been conducted on this particular insect, as of 2015, but the field of insect farting is alive and well, with wider surveys suggesting that many insects produce significant amounts of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. Termites beware.KABUL (Reuters) - NATO countries have strong reasons to maintain support for Afghanistan and will respond to U.S. President Trump’s call for more troops and funding, the alliance’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said on Wednesday.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg speaks during an interview in Kabul, Afghanistan September 27, 2017. REUTERS/Mohammad Ismail
“It is in the interest of Europe, of NATO allies to help stabilize Afghanistan,” Stoltenberg said during a visit to Kabul with U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, which was overshadowed by a militant attack on Kabul airport.
Trump made clear last month that he expected NATO to step up its contribution in Afghanistan when he announced a tougher new strategy against the Taliban and other militant forces. However the political reaction in Europe has been mixed with little public appetite for more involvement.
In Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel is working to form a government after last weekend’s election, her conservative party backs the mission. But senior figures from her two likely coalition partners, the liberal Free Democrats and environmental Greens, have expressed scepticism.
In Italy, the anti-establishment 5-Star party, riding high in opinion polls ahead of elections early next year, has said it would pull Italy’s force of more than 1,000 troops out.
“Germany has been a strong supporter of the NATO mission in Afghanistan for many many years,” Stoltenberg said. “Germany is the lead nation in the north (of Afghanistan) and I’m absolutely certain that Germany will continue to provide support.”
Stoltenberg said NATO assistance was aimed at ensuring Afghanistan did not become “a safe haven for international terrorism.” But he reiterated that NATO troops would not be returning to the combat role they ended in 2014 and would continue training and advising Afghan forces as well as providing equipment and funding.
“We are not going back to the big combat operations we had before. It will still be a non-combat operation.”
Stoltenberg said Afghan forces, which have suffered thousands of casualties fighting the insurgency, had been “managing a very difficult situation”.
But they had prevented the Taliban from gaining control of any major provincial centers and would be boosted by plans to strengthen the Afghan Air Force and Special Forces units.
“There will be setbacks but if we look at what we have achieved so far, we have been able to build a strong Afghan national security force and we’ll build it even stronger.”There is good hope! It IS in the cards for all dogs to get back to enjoying life again with their family after a disc episode. Make sure you are giving the gift your dog needs right now with STRICT rest. Tell your pup all is going to be ok, because it will be! Disc disease is not a death sentence. Don't make any decisions you cannot reverse! MORE
#1
100% STRICT rest 24/7 Make sure you have protected your dog's spinal cord with limited movement. Roll up a blanket to snug your dog in the crate for vehical transport to vet. At potty times just the very fewest of footsteps to get the job done then carry again back to the recovery suite.
M ORE #2
Get to a vet ASAP The right dia gnosis and the right medications just as soon as possible means protection for the spinal cord! The sooner medications are on board the sooner healing can get underway, pain be brought under control and deterioration of neuro functions be avoided.
M ORE
Disclaimer:
This information is presented for educational purposes and as a resource for the Dachshund community. The coordinators are not veterinarians or health care professionals. Nothing herein should be interpreted as medical advice and all should contact their pet care professionals for advice. The coordinators are not responsible for the substance and content contained herein and do not advocate any particular product, item or position contained herein.
c2018 Linda Stowe, founder of dodgerslist.com and www.facebook.com/Dodgerslist - web design by Paula Milner
This information is presented for educational purposes and as a resource for the Dachshund community. The coordinators are not veterinarians or health care professionals. Nothing herein should be interpreted as medical advice and all should contact their pet care professionals for advice. The coordinators are not responsible for the substance and content contained herein and do not advocate any particular product, item or position contained herein.c2018 Linda Stowe, founder of dodgerslist.com and www.facebook.com/Dodgerslist - web design by Paula MilnerI just want to put my hat in the ring for secretary of state in the McCain administration. I'm married. A family man. Have a daughter. Believe in God. Love baseball, ice cream, and I've been active in my daughter's car pool for over ten years. I love how Mrs. McCain so articulated Sarah's Palin's qualifications by saying that she knows national security because she lives so close to Russia. Good point.
I too know national security having visited Russia twice -- once to St. Petersburg as part of our extremely amorous honeymoon and another time to Moscow where I was writing an article on the World's Best Borsht. I have executive experience having overseen my neighborhood's annual block party for the past sixteen years -- dealing in areas where some of my neighbors have been unruly and uncooperative. On my street, I always have opted for diplomacy, rather than take out my gun and force some of my neighbors to participate. There was one incident and that was years ago -- where I got ahead of myself, and punched out a neighbor who was coming on to my wife. That was stupid. I should have shot his ass.Preorders have gone live and players of The Lord of the Rings Online will be happy they made their preorders come this fall, when Turbine’s latest LotRO expansion, Riders of Rohan launches.
RoR (which, by the way, is an exceedingly cool acronym, especially if you do it in your best lion voice) is packed to the gills with a shocking amount of new content and, just as cool, a full new game mechanic for players to dive into. That new element is, of course, mounted combat, something no MMO has adequately pulled off due to the realities of network latency and difficulties of paired animation. No longer is this the case.
Story and Mounted Combat in The Lord of the Rings Online
The story of The Lord of the Rings will further progress right up to the point where the Fellowship separates. During this time the players will find their way into Rohan, meet the villagers, and progress through a quest line which will offer them an all-new mount in the form of a war steed which will be able to be used for mounted combat.
Since mounted combat takes a lot of space, so it's only available in certain areas (the steed itself can be used as a travel mount in other areas as well). When engaging in one of the game’s many areas that allows for this style of combat, mounts have their own set of combat skills which replace the standard combat hotbar. These skills vary depending on what the trait tree the player used to spec their steed, but they generally include things like kicks and bites. Best of all the character riding the horse will also retain his or her iconic abilities (or spells) so not all combat from the seat of a steed will play the same.
Trait trees will have three main categories split as offensive traits, defensive traits, and support traits. The final version of these traits was not available during our play session, but needless to say it will allow for some very specific customization of the mount, which levels alongside the player.
Keeping a mount in motion while trying to string together combat abilities may sound a little too challenging, and it would be had not Turbine realized the difficulty ahead of time. Instead of relying on players to be able to grow a third hand, the mounts come pre-equipped with abilities that will charge the steed directly toward the targeted enemy. This will free up the player to prepare their attack and strike hard and true at the precise moment that will inflict the most damage. The damage is not only calculated from the type of ability that was used but also by the speed of the horse; so the faster you ride into your opponent, the more damage you’ll do.
The depth and awesome factor of working mounted combat alone would be enough to put The Lord of the Rings Online: Riders of Rohan on our nominee list for Best Expansion of E3, but Turbine went and threw in a ton of other goodies to look forward to, making the expansion a very serious contender.
Keeping MMOGs current is a challenge all developers face when a game continues to pull in players year after year. With RoR, Turbine is combating their MMO wrinkles by adding things like volumetric lighting, flora displacement (that’s when grass goes all “whoosh” as you run through it), and new technology for trees which allows lightning-quick rendering of trees which appear life-like. These are components that add that little bit extra to a game to pull gamers in to a more immersive world.
LOTRO Does Dailies
Turbine also showed us their version of daily quests, which will come down the pike after RoR launch. During their travels, players will come across the town of Snowborn, which has been burned to the ground. The daily quest will have players rebuilding the city.
At first glance the premise may sound a little old-hat, but the implementation is anything but. Every day as players perform these quests they will see a little bit of the town rebuilt which will happen dynamically right in front of them in a phasing-sort of concept. That is to say that while the space will still be shared between all players, what each player actually sees on screen may differ greatly. The downside to this sort of daily quest system is that eventually the town will be fully rebuilt and the player will no longer have the daily quest to do. But that will take some time, and appropriately reward participants.
Riders of Rohan is approximately twice the size of the Moria expansion, in terms of new geography, and will be available September 5th to all players who purchase it. Preorders have been available since June 5, and preordering will instantly grant some of the goodies mentioned here.The Lockheed P-2 Neptune (designated P2V by the United States Navy prior to September 1962) was a maritime patrol and anti-submarine warfare (ASW) aircraft. It was developed for the US Navy by Lockheed to replace the Lockheed PV-1 Ventura and PV-2 Harpoon, and was replaced in turn by the Lockheed P-3 Orion. Designed as a land-based aircraft, the Neptune never made a carrier landing, but a small number were converted and deployed as carrier-launched, stop-gap nuclear bombers that would have to land on shore or ditch. The type was successful in export, and saw service with several armed forces.
Design and development [ edit ]
XP2V-1 prototype in 1945
Development of a new land-based patrol bomber began early in World War II, with design work starting at Lockheed's Vega subsidiary as a private venture on 6 December 1941.[1] At first, the new design was considered a low priority compared to other aircraft in development at the time, with Vega also developing and producing the PV-2 Harpoon patrol bomber. On 19 February 1943, the U.S. Navy signed a letter of intent for two prototype XP2Vs, which was confirmed by a formal contract on 4 April 1944 with a further 15 aircraft being ordered 10 days later.[2] It was not until 1944 that the program went into full swing.[3] A major factor in the design was ease of manufacture and maintenance, and this may have been a major factor in the type's long life and worldwide success. The first aircraft flew in May 1945. Production began in 1946, and the aircraft was accepted into service in 1947. Potential use as a bomber led to successful launches from aircraft carriers.[4]
Beginning with the P2V-5F model, the Neptune became one of the first operational aircraft fitted with both piston and jet engines. The Convair B-36, several Boeing C-97 Stratofreighter, Fairchild C-123 Provider, and Avro Shackleton aircraft were also so equipped. To save weight and complexity of two separate fuel systems, the Westinghouse J34 jet engines on P2Vs burned the 115–145 Avgas fuel of the piston engines, instead of jet fuel. The jet pods were fitted with intake doors that remained closed when the J-34s were not running. This prevented windmilling, allowing for economical piston-engine-only long-endurance search and patrol operations. In normal US Navy operations, the jet engines were run at full power (97%) to assure takeoff, then shut down upon reaching a safe altitude. The jets were also started and kept running at flight idle during low-altitude (500-foot (150 m) during the day and 1,000-foot (300 m) at night) anti-submarine and/or anti-shipping operations as a safety measure should one of the radials develop problems.
Normal crew access was via a ladder on the aft bulkhead of the nosewheel well to a hatch on the left side of the wheel well, then forward to the observer nose, or up through another hatch to the main deck. There was also a hatch in the floor of the aft fuselage, near the sonobuoy chutes.
Operational history [ edit ]
Early Cold War [ edit ]
Prior to the introduction of the P-3 Orion in the mid-1960s, the Neptune was the primary U.S. land-based anti-submarine patrol aircraft, intended to be operated as the hunter of a '"Hunter-Killer" group, with destroyers employed as killers. Several features aided the P-2 in its hunter role:
Sonobuoys could be launched from a station in the aft portion of the fuselage and monitored by radio
Some models were equipped with "pointable" twin.50 caliber machine guns in the nose, but most had a forward observation bubble with an observer seat, a feature often seen in images.
The AN/ASQ-8 Magnetic Anomaly Detector was fitted in an extended tail, producing a paper chart. Unmarked charts were not classified, but those with annotations were classified as secret.
A belly-mounted AN/APS-20 surface-search radar enabled detection of surfaced and snorkeling submarines at considerable distances.
As the P-2 was replaced in the US Navy by the P-3A Orion in active Fleet squadrons in the early and mid-1960s, the P-2 continued to remain operational in the Naval Air Reserve through the mid-1970s, primarily in its SP-2H version. As active Fleet squadrons transitioned to the P-3B and P-3C in the mid- and late-1960s and early 1970s, the Naval Air Reserve P-2s were eventually replaced by P-3As and P-3Bs and the P-2 exited active U.S. naval service. VP-23 was the last active duty patrol squadron to operate the SP-2H, retiring its last Neptune on 20 February 1970,[5] while the last Naval Reserve patrol squadron to operate the Neptune, VP-94, retired its last SP-2H in 1978.
Nuclear bomber [ edit ]
At the end of World War II, the US Navy felt the need to acquire a nuclear strike capability to maintain its political influence. In the short term, carrier-based aircraft were the best solution. The large Fat Man nuclear munitions at that time were bulky and required a very large aircraft to carry them. The US Navy Bureau of Ordnance built 25 outdated but more compact Little Boy nuclear bomb designs to be used in the smaller bomb bay of the P2V Neptune, there was enough fissionable material available by 1948 to build ten complete uranium projectiles and targets, although there were only enough initiators to complete six..[7] The U.S. Navy improvised a carrier-based nuclear strike aircraft by modifying the P2V Neptune for carrier takeoff using jet assisted takeoff (JATO) rocket boosters, with initial takeoff tests in 1948. However, the Neptune could not land on a carrier, therefore the crew had to either make their way to a friendly land base after a strike, or ditch in the sea near a U.S. Navy vessel. It was replaced in this emergency role by the North American AJ Savage, the first nuclear strike aircraft that was fully capable of carrier launch and recovery operations; it was also short-lived in that role as the US Navy was adopting fully jet powered nuclear strike aircraft.[8]
Covert operations P2V-7U/RB-69A variants [ edit ]
Side view of RB-69A (S/N 54-4037), the first converted P2V-7U (BuNo 135612)
In 1954 under Project Cherry, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) obtained five newly built P2V-7 and converted these into P2V-7U/RB-69A variants by Lockheed's Skunk Works at Hangar B5 in Burbank, California, for the CIA's own private fleet of covert ELINT/ferret aircraft. Later, to make up for P2V-7U/RB-69A operational losses, the CIA obtained and converted two existing US Navy P2V-7s, one in September 1962, and one in December 1964 to P2V-7U/RB-69A Phase VI standard, and also acquired an older P2V-5 from the US Navy as a training aircraft in 1963. Test flights were made by lead aircraft at Edwards AFB from 1955 to 1956, all the aircraft painted with dark sea blue color but with USAF markings. In 1957 one P2V-7U was sent to Eglin AFB for testing aircraft performance at low level and under adverse conditions.
The initial two aircraft were sent to Europe, based at Wiesbaden, West Germany, but were later withdrawn in 1959 when the CIA reduced its covert aircraft assets in Europe. The CIA sent the other two P2V-7U/RB-69As to Hsinchu Air Base, Taiwan, where by December 1957, they were given to a "Black Op" unit, the 34th Squadron, better known as the Black Bat Squadron, of the Republic of China Air Force (|ROCAF/Taiwan); these were painted in ROCAF/Taiwan markings. The ROCAF/Taiwan P2V-7U/RB-69A's mission was to conduct low-level penetration flights into mainland China to conduct ELINT/ferret missions including mapping out China's air defense networks, inserting agents via airdrop, and dropping leaflets and supplies. The agreement for plausible deniability between US and Republic of China (ROC) governments meant the RB-69A would be manned by ROCAF/Taiwan crew while conducting operational missions, but would be manned by CIA crew when ferrying RB-69A out of Taiwan or other operational area to US.[citation needed]
The P2V-7U/RB-69A flew with ROCAF/Taiwan Black Bat Squadron over China from 1957 to November 1966. All five original aircraft (two crashed in South Korea, three shot down over China) were lost with all hands on board. In January 1967, two remaining RB-69As flew back to NAS Alameda, California, and were converted back to regular US Navy P2V-7/SP-2H ASW aircraft configurations.[9][10] Most of the 34th Squadron's Black Op missions remain classified by the CIA—though a CIA internal draft history, Low-Level Technical Reconnaissance over Mainland China (1955–66), reference CSHP-2.348, written in 1972 that covers CIA/ROCAF/Taiwan 34th Squadron's Black Op missions is known to exist. The CIA does not plan to declassify it until after 2022.[11]
Vietnam War [ edit ]
OP-2E Neptune BuNo 131478, formerly of VO-67, in AMARC storage at Davis-Monthan AFB, c. 1971. The camouflage is green for low level operations over Vietnam.
During the Vietnam War, the Neptune was used by the US Navy as a gunship, an overland reconnaissance and sensor deployment aircraft, and in its traditional role as a maritime patrol aircraft. The Neptune was also utilized by the US Army's 1st Radio Research Company (Aviation), call sign "Crazy Cat", based at Cam Ranh Air Base in South Vietnam, as an electronic "ferret" aircraft intercepting low-powered tactical voice and morse code radio signals.[12] The US Army operated the P-2 from 1967[12] until 1972, flying 42,500 hours with no accidents.[13] Observation Squadron 67 (VO-67), call sign "Lindy", was the only P-2 Neptune aircraft squadron to ever receive the Presidential Unit Citation,[citation needed] flying Igloo White missions sowing seismic and acoustic sensors over the Ho Chi Minh Trail.[14] VO-67 lost three OP-2E aircraft and 20 aircrew to ground fire during its secret missions into Laos and Vietnam in 1967–68. The Republic of China Air Force (ROCAF) secret 34th Black Bat Squadron's RB-69A/P2V-7U ELINT/SIGINT aircraft flew a low level electronic reconnaissance from Da Nang Air Base, flying over Thanh Hóa Province on 20 August 1963 to investigate an air resupply drop zone that turned out to be a trap for a ROCAF C-123B airdrop mission 10 days earlier due to the air-inserted agents having been captured and turned. Next year, an air defense radar mapping mission was also flown by 34th Squadron's RB-69A/P2V-7U aircraft into North Vietnam and Laos on the night of 16 March 1964. The RB-69A took off from Da Nang, flew up the Gulf of Tonkin before coasting in near Haiphong, then flew down North Vietnam and the Laos border. The mission was requested by SOG for helping plan the insert or resupply of agents. Seven AAA sites, 14 early warning radar sites and two GCI radar signals were detected.[11]
Falklands War [ edit ]
Sheffield The Argentine Navy SP-2H that tracked HMS
The Argentine Naval Aviation had received at least 16 Neptunes of different variants since 1958 including eight former RAF examples for use in the Escuadrilla Aeronaval de Exploración (Naval exploration squadron). They were intensively used in 1978 during the Operation Soberania against Chile including over the Pacific Ocean.[15]
During the Falklands War (Spanish: Guerra de las Malvinas) in 1982, the last two airframes in service (2-P-111 and 2-P-112) played a key role of reconnaissance and aiding Dassault Super Étendards, particularly on 4 May attack against HMS Sheffield. The lack of spare parts, caused by the US having enacted an arms embargo in 1977 due to the Dirty War, led to the type being retired before the end of the war; Argentine Air Force Lockheed C-130 Hercules took over the task of searching for targets for strike aircraft.[citation needed]
Other military operators [ edit ]
The Canadian version of the Lockheed Neptune (P2V7) served as an anti-submarine, anti-shipping and maritime reconnaissance aircraft in the RCAF Maritime Air Command from 1955, replacing the Avro Lancaster maritime aircraft. The Canadian P2V7 was fitted with piston engines initially, though, in 1959, the Neptunes had two underwing Westinghouse J34 jet engine pods retrofitted, similar to those fitted to US Navy variants. Armament included two torpedoes, mines, depth charges, bombs carried internally plus unguided rockets mounted externally underwing. A total of 25 Neptunes served with nos. 404, 405 and 407 squadrons until 1960. Upon unification of the Canadian Forces in 1968, the Neptune was retired and retroactively re-designated the CP122, The RCAF Neptune was replaced by the Canadair CP-107 Argus in the same year.[16]
With the founding of NATO in 1949 and the resulting additional maritime commitments it entailed for Britain, The Royal Air Force Coastal Command operated 52 P2V-5s, designated Neptune MR.1s as a stop-gap modern maritime patrol aircraft until sufficient numbers of the Avro Shackleton could enter service.[17] The Neptunes were used from between 1952[18] and March 1957,[19] being used for Airborne Early Warning experiments as well as for maritime patrol.[20]
In Australia, the Netherlands, and the US Navy, its tasks were taken over by the larger and more capable P-3 Orion, and by the 1970s, it was in use only by patrol squadrons in the US Naval Reserve and the Dutch Navy.[citation needed] The US Naval Reserve retired its last Neptunes in 1978, those aircraft also having been replaced by the P-3 Orion. By the 1980s, the Neptune had fallen out of military use in most purchasing nations, replaced by newer aircraft.
Neptune Aviation Services' P-2V Neptune drops Phos-Chek on the 2007 WSA Complex fire in Oregon.
In Japan, the Neptune was license-built from 1966 by Kawasaki as the P-2J, with the piston engines replaced by IHI-built T64 turboprops. Kawasaki continued their manufacture much later than Lockheed did; the P-2J remained in service until 1984.
Civilian firefighting [ edit ]
P-2/P2Vs have been employed in aerial firefighting roles by operators such as Minden Air Corp and Neptune Aviation Services. The fire fighters can carry 2,080 gal (7,874 l) of retardant and have a service life of 15,000 hours. Neptune proposes to replace them with British Aerospace 146 aircraft, which have an estimated service life of 80,000 hours and carry upwards of 3,000 gallons of retardant.[21]
"The Truculent Turtle" [ edit ]
The third production P2V-1 was chosen for a record-setting mission, ostensibly to test crew endurance and long-range navigation but also for publicity purposes: to display the capabilities of the US Navy's latest patrol bomber. Its nickname was The Turtle, which was painted on the aircraft's nose (along with a cartoon of a turtle smoking a pipe pedaling a device attached to a propeller). However, in press releases immediately before the flight, the US Navy referred to it as "The Truculent Turtle".[22]
P2V-1 "The Turtle" in 1946
Loaded with fuel in extra tanks fitted in practically every spare space in the aircraft, "The Turtle" set out from Perth, Australia to the United States. With a crew of four (and a nine-month-old gray kangaroo, a gift from Australia for the National Zoo in Washington, D.C.) the aircraft set off on 9 September 1946, with a RATO (rocket-assisted takeoff). 2 1/2 days (55h, 18m) later, "The Turtle" touched down in Columbus, Ohio, 11,236.6 miles (18,083.6 kilometres) from its starting point. It was the longest un-refueled flight made to that point beating the unofficial record held by the Japanese who had made a 10,212 miles (16,435 kilometres) flight in a Tachikawa Ki-77. This would stand as the absolute unrefueled distance record until 1962 (beaten by a USAF Boeing B-52 Stratofortress), and would remain as a piston-engined record until 1986 when Dick Rutan's Voyager would break it in the process of circumnavigating the globe. "The Turtle" is preserved at the National Museum of Naval Aviation at NAS Pensacola.
Variants [ edit |
85 NCT01081314 Completed Treating PTSD in Patients With Borderline Personality Disorder Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic
, Post-Traumatic Borderline Personality Disorder
Suicide
Self-Injurious Behavior Behavioral: Dialectical Behavior Therapy
Behavioral: PTSD Protocol Interventional
Phase 1
Phase 2 University of Washington
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Other / NIH Allocation: Randomized
Intervention Model: Parallel Assignment
Masking: Single (Outcomes Assessor)
Primary Purpose: Treatment PTSD Symptom Scale - Interview
Suicide Attempt Self-Injury Interview
Treatment History Interview
(and 3 more...) 39 Female 18 Years to 60 Years (Adult) NCT01081314 36517-C
R34MH082143 August 2009 May 2013 May 2013 March 5, 2010 November 23, 2015 Behavioral Research and Therapy Clinics, University of Washington
Seattle, Washington, United States
86 NCT01683136 Unknown † Evaluation of the HBDL Coil Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) Device - Feasibility Study for the Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder Borderline Personality Disorder Device: HBDL-coil Repetitive Deep Transcranial magnetic stimulation (rdTMS) Interventional
Not Applicable Shalvata Mental Health Center Other Intervention Model: Single Group Assignment
Masking: None (Open Label)
Primary Purpose: Treatment Change from Baseline in ZAN-BPD 20 All 18 Years to 60 Years (Adult) NCT01683136 SHA-09-11 September 2012 March 2014 September 11, 2012 September 11, 2012 Shalvata Mental Health Center
Hod Hasharon,, Israel
87 NCT02755181 Completed fMRI in Impulsivity Impulse Control Disorders
Borderline Personality Disorder Behavioral: Experimental Observational
Boehringer Ingelheim Industry Observational Model: Cohort
Time Perspective: Prospective Stability in scores measured as change from baseline to follow-up visit at 4 (+/-1) weeks for Affective Faces Task (AFT) fMRI response
Stability in scores measured as change from baseline to follow-up visit at 4 (+/-1) weeks for Monetary Incentive Delay (MID) fMRI task response
Stability in scores measured as change from baseline to follow-up visit at 4 (+/-1) weeks for resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) activity
(and 12 more...) 48 All 18 Years to 50 Years (Adult) NCT02755181 352.2067 July 22, 2016 May 30, 2018 May 30, 2018 April 28, 2016 August 29, 2018 Virginia Commonwealth University
Richmond, Virginia, United States
88 NCT02370316 Active, not recruiting Biomarkers of Change in BPD After Metacognitive Interpersonal Therapy-standard Approach Borderline Personality Disorder Behavioral: Metacognitive Interpersonal Therapy (MIT-SA)
Behavioral: Clinical Structured Treatment Interventional
Not Applicable IRCCS Centro San Giovanni di Dio Fatebenefratelli Other Allocation: Randomized
Intervention Model: Parallel Assignment
Masking: Single (Outcomes Assessor)
Primary Purpose: Treatment Change in Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS)
changes in metacognitive abilities (assessed with the Metacognition Assessment Interview)
Change from Baseline in activation in the amygdala at 12 months 80 All 18 Years to 45 Years (Adult) NCT02370316 GR-2011-02351347 CLIMAMITHE December 2015 November 2018 November 2018 February 24, 2015 August 10, 2018 Irccs Centre San Giovanni di Dio - Fatebenefratelli
Brescia, Italy
89 NCT01904227 Unknown † Intensified, Inpatient Adaptation of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) Borderline Personality Disorder Behavioral: standard outpatient DBT
Behavioral: Inpatient Adaptation of DBT Interventional
Not Applicable Rivierduinen, Centre for Personality disorders Jelgersma
Jelgersma Erasmus Medical Center
Rivierduinen, Centre for Personality disorders Jelgersma Other Allocation: Randomized
Intervention Model: Parallel Assignment
Masking: None (Open Label)
Primary Purpose: Treatment assessing change in number of suicide attempts/self-harming acts
assessing change in the severity of borderline symptomatology 150 All 18 Years to 40 Years (Adult) NCT01904227 Rivierduinen 2012 REDBT February 2012 August 2014 April 2015 July 22, 2013 November 11, 2014 LMC van den Bosch
Oegstgeest, Netherlands
90 NCT01512602 Completed Efficacy of Dialectical Behavior Therapy Versus CAMS-informed Supportive Psychotherapy on Self Harming Behavior Borderline Personality Disorder
Suicide Behavioral: DBT
Behavioral: CAMS Interventional
Not Applicable Mental Health Services in the Capital Region, Denmark
Lundbeck Foundation
University of Copenhagen Other Allocation: Randomized
Intervention Model: Parallel Assignment
Masking: Double (Investigator, Outcomes Assessor)
Primary Purpose: Treatment Number of repeated self-harming acts including suicide attempts (change in number of self-harming acts).
Depressive symptoms
Impulsivity
(and 7 more...) 108 All 18 Years to 65 Years (Adult, Older Adult) NCT01512602 RHP-DiaS-002 DiaS January 2012 July 2014 July 2014 January 19, 2012 April 28, 2015 Mental Health Services, Research Unit, Bispebjerg
Copenhagen NV., Denmark
91 NCT00539188 Terminated
Has Results N-Acetylcysteine in Adjunct to DBT for the Treatment of Self-Injurious Behavior in BPD Borderline Personality Disorder
Self-Injurious Behavior Drug: N-Acetylcysteine
Drug: placebo Interventional
Phase 2 Yale University Other Allocation: Randomized
Intervention Model: Parallel Assignment
Masking: Quadruple (Participant, Care Provider, Investigator, Outcomes Assessor)
Primary Purpose: Treatment Self-Harm Inventory (SHI) Score at 6 Weeks
Self-Harm Inventory (SHI) Score at Baseline
Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HAM-D) at 6 Weeks
Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HAM-D) at Baseline 6 All 18 Years to 65 Years (Adult, Older Adult) NCT00539188 YOCD-3 September 2007 November 2010 November 2010 October 4, 2007 April 1, 2013 March 6, 2013 Yale OCD Research Clinic
New Haven, Connecticut, United States
92 NCT00183651 Completed Treatment of Suicidal Women With Borderline Personality Disorder Borderline Personality Disorder
Suicide Behavioral: Standard dialectical behavior therapy (SDBT)
Behavioral: Individual DBT with no DBT group sessions (DBT-I)
Behavioral: Group Skills DBT with no DBT individual sessions (DBT-S) Interventional
Phase 2 University of Washington
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Other / NIH Allocation: Randomized
Intervention Model: Parallel Assignment
Masking: Single (Outcomes Assessor)
Primary Purpose: Treatment Suicidal thoughts or attempts
Coping skills 99 Female 18 Years to 60 Years (Adult) NCT00183651 R01MH034486 April 2004 September 2008 June 2010 September 16, 2005 February 2, 2012 University of Washington, Department of Psychology, Behavior Research and Therapy Clinics
Seattle, Washington, United States
93 NCT02387736 Active, not recruiting DBT for Chronically Self-harming Individuals With BPD: Evaluating the Clinical &Cost Effectiveness of a 6 mo. Treatment Borderline Personality Disorder Behavioral: Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (6 months)
Behavioral: Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (12 months) Interventional
Not Applicable Centre for Addiction and Mental Health
Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR)
Simon Fraser University Other Allocation: Randomized
Intervention Model: Parallel Assignment
Masking: Single (Outcomes Assessor)
Primary Purpose: Treatment Change in frequency and severity of suicide and self-harm behaviours over time as measured by the Suicide Attempt Self-Injury Interview (SASII)
Changes in health care use as measured by the Treatment History Interview-2 (THI-2)
Change in general functioning as measured by the Euroqol-5D
(and 6 more...) 240 All 18 Years to 65 Years (Adult, Older Adult) NCT02387736 026/2014 FASTER-DBT February 2015 July 2019 July 2019 March 13, 2015 February 8, 2018 Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada
Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada Center for Addiction and Mental Health
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
94 NCT03191565 Enrolling by invitation Using Smartphones for Selfmonitoring of Skill-use i Dialectical Behavior Therapy Borderline Personality Disorder
Emotional Instability
Skill, Coping Other: Paper diary sheet
Device: Monsenso DBT-app and IT monitoring program Interventional
Not Applicable Region of Southern Denmark
University of Southern Denmark
Innovation Fund Denmark
(and 3 more...) Other Allocation: Randomized
Intervention Model: Parallel Assignment
Masking: None (Open Label)
Primary Purpose: Device Feasibility Days/skill
Borderline symptoms
symptoms Ability to emotionally regulate
Ratio of positive and negative emotion 20 All 18 Years and older (Adult, Older Adult) NCT03191565 SDUSF-20216-56-(556) mDIARY August 1, 2017 August 30, 2019 August 30, 2019 June 19, 2017 April 20, 2018 Glostrup DAT team. Psykiatrisk Ambulatorium
Copenhagen, Brøndby, Denmark
Copenhagen, Brøndby, Denmark Haderslev DAT team
Haderslev, Denmark
Haderslev, Denmark Silkeborg DAT team, Psykiatriens Hus
Silkeborg, Denmark
Silkeborg, Denmark (and 2 more...)
95 NCT02203708 Completed Supportive Program for Mother With BPD Parent-child Problem
Borderline Personality Disorder Other: Supportive Program for Mother with BPD (SuPMother-B). Interventional
Not Applicable University Hospital, Toulouse Other Allocation: Randomized
Intervention Model: Parallel Assignment
Masking: Single (Outcomes Assessor)
Primary Purpose: Prevention Difference between the experimental and control groups on scores on the assessment scale withdrawal (Alarm Distress Baby (ADBB)).
Brunet-Lezine Scale
Borderline Personality Disorder Severity Index (BPDSI)
Severity Index (BPDSI) (and 5 more...) 10 All 18 Years and older (Adult, Older Adult) NCT02203708 11 199 08
Interregional PHRC 2011 PAM-B July 2012 May 2014 July 2014 July 30, 2014 July 30, 2014 Service de psychiatrie de l'enfant et de l'adolescent - Hôpital La Grave - centre Hospitalier de Toulouse
Toulouse, France
96 NCT03166579 Completed Effectiveness Evaluation of 'The Endeavour Programme' Personality Disorder, Borderline Behavioral: Dialectical Behaviour Therapy Interventional
Not Applicable Health Service Executive, Ireland Other Intervention Model: Single Group Assignment
Masking: None (Open Label)
Primary Purpose: Treatment Borderline Symptoms
Symptoms Suicidal ideation
Hopelessness
(and 3 more...) 71 All 18 Years and older (Adult, Older Adult) NCT03166579 NOSP July 2010 August 2016 August 2016 May 25, 2017 May 25, 2017
97 NCT02522143 Withdrawn College Students Who Self-Harm Borderline Personality Disorder
Suicide Behavioral: Informational sessions describing BPD characteristics
Behavioral: Condensed-DBT treatment intervention Interventional
Not Applicable University of Minnesota - Clinical and Translational Science Institute Other Allocation: Randomized
Intervention Model: Parallel Assignment
Masking: Single (Participant)
Primary Purpose: Treatment Change in BPD ( Borderline Personality Disorder ) behaviors
) behaviors Change in reported psychiatric symptoms,
Diminished emergency room visits 0 All 18 Years to 27 Years (Adult) NCT02522143 1310M45125 February 2014 December 2014 December 2014 August 13, 2015 June 20, 2017 CTSI
Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
98 NCT01719731 Completed Psychoeducation of Borderline Patients Borderline Personality Disorder Behavioral: Education
Behavioral: Non-Education Interventional
Not Applicable Mclean Hospital Other Allocation: Randomized
Intervention Model: Parallel Assignment
Masking: None (Open Label)
Primary Purpose: Treatment Zanarini Rating Scale for Borderline Personality Disorder
Borderline Evaluation of Severity over Time 80 Female 18 Years to 30 Years (Adult) NCT01719731 1R34MH095818 July 2013 April 2015 April 2015 November 1, 2012 September 25, 2015 McLean Hospital
Belmont, Massachusetts, United States
99 NCT03123198 Recruiting Dialectical Behavior Therapy Rutgers University Research Program Borderline Personality Disorder Behavioral: Dialectical Behavior Therapy Interventional
Not Applicable Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey Other Intervention Model: Single Group Assignment
Masking: None (Open Label)
Primary Purpose: Treatment Self-Injurious Thoughts and Behaviors Interview
Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-5
Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale
(and 2 more...) 100 All 18 Years and older (Adult, Older Adult) NCT03123198 10-714 DBT-RU March 2010 March 2025 December 2025 April 21, 2017 August 28, 2018 Rutgers University
Piscataway, New Jersey, United StatesA 24-year-old man who was struck by a vehicle on a native community northeast of Chatham was still fighting for his life in a London hospital Tuesday.
Chatam-Kent OPP say a Chrysler 300 turning onto Centre Street on the Moraviantown First Nation collided with three pedestrians walking down the road Saturday around 1:40 a.m.
Pedestrian Bailey Jacobs, 16, died at the scene.
A man, 24, was taken to London Health Sciences Centre where he was in critical condition Tuesday.
A 17-year-old female was treated and released from hospital.
The driver of the car, a 21-year-old Moraviantown man, wasn’t injured.
“He was detained and then he was released,” said OPP Const. Jay Denorer, adding the crash remains under investigation.
Chatham-Kent OPP are assisting Delaware Nation police with the investigation.
Moraviantown, 35 kilometres east of Chatham, has a population of 404, according to 2011 census figures from Statistics Canada.
Jacobs lived in Moraviantown but attended nearby Ridgetown District secondary school, according to her Facebook profile.
A Lambton-Kent District school board spokesperson declined comment Tuesday.
A visitation for Jacobs will be held Thursday at the Delaware Nation Community Centre. Her funeral is Friday at the same location.
dcarruthers@postmedia.com
twitter.com/DaleatLFPressYoga has become a fitness buzzword; now synonymous with gym goers
seeking a slim physique, toned arms or that need a ‘day off from my weight
routine’. Unfortunately, what becomes lost is the true meaning of yoga: the
union between the mind, body and spirit. The physical practice is just one
element of yoga, and it can become easy to get swept up in the fitness yoga
revolution that promises a Jennifer Aniston body. Taking time to step back
from the physical asanas of your practice and connect to your yoga practice
on a deeper level means that yoga is not longer just a Wednesday night
5.15-6.15pm activity at your local gym, but an experience which is infused
throughout your entire day, informing your thoughts and behaviour.
Breathe through stressful situations
Unfortunately stress is part of everyday life: time stress, financial stress, work
stress, family stress – it can be completely overwhelming! Yoga teaches of
the importance of pranayama or controlling our breathing, and way in which
our actions and movements should be linked with our breath. Using these
exercises outside of the yoga studio can help to calm our nerves and gain
perspective when stressful situations occur in our lives. Try slowing down your
breath next time you are stuck in traffic or forget to pick up something from the
grocery store for dinner, and see how it helps your anxiety levels to subside.
Keep working at it
Think back to your first yoga class. Do you remember looking at a lithe,
flexible yogi who effortlessly whipped up into Adho Mukha Vrksasana or
Bakasana without so much as a hesitation thinking to yourself “I will never
be able to do that!”? Take time to reflect on how far you have come! Can you
sink deeper into Virabhadrasana I? Can you balance for longer in Vrksasana?
These are all huge achievements that have taken time and considerable effort
on your part and are only possible through dedication! Remember this next
time you feel like giving up, and kindly remind yourself of how good it feels to
keep trying, recognizing your hard work and accomplishments.
Connect with yourself
Yoga encourages a deep, personal union, and self-observance is a large part
of that connection. By practicing dharana and bringing a consciousness and
concentration to our actions, we are able to develop a heightened awareness
of our own being. This is further extended in the practice of dhyana or
mediation, which involves taking time out to calm the mind, removing intrusive
thoughts and being still with the breath. These are wonderful tools to take
with you outside of the yoga studio, and to put into play in our everyday lives,
allowing us to be present and aware of our surroundings and to take account
of our thoughts during the day.
Don’t just see yoga as a job that must be ticked off, or a way to stretch after
your spin class the day before – yoga is a deep, spiritual union that offers you
the chance to be lifted in all aspects of your life. Take your yoga ‘off the mat’
and into your everyday to reap the benefits of dedicated practice.
Lauren Rose Burke is a writer, yogini and passionate health foodie from Sydney who spends her days drinking tea and dreaming of living in a house made of almonds and goji berries with a stream of coconut water outside…
Twitter: @LaurenRoseBurke
Instagram: @laurenroseburke
Blog: laurenroseburke.wordpress.comScience sets out what we think is true – but when it gets stuck, it’s time to explore what we think isn’t
Francesco Bongiorni
HOW does science advance? The number of papers published annually doubled every 9 years in the second half of the 20th century; the number of working scientists now doubles roughly every 18 years. So we might expect science today to be advancing at a breakneck pace. And so it is, but in a great many small steps, rather than giant leaps of understanding.
That’s fine: science has always advanced in small steps, paving the way for occasional leaps. But sometimes fact-collecting yields nothing more than a collection of facts; no revelation follows. At such times, we need to step back from the facts we know and imagine alternatives: in other words, to ask “what if?”
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That was how Albert Einstein broke the bind in which physics found itself in the early 20th century. His conception of a scenario that received wisdom deemed impossible – that light’s speed is always the same, regardless of how you look at it – led to special relativity and demolished what we thought we knew about space and time.
Now physics finds itself at an impasse again – and some physicists are reimagining the impossible, from revisiting the speed of light to dreaming up antimatter worlds. Their hope is that such what-if scenarios may provide coherent explanations for facts we have diligently collected but don’t understand (see “Cosmic uncertainty: Is the speed of light really constant?“).
Physics isn’t the only field that might benefit from a judicious dose of what-iffery. Attempts to understand consciousness are also just inching forward. We know anaesthetics can turn our awareness off, but not how they do so. What if the answer lies not in their chemistry, as is usually thought, but in physics (“Anaesthesia: What really happens when the lights go out?“)?
Despite its dependence on hard evidence, science is a creative discipline. That creativity needs nurturing, even in this age of performance targets and impact assessments. Scientist need to flex their imaginations, too.
“Let us dare to dream,” the chemist August Kekulé once suggested, “and then perhaps we may learn the truth.”
This article appeared in print under the headline “The impossible dream”Top-secret data from the National Security Agency, shared with The Intercept by WikiLeaks, reveals that the U.S. spy agency targeted the cell phones and other communication devices of more than a dozen top Brazilian political and financial officials, including the country’s president, Dilma Rousseff, whose presidential plane telephone was on the list. President Rousseff just yesterday returned to Brazil after a trip to the U.S. that included a meeting with President Obama, a visit she had delayed for almost two years in anger over prior revelations of NSA spying on Brazil.
That Rousseff’s personal cell phone was successfully targeted by NSA spying was previously reported in 2013 by Fantastico, a program on the Brazilian television network Globo Rede. That revelation — along with others exposing NSA mass surveillance on hundreds of millions of Brazilians, and the targeting of the country’s state-owned oil company Petrobras and its Ministry of Mines and Energy — caused a major rupture in relations between the two nations. But Rouseff is now suffering from severe domestic weakness as a result of various scandals and a weak economy, and apparently could no longer resist the perceived benefits of a high-profile state visit to Washington.
But these new revelations extend far beyond the prior ones and are likely to reinvigorate tensions. Beyond Rousseff, the new NSA target list includes some of Brazil’s most important political and financial figures, such as the Finance Ministry’s Executive Secretary Nelson Barbosa; Luiz Awazu Pereira da Silva, a top official with Brazil’s Central Bank; Luiz Eduardo Melin de Carvalho e Silva, former chief of staff to the finance minister; the Foreign Affairs Ministry’s chief of economics and finance, Luis Antônio Balduíno Carneiro; former foreign affairs minister and ambassador to the U.S. Luiz Alberto Figueiredo Machado; and Antonio Palocci, who formerly served as both Rousseff’s chief of staff and finance minister under former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Most notable about the list, published simultaneously by WikiLeaks, is the predominance of officials responsible for Brazil’s financial and economic matters (last four digits of the listed telephone numbers are redacted; click to enlarge):
Next to each name on the list, there are codes that indicate the purpose of the surveillance and the group of analysts within NSA responsible for it. The codes appear under the column entitled “TOPI,” which stands for “Target Office of Primary Interest.”
Alongside most of the government officials’ phone numbers is the designator “S2C42,” a reference to an NSA unit that focuses on intelligence collected from Brazil’s political leadership. The same code was seen in the previously reported document revealing NSA’s targeting of Rousseff’s cell phone:
But even more revealing on this new list is the designation next to several of the targeted officials responsible for financial and economic issues. Many of these individuals have a different code next to their phone number — S2C51 — which refers to NSA’s “international financial policy branch.” Brazilians are particularly sensitive to economic espionage by the U.S., both for historical reasons (as a hallmark of American imperialism and domination on the continent) and due to current economic concerns (for that reason, the story of NSA’s targeting of Petrobras was arguably the most consequential of all prior surveillance stories).
Several Brazilian officials expressed anger over the latest revelations. Gilberto Carvalho, former chief of staff to Lula and a top aide to Rousseff, harshly denounced the spying in an interview with The Intercept. He described his reaction as “maximum indignation,” declaring it a “violation of Brazilian sovereignty,” which the U.S. “does not have the right to do.” Carvalho added that the fact that Brazil “is trying to repair our relationship with the U.S. does not in any way diminish the gravity of these new revelations.”
For his part, the Central Bank’s Pereira da Silva said his reaction is to fully embrace the stinging denunciation of NSA’s electronic surveillance contained in Dilma’s September 2013 United Nations speech, delivered while Obama waited in the hallway to speak. That blistering speech was widely regarded in Brazil as a high point of Dilma’s leadership on the world stage.
Speaking from the General Assembly podium, she declared that “tampering in such a manner in the affairs of other countries is a breach of international law and is an affront of the principles that must guide the relations among them, especially among friendly nations.” She condemned U.S. mass surveillance as a “grave violation of human rights and of civil liberties,” and, in a rare invocation of her own personal history as a rebel against the country’s oppressive military dictatorship, said: “As many other Latin Americans, I fought against authoritarianism and censorship, and I cannot but defend, in an uncompromising fashion, the right to privacy of individuals and the sovereignty of my country. In the absence of the right to privacy, there can be no true freedom of expression and opinion, and therefore no effective democracy.”
Other Brazilian targets on the newly released NSA list include the longtime diplomat and author André Amado, as well as a current official with the Foreign Affairs Ministry, Fernando Meirelles de Azevedo Pimentel. It also includes the “cell” numbers for several of the key targets along with their office numbers. And it lists the Brazilian ambassadors in Paris, Berlin and Geneva, with the official “residence” of the latter targeted.
Questions submitted to NSA were not answered by the time of publication. Prior to the disclosure about its spying on Petrobras, the NSA insisted to the Washington Post that (emphasis in original) “the department does ***not*** engage in economic espionage in any domain, including cyber.” In response to the Petrobras report, however, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said that “it is not a secret that the Intelligence Community collects information about economic and financial matters,” but claimed that it does not “use our foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of — or give intelligence we collect to — U.S. companies.”
The list obtained by The Intercept from WikiLeaks is extracted from an NSA database. Dates that appear on it indicate the eavesdropping on several of the officials began in early 2011, but others were first targeted in 2010 while Lula, Rousseff’s predecessor, was still president. There is no indication that the surveillance has stopped. Rather than a one-time document created on a single day, the list appears to be an aggregate list of targets continually compiled and updated by the NSA. Last week, WikiLeaks released similar documents showing surveillance of French and German political and financial officials, and that spying took place over many years.
Photo: Patsy Lynch/REX Shutterstock/AP
Additional reporting by Ryan GallagherMedia playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Harrowing footage showed the aftermath of an alleged chlorine gas attack by Syrian government forces
The video is painfully difficult to watch. The pale, wet, listless bodies of young children are carried into a hospital as doctors frantically try to save lives. Men choke and vomit and cry out and a grandmother lies peacefully on a gurney. She is dead.
Five others died in the same attack on Sarmin, about 50 km (30 miles) southwest of Aleppo, in March this year - including three small children. None of them had a scar on their bodies.
For the children of Syria, it is not the high seas they must fear but death on dry land.
The footage was apparently taken in the aftermath of a chemical attack.
When it was shown to the UN Security Council it reportedly moved delegates to tears, and is just one of more than 60 incidents in which toxic agents are alleged to have been deployed.
Now, a leading chemical weapons expert has told the BBC there is "very strong and compelling evidence" that mustard gas has been used in a recent attack, blamed on Islamic State (IS) militants.
Image caption Civilians are supposed to be protected under the Chemical Weapons Convention
Last month the UN voted to set up an investigation to find out which individuals, groups or governments are involved in the use of chemicals as weapons in Syria.
The Syrian government has been repeatedly accused of perpetrating many of these attacks, something it vehemently denies.
But when Sarmin was attacked, witnesses say they heard a helicopter overhead and only government forces have helicopters in Syria.
Then people say they heard a roaring sound, like thunder but there was no explosion, just casualties.
Two years ago the UN voted unanimously in favour of the destruction of Syria's chemical weapons. It was perhaps the only threat that civilians were supposed to be protected from.
But there have been growing allegations that chemicals, in particular chlorine gas, have been used, mostly against civilian populations in dozens of attacks.
The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) looked at three of these alleged attacks and reported to the UN they have "a high degree of confidence that chlorine has been used repeatedly and systematically as a weapon" in Syria.
Image caption Syria's government has faced several accusations it used chlorine gas
Chlorine was first used as a weapon in the trenches of World War One. Denser than air, it was used to flush soldiers out of the trenches.
Many victims in Syria appear to exhibit symptoms consistent with such toxic agents but proving it is hard, not least because investigators cannot get the rapid access to sites that they would need to conduct verifiable tests.
The Syrian government has told us it has never used chemical weapons. It blames what it calls "terrorists" instead.
Rebel forces and more recently IS also stand charged. The militants have repeatedly attacked the town of Marea in northern Syria. But two recent strikes are feared to have involved chemicals.
I understand samples have been passed to the British government for testing.
This time the symptoms were different, with people exhibiting huge painful blisters and burns.
Image caption The British government is testing samples to determine if IS used mustard gas, the BBC understands
The fear is that IS has acquired and now used mustard gas.
'Chemical agent' traced in IS fire, says US general
Tarek Najjar, the director of the hospital in Marea where casualties were admitted, says he suspected mustard gas after seeing the symptoms. They included "suffocation, blisters, watery eyes and runny nose," he says. "We've never seen any injuries like this before. It's the first time to see such symptoms and casualties."
Jerry Smith, the OPCW's former head of operations in Syria, says "there's very strong and compelling evidence that this was a vesicant, a mustard agent that was used on this attack".
"Even if it wasn't actual mustard that was used, Any chemical that uses its damaging properties and used by an attacker is breaking the Chemical Weapons Convention and the Geneva protocol of 1925 and constitutes a war crime."
This week we have seen yet more people gathering on the Syrian side of the border, getting ready to leave and join the tens of thousands already heading for Europe - families who have endured four years of fear, who have been shot at, shelled and gassed.
With no sign of respite or relief it is unsurprising that so many Syrians are now on the move.
Analysis: Frank Gardner, BBC Security Correspondent
Syria was supposed to be rid of all chemical weapons, following a Russian-brokered UN deal two years ago. But it is clear this is not the case.
So where are these stocks coming from?
Chlorine, as a chemical, is not banned - it is readily available.
And according to chemical weapons expert Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, IS could have obtained mustard gas from three possible sources: from a large Iraqi facility they overran last year, from stocks the Syrian government failed to declare to the UN, and, most worryingly, from their own production line.
He said all the necessary precursor chemicals were present in Syria and that Islamic State had the expertise to turn it into a weapon.
The challenge of assessing Syria's chemical weaponsOf the many problems that vex podcast and radio producers, the shareability of audio — or the lack thereof — remains at or near the top of the list. Unlike photos, videos, and gifs, audio often struggles to spread on today’s highly visual social platforms, making it harder for those shows to find new listeners.
Shortcut, a new tool from This American Life, is the show’s attempt to fix the problem. With the tool, which is available on both desktop and mobile, listeners can select moments from any episode of This American Life (all of which have been transcribed and timecoded) and turn them in short videos that can be shared on Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere.
“Basically, we wanted to make something that would let people create audio gifs,” said Stephanie Foo, a producer at This American Life and Shortcut’s project lead. “The hope is that it helps diversifies our audience. We want people on social to hear these clips and think, ‘what the hell is that’ and get excited and dive in.”
Foo said that Shortcut, whose development started at an audio hackathon a year ago and which received backing from both the Knight Foundation and the Tow Center, was born in part out of the frustration she felt attempting to explain to her friends what she did for a living, or even what a podcast was. Few were willing to, for example, navigate to the exact moment in one This American Life episode where an interviewee called Foo “China lady,” thanks to the relative friction involved in doing so. “And of course, no one ever did listen when I posted the episodes,” she said. “Who would?” Shortcut has already helped change that.
The This American Life tool isn’t the first attempt by audio producers to make podcasts and radio segments more sharable. WNYC created a similar tool called Audiograms, which converts MP3 and WAV audio files into movie files that can be more easily shared on social. Both The Economist and NPR experimented with the audiogram idea, which has been a successful way to push out audio versions of stories about breaking news and interviews. Apps like Clammr and Chhirp are also built around sharing specific segments of podcasts.
As with Audiograms, which WNYC opensourced for other creators to use, This American Life also plans to release the code for Shortcut. The tool won’t work exactly the same for other shows, however, few of which have managed to transcribe the entirety of their archives like This American Life has. Those creators will have to rely on Shortcut’s waveform tool to select and share audio clips.
“This is just a first step. Ideally you would have an app that let you listen to a show and do this at the same time. That the dream, but that’s not what we have the resources to make,” said Foo. “This is at least a thought experiment saying that, if you really believe that sharing is broken, you can change it.”I've been reading Reddit.com a lot lately - it's a great aggregation site (news, and pretty much everything else under the sun) with unpredictable, quirky content and a young-ish, smart reader base.
Today I noticed a heavily recommended submission attacking attacking the Huffington Post for (allegedly) not being a real news site. Then I noticed a less-well recommended submission with the title of Has the Huffington Post actually ever broken a story?
Well, Huffpo sure has.
In May 2008, a wrote a post titled
Audio Recording of McCain's Political Endorser John Hagee Preaching Jews Are Cursed and Subhuman. It contained audio I'd found from a 2005 sermon (which I initially dated as "late 1990's" to be on the very conservative side) in which Texas megachurch pastor John Hagee, whose political endorsement presidential candidate John McCain had been after "like a dog in heat" (as I put it in a March 2008 post) declared that "God sent Hitler... Hitler was a hunter."
About a week later, Sam Stein of the Huffington Post noticed my post and covered it, in a story prominent on the Huffington Post's front page. From there Keith Olbermann's Countdown picked it up, and pretty soon scandalous audio, from a 2005 sermon, had seriously damaged presidential candidate John McCain's already shaky relationship with the evangelical right, his key base of electoral support.
[below: Keith Olbermann, on Countdown, covers "God sent Hitler."
Within 48 hours of when Olbermann showcased my audio clip of John Hagee bellowing about how God had sent Hitler, a "hunter", to chase Europe's Jews towards Palestine, the clip was being played on news stations worldwide. And, within about 48 hours, John McCain had a national press conference in which he rejected his endorsement from Hagee and denounced pastor Hagee's statement.
This was a blow to the McCain campaign, because in the 2000 election GOP primaries John McCain had repeatedly attacked evangelists such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as "agent of intolerance." McCain, of course, lost to George W. Bush, who had close ties (or better) with American right wing evangelicals.
McCain began advance work patching things up with Robertson, Falwell and the evangelical right somewhere around 2005, and it took McCain a few years to get to Hagee, who had by 2008 emerged as a major evangelical kingmaker. The McCain-Hagee rift was a blow to McCain's relationship with a major chunk of his GOP electoral base, and it arguably help tilt his campaign advisers towards their choice of Sarah Palin as McCain's VP running mate pick. That, in turn both electrified McCain's evangelical base and scored away independent and moderate voters. The rest is history.
Below |
copy of the 2001 soundtrack (in a different sleeve) next to John Fahey’s “fake” blues album, The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death.
Might there be a reason for placing Fahey’s not-at-all futuristic blues record next to the 2001 soundtrack? How about this: one of the songs on Fahey’s album is Bicycle Made For Two (aka Daisy Bell), the very thing that the HAL 9000 computer famously recites when it’s being shut down.
Lastly, that big graphic swirl above the booth is the symbol of the Vertigo record label.
Places like the Chelsea Drug Store were the magical homes of music before the corporations moved in and turned high street stores into warehouses flogging albums in bulk. In this scene at least A Clockwork Orange serves less as a warning of the future and more as a window on a world that’s disappeared.
Update: All the images have been upgraded from a Blu-ray edition of the film.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The album covers archiveMedia playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Liverpool's mayor said dog mess was "unacceptable"
People who film or photograph fly-tippers and irresponsible dog owners will not have to pay council tax, Liverpool's mayor has pledged.
Joe Anderson said he was "getting so angry" about dog mess and litter he needed the public's help to identify culprits in the act.
He said the plans were about boosting "civil pride" in the community.
The city's Liberal Democrats leader Richard Kemp said he was unconvinced by the proposals.
'Totally irresponsible'
Mr Anderson pledged to give those whose evidence leads to a prosecution free council tax for a year.
He said: "I'm asking people [to] please help us [and] provide us with information on anybody you see allowing their dog to foul the streets... [and] provide us with an address where they live.
"When they go out we'll have people covertly watching them and if it leads to prosecution, I will make sure you get your council tax for free, because we'll fine those people the maximum amount of money - £1,000."
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Mayor Joe Anderson said he was "getting so angry" with people who "don't care about their community"
Mr Kemp said he did not think many fines would be gained under the plans. He said he was "glad it's being acknowledged but I don't think this is the right way."
"I would employ more dog wardens. Responsible dog owners clean up after their dogs. It's the irresponsible ones who don't and they are more likely to be aggressive," he warned.
Mr Anderson also said he was examining ways to make recycling compulsory in Liverpool and claimed "thousands don't bother or care".
"It is about putting civil pride back into the community," he said.
"I need people to tell me where they know people are throwing bags in an alleyway the day after bin collection.
"I wouldn't call anyone who allows their dog to foul outside my house a neighbour. I class them as people that are totally irresponsible and don't care about their community."Dear Reader, As you can imagine, more people are reading The Jerusalem Post than ever before. Nevertheless, traditional business models are no longer sustainable and high-quality publications, like ours, are being forced to look for new ways to keep going. Unlike many other news organizations, we have not put up a paywall. We want to keep our journalism open and accessible and be able to keep providing you with news and analysis from the frontlines of Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish World.
Police Commissioner Roni Alsheich elicited audible gasps among a gathering of lawyers Tuesday when he said it was “natural” for law enforcement officials to be more suspicious of Ethiopians and other migrants than the general population.
“All over the world, it is proven that migrants are more involved in crime than others.
Younger people are more involved in crime than others.When the two things go together, a particular group is more involved in crime,” he said at the Israel Bar Association Conference at the David Intercontinental Hotel in Tel Aviv. Alsheich was responding to a member of the audience who asked why there is more police violence against Ethiopian-Israelis.“This also goes for Arabs… and also in east Jerusalem,” Alsheich continued. “When a policeman meets a suspect [of Ethiopian descent or other groups with higher crime rates], naturally he is more suspicious than with others.We know this. We have started to deal with this.”The police chief said, however, that the Ethiopian community’s faith in the police is at a high, despite some public battles. This, he said, is because the issue is being addressed by reducing “over-policing” and dropping low-grade cases in which Ethiopians were arrested because of friction with police but no other criminal suspicion.Also, he said, the Ethiopian communities’ leaders are working hand in hand with police to reduce friction.The umbrella organization of Ethiopian immigrants in Israel called upon Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan to fire Alsheich due to his remarks.“A man like this cannot command such an important body,” the organization said.Opposition MKs also sharply criticized Alsheich for his statements about minorities.“Not only is the commissioner not dealing with police violence toward the Ethiopian community, he is actually encouraging it,” said Zionist Union faction head Merav Michaeli. “Young Ethiopian immigrants are not ‘migrants.’ They are Israeli in every way, and statements like Police Commissioner Roni Alsheich elicited audible gasps among a gathering of lawyers Tuesday when he said it was “natural” for law enforcement officials to be more suspicious of Ethiopians and other migrants than the general population.“All over the world, it is proven that migrants are more involved in crime than others.Younger people are more involved in crime than others.When the two things go together, a particular group is more involved in crime,” he said at the Israel Bar Association Conference at the David Intercontinental Hotel in Tel Aviv. Alsheich was responding to a member of the audience who asked why there is more police violence against Ethiopian-Israelis.“This also goes for Arabs… and also in east Jerusalem,” Alsheich continued. “When a policeman meets a suspect [of Ethiopian descent or other groups with higher crime rates], naturally he is more suspicious than with others.We know this. We have started to deal with this.”The police chief said, however, that the Ethiopian community’s faith in the police is at a high, despite some public battles. This, he said, is because the issue is being addressed by reducing “over-policing” and dropping low-grade cases in which Ethiopians were arrested because of friction with police but no other criminal suspicion.Also, he said, the Ethiopian communities’ leaders are working hand in hand with police to reduce friction.The umbrella organization of Ethiopian immigrants in Israel called upon Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan to fire Alsheich due to his remarks.“A man like this cannot command such an important body,” the organization said.Opposition MKs also sharply criticized Alsheich for his statements about minorities.“Not only is the commissioner not dealing with police violence toward the Ethiopian community, he is actually encouraging it,” said Zionist Union faction head Merav Michaeli. “Young Ethiopian immigrants are not ‘migrants.’ They are Israeli in every way, and statements like
Join Jerusalem Post Premium Plus now for just $5 and upgrade your experience with an ads-free website and exclusive content. Click here>>JiriHrdina I believe in the Pony Power
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Quote: nik- Originally Posted by Lets not rebuild college lines please. I wish prospects would sign with the teams that drafted them. I do see why a forward spot would be an impossible mountain to climb in Chicago though.
I wish prospects would sign with the teams that drafted them too - but they don't always - and this is part of the game now. The Flames have been burned by this in the past, so it is only fair that if there is an opportunity to get a prospect for a lower value then you do it.
The Flames may have a leg up because of relationships between Hayes and his college buds. If so - take advantage of it.
The organization made a strong move to acquire Corban Knight for below value. More of those type of moves are welcome for an organization still relatively think overall on assets Sign him because he's a good prospect not to re-build lines. I think it is naive to think if the Flames have interest it is to re-build the line.I wish prospects would sign with the teams that drafted them too - but they don't always - and this is part of the game now. The Flames have been burned by this in the past, so it is only fair that if there is an opportunity to get a prospect for a lower value then you do it.The Flames may have a leg up because of relationships between Hayes and his college buds. If so - take advantage of it.The organization made a strong move to acquire Corban Knight for below value. More of those type of moves are welcome for an organization still relatively think overall on assetsBecoming Human – Hour 1
PBS Airdate: November 3, 2009
NARRATOR: Humans: without a doubt, the smartest animal on Earth. Yet we're unmistakably tied to our ape origins. Millions of years ago, we were apes, living ape lives in Africa. So how did we get from that to this? What happened? What set us on the path to humanity?
The questions are huge. But at last, there are answers.
More than 6,000,000 years ago we took that first step to separate from the apes.
DONALD JOHANSON (Arizona State University, Institute of Human Origins): We see the launching of the career that ultimately led to Homo sapiens.
NARRATOR: And 3,000,000 years ago, we see the roots of our big brain begin to take hold in a tiny creature, more like a chimp than a human.
PETER DEMENOCAL (Columbia University, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory): The frontier of human evolution is really being brought to this razor-sharp edge.
NARRATOR: And we now know that for millions of years, many different human-like species lived together on the planet, until one day there was only us: Homo sapiens, the most complex, adaptable animal on Earth.
So how did we get this way and why?
A radical new theory reveals how episodes of cataclysmic change forced our ancestors to adapt or die.
MARK MASLIN (University College London): I think we should actually look to our proud ancestry and how we evolved in East Africa and say, "That's how we survived that. We can survive the future."
NARRATOR: So get ready for a ride through millions of years of our history. It's the story of Becoming Human—our story, right now on NOVA.
Major funding for NOVA is provided by the following:
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And by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and viewers like you. Thank you.
NARRATOR: Millions of years ago, on the plains of Africa, a momentous event took place. Apes that had walked on four legs stood up and walked on two. Eventually, this change in posture would be followed by a change in their brains. Somehow, over time, they would become us.
We know it happened, but we've never known when or why, until now.
In the Sahara desert, a 6,000,000-year-old fossil called Toumaí¯ may hold the secret of how we first walked upright.
MICHEL BRUNET (College de France): We're writing the first chapter of human evolution. We're very close to the beginning, very close.
NARRATOR: And the fossilized bones of a child from three and a half million years ago hint to us about the beginnings of human thought.
We're discovering how many different human species lived on Earth at the same time and why all but one died out.
We, Homo sapiens, are the first, ever, to be alone.
So what powered our evolution? Why did we become human? Scientists are scouring the most remote parts of Africa for clues.
The search for answers begins here, in the Afar, northeastern Ethiopia. It's part of the Great Rift Valley, a deep cut in the earth where geologic forces are ripping Africa apart.
Millions of years of history are brought to the surface in layers of exposed rock. It's hot and desolate; dangerous, too. Ancient rivalries and modern weapons have turned the Afar into a no-man's land of simmering conflict.
But Zeray Alemseged has made this forbidding place his life's work. He's searching for the fossilized traces of our earliest human ancestors.
The fossil bones of animals like antelopes, elephants and pigs are abundant. But the fossils of our ancestors are extremely rare. Then, in a stroke of luck, Zeray makes the find of a lifetime, a find that illuminates our origins in a unique way.
ZERESENAY ALEMSEGED (California Academy of Sciences): On that afternoon, we decided to survey this hillside, and the first thing that we spotted was a cheekbone of the face.
NARRATOR: It was a face so tiny, it had to be a baby. But not a baby chimp, he could tell that from its shape. The skull was embedded in sandstone, but as Zeray turned it over he could see more bones inside.
Everything was squashed against the base of the skull and completely covered by sandstone block.
Clues to the age of the fossil came from a distinctive feature in the landscape, white bands of volcanic ash.
ZERAY ALEMSEGED: And that is the volcanic ash, dated to 3.4 million years ago.
NARRATOR: If the volcanic ash is 3.4 million years old, Zeray's fossil, which was lying just above it, must be younger.
It was a child from the dawn of human evolution, about 3.3 million years ago.
Zeray called the baby Selam, the Ethiopian word for peace. Then he set off on a quest to unravel her many mysteries.
Her journey began a very, very long time ago.
Imagine the entire span of recorded human history, taking us back to the Egyptian pyramids, about 5,000 years. Double it: 10,000 years ago, when plants were domesticated and agriculture begins. Double it again, to the time when Ice Age hunters paint stunning images on cave walls.
And keep doubling, six more times, taking us back 1.3 million years, when the first creature who really looked like us hunted on the plains of Africa. And then keep traveling back another two million years, and only then do we arrive in the time when Selam lived in Ethiopia nearly three and a half million years ago.
What were Selam and her family like? What kind of world did they live in? The answers are hidden in their fossil bones.
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Zeray's home. He is one of a whole new generation of African scientists trying to unravel the mysteries of human origins.
Zeray has brought his precious fossil here to the national museum. His challenge is to release her from the tomb of sandstone in which her bones are encased.
He quickly identifies her. She's from a species considered by most scientists to be an ancient ancestor, Australopithecus afarensis: a small, chimp-like creature who walked on two legs.
This is the same species as the famous Lucy, discovered in the 1970s by Don Johanson.
DONALD JOHANSON: Lucy was terribly important because she was really an amalgam, and she...of, of different characteristics of ape and human.
ZERAY ALEMSEGED: I think specimens like Selam and Lucy are extraordinary, simply because you can look at them and see evolution in the making.
NARRATOR: But seeing "evolution in the making" will take some work. Selam's fossilized bones are solid rock held together by a mesh of soft sandstone. It has to be painstakingly removed.
ZERAY ALEMSEGED: We spent hours...hours and hours and days and years and years, and I removed the sand grains, grain by grain, working every day.
NARRATOR: He's been at it for eight long years, but the payoff has been amazing. As the work progressed, Zeray revealed an almost complete skull, and tucked beneath it was nearly her entire spine, along with both shoulder blades. Other bones were found nearby.
ZERAY ALEMSEGED: An almost complete foot. This is the kneecap...the tibia, here.
NARRATOR: Never before had a child's skeleton been found, so ancient and so complete. Her bones would fit in a shoebox, but they speak volumes about her life.
For example, to find out how old she was when she died, Zeray looked at her teeth. But not the baby teeth visible in her jaw: the adult teeth growing inside the bone, as seen in a CT scan. From that, we know Selam died at age 3.
Like Lucy, she testifies to a crucial step in our evolution.
Unlike apes, these creatures walked upright. As the first fossil Don Johanson found clearly revealed.
DONALD JOHANSON: It was sticking out of the ground like that. And I gently tapped it with my sneaker and this is what fell out of the ground. And it is the, this is your, the top end of your shinbone. So the kneecap would sit right in here. And very close by, in two pieces, I found this bone. And when you put them together, and you see how they move and articulate...and it has all the hallmarks of an upright person.
NARRATOR: Other bones confirm that Lucy walked on two legs like us.
DONALD JOHANSON: This is Lucy's pelvis. And in a...and you can see how different a chimpanzee is. And the reorientation of these hipbones: in a chimp they're facing straight forward, so here's...this is, this is what everybody is sitting on in their living room right now. So they're not identical, but clearly these two resemble each other much more closely, right, than either one of these resembles the pelvis of an ape.
NARRATOR: From the waist down, Lucy was like us. From the waist up, she and her kind were all ape.
Selam's skeleton is the same, with chimp-like shoulder blades giving her the range of motion needed for climbing and swinging.
These ancient creatures must have spent time in the trees, possibly sleeping there at night to keep away from predators but walking upright on the ground during the day. They were at home in two worlds. What was their environment like?
It must have been very different from the Great Rift Valley of today. Across the border in Kenya is one of the hottest and most barren places on Earth, a vast expanse of volcanic rock and burning desert. That's how it is now, but there's good evidence that for most of its history, it was very different.
Researchers, braving temperatures over 100 degrees, are seeing signs of a dramatic transformation here in the Suguta Valley.
YANNICK GARDIN (University of Potsdam): The Suguta Valley was entirely covered in water, up to an elevation of about 580 meters.
DANIEL MELNICK (University of Potsdam): So you can imagine that all this valley was filled by a huge lake.
NARRATOR: A huge lake that's deeper than any of the Great Lakes. In fact, the entire African continent used to be a lot wetter than it is today.
Many millions of years ago, long before Selam and Lucy, Africa was a wet, tropical environment covered with rainforest. This is where the ancestors of Selam and Lucy lived. They probably looked a lot like chimps.
But then, Africa started to gradually dry out. The rainforest began to shrink. By Selam's time, three to four million years ago, the Great Rift Valley was a mosaic of different environments. We know that from the fossils of the animals that lived here. Their bones litter the ground.
ZERAY ALEMSEGED: This is a canine of a hippopotamus, so this is probably a skeleton of a hippopotamus.
How can one find a hippo in this type of environment? A nice antelope hereâ¦.
NARRATOR: The fossils tell the story of a vanished landscape.
ZERAY ALEMSEGED: This is a lower jaw of an antelope.
NARRATOR: Three million years ago, the Rift Valley was a patchwork of grassy plains, scattered woodlands, lakes and rivers.
ZERAY ALEMSEGED: Definitely very different from what we see here today.
Wow! A nice pig here.
NARRATOR: As their environment changed, scientists believe our ancestors changed too. They had been creatures who spent most of their time in trees, like chimps and orangutans today. But as their forests shrank, some of them developed the trait that we take for granted: bipedalism, walking on two legs. This is one of the defining characteristics of humans.
But how did bipedalism develop and why?
BRIAN RICHMOND (The George Washington University): Bipedalism is such an unusual trait. There's no other mammal that habitually walks on two legs like we do.
NARRATOR: Because it's unique, it's hard to figure out why it happened. There are a lot of theories.
BRIAN RICHMOND: One of them is that they stood up to be able to see over tall grass. Another theory: they stood up to be able to pick fruits off of the low branches of trees the way chimpanzees do today. Another theory states that they stood up to cool more efficiently, so that we don't have as much sun being on so much of our body.
DANIEL LIEBERMAN (Harvard University): And I think the most compelling idea, the most compelling hypothesis is that it saved us energy.
NARRATOR: And energy is crucial to survival.
Let's go back to the dense forest, home to our ancient ape ancestors 10 million years ago. Like many apes today, they were perfectly suited to a life in the trees.
DAN LIEBERMAN: They're very good at climbing in trees. They're phenomenal at climbing in trees.
NARRATOR: On the ground, these ancestral apes could probably walk on two legs for short distances if they had to carry something.
DAN LIEBERMAN: Fantastic climbers, but also able to walk and run rapidly and effectively, but not economically.
NARRATOR: Walking was tiring, but they didn't have to walk far.
DAN LIEBERMAN: But if you're a chimp and you only walk two to three kilometers a day it doesn't really mean much, right, it's not, it's not going to have that much of effect on your energy budget.
NARRATOR: But energy demands would change as the forest started to disappear. Our ape ancestors had to walk more.
DAN LIEBERMAN: They have to go farther to get from one fruit patch to another fruit patch for example.
NARRATOR: Dan Lieberman is an expert on bipedalism. He believes that walking on two legs evolved because it saved energy.
When you compare the energy consumption of humans to chimps, there's no contest. A chimp is an energy glutton.
DAN LIEBERMAN: It spends enormous amount of energy, about four times as much energy as a human walking.
NARRATOR: Whether it walks on four legs or two a chimp can't compete with the human gait.
DAN LIEBERMAN: It's poorly designed to withstand the forces of gravity. It has to spend a lot of muscular effort to keep itself from collapsing into a little pile of "chimpness" or whatever, with each step.
NARRATOR: According to Lieberman, small anatomical differences created large energy savings, setting our ancestors on the path to bipedalism, a path that would eventually lead to us.
But how long did it take? When Lucy's kind were first discovered, many people thought they were the so-called "missing link" between apes and humans.
But the science of genetics has transformed our understanding, with a technique called "the molecular clock." Today scientists can compare D.N.A. from closely related species to find out how long ago they split from a common ancestor.
MARK STONEKING (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology): It's just a very simple idea that the rate of change in D.N.A. sequences is more or less constant over time. And that's an extraordinarily powerful concept because it means that you have a way of determining when two species last shared a common ancestor.
NARRATOR: Living forms evolve because D.N.A. sometimes spontaneously changes as it copies itself. These changes happen at a surprisingly regular rate. By counting the differences between the genetic code of chimps and humans, we can calculate how long they've been evolving away from each other.
MARK STONEKING: And the dates one almost always gets are around five to seven million years ago for when humans and chimpanzees last shared a common ancestor.
NARRATOR: Here was proof that humans diverged from the apes much earlier than we thought, about six million years ago. It shows Lucy and Selam weren't one step removed from chimps but many. They may even be closer to us than to the first human ancestor.
So what came before Lucy and Selam? Who was our earliest ancestor?
Until the 1990s, the fossil record was blank. Fossil hunters combed East Africa's Great Rift Valley but could only find small fragments older than four million years.
Then, in 1997, a French anthropologist called Michel Brunet decided to look somewhere else.
MICHEL BRUNET: We decided to go to Africa, but the west, the west of the Great Rift.
NARRATOR: Sixteen hundred miles to the west, at the edge of the Sahara desert, in northern Chad.
MICHEL BRUNET: Obviously, if you only go to the field in East Africa, then you are going to find fossils in East Africa. This was the situation.
NARRATOR: Michel was looking in a place where the few animal fossils he turned up were all around six million years old.
No one expected any human-like fossils to be found in a layer that ancient.
MICHEL BRUNET: And everyone said, "No. There just aren't any fossils there."
NARRATOR: Michel was not to be deterred. He was stubborn, many thought to the point of madness. He and his team spent years searching the desert for signs of our ancestors. And year after year, they came up empty.
Then, on their 26th expedition, in 2001, they found a smashed, misshapen skull, around 6,000,000 years old. They called it Sahelanthropus tchadensis. There were no bones apart from the skull.
Could it be a human ancestor or just another ape? The skull was so deformed it was difficult to tell. Michel would have to reconstruct it.
His first step was to take the skull, now nicknamed Toumaí¯, to a particle accelerator in Grenoble, France, to use its powerful X-ray scanner. Over a thousand pictures of the fossil were taken to build a 3D image of the crushed skull.
Using the virtual image, the skull could be restored to its original shape. It was then reproduced by a type of 3D printer equipped with lasers which harden plastic. When it finally rose from its bath, the cast of Toumaí¯'s skull was ready for detailed study.
The cast allows Michel to answer an important question. Did this ancient creature walk on two legs millions of years before Lucy or Selam?
It's how the skull connects to the spine that provides the vital clue, and Michel could infer that from the shape of Toumaí¯'s skull.
If Toumaí¯'s skull is set on the neck of an ape that walks on all fours, his eyes point downward. That can't be right. Set on the upright spine of a biped, his eyes point straight ahead.
For Michel, this proved Toumaí¯ walked upright.
MICHEL BRUNET: Anatomically speaking, he had a receding back skull of a biped. The back of his skull is not that of a gorilla, like some people are trying to say; no, not at all. All you have to do is look.
NARRATOR: Some scientists still question whether Toumaí¯ was really a biped, but if Michel is right, his six-million-year-old fossil is a good candidate for the first human ancestor.
Discoveries like this are changing the way we see human evolution.
Scientists used to have a simple idea: the growth of open grasslands forced our ancestors out of the trees, they became bipeds, and in short order, brain size increased, human evolution took off. We were on our way to becoming human.
That simple idea prevailed for more than a century.
DONALD JOHANSON: Darwin thought that we left the trees, walked on the ground upright, freed our hands, made tools, got big brains, reduced our canines, and so on, all at the same time.
NARRATOR: But walking upright may not have automatically led to big brains at all.
From Toumaí¯ to Selam, both bipeds, brains stayed small. And they weren't the only ones. Over millions of years there was a profusion of upright walkers with complicated names and chimp-sized brains, like Orrorin tugenensis,...
DAN LIEBERMAN: What we're seeing is a florescence of species, multiple species. They're probably subtly different from each other.
NARRATOR:...Ardipithecus ramidus,...
DAN LIEBERMAN: But it's important to recognize that there are not major differences among these species.
NARRATOR:....Australopithecus africanus,...
DAN LIEBERMAN: They were all bipeds, big snouts, more or less chimp-sized brains.
NARRATOR:...Kenyanthropus platyops...
DAN LIEBERMAN: This way of life, this suite of adaptations, lasted for millions of years.
NARRATOR: Small-brained bipedal apes were extremely successful.
Debates rage among scientists about which one eventually led to us.
But as a group they flourished for about 25 times longer than we've been around.
They survived and thrived as brain size flat-lined for almost 4,000,000 years. But that doesn't mean nothing changed. There's evidence that the seeds of our humanity were growing in these ape-like creatures.
One key difference between humans and apes is the length of childhood. But what do we know about the childhood of our early ancestors?
ZERAY ALEMSEGED: We knew all about the adult individuals but we didn't know much about the children.
NARRATOR: The brains of baby chimps have an early growth spurt. They're almost fully formed by age three. In humans that growth spurt is slower, and it takes nearly two decades for our brains to fully mature.
But what about Selam's brain, 3.3 million years ago?
Her skull tells us all we need to know. We have her milk teeth and her adult teeth, which give us her age: three years old. And we have a cast of the inside of her skull, which tells us about her brain.
ZERAY ALEMSEGED: When you have this you can directly measure how much of the brain was formed at age three.
NARRATOR: From other fossils we know how large Selam's brain would have been as an adult. So Zeray could calculate how much of her brain was already formed by age three, when she died. He knows what the answer would be for a chimp.
ZERAY ALEMSEGED: By age three, a chimpanzee would have over 90 percent of the brain formed.
NARRATOR: But Selam's brain was only around 75 percent of its adult size, suggesting it was growing up slower.
Childhood would have been her time to learn, to learn the survival strategies her family group needed to live in a dangerous world. Perhaps this set the stage for our longer human childhood when culture is handed down.
But is there any other evidence Selam's brain was becoming more human and less ape?
To find out, compare a human brain to a chimp's.
TODD PREUSS (Emory University): This is the brain of our closest relative, the chimpanzee brain: slightly larger than you would expect of a typical primate for their body size, not greatly so.
NARRATOR: Scientists look for clues to the evolution of the brain in the folds and furrows on its surface. One important structure is called the Lunate sulcus.
TODD PREUSS: Well, in chimpanzees, as in many primates, there is this big deep sulcus here, the Lunate sulcus.
NARRATOR: The Lunate sulcus is a deep furrow in a primate's brain. It divides parts of the brain related to vision, from the rest of the neocortex, which is where more complex thought happens. The human brain doesn't have this deep furrow, and the neocortex is bigger than the vision structures which have moved far to the back.
So did Selam have the deep furrow and small neocortex of a chimp, or had something changed?
Brains don't fossilize, but her remarkably complete skull provides a way to see some of the different structures of her brain.
A cast of the brain case, called an endocast, preserves the impression of the brain's surface. Ralph Holloway has a collection of three hundred brain endocasts, from many of our ancestors.
RALPH HOLLOWAY (Columbia University): What a paleoneurologist, like myself, will be looking for are those indications on the endocast that might suggest reorganization taking place. And that's why things like the so-called infamous Lunate sulcus becomes important.
NARRATOR: Ralph claims that as chimp-like ancestors evolved into creatures like Selam and Lucy, the Lunate sulcus, the furrow marking the vision structures, moved back, making room for a larger neocortex, the thinking part of the brain.
RALPH HOLLOWAY: If you look carefully, what you've got here is a depression that could very likely be the Lunate sulcus. And so that suggests then, by Australopithecine times that, you know, you're having a beast that is simply smarter than present day chimpanzees.
NARRATOR: If that's the case, although still the size of a chimp's, Selam's brain had been rewired.
But there was a long way to go. She and her kind were still very ape-like. It would take another million years for the seeds of humanity contained in Selam's tiny frame to bear fruit.
It's a time still shrouded in mystery.
For almost half a million years the fossil record is virtually silent. But in this blank period, something is happening. In two-and-a-half-million-year-old layers, scientists begin to find something new.
We might be tempted to call them rocks, but someone was shaping them. They are the first stone tools.
BRIAN RICHMOND: The way we know this is a tool instead of just a broken rock is that it's broken in a very particular way, breaking a flake off this way, that way, this way, back and forth. So there is a method behind how this rock was broken in order to make it into a tool, and it's not a random method.
NARRATOR: It's considered unlikely they were made by Australopithecus, Lucy's kind.
BRIAN RICHMOND: Australopithecus was around for a couple of million years and did not make stone tools.
NARRATOR: But if not Lucy's kind, then who? The gap in the fossil record makes it difficult to say, but that's not surprising. Tools preserve easily, bones, much less so.
Finally, the skulls of a new creature begin to turn up. Is this the toolmaker?
The skulls are different from what came before. They represent the dawn of a new era, beginning around 2,000,000 years ago. This is our era, the era of the genus Homo, humans. The mysterious toolmaker, Homo habilis is the first of these new creatures.
BRIAN RICHMOND: We definitely have evidence that the stone tools were being used to break the long bones in order to get to the marrow inside the long bones. There were clear cut marks on the bones of turtles, crocodiles, big antelopes, little antelopes, even hippos—really big animals like hippos. So we know that meat had become a new important part of the diet of Homo habilis.
NARRATOR: The first fossil to be called Homo habilis included 21 bones of the hand and was nicknamed "handy man."
BRIAN RICHMOND: This little bone is the bone at the end of the thumb. And that little bone in Homo habilis, like in humans, is very broad. And the broad bone reflects having a broad pad on the thumb, with a lot of surface area for fine, precision grip.
NARRATOR: With newly dexterous hands, this creature could make better tools.
But what was it like? The few skeletal bones that have been found indicate a creature much smaller than us, about the same size as Lucy and Selam's kind—Australopithecus—three to four feet tall.
Homo habilis was still ape-like in many ways, but with a critical difference.
BRIAN RICHMOND: What we see in the evolution of Homo habilis is an expansion in the |
is, and if modern practitioners want to enjoy the full range of the tradition’s extraordinary promise, we need to treat meditation with the same respect and rigor that we afford asanas and pranayama. Then, yogis will find it easier to find time for the practice because they will experience it as easy and beneficial. Just as Gandhi did: one morning, facing a particularly challenging day, the Mahatma said, “I have so much to accomplish today that I must meditate for two hours instead of one.”On this week’s episode of The One Piece Podcast we have special guest Jennifer Piro, President of Otakorp/Otakon — the second biggest convention in the country — which will be held in Baltimore, MD this weekend! We have a panel there Saturday at 7:00PM in Panels 6, and don’t miss the premiere of One Piece film Z that Saturday at noon.
This week we have The Dude, Stephen (translator for One Piece in Weekly Shonen Jump) and Dennis from SK Cosplay.
Today’s sponsor is Kolektakon, your source for One Piece x Megahouse merchandise!
Next week the Toonami Recap and Anime Recap will return with double recaps! But this week, this is what we have:
0:00:00 Introduction
0:03:54 Interview Time: Jennifer Piro
0:29:41 Today’s Sponsor: Kolektakon
0:34:37 Manga Recap: Chapter 755
1:40:04 Piece Together
2:02:11 To Be Continued
We’ll see you next week. Same podcast time, same podcast place. We are MAJI!!The Irish branch of the controversial Church of Scientology is being kept afloat with loans from abroad after seeing its revenues plummet over the last number of years.
The Irish branch of the controversial Church of Scientology is being kept afloat with loans from abroad after seeing its revenues plummet over the last number of years.
According to new accounts filed for the organisation, the Church of Scientology Mission of Dublin saw its revenue drop from about €73,000 in to just under €50,000 last year.
Both figures pale in comparison to the €603,000 of revenue during 2006.
The Church is now more than €173,000 in the red after booking a loss of €35,494 last year compared to a deficit of €16,800 in 2013. The organisation is being partially sustained by interest-free loans from members of the Church of Scientology around the world.
A spokesman for the church said: "Many Scientologists in Ireland have for some time been more and more involved in our various community activities, which bring a higher reward than money. These include drug education, criminal reform, moral reform and human rights education."
He also claimed the church's "weekly congregation at the mission" had increased by 25pc from 2013 to 2014, although did not provide further figures.
Regarding the loans from abroad, he said: "Scientologists across the globe have been kind enough to assist us in our mission, and this has been very welcome."
The directors of the church state that as there is no fixed repayment arrangements on the loans, they "will be repaid at the discretion of the directors when future cash resources permit, which in turn is dependent on generating future surpluses".
Despite the sharp fall in revenue, the directors for the Church of Scientology Mission of Dublin expect "that the company has adequate resources to continue in operational existence for the foreseeable future."
The Church of Scientology was founded by the American science-fiction writer L Ron Hubbard in the 1950s and has become one of the most controversial spiritual movements of the last century.
The secrecy surrounding some of the church's practices has led to criticism, with critics saying that some of the more controversial teachings, including the alleged belief that humans have lived on other planets in past lives, are not revealed until a member has reached the Upper Levels of the organisation and spent a lot of money doing so.
However, the church says that the intimate nature of spiritual counselling requires it to practice confidentially.
It claims to have around 10 million members around the world although these figures are disputed.
The church has several high profile celebrity members, including Hollywood stars like Tom Cruise and John Travolta.
Irish IndependentThis fall marks an important moment in the history of Xbox as Xbox One readies for its biggest update yet – a completely re-imagined Xbox One, inspired by your feedback, brings the fastest and most social Xbox experience ever. You will also be able to play your Xbox 360 games on Xbox One at no additional cost. The New Xbox One Experience is releasing alongside the greatest games lineup in Xbox history, making it an incredible holiday for our fans.
As director of program management on the platform team at Xbox, I wanted to share an update of what to expect with the transformation in November. At Xbox, we put games and gamers at the center of everything we do. We are inspired by your passion and continue to listen to your input. The New Xbox One Experience will be powered by Windows 10, elevating the gaming experience on Xbox One. Integrating the speed of Windows 10, the New Xbox One Experience will get you to popular gaming features up to 50 percent faster. Instantly start a party, see what your friends are playing, and get updates to your recently played games from Home with no wait time. We’ll also be delivering your most requested feature – Xbox One Backward Compatibility.
Here’s a look at some of the most impactful updates you will see in November:
Play your Xbox 360 games on Xbox One. At launch you’ll be able to play over 100 Xbox 360 games on Xbox One with hundreds more in the months to come. This includes the added benefit of Xbox One features including screenshots, streaming, and game DVR – for your favorite Xbox 360 games. You can even play multiplayer with friends still using their Xbox 360.
A new Guide lets you quickly access essentials with just one button press to save time spent weaving in and out of apps. You can access the Guide from Home by pressing left or double tap the Xbox button on your controller to instantly overlay the Guide. You can access Friends, quickly start a Party, get to Settings, see System Notifications, view your Messages, and more from Home or without leaving your game. These are the top tasks Xbox fans do most often, so we focused on making them faster and easier to get to without disrupting your game.
We’re redesigning Home to make it faster and easier to get to the things you love. We’re introducing a faster and easier interface to provide access to games and apps you’ve recently used. At launch you’ll be able to more easily share your achievements and game clips with the Xbox Live community, see whether your friends are playing the same games and get one-click access to Game Hubs to get news and updates directly from the developers and community themselves.
We’re introducing a new Community section to make Xbox One more social. Based on your feedback, this section is optimized to help you tap into what other gamers are doing on Xbox Live and directly contribute to the conversation happening within the Xbox Live community. Check out what your friends are up to or keep track of the games you follow in the redesigned Activity Feed. Explore the new Trending section to view the most popular posts from players on Xbox Live.
The revamped OneGuide will be your single destination for TV, movies and video apps. From OneGuide, you can see a list of current trending live TV shows with the most viewers at that moment on Xbox. TV listings will now come up instantly and in full-screen, and we’ve added a picture-in-picture mode for TV so you can browse for other things to watch without missing what’s happening in your show. We’ll highlight a selection of the most exciting new movies, TV shows and deals from across the apps on Xbox One and the new App Channels area will show you the latest movies, TV shows and videos highlighted by the apps you care about.
We’re optimizing Store to help you quickly find the content you want. To the right of OneGuide, you’ll find the new and improved Store with features including four easy to explore areas – Games, Movies & TV, Apps, and Music – and a new vertical gallery view to bring more listings at a glance. Browse through intuitive categories like Staff Picks, New Releases, Top played, Top rated, Coming Soon and Recommendations to discover new games, apps, and entertainment for your Xbox One.
As we prepare for the global release of the New Xbox One Experience, it continues to be important to us to get your feedback. To help us do so, we’re gearing up to release the New Xbox One Experience to members of the Xbox One Preview Program. Like all features in the Preview Program, this will be a work-in-progress until it launches in early November. Because this is a significant update, we are giving Preview members the opportunity to decide for themselves if and how they want to participate in helping us release the New Xbox One Experience.
Here’s how it will work over the next couple of weeks:
We will roll this update out over time to Preview members who opt in for it. We’ll start with a set of Preview members who have historically submitted the most feedback – it will not roll out to everyone at the same time. Our goal is to start with a group, get feedback, then roll out to larger groups for additional feedback over time.
If you’re a member of the Xbox One Preview Program, you will get an invitation sent to you in an Xbox Live message.
From the invitation launch the Xbox Preview Dashboard and select the registration option.
You can then opt-in by selecting “Preview – New Xbox One Experience”.
If you choose not to participate in this update (you just leave your registration as preview), you will continue to receive “regular” Preview Program updates going forward. This will not remove you from the Xbox Preview Program.
New builds will regularly roll out over a period of several weeks to those who opt in, and our engineering team will work to improve the features and fix any bugs they identify throughout the preview testing.
The release to Preview will mark a significant milestone on our road to delivering the New Xbox One Experience. It’s important to us to continue to let our fans be a part of the process. Your feedback is incredibly important, so please continue to send us your input at Xbox Feedback and stay tuned for more information about the New Xbox One Experience in the coming weeks.
Thanks, and I look forward to your contributions in making Xbox great.
Mike Ybarra
@XboxQwikJACKSONVILLE, Fla. - A 12-year-old boy was arrested Friday in connection with the death of a 12-year-old girl, who was shot in late April during a sleepover, the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office said.
Police said the boy, who was 11 at the time, shot Ramya Eunice about 1:45 a.m. on April 30, striking her in the ear and on the left side of her head, while they were attending a birthday party sleepover at a home on Willow Branch Avenue in the city's Lackawanna neighborhood.
At the time, police said the shooting was accidental. News4Jax has chosen not to identify the boy for that reason, and because he is a minor.
Police previously said the boy went into a nearby, vacant home and found the gun. But the Sheriff's Office later said the boy found the gun underneath the house.
In May, Ramya died at a hospital after she was taken off life support. The medical examiner ruled her death a homicide.
On Tuesday, a warrant was issued for the boy on a manslaughter charge, and he was arrested Friday at his home, police said.
Gil Smith, a retired Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office deputy and News4Jax crime and safety analyst, said the arrest of the boy may have been delayed due to investigators interviewing witnesses and having to wait on lab results for evidence.
News4Jax spoke with Ramya's mother, Teresa Gordon, after police announced Friday night that an arrest was made in the case.
"I’m really grateful something was done. Someone needs to be accountable for this," Gordon said. "She didn’t deserve it."
Katarwa Buckman, one of Ramya's family members, echoed those sentiments.
"We are very grateful and we appreciate everything that JSO has done to help this mom that had been grieving about her child," Buckman said. "We're going to help her get past this as a family. We're all family and we're going to stay together and pray together."
Ramya’s death wasn’t the only shooting involving a minor in Jacksonville this year.
According to records, there have been nine shootings involving a child in 2017. On Friday, 3-year-old Connor Mickens was shot in the head inside a home Broadway Street in Northwest Jacksonville.
“Forty percent of people (killed with guns) are people under age of 24,” Smith said. “Most of the time we associate gun violence with mass shootings, (but) that only constitutes about 2 percent of gun deaths.”
Smith said that while stopping all shootings may not be realistic, many can be prevented by gun owners securing their firearms.
Smith added that Jacksonville faces another startling issue: The city ranks second to Atlanta in guns stolen from cars and homes.
Copyright 2017 by WJXT News4Jax - All rights reserved.Frequent use of over-the-counter painkillers carries real risks
It's easy to overdose or to patch over problems that require a doctor's care. Research adds the list of risk factors, but it also sees possible new benefits.
But there are real risks. It's easy to overdose, with dangers that include stomach upset, organ failure, strokes, even death. And the safe upper limits may vary from one person to the next, depending on body size, genes and prior health conditions.
All that pill popping certainly affects our health — and not always for the better. Used correctly, over-the-counter analgesics can help with acute aches and pains. Even more enticing, growing evidence suggests that some of them might also help fight Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease, as well as heart attacks and some cancers.
Acetaminophen, aspirin, ibuprofen, naproxen: More than 80% of us report using these four main over-the-counter analgesics, according to the market research firm Mintel. Two-thirds of us keep stashes on hand, not just at home but also at work, in our handbags or in the car. And about half of us have multiple bottles available, just in case.
Even healthy people can get themselves in trouble by thinking that if a little bit helps a little, a lot will help more. For some groups, including serious athletes and people with migraines, new evidence suggests that taking painkillers the wrong way or at the wrong time can do the opposite of what users took them for in the first place — create pain.
As data roll in about both the benefits and risks of over-the-counter painkillers, experts say the only good advice for everyone is to think twice before taking them.
"They are powerful drugs that are safe when taken as directed," says Janet Engle, a pharmacist at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a member of the Non-prescription Drugs Advisory Committee at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. "If you don't take them as directed — and something like 50% of patients don't — you can get into all kinds of issues."
Consumers may be glad to know that over-the-counter painkillers work better than sugar pills in trials, though placebos do have some effect. A 2004 study in the Journal of Rheumatology, for example, found a 30% to 45% reduction in pain symptom scores in knee osteoarthritis patients who took either naproxen or ibuprofen, compared with a 20% to 25% improvement for those who received placebos.
Many times, in fact, over-the-counter painkillers work as well as a group of anti-inflammatory medications called Cox-2 inhibitors, which are prescription only.
It's not clear whether any one painkiller works better than the others for all people or for all types of pain: Scientists haven't done many head-to-head comparisons. And since all bodies and metabolisms are different, one drug might work best for one person while a different one works best for another, says Wayne Nicholson, a clinical pharmacologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.
In one of the most comprehensive comparisons done on an extremely common pain condition, a 1991 study randomly assigned about 150 patients with osteoarthritis of the knee to get 1,200 milligrams of ibuprofen, 2,400 mg of ibuprofen or 4,000 mg of acetaminophen a day. A month later, all three groups reported the same amount of improvement — a reduction of up to 15% in their reported levels of overall pain. The study did not include a placebo.
The higher dose of ibuprofen used in that study is recommended by prescription only. But half as much worked just as well on most measures of pain and range of motion, Nicholson notes — and that kind of result pops up in many studies.
It contradicts what many people do: take larger doses when the pain is particularly bad.
"There's actually a pharmaceutical ceiling effect," Nicholson says. "For the average person, you get a certain effect at a certain level. You could take a ton more medicine, but it's not going to work more for you. It's just going to cause more side effects. That's where people get in trouble."Fracking is currently propping up our economy. It’s also environmentally devastating to nigh-apocalyptic levels. Here’s why we need to stop fracking immediately.
As the national debate over hydraulic fracturing rages on, new scientific evidence surrounding the environmental impact is constantly emerging. Fracking, the highly controversial method of extracting fuel sources by fracturing rock with pressurized liquids, has been linked to numerous environmental and health concerns. Many academic and governmental studies point to a high potential for harm from the practice. A powerful and deeply intertwined energy lobby maintains enough influence over legislation to keep regulation and environmental impact testing to a minimum. Many scientists fear that some of the damage that has already been done may take years to reverse, and many of the long term health effects are yet to emerge.
1. Radioactive Water
Radioactive isotopes used in fracking have been discovered in water supplies across the Marcellus Shale region. Many scientists and healthcare professionals are vocal about the dangers of radioactivity, but many of the isotopes remain unregulated. Much of the wastewater from fracking in this region is processed by public sewage treatment plants. Many of these plants do not have the capabilities to remove radioactive substances, and they make their way into the public water supply. (Graphene has been shown to purify fracking water, here.)
In early October, scientists from Duke University published a report indicating dangerously high levels of radiation in a stream in western Pennsylvania. The researches took samples of sediments in the Blacklick Creek, which feeds into the water system that also supplies drinking water to Pittsburgh. The Blacklick Creek receives fracking wastewater runoff from a nearby treatment facility. Radioactive radium levels in the section of creek receiving the runoff were 200 times higher than in sediment upstream. Long term exposure to irradiated water has the potential to lead to many health risks, and greatly increases the potential for cancer.
2. Poisoning of Livestock, Pets and Wildlife
A 2012 report published by Dr. Robert Oswald, professor of molecular medicine at Cornell University, found dozens of cases of animal sickness and death linked to exposure to drilling operations. Oswald, along with veterinarian Dr. Michelle Bamberger, investigated cases of animal poisoning across Colorado, Louisiana, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Texas. Many of these cases occurred when wastewater from fracking sites drains into fields, pastures and residential areas.
One of the most startling cases occurred in Louisiana. 17 cows died within an hour of direct exposure to hydraulic fracturing fluid. Autopsies pointed to respiratory and circulatory collapse as the cause of death. Another farmer reported that out of 60 cows that drank from a creek receiving wastewater, 21 died and 16 became infertile. His 36 other cows, which grazed in a field without access to the contaminated creek, did not develop any health or reproductive problems.
In January of 2012, Christopher Portier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Environmental Health, suggested that the EPA investigate the potential for contamination of food products. If livestock are grazing in contaminated land or drinking contaminated water, these contaminants could taint meat, cheese or eggs. Vegetables irrigated with contaminated water may also pose health risks. Unfortunately, the exact chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing fluid have been kept secret. Lawmakers backed by the energy industry installed legislation to maintain the secrecy of the chemical formulas and prevent the corporations from legal responsibility for contamination.
3. Groundwater Contamination
Many cases of groundwater contamination have occurred in the past two years. One of the most severe took place in Dimock, PA. 13 household wells were contaminated with combustible methane, and one exploded. A study by Duke University in 2011 found high levels of methane in 68 wells across Pennsylvania and New York. A follow up study in 2013 attempted to provide a stronger case that this contamination was caused directly by fracking. They found that wells closer to hydrofracking operations contained, on average, six times more methane than those at a greater distance from drilling sites.
On the other side of the nation, researchers with the EPA found high levels of synthetic chemicals, methane, and benzene near drilling operations in Pavilion, Wyoming. These chemicals were found in deep aquifers and wells, indicating that the contamination is widespread. The aquifers play an important role in the water cycle, and their contamination can lead to widespread exposure to these synthetic chemicals and volatile gases.
(Below, awful Republican senator Randy Baumgardner claims that fracking isn’t all that bad on the “Pray in Jesus’ Name” show, demonstrating a remarkable ignorance of basic science.)
4. Earthquakes
A study conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey, published in 2012, indicates a drastic increase in seismic activity in regions where hydraulic fracturing is occurring. The study found that the number of magnitude 3 and greater earthquakes in the midcontinent region of the US has been increasing steadily since 2001. From 1970 to 2000, there were an average of 21 M3 or greater earthquakes in this region per year. This increased to 27 between 2001 and 2008. In 2009, there were 50 such earthquakes. By 2011, this number of events reached 134. The study states that the acceleration in events can be linked to drilling operations in Oklahoma and Arkansas. The U.S. Geological Survey claims that the increase in seismic events is “almost certainly” manmade.
5. Air Quality
Air quality has also been measurably harmed by fracking. Volatile organic compounds like disulfides, benzene, and naphthalene are present in the air around compressor stations used in hydraulic fracturing. One study in Texas found carcinogenic benzene levels 55 times higher than EPA air quality standards. Naphtalene, a known blood poison, was also found to exceed legal limits.
Numerous cases of severe air pollution have also occurred in Burgettstown, PA. Residents describe noxious fumes “wafting in” to the town causing nausea, vomiting, and loss of consciousness. Though these events have not been officially linked to the energy industry, there is extensive fracking in the area. Similar anecdotal cases have emerged across the nation, and experts believe that it is vital to investigate the link to fracking.
The CDC’s Christopher Portier, in an interview with NPR news, stated “There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence out there. And so a well-conducted study looking at a number of communities could help us better understand if there’s an impact, what its magnitude [is] how we should avoid having that impact if there is one.”
Until the direct health effects are understood more clearly, many people are calling for hydraulic fracturing operations to be put on hold. The energy industry is risking everything, from the health of the nation to the stability of the food and water supply that millions rely on. It is important to stand up for these vital resources, and it is through collaborative outlets like the internet and grassroots movements across the nation that the voice of the environment may be heard.
(Below, check out video of the insane “Rocking in Ohio” concert, a pro-fracking propaganda educational program sponsored by Radio Disney and Ohio’s oil and gas industry, performed on a 26-stop tour of elementary schools and science centers across Ohio.)
Update: Luckily, a new analysis strongly suggests that fracking boom estimates have been way off—and that we might see a sharp decline after 2020
(This section by Ultraculture contributor Andrei Burke.)
A recent analysis of the fracking business in the United States has found that estimates made regarding the amount of natural gas that can be extracted by the controversial method is much too high—and that the boom may last just half as long as predicted.
This analysis, conducted by a research team at the University of Texas, contradicts the estimates made by other groups, specifically the Energy Information Administration (EIA). The EIA’s forecasts have largely determined the amount of investment that has gone into fracking in the corporate sector.
“We have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly 100 years,” President Barack Obama declared in his 2012 State of the Union address. Fracking has made it possible to coax natural gas out of shale rock for a relatively low cost, leading to an optimism in a “shale revolution” and “energy abundance” in the corporate sector. Companies have bet big on forecasts of a cheap and plentiful natural gas source. Energy producers in the US are expected to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in new fracking plants over the next 20 years, and billions more dollars have poured into the construction of export facilities to ship liquefied natural gas to Europe, Asia and South America.
But those investments have been based on the EIA’s expectation that peak US natural gas production will peak in 2040 and slowly taper after that, carrying us into the next century. Now, the findings of the team at University of Texas strongly suggest that fracking will peak as early as 2020 and see a sharp decline following that.
The estimates differ so dramatically because of the different approaches used to process data. EIA estimates were based on county-wide production in a given area. According to the Texas team, basing estimates on counties isn’t fine enough because county size can greatly vary. The Texas team refined their approach and divided areas into one square mile units. The EIA estimates also require a much higher amount of wells that could feasibly be drilled. The Texas team took into account and excluded areas where it would be difficult to drill, such under lakes or major cities.
These results are “bad news,” says Tad Patzek, head of the University of Texas at Austin’s department of petroleum and geosystems engineering, and a member of the team that conducted the recent analyses.
“We’re setting ourselves up for a major fiasco,” says Patzek, as companies are trying to extract shale gas as quick as possible and export significant quantities.
This could potentially mean the end of fracking on a global scale in the very near future. As US natural gas production collapses, plans to export overseas could dry up. Nations looking to tap their own shale reserves may reconsider.
“If it begins to look as if it’s going to end in tears in the United States, that would certainly have an impact on the enthusiasm in different parts of the world,” says economist Paul Stevens of Chatham House.
Update: 3 Billion Gallons of Fracking Sludge Dumped Into California’s Water Supply (10/10/2014)
(This section by Ultraculture editor Jason Louv.)
As if you don’t need another reason to ban fracking, check out this insanity: Over 3 billion gallons of fracking sludge have been illegally dumped into central California’s drinking water, and its farm irrigation aquifers. The toxins include high levels of lethal arsenic (carcinogenic and immunodisruptive), thallium (an ingredient in rat poison) and nitrates (highly toxic to cattle and other ruminants).
The mainstream media has not touched the story. I literally see one reference in the SFGate, and a report on RT. Are we truly this lost as a society that the wholesale poisoning of one of the richest economies in the world goes completely unreported?
The dump was revealed by the Center for Biological Diversity, which obtained the documents from the state of California.
Via the Center for Biological Diversity:
SAN FRANCISCO— Almost 3 billion gallons of oil industry wastewater have been illegally dumped into central California aquifers that supply drinking water and farming irrigation, according to state documents obtained by the Center for Biological Diversity. The wastewater entered the aquifers through at least nine injection disposal wells used by the oil industry to dispose of waste contaminated with fracking fluids and other pollutants.
The documents also reveal that Central Valley Water Board testing found high levels of arsenic, thallium and nitrates — contaminants sometimes found in oil industry wastewater — in water-supply wells near these waste-disposal operations.
“Clean water is one of California’s most crucial resources, and these documents make it clear that state regulators have utterly failed to protect our water from oil industry pollution,” said Hollin Kretzmann, a Center attorney. “Much more testing is needed to gauge the full extent of water pollution and the threat to public health. But Governor Brown should move quickly to halt fracking to ward off a surge in oil industry wastewater that California simply isn’t prepared to dispose of safely.”
(Below: An oil field worker in North Dakota lights his own tap water on fire, as it is full of fracking run-off. Insane.)
The state’s Water Board confirmed beyond doubt that at least nine wastewater disposal wells have been injecting waste into aquifers that contain high-quality water that is supposed to be protected under federal and state law.
Thallium is an extremely toxic chemical commonly used in rat poison. Arsenic is a toxic chemical that can cause cancer. Some studies show that even low-level exposure to arsenic in drinking water can compromise the immune system’s ability to fight illness.
“Arsenic and thallium are extremely dangerous chemicals,” said Timothy Krantz, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Redlands. “The fact that high concentrations are showing up in multiple water wells close to wastewater injection sites raises major concerns about the health and safety of nearby residents.”
The Center obtained a letter from the State Water Resources Control Board to the Environmental Protection Agency. The letter says that the Central Valley Regional Water Board has confirmed that injection wells have been dumping oil industry waste into aquifers that are legally protected under the federal Safe Drinking Water Act. The state Water Board also concedes that another 19 wells may also have contaminated protected aquifers, and dozens more have been injecting waste into aquifers of unknown quality.
The Central Valley Water Board tested eight water-supply wells out of more than 100 in the vicinity of these injection wells. Arsenic, nitrate and thallium exceeded the maximum contaminant level in half the water samples.
The CBD sternly warns that the long-term effects of this dump may take years to manifest:
While the current extent of contamination is cause for grave concern, the long-term threat posed by the unlawful wastewater disposal may be even more devastating. Benzene, toluene and other harmful chemicals used in fracking fluid are routinely found in flowback water coming out of oil wells in California, often at levels hundreds of times higher than what is considered safe, and this flowback fluid is sent to wastewater disposal wells. Underground migration of chemicals like benzene can take years.
In July the state’s Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources shut down 11 Kern County oil field injection wells and began scrutinizing almost 100 others that were potentially contaminating protected groundwater. The Environmental Protection Agency, which has ultimate legal authority over underground injection, ordered state officials to provide an assessment of the water-contamination risk within 60 days, and the letter from the state Water Board confirms that illegal contamination has occurred at multiple sites.
California’s oil and gas fields produce billions of gallons of contaminated wastewater each year, and much of this contaminated fluid is injected underground. California has an estimated 2,583 wastewater injections wells, of which 1,552 are currently active. Wastewater injection wells are located throughout the state, from the Chico area in Northern California to Los Angeles in the south, and even include offshore wells near Santa Barbara.
If you have any last shreds of doubts about fracking, and whether the people doing it have your best interests in mind, this might be your last wake-up call.When we first learned about Serious Sam VR during E3 2016 earlier this year, it came a bit out of nowhere, but at the same time it made perfect sense. We weren’t exactly expecting a VR adaptation of the classic gory shooter franchise, but that doesn’t mean his wise-cracking bombastic action felt out of place. In fact, it felt like a natural iteration of the franchise when we went hands-on with the rip-roaring slaughter fest for the first time.
Now that Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope is about to complete its jump to VR and release on Steam Early Access next week on October 17th, we took the time to dive back in for another go at the world Croteam built with the help of publisher Devolver Digital.
The Serious Sam franchise is a game series about action, gore, and over-the-top good times. The plot is often barely thick enough to make sense and the ratio of action to exposition is roughly 95% to 5%, give or take. After rolling through large levels full of hundreds of enemies, you’ll rest up by killing just a few more hundred enemies once again.
Now, the VR iteration retains a lot of that same DNA, but it’s in a very different package. At first glance, you’ll look at the screenshots and trailers and probably think that it just looks like “another wave shooter” and frankly, that isn’t an incorrect description. You stand in one place and all of the game’s enemies come charging at you from within your general 180-degree field of view. You can’t move around the environment like in Raw Data and you won’t have to spin around to shoot surprise enemies behind you like in The Brookhaven Experiment. My gut tells me the limited range of movement was a conscious decision to allow them to bring the experience to both the Rift and PS VR eventually.
Instead, in Serious Sam VR, you’ll literally be standing in one place and only face enemies that are funneled towards your location. It’s a bit restrictive, to be frank, and sometimes feels like a feature that you’d see in a separate, more robust full game, but it’s still fun.
Some enemies may get ambitious and instead of running directly at your bullets, try to come at you from the side, but for the most part you don’t really need to move your legs at all — just your head, arms, and torso. And for what it’s worth, you will move those parts of your body a lot if you want to have any success. It may be a relatively basic wave shooter, but that doesn’t mean that it’s boring or easy.
In the Early Access version of the Serious Sam VR, there are two planet missions to pick from: Earth and Pladeon. Each planet mission is broken up into four waves, each of which is in a completely different environment. After completing the first section with just your standard unlimited laser pistols, you can spend your cash that you earned buying new guns, refilling ammo, and regaining your health. By the time you reach the final area of a mission, you’ll likely have a mostly full arsenal of weapons to pick from.
Thankfully, just like any Serious Sam game, that arsenal is the real star of the show. You’ve got such a wide assortment of weapons to pick from, you could easily spend hourse replaying missions with different loadouts just to see what fits your playstyle best.
In addition to the standard laser pistols, there are shotguns, tommy guns, assault rifles, heavy laser guns, rocket launches, chainsaws, and yes — a minigun. The physically created prop that we detailed recently isn’t available for purchase, but it’s digital counterpart is in the game and it’s just as glorious to use as you’d hope.
Serious Sam VR is a relatively intense affair by all accounts. Even on the easiest difficulty setting, waves are relentless. You’ll quickly need to become accustomed to aiming with each hand, simultaneously, at different areas of the world, to take out enemies. There are few things that feel as badass as wielding a rocket launcher in one hand and a minigun in the other, pointed at two different enemies, lighting them up and spewing blood across the map. In this way, The Last Hope feels like you’re living out scenes from the cover art of previous Serious Sam games.
And that’s about it. Your fingers are gonna cramp up from squeeze the trigger of your Vive wands so many times, you’re gonna sweat from ducking and weaving out of the way of energy balls and rockets, and you’ll probably curse a bit when you get steamrolled by a horde of alien scorpions for the fifth time on the same damn wave. It’s simple and shallow, but it’s also intense and a hell of a lot of fun.
Serious Sam VR: The Last Hope releases onto Steam Early Access on October 17th, 2016 for $39.99. As the game receives updates, the price is expected to stay the same. Future updates will include more missions, environments, enemies, weapons, power-ups, and a skill tree. Oculus Rift support is coming once the Touch controllers release.
Tagged with: croteam, devolver digital, FPS, serious sam, shooter, VR, waveBEIJING (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. has made it harder to monitor calls and chats over its Skype phone service in China, a freedom of expression advocacy group said, as the Chinese government steps up censorship of the Internet.
Skype said on Monday it had ended an eight-year joint-venture with Hong Kong-based TOM Group - 51 percent owned by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing - and found a new partner in China.
"After careful analysis of the new Skype, we believe that Microsoft have lifted all censorship restrictions on their China product," the advocacy group, GreatFire, said on Wednesday.
"All user calls, chats and login information are encrypted and being communicated directly to Microsoft via HTTPS. This is a complete about-face for Microsoft from the TOM-Skype era, when all information was processed by TOM and stored by TOM on servers located in China with absolutely no privacy controls in place."
A Microsoft spokeswoman in China declined to comment and a public relations official at Skype's Asia-Pacific regional office could not immediately be reached.
Skype's new partner in China is Guangming Founder (GMF), a joint-venture of Beijing-based newspaper Guangming Daily and the Founder Group, a Beijing technology conglomerate established by Peking University, according to the new GMF-Skype website.
The Skype-TOM partnership has come under criticism from rights groups for allowing censorship and surveillance. Studies have shown the TOM-Skype service was subject to blacklisted keyword checks that could trigger monitoring of its users.
New censorship measures
Foreign Internet companies must tread |
way.
Five minutes later, while I was busy spinning webs or shooting lasers, some busybody little girls came over to tell me I was in big trouble and our teacher, Mrs. Steir, wanted to see me. I was pretty surprised, but also pretty confident I could explain myself. So Mrs. Steir asked me if I punched John, and I told her the whole story. Do you know what she did?
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She looked down at me and said, "Have you ever heard the story of the boy who cried wolf?" I protested and she was insistent, even though I'd never lied to her before. Even though I'd never been in trouble in class. Even though she'd only had John's (totally lame) word against mine. It was decided, and I lost the rest of recess for punching John.
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"Gladstone totally never called me."
I have never recovered from that incident. To this day, I get disproportionately angry if I'm falsely accused of lying -- especially because I tend to be a fairly truthful, heart-on-his-sleeve kind of guy. When it happens, I try to be objective. I try to take myself out of it, but I feel that irrational twinge of childhood injustice. How deep did this silly little incident cut? Well, let me tell you a story from sixth grade.
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See, I forgot to mention Mrs. Steir was about 903 years old. We were her last class before she retired. And six years later, when she was 909, she came to visit us before we graduated elementary school. A last goodbye. She recognized us all, and remembered all our names. Oh, except for me. So do you know what I did? I stood up in front of my sixth grade class and spoke directly to the worst teacher I've ever had: "Don't you remember me?" I said. "I'm the little boy who cried wolf." I then told her the whole story and how wrong she was. I'd love to tell you she felt awful and apologized, but instead, she had a good laugh that I still remembered such a silly thing. And even after that nearly vindicating experience, I still feel compelled to tell this story to all of you. Yep, broken.Last year I was presented with the amazing opportunity to give a speech at a TedX event in Sarasota, Florida. A friend had suggested that I apply, and my original speech idea was along the lines of “Women’s Roles/Voices in Geek Culture”. Little did I know how much that would change and evolve throughout the few months between being accepted as a speaker and the event itself.
As someone who is fully immersed in geek culture, I was admittedly surprised at the reactions to the first version of my speech. Basically, most of the people who heard it said that they either didn’t understand a lot of what I was talking about, or that they weren’t sure it was ‘universally palatable’ the way TedX speeches are supposed to be.
To be honest, it was difficult to take a step back from something I love so much and view it from an outsiders’ perspective. I wanted to use my speech to bring the idea of geek culture – and specifically, women’s involvement in it – to others. But suddenly I found myself wondering if it was even possible to do that in the twelve minutes I was allotted on stage.
Because that’s the thing you don’t know or see when you view Ted or TedX talks – that so much of the time, the end result – what you see live or online – is the product of months worth of coaching and feedback and editing (and in my case stress and anxiety and wondering if I’d ever get it right or if I should just admit that I was in over my head and throw in the towel).
My speech went through several iterations before it was completed, and as weird as it sounds I was both under- and over-prepared for the event itself. As fate would have it, I ended up giving a speech I was proud to have written…while suffering through a terrible case of bronchitis. I was medicated nearly out of my wits just to be able to get up on that stage, and this led to a lot more “um’s” and “uh’s” and other silliness that I wish I could edit out of what became the true final product.
But other than the difficulties that my illness caused (and of course the previous frustration with how to make my geeky story into something a bit more relatable to the general populace), TedX was nothing short of an amazing experience. I’m glad I didn’t throw in that towel, because not giving up meant that I got to spend nearly twelve minutes on a TedX stage, talking about the general ideas of self-defining oneself as a geek and how people can ‘geek out’ over so many things. Because there really are so many different kinds of geeks out there. I’m the geek who gets nearly obsessive over certain books and movies, who goes to conventions and speaks on panels about the things I love, who cosplays, who has a house full of Star Wars-themed rugs.
The question I tried to raise with my TedX speech was, what do you geek out about? And I’ll probably never stop talking about my TedX experience because that’s a conversation I’d like to keep going.
We at Some Nerd Girl wanted to know more about Tara’s experience – so we followed up with some burning questions!
What made you want to get your thoughts and ideas out there?
Well, I guess I’d been doing so for years through my blog and then writing for The Geekiary, as well as being a panelist at several conventions from 2012 on, but until my friend suggested that I apply to be a speaker, I’d never really thought about doing so – at least not for TedX.
What was your process for coming up with ideas and what you wanted to talk about?
When I was approached about applying to be a speaker, it was suggested that I stick with talking about geek culture, and to be honest, my original idea to focus on women’s roles/voices in geek culture immediately popped into my head.
How were you approached? What was the selection process like?
An acquaintance of mine was a speaking coach for TedX Sarasota and he thought I could bring something different to the table, so he suggested that I apply. I filled out the online application and was contacted maybe a month or two later – I can’t remember exactly how long. I’m not sure how the selection process went for TedX Sarasota, but I’ve since volunteered for TedX Greenville (just on the event staff) and I know that theirs is a pretty intense, time-consuming process, where they review all applicants, choose the ones they think best fit, and then continue to narrow it down from there. I’m assuming it’s probably similar with other TedX events.
Were you totally geeked out or were you like… of COURSE they picked me!??
Oh I was totally surprised and nervous and excited. Even though I was encouraged to apply, I certainly never *expected* that I would be chosen. I actually had to keep it a secret for a while after I found out, and let me tell you, that was one of the most difficult secrets I’ve ever had to keep! I just wanted to tell everyone because it was such a big deal to me that I would get to be involved in something so amazing.
How familiar were you with TED Talks? Did you have any favorites that inspired you to go for it?
I knew about TED talks and had watched a few throughout the years, but before participating in this event I hadn’t really delved into them all that much. (Mostly due to lack of time on my part, to be honest.) That said, now that I’ve done one myself, I’m constantly on the lookout for good ones, new and old!
What was the biggest challenge you faced?
Definitely having to take my original speech idea and basically rework it entirely so that it was more ‘universally palatable’….although coming down with a horrible case of bronchitis two days before the event didn’t help things either. Giving such an important speech all doped up on cold meds (I didn’t have time to go to a doctor and actually get real medication until after TedX) and with a 100+ degree fever was difficult to say the least.
What, if any, feedback or comments did you get afterwards? The nerd/geek culture is not always kind to those who point out girls love nerdy things, too.
Actually, it was during the preparation process that I struggled a bit – not that anyone was rude, but there were a lot of comments from the organizer and even fellow speakers that were along the lines of “this isn’t interesting because we don’t understand it”. I tried not to let it get to me, but I definitely got really stressed out about it, especially when I had to rewrite my speech several times. In the end, though, the final product was very well-received. I was approached by several attendees later on that day – some of them wanted to discuss similar interests (I had a great conversation about Timothy Zahn’s Star Wars EU novels); others just wanted to share with me what THEY ‘geek out’ about. To be honest, it was those conversations that really made the event memorable for me.
Tara has been a geek at heart all her life. She has spoken about geek culture at several industry conventions (including San Diego Comic-Con and Dragon Con), Ohio State University, and TedX Sarasota. She also co-founded and co-organizes Ice & Fire Con, the first ever Game of Thrones/Song of Ice & Fire convention in the U.S.. She resides in lovely Greenville, SC in a house full of Star Wars-themed carpets and a plethora of dogs and cats. You can find her personal stories at her blog, A Geek Saga.
AdvertisementsIf you weren’t expecting any renditions of the Model 3 today, then you probably also thought that Tesla’s introduction on Thursday night wasn’t that big of a deal for the automotive crowd.
In that case, we’ll just inform you that, as of now, Tesla have received 198,000 orders for a car that won’t be out for at least 18 months…
What’s more interesting about the new compact luxury car from Tesla is that, the company’s co-founder and CEO, Elon Musk, who is on the verge of acquiring a similar status among tech fans as Steve Jobs, has said that the Model 3 will form the basis for the successor to the brand’s first car, the Roadster.
Musk has promised to bring the new Roadster – name not confirmed yet – in 2019 with a speed mode called “maximum plaid”, a cheeky reference to Mel Brooks’ 1987 comedy Spaceballs.
If Tesla’s previous automotive endeavors are any indication – and it doesn’t get sidetracked by the Model 3’s introduction, then we should see a prototype of the next Roadster within the next two years, but until then, our friendly artist Theophilus Chin, has taken the new EV and with a little help from what we think is a Mercedes-Benz SLC/SLK hidden below, morphed it into a two-door sports car.
Rendering courtesy of Thephilus Chin
Photo GallerySeasoned producer and studio tech-head, Nectarios Meidanis, will be bringing his psychedelic knowledge to Earthdance Cape Town 2016 this weekend. Born in Greece, Nectarios performs solo as Martian Arts and has several collaborative projects. We had a chat with Nectarios about living in the UK, Boom, his analogue gear & visiting South Africa for the first time.
Psymedia: Hello Nectarios. Tell me about growing up in Greece, what was that like? When did you realize you wanted to take music more seriously?
Martian Arts: I went to my first party in 1994. It was near where I lived at the time in the outskirts of Athens, the forest of Varibopi. It was all Goa back then and I was amazed at the fact that people just took a sound system in the forest and played electronic music. Things happened in that forest, I was hooked straight away and here I am 22 years later, still loving a good party.
Psymedia: You grew up playing instruments and studied music in the UK. How did this benefit for your career as a whole? Did the UK scene have an influence on you?
Martian Arts: Studying at university was the best decision I ever made. I felt very lucky to be able to study exactly what I wanted. Synthesisers were like magnets, especially the Doepfer basic modular system they had in Uni. I was going by the university studios trying to jump into one of the synth studios when they were vacant, as the weekly hours I was allowed to book were not nearly enough to quench my thirst for the bleep.
The UK scene had a big influence on me. I was releasing breakbeat and some 4/4 music on Streetwise, Distinctive, Fabric Live, TCR and Audio Therapy to name a few). Back then you would actually make money from releasing a single with a track on each side of a record. DJs where still buying 12” back then. I’ve always loved funky music, so breaks were a great platform to express myself. I like to have the funk element in my psytrance tunes as well.
Psymedia: As Disco Hooligans, your first project, you released 2 albums on the netlabel Ektopplazm for free. What are your thoughts on free releases vs paid releases these-days? Are labels still important?
Martian Arts: Opinions vary on the subject, but labels are important to me and I think they should always be around. I came to discover artists just by following a label’s output that I liked the sound of. Back then, following a label’s output meant going down the record shop to listen to the new records. So I am keen on the old school way of things even if it now means simply following a Soundcloud page. Labels are extremely relevant to a music scene, especially when the people who run them are also people that just love the music and love the parties.
As for paid releases vs free releases, I think that most people just download music for free anyway, regardless of the release itself being free or not. Ektoplasm is good and I am happy to have released lots of music there. Many people start off from there and you never know who is going to download your album and send you a request for a booking. It happened to me, so it can happen to anyone.
Psymedia: How would you describe the sound of Martian Arts? Raja Ram is clearly a fan of your music. Would you say your sound appeals to the old-school, Goa lovers?
Martian Arts: Yes and no. Yes from people who hear a Goa vibe, mostly because I love a good old school Goa lead. No from the people that are not into the 16th single saw bass.
Psymedia: Are you still connected with the scene in Greece? What good festivals & parties are happening?
Martian Arts: I am connected with the artists here in Greece, but I don’t go to parties or play here. We had an amazing scene in Greece in the ‘90s, but greed sent it all down the drain and I am keeping my distance from greedy people.
Psymedia: How was Boom Festival this year? How was your talk at the Luminal Village? What makes this festival special?
Martian Arts: Boom is a pilgrimage, it’s that big festival in the relentless heat and dust with many people just going for it and at the end, catharsis comes and it feels great. The Luminal Village talk was very nice. I think knowledge is worth nothing, unless it is shared. I also like a good geeky synthesis talk.
Psymedia: It looks like you perform with quite a bit of analogue gear. Can you tell me more about your setup?
Martian Arts: I am using Ableton Live to play out and in the last couple of months I got this app called CV Toolkit from this young computer genius, that runs a company called, Spektro Audio. Its not an AU or VST, it’s just a standalone app that taps in the tempo of your DAW of choice. CV Toolkit sends a clock to my modular and it syncs to Live’s tempo and that is when the fun begins. I have finally made my live set to be the same way I make music in the studio, I listen to a beat and I patch a modular up to make a sequence and that’s me happy. I also have Machine with more drum samples and old blues chopped up vocal samples talking about African voodoo rituals and stuff, you know, the sort of thing that actually happens in a good party! Oh and monkey samples, elephants are nice but I reckon they’ve been done to death. It’s all about monkey samples nowadays. Preferably samples that you recorded on your own from the monkeys that live in Assagao.
Psymedia: Do you think a lot of top live psytrance artists are starting to neglect the ‘live’ part of their set(s)?
Martian Arts: I stopped judging what and how much someone does. Whatever makes the people on the dancefloor happy and also makes the performer happy to be there doing the thing, is fine by me. However, I loved the live sets of the 90’s where artists would show up with an Atari ST that runs Cubase with only 16 midi tracks, as I love watching Merv perform today. I like that raw aspect, but that is hard to go back to nowadays, where people want a mastered mix, playing flawlessly and loud as fuck from the PA, regardless of what is happening on stage. Nowadays the music is also not nearly as minimal as it was back then.
Psymedia: You’ve got a few active side-projects; the collective known as The Rave Commission, Ohmidrive vs Audioform & Strontium Dogs vs Merv from Eat Static. How do these projects differ? Is it challenging making time for all of them?
Martian Arts: Well, regarding Ohmnidrive, we haven’t done anything for the last few years, just a case of Pan and myself being too busy doing other stuff. Something will happen again at some point, though.
The Rave Commission is a massive melting pot of ideas from lots of people and the focus is peak time bangers. There is more than 8 of us now and last year we just all started focusing on it and we had something like an album done in a month. All the guys are great producers and the TRC chat is filled with bad jokes and filthy photos.
Strontium Dogs was Merv’s idea and me not believing that Eat Static wants to make a new project with your’s truly. Its the project where we just let loose. We agreed we’re just going to make a project and record really loud noises from the modulars where absolutely anything goes, regarding BPM and style, provided it has a mutant and at some points, punk vibe. I love it and the response has been very nice as well. The album is almost ready, we just need to mix the tunes down really as so far the only mix downs we have are from Merv’s mixing desk, when we play out.
Psymedia: This will be your first time in South Africa. What have you heard about our scene and what can the dance floor expect from your set?
Martian Arts: I know the scene in South Africa goes way back and I wish I could be there NYE 2000, alas I am very happy I am coming now and you can expect some big Goa leads and quirky noises and lots of fresh music that has not been uploaded anywhere yet.
Psymedia: Any upcoming releases you want to mention?
Martian Arts: The Strontium Dogs album, and I am happy to say that I just finished my debut Martian Arts album, so I am very happy for both these releases.
Psymedia : Thanks for the interview, see you at Earthdance Cape Town! Anything to add before we finish off?
Martian Arts: Live in the moment, enjoy life and I’ll see you at the dance floor!
CHECK OUT:Dark Horse proudly announces the newest video game art book in its long line of best-selling, award-winning titles with The Art of Metal Gear Solid V!
Witness the concept and design behind the genre-defining science-fiction military action and drama of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain!
Chronicling the development of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain by Konami Digital Entertainment and featuring hundreds of pieces of never-before-seen art, this beautifully assembled volume is an essential addition to any gamer’s collection. Dark Horse is proud to offer a piece of gaming history with The Art of Metal Gear Solid V!
In addition to the standard release, The Art of Metal Gear Solid V will also receive a limited edition of four hundred copies packaged in a tactical slipcase featuring an exclusive fine art print by superstar illustrator Ashley Wood!
The Art of Metal Gear Solid V is in stores November 2, 2016. Preorder your copy today at your local comic book store or favorite online retailer!
Praise for Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain:
“This is one of the most ingenious, lovingly crafted games of all time…Metal Gear Solid V is a masterpiece.”
—Games Radar
“The story and characters are captivating, making for an experience that’s unlike any other game I’ve played.”
—GameSpot
“The Phantom Pain closes the loop on the three decade-long Metal Gear saga and the result, warts and all, turns out to be one of the best entries in the series.”
—PolygonA BMW i5 SUV is strongly tipped to be the firm’s next all-new all-electric model, but it is not scheduled for launch until 2021.
Earlier this year, Harald Krüger, chairman of the board of management at BMW AG, revealed that the next BMW i product would be launched in 2021, dubbing it ‘i Next’. But he declined to elaborate beyond describing the future model as the “new spearhead of innovation and technology”.
BMW i Vision Dynamics previews i5 production model
Now sources have suggested that BMW has settled on an SUV bodystyle for its next model, reasoning that it is a shape with global appeal in a segment with booming sales and greater profit margins than hatchbacks or saloons. In addition, an SUV bodystyle more easily accommodates the bulky battery pack without compromising proportions.
Without commenting on the bodystyle, Ian Robertson, BMW’s head of sales and marketing, confirmed the firm was waiting until 2021 for its next major launch so it could take advantage of “the next big steps in electric motor, battery and autonomy”.
He said: “We are at the very early stages of i, but already we’re coming up to our 100,000th registration. Just as with M, there are opportunities that take time to build up, from i cars to i Performance products to i kit, such as an electric scooter.
“We conceived the i brand to work for the long term. The electric car market is emerging but we see enough to be confident that consumers are understanding what it is about. What’s more, 80% of i customers are new to BMW.”
Robertson added that the lessons learned from the i3 and i8 continue to give BMW an advantage over its opposition. He said: “The beauty of those cars is that they give us a competency in the field of electric cars and lightweight technology — not just in people, but in manufacturing, too. We are way ahead in the manufacturing of lightweight carbonfibre, for instance.”The Greek Anthology, Books 1–5 translated from the Greek by W.R. Paton and revised by Michael A. Tueller Loeb Classical Library/ Harvard University Press, 435 pp., $26.00
1.
In its present version, The Greek Anthology comprises about 4,500 short poems, composed by authors ranging from the third century BCE to the fourth century CE (with outliers on either end) and including works by many of the most brilliant figures of Greek literature, especially from the Hellenistic period (323–31 BCE). The collection—assembled over hundreds of years—came to Western Europe from Byzantium in the fifteenth century and immediately began to exercise on European poetry and culture an influence whose depth and breadth are even now difficult to gauge.1 “I’ll tell you the best poem ever written in Alexandria,” announces the commander in chief of the British army (Middle East Command) to a dinner party in Evelyn Waugh’s World War II trilogy, Sword of Honour. Duly encouraged by his hostess, the general begins:
They told me Heraclitus, they told me you were dead
They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.
I wept as I remembered how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.
And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,
A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest,
Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;
For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.
This is Callimachus (third century BCE), from the Anthology, in the inescapable Victorian translation of William Johnson Cory. Waugh, like other even mildly modernist Englishmen of his era, was both embarrassed by Cory’s sentimental old chestnut and unable to get it out of his head. He had the poetry-plagiarizing hero of The Loved One adapt it to commemorate the suicide of his mentor:
They told me, Francis Hinsley, they told me you were hung
With red protruding eye-balls and black protruding tongue
I wept as I remembered how often you and I
Had laughed about Los Angeles and now ’tis here you’ll lie…
This trip from the sublime—which Callimachus’s Greek text is—to the camp and down to the ridiculous is fully in keeping with the spirit of the Anthology, the vastness of which accommodates poems of remarkable variety. Under the auspices of the Loeb Classical Library, Michael A. Tueller has published the first volume (books one to five of sixteen) of a projected complete edition of the whole gigantic thing—a fully updated revision of W.R. Paton’s five-volume Loeb from a hundred years ago. It is an ambitious and worthy enterprise, but news of it may make non-initiates wonder what epigrams are, and what this enormous Anthology of them is, and why?
2.
Sometime in the mid-to-late sixth century BCE, the Greek lyric poet Anacreon, a fixture at the court of Polycrates, tyrant of the island of Samos (just…Originally published January 10, 2012 at 3:46 PM | Page modified February 6, 2012 at 11:38 AM
State Sen. Cheryl Pflug is the second Republican in recent days to say she will support gay marriage legislation. Congratulations to her for her courage and leadership on an important issue.
THE state Senate is becoming a place of possibility. Sen. Cheryl Pflug is joining other lawmakers willing to vote to give same-sex couples the full rights and benefits of marriage.
She is commended for standing up to say what she believes, even if it does not perfectly mesh with her caucus.
Pflug of Maple Valley is the second Republican senator in recent days to say she will support gay-marriage legislation. She has voted for domestic-partnership benefits twice and believes strongly in fairness for all.
"I have been a longtime supporter of human equality," said Pflug. "I do not feel diminished by having another human being experience the same freedom I am entitled to exercise. I would feel diminished by denying another human the ability to exercise those same rights and freedoms."
The more senators and representatives who see this matter in the broad light of day the better.
Gay-marriage proponents think votes exist for passage in the state House; but the math is more complicated in the Senate. Pflug's bold stance helps a lot. She and her neighbor in Olympia legislative offices, Sen. Steve Litzow, R-Mercer Island, both support the legislation without a public vote.
Going to voters, as Pflug points out, is for times when lawmakers do not know what to do. Pflug knows exactly what to do. Fairness can come only from giving gays and lesbians the same rights and benefits as everyone else. Three cheers for Pflug for demonstrating courage and leadership.The Airbnb Australian Boomers have made it two wins in as many days, outclassing the Philippines 97-75 in Nice, France overnight.
It was a commanding performance from the Australian team, outscoring their Asian opponents 50-33 after half time to claim a 22-point victory and head into tomorrow morning’s match-up with France full of confidence.
The Australians spread the love on the offensive end, with five players posting double digit scoring – led by Aron Baynes (15 points and four assits), Ryan Broekhoff (14 points on 4-of-7 3FG), Matthew Dellavedova (13 points), Brad Newley (13 points and four rebounds) and Nathan Jawai (10 points and four rebounds).
Young gun Dante Exum had his best all-round performance in the green and gold, posting an impressive stat line of eight points, five rebounds and a game-high six assists in 21 minutes.
His Utah Jazz NBA Summer League teammate Brock Motum continued his strong European tour, posting seven points and a game-high 12 rebounds as the Airbnb Boomers dominated the glass 40-30.
Airbnb Boomers Assistant Coach Luc Longley said it was pleasing to see the team perform against a potentially tricky opponent.
“We were nervous going into this game,” Longley said.
“They were a Korea, Angola-style game where they just run around and jack up threes, very hard to scout and very hard to prepare for, so it was a game where we needed to be disciplined defensively and only taking good looks was important, which I thought the guys did a really good job of doing.
“We’re really happy with the way the guys are coming together. Roles are clarifying. Players like Ryan Broekhoff are starting to find their niche and find their shots. There’s a couple of guys that still need to do that, but we’re happy with the process.”
Resting starters Dave Andersen and Joe Ingles for the clash, the Airbnb Boomers looked to veteran Brad Newley to set the temp early – and the 29-year-old responded, getting to the basket to post seven points in a 20-17 quarter-time lead.
Exum began to exert his playmaking influence on the game during the second quarter as Broekhoff picked up where he left off, finding his range from beyond the arc as the Australians posted a late 8-0 run to lead 47-42.
Having played largely a facilitating role – it was time for Dellavedova to show his shooting prowess, scoring 11 of his 13 points in the second half as the Airbnb Boomers found a variety of avenues to the basket.
The 24-12 final quarter ensured the 10-point three-quarter time lead would push beyond 20 at the final buzzer and continue the Airbnb Boomers’ undefeated Nice tournament.
Next up for the Airbnb Boomers is a match-up with France in the early hours of Monday morning.
In a coup for fans, all three games will be televised LIVE on ESPN2 and ESPN3.com.au, tipping-off in the early hours of Monday morning 18 August against France at 4:30am AEST.
Boxscore
Catch the latest edition of “Inside The Huddle” and go all access behind the scenes of game day with the Airbnb Boomers.
The Airbnb Boomers open their 2014 FIBA Basketball World Cup in Gran Canaria against Slovenia in the early hours of Sunday morning 31 August AEST.
Based in the Canary Island city of Gran Canaria, the Boomers will also face Angola, Korea, Lithuania and Mexico, playing five games in six days prior to the knockout phase.
CLICK HERE to see the full schedule for the 2014 FIBA Basketball World Cup.
Fans won’t miss a minute of the action from Spain with all Australian Boomers games to be broadcast LIVE* and in full on ABC2 as part of their extensive 2014 FIBA Basketball World Cup coverage.
CLICK HERE to read more about the ABC coverage of the 2014 FIBA Basketball World Cup.
The 2014 FIBA Basketball World Cup will be held in Spain from 30 August to 15 September.
*(Live AEST)
Airbnb Australian Boomers Team – 2014 FIBA Basketball World Cup
David Andersen – Strasbourg (France)
Cameron Bairstow – Chicago Bulls (NBA)
Aron Baynes – San Antonio Spurs (NBA)
Ryan Broekhoff – Besiktas (Turkey)
Matthew Dellavedova – Cleveland Cavaliers (NBA)
Dante Exum – Utah Jazz (NBA)
Adam Gibson – Adelaide 36ers (NBL)
Chris Goulding – CAI Zaragoza (Spain)
Joe Ingles – Maccabi Tel-Aviv (Israel)
Nathan Jawai – Galatasaray (Turkey)
Brock Motum – Bologna (Italy)
Brad Newley – Gran Canaria (Spain)
Coaching Staff
Head Coach: Andrej Lemanis
Assistant Coaches: Luc Longley and Trevor Gleeson
Mentor Coach: Dr Adrian Hurley
Technical Assistant Coach: Mick Downer
Airbnb Australian Boomers pre-FIBA Basketball World Cup Tour
Nice Tournament
Airbnb Australian Boomers v France
Monday 18 August @ Nice, France 4:30am
TV: LIVE on ESPN2
Online: ESPN3.com.au and Foxtel GO
Live Stats
Strasbourg Tournament
Airbnb Australian Boomers v Finland
Saturday 23 August @ Strasbourg, France 4:30am
Airbnb Australian Boomers v France
Monday 25 August @ Strasbourg, France 3:00am
TV: LIVE on ESPN2
Online: ESPN3.com.au and Foxtel GGoogle's plan to acquire Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion promises to trigger antitrust red flags just as much as it will shake up the mobile-handset business.
As the dominant leader in Internet search and search advertising, Google can't make an acquisition without raising regulatory hackles. And this deal, based on its size alone, will spark trustbuster scrutiny.
"We're quite confident that this will be approved," Google's chief legal officer, David Drummond, said during a conference call announcing the news today. "We believe, very strongly, that this is a pro-competitive transaction."
Google
Google is already facing an antitrust investigation from the Federal Trade Commission. In June, the company disclosed that it received "formal notification" from the agency that it was reviewing the company's business. And last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that the FTC was including the Android mobile operating system in that probe, looking into whether Google is barring smartphone makers that load Android on their devices from using competitors' services.
In looking at the Motorola deal, regulators will most certainly zoom in on Google's industry-leading Android. The question they'll try to answer is whether the Motorola acquisition benefits Android in a way that could increase Google's market power in search and search advertising.
It's an issue that Drummond sought to address right away.
"Android has clearly added competition, innovation, increased user choice," Drummond said on the call. "We think protecting that ecosystem is pro-competitive, almost by definition."
Competitors, though, are likely to see things differently. For now, Google's biggest rivals, Apple and Microsoft have declined to comment on the antitrust implications of the deal. But it's almost certain that they'll raise concerns with regulators.
"One way to look at this is, how is Microsoft going to complain? How is Apple going to complain?" says Eleanor Fox, an antitrust professor at New York University School of Law. "What are they going to want?"
Most likely, those companies will focus on the very same things that Google did as it considered buying Motorola-- its vast patent portfolio. Motorola Chief Executive Sanjay Jha noted on the conference call that the company has some 17,000 patents and another 7,500 patent applications pending.
Though not all of those are related to mobile devices, those patents will go a long way toward helping Google defend itself and its handset partners from lawsuits alleging that Android has infringed on patents. That's because patent litigation often plays out like a kabuki dance where one company with a patent threatens to sue another company that it believes has infringed on its innovation. The accused company often resorts to asserting it's own patents against its accuser. That leads to negotiations and cross-licensing deals.
But Google has been at a disadvantage in the game because it has a thin patent portfolio for mobile devices. That's why it's been sued by Oracle and its handset partners have been sued by Microsoft and Apple. And it's why Google was so desperate to buy Motorola, offering 63 percent more than Motorola's Friday closing price on the New York Stock Exchange.
So expect Apple, Microsoft, and others to raise concerns of anticompetitiveness over the deal to convince regulators to push a consent decree that would diminish the value of those patents. Google's rivals would love nothing more than to have regulators force the company to have to either divest or cross-license some of the Motorola patents. It won't be easy though.
"In order to have a consent decree, they are going to have to find an anticompetitive angle," Fox said. That's not easy in a so-called vertical acquisition, when one company acquires a customer or supplier, as opposed to buying a rival in a horizontal deal that would eliminate competition. Vertical acquisitions, such as the proposed Google-Motorola deal, tend to be viewed more leniently.
"Because Google has got real enemies some people will try to make noise about the deal," said Ed Black, president of the Computer and Communications Industry Association in Washington, D.C., a trade group that counts Google as well as Microsoft as members. "But from a regulatory standpoint they don't compete horizontally."
In general, federal agencies reviewing proposed acquisitions look at whether the deal will cause adverse competitive effects and whether it will create economic efficiencies that would otherwise not occur, Rick Brunell, director of legal advocacy at the American Antitrust Institute, said. Regulators will also look at whether either party will leave the market if the merger doesn't happen.
Motorola may not exactly be prepared to stop making cell phones, but its market share has plummeted since the success of the Razr half a decade ago. A June article in Fortune magazine called the company "an also-ran in global market share by units and by revenue." A report from market research firm Trefis, which bases its estimates on product desirability and revenue, said Motorola's mobile-phone market share will fall below 3 percent by 2017.
A federal requirement called the Hart-Scott-Rodino process requires companies to notify the FTC and the Justice Department in deals of this size. That also established a mandatory waiting period that must be met before the transaction can |
healing the burns just fine. They did not even hurt. Nora just sat there at Ren's side, waiting for him to wake up. Nora did not like the look of the bandage on his head, but it was better than watching him bleed. He would be okay. He had to be. He would wake up soon and when he did, Nora would be there. All she had to do was wait.
Jaune and Pyrrha had stopped by what seemed like hours ago. That had been exciting and really broke up the boredom. It was so nice to see them, even if Pyrrha did not look very good. At least she seemed happy. Nora looked at the clock. It had been fifteen minutes since the visit. She was hungry. The food at the hospital was terrible. She wanted Ren's pancakes. When he got better they'd make them together. All she had to do was wait.
Team YYRN entered Junior's bar, finding him sitting on a barstool and covered in blood. "I'm so sorry." He said, shaking his head and not looking at the new arrivals.
"What happened?" Yosuke asked. "Where's Team RWBY."
"I'm sorry." Junior repeated. "He was going to kill the twins if I didn't do it."
"Who was?" Naoto asked. "Do what?"
"It was Adachi." Junior said. "He found out I knew Team RWBY. He made me lure them here then he beat me up. When I came to the only thing left was Yang's scroll. That and the blood." Ominous puddles of blood stained the dancefloor.
"What did he do with them?" Rise asked.
"I don't know." Junior answered. "I was unconscious."
"Did he say anything?" Naoto asked. "Did he do anything strange while you were conscious?"
"When he came in he was carrying that screen." Junior said. A broken television lay on the bar.
"I think we know what he did then." Yosuke said. "This is bad."
"Did he say anything about us?" Naoto asked.
"No, he was only interested in Team RWBY." Junior replied. "He said the White Fang wanted them dealt with."
"So he doesn't know about us?" Rise said.
"I guess not." Junior said. "I'm so sorry. I shouldn't have done it. I got those innocent girls killed."
"I don't think they're dead yet." Yu said. "We're going to save them."
*Note: Because I'm evil, I will now take a week off from posting chapters of this story. Consider this a season finale. Next week I'll be posting some one-offs that I may go back to at some point, but the week after that I'll be back to your regularly scheduled programming. Thanks for reading!Liberal Democrat David Laws has resigned as Chief Secretary to the Treasury after admitting he claimed expenses to pay rent to his partner.
He said he could not carry on with the "crucial work" on the Budget while dealing with the implications of the revelations in the Daily Telegraph.
He had earlier apologised and said he would pay back the £40,000 he claimed.
Prime Minister David Cameron and his deputy Nick Clegg paid tribute to Mr Laws saying they hoped he would return.
The Yeovil MP said he wanted to keep his relationship with James Lundie private.
'Did wrong'
Mr Laws is the first resignation to hit the coalition government, just three weeks after it was formed.
He was one of the Liberal Democrat negotiators who hammered out the deal before joining the cabinet as a key member of Chancellor George Osborne's team.
Mr Laws said he had informed both David Cameron and Nick Clegg, but it had been "his decision alone".
In his resignation letter to Mr Cameron, he wrote: "The last 24 hours have been very difficult and distressing for me, and I have been thinking carefully about what action I should take in the interests of the government, my constituents and - most important of all - those whom I love.
"I am grateful for the strong support which I have received from my friends, family, and from you, the deputy prime minister and the chancellor. This support has been incredibly important, but nonetheless, I have decided that it is right to tender my resignation as chief secretary to the Treasury."
Explaining his decision, he said: "I do not see how I can carry out my crucial work on the Budget and spending review while I have to deal with the private and public implications of recent revelations.
"I cannot now escape the conclusion that what I have done was in some way wrong, even though I did not gain any financial benefit from keeping my relationship secret in this way."
He added: "Most importantly, I have an overriding responsibility to those I love most, and who I feel I have exposed to scrutiny in this way.
"I have pursued a political career because of my sense of public duty, but I have too often put this before the interests of those I love most. It is time to redress the balance."
Lib Dem Scottish Secretary Danny Alexander will take over the post, Downing Street has announced.
'Integrity'
Responding to Mr Laws' resignation letter, Mr Cameron said he was an "honourable man", adding: "I hope that, in time, you will be able to serve again."
Lib Dem Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg said he had always admired Mr Laws' integrity and he hoped he would one day be able to return to government.
He said Mr Laws' privacy had now been "cruelly shattered".
Mr Cameron wrote: "The last 24 hours must have been extraordinarily difficult and painful for you.
"You are a good and honourable man. I am sure that, throughout, you have been motivated by wanting to protect your privacy rather than anything else.
"Your decision to resign from the government demonstrates the importance you attach to your integrity.
"In your short time at the Treasury, you have made a real difference, setting the government on the right path to tackle the deficit which poses such a risk to our economy."
Mr Clegg said: "I very much hope that when those questions are answered there will be an opportunity for him to rejoin the government because, as everyone has seen in recent weeks, he has so much to contribute to national life.
"When all is said and done, this has come about because of David's intense desire to keep his own private life private. His privacy has now been cruelly shattered.
"I'm sure I speak on behalf of all fair-minded people when I say that I hope that David, and all those people close to him, will now be granted the privacy which he has always craved."
The chancellor said he was "very sorry" to lose Mr Laws from the Treasury.
Mr Osborne said: "It was as if he had been put on earth to do the job that was asked of him.
"I spoke to David several times over the last 24 hours and I have a huge admiration for the way he has conducted himself in the most difficult circumstances.
"I completely understand and respect his decision to step down. Public life should have a future place for such an honourable, talented person."
Former Liberal Democrat MP Lembit Opik who is a friend of David Laws, said he was the victim of a "witch hunt".
He said: "I think this is a national tragedy, not least because it suggests that - on matters which are nothing to do with a person's personal competence to do a job - they can still be pushed out of Parliament."Getty Images
The bullpen has been a problem area for the Detroit Tigers over the past several years, and that continues to be the case in 2015 with closer Joe Nathan out for the season after undergoing surgery for a torn UCL.
Continue for updates.
Nathan Speaks on Future Following Surgery
Saturday, May 2
After surgery on a torn UCL, Nathan spoke about his future with Casey Stern of MLB Network Radio, saying, "I'm gonna try, and I'm gonna push myself. If it doesn't happen I'm fine with the way my career has gone."
Nathan further elaborated about the potential end of his career, saying, "It's about the feeling. You know when you don't have anymore fight left. To me, I'm not there," per Stern.
On April 30, Anthony Fenech of the Detroit Free Press reported that Nathan underwent successful surgery and "everything went well."
The Tigers announced on April 23 that Nathan suffered a torn UCL and a torn flexor pronator tendon, which forced him to have season-ending surgery on his elbow:
Jeff Passan of Yahoo Sports noted that there is precedent for a player of Nathan's age (40) returning from such a serious injury:
On April 22, James Schmehl of MLive.com reported that Nathan suffered a setback during his appearance at Triple-A Toledo. The medical staff checked Nathan after he "appeared to wince after throwing a strike." Schmehl provided additional details:
John Wagner of ToledoBlade.com provided comments from Nathan, who spoke about the severity of the injury:
Schmehl pointed out that Nathan "looked strong" prior to exiting, with his fastball hitting 88-89 miles per hour.
Nathan has been one of MLB's premier closers since emerging with the Minnesota Twins in 2004, but he took a big step back last year. Although he saved 35 games in his first season with the Tigers, his 4.81 ERA left plenty to be desired.
The six-time All-Star earned a save on Opening Day for the Tigers this season, but it didn't take long for bad news to strike.
As the Detroit Free Press noted when Nathan first went to the disabled list, Joakim Soria will fill in for the Tigers in Nathan's absence.
Soria is perfectly capable of filling in due to the fact that he closed for the Kansas City Royals and Texas Rangers in the past, but losing Nathan hurts the bullpen depth considerably.
Follow @MikeChiari on Twitter.2016 is looking to be a banner year for Margot Robbie, who is currently in the process of transitioning from “rising star” to “bonafide movie star.” With roles in Suicide Squad, The Legend of Tarzan, and Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (not to mention her breakout roles in The Wolf of Wall Street, Focus, and Z For Zachariah), Robbie has shown the kind of range and charisma that you’d want in an actor headlining several films a year. And from the sound of things, she’ll soon be getting to call some of the shots herself. In addition to starring in the film adaption of Matt Ruff‘s Bad Monkeys, she will serve as a producer as well.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Universal has optioned the rights to Ruff’s 2008 novel and intends to build the project around Robbie. She will produce the film alongside Scott Stuber and Dylan Clark, which suggests the kind of creative control usually given to A-list talent. So make of that what you will. This is just another step in Robbie’s recent rise up the Hollywood food chain, especially since she’s already set to act as a producer on the in-development spin-off movie for her Suicide Squad character, the adorably psychotic Harley Quinn.
But let’s get back to Bad Monkeys, which sounds like an intriguing psychological thriller with a few science fiction elements. Robbie will play Jane Charlotte, a woman who is arrested for murder but claims she is only acting on behalf of a secret group called Department for the Final Disposition of Irredeemable Persons, who are dedicated to cleaning the world of evil. Naturally, this outrageous claim lands her in a psychiatric ward, where the attending doctors attempt to get to the bottom of her story and discover if she’s delusional, crazy, telling the truth or all of the above.
I haven’t read the book, but it sounds like it could be a killer role, requiring a performer who can be convincingly insane while also offering just enough evidence that everything she’s saying is completely true. Honestly, it sounds kind of a like a reverse 12 Monkeys, which offered Bruce Willis one of his finest characters.
It’s still early days for Bad Monkeys and no writers or filmmakers are currently attached to the project. But with Suicide Squad opening in a few weeks (and tracking looking really good), you can expect to start hearing more in the near future. Pretty soon, everyone is going to want to be in the Margot Robbie business. And can you blame them?Ellis Reynolds Shipp.
Ellis Reynolds Shipp MD FAAP[1] (January 20, 1847 – January 31, 1939)[2] was one of the first female doctors in Utah and west of the Mississippi. She founded the School of Nursing and Obstetrics in 1879, and was on the board of the Deseret Hospital Association. Shipp successfully combined motherhood and a medical practice, saying, "It is to me the crowning joy of a woman’s life to be a mother."[3] In her 50-year medical career, she delivered more than 5000 babies, and led the School of Nursing and Obstetrics to train more than 500 women as licensed midwives.[4][5]
Biography [ edit ]
Born Ellis Reynolds, she emigrated with her family to Utah Territory in 1852. Her family was among the early Mormon pioneer settlers of Pleasant Grove, Utah. In 1866, Ellis Reynolds married Milford Shipp. She bore a total of ten children, six of whom survived infancy.[6]
Shipp began studying at the University of Deseret,[7] then in Philadelphia at the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1875. She left her children behind in Utah Territory in the care of her husband's three other wives. Brigham Young sponsored her education in the eastern United States and she later did further medical studies at the University of Michigan. When she returned to Utah, Ellis Shipp worked with Eliza R. Snow to start an obstetrics school, eventually training 660 midwives.[8]
In 1910, she published a book of her own poems, Life Lines.[9]
Shipp served as a member of the General Board of the Relief Society from 1898 to 1907. She also served on the general board of the Young Women's Mutual Improvement Association.[10]
Shipp died at age 92 in Salt Lake City on January 31, 1939 of cancer.[2]
Honors [ edit ]
A neighborhood park in Salt Lake City, Utah, is named in Shipp's honor; it is located near where she lived and practiced medicine.[11] A public health center in West Valley, Utah, is also named in her honor.[12]
Ellis Reynolds Shipp Hall (Building 11) of the women's dormitories in the old Heritage Halls at Brigham Young University was named after Shipp.
Shipp is honored with a display room in the Daughters of Utah Pioneers Pioneer Memorial Museum in Salt Lake City.[13][not in citation given]
Notes [ edit ]It seems the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus have kept China's iPhone users busy.
iOS users in China downloaded more apps than their U.S. counterparts in the first quarter of 2015, according to new data from app-analytics company App Annie. The report suggests Apple's growing popularity in China has helped widen the disparity between revenue from the App Store and Google Play, despite Android's continued global dominance.
The report also underscores just how much of a game changer the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus were in China, noting that smartphones with screen sizes between 5 and 7 inches accounted for nearly 60% of smartphone shipments in the country, compared with just 40% in the U.S. and the rest of the world.
"China’s surge may have been partially caused by the recent launch of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus," according to the report. "While both the United States and China are two of Apple’s strongest markets, demand for smartphones with larger screens seems to be particularly high in Asia."
AppAnnie's report also has some bad news for Android developers. While the Google Play Store still sees significantly more downloads than the the App Store — a longstanding trend given Android's dominance in the global market — the disparity between Google Play's downloads and revenues has grown even more.
Image: App Annie App Annie
Revenue from Apple's App Store was 70% higher in the first quarter of 2015, compared with 60% in the third quarter of 2014, according to the report. Previous quarters suggested Android revenues were finally catching up to iOS, a trend that has now reversed. In short: Not only are iOS users still spending more money, they are now spending it faster than their Android-using counterparts.
The reasons aren't completely clear, but App Annie's analysts speculate that the success of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus in the U.S. and China helped fuel additional revenue. Google Play also doesn't exist in China, where third-party app stores such as Xiaomi dominate.President Trump's top aides are reportedly worried about what their boss will say to Russian President Vladimir Putin when they meet at the upcoming G-20 summit, according to a report from the New York Times.
Among the topics that aides are concerned Trump may discuss with Putin is their mutual distrust of the media, the Times reports.
Trump himself isn't worried about the meeting at all, according to the Times report. The president is more concerned with being criticized by German Chancellor Angela Merkel over his decision to exit the Paris climate agreement.
Click through images of Obama and Putin through the years:
12 PHOTOS Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin through the years See Gallery Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin through the years U.S. President Barack Obama extends his hand to Russian President Vladimir Putin during their meeting at the United Nations General Assembly in New York September 28, 2015. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque Russian President Vladimir Putin (C) looks back at U.S. President Barack Obama (L) as they arrive with Chinese President Xi Jinping (R) at an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit plenary session at the International Convention Center at Yanqi Lake, in Beijing, November 11, 2014. REUTERS/Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Pool (CHINA - Tags: POLITICS BUSINESS TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY) U.S. President Barack Obama (L) meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin during the G8 Summit at Lough Erne in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland June 17, 2013. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque (NORTHERN IRELAND - Tags: POLITICS TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY) U.S. President Barack Obama (2nd R) chats with Russia's President Vladimir Putin prior to a working session at the Group of 20 (G20) leaders summit in the Mediterranean resort city of Antalya, Turkey, November 16, 2015. REUTERS/Kayhan Ozer/Pool TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY U.S. President Barack Obama (L) talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin (R) and U.S. security advisor Susan Rice (2nd L) prior to the opening session of the Group of 20 (G20) Leaders summit summit in the Mediterranean resort city of Antalya, Turkey November 15, 2015. Man at 2nd R is unidentified. REUTERS/Cem Oksuz/Pool TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY U.S. President Barack Obama (L) talks with Russia's President Vladimir Putin as they gather for a family photo with fellow world leaders at the start of the G20 summit at the Regnum Carya Resort in Antalya, Turkey, November 15, 2015. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY U.S. President Barack Obama talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the APEC Economic Leadersâ Meeting in Lima, Peru November 20, 2016. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque A huge video screen on Sword Beach shows U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin as they arrive for the International 70th D-Day Commemoration Ceremony in Ouistreham June 6, 2014. World leaders and veterans gathered by the beaches of Normandy on Friday to mark the 70th anniversary of the Allied D-Day landings that helped turn the tables in World War Two. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque (FRANCE - Tags: POLITICS ANNIVERSARY CONFLICT TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY) Russian President Vladimir Putin holds out his arms as he walks past U.S. President Barack Obama (centre L) during a group photo at the G20 Summit in St. Petersburg September 6, 2013. Above Obama is British Prime Minister David Cameron, above Putin is German Chancellor Angela Merkel. At right is Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque (RUSSIA - Tags: TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY BUSINESS POLITICS) Russia's President Vladimir Putin (L) welcomes U.S. President Barack Obama before the first working session of the G20 Summit in Constantine Palace in Strelna near St. Petersburg, September 5, 2013. REUTERS/Grigory Dukor (RUSSIA - Tags: POLITICS TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY) Russian President Vladimir Putin (L), British Prime Minister David Cameron (C) and U.S. President Barack Obama take part in a group photo for the G8 Summit in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland June 18, 2013. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque (NORTHERN IRELAND - Tags: POLITICS) U.S. President Barack Obama (R) meets with Russia's President Vladimir Putin in Los Cabos, Mexico, June 18, 2012. The leaders are in Los Cabos to attend the G20 summit. REUTERS/Jason Reed (MEXICO - Tags: POLITICS) Up Next See Gallery Discover More Like This HIDE CAPTION SHOW CAPTION of SEE ALL BACK TO SLIDE
Former Defense Department official Derek Chollet told the Times that Putin will be very prepared for this meeting saying, "he's someone who is a master at manipulation."
Chollett went on to say, "I expect an Olympian level of macho posturing between these two leaders, who both understand the power of symbolism."The Distributed Denial of Service ( DDoS ) attack is becoming more sophisticated and complex, and, according to security experts, the next DDoS vector to be concerned about is SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) amplification attacks.
SANS Internet Storm Center reported SNMP scans spoofed from Yesterday afternoon, thereported SNMP scans spoofed from Google’s public recursive DNS server searching for vulnerable routers and other devices that support the protocol with DDoS traffic and are opened to the public Internet.
"We are receiving some reports about SNMP scans that claim to originate from 8.8.8.8 (Google's public recursive DNS server)," wrote Johannes Ullrich, dean of research of the SANS Technology Institute and head of the Internet Storm Center. "This is likely part of an attempt to launch a DDoS against Google by using SNMP as an amplifier/reflector."
Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is a UDP-based protocol designed to allow the monitoring of network-attached devices by querying information about their configuration. SNMP-enabled devices with such configurations can be found both in home and business environments and is typically used in devices such as printers, switches, firewalls and routers.
The ISC is investigating the magnitude of SNMP attacks, and discovered few packets that were targeting default passwords used by SNMP.
According to Ullrich, the attack uses the default "read-write" community string of "private." SNMP command is actually a "set" command that uses this default string as a password, and "private" is a common by-default password.
If the attack is successful, it tries to modify the configuration variables in the affected device, the TTL (Time To Live) variable is set to 1 which, according to Ullrich, "would make it impossible for the gateway to connect to other systems that are not on the same link-layer network." It also sets the Forwarding variable to 2, which turns off IP forwarding.
Ullrich said ThreatPost that he’s continuing his research on the attack, and admins should be on the lookout for packets from the source IP 8.8.8.8, which is Google’s public recursive DNS server, with a target UDP port of 161.
Many Large-scale DDoS attacks in the past year have used misconfigured DNS (Domain Name System) and NTP (Network Time Protocol) servers for amplification or reflection, in order to amp up the amount of traffic directed at a target.
In DNS reflection attacks, hackers take advantage of the millions of misconfigured DNS, known as open recursive resolvers or open recursors, on the Internet to amplify a much smaller attack into a larger data flood in an effort to get high attack bandwidth. Also earlier this year, more than 24 million home routers were targeted in DNS-based amplification attacks, from which more than five million were used during February alone as the starting point for DDoS attacks.
In Network Time Protocol (NTP) amplification attack, hackers have reached new heights of about 400 Gbps at its peak of traffic, which was greater than ever in history of the Internet. Hackers abuses the NTP servers by sending small spoofed 8-byte UDP packets to the vulnerable server that requests a large amount of data (megabytes worth of traffic) to be sent to the DDoS'd target IP Address.
The distributed reflection and amplification (DrDoS) attack allows an attacker to use a little skill and relatively small amount of resources in an attempt to create a larger data flood, therefore has become one of favorite weapon for the cyber criminals to temporarily suspend or crash the services of a host connected to the Internet, and with time, it will rise.The host, whose Crackle series is nominated for an Emmy alongside broadcast's bigwigs, also opens up about why he's "feeling less sad" about the late-night landscape and whether he'd consider doing an episode with Donald Trump.
Jerry Seinfeld was just as surprised as everybody else to hear that his Crackle series, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, was nominated for an Emmy alongside Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel Live!
"I feel like Lewis and Clark here paddling down the river to find the new world, and I can't believe I've found it," he says of the Sony-produced show in which he interviews comedy heavyweights including Lorne Michaels, Steve Martin and the late Garry Shandling over a car ride and coffee. The show's nomination in the variety talk category — Comedians has been nominated twice before, but both times in shortform categories — comes eight seasons into its run and has snagged a spot that might otherwise have gone to Seth Meyers, Stephen Colbert or The Daily Show's Trevor Noah. Adds Seinfeld, "To be still in a world of trying to innovate at this stage of my career is thrilling."
With that astonishment evident in his voice, the 62-year-old comic opened up about his episode with President Obama, potential plans to bring the web show to TV and why he's no longer so sad about the late-night landscape.
You're in the eighth season of Comedians. How has your process evolved over time?
I used to worry: Is this really a show? Is anyone going to like this? Will anyone even watch this? So the process hasn't changed, I'm just more comfortable and confident now that I know this is something that people like. I didn't know that about Seinfeld in the early 1990s, either. I thought, "I like this show. I wonder if anyone else will." And it took years before people reacted to that.
You recently had President Obama on the show. How did it come together?
My producer called someone on the White House staff, and they said they'd been wanting to get in touch with us because they were interested in him doing the show. I really didn't believe it was going to happen. My favorite moment was when I said to him, "When I call you, you answer the phone, 'White House,' I'll say, 'I'd like to speak with the president, please,' and then you say, 'Speaking.' " He thought that was a great joke, so we started with that.
What's on the cutting-room floor of that episode that we didn't see?
We're actually talking with some other platforms now about releasing the show in other forms with different material. That's one of the fun things about this world I've fallen into: I can remake these shows into other things for other places. So some of the stuff on the cutting-room floor from all of the episodes could come out in the future.
What does that mean exactly?
We're talking to television and cable and streaming [outlets], and so there are a variety of forms that this show might take. Nothing is set yet. It's just conversations now, but there's been a lot of interest.
As you drove away from the White House, what was the thing that made you go, "Damn, I wish I had asked him that"?
He was telling me about how the thermostat worked and the fact that you have to call somebody [to operate it]. I really wished I had asked him more about that call and how annoying it is to have to call someone to change the thermostat if you're cold or hot. Yes, that's the kind of stuff I'm interested in. (Laughs.)
You've said you decided Obama made sense for the show because he's a "comedian president." We now have a presidential candidate in Donald Trump who some would argue is unintentionally funny. Would you consider doing an episode with him?
I think it's funny that he likes to end sentences with, "Believe me," which is really asking a lot when you say something crazy. But I only would have a guest on if they can make me feel funny, too, and I'm not sure if he makes me feel funny or just... weird.
Looking at this season of Comedians, what was the highlight?
Garry Shandling hugging me and saying "I love you" was probably the best moment of my year. I didn't know that would be the last time I'd ever see him. And then being in the White House and having the president trust me to come in with cameras and make a silly show in the Oval Office and eat the fruit off the coffee table and then ask if it was washed.
Who's left on your guest wish list?
I think I'm going to start bringing some people back. Charles Nelson Reilly would come on The Tonight Show all the time, and I was always happy to see him. I'd like my show to be like that. I'd love to see Alec Baldwin again. Larry David, Bob Einstein, Sarah Silverman.
Three years ago, you told me that the late-night shows were leaving you with "a sad feeling." Is that still the case?
I'm feeling less sad now. Sometimes actors and actresses make me sad when they come out and tell you how great their show is and what a great time they had working with so-and-so. I just can't hear that anymore. First of all, you're working, so we don't care if you like them or if you're having a good time. And all we care about is the show anyway, so there must be a better question. But the political season has made late-night TV much more uplifting because you get to hear things reflected off of these people. I want to hear Bill Maher and John Oliver react — that has more substance than the general promotional tour that everybody else is on. So it's a good time for late-night comedians. I watch all of them, but I'm a really big fan of John Oliver.
You've said you don't watch a lot of TV. What's made you stop and pay attention?
We started watching [ESPN's] O.J.: Made in America last night, and that's just a hell of a piece of work.
Your pal Larry David is finally getting back to Curb Your Enthusiasm. Would you be up for making another cameo?
Anything with Larry, I'm in. I talked to him last week, and he says it's going great. Can you think of another popular show that went away and then came back five years later with the same cast?
If you wanted to pick up with Seinfeld tomorrow, you'd have a slew of options, too. But I'm guessing that won't happen?
No. But we did have an offer — I won't say who from — to do a new, live episode of Seinfeld on TV.
Did any piece of you consider it?
No! (Laughs.)
What happens when you land on a rerun of Seinfeld? Do you stop and watch for a few minutes?
I don't. I really should. I don't know why it makes me so uncomfortable. Whenever I see a clip of it, I think, "This is a very funny show."
A version of this story first appeared in the Aug. 19 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.Highs and Lows is a feature in which we chronologically track the peaks and valleys of an artist, band, or filmmaker’s career. This time, we look at a seminal Boston band who helped bridge the gap between indie and mainstream.
As music fans, we love to romanticize the influence and importance of our favorite bands. What’s not as appreciated is how thorny and complicated the path toward greatness often is for those bands that achieve it. Take any band tagged as “underrated” or “underappreciated” in its time, and it’s not hard to find the various bumps in the road.
Pixies, for one, have navigated their way through a myriad of ups and downs over the course of their 30-year career. In their initial seven-year run, they built a musical legacy that any self-respecting indie rock band would kill for. Surfer Rosa and Doolittle weren’t just outside-the-box, underground smashes upon their release in the late ’80s; they’re records that have continued to grow in stature in the decades since. No longer is it apt to call Pixies a cool indie band. It’s not a stretch today to hold the band’s influence up alongside many of the very best bands in rock and roll history. Kurt Cobain openly admitted that the now-legendary guitar intro to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was a Pixies rip-off while Thom Yorke, Bono, and David Bowie have also sang the band’s praises.
That all sounds positively storybook, but Pixies’ creative highs have been counterbalanced by some difficult lows over the years. Frustrations among band members brought the band to a halt, just as the alternative sounds they helped pioneer were bearing fruit on radio and MTV. They returned to prominence more than a decade later with a handful of successful reunion tours, only to stall creatively upon regrouping in recent years to pen new music. Band members have been replaced, as have their replacements. In this installment of Highs and Lows, we look at a seminal indie rock band’s long, choppy road to mainstream acceptance, culminating with the release of Pixies’ second post-reunion effort, Head Carrier
–Ryan Bray
Senior Writer
__________________________________________________________Earlier today, I had the huge pleasure of attending the Trial of the Pyx in the sumptuous surroundings of the Goldsmith Hall just by St Paul’s Cathedral.
The trial occurs on the second Tuesday in February every single year – and is truly ancient in nature, having happened every year since the year 1282. The trial is basically a test to ensure that the coinage of the realm is of good quality, and unlike many quaint ceremonies in the City of London, this one is still a legally binding procedure.
The name of the test – the Trial of the Pyx refers to the wooden box which is used to transport the coins to be tested from the Royal Mint to the Goldsmiths Hall.
A bit of history (with help from a leaflet by the Goldsmiths)
Some form of coin testing was undertaken in Saxon times, but it was during the reign of Henry II that the regular testing was instigated following complaints about the quality of the coins being issued by the Royal Mint. By the 13th century, the Trial of the Pyx was already following a form which is virtually unchanged since then – as shown in a writ of 1248 by Henry II to the Mayor of London, entrusting them:
“to elect twelve of the more discreet and lawful men of the city and join with them twelve good goldmsiths of the same city, who shall go before the Barons of our Exchequer at Westminster and examine, upon oath, together with the Barons, both the old and new money of our land, and make provision how it may be bettered, and that it be made of good silver, and that it be lawful and for the good of the realm”
The benchmark against which the coins are measured is known as the Trial Plate, and these were kept under the personal guard of the Monarch, in the Exchequer. The earliest surviving Trial Plate is stored in the Royal Mint, and dates from 1279.
Trial Plates are still used today – although they are managed by the National Weights and Measures Laboratory – who send a representative to the Trial to deliver them to the Court.
The earliest trials were held in Westminster Hall – and later at the Exchequer. It was Queen Elizabeth I who finally granted the responsibility for the Trial to the Goldsmiths’ Company some 500 years ago – and in 1870, the trial moved to Goldsmiths Hall, where it had remained ever since. This actually makes sense, as the Assay Office is also based in the Hall, and it is they who carry out the second phase of the trial.
The first phase of the Trial is presided over by the senior judge in the Court of Justice, known as the Queen’s Remembrancer, supported by his two clerks. The Jury comprises the Prime Warden of the Goldmiths’ Company with the three supporting Wardens, the Head of the Assay Office, and a selection of the Company’s Liverymen who make up the Jury. The size of the Jury will vary each year depending on how many coins are to be counted (I presume it was very large when the UK minted its initial batches of decimal coins).
—
It was to observe the first part of the trial that I was at Goldsmiths Hall this morning, for they allow a small number of people to attend and watch the proceedings. I was accompanied by my friend, Matt from The Londonist.
We arrived and were guided to seats for the visitors in the main hall – where a long table had been set up for the testing to take place. Once everyone was settled, an explanation of the morning’s events was laid out along with some of the history above.
The first phase of the Trial is the counting and weighing of coins brought to the hall in the Pyx boxes. Throughout the year, one coin from every single batch minted by the Royal Mint is set aside and put in sealed bags, each containing 50 coins. These bags are placed in the Pyx boxes for the Trial.
It was explained that some 63,000 coins |
insulin, corn starch, and sugar are the same in principle. This “sameness” adds unavoidable complexity to the GMO discussion. Genetic engineering seems to have developed two faces: life-threatening and life-saving. Anti-GMO organizations will sooner or later have to confront this contradicting duality, especially as genetic engineering opens a new chapter for medical advances, such as the potential cures for cancer and HIV.
So when should we expect GMO Inside to set up another petition, this time for GMO-free insulin? Part of me hopes soon since maybe the juxtaposition of a long-trusted drug and anti-GMO propaganda will be enough to resolve the two faces of genetic engineering into one honest representation.
Written by Guest Expert
Caroline Coatney is a plant breeder with experience in science communication and science policy. She has a Masters degree in plant biology from the University of Georgia.I’ve been wowed ever since I took the Bose sound true around-ear style headphones out of the box. Bose never ceases to amaze me and many others with their highly unique and top performing audio products, wether it be a home theatre system, or a pair of high class headphones like the SoundTrue’s. When I first saw a picture of these new release cans from Bose, I honestly thought they looked exactly like the QC15’s, but upon further investigation, use, and testing, it became apparent to me that they are actually quite different, and are rocking some significant improvements compared to previous models.
> > > Click here to see ratings, reviews, specifications and prices on Amazon < < <
Unboxing and First Look
Unboxing a pair of Bose cans is always an enjoyable experience, and most of them are similarly packaged and presented in a very picturesque and professional manner. The box for the SoundTrue’s was sealed in a light plastic, that was easy to peel off, once removed all you have to do is slip the cardboard cover off, and voila you will be presented with headphone case (headphones inside), and any accessories included. In this case for the around-ear SoundTrue’s the only accessories provided was the cables and the case, along with an instruction manual. I’ve had instances in which Bose had provided a multitude of plug adapters and all kinds of extra trinkets. First thing I noticed when removing them from the case was their unbelievable featherweight feeling. I guess when I first looked at them they looked a lot heavier than they actually are, so when I pulled them out, i couldn’t believe how light weight they were. Very interesting construction indeed.
The color that I have, is the black on black, but they also come in few variations such as; mint, white, and black/mint
My Thoughts And Experience
After all this unboxing excitement, I put them on. Extreme comfort at its best is how I would describe the experience. Oval shaped ear-cups with the ability to move and pivot in many directions, combined with a light weight frame, and ultra cushioned ear-cups and headband complete the build flawlessly. The headband is very thin on the SoundTrue around-ear style headphones, but it is supported by a sturdy metal interior, and lined with a thick gel padding at the top, which stops about half way down. I love the ear-cups on this model, they are big and oval, providing a luxurious amount of room for your ears, length, width and depth wise. The ear-cups are so big and comfy that they don’t actually touch your ears at all, but sit directly on your head, thus the around-ear style. Judging from my experience with having used and reviewed hundreds of headphones, these rank in the top 10 for comfort, very close to the Sol Republic Master Tracks. The only downside to all this positivity would be the obvious fact that they are larger than most headphones, and not as easily portable. But if thats an issue for you, have a look at the On-Ear SoundTrue headphones.
SoundTrue Around-Ear Style Audio Quality
Excellent, fine tuned sound quality, is what you can expect from the Bose SoundTrue models. I would describe the experience to be almost as an enhanced sound replication, not exactly as raw as what you would normally find in a pair of audiophile headphones. The overall tone is very balanced and the frequencies are executed very precisely. I did find these Bose around-ear headphones to have a slightly augmented bass, but this was only apparent in bass heavy music, and less so in other varieties. Overall I can’t complain, as these cans offer an amazing experience at a fair price point.
Fore more information and specifications, and for more personal reviews, click the product link below.
[asa]B00IUICOR6[/asa](Zac Baillie/AFP/Getty Images)
A bipartisan crowd of congressional critics and overwhelming public opposition killed President Barack Obama's proposal to attack the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad last year, but in the final months of 2013, at least some members of Congress reportedly approved secret weapon transfers to Syrian rebels.
The weapons being paid for by U.S. taxpayers include anti-tank missiles and are supplied to "moderate" rebels in southern Syria via Jordan, Reuters reported Monday evening, citing unnamed U.S. and European security officials.
Some members of Congress, including leading skeptics of U.S. intervention in Syria's three-year civil war, may have been unable to know about the funding and unable to object to it.
The arms funding likely was born as a "classified annex" in the defense subcommittee of the U.S. House Committee on Appropriations, then approved by the full appropriations committee, then the full House. A similar process would have occurred in the Senate.
But members of Congress do not automatically acquire the high-level security clearance required to view classified appropriations, a staffer of the House Appropriations Committee tells U.S. News.
Members of Congress without sufficiently high levels of clearance lose their right to know anything about classified appropriations – including dollar amounts and funding recipients – and therefore cannot participate in the approval process.
The committee staffer was unable to provide additional information about the reported funds for Syrian rebels.
Spokespeople for several congressmen who opposed intervention in Syria tell U.S. News they are looking into the issue. One leading intervention opponent has not seen the classified annex allocating funds to the rebels, according to a spokeswoman.
Officials cited by Reuters said several months of future arms deliveries are already funded by Congress. An American official told Reuters supportive members of Congress and national security officials are confident the weapons won't be taken by powerful al-Qaida-associated rebel groups who have attacked secular rebels and horrified Western media audiences by performing grisly public executions.
U.S. support for Syrian rebels – at least publicly acknowledged support – previously appeared to be tapering off. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Dec. 12 the U.S. would cease providing non-lethal aid to rebels – after incurring $260 million in such expenses – citing "how complicated and dangerous this situation is and how unpredictable it is."
Many facts about the ongoing arms mission and its legislative history are unknown. It's possible the funding was attached to the 2014 National Defense Authorization Act signed by Obama on Dec. 26.
Polls suggest that Americans are reluctant to support any intervention in Syria.
A Pew Research Center poll conducted June 12-16 found 70 percent of Americans oppose providing arms to rebels and that 60 percent believe the rebels may be no better than the Assad regime. A survey conducted June 28-July 8 by Quinnipiac University found 61 percent of Americans believe it's not in the country's national interest to intervene in the war and that 59 percent oppose arming Syrian rebels.
An apparent chemical weapons attack on the suburbs of Damascus Aug. 21 led Obama to announce his intention to conduct air strikes against Assad's government. Obama decided to seek congressional approval Aug. 31 after mounting public opposition. Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla., accused administration officials of providing members of Congress misleading intelligence in closed-door sessions to convince them to favor war.
The drumbeat for intervention wilted when it became clear the administration lacked the votes in Congress to win authorization. A flurry of polling confirmed skepticism not just of the proposed strikes, but also opposition to arming rebels. A Washington Post/ABC News poll conducted Aug. 28-Sept. 1 found 59 percent opposed air strikes on Syria and that 70 percent opposed arming the rebels. A CNN poll conducted Sept. 6-8 found 69 percent of Americans believed it was not in America's interest to intervene in the civil war.
Classified annex provisions occasionally enrage members of Congress who are unaware of their content until they become law. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., was infuriated earlier this month when a classified annex included in a $1.1 trillion spending package forbade the CIA from transferring its drone program to the Department of Defense. Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., explained to Roll Call that all members do not have access to all annex material.
More News:Update on Nov. 7: The Reddit account belonging to PanPthrowaway was deleted after this story was published.
On Sunday, Nov. 5, journalists at nearly 100 media organizations began publishing stories on a massive document leak revealing financial information about the offshore accounts of the ultra wealthy. At 1.4 terabytes, the trove dubbed the Paradise Papers is second in scale to last year’s Panama Papers (2.6 TB) and includes details on elites from the queen of England to aides of Donald Trump.
But 16 days before the first stories published, there was a prescient post on Reddit with the title “Do not give up. More is coming.”
Obvious throwaway. I cannot give much information, but I would encourage you all to keep your eyes open. These are more, bigger leaks coming that relate to the extremely wealthy and members at the highest levels of government in developed countries around the world, including the United States. Paradise.
The author had created the username PanPthrowaway specifically for the purpose of posting on the Panama Papers subreddit on Oct. 20. Over the next day or so, PanPthrowaway would drop some more hints in the comments:
I should add one more detail – the next leaks will involve senior members of the Trump administration, although I do not know when they will actually be published.
I will give you a hint so you know I’m authentic. In around two weeks you will see some damaging reports come out regarding Wilbur Ross (not related to Paradise). Take a screenshot of this post and come back when I’m right.
Figure of speech. I suppose I just wanted to make a post to let everyone know that this isn’t over. Something else is coming, and in my opinion it is bigger than the original Panama leaks. Also, I am not a part of the investigation, personally. But I can assure you that something is coming, and I offer upcoming damaging evidence against Wilbur Ross as proof I have my sources. Again, check in in about two weeks.
I personally am not involved in investigation. I cannot provide any timelines or expectations of when anything is to be released, unfortunately. But good journalism takes time. There are literally hundreds of people working on Paradise and they do not want to screw it up.
I encourage you to check back in in about 2 or two and a half weeks.
Indeed, two and a half weeks later, after the Paradise Papers were revealed, PanPthrowaway followed up with another post titled “Do I have your attention now?” Though the author had said earlier he or she was not part of the investigation analyzing the data dump, PanPthrowaway claimed in more recent posts to be a journalist.
Many on Reddit were impressed PanPthrowaway followed through, but some felt the ploy to gain internet notoriety came at the cost of potentially jeopardizing the investigation. As one user (blablablablabla78) put it:WASHINGTON — Congressional Republicans conceded defeat on Wednesday in their bitter budget fight with President Obama over the new health care law as the House and Senate approved last-minute legislation ending a disruptive 16-day government shutdown and extending federal borrowing power to avert a financial default with potentially worldwide economic repercussions.
With the Treasury Department warning that it could run out of money to pay national obligations within a day, the Senate voted overwhelmingly on Wednesday evening, 81 to 18, to approve a proposal hammered out by the chamber’s Republican and Democratic leaders after the House on Tuesday was unable to move forward with any resolution. The House followed suit a few hours later, voting 285 to 144 to approve the Senate plan, which would fund the government through Jan. 15 and raise the debt limit through Feb. 7.
Mr. Obama signed the bill about 12:30 a.m. Thursday.
Most House Republicans opposed the bill, but 87 voted to support it. The breakdown showed that Republican leaders were willing to violate their informal rule against advancing bills that do not have majority Republican support in order to end the shutdown. All 198 Democrats voting supported the measure.Reuters/Beck Diefenbach A six-year-old virus that drains bank accounts is thriving on Facebook, reports Nicole Perlroth of The New York Times.
The virus is spread through phishing messages.
When someone has been phished, their account will automatically send messages or links to a large number of their friends.
These messages or links are usually ads telling friends to check out videos or products. Don't click them.
Facebook is aware of the problem but it isn't taking the matter nearly as seriously as it should be, says Eric Feinberg, founder of the advocacy group Fans Against Kounterfeit Enterprise (FAKE).
Feinberg told The NYTimes, "[Facebook isn't] listening... we need oversight on this."
The virus is called Zeus. It's a special type of Trojan horse that has already infected millions of computers. Zeus works by remaining dormant on your computer until you log into your bank account. Once you're in it steals your password and drains your account.
Zeus targets Windows machines. It does not work on Mac OS X or Linux. The only real way to protect yourself from it is to make sure you only click links that come from trusted sources.
The virus is sophisticated too. Sometimes it can even replace your bank's website with its own page in order to get even more information like your social security number so that it can be sold on the black market.
Zeus has been around since 2007 and evidence shows that it is only getting more active. The virus is being hosted from computers controlled by a Russian criminal gang that has been linked to online crimes ranging from malware and identity theft all the way to child pornography.AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File Getting a drug all the way to approval is no easy feat — for pharmaceutical companies or for regulators.
And a few decades ago, the drug approval process was positively glacial. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) simply did not have the resources to efficiently review all the applications coming in.
In response, in 1992, the Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA) was passed, making it the law for pharmaceutical companies to directly pay the FDA to review their applications for drug approvals. That way the FDA has more resources to conduct rigorous and timely reviews, pharma companies get products through the regulatory pipeline faster, and patients get new drugs more quickly. Win-win-win, right?
That's one way to look at it. But others have argued that PDUFA "puts the FDA in the pockets of the drug industry," as Jessica Wapner explained on her PLOS blog a few years ago. "In the same way that doctors are accused of subjecting themselves to bias when they receive consulting or speaker fees from a drug company, so has the FDA been accused of kowtowing to the pharmaceutical industry, approving drugs that maybe shouldn't be approved for one reason or another."
One reason PDUFA has been somewhat controversial is that its impact has been enormous. Wapner notes that the part of the FDA that does approvals functions almost like a private company, since "its budget [is] mainly covered by PDUFA fees, rather than taxpayer dollars."
So how much money have pharma companies paid the FDA?
For a report published on August 15, healthcare consulting firm Avalere Health did the math on how much pharma companies have actually paid the FDA through PDFUA, adding up the wide variety of fees collected for different types of applications. (For a prescription drug application with clinical data, for example, the fee in 2016 is $2,038,100.)
The report found that since PDUFA was passed in 1992, pharma companies have contributed $7.67 billion to the federal agency.
"User fees are increasingly central to the funding of the drug, biologic and device review programs, and in some cases these fees account for a larger proportion of the FDA budget than congressionally appropriated monies," Avalere said in the report. "For example, user fees account for 68 percent of the FDA's review budget for prescription drugs, while 58 percent of the review budget for generic drugs comes from user fees."
And the fees charged each year by the FDA have risen sharply since the law was first implemented, the report found (though they're dropping in 2017):
Courtesy Avalere Health
Not all of the money that's collected is being put to use, Avalere noted. If it were, the analysts suggested, more drugs could be approved a lot more efficiently, making them available to patients who might need them. The report cited $300 million in user fees that hadn't been spent.
"The significant unspent funds left over from user fee programs suggest that FDA could do more to accelerate product reviews," Avalere manager Jay Jackson said in the report. The FDA has also decreased the fees next year to balance out that leftover money.
PDFUA, which has to be renewed every five years, is set to expire again in 2017.For people who live and work around Silicon Valley, sightings of self-driving cars have become pretty common — especially on the roads and highways near the Mountain View, California headquarters of Google, which has been championing the technology.
It now looks like such sightings could become more common throughout the Golden State in the months to come.
Today, the office of California Governor Jerry Brown announced that he has signed into law a bill that “allows driverless cars to be operated on public roads for testing purposes, provided that each vehicle has a full licensed and bonded operator in the driver’s seat to take control if necessary.”
The bill, SB1298,authored by state Senator Alex Padilla, also requires that the California DMV will adopt regulations that specifically cover autonomous vehicles by January 1, 2015.
According to a press release issued by the Governor’s office today, Jerry Brown visited Google’s headquarters and took one of the company’s self-driving cars for a spin prior to signing the bill into law.
The vehicles spotted already in the San Francisco Bay Area always have someone in the driver’s seat, but the purposefully low-key exterior and the spinning light detection and ranging (LiDAR) devices on the roof make it pretty apparent that they’re a bit different than their fully human-operated counterparts.
The governor’s office says that this legislation “paves the way for new technology that could reduce highway fatalities, pollution and congestion while expanding mobility options for elderly and disabled people.”
As my colleague Greg Ferenstein reported yesterday, Google has lobbied very hard for this bill. But they are not the only ones betting on a future with autonomous vehicles. If you talk to the founding teams at startups such as Zimride (which operates Lyft of pink mustache fame) and SideCar, they will tell you that one of the most exciting things about the ride-sharing space is the possibility that its core technology could ultimately be leveraged in a future time when computers are operating many of the vehicles on the roads.
Here’s a video of a self-driving car in action:If you want to be playing meaningful football at the end of the season, 0-2 isn’t a very good place to start. I’m not exactly revealing a state secret by suggesting that teams that start the season with a couple losses are less likely to make the playoffs than teams that start with wins, and it’s easy to get carried away with one week’s worth of information about a team, but a slow start really, really hurts. Our colleague Benjamin Morris over at FiveThirtyEight ran a chart detailing the historical likelihood that a team with a given record will make the playoffs. Morris noted that 0-2 teams have made the playoffs just 12 percent of the time.
That figure runs back through 1990, but the league’s structure has changed a bit since then. If we go back to 2002, when the NFL switched to its current divisional and schedule format, there have been exactly 100 teams to start 0-2. Just nine have made the playoffs. The most recent example came last year, when the Panthers started 0-2 with narrow losses to the Seahawks and Bills, the latter inspiring Ron Rivera to very famously turn into Riverboat Ron. The Panthers were the first 0-2 team since 2008 to make the playoffs, and it damn near required a coaching miracle to turn them around. It’s no easy feat.
With Baltimore blowing out Pittsburgh last night, we’re left with 15 0-1 teams heading into Week 2. Three matchups pit 0-1 teams against one another, so at the bare minimum, three 0-2 teams will head into Week 3. Using the Vegas odds for each team’s money line in a Monte Carlo simulation of Week 2, I found that the most likely outcome is that we’ll end up with seven 0-2 teams. And of those seven teams, we would expect at most one to make the playoffs. So, realistically, we’re eliminating six teams from playoff contention this weekend. In Week 2. Ouch.
It’s safe to say nobody’s very comfortable with the idea of going 0-2. But, among those 15 teams that might, which has the most to lose? Truthfully, I don’t think it really matters very much if the Raiders, Buccaneers, Jaguars, Rams, or Browns start the year 0-2; their quarterback troubles already make me skeptical that they can do very much even with a win this weekend. Likewise, the Saints, Packers, and Patriots are still probably going to do just fine in 2014, even if they get upset by the Browns, Jets, or Vikings on Sunday. Those seven other teams in the middle? They’re the ones that have the most to lose this weekend. We can eliminate the three from the NFC East (Washington, Dallas, and the New York Giants), whose futures are far more dependent on the Eagles losing to the Colts on Monday night than anything they themselves might do; it’s the four other 0-1 teams that have the most to lose heading into Week 2.
Chicago Bears
You know that thing fans do when they run through their schedule the day it’s announced and pencil in a win or a loss for every matchup on their calendar? What percentage of Bears fans do you think looked at the Bills in Week 1 at home and said, “Ahh, that might be a tough one, let’s chalk that one up as an L?” It might literally be zero percent. Sure enough, variance happens, and the Bills pulled out a 23-20 victory in overtime on the road over the Bears. Even worse, no fewer than four offensive starters left the game for Chicago, who had the league’s fewest missed games by starters on offense last year. All four of those starters — Roberto Garza, Matt Slauson, Brandon Marshall, and Alshon Jeffery — did not practice Thursday.
While most would have expected the Bears to be underdogs when traveling to San Francisco for the first regular-season game at Levi’s Stadium, they were considered an underdog that would have matched up well on offense against their opposition’s biggest weakness. The 49ers are undersize and mediocre at cornerback, a problem when battling against the physical 6-foot-3 Jeffery and 6-foot-4 Marshall. But if Jeffery and Marshall can’t go, the Bears would be forced to start Santonio Holmes and Josh Morgan at wide receiver. That’s not exactly the same thing.
A loss would knock Chicago down to 0-2 in a division that’s already looking exceedingly difficult, with Detroit and Minnesota looking very impressive in Week 1 victories. The Lions and Vikings are both underdogs this week against the Panthers and Patriots, respectively, but the Monte Carlo simulation suggests there’s a 47.7 percent chance Week 2 will end with the Bears at 0-2 and one (or both) of those teams atop the NFC North at 2-0. The Packers are also heavy favorites to beat the Jets in Lambeau Field, which would leave the Bears last in the NFC North with arguably their easiest game of the season on paper already in the loss column.
Chicago gets an easier road matchup when it travels to New York to play the Jets in Week 3, but its schedule ramps up after that: The Bears host the Packers, travel to face the Panthers and Falcons, host the Dolphins, and play the Patriots in Foxborough before Chicago’s Week 9 bye. I’m not going to pencil in wins and losses for those matchups — you just saw how useless that is — but a road win against the 49ers would be an enormously valuable way to make up for last week’s mistake.
Kansas City Chiefs
I suspect few Chiefs fans had a 16-point home walloping by the Titans in their plans for Week 1, but that’s exactly what happened. Even worse, the game was really more about the Chiefs playing poorly than it was the Titans playing especially well. The replacement-level talent filling in for suspended players was really bad, as players like Mike McGlynn and Frankie Hammond were overmatched by competent NFL competition. The Chiefs badly missed injured corner Marcus Cooper, and while he’s likely to be back Sunday, they’ll be without linebacker Derrick Johnson and defensive end Mike DeVito, each of whom are done for the year. I mean, without De’Anthony Thomas around, the Chiefs even looked terrible on special teams in Week 1. When you make Chiefs special teams coordinator Dave Toub look bad, you’re really playing awfully.
The good news is that the Chargers and Raiders also lost. The bad news is that the Broncos are still great. It’s exceedingly likely the Chiefs will need to qualify for the playoffs by winning a wild-card spot; they almost surely can’t hope to sneak into the playoffs by winning their division with eight wins like the Packers did last year, so the Chiefs are probably looking at nine and preferably 10 wins to feel confident about their chances of making a return trip to the playoffs.
Losing a home game to a team from the AFC South isn’t a great way to start that playoff trek. Unfortunately, playing the Broncos in Denver is basically already a loss. The Vegas money line suggests the Chiefs have just a 12.8 percent chance of winning Sunday. It’s not impossible to beat the Broncos in Denver, as the 2013 Chargers will happily remind you, but you need a lot of things to go right, and everything seems to be going wrong for the Chiefs right now.
A loss in Denver would put the Chiefs two games behind the Broncos in the AFC West with the tiebreaker in hand; it might already sink Kansas City’s chances to win the West before things even really get started. AFC wild-card rivals like the Titans, Texans, Colts, and Dolphins are also favored in most places Sunday, meaning there’s a pretty good chance the Chiefs could be two games back in that race, too. I’ve compared this team to the 2011 Chiefs, a group that followed an unexpected run to the playoffs by losing their first game in a home blowout (41-7 to the Bills) and seeing a star defender go down for the season (Eric Berry). In Week 2 of 2011, the Chiefs lost 48-3 to the Lions and had Jamaal Charles tear his ACL. Maybe an innocuous, injury-free loss to Denver wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world after all.
San Diego Chargers
Kansas City’s AFC West brethren, meanwhile, have a more agonizing loss to mull over. The Chargers were up 11 points on Arizona at the beginning of the fourth quarter and had a 90 percent win expectancy with less than 10 minutes to go, only for luck to cruelly bounce in the opposite direction. A road win against NFC West competition would have been an enormous boost in San Diego’s chances going forward, but it was not to be.
More good news/bad news: The good news is that the Chargers don’t have to play the Broncos in Denver this week; the bad news is that they have to play the Seahawks. The game is in San Diego, which is obviously better than traveling to Seattle and facing football’s best home-field advantage, but the Seahawks are still a very good football team outside of the Pacific Northwest. Vegas gives San Diego a 29.3 percent chance of beating the defending champions in Southern California on Sunday. It probably doesn’t help that San Diego is coming off a short week after appearing on Monday Night Football, while the Seahawks opened up the NFL calendar last Thursday and have had four extra days of rest.
But take heart, Chargers fans — there are a bunch of very winnable games coming up. After the Seahawks game, San Diego travels to Buffalo, comes home to host the Jaguars and Jets, and then travels to Oakland to kick off its divisional slate. The schedule gets tough later on — that three-game stretch in December against the Patriots, Broncos, and 49ers isn’t fun — but imagine how great it would be if the Chargers could hit the weakest part of their schedule with a win over the defending Super Bowl champions.
Indianapolis Colts
The Colts were supposed to be here. Beating the Broncos in Denver was always going to be a tall order, and there’s no shame in starting the year off with a loss. Losing Robert Mathis for the year, however, was not in the cards. The Colts were supposed to get their star defender back from his Clomid suspension after Week 4, but after Mathis tore his Achilles last week, he’s now done for the season without an obvious replacement. With no pass-rusher waiting to drastically improve their defense at the end of the September tunnel and both the Titans and Texans winning in Week 1, it’s more important for the Colts to start winning sooner rather than later. The AFC South looks like it’s going to be a much tougher fight than it was a year ago.
No problem. All they’ve got to do is beat the Eagles, and hey, the Jaguars nearly did that on the road last week, right? Not so fast. As Sheil Kapadia noted in his indispensable midweek Eagles columns, most of the Eagles looked great against Jacksonville on Sunday. It was only really Nick Foles who struggled. Philadelphia left a number of big plays on the field, with Kapadia suggesting that even an average Foles could have broken Donovan McNabb’s single-game Eagles passing record of 464 yards. Given that Foles isn’t working with a known injury, it seems more likely he had an isolated bad game than a dismal performance that would signify future problems to come. And while the Jaguars forced Foles into mistakes by sacking him five times during the first half, the Eagles offense went into overdrive during a 27-point second half, during which Foles was not sacked. Without Mathis, which pass rush do you think the Colts will be more likely to resemble?
The Colts are favorites to prevail in their home opener, with Vegas giving them a 60.4 percent chance of pulling out the win over Chip Kelly & Co., but there’s still the danger that Indy ends up 0-2 and looking up at the top of the AFC South. The Texans and Titans are both favored in Week 2, with Houston traveling to Oakland while Tennessee hosts a Cowboys team in disarray. The Monte Carlo simulation suggests that Indianapolis has a 35 percent shot of waking up Tuesday morning trailing either Houston or Tennessee by two games in the division. That would serve as an interesting prelude to the beginning of Indianapolis’s AFC South operations, as the Colts travel to Jacksonville in Week 3 before hosting the Titans in what’s suddenly looking like an important AFC South encounter. Indy may still be the favorites to win the division, even after losing both Mathis and Week 1 in a matter of days. If they’re two games back of the Titans or Texans come Tuesday, well, that might not be the case anymore.The Brooklyn Nets have a difficult decision to make.
Sources told ESPN's Chris Broussard that the Nets shortened their list of GM candidates to Bryan Colangelo, Arturas Karnisovas and Sean Marks and that a decision will likely come by the end of the week.
Here's a quick look at the trio:
Bryan Colangelo is a two-time NBA executive of the year. Garrett W. Ellwood/NBAE/Getty Images
Colangelo: A two-time NBA executive of the year (2005, 2007), Colangelo stands out due to his experience and accolades. He served as GM for several years in both Phoenix (1994-2006) and Toronto (2006-13), producing a couple drastic turnarounds (29 to 62 wins in 2005 and 27 to 47 wins in 2007).
While Colangelo, 50, did make some mistakes -- like trading Jason Kidd for Stephon Marbury in Phoenix and drafting Andrea Bargnani No. 1 overall in Toronto -- he was also responsible for putting together the Amare Stoudemire-Shawn Marion-Steve Nash and DeMar DeRozan-Kyle Lowry-Jonas Valanciunas cores.
The Suns may not have been able to get over the hump in the mid-2000s, but their high-octane, "seven seconds or less" offensive system under Mike D'Antoni revolutionized how the game is played.
Colangelo's father, Jerry, also has a past history as a strong executive and is currently trying to turn things around in Philadelphia. Bryan would certainly bring instant credibility to Brooklyn.
Karnisovas: The 44-year-old Lithuanian, who current serves as the assistant GM for the Denver Nuggets, has amassed a strong resume -- especially on an international level.
He played at Seton Hall under P.J. Carlesimo before having success overseas on several teams -- including Olympiacos and FC Barcelona.
During his tenure in Denver, the Nuggets have been able to add international diamonds in the rough like Nikola Jokic, Jusuf Nurkic and Joffrey Lauvergne. With Brooklyn lacking draft picks, this is an important skill.
Karnisovas spoke Russian during part of his interview with the Nets, which is certainly a plus. However, he's never been a lead executive before.
Marks: Marks, 40, is currently the assistant GM of the San Antonio Spurs.
He stands out because he's had experience in the NBA as a player, coach and executive. The 6-foot-11 native of New Zealand played in 230 career games with seven different teams (1998-2011), averaging 2.8 points and 2.8 rebounds.
He also served as an assistant under Gregg Popovich before moving into the front office. Marks did briefly serve as GM of San Antonio's D-League team, the Austin Toros.
The Spurs have obviously ascended to top status among NBA franchises, and the Nets (like others) would love to replicate what they've been able to accomplish.A woman ordered to pay nearly $24,000 to the man she accused of sexual assault has lost her appeal. The woman’s lawyer, Jonathan Collings, questioned the Welland small claims court ruling, in part, because he accused the deputy judge of relying on “sexual stereotypes.” Deputy Judge David Black found the woman was unreliable and that she falsely accused her ex-boyfriend as revenge for perceived infidelity. She was ordered to pay $23,842 — a decision that has drawn sharp criticism from sexual assault survivor advocates who argued it will discourage victims from reporting to police. Collings had asked for the case to be dismissed. However, Ontario Superior Court Justice James Ramsay dismissed the appeal, arguing the deputy judge was “entitled” to believe him over her and that the 2016 decision was not “improper.” “I agree that (to) resort to any gender related misconceptions would have been erroneous, but I do not think that the judge made any such resort,” Ramsay’s written decision said.
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The original ruling is based on “the contradictions in her own statements,” he said. Collings declined to comment further, adding that he’s not retained on the matter anymore and is unaware of any plans to appeal further. The woman cannot be named because of a publication ban. The Spectator has chosen to also not name the man, who has declined to speak with The Spectator.
The man, who represented himself at the hearing Sept. 8, argued the case has been a “nightmare.” He was charged criminally, but that charge was withdrawn at the preliminary hearing. Suzanne Mason, public education coordinator for the Niagara Sexual Assault Centre, attended part of the hearing and expressed shock at the decision. “That is very scary that you can go to police, have them believe you, have charges laid (and still be sued),” she said. The decision will have a “chilling effect” across Canada, where already only 5 per cent of victims report sexual assault, Mason said.
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The alleged incident happened at his residence in March 2011 at the end of an on-again, off-again relationship. She found a stain on his bed, which she said was peach lipstick from another woman, and he said was peach jam. She alleged that he then raped her. He said the sex was consensual. Black’s decision relied on texts and emails sent from the woman to the man following the incident that he ruled appear to indicate she “felt positively about the encounter.” Later messages turned angry, with the woman accusing the man of cheating on her, before she went to police. The deputy judge also relied on testimony from the woman’s doctor who examined her the next day and said she did not see bruising, despite the woman telling court she was sore all over. Experts point to a strong body of evidence that shows victims of sexual assault often don’t remember things clearly, don’t always seem upset and, when the attacker is someone who is known to them, may try to smooth things over. Lenore Lukasik-Foss, director of the Sexual Assault Centre Hamilton Area (SACHA), said the decision is part of a concerning trend toward victim blaming and relying on stereotypes. “There is always that worry around our judges not fully understanding the behaviour of survivors,” she said. “It’s not uncommon for them to make breakfast the next morning or email later.” This case also “feeds into the stereotype of the jilted girlfriend,” she said. “It plays into well-worn stereotypes of revenge-seeking women.” In truth, there are no more false reports of sexual assault than any other crime, Lukasik-Foss said. It’s the justice system that is “failing survivors.”Russian President Vladimir Putin insists that while the Panama Papers stories published by Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and its partner |
theme of the movie is limits: the limits of human knowledge and acts and the limits on wealth and control one needs to have. It embodies Catholic social teaching as it shows how small-scale local communitarian aid is better for the community than large-scale business, which tends to be greedy and oppressive.
Finally, please note that the Angelology of the film is controversial: we disagree with one another as to whether it could be in accord with Catholic orthodoxy.Giant-Alpecin have announced their eight-rider squad for Paris-Nice to be lead by Tom Dumoulin with support from Laurens ten Dam in his first race for the German team. Dumoulin, who started his season by placing fourth overall at the Tour of Oman, makes his second start at the 'race to the sun' and will look to better his ninth place of 2015 to set up a GC challenge. Related Articles Dumoulin follows his own beat on Green Mountain in Tour of Oman
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"Our first focus will be to do a good prologue with Tom. From there on we will take it day by day to see what is possible in the general classification," coach Aike Visbeek said.
Ten Dam lines up for his first race since the 2015 Tour de France and first in Giant-Alpecin colours following his move across from LottoNL-Jumbo. The 35-year-old will ride in support of Dumoulin at Paris-Nice, returning to the WorldTour race for the first time since 2012. Dumoulin will also be able to call upon Tobias Ludvigsson when the roads go uphill.
While the team features riders capable of claiming results in sprint finishes, Visbeek explained that the team has been selected to ensure Dumoulin is kept safe on the testing stages that feature the roads of Paris-Tours and "chalky tracks reminiscent of the Tro Bro Leon final" in the early stages.
"With the experience of Koen and Roy we will be able to deal with the different conditions of the race. In addition, Laurens will bring that necessary experience for the mountains," Visbeek explained.
The 74th edition of Paris-Nice starts with a 6.1km prologue in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, before taking the peloton south from Condé-sur-Vesgre to Vendôme. The race concludes with two stages around Nice with the final stage a 141km test from Nice to Nice that features six catergorised climbs, the last of which is the Col d'Eze, before finishing on the seafront Promenade des Anglais.
Giant-Alpecin for Paris-Nice: Roy Curvers, Laurens ten Dam, Tom Dumoulin, Simon Geschke, Cheng Ji, Koen de Kort, Tobias Ludvigsson and Georg Preidler.4 Game Asset Coloring Mistakes Beginners Make
Every time you create a game asset, you need to color it, apply materials and textures. And if you do it wrong, colors can ruin the asset and the whole scene where the asset is used. So here are 4 common mistakes people make coloring game assets.
1. Oversaturated Colors
I think this is the most common one. People like to crank the saturation up to 100%. After that, any 2D/3D model can look very hard to look at, especially if you have a lot of those objects in the scene.
Try to use lighter colors – less Saturation than 90% should be good to go. There are no perfect numbers but it works for the most part.
Here is the same pine tree with a desaturated colors. You can easily look at it and it won’t hurt your eyes.
2. Too Dark Colors
I see this a lot on the internet when beginners post images where they show off their assets with a very dark colors in a light scene, it looks dull and not realistic. Even darker than this palm tree! And if it’s in the dark scene you can’t see it at all.
Don’t do that! Try to use lighter and more vibrant colors, so your object look more natural and appealing to the eye. Make it stand out more, especially if it’s the main character of the game. Just think this way that your asset need to look right in any lighting conditions, test it in the day and night scenes to find the perfect values.
3. Too Light Colors
Sometimes colors can be so light that your asset won’t look interesting at all. Colors look washed out and boring. It’s bad especially if you want to attract the viewer’s attention to this object when it’s used in the game environment.
Yuo can fix that by increasing the Contrast a bit. Now it looks more appealing to the eye.
4. Inconsistent Colors
Using a very different contrast and brightness values of the color can ruin the overall look of your game asset. For example here is a very dark box with a very bright saturated cloth on top. It looks strange.
And here is the same box with cloth but using different color values. Box and cloth colors are very similar at brightness and saturation. Colors are much more consistent and it looks much more appealing to the eye.
So there are no perfect color values for coloring game assets. It can be very different because of the game art style, but in general using light (but not too light) and vibrant (but not oversaturated) color values should look nice in the most cases.
I usually use Brightness values between 5%-90%. Saturation Values between 0%-90%. This applies to all kind of asset syles and scene lighting.
Thank you for your time, and I hope that you learned something from these mistakes.
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Scientists discover fossil tumor in 255 million-year-old mammal forerunner
Ancient tumor was hidden inside fossil from Tanzania
A thin-section image zooms in on the fossil odontomas. Each looks like a miniature tooth.
December 8, 2016
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When paleontologists cut into the fossilized jaw of an ancient creature, they got more than they bargained for: a toothy tumor.
As the scientists report in a paper published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association Oncology, they discovered evidence that the specimen harbored a benign tumor made up of miniature, tooth-like structures. This type of tumor, known as a "compound odontoma," is common to mammals today. But this animal lived 255 million years ago -- before mammals existed.
"We think this is by far the oldest known instance of a compound odontoma," said paper author Christian Sidor, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Washington. "It would indicate that this is an ancient type of tumor."
Before this discovery, the earliest evidence of odontomas came from ice age-era fossils.
"Until now, the oldest known occurrence of this tumor was about 1 million years ago in fossil mammals," said Judy Skog, program director in the National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Earth Sciences, which funded the research. "These researchers have found an example in the ancestors of mammals that lived 255 million years ago. The discovery suggests that the suspected cause of an odontoma isn't tied solely to traits in modern species, as had been thought."
Skog added that the research demonstrates that paleontology can contribute to medical research. "This finding shows that the fossil record can play an important role in understanding how diseases evolve."
Mass of small "toothlets"
In humans and other mammals, a compound odontoma is a mass of small "toothlets" combined with tooth tissues like dentin and enamel. This type of tumor grows in the gums or other soft tissues of the jaw. It can cause pain and swelling and disrupt the positions of teeth.
Doctors consider odontomas benign tumors because they do not metastasize and spread throughout the body. But given the disruptions they cause, surgeons often opt to remove them.
The creature studied by the team didn't have the option of surgery. It was a gorgonopsian, a distant relative of mammals and the apex predator during its pre-dinosaur era, about 255 million years ago. Gorgonopsians are part of a larger group of animals called synapsids, which includes modern mammals as its only living member.
Some synapsids are called "mammal-like reptiles" because they possess some, but not all, the features of mammals. The first mammals evolved more than 100 million years ago.
"Most synapsids are extinct, and we -- that is, mammals -- are their only living descendants," said paper author Megan Whitney of the University of Washington. "To understand when and how our mammalian features evolved, we have to study fossils of synapsids like the gorgonopsians."
Slicing into a fossil
Paleontologists have categorized many "mammal-like" features of gorgonopsians. For example, like us, they have teeth differentiated for specialized purposes. But the researchers started studying gorgonopsian teeth to see if they had a different mammalian feature.
"Most reptiles alive today fuse their teeth directly to the jawbone," said Whitney. "But mammals do not. We use tough, but flexible, string-like tissues to hold teeth in their sockets. We wanted to know if the same was true for gorgonopsians."
A purely external examination of gorgonopsian fossils wouldn't answer that question. The scientists had to take the risky approach of slicing into a fossilized gorgonopsian jaw. By looking at thin sections of jaw and tooth under a microscope, they could see how a tooth was nestled within its socket.
Since this technique would damage the fossil, Whitney and Larry Mose, also of the University of Washington, used an "orphan" gorgonopsian lower jaw -- one that wasn't matched to a more complete fossil -- that Sidor had collected in southern Tanzania.
Mose prepared multiple thin slices from the gorgonopsian jaw, each only about as thick as a sheet of notebook paper, and mounted them onto slides. He and Whitney immediately noticed something unexpected within the jaw. Embedded next to the root of the canine were irregular clusters of up to eight tiny, round objects.
At higher magnification under a microscope, Whitney discovered that the objects in each cluster resembled small, poorly differentiated teeth, or toothlets. The toothlets harbored distinct layers of dentin and enamel.
"At first we didn't know what to make of it," said Whitney. "But after some investigation we realized that this gorgonopsian had what looked like a textbook compound odontoma."
Oldest odontoma
This is by far the oldest reported evidence for an odontoma, the scientists say, and possibly the first case in a non-mammal.
According to Sidor, odontomas have been reported in archaeological specimens, as well as in fossilized mammoths and deer. But those cases all date to within the last million years or so.
Since this synapsid had an odontoma, it would indicate that this condition existed well before the first mammals evolved.
"This discovery demonstrates that the fossil record can tell us a lot about our present-day lives, even the diseases or pathologies that are part of our mammalian heritage," Sidor said. "From the outside, you could never tell that this creature had this."
A University of Washington Mary Gates Research Fellowship also funded the study.
-NSF-
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Contact: Sharon Singh, [email protected], 202-675-8579, @spksingh
(Washington, D.C.) – Suzanne Nossel, Amnesty International USA executive director, issued the following statement in response to news reports that a young Afghan woman in Herat province was beheaded because she refused to be forced into prostitution by her in-laws:
“The tragic fate of Mah Gul is one more incident that highlights the violent atmosphere that women and girls face in Afghanistan and the region. They are raped, killed, forced into marriage in childhood, prevented from obtaining an education and denied their sexual and reproductive rights. Until basic human rights are guaranteed to women and girls in the region, these horrible abuses will continue to be committed.
“The enduring view that women and girls are disposable and not equal increases the chronic suffering of more than half the population. Women and girls must be empowered to receive an education, get employment and determine their own destiny.
“As Afghanistan assumes responsibility for its security, the international community must play its part in addressing the need to guarantee women’s rights to security, political participation and justice without compromise. Anything less risks Afghanistan and the region’s stability and prosperity.”
Amnesty International reiterates its call to the Afghan government to promptly enforce its law on Elimination of Violence Against Women. The law criminalizes forced marriage, rape, beatings, and other acts of violence against women. It was enacted in August 2009, but is still only sporadically enforced.
Amnesty International is a Nobel Peace Prize-winning grassroots activist organization with more than 3 million supporters, activists and volunteers in more than 150 countries campaigning for human rights worldwide. The organization investigates and exposes abuses, educates and mobilizes the public, and works to protect people wherever justice, freedom, truth and dignity are denied.Calgary, AB – As part of the WHL’s 50th Season celebrations, the WHL announced today that voting is now open for the selection of the Top 50 WHL Players of All-Time.
Fans can visit top50.whl.ca to cast their ballots once per week from a list of the top 125 players in WHL history as selected by a committee of League historians. Fans can return to the site beginning each Monday to cast a new ballot. Voting will be open until Sunday, December 20th.
The list of 125 players compiled by the committee has been separated into categories for voting based on times in which players played in the WHL. Fans must select their top three players from the 1967-76, 1977-86, 1987-96, 1997-06, and 2007-15 time periods. Additionally, fans can choose five wild card selections from any time period before completing their ballot.
Input from the committee will also be considered following the fan vote, and the Top 50 WHL Players of All-Time will be announced in the New Year.
The list of players from which fans will select their favourites includes greats from the League’s inception in 1966 through to players that suited up as recently as last season. In total, 88 forwards, 27 defencemen, and 10 goaltenders made the list. Players were selected based on a combination of the impact they had while playing in the WHL and their careers upon graduating from the League.
The committee that selected the list was comprised of members of the media and individuals who have demonstrated long-standing contributions to the WHL, along with members the WHL Office staff. The WHL would like to thank Gregg Drinnan, Norm Dueck, Peter Loubardias, Bob Ridley, Dan Russell, Rob Vanstone, Dean Vrooman and Bill Willms for their assistance with this project.
Players Eligible for Top 50 WHL Players of All-Time Voting (alphabetical order, last name first)In Toronto’s never-ending fascination with new transit maps, the City Planning department has released a vision for our rapid transit network as it will be in 15 years.
Despite much talk of “evidence-based” planning, this is a very political map, and I cannot help remembering then-Premier David Peterson’s announcement of 1990 (not long before he lost an election and Bob Rae wound up as his much-surprised replacement) that amounted to a chicken-in-every-pot map.
There is nothing wrong with network-based planning, and indeed I have been beating a well-worn drum on that subject for years. But let us also remember that the Scarborough Subway exists because of the political clout of Brad Duguid, a former City Councillor, now Ontario’s Minister of Economic Development. Mayor John Tory, in Toronto Life, cites Duguid as saying that “if anyone tries to cancel the [Scarborough] subway, they’ll do it over his dead body”. “Evidence” apparently includes having a large cudgel to keep wandering pols in line.
The map also includes the Mayor’s pet project, SmartTrack, and it’s no wonder that he steers clear of the Minister’s position given the need for a provincial agency, Metrolinx, to accommodate SmartTrack on their network.
All of this is part of the “Motherlode” of public consultation sessions now running in various places around the City, and through Metrolinx in the wider GTHA. Background information and links to related material are available at Toronto’s TransitTO web site.
The Yellow Line (aka Line 1 Yonge-University-Spadina)
The Vaughan extension of Line 1 will open very late in 2017. Whether we will have Andy Byford as Santa Claus bringing a shiny train full of toys to York Region remains to be seen.
Concurrently with the opening, the first phase of Automatic Train Control (ATC) will begin on this line from St. Clair West station north to Vaughan Centre. Additional phases will come online working “around the U” and north to Finch with project completion in 2019. Once the new system is fully operational, service can be improved from the currently scheduled level of 2’20” (a bound imposed by existing signals) down, possibly, to 1’50” for a capacity improvement of about 25%.
A future extension to Richmond Hill is shown in gray. How quickly it will be built depends on a combination of factors: the ability to offload Yonge line demand to other routes and to increase this line’s capacity, and the political will to spend on this extension in the face of many competing proposals. Ridership and network considerations are discussed in a recently released report detailing the interaction of the Relief Line, SmartTrack and the Richmond Hill extension. I will discuss that report in a separate article.
In brief, the Richmond Hill subway is not expected to generate a large peak demand, but coupled with expected growth on the network overall, Bloor-Yonge station will be overwhelmed in the absence of relief rapid transit capacity into the core.
The Green Line (aka Line 2 Bloor-Danforth)
The Scarborough Town Centre extension of Line 2 is planned to open in 2023 although some distance remains to be travelled on design and final approval. As noted above, political support for this is strong, and the planning has been warped to suit the circumstances.
As one member of the audience at a recent public consultation in Scarborough pointed out, the stop arrangement on the Stouffville GO corridor and the Scarborough Subway are backwards with the local stops (in the guise of SmartTrack) on the nominally regional rail line while the express service is on the subway. Such are the compromises needed to make two political pet projects fit on the same map.
Demand projections for this configuration have not yet been published.
The Purple (or “Plum”) Line (aka Line 4 Sheppard)
No changes to the Sheppard subway are planned at this time beyond the implementation of ATC and the replacement of the existing “T1” subway car fleet with four-car sets of “TR” (Toronto Rocket) trains similar to those now operating on Line 1.
The Brown Line (Sheppard East)
No technology is specified for what was once the Transit City Sheppard East LRT and its dogleg extension south via Morningside to University of Toronto Scarborough Campus. Given the antipathy of Scarborough politicians to anything-but-a-subway, Sheppard is unlikely to see more than express buses until there is a working LRT to demonstrate what could be accomplished with that mode. The big debate regardless of mode will be whether a new express bus would run in its own corridor (akin to the RapidWays in Mississauga and York Region), or if it would be little more than “BRT Lite” with a nominally-reserved curb lane for part of the day.
The Orange Line (aka Line 5 Eglinton Crosstown)
The central part of this line is now under construction with the major work being the boring of tunnels east from Black Creek and west from Brentcliffe toward Eglinton Station at Yonge Street.
The Crosstown West and East extensions are included on this map providing a route from UTSC to Pearson Airport (although whether a one-seat ride will be available is another question). At the public presentation, an audience member asked “how long” for the extensions, and was told that according to the TTC it would be eight years. This is simply intolerable for routes that would be largely built as surface LRTs, and in comparison to the timespans for both the tunelled Eglinton-Crosstown and the planned Finch West route.
That sort of extended timetable also begs the question of how any “economic stimulus” will ever flow from new spending when the lead time to actually build something is so long.
The Somewhat Darker Orange Line (Finch LRT)
This line will begin construction in 2017 and will open within the 6-year window of short-term projects. It will run from Finch West Station to Humber College.
The Turquoise Line (SmartTrack)
On this map, SmartTrack has inherited the colour now used by the Scarborough RT. The service is shown as running from Mt. Dennis in the west through the core and back north to Unionville. The big questions about SmartTrack, as discussed elsewhere, turn on its co-existence with GO service, on fares and the frequency of SmartTrack trains. Demand projections for SmartTrack clearly show that this service will not achieve its claimed ridership and benefits unless regular TTC fares apply (no premium for a transfer from “local” feeders), and service operates frequently.
The design of a feeder network in Scarborough will be complicated by the need to serve both the subway terminal at STC and the SmartTrack stations further west. Given the impetus to make STC a major centre, should bus routes primarily feed into that location (possibly placing more demand on the subway than it would otherwise get) or into the SmartTrack stations?
Elsewhere, SmartTrack faces challenges for line and station capacity (notably at Union) and the feasibility/complexity of local stations serving neighbourhoods like Liberty Village. Some indication of issues at various would-be station sites is revealed in the preliminary evaluation of new stations now underway. The display boards from public sessions with these details are not yet online.
Metrolinx has four proposed configurations of SmartTrack service levels and stations, some of which do not include the local Scarborough stations necessary to make the one-stop subway plan work, and some of which do not have enough service to make SmartTrack attractive to riders. It is quite clear that “SmartTrack” means different things to City and to Metrolinx planners.
Of particular note is the absence of SmartTrack from the “six year” map of new lines to be built and opened by 2021. This suggests that the original target for SmartTrack completion has run headlong into conflict with feasibility issues and the timing of related work on the GO corridors both for ST and for GO/RER.
The Mint Green Line (GO Transit)
This line comes in two flavours: thick (electrified GO/RER) and thin (GO limited service). The routes destined to get RER (frequent, all-day, two-way service) treatment are Lake Shore East and West, Kitchener (likely to Bramalea at least for a first phase), Stouffville and Barrie. The Milton and Richmond Hill lines will remain as diesel operations, although some improvement in service remains possible.
GO’s biggest challenge today is the capacity of Union Station (passenger handling) and the Rail Corridor (train handling) for much increased service. Metrolinx has studied satellite stations at Don Yard and Bathurst North Yard, as well as a tunnel under Union Station for the Lake Shore route, but there is as yet no decision on which option might be pursued.
The Olive Drab Line (UPX)
The UPX line will be electrified as an offshoot of the Kitchener corridor. As for the fares and service to be operated, it is anyone’s guess what we will see. The Metrolinx Board meets on February 23, 2016 to discuss an updated “business strategy” for this service.
The Pink Line (Relief Line)
On the map, this route is shown in two shades of pink with the darker, and presumably more definite, section running from City Hall to Pape Station via Queen Street. Information about the alignment selection appears in the public presentation linked above.
The preferred corridor runs along Queen Street from Pape, although looking at the scoring of options, one might argue that the King Street alignment stands very close to Queen, and it does obtain the same overall rank (3 out of 4). The decision to pick Queen was likely taken before the recent ridership projections were available. These show clearly a much higher demand for a Relief Line on the King Street route than the “preferred” Queen Street one. (I will explore details of the riding projections in a separate article.) Based on comments at the Scarborough public meeting, the deciding factor appears to have been cost and the relatively simpler Don River crossing of a Queen route.
However, the detailed background study of various options pegs the cost of a DRL via Pape and Queen with a common route to the Don River splitting there via Queen or King at the same level. Public remarks comparing the two alignments do not reflect some of the background analysis.
For more details about the Relief Line options visit the Corridor Results page.
The Blue Line (Waterfront LRT)
This route has been around in various forms since an EA was completed in 1990, and it suffers from the inevitable problem of plans left for too long for the political meddling that besets transit projects which are only vaguely defined. A detailed review of the waterfront line will be part of the “reset” study now underway. Many factors bear on what, exactly, is even meant by a “Waterfront LRT”.
To the east, the line is now shown as extending to Leslie Street with a potential to go further, although Swan Boats may be required. The route from Bay Street is likely to be east on Queens Quay to a realigned Cherry Street, then south into the planned “Villiers Island” (a new island created by the rerouted Don River), and east via Commissioners Street. How much of this would be built and how quickly is a matter for the study, and it relates to two other big projects, the Gardiner Expressway realignment at the Don River, and the realignment of the river itself as part of the Port Lands plan.
To the west, it is unclear whether the route would use the existing track on Queens Quay or new alignment further north on Bremner Boulevard. The section around the Rogers Centre (aka “The Dome”) would be particularly challenging as a surface route. Although some provision for a transit right-of-way exists on parts of this alignment, it is narrow and does not extend east of Spadina.
The alignment from Bathurst westward into the Exhibition grounds might be on the existing Fleet Street trackage (which was rebuild as a transit corridor in anticipation of the Waterfront LRT), or via Fort York Boulevard (as the continuation of Bremner). There are alignment issues along the way for the Bremner/Fort York route.
The future development of Exhibition Place and Ontario Place will require transit service further south, but there has been no consideration of the LRT line taking this route since an early version of the 1990 plan.
From Dufferin Street to Sunnyside, there are multiple possible alignments each with its benefits and challenges. The cheapest and simplest (via Dufferin and King Streets) is also the worst because the “LRT” line would be forced to run through one of the most congested sections of King West.
West of Humber Loop, the favoured terminal now appears to be a new Park Lawn GO station at an extended Legion Road rather than a loop at Park Lawn and Lake Shore Boulevard. This would connect the new LRT service to the ever-growing condo neighbourhood at Humber Bay.
Finally, there is some debate about whether the Waterfront LRT should even serve Union Station or simply run straight through. A moving sidewalk, or some form of shuttle, has been proposed for the existing Bay Street tunnel, although how this could possibly handle the demand for access to the core business district is a mystery. Meanwhile, the new bus terminal to be built at Bay and Lake Shore (opposite the Air Canada Centre) will have a direct link to the LRT station at Union. This is one of those ideas where the left hand, right hand problem is clearly evident.
Needless to say, a study to nail down the issues, challenges, and workable/preferable solutions is long overdue.
The Teal Line (Steeles BRT)
A BRT service from York University to Milliken GO/SmartTrack station is proposed on Steeles Avenue. As with the Sheppard East line, it is unclear just what is meant by “BRT” and how intrusive any new infrastructure might be. The road is a particular challenge because as a municipal boundary is under the shared jurisdiction of both Toronto and York Region councils.
The Mauve Line (Jane LRT)
Another Transit City route has emerged from hibernation with the proposed Jane LRT. Whether this will be built all the way south to Bloor as shown on the map, or become a branch off of the Eglinton line (feeding into services at Mt. Dennis or other points further east) remains to be seen. The section from Eglinton south to Bloor would be challenging to build and almost certainly would have to be underground due to constrained road space for a surface route.
A Jane route would improve the utilization of the carhouse planned for the Finch West LRT, and would connect that line to the main Metrolinx LRT shop at Black Creek.
The Thinner Orange Lines (Streetcars on their own right-of-way)
Most of the items on the map exist already (Spadina, Waterfront, St. Clair) but a new proposal has surfaced for transit priority on King Street. The extent shown on the map roughly corresponds to the never-enforced “transit priority” lane introduced years ago on King from Dufferin to Parliament.
This will be a challenging project because of competing demands for the road space on King including residential and commercial intensification that continues at a substantial rate. A related question will be the status of service on Queen Street given that development is spreading northward. Queen will need more transit service, and it will also be affected by any displacement of traffic from King, particularly in the west where parallel routes (Richmond/Adelaide) do not exist.
In Summary
Will we ever see all of this? Some of it, maybe, but there is enough on this map that exists to soothe political demands that changing fortunes could derail substantial chunks as we have seen before.
The big unanswered question is money. How will Toronto pay its share of this very aggressive plan, and to what extent will Queen’s Park and Ottawa embrace these proposals?
We have just been through a City budget round where the watchword “taxpayer dollars” might as well have been a flashing neon sign replacing “Toronto” in Nathan Phillips Square. The utter lack of will to actually spend money simply did not square with the grand schemes announced for our transit future. Even if Ottawa comes in with new money, and project schedules are advanced as a job stimulus package, Toronto and Ontario will have to come to the table with their share sooner than might have happened otherwise.
With both the Provincial and Federal budgets coming down in the next month, the actual status of new funding should be better understood.
Meanwhile, we have a very pretty map.Share This On Social
General threat hangs over the traditional political parties in Germany on the eve of general elections this year. This threat does not come from immigration or populism, but from inflation and low interest rates, oppressed by the monetary policy of the European Central Bank (ECB). The Germans long criticize of the ECB’s monetary policy. The stated objective for the growth of inflation to 2% benefit only a profligate southern European countries. They can borrow more at lower interest rates and inflation reduces the real value of their debts.
In the second quarter of 2016, Greece, Portugal, France, Belgium and Italy have increased their debt to GDP. This has led to growth and total debt of Eurozone countries by 204 billion EUR on year-on-year basis. Meanwhile, the Northern European countries, like Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland and Finland were among the countries that reduce their debts.
The higher inflation would melt part of the funds of savers, which is the core of the middle class in Germany. Overall the German households save nearly 17% of their current income, one of the highest rates among developed countries. They hold about 40% of their savings in bank deposits, and the rest in life insurance accounts that are then used at retirement.
The interest rates on savings accounts are currently about 1% in Germany and insurance rates are slightly higher, but the trend is to continue to fall.
In December, the inflation in Germany jumped to 1.7% over the same period last year, compared to 1.1% for the whole Eurozone. The expectations are this year inflation in European largest economy to reach 1.6% against 0.4% for the whole 2016. This practically means a negative interest rate for savers and they will lose money. This further worsens the prospects of the main political parties against the rise of populist Alternative for Germany. The party emerged third in the country, according to data from recent polls, and certainly will use monetary policy to their advantage.
The situation pushed German savers to alternative investments, such as real estate. This leads to strong growth in house prices. Although, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the properties in Germany are still undervalued compared to income in the country and the share of owners is the lowest in Europe (around 53%).
For the moment, nobody talks about housing bubble in Germany, but prices in major cities recorded growth rates of over 10% annually. While the conservative banks accept difficult current market prices and finance increasingly smaller share of the value of transactions at purchase. This makes it difficult for buyers to take advantage of lower interest rates.
The rents are also rising fast, especially in larger cities and most desirable areas, which restricts the population with medium and low incomes. This puts further pressure on the parties and Chancellor Angela Merkel recently said that people have never lived so well. Those who have money to buy housing in Berlin, Frankfurt or Munich are a minority. The politicians find it difficult to explain the situation to people.
The Germans tolerated ECB monetary policy until inflation was low. At the moment they began to lose money, they started the guilty games in Germany and a large part of the population turned against the European project. The ECB can not afford to lose the confidence of Germany.
So far the demands of Germany are ECB to consider increasing interest rates, but their were not heard. The Chairman of the bank Mario Draghi argues that Germany has gained over monetary policy than it has lost. However, this argument no longer passes in front of the middle class voters in the country. The Germans actually reduce indebtedness and do not abandon their old habits in favor of more adventurous investments, such as financial instruments.A deer is seen on the lawn of Annunciation Catholic Church on November 5, 2013 in Washington, DC. According to State Farm insurance, November is the month with the highest deer to vehicle collisions, 18 percent of the annual total. AFP PHOTO/Mandel NGAN (Photo credit should read MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images) File photo of a deer. (credit: MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)
MONTGOMERY, Ala. (CBS Atlanta/AP) — An Alabama man was charged with illegally keeping seven deer as pets, including a buck that mauled and partially blinded him, wildlife officials said Friday.
On Oct. 30, Julius Dunsmore entered a fenced pen on his property in Marshall County in the northern part of the state and was attacked by a nine-point buck. Dunsmore said the deer lifted him up on its antlers and carried him 30 feet. One antler punctured his face and severed the optic nerve to an eye. He also suffered puncture wounds in his rib cage, hips and legs.
Dunsmore said he will never again keep deer as pets. His injuries will require several surgeries.
“People need to know that these things are dangerous,” he said. “You never know when they are going to turn.”
Bucks can become combative during breeding season, normally fighting with each other or even people when the deer are kept in captivity, said Kevin Dodd, the enforcement chief for Alabama’s Wildlife and Freshwater Fisheries Division. Female deer, or does, can inflict serious injuries by kicking.
“Illegally held captive deer in Alabama have caused numerous serious injuries and one fatality in recent years,” Dodd told AL.com.
State wildlife officials killed the deer on Dunsmore’s property and are awaiting tests from a laboratory to determine if they were infected with any disease.
Dodd warned against keeping deer as pets.
“Good intentions, but it’s the wrong thing to do,” he said. “It always ends badly.”
(TM and © Copyright 2013 CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2013 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All |
The House of Representatives has made a move to avert a government shutdown with only days before Congress’s April 28 spending deadline.
As it stands, Congress has until midnight on Friday to pass a spending bill or the government will run out of money and shut down. But late Wednesday night, Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NJ), who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, introduced a continuing resolution to provide one week of stopgap funding, effectively extending the shutdown deadline to May 5, to buy Congress more time to negotiate a spending bill. The CR also includes funding for former miners’ health care and benefits by continuing funding for the Miners Protection Act.
If the CR passes the House and Senate — as it is expected to — it will successfully prevent a government shutdown for at least one more week. Democratic House Whip Steny Hoyer told reporters Thursday morning that he would vote against the short-term funding bill if Republicans tried to ram through their renewed health bill this week.
It looks unlikely that it will get to this point. The Republicans don’t seem to have the votes for health bill yet and will not bring a vote to the floor until they do, Speaker Paul Ryan said Thursday. And if they did, it’s possible Republicans could pass at least a CR on their own in the House. The House is expected to take up the CR vote Friday afternoon.
Passing a larger spending bill is a different story. House Republicans maintain that they are planning on coming to an agreement on a larger omnibus spending bill — which just crams together 11 appropriations bills into one spending package — by Friday.
But agreeing to an omnibus will be a more difficult task for Republicans than passing a CR. Even with the GOP in control of the House, Senate, and White House, Republican senators will need 60 votes to end debate on the appropriations bill and get it passed, which means they need to get their party in line plus eight Democrats on their side. Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-NY) said he is under the impression that Republicans need Democratic help in the House as well to pass a spending bill.
The Democrats have some leverage in the spending fight
Many of Trump’s campaign promises are at stake in this fight — and Democrats have made it clear they don’t want to concede on any of them.
If Republicans didn’t need Democrats to pass a bill, they would want to hike up defense spending, grant Trump’s border wall supplemental budget, defund Planned Parenthood (although Speaker Paul Ryan has said that belongs in the health care debate), and make sure subsidies to insurance companies core to Obamacare’s functionality weren’t included.
But Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has opposed those moves.
Senate and House Democrats have already warned Republicans that any attempt to pass funding for the border wall or other “poison pills” like defunding Planned Parenthood in the 2017 appropriations bill would be met with unified Democratic resistance — which would result in a shutdown.
Republicans will eventually either have to make peace with a shutdown or make concessions to Democrats. It looks as though they’re leaning toward the latter, which would result in an omnibus bill that’s pretty friendly to Democrats.
There are some areas of possible agreement, like increases in defense funding and a watered-down compromise on border security, possibly to fund more technology — an area that has more bipartisan support. Republicans already seem willing to concede to Democratic demands on bypassing wall funding altogether; Crowley said funding the wall “was no longer an issue” in an interview Wednesday.
The White House keeps taking a harder line, then rolling it back
The White House once seemed more interested in a fight than congressional Republicans. Over recess, the administration took a harder line on the shutdown deadline, saying funding for the wall is a “must,” and Trump tweeted that Obamacare is in “serious trouble.” The president was seemingly hinting at a deal that Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney put on the table: an exchange of $1 for the insurance subsidy payments under Obamacare for every $1 given to the border wall. The offer hasn’t swayed Senate Democrats.
A Democratic aide said Mulvaney told Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) that the White House could stop funding Obamacare’s subsidies as soon as next month, further escalating tensions over the omnibus bill Wednesday. Democrats want to include funding for the subsidies in the funding bill, which Speaker Ryan said he will not stand for. The White House rolled back its threat by Wednesday afternoon.
It’s still up for negotiation whether or not Obamacare funding will be included in the longer-term spending bill.
Nevertheless, it will be near impossible for Republican leadership to sell all its spending concessions to the entirety of its conference — especially once conservatives realize just how much their party has to concede. The irony there is that the more Republican leadership realizes it will lose conservative votes in its own party, the more it will have to rely on Democrats to avoid a shutdown.Yogventures backers, rejoice! Your patience is finally being paid off. According to GameStop, the makers of the failed video game have finally reached an agreement that will make everyone that supported the game super happy.
According to the video game shop, along with the free codes they already received for another crafting and survival game, each backer will be given a free copy of EveryQuest Next Landmark. Explaining the reasoning behind this new development, PC Games revealed Yogscast struck a deal with the game’s creator, SOE to give backers a Settler Founder’s Pack and immediate access to Landmark’s closed beta.
As previously reported, Yogscast announced the Kickstarter success Yogventure project was cancelled due to the game being “disowned” by the YouTube Channel after its developer, Winterkewl Games, declared it was on the verge of going out of business.
A statement from Yogcast to Eurogamer read, “The failure of Yogventures is a matter of deep regret for the Yogscast, we put a lot of faith in the developer Winterkewl, including allowing them to use our likeness and brand. However the project was too vast in scope to be realized and despite huge amount of hard work from Winterkewl, they have had to abandon it. The game as it stands is not capable of being released and certainly wouldn’t live up to the expectations of the people that backed the Kickstarter or preordered the game.”
“However, we don’t intend to leave it there as we know that the Yogventures backers and buyers are our most dedicated fans so we are intent on finding them some awesome stuff and cool experiences in its place.”
Co-founder of Yogscast, Lewis Brindley, also sent out an email to all backers, sharing, “As you may have heard, Winterkewl Games have stopped work on Yogventures – but this is actually a good thing. The project was proving too ambitious and difficult for him to complete with their six-man team.”
“While this was Winterkewl’s project, we put a lot time, energy and effort into trying to help them realize their dream. Since we heard the news, we’ve been working hard behind the scenes to make sure that you still get awesome stuff and cool experiences. Although we’re under no obligation to do anything, instead we’re going to do our best to make this right, and make sure you backed the project!”
During the weeks that followed, the Winterkewl team also shared details about the funds and why there will not be refunds. Since the money was all spent either directly on development of the game or paid to the Yogscast to handle physical rewards and ‘licensing fees’ I’m afraid Winterkewl Games has a negative balance at this point. We don’t have any of the money left and as such can’t really offer refunds.”
“I understand the frustration of that, but we put in I would say much more than a “Good Faith Effort” we literally gave it everything we had and then some to make this game happen. So, like I said all of those numbers are not completely vetted, once I get all the data formatted I’ll come back and post again. I do hope that sheds some light on where everything went though, nothing was scammed, no one and I mean NO ONE has gotten rich from this effort or is even better off then when we started, except for all the memories and the great feeling it was to see your support and try and make a great product from it.”REDLANDS >> Around two dozen employees from Hangar 24 Brewery were laid off earlier this week as part of a restructuring effort, the owner said Thursday.
According to brewery founder and Master Brewer Ben Cook, the layoffs came after the company noticed it needed a different sales and marketing team and personnel to address account needs.
“When we first started we had numerous, smaller accounts but now we are in larger grocery and bar and restaurant chains which requires (a) different (team),” he said. “To that end, we’ve made some changes, adding about 50 new people and letting less than two dozen go. To help us continue with our growth pattern, we created a new director of operations position and we even had to upgrade to an enterprise level accounting system.”
Cook said that the new system caused a delay in payment to vendors and that Hangar is currently “catching up” as a “result of that system changeover.”
Earlier this year, Hangar celebrated its sixth anniversary with its second AirFest, which took over the Redlands Municipal Airport. The celebration was planned to raise funds for the organization’s Hangar 24 Charities and celebrate the business’ growth.
Since its opening, the Redlands-based company has not only become a destination for beer lovers from across Southern California, but is one of Redlands’ most successful businesses.
One of the employees who was laid off early this week spoke to us on condition of anonymity, and said the company was facing a “financial crisis,” but Cook says that is not true.
“We are still growing like gangbusters,” Cook said. “Our revenues increased by 50 percent to reach an all-time high over the past year, and our distribution channels have also surged by 52 percent. As a result of this massive growth, we’re having to make sure we have the right people in the right seats on the bus right now.”
Expansion plans for 2015 are currently underway, along with the undertaking of next year’s AirFest, Cook added.
The Airfest will once again benefit Hangar 24 Charities, which is now run by an all-volunteer team after its former executive director Catherine Grinnan and the brewery “mutually parted ways” earlier this summer.
“The charity is a different entity from the brewery, so whatever issues the brewery is having is different from a start-up charity. I’m sad people lost their jobs, but I can’t officially comment on that,” she said. “A lot of times there’s a restructuring and companies do that. But I don’t know why.”
In addition to the AirFest, Hangar officials are also in discussions with the city and officials from other neighboring communities to open and build a new brewery and off-site tasting room.
“In our beverage distributor division, we added several new craft brewery and non-alcoholic suppliers, and added new distributors in California and in other states like Nevada and Arizona. (And) we also opened up a new 35,000-square foot distribution center in Redlands this year,” Cook said.The tea party had waged wars against President Obama’s health-care plan and government spending. But in early 2012, it was beginning to sound its next battle cry, one that is now deepening the split within the Republican Party: “crony capitalism.”
On the sixth floor of a Washington office building, Barney Keller, a 20-something communications director and researcher for the conservative group Club for Growth, was searching the Web for information about the Export-Import Bank. The little-known government agency provides tens of billions of dollars annually in financing to help foreign buyers purchase U.S. planes, trucks and other goods.
Every few hours, Keller would howl with news the bank had helped a special corporate interest: the corrupt energy giant Enron, or the solar-panel-maker Solyndra, or Hollywood studios. In the eyes of Keller and his bosses, Ex-Im was emblematic of a culture in Washington that puts corporate interests over ordinary people.
“I’m sitting in my office, and I hear Barney screaming, ‘This is unbelievable,’ ” recalled Chris Chocola, the former Indiana congressman who leads the group.
“It was like a treasure trove,” Keller said. “You could take any bad thing the government has done and put it into the Export-Import [Bank] and get hits.”
What began as a pet issue for a handful of conservatives is now turning the GOP on its head. The fight over the obscure agency has pitted traditional lawmakers backed by big corporations against tea party conservatives, who, still fuming over bank bailouts of 2008, insist that supporting free markets is not the same as supporting business interests.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups are mounting a major campaign to save Ex-Im, whose authorization expires Sept. 30 without congressional action, by contacting businesses that benefit from the agency and are based in Republican districts. “We have a ground game fully in place,” said Ned Monroe, the National Association of Manufacturers’ top political strategist.
The rift within the GOP could have consequences beyond internal party politics. Democrats are relishing the opportunity to back Republicans into an election-year corner over Ex-Im, whose authorization expires on the same day that legislation is required to keep the government open. Some on Capitol Hill fear the Ex-Im debate could become intertwined with the discussion over extending federal funding.
Opponents tend to seize on the most extreme stories about Ex-Im, such as loans that went to companies that struggled or allegedly behaved badly. But their broader ideological argument is that the agency represents the power of lobbying by big, wealthy companies, such as Boeing and General Electric, which are among those that benefit the most from the bank’s activities.
Supporters of Ex-Im, which government auditors say makes money for taxpayers, contend a few bad apples should not diminish the beneficial role the agency plays in the U.S. economy, helping hundreds of American businesses offer credit to foreign buyers in a world where many other countries subsidize their industries.
Concerns about giveaways to corporations helped fuel Virginia Republican congressional candidate Dave Brat’s successful tea party primary challenge to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in Virginia. Cantor, with close ties to the Chamber of Commerce and other corporate groups, helped organize a deal in 2012 that saved Ex-Im despite growing criticism by conservatives.
His successor as majority leader, Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, surprised constituents and many colleagues when he announced last Sunday that he would not support Ex-Im’s reauthorization.
“I was pretty shocked,” said Don Nelson, who runs an oil equipment company based in Bakersfield, Calif., in McCarthy’s district. He says his business needs Ex-Im support to sell overseas. “We have about 100 people, and if we lose the export business, that’s a lot of people we have to let go.”
McCarthy, who has voted for the bank in the past, is joined in opposition to its reauthorization by some key Republican figures, including Reps. Paul Ryan (Wis.) and Jeb Hensarling (Tex.), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.
“Whether it is termed public-private partnership, mercantilism, industrial policy or crony capitalism, regrettably a great deal of economic activity that masquerades today as free enterprise is not,” Hensarling said in a high-profile speech at the Heritage Foundation last month. “For the sake of our republic, our movement had best unmask the imposters and come down clearly on the side of free enterprise.”
The opposition to Ex-Im has forced House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) into a familiar if unwelcome spot, facing the choice of bowing to conservative forces in his party or overriding them by forging a compromise with Democrats.
In the past, “crony capitalism” has been used as a political mantra by some liberals. Its rise as a tea party issue raises questions about how Republicans who have relied on business support — and campaign donations — will respond to growing economic populism within their party.
Concerns about crony capitalism run deep among conservatives — especially young ones — nationwide. A major new Pew poll this week found that 69 percent of young, conservative-leaning voters and 48 percent of conservative voters overall say the economic system favors the powerful. Two-thirds of “business conservatives” think the economic system is fair.
Crony capitalism “is one of the core reasons that there’s a disconnect between Republican voters today and Republicans in Washington,” said Michael Needham, the 32-year-old chief executive of Heritage Action, which is pressuring Republicans to oppose Ex-Im and other corporate subsidies.
Needham became closely attuned to the issues of crony capitalism while studying at Stanford University’s business school in 2008 and 2009. He was required to take a course on “strategy beyond markets,” which the university describes as a response to the fact that “the profit-maximizing activities of firms often give rise to issues that involve governments and the public.”
“It was an explicit recognition by a top business school that to be a successful CEO, you have to be able to lobby Washington,” Needham said. “That distills everything that’s wrong.”
The first signs of the business-populist split in the GOP emerged in Washington during the 2008 bailout battle and the 2009 stimulus debate. Many big businesses supported the government’s efforts to rescue the financial system and the economy, fueling skepticism among hard-line conservatives who were wary of any government involvement.
That division abated during the rest of Obama’s first term, when both tea party and business conservatives found common cause in opposing the Affordable Care Act and efforts to raise taxes on the wealthy.
But conservatives kept their eye on issues that might have broader symbolic value. In 2012, organizations such as Heritage Action and the Club for Growth began to rail against Ex-Im and the Chamber of Commerce for supporting it.
“Ex-Im is a tiny little thing, but it’s creating a national debate,” said Andrew Roth, vice president for government affairs at the Club for Growth.
The effort against Ex-Im was also supported by the tea party group FreedomWorks. Max Pappas, who helped lead the drive against corporate subsidies for FreedomWorks, now works for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.).
Chocola, the Club for Growth president, said it is incumbent on conservatives to oppose business giveaways if they are also pushing for an overhaul of the social safety net. “There is a moral argument to be made,” he said. “How can you be out there talking about reforming social welfare if you’re not talking about reforming corporate welfare?”
Rebecca Robbins contributed to this report."NFPA 704: Standard System for the Identification of the Hazards of Materials for Emergency Response" is a standard maintained by the U.S.-based National Fire Protection Association. First "tentatively adopted as a guide" in 1960,[1] and revised several times since then, it defines the colloquial "fire diamond" or "safety square" used by emergency personnel to quickly and easily identify the risks posed by hazardous materials. This helps determine what, if any, special equipment should be used, procedures followed, or precautions taken during the initial stages of an emergency response.
Codes [ edit ]
The four divisions are typically color-coded with red on top indicating flammability, blue on the left indicating level of health hazard, yellow on the right for chemical reactivity, and white containing codes for special hazards. Each of health, flammability and reactivity is rated on a scale from 0 (minimal hazard) to 4 (severe hazard). The latest version of NFPA 704 sections 5, 6, 7 and 8 for the specifications of each classification are listed below. The numeric values in the first column are designated in the standard by "Degree of Hazard" using Arabic numerals (0, 1, 2, 3, 4), not to be confused with other classification systems, such as that in the NFPA 30 Flammable and Combustible Liquids Code, where flammable and combustible liquid categories are designated by "Class", using Roman numerals (I, II, III).[2]
Flammability (red) 0 Materials that will not burn under typical fire conditions (e.g. Carbon tetrachloride), including intrinsically noncombustible materials such as concrete, stone, and sand. Materials that will not burn in air when exposed to a temperature of 820 °C (1,500 °F) for a period of 5 minutes. 1 Materials that require considerable preheating, under all ambient temperature conditions, before ignition and combustion can occur (e.g. mineral oil, ammonia). Includes some finely divided suspended solids that do not require heating before ignition can occur. Flash point at or above 93.3 °C (200 °F). 2 Must be moderately heated or exposed to relatively high ambient temperature before ignition can occur (e.g. diesel fuel, paper, sulfur) and multiple finely divided suspended solids that do not require heating before ignition can occur. Flash point between 37.8 and 93.3 °C (100 and 200 °F). 3 Liquids and solids (including finely divided suspended solids) that can be ignited under almost all ambient temperature conditions (e.g. gasoline, acetone). Liquids having a flash point below 22.8 °C (73 °F) and having a boiling point at or above 37.8 °C (100 °F) or having a flash point between 22.8 and 37.8 °C (73 and 100 °F). 4 Will rapidly or completely vaporize at normal atmospheric pressure and temperature, or is readily dispersed in air and will burn readily (e.g. acetylene, propane, hydrogen gas). Includes pyrophoric substances. Flash point below room temperature at 22.8 °C (73 °F).
See also [ edit ]A Brooklyn gunman was convicted of manslaughter but acquitted of murder Tuesday for a brutal street killing sparked when his girlfriend insulted another woman’s hair weave – as disgusted jurors slammed the shooting as “stupid” and “ridiculous.”
Denzel Holder, 21, was also convicted of an illegal gun charge and will face up to 25 years behind bars when he is sentenced March 25 for shooting Shawn Williams, 19, in the Crown Heights beef sparked when Holder’s gal pal made fun of Williams’ girlfriend’s hair in August 2011.
“If it didn’t end in murder it would have been comical,” said one female juror who declined to give her name.
“It was over a weave. That’s absolutely ridiculous, but people do stupid things,” said another female juror, 21.
“It’s tragic. It’s stupid. It’s sad,” said a male juror. “It took one life and ruined another.”
Holder remained stone-faced and silent as the verdict was passed down in Brooklyn Supreme Court on Tuesday. His supporters filled the gallery behind him while Williams’ family packed the rows behind prosecutor Edward Purce.
“If you shoot someone in the back and then you stand over him and shoot again, ain’t that murder?” said Williams frustrated stepfather, Leonard Saunders, 50.
“I thought he should get murder. I want the max,” said Williams’ mom Dierdra Haynes, 51.
The jury voted to acquit Holder of murder because when he stood over Williams and fired he missed once and hit in “less-destructive” parts of the body like his lower back, said the 21-year-old female juror.'I am a predator' - ruin follows him everywhere CRIME Suspected con man who wove wild tales faces murder trial
Image 1 of / 9 Caption Close 'I am a predator' - ruin follows him everywhere 1 / 9 Back to Gallery
Looking back, those who crossed paths with Kaushal Niroula - an exchange student accused in a dizzying binge of graft and murder - wonder if anything he ever said was true.
He wasn't royalty in his native Nepal, as he once claimed, nor was he an estate lawyer or a luxury condominium buyer. Considering he is gay, it appears he did not fall in love with the Japanese tourist to whom he became engaged - while allegedly relieving her of half a million dollars.
With wonder and horror, authorities and associates are recounting a singular crime spree in which, they say, a dogged con man exploited others' goodwill or greed.
"This guy wanted that quantum leap," said Greg Ovanessian, a veteran San Francisco police fraud inspector, "from zero to everything."
In his wake, authorities say, he left ruin. He contributed to the 2008 closure of New College of California in San Francisco, which had been around for 37 years. He is accused of conning an art collector out of $400,000 - money he blew in Las Vegas.
In the capper, police say, Niroula and an odd band of accomplices killed a Palm Springs retiree and tried to sell his home. That has the 28-year-old Niroula - whom San Francisco prosecutors call the "Dark Prince" - in a Riverside County jail awaiting a Sept. 7 murder trial.
"Honey," Niroula once told a friend in a text message revealed by prosecutors in the Palm Springs case, "everyone believes me until they have been conned... some even after that."
The promise
Niroula had many believers after arriving in 2002 on a visa sponsored by New College, an alternative school in the Mission District.
The instructor who recruited him, Jerry Dekker, said Niroula had lived in a one-room home in Kathmandu but had a striking personality. "Being poor, gay and incredibly sharp," Dekker said, "he wanted to escape that world."
At New College, Niroula showed promise. His manners were regal, and he called instructors "sir" and "ma'am." He also spun a story.
Although he wasn't paying tuition, he was rich - but cash-poor because his accounts were frozen amid unrest in Nepal. When he could, Niroula said, he would give the school $1 million.
The scandal
New College needed the lifeline. And its leader bought in.
"He was very good at showing just enough little crumbs," said former New College President Martin Hamilton.
Once, he recalled, he went to dinner with Niroula and a man the student introduced as Nepal's former deputy foreign minister. Another time, Hamilton got a call from a banker in India who explained how Niroula was busy making arrangements for the $1 million donation.
The money never came, but scandal did. Niroula, faculty members said, gave the registrar papers with fake grades and Hamilton's signature.
Hamilton said the signature was forged, but the resulting probe helped cost the school its accreditation with the Western Association of Schools and Colleges.
Hamilton, who resigned in 2007, now admits he tried to help Niroula even after being conned out of thousands of dollars of his own money.
"He had me convinced that his sister - and this sounds embarrassing - had been kidnapped," he said. "He needed a few thousand dollars to get her released."
The veneer
As the school sank, Niroula built an image that awed some people and turned off others.
He didn't work, but amassed enough cash to frequent the Four Seasons and ride in limos. At Martuni's in San Francisco, bartenders recall him peeling off $100 for two drinks.
"Image is everything," Ovanessian said. "When you buy a round for the house, it has an effect."
Former housemate Thomas Avona, who was briefly married to a Nepalese who came to the United States with Niroula, described him as a childhood "nerd" who took flight in San Francisco.
"He destroyed money," Avona said. "He made you feel like everything was going to be OK, because he had either the money or the scheme to take care of it."
The con games
The schemes that followed included the one that hooked the Japanese tourist.
After meeting the woman on a 2006 trip to Waikiki, Niroula said he could get her a U.S. visa for investors if she wired more than $500,000 into a domestic account.
When she did, Niroula drained the account with forged checks, the woman wrote in a lawsuit.
Soon, he explained that he had only borrowed the money to help relatives flee Nepal. He was a member of the royal family, he said, and there were complications - his sister had been kidnapped. The woman then gave another $41,000 for ransom.
She later told police - who doubt Niroula ever had a kidnapped sibling - that she planned to marry Niroula. They had not had sex, she explained, because "he respected her," Ovanessian said.
Then there was the tale of the pretend painting. In September 2007, police say, Niroula and an art dealer boyfriend told collector Gary Heidenreich that he could acquire a work by surrealist Yves Tanguy.
The British crown wanted to sell it quietly - the Nazis had once owned it - and needed $400,000 of the $990,000 price up front. Heidenreich gave the money to the boyfriend, who gave it to Niroula, who spent much of it at Bellagio in Las Vegas, police say.
If Niroula was ambitious, he was also sloppy, authorities say. Heidenreich's money was traced to him, and on Feb. 29, 2008, San Francisco police arrested him.
By then, though, he had made a fateful connection - befriending an attorney and his client who had filed a high-profile, and lucrative, lawsuit against a San Francisco financier.
The sex case
According to a friend, Niroula read about the attorney, David Replogle, and his client Danny Garcia in People magazine. He soon grew close to them and partied with Garcia.
Garcia had become well known in 2003 by suing Thomas White, saying the wealthy financier had sex with him as a teenager. Two years later, White settled the suit - and a second suit Replogle filed on behalf of Mexican boys who said White abused them in Puerto Vallarta - for $10 million. Garcia, who is now 27, had helped recruit the Mexican plaintiffs.
Today, White remains jailed in Mexico and faces federal sex-tourism charges in San Francisco. But he is appealing the deal with the Mexican boys, claiming that Garcia, Replogle and others conned him.
It was Replogle, records show, who paid Niroula's $250,000 bail in the art caper. Niroula allegedly tried to pay him back by stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars in jewelry from a friend in Novato, and was arrested in August 2008.
A month later, a Marin County judge released Niroula, pending trial, when a hearing had to be postponed. The lead detective, records show, was unavailable while on honeymoon.
The soap opera
Within weeks, authorities say, Niroula was planning his two most startling crimes.
"I am a predator," he texted Garcia in November 2008. "That's why you love me."
Niroula, Garcia and Replogle had unusual relationships. Replogle once got a restraining order against Garcia, who countered in a court declaration that Replogle had showered White's alleged Mexican victims with cash and didn't care if they told the truth.
Garcia and Niroula were "hot and cold," a boyfriend of Garcia's later testified. During a cold stretch, he said, Garcia hacked Niroula's e-mail and called people Niroula knew to warn them about him - including the Japanese tourist.
He told others Niroula had tried to infiltrate the sex-tourism case to get some of White's money.
The inheritance
Still, in late 2008, Niroula and Garcia were in close contact. Prosecutors say they texted each other about "Operation C.L.," which targeted Cliff Lambert, 74, a Palm Springs retiree who was about to vanish.
Lambert knew Garcia first, having met him online, Riverside County prosecutor Lisa DiMaria told a judge last year.
Then, she said, Niroula became estate lawyer "Samuel Orin." He called Lambert to say he was in line for a big inheritance, prompting Lambert to invite him over.
The unraveling
On Dec. 5, 2008, prosecutors say, Niroula showed up at the house with two Heald College students from San Francisco whom he had offered a split of $30,000. One grabbed a knife and stabbed Lambert repeatedly, DiMaria said.
She said Lambert was stuffed in the trunk of his own car and buried in the desert. His body has never been found.
Garcia immediately splurged with Lambert's bank cards, DiMaria said, while Replogle posed as Lambert to give Niroula's art dealer boyfriend, Russell Manning, power of attorney over the dead man's affairs.
On Jan. 6, 2009, DiMaria said, Manning deeded Lambert's home to Niroula, who deeded it to San Jose telecommunications executive Jay Shah - who had once bailed him out of immigration custody.
The next day, though, police caught a break.
The man who allegedly stabbed Lambert, Miguel Bustamante, was caught cleaning out the victim's home. In jail, prosecutors say, he detailed the conspiracy to an informant.
Detectives also heard from a Saratoga real estate agent who had once let Niroula stay with him and his wife. Mark Evans said Niroula and Replogle had asked him to sell the Palm Springs house.
The explanation: Lambert had offered the property in a secret deal after he and another man tied up Niroula, raped him and gave him AIDS.
"It's always a wild story," Evans said.
The condo con
Even as police investigating the Lambert killing closed in, authorities say, Niroula was scheming another audacious crime.
In early 2009, while acting as home-shopper "Syd Jones," Niroula got a look at a condominium in One Rincon Hill, San Francisco's tallest residential tower, said city prosecutor Michael Troncoso.
Meanwhile, the prosecutor said, an accomplice, Winston Lum, forged papers to take title of the condo and two others worth $7.5 million - then applied for equity loans.
Before the real owner of the three condos discovered what was going on, the lender visited the units to make sure the deal was solid.
Lum took on the role of a Chinese-language speaker, Troncoso said, while Niroula became his translator. Lum didn't speak Chinese, though, and spouted "gibberish," the prosecutor said.
An investigation began when the real owner, Shirley Hwang, started getting Lum's mail and discovered he, not she, held title with the city recorder.
Lum, along with two other alleged participants - Jay Shah and San Jose attorney Melvin Emerich, who once aided Niroula in his Marin County case - have pleaded not guilty to multiple criminal counts.
The takedown
Niroula was also charged in the condo case. But by the time San Francisco prosecutors went to court, he and Replogle had been arrested on suspicion of murdering Lambert.
The two were taken into custody March 2, 2009, outside a hearing in the art fraud case.
Later that week, the $2.2 million condo loan was paid out to various accounts that police say are linked to the suspects. One check, for $869,000, was cashed in Zurich.
But Niroula "barely missed the money," Ovanessian said.
In July, police found Bustamante's Heald College classmate Craig McCarthy and charged him with Lambert's murder.
Manning, Niroula's art dealer boyfriend, was arrested the next month. Authorities couldn't tie the 68-year-old to the killing, so he pleaded guilty to fraud and got five years in prison.
As for Replogle and Garcia - who is also charged with murdering Lambert - they say they had nothing to do with his disappearance.
Replogle's lawyer, John Patrick Dolan, said his 61-year-old client thought Niroula had traveled to Palm Springs to finalize a settlement with Lambert over his purported sexual assault of Niroula.
Later, Dolan said, Replogle posed as Lambert only after his life was threatened by his alleged accomplices.
But prosecutors say Replogle spoke on the phone to Niroula, Garcia and Bustamante more than 160 times in the days before Lambert's disappearance.
The last believer
As a trial nears, Niroula is still trying to sell his story. He is acting as his own attorney.
He did not respond to an interview request sent to him in jail. But he still talks often on the phone to Jerry Dekker - the New College instructor who recruited him back in 2002 - assuring him he is innocent.
"He said, 'Jerry, you know me better than anybody. I'm just a poor Nepali boy from south Kathmandu,' " Dekker said. "He said he wants to go back to school, get his degree and get a job in the U.S. State Department."
Dekker said he does not condone any of the acts of which Niroula is accused, but has some sympathy for him.
Niroula has suffered from homophobia and the greed of others, he said, and his story "could be instructive to all of us about the hopes and aspirations of people from poor countries."
He was asked if Niroula might be manipulating him.
"Of course, that's his genius!" Dekker said. "You don't think I know that?"An homage to '50s sci-fi movies filtered through a 21st-century 3-D prism, Monsters vs. Aliens pops off the screen as an always sturdy, periodically exhilarating pastiche of jokes and action.
Though viewable in conventional 2-D, it's worth the two or three extra bucks to see DreamWorks Animation's stereoscopic cartoon in the format for which it was conceived. The movie was authored in the studio's proprietary InTru 3D, and screened for this review in an IMAX 3D theater. It will also be shown in 2,000 or so RealD-equipped screens around the United States.
Monsters vs. Aliens gets off to a slow and not particularly funny start as our heroine, Susan Murphy (voiced by Reese Witherspoon), prepares to marry a jerk (Paul Rudd) who insists on canceling their Paris honeymoon so he can audition for a weatherman gig in Fresno, California.
Instead, she gets smacked by a comet, grows 50 feet tall, and lands in a secret prison. Here's where the fun begins.
(Spoiler alert: Minor plot points follow.)
Pining to return to normal, Susan, renamed Ginormica, befriends mutant inmates that could be efficiently diagrammed as the smart one (Dr. Cockroach, voiced by House's Hugh Laurie), the dumb one (gelatinous B.O.B., voiced by Seth |
obic, because its name references only female genitalia when talking about women’s rights?
That’s to say nothing of “The Pant Antler,” a beer created with the sole purpose of “objectify[ing] the male genitalia” and poking fun at all genders, said brewery owner Tom Porter. Does All About Beer Magazine plan to wade into the discussion about misanthropy?
In its editorial, All About Beer Magazine says its objective is “to cover the beer industry in all forms.” In the same breath, the editorial claims the magazine has “a social responsibility to stand up against anything that demeans our fellow citizens, regardless of gender, religion, sexual orientation and race.”
Political correctness has increasingly intersected with the beer industry, and many craft brewers are using humorous, racy, or tongue-and-cheek names to help their product stand out in a crowded marketplace.
To fulfill its “social justice responsibility,” All About Beer Magazine is positioning itself as an arbiter of what is demeaning and tasteless. In doing so, it may well undermine its most fundamental editorial mission.
— Jillian Kay Melchior writes for Heat Street and is a fellow for the Steamboat Institute and the Independent Women’s Forum.Breaking his silence on the raging debate over acts of intolerance, actor Aamir Khan on Monday expressed “alarm” and despondency over the rise in such cases “in the last six to eight months”.
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In conversation with Anant Goenka, Wholetime Director & Head — New Media, The Indian Express, at the eighth edition of the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Awards, Khan said a sense of “insecurity” and “fear” had seeped deep within society, even in his family.
WATCH: Aamir Khan On Intolerance & Delinking Religion From Terrorism – Complete Coversation At RNG Awards
“(Wife) Kiran and I have lived all our lives in India. For the first time, she said, should we move out of India? That’s a disastrous and big statement for Kiran to make to me. She fears for her child. She fears about what the atmosphere around us will be. She feels scared to open the newspapers everyday. That does indicate that there is a sense of growing disquiet,” he said.
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Asked for his view on the trend of writers, artists, historians and scientists returning their awards, Khan said this was one way of getting their point across. “For creative people, to voice what they feel is important.
A number of creative people — historians and scientists — have increasingly had a certain feeling that they feel they need to express. One of the ways of expressing their dissatisfaction or disappointment is to return awards.”
Watch #RNGAwards
He said he would endorse any protest that is non-violent. “As long as you don’t resort to violence, all individuals have a right to protest and they can protest in any manner they feel is right. This is certainly a way to protest for creative people.”
The protests, he noted, were prompted by a growing atmosphere of intolerance around the creative community and the growing sense of insecurity and disappointment over it.
Click here to read in Hindi
“As an individual, as a citizen, certainly I have also been alarmed, I can’t deny it, by a number of incidents,” he said, “For us, as Indians, to feel a sense of security, two-three things are important. The sense of justice gives a lot of security to the common man. The second thing, that is important, are the people who are the elected representatives, at the state level or the level of the Centre… when people take law in their own hands, we look upon these representatives to take a strong stance, make strong statements and speed up the legal process to prosecute such cases. It doesn’t matter who the ruling party is.”
Click here is the complete list of #RNGAward winners
“On television debates, I see where one political party, in this case, the BJP which is ruling right now, is accused of various things. They said, ‘But what happened in 1984?’. But that doesn’t make right what’s happening now. What happened in ‘84 was disastrous and horrendous. At other times also, through ages, whenever there is a violent act, when an innocent person is killed, be it one or a large number, that’s very unfortunate. And these unfortunate moments are the ones when we look towards our leaders to take a strong step. Make statements that are reassuring to the citizens,” he said.
On the issue of censorship, Khan said though he had had no personal experience with the censors, he was alarmed by their stance. “It (the board) is reacting to things that we, as free people, as adults, should make our own choices on. Essentially the certification board is supposed to mention the age for which the film is suitable. There is no censorship required after the certification. As I understand it now, it has been aggressive in its approach and it is worrying.”
Khan opened up on another issue occupying the news feed, answering queries related to terror. “Acts of terror are not connected to any religion. If he is a Muslim and he engaging in acts of terror, I don’t think he is following Islam. Or for that matter, even a Hindu who is engaging in an act of violence, is not following Hinduism. No religion teaches killing of innocents. When you see an act of terror or violence, instead of calling him a Christian or a Hindu or an Islamic terrorist, you should just call him terrorist and remove the religion tag from it. That’s the first mistake when we label them. It’s just a terrorist who doesn’t have a religion,” he said.
He spoke of growing discomfort within the majority of moderate Muslims over such incidents. “If I’m not mistaken, a number of Muslim organisations have begun to speak openly against the ISIS and similar terror organisations, at least in India,” he said. Voicing his opinion as a Muslim, he said, makes him uncomfortable. “Firstly, why should I be representing anyone? Secondly, I have to represent anyone, why not everyone? Why Muslims? My birth may be in a Muslim household, but I speak for everyone,” he said.
The conversation also led to an interaction with the audience. While Lt Gen Arun Kumar Sahni, GOC-in-C South Western Command, expressed his desire to see more films that show the relationship between India and its neighbours in a positive light, Congress MP Shashi Tharoor spoke about how such an approach can compel people to think about their own deep-seated prejudices and bigotry in their own country.
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The Indian Express columnist Tavleen Singh asked Khan about his view on the Paris attackers invoking Islam to justify their act. “A person who is holding a Quran and killing people may feel he is doing it in the name of Islam, but as a Muslim, I don’t feel he is doing an Islamic act. He may claim to be a Muslim but we should not recognise him as that. My problem is not just with the ISIS, the fear is with that thinking. Today there is ISIS, tomorrow it would be someone else. This extreme thinking is what I worry about,” he said.Mozilla has decided to stop development of a version of its Firefox mobile Web browser for phones running Windows Mobile.
Microsoft has closed the door to native applications on smartphones running its new Windows Phone 7 Series software, Stuart Parmenter, director of Mobile Engineering at Mozilla Corporation, wrote in a blog post on Monday.
Mozilla was preparing to develop a version of Firefox for Windows Mobile, and the development work Mozilla has done on Windows CE 6 has left it “well positioned to have an awesome browser on Windows Phone 7,” according to Parmenter.
But the absence of a software development kit for native applications has made it impossible for Mozilla to move forward, he said.
Microsoft will only support development of applications running in the Silverlight runtime environment, or of games in the XNA Game Studio runtime environment, it announced last week at its Mix conference. It will not allow third party app developers direct access to the phone’s hardware, where they might be better able to exploit its potential.
Still, Parmenter hopes that Microsoft provide Mozilla with a way to build Firefox for Windows Phone 7 Series. Mozilla thinks Windows Phone 7 looks interesting and has the potential to do well in the market, according to Parmenter.
Firefox for Android is still only a pre-alpha version, which means it is still in the early stages of development, according to Mozilla. The pre-alpha version has been optimized for Motorola’s Droid and Google’s Nexus One.ON A recent evening Rob Quist ambled into a bar in Bozeman dressed in a Stetson and black jeans. He cleared his throat and recited a rhyme he had composed. “Montana…She’s slow to grant her favours to come-lately, newer faces./To long-time suitors, she reveals her hidden, secret places./She lives in big-time splendour; she’s the heart of the golden West./And all manner of wondrous creatures live and suckle at her breast.”
The occasion was not a beer-and-poetry night but a congressional campaign rally. On May 25th Mr Quist, a country-and-western singer and fourth-generation Montanan, will compete as a Democrat in a special election for Montana’s sole congressional seat, vacated when Representative Ryan Zinke was appointed secretary of the interior. Republicans have held the seat since 1996. But the polls, few as they are, suggest that Mr Quist is closing the gap with his opponent, businessman Greg Gianforte, a “newer face” originally from New Jersey who lost the race to become Montana’s governor last November.
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Neither man has much political experience. Mr Quist has spent the past decades performing music and poetry—sometimes, as his opponent relishes pointing out, at nudist resorts. Mr Gianforte is best known for starting a successful technology business and for his support of Bible-literalist causes. He chaired the board of a school in Bozeman that teaches evolution as “one of several theories of existence”, and has donated to a dinosaur museum in Glendive which claims that the earth is around 6,000 years old and that dinosaurs stomped about on Noah’s ark.
A strong showing in April in another special election, for a Republican-held seat in Georgia, has excited Democrats. Montana’s contest is being similarly interpreted as a litmus test of Mr Trump’s unpopularity. But this election may say more about Montana’s curious brand of politics than about national trends.
In November Montanans handed Mr Trump a landslide victory over Hillary Clinton while at the same time voting for Steve Bullock, the incumbent Democratic governor, over Mr Gianforte. Although the state has backed Republicans for president and for Congress since 1996, since 1911 at least one of its senators has always been a Democrat. In an office decorated with family photos, football helmets and paintings of Montana landscapes, Mr Bullock wonders whether Montana’s emptiness partly explains the state’s erratic voting tendencies. “We have 1m people spread out over a huge territory. There’s a sense of individualism, but also a recognition that you have to take care of your neighbour.”
Dale Martin, a historian at Montana State University, says Montanans, like most states of the Rocky Mountain West, have long had an ambivalent relationship with the federal government: libertarian by instinct, but reliant on federal subsidies for highways, mining and agriculture. According to The Tax Foundation, a think-tank, federal aid accounted for 39% of general revenue in 2014, making it the fourth-most-dependent state in the country.
Both candidates are trying to walk a difficult line. At an event in Butte, a run-down mining town, Mr Gianforte castigated federal overreach while cheering the idea that “public lands remain in public hands”. (His campaign for governor failed partly because of stories that he had sued to block public access to a fishing river in front of his Bozeman estate.) At his bar-room rally, Mr Quist championed liberal causes like reproductive rights, universal health care and economic equality. But to prove his gun-friendliness, he also taped a campaign advertisement in which he shoots at a TV screen playing an attack ad against him.Interviews
Nick Solak is a twenty-one-year-old second baseman out of the University of Louisville. The Yankees selected him Thursday night, with the 62nd overall pick in the 2016 MLB Draft. He is a pure hitter, owning a career.347 batting average in 157 college games. The average should translate to professional ball as he has only struck out 64 times in 499 career ABs in college. Although he does not provide a ton of power, he is a prototypical 2B, standing at 5’11 and weighing 163 pounds. He will have to put on some weight as he develops, but he has the upside to be a very good hitter and a solid second baseman.
Q: First and foremost, congratulations on being selected in the second round by the New York Yankees. How did you find out that the Yankees were taking you with the 62nd Overall Pick and what was the experience like?
“A: We [Louisville], had three guys drafted in the 1st round. We had a draft party in the basement of our stadium. Everyone from the team was there and lot of guys families were there. My name popped up on the screen and Andy Pettitte announced it. I sat there for a second, in shock. I hugged my mom and teammates. It is a thrill and very humbling.”
Q: So, you did not know the Yankees had drafted you until you heard your name called on MLB Network?
“A: I did not know the Yankees were going to draft me before I heard my name on TV. I met with their area guy, Mike Gibbons, in the fall. The Yankees also brought a sport psychologist in, who I met with. I had a little bit of an inclination they were interested.”
Q: You mentioned you had been in contact with the Yankees prior to the draft. Did the seem to be the most interested team?
“A: The Yankees were in the top five of teams who seemed most interested. They seemed like they wanted me and it ended up being that way.”
Q: What was your reaction to the Yankees, such a storied franchise, drafting you?
“A: I sat down trying to fall asleep, but I was thinking about being drafted by the Yankees. They are such a prestigious organization, with so many titles. It is an honor to be drafted by them. I was thinking back, and some of my earliest memories were going to White Sox Spring Training games in Arizona. But I also have a memory of going to the Yankees Spring Training game in Tampa and watching Derek Jeter and Robinson Cano. It was a really cool atmosphere, and out of all the Spring Training games, it felt most like a regular season game.”
Q: Who did you speak to? What did they say to you?
“A: Right after I was drafted, Mike Gibbons called and congratulated me. He mentioned the importance of tradition and finishing on a strong note at Louisville. He said that we will be in touch.”
Q: Yankee fans are very interested in learning about the newest member of their organization. Can you give them a brief scouting report on yourself, as a ballplayer?
“A: I think I am a grinder. The type of baseball player who will show up every single day and compete and help the team win in different ways whether it is hitting balls into the gap or stealing bases. And defensively, making plays at second base and trying to prevent runs out there. I think I have shown I can be a model of consistency. You know what you’re going to get.”
Q: A lot of other players from Louisville have already been drafted…What has it been like playing with such a talented group of guys and being part of such great teams?
“A: Ever since I stepped foot at Louisville, I have played with really high draft picks and talented baseball players. [They] have taught me so much about the game. It has made me a lot better as a baseball player. I think you learn so much about yourself as a player in college. At the same time, when you go off to Pro Ball, you always have those guys to lean on and you have the other guys too, who I can reach out to and pick their brains and see where they are at. I think that is what you can take from the guys you have played with before you.”
Q: What is the biggest difference entering Pro Ball out of college, instead of High School?
“A: The biggest thing is you’re more mature. You’ve played more and faced better competition. More importantly, going to three years of college helps your mental state and mental ability. One of the biggest things is you’re playing in the postseason and in important games and learn how to handle those situations. So, to come from a school such as Louisville and to go into an organization such as the Yankees, who stress the important of winning, it sets you up well.”
Q: After being selected by the Yankees, how do you focus on Louisville’s upcoming appearance in the in the postseason? And how do you handle Louisville coming into the tournaments as one of the favorites to win?
“A: We start our Super Regional this weekend. When it comes down to it, we had seven guys picked in the top 115 picks and all the guys understand that even more important than your draft pick, accolades, and awards, is the that this group of guys will be remembered for how well we performed and, ultimately, the team goal is to win the National Championship. The draft is a thrill and very exciting, but everybody is still focused on the team and our ultimate goal.”
Q: What does it mean to you to be named Third-Team All-America and Second-Team All-ACC selection as a junior in 2016.
“A: It is definitely an honor. You play with a lot of great players and against a lot of great competition and to help the team win is the ultimate goal. To help the team win, at the end of the day, your numbers hopefully turn out to be good. It is definitely an honor to be named an All-American and ALL-ACC. It shows a lot of hard work pays off.”
Q: What is the coolest thing that has happened to you since being drafted by the Yankees? Any interesting stories? Has anyone unexpected reached out to you?
“A: Mark Payton texted me, which is really cool. He is in AA with Trenton right now. He is a guy I have looked up to since I was a Freshman in High School. I have always looked up to him. He is grinding his way through the Yankees organization and getting a text from him was really cool.”
Q: Do you expect to sign soon or do you think it will be a prolonged process?
“A: Once my season ends here, I will be excited and ready to sign and start my professional career.”
Q: Who do you model your game after?
“A: Ian Kinsler has always been one of my favorite players that I model my game after. He is scrappy and a hard working second baseman who will score runs and play good defense. And I do not know if I am allowed to say this, but I also model my game after Dustin Pedroia. And Derek Jeter, of course. The guys that are winners and fun to watch play the game.”
Q: Who has been the most influential person/people in your baseball career?
“A: I would probably say my parents. They have been so supportive for my baseball career. Always looked at opportunities for me to keep improving and keep playing. And they helped find great coaches.”
Q: Did you play any other sports besides baseball?
“A: I played High School hockey until sophomore year. Hock and baseball are my two sports. After Sophomore year, I knew that if I wanted to pursue baseball in college, I had to drop Hockey. I love to follow Hockey and I am a huge Blackhawks fan.”
Q: So, who do you think will win the Stanley Cup?
“A: The Penguins are looking hard to beat and my sister goes to school in Pittsburgh. She brought a Penguins jersey home for me. I can’t really wear it, though.”The All-22 All-Star Team is an attempt to provide some insight on the NFL’s 22 most underappreciated players. Some will be All-Pros who haven’t fully gotten their due; some will be names few casual fans have ever heard. All will, for one reason or another, have been overlooked.
If 15-year-old Bobby Wagner had gotten his way, he never would have played football. He never would have been a four-year starter at Utah State, or first-team All-WAC three times. He never would’ve been an NFL starter as a rookie for one of the league’s best defenses. If it had been up to his younger self, Wagner would’ve grown nine inches by his 16th birthday and become a basketball star. It was only after he realized that growth spurt wasn’t coming that Wagner decided basketball probably wasn’t his future. And with a new football staff of coaches in place at Colony High School in Ontario, California, he made peace with a life in the trenches on his way to the field for the first time as a junior.
The Vitals Age: 23 College: Utah State Position: Inside linebacker Years as a pro: Two Draft position: Round 2 (47th overall) Contract: Base salary, $585,809; signing bonus, $393,236 (cap hit: $979,045) Pro Bowls: None All-Pro: None Game in 25 words or fewer: An athletically elite middle linebacker who consistently makes plays in the run game and is a more than capable player in coverage.
When people are talking about the Seahawks’ 2012 draft a decade from now, that conversation will start with Russell Wilson. But right now, Seattle’s finds from last April also include what it stumbled upon with the 47th pick. Seven years after his first snap, Wagner has entered his second season in the middle of the Seahawks defense. Seattle’s hope for Wagner was that he’d compete to be its starting middle linebacker — the most glaring hole in an otherwise excellent defense — but by season’s end, he’d surpassed any expectations the Seahawks could have had for his first season. Five games in, he was already playing every snap, staying on the field in each of Seattle’s sub and nickel packages, flashing a grasp of the defense beyond what nearly any 22-year-old rookie could manage.
But Wagner never had a doubt. “I was thinking, If I can get 100-something tackles in 12 games, imagine what I can do in 16,” he says. He no longer has to. Wagner stacked up 140 tackles as a rookie, the seventh-highest total in the league. Seattle’s Super Bowl expectations may be tied up in the leader the team found under center, but if this really is the Seahawks’ year, that will have plenty to do with the one they now have on defense.
Kevin Clune knew what he had in Wagner the first time he saw his sophomore linebacker in his natural environment. Clune had come to Utah State before the 2009 season to be the linebackers coach for Gary Andersen’s new staff, and one of the Aggies’ early team activities involved a three-on-three basketball tournament before spring practice. “How competitive he was, and how he ran around on the basketball court and took control of the game, that really showed us what we working with,” Clune says.
Wagner had started the final nine games of his freshman year, but in Andersen’s new 3-4 scheme, there were questions about where he’d fit in the defense. Clune saw a raw, athletic talent who had potential to play inside or outside linebacker. But over the course of spring practice, it became clear that Wagner was made to be a tackling machine.
In two high school seasons, Wagner averaged more than 100 tackles, but when he and Clune started their work together, he had played fewer than 40 organized football games in his life. So his role was limited to his individual assignment. And in that first season, that would be enough, Clune figured. Wagner led the WAC with 115 tackles on his way to first-team all-conference honors. So much for limitations.
In the spring before his senior season, Clune noticed Wagner scribbling in a notebook during a position meeting. Initially, he thought his star was ignoring the day’s lesson. When Clune went over for a closer look, he realized that Wagner had been fervently jotting down everything Clune had said. “I don’t know how many notes he took, but he was writing down everything — absolutely everything,” Clune says.
Soon, Wagner was given free rein of the Utah State defense. If he felt like he had an advantage over an opponent’s right guard, Wagner could shift the blitz patterns and coverage such that he’d be the one attacking the quarterback. Clune couches his comments by saying that there were some restrictions, but he also mentions that there were plenty of plays that had “Bobby” right in the name.
The development of Wagner’s knowledge was huge. It doesn’t hurt, though, that the 6-foot linebacker is a physical marvel.
Wagner actually missed the NFL combine with pneumonia, but when it came time for his pro day, he put on a display that sent him hurtling up draft boards. His recorded broad jump of 11 feet bested every other figure at the combine, and the 241-pound Wagner clocked a 4.46 in the 40-yard dash.
Clune points to two specific attributes that set Wagner apart from even the highest-caliber athletes. The first is the length of his arms. “I always joke, he might be 6-foot, but he’s got the arms of a 7-footer,” Clune says. “If you’re not perfect as a blocker, all of a sudden, he’s got you locked out, and it seems like he’s three feet away.” The other is his first step, another trait Clune first spotted on the basketball court. Wagner may not have the build for hoops, but without the game he may not have become the linebacker he is today.
His astounding measurables played a role in why teams like Seattle and Dallas were interested in Wagner as early as the second round. Speaking to reporters following the draft, Seahawks assistant director of college scouting Eric Stokes noted, “First and foremost [Wagner] is a big-time upgrade athletically. His speed and his range are going to be very impressive.” But in Wagner, Seattle also had a player whose testing figures matched his productivity. Wagner was the defensive MVP of the Senior Bowl, collecting seven tackles during the game and impressing in tackling drills all week.
Watching Wagner, it’s those abilities as a tackler that stand out as much as — maybe more than — his speed. Plays like this one, in which Wagner manages to chase down Cam Newton in the open field, are great highlights, but others like the one above are even more prevalent. According to Football Outsiders, Wagner had a tackle or assist on 27.5 percent of run plays faced by the Seattle defense — the highest figure in the league. Some of that is due to Wagner’s speed allowing him to be in on plays anywhere on the field. But for tacklers of his caliber, it’s about more than the ballcarriers they can get to. It’s about the ones they can find.
Again and again, Wagner’s patience shines through on film. Here, in a Week 8 game against Detroit, the Lions run a play that initially appears to be a zone to the left side but is actually a designed cutback. Rather than overrun to his right, Wagner waits just long enough for it to develop that he identifies the cutback lane, fills it, and drops Mikel Leshoure for a loss. One draft scouting report noted that Wagner “plays with his feet pointed forward,” a nod to his ability not only to get to running backs, but to make plays squared-up and downhill. Doing that with such patience is partially a product of Wagner’s proficiency for reading blocking schemes and diagnosing plays so consistently.
Wagner says that the most difficult part of the NFL transition was getting acclimated to the pro passing game. “In college, you might be able to get away with things here or there,” he says. “In the NFL, you can’t do that. There are just too many smart quarterbacks.” By Seattle’s second game, Wagner was making all the defensive calls when he was on the field. He says that understanding route combinations and tendencies is the area of his game he most wants to improve in his second year, but even if Wagner simply replicates his production from his rookie season, the Seahawks likely won’t be disappointed.
The first two weeks of Wagner’s sophomore campaign have been ripe for comparison. Last Sunday, the Seahawks traveled to Carolina to play Luke Kuechly and the Panthers. Both Kuechly and Wagner were taken in last year’s draft — Kuechly ninth overall — and they finished first and second, respectively, in last year’s Defensive Rookie of the Year vote.
This week, the comparison will be one Wagner has already been making on his own for some time. In college, as his interest in the linebacker position grew, Wagner began studying the best the game had to offer, which typically led him to Patrick Willis. Now, he and Willis are the leaders on defense for perhaps the two best teams in the NFC. On Sunday night, they’ll meet in what might be the most anticipated regular-season game of the year. Wagner admitted that on top of what’s at stake in the current Seahawks-49ers rivalry, there’s another element to playing against the likes of Willis and NaVorro Bowman. “You come off the field, and the people considered the top two linebackers in the game [come] onto the field,” Wagner says. “You want to stand out when you’re playing against those guys. I don’t play this game just to play it. I play it because I want to be the best. I definitely see who my competition is, how I feel I compare to them. I feel like I can be just as good as anybody else.”Socceroo World Cup defender Jason Davidson has had a dream starting debut for West Bromwich Albion, scoring the winning penalty in the club’s epic Capital One Cup win on Wednesday morning (AEST).
In a thrilling clash at the Hawthorns it was Davidson who proved the hero, slotting home his spot kick to hand the Baggies a 7-6 shoot-out win after the scores were locked at 1-1.
It didn’t look good for West Brom early in the shoot-out as Oxford’s Kiwi keeper Max Crocombe saved both of their first two attempts.
But Baggies ‘keeper Boaz Myhill also managed a couple of stops to keep the home side in it and allow Davidson his magic moment.
The 23-year-old almost won the match in the dying minutes of normal time when he burst into the box but his strike was straight at Crocombe.
Davidson wasn’t to be denied in the shoot-out though, capitalizing on Jake Wright’s miss to coolly convert the 18th spot-kick and send the Baggies into the third round of the competition.
There were plenty of other Aussies in action overnight.
James Wesolowski played a full match as his Shrewsbury Town side pulled off a major upset, beating Premier League club Leicester City 1-0.
Goal-keeper Adam Federici kept a clean-sheet as Reading beat Scunthorpe United 1-0, with Ryan Edwards also playing the last 16 minutes.
Socceroos due Massimo Luongo and Brad Smith both started for Swindon Town who were beaten 4-2 after extra-time by Championship club Brighton.
There was a goal and an assist for Bradden Inman in a superb performance but it wasn’t enough to save his Crewe Alexandra side, who went down in extra-time against Bolton Wanderers 3-2.
Ryan Williams and played full match as Fulham won 1-0 at Brentford but Neil Kilkenny’s Preston North End were beaten 3-1 by Middlesborough, with Bailey Wright not a part of the squad.Battlestar Galactica alum Michael Hogan has landed a multi-episode arc on 12 Monkeys’ second season, it was announced at the show’s Comic-Con panel on Saturday, moderated by this reporter.
Hogan, who played Saul Tigh, will portray Dr. Vance Eckland, a charismatic and intelligent scientist from the future. He’s a comrade of Dr. Jones (Barbara Sukowa), working alongside her at the temporal facility, who reveals that they may have a closer relationship than first meets the eye.
Additionally, it was announced that Todd Stashwick (Deacon), Emily Hampshire (Jennifer Goines) and Sukowa have been promoted to series regulars for season 2.
12 Monkeys is slated to return in early 2016 on Syfy.
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Click here for more of Entertainment Weekly‘s Comic-Con coverage.The escalating situation in Crimea and the U.S. presidential campaign have more than a few things in common, but two of them are Russian President Vladimir Putin and a dearth of facts.
It remains unclear exactly what happened on the occupied peninsula to trigger such a strident response from Russia, which accuses Ukraine of supporting terrorist attacks aimed at destabilizing its hold over Crimea. The confusion is by design.
"It looks like the people who have seized power in Kiev and continue to hold on to it, instead of looking for the compromises that we have talked about...instead of looking for ways to reconcile peacefully, they have resorted to terrorist practices," Putin said.
Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said in a statement that it had successfully “eliminated an intelligence network” of the Ukrainian Ministry of Intelligence after several alleged attempted “terrorist” attacks, resulting in the death of one FSB officer. Ukraine denies the allegations, and there seems to be little evidence that the events occurred as the FSB claims. As the journalist Leonid Bershidsky points out, the whole operation could be a false flag designed to give Russia an excuse to make further incursions into Ukraine.
Russia devised similar excuses to justify the 2014 annexation of the peninsula and the subsequent campaign in eastern Ukraine, which the Kremlin successfully painted as a “civil war” through its propaganda outlets in much of the world. Having seen how easy it is to fabricate its way through territorial expansion, it makes sense that the Kremlin might want to push a little farther into its southern neighbor.
* * *
Hannah Arendt warned that rewriting history, recasting the attackers and the attacked, is not a difficult proposition. In her 1967 essay “Truth and Politics,” Arendt tells the story of how French statesman George Clemenceau, in the final years of his life, was asked by a Weimar Republic representative what he thought future historians would make of World War I. “This I don’t know. But I know for certain that they will not say Belgium invaded Germany,” Clemenceau replied.
“A factual statement — Germany invaded Belgium in August 1914 — acquires political implications only by being put in an interpretative context,” Arendt writes. “But the opposite proposition, which Clemenceau, still unacquainted with the art of rewriting history, thought absurd, needs no context to be of political significance. It is clearly an attempt to change the record, and as such, it is a form of action.”
Trump has proven himself uniquely impervious to facts
In Crimea, and in this year’s U.S. presidential campaign, all facts are interpretative. The Republican nominee, Donald Trump, seems to compulsively fabricate matters of national security, taking a leaf out of the Kremlin’s playbook.
At the start of this beguiling season, many journalists and politicians thought that a bit of fact-checking would jog Trump’s memory and make him a “normal” candidate. But Trump has proven himself uniquely impervious to facts. We have already seen his revisions to reality turned into action.
Nowhere is more vulnerable to Trump’s revisions than Eastern Europe, a region whose history has been repeatedly and aggressively revised over the past century.
Trump's meandering opinions and obfuscations on the subject are on par with the manipulations that allowed Russian forces to slip so easily into Ukraine the first time, and those that fuel the perception of the Baltics as a border region that will inevitably change hands every couple of decades. The developments in Crimea are worrying signs that the impact of his fabrications are not confined to the network news.
“OK, well, he’s there in a certain way,” Trump told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos regarding Putin’s meddling in Ukraine. “But I’m not there. You have Obama there. And frankly, that whole part of the world is a mess under Obama with all the strength that you’re talking about and all of the power of NATO and all of this. In the meantime, he’s going away. He take — takes Crimea.”
His remarks on Eastern Europe are as messy as he says the region is. The swathe of land from Estonia to Crimea is already a great unknown for many Americans, full of “places that Americans don’t think about all that often,” as the New York Times’ David E. Sanger remarked in an interview with Trump. And the geographical and cultural expanse separating NATO’s centers of power from its eastern flanks further invites misunderstanding, making Trump’s remarks on the “mess” of Eastern Europe all the more dangerous.
“Just to be clear, the U.S. does not recognize Russia’s forcible takeover of Crimea just as we did not in the Baltic States in 1940,” the House Committee on Foreign Affairs felt obliged to tweet in response to the Republican candidate’s claims.
“Do facts, independent of opinion and interpretation, exist at all?” Arendt asks in her 1967 essay. She answers in the negative: “factual truth is no more self-evident than opinion, and this may be among the reasons that opinion-holders find it relatively easy to discredit factual truth as just another opinion. Factual evidence, moreover, is established through testimony by eyewitnesses – notoriously unreliable – and by records, documents, and monuments, all of which can be suspected as forgeries.”
* * *
Trump is a master of erasing, or making up, the evidence. Trump habitually bans journalists from his rallies, his supporters chanting “lock her up,” “get ‘em out,” “build that wall.” As the official nominee, he has access to verified facts in the form of classified national security briefings, but has sometimes chosen to eschew them.
He claims not to understand why this U.S. can’t use its nuclear weapons. “If we have them, why can’t we use them?” he reportedly asked one of his foreign policy advisers, multiple times. Generous observers might give him credit for reigniting a philosophical dispute about the state of the nuclear arsenals |
other, and we also introduced air to ground missiles taking things out.”
Principal photography in New Orleans featured practical sets that were extended by MPC. Legacy Effects also provided Endoskeleton reference on location; returning to the world of the Terminator was a significant moment for Legacy’s John Rosengrant, who had worked with Stan Winston on the first two films. “The production had an Endo design of where they wanted to go,” he says. “I thought it was a very nice update which stayed very faithful to it, but there were some new nuances that were clean innovations. We took those digital files and made them watertight and broke them down for making a real one. There were well over 300 parts and got them all ready for rapid prototyping. We printed out all the parts, cleaned them up, molded them and then made three Endoskeletons. One could be broken apart into various pieces for digital reference, one used for stunt type work.”
Legacy Effects took advantage of major developments in crafting on-screen materials the studio had made from working on films such as Iron Man and its sequels. “We had materials I wish we would have had back in 1983 And 1990!,” exclaims Rosengrant. “We’ve been developing with different formulas of urethanes that are flexible, and paint systems we’ve been working with that replicate metal on rubber surfaces. They were mostly made of different types of urethane, with some fiberglass parts. It was a paint treatment. In the first two movies had a vacuum metalizing process which is a spray that goes on plastic, but once it starts to rub off you’re screwed as there’s nothing you can do about it. Then we moved into actually chrome plating things. But then the downside of that is that it makes everything kind of heavy. Here we had a paint treatment that looks like chrome. It’s very durable, but if something happens to it you can touch it up.”
“The Legacy Endo,” adds Stopsack, “also held enough detail and accuracy for us to use as a guide when it came to the build of the digital version made at MPC. We took extensive photographs and approached it as it was a classical digital character.”
To animate the digital Endo’s, MPC carried out a number of motion studies. “The question really becomes,” notes Stopsack, “what is it you are going for? A raw mechanical machine? Or a machine that is built to mimic the human behaviour. In the end we settled on something that was in-between the two. Going to humanoid felt natural for such a menacing creature. But going robotic and machine like didn't work either, as it didn't leave us with a character people could ‘relate’ to, or I should say, people could fear.”
The attacking troops face a daunting challenge against the powerful Hunter-Killers and the Spider-Tanks, which are actually dropped by the HKs. “We explored various options on how to fold the Spider-Tanks, but also fit them into the body of the HKs,” says Stopsack. “With both machines being a significant size, we wanted to avoid the sense of the HK being an empty hull once the Spider-Tank got deployed. With the design being based of the original Terminator movies, the material finish had to be rather slick. The concept stage determined a sort of brushed metal look. The challenge there is to maintain the sense of scale. A fairly uniform finish quickly turns the perception into something small. We pushed for a fairly high frequency level for the ‘brushed metal’ for a start. The difficulty there is to maintain this detail within the shot context when the HKs or Spider-Tanks are seen further away from camera. We combined the general material with a detailed level of imperfection. Mud, grime, scratches, all of these were textural features that helped to sell the scale the menacing nature we wanted to go for.”
MPC’s in-house crowd tool, ALICE, served as the means to fill out the future war scenes on the ground and in the sky. “Crowd agents interacting on the ground level is something that ALICE was originally designed for,” states Stopsack. “Recent movies like Guardians of the Galaxy required us to prepare ALICE to deal with epic simulations in the sky. So we were more or less covered from a technological point of view. One difference is that we required a larger interaction between the two groups, which meant we had to spend a little bit of time extending the systems even further. Helicopters had to take out groups of Endo troops, while those interacted with other troops, all of this while HKs are attacking the helicopter.”
Back to the top.
Inside the TDD
On screen: John and Kyle make it to the Time Displacement Device (TDD), but having witnessed Skynet send a T-800 back to 1984, Kyle volunteers to also travel through time to save Sarah Connor.
VFX: Double Negative crafted the TDD environment and the actual time travel effect for this future sequence, as well as incarnations of the device for 1984 and 2017. “The idea behind it is a blend between organic and inorganic,” describes DNeg visual effects supervisor Pete Bebb. “We wanted to show the power of what it takes to turn on one of these TDD devices, and bear in mind you have to keep a living entity within it without getting completely destroyed. So we had almost a ‘birth of a star’ feel to it. A lot of arc’ing electric, solar flares but similar palette to the original with cyan blue feel.”
A practical TDD set-piece with rotating arms was enhanced and extended digitally as the machine gets up to speed. “Originally the premise was to have it incredibly violent and have huge arcs and lightning hitting off the side of the sphere,” says Bebb, “but inside it’s quite protected and serene. We needed to up it otherwise it wouldn’t feel like a painful device to go through.”
DNeg handled views of the time travel sphere arriving. For the later 2017 arrival, which occurs in the middle of a San Francisco highway, the studio augmented some plate photography. “We locked off a road at night in New Orleans,” recounts Bebb. “They built the device on a crane with huge strobe lights on it, dropped it down, hovered it roughly over the street and that gave the interactive lighting. We had a rough cutout of where the eight foot sphere would be, and then we put in our CG device.”
During Kyle’s travel through the TDD, he witnesses two timelines, one a happier journey in which he revisits alternate memories as a child, and then a more post-apocalyptic vision. One of Us treated footage to realize the disparate timeline views. “Most of the shots takes place in a flashback,” says One of Us visual effects supervisor Bryan Jones. “It was warmly lit and a lot of it was shot high speed to give it a little bit more of a dreamy feel. Our brief was to not just do a color grading gag or something that could have been done in DI.”
“They wanted it analog and photographic and optical,” adds One of Us co-director Dominic Parker, “because those feel more in the realm of psychological. Otherwise it looks like you’re treating an image, rather than seeing an image through some mental process.”
To get that feeling, the studio reference HDR landscape photography and optical bleeds and artifacts. “A lot of it was an aurora that surrounds the characters,” says Jones. “And a lot of it was displacement and roto-driven, and a lot of additive style exposure things to make it feel organic, rather than just a grade. We tried to steer away from the typical light wraps and glows. We used a lot of elements we could find for the light leaks and any sort of film gak stuff to embed in there.”
Back to the top.
Nice night for a walk
On screen: The T-800 in the form of a 1984 Arnold Schwarzenegger arrives in Los Angeles, and the familiar scene from The Terminator starts playing at out at Griffith Observatory, until an older - and re-programmed - version of the T-800 as ‘The Guardian’ suddenly interferes.
VFX: This twist in the tale required significant visual effects innovation, since Schwarzenegger - now 67 - would not have been able to play his younger self. The actor’s distinctive features were also something that could not necessarily be replicated with a body double and make-up effects. That left only a digital solution, with MPC entrusted to make a CG 1984 Schwarzenegger - itself a incredibly difficult task. “If we were creating a digi-double of an actor, today we would do a texture shoot and a reference shoot with that actor,” suggests MPC’s Stopsack. “We didn’t have the luxury basically, because he had to be Arnie from 30 years ago. We can’t really plan for it in the classical sense, we had to think about it a little differently.”
“What it really came down to,” adds Stopsack, “was utilizing any reference footage or material we could get our hands on. We’d do extensive research on Arnold and his younger years in the time of 1984. We’d look for any video and imagery and of course utilizing mostly the original Terminator movie.”
That reference included, too, pieces that had been created by Stan Winston Studios for the 1984 film. “We had a a head cast that was scanned digitally,” says Stopsack. “It gave us a starting point and something to cross-reference. But what is worth mentioning is the cast was taken with digital scanning not in mind, so the accuracy from the cast and scan was limited. It gave us an idea of proportions and how lean he was but really it only gave us a basis.”
MPC launched into a photomodeling process based on footage and source material, limiting themselves to around 50 main key angles of the character from which to work. Interestingly, Stopsack notes that how artists remembered Arnold from 1984 was different to what he actually looked like then. “If you do a bit of research and look at the footage from 1984 you actually start realizing his appearance changed tremendously from year to year and month to month - it was very dependent when the footage was taken. It was determined by whether he was in competition mode or working out. We had to be conscious of that and not be a slave to every picture we found of him in the 80s.”
A ZBrush sculpt served as the base build, with the the mesh then topologized. MPC approached the modeling from the inside out. “We did sculpt the model with an anatomically correct underlayer,” describes Stopsack. “It started with the skeletal base structure. Knowing that we were dealing with such an iconic figure, we played close attention to the proportional measurements that we could find out there. We ended up with roughly one million polygons for the body, plus another 250,000 or 300,000 polygons for things like eyes and teeth and nails.”
Rigging was important too, especially to try and re-create Arnold’s specific muscles shapes. Says Stopsack: “The inside out approach was our desired methodology again, and we pushed the rigging tech to deal with volume preservation in our muscular system, but we did start deviating at some point. We pushed the approach to 80 or 90 per cent, but then came to a realization that if you do the anatomical approach - take it one step further by making everything volume preserving and start simulating skin on top of that - you actually find you can be limited. This is because you might rely too much on the simulation being 100 per cent accurate.”
“For a generic human being or human character or an ape, that would have been the right approach,” adds Stopsack. "However, with the task in mind of re-creating scenes from the original footage - which really required a pixel per pixel match almost - I think we reverted at that point. The underlying physical structure gets you that far, but maintaining a match like the 1:1 physical re-creation means you start applying correctors on top of it. So all we did was just not have to rely on the physics of the actual simulations to get you there - which would not have worked out with that level of accuracy we needed.”
Shots of the T-800 begin with significant close-ups, which meant MPC had to enable complex facial rigging and skin creation. “We fleshed out a spec of FACS shapes we wanted to have,” states Stopsack. “Those FACS shapes were basically selected with the target in mind and we would have Arnold himself to capture these in a MOVA session for us, and be able to cross-reference them. What ended up happening is that we fleshed out these FACS shapes in our targeted base library, but we really did the first round of face shapes in a more traditional manner - we did face shape modeling for the face. Arnold wasn’t available straight away for a MOVA session, and it was also for us a way of getting a first set out quickly.”
Later, Schwarzenegger would complete a MOVA session to deliver FACS poses and dialogue from the scene. “We also had him capture more fight scene orientated facial performances - more action expressions,” says Stopsack. “These were for when he’s under more tension and stressed and needs a more ‘evil’ expression.” The poses were then re-targeted to the Young Arnold model and combined with the blendshapes.
For the skin, MPC knew it could take advantage of Pixar RenderMan’s new RIS ray tracing rendering tools, developing a shader that used multi-layer scattering to represent the epidermal and subdermal layers, “discarding the more traditional dipole method we’d used in the past,” says Stopsack.
The team had also been following research done in the area of skin, particularly USC ICT’s micro-geo pore texturing. “Internally we did some data acquisition on our end with macro photography to try and extract skin detailing for various patches on the face,” recalls Stopsack, “and use that data that we acquired to make that part of our base layer. The methodology was probably more simplistic than ICT would do, but it was a good enough reference and level of detail for the character.”
A blood flow model was adopted, too, to display on the face and body. “It required a certain lag,” says Stopsack, “and that’s what we introduced into the blood flow. As the compression releases it does take a certain amount of time depending on how strong the compression was to get the blood going back into the tissue. It was dynamically handled from rig to shader - it’s probably barely noticeable, but at the level we’re trying to do it was the subtlety we had to have to make it more convincing.”
Eyes were also crafted anatomically correct. “We layered in the cornea, the iris and the connection of the meniscus and the wetness layer and how it connects to the eyelids,” explains Stopsack. “Our eye model had the refractive and caustic effect that you would see in a human eye, but that was not necessarily fully raytraced - we fell back to a more art directable approach of using a pre-computed caustic using the incident of a light. There were two reasons for that - the benefit of doing a physically accurate approach was, yes, it’s got to be true because physics dictate this is what it should be. But doing it slightly the other way round doing a pre-computated map, gives you the benefit of having a little bit more artistic freedom.”
Young Arnold has 13 different hair systems - from head hair to eyebrows and peach fuzz - something achieved using MPC’s proprietary grooming tool Furtility. “The difference on this one was that with the RIS render method and a full path tracing approach,” says Stopsack, “not only does the shader method change to follow a more physical method, it also proved that with path tracing you do have a lot less areas you can cheat the appearance of the hair. That required us from a grooming point of view to be incredibly accurate - the clumping and curlyness and loose and stray hairs had to be bang on. We ended up having a million individual curves and hairs scattered and distributed all the way around him. It also had to include a level of imperfection to bring the character to life.”
In fact, imperfections became a crucial addition in selling the believability of the character. “CG imagery tends to end you up in a perfect sterile world and it’s something we had to learn throughout the process,” admits Stopsack. “We had to go through the process of ‘fucking it up’ a little bit. We have to be brutal to make sure it wasn’t all perfect, the bumpiness or imperfections in the skin. That was an exercise in consciously stopping and realizing it was too perfect, then would break it and once it was broken we’d find a middle ground.”
During the fight, sections of the Endoskeleton on the Young Arnold T-800 are exposed. For those, MPC relied on its own Endo build and was also conscious of matching it to the practical puppet built by Legacy Effects.
Filming for the sequence took place in New Orleans mostly on a bluescreen stage. Stand-in performer Brett Azar, who had a muscular physique, acted as the Young Arnold. “It was great to have a stand-in and be able to put together an edit of the sequence they were happy with,” says Stopsack. HDRI coverage on the stage would later help with lighting, and set survey scans aided in extending the partial sets to fill out the LA Observatory environment. MPC also conducted surveys at the real location and then stitched imagery together for the backgrounds.
For the dramatic fight - in which the T-800 is finally disabled with a uranium bullet fired by Sarah - MPC would essentially replace Azar with their digital Young Arnold. Occasionally a digital double or face replacements for The Guardian were required, too. And Lola VFX handled several ‘youthification’ shots for Schwarzenegger.
Later, Kyle encounters the T-800 which has been brought back to life by the T-1000. He fires a weapon at the terminator, causing its skin to peel and flake off in a fiery manner. “We used an Arnold mesh to act as a guide for where and how to place flesh and skin,” explains Stopsack. “Once we were happy with the overall distribution and amount, we started simulating this geo. It was basically a cloth simulation from that point onwards. Different physics had to be applied to various parts. Small pieces were light enough to be picked up by the heat and turbulence caused by the fire. Larger pieces dropped and were more gravity influenced. This process required some creative adjustments. To avoid any trouble with the targeted PG-13 rating, we had to avoid the sense and look of raw pieces of meat coming of the Endoskeleton. We ended going for a stronger charcoaled look and played flakes generally a bit lighter.”
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Effects legacy
On screen: During the film, The Guardian’s various levels of combat result in progressive damage.
VFX: Legacy Effects worked on make-up designs and appliances for the stages of damage and looks that Arnold Schwarzenegger goes through in the film. “My lead designer Scott Patton was instrumental in designing the various stages of make-up for the Terminators - of which there were several,” recalls Rosengrant. “The design process was fun and unique from the stand point that we had life casts through the years of Arnold and body scans through the years.”
The life casts were brought into the digital realm and combined with a CG model of the T-800 endoskeleton head. “That means we could actually import that in digitally into the scans,” says Rosengrant, “and then peel back the layers and create the looks of a typical Terminator being destroyed - which was a far cry from how I did it on T2 which was with a pencil! We had these highly detailed rendered 3D sculpted designs of the various progressions of damage that hit the major beats of what each Terminator would go through. It was a fun way of designing all of this. We had all of the various incarnations of what we have done through the years of how we have torn him apart.”
“Part of the design process,” adds Rosengrant, “was that you had the good Terminators who were heroic, so the way you tear them apart in the face was say a little different than what we would do to the 1984 Arnold which is supposed to be bad. The good ones still have to be heroic even when they’re having their flesh torn away! Whereas with the bad one when it died, we were able to take its nose off and do some things to it that you wouldn’t do to Arnold when you’re trying to keep him heroic-looking.”
Arnold masks "One of the challenges was that they had stunt doubles of Arnold for say motorcycle riding or otherwise," says Rosengrant. "We ended up making these very simple stunt masks that were based on Arnold - vacuformed - beautifully done Halloween masks of Arnold’s face for the stuntmen. There are times when it’s moving and in action in a medium or long shot it’s hard to tell the difference! Once you have the wig and mask on…the Terminator doesn’t make a heap of facial expressions! Those ended up being very helpful to both digital and stunts to have many Arnolds around on set."
Thousands of silicone and prosthetic appliances crafted by Legacy accompanied the shoot - arranged for scenes where The Guardian would be shot or clipped. “We had a make-up team in New Orleans,” says Rosengrant. “They became the Terminator maestros. What some of the make-ups were, were little bits of partial make-ups with greenscreen painted in there where the digital team would come in and put in the missing information or carve it in. This is something we started on T3 - the beauty of it is the digital hybrid with practical make-up and what you can take away digitally - it gives us the effect we were striving for in T1 and T2 but now you can do all seamlessly.”
Legacy also built a prosthetic dummy of the 1983/84 T-800 (as used by MPC for some reference) that served as a prop for the damaged terminator wrapped in plastic held by Sarah and The Guardian. “That was an interesting process because what we did was start with a life cast of that time period and we started with a body mold that we had from T3 of Arnold,” explains Rosengrant. “Although that wasn’t Arnold in his T1 prime - which was just a few months removed from one of his last bodybuilding championships - at least it gave us the right proportions. So what we did was a clay press out of that body and we got a head sculpture based on his life cast from the time period. Then Jason Matthews, a lead artist and sculptor, he sculpted on top of that body of Arnold a version of him as he looked in 1983. So we had all these pictures plastered up on the wall of Arnold’s last body building competition and whatever photos we had left - and shared from Matt Winston from Stan’s days. So we made a replica of Arnold from back in 1983."
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Knives, stabbing weapons
On screen: Also appearing in the alternative 1984 is a shapeshifting T-1000 (Lee Byung-hun) which attempts to re-acquire Sarah, Kyle and The Guardian.
VFX: DNeg took on the liquid metal effects required for the T-1000, which has the ability to replicate anything it touches, absorb bullet hits and produce sharp objects such as stabbing weapons - just like the character famously portrayed by Robert Patrick in T2. “The intention was there to respect the 1991 version, but back then of course they didn’t have all the amazing fluid solvers we have access to,” says Bebb. “There’s a reason it looked like what it did - because they literally sculpted everything based off of concepts approved by Jim Cameron, it was a lot of different blend shapes.”
Interestingly, DNeg did embark on fluid sim tests for the T-1000, but also found that these could be difficult to art direct into the appropriate shapes the character conforms to. “You can stop a fluid sim half way through, though, and get really nice imagery or form or sculpt,” says Bebb. “The shot where he smashes through the cop car and forms on the hood of the bonnet - that’s all just pure sculpt - literally it was just like the T2 methodology for that similar helicopter shot."
For shots in which the T-1000 was in liquid metal form, the filmmakers sought to properly represent the surrounding environment reflections. “We had a 6K RED camera with a 6mm lens on it that was shooting all of the environments,” explains Bebb. “We had 360 degrees of reflections for every shot, correct moving reflections - bespoke plates shot for just him - and also HDRIs.”
The T-1000s blades were always computer generated, although DNeg modeled them from original Legacy Effects reference. One challenge with the blade was working out their appropriate size depending on angle to camera. “There’s a sequence in the department store where he grows his blades directly into camera,” describes Bebb. “We must have done hundreds of versions of that because it didn’t look right for a whole. Essentially what you have is foreshortening - even if you have the blades correct they just look like chicken drumsticks, they look stupid. So in that shot I think those blades look about 6 feet long!
Ultimately, Sarah and The Guardian lure the T-1000 to acid-rigged sewer location and destroy the terminator. On set, Byung-hun mimed the disintegration, which DNeg than roto-mated, and also relied on additional mocap. “It was really a ‘poor man’s mocap’,” states Bebb, “knowing that we was the T-1000 while doing it and he might be in a different state of demise, lost a limb or a knee falling off.”
“We did his Endo arm as well for that sequence,” says Bebb, referring to the moment The Guardian pushes the T-1000 under the acid to reveal the mechanical arm. “The biggest thing for that was that the fanboys didn’t think it was big enough! But weirdly enough the Endo arm was built off a scan of his arm. It makes me think that the original Endo arm was far, far bigger. Essentially all you’re seeing is bone so it’s always going to be a little bit spindely - it’s got to fit in the hand.”
In Terminator 2, the -T-1000 was destroyed in a vat of molten steel, ‘morphing’ between the various forms it had taken. For the acid bath sequence in this film, the filmmakers devised a new ‘twist’. “Yes we’ve seen it melt and blend away,” says Bebb, “but we wanted to give it a different state of material transition. This is not so much fire that’s blowing it up, it’s acid, so we wanted to get the burning in there. We looked at the way that acids burn metal and ingots of aluminum. It breaks down into liquid metal and then it starts to burn, so you get this phosphorous flame, a lot of smoke, then it almost dries it out like a pumice and becomes rigid and bloated. Then it shatters to dust. That was a massive R&D effort. At the end of that, we had to do almost complete creature sculpts because you think he’s dead, but he’s not. We looked at The Thing and the goriness of it where it goes after Sarah for the last couple of beats.”
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Not man, not machine: more
On screen: After time traveling to 2017 in the hope of once again resetting the future, Kyle and Sarah are shocked to see John, who ultimately is revealed as 'nano-fied' terminator - a T-3000.
VFX: Realizing the ‘nano-fied’ look involved significant design, concept and R&D work from DNeg. “For want of a better word,” says Bebb, “the nano-fied version of John Connor is almost like an infection. Skynet can’t kill him so they decide the only way to do it is to control him. He’s replaced at a cellular level by nano-mites that take on his form. It looked a little bit like Jason Clarke, albeit a combat, stripped hybrid of the two of them. If you take the human form, it’s actually pretty well designed for what it does. If you were to take it up a notch to a combat level and take out all the fat, literally, then you get something which is far more streamlined and a pure thoroughbred of the two, what’s best of the organic and the inorganic side.”
The T-3000 is able to break down his mass, something achieved by controlling magnetic fields - an aspect that is revealed when he ventures too close to an MRI machine, and also used by The Guardian at the end of the film to successfully destroy him. The final nano-fied look was more matte, than metal, as in the other terminators. “The material we coined was a kind of ceramic carbon composite, with a slight iridescence to it,” outlines Bebb. “We gave it a slight tickle via the shader in different environments to make it look as good as it can, but essentially David and Alan wanted something that looked quite futuristic. We referenced the F-35 or the SR-71 - the more stealthy aircraft. It does have a slightly satin-like finish to it with a small specular kick.”
In its fully nano-fied state, the T-3000 was brought to life as a combination of witness camera capture of Clarke, keyframed animation and motion capture for the final fight towards the end of the film. “You’re essentially doing something which is a hybrid of Jason, so it didn’t need to exactly match him,” notes Bebb. “For the dialogue, we had a huge amount of tracking markers and witness cameras all shutter sync’d. But for the T-3000’s performance, we wanted to give it a slightly perfected look to bring in the machine side of what is the T-3000, otherwise it would just look like Jason walking. So every punch he does is a little bit harder, faster, straighter.”
Since the T-3000 had to be shown as an almost living mass of nano-mites, DNeg worked to give the terminator a constantly moving surface in Houdini. That setup had to also interact with fire sims for a shot of the T-3000 being blown up and emerging from a bunker. “The entire model is built in geometry,” says Bebb, “and then converted into hair so it could then be dynamically run. It’s about half a billion hairs. It has a pseudo heartbeat that runs through it like a pulse. There’s a different level of re-purposing mass to get that type of look when your muscles contract and expand. It’s almost a living/breathing CG thing, which you can key, but a lot was happening automatically in the background as an effects sim.”
“Janek coined that he wanted it to be ‘renderfam busting’,” adds Bebb. “And it was! It was initially 20-odd hours to render per frame, so we had to strip it down and modify it somewhat to get it to work. On screen it’s an incredibly highly detailed model. It has a blood view, it has muscles, it breathes - and then as it becomes more combat-effective, it realizes it doesn’t need all those things anymore. We also dialed in the ability for each of these hairs to be driven by any number of different rules.”
At times the T-3000 is shown as part-nano-fied and part-Jason Clarke, including when he is affected by the MRI scanner. “He’s essentially being pulled apart and stripped of his layers,” explains Bebb. “That was designed based on sound as well. We could plug the sound design into our model and it could all react accordingly. That’s what you see as the layers are getting stripped out, and every little bit is being pulled and pushed and drawn out is all being done dynamically through sound.”
After the T-3000 is revealed, The Guardian and the new Terminator fight - crashing through a parking garage wall and into a hospital waiting room. Method Studios blended these two environments together.
DNeg was occasionally required to produce a digital double of the actor. For that (and for other digi-double performances), the studio relied on its on-set Photobooth setup. “We took the actors’ photographs on set, then did all the FACS poses, expressions as well, and took the costumes and scanned them," describes Bebb. "This time around we did pretty much all the FACS expression, over 140 on each, but Jason in particular. And we did polarized and diffuse lighting. All the characters were then dev’d in PRman and Houdini because we needed them in different setups.”
Several moments called for the T-3000 to merge into John Connor form, and back again. “Every time you get a re-form, he’s re-purposing material, his skin and flesh and clothes, and that’s you see,” states Bebb. “We gave it a slight iridescence for the camouflage side of things. We looked at nature, say the cuttlefish, and how all the different pores and apertures close and they find the color, but not straight away - there’s a little bit of mimicking the environment around it that’s not quite right. So we had multiple passes that we could control to allow us to rebuild those layers instead of just a straight blend like in T2.”
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Golden Gate grind
On screen: Sarah, Kyle and The Guardian take to a school bus on the Golden Gate Bridge, but are pursued by the T-3000.
VFX: DNeg combined plates filmed at the real location in San Francisco and on a 500 foot bridge set in New Orleans, with digitally-produced bridge and bay environments, and helped stage scenes in which The Guardian is flung from the bus into a police car, and where the T-3000 causes the bus to flip in mid-air. “We tried to keep as much of the principal photography as we could, because they really did flip a bus,” notes Bebb. “But we also modeled it in CG.”
“For the environments,” continues Bebb, “we went to the Golden Gate and scanned it and took pictures, and built a pretty decent model of the entire bridge to use. And then we took that piece - the 500 foot section from New Orleans - and retro-fitted that into our Golden Gate Bridge. The GG sequence actually grew quite substantially, and that meant we had to do a bunch of car crash activity digitally.”
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Chopper chase
On screen: Remanded in custody, Sarah, Kyle and The Guardian escape the police headquarters via helicopter on their way to Cyberdyne but are once again pursued by the T-3000, also in a chopper.
VFX: DNeg delivered the helicopter chase, which included several dramatic stunts - a fuel tanker explosion, The Guardian launching himself as a ‘human missile’ against the T-3000’s craft and a final crash at Cyberdyne. “We spent a month after main unit wrapped in San Francisco and shot plates for the sequence,” says Bebb. “We had a film unit for VFX plates, and then we also did the usual thing where we scanned, photographed and scissor-lifted, so we had a CG model of San Francisco. Most of our helicopter battle is street level, and maybe 10 to 12 storeys up.”
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A new Skynet
On screen: It transpires that a computer operating system known as ‘Genisys’ from Cyberdyne is actually the precursor to Skynet, so our heroes look to blow it up, along with the T-3000.
VFX: Skynet is represented in its earlier stages as a child hologram-like light sculpture that enjoys a rapid evolution into the form of the T-5000 (Matt Smith), who had earlier attacked John in 2029 as Kyle entered the TDD. The light sculptures were effects crafted by DNeg, as was a battle between The Guardian and the T-3000, and the destruction of Cyberdyne’s headquarters.
“Skynet starts off as a child and then you see this growth all the way through the scene in the third act,” says Bebb. “It’s not quite a hologram because it’s not really projected. It’s more like lasers that are ionized air, like a light sculpture. We made that with particles and fluid solvers. There were huge amounts of particulates that all had various dynamically driven movement, but it had to look like Matt Smith so we had to be pretty close to the skin in order to read his performance.”
Following a fight in the maze of servers at Cyberdyne, The Guardian battles the T-3000 amongst a partially finished TDD, which also produces a magnetic field. During the confrontation, The Guardian sustains significant damage to his body and face - Legacy Effects worked on prosthetics for throughout the film, while DNeg also used witness cameras and tracking dots to show pieces of Endoskeleton coming through. The unstable TDD blows the T-3000 and the Cyberdyne building (The Guardian survives by falling into a vat of a vat of mimetic polyalloy liquid and emerges with liquid metal upgrades).
Exterior views of the Cyberdyne explosion featured plates of the Oracle headquarters. “We went out early in April and did a photo scanning shoot of the Oracle offices and surrounding area,” recounts Bebb. “Main unit went in July/August for main unit shooting and we did more scanning once it was dressed. But we knew it had to be built for destruction, so we did. The sims were so big they had a week turnaround.”
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ST. LOUIS, MO (KTVI) - The Cardinals have fired scouting director Chris Correa. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that he was on an “imposed leave of absence.” He has admitted in the past to hacking the Houston Astros database.
Representatives for the St. Louis Cardinals have declined to comment on the reason for Correa's termination. General Manager John Mozaliak confirms that Correa is no longer with the organization. Sources tell the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that he is not responsible for the alleged hacking being investigated by the FBI.
In a prepared statement, Correa lawyer Nicholas Williams wrote:
"Mr. Correa denies any illegal conduct. The relevant inquiry should be what information did former St. Louis Cardinals employees steal from the St. Louis Cardinals organization prior to joining the Houston Astros, and who in the Houston Astros organization authorized, consented to, or benefitted from that roguish behavior."
Correa was hired on a contract basis in 2009 to work with Jeff Luhnow. Luhnow was the amateur scouting and farm director. He left the team to become the Astros general manager in 2011.“It’s more peaceful now”: King Street dwellers on life without car traffic
“It’s more peaceful now”: King Street dwellers |
four quarters of 2014. In the December-quarter 2014, nominal growth fell by 2.2 per cent and real GDP growth fell by 0.4 per cent, after both recorded rises in the September-quarter.
The contributing factors to the decline in real GDP in the December-quarter was according to – EL.STAT data:
1. Household consumption was flat.
2. Government consumption spending fell by 1.1 per cent after falling by 3.6 per cent in the September-quarter. The fiscal austerity effect biting.
3. Exports fell by 1.3 per cent.
In terms of sectoral shifts, there was a dramatic contraction in ‘Wholesale and retail trade; repair of motor vehicles and motorcycles; transportation and storage; accommodation and food service activities’ – it declined by 25 per cent in the December-quarter 2014 in real terms.
But read this blog – Alleged Greek growth could be an illusion – for analysis of how the September-quarter result could be misleading.
In that blog, you will also learn about the difference between three important concepts (among others) that allow you to understand national accounts data:
1. Nominal or current-price Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
2. Volume measures of GDP.
3. The implicit GDP deflator.
I won’t repeat the discussion here – but rather, just summarise the main points.
The summary result for our purposes is that the expenditure version of Gross Domestic Product – GDP(E) = Final Consumption Expenditure by Households (C) and Government (G) + Gross Capital Formation + Exports of goods and services (X) – Imports of goods and services (M).
That is total spending in the economy from the three major sectors – government, private domestic and external.
It is a measure of all the goods and services produced in some year valued at the prices they sell at and aggregated into a single monetary measure of overall economic activity.
The current-price measure of GDP or nominal GDP is computed by using the prices of goods and services that prevail in each period.
That measure declined by 2.2 per cent in the December-quarter 2014.
However, a rising nominal GDP measure does not necessarily signal that real output is increasing in volume (that is, more goods and services are being produced).
Let’s say that current-price GDP increases over a year by 3 per cent, but over that same period prices have risen by 3 per cent.
So total production was say $100 and grew to $103 but all the change would in this case be due to the rise in the price level – that is, a pure valuation effect. The total real quantity of goods and services produced would not have changed, just their monetary value due to inflation.
To net out the price or valuation effect, statisticians produce constant-price or volume estimates of GDP, which I refer to as real GDP.
The way they have produced these estimates has varied over the years. They are currently produced using so-called “Chain volume measures”, which use the prices from the immediate past period to measure the change in the next period and net them out.
So for our purposes, real GDP (or chain volume measures) purge the impact of current price changes (from the last period) and tell us how much real production has increased in the period under scrutiny.
So real GDP plus the inflation rate (however measured) should be equal (more or less) to nominal or current-price GDP, if the accounting structures are sound.
Alternatively, Real GDP = Nominal GDP – Inflation rate.
The inflation rate can be measured in a number of ways (Consumer Price Index, GDP price deflator etc). I discuss that in some detail in the previously linked blog.
EL.STAT published its latest – Consumer Price Index data – on February 17, 2015, which shows that in the December-quarter 2014, the Consumer Price Index declined by 2.3 per cent (September index number = 108.29 and December = 105.79)
So if the real GDP growth rate was -0.4 per cent in the December-quarter 2014 and the approximate inflation rate was -2.3 per cent then the nominal GDP growth rate should be the sum of the two:
% growth in Nominal (current-price) GDP = % growth in real GDP plus the % inflation rate
Putting the numbers we know into the equation we get:
% growth in Nominal (current-price) GDP = -0.4 + (-2.3) = -0.4 – 2.3 = -2.7 per cent, which compares to the reported result of -2.2 per cent.
The difference will be in the inflation rate measure I have used. The GDP deflator (not available as I write this) would probably be around -1.8 per cent.
But it confirms that Greece’s nominal GDP contracted in the fourth-quarter 2014 as did the volume measure of GDP.
If the analysis in the blog – Alleged Greek growth could be an illusion – is correct (and no-one has found an error – and I know it has been read by Greek statisticians) – then Greece lapsed back into recession in the second-half of 2014.
The message to the Eurogroup is:
1. The current policies are not working and are causing further damage.
2. How long do they have to wait to understand that the so-called internal devaluation measures – cutting wages, pensions etc has only engineered a damaging deflationary spiral with entrenched depression and has done little to improve export competitiveness.
Note that exports went backwards in real terms in the December-quarter 2014.
So when is this cruel hoax going to end? It certainly will not end if the Greek government agrees to any more austerity.
Conclusion
I note that some of the Greek government politicians are now talking about holding some sort of vote (referendum) on what to do next should the negotiations with the Eurogroup fail.
Before they do that they should provide a public education campaign informing the Greek people that their penchant for remaining in the Eurozone is:
1. Inconsistent with their desire for a return to prosperity.
2. Not necessary for them to remain a part of the greater European narrative and all that that brings (relative to military coups etc).
The problem is that the Syriza leadership doesn’t even accept 1. and 2. so what hope is there?
That is enough for today!
(c) Copyright 2015 William Mitchell. All Rights Reserved.Brad Keselowski says he will continue to be aggressive on the track and fight for what he believes in off of it. (Photo11: Peter Casey, USA TODAY Sports)
If you are a Jeff Gordon fan or Brad Keselowski hater, do not read this story.
Your blood pressure will rise and your mood will sour.
Keselowski still isn't sorry for the move he pulled on Gordon last November at Texas Motor Speedway; in fact, he's glad he tried it and would do it again. And he doesn't plan to change a thing about the way he races; if anything, all his conflicts with veteran drivers have only reinforced his philosophies.
The 2012 Sprint Cup champion believes he's not only going to be a force for years to come, but thinks the generation coming into NASCAR behind him is weaker and less qualified than the current group of drivers.
If you don't see it that way, then Keselowski suggests taking another look.
"With the 5,000-foot view, which I feel like is where a lot of people get stuck, they say, 'Well, Brad's not making a lot of friends,' " he told USA TODAY Sports. "But I'm trying to look at a higher elevation than that. I'm trying to look at a 20,000- or 40,000-foot view of where I'm going to be five or 10 years from now.
"I feel like I'm doing things that are going to make me the guy to beat for the next five to 10 years. And there might be some heartburn, but that heartburn is temporary, and it's more than worth it to me looking at the longer view."
This is Keselowski at 31: Firmer than ever in his beliefs, unapologetically anti-establishment and determined not to back down.
In a lengthy interview with USA TODAY Sports in his motorhome at Daytona International Speedway, Keselowski explained why he has no remorse for the way he raced in last year's Chase for the Sprint Cup -- instigating fights and drawing fists -- and laid out why he thinks he's positioned for success in the next decade.
LOOKING AHEAD
Sitting with girlfriend Paige White, who is pregnant with the couple's first child (due in May), Keselowski seems most at ease when discussing his future.
When he thinks of how the sport will look 10 years from now, he sees himself on top of the heap. That's because most of today's star drivers will have retired – and he believes the generation behind them isn't filled with suitable talent to replace them.
Drivers such as Tony Stewart, Jimmie Johnson, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Kevin Harvick are all 39 or older and represent 10 Cup titles among them.
"Where are you going to find someone?" the Team Penske driver said. "You're going to have one or two that come through every two to three years, and that's not going to match the rate at which the Cup level is going to descend.
"I just don't see another Kevin Harvick, I don't see another Jeff Gordon -- not in the numbers that are going to retire in the next five years. We're going to lose 20 really good drivers in the next 10 years, and I don't see 20 replacements coming. I see maybe five to 10."
Brad Keselowski and girlfriend Paige White are expecting a child in May. (Photo11: Nick Laham, Getty Images)
Keselowski believes many of the most talented drivers in the next generation will never get a chance due to the lack of funding.
Keselowski pointed to NASCAR's K&N East Series, which serves as a feeder for the national series, "where so-and-so's dad has $3 million and he's going to run him for the next year in the best car and you're never going to have a chance to beat him, even if you are better," he said.
"The guys who do have the talent and the work ethic to make it never get that shot, and they're being replaced by guys who come in and almost sabotage their own career and their own path," he added.
His own experiences trying to climb the NASCAR ladder and competing against a couple dozen Cup drivers in the Xfinity Series helped prepare him for stock car racing's top level, he said. But Keselowski doesn't believe the next crop of drivers will get that chance to grow.
"I feel bad for the next generation of race car drivers," he said. "I don't feel like, with the exception of the few Chase Elliotts and Kyle Larsons, that they will be able to replace the current group on even par. The entryway is harder than ever."
Keselowski believes he has staying power -- both for his career and his philosophies. He doesn't have to change, he said.
The sport is coming to him.
Brad Keselowski, right, takes an arm to the throat during a fight at Texas Motor Speedway in November. (Photo11: Matthew Bishop, AP)
The Texas two-step
When Gordon announced his retirement from racing full-time, effective at the end of 2015, Keselowski sent him several text messages.
None of them were returned.
That's not surprising, since Gordon's bitterness over what happened at Texas last year is well-documented. And that incident is where much of the anger toward Keselowski as the sport's villain stems from for Gordon fans.
On a restart with two laps to go, Keselowski briefly saw a hole between Gordon and Jimmie Johnson – and with a win necessary to advance to the championship race, he decided to make a move.
But Gordon, caught off guard, came down the track to close the hole when Keselowski tried to drive through. Keselowski didn't back off, the cars made contact and Gordon ended up with a flat tire and a ruined race. Gordon ended up missing the Chase finale by one point.
You probably know the rest: Gordon confronted Keselowski on pit road, sparking a massive brawl.
When Gordon announced 2015 would be his final chance at a title, angry fans reignited their criticism of Keselowski because they pointed to that moment as the one which cost Gordon a shot at a fifth championship.
Keselowski said he has some remorse for Gordon's team – though not the ones who punched him in the face – but has none for the driver, because "he had the opportunity not to turn down.
"I knew when I took the shot against Jeff, it wasn't a 100% shot – it was maybe a 30-40% shot (to make a clean pass)," he said. "And I'm saying that as though I was a basketball player and there's three seconds left in the game and I have to shoot a three-pointer.
"... But you've got one bullet left in the chamber and your back is against the wall, you're going to shoot it."
There's a difference between the move he pulled at Texas and the one Ryan Newman made on Kyle Larson the next week at Phoenix International Raceway, Keselowski said. The Texas attempt was an "effort move" while Newman's was a "character move."
"The shot Newman took was kind of a 0% shot; it was kind of like a flagrant foul," he said. "My move had the potential to work and for everyone to come away clean. And when those moves exist, I'm going to take them even if the percentage is lower than what I want it to be. More times than not, I don't take the 0% shots."
'Bad Brad'
Keselowski doesn't want to be cast as NASCAR's villain, nor does he think he is one.
"I'm not really buying into the whole villain thing," he said. "Maybe that's a true sign of a villain, that they don't consider themselves to be the villain."
On the other hand, he said, "If the 'good guys' are Jeff Gordon and whatnot, then yeah, I want to beat them. That might be a villainous move."
Some drivers would be worried that drawing the ire of so many fans might have an impact on their careers. Keselowski isn't, because he said team owner Roger Penske firmly has his back ("unless I pull a Jerry Gappens," he said, referring to the New Hampshire Motor Speedway general manager who was arrested for lewdness last month).
And sponsor Miller Lite carries the same edge as an underdog brand compared to its rivals with larger market share. "Their feelings on that have empowered me," he said.
In addition to his car owner and sponsor, Keselowski also feels supported by NASCAR officials. Behind the scenes, Keselowski gets feedback that he's putting forth the kind of effort NASCAR wants to see from its drivers.
"I don't think they really care so much for my off-the-track comments, but I feel like they really appreciate the fact that I lay it out on the line to try and win a race," he said.
Keselowski insisted his philosophy is simple: Like a football player, he wants to leave it all on the field; if he doesn't win, at least he'll know he gave it maximum effort.
"I'd like it to be more complex than that," he said. "But whether I'm racing Jeff Gordon, who is one of the most beloved drivers, or Kyle Busch, who is one of the least beloved, I don't view them that way behind the wheel. I view them as a guy I'm here to beat.
"In some eyes, that's going to make me a bad guy. And if you're a Jeff Gordon fan, that makes me a bad person."
But although he doesn't have Gordon's endorsement, Keselowski said there are other drivers who have no problem with the way he races.
"I feel good about what I'm doing and there are plenty around me that are supporting me," he said. "Unfortunately, the ones who don't support me are the ones who seem to get the microphone more often than not. It's called the silent majority."
Follow Gluck on Twitter @jeff_gluck
PHOTOS: In the driver's seat with Brad KeselowskiThe Wild West shooter Upload VR called “one of the most versatile multiplayer VR titles available” just got its first upgrade. Dead and Buried’s aptly named Guns and Ghosts update has more characters, more levels, and more supernatural surprises!
New Characters and Shootout Map
You’ll meet two new characters—a gunsmith and a pistol-packing spirit—each with 10 unlocks available. Given the popularity of Shootout mode, we’re also unveiling a new rifle and single-shot sniper map, set in a desert oasis outside an old Spanish ghost town.
Horde Mode Enhancements
We’re also adding some exciting features to Horde mode, including a brand-new boss and a special resurrect gun to bring players back from the dead.
Even better, we’re introducing a single-player option so you can enjoy Horde mode with or without friends!
Smooth Operators
You’ll also notice lots of adjustments and solutions designed to improve your experience. That includes tweaks to address matchmaking with players who appear to be AFK. Hosts in the main menu lobby will now be dropped after a set period of inactivity, and matches will autostart after 60 seconds.
The Oculus Studios team is committed to ongoing support for titles like Dead and Buried, so they’ve paid close attention to player responses since launch.
“Listening to the community is a must, and we took your feedback to heart,” says Oculus Software Engineer Ryan Rutherford. “We’re thrilled to deliver these improvements and new content—and can’t wait to share more updates throughout the year!”
Get your trigger fingers ready. The Guns and Ghosts update launches today!
— The Oculus TeamAdd another blue chip sponsor to the growing pool of companies
supporting mixed martial arts as UFC welterweight contender Johny
Hendricks has signed a multi-fight deal with shoe and apparel giant
Article continues below...
Reebok.
Hendricks had worked with Reebok briefly in the past as part of
a sponsorship deal negotiated by KO Reps president Oren Hodak
surrounding his participation in an endurance obstacle course
called Spartan Race. KO Reps handles all of Hendricks’ sponsorships
including another blue chip sponsor in Bass Pro Shops, who have
supported the Texas based fighter for his last few bouts in the
UFC.
Now the top rated welterweight challenger has signed off on a
new long-term engagement with the company that will likely see him
wear Reebok into his UFC 167 fight against champion Georges
St-Pierre. The new endorsement deal still has to be approved by the
UFC for Hendricks to wear the apparel into the Octagon.
“I am very excited to extend our relationship with Reebok,”
Hodak said in a statement released to Fox Sports. “After our
meetings at the Reebok corporate headquarters in Boston, I was
confident that a long term deal was soon to follow. We look forward
to providing Reebok with an incredible amount of exposure just as
we have done with so many other great sponsors.
“Johny is on a nice win streak inside the cage and will
financially benefit from that hard work via this new
sponsorship.”
A few weeks back prior to UFC 165 in Toronto, UFC light
heavyweight champion Jon Jones announced a new endorsement deal
with sports drink company Gatorade, but just after the sponsorship
became public the terms and financial details were brought into
question.
The terms of the compensation for Hendricks could not be
disclosed at this time, but he will receive a financial package
from the company beyond athletic gear, shoes and other apparel he
will use during his training camp.
Hendricks’ new deal with Reebok will begin immediately with the
hope of wearing their logo and apparel into the Octagon at
target="_blank">UFC 167 when he faces St-Pierre in the main
event.We will look at how the contents of this array are constructed and can be manipulated to affect where the Perl interpreter will find the module files.
Default @INC Perl interpreter is compiled with a specific @INC default value. To find out this value, run env -i perl -V command ( env -i ignores the PERL5LIB environmental variable - see #2) and in the output you will see something like this: $ env -i perl -V... @INC: /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.18.0/x86_64-linux-thread-multi-ld /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.18.0 /usr/lib/perl5/5.18.0/x86_64-linux-thread-multi-ld /usr/lib/perl5/5.18.0.
Note. at the end; this is the current directory (which is not necessarily the same as the script's directory). It is missing in Perl 5.26+, and when Perl runs with -T (taint checks enabled).
To change the default path when configuring Perl binary compilation, set the configuration option otherlibdirs :
Configure -Dotherlibdirs=/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.16.3
Environmental variable PERL5LIB (or PERLLIB ) Perl pre-pends @INC with a list of directories (colon-separated) contained in PERL5LIB (if it is not defined, PERLLIB is used) environment variable of your shell. To see the contents of @INC after PERL5LIB and PERLLIB environment variables have taken effect, run perl -V. $ perl -V... %ENV: PERL5LIB="/home/myuser/test" @INC: /home/myuser/test /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.18.0/x86_64-linux-thread-multi-ld /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.18.0 /usr/lib/perl5/5.18.0/x86_64-linux-thread-multi-ld /usr/lib/perl5/5.18.0. -I command-line option Perl pre-pends @INC with a list of directories (colon-separated) passed as value of the -I command-line option. This can be done in three ways, as usual with Perl options: Pass it on command line: perl -I /my/moduledir your_script.pl
Pass it via the first line (shebang) of your Perl script: #!/usr/local/bin/perl -w -I /my/moduledir
Pass it as part of PERL5OPT (or PERLOPT ) environment variable (see chapter 19.02 in Programming Perl) Pass it via the lib pragma Perl pre-pends @INC with a list of directories passed in to it via use lib. In a program: use lib ("/dir1", "/dir2"); On the command line: perl -Mlib=/dir1,/dir2 You can also remove the directories from @INC via no lib. You can directly manipulate @INC as a regular Perl array. Note: Since @INC is used during the compilation phase, this must be done inside of a BEGIN {} block, which precedes the use MyModule statement. Add directories to the beginning via unshift @INC, $dir.
Add directories to the end via push @INC, $dir.
Do anything else you can do with a Perl array.
Note: The directories are unshifted onto @INC in the order listed in this answer, e.g. default @INC is last in the list, preceded by PERL5LIB, preceded by -I, preceded by use lib and direct @INC manipulation, the latter two mixed in whichever order they are in Perl code.
References:
There does not seem to be a comprehensive @INC FAQ-type post on Stack Overflow, so this question is intended as one.
When to use each approach?Manchester City's second leg at Monaco will mark a milestone for their manager, with Josep Guardiola celebrating his 100th match in charge in UEFA club competition – and the Spaniard is set to become the most successful coach at this stage of his career.
Guardiola is in charge of his third club, having spent four seasons with Barcelona and three at Bayern München before joining City in the summer. He has already racked up 61 wins and 23 draws in his first 99 games, which do not include the quarter-final decider against Bayern in 2008/09, when Tito Vilanova took over while his boss served a one-match touchline ban.
Regardless of the result in Monaco on Wednesday, Guardiola will go to the top of the list, ahead of current best performer Louis van Gaal (W61 D22 L17 in his first 100 games). But how does his record stack up against all the other coaches who have taken charge of a century of European matches after 100 games? UEFA.com has the answers.
Louis van Gaal had the previous best record after 100 games ©Getty Images
Sir Alex Ferguson with the UEFA Champions League trophy in 1999 ©Getty Images
Coaches' records in UEFA club competition after 100 games
Louis van Gaal W61 D22 L17
Rafael Benítez W60 D22 L18
Jupp Heynckes W58 D20 L22
Valeriy Lobanovskiy W56 D23 L21
Giovanni Trapattoni W56 D22 L22
Fabio Capello W54 D27 L19
Sven-Göran Eriksson W54 D26 L20
José Mourinho W54 D25 L21
Carlo Ancelotti W51 D27 L22
Ernst Happel W54 D18 L28
Sir Alex Ferguson W49 D32 L19
Manuel Pellegrini W48 D32 L20
Jorge Jesus W51 D22 L27
Otto Rehhagel W52 D19 L29
Bobby Robson W50 D25 L25
Ottmar Hitzfeld W50 D24 L26
Dick Advocaat W48 D29 L23
Luciano Spalletti W51 D19 L30
Unai Emery W47 D29 L24
Roberto Mancini W47 D27 L26
Oleg Romantsev W46 D23 L31
Guy Roux W46 D23 L31
Thomas Schaaf W44 D24 L32
Christian Gross W44 D23 L33
Guus Hiddink W43 D26 L31
Arsène Wenger W42 D29 L29
Mircea Lucescu W42 D25 L33
Yuri Semin W39 D23 L38
---
Josep Guardiola W61 D23 L15CARLTON coach Mick Malthouse has renewed calls for the AFL Premiership Cup to be named after Ron Barassi.
Malthouse first suggested the concept in 2002 and has seen nothing since to alter his thinking. Malthouse, 61, admits to being an unabashed fan of the 79-year-old Barassi but says his suggestions runs a lot deeper than idolisation.
media_camera Ron Barassi holds the 1964 premiership cup aloft
“To put it simply Ron Barassi is an institution. I am biased because I admire him so much and just love his company, but you have to look at the whole package and Ron Barassi is everything you want football to be,” said Malthouse, on a day where he conducted a series of press interviews in readiness for Friday, May 1, when he will pass Jock McHale as the games record holder for coaches.
“He is an outstanding Australian in so many ways and how utterly appropriate it would be to have our Premiership Cup dedicated to Ron Barassi, just as the US do in gridiron with the Vince Lombardi Trophy.”
Malthouse pointed out his four children had been raised in a house where AFL football is ever present, but a few years back one of his sons failed to recognise a picture of Hawthorn legend Michael Tuck.
“This is meant as no disrespect to Michael Tuck but I guarantee that if you took a photo of Ron Barassi around Australia that most people would know him straight away. He’s all the things that I look at when I think of greatness in our game,” said Malthouse.
“Ron Barassi is someone who respects all sports and a man who has never feared other codes. We have a wonderful sport that will remain number one in my and Ron’s lifetimes. We should respect and embrace other sports because that can only strengthen us. The moment you fear things you are weakened. Embrace soccer, embrace the rugby codes and learn from them as Barassi did throughout his career.
“And he was someone who was always willing to promote our code overseas. Will those countries embrace our game from a playing perspective? Probably not but you can still showcase a wonderful spectacle.”Merkel's grand coalition backed a law that would penalize social media giants, including Facebook, Google and Twitter, with fines of €50 million ($60 million) if they fail to remove offending content from their platforms within 24 hours. Observers say the law is aimed at silencing critics of Merkel's open-door migration policy.
Merkel and Schulz both agree that there should be no upper limit on the number of migrants entering Germany.
The policy positions of Merkel and Schulz on key issues are virtually identical: Both candidates are committed to strengthening the European Union, maintaining open-door immigration policies, pursuing multiculturalism and quashing dissent from the so-called far right.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), is on track win a fourth term in office after polls confirmed she won the first and only televised debate with her main election opponent, Martin Schulz, leader of the Social Democratic Union Party (SDP).
A survey for the public broadcaster ARD showed that 55% of viewers thought Merkel was the "more convincing" candidate during the debate, which took place on September 3; only 35% said Schulz came out ahead.
Many observers agreed that Schulz failed to leverage the debate to revive his flagging campaign, while others noted that Schulz's positions on many issues are virtually indistinguishable from those held by Merkel.
Rainald Becker, an ARD commentator, described the debate as, "More a duet than a duel."
"Merkel came out as sure, Schulz was hardly able to land a punch," wrote Heribert Prantl, a commentator at Süddeutsche Zeitung. "The candidate is an honorable man. But being honorable alone will not make him chancellor."
Christian Lindner, leader of the classical liberal Free Democrats, compared the debate to "scenes from a long marriage, where there is the occasional quarrel, but both sides know that they have to stick together in the future, too."
Television presenter Günther Jauch, writing in Bild, said he had hoped to "at least understand what differentiates Merkel and Schulz in political terms. Instead, it was just a conversation between two political professionals who you suspect could both work pretty seamlessly in the same government."
Radio and television host Thomas Gottschalk said that the two candidates agreed with each other too often: "They were both always nodding their heads when the other was speaking."
Germany's general election is scheduled for September 24. If voters went to the polls now, Merkel's CDU, together with its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), would win 39%, according to a September 4 Politbarometer survey conducted for the public broadcaster ZDF.
Coming in second, Schulz's SDP would win 22%; the classical liberal Free Democrats (FDP) 10%; the far-left Linke 9%; the Greens 8% and the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) 8%.
The poll also found that 57% of respondents said they preferred that Merkel serve another term; only 28% favored Schulz to become the next chancellor. Nevertheless, half of Germany's 60 million voters are said to be undecided, and some pollsters believe that the country's huge non-voting population may determine the outcome.
As Merkel's CDU/CSU is unlikely to emerge from the election with an absolute majority, the 2017 vote effectively revolves around the issue of coalition-building. If current polling holds, Merkel, who has vowed to serve a full four years if re-elected, will have two main options.
Merkel could form another so-called grand coalition, an alliance of Germany's two biggest parties, namely the CDU/CSU and the SPD. Merkel currently governs with a grand coalition and has done so during two of her three terms in office.
Both the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats have said they hope to end the grand coalition and lead the government with smaller partners after the September election. After the debate, however, many observers believe a grand coalition between Merkel and Schulz is more probable than not.
Merkel's second option would be to form a three-way coalition with the Greens and the FDP, which served as junior coalition partner to the CDU/CSU for almost half of Germany's post-war history. Merkel has already ruled out forming a coalition with either the Linke or the AfD.
In any event, the policy positions of Merkel and Schulz on key issues are virtually identical: Both candidates are committed to strengthening the European Union, maintaining open-door immigration policies, pursuing multiculturalism and quashing dissent from the so-called far right.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel (right) and her main election opponent, Martin Schulz (left), whose policy positions on key issues are virtually identical. (Image source: European Parliament/Flickr)
Merkel and Schulz are ardent Europhiles and both are committed to more European federalism. During an August 12 campaign speech in Dortmund, for example, Merkel described the European Union as the "greatest peace project" in history and vowed that she would never turn her back on this "wonderful project."
Previously, Merkel said:
"We need more Europe, we need not only a monetary union, but we also need a so-called fiscal union, in other words more joint budget policy. And we need most of all a political union — that means we need to gradually give competencies to Europe and give Europe control."
Merkel has also endorsed the idea of a European Monetary Fund to deal with sovereign defaults by eurozone countries:
"It could make us even more stable and allow us to show the world that we have all the mechanisms in our own portfolio of the euro zone to be able to react well to unexpected situations."
Schulz has argued that the EU must be preserved at any cost:
"We are at a historical juncture: A growing number of people are declaring what has been achieved over the past decades in Europe to be wrong. They want to return to the nation-state. Sometimes there is even a blood and soil rhetoric that for me is starkly reminiscent of the interwar years of the past century, whose demons we are still all too familiar with. We brought these demons under control through European structures, but if we destroy those structures, the demons will return. We cannot allow this to happen."
Schulz has opposed the idea of holding national referendums on leaving the EU:
"Referendums have always posed a threat when it comes to EU policy, because EU policy is complicated. They are an opportunity for those from all political camps who like to oversimplify things."
Schulz has also voiced optimism that the British decision to leave the European Union would facilitate the creation of a European Army:
"In the fields of security and defense policy, although the EU loses a key member state, paradoxically such a separation could give the necessary impulse for a closer integration of the remaining member states."
During the September 3 debate, Schulz declared that he would end Turkey's accession talks to join the European Union because of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's authoritarianism. Merkel initially said she opposed such a move but then suddenly changed her mind. Unexpectedly, Merkel said: "The fact is clear that Turkey should not become an EU member."
On the issue of migration, Schulz and Merkel differ on procedure, not principle. During the debate, for example, Schulz accused Merkel of failing to involve the European Union in her 2015 decision to open German borders to more than a million migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Merkel said that although some mistakes had been made, she would take the same decision again.
In fact, Merkel and Schulz both agree that there should be no upper limit on the number of migrants entering Germany: "On the issue of an upper limit, my position is clear," Merkel told ARD television. "I won't accept one."
Schulz has said:
"A numerical cap is not a response to the refugee issue, even if it is agreed upon in a European context. What do we do with the first refugee who comes to the European frontier and has no quota available? Do we send him back to perhaps a sure death? As long as this question is not resolved, such a discussion makes no sense."
Schulz believes the European Union should have a greater role in migration policymaking:
"What we need is a European right of immigration and asylum. The refugee crisis shows us clearly that we cannot give a national response to a global phenomenon such as the refugee movements. This is only possible in a European context."
Merkel has criticized Hungary for failing to show "solidarity" in aiding refugees. She has also vowed to punish Poland for its refusal to take in more migrants from the Muslim world:
"As much as I wish for good relations with Poland — they are our neighbor and I will always strive for this given the importance of our ties — we can't simply keep our mouth shut in order to keep the peace. This goes to the very foundations of our cooperation within the European Union."
Schulz vowed that, if elected chancellor, he would push for the EU to cut subsidies to countries that do not take in refugees: "With me as chancellor, we won't accept that solidarity as a principle is questioned."
Meanwhile, Merkel's grand coalition backed a law that would penalize social media giants, including Facebook, Google and Twitter, with fines of €50 million ($60 million) if they fail to remove offending content from their platforms within 24 hours. Observers say the law is aimed at silencing critics of Merkel's open-door migration policy.
Like Merkel, Schulz has reserved his worst vitriol for the anti-immigration AfD, whose leaders he has described as "rat catchers" (Rattenfänger) who are "trying to profit from the plight of refugees." He has also called them "shameful and repulsive."
In an August 22 interview with Bild, Merkel answered critics of her desire to continue in power by saying that the longer she rules, the better she gets: "I've decided to run for another four years and believe that the mix of experience and curiosity and joy that I have could make the next four years good ones."A downtown Louisville agency is looking to replicate an initiative in Cincinnati that has helped reduce the homeless population.The Courier-Journal reported the Louisville Downtown Partnership has studied |
1981.
The main evening programme airs at 7:00 pm, running for 20 minutes every night on NPO 3 (formerly Nederland 3). A 5-minute short version also airs on weekdays at 8:45 am. Both programmes are broadcast on the Dutch-language television station, BVN.
Aim [ edit ]
The aim of Jeugdjournaal is to present news that is both of interest to and within the mindset of young viewers, without shying away from the main national and international news headlines. Real news but presented in the language of young viewers. The broadcasts are viewed extensively by older viewers; about one-sixth of the programme's viewership are adults. A lot of former presenters made it to the regular (adult) main 'Journaal' that airs on NPO 1 at 8.00 pm.
Present Presenters and Reporters [ edit ]
Tamara Seur (2004)
Siham Raijou (2010)
Joris Marseille (2012)
Lysette van Geel (2014)
Welmoed Sijtsma (2015)
Lucas van de Meerendonk (2017)
Malou Petter (2017)
Former presenters and reporters [ edit ]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]It didn’t help that the rapper had been getting fewer than five hours of sleep a night lately, thanks to a grueling schedule. In addition to finishing the album, Bun B had launched a blog, co-authored a book, and spent an inordinate amount of time promoting the three—all while finishing up a semester as a distinguished guest lecturer at Rice University. At age forty, he was one of the hardest-working performers in the music business, with a remarkable longevity in the youthful universe of rap; that same month marked the twenty-first anniversary of the first album released by UGK, short for Underground Kingz, the group he’d formed with the late rapper Pimp C. The pair had helped introduce Texas rap to the world, an accomplishment that had since earned Bun B the honorific “original gangsta,” or OG.
That he had rapped in front of crowds 25 times the size of this sold-out audience in Jones Hall didn’t seem relevant. As the moan of a violin warming up drifted in from the stage, Bun B’s official photographer, his videographer, his social media promoter, his manager, and a Houston Press photographer watched him attentively, documenting every move with their cameras. Bun B struggled several minutes to tighten the tie band around his tuxedo collar, then cocked his right eyebrow. “This tie isn’t working,” he said. “This tie is not going to work.” His crew exchanged glances. He was nervous.
As Bun B stood before a mirror in a fluorescent-lit room the size of a walk-in closet, tugging on a dark-purple bow tie, his entourage huddled by the door, assessing his mood. Just a few hours earlier, the Grammy-nominated rapper—the famous surviving half of the hip-hop duo UGK—had seemed buoyant, with a nod and easy smile for anyone who approached. He had recently released his fourth solo album, Trill OG: The Epilogue, and he would soon be heading out on tour. But now, minutes before the show on this cool November evening, he’d grown solemn, tense. Bun B was about to do something new: perform with the Houston Symphony.
In an effort to calm him, or maybe just break an awkward silence, the videographer, a sweet-natured film school graduate named Sama’an Ashrawi, zoomed in with his camera and asked, “So what’s about to go down?” Earlier that day, Bun B had offered some thoughts on what he felt was at stake. “If this collaboration goes well with the Houston Symphony, just think of the possibilities for hip-hop in classical ballets, classical operas, and so forth,” he said. “There’s room for a lot of groundbreaking interpretation. It makes me want to take something like The Merchant of Venice or Fiddler on the Roof and see if there is a place—one or two places—to incorporate different elements.
“If I do right by this opportunity,” he continued, “it could open the way for many other young rappers to be part of something positive. I only get one shot. I haven’t done it yet. I get one time.”
Ashrawi, who had banked hundreds of hours of Bun B footage at family barbecues and other events, had been witness to this kind of creative fusion before. Bun B’s vast network of contacts and eclectic array of tastes—the blog he’d just launched, with sneaker site founder Premium Pete, was all about food; the title he’d just published, in collaboration with middle-school science teacher Shea Serrano, was Bun B’s Rap Coloring and Activity Book—were in part what made his fans, some 900,000 of them on Twitter, so devoted to him. Bun B didn’t just habitually cross genres and media platforms, he also moved among Houston’s subcultures with a native’s easy authority. He seemed to embody modern Houston itself, his endeavors a celebration of the steamy, glorious complexity of the most diverse city in Texas. This, not surprisingly, inspired a fervent sea of followers, Ashrawi among them.
Except that, at this moment, Bun B wasn’t feeling quite so self-possessed. “If you want to video me, you can video me, but we’re not going to do a Q&A and all that; this is nerve-wracking enough as it is,” he snapped. Unfazed, Ashrawi turned to me instead and began describing his love for Bun B, summarizing his feelings with “How does the grass thank the sun?”
A petite blond woman in her sixties poked her head in the doorway. “You guys doing okay?” she asked, as Bun B pulled off his tie and traded it for another. “You look beautiful. I’m so proud of y’all.” Her name was Sherry Levy, she said, and she was a volunteer for the Anti-Defamation League, which was co-hosting the concert with the Houston Symphony in honor of the two organizations’ centennial anniversaries.
It was Levy who was responsible for Bun B’s being there. After hearing that one ADL member had purchased concert tickets for 650 high school students, Levy had turned to her daughter, Gillian, for suggestions on a musician to include who would appeal to the teens. A college senior, Gillian had resented growing up in the “conservative bubble” of Houston, as she called it—until she discovered the vibrant local hip-hop scene. This changed her view of the city, and of herself. (“I realized how great our rap scene is, and it made me proud to be from Houston,” she told me.) The person at the center of that scene, she told her mom, was Bun B.
Curious ADL board members who Googled “Bun B rapper Houston” would have unearthed a peculiar combination of images. Some photos show a large glowering man in an assertive pose, wearing a baseball cap and an imposing gold chain, promoting song titles such as “Murder” and “That’s Gangsta.” But there are also photos, taken in recent years, of him in a staid V-neck sweater, his beard shaved close, smiling like a toothpaste model. Those doing the research might have gathered that Bun B is a big deal—he has collaborated with Jay-Z and OutKast, among others, and Beyoncé counts him as a friend—but they might not have fully understood his role in defining Houston for young people across the globe. In other words, these symphonygoers still weren’t sure exactly what to expect. And now they were in the audience, waiting.
At eight o’clock, the lights dimmed, and the audience’s murmurs quieted as heroic trumpets and thundering timpani signaled the start of “Fanfare for the Common Man.” Backstage, everyone cleared out with the exception of Bun B and his acolytes, who tried to look anywhere but his direction: the floor, a watch, a phone. Bun B straightened his lapels repeatedly, peering out the small window of a stage door at the orchestra. He started to pace. “This is my life now,” he said.
Bun B’s life these days is so deeply intertwined with Houston’s that he is often referred to as the city’s unofficial mayor. He has been featured in anti-texting public service announcements. He helps publicize drives for the Houston Food Bank. He hosts a twice-weekly segment on the TV station CW39 called Bun’s Beat (recent installments include “Bun B’s Thoughts on the NFL Banning the N-Word” and “Bun B’s Advice for Returning College Students”). He has been a regular guest on networks such as Comcast SportsNet Houston to discuss the Astros and the Rockets. He attends nearly every major concert. He promotes the city’s food and culture actively on his Twitter feed, where he can seem, at times, like a one-man chamber of commerce. “If you want to find out the best sushi spot, barbershop, or club, he would probably be the person with the widest Rolodex,” Houston rapper Chamillionaire told me. “You could ask him something crazy, like where to find left-handed scissors in Houston, and he could probably point you in three different directions.”
Houston’s actual mayor, Annise Parker, doesn’t claim to be so hip as to know all of Bun B’s music, and she finds some of his lyrics “out there,” but her respect is obvious. In 2011 she proclaimed an official “Bun B Day” in honor of his charity work, and the two are so friendly that during the Rockets playoffs last season, Bun B texted to invite her to watch from a suite. She hesitated at first—she doesn’t like socializing during games and worried she might stick out too much among a bunch of rappers—but eventually agreed. “And it was the damnedest thing,” she told me. “It was like being in a suite full of sports fans who are all introverts.” On Twitter, Bun B has called Parker “Best. Mayor. Ever.” She has reciprocated by touting his coloring book with the hashtag #keephoustontrill.
Kalele Thumbutu
“Trill,” the mayor understands, is a word closely associated with Bun B. Consider the titles of his previous solo albums: Trill, II Trill, and Trill OG. The tour he kicked off in March to promote the last installment in that series is called “The Trillest Tour.” The lyrics on his solo and UGK releases contain the word “trill” more than 250 times, as in, “No matter the situation, we gotta keep it trill.” The word, which he has trademarked, was a term that originated in the penitentiary and was spread by ex-prisoners in Port Arthur, where he grew up. It has appeared embroidered on his baseball caps and emblazoned on his T-shirts. He is asked for a definition so regularly that sometimes his voice betrays just a hint of exasperation. “Being trill really just means being true to who you are,” he told NPR the week of his symphony appearance. “ ‘Trill’ does not mean keeping it hood, does not mean keeping it gangster, or anything like that.”
This firm sense of identity is what makes Bun B such a compelling statesman. He is a devoted family man, with a wife of eleven years, two grown stepchildren he raised as his own, and a school-age granddaughter, who lives with him and his wife and fills much of his Instagram feed. And he inhabits a vaunted role as a mentor in the hip-hop community, where he has an unmistakable imprint. New artists mention him in their work (“Shout out to Bun for the opportunity,” wrote Houston rapper Propain in his song “Move On”), and he is regularly invited to perform on songs and in videos with locals like Lil’ Keke and Mike Jones. He goes to so many concerts that fledgling artists consider his attendance a validation of their work, as Drake admitted in the song “Too Much” when he rapped, “Backstage at Warehouse in ’09, like, ‘Is Bun coming?’ ”
A consummate OG, he is generous with his advice. With musicians he doesn’t know well, his encouragement can take the form of a compliment, as it did on the online Combat Jack Show in 2012, when he turned his attention to his fellow guest, a young rapper from Indiana named Freddie Gibbs. “You familiar with [the rapper] Threat, Freddie? Sickinnahead?” Bun asked. “When I look at the way he draws and paints his pictures, you remind me of that.” He went on, “It’s that third-person narrative—you know what I’m saying?—that some people can only do so well.” With those he knows better, he says, his instruction can be a little more raw: “I’ll say something like ‘Hey man, you may get this now, but two months from now, you’re gonna end up like that and you’ll feel like shit that you fucked with your life. So don’t do that. I did that. It bit me in the ass, and you’re about to do it bigger than I did and it’s going to come back and bite you harder.”
Artists like 24-year-old Kirko Bangz and 33-year-old Slim Thug, who have been the beneficiaries of his counsel, are grateful. “Most of the time I talk to him, it’s about real-life stuff,” said Bangz. “Like how to act. You gotta have your wits together in this game. You gotta understand that when you’re out there, you belong to the people.” Slim Thug, who has been friends with Bun B for more than a decade, heard similar warnings in his youth. “I ain’t gonna lie, I was just wild,” he said. “Back then, I had the attitude of ‘I’m from the hood, and before I had anything, nobody gave a damn about me, so I’m gonna live my life how I want to live it and do what I want to do.’ And that’s when he just took me by my shirt and said, ‘Hey man, chill out about all this.’ ” I asked if Bun B still gave him advice. “To this day!”
Though Bun B is similarly generous with his fans—he encourages those who share links to their music; he takes to Twitter to note birthdays, anniversaries, and sympathies; he poses for photos—his influence might not have been fully appreciated outside the world of rap had he not, in 2010, been invited by Anthony Pinn, a religious studies professor at Rice University, to speak in front of a class about the moral codes in hip-hop. It turned out that Bun B, who for the past ten years has attended the Church at Bethel’s Family, on the southwest side of Houston, had already pondered the topic. “He was very thoughtful, very clever, very compelling,” remembered Pinn, and it occurred to the professor that “there was every reason to bring him on in a more sustained way.” In January 2011 “Professor Trill” began co-teaching a course with Pinn titled “Religion and Hip-Hop Culture,” a class so intriguing that on the first day the auditorium was filled to capacity with curious students.
The class raised Bun B’s profile across the city, and the collaboration seemed to inspire even more creative civic pairings: this past summer, for example, the Blaffer Art Museum hired Bun B and Uchi chef Philip Speer for a VIP culinary event with live music (during one course, Speer doled out a pork belly bun with pickles and herbs while Bun B rapped his self-titled song “Bun”). An ambassador of sorts, he brings the rap community’s conversations to a wider arena—as when he appeared on MSNBC to discuss the admissibility of rap lyrics in criminal trials—and is always quick to examine hip-hop culture itself. At a public panel he led in 2011 on the topic “Should Rap Be in Church?” he didn’t shy from pointed questions about his lyrics. “First of all, let it be said that I do not create my music for children,” he began, standing behind a lectern in a cream-colored sweater vest. He considered many UGK songs to be morality tales, he said. Yet he also remembered feeling queasy the day his daughter walked into the house singing a rap song he considered inappropriate for her age. “That was not a good moment for me,” he acknowledged. “I’m a grandfather now. So I have to wonder if everything I said is stronger than what I did.”
This was typical Bun B: calm, introspective, diplomatic. “One thing I’ll say about him,” said Lil’ Randy, a deejay for the Houston rap group the Screwed Up Click, “is he would keep his calm in a sticky situation.” There is intention behind this composure. “The reason I’m very calm,” Bun B told a Combat Jack Show interviewer last May, “is because when I turn it on, I don’t know how to turn it off.”
“When was the last time you were really pissed off?” the interviewer asked.
“A couple of months ago,” Bun replied. “This kid got killed in Port Arthur, Texas, and my wife and I were really upset and concerned.” His wife, he explained, posted something about it on Instagram, which some followers misinterpreted as an insult to the town, and one user had suggested that someone punch her. Bun, with chagrin, recounted how he’d gone to the Sonic Drive-In where he believed the culprit worked, only to discover that the man was not employed there.
“My plan was not just to beat him up but to beat him up at his job and embarrass him at his workplace and make him lose his job,” he said. “I look back on it in retrospect, and it probably wouldn’t have been the best thing for me to do, because there was a Stop the Violence rally, like, happening the next week.” His interviewer, unable to contain himself, laughed. Bun B did not.
“That would have been, like, the worst thing I could have done for myself,” he said. “It would have really fucked up my public image with people, because I’m so concerned about community shit.”
Photograph by Jeff Wilson
This is not language, his mother says, he learned from her. Ester Taylor likes to be clear about that. She is a churchgoer; she doesn’t drink or cuss, and her principal vice is bingo. A tranquil, round-faced woman with a gentle smile, she still seems to be adjusting to the fact that her son is in the music business. She never imagined that one day he would buy her central air-conditioning, not to mention Louis Vuitton purses or other luxuries she usually refuses to accept—or that her neighbors would continually ask about him. “I went to the grocery store one time,” she said, “and this little white guy ran up after me: ‘Excuse me! Is this for real, you’re Bun B’s mother?’ ”
A native of Louisiana, Taylor moved to Texas as a newlywed when her husband, Rodney Freeman, got a job with the railroad in Houston. The couple had four boys, the last of whom acquired the nickname Bunny—further abbreviated Bun—as a way of shortening his given name: Bernard. When the marriage eventually dissolved, Taylor yearned for life in a small town, and in 1984 she and her two youngest sons moved to Port Arthur.
An oil boomtown in the twenties, Port Arthur hit economic troubles in the sixties and steadily declined thereafter. By the eighties, layoffs at the refineries and the influx of crack cocaine had aggravated this reality. Though Taylor, who remarried, provided her children with a tidy house in a decent neighborhood, with a carport and trim bushes out front, she could not shield them from the town’s gritty side. Port Arthur rapper Hezeleo, who grew up with the young Bernard Freeman, recalls one notorious section, a two-block segment at the end of Texas Avenue that locals called “Short Texas.” “It was like a strip in Vegas,” he said. “As I got to being more aware, I realized that we were in the hood, and the hood would come alive at you at any moment, so you had to be prepared to carry yourself a certain way.”
Taylor wasn’t overly strict, but she insisted on good manners—no cussing—and demanded that her son iron his pants before going to school. “I wanted him to teach,” she said. He was smart and got good grades; she imagined he might become a professor. Freeman also had a broad range of interests: he performed in plays, like A Raisin in the Sun, and took debate, where his teacher instructed him not to talk fast, as it detracted from his strong voice. Though he was a force in the classroom—“He could walk up to any circle and chill and kick it and be accepted,” Hezeleo remembered—he nevertheless felt odd. He didn’t know of many other black kids, for example, who dug David Letterman and Rich Little.
Noting the hefty salaries that engineers made at the refineries, Freeman figured he’d go to college and join their ranks—or maybe become an actor or a teacher, as his mom wanted. He could not have imagined then that music, in which he had an insatiable interest, would take him anywhere. But he feverishly gathered new cassettes and mix tapes of the latest rap acts whenever he visited his dad in Houston, and he impressed his friends with his ability to memorize lyrics. (Jelon Jackson, a high school friend, said, “He’d listen to Run-DMC or something and learn the words the next time around.”) The summer after tenth grade, when a few of his peers began to compose original raps, Freeman decided to try his hand at it, and soon he was writing more than anyone he knew, often modeling his work on that of rapper KRS-One, whose socially conscious ideals he admired. He wrote at least ten pages a day, honing his skills. (“I remember we would go to lost-and-found and get notebooks,” Jackson said. “People would trash them and he would pick them up and use them to write rhymes.”)
It was around this time that Freeman met Chad Butler, a teenager at a rival high school, whose passion for rap matched his own. “[Butler] was a nerdy guy, like myself, who loved music,” said DJ DMD, one of the innovators of the Port Arthur hip-hop scene, who met Butler as a ninth-grade trumpet player. Like Freeman, Butler scoured music stores and looked forward to trips out of town, like the intramural choir competition in Austin, so that he could load up on cassettes. “We would try to buy things we knew nobody in Port Arthur would have,” said former chorus mate Mitchell Queen, “so that when we traded, the trade was worth something.”
Perhaps because they were so similar, Freeman and Butler did not like each other at first. Freeman’s trips to Houston gave him stories about seeing famous rappers in clubs, and one night at a football game, after he had been crowing about having seen the rapper Eazy-E, Butler could no longer hide his annoyance. “Nigga, stop lying,” he said. “You lying all the time. You know that’s a goddamn lie. You don’t know that nigga.” Freeman pulled out a photo as evidence. “Yeah, I do,” he said. Impressed, Butler mentioned that he had some recording equipment at his house.
From that day on, Freeman didn’t consider Butler a friend as much as a brother. Freeman’s relationship with his biological brothers, a couple of whom were incarcerated, was strained; Butler, who was nine months younger than Freeman, was an only child. Freeman, who knew that his mother had lost a baby in childbirth after him, had always craved having a younger brother, and in Butler he found him.
Butler invited Freeman over to his house, and soon the two joined with friends Jackson and Queen to form a group named the Four Black Ministers. After they made a demo tape with four or five songs, which they sold throughout the area, the group changed their name to the Underground Kingz. But the members’ levels of dedication varied, and as graduation approached and college scholarships or commitments began to beckon, the quartet winnowed down to just Freeman and Butler.
By the spring of 1991, Freeman himself had received two scholarships and was entertaining the idea of college. But he felt strangely bound to Butler, who had dropped out of school and, in contrast to Freeman’s own vague ideas for his future, was committed to the single dream of making a record. When Butler secured a deal with a 23-year-old Houston flea market booth operator named Russell Washington, late in Freeman’s senior year, Freeman knew what he wanted to do. He decided to forgo college and concentrate on music.
Ester Taylor couldn’t believe her ears. A rapper’s life was the last thing she wanted for her son. Having already suffered the pain of two sons in prison, she could not bear the thought of another casualty; heartbroken, she gave Freeman a week to leave the house. On graduation day, his one brother who wasn’t in jail came from Houston to attend the ceremony. That night, Freeman told him, “I’m going with you,” and left for Houston.
At the time Freeman moved, Houston was just recovering from the oil bust, and while there were signs of a promising economic future—the Galleria, for example, was beginning to recapture its lost glamour—the city was crippled by the new crack epidemic and a soaring rate of violent crime. It was against this backdrop that Houston’s rap scene had started to form. The only label of consequence was Rap-a-Lot Records, run by a savvy and tenacious businessman named James Prince, who defied the stereotypes of Texas music by promoting groups like the Geto Boys, whose raw lyrics provoked controversy and whose album art included a real photo of one member just after his eye had been shot out. Artists who weren’t on Rap-a-Lot sold their music out of their car trunks or, as the not-yet-famous DJ Screw did, out of their houses. There were three radio stations that had begun airing hip-hop, but hardly any of the music was local. “Houston didn’t have an identity yet,” said longtime radio deejay Mean Green. “Everyone was kinda confused. They weren’t representing Houston. It was all Chicago outfits or Lakers.”
“A monopoly had been established in Houston,” explained Prince. “Every deejay was from the East Coast. At the time, they played nothing but East Coast music. We were considered country and laughed at, as if our raps wouldn’t qualify. We weren’t hip enough to be accepted by them.”
The demo tape that Russell Washington received from Butler and Freeman—who now adopted the names Pimp C and Bun B—featured two young men who were unmistakably Southern, if not distinctively Texan. The first single, “Tell Me Something Good,” which used a sample from the Rufus and Chaka Khan hit of the same title, humped along at a slow, grooving tempo. Rather than hide their drawl, the pair emphasized it—especially Pimp C, who dragged out his vowels as if he were pulling on a praline. When the song won a Houston radio contest, it became a local hit. “I remember when me and Bun heard the song on the radio,” said Washington, “we were in the car, and we started beating on the roof.”
The seven-song Southern Way EP came out in the spring of 1992 on Washington’s Big Tyme Records label, establishing UGK as an unapologetic voice for Southern rap. Amid all the East Coast hip-hop, the title itself made a statement, and Pimp C brought a new dimension to the music by layering live guitars, drums, and bass over UGK’s samples, which were based not on the funk and jazz used elsewhere in the country but on a more soulful sound—the Isley Brothers, Curtis Mayfield. The songs were novel enough to catch the attention of Jeffrey Sledge, then the vice president of A&R for New York’s Jive Records. “The production was very cutting-edge,” Sledge said. “And they weren’t talking about the regular old kind of stuff; they brought you into their world of Port Arthur, Texas.”
UGK’s celebration of their roots did not go unnoticed in Houston and Port Arthur either. “It was a different swag,” said Prince. “It was our swag. Houston swag.”
“In Texas history, you’re taught that you’re better in Texas,” said Houston rapper Paul Wall. “With pride in our state, from sports teams to actors and entertainers to food, we support our own. UGK was one of the first groups to really carry the torch for the Texas music scene and represent us in the lyrics, with places and names and slang.”
Jive Records offered Washington a buyout deal, which he eventually took, and UGK released their first full-length record, Too Hard to Swallow, on their new label. The group finally had the potential to break into the big time, especially after one of the songs off the record—an eerie, grinding song about selling crack called “Pocket Full of Stones”—made it onto the sound track of the movie Menace II Society.
Yet the relationship with Jive simmered with conflict. Some of the executives at Jive, having no template for a Southern group, worried about how audiences would react to such a dramatically different style, and Pimp C and Bun B perceived their support as tentative. The distrust was made worse when Menace II Society became a success, and UGK felt they’d been stiffed on the payout they deserved for creating a hit.
Despite these tensions, or maybe because of them, Pimp C and Bun B remained fiercely loyal to their audience. They took to local radio to air their grievances with Jive, as if speaking to family. They traveled to little clubs, building exposure one fan at a time. “We did a show in Lake Charles where it was, like, fifteen people in the club, know what I’m saying?” said DJ Byrd, a Port Arthur deejay who frequently toured with UGK in those days. “But they knew the songs on the radio with ‘Tell Me Something Good,’ and we rocked it with fifteen people.”
The duo eschewed the trappings of celebrity even as their ensuing albums, Super Tight (1994) and Riding Dirty (1996), increased their name recognition. Matt Sonzala, an Austin events promoter who traveled from coast to coast, writing city reports for the rap magazine Murder Dog, said that when he asked street rappers for influences, almost 90 percent of the respondents said UGK. “It shocked me,” he told me. “UGK didn’t have videos on MTV; they didn’t have songs on the radio across the country.” When Bun B met Biggie Smalls, around 1994, Bun B complimented the more established artist, “Yo, Biggie, you’re a bad motherfucker,” to which he responded—much to Bun B’s amazement—“I heard your shit too; I know who you are.”
While some of Bun B’s earliest lyrics reflected the crude impulses of a teenager (as in the famously gross “Pregnant Pussy”), now his words frequently revealed his depth of thought and his bottomless lexicon—a perfect foil for Pimp C’s lyrical simplicity. “Even though it was grimy, it wasn’t sloppy,” said Prince. The song “Murder,” for example, is considered by many rappers to be Bun B’s sharpest work:
Playa hater ditch digger figure
My hair trigger give a hot one in yo liver
You shiver shake and quiver
I’m frivolous if a nigga you wetter than a river.
“Bun B’s verse on ‘Murder’ was one of the most lyrically complex rhyming patterns I had ever heard anyone from the South spit,” said Chamillionaire. “I remember rewinding it a lot and listening to it over and over, so I could memorize it. I was amazed at his breath control and how many rhyming words he was able to squeeze into each bar.”
In what may be UGK’s saddest and most powerful song, “One Day,” Bun B rapped about a former classmate who got killed in a dice game and a friend who fell asleep behind the wheel of a car and drowned after driving into a canal. “So shit I walk around with my mind blown in my own fuckin’ zone,” he raps, “ ’cause one day you here but the next day you gone.” At an appearance in Barcelona in 2008, Bun B confessed that he has cried onstage when performing that song. “We’re talking about people that we loved and lost, and that is when music is supposed to be at its best,” he told his audience.
Inevitably, perhaps, his mother’s worries about his career choice were soon substantiated. Bun B once described his young self “smoking fry and drinking E&J and dirt weed and getting into fights and shit.” He told one interviewer that he sold crack cocaine, though he never partook of the drug himself, having seen it destroy too many of his neighbors in Port Arthur. Although he partied alone in those days and says that “nobody knows the full amount of dumb shit I’ve done in my life,” he leaves vivid hints. As he told McSweeney’s magazine in 2006, “I was literally on the highway, with cocaine on the dashboard, car on cruise, with my feet out the window, smoking a blunt, begging a state trooper to take me away for the rest of my fucking life.”
Officers did arrest him for possession of marijuana in 1997, keeping him locked up for three days. Sitting in his cell, Bun B considered how many of his contemporaries were dying, going to prison, or losing their minds from the drugs they were doing. He decided at that moment to “chill out from here on.”
Pimp C, meanwhile, chose differently. He had been charged with marijuana possession back in 1995 and spent a few days in jail; now he dressed flamboyantly, in a mink coat, and walked with a swagger, saying whatever was on his mind, wise or not. “To the young men of the city, he became our superhero,” said Houston Press music photographer Marco Torres. His persona grew even bolder in 1999, when UGK appeared on Jay-Z’s Grammy-nominated song “Big Pimpin’.” “He was extremely volatile at that time,” said Sledge, the former Jive vice president. “Probably the most volatile he ever was.”
His temper got the better of him one day in December 2000. He had walked into a shoe store at a mall and was talking to Bun B on his cellphone when a woman began to loudly insult him. Not one to flee a fight, Pimp C hung up and faced her, offering his own vociferous opinions. The two went toe-to-toe for a minute as her friends watched and laughed, until Pimp C believed he saw the woman reach into her jacket. He lifted his coat and showed a pistol, then asked her to freeze. “Y’all need to back up out of this store, this is not funny no more,” he told them.
Security was called, and when the guards found Pimp C in the parking lot, he was charged with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. He pleaded no contest and got probation, but when he fell behind on his community service requirements, in 2002, the judge’s patience wore thin. He was sentenced to eight years in prison.
Everyone had an opinion about how Bun B should move forward. He could disband UGK, go solo, or find a new partner. But when a representative at Jive noted a clause in UGK’s contract stating that a member who went to jail or died could be replaced, Bun B’s reaction was clear. “Bun was like, ‘That’s not happening,’ ” said Sledge. “It wasn’t even a discussion.”
That anyone would even dare think he’d abandon Pimp C was proof to Bun B of the lack of loyalty in hip-hop culture. He was appalled; he had never bought into the philosophy of, as he calls it, “Get what you can, do what you can for you, and fuck the next man,” least of all when it came to his inner circle. Instead, to keep UGK’s name alive, he hatched a plan.
It became known as the “Free Pimp C” movement, a public relations crusade to promote his partner against all odds. Bun B appeared on records by Paul Wall, Ludacris, and other big-name hip-hop artists, working the phrase “Free Pimp C” into the raps; soon fans were buying “Free Pimp C” T-shirts at mall kiosks and record stores. It helped that Texas rap, led by artists such as Wall and Mike Jones, was finally dominating the charts; listeners across the country now memorized lyrics about the candy-colored cars and codeine syrup of Houston’s hip-hop culture. (“If you look at the East and West coasts, you see they have grills in their mouths—the very image we created down south,” said Rap-a-Lot’s Prince. “The script has flipped.”) Rappers increasingly requested Bun B’s appearance on their songs, until there came a moment when an artist was basically a nobody if he didn’t have Bun B on a cut, rapping “Free Pimp C.”
Pimp C’s homecoming, in 2005, couldn’t have been timed any better. Two months after Bun B did finally record a solo album, Pimp C was released on good behavior, a bigger folk hero than before he’d gone away. “Next thing you know, he was Bob Dylan,” remembered high school friend Mitchell Queen. The enthusiasm of the fans, who at one point mobbed Pimp C and his wife, Chinara Butler, at a mall (“There were fifty to one hundred people running toward us,” remembered Butler), was rivaled only by the eagerness of other artists waiting to collaborate with UGK once again.
The self-titled Underground Kingz double album was released in August 2007 and debuted at number one on the Billboard 200. Featuring collaborations with some of the biggest names in rap, from Z-Ro and Talib Kweli to Rick Ross and Big Daddy Kane, the release cemented UGK’s dominance. Though the music touched on the usual topics of sex, cars, and drugs, it also ventured into unexpected territory, including questions of salvation and a call to stop glorifying the street life where “hustlers only hustlin’ to survive.” Their collaboration with OutKast, “ |
Angerer, a photographer with Getty Images News, was admitted to the restaurant, where he took a picture of the two erstwhile foes. Trump had a sly-looking grin on his face. Romney appeared to be grimacing. “Donald Trump looks like a cat that caught a mouse and is now batting it around with its paws until it dies,” Taegan Goddard, the publisher of Political Wire, wrote on Twitter. “Romney is the mouse.”The head of Germany’s Social Democrats, Martin Schulz, said on Monday (4 December) he had been urged by French President Emmanuel Macron and other European leaders to join Chancellor Angela Merkel’s next government and push for EU reforms.
If his centre-left SPD joins another governing alliance with Merkel’s conservatives or allows her to run a minority government, “it won’t be business as usual” in Berlin, vowed Schulz, the former president of the European Parliament.
Schulz said he had been encouraged by European “sister parties” and some leaders, including Macron, to join Merkel’s fourth government and help promote European reforms.
“The phone conversations I’ve had so far … and the exchange of mails and text messages have been unanimous,” he told a Berlin press conference.
The core message, he said, was that Germany should adopt “a progressive, a more social, a more dynamic policy on Europe”.
“We take their message very seriously,” said Schulz, a vocal critic of Berlin’s tough austerity stance during the eurozone crisis when creditors demanded tough reforms from crisis-hit economies in return for international bailouts.
Macron has pushed for sweeping reforms, including a common eurozone finance minister and budget – an idea that has received a lukewarm response from Merkel’s conservatives who fear it could cost the top EU economy dearly.
Schulz lost to Merkel in the 24 September elections and initially vowed to take his party into opposition but has now emerged as the man who could hold her political fate in his hands.
The Brief: Coalition man To be or not to be in a grand coalition: that is the question. Initially rejected by SPD, a grand coalition now looks like the only chance to solve Germany’s problems, which can in turn give a boost to the much-needed post-Brexit EU reforms.
After Merkel’s exploratory talks to form an alliance with two smaller parties collapsed, her conservatives are hoping for a continuation of their previous “grand coalition” with the SPD for the next four years.
Schulz has asked his divided party to back him in open-ended discussions on whether the two parties should team up again, and on what terms, to avoid new elections.
Sunday’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper reported that Macron and Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras had encouraged Schulz to extend the four-year-old alliance, currently a caretaker government, and shift Berlin’s policy on Europe.
Martin Schulz says he received a call from Alexis Tsipras last week, "encouraging" him to take a role in forming next German government. Expect to hear this more often if SPD forms another grand coalition — Philip Oltermann (@philipoltermann) November 27, 2017
Schulz said that left-leaning European parties and Macron’s government, looking to Germany, “have a great interest in seeing an end of the blockade of necessary eurozone reforms, seen especially in the finance ministry”.A met S in the sixth grade. They were best friends for ten years and had dated on and off for four. “He knew my whole family. He came to my sister’s wedding,” says A, now a 23-year-old college student. They broke up in the fall of 2011, when a suspicious Foursquare check-in led to a confession of infidelity. “That’s one of the weirdest parts,” she announces halfway through a breakup story of harrowing intensity. “He cheated on me.” (Because of ongoing and sensitive legal matters, she asked us not to use names.)
Several months after the breakup, A was studying for an exam when an anonymous e-mail alerted her to Tumblr and Flickr accounts created under her full name, featuring dozens of nude photos of her. Some were images she’d sent to S during their relationship; others she believes he took while she was unaware. (S did not reply to a phone call requesting comment.) A went to the police in her hometown of Plainsboro, New Jersey; they took her statement and advised her on how to get the photos taken down. To her humiliation, A says, Tumblr and Flickr both required her to do a “MySpace salute,” holding a sign with her full name on it next to her face, so they could verify that she was the subject of the photographs in question. “It was probably the crappiest picture in my life,” she says with a wry laugh.
Though the original photos came down, many had already been re-posted. One by one, she e-mailed strangers asking them to remove her from their Tumblrs, blogs, and porn sites. Some complied, but others — including a racial fetish website hosted in a foreign country — ignored her. “That site had pictures of me completely naked, and the biography underneath had my full name and my sister’s name, and it was about how I liked to be raped and gang-banged, and my sister likes it, too, and her husband knows and is okay with it,” A says. Her college was listed, too. After ending up on websites featuring “local girls,” she began receiving less-than-neighborly attention. A remembers shooing her young cousins away during a back-to-school shopping trip at Target, when an older man approached to compliment “your pictures.” Another time, printouts of her nude photos were left outside her front door.
A’s story is remarkable not because of the personal betrayal it involved or the public humiliation of having an X-rated digital doppelgänger. Those things happen to countless victims of “revenge porn,” the term for sexually explicit images distributed without the subject’s consent, whether by an ex-boyfriend or anonymous hackers. What’s truly remarkable is that the legal system took interest in A at all. But she happens to live in New Jersey, the only state where revenge porn is currently illegal.
Within a month, A’s ex-boyfriend was questioned and arrested for felony invasion of privacy. Distribution of pornography by anyone “knowing that he is not licensed or privileged to do so” has been a third-degree crime, punishable with up to five years in prison or a $30,000 fine, for about a decade in New Jersey. The state’s most infamous privacy-invasion convict, Rutgers webcam bully Dharun Ravi, grew up in A’s hometown. They went to neighboring high schools. A’s ex received his first punishment in June of 2012 — the month Ravi spent in jail.
A’s ex initially got off with a misdemeanor conviction. She didn’t want to “ruin his life,” so she told the prosecutor she was okay with the reduced punishment: probation, community service, anger-management classes, a psychological evaluation, a $500 fine, and — after an appearance in family court — a permanent restraining order. But when A’s pictures continued to appear online, she got a second chance to press charges. “He was kind of stupid, because when he linked my Facebook to these sites, people were obviously going to reach out to the real me and tell me what was going on,” she says. When a stranger Facebook-messaged A with transcripts of chats he’d had with someone posing as her on a pornographic dating site, the police requested IP addresses. That evidence — paired with a second round of questioning — allowed her ex-boyfriend to be charged, finally, with felony invasion of privacy and violation of a restraining order. “I broke down when that news came in,” she says. “It was such a big weight off my shoulders, because for that whole year I regretted letting him get away that easily.” A grand jury indicted him on both counts yesterday.
Had A lived in any other state, her story would have played out quite differently. She was over 18 at the time she posed for pictures. She gave them willingly to S. Though harassment statutes may apply to some elements of the case, the crime that defined A’s case and powered her torments was the unauthorized display of her photos. In every other state, that’s not against the law.
At the heart of a burgeoning movement to change that is End Revenge Porn, the advocacy group that A began volunteering for in the wake of her nightmare experience. It’s the brainchild of Florida resident Holly Jacobs, who went public last spring with her five-year battle against a pornographic attack so pervasive it led her to change her name. She has since built a network of around 50 victims and legal experts advocating for laws banning revenge porn, and she’s now spinning End Revenge Porn into a nonprofit called the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative. She works with lawyers, academics, and legislators — including California state senator Anthony Cannella, who has sponsored a California bill to make revenge porn a misdemeanor, punishable by up to six months in jail for a first offense; the popular bill is under consideration right now. Cannella first heard about revenge porn the day after Holly went public, when a Sacramento news station broached the topic. His communications director Jeff Macedo says their office worked with several members of Holly’s team.
“The only way that we’re going to get real change is if there’s a serious criminal statute on the books,” says Mary Anne Franks, a University of Miami law professor and board member at CCRI who has presented her legislative recommendations in Wisconsin, Georgia, and Florida, where a bill fell through last year. Franks is pushing to bring it back, with new wording, in the next legislative session. Ideally she’d like a federal law, since cybercrimes often occur across state lines. Federal stalking, hacking, and child-pornography statutes have been used in some revenge-porn cases.
L.A. mother Charlotte Laws testified in support of Cannella’s bill and also sits on CCRI’s board of directors. A single mother and realtor with a background in local politics, Laws joined the revenge-porn crusade when a topless photo of her 26-year-old daughter Kayla appeared online. “She was like a rape victim. She was absolutely distraught,” Charlotte recalls.
“I take a lot of pictures of myself,” Kayla explains. “You know, our generation is a very self-centered generation. A lot of people take selfies and whatnot.” She e-mailed a topless shot to herself without any specific plans for use. “Just because it was a good picture!” she says, alternating between giggles and outrage as she tells the story. After her e-mail was hacked and her photo posted on notorious revenge-porn website Is Anyone Up?, she was deluged with propositions and insults on social media.
But her mother was on the case. “I used to be a private investigator,” says Charlotte, “so I started my own investigation of the website while trying to get my daughter’s pictures taken down.” She found that 40 percent of the pictures posted within a two-week period had been the result of hacks, and she contacted first the LAPD, then the FBI. Initially the FBI was dismissive, she says, instructing her to fill out an online report. “So I said to them, ‘Oh, I see, Scarlett Johansson gets attention when she gets hacked, but the average person doesn’t.’”
Soon thereafter, three FBI agents arrived at the Laws’ house to start the hacking investigation that would eventually lead to Is Anyone Up? getting taken down. (For now, at least.) Charlotte eventually made contact with 60 people who had appeared on Is Anyone Up? She connected to the group with lawyers and considered filing a lawsuit but, between the cost of lawyers and fears about negative attention, decided against it.
“These kids don’t care if they get sued a million times,” Charlotte Laws says, referring to the perpetrators of involuntary pornography. “They’re 20-something-year-old kids who live with their parents. They have no money. They just don’t care. But they are afraid of law enforcement.” Is Anyone Up? came down only after the FBI questioned twentysomething owner Hunter Moore, she notes. She is now a member of CCRI’s board, too.
Thirty-three-year-old Hollie Toups is testing both the civil and criminal systems, as she simultaneously wages a class-action lawsuit against revenge-porn site Texxxan.com and a campaign to criminalize revenge porn in Texas. When explicit images of the Nederland resident appeared on the geographically searchable website, she didn’t go to the police. “I was embarrassed. It’s a small town,” she says. She’d spoken to other women featured on the site — she’d even recognized a few — and they’d told her law enforcement hadn’t helped. So she teamed up with an aggressive trial lawyer named John S. Morgan, who launched a class-action lawsuit against Texxxan and its host, Go Daddy. “I’m going after the revenge porn industry, those sickos who post private information of women without their knowledge,” Morgan told the Houston Chronicle. When several underage victims joined Morgan’s suit, the FBI began a child-pornography investigation. (Charlotte Laws believes revenge porn could be eradicated by holding amateur websites to porn-industry standards. To prove performers are of age, professional pornographers must keep I.D. and signed statements on file.)
“This is America! We have rights,” Hollie exclaims. The week before we spoke, she and two other members of the class-action suit attended the deposition of accused Texxxan owner Hunter Thomas Taylor, who lives in a neighboring town. “The scariest part was realizing the guy behind it was from our community. You always want to think the bad guy is somewhere else,” she said.
Hollie couldn’t discuss the contents of the deposition but says, “It felt really good, despite how nervous we were. It felt really empowering. I don’t think he ever expected to face us.” Afterward, the three women let off steam over chips and salsa at a Mexican restaurant. “Even though I just met all of them in January, there’s a group of us that became really close friends and talk to each other every day,” she says. She counts revenge-porn advocates in other states — like Bekah Wells, the Floridian behind Women Against Revenge Porn — among her close friends now too. Hollie recalls: “I was talking to one of them, and she was like, ‘You know, the worst thing that could have happened, happened. And then I met you, and it’s like, even in the darkest of times, sunshine. I’ve got a new friend.’”
As A’s legal case continues, she’s channeling her energy into assisting victims who contact End Revenge Porn for guidance and support. “I tell them that we’re here, that they’re not alone.”ONCE every few years an NRL star will do something so ridiculous it makes headlines around the world.
Back in 2014, it was Todd Carney urinating into his own mouth in an infamous “bubbling” incident. At the end of the 2010 season, former Raiders star Joel Monaghan attracted unwanted global attention after a photo was circulated of him simulating a lewd act with a dog.
So when Mitchell Pearce essentially combined both Carney and Monaghan’s actions while on an Australia Day bender, it was only natural that the world’s media would take notice.
An intoxicated Pearce can be seen in a video shown by the Nine Network’s A Current Affair forcing an unwanted kiss on a female, who rejects his advances and clearly states, “I am a lesbian,” before he kisses her.
Pearce then turned his attention to the woman’s dog, announcing: “I’ll f*** that dog, I don’t give a f***, I don’t have a sexuality.”
Pearce, who was shirtless but wearing shorts, is then seen to simulate sex with the dog.
The woman tells him to stop but Pearce continues before the woman takes the dog away and tells him to leave.
Pearce again states what he would like to do to the animal. “I want to f*** your dog, I don’t even care anymore.”
The woman then suggests Pearce had also urinated on her couch.
It was a bizarre incident, but former NRL player and now Fox Sports commentator Jimmy Smith added some light on why Pearce might have done what he did.
“He describes himself as an erratic person,” Smith said on Channel 9’s A Current Affair on Thursday night.
“That’s how he described himself to us just a couple of weeks ago.
“It was almost like a premonition.”
While that’s no excuse for his behaviour, it is an interesting insight considering it came from the man himself.
Here is how everyone from the world press to the RSPCA reacted to the story that places a dark cloud over the future of one of the NRL’s biggest names.
WORLD PRESS
WRITING for New Zealand’s stuff.co.nz, Laura McQuillan pointed the finger firmly at the NRL, claiming it “tolerates bad behaviour, until it reaches a public tipping point, and teams have no choice but to sack players to save face”.
“Being a meathead — especially a drunk one —is encouraged as some sort of show of masculinity,” McQuillan added.
“Ditch the ‘boys will be boys’ mentality, and push the leaders of sporting bodies, like the NRL, to start taking some actual leadership. It’ll be a much better time — for fans, sportspeople and dogs.”
The story made headlines in country’s that would hardly realise rugby league is a sport.
Swedish national tabloid Expressen ran the headline “Star simulates sex — with a dog”.
“The rugby world is in shock after one of its most bizarre scandals ever exploded,” the report read.
Spanish daily newspaper Sport’s headline blasted: “Sex with a dog? The possible end of Pearce’s career.”
“A rugby league player for the NRL’s Sydney Roosters lost his head at a party and, after failing to kiss a woman, took her dog in a sorry episode that has come to light,” they wrote.
While in the UK, The Independent reported the incident detail before stating it had “sparked outrage in Australia”.
THE GREAT
FORMER Origin star Mark Geyer made his thoughts on the Pearce situation clear on Triple M’s The Grill Team on Thursday morning, saying the halfback should be made to step away from the game for 12 months and get a “real job”.
“I saw a bloke next level drunk. I saw a bloke with a massive problem,” Geyer said in a pre-recorded message.
“A, forcing himself on to a girl in her own home. B, incoherent saying he was both gay and Aboriginal in the same sentence. C, performing a lewd sex act on a small dog,” he continued.
“Was it the worst thing I’ve ever seen? Probably not, but it’s right up there. The blame game card can not be played any more. This is a bloke who’s 26, he’s not a rookie. This is Pearce’s fourth or fifth indiscretion.
“He needs to be taken out of the system that he joined as a kid to appreciate what he’s got. Mitchell Pearce needs help. He’s obviously powerless when affected by alcohol and can not control his behaviour. He needs to be suspended for 12 months, get a real job away from football and undergo both counselling and rehab.
“I can only imagine how his parents would be feeling today. If I saw my son on a video recording acting that way I’d kick his arse from here to Katoomba.
“Pearce needs helps and needs to be as far away from footy as possible.”
THE MAN
ANTHONY Mundine said Pearce’s actions were the reason he never touched a drink.
The former NRL star said, however, that the whole situation had been blown out of proportion.
All Mitch was doing was acting like a drunk! That's why I've never drunk or touch drugs cause it effects you negatively... Posted by Anthony Mundine on Wednesday, January 27, 2016
THE ROOSTERS
THE Sydney Roosters released a statement Thursday morning, revealing Pearce had been stood down by the club.
“The club wishes to advise that Mitchell Pearce has been stood down from all training commitments until the club concludes its internal investigation,” the Roosters said in a statement.
“The club continues to work closely with the NRL Integrity Unit and will be making no further comment at this time.”
Roosters coach Trent Robinson then appeared in front of the media shortly before 10am AEDT, but added little to the club statement other than that he had spoken to Pearce both on Wednesday and Thursday.
“The behaviour was unacceptable, we understand that,” Robinson said, but refused to comment until the investigation had taken its course.
The Daily Telegraph reported club will strip Pearce of his captaincy, fine him up to $50,000 and enforce a ban preventing him from participating the World Club Challenge in England next month.
THE NRL
UNFORTUNATELY, the National Rugby League is no stranger to incidents like this and went into damage control immediately after the report surfaced on Wednesday evening.
“The NRL has asked the Sydney Roosters for a report into an incident involving Mitchell Pearce — after the club advised the NRL about the matter,” the NRL said.
“The Integrity Unit will work with the Roosters to ensure the matter is dealt with appropriately.”
Melbourne Storm boss Dave Donaghy said it was “incredibly frustrating” from his club’s point of view.
“99.9 per cent of players actually do do the right thing in the community space. Our staff and players put a lot of hard work in the community space as well,” Donaghy told Nova 100’s Chrissie, Sam and Browny breakfast show.
“While we are flying the flag for rugby league in this market, unfortunately we get tarred with the same brush and that shouldn’t be the case.”
THE ALLAN BORDER MEDALLIST
DAVID Warner’s honour of being named Australian cricketer of the year was overshadowed by the Pearce news breaking on Wednesday night.
Asked whether he was annoyed Pearce had knocked Warner receiving the Allan Border Medal back to page four of the newspaper, the Aussie opener laughed and said he was sure Pearce would have preferred if it was Warner on page one instead.
Similarly to Mundine, Warner said athletes needed to be extremely careful in the age of the mobile phone and social media.
“It looked a bit disturbing,” Warner said on WSFM101.7’s Jonesy and Amanda breakfast show.
“It shows that today you’re never safe with mobile phones.
“Obviously I don’t condone what he did. It’s an appalling act but you look at Todd Carney as well: a couple of mates send around some videos... No one is safe and you shouldn’t carry on like that.
“I’m pretty sure he’ll be disappointed today having to see that and be embarrassed in front of a lot of people.”
THE RSPCA
RSPCA NSW chief inspector David O’Shannessy said the organisation was “appalled” by Pearce’s act but no charges would be laid.
“The RSPCA like the community are appalled by Pearce’s behaviour. Fortunately the dog’s uninjured,” he said.
“It’s disappointing someone can behave so poorly and degrade the human-animal relationship. Alcohol is not an excuse for animal cruelty.
“There’s no offences commited under the prevention of cruelty to animals act.”
1/2 - RSPCA NSW is appalled by footage showing NRL player Mitchell Pearce engaging in a lewd act with a dog on the night of January 26/27... — RSPCA NSW (@RSPCANSW) January 27, 2016
2/2 -...RSPCA NSW is investigating and anyone with additional information is urged to call 1300 CRUELTY. — RSPCA NSW (@RSPCANSW) January 27, 2016
SOCIAL
UNSURPRISINGLY, Twitter is having a field day.
Dogs when they see Mitchell Pearce be like pic.twitter.com/RN8GmsccFI — Paul Boehl (@Boehl7) January 27, 2016NextThing is a platform that helps shoppers make their online purchases WAY easier. With a specially developed algorithm, NextThing compares and analyzes millions of product reviews from actual customers, sales data from manufactures, and quality reports from across the web. We do the hard work for you by trimming down the choices to top rated products to only show you the very best products available, and at the best prices.
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Chris Pokorny of Dawgs by Nature gets us started this year with the first overall pick belonging to the Cleveland Browns. Cleveland entered the offseason with more than $100 million in salary cap room, but hasn’t signed a pass rusher. That comes despite having just 26 sacks in 2016, the second-worst total in the NFL. That’s as good of an indication as anything on where this pick is going.
1. Browns: Myles Garrett, DE, Texas A&M
Pokorny: Despite the long-standing need for a quarterback, there is no doubt that the Cleveland Browns will select Myles Garrett. He has been rated as the top prospect for a while, and delivering at the NFL Combine solidified his status as a can't-miss pick. Besides the need at quarterback, for which there isn't a worthy prospect at No. 1 overall, it also aligns with a positional need for Cleveland.
Rise ’n Grind Want NFL news and interesting links in your inbox every weekday morning? Rise ’n grind with us. Your email address Subscribe By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy and European users agree to the data transfer policy.
The team significantly addressed the offensive side of the trenches in free agency by giving left guard Joel Bitonio a lucrative contract extension, making free agent right guard Kevin Zeitler the highest-paid guard in the NFL, and adding JC Tretter to man the center position. The team has yet to upgrade the defense that ranked No. 31 in the NFL in 2016 under former defensive coordinator Ray Horton. The team's new defensive coordinator, Gregg Williams, has already been salivating over Garrett, who can inject a spark into the defense from Day One.
Analysis: Of the 64 picks that will take place in this mock draft, this is obviously the easiest one to execute. Garrett has been the top player in the draft since the start of the last college football season, and he fits one of Cleveland’s pick needs.
Top five players remaining
2. Jonathan Allen, DL, Alabama
3. Jamal Adams, S, LSU
4. Malik Hooker, S, Ohio State
5. Marshon Lattimore, CB, Ohio State
6. Solomon Thomas, DE, Stanford
Browns picks
1-1: Myles Garrett, DE, Texas A&M
1-12: (coming March 30)
2-33: (coming April 10)
2-52: (coming April 19)
Our next pick of the day is coming up at noon ET via David Fucillo from our San Francisco 49ers site Niners Nation.
Poll What grade do you give the pick of Myles Garrett? This poll is closed. 80% A (8559 votes)
11% B (1240 votes)
3% C (324 votes)
1% D (106 votes)
3% F (362 votes) 10591 votes total Vote Now
How the NFL Draft became such a big dealIt's funny watching all the Bush administration alums on Fox despairing over the necessity of outreach to the Hispanic community. (Also at PJ Media, "Yes, George W. Bush Might Well Be the Last Republican President.") These were the same people who refused to "dignify" the rabid coordinated leftist attacks on President Bush with a response. It would "just prolong the story," they told us.
We are still suffering from their failure to understand the left and fight back, as seen by the fact that Ohio exit polls showed voters still blamed Bush for the bad economy. That's what I call prolonging a story.
All the talk about "appealing" to Hispanics by rewarding the lawlessness of illegal immigration is another example of some Republicans failing to understand the enemy on the left. Racial interest groups beholden to the Democrat Party will not stand down simply because the Republican Party endorses a form of amnesty. To hope that Hispanics will politically drift to the GOP after immigration concessions overlooks the racial stranglehold groups like the NAACP and La Raza (yes, "The Race") have over political dialogue and organizing.
I saw the same Bush-era racial naivete play out in 2006 when Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act was up for renewal. Many in the GOP viewed the renewal as a "chance to reach out to minorities." Sound familiar?
The Bush administration and the then-chairman of the House Judiciary Committee deliberately decided to give the NAACP and the other racial groups whatever they wanted in the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act. The offer was accepted and the NAACP and MALDEF asked for the reversal of two Supreme Court cases by statute that had the effect of allowing "any" discriminatory effect to justify an objection to a law under the Voting Rights Act. (I have written about the complicated legal changes extensively here at PJ Media and will not do so again in this post.) This 2006 change was directly responsible for blocking voter ID laws in Texas and South Carolina in 2010 and citizenship verification laws in Georgia in 2009.
The Republicans were proud of their minority outreach in the summer of 2006. President Bush signed the law in a White House ceremony with the race hustler Al Sharpton and other familiar faces in attendance. Surely this "outreach" would buy peace for the Republicans, right?
Wrong. No sooner had the ink dried on the paper than all of the race groups turned on President Bush. The next two years heard a constant drumbeat in the media and from some of the same people invited to the signing ceremony that Bush was an "enemy of minority rights." The racial groups were particularly venomous toward the administration.NADA NEW YORK 2017
It’s no secret that art and activism go hand and hand—artists are not ones to shy away from questioning and critiquing social and political structures. Reflecting on this spring’s art fairs, it’s clear that onset of a new, uneasy era has spurred an emergence of blatantly political art. At New Art Dealers Alliance or NADA, this was a recurring theme— evident by the work itself, and the fact that 50% of profits were donated to the ACLU.
This year, NADA hosted their fair at Skylight Clarkson North, a drastic change from their previous, much smaller venue on the east side. The increase in square footage allowed for comfortable gallery booths as well as an expansive performance space. For me, the most exciting works mixed playfulness with maturity— cumulating a strong sense of identity in a time of crisis.
[ + ] NADA NEW YORK 2017 [Official] [Exhibitors] [Facebook] [Instagram]
// JENNY HOLZER AT ALDEN PROJECTS
There’s no one more political than Jenny Holzer, and her Inflammatory Essays don’t hold back in the slightest bit. They are caustic, candid, and totally obliterate the concept of the patriarchy. Anyone with an interest in art has likely seen them before, but their inclusion at NADA wasn’t the least bit redundant— instead, it was a reminder that her words are still just as valid today.
// MERIEM BENNANI AT SIGNAL GALLERY
If there’s advertisements for seasonal clothing, why not seasonal hijab’s? Meriem Bennani answers this question with her ad for the “funjab”. Although lighthearted and witty, she addresses a serious subject. Bennani takes an article of clothing that has been the subject of absurd discourse and contempt, and reclaims it by placing it in a sphere of normalcy.
// ALEX EAGLETON AT SAFE GALLERY
Upon approaching Safe Gallery’s booth at the NADA fair, you may have noticed something very different right off the bat. Firstly, upon entering you are met with a baby pink carpet that exudes a cheap, suburban sadness. Then you probably noticed the colorful bongs scattered across the floor. The entire scene is pretty symbolic, but also incredibly playful and honest.
// JOHN EDMONDS AT LTD LOS ANGELES
It’s hard to ignore soul-bearing work of John Edmonds, which made him a standout at NADA (deservingly so). His series titled Du-rags features multiple portraits of black men in du-rags, anonymous figures representing black culture and masculinity. This series is a follow up to his previous work that featured men in hoodies, a nod to a major material symbol of racial profiling and police brutality.
// MAX MASLANSKY AT DUTTON GALLERY
What might look like a soft, romantic painting, is completely subverted by the ingenious stylings of Max Maslansky. He recreates pornographic photos by painting directly on bedsheets— mimicking stains left behind by lovers. This work features a dominating female figure illuminated by warm colors and a vibrant innocence.
// WENDY WHITE AT RAWSON PROJECTS
It doesn’t get more raw and relatable than a collage of thrashed denim and camel cigarettes. Reimagining materials that are perhaps the most familiar to us, Wendy White transforms the most common components into a charming, crafty collage. It’s a relief from the hodge-podge of abstractism that can feel tiring and inaccessible.
// JOSH MANNIS AT ERIC HUSSENOT
Hussenot’s painting, which features a group of terrified female figures is jam packed with contextualized references. For starters, there’s the not-so-subtle symbols of the white house and the assault rifle in the background. Accompanied by women clutching each other in complete terror, the connotation here presented by Josh Mannis is anything but understated.
Photos © Gillian Nelson. All Rights Reserved.The American Legion and the Boy Scouts denounced it. The New York Times called it “nightmarish and bloodcurdling.” And after it incited a near riot in a local theater, the city of Memphis banned it. 50 years ago, when The Blackboard Jungle hit screens across the country, the controversial opening salvo of the film was a shot of amplified fury called “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and the Comets.
Music historians may disagree about who recorded the first rock ’n’ roll song (Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88” and Fats Domino’s “The Fat Man” are two leading contenders), but there’s no doubt about what record punched an electric guitar–shaped hole in the society at large.
Bill Haley was an unlikely rock ’n’ roll hero. Born July 6, 1925 in Highland Park, Michigan to musical parents, he became known as a teenage yodeler, then worked for a time as a DJ. In his 20s, he led a country swing band and had his sights set on becoming the next Gene Autry. It was one of his band members, a Philly kid named Joey Ambrose, who introduced Haley to rhythm and blues. By the early 1950s, Haley had cut two songs, “Crazy Man Crazy” and “Rock the Joint,” that pointed the way to his future. He’d also started wearing the Brylcreem spit curl that would become an iconic image of early rock ’n’ roll.
“Rock Around the Clock,” copyrighted in 1952, is credited to Max C. Freedman and Jimmy DeKnight, whose real name was James Myers. Myers, a publisher and hustler who “dabbled” in songwriting, had collaborated with Haley on a few tunes in the late 1940s when the singer was with the Saddlesmen. According to what Myers told NPR in 2000, he had “most of the song written” when Freedman helped him finish it. Freedman, who died in 1962, wasn’t around to dispute that account, but others, including founding Comets member Johnny Grande told NPR, “Freedman wrote the song.” Whether Myers pulled an Irving Mills and put his name on it, in a publishing arrangement, we may never be known.
But without Myers, the song may never have been recorded. He championed it, pitching it first to his old friend Bill Haley. At the time, Haley was recording for the Essex label, a company owned by Dave Miller. “Myers and Miller didn’t like each other,” Haley recalled in his biography. “Three times I took the tune in the recording studio. Every time Miller would see it, he’d come in and tear it up and throw it away.”
While Haley played the song in his live set, another act, Sonny Dae and His Knights, cut the first record on it. It went nowhere. By then, Myers had landed a new deal for Haley with Decca. Milt Gabler, the man behind all the great Louis Jordan sides of the early 1950s, was slated to produce the sessions.
On April 12, 1954, Haley and the Comets were booked into the Pythian Temple studio, a converted Masonic temple in downtown New York, to record two songs—“Thirteen Women” and “Rock Around the Clock.” That afternoon, the band got stranded in the Delaware River when their ferry ran aground. They arrived at the studio hours late, with time running out.
Milt Gabler had a stake in the publishing of “Thirteen Women,” so he spent most of the session on it. Two takes were cut on the B-side, with Haley shouting out his vocal above the raucous joy of the band. Comets bass player Marshall Lytle recalled in Haley’s bio, “We spent two-and-a-half hours on the A-side and 30 minutes on the B-side, and in 30 minutes, we came up with what is now the anthem of rock ’n’ roll.”
An explosive snare drum, a thumping bass, a spirited vocal—there were several magical elements to this two-minute, eight-second recording, but what really gave it a jolt of electricity was Danny Cedrone’s |
DNA test with conventional screening. The researchers tested one type of DNA test, offered by Ariosa Diagnostics, but other companies market similar tests.
The researchers found that the new test correctly identified more Down cases—with far fewer false positives—than standard screening that combines blood tests with an ultrasound exam.
The DNA test identified all 38 cases of Down syndrome and produced only nine false positives (0.06 percent). Standard screening identified 30 of the 38 cases of Down syndrome and produced 854 false positives (5.4 percent).
About 3 percent of the DNA tests did not produce a result, often because the fraction of fetal DNA in the blood sample was too low. These participants had a higher frequency of Down syndrome cases as well as other chromosomal abnormalities, and further study is needed to determine the best approach for these patients.
Before the DNA test can be widely introduced into the clinic, the study’s authors say that people’s expectations of the test should be carefully considered. The test is highly accurate at detecting Down syndrome and other conditions with extra chromosomes, but standard screening and diagnostic testing can identify a broader array of abnormalities not detectable with the cell-free DNA test.NRA Plan Is So Dumb That 1/3 of Public Schools Already Use It
On December 21, NRA President Wayne LaPierre issued a statement on the Newtown shootings. He proposed armed security on staff at all US schools.
The liberal media blasted LaPierre for proposing cops in public schools but forgot that Bill Clinton proposed the same thing back in 2000…
And one third of all public schools already use it.
National Review reported:
Nationwide, at least 23,000 schools — about one-third of all public schools — already had armed security on staff as of the most recent data, for the 2009-10 school year, and a number of states and districts that do not use them have begun discussing the idea in recent days…
Related… Via Instapundit: Gun Restrictions Have Always Bred Defiance, Black MarketsThe Texas state director of Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush's young donor program has quit and is planning to join the campaign of Democrat Martin O'Malley.
Shooter Russell, a University of Texas sophomore who since June had held the formal role with Bush's "Mission: NEXT program," told the Houston Chronicle he made the switch because of the GOP's opposition to people fleeing war-torn Syria.
"The final nail in the coffin were Trump's comments on Muslims, the inaction by the party, and our very own state's actions on blocking Syrian refugees," said Russell, who added that he has cousins who do mission work in the Middle East.
As state director, Russell said he oversaw about 80 volunteers at 15 chapters across the state, set up phone-banking plans and helped organize an event featuring Bush's son, Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush. Now, he said, he is planning to travel to Iowa to campaign for O'Malley, a former governor of Maryland who is far behind in the polls.
The abrupt change in loyalty may invite comparisons to CJ Pearson, the YouTube star from Texas who endorsed GOP U.S. Sens. Ted Cruz and Rand Paul before recently announcing his support for Democrat Bernie Sanders. Russell had a more formal role with the Bush campaign than Pearson had with Cruz or Paul, however.
The defection is the latest sign of the troubled campaign of Bush, a former governor of Florida and son and brother of presidents. Bush was the early front-runner for the nomination, but has struggled. A recent poll in his home state of Texas put his support at 4 percent.
The campaign did not return a message seeking comment.T-Mobile
T-Mobile is giving its smartphone upgrade a serious boost.
The upstart wireless carrier on Thursday introduced a new program that will allow customers to upgrade their smartphones whenever they want, up to three times a year. That stands in contrast with traditional plans that allow you to upgrade only after you've paid off a portion of your phone or after your two-year contract is up.
But Jump On Demand, which kicks off on June 28, has a few catches of its own: You have to purchase a new smartphone to join the program, so many existing T-Mobile customers can't walk in and demand an upgrade on Sunday. When you opt to upgrade, you need to turn your existing smartphone in. Also, only select flagship smartphones like the Apple iPhone 6, Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge, and LG G4 will be available for upgrades, although the company hinted at more products down the line.
It's the latest promotion from a company that's made a flurry of moves in its Uncarrier drive to attract customers from rivals. So far, it's proven effective, with T-Mobile's growth in customers who pay at the end of each month -- a lucrative demographic known as postpaid subscribers -- outstripping that of the rest of the national players. T-Mobile, the nation's fourth-largest wireless carrier, teased that there would be more promotions to come this summer.
The first promotion under the company's new "Uncarrier Amped" campaign, Jump On Demand also comes amid a renewed sense of competition in the wireless industry, with No. 3 Sprint, which had been steadily losing customers over the last two years, far more active in marketing and promotions in recent quarters. The activity between the two smaller players -- essentially at a dead heat when it comes to total subscribers -- has drawn the attention of the big two, Verizon Wireless and AT&T. The result: more deals and better packages of data for consumers.
T-Mobile
Jump On Demand requires customers to make monthly payments on a smartphone for 18 months. After 18 months, you can turn in your smartphone and leave the service, upgrade to another phone for a new plan or make a final payment, which is the equivalent of the final six months of payments, and keep the device. The other benefit is the elimination of upfront costs and taxes that T-Mobile customers had to pay with its typical monthly installment plans.
"This is a really big move for us," T-Mobile Chief Operating Officer Mike Sievert said in an interview. "Providing this kind of flexibility is expensive and difficult, but we think it's worth it."
The program is a mix of an equipment installment plan and the leasing plan pioneered by Sprint. Sprint has won over customers with its own leasing program, which charges $20 a month, but allows you to swap out for a new smartphone every 24 months (a pricier plan allows you to upgrade even faster).
"Jump on Demand is T-Mobile's way of getting into the device-leasing business while simultaneously satisfying customers who desire easier, more frequent smartphone upgrades," said Tammy Parker, an analyst at Current Analysis.
The announcement represents an upgrade over its existing smartphone upgrade program, called Jump, which is still an option for consumers. Jump originally allowed you to upgrade your smartphone after 12 months, or after you've paid off half the cost of the device. The program cost $10 a month extra, but came with insurance.
Jump On Demand sheds the $10-a-month fee, but drops the insurance component too. Customers can pay $8 a month for insurance.
The original Jump was the second Uncarrier program announced two years ago. It was one of the first significant moves T-Mobile made to shake up the industry. After Jump launched, AT&T and Verizon Wireless followed suit with their own upgrade programs.
But last month, Verizon killed off the ability to upgrade your smartphone early, instead requiring customers to pay off the cost of the entire device before making a switch. Under a monthly payment program, that can take as long as 24 months. At the time, Verizon said the move was made to simplify the purchasing process.
Sievert called out Verizon specifically when criticizing the "knock-off upgrade programs" that have slowly walked back their key benefits. Verizon wasn't available for comment.
As with other replacement programs, the smartphone has to be in good working order in order to qualify for a trade-in. But you can't just bring in any smartphone and get an upgrade -- you need to sign up for a new phone and enter the program.
Customers on the existing Jump program can use their upgrade to get into Jump on Demand. Anyone who wants to sign up will have to go to a T-Mobile store initially, although Sievert said the company plans to expand the option to other retailers and its website soon.
In addition, T-Mobile said it is offering a promotional offer of $15 a month for the base model of the iPhone 6. The deal goes after Sprint's own $20-a-month plan.
"We think it's the best deal that has ever been offered on an iPhone," Sievert said.
Updated at 7:03 a.m. PT: Included additional background, along with comment from T-Mobile and an analyst.John Kettler Is In The Hospital!
ATTENTION EVERYONE!
John has been going through a very stressful, complicated and unexpected move. He was just settling into his new place when he had a slip and fall accident. He hit is head very hard. Being the typical guy, he didn’t want to go to the doctor but fortunately, friends convinced him to call 911. It’s good they did, because it turns out he did some real damage to himself. John has bleeding on the brain and presumably a concussion of some kind.
Right now he is in the ICU. At least some of his family members are with him. The report I just got is that he is stable, but that’s all I know. Until I talk to John or his family, we will not release any info about where he is hospitalized, his specific condition or prognosis.
Please think good thoughts, send your prayers and good wishes, and watch this post for updates. Sunfire and I will add more when we know more.
— The Webmaster
UPDATE 6:00 P.M. PST: I spoke with John’s brother a while ago. The prognosis as far as can be determined at this point is good. No serious damage, but full test results come back tomorrow. John is resting and seems to be doing a bit better. Keep those good thoughts, vibes and prayers coming, everybody! It means the world to John!!!
— The Webmaster
UPDATE 4:00 P.M. PST (Tuesday): Just got off the phone with John. His voice was strong, all things considered. He is still in the ICU, but he is doing much better. The doc’s think he can leave tomorrow, but we won’t know for sure till then. He wanted everybody to know how much he appreciates all the kind thoughts, comments and good wishes. Keep ’em coming! 🙂
It turns out he had a sort-of “out of body” experience in the hours after hitting his head, which explains (in part) why he didn’t immediately get himself looked at. He was in quite an altered state of consciousness. Perhaps John will describe it in a post. Special thanks to Gwen for insisting he call 911 and get himself checked out.
I’ll report more as it develops, but hopefully we’ll all hear from the man himself in the next 24-48 hours.
— The Webmaster
UPDATE 2:45 P.M. PST (Wednesday): Good news! John was released from the hospital today. He is back at his new place (scene of the accident, so to speak) and resting. He sounded good but very tired and a bit medicated. I encouraged him to take it easy.
The prognosis appears to be good. The injury was bad but not bad enough they had to crack his head open. It’s amazing how much damage you can do to yourself when you really try. He is already talking about new projects, so that is a good sign.
John indicated he will try and get back in the swing of things tomorrow. He was scheduled for a radio appearance then, but we’ll see if it comes off. It depends on how he feels in the morning. Once again, he expressed thanks to everybody for all the love and support, as do Sunfire and myself.
— The Webmaster
NOTE: I characterized John’s accident as “slip and fall,” which isn’t exactly right. What actually happened was more like “stumble and slam” or something like that. I’m sure John will regale us with the details eventually.
SHARE IT!Inside Jenny McCarthy's'sophisticated' Playboy shoot: Blonde bombshell channels Old Hollywood as she poses topless
She says that her Playboy snaps are 'classy and sophisticated' and compared them to a photo-spread which you might find in famed fashion magazine W.
And now a first inside shot of Jenny McCarthy in the popular men's magazine has been revealed.
The 39-year-old model is seen channelling old Hollywood as she poses topless in the image, which has been censored by the Mailonline.
Blonde bombshell: Jenny McCarthy channels Old Hollywood in an inside snap from her recent Playboy shoot
The mother-of-one has her platinum blonde locks coiffed in a wavy, slightly 1920s style, and her pout is painted in glossy red lipstick.
Her complexion flawless, the actress and TV host also has a slight smoky eye.
This week Jenny - who has posed for the men's magazine six times - said that she believes nudity is very prevalent in modern day society and is not worried her 10-year-old son Evan will see the pictures of her without clothes on.
She said: 'I think he can find a lot worse available on the Internet these days.
Elegant: Jenny said she's overjoyed with her nude Playboy cover, which she said is 'classy and sophisticated' - the issue hits newsstands Friday
'I think people make such a big deal sometimes about it, when I feel like it just comes down to how you raise your child and how you explain things to your kid.'
However, Jenny - who is currently dating sports star Brian Urlacher - is coy about showing off the images in her home and does not like to display them for all to see.
She told People : 'I don't have one magazine cover up, period.
Model mom: Jenny takes her son Evan along to a Pilates class in Sherman Oaks, California 'I mean, I don't even have my Rolling Stone cover up. It's like, who wants to look at themselves? I don't. Seriously, the only picture I have up of myself is one of a shark eating Evan and me.' Jenny has previously spoken of her pride at seeing her cover.
Action replay: Jenny's 1994 Playboy cover - she has featured on the cover six times 'I'm really proud of it. The pictures are really gorgeous and classy. They could be out of W magazine. 'They're really elegant. It's probably a lot more sophisticated than a lot of the stuff you'd see of people with their clothes on,'she told the U.S publication.
And preparing for the naked shoot was a little intense for the TV personality than you might expect.
She said: 'The one thing I like about Playboy is they don't have the anorexic look.
'The women are voluptuous.
'So I didn't really want to diet. I just wanted to tone up.' The model-and-actress started her career with a shoot in Playboy's October 1993 issue and she went onto to be named Playmate of the Month and later Playmate of the Year in 1994 and has appeared in the magazine several times.
Jenny turns 40 in November and she previously admitted she wanted to bare all in the magazine one more time before she reached the landmark age.
Showbiz roundup! 'Biebolitics', Katy needs MEAT & Madonna busting out...veinsFrom today, around a million workers will benefit from a rise in the minimum wage. Their earnings won't go up by much – a rise of 11p per hour is actually a pay cut in real terms. And as for young people working for the minimum wage, those that have jobs at all, they aren't likely to get any pay rise at all.
The small increase in the minimum wage is symptomatic of what's happening to wages across the economy. For the last three years, wages have been falling in real terms, as the cost of living outstrips paltry pay rises. TUC research out this week estimates that the average worker on £26,000 is around £1,500 poorer than they were three years ago.
Listening to government ministers you'd think it was the old foes of red tape and bloated public services that were holding the economy back. But neither of these were much of a brake in the decades running up to the financial crash.
A far better way to assess the poor health of the economy is to look at consumer spending – the main driver of economic growth in the UK. Here, falling wages, tax rises and cuts to tax credits are making people poorer. We are all spending less money as the country is gripped in the tightest squeeze on living standards since the 1920s.
The origins of this income squeeze go back far longer than the financial crash. The proportion of economic gains going on wages has been falling for 30 years. Over the last few decades this was covered up by strong employment growth, new support such as tax credits and rising personal debt. This support is unlikely to continue into the next decade.
Of course some have been immune to this squeeze. The pay of those at the top soared away during the boom and has failed to come back down to Earth after the crash.
Now that we're all feeling the effects of a failed executive pay culture based on short-termism and stock market bubbles, we need to re-examine the way we set pay from the bottom to the very top of business.
The twin track of wage growth since the turn of the century is illustrated by a statistic calculated by One Society, which found that if the minimum wage had increased at the same rate as the pay of FTSE 100 directors since its introduction in 1999, it would now be almost £19 an hour, rather than its current rate of £6.19.
This tells us just how out of control pay at the top is and how hard life is for those struggling along at the bottom.
We will hear lots of plans for growth during the party conference season. But the issue that the TUC – and the vast majority of ordinary working people, I suspect – want to hear more about from all parties is pay.
Wages are fundamental to our economic recovery. We need decent pay to lift people out of poverty, helped by a higher minimum wage and a more widespread living wage. We need a better chance of a comfortable income for those in the middle, helped by encouraging more skilled jobs in growing industries. We need fairer wages for those in the boardroom, with employees having a seat on remuneration boards and packages that run in line with the long-term health of a company and not its short-term share price. And, of course, we need strong unions and more collective bargaining. That is the best way to ensure that all workers get the level of pay they deserve and that employers can afford, and so build a stronger and fairer economy for the future.The Philadelphia 76ers entered Wednesday's action as the league's sole remaining winless team, at 0-11, and with the NBA's eighth-worst defense, allowing 104.2 points per 100 possessions. It's hard to blame them for trying something new to increase their chances of stopping the opposition; unfortunately, the rules say you're only allowed to play five dudes at a time.
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Following a 20-second timeout late in the second quarter of Wednesday's home game against the Indiana Pacers, the Sixers broke the huddle and headed out to the court, with Nerlens Noel, Robert Covington, Hollis Thompson, Jerami Grant and Phil Pressey taking the floor in hopes of reducing a nine-point deficit. Unfortunately, as they did so, rookie big man Jahlil Okafor joined them.
That's six dudes. That's one too many dudes. And since Indiana had already inbounded the ball to trigger live game action, that's a problem. Specifically, it's a technical foul, giving the Pacers a technical free throw. He made it, extending the lead to 10 and leaving head coach Brett Brown — who very understandably seems to be hanging on by a very thin thread right now — looking defeated on the sidelines.
Again, though, it's difficult to throw stones at him. I mean, when the Sixers just let five players try to defend George and the Pacers, stuff like this happens to Nik Stauskas:
[Follow Dunks Don't Lie on Tumblr: The best slams from all of basketball]
Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right? (Not that there's much being gained in Philly these days anyway.)
Story continues
Things got demonstrably worse for the Sixers from there. Brown's club had no answers for George, who finished with 34 points on 13-for-24 shooting, including a 5-for-10 mark from 3-point range, to go with eight rebounds, five assists and four steals in 32 minutes of work. When the 76ers had the ball, they once again just could not stop shooting themselves in the foot, logging 29 turnovers (and 31 total team turnovers) that led to a whopping 37 Pacer points in a 112-85 rout. It's the first 29-turnover outing in nearly 11 years, according to Basketball-Reference.com.
Philly trailed by 20 or more points for the final 21-plus minutes of the contest, which, sadly, is becoming an all-too-common occurrence:
76ers in the 2nd half of games this season Minutes played when leading by any margin: 14 Minutes played when trailing by 20 or more: 58 — ESPN Stats & Info (@ESPNStatsInfo) November 19, 2015
The 76ers now stand at 0-12, drawing within six defeats of matching the 2009-10 New Jersey Nets for the longest losing streak ever to start a season. If you include last season, they've lost 22 straight games, drawing them within two losses of tying the 1981-82/1982-83 Cleveland Cavaliers for the third longest overall losing streak in NBA history. That's the kind of thing that makes you think they should be allowed an extra man for at least part of the proceedings.
Even Sixers backers conditioned to approach the systematic multi-year sink-to-the-bottom rebuild pitched by general manager Sam Hinkie and signed off on by ownership seem to be losing faith:
A #76ers fan just now yelled: “Where’s the process?! What can we trust?!" — Candace Buckner (@CandaceDBuckner) November 19, 2015
Well, if nothing else, it seems you can trust that refs will notice when you try to check in six guys out of a timeout, and T you up for it.
Hat-tip to CBSSports.com's James Herbert.
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don't Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at devine@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter!
Stay connected with Ball Don't Lie on Twitter @YahooBDL, "Like" BDL on Facebook and follow Dunks Don't Lie on Tumblr for year-round NBA talk, jokes and more.Tom Hardy, Jacob Tomuri and Paul Anderson wear their Raven Clan shirts (Picture: Tom Hardy Dot Org)
We all know Tom Hardy loves dogs, but it seems there’s another animal that the action star is a fan of.
So much so that he’s apparently set up a ‘raven clan’ to show his appreciation for the black bird.
Really you ask? Well, the signs of his feathered appreciation are all there.
First a raven tattoo on his left pectoral, then the appearance of the winged creature on a number of his self-designed apparel for BLAG.
Tom’s custom-made raven e-cigarette by Crux London (Picture: blu eCigs)
He also wore a raven pin to the UK premiere of Child 44 on the front of his tie.
Now he’s just ordered a special e-cigarette with a raven on it from celebrity jeweller Crux London.
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Tom has asked for a custom-made camouflage design made from three shades of silver and titanium and engraved with the bird.
Bargain at £1,000.
Tatt’s nice (Picture/ Tumblr)
According to one fansite, Tom’s love of ravens is something shared with his The Revenant co-stars Paul Anderson, Jake Tomuri and Lukas Haas, and was also influenced by the Pilgrims Group which is ‘an international security specialist society which escorted the actor and Olly Williams into Afghanistan on their extensive research trip there Samarkand.’
And judging by the Mad Max Fury Road star’s Tumblr, they’re not off the mark.
Someone send Tom a raven and tell him we want to join!Fast Fiber Plastics and hemp make for a strong, light, fuel-efficient body. Motive Industries
Steven Kotler
PopSci
Marijuana’s fibrous cousin hemp has a long history with auto makers. in 1941 Henry Ford unveiled a car body made primarily out of organic fibers, hemp included. seventy years later, the world’s first production-ready biocomposite electric car—with hemp as the “bio”—will finally hit the streets. The Kestrel, a three-door hatchback, is made of a “hemp composite as strong as the fiberglass in boats, yet incredibly lightweight,” says Nathan Armstrong, the president of Motive industries, Kestrel’s manufacturer.
Whereas a comparably sized Ford Fusion weighs 3,720 pounds, the Kestrel will be just 2,500 pounds with the battery. this “might be the sweet spot for electric vehicles,” Armstrong says, because the car’s low tonnage means a fuel-efficiency increase of 25 to 30 percent.
To make this resilient, lightweight compound, hemp stalks are combed and rolled into a mat that is infused with a polymer resin. the hemp makes the biocomposite’s flexibility similar to the carbon fiber used in racecars.
Hemp grows fast and it’s cheap, which should keep the Kestrel’s production price around $25,000. A prototype is nearly complete, Armstrong says, and Motive plans to have thousands of its hemp-mobiles on the road by 2012.The freshman Republican senator from Arkansas was responding to Javad Zarif’s recent comments on the emerging nuclear deal between the United States and Iran. A United Nations resolution would provide sanctions relief to Iran after negotiators reached an agreement in June, Zarif said, “whether Sen. Cotton likes it or not.”
Just a few months into his first term, Cotton has become one of the most visible critics of the Obama administration’s handling of Iran policy. In March, Cotton spearheaded a letter signed by himself and 46 other Republican senators to Iranian leaders warning them that even if the two nations reached an agreement to curb Iran’s nuclear program, Congress — or a future president — could change or revoke the accord. Cotton’s decision to pen the letter and go around collecting his colleagues’ signatures was an unusual move — especially for a freshman senator, who are traditionally meant “to be seen, and not heard.” It triggered days of backlash from the administration, Democrats, and even a few Republicans.
(RELATED: Tom Cotton Is Taking the Biggest Risk of His Career. But It Could Reap Huge Rewards.)
Cotton’s tweets to Zarif are a rather unusual move for a senator, too. And they indicate that Cotton doesn’t plan to let go of the in-your-face strategy he has built in a few short months for being heard on and off the Hill about foreign policy. The fact that he’s a new senator doesn’t appear to faze him, either. “I think this question is not a matter of how long someone has been in the Senate or the Congress or how long [someone] has been serving in the government,” Cotton told reporters earlier this month, “but who is right and who is wrong about this matter.”Barcelona would not be Barcelona without the work of two titans of the Modernista movement—Lluís Domènech i Montaner and the more famous Antoni Gaudí. From the Hospital Sant Pau to the Sagrada Familia, their colorful, nature-inspired, trippy works of art continue to enchant.
While Montaner was certainly a master, it was Gaudí’s work that made the Modernista movement world-renowned. His buildings made the phrase “attention to detail” seem like an understatement. At Palau Guell, for instance, he seamlessly blended masterworks of iron, wood, glass, and tile into a private home, the likes of which the world had never seen. His Barcelona masterpiece, Sagrada Familia, which is still under construction, is mind-numbing in large part because it’s hard to fathom how a building so awe-inspiring in size can be simultaneously unforgettable for its minute details. Sadly, his life ended in tragedy in 1926, as he was struck at age 73 by a tram, and because of his clothing (Gaudí dressed in clothes often described as rags) he did not receive immediate care and died.
Then, in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War, his studio and his papers were destroyed in a fire. However, in 1956 his former assistant put together a monograph showing that the Catalan master had once hoped to bring some of his architectural sparkle to New York City’s skyline with a futuristic curved tower that would have been the tallest in the world.
Joan Matamala Flotats was a sculptor whose father, Lorenzo Matamala y Pinyol had been the main model-maker and sculptor for the Sagrada Familia. In 1956 Matamala the son published a 64-page monograph titled “Cuando el Nuevo Continente llamaba a Gaudí (When the New World called Gaudí) (1908-1911).” The monograph revealed for the first time a proposal for a monumental hotel tower in Manhattan.
In May 1908, the story goes, two U.S. businessmen visited Gaudí in Barcelona to convince him to design a hotel for New York City. One of the businessmen was supposedly the president of the New York and New Jersey Railroad Company (and future Treasury secretary), William Gibbs McAdoo.
The building that Gaudí proposed was unlike anything New York’s cast-iron Beaux-Arts skyline had seen.
Dubbed the Hotel Attraction (according to Matamala’s recollection), Gaudí proposed a parabolic skyscraper towering over the city at 360 meters. It would have been the tallest building in the world until the completion of the Empire State Building. The central parabolic tower would be surrounded by domed towers merged into its side giving it what I can only describe as a very tall version of Dugtrio from Pokémon.
There would have been rooms in the domed towers and restaurants in the central tower. The top of the tower would feature a room clocking in at roughly 400 feet tall, which would have featured a 30-foot copy of the Statue of Liberty. On the outside on top of this hall, a giant star, dubbed a “sphere of all space” by Matamala, would have allowed views of Manhattan for 30 tourists at a time. The restaurant level was made up by the conjoined towers clocking in at 50-feet high and were meant to represent five of the continents and could each seat 400. The whole tower would have been clad in kaleidoscopic colors of marble and polychrome tile.
The exact location for the proposed tower is unknown, but a group of architects and historians argued that it was intended for the site of the first World Trade Center towers and put it forward for the Ground Zero memorial design competition in 2003. Needless to say, it was not chosen.
As befits a mysterious project like this, there are a number of theories as to why the hotel was never built. Some believe it was the budget that would have been required, or that it was the amount of time (an estimated eight years) it would have taken to complete. Others with a greater flair for the dramatic argue that it was canceled because Gaudí fell sick, or that his political leanings meant he did not like that the hotel was for the wealthy.
In 1971, the monograph was bought by Professor Juan Bassegoda i Nonell, the now deceased former curator of the Real Catedra Gaudí at the University of Barcelona. Included in the monograph were multiple sketches of the plans attributed to Gaudí. Matamala, who would have been a teenager toiling away in Gaudí’s studio at the time of the plan, also made ten drawings of his own based on his memory of what Gaudí was working on. Bassegoda told the New York Times in 2003 that ''for 40 years I have been studying Gaudí's works, and I am sure the drawings are authentic.’' While various architectural historians knew about the project (Clovis Prevost and Robert Descharnes had written about it in their 1969 book about Gaudí), the full extent of the monograph wasn’t revealed to the public until 1989 when Bassegoda published it.
When Gaudí graduated from architecture school, its director famously declared: “I do not know if we have awarded this degree to a madman or to a genius; only time will tell.” More than a century removed from his death, Gaudí’s plans for Manhattan are a reminder that the two aren’t mutually exclusive.
This is part of our weekly series, Lost Masterpieces, about the greatest buildings and works of art that were destroyed or never completed.Full-time faculty members at Ohio public institutions are objecting to proposed legislation with big implications for their right to organize unions. Tucked deep into a 3,090-page budget bill pending before the state’s House Finance Committee is language that would reclassify professors who participate in virtually anything other than teaching and research as supervisors or managers, and therefore exempt from collective bargaining. So serving on a committee, for example, turns a professor into a manager.
The language is nearly identical to another, ultimately failed piece of state-level legislation from four years ago, but faculty members consider the new bill a serious threat -- and they’re warning legislators of the possible consequences of its success.
“What would happen if this passes, I think, is that faculty would choose simply not to do service and without that, universities would grind to a halt,” said John McNay, chair of the history department at the University of Cincinnati’s Blue Ash campus and president of the Ohio conference of the American Association of University Professors. “People ought to be aware that we volunteer to do those things.”
Earlier this week, state legislators introduced new language into the massive budget bill redefining what it means to be a supervisory or management-level faculty member at a public institution. The proposed legislation, Substitute House Bill 64, says that in addition to designated supervisors such as division and department heads, “any faculty member or group of faculty members that participate in decisions with respect to courses, curriculum, personnel or other matters of academic or institutional policy are supervisors or management-level employees.”
The bill also says that “any faculty who, individually or through a faculty senate or like organization, participate in the governance of the institution, are involved in personnel decisions, selection or review of administrators, and determination of educational policies related to admissions, curriculum, subject matter and methods of instruction and research are management-level employees.”
McNay, who testified against the bill during a hearing at the Ohio Statehouse Thursday, said he thought the bill demonstrated a serious lack of understanding about how universities function. Faculty members do have a certain degree of authority regarding the institution’s academic mission -- for good reason -- but that rarely extends to other kinds of decisions, he said.
“If, for example, a history department is going to hire someone to teach the Cold War, should the director of admissions decide on the qualifications of that individual?” he said. “The reason faculty members are involved in these decisions is that institutions need their expertise.”
Simply put, he said, professors aren't managers. Asked how that opinion squared with the longstanding legal precedent against tenure-line faculty unions at private institutions stemming from the 1980 U.S. Supreme Court decision Yeshiva v. NLRB -- in which the court determined that tenure-line faculty members are managers and therefore not entitled to collective bargaining -- McNay said that ruling was “unfair” and also misinterpreted the faculty role. And the authority of the tenure-line faculty member at many institutions has only eroded since 1980, he said.
Whatever one thinks of the Yeshiva ruling, it applies only to private higher education. Collective bargaining at public colleges and universities is governed by state law, and Ohio is a state with considerable faculty unionization in the public sector.
Rudy Fichtenbaum, president of the national AAUP and a professor of economics at Wright State University in Ohio, called the bill “a major threat” and a thinly veiled attack on unions and faculty generally that’s part of a national trend.
“Certainly we know that what faculty do through shared governance does not amount to real decision-making authority,” Fichtenbaum said. “In light of what’s been happening in Wisconsin, where there have been calls for the outright abolition of tenure and shared governance, it’s pretty clear what these legislators are after. This amounts to a declaration of war on the faculty.”
It’s not only full-time faculty who oppose the bill. Matt Williams, a part-time faculty activist in Ohio who stopped adjuncting 10 years ago due to the low pay and poor job security, said a decades-old prohibition against part-time faculty unionization in his state already has disempowered the majority of the teaching force there.
“We know what public higher education looks like in the absence of collective bargaining for the faculty,” Williams wrote in letter to the committee responsible for the bill. “Nearly three-quarters of Ohio’s faculty at institutions of higher education are employed on a so-called part-time or contingent basis. These highly educated, hardworking educators are |
coming into the school recommend them for children and we'll buy them in for the children that are identified.
"For a long time they've always existed but they've never been as popular as they seem to be now.
"It's become a playground toy as well as something that is used by children to stop them from fidgeting."
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Remember loom bands? These bright rubber bracelets adorned millions of wrists in 2014
There are many different types of fidget spinners but the most popular is a small, three-pronged device.
When it is placed between the thumb and a finger, the user can give it a quick flick to trigger a spin.
Like all the best playground toys, they can be bought for a couple of pounds in a local corner shop - though some are retailing at a much higher price online.
But now some parents have raised concerns that they may be a distraction in the classroom.
I think people in general are pretty stressed out right now by Brexit, the various elections, Donald Trump, Syria, North Korea....you name it. So, it is a good time to be selling something that allows an individual to fidget off some stress Richard Gottlieb, Founder of Global Toy Experts
Mother-of-three Doreen Boyle said the toys were "infuriating".
"My youngest, who is 13, appeared with this fidget on Thursday, and it has not left his side.
"I've had a house full of little boys all weekend and they've all got them, and nobody can talk to you, nobody can have any eye contact with you because they're all playing with this thing.
"And I can't believe that they're not going to affect performance in class."
Teacher Ms Timmons said that they can aid learning among some children.
However in her class there are strict rules that, if they are being used, they must be kept below the desk and out of the sight of teachers and fellow pupils.
"If a child is going to fidget, they're going to fidget, there's nothing you can do to stop them," she said.
"But these fidget toys are one way of allowing them to fidget without the disruption of the tapping pencils fidgeting, or the tapping feet.
"It's a much less disruptive way to channel their energies into something else while the teaching is going on. "
Image caption The fidget spinners were originally developed to help children with ADHD and autism
Image caption There are a range of so-called "fidget toys", including this cube device
Dr Amanda Gummer, a child psychologist, said the craze was helping to de-stigmatise a toy that was previously only used by children with additional needs.
The fidget toy phenomenon is one that is sweeping the world, not just the UK, according to Richard Gottlieb, founder of US-based consultancy Global Toy Experts.
"It's spreading globally...and rapidly," he said.
They are not just confined to the playground however. Adults are also increasingly turning to fidget toys. So what is their appeal?
"I think its the need to fidget manually," said Mr Gottlieb.
"That's why some people smoke, others squeeze a rubber ball and even Captain Queeg in the movie the Caine Mutiny manipulated two steel balls in his hand whenever he got worked up.
"I think people in general are pretty stressed out right now by Brexit, the various elections, Donald Trump, Syria, North Korea....you name it.
"So, it is a good time to be selling something that allows an individual to fidget off some stress - particularly at a time when smoking is looked down on."
He believes the playground craze has been fuelled by a generation of stressed-out children.
"Typically there are people who are influencers, and they can be anything from the coolest kid on the playground to the coolest person in the office, that by simply using a product cause others to do so as well," he said.
"In this case, however, it took off like crazy and I think it is, again, because adults are anxious but, at least in the US, kids are anxious as well.
"There is just way too much much pressure from parents, too much school work and too much time engaged in adult supervised activities."TALLAHASSEE -- Florida State coach Jimbo Fisher answered with a curt ‘no.’
He paused after his initial response to a question about whether he believed silence on coaching rumors could negatively impact recruiting. Fisher then elaborated a little more, indicating that past decisions to ‘no comment’ coaching rumors while negotiating never hurt FSU’s recruiting classes in the past.
“We’ve recruited very well since I’ve been here, haven’t we?” Fisher asked, rhetorically, during his Monday press conference.
Two days later, two long days with swirling rumors about Fisher’s interest in Texas A&M and no definitive comments from FSU’s coach, the Seminoles lost one commit in four-star cornerback Houston Griffith. Then a little later into Wednesday evening, FSU saw another pledge decommit, this time it was three-star defensive back Israel Mukuamu. Finally, the hat trick was completed, as four-star center Verdis Brown backed away from his commitment.
Oh, and commits Amari Gainer and D'Marcus Adams voiced frustration with the lack of communication from FSU’s current coaching staff.
Lack of communication got us thinking and wanting answers?? https://t.co/mKDqhWe2dJ — F L O R I D A?? (@D3era) November 30, 2017
So, uh, yeah. Silence can hurt recruiting.
On Monday it was an inconvenience.
On Tuesday it was a hindrance.
And by Wednesday it led to an unmitigated dumpster fire.
At its best, this was hubris at its finest, a miscalculation on Fisher’s part if he intends to stick around at FSU. He’ll have to mend a lot of fences and will need to scramble to salvage the 2018 recruiting class.
At its worst, and this is the most likely scenario, Fisher has moved on already from FSU. Maybe not physically, but emotionally.
Meanwhile, current players are still in the dark as of Wednesday evening and assistant coaches have not been informed of Fisher’s intentions. Those inside the football program or on its periphery have described the last 24 hours as "embarrassing" and "unfortunate" while one parent of a player said that it's probably best for Fisher to go. Trust has been broken.
It’s crystal clear now: We’ve reached the point of no return.
This situation, as it currently is constructed -- with no clarity, no definitive answers from Fisher -- cannot go on. It's unhealthy for the university, for the football program and I'd imagine everyone (including Fisher) involved in the negotiations. We reported earlier that FSU expects a decision from Fisher to be made public today, and that Fisher’s decision is expected to be that he’s going to Texas A&M. Maybe there’s a scenario in which Fisher changes his mind in the next few hours -- FSU would ultimately want to keep Fisher, because he’s a proven coach -- although that would take a ton of humility and a clear plan to clean up this mess. But it’s more likely that Fisher is gone and FSU is going to place as much pressure as it can -- which isn’t much given Fisher’s favorable contract -- to force the coach into making his decision.
No more limbo, it’s time to move on if a decision has been made.
The first indication that FSU was ready to move forward without Fisher, to me, came on Tuesday when president John Thrasher publicly commented to the Tallahassee Democrat on dynamics at play between Fisher and Seminole Boosters, Inc. I was aware of friction between Fisher and the Boosters, and Fisher and the athletic department, but for whispers to reach the point of having a clear voice...well that was telling. Thrasher has always championed Fisher, but on Tuesday it sounded like he was showing support for the Boosters.
“This structure has been in place since the Boosters were founded,” Thrasher told the Democrat. “It has served us well, and I don't see any issues that reasonable adults could not work through.”
On Thursday morning, as I write this, I am unsure if a scenario exists in which things are worked out. It would take a total turnaround from Fisher. FSU started vetting Oregon coach Willie Taggart days ago and is prepared to move on with a coaching search once Fisher’s intentions are made public.
And of course there is a game on Saturday. The contest against Louisiana-Monroe will determine whether FSU extends its bowl streak to 36 years and its winning streak to 41 seasons, and all indications are Fisher has wanted to coach in that game. I get wanting to finish what you started, truly, I do. At the same time, I think it’s clear now that it’s probably best for both sides to move on as quickly and as amicably as possible.
So as recruits flee, coaches and players remain waiting for answers and fan angst builds, FSU is in a position to where it must push Fisher to move forward if that’s what he intends to do.
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They might look cuddly, but polar bears are vicious predators, and when hungry, aren’t particularly choosy about what they hunt. But this polar bear, up in Churchill, Manitoba, Canada, wasn’t looking for a meal when it nuzzled up to this sled dog. It just wanted to pet its soft, fluffy fur.
David De Meulles wasn’t sure what would happen when the polar bear approached the dog, which was tethered to a leash. He expected the worst, but was instead rewarded with this amazingly adorable footage. Just don’t get any wrong ideas about cozying up to a polar bear if you happen to encounter one in the wild—it won’t end this well.
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[YouTube via CBC via Twitter - Alexandra Klasinski]Aaron Ramsey says Francis Coquelin's presence in midfield has given him more license to go forward.
The 23-year-old has partnered Ramsey in each of Arsenal’s last two Premier League games, helping Arsene Wenger’s side keep clean sheets in impressive wins against Manchester City and Aston Villa.
However, the Wales midfielder believes the holding midfielder’s form has also benefited the Gunners in attack.
"I’ve been really impressed by the way he’s been playing and he’s earned this credit he’s getting at the moment" Aaron Ramsey
“He’s very solid defensively, wins the ball back and gives it to other players to start off attacks,” Ramsey explained. “He’s done really well, I’ve been really impressed by the way he’s been playing and he’s earned this credit he’s getting at the moment.
“I have that insurance now where I know he’s going to be sitting in front of the back four so it allows me to get forward whenever I want. I try to get back in as much as I can and as quickly as I can.
“I’m feeling stronger every game to be able to do that. The team’s doing really well and there’s a good understanding and level of confidence at the moment.
“We’ve learnt from last season when we left ourselves a bit too open in the big away games and teams picked us off. We’ve proven that against Manchester City - sometimes you have to sit in and get bodies behind the ball to try and frustrate them. I thought we did that really well against City.”This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZALEZ: We begin today’s show with more on the death of Osama bin Laden. Numerous questions have been raised on how the al-Qaeda leader could have been living in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad just down the street from Pakistan’s premier military academy. CIA Director Leon Panetta has reportedly told members of Congress in classified briefings that Pakistan was either, quote, “knowledgeable or incompetent” when it came to bin Laden’s whereabouts.
Some evidence has emerged to indicate that the Pakistani military may have had a direct role in harboring bin Laden. The journalist Steve Coll, who has written extensively on the bin Laden family, reports that local maps show land near the bin Laden compound as “restricted areas,” indicating that they were under military control. Coll writes that the initial circumstantial evidence suggests, quote, “that bin Laden was effectively being housed under Pakistani state control.”
AMY GOODMAN: The Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail is reporting a local police source in Abbottabad said bin Laden’s compound was also used by Hizbul Mujahideen, a Pakistani militant group active in Kashmir that many believe has the support of Pakistani security services.
Meanwhile, the Pakistani government is claiming it warned U.S. intelligence two years ago about the compound where bin Laden was killed. In a statement, the Pakistani Foreign Ministry said it had shared intelligence with the CIA about the compound since 2009. The statement says, quote, “The fact is that this particular location was pointed out by our intelligence quite some time ago to the U.S. intelligence.”
We’re going right now to Pakistan to Graeme Smith, an award-winning foreign correspondent for The Globe and Mail newspaper in Toronto. He was in Abbottabad yesterday investigating the mystery behind the bin Laden compound. He’s joining us now on the phone from Islamabad.
Graeme, welcome to Democracy Now! Tell us what you found.
GRAEME SMITH: Well, you know, what we found is really a mystery. Abbottabad is now a city of whispers, in some ways. You know, people are being stopped on the street many times a day and being asked, you know, “What did you know?” And sometimes the people asking the questions are journalists, and sometimes they’re security forces. And so, it becomes very hard to sort out truth from rumor. Neighbors have started to regurgitate what they’ve heard from other neighbors, and so the sort of the information swirling around this high-walled compound, in quite a lovely, scenic part of Abbottabad, is — the information is getting rather murky.
And so, what we’ve been trying to do, actually, is to run down some of the documentary evidence, and that’s proven rather difficult, because although there were at least four gas meters on the outside of the compound and a few electricity meters, so presumably, therefore, there should be, you know, a gas company account and electricity company account, and there should also be a land registry document and all these things, these documents are proving really hard to find, because the Pakistani government has instructed local officials not to disclose them.
Now, we have been able to get through that problem a little bit by finding a friendly local administrator in Abbottabad, who read off the name and family name and home town listed on the land registry document, which suggests that whoever registered themselves as the owner of the bin Laden compound claimed to live in a district called Charsadda just north of Peshawar in the tribal areas. And at the moment, we’re trying to figure out whether that was an alias, as Pakistani officials claim, or something else. So we’re sending a reporter right now, as we speak, up to Charsadda.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, Graeme, you noted that while the Pakistani officials say that it was an alias or false identity, that it would be very difficult, given not just the land transfer itself, but all of the other things that had to be done in terms of getting permits for construction, getting utilities hooked up to the compound, that this would require quite a bit of review by various officials in terms of identifying the actual individuals who own the place.
GRAEME SMITH: Yeah, that’s right. I mean, it’s not impossible to falsify these things. Quite a lot of Afghans, especially, use fake ID cards in Pakistan, and the government has been trying to set up a sort of electronic database of all national identity cards. But there remain a lot of these sort of older generation, non-databased cards, and so it is possible that whoever set up the compound could have used a fake ID card and then sort of built this elaborate sort of system of fraud, basically, you know, paper upon paper upon paper — you know, a land transfer paper, a note from the cantonment board authorizing the connection of a gas line, all of these signatures and stamps and so forth, all of the mundane paraphernalia of bureaucratic life in Pakistan. It’s possible that this was entirely faked.
But what’s interesting is that all along the way, you know, there would have opportunity to check. One guy who has built 25 homes in Bilal Town, which is — he’s a contractor who works in the area, said that, you know, typically, your ID would be checked about seven times along the way. And what also struck me was that, in that area — it was built on military land, which is not unusual. There’s a lot of suburban development on military land in Pakistan. But in those areas, your application to build something has to be reviewed by a cantonment board, which is chaired by a serving colonel in the Pakistani military. And so, it really does seem like bin Laden was living for years right under their noses and, you know, that these checks and balances were either missed or overlooked.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And the potential links of the two brothers to Hizbul Mujahideen? And what is that group and its potential connections to Pakistani intelligence?
GRAEME SMITH: This was a tantalizing lead that we got earlier in the week. A police official in Abbottabad told us that the compound, as he put it, belonged to Hizbul Mujahideen. Then that police official became abruptly unavailable when we tried to talk to him further about that. And police officials, of course, in Abbottabad have been instructed not to get into, you know, who owned the compound or who controlled it. So, it’s been rather difficult here, I have to say, researching the story, trying to get to the bottom of what was going on. The Pakistani military has now taken over the investigation and will presumably make their own inquiries.
Hizbul Mujahideen, by the way, if there was some link to them, it would be quite embarrassing to Pakistan, because Hizbul Mujahideen is one of these militant groups that has operated with some impunity in Pakistan for many years. It was originally set up to fight the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan and then morphed into a liberation movement in what Pakistanis call Azad Kashmir and in what they call Indian-occupied Kashmir. And so, that’s a group that has enjoyed a fair bit of freedom to act, and it has not really been — the members have not really been rounded up by the Pakistani security forces. And some analysts say that Hizbul Mujahideen has been, in fact, directly supported by the Pakistani state.
AMY GOODMAN: Graeme Smith, you have lived in the region for years. Can you talk about the press reaction and the popular reaction? And also, in Abbottabad, I mean, it’s a military town — retired military, current military — next to the equivalent of the U.S.'s West Point, so it's not just average civilians that live around him, not to mention his house is so much vastly bigger than everything in the environs, it would certainly stand out and make people wonder who’s living there.
GRAEME SMITH: Yeah, it did stand out in the neighborhood, you know? And I was struck when I went there actually how ugly it is. You know, it was described initially as a mansion, but, you know, it really did look more like a security compound of some kind, almost like a small prison. And I couldn’t help thinking that, you know, whoever constructed this thing may not have had bin Laden’s comfort in mind. You’re right, Abbottabad is an otherwise very pretty town. You know, even the neighborhood where bin Laden was apparently living is, you know, on a dirt road lined with poplar trees and the smell of crushed mint underfoot, you know, just this lovely bucolic setting.
The town of Abbottabad is wealthy. It’s the sort of place where, you know, you sense that Pakistan is westernizing. You know, it has Shell gas stations and all kinds of other comforts that you might associate with the Western world. It’s nowhere near as sort of ramshackle as some of the places like Quetta and Peshawar, where most of the sort of war on terrorism has been focused. You know, it’s — Abbottabad is known for being a cantonment town, as you said. It’s a garrison outpost. And yeah, this Pakistani military college was very well respected. In fact, just a week before the raid, the head of the Pakistani military, General Kayani, visited this military facility for its graduation ceremony, I believe it was. And he announced, very proudly, that the Pakistani military had broken the back of terrorism in the region.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to play for you the White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, former reporter, addressing the claims that Pakistan was knowingly harboring Osama bin Laden.
PRESS SECRETARY JAY CARNEY: What John Brennan said and what I will repeat is that we obviously are interested in finding out the details of the support network that obviously helped Mr. bin Laden hide in Abbottabad. We don’t know the members of that support network. We also note that the Pakistani government has launched an investigation of its own, and we think that’s a good thing. And we will work to find out as much as we can about how that happened.
I would then further state that our relationship with Pakistan, while complicated, is very important. And it is very important precisely because of our need to continue the fight against al-Qaeda, to continue the fight against terrorists. The fight is not done. And we look forward to cooperating with Pakistan in the future. As others have said, more terrorists have been killed on Pakistani soil than probably any other country. And the cooperation we’ve received from Pakistan has been very useful in that regard.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s White House Press Secretary Jay Carney. This is Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani, speaking on Charlie Rose Show on Tuesday.
AMBASSADOR HUSAIN HAQQANI: I think that — well, first of all, let me just say that I did make those phone calls. And what I’m told is, we just dropped the ball. And there is going to be an inquiry of sorts. There will be a — we will get to the bottom of it. How did it happen? But the most important concern here right now is to reassure people in the United States that Pakistan and Pakistanis as a nation did not look upon Osama bin Laden favorably. And that’s very important. I’m getting threatening phone calls. My embassy is getting threatening phone calls. There are people who have gone berzerk. They’re sending emails saying — instead of recognizing what Pakistan has contributed, the failure is being pointed out.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States on PBS. Your response, Graeme Smith, to both the White House press secretary and the Pakistani ambassador?
GRAEME SMITH: Well, first of all, I find it funny that the White House insists on calling this place Abbottabad pron. Abb-ott-abad_], when it’s actually Abbottabad [_pron. Abtabad.
I was in Quetta, Pakistan, when all of this happened. And a security official visited my hotel room and urged me not to leave, for my own safety. On the streets, members of the JUI, a religious political group, were holding demonstrations in favor of Osama bin Laden, burning U.S. flags and holding up photographs of Osama bin Laden. And, you know, you can’t help but feel that Pakistan is a nation torn in different directions. You know, on the one hand, there are people who will take to the streets and, you know, demonstrate in favor of this terrorist mastermind. And on the other hand, there are very urbane, intellectual, moderate men like Husain Haqqani, the ambassador you’ve just clipped there, you know, people who completely disagree with bin Laden’s philosophy. And so, it’s really difficult, I think, to run a country like that. And I think some of the bifurcation in the country’s policies that you’ve seen are part of a bifurcation of the country itself, that Pakistan is fundamentally a country at war with itself.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, what about this whole reaction of the Pakistani press? I think in one article you quoted The Nation magazine in Pakistan saying, quote, “The presence of the world’s most wanted terrorist in such a strategically sensitive city is beyond the understanding of a sane man.” Is that typical of the reaction in the national press there?
GRAEME SMITH: It’s reasonably typical, yeah. I mean, I think the outrage in the Pakistani press, especially the Urdu press, is focused a lot more on the violation of sovereignty and this question of, you know, how Americans are able to fly helicopters into our country without us noticing, and could this happen again? Specifically, could it happen again to, say, our nuclear installations? But yeah, I mean, on the question of, you know, were our security services complicit in some way with hiding Osama bin Laden, that’s a question you’ve seen really openly expressed in the Pakistani press, which is kind of remarkable, actually. You know, the Pakistani press is relatively free, but, you know, I think this incident has galvanized some sort of — especially liberal sections of the media and encouraged them to speak openly about whether or not their own government is pursuing a double policy on it. And that sort of openness has already been there, but yeah, this is definitely a watershed moment politically, I think. You’re starting to see people talk about that a lot more boldly than they were before.
AMY GOODMAN: And finally, Graeme Smith, the issue of drone attacks. I mean, on the one hand, you have the U.S. moving in, as President Obama promised he would even before he was president, if they knew where Osama bin Laden is, with or without the approval of Pakistan. But you’ve been writing also about the drone attacks. While it was just said in the clips we just heard that Osama bin Laden is not popular in Pakistan, neither is the United States, with the majority of Pakistanis considering the United States the enemy, even as it gives the Pakistani government something like $3 billion a year.
GRAEME SMITH: Well, yeah, but giving money to the government is very different from being popular with the people. The government itself here is not particularly popular at the moment, either. People are always very reassured when I tell them I’m Canadian, not American, in Pakistan. You know, it is not a very great thing to be American on the streets of Pakistan at the moment.
Now, on the other hand, I think the next generation of Pakistanis is very much — they may hate me for saying this, but they’re similar in some ways to the next generation of Indians. You know, they’re growing up watching satellite television. They’re growing up learning English. And you may find that, within a generation, that Pakistan, like India, is much more aligned with the interests of the Western world than, for instance, China will be.
AMY GOODMAN: And on the issue of the aid, as you pointed out, giving money to the government doesn’t mean that it’s supporting the Pakistani people. We’re seeing this Arab Spring, where despots who are shored up by the United States are falling one by one. Is there that feeling in Pakistan, that the U.S. government is shoring up unpopular leaders and has sort of put a coat of armor around them? And what does this mean for the war in Afghanistan?
GRAEME SMITH: Ah, well — yeah, I mean, certainly, U.S. support for the regime in Islamabad does not make it any more popular with ordinary people. You know, the idea of American money and American weapons coming in and being used to prop up Islamabad certainly does not endear the government at all, especially, you know, in places like Balochistan, which has active insurgencies going on, places like Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, you know, which also has active insurgencies.
So, overall, though, I think the events of the last week will be a net positive for the region as a whole, especially when it comes to changing the debate in America about Afghanistan. You know, I spent three years living in Kandahar, and I just — I couldn’t help feeling that American fears about terrorism were driving some policy in southern Afghanistan that was not necessarily helpful for the people living there. And so, I think, you know, especially my friends in Kandahar, my friends in Quetta, those who believe that Osama bin Laden is dead are breathing a sigh of relief, because they think — they think maybe the Americans are going to relax and go home.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, that’s one thing I wanted to ask you, since you mentioned your time you spent in Kandahar. Your sense of whether the death of Osama bin Laden will increase pressure on the United States to leave Afghanistan or whether there will be this attempt to say we’ve got to continue this war until the last member of al-Qaeda is either in jail or dead?
GRAEME SMITH: Yeah, I mean, I’m not an expert on U.S. politics. I’m much more at home with the tribes of southern Afghanistan, so I can’t really tell you how that will play out domestically in America. But that is certainly how people are viewing it on the ground. You know, some of my Pashtun friends were telling me, “Look, we think that America has staged this event, because we think they had Osama all along, but this is the moment when they want to leave Afghanistan, so they’ve chosen this moment.” You know, and which obviously that’s typical sort of wild conspiracy talk that you hear among the Pashtun tribes. But yeah, I mean, this is being seen by them certainly as a sign that America intends to withdraw.
AMY GOODMAN: And finally, Graeme Smith, the debate in the United States about whether President Obama should show the picture of Osama bin Laden dead — he has said he will not. What is the feeling in Pakistan?
GRAEME SMITH: I mean, nobody here really believes anything the Americans say, to be honest. So, on the streets of Pakistan, you know, they want proof. They want evidence. And from all sides, not just the Americans. They want to see documents. They want to see photos. They want to know exactly what was up at that compound. And they’re not going to take our word for it.
AMY GOODMAN: Graeme Smith, I want to thank you for being with us, foreign correspondent for The Globe and Mail in Canada, has won three National Newspaper Awards, Canada’s highest prize for print journalism, speaking to us from Islamabad.Meet WhatPulse - all you need to know everything about your computing habits
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So start off by registering an account (or use the "Login with Facebook" button at the top right), download the WhatPulse client and start your stats gathering!news, local-news, John Gilbert Lake Macquarie Council, Lake Mac Independents, John Gilbert Lake Mac Independents, John Gilbert Christian Democrats, Fred Nile, Jodie Harrison, Jason Pauling, Lake Macquarie Council
ABORTION rights activists are “child murderers”, “Leftards” seek the “homosexualisation” and “muslimisation” of Australia, and the country could be headed for a civil war in which “Aussie protectionists” fight to save us from “invasion, cultural deletion and political correctness”. Welcome to the world according to Lake Macquarie Councillor John Gilbert, one of eight new representatives on the 13-person council announced on Monday. Cr Gilbert, a real estate agent from Swansea Heads, is one of three councillors elected from the Lake Mac Independents group, a collection of candidates with ties to Fred Nile’s Christian Democratic Party. A former member of both the CDP and the Labor Party, Cr Gilbert’s personal biography describes him as a “passionate” and life-long resident whose policy interests include youth unemployment and affordable housing. But what it doesn’t list are his strong conservative credentials, including his anti-abortion views and his candidature for the CDP in the seat of Orange in 2015. In fact the Newcastle Herald can reveal that in a series of Facebook posts made on his personal page in 2015 and since deleted, Cr Gilbert has expressed strong views on everything from ABC journalists – who he describes as “disgusting dogs” – to Mike Baird, who he says “encourages the Islamisation of NSW to be rapidly increased”. In May 2015 Cr Gilbert posted a photo of a child with the caption “babies don’t choose to die” and the “Stand4Life” hashtag, an anti-abortion slogan used by conservative figures in the United States like Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee. In a comment on the post, he likened Labor MPs like Tanya Plibersek and “Greenys” to “child murderers”. In another in August last year he said that Labor, the Greens and “general Leftards” wanted the “muslimisation of Australia” and the “homosexualisation of Australia”. “But Muzzies want to kill gays,” he wrote. “So what’s the answer? Any Leftards able to clarify please.” In October last year he wondered whether Australia was “heading to civil war on home turf” between “the Aussie protectionists” and the “Leftards”. “Maybe that is how things will end up in order to protect us from further invasion, cultural deletion and political correctness,” he wrote. “I hope it can be averted.” While the comments may come as a surprise to some of his supporters, Cr Gilbert said he did not regret most of the posts and rejected the suggestion he should have disclosed his conservative views before the election. “Because I think everyone is entitled to have an opinion [and] I certainly don’t intend to shut down free speech,” he said. “Local government policy should relate to things that come under the umbrella of local government … I think during the election people made decisions based on policies [that] come under the umbrella of local government.” He said that the majority of the posts had been made “quite some time ago” and that he had deleted most of them. “I am not advocating civil war or civil unrest,” he said. But Charlestown Labor MP Jodie Harrison, who recently ended her term as Lake Macquarie Mayor, said it was a “diverse area” and it was “certainly likely” that Cr Gilbert would come up against issues that would relate to his personal convictions. “Certainly there might be applications for grants, for example, that come from community groups from a different race or religion, that often happens,” she said. “I really hope that he focuses on local government issues and doesn’t use Lake Macquarie and its very good residents as a grandstand for far-right views that the majority of the residents don’t share.” Asked if he would be able to vote for issues that may conflict with his personal views, for example the mosque development in Buchanan approved by Cessnock Council this year, he said he would “provided it met development guidelines”. “Any opinion I have outside of local government is not going to enter into local government policies I take part in,” he said. “If a DA comes up obviously there's demand for it [and] it’s a matter of us making sure it fits within guidelines [it’s] nothing to do with any other beliefs. “A mosque doesn’t effect the way the community is run, the introduction of Sharia Law would, but a mosque wouldn't impact that.” Liberal Party Councillor Jason Pauling said while he didn’t personally support Cr Gilbert’s views, “I do lean towards freedom of expression and appropriate democratic debate”. “Council is a broad representation of views [and] backgrounds and I remain confident that all councillors will engage in energetic debate based on the best outcomes for the city as a whole,” he said. “Value sets will be challenged for all councillors and no doubt the odd barb will be exchanged.” Asked whether he thought councillors should disclose views on issues outside of council politics he said an advantage of political parties “is the very fact that you know the general value set of the individuals concerned”. The new Lake Macquarie Council includes six councillors from Labor, three from the Liberal Party, three from the Lake Mac Independents and one from the Lake Alliance.
https://nnimgt-a.akamaihd.net/transform/v1/crop/frm/CFDX85wrE5f5cz37MLzPAW/d1783b7c-88c4-4fb9-9e59-7455d62978d9.jpg/r0_22_2079_1197_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg…pivoted, and restarted development of his teaching at least 3 or 4 times, depending on how you keep score. Immediately after forming the intention to benefit all conditioned beings by teaching the Noble Path, he concluded;
“And what may be said to be subject to aging… illness… death… sorrow… defilement? Spouses & children… men & women slaves… goats & sheep… fowl & pigs… elephants, cattle, horses, & mares… gold & silver [2] are subject to aging… illness… death… sorrow… defilement. Subject to aging… illness… death… sorrow… defilement are these acquisitions, and one who is tied to them, infatuated with them, who has totally fallen for them, being subject to birth, seeks what is likewise subject to aging… illness… death… sorrow… defilement. This is ignoble search.”
So rejecting the household life, he went forth into the homeless life of a bhikkhu. That was the first pivot. Then he approached Alara Kalama:
“Having thus gone forth in search of what might be skillful, seeking the unexcelled state of sublime peace, I went to Alara Kalama and, on arrival, said to him: ‘Friend Kalama, I want to practice in this doctrine & discipline.’
“When this was said, he replied to me, ‘You may stay here, my friend. This doctrine is such that a wise person can soon enter & dwell in his |
the expected result.”
Experts play for high stakes
While the four models generally agreed with the PRISM data, they did vary from each other and the proxy record in the North Atlantic, but Harry thinks even that could be useful. “It’s good news that the models all produce very similar outputs that is in good overall agreement with the data,” he said. “The mismatch in the North Atlantic can be attributed to the high degree of variability in that setting today. We want to be able to understand the nuances of the different models on a regional scale so this initial result is a great experiment.”
He puts much of the credit for the positive results on the quality of the data and expertise of the modellers. “Beyond that, I’d credit the good agreement between models and data to the fact that the mid Pliocene has a strong and robust climate signal,” he said. “The fact that the signal is from a similar amount of warming to what’s expected by the end of the 21st century makes the work that much more important.”
This is just an early stage in the PlioMIP project, Harry underlined, as other models involved are still yet to finish. Analysing the results in depth will be a “Herculean effort” he added, and follow-up experiments are already being planned. But the scientist emphasises that the outcome will be highly valuable.
“This is collaborative science at its best,” Harry said. “We have the world’s experts in different types of climate proxy data and reconstruction working with international experts in the field of climate modelling. The data and model people do not always speak the same languages, but in PlioMIP we have made a truly integrated group and work very hard to understand the strengths and weaknesses of both the models and the data. It’s extremely challenging and at the same time rewarding work. The stakes are high – we are ultimately talking about the future of our planet.”
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A report commissioned by the Society of Surveyors in Ireland confirms the massive additional cost burden building control procedures introduced since March 2014 have placed on the construction sector and consumer. it is an excellent source of accurate data and analysis and poses some interesting questions, not least the accuracy of forecasts of residential completions. SI.9 is seen as a key risk to construction in 2016. Quote:
“The majority of respondents stated that the Building Control (Amendment) Regulations accounted for up to five per cent of the price increases across all categories of dwellings in Dublin and across the rest of the country.” (p24, See link here)
Download report here: SCSI Irish Construction Prospects DKM Final Report 8April2015
Building Control (Amendment Regulations) SI.9 have affected the feasibility of many projects. Estimates of SI.9 on the residential sector costs vary from €27,000 per apartment to over €50,000 for a self-built house. This report from a key industry stakeholder involved in the formation of SI.9 confirms these estimates.
In October this year RIAI President Robin Mandal confirmed the time needed by professionals alone to administer new building control regulations for the housing programme would be between 2- 3 million “man hours” per annum (€200- €300m). These costs excluded significant contractor and phasing costs for developers which could double these figures. As BC(A)R SI.9 applies to non-residential projects there are industry-wide implications.
Legal construction experts have confirmed that SI.9 building control procedures add no new consumer protections.
“The Dublin Housing Supply Problem – Survey Responses…The lack of profitability in residential construction due to high costs (including those imposed by regulation) was also frequently mentioned (18% of responses).” (p23)
Asking prices in Dublin and around the country still below normal building costs. SI.9 has further impacted upon residential supply and made many schemes aimed at first time buyers very difficult. Lack of development finance coupled with increased regulatory costs has compressed margins to a point where developers simply must wait for asset prices to rise, or build at a loss. The cost increase due to SI.9 is significant even in the current very competitive pricing environment. Many companies have absorbed duties and roles as part of normal appointments and preliminaries to date, not passing costs on to consumers. As work becomes more plentiful expect costs to rise sharply. Planning permissions for multi-unit residential projects have further reduced indicating that speculative residential developments of any scale are a non-runner in the medium term.
A recent Knight Frank Survey noted that the majority of current residential projects are smaller schemes with less than 50 units. It also confirmed that 98% of industry believe these regulations are a barrier to residential supply.
In response to “excessive” SI.9 professional fees for “once-off” dwellings a Ministerial review of BC(A)R SI.9 was commenced in April 2015 which concluded in September when Minister Coffey published an “opt out” for single houses and residential extensions from the administrative provisions of SI.9 (SI.365). SI.365 has seen as a welcome development by consumers and senior industry figures. This is a significant part-reversal of Government policy which should improve once-off housing levels. Owners that opt-out of the SI.9 certification process can avail of industry-standard “opinions on compliance” that are used in conveyancing.
However a similar review was not called for multi-unit sector or the non-residential sector which still carry the brunt of these ineffective and costly administrative procedures. Since September local authority housing comes under the remit of SI.9 impacting on the cost and delivery of social housing.
“Key Risks to forecast…Other issues raised by SCSI members include the availability and quality of new graduates, the ageing workforce, upward pressure on costs, the lack of specialist contractors, the adverse impact of the Building Control regulations and the complexity of negotiations on residential development schemes given the large number of stakeholders involved in negotiations.” (page x)
Senior industry figures have been calling for these regulations first to be deferred, then revoked since introduction in March 2015. How long can Ministers Kelly and Coffey continue to ignore the calls for an immediate review into the effectiveness and cost of BC(A)R SI.9 to the wider industry?
Other posts of interest:Updated: Oct 8, 2012, 08:14 IST
We are approaching New Year celebrations but apart from the partying and the gifting,
are you aware about some uncanny facts about New Year celebrations and customs? Yes, the New Year is considered the oldest of all holidays, since it is believed to have been observed for the first time, nearly 4000 years ago in Babylon but this is just the tip of the iceberg as we delve deeper into facts about the New Year that you probably didn’t know:
1. How January 1 became the chosen date for New Year?
A long time ago, in 153 BC, a Roman senate announced January 1 as the official New Year date. However, this date wasn’t accepted by everyone until 46 BC when Julius Caesar again declared January 1 as the New Year. January 1 lost its significance for a long time before it was revived in 1582 by a Gregorian (Christian) calendar and since then, January 1 has gained universal acceptance as the New Year date. Before this, December 25 and March 25 were the most popular New Year dates!
2. Yes, Gifting Underwear On New Year Is Cool!
You might exclaim, “Yikes!”, but in many South American nations like Brazil and Bolivia, gifting yellow underwear on
. The tradition says that the underwear has to be worn immediately as the clock strikes past the midnight on 31st December. In Mexico, women hoping to find love in the New Year believe that wearing red underwear will pacify their love life.
3. What’s the story behind Times Square New Year celebrations?
Visitors to the famous Times Square in New York City are asked to write their New Year wishes on small pieces of paper. This practice is carried throughout the year. As the New Year approaches, all the written wishes are collected and bundled inside massive confettis. The wish-carrying confetti is unleashed and these slips are showered on the crowd that gathers at Times Square on New Year’s Eve, every year.??
4. Find Out How New Year Can Be Creepy
Talca is a small town in Chile, infamous for the strange manner in which its residents bring in the New Year. Here, families visit the graves of their beloved as a part of the celebrations! This is usually done after the typical dinner served on December 31st. The idea is to welcome New Year with those who were loved but are no longer present with their families. This tradition is not historic—it started as recent as 1995!
5. Why Brazilians Get A Bit Eccentric On New Years?
Brazilians seem to follow a long list of New Year beliefs. For instance, those who wear white clothes on New Year's Eve are supposed to get a greater chance of having a peaceful year. Those living along the beach believe in jumping seven times along the shores, after midnight along with dispersing flowers into the waves. It is said that making any wish while doing so is destined to come true.
6. Yes, Burning Down The Year Gone By Is A Celebration Too!
In Puerto Rico and Colombia, a life-sized male doll is set ablaze at midnight. The doll is stuffed with the memories, in the form of old clothes and photos, and setting it afire is believed to squash all things unpleasant associated with the passing year.
7. Broken Plates For New Year?
The Danish traditionally believe that finding broken dishes at the entrance of the house brings luck. Thus, families keep some plates at their doors on December 31, hoping that these will be broken and the New Year will unleash better luck for the family.
8. A Ring Is Probably The Best New Year Gifting Idea
Many cultures have endorsed the idea of gifting rings or ring-shaped objects on New Year. This is because the circular shape symbolizes the human life coming a full circle.
9. Getting Fruity With New Year
For the Spanish, New Year customs include eating twelve grapes at the stroke of midnight, one at a time, scheduled according to the chime of the clock. Twelve grapes represent the 12, coming months and this custom is believed to bring good luck.
10. If you are Tall & Dark-Haired Head Towards An English Home on New Year
The English probably have the strangest of all New Year beliefs where if the first person to enter their home on New Year’s is tall and dark haired, it is counted as a sign of a happy, joyous New Year! (Special Features, MensXP.com)
Also read:
Don't MissWhat happens in the margins of the music Liz Harris makes as Grouper is often as important as the music itself. In a performance at Krakow's Unsound Festival earlier this month, the rattle of a film projector added a layer of instant nostalgia to her murky swirls of voice and guitar. Much of the time, Grouper's music is so diffuse that there's no longer any distinction between center and margin anyway, no difference between foreground and background.
That is not the case on Ruins, the first album from the Portland, Oregon, musician since last year's The Man Who Died in His Boat. Here, the incidental noises—crickets, croaking frogs, thunder and rain, and, at one point, the unmistakable beep of a microwave oven that fired up after a blackout in the house where she was recording—serve primarily to underscore how stark the music is, unadorned and pocked with vast silences. Ruins is Grouper's "unplugged" record, essentially, as much as that might sound odd for a musician who has always put acoustic guitar and piano and voice at the core of her work. Here, however, she foreswears the looping pedals and the innumerable layers of fuzz that are just as essential to her aesthetic. What we're left with is achingly beautiful and, given the intensely private nature of most of Grouper's work—on stage, she often plays sitting down, crouched over in order to manipulate her effects pedals, her face hidden in shadow—almost unnervingly direct.
The emotional core of the album is the four melancholy songs for piano and voice, which are complemented by two instrumentals of a similar mood. Rarely have Harris' lyrics been so clearly audible, and rarely, if ever, has love been so plainly the focus of her songwriting. "I hear you calling and I wanna go/ Run straight into the valleys of your arms," she sings on "Holding", her multitracked close harmonies reminiscent of Low circa The Curtain Hits the Cast. On the devastating "Clearing", she sings, "Every time I see you/ I have to pretend I don't"; on "Call Across Rooms", she has a change of heart: "I have a present to give you/ When we finally figure it out." ("The song is on one level very plain and literal, about a letter I wrote for someone I loved and could not get along with," she told Vogue.)
Not everything is so explicit. In "Clearing", she keeps her vocal range between the notes of her piano chords, as though she were seeking refuge there, and her wispy voice frequently dissolves into indecipherability, like cold breath passing through a beam of sunlight. Her phrasing is tentative and guarded; even without recourse to her trusty loops, she finds ways to muddy the atmosphere. Multitracking offers a way of hiding behind her own shadow, and her foot rarely leaves the piano's sustain pedal, even on the instrumental numbers.
Only two songs on the album don't quite fit the mold. The opening "Made of Metal", essentially a means of clearing the air, is just a slow, ritualistic drumbeat wreathed in the sound of distant frogs. And the closing "Made of Air" returns us to the drifting ambient world of Grouper that we're most familiar with. The latter dates back to 2004, and it's of a piece with other material from that period, like her 2005 album Way Their Crept, where looping tones of uncertain provenance—Voice? Guitar? Keyboard?—swirled into a jellied haze. It doesn't necessarily fit with what's come before it, but it's a welcome addendum to the album, if only for its familiarity.
Ruins has a vivid sense of place. Harris recorded the album in 2011 during an artistic residency in Aljezur, Portugal—a tiny coastal town tucked inside a nature preserve on the southwestern corner of the country. In a press release, she describes the pleasures of recording simply, hiking to the beach, and getting lost in her head, working out "a lot of political anger and emotional garbage… The album is a document. A nod to that daily walk. Failed structures. Living in the remains of love." Even without knowing the particulars of the album's backstory, the naked recording means that you can practically picture the room in which it was made—the worn floorboards, or maybe ceramic tiles, dusted with sand; the stucco walls, slightly damp; the steam rising from a cup of tea near the upright piano. Even the microwave that made the tea, which beeps once towards the end of "Labyrinth", an accidental noise allowed to remain in the final cut. From the hushed mood and half-enunciated vocals of it all, you get the feeling she didn't speak to many people during that time of focused creativity. Lucky for us.In Saumur, there’s a marvellous tank museum—le Musee des Blindes, as it’s called in French—and I was there not so long ago.
The tanks date from World War I up to modern times. There’s a WWII Panther and a King Tiger and this Panzer Mark II. The Mark IIs did stalwart service during the 1940 Blitzkrieg.
One of the gems of local history concerns the cavalry school based in Saumur (there was no museum then, of course) and tells of how the young cadets held the bridges across the Loire in the face of the modern tanks and artillery of the advancing Germans. It happened on 19–20 June 1940, seventy-two years ago today.
After I spent the morning at the museum—immersed in history, and tanks, and meeting a few kindred spirits as obsessed as I—it was time to slip back a few centuries and take in the town’s second big attraction, the Chateau de Saumur. The chateau is responsible for an excellent Cabernet Sauvignon; light and fruity, very much to my taste. That’s me, among the vines.
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TwitterMs. Lofgren was co-sponsor of a bill in the House earlier this year that would among other things prohibit the use of firearms on drones in domestic airspace, though, not necessarily other weapons like tear gas or pellets.
The agency has used Predator drones, the same vehicles used overseas by the United States military, since 2005. Built by General Atomics, the drones weigh about 10,500 pounds and can fly for 20 hours nonstop. They are based in Arizona, Florida, North Dakota and Texas.
“C.B.P. needs to assure the public that it will not equip its Predators with any weapons — lethal or otherwise,” Jennifer Lynch wrote for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, based in San Francisco, in a blog post on Wednesday about the documents. “Without first addressing these issues, the agency — and Congress — should halt the expansion of C.B.P.’s Predator drone program.”
The flight logs provided by the agency show that it has become increasingly generous with its unmanned aerial vehicles. They have been used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the North Dakota Army National Guard, Texas Department of Public Safety and the United States Forest Service, among others.
The use of drones by the F.B.I. came to light only two weeks ago, when its director, Robert S. Mueller III, in response to a question, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that unmanned aerial vehicles were “very seldom used” by his agents. He went on to say the agency was developing guidelines on their appropriate use. An earlier information request filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation suggested that the F.B.I. had at least three drones in its possession as of 2011, when that request was filed.
The border agency said that when conducting joint operations with state, local and other federal agencies, its own privacy policies governed the use of data collected by the drones and “the live feed from any aircraft is encrypted and only accessible to those with specific clearance.”Blair Watch Discount Codes Back Soon
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If you live in America, or want to buy anything in there, you'll no doubt want to use something called a coupon. Coupons are just like discount codes, but ermmm, called something called coupon codes instead. For this we have a site called coupon code alerts and they also send you out coupon alerts when new money saving deals are added to the system. Nice little site full of money saving offers that give you a nice percentage off each shop. Not many retailers sadly but they are growing fast.
Contact UsPhotos via Flickr user Matt Paish
It’s been almost a year since the Hong Kong government released a list of 480 items of intangible cultural heritage representing the best of the city’s cultural treasures. One of the big surprises was the inclusion of 27 different traditional Chinese martial art styles on the list. The list included stalwarts—Taiji Quan, Southern Shaolin Five Ancestors Fist, and Wing Chun—but also a host of styles most people outside of Hong Kong or the martial arts academic world have never heard of, like Monkey and Axe Hammer Style, the Kung Chi Fuk Fu Fist or the many Northern Praying Mantis styles lurking about Hong Kong’s New Territories.
The inclusion of so many different local styles was a victory for the communities and styles that made it, and a sore defeat for those that didn’t. Considering the jostling and competition rampant in traditional Chinese martial arts circles, the back-room discussions and rice wine-soaked lazy susan dinners that preceded the list must have been epic.
One of the variations that came to light deals with the differences between Wing Chun and the many different Hakka community martial styles. For most people, there is little discernible difference between Wing Chun (and its many variations) or the Hakka Styles, including White Eyebrow, Phoenix Eye Fist or Southern Mantis. The styles were all practiced in and around the Pearl River Delta, by communities who distinguished themselves from others with their dialect, family-trees, and often martial lineages.
The Hakka are interesting because they are the gypsies of the East. There are many legends surrounding their origins, but basically the Hakka—which translates into “guest people”—migrated south from the central plains of Henan and Hunan during the Han Dynasty more than 2000 years ago. They maintained their languages, their styles of dress, architectural elements to their villages, and also their martial traditions. That last bit is up for debate though, as many of the styles that are now considered to be Hakka became popular in the period between the fall of the Qing (1911) and WWII. That’s basically when every single style we know of today became popular, the same period that spawned a thousand and one legends about mythical founders and long lost arts.
The 1920s and 30s saw an explosive rise in the number of martial arts schools, styles, and practitioners which culminated with the establishment of the National Academy for the Martial Arts in Nanjing. It was an attempt to harness all of this energy and channel it away from rebellions and cult-like movements and into patriotic and productive uses. Long story short, the Communist victory put a lid on the pot and forced everyone who could to make for Hong Kong or put on a red badge and swear off kung fu forever.
The Hakka were among the many people to land in Hong Kong. They moved out from there—as they had been doing for centuries prior like the true gypsies they are—and brought their culture to Southeast Asia, Europe and North America, the Caribbean and South America. Many of the Chinese restaurants you eat and Wing Chun dojos you train at were founded by Hakka wanderers.
When this list of culturally significant martial styles was released last year, many of them were Hakka styles. The mantis techniques are considered “Hakka property” in a way, as are many variations of the Wing Chun style and other martial arts that stem from the legendary Southern Shaolin Temple and the female fighters at the core of many kung fu origin myths.
Problem is, most of this stuff is myth. Legend. Prone to twist and change and be exposed by any real academic work. What this means is that the Chinese martial artists spend a lot of time working on their myth-game and leaving the fighting arts to other, less community-oriented martial arts. In China and Hong Kong, it’s more important to have your community of martial artists (and thereby your story) be recognized by the government and given official status than it is to be known as great fighters, or even further, to have an individual martial artist among you known as a powerful force in the combat world.
Now, after the list has been established and the 27 styles have been codified by the Hong Kong government as true and official examples of intangible culture that must be protected, the fight is on for funds. Styles on the Mainland reject the list, ignored styles in Hong Kong press their case, and the styles that have made the list now are on the hunt for Unesco and UN recognition. Who has the more authentic lion dance? Whose story is the most compelling? Who can down the most shots with the “man in charge,” thereby ensuring a spot at the Chinese kung fu table of official styles?
“All of the "non productive" energy that gets dumped into things like lion dancing and myth construction [is] a great way to claim territory and defend it short of actual violence,” said Prof. Ben Judkins. “Western Combat sports are about making individuals tough, but things like the Red Spears, or even a Choy Li Fut Class, were about turning a bunch of disorganized guys into a political force to be reckoned with.”
And this is part of the reason why kung fu has not yet (and might never) enter the mixed martial art world as a community, or as some “style” of fighting like Muay Thai or BJJ. The kung fu world is in general more interested in political and community power, rather than the prestige that comes with actual hand-to-hand combat. Being on a list is in more important to Hakka martial artists than winning a fight, because the list defines them and nourishes them into the future. A fight gives them essentially nothing.
Check out these related stories:
The Master of the Flying Guillotine: Kung Fu Grindhouse Classic Through a Cold War Filter
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The Shaolin Temple Is Under InvestigationPresident Trump told a rally of supporters on Thursday night that he won the election not because of the Russians but because of the voters in places like West Virginia, trying to shoot down suspicion of any influence from Moscow.
“We didn’t win because of Russia,” Trump said at the Big Sandy Superstore Arena in Huntington, W.Va. “We won because of you. That I can tell you.”
The president told the crowd he believes the Russia meddling probe that has hampered his administration is a “total fabrication.”
“What the prosecutors should be looking at are Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 deleted emails,” he said.
Trump handily defeated Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in West Virginia in the presidential race, winning 68 percent of the vote to Clinton’s 26 percent. He argued he defeated Clinton by simply outworking “the other side.”
“We won because millions of patriotic Americans voted to take back their country,” he said. “Have you seen any Russians in West Virginia, or Ohio, or Pennsylvania? Are there any Russians here tonight?”
He painted the Russia investigation as a plot by his opponents to delegitimize his presidency.
“They can’t beat us at the voting booths so they’re trying to cheat you out of the future and the future that you won,” Trump said. “They’re trying to cheat you out of the leadership you won, with a fake story that is demeaning to all of us.”
The rally took place just hours after fresh news broke about special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that Mueller has impaneled a grand jury, a sign the probe is heating up. Reuters also reported that grand jury subpoenas have also been issued in relation to the infamous meeting Donald Trump Jr. and other top campaign officials had with a Russian lawyer.
MUELLER REPORTEDLY IMPANELS GRAND JURY IN RUSSIA PROBE
“I just the hope the final determination is a truly honest one, which is what the millions of people who gave us our big win in November deserve,” he said in apparent reference to Mueller's probe.
During the rally, Trump also celebrated the announcement from West Virginia’s Democratic governor, Jim Justice, that he is changing parties to become a Republican.
“I want to thank your great governor,” Trump said. “Having Big Jim as a Republican is such an honor, I will tell you. Such an honor. A fantastic man, a fantastic guy. And thank you Jim.”
Justice took the podium and said: “Like it or not like it, but the Democrats walked away from me.” He praised Trump and spoke of spending time with the president’s family.
“I can’t help you anymore being a Democratic governor,” Justice said. “So tomorrow, I will be changing my registration to Republican.”
The governor also dismissed the Russian investigation.
“Have we not heard enough about the Russians?” Justice said.Facebook says it plans to marginalize what it considers to be “clickbait” news stories from publishers in its news feed, in another step to keep its 1.71 billion members regularly coming back to its social network.
In a change to its news feed algorithm on Thursday, Facebook said certain types of headlines would be classified as clickbait, those that “withhold or distort information.” Those stories will then appear less frequently in users’ feeds, the company said.
“We want publishers to post content that people care about, and we think people care about headlines that are much more straightforward,” Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s vice president for product management for the news feed, said in an interview.
Facebook has been working to maintain the integrity of the news feed to keep users happy and spending as much time on Facebook as possible. The Silicon Valley company constantly tweaks its algorithms, and in June it made a sweeping set of changes that would rank publisher content in general less favorably in the news feed.With ever more fun video games coming out each day, kids today prefer spending their free time in front of the PC or with a gaming console instead outside paying games with their friend. The result is empty playgrounds and obese kids who don’t get enough exercise. So, many people put great effort in designing playgrounds that kids will want to play in. Many have failed miserably.
Really, seeing our list of playground games you’ll wonder just what the hell was going though the designers’ head when they’ve decided to make these… things. If you can even manage to get a kid to play at these playgrounds, they will need some serious therapy session afterwards. Yes, they are that bad. See for yourself.
1. Yes, The Mouth Goes Between The Legs
2. One Happy Pig
3. Kid Comes In, Kid Comes Out Of The Elephant
4. Those Are Not Playful Houses
5. Want A Spin With The Devil?
6. Perfect For Bored Moms
7. Well, Kids Do Come From There Too
8. Jump In The Mutant’s Mouth, It’s Fun
9. Are The Monkey Heads Really Necessary?
10. Pass Trough The Rainbow Of Piss
11. This Chef Needs A New Entrance
12. It’s Harder For Girls
13. The More You Slide, The Happier The Clown Is
14. Get On The Happy Train
15. Sit In My Lap, It’s Not Creepy
16. How Was That Saying: Give Them Enough Rope…
17. Slide Down The Banana’s Tube
18. Well, It Sort Of Looks Like A Clowns Nose…
19. What Is The Small Whale Doing?
20. Because Everyone Loves Big Scary Insects
21. Impaled Crocodile… What Fun
22. Going Back To Where You Came From
23. Riding A Creepy Snake Thing
24. Another Great Exit
25. Ride A Man
26. This Creepy Crawly Is Not Scary At All
27. Playing On The Bear’s Wood
28. That’s How You Whistle
29. Impaling Humans And Animals Is So Fun
30. Every Kid Want To Be Grabbed By The Witch From The Sand
Talk about messing a kid up. With playground like these, no wonder kids stay home.
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Thank You!The scientists who escaped the Nazis
Gustav Born is one of the last living links with the refugee scientists
When Gustav Born's family were advised in early 1933 that it was time to leave Nazi-controlled Germany, it was from a good authority.
The advice was from Albert Einstein, who told his friend and fellow scientist Max Born to "leave immediately" with his family while they were still able to travel.
They packed their bags and headed across the border, first to Italy and then to England, where they arrived as part of what must have been the best-qualified refugee trail in history.
Gustav Born was 11 at the time, living in Gottingen, Lower Saxony, where his father, Max, was director of one of the world's leading centres for physics research.
The Borns were Jewish, and when Hitler took power, Max Born and his Jewish colleagues were prevented from working at the university. This pioneering, elite group of theoretical scientists were turned into asylum seekers.
Gustav now lives in London, a few days short of his 92nd birthday, and he looks back with great clarity on the remarkable flight of these German academics. The conversation is like opening a 1930s Mitteleuropa time capsule.
Living links
He is now one of the last living links to these academic refugees, who between them went on to win 16 Nobel prizes - his father received the award for his work in quantum mechanics.
Did these scientists realise the extent of the threat from the Nazis?
Albert Einstein in London in 1933 warned against the "temptations of hatred"
"Yes, I think my father probably did. Among his Jewish colleagues, some did, but some didn't believe for some time. But the scale of what the Nazis were doing became apparent in the first three to six months."
Gustav remembers that the ugly mood of anti-Semitism had even reached the playground, with some children not allowed to play with him.
There were also positive examples of human nature, such as the academics who stood by their Jewish colleagues. The Nobel prize winner Max von Laue showed great support, says Gustav.
The physicist Max Planck went to see Hitler in person to challenge the exclusion of Jewish scientists, but Hitler "foamed at the mouth and wouldn't let him talk any more".
It was still tough to leave. Max Born had to give up running an institute, his wife was heartbroken at the prospect of emigrating.
"They hated to be uprooted in this crude and dangerous way."
'Individual liberty'
When the Borns left, they were not under any illusions that this would be a temporary departure. "Nazification" was happening rapidly and there were political murders.
Continue reading the main story REFUGEE NOBEL LAUREATES Nobel prize winners : Prof H A Bethe, Prof M Born, Sir Ernst Chain, Prof M Delbruck, Prof D Gabor, Dr G Herzberg, Prof J Heyrovsky, Sir Bernard Katz, Sir Hans Krebs, Dr F Lipmann, Prof O Loewi, Prof S Luria, Prof S Ochoa, Dr M Perutz, Prof J Polanyi, Prof E Segre
: Prof H A Bethe, Prof M Born, Sir Ernst Chain, Prof M Delbruck, Prof D Gabor, Dr G Herzberg, Prof J Heyrovsky, Sir Bernard Katz, Sir Hans Krebs, Dr F Lipmann, Prof O Loewi, Prof S Luria, Prof S Ochoa, Dr M Perutz, Prof J Polanyi, Prof E Segre Knighthoods: Sir Walter Bodmer, Sir John Burgh, Sir Ernst Chain, Sir Hermann Bondi, Sir Geoffrey Elton, Sir Ernest Gombrich, Sir Ludwig Guttman, Sir Peter Hirsch, Sir Otto Kahn-Freund, Sir Bernard Katz, Sir Hans Kornberg, Sir Hans Krebs, Sir Claus Moser, Sir Rudolf Peierls, Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, Sir Karl Popper, Sir Francis Simon Source: Council for Assisting Refugee Academics
"My parents were pretty sure this was a one-way journey."
While the Borns were watching the swastikas appearing in Gottingen, a much more tweedily humanitarian response was being marshalled by university staff in Britain.
The economist William Beveridge had set up the Academic Assistance Council, with the aim of rescuing Jewish and politically vulnerable academics.
It was an organisation that would help 1,500 academics escape Germany and continue their research work in safety in Britain.
It was quickly backed by academics whose names now read like a row of text books - J B S Haldane, John Maynard Keynes, Ernest Rutherford, G M Trevelyan and the poet A E Housman.
Albert Einstein supported this high-brow escape committee with a highly-charged speech in the Albert Hall in London in October 1933.
He set out an epic defence of Western liberal values of "tolerance and justice" against the "temptations of hatred and oppression", at a time of deepening extremism and economic and political turmoil.
"It is in times of economic distress such as we experience everywhere today, one sees very clearly the strength of the moral forces that live in a people."
World Refugee Day 2013: Syrian refugees in Jordan
He told his audience that it was "the liberty of the individual that has brought us every advance of knowledge and invention - liberty without which life to a self-respecting man is not worth living".
Rescue operation
The council launched its "rescue operation", arranging for academics to come to Britain and providing practical support in the form of grants, accommodation and most importantly jobs.
This was a remarkably talented group being cast aside by the Nazis. As well as the trawl of Nobel prizes, there were 18 future knighthoods and over 100 fellows of the Royal Society or British Academy.
According to the Association of Jewish Refugees there were about 70,000 Jewish refugees who came to Britain before the outbreak of war in 1939.
Nobel prize winner and refugee Max Born took British citizenship before the outbreak of war
Max Born and his family went first to Cambridge and then to Edinburgh University. He paid his way by writing a science text book that became a school standard.
There were others who moved on to the United States. Mathematician Richard Courant went to New York where one of the foremost centres for applied maths, the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, is named after him.
Losing such intellectual powerhouses was a self-inflicted wound for the Nazi war effort.
In the race to develop atomic weapons, German refugees played a key role in making sure that it was the United States that won.
Even though Max Born refused on moral grounds to work on atomic weapons research, Robert Oppenheimer, the US-born "father of the atomic bomb", had been Born's PhD student at Gottingen.
There were signs at one stage that the Nazis might have realised their mistake.
In 1934, Max Born and his family were visited in Cambridge by Werner Heisenberg, another Nobel prize winner and old colleague who had continued working at Gottingen.
Heisenberg brought a message from the Nazi government inviting Max Born to return to continue his scientific work in Germany. The invitation left Born "beside himself with fury", his son recalls.
Going back
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" 2018-07-22 00:55:41 kingshuk pathak said because " help the good poor people who really want it, and forget it about your help god is with you stop fighting god is with you Love your world plant more trees god is with you stop religious fighting god is with you support inter religious marriage god is with you " 2018-07-09 01:59:43 Vern J Wolitski said because "God can be found deep deep deep within your soul. Use the prophets as your instructors, and go on the journey within. Abraham, Krishna, Moses, Zoroaster, Buddha, Christ Jesus, Mohammed, Bab, Baha’ullah" 2018-07-01 20:44:54 john said because "God is one. We are one. Love is all." 2018-06-26 15:40:27 Sena said because "There`s no need forcing others to learn your believes. People are allowed to believe what they want to believe. As long as what they do isn`t threatening others and themselves." 2018-06-22 23:43:05 Sena said because "I want to give feedback to your twitter account @dailygita (twitter.com/dailygita). Since twitter allows us to tweet 280 chars now, maybe you can now tweet a full text of bhagavad gita verse. Because I really like to read them and sometimes confused when a verse is split into two separate tweets." 2018-06-22 23:37:35 anonymous said because "I love God. He is everywhere " 2018-06-22 02:12:31 Mithridates VII said because "Good thoughts, Good words, Good Deeds. When we cultivate God`s divine order in our souls, we bring divinity, and thus peace and prosperity, to this Earth. " 2018-06-19 21:27:35 AMU said because "If only you read the Quran, the whole world will truly seek the religion of Islam watch Tahir Islamic Teaching on Youtube for morr teachings inshallah..." 2018-06-04 18:16:53 anonymous said because "God is amazing!" 2018-05-30 20:08:35 Dr. Vikas Joshi said because "No God, No War" 2018-04-23 14:18:57 Aaron+goldstien said because "god is 1 god is all" 2018-03-27 14:34:34 miracle said because "i love him" 2018-03-13 16:19:15 PRABHJOT SINGH said because "अवल अल्लाह नूर उपाया कुदरत के सभ बन्दे एक नूर से सभ जग उपज्या कौन भले कौन मंदे" 2018-03-10 09:55:37 Meyer ben Shepsal said because " True religion — the religion of revelation. The revelation of supernatural values, a partial insight into eternal realities, a glimpse of the goodness and beauty of the infinite character of the Father in heaven — the religion of the spirit as demonstrated in human experience." 2018-03-06 03:03:54 Intuitive+Param+ said because "HE is ONE and ONENESS is his true recognition. No Hindu, no Muslim, no Christian, not only these but also no Ishwar, no Allah, no God as all these make islands in the ocean of the ONENESS. So, instead of all the above there is only ONE, that`s HE. All the quarrels go to finish when you reach out to HIM. HE is SUPREME, so HE is Omniscient, Omnipresent and Omnipotent. Let all islands of your conception towards HIM dissolve into the Ocean and get enjoyed of the INFINITE, and stay blessed forever. Aum 🙏" 2018-02-23 11:41:37 Intuitive Param said Yes because "HE loves unconditionally. " 2018-02-23 09:09:36 Intuitive Param said because "HE is ONE and ONENESS is his true recognition. No Hindu, no Muslim, no Christian, not only these but also no Ishwar, no Allah, no God as all these make islands in the ocean of the ONENESS. No names, no forms but the Presence all the time. So, instead of all the above there is only ONE, that`s HE. All the quarrels go to finish when you reach out to HIM. HE is SUPREME, so HE is Omniscient, Omnipresent and Omnipotent. Let all islands of your conception towards HIM dissolve into the Ocean and get enjoyed of the INFINITE, and stay blessed forever. Aum 🙏 " 2018-02-23 08:56:43 anonymous said because "Peace!" 2018-02-22 20:13:43 anonymous said because "I Love Jesus" 2018-02-22 20:12:18 anonymous said because "GOD is awesome!" 2018-02-22 20:01:23 K.vamshee krishna said Yes because "for him all are equals, he is truly secular, he is the only one who can give perfect judgement on anything." 2018-02-22 00:49:52 K.vamshee krishna said because "vasudeva kutumbakam - `the world is one family`" 2018-02-22 00:49:22 Raju said because "I never saw to god, but My soul connected with god " 2018-02-15 11:42:56 Ahmed said because "my religion is only believerism religion and not any other religion visit www.believerism.com to know about my religion. I Love My God." 2018-02-15 08:20:51 Pranaya said because "GOD is within you, introspect with steady mind and with selflessness and you will feel god. God is in all his creations, you need patience to see him." 2018-02-14 13:11:29 Aaron goldstien said because "god is all peace and love" 2018-02-14 12:36:48 anonymous said because "God exists and it is you - just know thyself" 2018-02-08 15:18:11 The Oracle said because "Prepare yourselves with this knowledge. The Seventh Kingdom is coming." 2018-02-05 16:26:55 Sravan said because "God Almighty,Please understand me.Please understand All.Please give me All right now." 2018-01-30 10:39:25 Sravan said because "Lead us, O Supreme Spirit, Teacher of teachers, from falsehood unto rectitude, from darkness into light of knowledge, from death and disease to immortality and Eternal Happiness." 2018-01-30 09:59:20 Sravan said because "Mayest not, Thou, O Punisher of the wicked, destroy our young ones, nor our old ones, foetuses, mothers, and fathers, nor those who are dear to us, nor our relations, nor our bodies. Direct us to that path by following which we may not be liable to punishment by Thy Law." 2018-01-30 09:57:37 Sravan said because "Lead us, O Bestower of all happiness, Omniscient, Supreme Spirit, into the path of rectitude and thereby inspireus withh all kinds of knowledge and wisdom, rid us of all that is false and sinful in our conduct, and make us pure. To ths end, we in all humility repeatedly praise and adore Thee." 2018-01-30 09:55:51 Sravan said because "May, O Great God, Wises of the wise, through Thy grace, my mind - which like the hub of a wheel into which all the spokes are inserted, is the repository of the Rig Veda, the Yajur Veda, The Sama Veda and also the Atharva Veda, the mind in which Omniscient, Omnipresent conscious Being - the Witness of all - makes Himself known - be freed from all ignorance and be endowed with the love of knowledge." 2018-01-30 09:51:00 Sravan said because "God Almighty,Please forgive me.May, O Lord of the Universe, my mind - the mind which is the medium through which all yogis acquire knowledge of the past, the present and the future which becomes the means of the union of the immortal human soul with the Supreme Spirit and thereby makes it cognizant of the three periods of time (past, present and the future), PAGE 212 the mind which is capable of conscious exertion and is closely united with the five sense, the faculty of discernment and the soul, and is the means of the advancement of that great Yajna called yoga - be endowed with true knowledge and yoga and thereby be freed from all kinds of pain and ignorance.` " 2018-01-30 09:48:25 Sravan said because "May, O Lord of the Universe, my mind - the mind which is the medium through which all yogis acquire knowledge of the past, the present and the future which becomes the means of the union of the immortal human soul with the Supreme Spirit and thereby makes it cognizant of the three periods of time (past, present and the future)," 2018-01-30 09:45:44 Sravan said because "God Almighty,May, O lord, my mind - the mind which is the repository of the highest form of knowledge, is the faculty for consciousness and judgement, is the light of the senses, and is immortal, the mind without which a man is powerless to do even the most insignificant thing - aspire for purity and shun wickedness.` " 2018-01-30 09:44:01 Sravan said because "May, O Omniscient God, my mind - which is the source of all activity and which, thereby, enables men of learning, piety and courage to perform acts of great public good and heroic deeds on the field of battle and other occasions, which possess wonderful powers and admirable qualities and rules the senses - harbour only righteous desires and completely renounce sin and vice." 2018-01-30 09:41:41 Sravan said because "God AlmightyMay,O Ocean of Mercy, through thy grace my mind - the mind that in the wakeful state travels long distances, and, possesses brilliant qualities, which self-same mind - light of the senses - in sleep attains to the state of profound slumber and in dreams wanders over different places - always entertain pure thoughts for the good of the self as well as for that of all other living beings. May it never desire to injure any one.`" 2018-01-30 09:40:44 Shivam jadli said because "Is God really or not?" 2018-01-23 11:54:22 PREMA said because "GOD IS LIKE GOLD. THE ORNAMENTS REPRESENT THE RELIGION. SOUL IS ONE THE PARTS OF THE BOBY ARE THE RELIGIONS. ALL ARE IMPORTANT FOR THE BOBY TO FUNCTION WELL." 2018-01-21 22:46:10 Viv said Yes because "I can only say that if I can completely let go and believe in his will implicitly then only can I truly love god" 2018-01-18 16:37:31 Muhmmad Aabid said because "God gives the Glad tiding to whom he will, and make destroy to whom he will." 2017-12-26 20:42:45 anonymous said because "God is not real" 2017-12-20 14:14:58 HUSSAM said because "LET PEACE AND WELFARE TO ALL HUMAN BEINGS AT THE ENTIRE EARTH" 2017-12-18 08:31:07 Questions said because "What was your original nature before you were born?" 2017-12-11 15:08:08 Questions said because "May the cosmic energy find all of you in your quest for God. Death is the transition to a pain-free, and disease-free environment. The inside world (Your thoughts, feelings, and emotions) and the outside world (Everything around you and out beyond galaxies, upon galaxy) are all one, and move together as an ORGANISM ENVIRONMENT. That is you." 2017-12-11 13:43:14 Sravan said because "Om,please understand me.Om,Please understand All.Om,Please give me All,right now." 2017-12-09 10:01:22 sravan said because "Ishwar,Please save my soul and me." 2017-12-09 08:54:11 sravan said because "Ishwar,the kindest,cruel to none,second to none,Please save me from the Devil,fallen angels,the descendants of Devil,Devil`s ministry,the darkness,the bad,the Evil,the sins,weaknesses and effects of these. " 2017-12-09 08:49:11 ISHWAR ajwani said because "I love Buddha" 2017-12-07 07:20:16 Kirankumar said Yes because "God is all love. Love is all positive, there is no room of negativity in love." 2017-11-26 02:08:07 Kirankumar said because "Love is all positive. There is no room of negativity at all in love." 2017-11-26 02:01:43 Mac said because "We are alive... soon we will Die! What will we do while we are waiting?" 2017-11-18 18:22:16 Manisha Pradeep said because "Love is God and God is love. Lets all love Him in whichever FORM we love Him in or we may even love the FORMLESS one that He is......Hare Krsna!!!!!!" 2017-11-17 00:24:08 Rain said because "Left behind all Negative, and Let`s together Practice Positive things" 2017-11-09 05:04:37 Ahmed said because "my religion is believerism www.believerism.com " 2017-11-07 02:29:51 Jose Mejia said because "All great religions come from the same Loving God. Each one of them is one stage in the development of humanity’s spiritual and social evolution. Our egotistical desires and our continuous pursuit of power is what keeps us away from embracing this evident truth. One God, one religion, one humanity. God bless you all!" 2017-11-04 13:17:11 Mark said because "He Came for the lost!" 2017-10-30 00:24:01 Stefan said because "God is Love and all that hate him are ruined." 2017-10-27 18:33:01 Stefan said because "May humanity unite as the ants in the field and excel as one with faithful hearts to do the will of God." 2017-10-27 18:28:55 ISHWAR said because "I believe in all religion " 2017-10-25 19:42:47 beedee said because "universe is programmed by GOD" 2017-10-21 22:21:03 Sarsana said No because "I am a Buddhist " 2017-10-12 15:00:31 Eck said because "May thee one bless you all!" 2017-10-04 09:30:57 Randy said because "God granted mr his grace! Jesus did the rest" 2017-10-02 04:54:34 Arjuna said because "Be the greatest teacher ever... " 2017-09-23 13:52:02 Ranjit Halder said because "God blessed me" 2017-09-15 10:43:20 Prakash said because "Jai" 2017-09-09 01:47:38 omar said because "because he created mankind from a drop and the holy Quran tell us a baby is formed in the mother womb" 2017-09-06 20:52:50 Emmanuel Philip Mwewa said Yes because "That`s the only way I can ever be truly happy..." 2017-09-03 20:05:45 Emmanuel Philip Mwewa said because "Time is the true healer. God is soon to reveal all that we ask. Peace is the answer. God is forever almighty. All reigions have a common enemy. " 2017-09-03 20:04:07 JayDee said because "If you say you love God yet hate your fellow man you are a liar and love of the Father is not within you because God is love and those who love him must worship him in spirit and truth. Jesus is the Son of God the Firstborn who will make wars to cease by the power of His heavenly Father. Amen and Selah" 2017-08-27 13:20:40 June Dewar said because "My religion is truth as written in the holy inspired writings of the Prophets in the scriptures; by the Qu`ran and by the Torah. All these are writings of worship of the One True God by Love, justice, peace and mercy of the repentant sinners who change their ways and abide by the holy writings. War is by the machinations of Satan and his demonic influence upon greedy adherents of selfishness and pride just like their father the devil who was a deceiver from the beginning and truth is not ever found in him. These people are deceived into believing they will be successful in all they do but they are wrong. The battle is about to begin when truth will conquer the evil lies of the wicked ones." 2017-08-27 13:04:39 John said because "Peace be you, let there be peace within you and all around you" 2017-08-27 11:36:36 Nakul said because "every religion teaches d ways leading to peace" 2017-08-27 03:27:44 Felix said because "I choose no religion, for I was born in one and found out many existed. Everyone claims to be superior but all teach the virtue of love. I choose to accept and believe the fact the He lives. And forevermore so shall it be." 2017-08-27 02:52:28 jethro said because "ya I love GOD" 2017-08-22 01:40:44 anonymous said because "ilove india ishwar khandia" 2017-08-17 12:41:52 Jasmine said because "I don`t consider Buddhism as religion but I`ve been looking translations for FOREVER. Glad I came upon this site when I did" 2017-08-15 18:23:06 Mohammed said because "Muhammad is the last of the messengers and prophets" 2017-08-13 07:57:33 Dan said because "I never had a religion before and this helped me find the one who spoke to me. Thank you. " 2017-08-11 09:35:29 M.Anjanaa said because "i loved it and english translation was the most" 2017-07-26 06:57:30 M.Anjanaa said because "i won in geetha chanting wonderful i loved it awesome amazing superb english translation is so nice" 2017-07-26 06:56:37 AJFA said because "Without spirit, life is a series of disasters interrupted by brief moments of comfort. With Spirit, life is an endless stream of lessons pushing us deeper into joy." 2017-07-25 21:51:30 Jim said because "He is most amazing" 2017-07-25 19:48:53 Rajireddy said because "I love bhagawan" 2017-07-22 02:18:24 Robert Leutwiler Smith said Yes because "God or whatever you call the power that maintains All loves us and cares for us in ways that we can feel and understand. Faith is not about writing in books but action and real life practice." 2017-07-11 12:07:22 Robert Leutwiler Smith said because "Where I live in Connecticut, after the lies and disrespect shown in the recent election, some people think they are Vigilantes and start hurting and reporting innocent people who are different. Please pray with me for peace and especially for the protection of mine and these victims." 2017-07-11 12:04:34 AKTER HOSSAIN said because "Ya Allah!i surrender myself to You.you`re the One who created me,the One who knows my pains and my hidden tears the One who sees everything hidden and untold." 2017-07-09 21:01:33 Shannon said because "I appreciate all creatures, even though I may not understand them. " 2017-07-08 21:35:39 Lisa said because "God is the only good that is!" 2017-07-08 20:06:20 Ankit said because "Guru purnima value of mathura in hindi" 2017-07-07 13:43:48 Kranthi Kiran said because "I am th God" 2017-06-28 13:47:44 Suman said because "I love God because he is ever cheerful and always gives me joy and peace." 2017-06-25 02:06:13 Suman said because "God is amazing." 2017-06-23 13:47:41 teddy said because "torah " 2017-06-19 07:50:18 Lisa said because "May turn our hearts and faces toward our loving God" 2017-06-18 21:47:32 Sebghatullah said because "I love Allah(god), he is god of Israel,Hebrew,Ibraham,John,Jecob,Moses,Jesus,Muhammad(pbu all them), and all mankind. I love Jesus,Moses and all other prophet which mentioned in Quran the god is one. " 2017-06-09 07:11:51 Maureen said because "Those who love God realise that we cannot capture abstract Go(o)dness in a single name; we can only translate his qualities/identity in lives of peace, love, care, justice..." 2017-05-31 09:35:54 ervan said Yes because "Because he is my lord snd my god" 2017-05-23 11:28:24 life short said because "I love Yahovah He is the answer" 2017-05-19 11:33:15 Joseph Kosinski said because "God (Yahweh) is eternal." 2017-05-13 06:42:37 Lisa crumell said Yes because "He`s my Lord and Savior he`s here when nobody on Earth can help you he`s there for you" 2017-05-11 21:37:28 Amos said because "Wait, there is holywood word in quran source on your web, please provide more trusted refference. I want to read them (all religion). I want to make sure you have trusted source." 2017-05-11 05:25:43 S.A.M said because "God as told by humans is man made,actual God is not known to us but must be most kind entity " 2017-05-09 05:12:44 prashant bhise said because "Without taking breath no one can stay alive, Its not only god that make us stay alive but taking breath every second keeps us alive" 2017-05-02 06:54:20 Nabin Rai said Yes because "He complete me by giving meaning to the life." 2017-04-28 14:57:57 Wolitski said Yes because "I`m alive." 2017-04-28 09:47:05 Zara said because "I love god because he made us and he loves us as he made us. He gives us everything when we don`t ask for it and he gives us different attributes so we can recognise each other. " 2017-04-27 14:04:10 Joanna said because "I love God, Mother and Father. Never has God let me down, not even once not answered a prayer. We are all his/her children forever loved no matter what. Be blessed beloved brothers and sisters ❤️" 2017-04-23 20:53:01 Joseph Kosinski said because "I love GOD because all the religions that I have studied include him." 2017-04-22 13:54:38 Arjuna said Yes because "To burn the weeds and harvest the wheat..." 2017-04-20 05:50:24 Susan said because "He shows his love for me on every corner of my life" 2017-04-19 20:29:18 Ismail said because "He saved me so many times " 2017-04-19 20:16:35 John said because "He is the awesomest!" 2017-04-19 19:50:13 spandam said because "hes sexy af bro. " 2017-04-18 23:39:06 Angela Santiago-Cortes said because "Creation is the same through all religions, they just like to use different words." 2017-04-18 12:43:19 Arjuna said Yes because "Waking up this morning..5:40am in washington dc...." 2017-04-18 05:40:04 Nova Stauffer said because "He knows all the worlds information and shares it with humans" 2017-04-17 18:22:40 Arjuna said Yes because "Understanding " 2017-04-17 05:29:32 Arjuna said Yes because "Of Armonie" 2017-04-16 05:13:19 John said Yes because "To be a better person" 2017-04-14 20:05:14 Arjuna said Yes because "Life " 2017-04-14 05:44:28 Naveen sharma said Yes because "Bhagwan mera janmdata h." 2017-04-14 01:43:33 Arjuna said Yes because " Women " 2017-04-13 19:20:27 Arjuna said Yes because "Tree" 2017-04-12 20:20:27 Arjuna said Yes because "Water" 2017-04-11 05:22:55 Mogno Khan said Yes because "He created everything for us" 2017-04-10 23:54:48 Arjuna said Yes because "Air" 2017-04-10 05:26:18 Carolyn Goss said Yes because "Because he sent his only begotten son to die for my sins because he is a loving God." 2017-04-08 14:58:04 Wolitski said Yes because "I`m alive!" 2017-04-07 22:36:01 Amelia said Yes because "Just love Him, no excuse " 2017-04-07 02:28:53 Atif Riaz Butt said because "Islam is religion of peace love and humanity" 2017-04-07 01:25:01 Wolitski said Yes because "I`m alive." 2017-04-07 00:18:01 Alice Chileshe Mulenga said because "HE first loved me.He showed me wat agape love is by sending HIS only begotten son JESUS CHRIST to die for worthless me and that`s how I know that GOD knows me,loves me and recognises me as HIS creation(child) GOD deserves to be love because HIS love 4us is unchangeable. It`s deeper than the deepest ocean,higher than the highest mountain and wider than then widest skies. GOD is great" 2017-04-04 11:14:05 Maryam (Muslim) said Yes because "Because I meant for it. " 2017-04-04 07:36:18 anonymous said because "Peace expresses Magnificent Nature and it exist." 2017-03-25 11:24:43 stuart said because "he carries me in my toughest of times; he loves us all without condition" 2017-03-22 21:01:54 Evans Adu-Baffoe said Yes because "God made me in his image and likeness to dwell and dominate the earth" 2017-03-22 09:48:13 John said Yes because "He first loved me! He created me for a purpose and lasting peace is found only in him!" 2017-03-21 23:42:34 Jimmy said Yes because "Because he is all there can be" 2017-03-16 15:24:13 akash dede said because "i believe in humanity" 2017-03-14 05:57:39 Lucky one said Yes because "I am lucky to give my love to Him. He is the ocean of love and if I fill my heart with Him, it spills out back to Him!" 2017-03-12 21:03:23 Chandler said Yes because "He is love. He is in all things. I am that, you are that. Hari Om Tat Sat" 2017-03-11 18:16:55? said No because "He is amazing" 2017-03-08 16:33:40 Doug said Yes because "He let`s me feel his love. " 2017-03-08 09:16:22 Calvin said Yes because "I want a peace of mind. Not controlled by my emotions" 2017-03-07 05:39:43 semarayasa said Yes because "i believe that god is a creator" 2017-03-03 21:18:16 Hailey said Yes because "He helps me through good times and bad he is my rock my redeemer...out of all the things in my life that hAve changed god will remain the same. " 2017-03-02 11:29:16 Sarah said Yes because "Gives me peace and understanding." 2017-02-24 11:59:56 Gary said Yes because "What is the Alternative" 2017-02-24 00:29:20 anonymous said because "He is the greatest" 2017-02-22 22:57:17? said Yes because "Yes" 2017-02-15 20:00:24 David said because "he forgives everyone for everything (except blashpemy against the Holy Spirit)" 2017-02-14 01:26:27 Candrenasia said because "He is the best. Thanks for sharing " 2017-02-13 18:30:18 Glenn Byrnes. said because "It`s beats war." 2017-02-13 04:34:35 Chris said because "Nothing can help me when I am heavy hearted, feeling defeated, desperate, hurt, scared, unsure but GOD!" 2017-02-13 01:19:58 Anonymous said because "God has become me." 2017-02-10 23:44:06 Pius Emeka Bwafor said Yes because "HE is my creator and everything" 2017-02-06 03:37:05 richard said because "He died for me" 2017-02-05 06:38:22? said Yes because "Jesus is God and lord" 2017-02-04 21:44:19 Well wisher of Humankind said because "Allah with love says in Holy Quran chapter(82:6)`Oh mankind, what has distracted you from your Generous Lord?”" 2017-02-03 18:15:00 Faiyaz Yakub Ibrahim Patel said because "Say: He is Allah, the One and Only; Allah, the Eternal, Absolute; He begetteth not, nor is He begotten; And there is none like unto Him." 2017-02-03 17:58:15 Salman Akhtar said Yes because "Yes I do, because all GODS are friends with the Supreme-GOD, or Heavenly Father if we refer to Bible, who is the creator of this universe :)" 2017-02-02 01:12:59 Nicola said Yes because "Of who he is" 2017-01-30 10:28:51 King said Yes because "I want too much." 2017-01-29 21:05:22 nabih Refai said Yes because "All that were is and will be all that was never or seems to exist everything and everyone everywhere across times and spaces are One great Harmony.This Harmony vibrates through all and I wish to become able to attend and call on that Power through the discipline of Kami " 2017-01-21 15:14:10 gurjeet singh said Yes because " I unbelievable if some like him. he is true only he is.he is creater " 2017-01-21 09:11:34 Lx said Yes because "Almighty" 2017-01-21 00:03:54 Alin Segall said because "God has been here before all of us and, yet, he has faced the Darkness with enduring love and hope. There was nothing and, increasingly, the universe is being populated with light and being, and love and compassion. Humans might be depressed at the state things are in the world because they are looking upwards from below. Imagine looking downwards, from above. Have faith in His Works. Have courage to see the enduring examples of love, mercy and compassion. Most of all, fight despair with this vision of a unified world where man and God will learn to walk as one. This is what God tells us. Now, more than ever. And this is why I love him." 2017-01-20 17:06:34 ilgiocoliere said Yes because "Because yes" 2017-01-19 13:57:57 Justin said Yes because "God is life. God is love. I am created in God`s image. I am his child. I love God because he gives me breath of life " 2017-01-18 00:19:14 abhi said Yes because "It exist" 2017-01-15 12:52:04 Sumit said Yes because "God is kind to me and makes me feel happy" 2017-01-15 12:45:03 Krishna said because "Without the mind the universe is nothing but peace" 2017-01-13 17:11:38 Ejdi said because "He loves me." 2017-01-10 06:52:23 David said Yes because "He first loved me!" 2017-01-07 20:57:04 Godwin Mongi said Yes because "He is God" 2017-01-05 16:28:03 Pathias Paul said because "He is the almighty who has given me uncondition love" 2017-01-02 00:37:47 Kathe in the forest said Yes because "He is always with me. He gave me his only son, who died for my sins and thru him I will get to heaven. " 2017-01-01 21:46:59 anonymous said because ":-( you, thats why" 2016-12-31 02:22:39 Michelle said because "I trust in god to show it to me. " 2016-12-28 23:31:03 Valerie Angele said Yes because "I am part of God " 2016-12-23 10:59:22 Valerie A said Yes because "I am part of God " 2016-12-23 10:56:41 Jayu said Yes because "God is my active partner" 2016-12-23 02:01:09 Joshua Battles said Yes because "I want to understand my place in the world." 2016-12-18 13:35:38 gautam said because "he cured my OCD" 2016-12-15 11:22:48 Tiffany said Yes because "GOD LOVES ME!!!!!" 2016-12-14 13:31:56 Henry said because "What is within comes out and what is without comes in." 2016-12-06 21:25:53 anonymous said because "What`s not to love? He is awesomest!" 2016-12-04 21:58:15 anonymous said because "Peace is the only way this world can survive" 2016-12-04 21:55:20 anonymous said because "He has given me so much in Life" 2016-12-04 21:52:52 anonymous said because "He has given me so much in Life" 2016-12-04 21:50:07 Govinda said Yes because "I belongs to Brahmin and I believe in god" 2016-10-22 06:10:05 Dylan Schwartz said Yes because "Because God is love and God is so kind and amazing " 2016-10-21 22:37:00 anonymous said because "that part where I suppose to say something important well things move in order things that are not in order will bring disruptions to the way of LIFE. So for me peace starts the process...but before peace do it have to come after war?" 2016-10-19 09:51:17 Wallace said Yes because "I am nothing without God. He is my Lord; there is no God but God. Upon Him I rely and to Him is my return." 2016-10-18 01:03:10 Wallace the Noble said Yes because "I am nothing without God. He is my |
would be ideal to run the farm.
Burns, who is accepting entries at bluebirdhillfarmessaycontest.com, said essays have already started pouring in and the contest isn't over until June 1.
"The first person who called said, 'Is this for real?' And I said, 'This is for real.' For sure," Burns told WNCN-TV.
"As soon as it went out it just kind of exploded," Burns said. "I've heard from people I haven't heard from in 20 years, calling and saying 'Oh I wish I could have that farm. Most of them are too old. So it's just been a real surprise. A pleasant surprise."
Burns told The Citizen-Times of Asheville that she is seeking a "committed couple" to run the farm because experience has taught her that it's too much for a single person to handle.
"It's too much work for one person. I've worked from dawn til dark for most of the 18 years. My body won't let me do it anymore," Burns said.
"To me, there's no better calling in life than raising organic food," Burns said. "I'm looking for a like-minded couple who have experience and training in organic farming and are willing and able to put in the long days and hard work that farming requires."In the video below Katie Halper “translated” Netanyahu’s racist emergency election appeal to get out the vote. Titled “An American Translation of Benjamin Netanyahu’s own words”, she noted in the video all the words are Netanyahu’s with a few changes:
The only changes were replacing:
“Arab” with “Black”
“right wing” with “Republican”
“Likud” with “Republican”
“Labor” with “Democrats”
“Israel” with “United States”
The alarmingly racist appeal has been cited as being responsible for a surge in the polls for Likud. Let’s watch the video:
The Republican leadership is in danger.
Black voters are coming out in droves to the polls
Left wing organizations are busing them out. Get out to vote, bring your friends and family, vote Republican in order to close the gap between us and the Democrats. With your help and the help of God,
We will build a nationalist government that will protect the United States of America.
We’re grateful to Halper for making Netanyahu’s screed more accessible to the American public. There’s something very eery about hearing the tone of his voice while reading those words.
At the end Halper asks “Can you imagine if an American politician said that?” There’s been an excess of commentary about the racist nature of the speech on social media with many wondering how it would fly in this country. Of course all hell would break out in the press if during a U.S. presidential campaign one of the leading candidates warned blacks, or Jews, were flooding to the polls funded by foreign interests and we should all go out and vote to counter them. It would be condemned (even if there is a history of doing just this). But the issue here is that Netanyahu did exactly this in 2015, and in a place like Israel it works. Why is that? And what does it say about the supposed shared values between Israel and the United States?Above: MINUSTAH Chief Sandra Honore (UN Photo)
By the Caribbean Journal staff
The recently-signed El Rancho accord between the branches of Haiti’s government is an “unprecedented step in Haitian political history,” according to MINUSTAH chief Sandra Honore.
The accord, which was signed on March 14, stipulates that elections be held this year in Haiti; it would combine elections delayed more than two years with those scheduled for the end of 2014, which include the entire Chamber of Deputies.
Earlier this month, Haiti President Michel Martelly said the accord had “made possible what seemed impossible.”
“Dialogue as means of agreement is a victory for Haiti,” said Honore, a native of Trinidad and Tobago who was addressing the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday. “The long-awaited adoption and promulgation of the Electoral Law in December 2013, along with the March 14th Accord emanating from the inter-Haitian dialogue, have prepared a path toward inclusive and transparent elections to be held later this year – a sine qua non for the continuous functioning of Parliament in January 2015.”
Honore said Haiti was now at a turning point, urging that the provisions of the accord be “implemented in a timely manner by the Haitian authorities.
“To this end, MINUSTAH along with members of the international community represented in Haiti, are engaging Haiti’s key political actors,” she said.
The MINUSTAH chief also addressed Haiti’s economy, which grew by 4.3 percent in 2013, something she said was reason for “cautious optimism and renewed hope.”Members of the House of Representative Committee on Science, Space & Technology—including representative Don Beyer (VA), Jacky Rosen (NV), Mark Takano (CA), and a number of other Democrats—have signed and submitted a letter to President Trump expressing concern over the President's methods of receiving scientific information. The letter states that by failing to appoint a qualified director to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy or adequately staff the department, the President has left himself vulnerable to “misinformation and fake news,” noting that Trump has, “a tool at your disposal in this regard, should you wish to make use of it, in the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) which, under your administration, has been left largely unstaffed and without a director.”
Congress created the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under the National Science and Technology Policy, Organization, and Priorities Act in 1976 with the goal of providing the President and those within the Executive Office quality advice on the creation and modification of policies that directly affect science and technology. The role was first created informally under President Kennedy, whose staff recognized a need for scientific expertise to guide his decision making on issues like the NASA moon mission and evolving medical and military technologies.
“The Trump Administration has been defined by chaos and alternate facts, but it has also consistently shown total disregard for science," Beyer told Popular Science. "Trump himself famously called climate change a Chinese hoax, so it's not surprising that he has been repeatedly taken in by false stories that may reinforce his worldview but bear no resemblance to the truth. We are urging him to appoint reliable staff informed by sound science, including a Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, so that he can at least give himself better access to accurate information which we hope will lead to better policies.”
The letter is not the first time that the administration has received criticism over its apparent disregard for science and the scientific process. The President’s rumored choice for the role of lead scientist at the United States Department of Agriculture is Sam Clovis, a talk show host with a doctorate degree in public administration—not in a scientific field. Previous undersecretaries have been experts in nutrition or public health, or held degrees in biochemistry or plant physiology.
In addition, earlier this month the EPA dismissed several members of its science advisory board while the Department of the Interior placed its own “under review”. Although members typically serve for two to three years, many of these members were dismissed after having served only one. Statements made by members of the administration suggest that they will be replaced by scientists that are more closely tied to industry, which has many concerned that the board will act in the best interest of corporations and not of the American people.
The actions are alarming enough that on Thursday, 70 members of Congress led by Elise Stefanik (R-NY) and Bill Foster (D-IL) sent a letter to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt concerning the recent dismissal of several members of the EPA’s Board of Scientific Counselors. The letter states that, “We are alarmed at the signal this sends about both the priorities of the EPA and about its willingness to protect the environment.”
“There have always been a few industry folks on the science advisory board,” says Granger Morgan. Morgan is the Hamerschlag University Professor of Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University and a former chair of the EPA Science Advisory Board. “The selection criteria have always been to find the people with the very best science. And you need a diversity of science expertise because the agency works across a whole wide range of things, but informally staff has always tried to make sure they balance in other respects as well, with folks in industry.”
Members of the science advisory board include academic scientists as well as researchers for corporations, including Proctor and Gamble and Exxon Mobil. You can get a taste of what these panels are like by reading a transcript.
“No scientific advisory body I know has ever been anti-industry, and I've studied quite a number of these bodies over the years,” echoes Sheila Jasanoff a Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Harvard University who literally wrote the book on science advisory panels. “Even in the National Academy of Sciences and the National Research Council, there's always a balance, and the federal advisory committee act says that there should be a fair balance in terms of the interests represented.”
Science advisory boards were created in recognition of the fact that scientific outcomes aren't black and white. Scientists can reach a consensus on issues they've thoroughly investigated, but the policies that should follow aren't always cut and dry. A drug with a laundry list of side effects, for example, may be intolerable for treating a cold but perfectly acceptable for treating life threatening diseases. The EPA’s Science Advisory Board, for example, was created by Congress in 1978, after a generation of American wildlife was systematically poisoned by herbicides and pesticides that were supposed to make life better for Americans. Those organochloride pesticides still persist in the environment.
“The [EPA] Science advisory board does basically two things,” says Morgan. “First, it reviews major agency products—if the agency does a piece of analysis for a new regulation or something like that, then the science advisory board is typically asked to look at it and provide commentary on whether they've got the science right, whether the analysis was done correctly. It doesn't make policy prescriptions.”
Science advisory boards tackle the question of, “how do you bridge uncertainty in a complex society where you can't know everything?” says Jasanoff. “For that you need balance.”
“What we're seeing right now are things that are pathological and problematic," she adds. "One is targeting specific individuals, which is always a bit suspect in the science world. And two, a replacement of one type of stakeholder with another, instead of recognizing that it's the multiplicity of the stakeholders that produces the reliability of the knowledge.”
Without this kind of balanced, outside perspective, misinformation thrives.
The House letter states that “Disseminating stories from dubious sources has been a recurring issue with your administration,” pointing to a May 15, 2017 Politico article which notes that Trump’s “Deputy National Security Advisor passed along printouts of two Time magazine cover stories—one, a previously identified and debunked internet hoax purporting to be from the 1970s warning of a coming ice age, and the other, from 2008, a special report on global warming, with the intention of undermining concern about climate change.”
Of course, the representatives responsible for the letter don’t speak for all members of the committee. In fact, the committee’s official Twitter account often disseminates the sort of anti-science news Beyer and co. are trying to get off of the President’s desk.passive range has also been increased. SMASHING.]The PBE has been updated! Today's update includes changes to, a new icon for, and several champion and jungle balance changes!Continue reading for more information!
(Warning: PBE Content is tentative and iterative - what you see may not reflect what eventually gets pushed to live servers! Manage your expectations accordingly. )
Table of Contents
Elderwood Bard Updated
on 2/24 (his debut) vs 3/2 (Today):
and here's an up-to-date batch of screenshots:
Elderwood Bard screen shots, For an updated set ofscreen shots, check out our comprehensive PBE post!
Miscellaneous
Balance Changes * Remember *: The PBE is a testing grounds for new, tentative, and sometimes radical changes. The changes you see below may be lacking context or other accompanying changes that didn't make it in - don't freak out! These are not official notes.
* Remember *: The PBE is a testing grounds for new, tentative, and sometimes radical changes. The changes you see below may be lacking context or other accompanying changes that didn't make it in - don't freak out! These areofficial notes.
Champions Bard
Cosmic Binding (Q) damage changed to 75/110/145/180/215 from 85/115/145/175/205
Nidalee
Pounce ( Cougar W) damage REVERTED to 50/100/150/200 from 40/80/120/160
damage REVERTED to 50/100/150/200 from 40/80/120/160 Swipe ( Cougar E) AP ratio REVERTED to.45 from.55 [Note: Both of these are reverts back to live values]
Sona
Crescendo (R) mana cost lowered to 100 at all ranks from 100/150/200
King's Tribute (Passive) range increased to 1400 from 1000
range increased to 1400 from 1000 Frozen Domain (W) increased healing on the ice increased to 20% from 8/11/14/17/20%
Terror Capacitor (W) base shield value reduced to 60/100/140/180/220 from 80/130/180/230/280
base shield value reduced to 60/100/140/180/220 from 80/130/180/230/280 Terror Capacitor (W) % maximum mana scaling increased to 8% from 5%
[Note: the % mana scaling on W was added in an earlier patch this cycle. His shield value overall should still be higher vs live,]
Hyper-Kinetic Position Reverser (R ) cooldown lowered to 120/100/80 from 120/110/100
Time Bomb (Q) cooldown reduced to 10/9.5/9/8.5/8 from 12/11/10/9/8
Items Bami's Cinder
[ Hot New icon]
Damage increased to 16 (+1 per champion level ) from 15 (+1 per champion level level)
Maximum damage based on time in combat now to 24 (+ 1.5 per champion level) from "up to 100% "
[Bug fix] Cost now properly listed as 2200g for each variation.
release skin, has recieved a few tweaks in the last couple of PBE updates. In today's update, his beard, horns, and overall color were tweaked.Here's a comparison ofnow has a counter for how many dragons each team has taken.There are a few changes forrelated files. Nothing specific to share... but somebody somewhere is workin' on something.The Moscow Region holds a day of mourning on Saturday for those, who lost their lives in a deadly blaze at a local hospital earlier this week.
MOSCOW, April 27 (RIA Novosti) - The Moscow Region holds a day of mourning on Saturday for those, who lost their lives in a deadly blaze at a local hospital earlier this week.
A total of 38 people died early on Friday in the fire that broke out at a psychiatric hospital in the small town of Ramensky north of Moscow.
“All scheduled entertainment events have been cancelled in connection with the mourning,” the press service for acting Moscow Region Governor Andrei Vorobyov said.
A police source told RIA Novosti earlier that most patients in the facility in Ramensky had died in their sleep from smoke inhalation, as they were likely sedated by prescribed medicine.Dong, his wife Viet Truong, sons Cung, Trieu, Duy, and Tan — the fourth was the only one born in Canada — lived first on Stinson Street in the east end, and then on the east Mountain, where the boys attended Barton high school.
Dong was strict with his sons, insisting they work harder in school than other kids because of where they had come from.
The family was sponsored by Ryerson United Church, and members John and Elizabeth Sadler loaned them money to buy their first house after the initial sponsorship ended.
Canada accepted nearly 60,000 Vietnamese boat people from about 1975 to 1980.
[How the process of admitting Syrian refugees from Jordan will work]
Dong and Viet each worked multiple jobs and he ran a landscape company. He suffered a stroke in 1997, Trieu believes, as a result of all he had been through.
"My father had stresses in his life that I cannot begin to understand."
While attending Queen's University and playing on the volleyball team, Trieu met his future wife, Brooke Biggs, who was a star squash player. They have two daughters, Claire, 5, and Emma, 3.
In September, when newspapers published the picture of a three-year old Syrian boy washed up on a Turkish beach, Trieu felt it.
That could have been him. None of those who rode that boat out of Vietnam in 1981 knew how to swim.
"I'm not proud that it took a picture to get us involved, but that's the way it was," says Trieu, who is a soft-spoken man.
"The similarities of what our family benefited from are not lost on me."
Trieu and Brooke chatted with friends about helping. It grew to include friends who belong to St. James Anglican Church in Dundas, which has sponsored refugee families from conflicts in Iraq, Kosovo, and Vietnam.
[Paintings a poignant picture of Syrian refugee life for Canadian ministers]
Brooke heard that it costs $27,000 to sponsor a family of four for one year. But they wanted maximum impact, so were matched with a family of Syrian farmers: 14 in the family in total. It will cost $64,000 to sponsor them for a year.
Each member of the original sponsorship group committed $1,600. It grew to 25, and then 50, and counting, which includes a group at St. James.
An online fundraising site continues to add to their total, and the group has set up committees including health, clothing, transportation and finding housing — the toughest challenge for a family that large.
"So many hands are making it work," says Jean Archbell, the pastor at St. James. "The young people have so much energy."
The Syrian family's name is Al Rahmo. They have Canadian travel visas but are waiting on government officials in a refugee camp in Lebanon to issue exit visas. It could happen any day now.
Trieu Nguyen is an understated person. He stresses that the effort is all about the group, there is no leader and their efforts "are not extraordinary compared to others in the community."
Brooke, a physiotherapist at McMaster Children's Hospital, prodded him to tell his family story.
"There are a lot of Trieus out there," she says.
The couple is disappointed when they see negative comments online about supporting refugees.
Trieu says his parents worked hard, bought homes and cars, paid taxes. They live in Dundas. All four sons graduated from university with engineering degrees.
"(The Syrians) may have to lean on our safety net but I wouldn't expect they will be using it very long."
When he was born on the other side of the globe, Trieu's grandmother picked his name, which she said meant ocean tides.
He's come a long way, just like the Syrian kids about to land in Hamilton, who will walk in similar footsteps — uncertain ones, but steps nevertheless.
To contribute to the group's Syrian refugee family fundraising campaign go to youcaring.com.
For more information or to get involved: brooke.trieu@gmail.com
jwells@thespec.com
905-526-3515 | @jonjwellsThe conventional wisdom says that the past 10 years have been a bad time for science fiction on television. Fantasy has been on the upswing. Space opera all but disappeared. Science fiction shows get canceled all the time. But a ton of great science fiction has been created since 2005. Here are 15 shows that changed everything.
And yes, this is only shows created in 2005 or later—so there’s no Firefly, no Lost and no Battlestar Galactica. Those shows get praised often enough already.
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1) Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Many people expected The Sarah Connor Chronicles to be a cash-grabbing follow up to a beloved series—but it turned out to be a far superior extension of the Terminator mythology than any of the post-Cameron sequels. Ambitious, novelistic and psychologically layered, it differs from most sci-fi television in that it’s as much an artful character study as it is an ass-kicking genre show. Lena Headey’s complex, damaged and thoroughly compelling take on the character can stand comparison to the protagonist of any critically lauded prestige drama. Viewers didn’t expect introspection, nuance and emotional intelligence from a Terminator show. The Sarah Connor Chronicles proved them wrong, demonstrating that the sci-fi TV format (and spinoffs in particular) could, in the right hands, prove just as thematically dense or existentially fraught as an episode of your average HBO or AMC drama. What’s more, this show went into greater depth about the development of artificial intelligence than any show had previously, at a time when computers were increasingly taking over our lives in reality.
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2) Fringe
Pop sci-fi at its most exhilarating and outre, this show about a mad scientist and the war between universes demonstrated to television audiences that the genre didn’t have to choose between being intimate or spectacular, thoughtful or explosive, personal or universal. Fringe was, between the porcupine men and the universe-traversing ghosts, spectacularly imaginative. It pushed the envelope of television science fiction, by putting together a remarkably cohesive yet complicated mythos that still left breathing room for numerous tertiary stories and flights of fancy, a feat that The X-Files took a worthy stab at but failed to see through to the end. The show also breathed fresh life into the medium by remaining totally unembarrassed by its frequently bizarre science fictional elements while still keeping everything relatively grounded by a genuine philosophical bent. Several other shows have tried showering us in pulp and weirdness while still attempting an earnest consideration of faith, science and the universe. Most failed (Lost, I’m looking at you). Fringe redefined the genre by actually pulling it off. But most of all, Fringe managed to create a character that we’d never quite seen on television before: Walter Bishop, a mad scientist who had done terrible things but was still somehow sympathetic.
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3) Agents of SHIELD
This superspy show is not perfect—and in fact, it’s had stretches of outright badness. But you can’t deny that the televised adventures of the Marvel Universe’s most famous government agency represents a new frontier in transmedia storytelling. Not only is Agents of SHIELD the MCU’s first incursion into the medium of television, it’s a groundbreaking experiment in how to build out stories told in one medium, via the judicious use of another. As the movies play out alongside the show, what happens on one side affects events on the other, beloved supporting characters in one medium get more face time in the other, and the creative enterprise of worldbuilding has grown more expansive and meticulous than ever before. Other franchises have attempted this, but none have done so in such a concerted, strategic and collaborative fashion. It’s the genre TV equivalent of rolling out a multi-front military initiative.
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4) Sense8
Love or hate the Wachowskis and their occasionally twee preoccupation with life, reality and spiritual awakening, it’s impossible to ignore the ways in which their Netflix drama about psychically linked strangers is a game-changer. The plot and its associated tropes are well worn and familiar to anyone who’s watched the duo’s films. Where the show shifts television’s science fiction paradigms is in its unprecedented embrace of diversity and its beautifully organic incorporation of issues relating to race, sexuality and gender identity. The show’s queer, transgender and female characters are front and center—not as progressive lip service, but as integral elements of the narrative, their struggles central to the show’s themes and core ethos. Sense8 is about psychic connection as a thinly veiled metaphor for empathy and, as such, fuses its politics and its plot in emotionally resonant fashion. If there’s another genre show that has presented such a complex and sympathetic portrayal of a trans character and then gone on to create a thematic link between her experiences as a trans person and the science fictional elements of the story, I haven’t seen it. It’s also worth acknowledging that whether or not Netflix spins it into a success, the show is still a pioneering sci-fi effort in the first wave of original streaming content, a format that is likely to become the standard iteration of what we think of as TV.
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5) Orphan Black
There’s a lot that’s unique about this show about a group of clones. Orphan Black demonstrates that a complicated conspiracy story can actually be pulled off on genre television without devolving into a morass of Escherian plot machinations. It’s an extremely thoughtful consideration of scientific ethics and the moral dimensions of human cloning. But, most of all, it’s a unique example of the science fiction show as acting showcase. No other show has taken an astonishingly talented actress, and given her quite this much to work with. Tatiana Maslany is a revelation as the group of clones, making each one a distinct individual with her own personality, mannerisms and emotional arc. Showrunners generally supply a show’s guiding vision—but as talented and indispensable as Graeme Manson and John Fawcett are, Orphan Black is a unique example of lead actress as auteur.
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6) Misfits
This scrappy British show about juvenile offenders who get superpowers has become an unlikely hit—thanks largely to its revolutionary abandonment of narrative constraints as they relate to genre, format, character or pretty much any other aspect of storytelling. It’s a singular case study in how to take practical limitations and turn them into advantages. Truncated season lengths preventing you from making the most of serialized storytelling? Abandon longform conventions and tell insane, daring stories that have next to no long term fallout. No money for spectacular effects? Channel the imaginative potential that would have informed those effects into storylines that are just as spectacular and inventive. One would be hard pressed to find another show in which an entire subplot is devoted to a guy trying to find his penis. Misfits dedicates itself to demonstrating that science fiction TV doesn’t need to be limited by boundaries of budget, taste or convention.
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7) The Venture Brothers
There have been funny science fiction cartoons before, but none quite like The Venture Bros. This may be blasphemy to some—but not even the excellent Futurama can hold a candle to this show’s unbelievably dense layers of joke-a-second setups and incongruously profound observations about humanity. Arch-villains or science heroes, we all have family drama and tragicomic personal hangups to grapple with. The Venture Bros is basically the animated science fiction equivalent of Arrested Development, a miracle of complicated continuity, baked-in references and psychological insight that somehow manages to stay hilarious in part because of how difficult it can sometimes be to parse. The Venture Bros bakes science fantasy and pulp into the impossibly intricate mechanism of its narrative, in the same way that Arrested Development incorporates reality TV and soap opera elements. The result demonstrates that genres that aren’t always equated with endless laughs and spot-on parody can actually supply both—while also establishing a huge cast of characters that spins perpetually in the tumble dryer of an insanely complex and vast fictional universe. What The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy did for science fiction on the radio and the printed page, The Venture Bros does for animation.
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8) Black Mirror
Social satire and techno-anxiety have long been major driving forces in the history of science fiction—but never before has a television show brought the two together in such a potent, blackly funny manner. Utilizing an anthology format that allows it to examine from various angles the ways in which technology and society overlap, it presents a series of dystopian scenarios that somehow mine nightmares out of banality. While television science fiction is mostly about the spectacular, most episodes of Black Mirror focus on the daily routines of their protagonists, routines that are altered just the right amount for satiric and entertainment purposes by scary and largely believable advances in technology. That said, the ultimate responsibility for the insidiously awful circumstances creeping through every episode lies with us, the human beings who create and embrace that technology in a display of gormless hubris. The best science fiction AND the best satire are grounded in recognizable truth and reality. Black Mirror demonstrates this better than any science fiction show that came before it.
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9) Chuck
This show about an underachieving nerd who gets a CIA spy program uploaded into his head might be the first to combine the highly disparate genres of science fiction, slacker comedy and rom-com. In between increasingly outlandish spy missions accomplished via tech-bestowed superpowers, Chuck struggles through a quarter-life crisis straight out of early career Richard Linklater movie and fumbles his way from a protracted will-they-won’t-they phase to a blossoming love affair with CIA agent Sarah Walker. Your mileage may vary with regard to how much of the mushier elements you can stomach, but no one has ever tried to make a spy-fi show that’s also a romantic comedy. Props to Josh Schwartz and Chris Fedak for trying.
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10) Doctor Who, Torchwood and the Sarah Jane Adventures
Sure, Doctor Who has existed since 1963—but when it was brought back from oblivion in 2005, it was a very different animal. In particular, Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat reinvented Doctor Who as a portal fantasy mixed with a domestic soap opera—a fanciful combination of genres that had never even been imagined, much less invented, before. The companions who travel with the Doctor through time and space keep one foot in their present-day existences on Earth, and still have romances and family dramas with normal(ish) people. But the TARDIS always pops up to invite them on adventures in strange worlds. Meanwhile, Doctor Who and its spinoffs, Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures, pulled off an incredible accomplishment: Having three shows set in the same universe, with closely linked continuity, but aimed at vastly different audiences. Torchwood was more adult (both in terms of sexuality and in terms of bleakness) than Doctor Who, while Sarah Jane Adventures was aimed at younger children. And yet, the three shows could (and did) cross over. Also, Torchwood changed science fiction forever, in two other ways: It starred a flamboyantly bisexual character, who has a hugely important same-sex romance, and its format changes with almost every season it was on the air, experimenting with serialization in ways that had never been done before.
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11) Heroes
It’s probably hard to remember, but when it started, Heroes was like nothing anybody had ever seen before — a heavily serialized show about a group of people with superpowers, in which viewers had to wait almost a whole season to see them team up. The globe-spanning storyline brought together characters from Japan, India and all over the United States, while the show managed to use its pervasive mysteries about an apocalyptic future to further its character development. (And then after the first season, not so much.) Also, the show’s development of the sinister HRG from scary stooge to a sympathetic, complex character was a marvel. For one brief, shining year, Heroes showed everyone how much superheroes could mean on television.
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12) Continuum
This Canadian show about a supercop who travels back in time from 2077 along with a group of anti-corporate terrorists manages to pull off some insanely complicated time-travel storytelling, building on the stuff that Sarah Connor Chronicles managed. (And helping to pave the way for Syfy’s new show Twelve Monkeys.) But the thing that makes Continuum really innovative, especially in its early seasons, is the way that it creates a conflict with no “right” side. Kiera, the show’s main character, wants to preserve law and order, and keep her family safe. But the Liber8 terrorists she’s fighting have some excellent points about the evils of the corporate-dominated state she’s defending. Coming on the heels of the Occupy Wall Street movement, this show gave us a new vision of a corporate-dominated dystopia—and then refused to give us any easy answers about. Most of all, the character of Alec Sadler, future corporate despot, is like Walter Bishop in reverse: Sympathetic even though we know he’ll do awful things.
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13) Person of Interest
This show about a superintelligent computer that can predict crimes before they happen is a brilliant innovation in terms of format—Person of Interest is superficially a crime-solving procedural, but constantly wrestles with themes of artificial intelligence, surveillance, and the espionage-industrial complex. Along the way, Person of Interest asks questions like, Can an artificial intelligence ever adhere to human morality? Is a superintelligent computer destined to rule us, perhaps without our knowledge? Can surveillance ever be a benevolent or helpful thing? Thanks to Edward Snowden’s revelations and the ever-encroaching security state, this show has had to move fast to keep up with reality—and along the way, it’s changed the rules for science fiction. More recently, showing a war between artificial intelligences, it’s had to find ways to depict something that television had never attempted, without any cheesy “virtual reality” scenes.
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14) The Walking Dead
This zombie show is more or less science fiction—the zombies are apparently caused by a virus, and there’s some kind of conspiracy involving the CIA. And along with shows like Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead has shown that “genre” entertainment can be as dense, character-focused and intense as any other “prestige” television. A lot of the broadening of genre entertainment on television can be traced to The Walking Dead’s popularity. And meanwhile, The Walking Dead represents a huge innovation on form: This is a serialized zombie movie, in which the characters can never reach the safety of a conclusion. Even in an era that’s given us many post-apocalyptic TV shows, this show has brought the apocalypse to a new level.
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15) Star Wars: The Clone Wars
This animated spinoff of the Star Wars films started as a kid-friendly show, but quickly became something much more intense: a serious examination of war and the rights of soldiers. This show fully explored the horrible conundrum of enslaved clone warriors that the movies barely touched on. And with the relationship between Ahsoka and her mentor Anakin “Darth Vader” Skywalker, this show explored a darkness that few cartoons had ever touched on. Plus this is a brave experiment in using animated storytelling to expand and alter the continuity of a live-action film franchise. [Thanks to everyone who brought this one up — we really meant to include it from the beginning!]
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Additional reporting by Charlie Jane Anders and Rob BrickenMe, Myself and Math, a six-part series by Steven Strogatz, looks at us through the lens of math.
No other number attracts such a fevered following as the golden ratio. Approximately equal to 1.618 and denoted by the Greek letter phi, it’s been canonized as the “Divine Proportion.” Its devotees will tell you it’s ubiquitous in nature, art and architecture. And there are plastic surgeons and financial mavens who will tell you it’s the secret to pretty faces and handsome returns.
Not bad for the second-most famous irrational number. In your face, pi!
It even made a cameo appearance in “The Da Vinci Code.” While trying to decipher the clues left at the murder scene in the Louvre that opens the novel, the hero, Robert Langdon, “felt himself suddenly reeling back to Harvard, standing in front of his ‘Symbolism in Art’ class, writing his favorite number on the chalkboard. 1.618.”
Langdon tells his class that, among other astonishing things, da Vinci “was the first to show that the human body is literally made of building blocks whose proportional ratios always equal phi.”
“Don’t believe me?” Langdon challenged. “Next time you’re in the shower, take a tape measure.” A couple of football players snickered. “Not just you insecure jocks,” Langdon prompted. “All of you. Guys and girls. Try it. Measure the distance from the tip of your head to the floor. Then divide that by the distance from your belly button to the floor. Guess what number you get.” “Not phi!” one of the jocks blurted out in disbelief. “Yes, phi,” Langdon replied. “One-point-six-one-eight. […] My friends, each of you is a walking tribute to the Divine Proportion.”
I tried it. I’m 6-foot-1, and my belly button is 44 inches from the floor. So my ratio is 73 inches divided by 44 inches, which is about 1.66. That’s about 2.5 percent bigger than 1.618. But then again, nobody ever mistook me for Apollo.
The golden ratio originated in the ideal world of geometry. The Pythagoreans discovered it in their studies of regular pentagons, pentagrams and other geometric figures. A few hundred years later, Euclid gave the first written description of the golden ratio in connection with the problem of dividing a line segment into two unequal parts, such that the whole is to the long part as the long is to the short.
To make this problem more vivid and tangible, let’s think of it as a carpentry job. You’re working for Euclid, a notoriously fussy customer. He hands you two boards, each 60 inches long. Your job is to cut one of the boards into a long piece and a short piece, while leaving the other board whole. Sounds easy, but then Euclid says, “Not so fast, pal. The whole board and the long piece have to be in exactly the same proportion as the long piece and the short piece.”
You have no idea what the cranky old man means by that, so you simply saw one of the boards in half. Euclid screams when you hand him your work. “What’s this? Both these pieces are 30 inches long. That’s a ratio of 30 to 30, or 1 to 1. But the whole board is twice as long as either of them — a ratio of 60 to 30, or 2 to 1. Arrrgh! I told you, the whole to long and the long to short ratios are supposed to match. Try again!” and he hands you two new 60-inch boards.
So this time you cut the board much more unevenly into a 40-inch piece and a 20-inch piece, hoping to bring the ratios closer together. Now the ratio of whole |
two periods reflected only the deeper-lying antagonism between the general economical conditions of existence of the classes in question (1906; p. 152).
The deeper-lying antagonism between classes was that one class exploited the labor of others. Slavery, serfdom, debtorship: these were all mechanisms for exploitation. It is indeed valuable to analyze how these mechanisms worked, including the creditor-debtor relationship. But we should never forget that the purpose of any of these methods was the exploitation of labor.
Similarly, Graeber misstates the meaning of wage-labor under capitalism. He refers to that most basic, dominant institution of our present economic life: wage labor (2011; p. 206). But he writes this in the context of discussing the legal philosophy of rights and liberties. He writes that a wage-labor contract is [an] agreement between equals to no longer be equal (at least for a time). It is the very essence of what we call debt (p. 120).
Again, he understands everything about wage-labor except that it is a form of exploitation. The whole point of the capitalist making the worker temporarily unequal is to get the workers to work for a certain number of hours to produce the equivalent of the workers wages and then to continue to work for several more hours, giving (essentially unpaid) labor, producing surplus value (the basis of profit). If this is the very essence of debt, then the essence of debt is exploitation of labor. (Of course, Graeber knows that slavery and wage-labor exploit human labor; he just does not consider this to be vitally important to their meaning.)
Graeber notes that socialists saw capitalism as the system whereby those who own capital command the labor of those who do not (p. 345). This is not his view, however. Graeber notes that banks and bond markets and other financial institutions had come into existence before the rise of factories and wage labor itself (p. 345) and therefore capitalism can be said to begin before there was wage labor. There is no point in quibbling over definitions. Certainly the early market economy developed all sorts of economic apparatuses which paved the way for the eventual development of a fully capitalist society. But a qualitative change occurred with the spread of wage-labor, which Graeber has correctly called, the most basic dominant, institution of capitalism.
Graeber misunderstands what capitalism is. He describes it as commercial society, an economy driven to expand its money, to growth and accumulate its wealth. A marginal few in pre-capitalist economies sold commodities to get money in order to buy new (and more desired) commodities. But capitalists, he says, take money to buy commodities in order to sell these commodities for more money than they started with. Graeber applies this to early merchants (who bought goods in one place in order to carry them to distant places and sell them for a higher price due to their rarity). But such merchants (like the Polo brothers) did not increase the overall wealth of society, they only moved it around. Under capitalism (as Marx saw it), the industrial capitalists buy raw materials and machinery, in order to combine them with the labor-power hired from workers. The labor of the workers makes new things and new values, including unpaid-for surplus value. That is how capitalism expands.
Commodities and Values
Graeber works his way through several theories of the origins and the nature of money. He concludes, there is an unresolved debate between those who see it as a commodity and those who see it as an IOU. Which one is it?...Its both. Money is almost always something hovering between a commodity and a debt-token (pp. 73, 75). Yet his whole book focuses on the nature of debt (credit) and says virtually nothing about commodities, what they are and how they evolved. Is this because commodities cannot be discussed except by acknowledging that they are objects and services provided by human labor?
Compare this with the very first paragraph of Marxs Capital: The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities, its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity (1906; p. 41). This is a different concept of what capitalist society is and how it needs to be analyzed.
Together with his silence about what commodities are, there is Graebers silence about economic value. Considering money, Graeber demonstrates that both the commodity theorists and the credit theorists agree that the function of money is to measure the value of other commodities (p. 44). A gold coin is a promise to pay something else of equivalent value to a gold coin (p. 47). What we call money is a way of comparing things mathematically, as proportions: of saying one of X is equivalent to six of Y (p. 52). But to say that things are equivalent in certain proportions is to say that they have equal (equivalent) values. What is this value that can be measured in terms of how much each commodity has?
Marx believed that economic value, the exchange value of the capitalist market, was different from the utility (use-value) of the commodity. The producing (and selling) capitalists do not care what the use-value is of a commodity, so long as there is a buyer who is willing to pay money for it. The exchange value of a commodity is the amount of socially necessary labor time which went into each commodity (as modified by various factors such as the average rate of profit, the effect of monopoly, short-term fluctuations in supply and demand, etc.). Some sort of labor theory of value was almost universal among pre-Marxist classical economists, including Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Proudhon. For example, Ben Franklin wrote, Trade in general being nothing else but the exchange of labor for labor, the value of all things is most justly measured by labor (quoted in Marx, 1906; p. 59). Graeber rejects the labor theory of value but does not say why. Nor does he suggest any alternate approach to value (such as the marginal utility approach). In all this big book he has nothing to say about value in the market. (I see that he has written a book which has value in its title. Whether it discusses this topic, I do not know.) Yet again, he downplays the importance of labor.
In a footnote in the back of the book, Graeber makes a brief remark that he has tried to move away from the economistic framing of human life as reproduction of labor that hobbles so much Marxist literature[my] emphasis [is] on life beyond survival (p. 453). This from someone who has written a 450 page book in which, as he says, I am mainly interested here in economics! (p. 406). It is indeed wrong to make a crude, mechanistic, analysis in which labor is directly all that matters and everything else would just be an unimportant reflection. That would be economistic. But there is no reason why the reproduction of labor cannot be seen as a major factor, influencing the rest of society and being influenced by other social factors in turn (by politics, family structure, social psychology, religion, art, etc.). That would not be economistic.
Todays Crisis
Graebers writing is weakest when discussing the causes of the current economic crisis. It is sloppy and unbelievable. He states, Presented with the prospect of its own eternity, capitalismor anyway, financial capitalismsimply explodes. Because if theres no end to it, theres absolutely no reason not to generate creditthat is, future moneyindefinitely. The period leading up to 2008 was one in which many began to believe that capitalism was going to be around forever. The immediate effect was a series of increasingly reckless bubbles (p. 360). Apparently he is serious (he repeats this analysis).
Was the period before the recent period (say, the post-World War II apparent prosperity) one where people did not believe that capitalism would be around forever? (I lived through the 60s, and I can assure Graeber that most people, alas, thought capitalism was eternal.) Did investors turn to financialization in the 80s because they had a new faith in capitalism? Is there any evidence for these claims? If this was so, then why did the bubbles ever pop? A sudden belief in the limitations of capitalism?
This view is based on nothing but speculation about mass psychology. It ignores the long term trends (at least since about 1970) toward economic stagnation, overproduction, unemployment and underemployment, underdevelopment and lop-sided development in the oppressed nations, etc. There was a long-term tendency of the rate of profit to fall, together with a growth of monopolization. These caused stagnation in the real economy (the production of real goods and services), due to the decline of real surplus value production. In response, capitalists increasingly invested in the paper economy, in what Marx called fictitious capital, to produce paper profits (which turned out to be unsustainable). Obviously this question would take much longer to explain and debate (see Foster & Magdoff, 2009; Kliman, 2012; Mattick, 2011). At least this explanation is rooted in real factors of labor and production.
His Vision for the Future
A major advantage which anarchism has over Marxism, is that Marx was quite vague about any program for a society after capitalism, focusing mostly on current analysis and strategies for change. By contrast, anarchists have offered visions for a new and better society, in more or less detail. But not Graeber. What I have been trying to do in this book is not so much to propose a vision of what, precisely, the next age will be like, but to throw open perspectives (p. 383). Tellingly, at no point in this book, does Graeber identify himself as an anarchist or advocate anarchism, nor does he call himself a revolutionary or advocate revolution. At the most, in a footnote, he vaguely remarks that, rather than Marxism, I am drawing here more on the alternate strain of revolutionary theory, evident most famously perhaps in Peter Kropotkins Mutual Aid (p. 404).
However, if we look carefully at his book, we can find the basic principles which he expects to apply to the next age. After all, what thinkers believe is central to capitalisms functioning will determine what they think is necessary to change in order to abolish capitalism and the state. Marx, as well as anarchists of the broad, class-struggle, tradition, believed that exploitation of workers was central to capitalism. Therefore they advocated a cooperative, classless, society, without exploitation, as central to the struggle against all forms of oppression. But if people agree with Graeber that debt is basic to the functioning of capitalism, then they will focus on the abolition of debt (or at least its limitation).
Graeber declares that all societies, past present and future, base their economies on three modalities. There are three main moral principles all of which occur in any human society, and which I will call communism, hierarchy, and exchange (p. 94).
By communism, Graeber means that all societies rely on community, solidarity, mutual aid, neighborliness, informal cooperation, and love. He specifically denies that communism, as he uses it, has anything to do with ownership of the means of production. The question of individual or private property is often little more than formal legality anyway (p. 95). Communist societyin the sense of a society organized exclusively on that single principlecould never exist (p. 95). However, Kropotkin and other anarchist-communists of the alternate strain of revolutionary theory did advocate a cooperative economy with the means of production held collectively (in common). From this point of view, Graeber would seem to be rejecting libertarian communism.
What Graeber means by writing that there would always be hierarchy is not quite clear. Is he denying that an egalitarian society is possible? Is he saying that some sort of state is inevitable? Or is he just saying that even in a classless, egalitarian, society, adults will have responsibility for children, some people may be more influential than others among friends, and so on? Anarchists could accept the latter, but I am not sure if that is what he means.
Exchange in the Market
By exchange, Graeber means a situation in which each side gives as good as it gets (p. 103). This may include exchanging gifts or barter or competitive commercial business. Theres always some sort of system of exchange (p 385) which may be a market. Markets can be good and noncapitalist, he claims. Graeber goes to great lengths to repeatedly insist that markets and capitalism are not necessarily the same. The market [and] capitalism (I must continually remind the reader that these are not the same thing) (p. 376). Markets, when allowed to drift entirely free from their violent origins, invariably begin to grow into something different, into networks of honor, trust, and mutual connectedness (p. 386).
I agree that early markets (exhanges of commodities at the margins of society) were the not the same thing as developed capitalism (when human labor-power became a commodity and the whole of society was subordinated to commodity production). But capitalism developed out of early commodity exchange (with a big assist by the state). A return to pre-capitalist markets would only make likely the re-development of capitalism.
To continue to have markets, implies continuing to have money. Graeber states, Money was no more ever invented than music or mathematics or jewelry.Its probably as old as human thought (p. 52). If money is an aspect of human thought, comparable to music or mathematics, then, like music and mathematics, presumably we can expect to always have money.
Of all the things he could raise, Graeber makes only one specific concrete proposal. It is for some kind of Biblical-style Jubilee (p. 390). All debts, domestic and international, would be forgiven (he does not say whether this should be periodic, as in the Bibleevery 7 years or every 50 years). This would, no doubt, be difficult to win. Great imperial states have invariably resisted this kind of politics (p. 390). Indeed! I would think that to achieve such a demand would require the overthrow of the capitalist class and their state. But anyway, Graeber concludes, Nothing would be more important than to wipe the slate clean and start again (p. 391). This last phrase is revealing. Apparently debts would not be abolished forever; people would start over again, accumulating debts.
Conclusion
Without going into detail, Graeber imagines a future society, without capitalism but without common ownership of the means of production either, with some degree of hierarchy, with some sort of market, with money, and with debts. This is not really a revolutionary alternative to capitalism. It is the image of a cleaned up capitalism, without its bad qualities (a good, communal, market, limited hierarchy, debts which are periodically wiped out, etc.).
David Graebers Debt, The First 5,000 Years, is an interesting and thought-provoking book. It is worth reading as a history of debt, credit, and money. However, it has a mistaken basic concept, that debt is at the center of human economics and society, generally downplaying the significance of human labor (which was correctly emphasized in Marxs economic theory). For this reason, Graeber has a mistaken analysis of the Great Recession and the current economy. He presents a limited and nonrevolutionary vision of a post-capitalist future, quite in contrast to the revolutionary anarchist-communist (libertarian socialist) program of Kropotkin and others.
Note: In the Fall, AK Press will publish a book by me on some of these topics. Its subtitle will be An Anarchists Introduction to Marxs Economic Theory. It is an expanded and revised version of material which has appeared on www.Anarkismo.net.
References
Choonara, John (2009). Unravelling Capitalism: A Guide to Marxist Political Economy. London: Bookmark Publications.
Foster, John Bellamy, & Magdoff, Fred (2009). The Great Financial Crisis; Causes and Consequences. NY: Monthly Review Press.
Graeber, David (2011). Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House.
Kliman, Andrew (2012). The Failure of Capitalist Production: Underlying Causes of the Great Recession. London: Pluto Press.
Mattick, Paul (2011). Business as Usual: The Economic Crisis and the Failure of Capitalism. London: Reaktion Books.
McKay, Iain (2008). An Anarchist FAQ; Vol. One. Edinburgh, Scotland/Oakland CA: AK Press.
Marx, Karl (1906). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. NY: Modern Library.
Schmidt, Michael, & van der Walt, Lucien (2009). Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism; Vol. 1. Oakland CA: AK Press.
*written for www.Anarkismo.net In An Anarchist FAQ, Iain McKay writes, (2008; p. 13). This is why David Graeber, the anarchist anthropologist, deserves praise for writing a major work on political economy. He has written, he says, a (2011; p. 212). (p. 89). The book was influenced by the Great Recession of 2008 and following, which should have been (p. 15). (p. 18). Graebers book is not only a history of debt and money, but also involves questions of morality and of possible futures, .I am reviewing this book from my own viewpoint. I am a revolutionary anarchist who has concluded that Marxs critique of political economy is the most useful economic theory for understanding how capitalism works. This was the opinion of Bakunin and of many anarchists since (see chap. 3 of Black Flame, Schmidt & van der Walt, 2009). I do not call myself a Marxist, however, because there is also much in Marxs theories with which I strongly disagree, not to mention my rejection of the theory and practice of most of the post-Marx Marxists. It is from this viewpoint that I critique David Graebers contribution.Much of this book is very interesting as well as clearly written, lively and witty. It covers an amazingly wide range of topics, over its 5,000 years. This includes lengthy discussions on the possible origins of money, the role of debt in various religions, the relation of slavery to the beliefs of the heroic age, the origins of please and thank you, temple prostitution, the interaction between early markets and early states, and many other topicswhich makes it difficult to review! Graeber avoids Eurocentrism, by looking at economic developments on a world scale, covering the major regions of human settlement as they evolved separately and together. Even when I disagree with him or (more often) am not sure whether he is right, I find his writing thought-provoking. Unfortunately, due to space limitations, I cannot write about most of the subjects he raises.His book is best treated as a history of debt, credit, and money, and of the interaction of these with other aspects of society (politics, family structures, ideologies: religion, philosophy, and morality, etc.). From my viewpoint, stated above, I have no problem saying that debt and credit are vitally important in economic history as well as today. (Choonara, 2009; p. 100).My disagreement with Graeber is that he makes debt and credit the main factor in social development. I believe there is something even more central, which is human labor. In my opinion, his view leads to a wrong analysis of the current economic crisis and to a limited program for This problem appears in his discussion of slavery. Graeber emphasizes the centrality of slavery to social development. At certain times and places, slaves were even used as money. Slavery was central to the self-conception of the heroes of certain societies. Slavery laid the basis for modern economies. Graeber describes this important institution: (2011; p. 168).This is true and even insightful. Yet it leaves out what almost anyoneeven those who never heard of anarchism or Marxismwould include: that slaves were forced to work, with barely any return, for someone else. The whole point of ripping people from their social contexts and making them legally dead was so that a minority (a boss class) could work them like ill-fed animals, give them as little sustenance as possible, and then take the results of their unpaid labor. In other words, the point of slavery was exploitation of human labor. And the history of ancient slave empires, as well as of more modern chattel slavery in North and South America, was a history of class conflicts between the slaves and the master classes.Marx could have been responding to Graeber (agreeing and disagreeing) when he wrote, in Capital, vol. 1, (1906; p. 152).The deeper-lying antagonism between classes was that one class exploited the labor of others. Slavery, serfdom, debtorship: these were all mechanisms for exploitation. It is indeed valuable to analyze how these mechanisms worked, including the creditor-debtor relationship. But we should never forget that the purpose of any of these methods was the exploitation of labor.Similarly, Graeber misstates the meaning of wage-labor under capitalism. He refers to (2011; p. 206). But he writes this in the context of discussing the legal philosophy of rights and liberties. He writes that (p. 120).Again, he understands everything about wage-labor except that it is a form of exploitation. The whole point of the capitalist making the worker temporarily unequal is to get the workers to work for a certain number of hours to produce the equivalent of the workers wages and then to continue to work for several more hours, giving (essentially unpaid) labor, producing surplus value (the basis of profit). If this is the very essence of debt, then the essence of debt is exploitation of labor. (Of course, Graeber knows that slavery and wage-labor exploit human labor; he just does not consider this to be vitally important to their meaning.)Graeber notes that (p. 345). This is not his view, however. Graeber notes that banks and bond markets and other financial institutions had come into existence (p. 345) and therefore capitalism can be said to begin before there was wage labor. There is no point in quibbling over definitions. Certainly the early market economy developed all sorts of economic apparatuses which paved the way for the eventual development of a fully capitalist society. But a qualitative change occurred with the spread of wage-labor, which Graeber has correctly called, of capitalism.Graeber misunderstands what capitalism is. He describes it as commercial society, an economy driven to expand its money, to growth and accumulate its wealth. A marginal few in pre-capitalist economies sold commodities to get money in order to buy new (and more desired) commodities. But capitalists, he says, take money to buy commodities in order to sell these commodities for more money than they started with. Graeber applies this to early merchants (who bought goods in one place in order to carry them to distant places and sell them for a higher price due to their rarity). But such merchants (like the Polo brothers) did not increase the overall wealth of society, they only moved it around. Under capitalism (as Marx saw it), the industrial capitalists buy raw materials and machinery, in order to combine them with the labor-power hired from workers. The labor of the workers makes new things and new values, including unpaid-for surplus value. That is how capitalism expands.Graeber works his way through several theories of the origins and the nature of money. He concludes, (pp. 73, 75). Yet his whole book focuses on the nature of debt (credit) and says virtually nothing about commodities, what they are and how they evolved. Is this because commodities cannot be discussed except by acknowledging that they are objects and services provided by human labor?Compare this with the very first paragraph of Marxs Capital: (1906; p. 41). This is a different concept of what capitalist society is and how it needs to be analyzed.Together with his silence about what commodities are, there is Graebers silence about economic value. Considering money, Graeber demonstrates that both the commodity theorists and the credit theorists agree that the function of money is (p. 47). (p. 52). But to say that things are equivalent in certain proportions is to say that they have equal (equivalent) values. What is this value that can be measured in terms of how much each commodity has?Marx believed that economic value, the exchange value of the capitalist market, was different from the utility (use-value) of the commodity. The producing (and selling) capitalists do not care what the use-value is of a commodity, so long as there is a buyer who is willing to pay money for it. The exchange value of a commodity is the amount of socially necessary labor time which went into each commodity (as modified by various factors such as the average rate of profit, the effect of monopoly, short-term fluctuations in supply and demand, etc.). Some sort of labor theory of value was almost universal among pre-Marxist classical economists, including Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Proudhon. For example, Ben Franklin wrote, (quoted in Marx, 1906; p. 59). Graeber rejects the labor theory of value but does not say why. Nor does he suggest any alternate approach to value (such as the marginal utility approach). In all this big book he has nothing to say about value in the market. (I see that he has written a book which has value in its title. Whether it discusses this topic, I do not know.) Yet again, he downplays the importance of labor.In a footnote in the back of the book, Graeber makes a brief remark that he has (p. 453). This from someone who has written a 450 page book in which, as he says, I am mainly interested here in economics! (p. 406). It is indeed wrong to make a crude, mechanistic, analysis in which labor is directly all that matters and everything else would just be an unimportant reflection. That would be economistic. But there is no reason why the reproduction of labor cannot be seen as a major factor, influencing the rest of society and being influenced by other social factors in turn (by politics, family structure, social psychology, religion, art, etc.). That would not be economistic.Graebers writing is weakest when discussing the causes of the current economic crisis. It is sloppy and unbelievable. He states, (p. 360). Apparently he is serious (he repeats this analysis).Was the period before the recent period (say, the post-World War II apparent prosperity) one where people did not believe that capitalism would be around forever? (I lived through the 60s, and I can assure Graeber that most people, alas, thought capitalism was eternal.) Did investors turn to financialization in the 80s because they had a new faith in capitalism? Is there any evidence for these claims? If this was so, then why did the bubbles ever pop? A sudden belief in the limitations of capitalism?This view is based on nothing but speculation about mass psychology. It ignores the long term trends (at least since about 1970) toward economic stagnation, overproduction, unemployment and underemployment, underdevelopment and lop-sided development in the oppressed nations, etc. There was a long-term tendency of the rate of profit to fall, together with a growth of monopolization. These caused stagnation in the real economy (the production of real goods and services), due to the decline of real surplus value production. In response, capitalists increasingly invested in the paper economy, in what Marx called fictitious capital, to produce paper profits (which turned out to be unsustainable). Obviously this question would take much longer to explain and debate (see Foster & Magdoff, 2009; Kliman, 2012; Mattick, 2011). At least this explanation is rooted in real factors of labor and production.A major advantage which anarchism has over Marxism, is that Marx was quite vague about any program for a society after capitalism, focusing mostly on current analysis and strategies for change. By contrast, anarchists have offered visions for a new and better society, in more or less detail. But not Graeber. (p. 383). Tellingly, at no point in this book, does Graeber identify himself as an anarchist or advocate anarchism, nor does he call himself a revolutionary or advocate revolution. At the most, in a footnote, he vaguely remarks that, rather than Marxism, (p. 404).However, if we look carefully at his book, we can find the basic principles which he expects to apply to the next age. After all, what thinkers believe is central to capitalisms functioning will determine what they think is necessary to change in order to abolish capitalism and the state. Marx, as well as anarchists of the broad, class-struggle, tradition, believed that exploitation of workers was central to capitalism. Therefore they advocated a cooperative, classless, society, without exploitation, as central to the struggle against all forms of oppression. But if people agree with Graeber that debt is basic to the functioning of capitalism, then they will focus on the abolition of debt (or at least its limitation).Graeber declares that all societies, past present and future, base their economies on three modalities. (p. 94).By communism, Graeber means that all societies rely on community, solidarity, mutual aid, neighborliness, informal cooperation, and love. He specifically denies that communism, as he uses it, has (p. 95). (p. 95). However, Kropotkin and other anarchist-communists of the alternate strain of revolutionary theory did advocate a cooperative economy with the means of production held collectively (in common). From this point of view, Graeber would seem to be rejecting libertarian communism.What Graeber means by writing that there would always be hierarchy is not quite clear. Is he denying that an egalitarian society is possible? Is he saying that some sort of state is inevitable? Or is he just saying that even in a classless, egalitarian, society, adults will have responsibility for children, some people may be more influential than others among friends, and so on? Anarchists could accept the latter, but I am not sure if that is what he means.By exchange, Graeber means a situation (p. 103). This may include exchanging gifts or barter or competitive commercial business. (p 385) which may be a market. Markets can be good and noncapitalist, he claims. Graeber goes to great lengths to repeatedly insist that markets and capitalism are not necessarily the same. (p. 376). (p. 386).I agree that early markets (exhanges of commodities at the margins of society) were the not the same thing as developed capitalism (when human labor-power became a commodity and the whole of society was subordinated to commodity production). But capitalism developed out of early commodity exchange (with a big assist by the state). A return to pre-capitalist markets would only make likely the re-development of capitalism.To continue to have markets, implies continuing to have money. Graeber states, (p. 52). If money is an aspect of human thought, comparable to music or mathematics, then, like music and mathematics, presumably we can expect to always have money.Of all the things he could raise, Graeber makes only one specific It is (p. 390). All debts, domestic and international, would be forgiven (he does not say whether this should be periodic, as in the Bibleevery 7 years or every 50 years). This would, no doubt, be difficult to win. (p. 390). Indeed! I would think that to achieve such a demand would require the overthrow of the capitalist class and their state. But anyway, Graeber concludes, (p. 391). This last phrase is revealing. Apparently debts would not be abolished forever; people would start over again, accumulating debts.Without going into detail, Graeber imagines a future society, without capitalism but without common ownership of the means of production either, with some degree of hierarchy, with some sort of market, with money, and with debts. This is not really a revolutionary alternative to capitalism. It is the image of a cleaned up capitalism, without its bad qualities (a good, communal, market, limited hierarchy, debts which are periodically wiped out, etc.).David Graebers, is an interesting and thought-provoking book. It is worth reading as a history of debt, credit, and money. However, it has a mistaken basic concept, that debt is at the center of human economics and society, generally downplaying the significance of human labor (which was correctly emphasized in Marxs economic theory). For this reason, Graeber has a mistaken analysis of the Great Recession and the current economy. He presents a limited and nonrevolutionary vision of a post-capitalist future, quite in contrast to the revolutionary anarchist-communist (libertarian socialist) program of Kropotkin and others.In the Fall, AK Press will publish a book by me on some of these topics. Its subtitle will be. It is an expanded and revised version of material which has appeared on www.Anarkismo.net.Choonara, John (2009). Unravelling Capitalism: A Guide to Marxist Political Economy. London: Bookmark Publications.Foster, John Bellamy, & Magdoff, Fred (2009). The Great Financial Crisis; Causes and Consequences. NY: Monthly Review Press.Graeber, David (2011). Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House.Kliman, Andrew (2012). The Failure of Capitalist Production: Underlying Causes of the Great Recession. London: Pluto Press.Mattick, Paul (2011). Business as Usual: The Economic Crisis and the Failure of Capitalism. London: Reaktion Books.McKay, Iain (2008). An Anarchist FAQ; Vol. One. Edinburgh, Scotland/Oakland CA: AK Press.Marx, Karl (1906). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. NY: Modern Library.Schmidt, Michael, & van der Walt, Lucien (2009). Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism; Vol. 1. Oakland CA: AK Press.*written for www.Anarkismo.net Digg this del.icio.us Furl Reddit Technorati Facebook Twitter << Back To Newswire
English Italiano Deutsch This page can be viewed inAn image from a video of a Cabaret Décadanse song from the Marionnettes Plein la Rue festival. (Ronit Milo)
Organizers for the Marionnettes Plein la Rue festival promised that this year's event would be "a delirious, delightful thrill for the whole family!"
And by most accounts, it was: Photos of the sixth annual Montreal-area street fair showed smiling crowds eating grilled corn on the cob, browsing through brightly colored booths and enjoying the raison d'être for the event: the free puppet shows.
At least one of those shows delivered on the promise of a delirious thrill — just not in the way organizers expected.
On Sunday, with a crowd of young children gathered around an open-air stage, one of the troupes, Cabaret Décadanse, launched into a number from its free show, "Aux Grand Airs."
The name of the song? "Prison B---h."
The song's lyrics were risqué, to say the least, referencing gay sex between inmates.
In front of the stage, a young girl in a striped blue dress twirled around to the music, oblivious to the lyrics. Another boy tapped his feet to the doo-wop beat.
The ditty continued, as a shaggy gray wolf puppet wearing bunny ears "danced" and sang" to the tune.
Watching and recording the performance from the crowd, Ronit Milo was shocked. She had come to the festival with |
. In The Rejected, openly gay men appeared in a different kind of mask, what historian Martin Meeker calls “a mask of respectability.” Alongside experts in law, anthropology, psychiatry, and religion, homophile activists challenged postwar American stereotypes that maligned homosexuals as predatory “sex perverts” and national security risks.
The documentary epitomized both the possibilities and the limitations of the homophile movement’s politics of respectability. Two different segments in the program featured the leaders of the Mattachine Society, a San Francisco homophile (pre-1969 homosexual activist) organization. These sections presented homophile perspectives as having authority equal to medical experts. This authority, however, depended upon Mattachine Society leaders presenting themselves in a gender normative manner. Even as The Rejected presented homophile activists’ perspectives as an essential element of its balanced representation of homosexuality, the activists destigmatized homosexuality by disavowing gender variance. The documentary’s syndication ultimately served as effective publicity for the Mattachine Society and expanded the organization’s reach while reinforcing the stigma associated with gender deviance in the postwar era.
The Rejected exemplifies the normative ideas about gender shared by the straight documentarians and gay homophile activists and the efforts of both to distance homosexuality from highly visible and gender non-conforming gay men. In historian Craig Loftin’s words, men in “the homophile movement held attitudes about gender that were consistent with the rest of the American public, and they replicated many of the same patterns of hostility towards swishes that heterosexuals leveled at homosexuals.” The opening segment spotlights an exchange between the narrator and Mattachine President Hal Call, secretary Donald Lucas, and treasurer Les Fisher as to what “other homosexuals think about the so-called ‘queens’” and what the “queens’” feelings were about “themselves and their place in society.” Call responded that “the ‘swish,’ or the ‘queen,’” represented only a “small minority” of homosexuals despite powerful cultural stereotypes to the contrary. Call continued, “These people, actually, in most cases, are not even liked by the rest of their homosexual brethren, because they have perhaps rejected themselves and they feel that society has rejected them.” Call’s disparaging statement was in the mainstream of homophile thought; Washington-based activist Frank Kameny insisted that gay picketers outside federal buildings wear conservative suits or full-length skirts according to their gender. These actions sought to legitimate sexual nonconformity by disavowing gender nonconformity.
The Mattachine Society enlisted the assistance of medical experts, some of whom appear in The Rejected, to destigmatize same-sex desire. The presence of these experts garnered a positive response after the program first aired on September 11, 1961 and was syndicated across the country thereafter. The majority of viewers’ letters received by KQED praised the documentary and the station fielded hundreds of requests for program transcripts. Call himself later published and distributed copies of its transcript in response to this demand. The Mattachine Society also received dozens of letters, visits, and phone calls from supporters and potential members who learned of the organization through the program. The responses to The Rejected published in homophile publications whose readership was largely white, middle-class, and male were especially effusive in their praise. In September, 1961, an anonymous reviewer in the Daughters of Bilitis’s lesbian publication, The Ladder, described the documentary as a “‘famous first’ TV program” that provided “a rare opportunity to see a…breakthrough in public education and awareness of the homosexual.” In his December 1961 review of The Rejected for ONE Magazine, an independent homophile publication, Thomas M. Merritt praised the program’s “good taste,” its “dignified and distinguished professional” panelists, and its “calm and reasonable” discussions of homosexuality, insisting that the program’s embodiment of respectability was the key to its success.
The increase in inquiries and letters received by the Mattachine Society in San Francisco after The Rejected indicates that the program had significant reach and created further opportunities for homophiles to transmit further affirming messages to men and women seeking their assistance. The rediscovery of The Rejected’s film footage thus restores a critical piece of gay history. Not only does the footage literally add gay activists’ voices and faces to the historical record, but it also provides a rare glimpse of early gay movement-building strategies in action. By both forging alliances with renowned experts and by themselves embodying white male expertise, Mattachine Society leaders in The Rejected projected a respectable image of homosexuality to audiences across the country. However, like all images, the one projected should be viewed as a strategic representation. As Martin Meeker notes, this strategy was meant “to deflect the antagonisms of its many detractors…[The] practice of dissimulation disarmed some of the antigay sentiment in American society while it also enabled the homophiles to defend and nurture the gay world.” In many cases, The Rejected marked the beginning of a much longer and queerer conversation between homophiles and their audiences in the 1960s. Click here to watch The Rejected.
Andrew Lester is a doctoral student in Rutgers University-Newark’s American Studies program. He received his Master’s degree in American Studies from University of Massachusetts-Boston in 2013. His research focuses on the histories of the Gay Liberation and Black Power movements in California’s Bay Area in the 1960s.
NOTCHES: (re)marks on the history of sexuality is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at www.notchesblog.com.
For permission to publish any NOTCHES post in whole or in part please contact the editors at NotchesBlog@gmail.comWhether she is acting or writing and/or recording music, Brina Palencia's passion for creative expression is evident in her performances.
The multi-talented entertainer has amassed a following among anime fans for breathing life into complex, fan-favorite roles such as Ciel Phantomhive in “Black Butler,” Tony Tony Chopper in “One Piece,” Shirayuki in “Snow White with the Red Hair” and Touka Kirishima in “Tokyo Ghoul.”
Palencia will be appearing at Tekko at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center April 7-9.
The Swerve Magazine: You have played a number of meaty roles that require a lot from you. What types of roles are you drawn to as a performer?
Brina Palencia: I am mostly drawn to anything that has a lot of emotional layers. I think that Ciel Phantomhive in “Black Butler” is a perfect example of that. He's someone who has endured great loss at a really young age, who is also having to run his family's company, who is also the Queen's Guard Dog who also happened to sell his soul to a demon (laughs), so he's just got a lot going on. Technically on top of that, the English dialect just adds to the complication of that character, which I love. I want a challenge as an actor. I want something that's really going to stretch me.
SM: In addition to Ciel, what are some of the roles that you have found to be the most challenging and rewarding?
BP: Surprisingly, Chopper in “One Piece” is really rewarding. On the surface, he is a silly, cute character, but he goes through some really emotional stuff, especially his origin story. I think “One Piece” does a really good job of it, in general, creating a show that seems very lighthearted on the surface, but once you get into it, it doesn't shy away from death. It kind of grows up with its audience; it starts pretty young and pretty simple, but then it gets more and more complicated and more and more real, as far as the drama of what all of the characters go through.
SM: Speaking of that role, what's it like to play a character for this long, and what looks to be many years to come?
BP: It's really, really cool and an honor, honestly. I went to Japan a few years ago for a motion-capture gig, and it was amazing to see so much Chopper stuff everywhere. That show just does such a good job of always keeping it fresh and new. I think that every character in the show grows and becomes more interesting. It's never gotten boring—you would think it would after years of it. It never gets boring, and also, Chopper keeps getting cuter and cuter.
SM: When you're recording for anime or video games, you are recording solo, but you often know who the other cast members are so that you can anticipate some readings. Who are your favorite people to be cast opposite?
BP: J. Michael Tatum, for sure. I think the reason he and I work so well together is that we have both directed the other. He directed me in “Romeo x Juliet, ” and I directed him in “Black Blood Brothers,” which also was his first leading man role—you're welcome world.
I really like working with Colleen Clinkenbeard and Monica Rial, just because I know them really well in life. I've directed Monica before, so it's easy for me to anticipate where she's going to go. There's a lot of really good ones.
I think Josh Greele and I work really well together. We were paired opposite of each other in “Future Diary” and more recently in “Snow White with the Red Hair.” He's really, really phenomenal, although I have to say he has a tendency to kind of surprise me with his readswhich is a good thing. With “Snow White with the Red Hair,” I recorded after everybody, so I got to hear him a lot, and I was always taken back by his talent and his uniqueness.
SM: You had mentioned directing. What was stepping on the other side of the booth like, and how has that helped you going forward?
BP: I directed when I was very young, and I only did it for a few years, but I know that I am a much better voice actor now than I was before I ever directed. Directing is basically what taught me how to voice act because I had the pleasure of getting to work with people like Monica Rial, Luci Christian, Jason Douglas, everybody that was on “School Rumble.”
It was a humbling experience getting to see as a young voice actor, “Oh that's why you get cast all the time because you're incredible.” And just on a technical level, seeing how quickly they're able to match the mouth movements, and how they're able to cold read and bring depth to the character without even having to know that much information because they are willing to make a choice very quickly.
It was like an acting master class for me. If people do get the opportunity to direct—I know most people are just chomping at the bit just to voice act—but if you ever get the opportunity to direct, it really does show you what is needed and what is expected of you. I would say that for any art form, if you ever get the chance to be on the opposite side of what you're trying to do: if you're an actor, try writing; if you're a writer, try acting, that kind of thing. I think the more parts of the process you know, the more complete of an artist you'll be.
SM: You are also known for your work with music. On the anime side, how did you get involved with rewriting and localizing songs from the soundtracks?
BP: It started with “School Rumble” because it had a few songs that had to be adapted, and I just did it without asking. I guess I did well enough because they were willing to hire me to do more. Before that, I had worked on “Beck: Mongolian Chop Squad” as an actress, and I sang with Mike McFarland, and at the time, Mike McFarland was basically the go-to guy for all of that stuff.
I'm not exactly sure if he heard about my stuff in “School Rumble” or not, but it was after “School Rumble” that he started asking if I wanted to take some of the jobs that were being offered to him to adapt some of the songs. I jumped at the opportunity. Lucky for me, he was always just so busy as a producer and a director, that he didn't have time anymore to do the songs as much, so I just stepped in and filled that gap. That form of directing, I've been doing pretty consistently since then. It's still to this day, one of my favorite things to do in the anime world. I would say almost more so than voice acting.
SM: Wow.
BP: Yeah, I know. I'm currently working on a show that I can't talk about, but it was sort of a reminder of like, “Wow, I think I do like this more than voice acting.” Because with localizing the songs, even if it's a song that I don't like, I still have so much fun doing it because it's like a puzzle figuring out how to make it sound like a real song in English, and then getting to work with the singers, and finding the perfect placement for it, and then helping them do the harmonies. Harmonies in J-Pop are so different than in a Western song because their whole scale system is different, so it's just interesting to see what choices are made both melodically and harmonically. It just makes me really happy, (laughs) and hearing the final mix of it, makes me giddy with joy. Today we finished a song that's pretty huge and epic, and I was just literally giggling like a school girl listening back to it. Whereas with voice acting, if I have a character like Ciel, absolutely I'm all in, but if it's just a silly sort of vapid character, I just don't get excited about it, whereas it could be a silly vapid song, and I will lose my mind at how excited I will be to work on it.
SM: Moving to your own music, what is your writing process like when you are working on your songs?
BP: It's a surprise every time because I feel like my songs sort of come from nowhere. Even when I do my Instagram songs, where I take a one-word suggestion and base a song off of it. The way that I choose the one word is that I'll go through the comments and just look at the words, and if there's a word that hits me emotionally for any reason, then that's my word. I just sort of sit there and think about that word and what it means to me or what it might mean to someone else, and something just comes.
The other day—this actually happens often, where I'll come up with songs in my dreams. Having my phone by my bed is kind of awesome because it has the voice notes in it, so I will wake up from a dream, and I have to immediately record the melody that I hear, or I will forget it very quickly. So there are a lot of times that I'll wake up and just kind of move over and grab my phone—and my husband always wakes up before me, so he'll be like, “Hey babe, good morning,” and I'll like, “Shut up! I have to record this right now!” and he's like, “ooookay.”
Honestly, when I am done writing a song, most of the time I don't feel like I wrote it. I feel like it came from nowhere, and it just came through me; I don't feel like I came up with it.
SM: You've been playing a lot more on-screen roles in recent years. What's it been like adding more of that to your creative pursuits?
BP: It's been really cool. I think as far as acting, my favorite form of acting is on-camera. It's really incredible getting to embody a character, and not just do the voice, but letting every fiber of your being become this character, it's really gratifying. The one thing I will say though that sucks is that you are so much more limited in what you can play. As far as age and look and body type, and everything.
SM: It's tough to pull of a reindeer, yeah.
BP: Exactly. I would never be able to play a shape-shifting reindeer or an alien frog or those kinds of things. Actually, I've had the pleasure of getting to do some motion capture stuff recently, and it kind of marries both the on-screen acting and voice acting in that you're not limited physically to what you could play, but you still get to embody the character and act out the scene, and feel it with your body, what it's like to be this character...without have to worry about, “Oh my god, I need to lose 15 pounds.”Brandtaucher submarine cutaway model in Thesubmarine cutaway model in Dresden, Germany
Brandtaucher (from an 1896 book) Sketch of the(from an 1896 book)
Brandtaucher (German for Fire-diver) was a submersible designed by the Bavarian inventor and engineer Wilhelm Bauer and built by Schweffel & Howaldt in Kiel for Schleswig-Holstein's Flotilla (part of the Reichsflotte) in 1850.
History [ edit ]
In January 1850 Bauer, a cavalryman during the German-Danish War, designed Brandtaucher as a way to end the Danish naval blockade of Germany. Bauer's early sketch attracted the attention of the Minister of Marine, who allowed him to construct a 70 × 18 × 29 cm (27.6 × 7.1 × 11.4 in) model. The model was demonstrated in Kiel harbour in front of naval dignitaries. Its satisfactory performance led to the construction of a full-scale model, which was funded by contributions from army personnel and local civilians. Due to the inadequate funding, the scale of the boat had to be downgraded and the design altered and simplified; resulting in a reduced diving depth from 30 m to 9.5 m. This redesign included eliminating the use of enclosed ballast tanks to contain the water being taken into and expelled from the submarine. Instead, the water was allowed to pool inside the bottom of the hull, below the main floor, and was able to move relatively unobstructed within this area when the ship changed orientation. The resulting instability was probably a significant contributing factor to the loss of the vessel.
As built, Brandtaucher was 8.07 m long and 2.02 m at maximum beam, with a draught of 2.63 m. It was propelled by a crew of three turning large tread wheels connected to a propeller. The boat could reach a speed of three knots, but this could not be maintained for long periods of time.
On 1 February 1851, Brandtaucher sank after a diving accident during acceptance trials in Kiel Harbour.[1] The submarine experienced equipment failure, and sank to the bottom of a 60-foot hole at the bottom of Kiel Harbour. Bauer escaped by letting in water, thus increasing the air pressure, which allowed Bauer and his two companions to open the hatch and swim to the surface. This was the first submarine escape to be witnessed and reported.[1]
In 1887 the wreck was discovered, and it was raised on 5 July 1887. Brandtaucher was first placed on display at the Naval Academy in Kiel and then in 1906 it was moved to the Museum für Meereskunde in Berlin. From 1963 to 1965 it was restored in the DDR at Rostock, and placed on display at the Nationale Volksarmee Museum in Potsdam. The boat can now be viewed at the Militärhistorisches Museum der Bundeswehr (German Armed Forces Museum of Military History), in Dresden.
References [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]On the weekend of the 2009 All-Star game in Phoenix, Pat Garrity, the treasurer of the National Basketball Players Association, walked into a conference room inside the Sheraton Phoenix determined to make one final stand in his decade of service to the union. Garrity had warned peers and NBPA executive director Billy Hunter prior to the '09 executive committee meeting that he planned to challenge Hunter on business practices, and several players purposely steered clear of the confrontational scene.
In the aftermath of the U.S. banking crisis in 2008, Garrity had grown increasingly suspicious of an investment bank project that Hunter had been pitching to the executive committee and player representatives. For Garrity and some peers in the NBPA, the investment made no sense.
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Hunter had sought a $7 million to $9 million investment from the union into Interstate Net Bank of Cherry Hill, N.J., a financial institution that federal and state banking regulators had slapped with debilitating "cease-and-desist" orders, sources said.
Garrity discovered information online that left him feeling obligated to confront Billy Hunter: Hunter's son, Todd, had a seat on the board of directors of Interstate Net Bank.
[Y! exclusive: How NBPA director Billy Hunter distributed funds to family members]
Todd Hunter is also a vice president for Prim Capital, which has a consulting contract with the NBPA that has paid the company in excess of $2.5 million since 2006, according to U.S. Department of Labor filings.
"Why didn't you disclose any of this?" Garrity asked Hunter several times at the 2009 meeting, witnesses told Yahoo! Sports.
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When reached by phone, Garrity confirmed the description of events that sources provided Yahoo! Sports. He declined to further comment. Hunter declined comment for this story through a union spokesman.
At the meeting, Hunter left the talking to longtime ally and NBPA chief counsel, Gary Hall, and Hall wasn't offering answers. Garrity and Hall screamed back and forth, and Garrity's questions weren't addressed, witnesses said.
Finally, witnesses said, Hall – who died on May 11, 2011 – told Garrity that he was a retired player, no longer welcome on the executive committee, and that security would be called to remove him unless he left on his own. With executive committee members Keyon Dooling and Adonal Foyle appearing uncomfortable – and NBPA president Derek Fisher refusing to use his authority to demand Garrity be allowed to speak over Hall's yelling – Garrity left the room, left the NBPA and never returned again. Fisher declined comment.
The potential conflicts were far deeper and connective than Garrity realized at the time, a Yahoo! Sports investigation has discovered. Prim Capital controlled 200,000 shares of ISN Bank stock, according to a 2010 ISN Bank letter to stockholders. In addition to Todd Hunter, another Prim employee, executive Carolyn Kaufman, joined the bank's board of directors of ISN in 2004 and was paid $97,000 and $90,000 in consecutive years, according to a KPMG audit of ISN Bank in January 2008 that Yahoo! Sports obtained. She owned 250 shares of the stock, according to the March 2010 ISN letter to stockholders. The audits had been available online.
"Ms. Kaufman was appointed to the board at the request of Prim Capital, which owns 200,000 shares. The combined 200,250 shares represent 4.9 percent of the outstanding shares," the 2010 letter from ISN senior vice president and CFO William Easterday said.
Todd Hunter joined the bank's board of directors in 2007, the 2008 audit report says. Records show the bank's deterioration dropped stipends for board members to $12,000 per year in 2007. Todd Hunter did not return multiple messages seeking comment. Kaufman also didn't return a message.
The NBPA retained Howrey LLP, a New York law firm, to work as legal counsel on "banking projects," sources told Yahoo! Sports. During most of this engagement, Howrey employed Alexis Hunter, Billy Hunter's daughter.
Howrey received its first payment of $60,035 from the NBPA in September 2007 – the same month it hired Alexis Hunter as an associate. She stayed employed at Howrey until March 2011, days before the firm was forced into Chapter 7 bankruptcy by its creditors.
During Alexis Hunter's employment with the firm, the NBPA paid Howrey $316,550, according to U.S. Department of Labor filings.
After Howrey shut down in March, Alexis Hunter was hired as special counsel at the New York-based law firm of Steptoe & Johnson in April 2011 – within the same period the NBPA hired Steptoe & Johnson to take on a bulk of its legal work for the pending NBA lockout. Alexis Hunter appeared in the Southern District Court of New York in September and October on behalf of the NBPA requesting the court dismiss an antitrust claim by the NBA. Alexis Hunter didn't return a voicemail seeking comment.
"We made multi-hour presentations to the union before they eventually selected us to assist them in that case," Steptoe & Johnson labor attorney Lawrence Katz told Yahoo! Sports.
Asked when those meetings occurred, Katz said, "Oh, late spring … March or April of 2011."
When asked if Alexis Hunter's relationship with her father, Billy Hunter, had anything to do with her hiring or Steptoe securing the NBPA's business, Katz declined comment.
Asked whether the union's engagement of the firm that employed Hunter's daughter might represent a conflict of interest, Katz said: "I don’t see how. … I think the question is answered by saying the lawyers the union hired were very well-qualified to practice in this area. Between myself and Steve Wheeless [we've been practicing in this area] for over 60 years.
"So it's not as if we got the business as a gift."
Steptoe & Johnson has billed the NBPA more than $1 million for its work since April 2011, sources close to the firm told Yahoo! Sports.
Steptoe & Johnson and Hunter pushed forward on a legal strategy that called for filing unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board against the NBA in August. At the time, this was an unpopular choice with many prominent player agents, who wanted to decertify the union and file an antitrust suit in federal court against the NBA. Steptoe's attorneys and Hunter insisted to players the NLRB would hear the players' case in relatively fast order, but it never happened.
In December, the union finally dropped unfair labor practice charges and abandoned the case in preparation for disbanding the Players Association to reach a lockout settlement with the NBA.
Two more of Billy Hunter's family members – daughter Robyn Hunter and daughter-in-law Megan Inaba – have senior staff positions in the NBPA's New York office. Robyn Hunter made $86,198 from July 1, 2010, to June 30, 2011, as director of benefits and concierge services, according to Department of Labor filings.
[Related: NBPA compensation by the numbers]
Inaba, the wife of Todd Hunter, was paid $180,444 from July 1, 2010, to June 30, 2011. Among her responsibilities are coordinating the union's All-Star weekend gala and summer meetings, as well as running the union's Twitter account and handling other social media responsibilities. In her position as director of special events, Inaba has averaged the sixth-highest salary in the NBPA over the past five years: $148,633 per year, according to the filings.
The NBPA's charter does not contain a nepotism policy, sources said. "There's nothing illegal," Billy Hunter told The New York Times on Monday, "and you're not going to find anything illegal, you or anybody else, if that's what you're looking for. I'm not afraid of that."
As NBA players lost $400 million in salary during last summer's lockout – and $3 billion over the course of the new 10-year collective bargaining agreement – Billy Hunter, his family and the entities that employed them made approximately $3,430,953 from July 1, 2010, to June 30, 2011, according to labor filings.
"The real issue here is whether these potential conflicts were disclosed and the failure of someone who has a fiduciary duty [to union members] to make that disclosure presents a compelling question," Ronald Shechtman, managing partner and chair of Pryor Cashman's Labor and Employment Group, told Yahoo! Sports. "Not only is there a duty to disclose, there is a duty to explain the rationale for routing the business that way so that the fiduciaries [players] can make a judgment that the decision is based on good reason or good cause other than the fact that someone is a relation."
These were central themes to Garrity's objections in February 2009 in Phoenix: Due process for hiring, and the appearance of Hunter's family ties impacting union business and finances. Garrity wanted answers about Hunter's motivation for investing into a small New Jersey bank that the Philadelphia Business Journal reported, "was a toxic mix of brokered deposits, construction and land development loans and questionable management."
Beyond the banking issue, Garrity raised questions about the process that led to the hiring of Hunter's daughter, Robyn, into a newly created staff position of director of benefits and concierge services. What was the human resources process? Was the job posted? Who else was interviewed?
League sources told Yahoo! Sports that the NBPA's health care provider, Cigna, had offered a premium service that would've afforded the Players Association access to a telephone concierge service to answer and assist players on benefits issues. Because the NBA was such an elite account for Cigna, the service would've come free of charge. Billy Hunter rejected the idea, sources said, and within months hired his daughter in a role with some duties similar to the ones that had been offered to the Players Association.
The pursuit of the $7 million to $9 million bank investment didn't end in the February 2009 meeting when Garrity raised questions with Derek Fisher, union lawyers and several members of the executive committee in the room. Despite ISN Bank officials sending dire shareholder letters over these same months, Hunter stayed on course seeking an investment from the NBPA. Four months after Garrity confronted Hunter, the push for investment into the failing ISN Bank was still alive at an NBPA meeting in Las Vegas in late June 2009, sources said.
The pursuit of ISN Bank eventually ended as ISN spiraled beyond revival in early 2010, sources said. The New Jersey Department of Banking and Insurance closed the bank in September 2010. The FDIC bailout of Interstate Net Bank cost taxpayers $23.9 million.
At least one banking executive who was familiar with ISN was concerned about the solvency and stability of the bank. Gerry Banmiller, CEO of First Colonial Bank in Collingswood, N.J., told the Philadelphia Business Journal that he received "more than one phone call" in 2008 asking whether his bank would be interested in purchasing ISN.
"But published information about the bank led me to believe that we couldn't have resurrected it," Banmiller told the Journal. "It was in the tomb to stay."
The network of Hunter family members in positions of potential conflict and influence with NBPA business has been a crux of Fisher's push for a review of the NBPA's business and financial practices, sources said. Washington Wizards guard Mo Evans, a member of the union's executive committee, told reporters in Washington the committee has addressed potential nepotism issues with Billy Hunter after Fisher's inquiries, and that Hunter addressed any concerns "to our satisfaction."
Hunter and the eight-man executive committee have pushed back on Fisher's desire for the audit, and the executive committee recently voted to ask Fisher for his resignation as union president.
"The allegations that are now being directed at me are defamatory," Fisher said in a statement on Friday. "But I urge our members to order an independent review beginning immediately and that will be proven along with finding out definitively if there are any issues with the NBPA's business practices and finances."
Before Fisher recently confronted Hunter and demanded a review of the union's business and financial practices, Garrity had been the last player in a position of power to truly challenge the union's executive director. As Garrity was shouted down, Fisher and his peers did nothing to back him that day, sources said. Fisher kept saying it wasn't the time or place for such a discussion, witnesses said. When Fisher wouldn't back him, witnesses said, Garrity seemed to understand it was pointless to keep pressing Hunter and Hall.
After Garrity left the 2009 meeting, sources said Hunter made a request: He told the executive committee he was owed several years of missed vacation, and that Hunter deserved $1 million in compensation. Eventually, the committee granted it.
Garrity and members of the executive committee had been aware of Todd Hunter's role with Prim Capital, an outside contractor to the NBPA. Todd Hunter had worked for Prim Capital of Independence, Ohio, since September 2002, when he was hired as a vice president for the financial planning and investment strategy company. Prim Capital had pitched Billy Hunter and NBPA leadership at the union's summer meeting in 2002 and entered into a signed agreement to run the union's financial awareness program for its 450 players in early 2003.
Todd Hunter often runs seminars with each of the 30 NBA teams each season, and an NBA official present at the seminars offers a disclaimer on the league's behalf prior to Prim's presentation. "The disclaimer is specific to Prim as they are contracted by the union as opposed to other presenters who are contracted by both of us [the union and the league]," NBA spokesman Tim Frank told Yahoo! Sports.
Prim Capital's chairman and president, Joe Lombardo, worked with Billy Hunter and the NBPA in two previous employments at Merrill Lynch and Prudential, and started Prim Capital in 1997. For most of the 2002-03 NBA season, Prim Capital entered into an agreement with the Players Association to provide a "comprehensive investment portfolio analysis program." Lombardo didn't return a message.
Yahoo! Sports obtained the NBPA's 2002-2003 consulting agreement with Prim, which was an exhibit to a complaint in a lawsuit between CSI Capital Management and Prim. The agreement reads, "The NBPA believes that its members will benefit if they have an opportunity to engage in an objective company like Prim."
At the beginning of Prim's agreement with the NBPA in 2003, Prim performed financial reviews for players that included the chance to cut themselves into the monies purported to be recovered on the players' behalf. The agreement allowed Prim to share in 50 percent of the savings obtained through restructuring fees through existing money managers. If Prim lowered a player's fees, Prim shared in the savings.
CSI Capital Management of San Francisco disagreed with the idea the union was helping to provide independent audits. CSI sued Prim for unfair business practices, slander and that Prim's ostensibly "free and objective" audits were actually being provided in an attempt to encourage players to secure Prim's services. Prim filed a countersuit against CSI and eventually a settlement was reached.
Philip Scott Ryan, an attorney for CSI, wrote in a letter to Billy Hunter that "allowing Prim to do audits for your union members is equivalent to having an agent auditing other agent's work. The absence of objectivity and the pressure of unending conflicts of interest are obvious."
The NBPA and Prim changed the structure of agreements after the CSI lawsuit, and the union began to pay Prim a flat annual fee for the services, sources said. Prim has been forbidden to take the players as clients. Over the past five years, government filings show the NBPA paid Prim an average of $501,986 a year for its services.
Other investigation coverage by Yahoo! Sports:
• Sources: Syracuse basketball program repeatedly violated internal drug policy
• Sources: Auburn guard Varez Ward at center of federal point-shaving investigation
• Miami booster spells out illicit benefits to players
• Ohio State coach Jim Tressel knew of players’ violations(UPDATE June 5, 2017) Crews this morning began draining the pond in southwest Cedar Rapids. The process could take a full day.
One person was hoping to catch some of the bluegills and other fish that would otherwise be buried to stock his pond in Amana.
City officials directed questions about the detention basin – with a price tag of $287,775 – to Project Administrator Patrick Wieneke, who is out of the office for the week.
Neighbor Frank Kubovec said he was surprised that the Iowa Department of Natural Resources or other agencies did not appear to have more oversight of the project, given the bats, eagles and other wildlife in the area.
“They could have done a lot of different things,” he said of the city’s plans for the nearly 1-acre pond and surrounding land that was previously forested. “It’s a shame to see this.”
Sara Baughman, communications coordinator for Cedar Rapids Utilities, sent the following response this afternoon:
“We’ve received citizen concerns regarding a regional detention basin project located west of 18th Street SW, directly east of Hughes Drive SW. This property was acquired by the City in 1999 for stormwater management and is needed to collect stormwater runoff from 94 acres upstream. The project will reduce stormwater runoff impacts to downstream properties along Rockford Road SW and 3rd Avenue SW.
Throughout the planning and design process, City staff worked with neighbors and met with residents several times; the most recent public meeting was held in March of 2016 to share design plans with residents closest to the project area. An invitation was sent to 21 addresses and 9 individuals attended that meeting. These design plans were developed with strict oversight from the Army Corps of Engineers and Iowa Department of Natural Resources (IDNR). Because wetland north of the pond will be disrupted by this project, an area in Seminole Valley Park will be used as a wetland to minimize the environmental impact. In regards to the fish in the pond, the IDNR will not allow the fish to be moved due to disease risk and required on-site burial. Native grasses and wildflowers will be planted within the basin and 30 trees will be planted around the basin.
The public hearing for the project was held on January 24, 2017 and bids were received on February 1, 2017. No public objections were filed.”
By Cindy Hadish
CEDAR RAPIDS – Fish, frogs and other aquatic life will be buried alive under plans to remove a tree-lined pond that residents have enjoyed for decades in southwest Cedar Rapids.
“We’ve already shed some tears over this,” said Nick Maybanks, who taught his daughters how to fish in the pond, between Balsam Drive and 18th Street SW.
Related: City continues string of tree removals
The land is owned by the city, which is removing the pond and numerous trees to create a detention basin.
Neighbors who live near the area, which they describe as a nature “oasis,” said the pond has been there for more than two decades, with the surrounding land serving as a haven for monarch butterflies, turkeys, hawks, owls, deer and other |
State, who was on a peace mission for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and did his best to abuse his American guest.[213] Welles asked Ribbentrop under what terms Germany might be willing to negotiate a compromise peace, before the Phoney War became a real war. Ribbentrop told Welles that only a total German victory "could give us the peace we want". Welles reported to Roosevelt that Ribbentrop had a "completely closed and very stupid mind".[214] On 10 March 1940, Ribbentrop visited Rome to meet with Mussolini, who promised him that Italy would soon enter the war.[215] For his one-day Italian trip, Ribbentrop was accompanied by a staff of thirty-five, including a gymnastics coach, a masseur, a doctor, two hairdressers, plus various legal and economic experts from the Foreign Office.[216] After the Italo-German summit at the Brenner Pass on 18 March 1940, which was attended by Hitler and Mussolini, Count Ciano wrote in his diary: "Everyone in Rome dislikes Ribbentrop".[217] On 7 May 1940, Ribbentrop founded a new section of the Foreign Office, the Abteilung Deutschland (Department of Internal German Affairs), under Martin Luther, to which was assigned the responsibility for all anti-Semitic affairs.[218] On 10 May 1940, Ribbentrop summoned the Dutch, Belgian and Luxembourg ambassadors to present them with notes justifying the German invasion of their countries several hours after the Germans had invaded those nations.[219] Much to Ribbentrop's fury, someone leaked the plans for the German invasion to the Dutch Embassy in Berlin, which led Ribbentrop to devote the next several months to conducting an unsuccessful investigation into who leaked the news. This investigation tore apart the agency as colleagues were encouraged to denounce each other.[219]
In early June 1940, when Mussolini informed Hitler that he at long last would enter the war on 10 June 1940, Hitler was most dismissive, in private calling Mussolini a cowardly opportunist who broke the terms of the Pact of Steel in September 1939 when the going looked rough, and was only entering the war in June 1940 after it was clear that France was beaten and it appeared that Britain would soon make peace.[220] Ribbentrop, though he shared Hitler's assessment of the Italians, nonetheless welcomed Italy coming into war. In part, this seemed to affirm the importance of the Pact of Steel, which Ribbentrop had negotiated, and in addition, with Italy now an ally, the Foreign Office had more to do.[220] Ribbentrop championed the so-called Madagascar Plan in June 1940 to deport all of Europe's Jews to Madagascar after the presumed imminent defeat of Britain.[221]
Relations with wartime allies [ edit ]
Ribbentrop, a Francophile, argued that Germany should allow Vichy France a limited degree of independence within a binding Franco-German partnership.[222] To this end, Ribbentrop appointed a colleague from the Dienststelle, Otto Abetz, as Ambassador to France with instructions to promote the political career of Pierre Laval, who Ribbentrop had decided was the French politician most favourable to Germany.[223] The Foreign Office's influence in France varied, as there were many other agencies competing for power there. But in general, from late 1943 to mid-1944, the Foreign Office was second only to the SS in terms of power in France.[224]
From the latter half of 1937, Ribbentrop had championed the idea of an alliance between Germany, Italy, and Japan that would partition the British Empire among them.[97] After signing the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact, Ribbentrop expanded on this idea for an Axis alliance to include the Soviet Union to form a Eurasian bloc that would destroy maritime states such as Britain.[225] The German historian Klaus Hildebrand argued that besides Hitler's foreign policy programme, there were three other factions within the Nazi Party who had alternative foreign policy programmes, whom Hildebrand designated the agrarians, the revolutionary socialists, and the Wilhelmine Imperialists.[226] Another German diplomatic historian, Wolfgang Michalka argued that there was a fourth alternative to the Nazi foreign policy programme, and that was Ribbentrop's concept of a Euro-Asiatic bloc comprising the four totalitarian states of Germany, the Soviet Union, Italy and Japan. Unlike the other factions, Ribbentrop's foreign policy programme was the only one that Hitler allowed to be executed during the years 1939–41, though it was more due to the temporary bankruptcy of Hitler's own foreign policy programme that he had laid down in Mein Kampf and Zweites Buch following the failure to achieve an alliance with Britain, than to a genuine change of mind.[225] Ribbentrop's foreign policy conceptions differed from Hitler's in that Ribbentrop's concept of international relations owed more to the traditional Wilhelmine Machtpolitik than to Hitler's racist and Social Darwinist vision of different "races" locked in a merciless and endless struggle over Lebensraum.[188] The different foreign-policy conceptions held by Hitler and Ribbentrop were illustrated in their reaction to the Fall of Singapore in 1942: Ribbentrop wanted this great British defeat to be a day of celebration in Germany, whereas Hitler forbade any celebrations on the grounds that Singapore represented a sad day for the principles of white supremacy. Another area of difference was Ribbentrop's obsessive hatred for Britain – which he saw as the main enemy – and view of the Soviet Union as an important ally in the anti-British struggle. Hitler saw the alliance with the Soviet Union as only tactical, and was nowhere as anti-British as his Foreign Minister.[188]
In August 1940, Ribbentrop oversaw the Second Vienna Award, which saw about 40% of the Transylvania region of Romania returned to Hungary.[227] The decision to award so much of Romania to the Hungarians was Hitler's, as Ribbentrop himself spent most of the Vienna conference loudly attacking the Hungarian delegation for their coolness towards attacking Czechoslovakia in 1938 and then demanding more than their fair share of the spoils.[227] When Ribbentrop finally got around to announcing his decision, the Hungarian delegation, which had expected Ribbentrop to rule in favour of Romania, broke out in cheers, while the Romanian foreign minister Mihail Manoilescu fainted.[227]
In the autumn of 1940, Ribbentrop made a sustained but unsuccessful effort to have Spain enter the war on the Axis side. During his talks with the Spanish foreign minister, Ramón Serrano Súñer, Ribbentrop affronted Súñer with his tactless behaviour, especially his suggestion that Spain cede the Canary Islands to Germany.[228] An angry Súñer replied that he would rather see the Canaries sink into the Atlantic then cede an inch of Spanish territory. An area in which Ribbentrop enjoyed more success arose in September 1940, when he had the Far Eastern agent of the Dienststelle Ribbentrop, Dr. Heinrich Georg Stahmer, start negotiations with the Japanese foreign minister, Yōsuke Matsuoka, for an anti-American alliance. The end result of these talks was the signing in Berlin on 27 September 1940 of the Tripartite Pact by Ribbentrop, Count Ciano, and Japanese Ambassador Saburo Kurusu.[229]
In October 1940, Gauleiters Josef Bürckel and Robert Wagner oversaw the near total expulsion of the Jews into unoccupied France; they deported them not only from the parts of Alsace-Lorraine that had been annexed that summer to the Reich, but also from their Gaues as well.[230] Ribbentrop treated in a "most dilatory fashion" the ensuing complaints by the Vichy French government over the expulsions.[230]
In November 1940, during the visit of the Soviet Foreign Commissar Vyacheslav Molotov to Berlin, Ribbentrop tried hard to get the Soviet Union to sign the Tripartite Pact.[231] Ribbentrop argued that the Soviets and Germans shared a common enemy in the form of the British Empire, and as such, it was in the best interests of the Kremlin to enter the war on the Axis side.[231] He proposed that, after the defeat of Britain, they could carve up the territory in the following way: the Soviet Union would have India and the Middle East, Italy the Mediterranean area, Japan the British possessions in the Far East (presuming of course that Japan would enter the war), and Germany would take central Africa and Britain.[231] Molotov was open to the idea of the Soviet Union entering the war on the Axis side, but demanded as the price of entry into the war that Germany recognise Finland, Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey, Hungary and Yugoslavia as within the exclusive Soviet sphere of influence.[231] Ribbentrop's efforts to persuade Molotov to abandon his demands about Europe as the price of a Soviet alliance with Germany were entirely unsuccessful. After Molotov left Berlin, the Soviet Union indicated that it wished to sign the Tripartite Pact and enter the war on the Axis side. Though Ribbentrop was all for taking Stalin's offer, Hitler by this point had decided that he wanted to attack the Soviet Union. The German–Soviet Axis talks led nowhere.
Krosigk, Clockwise from top left: Funk Goebbels, Ribbentrop and Neurath during a Reichstag session, 1941
As World War II continued, Ribbentrop's once-friendly relations with the SS became increasingly strained. In January 1941, the nadir of the relations between the SS and the Foreign Office was reached when the Iron Guard attempted a coup in Romania. Ribbentrop supported Marshal Ion Antonescu's government and Himmler supported the Iron Guard.[232] In the aftermath of the failed coup in Bucharest, the Foreign Office assembled evidence that the SD had backed the coup, which led Ribbentrop to restrict sharply the powers of the SD police attachés. Since October 1939 they had operated largely independently of the German embassies at which they had been stationed.[233] In the spring of 1941, Ribbentrop appointed an assemblage of SA men to German embassies in eastern Europe, with Manfred von Killinger dispatched to Romania, Siegfried Kasche to Croatia, Adolf Beckerle to Bulgaria, Dietrich von Jagow to Hungary, and Hans Ludin to Slovakia.[234] The major qualifications of all these men, none of whom had previously held a diplomatic position before, were that they were close friends of Luther and helped to enable a split in the SS (the traditional rivalry between the SS and SA was still running strong).[234]
In March 1941, Japan's Foreign Minister Yōsuke Matsuoka, a Germanophile, visited Berlin. On 29 March 1941, during a conversation with Matsuoka, Ribbentrop, as instructed by Hitler, told the Japanese nothing about the upcoming Operation Barbarossa, as Hitler believed that he could defeat the Soviet Union on his own and preferred that the Japanese attack Britain instead.[235] Hitler did not wish for any information that might lead the Japanese into attacking the Soviet Union to reach their ears. Ribbentrop tried to convince Matsuoka to urge the government in Tokyo to attack the great British naval base at Singapore, claiming the Royal Navy was too weak to retaliate due to its involvement in the Battle of the Atlantic. Matsuoka responded that preparations to occupy Singapore were under way.[236]
In the winter of 1940–41, Ribbentrop strongly pressured Yugoslavia to sign the Tripartite Pact, despite advice from the German Legation in Belgrade that such an action would probably lead to the overthrow of Crown Prince Paul, the Yugoslav Regent.[237] Ribbentrop's intention was to gain transit rights through the country that would allow the Germans to invade Greece. On 25 March 1941, Yugoslavia reluctantly signed the Tripartite Pact; the next day the Yugoslav military overthrew Prince Paul in a bloodless coup.[237] When Hitler ordered the invasion of Yugoslavia, Ribbentrop was opposed, because he thought the Foreign Office was likely to be excluded from ruling occupied Yugoslavia.[238] As Hitler was displeased with Ribbentrop over his opposition to the invasion, the minister took to his bed for the next couple of days.[238] When Ribbentrop recovered, he sought a chance to increase his agency's influence by giving Croatia independence.[238] Ribbentrop chose the Ustaša to rule Croatia. He had Edmund Veesenmayer successfully conclude talks in April 1941 with General Slavko Kvaternik of the Ustaša on having his party rule Croatia after the German invasion.[238] Reflecting his displeasure with the German Legation in Belgrade, which had advised against pushing Yugoslavia to sign the Tripartite Pact, Ribbentrop refused to have the German Legation withdrawn in advance before Germany bombed Belgrade on 6 April 1941. The staff was left to survive the fire-bombing as best it could.[239]
Ribbentrop liked and admired Joseph Stalin and was opposed to the attack on the Soviet Union in 1941.[240] He passed a word to a Soviet diplomat: "Please tell Stalin I was against this war, and that I know it will bring great misfortune to Germany." When it came to time for Ribbentrop to present the German declaration of war on 22 June 1941 to the Soviet Ambassador, General Vladimir Dekanozov, the interpreter Paul Schmidt described the scene:
It is just before four on the morning of Sunday, 22 June 1941 in the office of the Foreign Minister. He is expecting the Soviet Ambassador, Dekanozov, who had been phoning the Minister since early Saturday. Dekanozov had an urgent message from Moscow. He had called every two hours, but was told the Minister was away from the city. At two on Sunday morning, von Ribbentrop finally responded to the calls. Dekanozov was told that von Ribbentrop wished to meet with him at once. An appointment was made for 4 am
Von Ribbentrop is nervous, walking up and down from one end of his large office to the other, like a caged animal, while saying over and over, "The Führer is absolutely right. We must attack Russia, or they will surely attack us!" Is he reassuring himself? Is he justifying the ruination of his crowning diplomatic achievement? Now he has to destroy it "because that is the Führer's wish".[241]
When Dekanozov finally appeared, Ribbentrop read out a short statement saying that the Reich had been forced into "military countermeasures" because of an alleged Soviet plan to attack Germany in July 1941.[241] Ribbentrop did not present a declaration of war to General Dekanozov, confining himself to reading the statement about Germany being forced to take "military countermeasures".[241]
Despite his opposition to Operation Barbarossa and a preference to concentrate against Britain, Ribbentrop began a sustained effort on 28 June 1941, without consulting Hitler, to have Japan attack the Soviet Union.[242] But Ribbentrop's motives in seeking to have Japan enter the war were more anti-British than anti-Soviet.[242] On 10 July 1941 Ribbentrop ordered General Eugen Ott, the German Ambassador to Japan to:
Go on with your efforts to bring about the earliest possible participation of Japan in the war against Russia…The natural goal must be, as before, to bring about the meeting of Germany and Japan on the Trans-Siberian Railroad before winter sets in. With the collapse of Russia, the position of the Tripartite Powers in the world will be so gigantic that the question of the collapse of England, that is, the absolute annihilation of the British Isles, will only be a question of time. An America completely isolated from the rest of the world would then be faced with the seizure of those of the remaining positions of the British Empire important to the Tripartite Powers.[242]
As part of his efforts to bring Japan into Barbarossa, on 1 July 1941, Ribbentrop had Germany break off diplomatic relations with Chiang Kai-shek and recognized the Japanese-puppet government of Wang Jingwei as China's legitimate rulers.[243] Ribbentrop hoped that recognizing Wang would be seen as a coup that might add to the prestige of the pro-German Japanese Foreign Minister Yōsuke Matsuoka, who was opposed to opening American-Japanese talks.[243] Despite Ribbentrop's best efforts, Matsuoka was sacked as foreign minister later in July 1941, and the Japanese-American talks began.[243]
After the war, Ribbentrop was found to have had culpability in the Holocaust based on his efforts to persuade the leaders of satellite countries of the Third Reich to deport Jews to the Nazi extermination camps.[244] In August 1941, when the question of whether to deport foreign Jews living in Germany arose, Ribbentrop argued against deportation as a way of maximizing the Foreign Office's influence.[245] To deport foreign Jews living in the Reich, Ribbentrop had Luther negotiate agreements with the governments of Romania, Slovakia, and Croatia to allow Jews holding citizenship of those states to be deported.[245] In September 1941, the Reich Plenipotentiary for Serbia, Felix Benzler, reported to Ribbentrop that the SS had arrested 8,000 Serbian Jews, whom they were planning to execute en masse. He asked for permission to try to stop the massacre.[245] Ribbentrop assigned the question to Luther, who ordered BenzUbisoft has released the revised system requirements for the PC version of Watch Dogs - and they appear to be even more demanding than those alleged to have been released last week.
The new system requirements, posted on Ubisoft's Uplay website, require that PC players have a minimum 6GB RAM and Quad Q8400 processor, up from the 4GB RAM and Quad Q6600 posted previously.
The specs also appear to contradict comments from the game's technical director last week, who claimed that last week's requirements were "not official configurations" and that the "real specs... will be lower".
To get the most out of the game, though, you'll need an Intel i7 processor, 8GB RAM and 2GB DirectX 11 graphics card. And don't even think about picking it up on PC if you're still running 32-bit Windows XP: you'll need a 64-bit version of Windows Vista SP2 or later to even get the game to boot.
MINIMUM
Supported OS: Windows Vista SP2 64bit, Windows 7 SP1 64bit, Windows 8 64bit
Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad Q8400 @ 2.66Ghz or AMD Phenom II X4 940 @ 3.0Ghz
RAM: 6 GB
Video Card: 1024 VRAM DirectX 11 with Shader Model 5.0 (see supported list)
Sound Card: DirectX 9 compatible Sound Card
This product supports 64-bit operating systems ONLY
RECOMMENDED
Processor: Core i7 3770 @ 3.5Ghz or AMD FX-8350 @ 4.0Ghz
RAM: 8 GB
Video Card: 2048 VRAM DirectX 11 with Shader Model 5.0 or higher (see supported list)
Sound Card: Surround Sound 5.1 capable sound card
Supported Video Cards at Time of Release:
nVidia GeForce GTX460 or better, GT500, GT600, GT700 series;
AMD Radeon HD5850 or better, HD6000, HD7000, R7 and R9 series
Intel® Iris™ Pro HD 5200
Watch Dogs launches on PC alongside the current-gen and Xbox One versions on November 22. A PlayStation 4 version is due to follow on November 29.
Source: shop.ubi.comAt first glance you might think this trio of wall warts are nothing more than multi-port chargers to power up your USB devices. Looks can be deceiving, though: they’re actually full-blown Windows PCs.
Taiwan’s Quanta Computer had these slick little plugputers on hand to show off at Computex recently. Quanta (one of the world’s leading gadget OEMs) is calling their device the Compute Plug. The Compute Plug is roughly the same size as an AC adapter for your modem or router. Inside the plastic shell you’ll find an Intel Atom-based computer with integrated WiFi and Bluetooth. It has three external ports: a pair of USB 3.0 for your peripherals, and an HDMI for hooking up an external display — if needed. These compact machines would make excellent headless PCs.
Microsoft considers the Compute Plug to fall into the “PC-on-a-stick” category, just like Intel’s similarly-named Compute Stick. Along with the name, the hardware is also pretty similar, though the additional ports on Quanta’s Compute Plug are a nice bonus. Prices should be similar, too.
You’ve probably seen a wallplug computer before. There have been several ARM-based devices like this over the years, many based on Marvell’s SheevaPlug design. Typically, though, they’ve been built with ultra-efficient processors that don’t pack a ton of computing muscle. That’s not to say that a Compute Plug with an Atom will compete with your desktop or laptop, but it ought to be able to handle some light gaming and push 4K video to your TV.
It’ll also run Windows 10, and you might be able to pick the flavor. While you could certainly run Home or Pro on the Compute Plug, the IoT edition might be a better choice if you wanted to use one as the brains behind a connected project you’re pondering.Dear Editor:
Story after story characterizes Trans Mountain expansion approval as based on facts and evidence. However, the source of these appears to be a 2016 National Energy Board recommendation.
article continues below
In May of this year, an expert panel convened by Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) confirmed Canada’s loss of confidence in the National Energy Board (NEB). The ECCC-convened panel’s 2017 report recommends a new joint process with the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency for environmental assessment review.
When I see Kinder Morgan submit as evidence a study of diluted bitumen in which no conclusion could be drawn because the researcher forgot to bring a ruler large enough to measure the contents of a five-gallon container, I am forced to conclude the NEB review process is indeed broken. Project submissions should be free of such silliness and Kinder Morgan’s project should receive no special favour.
Our government ought to subject Trans Mountain expansion to a joint review deserving of Canadians’ confidence.
Christine Leclerc, BurnabyHillary Sinks with the 'Kitchen Sink' Ever since George H.W. Bush went into “campaign mode” in 1988 and exploited black convict Willie Horton to dirty up Michael Dukakis, it’s been a staple of modern politics that you can negate your own high negatives by driving up those of your opponent. Bookmark
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Printer friendly Except in 1992, when the “Passportgate” scheme for demeaning Bill Clinton’s patriotism blew up in Poppy Bush’s face, some effective smear has been associated with every Bush national campaign. Think of John McCain’s “black child,” Al Gore’s “delusions” and the Swift Boat lies about John Kerry’s heroism. Indeed, dirty politics has been a hallmark of the Bush Family Dynasty – and Bill and Hillary Clinton clearly were taking notes. [For details on the Bush schemes, see Secrecy & Privilege and Neck Deep.] So, perhaps it should have been expected that Hillary Clinton would borrow the Bush family’s playbook when her presidential campaign prepared to throw “the kitchen sink” at Barack Obama. Sen. Clinton, who has long suffered from high negatives, needed to boost up those numbers for the Illinois senator. Sadly for the Clinton campaign, however, the strategy appears to be backfiring. Though the coordinated attacks against Obama’s character and judgment may have damaged him some, a new poll shows that Sen. Clinton may have hurt herself more. “Both Democrats, and especially New York's Sen. Clinton, are showing wounds from their prolonged and increasingly bitter nomination contest, which could weaken the ultimate nominee for the general-election showdown against Sen. McCain of Arizona,” the Wall Street Journal reported. “Even among women, who are the base of Sen. Clinton's support, she now is viewed negatively by more voters than positively for the first time in a Journal/NBC poll.” [WSJ, March 27, 2008] In a Journal/NBC poll just two weeks ago, Clinton was in positive numbers with voters overall, 45 percent to 43 percent. However, in the new poll, Clinton’s overall negatives rose to 48 percent and her positives sank to 37 percent. Even more stunning, Clinton is now drawing a net-negative rating among women, with 44 percent of women having a negative impression of Clinton versus 42 percent with a positive view. Two weeks ago, 51 percent of women had a positive opinion of Clinton. Clinton also is sinking among white voters, who view her negatively by 51 to 34 percent. Obama has slipped, too, with white voters, down five points, but he still gets a net positive rating of 42 to 37 percent. Among all voters, Obama is rated positively by 49 to 32 percent, roughly parallel to Republican John McCain, who registered a 45 to 25 percent positive rating. The bottom line for Sen. Clinton may be that in throwing the “kitchen sink” at Obama, she didn’t realize that it was tied to her ankle. Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com. To comment at Consortiumblog, click here. (To make a blog comment about this or other stories, you can use your normal e-mail address and password. Ignore the prompt for a Google account.) To comment to us by e-mail, click here. To donate so we can continue reporting and publishing stories like the one you just read, click here. Back to Home PageOne of the strengths boasted by.NET Core is its new command line interface (CLI for short), and by now you're probably aware that Visual Studio, Rider, Visual Studio Code etc shell out to the.NET Core CLI under the bonnet for most.NET Core related operations, so it makes sense that what you're able to do in your favourite IDE you're also able to do via the CLI.
With this in mind, only recently did I spend the time and effort to investigate how easy it was to create and manage a project solution via the CLI, including creating the solution structure, referencing projects along the way and adding them to.NET's.sln file.
It turns out it's incredibly easy and has instantly become my preferred way of managing solutions. Hopefully by the end of this post you'll arrive at the same conclusion too.
Benefits of using the CLI for solution management
So what are the benefits of using the CLI for solution management? Let's have a look:
Something that has always been a fiddly endevour of UI interactions is now so much simpler via the CLI - what's more, you don't need to open your editor of choice if you want to create references or update a NuGet package.
Using the CLI for creating projects and solutions is particularly helpful if (like me) you work across multiple operating systems and want to normalise your tool chain.
Loading an IDE just to update a NuGet package seems unnecessary
Let's begin!
Creating our solution
So let's take a look at how we can create the following project structure using the.NET Core CLI.
piedpiper └── src ├── piedpiper.domain ├── piedpiper.sln ├── piedpiper.tests └── piedpiper.website
First we'll create our solution (.sln) file, I've always preferred to create the solution file in the top level source folder but the choice is yours (just bear in mind to specify the right path in the commands used throughout the rest of this post).
# /src/ $ dotnet new sln -n piedpiper
This will create a new sln file called piedpiper.sln.
Next we use the output parameter on the dotnet new <projecttype> command to create a project in a particular folder:
# /src/ $ dotnet new mvc -o piedpiper.website
This will create an ASP.NET Core MVC application in the piedpiper.website folder in the same directory. If we were to look at our folder structure thus far it looks like this:
# /src/ $ ls -la piedpiper.sln piedpiper.website
Next we can do the same for our domain and test projects:
# /src/ $ dotnet new classlib -o piedpiper.domain $ dotnet new xunit -o piedpiper.tests
Adding our projects to our solution
At this point we've got a solution file that has no projects referenced, we can verify this by calling the list command like so:
# /src/ $ dotnet sln list No projects found in the solution.
Next we'll add our projects to our solution file. Once upon a time doing this involved opening Visual Studio then adding a reference to each project manually. Thankfully this can also be done via the.NET Core CLI.
Now start to add each project with the following command, we do this by referencing the.csproj file:
# /src/ $ dotnet sln add piedpiper.website/piedpiper.website.csproj $ dotnet sln add piedpiper.domain/piedpiper.domain.csproj $ dotnet sln add piedpiper.tests/piedpiper.tests.csproj
Note: If you're using a Linux/Unix based shell you can do this in a single command using a globbing pattern!
# /src/ $ dotnet sln add **/*.csproj Project `piedpiper.domain/piedpiper.domain.csproj` added to the solution. Project `piedpiper.tests/piedpiper.tests.csproj` added to the solution. Project `piedpiper.website/piedpiper.website.csproj` added to the solution.
Now when we call list on our solution file we should get the following output:
# /src/ $ dotnet sln list Project reference(s) -------------------- piedpiper.domain/piedpiper.domain.csproj piedpiper.tests/piedpiper.tests.csproj piedpiper.website/piedpiper.website.csproj
So far so good!
Adding a project reference to a project
Next up we want to start adding project references to our project, linking our domain library to our website and test library via the dotnet add reference command:
# /src/ $ dotnet add piedpiper.tests reference piedpiper.domain/piedpiper.domain.csproj Reference `..\piedpiper.domain\piedpiper.domain.csproj` added to the project.
Now if you were to view the contents of your test project we'd see our domain library has now been referenced:
# /src/piedpiper.tests/ $ cat piedpiper.tests/piedpiper.tests.csproj <Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk">... <ItemGroup> <ProjectReference Include="..\piedpiper.domain\piedpiper.domain.csproj" /> </ItemGroup> </Project>
Next we'll do the same for our website project, so let's go to our website folder and run the same command:
# /src/ $ dotnet add piedpiper.website reference piedpiper.domain/piedpiper.domain.csproj
# /src/ $ cat piedpiper.website/piedpiper.website.csproj <Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk">... <ItemGroup> <ProjectReference Include="..\piedpiper.domain\piedpiper.domain.csproj" /> </ItemGroup> </Project>
At this point we're done!
If we navigate back to our root source folder and run the build command we should see everything build successfully:
$ cd../ # /src/ $ dotnet build icrosoft (R) Build Engine version 15.3.388.41745 for.NET Core Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. piedpiper.domain -> /Users/josephwoodward/Desktop/demo/src/piedpiper.domain/bin/Debug/netstandard2.0/piedpiper.domain.dll piedpiper.tests -> /Users/josephwoodward/Desktop/demo/src/piedpiper.tests/bin/Debug/netcoreapp2.0/piedpiper.tests.dll piedpiper.website -> /Users/josephwoodward/Desktop/demo/src/piedpiper.website/bin/Debug/netcoreapp2.0/piedpiper.website.dll Build succeeded. 0 Warning(s) 0 Error(s) Time Elapsed 00:00:08.08
Adding a NuGet package to a project or updating it
Before wrapping up, let's say we wanted to add a NuGet package to one of our projects, we can do this using the add package command.
First navigate to the project you want to add a NuGet package to:
# /src/ $ cd pipedpiper.tests/ $ dotnet add package shouldly info : Adding PackageReference for package'shouldly'... log : Installing Shouldly 2.8.3.
Optionally we could specify a version we'd like to install using the version argument:
$ dotnet add package shouldly -v 2.8.2
Updating a NuGet package
Updating a NuGet package to the latest version is just as easy, simply use the same command without the version argument:
dotnet add package shouldly
Conclusion
If you've managed to get this far then well done, hopefully by now you've realised how easy creating and managing a solution is using the new.NET Core command line interface.
One of the great powers of using the CLI is you can now turn creating the same project structure into a handy bash script which you could alias and reuse!
#!/bin/bash echo "Enter project name, followed by [ENTER]:" read projname echo "Creating solution for $projname" dotnet new sln -n $projname dotnet new mvc -o $projname.website dotnet new classlib -o $projname.domain dotnet new xunit -o $projname.tests echo "Adding projects to solution" dotnet sln add **/*.csproj echo "Referencing projects" dotnet add $projname.website reference $projname.domain/$projname.domain.csproj dotnet add $projname.tests reference $projname.domain/$projname.domain.csproj
Happy coding!Dave Bautista revealed all at the European premiere of Guardians of the Galaxy (Picture: Getty Images)
Guardians Of The Galaxy star Dave Bautista has revealed that he’s seriously hoping for a return to the 007 franchise after portraying villainous henchman Mr Hinx in Spectre.
The former wrestler, who plays Drax the Destroyer in the Marvel sequel,Guardians Of The Galaxy Vol.2, showed his nasty side as he grappled with Daniel Craig in the most recent Bond movie, released in 2015.
But despite being thrown from a train by Daniel Craig’s super-spy, Bautista is seriously hoping that there’s a future for the character.
‘Yeah! Believe me we’re talking about it a lot. We’re waiting at home with our fingers crossed’, he exclusively told Metro.co.uk at the Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 2 European premiere.
Dave stars as Drax the Destroyer in Guardians 2 (Picture: Marvel Films)
However, he thinks that a return is hinging on one thing – the widely speculated future of Daniel Craig as 007.
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He said: ‘We’re waiting for the news to see if Daniel will sign up for Bond 25, because then there’s a chance that Hinx will come back.’
As for now though, he’s firmly in the dark over Craig’s future with the iconic spy franchise.
Dave’s Mr Hinx does battle with Daniel Craig in Spectre (Picture: Sony)
‘I’m reading the rumours just like everyone else’, he admitted.
Elsewhere, Bautista talked up Avengers: Infinity War, and teased that it will see the Guardians teaming up with the superhero team to ‘kick the sh*t’ out of supervillain Thanos.
‘We’ve already announced that The Guardians are crossing over so I would believe that everyone is on the same page’, he teased.
‘We need to kick the s**t out of Thanos!
MORE: Has Guardians Of The Galaxy star Zoe Saldana revealed the name of Avengers 4?
MORE: Miley Cyrus has secretly filmed a cameo for Guardians of the Galaxy 2Simon Gittany has been found guilty of murdering his fiancee, Lisa Cecilia Harnum, by throwing her off a high-rise Sydney apartment balcony.Gittany, 40, stood stock still and his girlfriend Rachelle Louise started screaming as Justice Lucy McCallum handed down her verdict in the supreme court in Sydney on Wednesday.Louise yelled abuse at the judge, and was taken from the court in floods of tears.Other family members stormed out of court and the judge briefly adjourned the verdict to restore calm.Justice McCallum found Gittany was in a state of "uncontrollable rage" on the morning of Ms Harnum's death after he discovered she was leaving him."He maintained that rage and in that state, carried her to the balcony and unloaded her over the edge," Justice McCallum said.In a verdict that took more than four hours to deliver, Justice McCallum gave a damning assessment of Gittany's character, finding he was "controlling, dominating and, at times, abusive" of Ms Harnum.She found he lied "with telling ease" and distorted the truth when he took the stand in an attempt to discredit the woman he murdered."At many times in his evidence the accused struck me as being a person playing a role, telling a story which fit with the objective evidence but which did no more than that," Justice McCallum said."His account of what happened appeared to exist on borrowed detail |
SSION RATE 16% ADMISSION RATE TEST REQUIREMENTS Required TEST REQUIREMENTS APPLICATION FEE $70 APPLICATION FEE NO. OF ONLINE PROGRAMS 1 NO. OF ONLINE PROGRAMS Additional Info Click here for free info about University of California-Los Angeles You might know the University of California, Los Angeles for its history of athletic success, but it's also got plenty going on off the field. UCLA is an internationally renowned public research university that has been named a top public school not just among California universities but nationwide. There are over 100 separate academic departments at UCLA, serving approximately 125 majors. The faculty here includes Fulbright Scholars, Nobel Prize winners and a recipient of the Fields Medal, a prestigious prize for young mathematicians. UCLA is also active in helping its surrounding communities, via campus programs, online programs, and dedicated outreach. One such program is the Mobile Clinic Project, through which students in medicine and public health bring clinical services to underserved populations in the Los Angeles. Additional Info
9 University of California-Berkeley + ADMISSION RATE 17% ADMISSION RATE TEST REQUIREMENTS Required TEST REQUIREMENTS APPLICATION FEE $70 APPLICATION FEE NO. OF ONLINE PROGRAMS 2 NO. OF ONLINE PROGRAMS Additional Info Click here for free info about University of California-Berkeley Founded in 1868, the University of California, Berkeley, sometimes called Cal, is the oldest University of California school and serves as the system's flagship. Total student enrollment here was over 41,000 at last count, just a few thousand shy of UCLA's top enrollment figure among University of California colleges. More than 70 percent of UC Berkeley's undergraduate courses consist of fewer than 30 students. It's also one of the top schools in California for faculty accolades -- seven Nobel Prizes, four Pulitzer Prizes, three Fields Medals and fifteen National Medals of Science were held by faculty members in 2017. Along with online programs to consider and an well-regarded faculty, there's also a history of great discoveries and achievements here in this city across the water from San Francisco. The Berkeley campus was home to the beginnings of modern statistical theory and the co-founding of the Sierra Club with legendary naturalist John Muir. Additional Info
10 California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo + ADMISSION RATE 35% ADMISSION RATE TEST REQUIREMENTS Required TEST REQUIREMENTS APPLICATION FEE $55 APPLICATION FEE NO. OF ONLINE PROGRAMS 1 NO. OF ONLINE PROGRAMS Additional Info Click here for free info about California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo The flagship location of California Polytechnic State University -- Cal Poly for short -- gives students a lot of space on which to learn. This Central Coast institution, technically in the California State University system, holds the title to more than 15 square miles of land at the main campus and in the surrounding area. Cal Poly has grown from its founding as a vocational high school in 1901 into one of the best colleges in California, especially for engineering students. Its programs for aerospace, civil, computer, electrical and mechanical engineering all placed at No. 3 or higher on national rankings lists in 2017. Online graduate students have a couple of virtual curriculum options at Cal Poly. The online degrees for Master of Science (M.S.) degrees in fire protection engineering and packaging for business logistics are available entirely in the online classroom. Additional Info
Most Popular Degree Programs in California
Many of the best on-campus or online colleges in California share a common trait when it comes to curriculum. They may all offer the following degree programs, some potentially online programs, which are among the most popular degrees in California.
# of schools offering this program Associate in Business Administration and Management 140 Associate in Liberal Arts and Sciences/Liberal Studies 115 Associate in Accounting Technology/Technician and Bookkeeping 115 Associate in Mathematics 108 Associate in Humanities/Humanistic Studies 107 Associate in Child Care Provider/Assistant 105 Associate in Psychology 105 Associate in Biological and Physical Sciences 103
In-Demand Careers in California
Deciding between available California degree programs, whether through campus-based or online colleges like in the school profiles mentioned above, can be a daunting task. However, it can help if you know which careers are expected to be in demand. Then, online students, nontraditional students, or any student can look for accredited on-campus and online degree programs tailored to those occupations.
Career Title Projected Job Growth Total Employment Annual Salary Solar Photovoltaic Installers 130.6% 3,900 $44,950 Home Health Aides 41% 25,180 $31,610 Software Developers, Applications 40.1% 141,870 $126,470 Personal Care Aides 39.9% 520,660 $26,220 Nurse Practitioners 35.1% 13,570 $126,770 Statisticians 34.9% 4,990 $94,230 Taxi Drivers and Chauffeurs 34.8% 24,370 $31,250 Physician Assistants 34.3% 11,110 $112,930 Physical Therapist Aides 33.8% 6,350 $30,480 Occupational Therapy Assistants 31.6% 2,010 $62,920 Physical Therapist Assistants 30.8% 5,120 $60,780 Health Specialties Teachers, Postsecondary 29.9% 13,690 $153,410 Operations Research Analysts 29.7% 12,670 $91,510 Medical Assistants 29.2% 89,910 $36,630 Massage Therapists 29% 17,390 $41,500 Physical Therapists 28.8% 20,450 $95,570 Phlebotomists 28.7% 12,580 $43,380 Actuaries 28.6% 1,200 $117,950 Nurse Anesthetists 28.6% 1,460 $217,230 Information Security Analysts 28.4% 8,470 $108,090 Market Research Analysts and Marketing Specialists 28.3% 96,600 $80,020 Nonfarm Animal Caretakers 26.4% 20,870 $29,670 Nursing Instructors and Teachers, Postsecondary 26.2% 3,870 $94,670 Diagnostic Medical Sonographers 25.9% 6,380 $91,700 Tile and Marble Setters 25.8% 7,150 $49,240 Respiratory Therapists 25.3% 17,530 $79,680 Cartographers and Photogrammetrists 25% 1,310 $84,280 Therapists, All Other 25% 770 $61,290 Helpers--Brickmasons, Blockmasons, Stonemasons, and Tile and Marble Setters 25% 3,700 $38,520 Occupational Therapists 24.8% 10,620 $89,870 Source: 2017 Occupational Employment Statistics and 2016-26 Employment Projections, Bureau of Labor Statistics, BLS.gov; 2016-26 State Occupational Projections, Projections Central, projectionscentral.com
Financial Aid and Scholarships in California
A seemingly pricey tuition shouldn't keep you from checking out in-person or online degree programs. While the best accredited traditional and online colleges in California offer institutional grant aid, there are other options for financial aid to consider when looking for tuition cost or books and supplies coverage. Federal loans and grants as well as private scholarships are available as additional resources. Plus, the State of California offers its own assistance to college students through programs such as the California Dream Act and the California Middle Class Scholarship. For more insight into scholarships available for campus-based or online colleges, you can browse our scholarship database starting with the items listed here.
Alumni Scholarship Freshman applicant must graduate from a California high school with a minimum 3.85 GPA and a minimum combined SAT I score of 1200. Transfer applicant must have at least 84 transferable quarter units from a California community college and have a minimum 3.5 GPA. More MAX. AWARD AMOUNT $10,000 APPLICATION DEADLINE JVS Scholarship Fund Applicant must be a Jewish, permanent legal resident of Los Angeles County with demonstrated financial need. Applicant must be planning to attend as full-time student at an approved college, university, vocational school, graduate school or professional school. FAFSA must be filed. More MAX. AWARD AMOUNT $5,000 APPLICATION DEADLINE RENEWAL CRITERIA Renewable if recipient remains in good academic standing and is making timely progress towards a degree or vocational certificate. Presidential Scholar at Entrance Scholarship Applicant must have a minimum 4.0 GPA. More MAX. AWARD AMOUNT $1,000 APPLICATION DEADLINE RENEWAL CRITERIA Renewable for up to four years if recipient maintains A or A- grades while in residence. MTS & Coca-Cola Laptop Scholarship Applicant must be a high school senior who is graduating from an accredited San Diego county high school. Application and essay question are required to be submitted. Early application deadline is March 14; early applicants could win an iPad, iTunes gift card, Hard Rock Cafe gift card, or a Regional Monthly Transit Pass. More MAX. AWARD AMOUNT N/A APPLICATION DEADLINE
Additional Resources
Article SourcesThe long-rumored KTM 800 Adventure was spied testing in Spain, both on the road and in the dirt. Though the engine is obscured by what look like may be auxiliary (or main?) fuel tanks that dip low on either side of the powerplant, there are a pair of exhausts emanating from the front of the engine that converge into a collector and single pipe that exits on the right rear of the machine.
Oh, glory! It’s about time. We’ve been expecting a “serious” entry into this class for quite a while. The Triumph Tiger 800 XC variants and BMW F800GS have long been class staples, but even the most aggressively dirt-oriented of these models is far from rally ready. In contrast, this KTM 800 Adventure looks almost ready for Dakar duty.
A beefy inverty WP fork runs up front with twin Brembo radial-mount brakes. The single WP shock at the rear looks to be linkageless. Swingarm is 1190 Adventure-inspired and quite long. Something on the order of 9 inches of suspension travel front and rear would be about right, and expect full adjustability. The company who’s built its reputation on “Ready to Race” wouldn’t have it any other way.Note: The current version of this mod isn't compatible with Advanced Edition Stay tuned for an update that should fix whatever issues you may have come across
And if you're curious as to why this has been on hiatus for so long, take a look at my other project Super Galaxy Squadron. Since it's something I'm doing solo, it naturally takes up a lot of my time
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FTL Remastered sets out to give the (previously untapped) visual potential of FTL the pixeled love it deserves, remaking every art asset in the game to be more functional, better looking, or occasionally both.
As you might expect, doing pixel art for free on the internet isn't exactly a sustainable lifestyle. Being a human, I need certain things like food and sleep, and working full-time hours on a tiny mod for a year old indie game, when paired with working for a college degree and trying to survive, isn't terribly high on my list of priorities. If you like this mod and want it to be completed, consider donating so I can justify spending this kind of time. I'd like to, but I also kind of like being able to eat and pay bills and all that business.
PROGRESS: I don't even know/1876
CURRENT:
[12/28] - Most map things complete, still need backgrounds/nebulae
-First form of rebel flagship complete
-Various improvements to UI/weapons
OLD:
[12/24] - High contrast UI (except for most menus), better main menu, better warning messages, better asteroids, except for two of the three backgrounds, four frames of male humans done (click on one while they're facing down to see the change) [12/21] - Crystal and boss weapons complete (except for lockdown bombs but I don't know if those are actually programmed in), boarding drones partially complete, partially screwed up, stand by on that, various UI changes
[9/29] - Kestrel is finally in, along with higher contrast health bars and updated doors
[9/24] - All flying drones are done, still have boarding and system repair ones to go but those'll probably be done along with other character sprites
[9/22] - Finished beams and bombs
[9/21] - Weapons are nearly done, only the bombs, a couple beams, and special weapons like for bosses and Crystal ships are left to goSo far, Donald Trump is on his way to being merely a bad president rather than the worst. (That could change; please, Fates, do not pounce.) Yet I doubt any president has had more people saying, only months in, “This guy’s gotta go.” I admit I’m often one of those people myself, even though I consider Trump’s proven misdeeds to be technically minor so far. A small but growing number of people on the right are calling for Trump’s removal, too. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has called for Republicans to launch a palace coup against the president, and American Conservative writer Rod Dreher has suggested that Congress impeach Trump “to protect the integrity of our constitutional order.” Even Trump supporters have sometimes hinted at frayed patience, watching their agenda slip away over yet another “modern day presidential” tweet.
What we’re learning, it seems, is how much propriety, even in purely ritualistic form, matters in a president. What some of us (like this writer) are struggling with is the question of whether an absence of sobriety can ever justify something so drastic as premature removal from office.
As absurd as it may be only months into a presidency, impeachment is already getting lots of attention, and it’s as much because of unhinged tweeting as it is because of policy. Last weekend, thousands of Americans took to the streets to demand Congress take action. California Democrat Brad Sherman has written a proposed article of impeachment. Maryland Democrat Jamie Raskin has rounded up 25 congressional colleagues to support a presidential “oversight” commission that would monitor the commander-in-chief for soundness of body and mind. “I assume every human being is allowed one or two errant and seemingly deranged tweets,” Raskin told Yahoo News. “The question is whether you have a sustained pattern of behavior that indicates something is seriously wrong.”
WATCH: Why It’s O.K. to Ignore Trump Sometimes
Officially, of course, collusion with Moscow or obstruction of justice is the reason we’re supposed to want to go after Donald Trump. But allegations of outright criminality are far ahead of what the evidence permits so far. Certainly, like other bad presidents, Trump has made some horrible policy choices, including ramping up tensions with Iran, proposing to put health coverage out of reach for millions of Americans, withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement, and doing Saudi Arabia’s bidding in the Middle East, to name a few. But crimes? No. Nothing has been close to proven, at least, and we can’t reasonably call for impeachment based on suspicions.
Even if it turns out that a G.O.P. operative contacted Russian hackers (in vain) to get ahold of the deleted e-mails of Hillary Clinton, such a sin seems minor in comparison to that of, say, launching a war based on false assurances (hello, George W. Bush) or of violating an arms embargo to sell missiles to Iran and diverting the profits to a Central American guerrilla group (please stand, Ronald Reagan). Perhaps it’s worse than directing hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to fraudulent plaintiffs in what appears to have been a crude effort at vote buying (don’t be shy, Barack Obama), but it’s still debatable whether it’d put Trump in a league of his own. It grates especially on the soul—my soul, at least—to hear pious denunciations of Trump from the same people who served with Dubya as the U.S. established an archipelago of dark sites in which captives were tortured, sometimes to death. You’re going to talk about character?
But, still, they have a point. When Trump tweeted that Mika Brzezinski was bleeding from a facelift, people joked that it was the end of civilization—and it wasn’t entirely a joke. For many Americans, this author included, it prompted another round of “This guy’s gotta go.” And that in turn raises the question of why. Why should style ever matter more than substance? Selling arms to Saudi Arabia is a matter of life and death—mostly death—for thousands of innocent people, but no one would suggest Trump be impeached over it. By contrast, tweets about Mika Brzezinski hurt barely anyone apart from Mika Brzezinski, and yet they left everyone disgusted and spooked.
The only answer I can come up with turns out to be painfully conservative. I say “painfully” not because there’s anything wrong with conservatism per se but because, if Trump got anything right about our times, it was that we’d come to a radical moment. Bernie Sanders picked up on the same thing. Many Americans, whether on the left or right, didn’t just want a few adjustments but a re-examination of fundamentals. Trump’s willingness to scandalize the garden party was proof of his willingness to take on this task. Somebody needed to throw a few teacakes at the guests, and conservatives don’t do that. But Trump never moved on from there. He just stuck around to throw everything else.
Normal heads of state either possess many of the traditional Roman virtues—a trip to Google reminded me of some favorites: gravitas, veritas, humanitas, frugalitas, pietas, severitas, salubritas—or at least try to fake them. Donald Trump exhibits almost none of them, ever. He can just barely pull off a joint appearance with a visiting dignitary before the limits of his self-control kick in and he’s back to being himself. That’s alarming. Whether in ancient Rome or ancient China, nothing portended calamity like an emperor who flouted the formalities.
Yes, Donald Trump loves his country, and perhaps to that extent offers a favorable contrast to a tiny but vocal god-damn-America cohort that unfairly but inescapably tarnishes the brand of his opposition. But he loves it in the manner of someone who thanks you effusively for the gift of a Rodin statue and then uses it as a doorstop. What Trump says and does is often funny—hilarious, even—but mainly because it violates our sense of sacredness and decency. We’re reminded almost daily that iconoclasm is one of humor’s great wellsprings, but when it comes from our head of state, the laughter is mighty bitter. Caligula was funny, too.
And so it is that people think seriously about palace coups or impeachment—are forced to think about it—even as most liberals would generally prefer Trump’s policies to those of Mike Pence, and some of us would rank his worst sins much lower than those of several presidents who appear on our legal tender. As it turns out, we’re far more tolerant of constitutional subversion than of outright insurrection, and perhaps for legitimate reasons. Nibbling away at constitutional norms is terrible, and presidents from both parties have done it, but the very threads of civilization feel at risk when our head of state flouts the few formalities that we have. We need what Confucius called “the rites.” We want our judges in robes, not T-shirts and shorts. And we want an emperor who can handle what might be the most important requirement of the job: to keep up appearances.
If Trump is impeached, we’ll tell ourselves it’s for breaches of the law. But the truth is it’s going to be for breaches of decorum. And it’s getting harder and harder to dismiss the thought that that may be cause enough.Astronomers analyzing a long-lasting blast of high-energy light observed in 2013 report finding features strikingly similar to those expected from an explosion from the universe's earliest stars. If this interpretation is correct, the outburst validates ideas about a recently identified class of gamma-ray burst and serves as a stand-in for what future observatories may see as the last acts of the first stars.
"One of the great challenges of modern astrophysics has been the quest to identify the first generation of stars to form in the universe, which we refer to as Population III stars," explained lead scientist Luigi Piro, the director of research at the Institute for Space Astrophysics and Planetology in Rome, a division of Italy's National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF). "This important event takes us one step closer."
Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are the most luminous explosions in the universe. The blasts emit outbursts of gamma rays -- the most powerful form of light -- and X-rays, and produce rapidly fading afterglows that can be observed in visible light, infrared and radio wavelengths. On average, NASA's Swift satellite, Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and other spacecraft detect about one GRB each day.
Shortly after 12:11 a.m. EDT on Sept. 25, 2013, Swift's Burst Alert Telescope triggered on a spike of gamma rays from a source in the constellation Fornax. The spacecraft automatically alerted observatories around the world that a new burst -- designated GRB 130925A, after the date -- was in progress and turned its X-ray Telescope (XRT) toward the source. Other satellites also detected the rising tide of high-energy radiation, including Fermi, the Russian Konus instrument onboard NASA's Wind spacecraft, and the European Space Agency's (ESA) INTEGRAL observatory.
The burst was eventually localized to a galaxy so far away that its light had been traveling for 3.9 billion years, longer than the oldest evidence for life on Earth.
Astronomers have observed thousands of GRBs over the past five decades. Until recently, they were classified into two groups, short and long, based on the duration of the gamma-ray signal. Short bursts, lasting only two seconds or less, are thought to represent a merger of compact objects in a binary system, with the most likely suspects being neutron stars and black holes. Long GRBs may last anywhere from several seconds to several minutes, with typical durations between 20 and 50 seconds. These events are thought to be associated with the collapse of a star many times the sun's mass and the resulting birth of a new black hole.
GRB 130925A, by contrast, produced gamma rays for 1.9 hours, more than a hundred times greater than a typical long GRB. Observations by Swift's XRT revealed an intense and highly variable X-ray afterglow that exhibited strong flares for six hours, after which it finally began the steady fadeout usually seen in long GRBs.
"GRB 130925A is a member of a rare and newly recognized class we call ultra-long bursts," said Eleonora Troja, a visiting research scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and a member of the study team. "But what really sets it apart is its unusual X-ray afterglow, which provides the strongest case yet that ultra-long GRBs come from stars called blue supergiants."
Astronomers think Wolf-Rayet stars best explain the origin of long GRBs. Born with more than 25 times the sun's mass, these stars burn so hot that they drive away their outer hydrogen envelopes through an outflow called a stellar wind. By the time it collapses, the star's outer atmosphere is essentially gone and its physical size is comparable to the sun's. A black hole forms in the star's core and matter falling toward it powers jets that burrow through the star. The jets continue operating for a few tens of seconds -- the time scale of long GRBs.
Because ultra-long GRBs last hundreds of times longer, the source star must have a correspondingly greater physical size. The most likely suspect, astronomers say, is a blue supergiant, a hot star with about 20 times the sun's mass that retains its deep hydrogen atmosphere, making it roughly 100 times the sun's diameter. Better yet, blue supergiants containing only a very small fraction of elements heavier than helium -- metals, in astronomical parlance -- could be substantially larger. A star's metal content controls the strength of its stellar wind, and this in turn determines how much of its hydrogen atmosphere it retains before collapse. For the largest blue supergiants, the hydrogen envelope would take hours to fall into the black hole, providing a sustained fuel source to power ultra-long GRBs.
Writing in the July 10 edition of The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the researchers note that radio observations of the GRB afterglow show that it displayed nearly constant brightness over a period of four months. This extremely slow decline suggests that the explosion's blast wave was moving essentially unimpeded through space, which means that the environment around the star is largely free of material cast off by a stellar wind.
The burst's long-lived X-ray flaring proved a more puzzling feature to explain, requiring observations from Swift, NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA's XMM-Newton satellite to sort out. As the high-energy jet bores through the collapsing star, its leading edge rams into cooler stellar gas and heats it. This gas flows down the sides of the jet, surrounding it in a hot X-ray-emitting sheath. Because the jet travels a greater distance through a blue supergiant, this cocoon becomes much more massive than is possible in a Wolf-Rayet star. While the cocoon should expand rapidly as it exits the star, the X-ray evidence indicates that it remained intact. The science team suggests that magnetic fields may have suppressed the flow of hot gas across the cocoon, keeping it confined close to the jet.
"This is the first time we have detected this thermal cocoon component, likely because all other known ultra-long bursts occurred at greater distances," said Piro.
The astronomers conclude that the best explanation for the unusual properties of GRB 130925A is that it heralded the death of a metal-poor blue supergiant, a model they suggest likely characterizes the entire ultra-long class.
Stars make heavy elements throughout their energy-producing lives and during their death throes in supernova explosions and GRBs. Each generation enriches interstellar gas with a greater proportion of metals, but the process is not uniform and metal-poor galaxies still exist nearby. Looking farther into the universe means looking deeper into the past, toward earlier stellar generations formed out of increasingly metal-poor gas. Astronomers think Population III stars ended their lives as blue supergiants, so GRB 130925A may prove to be a valuable nearby analog to phenomena we may one day detect from the universe's most distant stars.Last summer, Jurgen Klinsmann asked Jordan Morris to come meet him at the Four Seasons in Palo Alto, California. Morris, then 19 and with just a few caps for the U.S. under-20 team, wasn’t expecting much from the interaction. “I just thought he wanted to talk about how things were going and check in a little bit,” Morris said. “Then he dropped that. It was pretty amazing. I was kind of speechless, to be honest. My heart dropped.”
“That” was an invitation to the senior squad’s upcoming camp — the first after the 2014 World Cup — before a friendly against the Czech Republic. Morris, who made the All-Pac-12 first team his freshman year, accepted and soon became the first active college player to be on a U.S. roster since Chris Albright in 1999. While he didn’t make it onto the field in Prague, he showed enough to earn another look, making late substitute appearances against the Republic of Ireland in November and Switzerland last month. Then, with Jozy Altidore suspended, Morris started up top against archrival Mexico in mid-April. All he did was score the opener, becoming the first college student to score a goal for the full national team since — well, not even Paul Kennedy, the dean of U.S. soccer writers, is entirely sure. A week later, he found the back of the net in the U.S. U23 team’s 3-0 win over El Tri.
“It’s all been a blur,” Morris said, laughing as he struggled to recount which days he was where.
So, a question: Why Morris, who wasn’t even on a list of the top 100 American soccer players as of July 2014?
Part of the answer is fortuitous circumstance. Before the World Cup, the Americans trained at Stanford and played the Cardinal during a closed-door scrimmage. Morris impressed Klinsmann with his ability to read the game and his one-on-one skill.
The second part is that Klinsmann and tactician-in-chief Berti Vogts are obsessed with speed. (See: Yedlin, DeAndre.) And Morris, who says he ran a 4.5-second 40 the last time he was clocked, has impressive pace. Against both Mexican teams, he shuttled down either flank, outrunning defenders to long balls over the top. While Klinsmann wants the U.S. team to play a possession game, that’s been slow progress and the team’s defenders still resort to long clearances when pressed. Having a speedster at the tip of the formation doubles as both a release valve against opposing pressure and a key to unlock opposing back lines. You don’t have to squint to picture Morris streaking through two center backs to get on the end of a chip from Michael Bradley. He still needs to adjust to the speed of thought in the international game, and Morris says he’s working on it, but he possesses the straight-up point-to-point burst to succeed.
The third part is philosophical. Klinsmann won’t get fired for bringing Morris into camp and giving the kid a shot. While doing so might anger a few more-experienced players who think they deserve a chance, it’s not like Klinsmann chose Morris over Lionel Messi. If the 20-year-old from Stanford fails miserably, it would be easy enough to put it in the “good job, good effort” category and move on. If he happens to make a smart run, get a lucky bounce, find the ball at his feet, and finish sweetly, well, then someone who’s too young to win the Budweiser Man of the Match scores the opener against Mexico and Klinsmann looks like a genius. The coach wins because he can’t lose.
In addition to whatever larger significance Morris holds for the national team manager, he’s representing the embattled world of American college soccer. The intercollegiate season lasts three months, which is significantly shorter than the 10-month U.S. Soccer Development Academy schedule or any club program in the world. The general perception — one that’s mostly true — is that if you want to make it as a professional soccer player, going to college is a handicap since there’s not enough time to train and the training you do get — both from the quality of coaching and from the level of competition at practice every day — can’t keep pace with what’s offered at the professional level. Morris, like Alejando Bedoya before him, shows that there’s still more than one way to make it to the highest level.
“I looked up to young players who were able to break through on the national team level,” Morris said. “Hopefully I can do that for some young players. Hopefully me going on to that level and playing in that game had the same effect on some other players in college.”
Although the Seattle Sounders, where he’s played for the U23s and where his father is the team doctor, continue to offer him increasingly larger contracts, Morris plans to stay at Stanford — for now. The sophomore took it easy this semester because he knew he’d be traveling a bit — the U.S. national team is the new semester abroad — but he still has political science and religious studies classes to attend, in addition to practice with his college team.
Michael Steele/Getty Images
So the education of Jordan Morris will continue, perhaps accelerated by the recent success but not fundamentally altered. The U.S. coaching staff, specifically Andi Herzog, who is an assistant with the senior national team and head coach of the U23 squad that will try to qualify for the Olympics in the fall, wants its emerging star to continue doing what he does best. “We always say you have to work on your weaknesses, but I think it’s more important to work on your strengths,” Herzog told ESPN, citing his charge’s speed and nose for goal.
“When you get into those intense games, you want to do what you know and what you’re good at,” Morris said. “I’ve been blessed with some speed and I try to use that to the best of my ability.” He’s picking up tips from Herzog, who made 103 appearances as an attacking midfielder for the Austrian national team and frequently works with the American forwards in his capacity as a national team assistant, and from Klinsmann, one of the all-time goal-scoring greats in world soccer.
The newest wrinkle to his game is to start behind the center backs before he checks to the ball, thus making him harder to track. It’s a little tidbit, but he’d never thought about it before. When I suggested that starting from an offside position isn’t something they teach in American youth soccer, Morris agreed: “Exactly, yeah.” From Klinsmann’s mouth to the college kid’s mind.
While Morris scored the two most memorable goals of his young career over the last two weeks, when I put him on the spot, he said his third-favorite came during his freshman year against the University of California–Santa Barbara. It was his first collegiate tally, a sudden-death game winner in overtime against one of the best squads in the country. “It was down at their place. There were about 8,000 fans who were taunting us the whole game,” Morris said. “It wasn’t even a very good goal. It was a deflection that just kind of hit off me and went in. But I celebrated that one quite a bit.”
Whether it’s in front of fewer than 10,000 at UCSB or 64,369 at the Alamodome, they all count the same.
Noah Davis (@noahedavis) is Grantland’s United States men’s national team columnist and deputy editor at American Soccer Now.RANCHO SANTA MARGARITA – Anyone found sleeping in their vehicle on city property could face a fine of $1,000 or six months in jail.
The City Council in Wednesday voted 4-1 to pass an ordinance that the city’s Chief of Police Lt. Brian Schmutz said will give his deputies greater control in responding to ‘suspicious person in car’ calls.
Schmutz told the council in the last year his department has responded to 330 calls for such service. At least a couple dozen have been found to be “sleeping in cars” calls, he said. Others, he said, residents voiced concerned about people doing drugs in their vehicles or casing a neighborhood.
Schmutz said he asked the council to take a look at this law after doing an analysis of training needs and patrol schedule for his deputies.
“One tool used to enforce neighborhood safety would be this ordinance,” Schmutz said.
He also pointed to cities such as Lake Forest, Aliso Viejo, Mission Viejo Tustin, San Juan Capistrano, San Clemente Laguna Niguel, Costa Mesa and Irvine, who already have the law on their books. In some cases, the laws are more stringently enforced allowing no sleeping in cars at any time, he added.
Schmutz also cited an arrest of a man found sleeping in his car last year near a school zone. In this case, the man arrested for possession of a loaded firearm. During their investigation deputies also found police insignia and handcuffs. Later, the located the keys for the handcuffs in the man’s socks, Schmutz said.
The ordinance, which will go to a second reading on March 14 to allow for more public input, would prohibit anyone from sleeping in a car, trailer, camper or tent traveler parked on a city maintained street or alley between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. It will not be enforced on private property. If passed then it will go into effect 30 days later.
Councilman Jesse Petrilla said he was not in favor of the law citing safety concerns such as a tired driver.
“When the 241 Toll Road is complete travelers may be passing through from as far away as San Diego,” he said. If they feel they may fall asleep, this could be dangerous. If someone is down on their luck, I believe the last thing they need is a $1,000 fine or six months in jail.”
“I believe in private property rights and limited government,” he said. “This goes a little bit farther than I feel comfortable with.”
The council discussed issues regarding a tired driver and homelessness as well as the possibility of an intoxicated driver.
Schmutz pointed out that homeless people could still sleep at other locations such as commercial centers, restaurants or camp grounds. He pointed out that someone sleeping in their car in a neighborhood would not be fair to residents and reminded the council there are no bathroom facilities in such a case. He also added that a sleeping person is vulnerable when sleeping in public.
As far as motorists sleeping off a hangover, Schmutz said a person can still be arrested for DUI if they are found behind the wheel with keys in their car, even if they’re asleep.
“Our City Council is committed to providing every possible tool to our police department to ensure the streets and neighborhoods of Rancho Santa Margarita always remain the safest in the state of California, Mayor Tony Beall said.
Contact the writer: 949-454-7307 or eritchie@ocregister.com or twitter.com/lagunainiReflecting on a Woeful Leafs Season
by
Now that the regular season is over, it’s time for fans of the Toronto Maple Leafs to reflect on the season that was. And, considering the circumstances, it’s doubtful that it can be a happy reflection. On the 13th of March, after defeating the L.A. Kings just over a month ago, the Leafs were comfortably sitting second in the Atlantic division. At that point, they were pretty much a lock to return to the playoffs, and fans were thinking about favourable first round opponents. It was said then that, barring a “historic collapse”, the Leafs would play postseason hockey.
But, this is of course the Toronto Maple Leafs we’re talking about. If there’s any team that can manage to fail spectacularly, it’s them. After beating the Kings, they proceeded to lose 8 straight games(and 12 of their last 14). The Leafs went from one of the top teams in the Eastern conference to the 8th overall draft |
will make it much more dangerous for US carrier fleets to operate close to China's coast, pushing them out further offshore.
Taiwan, Korea and Japan that look to the US for their security may start to question how much America can really protect them in future, analysts say.
A Japanese defence study last week expressed concern about what it called China's failure to explain its military ambitions.
Image copyright bbc
In the past year, China has had maritime run-ins with Japan, Vietnam and also the Philippines over disputed territories in the area.Edmund Burke, the eighteenth-century British statesman, has long been a popular figure for political conservatives to cite. But his views on religion get relatively little attention. This is a shame, because Burke has a lot to offer those concerned about matters of religion, morality, and politics in contemporary American life. He is a figure who may make some orthodox Catholics uncomfortable because, despite placing great emphasis on the importance of religion, he sometimes seems unconcerned about precisely which religion one follows. His writing on religion is centered on its role in politics, society, and morality, not on theology or questions of salvation. But his perspective is both sophisticated and pious, and speaks to the need for a deep sense of reverence—and of how to maintain it.
Burke’s own religious background is actually a matter of some controversy. He was an Irishman; his mother and sister were Catholic. Burke, his father, and his brothers were officially Anglican, but this was probably a reflection of the political realities of the time. Due to the severe challenges presented by the oppression of Irish Catholics, it was common in families for the women to be openly Catholic while the men were secretly Catholic but nominally Anglican. Burke’s father was a lawyer, and appears to have been one of many Catholic lawyers who “converted” to the Church of Ireland when Catholics were barred from the profession. At any rate, Burke spent much of his early youth with his Catholic cousins, then attended a Quaker school (schools for Catholics were illegal) and the Anglican Trinity College. For Burke, religion was the “first prejudice.” That is, religious presumptions are foundational to virtue, morality, and a good society. He celebrated the English tradition of “education by ecclesiastics,” believing that this fostered the right attitude and outlook in young men. Most notably, he emerged as a defender of England’s church establishment, believing that this discouraged “fraud and violence and injustice and tyranny” in government. He liked church-state linkage not for the benefit of the church, but as a way of conveying the idea that politics is a sacred trust. Burke had a deep sense of the sacred, and he understood that it is vital that we recognize that our whims—experienced either singly or collectively—do not set the standards of right and wrong. Church-state linkage helped to “consecrate” the state. For Burke,
This consecration is made, that all who administer the government of men, in which they stand in the person of God himself, should have high and worthy notions of their function and destination; that their hope should be full of immortality; that they should not look to the paltry pelf of the moment, nor to the temporary and transient praise of the vulgar, but to a solid, permanent existence, in the permanent part of their nature....
One thing which made religion a key to virtue was the humility which Christianity promoted. Most of our political and social problems, Burke believed, stemmed ultimately from vanity, the chief of the vices. We must recognize that we are a part of an order greater than ourselves if our lives are to have meaning and virtue and if our society is to be a humane and stable one. One of the things which most appalled Burke about the French Revolution was its attack on the church. He recognized that this would doom the project, since “all other nations have begun the fabric of a new government, or the reformation of an old, by establishing originally or by enforcing with greater exactness some rites or other of religion.”
Despite Burke’s defense of church establishment, he was also a supporter of religious liberty. And, he bitterly attacked the anti-Catholicism laws imposed on Ireland. Such laws were eroding Irish society, destroying social and cultural bonds and transforming the population into an atomized mob ripe for rebellion. Government attacks on new and minority churches were bad enough, but attacking the major, ancestral church of a society was deadly. He warned against the promotion of a generic “Protestantism” understood as anti-Catholicism, pointing out that an atheist, with his rejection of all Catholic doctrine rather than just portions of it, is “the most perfect Protestant.” In attacking Catholicism, government was attacking religion, piety, and, ultimately, society itself.
Notably, Burke displayed great respect for, and interest in, major non-Christian religions such as Hinduism and Islam. Indeed, in opposing the openly tyrannical governance of India by the fortune-seeking men of the East India Company, he noted that, in contrast, rule in traditional Islamic states (such as those they were supplanting) was—at least in theory—never arbitrary. This was because the prince’s actions were constrained by Islamic law, and clerics had the moral authority to help check his excesses. (Burke was not, of course, speaking of a modern radical Islamist state.) Burke’s combination of emphasis on the importance of religion and apparent lack of concern regarding precise religious doctrine and practice is demonstrated by his historical writing on the conversion of England to Christianity. He notes that,
Whatever popular customs of heathenism were found to be absolutely not incompatible with Christianity, were retained; and some of them were continued to a very late period. Deer were at a certain season brought into St. Paul’s church in London, and laid on the altar; and this custom subsisted until the Reformation. The names of some of the church festivals were, with a similar design, taken from those of the heathen, which had been celebrated at the same time of the year.
It is clear that Burke views this merging of the Christian and pagan favorably, noting that the Pope had “a perfect understanding of human nature” since he avoided abrupt changes “in order that the prejudices of the people might not be too rudely shocked by a declared profanation of what they had so long held sacred.” For Burke, it is maintaining a sense of the sacred that is paramount. This sense is bound up not only in religious doctrine, but in various rites, places, and celebrations, and is linked to their venerable nature.
An assumption that Burke simply likes all religion indiscriminately would be very wrong. He actually discriminates very sharply among forms of religiosity. As a young man he published a book, A Vindication of Natural Society, which was in part a satire on the advocacy by Bolingbroke and others of “natural religion.” The term “natural religion” referred to religion accessible entirely through natural reason; its popular advocates tended to be hostile toward traditional Biblical Christianity. For Burke, this “natural religion” was something to be mocked; his broad approval of religiosity did not extend to religions which were largely created by their adherents. His well-known support for religious toleration also stopped with Unitarians, who, he argued, were much more committed to particular political doctrines than to religious ones, and, hence, could be considered a political, rather than religious, group.
Burke proclaimed approvingly that “there is no rust of superstition, with which the accumulated absurdity of the human mind might have crusted it [religion] over in the course of ages, that ninety-nine in a hundred of the people of England would not prefer to impiety.” For him, from a moral and political perspective, specific religious doctrines and practices are generally not particularly important, but orthodoxy is. Burke thus emerges in the usual position of a defender of orthodoxy—of almost any type. Religion “works,” in his view, when it stands apart from the whims of those who practice it. Only then can it enable self-discipline, give meaning, and provide a real sense of the sacred and the sublime in life. Critically, only orthodox religion effectively promotes recognition of the existence of standards beyond those of mere convention. Vague spirituality, or some made-up religion, or Christianity scrubbed and watered-down to conform to the sensibilities of the “moderns” of the day, does not suffice.
Burke once remarked that “that great chain of causes, which linking one to another even to the throne of God himself, can never be unraveled by any industry of ours.” As a young man he was fascinated by the sublime, which he understood to be tied to power, infinity, venerability and, especially, mystery. For something to be sublime it must be beyond one’s full knowledge and beyond one’s control; Burke contrasted a sublime portrayal of a horse in Job with a non-sublime description of a horse’s usefulness. An experience of the sublime reminds us of the human condition, which is both one of limitation and one of connection to that which is greater than ourselves. It thereby inspires the right sort of humility and responsibility. The sacred and the sublime are linked; meaningful religion must be sublime, and to be such, it cannot be a mere tool of human invention for human convenience.
We’ll never know exactly what Burke’s theological views, or private religious views, were. (At a personal level he never gave any sign of being anything other than a pious and orthodox Christian.) We do know that politically he devoted his career to fighting against “caprice.” To him caprice inevitably led to abuses of power, and to tyranny or anarchy. His fight was, effectively, against the postmodern sense of arbitrariness, which he saw appearing on the horizon. Burke teaches us that religion plays a critical role in fighting against arbitrariness or caprice. For him, a humane, stable, and free state requires not just religious tolerance and an acceptance of pluralism, but a broad embrace of a particular sort of religiosity—orthodox religiosity—in private and public life. Only religion of this sort can stand above society and the state while heightening our awareness of the sacred, thereby setting bounds to our politics and elevating our lives.
Books by Dr. Byrne may be found in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore. This essay originally appeared in Crisis Magazine and is reprinted here with their gracious permission.The real Santa lived a long time ago in a place called Asia Minor. It is now the country of Turkey. His name was Nicholas.
Nicholas' parents died when he was just a teenager. His parents left him a lot of money which made him a rich young man. He went to live with his uncle who was a priest.
Nicholas heard about a man who had lost all his money. He had three daughters who were old enough to get married. But in those days young women had to have money in order to get married. This money was a "dowry" and it was used to help the new family get started. If you didn't have dowry money, you didn't get married.
This family was so poor they had nothing left to eat. The daughters were going to be sold as slaves because they couldn't live at home any longer. They were very sad. They wouldn't be able to have families of their own. And they would have to be slaves—no longer able to decide where they would live or what they would do.
The night before the oldest daughter was to be sold, she washed her stockings and put them in front of the fire to dry. Then all of them went to sleep—the father and the three daughters.
In the morning the daughter saw a lump in her stocking. Reaching in, she found a small, heavy bag. It had gold inside! Enough to provide food for the family and money for her dowry. Oh, how happy they were!
The next morning, another bag with gold was found. Imagine! Two of the daughters would now be saved. Such joy!
And the next night, the father planned to stay awake to find out who was helping his daughters. He dozed off, but heard a small "clink" as another bag landed in the room. Quickly he jumped up and ran out the door. Who did he catch ducking around the corner?
Nicholas, the young man who lived with his uncle. "Nicholas, it is you! Thank you for helping us—I hardly know what to say!" Nicholas said, "Please, do not thank me—thank God that your prayers have been answered. Do not tell others about me."
Nicholas continued helping people. He always tried to help secretly. He didn't want any attention or thanks. Years passed and he was chosen to be a bishop. Bishops look after their people as shepherds look after their sheep. And that is what Nicholas did. When there wasn't any food, he found wheat; so no one went hungry. He always helped people in trouble. All his life Nicholas showed people how to love God and care for each other.
Everyone loved Nicholas. After he died, they told stories of the good and kind things Nicholas had done. Sailors took these stories about Nicholas everywhere they went. Some of the stories were about his special care for children—helping and protecting them when danger threatened. And so more and more people learned about good, kind Nicholas. They wanted to be like him. He is an example of how we should live. And that is why he became a saint.
This is the story of the real Santa Claus, St. Nicholas. To this day people say that St. Nicholas, or Santa, is the special friend of children.
—Carol Myers
Rotating images: Gabrielle Haymoz, Musée d'art et d'histoire, Fribourg, Switzerland. Used by permission.
Illustration: © St. Nicholas Center
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back to topExcerpt: 'Hope For Animals And Their World'
I am writing this from my home in Bournemouth, England. I grew up in this house, and as I look out my window I can see the very same trees
I climbed as a child. Up high in those trees I believed I was closer to the birds and the sky, more a part of nature. Even as a very young child, I felt most alive in the natural world, and almost every book I read borrowed from the local librarywas about animals and adventures in wild untamed places in the world. I began with the stories about Doctor Dolittle, that English doctor who was taught animal languages by his parrot. Then I discovered the books about Tarzan of the Apes. Those two books inspired a seemingly impossible dreamI would go to Africa one day and live with animals and write books about them.
Hope for Animals and Their World: How Endangered Species Are Being Rescued from the Brink
By Jane Goodall
Hardcover, 416 pages
Grand Central Publishing
List price: $27.99
Perhaps the volume that influenced me most was called The Miracle of Life. I spent hours poring over the small print of those magical pages. It was not a book written for children, but I was absolutely absorbed as I learned about the diversity of life on earth, the age of the dinosaurs, evolution and Charles Darwin, the early explorers and naturalistsand the amazing variety and adaptations of the animals around the world.
And so, as I grew older and learned more and more, my love of animals broadened from my hamster, slow worm, guinea pigs, cats, and dogs, to
a fascination for all the amazing animals I read about in those books.
There was no television when I was young: I learned everything from booksand nature.
My childhood dream was realized when I was invited to Kenya by a school friend. I set off when I was twenty-six years old, after working as a waitress to save the fare. I went by boat because it was cheapest, calling in at places I had read about such as Cape Town and Durban, and finally arriving in Mombasa. For me it was especially exciting to arrive at the Canary Islandsfor Doctor Dolittle had been there, too! What adventure, back then, for a young woman traveling alone.
Once I reached Kenya, my love of animals led me to Louis Leakey, who eventually entrusted me with the task of uncovering the secrets of the behavior of the animal most like us. (Quite extraordinary when you consider I had no degree and back then girls did not do that sort of thing!) That study of chimpanzees, in Tanzania's Gombe National Park, has lasted for half a century and helped us understand, among other things, more about our own evolutionary history. It has taught us that the similarities in biology and behavior between chimpanzees and humans are far greater than anyone had supposed. We are not, after all, the only beings with personalities, rational thought, and emotions.
There is no sharp line dividing us from the chimpanzees and the other apes, and the differences that obviously exist are of degree, not of kind.
This understanding gives us new respect not only for chimpanzees, but also for all the other amazing animals with whom we share this planet.
For we humans are a part of, and not separate from, the animal kingdom.
We are still studying the chimpanzees of Gombe, and I might well have stayed there, with the animals and forests I love, if I had not attended a conference called Understanding Chimpanzees. It was that conference, in 1986, that changed the course of my life. Field researchers from all the study sites across Africa came together for the first time.
There was one session on conservation that was utterly shocking. Right across their range, the chimpanzees' forests were being felled at a horrifying rate, they were being caught in poachers' snares, and the so called bushmeat tradethe commercial hunting of wild animals for foodhad begun. Chimpanzee numbers had plummeted since I began my study in 1960, from somewhere over a million to an estimated four to five hundred thousand (it is much less now).
It was a wake-up call for me. I went to the conference as a scientist, planning to continue working in the fi eld, analyzing and publishing my data. I left as an advocate for the chimpanzees and their vanishing forest home. I knew that to try to help the chimpanzees, I must leave the fi eld and do my best to try to raise awareness and hope that we could start to halt at least some of the destruction. And so, after spending twenty-six years of my life doing what I loved best in the place I loved best, I took to the road. And the more I traveled around the world, giving lectures, attending conferences, meeting with conservationists and legislators, the more I realized the extent of the devastation we are wreaking on our planet. It was not just the forests harboring chimpanzees and other African animals that were endangeredit was forests and animals everywhere.
And not only forests, but all of the natural world.
Life on the road is hard. Since 1986, I have traveled some three hundred days a year. From America and Europe to Africa and Asia. From airport to hotel to lecture venue; from schoolroom to corporate conference room to government offices. But there are some perks along the way. I get to visit some incredible places. And I get to meet some truly wonderful and inspirational people. And I hear, among all the terrible news of the ongoing destruction of the natural world, some stories of people who have prevented the felling of an old-growth forest, stopped the building of a dam, succeeded in restoring a despoiled wetlands, saved a species from extinction.
Even so, evidence is mounting of a sixth extinctionthis time caused by human actions. To keep up my spirits when I was tired and things seemed extra-bleak, I made a collection of what I call my "symbols of hope." Many illustrate the resilience of naturesuch as a leaf from a tree found in Australia, previously known only from fossil imprints on rocks. A tree that has survived seventeen ice ages and is still alive and well in a hidden canyon in the Blue Mountains. A feather from a peregrine falcon that was flying again in an area where it had been locally extinct for a hundred years and another from a California condor, a species rescued from the brink of extinction. This was what caught Thane's attention when I was lecturing at the zoo in Cincinnati. He said I should write up those stories. I told him I intended tobut there was so little time. He said he would help. Thane is a kindred spirit. He, too, is filled with optimism for our future.
Clearly this is a very different book from the slender volume originally planned. I kept meeting amazing people who had done amazing work to prevent animals from becoming extinct. And I met them all over the world. How could I write about the California condor and not the whooping crane? And what about the giant panda, symbol of conservation?
Then, somehow, word got out that we were writing this book and information flooded inwhy were we not including insects? Amphibians? Reptiles? And surely the plant kingdom was important, too?
And so the book grew, not only in volume, but also in concept. It seemed so important to discuss some of the species believed extinct that have been rediscoveredsometimes more than a hundred years after they had been written off. And to write about the wonderful work being done to restore and protect habitats. I found that people got really excited about the idea of sharing the good news, shining a light on all the projects, large and small, that together are gradually healing some of the harm we have inflicted. It has been several years in the making, this book, and it has taken me on a fantastic journey of exploration: I have learned ever more about animal and plant species brought to the brink of extinction by human activities and thensometimes at the very last minute and against all oddsbeen given a reprieve. The stories shared here illustrate the resilience of nature, and the persistence and determination of the men and women who fightsometimes for decadesto save the last survivors of a species, refusing to give up.
There is Old Blue, at one time the very last female black robin in the world who, with the help of an inspired biologist, saved her species from extinction. There is the individual tree, the very last of its kind, that, having been almost eaten to death by browsing goats, was killed by a forest fireyet found the energy to produce seeds on its last living branch. With the help of inspired horticulturists, the species sprang back, like the phoenix, from the ashes.
It is these and many other human and other-than-human heroes that you will meet in the following chapters. There are tales of adventure and high courage, as biologists risk their lives to climb sheer rock faces or leap from wildly tossing boats onto jagged rocks, and pilots maneuver helicopters through forbidding landscapes in terrible weather. There are stories of men and women brought close to despair as they battled bureaucracies to try to save a species from extinction, knowing that delay caused by human obstinacy was lessening their chances of success with each passing day. There is an account of a man trying to persuade a falcon to copulate with his hat and another who mimics the courtship dance of a crane to persuade her to lay an egg.
Many of the rescue programs are ongoing even as we write. New generations of whooping cranes and northern black ibises are still being taught new migration routes, led by human devotees in flying machines.
New breeding and release techniques for giant pandas, and better protection of wild habitat, offer hope for their future in China, but there is a long way to go. The plight of the Asian vultures that died in their hundreds of thousands from non-intentional poisoning is being ad- dressed through captive breeding and "Vulture Restaurants" in the wild, but there is much, much work to do.
We realize that there are countless other programs going on around the world to conserve existing populations of animals and plants. But we had to pick and choose, and we included mainly stories that we knew about, firsthand. I wish we could include the efforts of the pioneer conservationists, such as Theodore Roosevelt, who established the first national parks and reserves for the protection of wilderness areas.
Or write about the farsighted people who worked to protect the last of the beavers from an industry desperate to plunder their pelts for the making of hats. There are many who have fought to save other mammal and bird species from extinction because of our insatiable desire to bedeck ourselves with their skins, furs, and feathers. Koala bears might no longer be with us but for those who realized, back in the 1800s, that they would soon be gone if steps were not taken to save their eucalyptus forests. Indeed, there are countless species not even classified as endangered today that might well have become extinct were it not for caring people who protected them long ago. To those early pioneers in conservation we owe a great deal.
In October 2008 in Barcelona, Spain, the International Union for the
Conservation of Nature (IUCN) released results of a global survey of mammal populations. It concluded that "at least a quarter of mammal species are headed toward extinction in the near future." And tragically, for many, there may be little that can be done. Yet I have been so inspired by the stories included in this book and by the people who refuse to give up.
There is an old maxim: "While there is life, there is hope." For the sake of our children we must not give up, we must continue to fight to save what is left and restore that which is despoiled. We must support those valiant men and women who are out there doing just that. And it is important for us to realize that we cannot relax our efforts on behalf of endangered animalsfor the threats to their survival are ever present, often growing. Human population growth, unsustainable lifestyles, desperate poverty, shrinking water supplies, corporate greed, global climate changeall these and more will, unless we are vigilant, undo all that has been accomplished.
It is inevitable that more and more species will need a helping hand if they are to continue to share the planet with us. So it is fortunate that increasing numbers of people are waking up, becoming aware of the damage we are inflicting on the web of life, and wanting to do their bit to help, whether as wildlife biologists, government officials, or concerned citizens.
One thing is certainmy own journey of exploration will not stop. I shall go on collecting stories, meeting and talking with more extraordinary and inspirational people. There are many to whom I have only spoken on the telephone, but now I want to meet them: I want to look into their eyes to see the spirit of determination that keeps them going, and look into their hearts to glimpse the love for the species or the natural world that takes them to lonely, all-but-inaccessible places. And I want to share their stories with young people around the world. I want them to know that, even when our mindless activities have almost entirely destroyed some ecosystem or driven a species to the brink of extinction, we must not give up. Thanks to the resilience of nature and the indomitable human spirit, there is still hope. Hope for the animals and their world. It is our world, too.
Jane Goodall, February 2009
Excerpted from HOPE FOR ANIMALS AND THEIR WORLD by Jane Goodall with Thane Maynard and Gail Hudson. Copyright 2009 by Jane Goodall with Thane Maynard and Gail Hudson. Used by permission of Grand Central Publishing. All rights reserved.This report was written in collaboration with the Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT).
The title of this report was modified following feedback regarding the term human shield. The use of Grads in this area of Donetsk endangers civilian lives, but is not intended to meet the legal definition of human shields. The legal term ‘endangering protected persons’ (civilians in this case) is most probably more suitable for this situation.
On 31 January 2017, the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine recorded the up to now highest number of explosions in the war in Eastern Ukraine. The current hotspot of the fighting, which has led to numerous civilian and military casualties, is the area between Adviivka, controlled by Ukraine, and Yasynuvata, controlled by the so-called “DNR” (Donetsk People’s Republic). The current events mark a new peak in the fighting in this warming winter (1 / 2). The press center of the Ukrainian “Anti-Terrorist Operation” reported that at least 100 Grad rockets were fired by combined Russian-separatists forces in the Donetsk sector on January 31. As this report will demonstrate, recently uploaded videos show least half of these rocket launches, which have been geolocated to a residential sector in eastern Donetsk. Recent satellite imagery and witness accounts confirm the geolocation, revealing the firing locations for Russian-separatist Grad launches.
Grads near Auchan
Social media accounts from a local pro-Ukrainian VK.com group in Donetsk monitoring outgoing and incoming shelling (see here, and here) suggest that combined Russian-separatists forces have been constantly firing Grads from the separatist-controlled Donetsk bypass highway near Auchan hypermarket:
“10 mins ago 4 Grads fire three packages each from the bypass road and bailed out… BITCHES!!!”
“Grad firing from bypass near Auchan” (source)
The same is reported by a popular pro-Ukrainian blogger, who likely uses a similar group as a source:
“11:15 Grads fired off their salvos from the bypass near Auchan and were off immediately”
As often is the case with shelling, social-media users reported incoming fire from government-controlled Avdiivka, including Grad MLRS, roughly at the same time as outgoing Grad fire was reported from Donetsk:
4:16 Grads again, near the church, loud and scary!!! 11:10 Chaotic impacts on Turgeneva, like in 2015 14:54 Grads fired from Donetsk as soon as the repair brigades went out, those bitches!
Furthermore, a pro-Kremlin newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda reporter describes hearing Grads (archived) while at a mourning service for killed Vostok commander Ivan “Grek” Balakai on January 31 (see DRFLab report on the circumstances of his death). Later, a friend of the reporter confirmed to her that Grads were constantly firing the night before (January 30) and are based near the Auchan hypermarket. A video from the ceremony posted on the VK community of the Vostok battalion where the deceased commander used to serve confirms that the church is located in the residential area south of the hypermarket (47.989551 37.911307).
These reports are noteworthy because the stated location near the Hypermarket Auchan (47.996948 37.910538) suggests outgoing fire near a residential area. The Donetsk Bypass and an oncological hospital (47.997286 37.901797) are also in the general area.
Additionally, the church referenced by the Komsomolskaya Pravda reporter is in the same area, marked by yellow in the map below. A comparison of a video produced showing the church service for “Grek” and Yandex Panorama (street view) imagery shows that they are the same church, located near the residential area where Grads were fired.
Rockets on video
Beside these reports, six videos were uploaded showing the usage of Multi-Launch-Rocket-Systems (MLRS) near Donetsk on 31 January 2017 and 1 February 2017. Two videos show launches at night and were published on 31 January 2017. Three videos published on 31 January 2017 show launches during the day, and another video showing a launch during the day was published on 1 February 2017. All six videos could be geolocated to the area near of the Auchan hypermarket (video 1+2 / 3+4 /6).
Five of the videos point to a launch site a bit east of the hypermarket, and video 5 points to a launch site east of the residential block from which the video was filmed. A detailed analysis of the videos reveals that video 1 and 2 – the two videos showing the night Grad launch – quite likely show the same attack. In both videos, a van is visible on the road. In total, at least 15 launched rockets are visible in videos, while around 20 launches are audible.
Video 3 and 4 were filmed from approximately the same area of the quarters south of the hypermarket. In both videos, we observe civilan cars driving on a visible bypass. The rocket launch also occurs in approximately the same area. However, both videos most likely do not show the same scene. In video 4, sirens are audible after the launch, while nothing similar is audible in video 3. Also, the dust cloud resulting from the launch has a different form at the moment the last rocket is launched in both videos. Twenty-eight rockets are fired in video 3. At the beginning of this video, a salvo of 8 rockets is launched, and after a brief pause, another salvo encompassing 20 rockets is observed. Given the almost parallel launch of two rockets each in the second salvo, two launchers are likely. Video 4 shows at least 8 launched rockets.
Video 5 shows a different perspective with the camera pointing to the east. In the video, with audible sirens in the background, at least 9 rockets are just barely visible in the sky above the filmed building – almost in the center of frame. The different viewpoint and the trajectory of the visible rockets suggest a different launch site east of the residential area.
Video 6 again points towards the launch site near the Hypermarket Auchan. At the beginning of the video, the visible dust cloud and audible sirens suggest that the preceding salvo was not covered by the video. After a few seconds, a second salvo is fired. At least 7 rockets are visible, but the audible sound suggests that additional rockets were fired.
In total, the five videos published on 31 January 2017 show four different attacks with at least 60 launched rockets from the area. While we can only see this many rockets, the recorded sounds in the videos suggest that additional missiles were launched in these four attacks. At least two different launch locations were used for this attacks.
Looking from above
Recent satellite imagery allows us to further confirm the video and social media content, with available satellite imagery from Tuesday, 31 January, and two weeks ago, 20 January. The ground scarring (blast marks) resulting from outgoing MLRS fire is clearly visible in the more recent imagery. Moreover, the identified launch sites exactly match the areas identified in the videos.
Comparison between 20.01.2017 and 31.01.2017 (47.998585 37.913008), Digital Globe, NextView license
The open area 200 meters east of the hypermarket and 40 meters south of the bypass shows 5 blast marks in the 31 January 2017 imagery. Similar marks are not visible in the 20 January 2017 imagery. The overlapping of the center three marks suggests that the area was used at least three times. The tracks leading to the marks come directly from the bypass. This area corresponds with the rockets launches seen in videos 3, 4 and 6. However, given that video 6 was published on 01 February 2017, this particular attack may not be covered by the available imagery.
Comparison between 20.01.2017 and 31.01.2017 (47.994986 37.932735), Digital Globe, NextView license
A second launch site could be identified east of the residential areas and just beside the bypass (47.994986 37.932735). The area shows four blast marks. The grouping suggests that two attacks were launched from this position. The 9 visible blast marks indicate that they all used the same firing direction and point approximately toward Avdiivka, which is approximately 18-19 km north-west of the location.
Summary
The available evidence clearly documents that on 31 January 2017, multiple attacks with MLR systems were launched in proximity of the hypermarket Auchan in Donetsk. The location deep inside the so-called “DNR” and the firing directing pointing toward Avdiivka clearly document the responsible side for these particular attacks. One launch site is around 200 meters east of the hypermarket, and in fewer than 500 meters from a school and residential area. The second launch site is in proximity of the bypass and around 600 meters from an industrial area and 1000 meters from a residential area. Some of the attacks occured during the day while the nearby bypass was also used by civilians.
Given the proximity of both launch sites to civilian infrastructure in the area, a potential Ukrainian counter attack to surpress and respond to the rocket fire would have automatically risked civilian lives in the area. The cross-country mobility of the likely used MLR system, BM-21 Grad, would have allowed alternative launch sites. However, the repeated usage of the launch site 200 meters east of the hypermarket Auchan strongly suggest that the selection of this area happened on purpose, deliberately risking the lives of the civilians in the area.Don the dog at Kirkton Farm in Abington, Scotland who caused tailbacks on a busy motorway this morning Wednesday April 22, 2015. The border collie inspired a traffic scare and social media gold after he plunged down a hill and onto a highway in his master’s vehicle. Wednesday’s incident near Abington, Scotland, began when farmer Tom Hamilton left Don sitting in his utility vehicle as he inspected lambs. He insists the parking brake was on. (Danny Lawson/PA via AP) UNITED KINGDOM OUT The Associated Press
LONDON (AP) — Don the Sheepdog might want to learn a new trick: applying the brakes.
The border collie inspired a traffic scare and social media gold after he plunged down a hill and onto a highway in his master's vehicle.
Wednesday's incident near Abington, Scotland, began when farmer Tom Hamilton left Don sitting in his utility vehicle as he inspected lambs. He insists the parking brake was on.
Not strongly enough. The vehicle rolled through a fence, down a steep hill and across the M74 motorway, missing other vehicles and hitting a security barrier. Onlookers presumed the dog was driving, and that inspired an online joke-fest.
Some wondered if police had collared Don and put him in the doghouse, whether he was licensed to drive, or might have been barking mad.Image copyright AP Image caption It is estimated there are between 30,000 and 40,000 sex workers in France
French MPs have passed a law that makes it illegal to pay for sex and imposes fines of up to €3,750 (£3,027, $4,274) for those buying sexual acts.
Those convicted would also have to attend classes to learn about the conditions faced by prostitutes.
It has taken more than two years to pass the controversial legislation because |
as a way to democratize finance and give all income classes the tools to borrow, invest, and bank. But at their worst, they could be teamed with Big Data to target vulnerable people with high-cost loans.
Under the plan, fintech companies could choose a national charter that would make them subject to OCC-supervised standards on corporate governance, risk management, and capital and liquidity requirements. “Preferences and needs of consumers, communities, and business are changing,” said Comptroller of the Currency Thomas Curry at the announcement. “Chartering companies that are finding new and better ways of satisfying those needs is another step toward supporting responsible innovation that is good for consumers, good for the federal banking system, and good for the country.”
There may be excellent reasons to charter fintech companies. Having non-banks engage in lending and other services outside of the regulatory perimeter makes it difficult to properly monitor the entire financial sector. National standards would not only train fresh eyes on the market (and after the Lending Club loan backdating scandal, it’s clear fintech needs some policing), it would cut down on the regulatory arbitrage that happens now. Under that system, fintech firms partner with national banks so they can adhere to one standard instead of a state-based patchwork of rules. This trends toward monopolization of financial services, at a time when the banking industry would actually benefit from more competition.
But there’s a problem. Federal banking law puts limits on what’s known as state visitorial powers—the ability to regulate, examine, and supervise a company’s affairs. A chartered fintech firm could get this kind of relief if OCC declared that the company was no longer subject to certain state rules. “We don’t want a situation where the OCC charter trumps state law,” says Senator Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat who sits on the Banking Committee.
The Dodd-Frank Act excluded certain types of pre-emption, and also affirmed that states may bring lawsuits against national banks for violations of state law, as well as of rules issued by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. But OCC could still pre-empt state consumer-finance laws if the agency determines that the law discriminates against national banks, or “interferes with the exercise by the national bank of its powers,” according to Dodd-Frank Section 1044. The Comptroller makes these determinations on a case-by-case basis, subject to judicial review.
For example, an online lender with a federal charter might argue for an exemption from Oregon’s payday lending law, which limits the interest rate to 36 percent. Nothing in the current proposal prevents a current or future Comptroller from deciding to pre-empt that rule. “Creating a charter that doesn’t explicitly protect consumers runs the same risk as what we see in the credit card industry, where the laws of a state trump the laws where the transaction is made,” Merkley says.
This concern is not merely theoretical. In 2002, Georgia passed the strongest anti-predatory mortgage laws in the nation. OCC pre-empted the law for national banks, claiming that there was “no evidence that national banks are engaged in predatory lending practices.” This created a chilling effect; state legislatures simply stopped working on mortgage fraud laws, expecting a federal override. Merkley described his efforts as Oregon House Speaker to pass a law against predatory lending in 2008, five years after the OCC pre-emption. “We passed it, but in the Senate, the leadership said they wouldn’t put it up for a vote,” Merkley says, “because it created inconsistency between federal and state banking charters.”
State banking regulators have been quick to push back against OCC. Maria Vullo, superintendent of the New York Department of Financial Services, issued a blistering statement, vowing “New York will not allow consumer protections to fall into the void.” Vullo told Bloomberg that states have long regulated non-depository financial service providers, which they “should continue to protect without the threat of pre-emption.”
In his announcement, Curry said understandable concerns about pre-emption are “not exacerbated by granting special purpose charters.” He cited numerous areas where state law applies to national banks—including fair lending, debt collection, foreclosures, and even unfair and deceptive practices—and assured that any fintech charter would operate the same way.
However, even Curry would agree that his interpretation is subject to change depending on OCC guidance. And Curry won’t be around much longer. His term as comptroller expires in March, meaning Trump will get to name the individual who would likely complete the fintech charter process. So an Obama-appointed banking regulator just set the table for a Trump designee to easily undermine state consumer protections.
Top tech firms, which are meeting with Trump this week, know well what’s at stake here. In July, a consortium called Financial Innovation Now, which includes Apple, Amazon, and Google, released a white paper lamenting the burdensome regulations associated with fintech, all but begging for the feds to step in and override a state-dominated process. “New technologies may themselves solve regulatory policy goals and obviate the need for some regulations,” according to the paper. Financial Innovation Now signaled that members were “encouraged” by Curry’s attempt to streamline fintech regulations.
This isn’t the only example of Obama’s independent agencies taking actions that will make life easier for Trump’s. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission just stopped work on a rule aimed at preventing speculation on oil and other futures markets. Nearly the entire top staff at the Securities and Exchange Commission has resigned since the election. But Curry’s maneuver could prove even more damaging, because he’s creating a previously nonexistent device for the Trump OCC to employ.
OCC will have to weigh public comments before implementing the charter rules. Merkley, for one, wants definitive language that prevents the overriding of state laws. “It comes down to states being a good backstop for the protection of consumers,” he says. And fintech firms could still be subject to Consumer Financial Protection Bureau oversight. But the deregulation-minded Trump administration is unlikely to appreciate these attempts at preservation. The president-elect and his team already had plenty of means to wreck consumer protection; Thomas Curry didn’t have to deliver them another hammer.Get the latest news and videos for this game daily, no spam, no fuss.
Professional Korean StarCraft player Lee "INnoVation" Shin Hyung, currently signed to Korean team STX Soul under the Korean eSports Association (KeSPA), is expected to join Team Acer on September 1 when his current contract runs out, sources close to the situation tell GameSpot.
Team Acer, named after the multinational hardware and electronics company, has been teasing the announcement since the beginning of Blizzard's Season 2 World Championship Series Finals, stating the player would be officially announced by the end of the tournament. Acer thereafter released a new statement, stating it could not officially announce the signing yet due to issues with STX Soul.
"The player in question is still under contract with his old team until the end of August, a fact that was not entirely certain until today, so he will officially join Team Acer on the 1st of September," the statement read. "The team requested that we announce matters in this order, waiting until the official end of his contract before making public that he is joining our team."
In response to Acer's teases announcements, a representative from STX told Fomos.co.kr, "There was contact [to Acer], but there was no progress in detail on the contract. It seems there was a personal contact to the player while he was in Germany. We were flustered by [Acer]'s article."
Barring any unforeseen problems arising from the announcement of an announcement, Lee will continue to join the team when his contract with STX Soul ends on September 1.
Secondary reports from Fomos indicating that STX may shut down its StarCraft team due to financial problems have yet to be confirmed. STX Soul defeated Woongjin Stars earlier this month to become the 2012-2013 SK Planet Proleague Season 1 Champions.
Lee is the champion of WCS Season 1, and runner-up of WCS Korea Season 2. He finished 9-16th in this past weekend’s WCS Season 2 Finals.
Lee's addition to Team Acer joins a cast that includes Canadian superstar Sasha "Scarlett" Hostyn, and GSL Champion Mun "MMA" Seong Won.
Team Acer declined comment to GameSpot regarding the signing. Officials from KeSPA did not return comment by the time of this posting.An Auckland school has moved forward with its controversial plan to make expensive tablet devices compulsory for junior pupils by rolling out a training programme for teachers.
In June Orewa College made headlines across the country after telling parents of all Year 9 students that they needed to purchase an iPad 2, which costs between $799 and $1148, or a similar handheld tablet device for their children's lessons next year.
Teachers have been schooled in using the high-tech device by IT organisation Core Education and by other staff members, and have been familiarising themselves with tablet software since last term.
Orewa College Principal Kate Shevland said that training would continue until the end of the year.
Shevland said the training "covered a range of practical aspects" of using the tablet as well as showing teachers how the device would change the "way students submit work and how teachers assign work and respond to work".
"We've had an overwhelming response from teachers the more they get to know the potential of the tablet," she said.
Introducing tablets as compulsory stationery items drew criticism from budget and education advisors who believed it would cause a two-tier education system as many families would struggle to afford it.
One of those critics was labour education spokesperson Sue Moroney who said low-income families were already struggling to pay for school uniforms and basic stationery items.
"I think what we've got to be careful of is that we don't end up with a two-tier education system where we put low-income families in a really embarrassing situation where they can't provide their child with really expensive technology and therefore limit their education," she said at the time.
She added the move would also affect middle-income families who are fighting to stay afloat in the current economic climate.
"The school needs to recognise the financial pressures that are on people. The price of everything is going up faster than expected, and as well as that wages are flatlining," she said.
Her views were backed by Raewyn Fox, the chief executive of New Zealand Federation of Family Budgeting Services, who said some families may forgo essential household items so they could afford the device.
"Parents quite often put their kids' education absolutely first and they will pay for that before paying for food or paying for the power bill or something like that," she said.
But Shevland is adamant parents are on-board with Orewa College's plans.
"We have had a meeting with the parents of the students coming in to Year 9 - many of them are new students, even though our main intake is Year 7 - and we've been through all these issues," she said.
It is not clear when the entire school will have handheld tablets as a compulsory stationery item, but Shevland is already surveying Year 8 students about suitable times to introduce them.
"Obviously we haven't entirely made a decision on that matter, but we're working through the training and seeing what is practical."
Shevland said the introduction of tablets is already changing the education landscape worldwide.
"It enables more personal attention and an individual approach to learning. Students will become more independent, be able to collaborate with peers better and have access to information earlier."One of the most explosive tracks of 2013 that left its mark at nearly every big room festival set across the globe has always had a bit of a mysterious side as far as who actually produced the track. Rumors spread that DVBBS and Borgeous contracted the infamous Maarten Vorwerk to write the track for them and even some fake contracts circled the blogsphere. Maarten Vorwerk promptly denied any involvement with the track and since put the rumors to rest. So who is responsible for the track then? Are we left to assume DVBBS and Borgeous wrote the track themselves? I was not satisfied with this answer.
Upon some further digging the Tsunami story gets much more interesting. It turns out there is another writer credited with the track. According to the American Society of Composers Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), the writers of Tusnami are; James Borger (Borgeous), Alex Van Den Hof, Chris Van Den Hof (DVBBS) and Niles Holowell-Dhar with the performers being Borgeous and DVBBS. The last credited writer, Niles Holowell-Dhar, may not be a familiar name, but is one half of the group the Cataracs who when the duo split began producing under the name KSHMR. Though this is still a theory as KSHMR has done his best to remain a secret, there is plenty of evidence to support that Niles Holowell-Dhar is in fact KSHMR.
Niles Holowell-Dhar is credited as a writer on every KSHMR track as well as all of the Catarac’s tracks. Even more interesting, is that Niles is also credited with tracks like Stampede (Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike, DVBBS and Borgeous), Invincible (Borgeous) as well as tracks for the likes of 50 Cent and the New Boyz. People have generally assumed KSHMR was a ghost producer for may big room tracks that has remained in the background until recently with some of his own releases including a collab with DallasK, Burn, that hit the #1 spot on BeatPort. It turns out, the rumors are correct and the evidence lies within the writers credits. The truth will always reveal itself and though KSHMR has done a great job remaining behind the scenes, the people who are purchasing and supporting these acts would like to know who is really behind the music. For a full discography of Niles Holowell-Dhar (KSHMR), check his list of writer’s credits here:
https://www.ascap.com/Home/ace-title-search/index.aspx
#DVBBS #MaartenVorwerk #Borgerous #KSHKR #Tsunami #DimitriVegas #LikeMike #EDMGhostProducer #GhostProducer3D Printing is spreading its wings to reach literally hundreds of different industries. Its saving lives, cleaning up the environment, and making manufacturing more efficient. It’s also entertaining us, and has a certain cool factor about it which makes companies like Pinla 3D a success.
There are several companies out there offering tiny 3D printed models of one’s self for prices which range all over the place, but up until a few days ago, a life-size 1:1 3D print of yourself was virtually impossible to obtain. Well, leave it up to a Chinese company called Pinla3D to take things up a notch. Pinla3D has recently opened up a storefront at Nanjing’s Wondercity Mall, located in China’s Jiangsu province.
At the store customers can go in, get a full body scan, which takes between 2-3 minutes, choose from one of 15 different sized statues they would like to be printed out in, and place their order. It will then take approximately two weeks for the company to print our your statue, and have it available for pickup.
Pinla3d’s smallest statue avaalable measures just 12.5cm in height, and costs RMB998 (approximately $160). The largest is a true 1:1 life-size statue which will set a customer back RMB175,000 (approximately $28,550).
The detail, color and accuracy of the prints are quite amazing according to recent customers at the new location. Printed with a high strength composite polymer material, the finished product has a feel similar to a ceramic.
“I bought a small statue today for my girlfriend. It’s a way for her to remember me while I travel on business. I dropped the first one and it broke, so be careful,” warned Zhang Wei, a 28 year old customer at the recently opened location.
If you are in the area and decide you are interested in one of these 3D prints, it is suggested by the company that you make an appointment via their website or the phone. Discuss these life size statues at the forum.Gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie, who seemed to be leaning no on the question of support for the transportation funding reform that former Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell pushed through in 2013, unveiled the transportation program he would push as governor, including a promise to “oppose any effort to roll back HB2313.”
HB2313 is what state legislators and lobbyists call McDonnell’s reform.
McDonnell’s reform swapped the state’s longstanding 17.5 cent-a-gallon gas tax for a new wholesale fuels tax that was intended to generate more money for roads as gas prices rose. It also included a regional sales tax surcharge for Hampton Roads that’s covering much of the Interstate 64 widening.
In addition to saying he’d oppose changing McDonnell’s funding system, Gillespie said he would oppose any mandate that the state sign a collective bargaining agreement with a union as a condition to awarding a highway construction contract. Federal policy under an executive order of President Barack Obama encourages these, according to the Federal Highway Administration.
His plan also says he would look at limited commercialization of highway rest stops, push for a constitutional amendment to create a “lockbox” for transportation tax and fee revenue so that they could not be used for other state programs, and support legislation requiring the state to maintain permanent, separate transportation funds.
He also called for public-private partnerships to replace the state’s many aging and deficient small bridges and a rural infrastructure coordinating committee to tackle the poor condition of rural roads, and said he would reverse Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s policy of focusing on transportation corridors, saying it hindered local government efforts to promote economic development.
Gillespie’s stand on McDonnell’s funding reform led Democratic candidate Ralph Northam’s campaign to accuse him of inconsistency.
Actually, what campaign spokeswoman Christina Freundlich said was that Gillespie “is just being a political opportunist who is only looking out for himself and not what is best for Virginia.”
This goes back to the summer, when Gillespie blasted Northam for voting for the McDonnell initiative that Gillespie called “the largest tax increase in Virginia history.”
In addition to opposing the federal effort to encourage collective bargaining agreements, Gillespie said he’d push for federal support to dredge Hampton Roads channels to 55 feet, and said he wanted to see the James River channel to Richmond dredged deeper, as well, in order to move more traffic by water to Richmond’s wharves, rather than by Interstate 64. he also said he would accelerate expansion of the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel.
Vogel and Fairfax on health care
Could it be that our very own Senate of Virginia will determine whether America moves to single-payer health care?
Jill Vogel, the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, offered this warning in a recent fundraising email: “Did you know that my opponent, Justin Fairfax, supports single-payer health care?”
CAPTION Virginia Peninsula residents react to the controversy involving Gov. Ralph Northam appearing in a racist yearbook photo. Virginia Peninsula residents react to the controversy involving Gov. Ralph Northam appearing in a racist yearbook photo. CAPTION Virginia Peninsula residents react to the controversy involving Gov. Ralph Northam appearing in a racist yearbook photo. Virginia Peninsula residents react to the controversy involving Gov. Ralph Northam appearing in a racist yearbook photo. CAPTION Trump doesn't rule out another government shutdown during Super Bowl Sunday interview on CBS's 'Face the Nation' and during the network's pre-game coverage. By declaring a national emergency, Trump could redirect military construction money to build a wall on the U.S. southern border. Trump doesn't rule out another government shutdown during Super Bowl Sunday interview on CBS's 'Face the Nation' and during the network's pre-game coverage. By declaring a national emergency, Trump could redirect military construction money to build a wall on the U.S. southern border. CAPTION Protesters demanding his resignation gather outside the governor's mansion in Richmond on Saturday, February 2, 2019 after a racist photo of Gov. Ralph Northam was found in his 1984 medical school yearbook. Protesters demanding his resignation gather outside the governor's mansion in Richmond on Saturday, February 2, 2019 after a racist photo of Gov. Ralph Northam was found in his 1984 medical school yearbook. CAPTION US Economy Suffered $11 Billion Hit From Government Shutdown But, the CBO's report adds that $3 billion of the total loss is gone for good. The shutdown, caused by President Trump's request for border wall funding, lasted a record 35 days. US Economy Suffered $11 Billion Hit From Government Shutdown But, the CBO's report adds that $3 billion of the total loss is gone for good. The shutdown, caused by President Trump's request for border wall funding, lasted a record 35 days. CAPTION Trump Will Not Deliver State of the Union on Tuesday. Tuesday was the day the address had been originally scheduled to take place. An aide for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi confirmed that President Donald Trump's address will not take place. Trump Will Not Deliver State of the Union on Tuesday. Tuesday was the day the address had been originally scheduled to take place. An aide for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi confirmed that President Donald Trump's address will not take place.
"Justin proudly supports the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid expansion,” his campaign spokeswoman Lauren Burke said.
And yes, Fairfax did respond to a candidate question from a Northern Virginia group that asked for a yes or no answer about whether he favored “Medicare for all,” the name Sen. Bernie Sanders and Democratic senators up in Washington have given their version of government-funded, universal health insurance.
He also believes employers’ contracts with employees should provide for retirement pensions, fringe benefits and job security, the questionnaire shows. Fairfax thinks programs like food stamps and earned income tax credits are good ideas too.
Funny thing, though. While the job of lieutenant governors of Virginia – actually their only job – is to preside over the state Senate and to break ties when that august body votes on proposed state laws, they don’t get a say on what the U.S. Senate does or does not do. And they can’t tell companies how to write employment contracts, either.
They can’t even sponsor legislation in our own state Senate.
They could, and should, take a position on state legislative issues on which there’s a chance they’d be a tiebreaking vote.
On health insurance, that could involve whether Virginia decides to accept Obamacare funds to expand Medicaid or not. So far, it’s been no. And the way votes have split so far, it turns out that what current Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam thinks (he favors expansion, by the way) hasn’t made the tiniest difference in the General Assembly’s rejection of Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s repeated requests to expand Medicaid.
Still, when it comes to health insurance, what Virginians need to know is where a would-be lieutenant governor stands on Medicaid expansion if by chance the General Assembly becomes significantly less adamantly opposed.
So, for the record, if Medicaid expansion come down to a state Senate tie, here’s what you need to know:
Fairfax: yes.
Vogel: no.
So how about single payer?Downtown was alive. I could walk to almost anything within a few blocks — restaurants, shopping, theater or the mighty Mississippi. Public spaces such as Peavey Plaza offered a welcoming respite from hectic city life. With its iconic modernist fountains flowing into a large pond, Peavey provided a calm spot to have lunch and enjoy the scenery of Orchestra Hall and Nicollet Mall.
In winter, the pond became an ice-skating rink, looking like a modernist take on a scene from a Hans Christian Andersen story.
It was idyllic. Mary Tyler Moore was right; here, you could make it after all.
While downtown back then lacked certain basics, such as a real grocery store, that was a minor inconvenience to city dwellers like me who survived on pizza delivery and Chinese takeout.
Sure, there was noise. After all, I lived in the Warehouse District, vibrant with nightclubs and bars along First Avenue. Sometimes I would open the window just to take in the sounds of the city and watch people saunter by.
Weekends, especially, were enlivened by partyers and revelers out for fun. It felt safe. Anyone could see there was a police presence, proactively keeping the peace. Apart from an occasional siren — or bars dumping bottles into the recycling at 2 a.m. outside my bedroom window, with the sanitation department arriving at 5:30 a.m. to pick it all up — the city noise didn’t bother me. As a matter of fact, downtown Minneapolis has been historically as quiet as any suburb during the wee hours of the morning.
Besides, I am not one of those nettlesome types who move into downtown expecting silence. The clamor soon ceased to register as anything unusual.
But in recent years, all that had been idyllic has changed.
In the span of 17 years, I’ve watched the city go from vibrant, to shaky, to frightful.
No longer do I enjoy watching revelers along First Avenue, nor entertain the notion of going out for dinner downtown if I would have to walk home after nightfall. What I now see is a volatile mix of angst and boredom, victim and predator, roaming the streets. Downtown has changed into something disturbing and despondent.
The once-energetic Nicollet Mall, which needed no makeover to succeed, has succumbed to the terrible fate of becoming a vanity project of reconstruction dreamed up by the City Council and mayor to keep up the appearance of a first-rate modern city. Three years in the making, the torn-up mall has managed to kill off tourism and revenue and take what retailers and small businesses we had (already just hanging on) and push them off a cliff.
When giant retailers such as Macy’s or Neiman Marcus close up shop, it isn’t because they missed the mark on fashion; it’s that downtown now eschews people more than it embraces them. Yes, brick-and-mortar retail is dying as we know it, but a bulldozed mall doesn’t help. It is an epic fail before it is even “substantially” complete (as the banners around the area woefully assure us).
Peavey Plaza is but a shell of its former glory. The iconic fountains haven’t operated for years; they stand dry as bone, aging away in disgrace. No one really sits there to relax anymore. It is essentially a relic, a ruin, an abandonment that needn’t have happened if the powers that be had cared about it and what it provided for the community.
No more does Holidazzle parade down Nicollet Mall with families cheering it on. No more do downtown block parties celebrate summer or the Aquatennial in any form resembling what we enjoyed when I moved in. Though I’m not one for nostalgia, the charm of our downtown community has faded away.
Hard to say if it’s the shortsightedness of the City Council, the mayor or the building owners driving the downfall. I’m willing to bet it’s a combination of all that and more — of favoring finances over community. Egotism over generosity.
What has replaced the former spirit is a mixture of gangs, troubled young people and panhandlers moving along the corridors, day or night.
I have now become accustomed to fights breaking out during the day along Hennepin Avenue, where young people challenge each other regularly.
A particular hot spot seems to be the sidewalk in front of the public library. I can only make street-smart, educated guesses as to why that is.
Gunshots ring out two to three times a week at 2 or 3 a.m., from rival gangs intent on offing each other. Years ago, I would have jumped out of bed at such sudden mayhem. Now it’s routine, as is my call to 911.
With my cellphone, I have filmed dead gang members being rolled into ambulances after a barrage of 15 gunshots went off on my block. That was in 2016. The metal door in the lobby of my building still displays the bullet marks.
I’ve watched fights and knifings in the middle of Hennepin Avenue at 10 p.m. on a Friday night, stopping traffic. With no police in sight, cars just drove around the melee to get by.
One would think I live in a war zone, and one wouldn’t be wrong. The police have now become reactive instead of proactive. Political restrictions placed on them by a higher level of city government render their efforts to combat crime almost futile. A crime has to happen before they can act.
And the City Council? When I send my footage, I am lucky if I even get a response. When I do, it’s usually some slick rhetoric that offers nothing to resolve the issue. Crime continues to escalate. Much of it goes unreported downtown.
The irony is that, despite the climbing crime rates, the area I live in has catapulted into one of the most expensive places in downtown Minneapolis.
I refer to it as “The Gilded Cage.” The North Loop, as it is now called, has revived itself as a haven of exclusive shops and restaurants during the day. New, bona fide grocery stores dot the tiny parcel of downtown, and expensive new apartment complexes have surged to an all-time high.
In some ways, downtown has become more livable. But that doesn’t prevent the invasive growth of crime moving into the area like buckthorn. Gangs feast on such growth — on privileged downtowners walking around unaware of their surroundings.
It will be hard to rid ourselves of this without vision and strength in our leaders. I don’t believe our leaders have the fortitude to be as tough as their rhetoric.
Even Target Field and U.S. Bank Stadium, arenas built to attract crowds, can’t retain visitors after an event. Downtown is just too scary after dark; people leave.
It’s sad to see a city go to waste when its potential is so high. It makes me want to move somewhere safe, somewhere where I don’t have to listen to sirens all night, or to meth heads hacking up old memories in the back alley. Or to gunshots.
It’s as if city government has turned a blind eye to the real-life problems of downtown, determined to put a glossy cover on a badly written book. And for what? Vanity? Arrogance? I cannot tell.
You can’t Photoshop reality. It brutally is what it is, and if city leaders don’t buck up and get tough with action, our downtown is doomed as an oasis of exciting, vibrant life offering a plethora of options for all.
“All that glitters is not gold,” my grandfather used to say. The gold I found when I moved into my home 17 years ago in the heart of downtown Minneapolis is gone. Our town may be a glittering sight in photographs, all shiny and new, but don’t let the cover fool you. Downtown needs help before it’s too late.
I fell in love with a beautiful city. I want it back.
Carter Averbeck lives in Minneapolis.In an interview in Sunday's Washington Post, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu may go further than any of his predecessors in rejecting a settlement freeze -- this after President Obama went further than any of his predecessors in demanding one.
In the fifteen years since Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yasir Arafat signed the Oslo agreement, Israel has never, in principle, ruled out a settlement freeze. On occasion, it has, in fact, implemented a freeze while on several others, Israeli prime ministers said "yes" but with conditions.
There has been one constant. Israeli prime ministers tended to go along with the US and Palestinian view that freezing settlements was not a final status issue (i.e, one that would only be resolved in the context of comprehensive negotiations) but a precondition for negotiations like the PLO's cessation of violence, which has been in effect for years.
Israeli prime ministers understood that Palestinians viewed the expansion of settlements as something unacceptable during negotiations. As one Palestinian put it, "You can't discuss how you will divide the pizza while one guy is gobbling it up."
This all changed today with the interview in Sunday's Washington Post.
WP: What do you think should happen with the Palestinians? Netanyahu: We just wasted six months because of the Palestinian effort to place preconditions on the negotiations -- preconditions that weren't there for the last 16 years. WP: Is that freezing the settlements? Netanyahu: It's freezing the settlements, it's committing in advance to the negotiations. WP: It's committing to the outcome basically? Netanyahu: Yes, it's the old technique. Let's agree what the results of the negotiations will be before the negotiations begin. And then Netanyahu flatout misrepresents the Obama administration's position by saying it agrees with him. Netanyahu: I think the Palestinians have to recognize that Washington says there should be no negotiations without preconditions.
Of course, President Obama said the opposite and so did Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. (In Clinton's words, President Obama wants to see a stop to settlements -- not some settlements, not outposts, not natural growth exceptions.") They have both demanded a settlement freeze as a means of getting negotiations started, i.e., as a precondition.
And as far as pretending that a settlement freeze is a "final status" issue and always was, Netanyahu is rejecting the positions of every one of his predecessors since 1993. They all accepted the idea that a freeze was a preliminary step. Bibi has broken new ground (maybe to build a settlement on it).
To put it bluntly, President Obama is being royally dissed.
But all is not lost. The President should say: "Okay, Bibi, we agree. A settlement freeze is a final status issue. I want you and Abbas to come to Camp David now to begin and finish negotiations on the final status of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. We will, as you prefer, discuss the settlement freeze in the context of setting final borders for Israel and the Palestinian state."
One thing is certain. The President cannot accept this type of rebuff lying down. Congressman Joe Wilson only yelled out "liar." Netanyahu's response to Obama is worse. It reminds me of that old New York Daily News headline after President Ford rejected an aid package for a bankrupt New York City, "Ford to City: Drop Dead."
This is not how an ally -- especially one who receives more aid, by far, than any other country in the world -- should be permitted to address an American President.
Crossposted Media Matters Action NetworkView the most recent version.
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Today, Statistics Canada provides Canadians with a first glimpse of the latest national statistical portrait with results of the 2016 Census count on population and dwellings.
The count tallies 35,151,728 people who reported living in Canada on Census Day, May 10, 2016, and shows the patterns of population growth across the country.
Over the coming year—as Canadians celebrate 150 years since Confederation—the agency will unveil the full range of census data that will together paint a factual picture of the lives of Canadians and their communities.
The population count in 2016 was 10 times greater than in 1871, when the first census after Confederation recorded 3.5 million people in Canada. By 1967, when Canadians were toasting 100 years since Confederation, that number had grown to 20.0 million (1966 Census).
Over the years, Canadians have been trekking west. In 1871, most Canadians lived in the four founding provinces of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, while Western Canada was sparsely populated. By 2016, close to one-third of the population lived in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia.
Canada's population: Migratory increase accounts for two-thirds of growth
From 2011 to 2016, the population increased by 1.7 million or 5.0%, a slightly lower rate than 5.9% from 2006 to 2011.
Infographic 1
Annual average growth rate, natural increase and migratory increase per intercensal period, Canada, 1851 to 2056
About two-thirds of Canada's population growth from 2011 to 2016 was the result of migratory increase (the difference between the number of immigrants and emigrants). Natural increase (the difference between the number of births and deaths) accounted for the remaining one-third. In the coming years, population growth in Canada is projected to be increasingly linked to migratory increase rather than natural increase, mainly because of low fertility and an aging population.
International comparisons: Canada has the highest population growth among G7 countries
Canada led the G7 in population growth from 2011 to 2016, rising on average 1.0% per year, a ranking also recorded over the two previous intercensal periods (2001 to 2006 and 2006 to 2011).
Chart 1
Average annual population growth rate among G20 and G7 countries, 2011 to 2016¹
As in Canada, migratory increase is the key driver of population growth in other G7 countries, such as the United Kingdom, Germany and Italy. In addition, three G7 countries—Germany, Italy and Japan—have recorded more deaths than births in recent years, meaning that the population growth in these countries depended entirely on migratory increase.
Canada's average annual population growth rate of 1.0% from 2011 to 2016 was the eighth highest among G20 countries, behind Saudi Arabia, Turkey, South Africa, Australia, Mexico, Indonesia and India.
Population density: Two-thirds of Canadians live close to the southern border
Canada has a small population living in a large land area (close to 9 million square kilometres), leading to a low population density compared with other countries. For example, Canada had 3.9 people per square kilometre in 2016, compared with 35.3 people per square kilometre in the United States.
The Canadian population, however, is highly concentrated geographically. In 2016, two out of three people (66%) lived within 100 kilometres of the southern Canada–United States border, an area that represents about 4% of Canada's territory.
Many census metropolitan areas (CMAs) are located near the border, including Toronto, Montréal and Vancouver. The population density of some municipalities located in these CMAs is well above the national average. The municipality of Vancouver had the highest population density in Canada, with more than 5,400 people per square kilometre. Among municipalities of 5,000 or more inhabitants, the next three with the highest population density were located in the Montréal CMA—Westmount, Côte-Saint-Luc and Montréal.
Canada 150: From Confederation to the 2016 Census
Canada's population has increased tenfold since Confederation. However, the country's |
, and systemic oxygen consumption. The continued application of current treatment guidelines has led to improved algorithms for treating septic patients; however alone these may be insufficient to produce further decreases in sepsis mortality rates. For example, while antibiotic treatment is a key pharmacological intervention in sepsis management, the rising incidence of antibiotic resistant microbes is recognized as an emerging obstacle 10. Furthermore, a recent meta‐analysis 21 on the impact of EGDT has called into question the benefits of this therapeutic approach. The authors reported that EGDT was not superior to standard of care for septic shock patients but was associated with both an increased admission to ICU and an increased utilization of ICU resources. Despite clinical trials examining potentially causal therapeutic compounds for sepsis treatment, including an IL‐1 receptor antagonist 22, TNF‐α antagonist 23, human recombinant activated protein C (APC) 24, intravenous immunoglobulin G therapy 25, TLR4 antagonist 26, and talactoferrin 27, no new pharmacological therapies have entered the clinical routine 28.
Preclinical Sepsis Models Small animal models have been used extensively to investigate the physiological process that lead to sepsis syndrome and ALI/ARDS, and to study the effects of potential therapeutics. Generally, these models introduce a systemic or a localized challenge into the host in order to induce a sepsis‐like pathology 29. In systemic challenge models, bacteria (i.e., Escherichia coli) or bacterial‐derived toxins (i.e., lipopolysaccharide, LPS) are administered into the animal by intravenous or intraperitoneal injection. The resulting rapid systemic release of pro‐inflammatory cytokines, such as TNF‐α and IL‐1, and an increase in hypodynamic cardiovascular activity, leads to onset of a septic shock‐like state. In localized challenge models, a source of infection is introduced into a specific anatomical region. As the lung and abdominal cavity are the most commonly observed locations of infection in septic patients 30, models of pneumonia and peritonitis are frequently used. Endotoxemia models utilizing LPS have been used extensively as they offer a convenient, reproducible method of experimentally inducing sepsis. However, the severity of LPS‐induced sepsis can depend on the model species or strain being used. For example, a much higher equivalent LPS dose is required to induce a sepsis‐like condition in mice than in human 31; therefore, such models are unlikely to accurately reflect the human disease course. The cecal ligation and puncture (CLP) model is chiefly used in the study of abdominal sepsis as it is thought to closely mimic the clinical situation 32, comprising of both a tissue trauma and a mixed microbial infection. In CLP, the cecum is ligated distal to the ileocecal valve; puncturing of the ligated cecum then permits contamination of the peritoneal cavity with colonic‐derived bacteria leading to the onset of an abdominal sepsis‐like condition. An added advantage of CLP is that it is highly adaptable, both sepsis onset and severity can be manipulated by varying the frequency of cecum punctures, needle size and the length of the cecum ligated 29.
Mesenchymal Stromal Cells Mesenchymal stromal cell (MSC) are non‐hematopoietic, multipotent stromal precursor cells that can be isolated from tissues such as bone marrow, adipose, dental pulp, placenta, cord blood, and matrix 33. MSC are capable of modulating the immune response 34 by both cell‐to‐cell contact and through the release of soluble paracrine factors including nitric oxide, indoleamine 2,3‐dioxygenase, PGE 2, TGF‐β, and IL‐10 35, 36. MSC also promote expansion of the regulatory T cell (Treg) compartment 37. In a model of solid organ transplantation, we 38 have identified that infusions of MSC and multipotent adult progenitor cell (MAPCs), a bone marrow derived cell that shares a number of MSC characteristics including multipotency and immunosuppressive potential, lead to an induction of myeloid‐derived suppressor cells (MDSCs) to initially promote induction of pro‐inflammatory Th17 followed by conversion into CD4+ Tregs. The last decade has witnessed a surge in the number of preclinical and early phase clinical trials studying multipotent cell‐based technologies for indications including, but not limited to, GvHD, ischemic stroke, Crohn's disease, motor neuron disease, and acute myocardial infarction. MSC possess a number of characteristics that make them an attractive therapeutic candidate; they can undergo extended expansion without detriment to their multipotency or self‐renewal properties 39 and they exhibit low immunogenicity 40 and low tumorigenicity 41. Our own mouse models have provided evidence that intravenously infused MSC are short‐lived, with the lungs acting as the principle site of early entrapment 42. This may be a benefit in those indications in which the lung is the principle region of tissue injury, such as in the case of ALI/ARDS, as this would facilitate a high local concentration of MSC directly at the site of inflammation. Furthermore, a rodent model of ALI has provided initial evidence that the route of cellular application (intravenous and intratracheal) can partially influence MSC activity 43. However, it also might be counterproductive to apply MSC to patients where the pulmonary circuit is partially compromised as the potential for pulmonary embolism might be greater. MSCs are generally considered amendable to cryogenic storage 44. Notwithstanding, there is evidence that senescence is enriched in MSC populations that have been subjected to freeze‐thawing protocols 45 which may subsequently impair their immunosuppressive potency 46. To date, the majority of pilot and early phase clinical studies have focused on autologous or syngeneic MSCs. However, the process of isolating, cultivating, and assessing patient‐specific MSCs typically requires weeks, therefore prohibiting their use in those diseases with restrictive treatment windows. Consequently, studies are beginning to focus on allogeneic MSC as these cells would permit on‐demand patient treatment. Currently, our own group is conducting a phase I clinical trial to assess the safety and feasibility of third‐party MAPCs in liver transplant recipients 47. Recently, positive results have been reported in a phase III randomized, double blind, multicenter trial designed to assess the safety and efficacy of a proprietary allogenic adipose‐derived MSC (ADSC) to treat complex perianal fistulas in Crohn's disease (ClinicalTrials.gov NCT01541579). Here, the authors reported that a significantly greater proportion of ADSC treated patients achieved the primary endpoint of combined remission at week 24 compared to the placebo group 48. Certainly, the use of third‐party “off‐the‐shelf” MSC‐based would potentially enable an early therapeutic intervention such as is currently recommended in the treatment of sepsis syndrome.
MSCs Reduce Inflammation In vivo models of sepsis and ALI/ARDS have shown MSCs treatment to improve survival and to positively influence a number of indicators of the clinical course (Table 2). However, the precise mechanisms by which MSCs may mediate their effects remain for the most part unclear. Several preclinical studies have determined that in sepsis and ALI/ARDS, MSC exposure resulted in a decline in pro‐inflammatory cytokines including IL‐1α, IL‐1β, IL‐6, IFN‐γ, and TNF‐α 46, 49-57, 59, 61, 63-70, 73 and an increase in anti‐inflammatory cytokines such as IL‐4, IL‐5, IL‐10 49-51, 56, 57, 63, 64, 67, 70, 73. Gupta et al. 49 found that in mice, intrapulmonary administration of BMSC 4 hours after induction of ALI by E. coli endotoxin resulted in improved survival, reduced excess lung water and improved lung histology, resulting in a decrease of bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) TNF‐α and MIP‐2 and an increase of IL‐10 levels within BAL and plasma samples. Importantly in the context of ALI/ARDS, BMSC treatment resulted in a decrease in alveolar epithelium permeability. Animals treated with fibroblasts or apoptotic MSCs showed no such shift. It was also determined that MSC engraftment occurred infrequently and that although MSCs do express the LPS receptor complex, its presence did not alter endotoxin distribution. As invitro transwell‐experiments demonstrated that MSC were able to inhibit TNF‐α production by alveolar macrophages through a contact‐independent mechanism, the authors concluded that the beneficial effects of MSC in this model appeared to be largely mediated by soluble factors. In a CLP model of sepsis, Nemeth et al. 51 reported that an injection of 1 × 106 BMSC resulted in increased survival, decreased vascular permeability, a reduction of TNF‐α and IL‐6 and an increase in IL‐10. No such effect was seen following injection of fibroblasts, whole bone marrow or heat‐killed BMSC. While a beneficial response to MSC could be observed in mice lacking mature T and B cells or NK cells, clodronate depletion of monocytes and macrophages abolished the MSC effect. Similarly, the MSC effect was abrogated in mice treated with either anti‐IL‐10 or anti‐IL‐10 receptor antibodies. The authors demonstrated that LPS treatment of BMSC resulted in an upregulation of PGE 2 which in turn stimulated macrophage production of IL‐10. Li et al. 61 showed that after induction of ALI by LPS in rat, human umbilical cord derived MSC (UC‐MSC) improved survival, lung histology, wet‐dry weight ratio and reduced neutrophil infiltration. However, while UC‐MSC led to a reduction in serum contractions of TNF‐α, IL‐1β, and IL‐6 following LPS challenge, no effect was observed on IL‐10 levels. Sepúlveda et al. 46 demonstrated in an LPS sepsis model that treatment with non‐senescent human BMSCs resulted in increased survival despite decreasing IL‐10 values. Although senescent human BMSCs were able to inhibit lymphocyte proliferation in vitro, the ability to positively influence sepsis was abrogated. In a recent study of CLP induced sepsis, Guldner et al. 69 reported a reduction in TNF‐α and in IL‐6 that was accompanied by a modest reduction in IL‐1β following injection of either 1 × 105 human BMSCs (hBMSCs) or mouse BMSCs (mBMSCs). An increase in IL‐10 was observed in mice treated with hBMSC, whereas mBMSC treatment resulted in a decrease. Both groups displayed similar decreases in lung edema and inflammation; however, hBMSCs were superior in restoring lung function. Interestingly, the authors reported no difference on day 3 survival amongst untreated CLP animals (89%) and those treated with either hBMSC (82%) or mBMSC (96%). The role of MSC in modulating cytokine levels in sepsis syndrome models is undoubtedly complex; concerning IL‐10, conflicting results have shown MSCs to both positively 50, 56, 57, 63, 64, 67, 70, 73 as well as negatively 46, 54 influence levels, or alternatively have no effect 59, 60. There are similar inconsistencies in relation to IFN‐γ levels, with groups describing a reduction 50, 57, 73, an increase 70 or no effect 51, 67. It is likely that this apparent functional heterogeneity is a reflection of differences in experimental models, treatment regimens and MSC sources. Table 2. Preclinical studies of mesenchymal stromal cells in treating ALI and sepsis in which mortality was assessed Model Treatment Dose regimen Result of cell treatment Author, Year [Ref.] Mouse, ALI, E. coli‐induced Mouse BMSC (syngeneic) 7.5 × 105 IT 4 hours post E. coli challenge ↑ survival, IL‐10 ↓ pulmonary edema, alveolar epithelial permeability ↓ TNF‐α and MIP‐2 Apoptotic MSC = no effect Gupta et al. 2007 49 Mouse BMSC apoptotic (syngeneic) Mouse, sepsis/colitis, CLP Human ADSC 1 × 106 IP 4 hours post CLP ↑ survival, IL‐10, bacterial clearance ↓ TNF‐α, IL‐6, IL‐1β, MIP‐2. RANTES, IL‐12, IFN‐γ Gonzalez‐Rey et al. 2009 50 Mouse ADSC (allo/syngeneic) Mouse, sepsis/colitis, LPS Human ADSC 3 × 105 or 1 × 106 IP 0.5 hours post LPS Mouse, sepsis, CLP Mouse BMSC (auto/allo) 1 × 106 IV 24 hours prior or 1 hour post CLP ↑ survival, kidney function, IL‐10 ↓ TNF‐α, IL‐6 No change = IFN‐γ Nemeth et al. 2009 51 Mouse, sepsis, CLP Mouse BMSC (allo) +/− IL‐10 overexpression 1 × 106 IV 1 hour post CLP ↑ survival ↓ TNF‐α, IL‐6, IL‐1α IL‐1β Bi et al. 2010 [52] Rat, ALI, bleomycin inhalation Rat BMSC (allo) 1 × 106 IV 96 hours post bleomycin ↑ survival ↓ IL‐1β, TGF‐β, VEGF,IL‐6, TNF‐α, NOS Lee et al. 2010 [53] Mouse, sepsis /ALI, CLP Mouse BMSC (allo) +/− antibiotics 2.5 × 105 IV 6 hours post CLP ↑ survival, bacterial clearance, organ function ↓ IL‐6, IL‐1β, IL10, KC, JE, CCL5 Mei et al. 2010 [54] Mouse, ALI, E. coli‐induced Human UC‐MSC 1 × 105 IT 3 hours post E. coli challenge ↑ survival, bacterial clearance ↓IL‐1α, IL‐1β, IL‐6, TNF‐α, MIP‐1α, MIP‐1β, MIP‐2, RANTES, MPO Kim et al. 2011 [55] Rat, ALI, LPS Rat BMSC (allo) 1 × 106 IV 2 hours post LPS ↑ survival (not significant), IL‐10 ↓ IL‐1β, TNF‐α, MPO Liang et al. 2011 [56] Mouse, ALI, LPS Human UC‐MSC 1 × 106 IV 4 hours post LPS ↑ survival, IL‐10, Treg ↓ IFN‐γ, TNF‐α, MIP‐2 Sun et al. 2011 [57] Rat, sepsis, CLP Rat ADSC (auto) 1.2 × 106 IV at 0.5, 6, & 18 hours post‐CLP ↑ survival, ↑ Tregs (healthy only) ↓ Tregs (apoptotic only) ↓ TNF‐α (apoptotic only) Chang et al. 2012 58 Rat ADSC apoptotic (auto) Mouse, ALI, E. coli‐induced Mouse BMSC (allo) 7.5 × 105 IT 4 hours post E. coli challenge ↑ survival, lipocalin 2 ↓ TNF‐α, MIP‐2, MPO No change = IL‐10 Gupta et al. 2012 [59] Mouse, sepsis, P. aeruginosa induced Human BMSC 1 × 106 IV 1 hour post P. aeruginosa challenge ↑ survival, bacterial clearance ↓ PAI‐1 No change = TNF‐α, IL‐10, MIP‐2, PGE 2 Krasnodembskaya et al. 2012 [60] Rat, ALI, LPS Human UC‐MSC 5 × 105 IV 1 hour post LPS ↑ survival ↓ IL‐1β, TNF‐α, IL‐6, MPO No change = IL‐10 Li et al. 2012 [61] Rat, VILI Rat BMSC (allo) 4 × 106 IV/IT 2.5–3 hours post VILI initiation ↑ lung recovery ↑ IL‐10 (IV BMSC only) ↑ KGF (IT BMSC only) ↓ TNF‐α, IL‐6 ↓ lung inflammation No change = survival Curley et al. 2013 [62] Rat BMSC (allo)conditioned medium 300 μl IT 2.5–3 hours post VILI initiation Rat, ALI, Paraquat Rat BMSC (allo) +/− methylprednisolone 1 × 107 IV 6 hours post paraquat ↑ survival, IL‐10, SOD ↓ NF‐кB p65, TNF‐α, IL‐1β, IL‐6, MDA Yang et al. 2013 [63] Rat, ALI, LPS + chest impact Rat BMSC (syngeneic) 2.5 × 106 IV 2 hours post LPS ↑ survival, IL‐10 ↓ TNF‐α, IL‐6, No change = IL‐1β Zhao et al. 2013 [64] Mouse, sepsis, LPS Human BMSC alive/senescent 1 × 106 IV 0.5 hour post LPS ↑ survival ↓ TNF‐α, IL‐6, IL‐10senescent MSC = no effect Sepúlveda et al. 2014 [46] Rat, sepsis‐induced kidney injury, CLP Rat ADSC apoptotic (auto) +/− melatonin 1.2 × 106 IV at 0.5, 6, & 18 hours post‐CLP ↑ survival, kidney function ↓ TNF‐α, NF‐кB MIP‐1α, IL‐1β, RANTES No change = Treg Chen et al. 2014 [65] Rat, sepsis, CLP Human BMSC 5 × 106 IV 4 hours post CLP ↑ survival, Treg ↓ TNF‐α, IL‐6 Chao et al. 2014 [66] Human UC‐MSC Mouse, sepsis, E. coli induced Mouse ADSC (auto) 1 × 106 RO at time of E. coli challenge ↑ survival, IL‐10 ↓ TNF‐α, MPC‐1, IL‐6 No change = IL‐12, IFN‐γ Pedrazza et al. 2014 [67] Mouse, sepsis, CLP Human MenSC +/− antibiotics 7.5 × 105 IP 3 hours post CLP ↑ survival, bacterial clearance, liver function ↓ TNF‐α, MPC‐1, IL‐6, IL‐10 Alcayage‐Miranda et al. 2015 [68] Mouse, sepsis/ALI, CLP Human BMSC 1 × 105 IV 24 hours post CLP ↑ lung recovery (human BMSC) ↑ IL‐10 (human BMSC) ↓ TNF‐α, IL‐6 ↓ IL‐10 (mouse BMSC) No change = survival Guldner et al. 2015 [69] Mouse BMSC Rat, ALI, E. coli induced Human BMSC Series 1 1 × 107 or 2 × 10 7 IV 0.5 hours post E. coli challenge ↑ lung recovery, IL‐10, KGF ↑ bacterial clearance (2 × 107 only) ↓ BAL neutrophils No change = IL‐6 Devaney et al. 2015 (43) Series 2 2 × 106, 5 × 106 or 1 × 107 IV 0.5 hours post E. coli challenge ↑ survival, lung recovery, bacterial clearance ↑ IL‐10, KGF (1 × 107 only) ↓ BAL neutrophils (1 × 107 only) ↓ IL‐6 Series 3 1 × 107 IV or IT 0.5 hours post E. coli challenge ↑ survival, lung recovery, bacterial clearance, IL‐10, KGF ↓ BAL neutrophils (IV only) ↓ IL‐6 Mouse, sepsis, CLP Mouse DMC (auto) 2 × 106 IV 4 hours post CLP ↑ survival, IL‐4, IL‐5, IFN‐γ ↓ IL‐1β, IL‐6 No change = IL‐10 Wang et al. 2015 [70] Rat, VILI Rat BMSC (allo) 1 × 107 IV 1.5 – 2.5 hours post VILI initiation ↑ lung recovery (IV BMSC only) ↓ lung inflammation (IV BMSC only) ↓ IL‐1β, IL‐6 (IV BMSC only) No change = survival, IL‐10, KGF Hayes et al. 2015 [71] Rat BMSC (allo)conditioned medium 500 μl IV 1.5 – 2.5 hours post VILI initiation Mouse, ALI, E. coli induced Human BMSC 8 × 105 IT/IV 4 hours post E. coli challenge ↑ survival, bacterial clearance, KGF ↓ lung inflammation, protein permeability ↓ MIP‐2, TNF‐α Monsel et al. 2015 [72] Human BMSC microvesicles 30, 60, or 90 μl IT/IV 4 hours post E. coli challenge Rat, sepsis‐induced organ injury, CLP Human WJ‐MSC + antibiotics 1 × 106 IP 6 hours post CLP ↑ survival, liver function, kidney function, IL‐4. IL‐10 ↓ NF‐кB, IL‐1α, IL‐6, IFN‐γ No change = TNF‐α Cóndor et al. 2016 [73] Rat, sepsis‐induced organ injury, cecal bacteria induced Rat ADSC (auto) +/− antibiotics 5 × 105 IV at 0.5, 6, & 18 hours post‐sepsis induction ↑ survival, kidney function, ↓ TNF‐1α, NF‐кB, IL‐1β, MMP‐9, RANTES ↓ ROS Sung et al. 2016 74
MSCs Promote Bacterial Clearance Seemingly running contrary to their immunosuppressive capacity, treatment with MSCs has been reported to improve bacterial clearance 55, 60. Although MSC themselves lack phagocytic activity 54, MSCs can stimulate phagocytosis by monocytes 60, macrophages 54 and neutrophils 75. Gonzalez‐Rey et al. 50 reported that in addition to positively influencing the cytokine balance and animal survival, exposure to either human (1 × 105−5 × 106) or mouse (1 × 106) ADSCs resulted in reduced peritoneal bacterial counts, possibly through modulating activated macrophage activity. MSCs also appear to inhibit bacterial growth through the secretion of antimicrobial compounds including the human cathelicidin antimicrobial peptide LL‐37 76, keratinocyte growth factor (KGF) 77, and lipocalin 2 59. Lee et al. 77 examined the effects of hBMSC in an ex‐vivo perfused human lung model. Application of hBMSC (5 or 10 × 106 cells) either one or 2 hours after E. coli challenge (109 or 1010 CFU) resulted in a significant decrease in bacterial load, improved alveolar fluid clearance and reduced inflammatory cell infiltration. MSCs antimicrobial effect was abolished following inhibition of KGF by neutralizing antibody. In a series of experiments performed by Devaney et al. 43 in a rodent E. coli ALI model, it shown that a single dose of between 5 × 106 and 2 × 107 of hBMSCs resulted in improved survival, reduced lung injury and a reduced bacterial burden that was also associated with increased LL‐37 concentrations. Intravenous and intratracheal administration routes were found to be equally effective in prolonging survival and alleviating ALI symptoms. However, hBMSC applied intravenously led to a reduction in the frequency of alveolar neutrophils while intratracheal hBMSC was more effective at increasing levels of IL‐10 and KGF.
MSCs Enhance Lung Recovery Multiple studies examining the effect of MSC in models of lung injury have reported MSC application to be associated with enhanced lung recovery and regain of function. Curley et al. 62 demonstrated in rat that following ventilation‐induced lung injury (VILI), intravenous or intratracheal administration of allogeneic BMSC (4 × 106 cells) restored lung function, enhanced the alveolar air‐space volume and reduced alveolar thickening and decreased markers of inflammation. A similar effect was also reported following intratracheal administration of MSC conditioned media (CM). However, in a follow‐up study performed by the same group, intravenously administered CM was found to be largely ineffective at restoring arterial oxygenation, respiratory static compliance, lung wet:dry ratio and reducing inflammation when compared to intravenously administered allogeneic BMSC (1 × 107 cells) 71.
Recent MSC‐Derived Therapeutic Strategies Cellular‐based therapies currently in development for sepsis syndrome and ALI/ARDS treatment have focused on MSC derived from bone marrow or adipose tissue. However, recent studies have also assessed the feasibility of utilizing MSC isolated from alternative sources whilst others are examining the therapeutic efficacy of MSC‐derived vesicles. In a recent publication, Cóndor et al. 73 analyzed the efficacy of MSCs derived from human Wharton's Jelly (WJ‐MSCs) in a rat sepsis model. In animals receiving 1 × 106 WJ‐MSC 6 hours after CLP, 5‐day survival was significantly increased (87.5% vs. 55.6% in CLP only) and both liver and kidney function were improved. WJ‐MSCs treatment resulted in IL‐1α, IL‐6, and IFN‐γ values similar to non‐CLP controls. However, there was no detectable effect on either IL‐4 or IL‐10. In a CLP mouse sepsis model, Alcayaga‐Miranda et al. 68 evaluated human MSCs derived from menstrual fluid (MenSC) in combination with antibiotic therapy. Injection of 7.5 × 105 MenSC cells promoted survival and bacterial clearance, improved lung histology and was associated with a decrease in markers of multiorgan dysfunction. A synergistic effect was observed when MenSC were combined with Enrofloxacin. At 40 hours, cell‐treated animals exhibited reduced TNF‐α, IL‐6, MCP1, and also IL‐10. The authors reported that while LL‐37 could not be detected, expression of the peptide hormone hepcidin was increased in treated animals, inhibition of which nullified the antimicrobial effect. Wang et al. 70 reported on the ability of murine, nonexpanded, dermal‐derived MSCs (DMCs) to attenuate CLP–induced sepsis. Up to 1 × 710 DMCs were recovered from processed dermis samples without the need for further culture. Mice injected with 1 × 106 DMCs 4 hours after CLP possessed decreased IL‐1β and IL‐6 values and displayed an increase in IL‐4, IL‐5, and IFN‐γ. However, no significant change in IL‐10 level was detected. In addition, DMCs positively influenced macrophage migration and phagocytic activity. At present, preclinical and clinical studies of MSC‐based technologies have focused on the use of whole MSCs. However, there is growing body of evidence that extracellular vesicles (EVs), a constitute of MSC CM that includes endosomes and microvesicles, might impart a therapeutic benefit through transporting and delivering MSC‐derived protein, microRNA and mitochondria to target cells. The therapeutic capacity of hBMSC‐derived MVs was recently compared to that of MSC by Monsel and colleagues 72. MVs were recovered from a 48‐hour culture of 9 × 106 hBMSC by ultracentrifugation. Similar beneficial effects to E. coli induced ALI were observed in response to MV and MSC intervention. Survival and bacterial clearance was increased in both groups and lung injury was decreased. Preincubation of hBMSC MVs with anti‐CD44 antibody impaired the effect on survival, suggesting that cellular uptake of MVs is required in order to elicit a therapeutic effect. Although a detailed assessment of MV‐based therapies is beyond the scope of this current review, Monsel et al. 78 has produced a particular thorough examination of the scientific literature in this area.
MSC in Acute Respiratory Distress and Sepsis Syndromes—The Clinical Experience Currently, there are only a limited number of reports detailing the response of septic and ALI/ARDS patients to MSC. However, there are a number of ongoing clinical trials registered which are estimated to be completed shortly or within the next 1–2 years (Table 3). One of the earliest studies to examine the safety of MSCs in ARDS patients was conducted by Zheng et al. (NCT01902082) 79. In this phase I, single‐center, double‐blind, placebo‐controlled study, 12 patients were randomized 1:1 and received a peripheral intravenous infusion of either 100 ml saline or a single dose of allogeneic ADSC equivalent to 1 × 106 cells kg/bw over 1 hour. The study reported that while ADSC infusion appeared safe, there were no significant differences in total length of hospital stay, ICU‐free days, and ventilator‐free days or in serum ARDS biomarkers (SP‐D, IL‐6, IL‐8) between treatment arms. However, the authors acknowledged that the study's small sample size and a limited follow‐up period of 28 days hampered further analyses. The RUMCESS (NCT01849237) trial, a single‐center, open label, randomized study, sought to assess the impact of MSCs in patients with septic shock and severe neutropenia. The primary outcome measure was 28‐day mortality; secondary outcome measures included the effect of MSC on organ dysfunction parameters, systemic inflammatory markers and SOFA‐score. Of the 27 patients enrolled, 13 received conventional treatment while 14 received conventional treatment plus a single dose of 1 × 106 MSC IV administered within 10 hours after onset. Galstian et al. 80 reported that the MSC treated group had a significant increase in 28‐day survival rates (57% vs. 15%) that was associated with a decrease in SOFA‐score. However, there was no difference in post‐28 day survival rates. While an improvement in 28‐day survival is certainly encouraging, it is difficult to draw further conclusions from this study as no inflammatory marker analysis was performed and there is little information on the type of MSCs used in the study. CELLULA (NCT02328612) was a commercially sponsored, randomized interventional trial designed to study the effects of ADSC in healthy male volunteers treated with LPS. After receiving LPS, 32 volunteers received either IV placebo or 2.5 × 105, 1 × 106 or 4 × 106 cells kg/bw of Cx611, an allogeneic ADSC. Though the trial was registered as complete in April 2015, at the time of writing no peer reviewed results are available. In 2015, Wilson et al. 81 published results of a phase I, multicenter, open label, dose‐escalation pilot study, START (NCT01775774). Selecting patients with moderate to severe ARDS, the aim of this study was to assess the safety of allogeneic bone‐marrow derived MSCs (BMSC) by measuring the incidence of defined prespecified infusion associated events experienced by three cohorts (9 patients in total) receiving either 1 × 106, 5 × 106, and 10 × 106 cells kg/bw. The study concluded that while all BMSC dose levels were well tolerated, no significant differences in ARDS markers (IL‐6, IL‐8, ANGPT2, and AGER) between cohorts could be detected. A follow‐up phase II efficacy trial is currently ongoing (NCT02097641). Simonson et al. 82 reported on the clinical outcome of two patients diagnosed with severe ARDS treated with 2 × 106 cells kg/bw allogeneic BMSC. Cell infusion in both patients was uneventful and was completed without complication. At 5 days post‐infusion, patient 1 developed nosocomial pneumonia that subsequently responded to antibiotic treatment. Patient 1 was extubated 4 weeks after MSC infusion and patient 2 after 12 days. Both patients showed a decrease in markers of epithelial apoptosis, alveolar‐capillary fluid leakage together with a decline in pro‐inflammatory cytokines, miRNAs, and chemokines in plasma and BAL fluid. The authors acknowledged that the treatment of these patients generated valuable data, but that larger patient cohorts would be required to thoroughly investigate the response of ARDS patients to MSCs. Table 3. Ongoing and new studies of MSC in sepsis syndrome and ALI/ARD Study title Indication Registry numbers Study design Estimated enrolment (to received cell therapy) Cell type Dosing schedule Start Date Est. End Date A pilot study for the efficacy and safety of mesenchymal stem cell in acute severe respiratory failure (STELLAR‐Pilot). ARDS NCT02112500 Phase II, open label, single group assignment 10 (10) Auto BMSC Unknown Feb 2014 Dec 2016 Treatment of severe acute respiratory distress syndrome with allogeneic bone marrow‐derived mesenchymal stromal cells (MSC‐ARDS). ARDS NCT02215811 Phase I, open label, single group assignment 10(10) Allo BMSC Unknown Mar 2014 Dec 2015 Phase1 study of recombinant stem cells that repair lung injury in H7N9 infected patients. ALI/ARDS NCT02095444 Phase I/II, open label, single group assignment 20(20) MenSC Four infusion; 1 × 107 kg/bw IV (twice per week) Mar 2014 Dec 2016 Prospective, randomized, multicenter phase 2 clinical trial of allogeneic bone marrow‐derived human mesenchymal stem cells for the treatment of acute respiratory distress syndrome (START). ARDS NCT02097641 Phase II, randomized, double blind, single group assignment 60 (30) Allo BMSC Single infusion; 1 × 106 kg/bw IV day one Mar 2014 Dec 2017 Cellular immunotherapy for septic shock: A phase I trial (CISS). Sepsis NCT02421484 Phase I, open label, single group assignment 9 (9) Allogeneic BMSC Single infusion, IV Cohort 1, 3 × 105 kg/bw Cohort 2, 1 × 106 kg/bw Cohort3, 3 × 106 kg/bw May 2015 Sep 2016 Safety and efficacy of human umbilical‐cord‐derived mesenchymal stem cell transplantation in acute lung injury (UCMSC‐ALI). ALI NCT02444455 Phase I/II, open label, single group assignment 20 (20) Allogeneic UCSC Three infusions; 5 × 105 kg/bw IV May 2015 Dec 2017 A phase Ib/IIa, randomized, double blind, parallel group, placebo controlled, multicenter study to assess the safety and efficacy of expanded Cx611 allogeneic adipose‐derived stem cells (eASCs) for the intravenous treatment of adult patients with severe community‐acquired bacterial pneumonia and admitted to the intensive care unit (SEPCELL). Sepsis 2015‐002994‐39 Phase I/II, randomized, double blind, parallel assignment 180 (90) Allogeneic ADSC Two infusions; 1.6 × 107 cells day 1 1.6 × 107 cells day 3 Oct 2015 Jul 2017 A phase 1/2 study to assess the safety and efficacy of multistem therapy in subjects with acute respiratory distress syndrome (MUST‐ARDS). ARDS NCT02611609 Phase I/II, double blind, parallel assignment 36 (26) Allogeneic MAPC Cohort 1, 3 × 106 cell Cohort 2, 9 × 106 cell Cohort 3, either 3 × 106 or 9 × 106 cell Jan 2016 Dec 2017 A phase II trial of mesenchymal stem cells for treatment of acute respiratory distress syndrome in stem cell transplant patients. ARDS NCT02804945 Phase II, randomized, double blind, parallel assignment 50 (25) Allogeneic MSC (source unknown) Single infusion; 1 × 107 kg/bw IV day one Oct 2016 Oct 2018
Conclusion Sepsis syndrome and ALI/ARDS represent a significant treatment challenge and remain a frequent course of death. Despite extensive efforts to develop innovative therapeutic strategies, none so far have translated into a new evidence‐based treatment. Compounds which repeatedly showed promise in preclinical and phase I/II trials, have subsequently failed phase III assessment. Most notably human recombinant APC, the only compound to receive marketing authorization for sepsis treatment, was subsequently withdrawn after follow‐up phase III studies failed to replicate the patient benefit observed in |
o Basso.
There were numerous parodies of the program, including in the Foghorn Leghorn cartoon "Fox Terror", Bob and Ray's The 64-Cent Question. The Jack Benny Program featured Hal March as a contestant in an October 20, 1957 spoof[6] with Benny asking the questions. As a gag, Benny actually appeared as a contestant on The $64,000 Question on October 8, 1957, but insisted on walking away with $64 after answering the first question. Hal March finally gave him $64 out of his own pocket.
At the height of its popularity, The $64,000 Question was referenced in the scripts of other CBS shows, usually but not exclusively through punch lines that included references to "the isolation booth" or "reaching the first plateau." Typical of these was spoken by The Honeymooners' Ed Norton (Art Carney), who identified three times in a man's life when he wants to be alone, with the third being "when he's in the isolation booth of The $64,000 Question." At least three other Honeymooners episodes referenced Question: In A Woman's Work Is Never Done Ralph proposes to Alice that he go on the show because he's an expert in the "Aggravation" category. In Hello, Mom Norton tells Ralph that his mother-in-law's category on the show would be "Nasty". In The Worry Wart, Ralph advises Alice to become a contestant because she's an expert in the "Everything" category.
Another episode of The Honeymooners, delivered one of the best known Question references – a parody of the show itself, in one of the so-called "Original 39" episodes of the timeless situation comedy. In that episode, blustery bus driver Ralph Kramden becomes a contestant on the fictitious $99,000 Answer. Regarded as one of the Golden Age of Television's best quiz show parodies, the Honeymooners episode depicted Kramden spending a week intensively studying popular songs, only to blow the first question on the subject when he returned to play on the show. The host of the fictitious $99,000 Answer was one Herb Norris, played by former Twenty Questions emcee and future Tic-Tac-Dough host Jay Jackson.
The show has been referenced on other game shows. On the U.S. version of Deal or No Deal, an episode aired January 15, 2007, in which the banker's offer was $64,000. Host Howie Mandel said, "This is the $64,000 question."
Cancellation [ edit ]
Three years after exploding into a nation's consciousness, Question and Challenge were both gone from the airwaves. Having faded in popularity in the wake of the hugely popular Twenty-One championship of Charles Van Doren, Question and Challenge were pulled off the air within three months of the quiz show scandal's outbreak. Challenge ended first on September 14, 1958 with Question taking its Sunday-night timeslot after a three-month hiatus until it was canceled in November.
Scandal [ edit ]
The relatively new but phenomenally popular Dotto, and then Twenty-One, were found to have been rigged and were promptly canceled. A Challenge contestant, Rev. Charles Jackson, told the federal grand jury probing the quiz shows that he received answers during his screening for his appearance. That prompted Challenge's sponsor, the Lorillard Tobacco Company (Kent, Old Gold cigarettes), to drop the show.
The $64,000 Question had the opposite problem: their sponsor's CEO, Revlon's Charles Revson, often interfered with production of Question, especially attempting to bump contestants he himself disliked, regardless of audience reaction. Revson's brother, Martin, was assigned to oversee Question–including heavy discussions of feedback the show received. The would-be bumpees included Joyce Brothers herself, who managed to outwit the question writers and Revlon long enough to win the maximum prize.
According to producer Joe Cates in a PBS documentary on the scandals, he used an IBM sorting machine to give the illusion that the questions were randomly selected – in fact, all of the cards were identical. Since all of the buttons were on one line[clarification needed], they were mostly for show.
It was revealed during Congressional investigations into the quiz show scandal that Revlon was as determined to keep the show appealing to viewers as the producer of Twenty-One (albeit also under sponsor pressure) had been. Unlike Twenty-One and Dotto, where contestants got the answers in advance, Revlon was reportedly far more subtle, they may have depended less on asking questions on the air that a contestant had already heard in pre-air screenings than on switching the questions kept secure in a bank vault at the last minute, to make sure a contestant the sponsor liked would be suited according to his or her chosen expertise.
The most prominent victim may have been the man who initially launched the franchise. Louis Cowan, made CBS Television president as a result of Question's fast success, was forced out of the network as the quiz scandal ramped up, even though it was NBC's quiz shows bearing most of the brunt of the scandal – and even though CBS itself, with a little help from sponsor Colgate-Palmolive, had moved fast in cancelling the popular Dotto at almost the moment it was confirmed that that show had been rigged. Cowan had never been suspected of taking part in any attempt to rig either Question or Challenge; later CBS historians suggested his reputation as an administrative bottleneck may have had as much to do with his firing as his tie to the tainted shows. Cowan may have been a textbook sacrificial lamb, in a bid to preempt any further scandal while the network scrambled to recover, and while president Frank Stanton accepted complete responsibility for any wrongdoing committed under his watch.
Aftermath [ edit ]
By the end of 1959, all first generation big-money quizzes were gone, with single-sponsorship television following and a federal law against fixing television game shows (an amendment to the 1960 Communications Act) coming. Except for the skill-based Jackpot Bowling (1959–1961) and Make That Spare (1960–1964), a period on Beat the Clock (1960) when its Bonus Stunt grew in $100 increments past the $10,000 mark until finally being won for $20,100 on September 23, and the short-lived ABC quiz 100 Grand (1963), the networks stayed away from awarding five-figure cash jackpots until the premiere of The $10,000 Pyramid and Match Game 73 in 1973. The disappearance of the quiz shows gave rise to television's next big phenomenon–Westerns.
The scandals also resulted in a shift of the balance of power between networks and sponsors. The networks used the scandals to justify taking control of their programs away from sponsors, thereby eliminating any potential future manipulation in prime-time broadcasting, and giving the networks full autonomy over program content.[7]
None of the people directly involved in rigging any of the quiz shows faced any penalty more severe than suspended sentences for perjury before the federal grand jury that probed the scandal, even if many hosts and producers found themselves frozen out of television for many years. One Question contestant, Doll Goostree, sued both CBS and the producers in a bid to recoup $4,000 she said she might have won if her match of Question hadn't been rigged. Neither Goostree nor any other quiz contestant who similarly sued won their cases.
Louis Cowan – In addition to Quiz Kids (1949–1951) and Stop the Music (1949–52, 1954–56), Cowan also created Down You Go (1951–1956) and the short-lived Ask Me Another (1952). Cowan briefly served as CBS Television Network president before leaving in the wake of the quiz show scandals. He later joined the faculty of the Columbia University school of journalism. He and his wife Polly were killed in an apartment fire in New York City in 1976. Lou Cowan's son Geoffrey later produced brief revivals of Quiz Kids in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s and is currently dean of the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication.
– In addition to (1949–1951) and (1949–52, 1954–56), Cowan also created (1951–1956) and the short-lived (1952). Cowan briefly served as CBS Television Network president before leaving in the wake of the quiz show scandals. He later joined the faculty of the Columbia University school of journalism. He and his wife Polly were killed in an apartment fire in New York City in 1976. Lou Cowan's son Geoffrey later produced brief revivals of in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s and is currently dean of the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication. Hal March – The former comic actor who became an overnight star on Question continued to appear as an actor in television and movies throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Shortly after he signed on as host of It's Your Bet in 1969, he was diagnosed with lung cancer and died in 1970, four months short of his 50th birthday.
– The former comic actor who became an overnight star on continued to appear as an actor in television and movies throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Shortly after he signed on as host of in 1969, he was diagnosed with lung cancer and died in 1970, four months short of his 50th birthday. Irwin "Sonny" Fox – The first Challenge host was also known at the time for co-hosting the CBS children's travelogue Let's Take a Trip (Fox described it as "Taking two children on sort of an electronic field trip every week–live, remote location, no audience, no sponsors"), but his fame rests predominantly on his eight-year (1959–1967) tour as the suave, congenial and dryly witty fourth host of New York's Sunday morning children's learn-and-laugh marathon, Wonderama. Fox hosted Way Out Games (1976–1977), a Saturday-morning series for CBS, then later spent a year (1977–1978) running children's programming for NBC and eventually became a chairman of the board for Population Communications International, a nonprofit dedicated to "technical assistance, research and training consultation to governments, NGOs and foundations on a wide range of social marketing and communications initiatives", for which he is still an honorary chairman. Fox has also been a board chairman for the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
– The first host was also known at the time for co-hosting the CBS children's travelogue (Fox described it as "Taking two children on sort of an electronic field trip every week–live, remote location, no audience, no sponsors"), but his fame rests predominantly on his eight-year (1959–1967) tour as the suave, congenial and dryly witty fourth host of New York's Sunday morning children's learn-and-laugh marathon,. Fox hosted (1976–1977), a Saturday-morning series for CBS, then later spent a year (1977–1978) running children's programming for NBC and eventually became a chairman of the board for Population Communications International, a nonprofit dedicated to "technical assistance, research and training consultation to governments, NGOs and foundations on a wide range of social marketing and communications initiatives", for which he is still an honorary chairman. Fox has also been a board chairman for the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Patty Duke – A child star (thanks to her Broadway portrayal of Helen Keller) when she appeared on Challenge, she eventually testified to Congressional investigators – and broke to tears when she admitted she'd been coached to speak falsely, an incident Sonny Fox described when interviewed for the PBS program reviewing the quiz scandals. Duke survived to become a television star ( The Patty Duke Show ) in the early-to-mid-'60s, before moving on to more film and television work (including a memorable role in Valley of the Dolls ), becoming an activist in the Screen Actors Guild, writing two memoirs ( Call Me Anna and A Brilliant Madness ) describing her troubled child acting career and her lifelong battle with manic depression, and becoming an advocate for better protection and benefits for child actors. She died on March 29, 2016, from Sepsis, resulting from a ruptured Intestine.
– A child star (thanks to her Broadway portrayal of Helen Keller) when she appeared on, she eventually testified to Congressional investigators – and broke to tears when she admitted she'd been coached to speak falsely, an incident Sonny Fox described when interviewed for the PBS program reviewing the quiz scandals. Duke survived to become a television star ( ) in the early-to-mid-'60s, before moving on to more film and television work (including a memorable role in ), becoming an activist in the Screen Actors Guild, writing two memoirs ( and ) describing her troubled child acting career and her lifelong battle with manic depression, and becoming an advocate for better protection and benefits for child actors. She died on March 29, 2016, from Sepsis, resulting from a ruptured Intestine. Charles Revson – Inspired by cosmetics competitor Hazel Bishop (whose sponsoring of This Is Your Life provided big sales to Bishop) to think about television sponsorship in the first place, Revson was never investigated in his own right for his role in the quiz show scandals despite testifying (as did his brother, Martin) before Congress when the scandals broke in earnest. The cosmetics empire he founded, however, continued its success – and continued to sponsor television programming – for many years after the scandals faded away. Known as a hard-driving, hard-driven perfectionist whose overbearing manner usually alienated even his closest business partners, Revson's success left him a billionaire when he died in 1975. His charitable foundation has since given over $145 Million in grants to schools, hospitals, and service organizations in various Jewish communities.
– Inspired by cosmetics competitor Hazel Bishop (whose sponsoring of provided big sales to Bishop) to think about television sponsorship in the first place, Revson was never investigated in his own right for his role in the quiz show scandals despite testifying (as did his brother, Martin) before Congress when the scandals broke in earnest. The cosmetics empire he founded, however, continued its success – and continued to sponsor television programming – for many years after the scandals faded away. Known as a hard-driving, hard-driven perfectionist whose overbearing manner usually alienated even his closest business partners, Revson's success left him a billionaire when he died in 1975. His charitable foundation has since given over $145 Million in grants to schools, hospitals, and service organizations in various Jewish communities. Dr. Joyce Brothers – Only the second contestant to win the show's big prize (after expertly thwarting numerous attempts to bump her from the show because Martin Revson was said to have disliked her and doubted her credibility as a boxing expert), Brothers has enjoyed the most enduring fame and media success among anyone who rose to prominence by way of Question. Her championship as a boxing expert led to an invitation to become a commentator for CBS' telecast of a championship boxing match between Sugar Ray Robinson and Carmen Basilio. By August 1958, Brothers was given her own television program, first locally in New York and then in national syndication. Making numerous television and radio appearances as a psychologist, not to mention numerous television comedy roles, Brothers has also written a long-running syndicated advice column in newspapers and magazines, which was used as a source for some questions on the 1998–2004 revival of Hollywood Squares. She is still considered, arguably, the first media psychologist and had been licensed by New York as a psychologist since 1958. She died from respiratory failure on May 13, 2013 at age 85.
– Only the second contestant to win the show's big prize (after expertly thwarting numerous attempts to bump her from the show because Martin Revson was said to have disliked her and doubted her credibility as a boxing expert), Brothers has enjoyed the most enduring fame and media success among anyone who rose to prominence by way of. Her championship as a boxing expert led to an invitation to become a commentator for CBS' telecast of a championship boxing match between Sugar Ray Robinson and Carmen Basilio. By August 1958, Brothers was given her own television program, first locally in New York and then in national syndication. Making numerous television and radio appearances as a psychologist, not to mention numerous television comedy roles, Brothers has also written a long-running syndicated advice column in newspapers and magazines, which was used as a source for some questions on the 1998–2004 revival of. She is still considered, arguably, the first media psychologist and had been licensed by New York as a psychologist since 1958. She died from respiratory failure on May 13, 2013 at age 85. Ralph Story – He became the much-loved host of Ralph Story's Los Angeles (1964–1970), still considered the highest-rated, best-loved local show in Los Angeles television history. Story has also hosted A.M. Los Angeles and was the narrator for the ABC series Alias Smith and Jones in 1972–1973. He died on September 26, 2006 at the age of 86.
Revivals [ edit ]
Selected PBS outlets showed surviving kinescopes of the original Question in Summer 1976, as a run-up to a new version of the show called The $128,000 Question, which ran for two years. The first season was hosted by Mike Darrow and produced at the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York City, while the second was produced at Global Television Network in Toronto, Ontario, Canada and hosted by Alex Trebek.
In 1999, television producer Michael Davies attempted to revive Question as The $640,000 Question for ABC, before abandoning that project in favor of producing an American version of the British game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?. Millionaire has a very similar format to The $64,000 Question – 15 questions (now 14) in which the contestant's money roughly doubles with each correct question until reaching the top prize. However, the questions in Millionaire are of a broader variety than Question's one-category line of questioning and have a different category for each question, contestants are allowed to leave the game with their money after a question is revealed but before it is answered, and Millionaire offers three chances for help (called "lifelines"), which were not present in Question.
In 2000, responding to the success of Millionaire, CBS bought the rights to the property in a reported effort to produce another revival attempt, The $1,064,000 Question, to be hosted by sportscaster Greg Gumbel. Because of format issues similar to those encountered by Davies for ABC, this version was never broadcast.
International versions [ edit ]
Australia [ edit ]
A similar version was successful in Australia from 1960 to 1971 on Seven Network. Initially called Coles £3000 Question, the show changed its name to Coles $6000 Question on February 14, 1966 (the date Australia converted to decimal currency) and was sponsored for most of its run by Coles Stores. In July 1971, Coles dropped its sponsorship and the show became The $7000 Question. It was hosted by Malcolm Searle (1960-1963) and Roland Strong (1963-1971).
United Kingdom [ edit ]
Mexico [ edit ]
The Mexican version, "El Gran Premio de los 64,000 pesos" lasted from 1956 to 1994 with some interruptions, changes of name to compensate peso devaluation, and changes of TV network. Most of the time it was hosted by Pedro Ferriz. A movie was made in which Ferriz asks questions to a character played by Sara García, known then as "Mexican Cinema's Granny."
Connections [ edit ]
Followed by [ edit ]
The $128,000 Question (1976)
Version of [ edit ]
Kvit eller dobbelt (1956)
(1956) Kvitt eller dobbelt (1961)
Spin off [ edit ]
The $64,000 Challenge (1956)
Spoofed in [ edit ]
In popular culture [ edit ]
When Late Night with Conan O'Brien returned on January 2, 2008, after the 2007-08 Writers Guild of America strike, Conan said in his opening monologue, "That brings us to the big $64,000 question of the evening: what do we do now?" The writers had not returned when the show came back on the air.[9]
David Carradine's character "Bill" in the Movie Kill Bill: Vol 2 (2004) references the show saying, "Now comes the $64,000 question. Why did you run away from me with my baby?" during one of his last conversations with "The Bride" (played by Uma Thurman).[10]
References [ edit ]According to Baltimore city prosecutors, Freddie Gray ended up dead in part because police officers illegally exploited their powers to seize and detain even innocent citizens.
This week, one of the six officers charged in the case pushed back on that claim, demanding that prosecutors prove that the arrest of Mr. Gray was incorrect. At issue is whether the small, spring-assisted pocket knife Gray was carrying is actually illegal.
The debate over why Gray ended up in police custody – where he suffered a fatal neck injury – speaks to a primary grievance echoed in protests from New York to Baltimore in recent months: that laws intended to protect everyone are often used to hassle certain citizens, but not others.
The string of fatal police encounters that have begun from infractions such as jaywalking in Ferguson, Mo., and selling cigarettes in Staten Island is raising questions about the limits of police power. The incidents have highlighted the claim that the level of deference shown to police by both American society and the courts has had a negative effect on relations with poor communities.
Courts have given police officers “fair leeway” to make mistakes in their enforcement of the law, including a United States Supreme Court decision on the subject in December. This is necessary “for enforcing the law in the community’s protection,” the high court said.
But the concern raised in Baltimore is that this power has been abused during the tough-on-crime era that emerged in New York in the 1990s and spread nationwide.
“The problem is, when we expand an officer’s right to intrude into our lives, there’s always the question of the appropriate use of discretion,” says Rob Kane, a criminologist at Drexel University in Philadelphia who specializes in police authority. People “are taking pause [after Freddie Gray's death]... because social science evidence shows that police are going to be most prone to abuse that discretion in disenfranchised neighborhoods.”
Knives have been a favorite target for police under political pressure to clean up the streets, argues Jon Campbell of the Village Voice. Seizing a particular kind of knife has been a cornerstone of New York City’s “stop and frisk” policy, which allows officers to frisk anyone who they reasonably think might be breaking the law.
In an earlier article, he notes:
About 80 percent of weapons recovered under stop-and-frisk were knives, according to an analysis of the department's own statistics. And experts say the vast majority of those were likely misclassified as [illegal]. Whether deliberate or not, dramatically expanding the definition of an illegal knife has not only landed thousands of innocent people in jail – it also had the effect of making stop-and-frisk appear far more effective than it actually was.
In 2013, Bill de Blasio ran for mayor of New York on a platform of reforming stop and frisk. He won with strong support from minority communities.
Meanwhile, in the mid-2000s heyday of zero-tolerance policing in Baltimore, 1 in 3 arrests were thrown out by prosecutors for having "insufficient evidence," according to state attorney data compiled by the American Civil Liberties Union for a 2006 civil rights lawsuit. The ACLU suit didn't compare the data with other cities, but at the time a senior ACLU attorney in Maryland called the numbers "unmatched by any other city that I know of."
For her part, Maryland state prosecutor Marilyn Mosby has said that Gray’s knife was legal. Maryland and Baltimore law prohibit “automatic” knives such as switchblades. Gray’s knife was described by police as a “spring-assisted” folding knife, meaning that it’s not “automatic” but that the folding blade has to be partially moved via a thumb tab before the spring completes the opening motion.
Admittedly, there is widespread confusion across America about which knives are legal. In the past four years, 11 states have ended bans on the kinds of new folding knives carried by Gray.
The Baltimore police union says the officers in the Gray case acted correctly and did nothing to unduly harm him while he was in custody. The union suggests that the prosecution rushed to judgment in a case that amounts to a tragic accident.
The officers’ argument, at least regarding the arrest itself, has merit, legal experts say.
Under the current legal standard in the US, “it seems reasonable to allow police officers to make errors of law when trying to decide whether a person’s behavior or instruments they possess are illegal,” says Professor Kane.
Officer Edward Nero, who helped capture the fleeing Gray, filed motions on Monday for prosecutors to present the knife for inspection. He argues that it is illegal, negating the false imprisonment charge against him. (He’s also been charged with assault and misconduct in office.) Up to this point, prosecutors have declined demands from the Associated Press to release pictures of the knife.
But in the end, the charges of illegal imprisonment, may not hinge on the details of Maryland’s knife law. Instead, the question may be one of whether officers are legally liable for knowing the exact wording of laws. Even if objective observers would declare Gray’s knife legal, “is it still unreasonable for the officer to think that it could be an illegal knife? That’s a close call,” says David Gray, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law.
In Heien v. North Carolina, the Supreme Court ruled in December that US cops are allowed to make such “reasonable mistakes of the law.” A motorist was mistakenly pulled over for having one brake light out, even though that was legal under state law. A search of the car found cocaine.
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The motorist claimed police had no reason to pull him over. The Supreme Court sided with the officer. “The question here is whether reasonable suspicion can rest on a mistaken understanding of the scope of a legal prohibition,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court in the 8-to-1 decision. “We hold that it can.”
In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked where that left everyday citizens: “One wonders how a citizen seeking to be law-abiding and to structure his or her behavior to avoid these invasive, frightening, and humiliating encounters [with police] could do so.”Nekketsu Oyako is a “theme park” beat `em up for the Sega Saturn.
Nekketsu Oyako Images
Data
Alternate Titles 熱血親子 Genre Beat `em up # of Players 1-2 Developer(s) Technosoft Publisher(s) Technosoft Release Dates July 21st, 1995 (JP) Release Prices ¥ 5,800 (JP) Product IDs T-1802G (JP) Barcodes 4907095000426 (JP) Rating Suitable for All Ages
Nekketsu Oyako Overview
Nekketsu Oyako (熱血親子) is a port of the PlayStation 1 launch game of the same name by Technosoft. It’s a fairly decent game along the lines of Final Fight or Streets of Rage. Which is great because you’ve likely already played them and want to try something different, and there’s not much like those games on the Sega Saturn.
If I had to describe Oyako in an incredibly succinct manner, it would be “theme park beat `em up.” It’s strength is it’s sense of humor, with crazy enemies and stages for you to fight and experience.
What other head buster features stages on the back of a whale, or in it’s stomach? What game then has you fighting multi-armed oceanic enemies with boxing gloves on inside of said whale? Yeah, Oyako is pretty much in a class by itself.
My biggest problem with the game is the heavy usage of mesh transparencies. We all know the Saturn relied on them hard, but here their constant usage is a bit jarring. I would prefer flickering sprites or any other technique, personally.
That aside, Oyako is a fairly fun ride at least the first couple of times. I’m not the biggest fan of the genre, often getting bored halfway through most of them. This one had enough interesting things for me to see through the end.
Nekketsu Oyako Screenshots
Nekketsu Oyako Videos
Nekketsu Oyako [Saturn] by TechnoSoft [HD] [1080p]
Watch this video on YouTube
Other Media
A print ad for the game ran in some Japanese gaming magazines.
Cheats & Secrets
Game Shark Codes
Master Code F6000914 C305 Infinite Time 3609E133 0063 Infinite Lives P1 3606B955 0063 Infinite Lives P2 3606BA59 0063 Invincible P1 (Flashing) 3606B9BB 00FF Invincible P2 (Flashing) 3606BABF 00FF Infinite Health P1 3606B957 0068 Infinite Health P2 3606BA5B 0068
External Links
Discuss this game on our forums!
Search for the game on eBay
Special Thanks / Sources
-Game Shark codes thanks to Helder.I don’t know whether Steve Bannon has a long-term future in the White House, but I do know this:
The press wants him out.
There has been an almost obsessive focus with the fate of President Trump’s chief strategist, and the tone of the stories about the internal battles is unmistakable.
Bannon is the wild man, the extremist, the nationalist who is pulling the president in the wrong direction. He is fighting the moderates, the realists, the gang led by Jared Kushner that is nudging the president in a more reasonable direction.
And the Kushner faction, which includes a couple of Wall Street veterans, happens to favor the kind of compromises that most journalists want.
As an added bonus, Bannon has made no secret of his loathing for the press. So there’s an element of payback here as well.
I’m not minimizing the importance of these battles. Since Trump is not a fiercely ideological leader, the voices he listens to may well shape the future of his administration.
But there is a tendency in some media quarters to depict the combative Bannon as a Svengali who is pulling the president’s strings. The reality is that Trump was sounding nationalist themes, especially on trade and economic issues, decades ago. The reality is that Bannon joined the campaign for the final 2-1/2 months.
That is not to minimize his importance as a force in the White House. Trump respects Bannon as a former Goldman Sachs executive and Hollywood entrepreneur who made his own fortune. But Trump is at heart a dealmaker who prides himself on flexibility.
It’s also true that the president wants to be the star of his own show. Bannon hasn’t exactly sought a high profile, passing up every television interview request since he joined the campaign. But the Time magazine cover on him—“The Great Manipulator”—didn’t please the boss.
The infighting, waged through constant leaks to the press, is all too real and goes well beyond Bannon. But the friction between Bannon and Kushner reached the point where Trump told them to work things out, or he would do it for them. And a son-in-law tends not to lose that kind of battle.
A couple of presidential interviews this week have fueled the notion that Bannon is on thin ice. Trump told the Wall Street Journal that Bannon is “a guy who works for me.”
And the president said this to New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin: “I like Steve, but you have to remember he was not involved in my campaign until very late. I had already beaten all the senators and all the governors, and I didn’t know Steve. I’m my own strategist.”
To me, that’s a bit of a brushback pitch to remind Bannon that hey, he’s staff, and that it was Trump that got Trump elected.
But the Washington Post says Bannon has been “publicly humiliated by his boss.”
The paper called him “a marked man,” and then used this medical metaphor:
“The president’s comments were described by White House officials as a dressing-down and warning shot, though one Bannon friend, reflecting on them Wednesday, likened Bannon to a terminally ill family member who had been moved into hospice care.”
There were also leaked and damaging assessments in the New York Times, which said Bannon is keeping a low profile due to his “isolation inside the White House,” with aides describing Trump’s “growing irritation” with all the credit he is getting.
And this zinger, quoting a source as saying Trump has described Bannon as “not a team player.”
But for all the journalistic drama, both papers get around to acknowledging that nothing may change.
The Post: “For now, at least, Bannon may survive the turmoil.”
The Times: “One person with firsthand knowledge of internal White House dynamics…insisted that no immediate changes were likely.”
Ah. Never mind.
Bannon is a symbol. To many Trump supporters, he represents the defiant, revolutionary conservatism they want from the president. To many Trump detractors, and many media types, he represents an undisciplined, extremist ideology--a pirate, in Newt Gingrich's word. It's still unclear whether he'll ultimately have to walk the plank.LITTLE ROCK — Former federal prosecutor Conner Eldridge says he's considering challenging Republican U.S. Sen. John Boozman in Arkansas next year and plans to make a decision in the coming weeks.
Eldridge on Monday said he's considering running for the Democratic nomination for the Senate seat held by Boozman, who was first elected in 2010 and is seeking a second term.
Eldridge stepped down as the U.S. attorney for the western district of Arkansas earlier this month after widespread speculation he was weighing a Senate bid. He was appointed to the post in 2010. His last day on the job was Friday.
Eldridge faces an uphill battle in Arkansas, where Republicans have swept statewide and federal offices in recent elections by tying Democrats to President Barack Obama.
Read Tuesday's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for full details.During his GAME24 keynote, NVIDIA’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang revealed that more than ten million gamers have bought into the GTX680 class of GPUs. Now that’s a huge number, right? Well, this may not actually be what most of you expect, as Jen-Hsun presented that sales number in a way that both a) makes sense and b) sounds huge.
Before discussing this number, let’s see Jen-Hsun’s actual quote from his keynote:
“There are ten million gamers around the world who bought into the GTX680 class of GPUs”
The key point here is the ‘GTX680 class’. So, what is a GTX680 class GPU? Our guess is that en-Hsun was using the ‘GTX680 class’ term in regard to the chipset itself (GK104) and not to the actual performance. In other words, this basically means that ten million gamers have bought a GTX680 reference model, GTX680 OCed models, GTX660, GTX670 or a GTX690.
Still, that’s a pretty big number, and shows that PC gaming is far from dead. After all, it doesn’t really shock us that more and more console-only games are coming to the PC. PC – thanks mainly to Steam – is a huge market at this point and it’s only natural to see Namco Bandai, Konami and other console-only studios start supporting it.
In case you missed NVIDIA’s keynote, you can view it below!In a fast-evolving world, data is essential to good decision making. This makes accessibility paramount AND the utmost security is the universal expectation. What a paradox we’ve created. Data is valuable because of the insights we can derive from it. But, we must also make sure data stays secure to protect privacy. A flexible governance approach maximizes data across an organization. What does this look like? It’s the incorporation of proper user access control, and/or role-based access to data. Vital to this data access is its classification.
So how do you do that? Working for a marketing agency, I have access to a lot of different sources of data. We work with all types of clients and industries. The data I am sifting through is often tied to finance, government, and higher education. Once we have access, we are usually held accountable for what happens to this data while it’s in our possession. In our case, data is only accessible by the relevant department. The passwords for client WordPress sites are only given to developers and marketers. This isn’t the case for all data in our organization. Data with a high risk potential is more strictly guarded. Our data governance process is one that is reliable and effective.
Defining Data Governance
Data governance is not a ‘one size fits all’ system. Your organization will need a strategy this is as unique as you are. Small organizations can afford to grant data access to users faster, due to size. Bigger organizations should follow a more rigid process. The Data Governance Framework laid out by the Data Governance Institute is a good place to start. They describe this framework as a “logical structure” for data organization and activities. This is especially true with regards to “making decisions and taking action on…data.” Here’s their visual chart of the framework in action:
Applying this framework assigns rigorous accountability. It also provides a clear process for making decisions. But, it does have a drawback. This kind of strict governance leaves little room for flexibility. Unfortunately, this slows down decision making. In short, strict processes can have a monetary impact on an organization in the short term.
Better Governance through Data Classification
To strike the right balance, consider the classification of your data. Not all data is equal, so not all data needs to adhere to the strictest of controls. How do you know the difference? What data needs high levels of governance vs standard governance? At Atlantic BT, we refer to the Federal Information Processing Standards. This document covers the categorization of information. It also covers information systems as seen in this chart:
An informal governance framework will be best for data that is low risk. The odds of it compromising confidentiality and integrity are small. This kind of data does not need to follow strict governance for user access. Stakeholders can then access this data with ease. As a result, faster and better decisions can occur with minimal risk.
Who has accessibility to what data?
A subset of governance is security through user access controls. User access controls are like role-based access. There are restrictions to data with regards to who actually needs to use/see it. For example: marketer 1 works for client A but not client B, so she has access |
not understand the history behind the Hyde Amendment, most Americans support its policy.
“A national poll conducted by Marist in January found that taxpayer funding of abortion is opposed by nearly seven in 10 Americans,” Plaster said.
“This year we sense that what our culture most needs is hope.” —@jeannemfl
Plaster said she feels this to be the case because she believes many Americans have come to think that abortion is not health care.
“While we can’t know for certain each of the reasons that seven in 10 Americans oppose tax-funded abortion, perhaps we can safely say that Americans simply understand that it goes beyond simply access to health care,” Plaster said.
While Hyde didn’t accomplish all of his pro-life goals. Mancini said, he exemplifies what everyone should aspire to become, since building a legacy in “the power of one” will look different for each person:
My understanding is that [Hyde] had a dream of passing a constitutional amendment that would make abortion illegal and recognize the dignity of the the human person from conception. This was his dream and he felt like he was a failure because that did not successfully pass in the ’70s. And so what he did instead was he introduced a rider [that] has been the most impactful pro-life legislation, literally saving millions of lives.
Mancini said her goal is to begin celebrating Hyde’s legacy now so that by the time the 43rd annual March for Life arrives in January, attendees will be able to appreciate and aspire to replicate his witness.
“So what I would encourage as we’re celebrating ‘the power of one’ and beginning to think about that a little bit more as our theme this year, that we would take our cues from … Henry Hyde, who embodied this theme so beautifully,” Mancini said. “And so what we’re going to do is listen to him and his words.”
This article has been updated to clarify when the next March for Life will occur.Australian Bureau of Statistics promises not to send out questions to voters before 12 September
The full bench of the high court will hear challenges to the proposed same-sex marriage postal vote next month, just days before ballots are sent to Australian homes.
Chief Justice Susan Kiefel set down the matter to come before the court on 5 and 6 September. The ABS has given an undertaking it would not send out voting forms any time before 12 September.
A directions hearing into the challenges will be heard next week.
Two separate challenges have been brought against the postal vote: one by independent MP Andrew Wilkie, marriage equality advocate Felicity Marlowe, and Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays Brisbane; the second by Australian Marriage Equality and Victorian Greens Senator Janet Rice.
Both argue that the government is acting unconstitutionally in appropriating $122m for the vote and ordering the Australian Bureau of Statistics to run the postal survey.
Keifel CJ said the court was seized of the urgency of the matter. The government has nominated 12 September as the beginning of the postal survey mail-out.
“It goes without saying … that the timetable is incredibly tight and the parties will need to adhere to it scrupulously,” Kiefel CJ said.
Outside court in Sydney, Anna Brown said there were important questions about the lawfulness of the postal survey.
“It is appropriate for the High Court to consider them,” Brown said.
“All Australians should have the same opportunities for love, commitment and happiness. Australians don’t want more excuses or delaying tactics – we want marriage equality.”
The challenges will argue the government cannot appropriate $122m for the postal survey as either ordinary government business, or as “unforeseen circumstances”.
Submissions to the court say the government first sought legal advice on a postal vote as long ago as March, months before the May budget, and has not passed legislation to appropriate money for the postal vote.
Australian Marriage Equality co-chair Alex Greenwich said he was encouraged the High Court had chosen to hear the case, and quickly, reflecting the importance of the issue to the Australian people.
Greens Senator Janet Rice, party to one of the challenges, said the government’s plebiscite had been twice rejected by the Senate, and that the government was now seeking to subvert the will of the parliament by proceeding with a plebiscite without parliamentary approval.
Also on Friday, the Turnbull government moved to address various concerns about the integrity of the postal survey.
Acting special minister of state, Mathias Cormann, reached out to Labor and the Greens offering to extend electoral law provisions banning misleading information, fraud, bribery and intimidation to protect the survey.
Concerns have been raised that silent electors, who can vote in ordinary elections but whose addresses are not recorded on the roll, could be disenfranchised. Cormann said the government was committed to ensuring “all Australia on the election roll, including silent electors, have the opportunity to have their say”.
“The ABS will make further announcements in relation to this as soon as arrangements have been finalised.”
Labor also questioned whether the government had accidentally allowed 16 and 17 year olds to vote in the poll. According to the relevant legislative instrument made by treasurer, Scott Morrison, people who have made “valid applications for enrolment on the Commonwealth electoral roll before the end of 24 August 2017” will be entitled to vote.
Under the Electoral Act Australians aged 16 and 17 are allowed to make a “claim for enrolment” which results in provisional enrolment. Labor believes this may mean 16 and 17 year olds are entitled to vote in the same-sex marriage survey.
It comes as the Equality Campaign, run by Australian Marriage Equality, launched on Friday, just days after AME co-chair Alex Greenwich refused to rule out a boycott.
The executive director of the Equality Campaign, Tiernan Brady, said if the postal survey goes ahead “we are in this to win this”.
“We owe it to the hundreds of thousands of LGBTI people across Australia who want the same dignity as everyone else and... to the vast majority of Australians who have long felt that marriage equality should be the law of our land,” he said.
Brady urged people to enrol to vote, describing it as “part of the unfair process” that Australians, especially young people, would have just 12 days to enrol or update their enrolment.
Greenwich said that marriage equality advocates had a “duty of care and responsibility” to campaign and achieve marriage equality by the end of the year.LOS ANGELES — After 18 years and 400 episodes, you might think you know everything about "The Simpsons." But, on the verge of the show's movie debut this weekend, the creators and voice talents gave us the scoop on Springfield — a town that has nearly as many secrets as it does citizens who've met their tragic demise riding the Escalator to Nowhere. So hold onto your Duffman hat and get ready to let out a few Frink-like exclamations, as we present the "Simpsons" trivia that even the most loyal geeks don't know.
(Watch "Simpsons" creator Matt Groening and Executive Producer James L. Brooks address burning questions about the classic series.)
Eat My Catchphrase — "Well, 'Eat my shorts,' that was an ad-lib that I did in one of the earlier table reads," revealed Nancy Cartwright, who voices Bart. "It's something that I said when I was in the marching band in high school. We would march from the high school to the football stadium [and were supposed to chant] 'Fairmont West! Fairmont West!' but it changed my senior year to 'Eat my shorts!' " Laughing, she added: "Only the people that were sitting in the front row could get what we were saying."
3AT MY 5H0RT5 — While most celebs in L.A. hide behind tinted windows, Cartwright embraces her notoriety to the point where her convertible car has vanity plates featuring one of Bart's catchphrases (and no, it's not 3AT MY 5H0RT5). "That's Nancy," laughed Yeardley Smith, who voices Lisa. "She's way out there."
The Man Behind Artie Ziff — "When I did 'The Way We Was' episode, I went through my high school yearbook for character ideas and designs because that was the period we were parodying," series and movie director David Silverman remembered. "And [Homer's high school rival] Artie Ziff is based on a friend of mine — the way he looked and the way he dressed. The guy's named Michael... wow, I forget his name now," Silverman laughed. "I haven't seen him in a long time, but it is based on him... and he definitely knows this."
The Man Who Lived... Twice — The "Simpsons Movie" features the death of a prominent Springfield resident, but don't shed too many tears, warns executive producer James L. Brooks. "There is a rebirth that might have to take place soon [on the show]," he hinted. "Yeah, that's right," added executive producer Al Jean, saying that they'll bring the character back à la Dr. Marvin Monroe. "I won't say who it is that dies. But he does say, 'Bye everybody!' "
A Secret Identity Revealed! — After years of anticipation, a "Simpsons" episode revealed the Comic Book Guy's name to be Jeff Albertson. Matt Groening, however, invokes his rights as creator to contradict that plot point. "I had a different, much more tragic design, but I was out of the room when [the writers] named him," insisted Groening, revealing the character's stalker tendencies. "In my mind, 'Louis Lane' was his name, and he was obsessed and tormented by Lois Lane."
An Odd Coupling — As those who've seen the early "Simpsons" shorts know, Homer's voice was originally modeled after a famous actor. "I started doing Walter Matthau back when we were doing the one-minute things on 'The Tracey Ullman Show,' " remembered Dan Castellaneta, who voices Homer. "But once we started doing the show, we'd do nine to 10 hours of recording, and I couldn't sustain that voice over that period of time. So, I had to find something a little more comfortable to do." Added Castellaneta: "I never met Walter Matthau, unfortunately, but he was one of my favorite actors."
Not That There's Anything Wrong With That — Once and for all, Silverman set the record straight on Homer's co-workers' overly friendly relationship, saying: "Lenny and Carl are very good friends, and [whether they're gay] depends on the show... part of the joke is you think they are, and then they talk about their girlfriends." As for Waylon Smithers? "That cat's almost out of the bag," he laughed. "But [Smithers] seems to be focused on one particular human, as opposed to anything beyond that. [Rather than being gay], he's sort of 'Burns-sexual.' "
Todd and Mr. Peabody — "Todd Flanders' voice is like Sherman from 'Mr. Peabody and Sherman,' " revealed Cartwright, whose love for the "Rocky and Bullwinkle" segment also yielded a cameo by those characters in the "Treehouse of Horror V" episode. "Todd turned out to be sort of like Sherman," she laughed, doing the voice: "Yes, Professor!"
Homer the Clown? — Herschel Pinkus Yerucham Krustofski might be better known as Krusty the Clown, but when Groening looks at the character, he still can't help but think of Homer. "Krusty the Clown was originally Homer Simpson's secret identity," he grinned, remembering an early episode that was supposed to have Homer dressing up like a clown. (Homer actually became a Krusty impersonator in season six's "Homie the Clown.") "If you look at the basic design of the clown, it's just Homer's body clowned out."
It Tastes Like... A Comedy Legend — "Ralph Wiggum is named after Ralph Kramden," Jean revealed. "We were trying to write up this character who is a doofus kid, and we loved 'The Honeymooners,' so we threw that in."
Bart's Secret Phobia — What's the best "Simpsons" deleted scene of all time? "There was a scene where Bart got trapped in a mummy sarcophagus," Jean remembered, offering up his favorite. "Marge is outraged, but Homer says, 'That boy has got to get over his fear of coffins!' It was cut from the movie, but it will be in a show this fall."
Moe Szyslak vs. the FCC — When Hank Azaria and the other voice talents record their lines, they swear — a lot. "Somewhere in the archives, there's a tape of each of the characters swearing expletives, including Lisa," Smith said. "I think the outtakes of 'The Simpsons' would be a phenomenal DVD extra."
What a Way to Make a Living — Homer has held 188 jobs over the show's run. "Well, those are side jobs — he's worked at the nuclear plant forever," Brooks laughed. "That's his steady gig — let's call it one job and 187 part-time jobs."
Bob's Your Uncle — "What movie did 'Sideshow Bob' Terwilliger get his name from? 'The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T.,' " said Castellaneta, citing a 1953 cult classic. "The character's name is Dr. Terwilliker, an evil piano teacher. That's where Matt got the name." Despite the fact that the names are spelled different and fans have long believed Krusty's evil sidekick is named after a street in Oregon, the voice of Krusty says he and Groening are both big fans of the flick.
A Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy — Ever notice how many "Simpsons" characters are southpaws? "That was a tribute to me, and everyone else who is left-handed," Groening chuckled. Added Silverman: "Bart is left-handed, and that led to Flanders being left-handed, which led to the Leftorium."
Bizarro Bart and Lisa — Two decades ago, Cartwright and Smith read for each other's future roles — so, what would Springfield be like if Bart and Lisa switched vocalists? "Oh! I wouldn't be here!" Cartwright insisted. "There's no way I would have been cast as Lisa Simpson!" Smith tells a similar story: "I always sounded too much like a girl," she grinned. "I read two lines as Bart and they said, 'Thanks for coming!' "
Check out everything we've got on "The Simpsons Movie."
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Want trailers? Visit the Trailer Park for the newest, scariest and funniest coming attractions anywhere.A radar estimate for rainfall in the area of the sinkhole was 6.7 inches Saturday.
Flash flooding along Southwest College Road in Ocala Saturday afternoon caused waist-deep flooding in the Shady Oaks Shopping Center parking lot.
At the same time a sinkhole swallowed a car across the highway in the parking lot of the Checkers restaurant.
The sinkhole ruptured a gas line, and Gaitway Plaza, at 2701 SW College Road, had to be evacuated. By 7 p.m., officials with TECO Peoples Gas had clamped the line.
Star-Banner photographer Doug Engle was in Earth Fare at the time of the heavy rainfall between 4:45 and 5 p.m.
At about 5 p.m., he said, everybody was standing near the doorway looking at the flooded parking lot. One young woman walked out to her car near the CVS pharmacy. When she started across, he said, the water was up to her ankles, but when she reached the car it was waist deep.
Engle estimated that about a dozen cars had water above the floor boards.
He left the store sometime after 5:20 p.m., after Ocala Fire Rescue crews had arrived. The water, however, was not receding quickly.
Across Southwest College Road — also known as State Road 200 — Vincent and Janet Coyne, of Ocala, had just gotten their food from the drive-through at Checkers. They were about to leave the parking lot when the front end of their 2014 Kia Optima hybrid suddenly dropped.
Janet Coyne, 79, said she was screaming and jumped out of the car as quickly as she could. Her 81-year-old husband also got out fast.
Officials described the sinkhole as about 25 feet deep and 25 feet wide. The gaping hole attracted multiple onlookers and those driving by who snapped scores of pictures using their cellphones.
During the gas leak, several roads in the area were closed off by Ocala Police officers who diverted traffic. But after the line was clamped, the roads and the plaza were reopened.
An official with TECO said they would have to wait until the car was removed to see what repairs were needed and make sure there were no more leaks.
National Weather Service meteorologist Phil Peterson in Jacksonville said a small frontal boundary and the East Coast sea breeze came together to cause the heavy rains.
A radar estimate of rainfall in the area of the sinkhole was 6.7 inches Saturday, he said. That area was from southwest Ocala toward Santos, especially closer to Santos.
A gauge in the Bellechase neighborhood showed 4.85 inches, Peterson said. The rain fell between 4 and 5:30 p.m.
As to what may have caused the sinkhole, an Ocala city official said it appeared the limerock that is underneath the drainage system eroded, causing it to collapse and form a hole. The official said since the hole is on private property, city officials and the vehicle's owner would meet to discuss how they are going to remove the car from the large deep ditch. Then, they will have to get a contractor to assess the damage and fix the hole.
The official said no utilities were in danger and a Department of Transportation official told them that the nearby roadway is safe.
Until the repairs can be done and the vehicle removed, the official said barricades set up around the hole and the restaurant would remain to keep people from entering the area.
Fire officials said with the parking lot flooding across the street, it appears the drainage was overwhelmed by the rain and therefore could not hold the amount of water that was gushing into the system.
Contact Austin L. Miller at 867-4118, austin.miller@starbanner.com or @almillerosb.Experts raise concerns over waste stored in the open air at Europe’s largest nuclear power station, as the conflict increases Ukraine’s reliance on power from its ageing plants
Concerns have been raised by environmentalists and atomic power experts over the way waste is being stored at Europe’s largest nuclear power station, in crisis-ridden Ukraine.
More than 3,000 spent nuclear fuel rods are kept inside metal casks within towering concrete containers in an open-air yard close to a perimeter fence at Zaporizhia, the Guardian discovered on a recent visit to the plant, which is 124 miles (200km) from the current front line.
“With a war around the corner, it is shocking that the spent fuel rod containers are standing under the open sky, with just a metal gate and some security guards waltzing up and down for protection,” said Patricia Lorenz, a Friends of the Earth nuclear spokeswoman who visited the plant on a fact-finding mission.
“I have never seen anything like it,” she added. “It is unheard of when, in Germany, interim storage operators have been ordered by the court to terror-proof their casks with roofs and reinforced walls.”
Industry experts said that ideally the waste store would have a secondary containment system such as a roof.
Ukraine’s conflict in Donbass is 124 miles away from the plant, but Gustav Gressel, a fellow at the European Council of Foreign Relations thinks the front line is too far away – for now – to be at risk from fighting.
However, locals still fear for the potential consequences if the conflict was to spread in the plant’s direction. Just three decades ago, an explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant north of Kiev released a radioactive cloud that poisoned vast tracts of land.
“People are scared because the conflict zone is quite near,” Vasiliy Ivanovic, a former policeman turned environmental volunteer told the Guardian. “If Putin wants to connect Russia to the Crimea, the route goes through Mariupol. The Russian troops are already near there, and they have missiles that could hit the power plant.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Entrance to Zaporizhia nuclear power station Photograph: Igor Chekachkov for The Guardian
Ukrainian forces repelled attacks by Russian-backed separatist rebels in Mariupol a year ago, but two Ukrainian troops were injured during clashes in the strategic port city earlier this month.
Any separatist offensive in the region could threaten the Zaporizhia plant because of Russian military tactics. Initial barrages against frontline positions are often followed with bombardments of possible lines of defence.
“The Russians use a large amount of multiple rocket-propelled systems that are not entirely precise, and they don’t really care where they land,” said Gressel.
The Zaporizhia plant might itself be used as a defensive position by fleeing Ukrainian soldiers he said, adding: “Of course, there could be a natural disaster if the fighting comes there.”
Given the current state of warfare, I cannot say what could be done to completely protect installations from attack Sergiy Bozhko
Plant security at Zaporizhia is now at a ‘high readiness’ level, while air force protection and training exercises have been stepped up. Officials say that if fighting reaches the plant, there are plans for the closure of access roads and deployment of soldiers.
But they say that no containment design could take the stresses of military conflict into account. “Given the current state of warfare, I cannot say what could be done to completely protect installations from attack, except to build them on Mars,” Sergiy Bozhko, the chairman of the State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate of Ukraine (SNRIU) told the Guardian.
“Ukraine’s plan is to withstand and win,” he added.
Spent fuel rod containers in the open air. Photograph: The Guardian
Zaporizhia’s storage unit was built to a US design specification that involved rigorous testing for the possibility of a terrorist attack.
The US Sandia Lab tests considered scenarios up to airliner impact, although the results remain classified, Neil Hyatt, a professor of radioactive waste management at Sheffield University, told the Guardian.
However, a dry storage container with a resilient roof and in-house ventilation would offer greater protection from missile bombardment, he said – so long as the structure was designed that way from the start. “You would need to prepare adequate foundations to accommodate the substantive structure required, so I doubt this could be retrofitted at Zaporoizhia with the casks in place,” Hyatt said. “You would need to build a [new] purpose structure and then move the casks to the structure.”
Antony Froggatt, a senior research fellow and European nuclear specialist at Chatham House agreed that a secondary containment system would offer greater protection from internal or external explosions.
“It is obvious that if you do not have an array of dry cast [interim] stores with secondary containment around it, then that will have a greater risk of release of radioactive material,” he said.
But installing these would “be a very expensive decision,” according to Nikolai Steinberg, a prominent Ukrainian nuclear expert and former energy vice-minister. “I think it is not necessary,” he said.
Sources at the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) told the Guardian that any funding request from Ukraine for such a structure would be seriously considered. The bank has already made €300m available for nuclear lifetime extension programmes in Ukraine, before the regulators have even signed off on them.
We know about the weak links in the plant [security]... But I doubt that that these should be disclosed
A pall was cast over security arrangements at Zaporizhia last May when the plant was the scene of an armed confrontation between security guards and paramilitaries from the ultra-nationalist ‘right sector’, which is allied with neo-Nazi groups. The gunmen reportedly wanted to ‘protect’ the plant from pro-Russian forces, but were stopped by guards at a checkpoint.
“We have several risky nuclear materials [at Zaporizhia],” said Sergei Shegin, the plant’s chief reactor specialist. “As well as the reactors, we have spent nuclear fuel and all possible measures should be taken. As technical specialists, we know about the weak links in the plant [security], and there are some. But I doubt that these should be disclosed.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Zaporizhia plant and surrounding villages. Photograph: Igor Chekachkov for The Guardian
Around 770,000 people live in the city of Zaporizhia and safety issues have risen to the fore among local people. Most support the reactor for the jobs it provides, but environmental concerns have grown since a plant shutdown in December amid rumours of a radiation leak, which were denied by the company.
The share of Ukrainian electricity provided by nuclear rose by around 10% in the last year, as conflict in the Donbass region threw Russian gas supplies into doubt.
Coal supplies too had to be tortuously re-routed from Ukraine’s east through Russia, to keep up a pretence they are being sourced internationally and avoid the impression of buying energy direct from the separatist rebels who are fighting Ukrainian soldiers.
As a result, uranium fuel supplies are fast becoming a new east-west battlefield in the post-Soviet great energy game.
Nuclear fuel is the only sphere in which cooperation remains friendly because Ukraine is one of Russia’s biggest clients
“Nuclear energy is the only possible option for us to replace the generated electricity that we lost [from coal and gas],” a government source told the Guardian. “After the start of open war with Russia, it was understood that all our other strategies in the energy sphere would become impossible.”
Some 60% of Ukraine’s electricity is now produced by 15 ageing reactors – concentrated in four giant plants. Nine of these will reach the end of their design lifetimes in the next five years, and three have already.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Graffiti in Energodar town close to the Zaporizhia plant. Photograph: Igor Chekachkov/Igor Chekachkov for The Guardian
Most of Ukraine’s nuclear fleet depends on Russia’s Rosatom to supply its enriched uranium fuel – and to whisk away the resulting radioactive waste for storage.
“Nuclear fuel is the only sphere in which cooperation remains friendly, constructive and successful because Ukraine is one of Russia’s biggest clients,” said Roman Rukomeda, a political analyst. “It is an issue of money.”
But as fear and loathing in the war-torn region grow, government sources say that in the long term, Ukraine aims to forge a three-way split in nuclear fuel supply contracts between US-company Westinghouse, European companies, such as Areva, and Rosatom. This creates its own safety issues.
One key Ukrainian reactor will be mothballed next month, until concerns about nuclear fuel provided by Westinghouse have been resolved.
Chernobyl arch faces €265m funding gap ahead of disaster's 29th anniversary Read more
The 1,000MW Chernobyl-era reactor in the South Ukraine plant was last week denied a lifetime extension until the state energy company, Energoatom, provides data to the SNRIU nuclear watchdog about Westinghouse fuel trials, operations and core reactor conditions afterwards.
The regulator listed several other safety limitations and deficiencies brought on by the plant’s ageing components, including 33 ‘deviations’ from current nuclear and radiation safety norms.
With war and an energy tilt to the West narrowing energy security options though, the shutdown is expected to be short-lived.
Security sources say that Rosatom may remain Kiev’s biggest single partner but it will definitely lose its monopoly in the years ahead, and Westinghouse’s share of uranium fuel supplies will grow.
Last December, the US firm signed a memo with Ukraine to “significantly increase fuel deliveries” to Ukrainian plants, though the details are sketchy. A similar deal was signed with the French nuclear company Areva on 24 April.
But fears of Russian retaliation have dogged past plans to shift supply or disposal contracts to the West, and market diversification will be a slow process.
“There is always a threat that it can become a political issue and Russia could stop their contracts,” one source said. “The Americans are proposing that their company Westinghouse substitute for Rosatom, but warning us that it will take one or two years to produce the fuel, so we will need at least one year’s supply in storage.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Picture of Zaporizhia power station in a hotel in Energodar. Photograph: Igor Chekachkov for The Guardian
The US has provided technology, training and hundreds of millions of dollars to help Ukraine’s push for fuel diversification, according to a US diplomatic cable from 2009, published by Wikileaks.
Westinghouse has also lobbied the Ukrainian government at ministerial level to commit to buying their fuel for at least five reactors. Plant managers say that it will be used in Zaporizhia by 2017.
But local people in the reactor’s shadow say they fear the consequences of a patched up Soviet-era plant cranking up to generate electricity into the 2020s.
“History teaches us that history doesn’t teach us anything,” Ivanovic said. “Another catastrophe could happen again.”Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Jan. 16, 2017, 11:37 AM GMT / Updated Jan. 16, 2017, 6:02 PM GMT By F. Brinley Bruton, Kurt Chirbas, Rima Abdelkader and Daniella Silva
Five people were killed when a lone gunman opened fire during an electronic dance music festival at a Mexican resort popular with foreign tourists, authorities said Monday.
"Five people died, four men and one woman," the attorney general of the Mexican state of Quintana Roo said on Facebook Monday morning.
A man with a gun attempted to enter Blue Parrot nightclub in Playa Del Carmen at around 2:30 a.m. Monday but was denied entrance by event security, causing him to open fire, the attorney general said.
The four male victims died from gunshot wounds and the woman appeared to have been killed in a stampede of people as club goers fled the shooting, Attorney General Miguel Angel Pech said at a press conference later Monday. Three of the dead were security personnel.
The victims included two Canadians, one Italian and one Colombian, he said.
An additional 15 people were injured and one person was in serious condition.
Pech said three people were detained for questioning, but it was unclear whether they were involved in the shooting.
"We're aware of another incident where there was an exchange of gunfire, which occurred near the club, but we are investigating if they are related," Pech said.
Earlier Monday, the event's organizers had said four people were killed, three of which were of a part of their security team.
"It is with great sadness to share that police have confirmed reports of a lone shooter outside the Blue Parrot nightclub in Playa Del Carmen earlier today, which resulted in four fatalities and twelve injured," according to a statement posted on The BPM Festival's Facebook page.
"Three members of the BPM security team were among those whose lives were lost while trying to protect patrons inside the venue," the statement added.
Scottish DJ Jackmaster, who was scheduled to perform at the festival, said in a tweet that four or five people had been fatally shot and "many wounded."
"Someone has come into the club in Playa Del Carmen and opened fire," he wrote.
A member of the tourist police earlier told NBC News that they could not "discuss this incident because the information is confidential."
Gunshots were reported in or near the Blue Parrot, which is some 45 miles south of Cancun and across the channel from the island of Cozumel.
The organizers of The BPM Festival initially tweeted that "after alleged reports of shots fired this morning at Blue Parrot, all BPM parties are shut down while police investigations are underway."
The tweet was later deleted.
Mexican police agents patrol near a nightclub in Playa del Carmen, Mexico where 5 people were killed, three of them foreigners, during a music festival on Jan. 16, 2017. Stringer / AFP/Getty Images
Hector Escardo told NBC News via Twitter that he got to the Blue Parrot around five minutes before gunfire broke out.
The media industry worker from Los Angeles said the “place was packed, music in full swing” when he heard the first shots.
Escardo “dropped next to the bar, straight on the floor" at the burst of gunfire coming from some 30 feet away.
After another volley of shots rang out, partiers surged toward a fence separating the club from a rocky beach, the 39-year-old said.
He watched “all these people go crazy and jump over."
View of the Blue Parrot nightclub in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, where 5 people were killed, three of them foreigners, during a music festival on Jan. 16, 2017. Stringer / AFP/Getty Images
Meanwhile, inside the club “three, four police [were] running, chasing someone, could've been staff or even crooks but I'm not sure,” said Escardo, who added that he saw at least three people who appeared to have been shot.
Marcos Vazquez was with his girlfriend at the nearby La Vaquita nightclub when he saw people running by.
The 29-year-old from El Paso, Texas, told NBC News that he ran into the bathroom and locked himself inside with eight other people. Five minutes later, they left and went outside and took a taxi away from the club.
The organizers described The BPM Festival as "an annual ten day and night electronic music festival." Sunday was its closing night.
"This global gathering of DJs, producers, revelers and industry professionals has become a must for any music lover with a discerning taste for quality electronic dance music," according to Thump, a music and culture channel for VICE.
A map showing Playa del Carmen, Mexico. Google Maps
Tourism is vitally important Playa del Carmen, which is located in the state of Quintana Roo on the Yucatan Peninsula. It had escaped much of the bloody violence that have plagued Mexico's western coastal tourists spots, such as Acapulco.According to the ASH Smokefree GB survey, around two million adults in Great Britain currently use e-cigarettes. A third are ex-smokers who have given up completely, and a further third are using them as part of a quit attempt.
While e-cigarettes are not completely without risk, they carry a far lower risk to health than smoking tobacco. A recent Cochrane Review found that e-cigarettes can help smokers to quit or reduce their smoking and the National Centre for Smoking Cessation and Training (NCSCT) advice to local stop smoking services is that they should be open to helping smokers who want to quit smoking with the help of e-cigarettes, especially in those that have tried, but not succeeded, in stopping smoking with the use of licenced stop smoking medicines.
Public Health England (PHE) is responsible for reviewing the evidence on e-cigarettes and providing evidence-based recommendations to inform the Government’s future thinking. In May 2014 PHE published an expert report from Professor John Britton, one of the UK’s leading respiratory physicians and tobacco researchers (available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/311887/Ecigarettes_report.pdf).A Przewalski's horse leaves its container after being released in Takhin Tal National Park, part of the Gobi B Strictly Protected Area, in south-west Mongolia, June 20, 2017. REUTERS/David W Cerny
GREAT GOBI B, Mongolia (Reuters) - A quarter-century-old project to repopulate the steppes of Mongolia with wild horses was kept alive as four animals made the long trip back to their ancestral home from Prague Zoo.
Driven to extinction in their homeland in the 1960s, the Przewalski’s horses survived in captivity before efforts began to re-introduce them to the arid desert and mountains along Mongolia’s border with China.
Zoos organized the first transport to Mongolia of the strong, stocky beasts in 1992.
For the past decade, Prague Zoo has been the only one continuing that tradition and it holds the studbook of a species whose ancestors - unlike other free-roaming horses such as the wild mustangs of the United States - were never domesticated.
The zoo completed its seventh transport last week, releasing four mares born in captivity in the Czech Republic, Germany and Denmark in the Gobi desert. They will spend the next year in an enclosed area to acclimatize before being freed.
“All the mares are looking very well, they are not hobbling, they are calm, eating hay and trying to test the taste of the new grass,” Prague Zoo veterinarian Roman Vodicka said after making observations a few days after the release.
Prague has released 27 horses in total and officials estimate around 190 are now back in the wild in the Gobi B park, where the most recent arrivals were sent.One of the first chip shops in Ireland.
One of the first chip shops in Ireland.
YOU CAN BANISH the midweek blues today by getting some fish and chips for dinner tonight- and what’s even better is that they are going for half price.
The Irish Traditional Italian Chippers Association (ITICA) members will be offering their customers half price fish and chips throughout the day as part of National Fish and Chip Day.
Irish people have had a long love-affair with the Italian chipper takeaway ever since Italians from a small Italian village in Val Di Comino arrived in Ireland and opened the first local chipper in the 1880s. There has even been a documentary made about the well-established community here in Ireland aptly named “Chippers“.
The families from Southern Italy all bore the names that are well-known at the local chip shops today. The legacy of those Italians has made the local chipper a staple in almost every town in Ireland.
Speaking to The Journal ITICA Chairman Peter Borza said that more than 200 Irish traditional Italian chippers around the country were taking part and that they were looking forward to a very busy but fun filled day.
He added that the tradition of chippers in Ireland goes back “a long long time” adding that the National Fish and Chip Day aimed to commemorate the long history.
“This day gives us the opportunity to thank our customers for their support and it’s a pretty hectic day. We started the campaign in 2010 and every year it has just been |
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By Yusouf. October 17, 2012. 8:30am
Atelier Ayesha is headed to Europe, Tecmo Koei Europe’s community manager has revealed. The game will see a Q1 2013 release date and will be released for the PlayStation 3.
In addition to Atelier Ayesha, Tecmo Koei have also confirmed the localisation of Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 Plus and Fist of the North Star: Ken’s Rage 2.
Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 Plus will arrive in Q1 2013 for the PlayStation Vita, while Fist of The North Star: Ken’s Rage 2 will be available on the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 in February 2013.
The Wii U version of Ken’s Rage 2 has yet to be dated for European release. However, Warriors Orochi 3 Hyper is headed to the Wii U on November 30th.Introducing Al Pacino as Joe Paterno.
HBO has unveiled a first look photo of the actor in character as the football coach for the cabler’s upcoming project directed by Barry Levinson.
The as-yet-untitled film centers on Joe Paterno, who, after becoming the winningest coach in college football history, is embroiled in Penn State’s Jerry Sandusky sexual abuse scandal, challenging his legacy and forcing him to face questions of institutional failure regarding the victims.
The film also stars Riley Keough as Sara Ganim, the 23-year-old journalist who first reported on the scandal, bringing it to the attention of the national media — and ultimately winning a Pulitzer Prize for her work. Annie Parisse will play Mary Kay Paterno, Joe Paterno’s daughter.
Levinson is directing and executive producing through his Levinson/Fontana banner, with Jason Sosnoff and Tom Fontana also executive producing. Edward Pressman and Linday Sloane also executive produce, along with Rick Nicita through his RP Media Company. The film was written by Debora Cahn and John C. Richards and David McKenna, and is being produced in association with Sony Pictures Television.
The film marks Pacino’s latest in a string of HBO efforts, along with the Jack Kevorkian biopic “You Don’t Know Jack,” “Phil Spector,” which followed the murder trial of the music business legend, and the mini-series “Angels in America.” Levinson directed and executive produced “You Don’t Know Jack,” as well as executive produced “Phil Spector.” The pair also collaborated on the 2014 film “The Humbling.”Story highlights Ratings agency Fitch downgrades Portugal's debt to junk status
Participation in the strike is very high, a union official says
Portugal's government wants to implement unpopular tax hikes and spending cuts
Portugal became the third eurozone country to request a bailout in April this year
All international flights to and from Portugal were canceled Thursday as a general strike over austerity measures caused chaos for the country's transport network.
Portugal, which earlier this year became the third of those countries that use the euro to receive a bailout, after Greece and Ireland, is battling to reduce its deficit through a combination of tax hikes and deep cuts to public services.
The strike was called last month by two of the country's main unions amid wide public unhappiness over the proposed measures.
Rui Oliveira, a spokesman for Portugal's airport authority at Lisbon Airport, told CNN the country's airports were open but no international flights were taking off or landing.
Only three domestic flights are scheduled to operate Thursday between Lisbon and the islands of Madeira and the Azores, he said. In total, 481 flights were canceled, 311 of them in the capital, Lisbon.
Lisbon's Metro system has closed its doors while only a handful of buses are running in the capital, Portugal's Publico newspaper reports.
Those taking part in the action are rallying in Rossio Square, in the heart of Lisbon.
Lucia Macau, a spokeswoman for the UGT national labor union, told CNN the strike looked set to be one of the biggest this year.
"People are very unhappy about all the measures imposed to the country, especially the scale of austerity the budget implies, and cuts... which are leading to a gradual impoverishment and exploitation of the people -- and that has to be stopped," she said.
It was too early to tally up the numbers taking part in the strike, she said, but workers from Portugal's education and health sectors had joined transport employees in the labor stoppage.
"On the transport system the effects are very big," she said. "It seems this paralysis is affecting the country from north to south."
Amavel Alves, coordinator of the transport and communications union FECTRANS, told CNN that participation in the strike was very high.
He said 98% of rail workers and 85% of postal workers had walked out, while the Metro in Lisbon and water transport were totally paralyzed.
None of the 70 ships that were supposed to dock at Portuguese harbors Thursday had done so, he said, with some remaining out at sea and others going instead to neighboring Spain.
Meanwhile, ratings agency Fitch downgraded Portugal's sovereign debt to junk status Thursday, with lower growth expected in light of the "worsened European outlook," it said.
"The country's large fiscal imbalances, high indebtedness across all sectors, and adverse macroeconomic outlook mean the sovereign's credit profile is no longer consistent with an investment-grade rating," the agency said.
The recession will make the government's deficit-reduction plan more difficult over the next two years, Fitch said, but its commitment to the program is judged to be strong.
While Portugal's debt rating was lowered one notch, to BB+ from BBB-, the outlook was negative, meaning the agency believes it could slip still further.
Portugal applied to Europe's bailout fund, the European Financial Stability Facility, in April and a €78 billion ($105 billion) bailout was agreed to the following month.
Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho promised on taking office in June to tackle Portugal's burgeoning financial crisis, including taking steps to meet the European Union requirements for deficit reduction and revenue hikes in order to receive bailout funds.
The austerity budget for 2012 put forward by his center-right government is due to be approved later this month.
His predecessor as prime minister, Jose Socrates, stepped down in March after his socialist government was unable to push though austerity measures intended to avoid the need for a bailout.Welcome to halfwheel’s coverage of IPCPR 2012, live from the trade show floor in Orlando, FL. And by live, we mean halfwheel’s live coverage. This is the coverage you would expect from halfwheel: photography from Brooks, and editorial coverage from Brian Burt and myself. We will be visiting booths in much the same manner as TheCigarFeed did at the 2011 IPCPR show—only with significantly better photography and more in-depth commentary.
We won’t be covering every booth—as we are only here as a whole for three days and there are hundreds of booths—but we will get to as many as we can. If there is a specific booth you’d like us to cover—post below and we will try to stop by. In addition, Brian Burt is tasked with handling the social media and comments for the weekend—although Brooks and I will surely stop by—so if you have any questions, please ask and we will respond, or get comment from the appropriate person to respond.
The show opens now (10 AM) and we will be updating within the next 90 minutes with the first booth and there will be updated every 45 minutes or so from now until likely around 6 PM from Friday-Sunday.
In the mean time, we will continue to post daily reviews and you can always follow us on Twitter: Brian Burt (@Brutus2600), Patrick Lagreid (@PHXCigarGuy), Brooks (@elbrooksie), myself (@elninodiablo) and the official @halfwheel account.
Our goal is to make this the most dynamic, accessible, usable and updated coverage for the show with the same quality halfwheel is known for from the editorial and photographic stand points. We have put a lot of time and energy into planning for the live coverage—and we hope you enjoy it.
If you haven’t read our Guide to IPCPR 2012, it serves as a great preview for most of the new products at the show with well over 400 new SKUs set to debut. In addition, you can find all of our IPCPR 2012 coverage in the menu above or via the IPCPR 2012 category tag.
Finally, we would like to thank site sponsor Drew Estate for sponsoring our live coverage of IPCPR 2012. Their ads will appear at the top and bottom of every post through the end of Monday.
This post will be sticked through Friday, all IPCPR booth coverage will be featured in the box above.
Enjoy.We can all pretend like there is nothing going on around the Korean Peninsula and hope that cooler heads will prevail, but if history is any guide, when the militaries of multiple nations begin to mass troops at borders, it takes only a single, often seemingly inconsequential, catalyst to plunge the situation into all-out war.
That’s exactly what’s happening in North Korea today. Two weeks ago China deployed some 150,000 troops to the North Korean border and put their entire military on high alert in anticipation of a U.S. military strike on Kim Jong Un.
Now we learn that Russia is rapidly deploying troop and equipment to their border with North Korea, as well.
Vladimir Putin is sending troops and equipment to Russia’s border with North Korea over fears the US is preparing to attack Kim Jong-un. …
A video purports to show one of three trains loaded with military equipment moving towards the 11 mile-long land frontier between Russia and the repressive state. Another evidently highlights military helicopter movements towards the North Korean border and manoeuvres across rough terrain by army combat vehicles. Other reports suggest there have been military moves by road as well. There have been concerns that if a conflict breaks out Russia could face a humanitarian exodus from North Korea. But Putin has been warned, too, that in the event of a US strike on Kim Jong-un’s nuclear facilities, contamination could swiftly reach Russia. ‘Railway trains loaded with military equipment moving towards Primorsky region via Khabarovsk have been noticed by locals,’ reported primemedia.ru in the Russian far East – linking the development to the North Korean crisis. ‘The movement of military equipment by different means of transport to southern areas is being observed across Primorsky region over the past week,’ said military veteran Stanislva Sinitsyn. Full report: The Daily Mail
A few hundred thousands troops on the North Korean border, a U.S. Naval Strike Fleet awaiting orders from President Trump and constant threats of missile and nuclear tests from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un…
What could possibly go wrong?
Related: This FDA Approved “Nuke Pill” Could Save Your Life In A Nuclear Emergency"Skyfall" helps European films to a market share of more than 30 percent.
Box office revenue in Europe hit a new high of $8.5 billion (€6.47 billion) last year, even as admissions slipped slightly and several territories experienced a major recession-led drop in sales.
STORY: 'Skyfall' and 'The Hobbit' Drive MGM's 2012 Revenue to $1.38 Billion
Figures released Tuesday by the European Audiovisual Observatory show that total box-office revenue in the 27 countries of the European Union topped last year's record figure to set a new high-water mark. This was despite a slight drop in overall attendance, with 933.3 million tickets sold across the EU last year, 2.2 percent fewer than in 2011. Higher average ticket prices, driven by a continued appetite for 3D films, more than made up the difference.
STORY: 'Skyfall' Scores $5.1 Million Opening Day in China
Hollywood continues to dominate European screens, and U.S. productions accounted for 62.8 percent of EU ticket sales last year, a 1 percent increase, with Ice Age: Continental Drift the most popular U.S. import, selling 31.4 million tickets across Europe.
European films were even stronger, however, thanks in large part to Sam Mendes' James Bond film Skyfall, which sold 44.4 million tickets across the EU last year, making it the most successful film in the region. The only other European title to crack the top ten in 2012 was French comedy The Intouchables, which sold 24 million tickets, just behind Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey and more than The Avengers in Europe. Two other strong performers were Olivier Megaton's action thriller Taken 2 (10.4 million tickets sold) and Juan Antonio Bayona's tsunami drama The Impossible, which sold 6.5 million tickets last year, the bulk of them in Spain.
Overall, EU theater goers bought 313 million tickets for European movies last year, a 12 percent jump on 2011, and European titles accounted for more than a third (33.6 percent) of overall admissions, a 5.6 percent increase.
That positive news, however, masks the major drops in EU countries suffering from the Euro crisis, particularly in the recession-wracked south. Admissions were down 10 percent in Italy, 6.7 percent in Greece and 12 percent in Portugal. In Spain, admissions fell 5 percent and would have been much worse without The Impossible, which earned more than $54 million locally, the best-ever performance by a Spanish title. Even France, home to Europe's largest theatrical audience, saw a substantial drop in ticket sales, with admissions falling 6.3 percent year-on-year, to 203.4 million.
On the plus side were Germany (4.3 percent increase), Finland (up 19.7 percent) and Romania (up 15.4 percent), with the U.K. holding steady as Skyfall made up for the lack of a Harry Potter title in release last year.Sen. Ted Cruz was booed offstage at a conference for Middle Eastern Christians Wednesday night after saying that “Christians have no greater ally than Israel.”
Cruz, the keynote speaker at the sold-out D.C. dinner gala for the recently-founded non-profit In Defense of Christians, began by saying that “tonight, we are all united in defense of Christians. Tonight, we are all united in defense of Jews. Tonight, we are all united in defense of people of good faith, who are standing together against those who would persecute and murder those who dare disagree with their religious teachings.”
Cruz was not reading from a teleprompter, nor did he appear to be reading from notes.
“Religious bigotry is a cancer with many manifestations,” he continued. “ISIS, al-Qaida, Hezbollah, Hamas, state sponsors like Syria and Iran, are all engaged in a vicious genocidal campaign to destroy religious minorities in the Middle East. Sometimes we are told not to loop these groups together, that we have to understand their so called nuances and differences. But we shouldn’t try to parse different manifestations of evil that are on a murderous rampage through the region. Hate is hate, and murder is murder. Our purpose here tonight is to highlight a terrible injustice, a humanitarian crisis.”
“Christians have no greater ally than Israel,” he said, at which point members of the crowd began to yell “stop it” and booed him.
EWTN News Nightly’s Jason Calvi caught the moment on video.
Watch:
“Those who hate Israel hate America,” he continued, as the boos and calls for him to leave the stage got louder. “Those who hate Jews hate Christians. If those in this room will not recognize that, then my heart weeps. If you hate the Jewish people you are not reflecting the teachings of Christ. And the very same people who persecute and murder Christians right now, who crucify Christians, who behead children, are the very same people who target Jews for their faith, for the same reason.”
The cries of “stop it, stop it, enough,” and booing continued. “Out, out, leave the stage!” At this point IDC’s president, Toufic Baaklini, came out to the stage to ask for the crowd to listen to Cruz, but Cruz had already had enough.
“If you will not stand with Israel and the Jews,” he said. “Then I will not stand with you. Good night, and God bless.” And with that, he walked off the stage.
Many Christians in the Middle East take issue with Israeli military policy, which has made life for Palestinian Christians in their homeland very difficult, and driven many from their homes. “Israel’s policies have led to demographic pressure that’s made the West Bank and Gaza far more Muslim than in 1948,” explained one Middle East analyst.
IDC’s Executive Director, Andrew Doran, then came out on stage, saying “For the love of God, we’re here to talk about Christians and we’re here to be united.”
Antiochian Orthodox Metropolitan Joseph Zahlawi, who leads the Antiochian Orthodox in North America, soon after led those present in the Lord’s Prayer.
Follow Tristyn on TwitterTuesday, July 24 – Remember the Titans Starring: Denzel Washington, Will Patton, Wood Harris
Director: Boaz Yakin
Winner of 8 awards including the BET Award for Best Actor (Denzel Washington)
Rated: PG; Runtime: 113 min; 2000 African-American coach Herman Boone (Denzel Washington) and assistant coach Bill Yoast (Will Patton) are forced to overcome their own differences as they attempt to lead their newly-integrated Alexandria, VA football team to victory. Based on the real events at T.C. Williams High School in 1971, the coaches, teammates and entire community face challenge after challenge during their first season as a racially integrated unit.
Wednesday, July 25 – Casablanca Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid
Director: Michael Curtiz
Winner of 3 Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Director and Best Writing, Screenplay)
Rated: PG; Runtime: 102 min; 1943 Cynical ex-patriot Rick Blaine (Oscar-winning Humphrey Bogart), who owns a nightclub in Casablanca, Morocco, discovers his old flame Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman) is in town with her husband, Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid). Laszlo is a WWII resistance leader from Czechoslovakia, and with Nazis on his tail, Ilsa knows Rick can help them get out of the country - but will he?
Thursday, July 26 – The Big Sick Starring: Kumail Nanjiani, Zoe Kazan, Holly Hunter, Ray Romano
Director: Michael Showalter
Nominated for an Academy Award and 2 Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards
Rated: R; Runtime: 120 min; 2017 Based on a true story, Pakistan-born comedian Kumail Nanjiani (as himself) and grad student Emily Gardner (Zoe Kazan) fall in love, but struggle as their cultures clash. When Emily contracts a mysterious illness, Kumail finds himself forced to face her feisty parents (Holly Hunter & Ray Romano), his family's expectations and his true feelings.
Friday, July 27 – Mean Girls Starring: Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Jonathan Bennett, Tina Fey
Director: Mark Waters
Winner of several MTV Movie & Teen Choice Awards; Adapted for the hit Tony-nominated musical
Rated: PG-13; Runtime: 97 min; 2004 Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan) was formerly home-schooled by her zoologist parents in Africa. When she transfers to an American high school for the first time, she becomes an instant hit with The Plastics, the A-list girl clique at her new school. But Cady learns how mean girls can be when she makes the mistake of falling for Aaron Samuels (Jonathan Bennett), the ex-boyfriend of alpha Plastic Regina George (Rachel McAdams).After a little wait, I received my Hometown Exchange yesterday! I stalked my package relentlessly on UPS. I got a little annoyed with UPS since I got this message: "An exception in the sorting process has occurred. UPS has taken corrective action." which delayed my package by a whole day! What does "an exception" mean anyway?
But everything got there in one fantastic piece! My match sent a lovely note which explained her hometown of Gadsen, AL. She tailored her gift to meet my likes as well as a way to show off her hometown. She noticed that my favorite book and movie are "To Kill a Mockingbird." She told me that Phillip Alford who played Jem in the movie was also from her hometown. I dropped the not-so-subtle hint that I had lost my copy of the book in a move, and she sent me a copy! So happy to have a copy again.
I am also looking forward to reading "God & Football" by Chad Gibbs, a local author. I am, in fact a football fan. Go Ravens! I think I shall read, enjoy some Alabama-shaped cookies, and a beer.
Many thanks for a thoughtful gift!Astana rider Maxim Iglinskiy tested positive for EPO in August
Tour de France winner Vincenzo Nibali's Astana team will have its WorldTour elite status reviewed after a third rider failed a doping test in 2014.
Brothers Maxim and Valentin Iglinskiy tested positive for EPO, while llya Davidenok was this week notified of an adverse finding for anabolic steroids.
Maxim was in the nine-strong Astana squad that helped Nibali win the Tour.
Now the International Cycling Union's (UCI) licence commission will review Astana's anti-doping policies.
Last week, the UCI said the team could have "conditions attached to their licence".
Astana's Kazakh boss Alexander Vinokourov completed a two-year drugs ban in 2009 but returned to win the road race at the London Olympics in 2012.
Davidenok, 22, failed a test at August's Tour de l'Avenir, the junior Tour de France, where he won a stage. He was also eighth in the Under-23 World Championships a month later.
The Kazakh rider has the right to request analysis of his 'B' sample but has been provisionally suspended.PayPal pulls 400 jobs over North Carolina anti-LGBT law
FILE - This March 10, 2015, file photo, shows signage outside PayPal's headquarters in San Jose, Calif. PayPal said on Tuesday, April 5, 2016, it's canceling plans to bring 400 jobs to North Carolina after lawmakers passed a law that restricts protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File) less FILE - This March 10, 2015, file photo, shows signage outside PayPal's headquarters in San Jose, Calif. PayPal said on Tuesday, April 5, 2016, it's canceling plans to bring 400 jobs to North Carolina after... more Photo: Jeff Chiu, AP Photo: Jeff Chiu, AP Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close PayPal pulls 400 jobs over North Carolina anti-LGBT law 1 / 1 Back to Gallery
Amid a flurry of strongly worded tweets, PayPal on Tuesday became the first and only prominent tech company to commit to moving operations out of North Carolina, whose governor last week signed into law a bill that bars local governments from passing antidiscrimination protections for LGBT people.
Bay Area companies with operations in North Carolina and Mississippi have loudly condemned recently passed state laws that target lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.
But few have put action behind their words. The electronic payments firm announced Tuesday it would scrap plans to open a new global operations center in Charlotte, N.C., after committing to employ more than 400 people in skilled jobs in the state.
No other company has committed to taking steps to leave either North Carolina or Mississippi, which on Tuesday passed legislation that allows public employees, schools, hospitals, shelters, faith-based organizations and businesses to refuse service to LGBT people and families. The Mississippi bill also allows these organizations to refuse to acknowledge the gender identities of transgender people.
“Our decision is a clear and unambiguous one,” wrote Dan Schulman, PayPal’s president and chief executive, in a company blog post. “As a company that is committed to the principle that everyone deserves to live without fear of discrimination simply for being who they are, becoming an employer in North Carolina, where members of our teams will not have equal rights under the law, is simply untenable.”
Microsoft, considered a “major supporter” of the Mississippi Economic Council, a pro-business lobbying group, declined to comment on whether the Mississippi bill would affect its business in or relationship with the state.
Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president and chief legal officer, took to Twitter to announce his disappointment in the Mississippi government: “These laws are bad for people, bad for business and bad for job growth,” he wrote.
The Mississippi Economic Council condemned the legislation Monday — a day before Gov. Phil Bryant signed it into law.
PayPal’s move comes a week after similar pressure forced the hand of Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal, who vetoed a similar religious-freedom bill after Salesforce and Netflix said they would pull operations and relocate offices and staff outside of Georgia should the provision pass.
A slew of other companies with employees in the region condemned the legislation, but did not warn of further action.
Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, said though actions like closing offices or facilities may have a starker impact on a state’s economic vitality, public condemnation by globally recognized brands like Google, Facebook and Apple also go a long way to influence public opinion.
“It brings enormous visibility to the issue and helps enormously with public education,” Minter said. “Public officials really care what businesses think about their state. It helps when businesses put up a united and powerful front.”
Minter noted the business community in the Bay Area, including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, had been instrumental and vocal supporters of same-sex marriage laws and many companies had written friend of the court briefs in support of extending the right to marry to gay couples when the issue was before the Supreme Court in 2014.
“These businesses are already connected and committed to standing with LGBT equality so it’s much less of a heavy lift to get them to weigh in,” he said. “They’re already there.”
San Francisco and several other cities have limited municipal employees’ travel to states or municipalities with anti-LGBT laws.
Last week, Mayor Ed Lee said Bay Area businesses putting weight behind the issue was significant.
The city will “join with businesses and others to put economic and political pressure on these state governments that are doing the wrong thing,” Lee said.
Assemblyman Evan Low, D-San Jose, introduced a bill last month that would ban state government workers from traveling to states with anti-LGBT laws. San Francisco Supervisor Scott Wiener has introduced a resolution to lend the city’s support to Low’s measure.
In 2015, when Indiana passed a law facilitating discrimination against LGBT individuals, Salesforce’s Benioff canceled all of the company’s events in the state. No tech company has yet followed suit in announcing employee travel bans or canceled events in North Carolina or Mississippi.
Marissa Lang is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mlang@?sfchronicle.com Twitter: @marissa_jaeSanders' remarks begin at 1:34:00
At a rally for the progressive PAC "Our Revolution," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) defended President Trump's voters, dismissing claims they are bigoted or "deplorable."
Though he had harsh words for the president himself, Sanders said those who think "the people who voted for Trump are racists and sexists and homophobes and 'deplorable' folks" are wrong.
"I don't agree, because I've been there," he said, adding that the takeaway from 2016 was not that Trump won the election, but that the Democratic Party lost the election.
Pirro: 'Bozos' Still Haven't Figured Out What Russia Did to Stop 'Queen Hillary's Coronation'
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DNC Chair: Trump 'Didn't Win Election', GOP 'Doesn't Give a S--t About People'
He said that with a proper progressive candidate, voters would not elect followers of the Republicans' "right-wing, extremist party agenda."
Sanders called for a "restructuring" of the Democratic Party ahead of the 2018 elections.
Jeff Weaver, Sanders' former campaign manager and president of "Our Revolution" said on "Fox & Friends" that voters did not feel that the Democrats' message resonated with voters in blue states that supported Trump.
However, Weaver stopped short of criticizing candidate Hillary Clinton when pressed by Pete Hegseth.
WATCH: Gutfeld's Hilarious Spoof of a Rachel Maddow 'Exclusive' Russia Report
Gohmert to Trump: Work With Freedom Caucus, We Stood By You When Ryan 'Ran Scared'
Trump Applauds NYT Report Showing ObamaCare in TroubleImage caption Though he is a former fighter pilot, it was his qualification as a lawyer that resulted in Mr Kjos taking charge of an airline
The effortless elegance of London's May Fair Hotel is disrupted as a bulldog of a man crouches under the table to wipe the floor.
"Had a bit of an accident," he says with a big grin as he tosses soggy kitchen towels into a nearby paper bin. "Cup of coffee hit the floor."
And then, his right arm outstretched: "Hello, I'm Bjorn."
Bjorn Kjos' informal manners and his unusual preparedness to get his hands dirty belie both his achievements and his goals.
As co-founder, majority owner and chief executive of Norwegian Air Shuttle, Mr Kjos' business is already snapping at the heels of low-cost airlines Easyjet and Ryanair, opening new bases at European airports at a rate of knots.
"And this," Mr Kjos insists, as he points at a world map on his laptop that is criss-crossed with flight routes, "is just the start."
Accidental adventure
Norwegian was created in 1993, rising from the ashes of bankrupt airline Busy Bee, and although Mr Kjos was one of its founders, it was not his idea.
We're saying it's way too expensive to fly long-haul today, and we're doing something about it Bjorn Kjos, Norwegian
Instead, it all started with a phone call from old friends from his time in the Royal Norwegian Air Force, where he was a fighter pilot for eight years before he left to pursue a career in law.
"They needed a lawyer who wouldn't charge too much, or perhaps nothing at all," Mr Kjos recalls. "So they told me, 'You earn too much and work too little.'"
Over the next decade, Norwegian remained a small service provider to regional airline Braathens, until 2002 when a takeover by flagship carrier Scandinavian Airlines resulted in its contract being cancelled.
Norwegian almost collapsed, so Mr Kjos stepped in as chief executive and injected much-needed cash into the troubled business, becoming the majority shareholder in the process.
"I was only supposed to stay for three months," he says.
Growing fleet
Image caption Modern, fuel-efficient aircraft are essential tools in the battle to cut costs, Mr Kjos believes
Instead, Mr Kjos stayed on at the helm, as Norwegian rose from a position as an also-ran in the world of aviation to become:
the second largest airline in Scandinavia
the third largest low-cost airline in Europe
the 10th largest airline in Europe and
the 10th largest low-cost carrier in the world.
The airline currently has 74 aircraft flying from several operational bases in Scandinavia, Spain and the UK to 120 destinations in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.
Last year, it had almost 18 million customers, a number set to soar as its fleet almost trebles over the next few years, on the back of what Mr Kjos describes as "the largest aircraft order in European aviation history" for 222 new Airbus and Boeing aircraft valued at some $22bn, signed in January last year.
Given the turbulence that has long been buffeting the world economy, such a bet might seem foolhardy, especially as it is almost impossible to predict the pace of an airline's growth in an increasingly competitive market place.
But Mr Kjos insists it would be riskier not to order new aircraft than to do so, since soaring fuel prices have rendered airlines with old fleets hopelessly uncompetitive.
"Just look at who's been making money in recent years," he says. "It's the low-cost carriers, and they own their fleets. The legacy carriers have suffered huge losses."
Large aircraft orders in a market dominated by just two manufacturers serve the additional purpose of limiting the supply to competitors, Mr Kjos reasons.
"If you place an order now, you'll have to wait until 2020 before you can get a new aircraft," he says. "So it's better to order too many. If I find I've got too many, I'll just lease some of them to other airlines."
Futile strategy
Image caption Asian rivals such as Scoot will dominate the low-cost long-haul market, Mr Kjos predicts
But it is not the predicaments of troubled legacy carriers, nor the rivalry with Easyjet and Ryanair, that keeps Mr Kjos engaged.
Rather, it is the emergence of Asian airlines such as Air Asia and Scoot, or Jetstar and Cebu Pacific.
"The Asian airlines operate with costs that are half that of Emirates and a third of Lufthansa's," he says.
Currently, there are competition restrictions in place that prevent them from competing head-on with incumbent carriers in Europe and North America, and "airlines that aren't competitive will lobby to prevent them from coming", Mr Kjos says.
But that, he insists, would be futile.
Currently, nine out of 10 passengers on flights between Europe and Asia are European, but in a decade or two, that picture will have been reversed, Mr Kjos predicts.
"The wave will come from Asia, where the new competitors are, not the other way around as it is today," he says, predicting that this will soon result in a global Open Skies agreement that will in effect remove any measures that currently keep the Asian rivals out.
"The influx from Asia offers enormous potential in terms of mass tourism and thousands of jobs. The flow will be so large, you simply cannot afford to stop it, so politicians won't say no to global Open Skies merely to save a few airline jobs."
Do like the Asians
To make sure Norwegian stays in the game, Mr Kjos has decided to compete in the low-cost long-haul market, initially with direct flights from Scandinavia to New York and Bangkok, then over time through a yet-to-be-established Asian subsidiary.
"We're saying it's way too expensive to fly long-haul today, and we're doing something about it," he says.
"Asian low-cost carriers will dominate the fast-growing low-cost long-haul sector, so if you're going to |
appy kind of honour and integrity within them.
"That's really it," agrees Hofmeier. "It's kind of a lot of dog and pony show for one trick, and that's the trick: whether you're making espresso or folding newspapers, do that thing with care and attention repeatedly, and you become very good at it. I thought video games could do this for everything - everything! - that people do. If you could take the entire spectrum of human toil, all the boring stuff, and then make it effectively in the way that movies or books or poetry summate human experience in broader terms or more specific ones, if you could do that for work, and make it interactive in the way that work is interactive, you can actually get the same satisfaction from perfecting a mundane skill. Then, factoring that into a character's larger life I think makes it even more satisfying. Hopefully."
The skills you're learning are not quite the skills that your on-screen avatar is displaying, of course. Andrus cuts his packing bindings and arranges his papers while you play a sort of typing-tutor mini-game, for example: the two acts apparently have little in common, and yet they both invoke the same blend of pedantic rigour and mindless dexterity. Did Hofmeier spend a lot of time finding the right mechanical analogies for each task?
"I threw a lot away in that regard," he says. "I wanted to communicate, say, that - this is something newspaper vendors do specifically - they will make small talk as they track down the article in question to facilitate the sale and to keep it smooth and happy. The small talk in order to expedite the sale seemed essential, and it's also working, a form of toil in itself. The typing of those mantras: because you're moving your hand from keyboard to mouse and back, it seemed to mirror the physical act, and the conversational act too. I don't know if it works for everybody, but a lot of people seem to get the intangible spirit I was going for, even if it's not as explicit as games tend to be."
"There's nothing within the basic material fact of games themselves that makes them poorly suited to do something realistically or portray reality in some way, so I felt that had to be done. I made the most realistic game I could in the most boring way. I think there's something transcendent about boring entertainment."
Cart Life's town simulation is surprisingly complex - play the game through with different characters and you'll see the same faces cropping up in different situations.
It's a real balancing task for a designer, I suspect. Movie directors can call in a montage to suggest the passage of time spent in repetitive labour. Hofmeier absolutely didn't want to do that, but he also didn't want to haemorrhage too many players as they got stuck in, right? Break down a lot of what even mainstream games get you to do moment-to-moment and it can seem uncomfortably close to work, perhaps, but did Hofmeier have to pick a careful path through these sequences regardless? When driving home the boredom of vending, is there such a thing as good boredom and bad boredom from a design perspective?
"I don't think there's any degree of polish I could have put on these things that would have won people over straight away," he argues. "You have to be disgusted, or turned off, or really disheartened. That's all part of the cocktail. You have to have that angst or distaste for it, because we're all averse to work - I think everyone is. But you've still got to do it. It's real delicate. The idea is that you see what's at stake for the characters, and you feel enough about what's at stake to do that work at first. Then, as the work becomes more satisfying the personal stuff that's at risk for the characters starts to harmonise.
"Generally film and books and the way they deal with mundanity and tedium is that they steer clear of it. I don't have a great cultural vocabulary, but there's this great French movie called Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, and there's this scene in it that hit me pretty hard. It's a woman preparing food for someone she loves. Normally this would be a montage or a series of jump cuts, or they'd only show the initial gestures being made and then the user - ha ha! I mean the viewer - would fill in these points on their own.
"Instead we watch her. She's pretty much bored. She's daydreaming, as we do a little, but then it becomes captivating and we're in there with her. This is the negative space around which all narrative is cut, and yet this is the stuff that makes us and the character the same. In a way, this is the thing that this film-maker finds most interesting to remark on. It's never remarked on generally and yet it's more interesting than many typical fictional devices are.
"Then there's something like Wit, this stage play about chemotherapy," Hofmeier continues. "There's a moment where the character turns to the audience and says, 'You must be bored by this by now, but think how much worse it is for me who has to sit here for hours, bored and horrified.' For me this one doesn't work, because there's not enough negative space and we're still being spoken to across the division of the fourth wall. There's still something special and magical here, and it's not boring at all, even though it intends to be, and it regards this content as boring, this confession as mundane. These things are rare in art but they're unifying - I wanted to make a game that does that."
Each character has their own quirks, many of which feed into actual mechanics.
For the very reason that this stuff is so rare, there was a risk that Cart Life could have accidentally ended up fetishizing real life, as with the opening scenes of Heavy Rain, in which a character's process of waking up and messing around in his home strikes a rather odd note. A large part of the narrative intention, I suspect, was to draw players into the game's supposed ordinary world, but the designers' delight in how marvellously ordinary their world was turned it into a kind of domestic fun house. The taps! The towels!
"It's tough," agrees Hofmeier. "The medium of interactivity necessitates this weird form of puppetry. In film you can have documentary film as well as narrative film and so the material of a movie doesn't dictate its relationship with the truth. The puppetry of film still has to take place for the lens. But the lens of games kills everything on the other side. The closest you get to something genuine or real in material terms happens in an MMO or something like that. Maybe board games have a little of it. What I'm trying to say is that it's always going to fail to some degree whenever you try to portray truth and reality through games. It's always going to only get halfway there. That's the best it can do."
It should be clear by now that beneath the studied simplicity of the aesthetic, Cart Life can be powerfully complex. It's so complex that it's hard to play the game without wondering about its creation - particularly when you learn that Cart Life is essentially Hofmeier's debut as a designer. What was it like to make? Where did the initial idea come from?
"Exploration happens unbidden," says Hofmeier. "In the case of Cart Life, it was this: I do love video games, I've played much more than my fair share in my life, but it's always bothered me that they use the term realistic in their marketing and in their self-identity. The most realistic space alien combat system ever made.
"Games have the capacity. There's nothing within the basic material fact of games themselves that makes them poorly suited to do something realistically or portray reality in some way, so I felt that had to be done. I made the most realistic game I could in the most boring way. I think there's something transcendent about boring entertainment. I think there's something really tender and unifying in eliminating the vibrant outer-coat candy shell of games themselves and looking at their ability to do something more inclusive or that's more of an invitation, instead of just being fun or sensational, as they do really well. They don't need me for that, certainly.
"Before too many people had played the game, it was easy to lie about Cart Life," he muses. "Which I did all the time with gusto. I would say, "It's like Farmville. It's like following your Sims character to your job - what are you going to charge for lattes and what would you paint your stand? It's fun." And that was the proposition. People would then play it and see it for what it was, and it seemed like it was easier for them under those circumstances to be compelled by the tender parts and to feel as though these things were really at stake. Then they could take part in these characters' lives, spend a week together. But when you see it as a piece of work up front, it becomes like a piece of health food.
"At Netflix, the most commonly added movies to peoples' queues are the documentaries and the high-art inspirational movies. But they're not the ones that most frequently get watched - those are action movies and Adam Sandler and TV shows. Not to say there's anything wrong with any of that. I love pop music and chocolate and disco and I'll play the hell out of mass market triple-A games. But when Cart Life then gets relegated to the province of the documentary movie? I mean, it doesn't sound great: it's boring on purpose. Do I need to play it to get the nutrients from it? Maybe just reading about it from other people who have played it, maybe that's enough. I kind of feel that's where Cart Life is these days."
I ask Hofmeier whether he in some way benefited from the isolated position he found himself in when designing the game, outside of the wider indie scene, coming from a career in illustration. "I'm troubled it's so obvious," he laughs. "It's true. I was real audacious. I thought I was the first person who ever thought of doing something artistic with a game and not just creating a commercial product. Then, in the course of designing the game, especially towards the end, I saw this amazing groundswell of weird, beautiful, very human, earnest content being made. It was incredibly encouraging, but at the same time it dampened my confidence that I could make a contribution. I felt like I was slipping on all the oldest banana peels while the luminaries of this great medium were performing grand bravuras. There's amazing food on the table these days, so Cart Life being as time-consumptive as it was, I was glad to wash my hands and join the party a little bit."
"The medium of interactivity necessitates this weird form of puppetry. In film you can have documentary film as well as narrative film and so the material of a movie doesn't dictate its relationship with the truth. The puppetry of film still has to take place for the lens. But the lens of games kills everything on the other side."
Time-consumptive is right, incidentally. Cart Life was conceived as a month-long project. Instead, it took three years. "I suppose the game itself was the same in the initial conception," Hofmeier explains. "It didn't change that much over time. All the essential characteristics of Cart Life were right there in the first gestures. The only thing that changed was me. If I was to make the game now from scratch, there's lot of stuff I'd emphasise with more care: permits, fines, disputing fines, food handling, sanitation, but that's only because having released it, the people who seem to categorically respond the least to Cart Life are actual food vendors. It doesn't tell half the story. It's a lot harder in real life than it is in the game, of course - but it's actually a lot more fulfilling. It's their lives, it's their actual existence. I've talked to ballet dancers about Black Swan, and they hate it. Any time an entertainment medium tries to portray a vocation it's going to fail, by having to emphasise sex or tragedy or the danger."
Hofmeier's not a method designer, somewhat disappointingly: his research into street vending didn't include running his own cart. "I'd always wanted to, but making the game convinced me otherwise," he admits. "I did talk with a lot of vendors in the different towns I lived in during the time I was making it. You know what talking to people about money is like, but the proposition of the game invited them to talk about things they might not have done otherwise. Some of the vendor stuff is watered down, but hopefully that means it can relate to other parts of life. Whatever you do for a living, hopefully there's something you can get out of this game. That's why there's the slight de-emphasis of cart specifics, why the research was mainly on things like what people are willing to pay for a hot dog, the circumstances in which people are willing to tip, when do people work and stuff like that."
At the core of the game, though, buried beneath the dollars and cents, it's all about the characters - Andrus with his awkward verbal ticks, Melanie with her headaches. These are the people who keep you working, and they're the people who truly make the game stand out, through their range, the casual complexity of their construction, the fact that they're consistently less stagey than you expect them to be. They're wry studies in frailty, drawn with an awareness of the power of subtext.
They're also the part of the game that Hofmeier finds it hardest to address. "I feel that in order for this thing to happen, I have to forfeit ownership of these characters to the people that have spent time with them as players," he says. "I feel that anything I say about them will do damage to their authenticity, their humanness, even though it's all just make-believe anyway. Maybe they're just puppets on a script, just blinking lights and little scratchy sounds.
Deciding how to get around is a tricky proposition in a town where time is money. Walk and waste precious minutes, or fork out for a bus or taxi?
"Here's something, though. I went to UCLA last year to speak. It was really interesting to be around young artists who have chosen the medium of games. As you might guess, Cart Life doesn't play real well at games festivals. As people mill through, they quickly appraise the artistic merit of something that is deliberately repulsive and they move away. So over time this happens and, say, Andrus gets picked: his day starts, then somebody plays him for a bit and moves on, and then he stands alone for five or six minutes of real time - a long time in the game. Then somebody else comes along and they screw around for a little bit. Removed from the initial introduction to the character, they are even more confused than the first person. It goes on and on. After a while, Andrus gets really dark. He hasn't eaten in a really long time, his cat is hungry, maybe starving, he's completely broke - it's the middle of the night - and he's standing on the street in a town he knows nothing about.
"I hate saying so, but I'm compelled to be honest: in my heart, deep down, in my most childish little way, I feel awful for bringing Andrus to the UCLA Games Art Festival. Because I should have known that it wouldn't go well for him. He's standing there wondering if he has lung cancer. He's wondering if anyone would miss him if he died, or whether anyone would notice. He's wondering what they do with bodies that they find on the street. He's getting really dark. I'm staring at him and I want to go over there and feed him and give him a cigarette and feed his cat - because I'm a child. It's just a script and blinking lights. I know better, and I shouldn't have tenderness for these characters, and part of the game is making it possible to inflict as much pain as possible on these characters. When things go poorly for Melanie or Andrus or Vinny, it can get a little dark and there's pain there. It's necessary for this to be realistic, for them to be alive - seemingly alive. They have to experience pain. Players' decisions have to have consequences. You can play the game and damage these characters - maybe even by accident. I feel like I'm killing my babies, but over and over again, infinitely and into eternity."
Weren't they damaged the moment Hofmeier gave them desire? Like Sims, they are creatures of compulsion: Andrus needs to smoke, needs to feed his cat, wants to get out of the motel he's living in. Cart Life's cast are defined by the thing they want, the things they're working for.
"That's right, but I guess at that point I just hadn't grown tender," Hofmeier says. "They were just tools. Just a means by which I could hopefully screw with the internal organs of a playing audience. But then over time, I fell victim to the material device of the pixel face. I filled in the blanks. I think about them as more than what they actually are. I know it's not healthy and I don't like that I've made that mistake. Given that capacity, and their ability to feel pain when they're denied their desires, infinitely, on all these computers across the globe, maybe they're living well and maybe they're not. It's real strange."
Hofmeier thinks for a few seconds, presumably casting an inward eye over all the bright cities of the world where Cart Life flickers and buzzes on flat screen monitors, where virtual food is consumed, where virtual sales are made, and where Andrus stands on virtual sidewalks, smoking and worrying and "getting really dark". "I hope this doesn't sound cheesy or insincere," Hofmeier says at last, "but I had no idea people would feel this way about this game. I thought it would just be me and my friends playing it. I didn't expect to be able to continue making games at all. But now I think maybe there are more games to be made.
"If people are willing to put up with Cart Life, I guess I should just push them a bit harder."The Valiant
Written by Jeff Lemire and Matt Kindt
Drawn by Paolo Rivera
Colored by Joe Rivera
Lettered by Dave Lanphear
Published by Valiant Entertainment
The Valiant wants to be the comic book equivalent of a superhero movie (and how weird of a statement is that to type) and maybe it succeeds in being as unsatisfying as most superhero movies are. The comic fails to truly challenge its characters. They act and react more like the stereotypical roles out of some third-rate horror movie rather than as heroes and warriors. The thin writing is disappointing because nothing in the comic happens for any real reasons. And because there are no reasons, there are no consequences to the actions of the Eternal Warrior, the Geomancer or Mr. Flay.
The best way to talk aboutby Jeff Lemire, Matt Kindt, and Paolo Rivera may be in terms of the current crop of blockbuster movies. Simply put, this isto all of theandstories that Valiant has been doing the past couple of years. Lemire, Kindt and Rivera bring together various heroes of the Valiant universe to fight a threat that none of them could handle individually. And it’s even a threat tied into some shared history of a couple of the characters. It’s a classic template that is being followed here astries to makes its heroes and villains into something that tries to be equally classic to the story type.Lemire and Kindt start the story out with a simple enough concept; there is an immortal enemy that keeps the immortal hero from fulfilling his duties to keep the protector of the Earth alive. Century after century, Gilad fights a monster whose only purpose is to kill the Geomancer. It’s an eternal struggle and it has same ending no matter what century or country the battle takes place in; the Geomancer gets killed. It happened a long time ago and it’s happening now. The current Geomancer, Kay McHenry, is still just trying to figure out what her role as Geomancer is. As she tells Gilad’s brother Armstrong, “... I couldn’t keep a houseplant alive. For real. And now I’m supposed to be the guardian of the earth somehow?” From there, a gathering of Valiant’s heroes Gilad, Bloodshot, Ninjak and Valiant's own who’s who of heroes gathers around Kay to protect her from the eternal enemy.There’s a lot going on inand unfortunately Lemire and Kindt don’t have the space to do everything the story needs. This comic is an ambitious project, linking together so many concepts and characters from a shared universe against a new big bad villain. They give every character their moment, easily defining them by what they do and say. In that way,acts as primer for the Valiant universe. Each of the main characters has a strong, basic concept-- the eternal warrior, the modified soldier, the lost protector. Each character has a predefined role to play and they stick to it. Even the secondary and tertiary characters have their assigned roles and duties. It’s like the writers’ marching orders were to keep each of the characters as defined as possible without allowing much growth.The lack of giving the characters space to operate givesa constructed feel. Throughout the book, there’s a roadmap that the creators are sticking to that doesn’t give the story any room to stretch out or find its own way. And thanks to that, it ends up feeling rushed on its inevitable march to its conclusion. It so determinably knows where it is headed that it rushes there headlong without working to define the threat or the stakes of the story. The eternal villain, eventually given the moniker Mr. Flay, is given no reason or purpose for what he does other than he is evil. Kay’s role as Geomancer is so wishy-washy that we have no idea why it matters whether a Geomancer lives or dies. And the ending is such a big cheat that you have to think that a fifth chapter of this book was somehow left out of it, explaining the pulled out of thin air twist to the ending. A few more panels or pages given to any of these story elements would have madea story worth caring about.Paolo Rivera may be the best thing about this comic but he may not have been the best choice of artist for it. Rivera is a thoroughly modern artist but he has such classic superhero sensibilities. His clean and smooth artwork really recalls the timeless line and storytelling of John Romita Sr. Like Romita Sr., Rivera has an assured and controlled flow to his artwork. Rivera’s restrained classicism gives the story a timeless feel because his drawings are so simple. Compared to a lot of modern artists, his relative minimalism focuses you more on the storytelling than on any grandstanding by the artist.That quiet reserve in Rivera’s artwork keeps the attention on the characters but when Rivera is asked to draw big, action packed scenes, the book remains as quiet and subdued as it does when two characters are just talking. Neither the art or the story can be as big as they need and want to be. None of Lemire, Kindt or Rivera are ever able to let loose in this story and make the threats be anything threatening or the action be anything thrilling.never makes you believe in the evil or the solution to that evil. Rivera’s design for the eternal enemy is fantastic but there is no reason that we scared by this threat other than the creators say we should be. There’s no reason we should buy into any of the relationships or buy into the stories’ ultimate resolution other than we hit the end of the story and have to accept that this is the way that the story ends."MUCH loved, seldom bought" might soon be the epitaph of Sweden's struggling Saab. It seems unlikely that Trollhattan car firm will manage to swerve around its creditors once more. After a court last week rejected Saab's request for a breathing space to reorganise its finances for the second time in three years, two unions opened bankruptcy proceedings on September 12th for unpaid wages. Saab now has only until September 26th to convince the court that the money for a rescue is on the way at last.
Saab has been on the skids for some months. It has hardly made any cars since April, when suppliers cut it off for not paying bills. Victor Muller, Saab's boss, has been trying to find a rescuer in China, taking the same road as Sweden's other car firm Volvo, which was bought by Geely in March 2010. But the rescue team of Zhejiang Youngman Lotus Automobile and Pang Da Automobile Trade has been kept waiting for an approval from the Chinese authorities to invest in Saab, though there are signs this might come soon.
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Selling Saab to the Chinese would be the latest episode in decades-long saga. Originally a maker of aeroplanes (Saab is short for Svenska Aeroplan AB), it started building cars in the late 1940s. In 1968 it merged with a lorry company, Scania-Vabis. In 1989 General Motors bought 51% of Saab-Scania's car division and acquired the rest a decade later. When the world's biggest carmaker went into meltdown in 2008, it put Saab up for sale. Despite widespread interest from bidders, the credit crunch put paid to any deal, triggering the company's death throes.
Saab was eventually sold in early 2010 to Spyker Cars, a Dutch maker of supercars founded by Mr Muller. Yet financing from a Russian associate has not been enough, and the Chinese delays have made the position desperate. Saab has always been too small to survive on its own. A volume carmaker (even one making premium models) needs to produce 200,000 a year to survive. Saab has never exceeded 120,000 in recent years. And in 2010 it only sold a pathetic 32,000—mostly in Sweden, America and Britain, its main markets.
From the start, Saabs have drawn on their aeronautical heritage, boasting wraparound windscreens, tear-shaped bodies and the lowest drag coefficient of any cars for the early models. Safety and quirky technology have always been features. In 1958 a Saab was the first car to be fitted with seat belts as standard equipment. Headlamp wipers and washers followed in 1970 (to get rid of snow). Asbestos-free brake pads in 1982 and air conditioning without chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) in 1991 demonstrated green credentials. Saab was also a pioneer of direct electronic ignition, getting rid of distributors and spark plug wires prone to breakdowns.
Just as Volvo and Jaguar lost market appeal in the hands of Ford, Saab was perceived to be dumbed down as GM technology infiltrated the firm—which threatened to poison the brand. Saab drivers tend to be a slightly offbeat, clannish crowd, united in their snobbish disdain for German BMWs or Mercedes. They have variously been dismissed as “college lecturers with tweed jackets and leather arm patches” or “creative advertising types with large spectacles”. If Saab was a singer, it would be Joni Mitchell, cool and stylish in middle age, though with limited appeal.The move is part of a broader reorganisation of the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) to tackle the threat of terrorism, and enable national servicemen to be deployed jointly with the Home Team in security operations.
SINGAPORE: To deal with the growing threat of terrorism, the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) is expanding counter-terrorism training beyond the military’s selected active units such as the Special Operations Taskforce and the Army Deployment Force which was set up just last year.
From July, 18,000 full-time and operationally ready national servicemen will be trained each year to deal with homeland security, announced Defence Minister Ng Eng Hen in an interview on Tuesday (Jun 27) to mark SAF Day.
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There will be a dedicated training institution called the Island Defence Training Institute (IDTI) located in Clementi Camp, where soldiers will learn about search and arrest procedures, and how to use retractable truncheons. The curriculum will be adapted from the SAF’s existing urban operations.
The training will enable national servicemen to be deployed jointly with the Home Team in security operations.
At the same time, Dr Ng said the SAF will also step up its ability to respond to acts of terror in the air and at sea. He pointed to 2008 Mumbai attacks when militants entered the city by sea, and the September 11 attacks when two planes were hijacked, one of which crashed into the World Trade Center in New York.
To improve maritime security, Dr Ng said the Republic of Singapore Navy will lead Government-wide exercises to refine protocol in dealing with incidents at sea. The Republic of Singapore Air Force will conduct similar exercises.
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Both the navy and the air force will also upgrade their hardware and deploy more unmanned assets so they are prepared to handle a more varied range of threats.
“The reorganisation occurs against the backdrop of changing assumptions … that attacks that could occur in Singapore may increase in scale, frequency and impact,” Dr Ng said.
“It's a sobering change of assumptions, but I think we (had) better change to meet a heightened need, rather than be caught with inadequate resources.”
TERRORISM IS “ENDEMIC”
The number of terror attacks around the world has gone up by more than eight times in just 15 years - from about 2,000 at the start of this century, to nearly 17,000 in 2015, according to the Global Terrorism Database.
So far this year, major European cities such as London, Manchester, Paris and Stockholm have been hit.
In Asia, suicide bombers killed Indonesian police officers at a busy Jakarta bus station in May, while the conflict between Philippine government forces and Islamic State-linked fighters in the southern city of Marawi shows no sign of ending.
An assault on the Philippine city of Marawi by fighters flying the Islamic State flag has ignited an unprecedented urban war and claimed hundreds of lives. (Photo: AFP/Ted ALJIBE)
In Singapore, Dr Ng noted that terrorists had targeted the Marina Bay Sands integrated resort, before their plans were foiled by authorities last year.
Terrorism is “endemic” and is here to stay, said the Defence Minister.
“Despite years of effort, you can't eradicate it. Sometimes it rises, sometimes it falls, sometimes it's catastrophic, and then you pick up the pieces and you start again. But eradication of the root causes is going to take a long time. It may never happen in our lifetime."
DEALING WITH TERRORISM “DECISIVELY” AND “AT SOURCE”
Dr Ng highlighted the threat of militants returning to this region, as extremist fighters in Syria and Iraq are being defeated. The ongoing battle in Marawi, he said, would be an “attraction” for such militants searching for a new cause to fight for.
He stressed that the SAF is committed to dealing with such problems "decisively" and "at source,” which is why Singapore regularly deploys soldiers overseas to support the fight against the terror threat. Dr Ng cited the SAF’s past deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, and said the SAF also regularly shares intelligence with regional partners.
File photo of a member of a Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) medical team administering aid in Afghanistan in 2009. (Photo: MINDEF)
When asked if Singapore is ready to send troops to Marawi, Dr Ng did not rule out the possibility.
"We have to help the Philippines deal with this threat because it is in our interests to do so,” he said. “If we are asked, in principle, yes, we want to deal with it. How we do it (will be) based on how we can make the most impact and where we are asked to help."
Dr Ng added that if asked, Singapore would also contribute to patrols with the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia in the Sulu Sea off southwest Philippines. The area is notorious for kidnappings, as well as the smuggling of weapons and extremists into the rest of Southeast Asia.
"Only a strong SAF can protect Singapore and Singaporeans from external threats," said Dr Ng as Singapore marks 50 years of national service.
"The next two decades or longer will not see threats diminish, but indeed increase – whether it is from conventional threats, maritime threats, terrorist threats, cyber threats – and the SAF is adapting swiftly to this new threat environment."I was about 10 when I started role playing, my first game being Dungeons and Dragons back in 1979, but I also discovered Traveler back then and after that always preferred science fiction role playing games. I had taught my kids some games in the past, both D&D and a few RPGs designed specifically for children. My kids, 10 year old daughter and 12 year old son, discovered Solar Echos at Balticon this last year and after playing a few sessions encouraged me to buy them a copy of the game. The rules are simple enough to allow playing with minimum set up time for the players and were easy for my children to read and understand. My ten year old has run a few adventures for us since buying the game. The real depth of the system though, I discovered when my son started to try to create his own content. In order to understand the information provided for each of the alien races, he read up on astronomy and star types, and he noticed how the spectrum of the parent stars impacted the creature’s vision. I saw how much thought was put into the science in this science fiction game, things that can be left as just background if someone is looking for just a fast-paced game, but that are also inspiring my kids to research astronomy and biology as they try to follow the examples in the book and create both realistic and interesting aliens of their own. It is encouraging both creativity and learning and I’m glad my kids discovered the game.”
-Tim, father of gamer childrenAt a tea stall in Payippadu, Kottayam; the board lists the menu in Hindi. (Source: Express photo)
Kerala has started to warm up to Hindi, a language that hadn’t so far caught on in the state. Police and traders have been taking lessons to communicate better with migrant workers from North India, who number 25 lakh according to a government estimate.
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Although migrant workers settled in Kerala for decades have learnt to speak Malayalam, there are also a large number of seasonal workers who do not feel that necessity. Locals who hire or deal with them, therefore, have been learning a little bit of Hindi to be able to communicate with staff on buses, hotel workers, sales staff and those working in the service sectors.
Again, police have occasionally picked up migrant workers, sometimes for involvement in crime and sometimes for being found on the streets at odd hours. The workers have rarely been able to explain themselves, with few policemen conversant in Hindi.
Of late, a few police stations in Kerala have hired teachers for basic lessons in communicative Hindi. Says Abdul Raheem, inspector at Meenachil police station in Kottayam district, “To question migrant workers from North India, we felt that police should learn to speak in Hindi. In many incidents, we faced a language barrier when the migrant workers were involved in cases. Hence, I sought the help of a local Hindi teacher to train police in some basics of communication in Hindi. At times, we have had to seek the help of retired defence service personnel to communicate with migrant workers.”
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Prof A U Varghese, who teaches Hindi at Bharat Mata College at Thrikkakara, near Kochi, says he has given training in Hindi to policemen at the local station. “I have held classes on how to elicit responses in Hindi on basic details from a complainant or an accused. All the policemen at the station were very keen to learn Hindi for basic communication,” says Varghese.
Retail traders in small towns and villages, many of which have settlements of migrant workers, have started to display their price lists in Hindi too, besides putting on display essential bits of information in that language.
“If we traders don’t know Hindi, we are going to lose our business with migrant workers,” says M Mohiydeen, a cellphone-cum-footwear trader at Payippadu village in Kottayam. “If we do know Hindi, they will feel comfortable in the locality, prompting them to stay and buy from us.” Mohiyudeen knew no Hindi until migrant workers started arriving at Payippadu village. “I took the help of a relative who knows the language.”
At a hotel at Payippadu, the owner-cum-supplier takes orders from a client and passes on instructions in Hindi to the kitchen staff.
Traders in Perumbavoor near Kochi, which has one of the earliest settlements of migrant workers from North India, have made themselves conversant with Hindi. The owner of a medical shop here says many migrant workers approach the sore to deal with various ailments. “They describe the ailments and we give them medicine. Had we not learnt Hindi, we would have simply lost the business from that segment.”
On buses in many places, the staff can be heard speaking to migrant workers in Hindi. With workers’ settlements having come up in several areas, buses are also displaying destinations in Hindi.
Migrant workers are in several skilled and semi-skilled jobs. Many of them have become waiters, hotel room boys and workshop mechanics, and the need to learn Hindi has forced itself on Kerala’s own people seeking those services in their home state.
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Besides, some migrant workers have married local women, giving Hindi a permanent residence in Kerala.Winners: Uruguay
Teams: 13
Teams in qualifiers: N/A
Notable absentees: Of the major European countries, only France took part
Surprises: USA, who finished third
Golden Boot: Guillermo Stabile (Argentina) -- 8
Stats: A total of 70 goals were scored (3.89 per match); Argentina (18) scored the most
Format: One group of four and three groups of three in the qualifying stage, with the top from each group going into the semi-finals
Number of matches 18
Innovations
• This was the first World Cup
• Uruguay, Argentina, Brazil and USA were seeded (USA because they had a professional league)
Controversies
• Eight weeks before the start, there were no European entries and the fact that four finally took part was only down to an offer from FIFA president Jules Rimet to underwrite all their costs
• The group match between Argentina and France ended six minutes early because of an error by the referee, with Argentina leading 1-0. After a half-hour delay, the game resumed but there were no more goals
• Peru's |
she said. “It’s improved.
“I’ve been trying to get my youth allowance payment but they put down the wrong university, despite the fact I had put in the documents. Six months ago my payments got cut off so I’m still trying to get back pay for the course I finished in November. It’s been very delayed.
“I know a lot of people in the same boat.”
Jeff and Lisa Thomas*, a couple in their sixties who spoke to news.com.au at the Sydney Centrelink office, said they had been battling the system all year. “We didn’t get any money for three months,” said Jeff, 60, who was made redundant from his job in property in February and hasn’t been able to find another job since. “There’s not enough staff. They should have twice as many people. “People are passing work on to others. They put me on the phone to someone in Canberra, I was on the phone for an hour and they said, it’s [the branch] that has to deal with that. I looked around and security said, you can’t do that. Eventually someone helped.”
The couple decided to sell their house and downsize, and began receiving rent allowance of $123 a fortnight to help fund their $600-a-week apartment while they looked for somewhere to buy.
Then one member of staff told them shouldn’t be receiving the allowance and would have to pay it back. “We’re not sure that’s right, because two other members of staff said we were,” said Jeff. “The staff don’t know the policy. We’ve been bled dry, they should be encouraging people to downsize.”
Jeff also receives $28 a week from Newstart if he applies for 10 jobs — most of which he says he hasn’t a hope of getting — but recently discovered he only needed to apply for five.
Lisa, 67, said staff had gradually been replaced by “friendly, efficient, helpful self-service — in other words, nothing.”
She believes the office needs dozens more people, and advises others to ask for copies of anything they sign at Centrelink and keep their own file. Hers is 120 pages long. “Practices are sloppy, they’re stressed and understaffed,” she said. “I don’t think they’re properly trained.
“I feel sorry for the people who work there. They are stressed. The Government is trying to screw money out of the poorest of the poor.
“Now all they do is accuse people of bludging, not wanting jobs.”
* Names changed to protect identities
If you or someone you know needs help, contact Lifeline on 13 11 14.Torrent-Finder.com is down today; the site was apparently seized by government agencies for reasons unknown. In all likelihood, the site was taken down due to intellectual property concerns including copyright infringement and trafficking in counterfeit goods.
The agencies named in the notice include the Department of Justice, the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center, and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement arm of Homeland Security Investigations.
While torrenting in general is one of the seedier parts of the underbelly of the Internet, Torrent-Finder itself did not host or link to any torrents. Instead, it simply acted as a sort of torrent search engine, returning iframes with other sites that do contain torrent links.
If you'd like to see how the site works for yourself, you can check out Torrent-Finder.info, which hasn't apparently popped up on the government's radar yet.
This technicality was apparently not enough to keep the hounds at bay, however. Currently, the site's homepage looks like this:
Most troubling of all, however, are statements made by the owner of Torrent-Finder.com. He told the bloggers at TorrentFreak that his site was seized "without any previous complaint or notice from any court... While I was contacting GoDaddy I noticed the DNS had changed. Godaddy had no idea what was going on and until now they do not understand the situation, and they say it was totally from ICANN.”
What do you make of this site's seizure by the U.S. government? In the struggle to protect copyrighted works, should the powers that be still have to notify site owners that their websites are in violation? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.Way back when The Flash began its first season, the pilot episode ended with a reveal that blew the minds of comic book fans: In 2024, Iris West-Allen had written a story about The Flash's disappearance in the Crisis on Infinite Earths, suggesting that not only was the show building toward the Crisis but that Iris and Barry were canonically destined to get married. The headline in question was on display in the Reverse-Flash's time vault, a relic from his own past and our future. Like Back to the Future, The Flash has often used the seeming constancy of that newspaper to check in on the state of the timestream: when someone changes the future, the paper will reflect those changes, and the heroes can act on it. Last season, Iris's name disappeared from the byline, and later it was revealed that she died before 2024 ever happened, murdered by Savitar. The journey to saving her life dominated the second half of the season, and when they ultimately did, the newspaper was used as evidence that things were "back to normal." So, a reader posed the question: if her byline is restored, does that give Iris "plot armor" until 2024? Well, yes and no...!
Slide 1/3 – Not definitely... While this is a legitimate question, the answer seems fairly simple at face value: given what we have seen so far on The Flash, simply restoring her byline does not guarantee Iris's safety. Why not? Well, because her byline has been removed, replaced, or altered in the past and then restored, only to have things change again. There is very little predestination in The Flash, partially because if there were major landmarks you knew would happen in a decade it would make things in the present much less urgent. The use of time travel and the consistent weakening of the timestream likely means that, in-story, Iris is no more "safe" for the next seven years than she always was. Even if she was safe, for instance, what if something that one of Barry's many time-traveling villains did changed the history around her? Iris could be fine, she could be married to Barry, everything could be great -- and somebody could still blow up the newspaper office and obliterate the headline and its byline from history forever. So, basically, it seems like there's no real reason to believe that much has changed, right? (Photo: DC Entertainment)Big state budget shortfalls are an inevitable side effect of a weak economy. The Wall Street Journal reports that the decline is projected to leave states with an aggregate deficit three times the level last year, and suggest that the economy may be weaker than the GDP stats suggest.
FYI, I was just on a panel at the Inman Real Estate Conference in San Francisco with (among others) John Williams of ShadowStats, CR of Calculated Risk, and Noah Rosenblatt of UrbanDiggs. Williams claims that were government figures prepared on the same basis as they were in 1970, we’d already be in the worst recession since the Great Depression. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but I am willing to accept the notion that we are in a recession, as opposed to skirting on the brink of one.
From the Wall Street Journal:
The stumbling U.S. economy is forcing states to slash spending and cut jobs in order to close a projected $40 billion shortfall in the current fiscal year.
That gap — identified Wednesday in a survey by the National Conference of State Legislatures — is more than triple the size of the previous year’s. It is the result of broad economic weakness at the state and local levels that could cause pain throughout this year and into 2010. Sales-tax collections, for example, have been hurt by the housing slump and high gasoline prices, which are prompting cutbacks in consumer spending. Personal income-tax collections have been hit by rising unemployment, while corporate income-tax collections have been eroded by falling profits….
A separate survey of economic conditions by the Federal Reserve’s 12 regional banks — the “beige book” — said economic activity was sluggish across most of the U.S….
Unlike the federal government, most states are required to balance their budgets. Most have so far resisted tax increases, instead opting for raising prices on things like tolls and college tuition, and cutting back on services like education and health care. Some chose one-time measures such as tapping rainy-day funds that were built up in flusher times. That could lead to future cutbacks if the economy doesn’t bounce back in coming months.
The spreading economic weakness also is affecting localities, which are being ravaged by falling property-tax collections and a decline in state aid. In Minnesota, the city of Duluth plans to stop operating its Fun Wagon — a free trailer stuffed with games and cookout supplies for a neighborhood party. Other services, including a city pool and a fire hall, also are being eliminated….
The housing slump, now well into its second year, is the primary culprit. The decline in home sales has cut into real-estate transfer taxes. Construction spending and employment has declined. Fewer home sales have resulted in lower sales of home furnishings and washing machines, eating into sales taxes.
Of course, for many states, today’s budget woes stem at least partly from expanding their services during the good times and not planning enough for the inevitable downturn.
Meantime, states are dealing with shortfalls of many kinds. According to the report by the association of state legislatures, 22 states are reporting sales taxes that are below forecast. In nine of those states, the collections were below forecasts that had already been reduced downward. Seventeen states had a shortfall in corporate income tax, 11 states were behind on personal-income taxes, and 11 were also behind on miscellaneous taxes such as insurance-premium taxes.On Monday, Tim Cook, of Apple, and Marco Rubio, of the Senate, agreed on the answer to a question that Governor Mike Pence, of Indiana, has gone to absurd lengths to dodge. Both said that the idea of Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act was to let certain businesses turn away gay and lesbian customers. The difference is that only one of them—the one with some Apple Watches to sell—thought that the act was a bad idea; the other one, who was speaking on Fox News, didn't. Rubio also said that he'd make a “big announcement” next month, probably having to do with running for President. His view was seconded by another Presidential candidate, Jeb Bush, who, after talking about how the spread of same-sex marriage had caused florists to face crises of conscience, said of the RFRA, "We're going to need this." Need it for what?
"FIX THIS NOW" was the headline on the front page of the Indianapolis Star the next morning. The editorial inside said that the law, "whatever its original intent," had created a "deep mess," one that endangered the state's reputation and its economy. The newspaper argued that nothing short of a comprehensive state anti-discrimination law that would protect the rights of gays and lesbians would fix it. Governor Pence has said that he has no interest in such a law, although this morning he conceded that he would support an adjustment to the act—“a clarification, but it's also a fix." He wasn’t specific about the change, and it’s hard to know if it will be enough, particularly since Pence went on to say that the RFRA had been "smeared"—that it had never been discriminatory, and the problem was one of “perception.”
The Indiana law is the product of a G.O.P. search for a respectable way to oppose same-sex marriage and to rally the base around it. There are two problems with this plan, however. First, not everyone in the party, even in its most conservative precincts, wants to make gay marriage an issue, even a stealth one—or opposes gay marriage to begin with. As the unhappy reaction in Indiana shows, plenty of Republicans find the anti-marriage position embarrassing, as do some business interests that are normally aligned with the party. Second, the law is not an empty rhetorical device but one that has been made strangely powerful, in ways that haven't yet been fully tested, by the Supreme Court decision last year in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. That ruling allowed the Christian owners of a chain of craft stores to use the federal version of the RFRA to ignore parts of the Affordable Care Act. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in her dissent, argued strongly that the majority was turning that RFRA into a protean tool for all sorts of evasions. As Jeffrey Toobin has noted, she was proved right even before the Indiana controversy.
Both of those factors have combined to produce real confusion about the Indiana law. Some people are not being straightforward about its implications, whether because they are calculating, mortified, or—in the case of opponents, some of whom have also been unclear about what the law means—alarmed, but it also inhabits novel legal territory, so it is genuinely hard to know what those implications would be. Governor Pence has done much to muddle things even more. On Sunday, on "This Week," George Stephanopoulos asked Pence “a yes-or-no question” about whether "a florist in Indiana can now refuse to serve a gay couple without fear of punishment." He asked half a dozen times, but never got an answer:
Pence: This is not about discrimination, this is about...
Stephanopoulos: But...
Pence:... empowering people...
Stephanopoulos: But let me try to pin you...
Pence:... government overreach here.
Stephanopoulos:... down here though.... It's just a question, sir. Question, sir. Yes or no?
Pence: Well—well, this—there's been shameless rhetoric about my state and about this law and about its intention all over the Internet. People are trying to make it about one particular issue. And now you're doing that as well.
Pence strongly suggested that Indiana's law was identical to the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act and to laws in twenty states that bear the same name. In a more careful formulation, in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, Pence said that the Indiana law "simply mirrors federal law that President Bill Clinton signed in 1993”—which is correct only if the mirror is the kind that adds twenty pounds when you look in it. Pence also said that Barack Obama, as an Illinois State Senator, had voted for a Religious Freedom Restoration Act with the "the very same language" as Indiana's law; Politifact rated that claim only "half true." The law has, in fact, been tweaked in ways that seem designed to maximize the effect of the Hobby Lobby decision. In that decision, the Justices found that the "person" with religious beliefs referred to in the federal RFRA could be a closely held for-profit company. (That is what Hobby Lobby is, so the opinion didn’t have to settle the question of whether other kinds of corporations had the same religious freedom.) The Indiana law went farther down that path: it explicitly covers "a partnership, a limited liability company, a corporation, a company, a firm, a society, a joint-stock company, an unincorporated association, or another entity." (It also says that the religious human beings behind a company only have to have "substantial ownership" of it—not even majority control—for the company to be covered by the act.) The Indiana law is also distinct in that the government does not need to be a party to the case, multiplying the potential number of lawsuits it can be used in. And there are, as Politifact and others have noted, contextual differences: other states, including Illinois, have laws against discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation, which prevent some of the potential ill uses of the Indiana RFRA (Existing laws explain why racial discrimination is less of a RFRA problem, as the Indianapolis Star pointed out in a very good survey of the law.) Indiana, again, does not, though some municipalities in the state do. And that was before Hobby Lobby.
A RFRA of some kind is not, in the abstract, a terrible idea. In the simplest terms, RFRAs offer someone who violates certain laws a defense: the law is a restriction on my religious practice; the state has another, less intrusive way to accomplish what it wants, and exempting me does not thwart some compelling state interest. The inspiration for RFRAs was the prosecution of Native Americans for rituals involving peyote. It is logical for the government, for example, to find a way to allow a Sikh to keep his turban on even in a place where regulations say that hats must be removed, and should be easy to do without creating a security problem. But the idea of religious practice seems to have morphed to include a vague sense of offense at the lives of others. In Hobby Lobby, it was corporate owners who felt "implicated" by the contraceptive decisions of the employees whose health insurance they helped pay for. A Heritage Foundation paper cited a baker who thought that his religious freedom would be infringed upon if he delivered his goods to a same-sex wedding, because, he said, "when I do a cake, I feel like I am participating in the ceremony or the event or the celebration that the cake is for”—as if he were being forced to get gay-married himself.
For the moment, Indiana's RFRA is open-ended. Its true reach will not be tested until some florists or bakers—or doctors or teachers, manufacturers or insurers—get to court, and perhaps gain victories that realize the most profound concerns about the law. (Hobby Lobby was once considered a long shot.) That contingency is why its supporters have been able to deny that it offers a license to discriminate. Pence, in his Wall Street Journal piece, took great offense at that notion, and then almost immediately cited a law professor who said that the law would give "valuable guidance to Indiana courts." As Pence put it, "RFRA only provides a mechanism to address claims, not a license for private parties to deny services." Perhaps it is more accurate, then, to call it a mechanism to discriminate, rather than a license. What it certainly will do is give some people more confidence to discriminate. But is that what Indiana really wants? And is that what the G.O.P.’s 2016 candidates should be looking for?BERLIN (Reuters) - The director of a new documentary outlining U.S. plans for an extensive cyber attack on Iran said on Wednesday he was angry and appalled by the rapidly growing trend towards secrecy in the U.S. government.
Director Alex Gibney addresses a news conference to promote the movie 'Zero Days' at the 66th Berlinale International Film Festival in Berlin, Germany, February 17, 2016. REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch
Veteran documentary maker Alex Gibney was speaking to reporters in Berlin, where his film “Zero Days” is being shown in competition for the Berlin International Film Festival’s top Golden Bear prize.
The documentary says how the U.S.’s National Security Agency (NSA) developed a cyberwar program dubbed “Nitro Zeus” that it hoped would bring Iran to its knees in the event of hostilities.
“I am angry about the incredible amount of secrecy in the United States and how it has become a kind of obsession that is damaging our democracy,” Gibney said at a post-screening news conference.
“I think, frankly, that the trend and the momentum towards greater and greater secrecy in the U.S. administration is appalling.
The documentary focuses on Stuxnet, a computer worm developed by the United States and Israel - but never acknowledged by either government - in order to attack Iran’s nuclear program and sabotage centrifuges that were enriching uranium.
Through accounts of whistleblowers, analysts, journalists and secret service officials, the documentary shows how Stuxnet was the first known attack in which computer malware left the realm of cyberspace and caused physical destruction.
The film hints, based on accounts of several NSA insiders, that Stuxnet was just the tip of the iceberg.
“I mean you’ve been focusing on Stuxnet but that was just part of a much larger operation... Nitro Zeus, NZ,” an actress says in the film, speaking for several NSA employees who were interviewed but whose identity was kept secret for source protection.
According to these accounts, the NSA spent “hundreds of millions, maybe billions” on Nitro Zeus to be prepared for the eventuality that Israel decided to attack Iran and the United States would be drawn into the conflict.
Details of the Nitro Zeus program were revealed in the New York Times on Wednesday.
The composite NSA source says that despite the deal agreed in July with Iran by the United States and its negotiating partners to curtail Iran’s nuclear program, the Nitro Zeus capabilities remain “implanted” in Iran’s servers and computers.
“We were everywhere inside Iran, still are,” the actress speaking for the NSA sources says.
“I’m not going to tell you the operational capabilities of what we can do moving forward, or where, but the science fiction cyberwar scenario is here, that’s Nitro Zeus.”
The film suggests that Israel moved independently from its U.S. partners and changed the code of the initial Stuxnet virus in such a way that it spread all over the world with unforeseeable consequence, including allowing other governments to copy it.
Before its discovery in 2010, Stuxnet took advantage of previously unknown security holes in software from Microsoft Corp and Siemens AG to penetrate Iran’s facilities without triggering security programs.
Gibney contends that Stuxnet opened forever the Pandora’s Box of digital warfare, and that it had been used as an instrument of warfare against a country with which the United States was not at war.
He also says the United States could well be more vulnerable than other countries, taking into account that its economy and companies are the most Internet-connected in the world.
“And as we can see from this film and this subject, it’s preventing a very important discussion about offensive cyber weapons which I think threaten us in a profound and existential way.”
The film derives its title from the term used for previously unknown flaws in computer software that hackers and spy agencies can exploit to attack networks in order to damage infrastructure such as hospitals, transportation systems or power plants.
The U.S. distribution rights for “Zero Days” are owned by Magnolia Pictures which is planning to release it in theaters in late summer. Showtime owns the paid television rights.Jordan Eberle married his high-school sweetheart Lauren Rodych on Saturday, but it was some of his former teammates who stole the show.
Taylor Hall, Eberle's teammate with the Edmonton Oilers until he was traded to the New Jersey Devils on June 29, 2016, joined Eberle and a host of others in a karaoke version of Darius Rucker's country classic "Wagon Wheel" at the reception at the Fairmont Palliser hotel.
Instagram from @dvandewalle: Name your fav oiler/former oiler slash karaoke party. #becomingmrseberle
If the lead singer on stage looks familiar it's because it is country-music artist Brett Kissel.
Kissel, whose viral moment came after his microphone failed while singing the national anthem before Game 3 of the Western Conference Second Round between the Oilers and Anaheim Ducks at Rogers Centre on April 30, also invited the happy couple to join him in a performance of Bryan Adams' "Summer of '69."
Instagram from @misslaurensmusic: Crashed @brettkissel's show...�� #becomingmrseberle
Eberle, who was traded by the Oilers to the New York Islanders on June 22, was surrounded by ex-teammates, including Hall, Oilers defenseman Darnell Nurse, Oilers captain Connor McDavid and Calgary Flames forward Luke Gazdic.
Instagram from @misslaurensmusic: Probably the longest I've ever gone without posting on Insta, because I was busy getting wifed up yesterday�� #becomingmrseberle
Before the singing portion of the program, Hall did his best goalie impression, taking shots from McDavid, who also happens to be his former roommate.
Instagram from @dvandewalle: That time Connor Mcdavid took shots on Taylor Hall. #becomingmrseberle
Hall, who may have been hurting Sunday, still was able to poke fun at himself when seeing the clip of himself singing on stage.
Tweet from @hallsy09: Sunday scaries 10/10 https://t.co/msnNbnXNmsDATE: Aug 18, 2012 | BY: Josh Tyler | Category: Sci-Fi
This week my regular obsession with the way we used to see the future ends up in the midst of a massive government conspiracy involving the use of ancient mythology to fight off an alien invasion in Stargate SG-1. There’s no shortage of adventure, but along the way just what did Stargate really have to say about humanity? To find out, take a wormhole with me through the latest installment in GFR’s ongoing series, Futures Past…
Being based on the 1994 science fiction movie Stargate was both the best and the worst thing to happen to the television spin-off Stargate SG-1. It meant a ready-made mythology and a built in audience to launch a new science fiction franchise, but it also meant they were stuck with a few ideas that never really fit the concept’s new televised science fiction format.
Stargate SG-1 debuted in 1997, smack dab in the middle of one of the most economically prosperous and optimistic periods in the history of the United States. The show, however, was produced in Canada so maybe they never got the memo. Unlike previous science fiction endeavors which imagined a hopeful and possibly better world filled with human exploration reaching out into the stars, SG-1 had something less Utopian and perhaps in its own way also more realistic, in mind.
Set in a future so near it might even be happening concurrently with our own, SG-1 is the story of a secret military agency which explores other planets as a means to find, steal, or borrow technology needed to defend our world from an evil race of alien parasites known as the Goa’uld. At first humanity’s only way offworld is the Stargate, discovered by chance in Egypt and used by Stargate Command to send their teams, particularly their best team SG-1, out into the universe. Later in the show other methods become available but the SGC mandate never really changes: Find weapons we can use to to protect Earth, and while you’re at it, don’t let the taxpayers know what’s happening.
That element of secrecy wasn’t an obstacle, it was a selling point as evidenced in the original trailer for the show’s 1997 debut…
Stargate SG-1’s unwavering opinion of humanity is that we can’t handle the truth, and it sticks to that view throughout not just SG-1 but two other series added to the franchise, long after the notion of keeping the galaxy at large a secret from everyone becomes untenable. Maybe they were simply hamstrung by their original premise, but whatever the reason for the show’s direction, SG-1’s view of humanity’s future is one in which we need protection from ourselves as much as outside invaders.
Oddly enough a lot of what they’re protecting us from isn’t really all that alien. The members of SG-1 visit hundreds of planets and each looks pretty much like the next. Actually, they all look like Canada, likely because that’s where the show was shot. But perhaps that coincidence of budget wasn’t really so far off the mark. The rocks we’ve found on the Moon look a lot like the rocks we already have here on the ground and recent Mars photos returned from NASA’s Curiosity rover look just like any old Earth desert. In the end it could be that SG-1 actually got space exploration right: rocks are rocks, dirt is dirt, and trees are trees, no matter which planet you’re on.
In the near future of SG-1 the only way humanity has of getting on those all too familiar looking planets is using technology not our own. The show does its best to put a brave face on it by occasionally striking a hopeful note, but the truth is that the world of SG-1 is one on which humans have become a race of scavengers, patrolling the universe on borrowed technology we’ve taken from others and don’t really understand. Stargate abandons the notion that we’ll ever be able to achieve on our own, and simply accepts the fact that if humanity’s going to spread out, we must get our best technological ideas from someone smarter than we are.
SG-1’s pessimistic view of humanity and our possible future space exploration was in a sense ahead of the curve. It helped bring an end to the wide-eyed optimism of classic science fiction and had a hand in ushering in the pessimism which pervades modern science fiction. Stargate SG-1’s secret reality of theft, lies and conspiracy may not be the one I’d choose, but maybe it’s one of the most realistic views science fiction has ever offered.
Get more Futures Past right here.Sens. Jeff Merkley Jeffrey (Jeff) Alan MerkleySenate reignites blue slip war over Trump court picks Dems face tough vote on Green New Deal GOP Green New Deal stunt is a great deal for Democrats MORE (D-Ore.) and Bernie Sanders Bernard (Bernie) SandersPush to end U.S. support for Saudi war hits Senate setback Sanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' MORE (I-Vt.), a 2016 contender, are launching a long-shot effort to block the federal government from issuing fossil fuel extraction leases on public land.
The pair will introduce a new bill Wednesday that prevents the government from issuing new fossil fuel leases on federal land and denies the renewal of unused leases when they expire.
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The bill, Merkley said Tuesday, is designed to combat climate change. Scientists say keeping the large stores of untapped fossil fuel reserves underground will help keep the Earth from warning more than 2 degrees Celsius, the threshold they predict will usher in the worst of global warming.
“We have to stop thinking of these — in terms of the leases on our public fossil fuels — not as a way to build revenue for the government, but in fact to address the challenge of global warming,” Merkley said. “It is a paradigm shift.”
The bill is certain to languish in the Republican-controlled Congress, which has looked to expand energy development on federal land, not limit it.
But Merkley said he hopes the legislation will kick off a grassroots movement that will eventually force lawmakers to block new drilling and mining on public land.
Merkley and Bill McKibben, the founder of the climate change group 350.org, told reporters Tuesday that they are buoyed by the state of the environmental movement and hope to direct that enthusiasm toward federal energy development next.
“This is a thing that will push the debate toward places it needs to go, and that debate is evolving way, way faster than anyone thought,” McKibben said.
They pointed to two major grassroots environment movements opposing the Keystone XL pipeline and a Royal Dutch Shell plan to drill for oil and gas in the Arctic Ocean.
If green groups can raise the same enthusiasm against federal land leases, they said, that would breathe life into a proposal to end federal new federal land energy development.
“This gives a rallying point for the grassroots to get in engaged, as they got engaged in the Keystone pipeline, as they got engaged on the Arctic,” he said.
Congressional Republicans will certainly block Merkley’s bill, a prospect he said he accepted on Tuesday. Republicans have tried to pressure President Obama to expand energy development on federal land, which has dipped slightly over the last few years.
But Merkley said he’s introducing the bill now to get it on lawmakers’ radar. Merkley hopes candidates in addition to Sanders take a position on the matter soon.
“It also is designed to say: this is a credible policy strategy, bring it in to full public discussion,” he said. “Hopefully it will also become part of the debate in our election process, which is unfolding before us.”One of the oddest aspects of the 2010 midterms is how swing and right-leaning independent voters seem to be so willing to overlook troubling character flaws in fringe candidates, as long as the candidates repeat the tea party’s false narratives about bailouts, the Stimulus and the size of government.
There is no better example of this in the House races than in Florida’s 22nd District where voters appear set to replace Democratic Rep. Ron Klein with Allen West, a former U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel who was relieved of command in Iraq and forced to retire after he pleaded guilty to assaulting a policeman in his custody.
“Frustration and anger overcame his professional ethics and personal values, and he performed what he knew to be illegal and immoral acts,” according to a statement issued by the Army’s Fourth Infantry Division. In other words, he popped off under pressure and tortured a prisoner — just the personality type we need in Congress.
More recently, West has been criticized for his role as a columnist for a biker magazine that routinely dehumanizes women and his associations with the Outlaws biker gang, which is classified as a violent criminal organization:
The Department of Justice has said the Outlaws are a gang known for making and distributing meth, committing homicide, and prostitution. The Outlaws have been called “organized crime” syndicate. The Outlaws have a history of denigrating women and considering women property — actually branding women like cattle. [Justice Department, National Gang Threat Assessment 2009, Published January 2009]
Truer to his tea bagger roots, Allen West also made news last week when thugs clad in leather threatened a tracker from the Klein campaign and forced him to leave a campaign event at a public park. The incident happened around the same time that paid thugs working for Alaska U.S. Senate candidate Joe Miller “arrested” a reporter for aggressively questioning the candidate about allegations he faced ethics charges when he worked for a local government.
With all that in mind, it seems odd that West would accuse anyone else of corruption — and it’s even more surprising that he leveled that particular charge against his own party:
WEST: [The] GOP violated their own Contract with America and became a lesser version of the liberals, big spending and corruption.
Leaving aside how delusional it is to compare the number of Dems who faced corruption charges with the number of Republicans who were accused of or charged with corruption from 1994 to 2006 — a list that includes former Speaker Newt Gingrich, for Majority Leader Tom DeLay, White House advisors Karl Rove and Scooter Libby and former attorneys general Alberto Gonzales and John Ashcroft, GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff and former Rep. Duke Cunningham, just to name a few — a report last week suggests West has done a 180-degree flip-flop on his attitude about big money and the GOP:
Florida candidate Allen West, a former Army officer and early tea party favorite who once criticized existing Republican lawmakers as “a lesser version of the liberals [on] big spending and corruption,” has also taken $15,000 from the two House leaders [Rep. John Boehner and Rep. Eric Cantor], part of a more than $71,000 haul from at least 37 House Republican incumbents.
And where did Boehner get the money he funneled to West? Mainly from two sources: Washington-based corporate lobbyists and bailed out corporations — both of which tea baggers like West supposedly despise.
As more evidence that West has abandoned his purportedly principled tea party anti-establishment stance, he invited Boehner, a notorious Washington fatcat boozer and schmoozer, down to Florida last week to do a little campaigning:
On Monday, Republican Leader John Boehner campaigned in south Florida with congressional candidate Allen West, who is also featured on Boehner’s campaign website. On Tuesday, the NRCC touted West’s candidacy at National Journal forum.
It’s clear what Boehner wants from Allen West — he is trying to buy a tea bagger’s vote in his race to be elected speaker if the GOP takes the House next Tuesday. And what West wants from Boehner is what every freshman House member wants: better committee assignments and plusher office digs.
Bottom line: Swing and right-leaning voters should beware. The Republican Party may have tried to camouflage its old identity with the tea party brand, but it has not changed its stripes. There is no better proof of this than one-time outsider candidate Allen West’s eagerness to abandon his core principles when a D.C. insider like Boehner dangles the prerequisites of power in front of him.
This is the second match-up between West and Rep. Ron Klein. A recent independent Sunshine State News Service poll suggests West is ahead this time, 47 percent to 44 percent, with 9 percent undecided.The Treasury's top civil servant has insisted that publishing his advice to UK Government ministers on a possible currency union with an independent Scotland was "vital to the national interest".
Sir Nicholas Macpherson, the permanent secretary to the Treasury, said he is "confident" he did the right thing in taking the unusual step of making public his advice to Chancellor George Osborne.
The Tory Chancellor ruled out entering into a currency union with Scotland if it leaves the rest of the UK after Sir Nicholas told him such an arrangement could be "fraught with difficulty" and raised concerns about the Scottish Government's commitment to making such a deal work.
First Minister Alex Salmond continues to insist that a currency union is in the best interests of both Scotland and the rest of the UK if there is a Yes vote in September's independence referendum.
But Sir Nicholas told Mr Osborne: ''I would advise strongly against a currency union as currently advocated, if Scotland were to vote for independence.''
He explained to MPs on the Public Administration Select Committee that he had made his advice public because the UK Government wanted to make its position on the crucial issue "absolutely unambiguous, absolutely clear".
While Mr Salmond has accused Sir Nicholas of being beholden to his "political masters", the Treasury permanent secretary said: "This was in the context where the Scottish Government was claiming something was not only in Britain's interests, but that somehow the British Government was blustering and bluffing.
"So this was quite an exceptional set of circumstances which goes to the heart of the integrity of our currency."
He added that making his advice public was "not something I entered into lightly", but stressed: "I happen to believe it was vital to the national interest. I'm confident I made the right decision."
Publishing the advice was about making the "British Government position absolutely crystal clear" in what was a "very unique context where you have another government in the United Kingdom asserting what the United Kingdom would do".
Sir Nicholas said: "I do think these are quite exceptional circumstances which go right to the heart of the national interest. I remain unapologetic.
"I do not propose to make a habit of publishing advice. This was about convincing the British people, the wider world, the markets, of the sincerity of the Government's position."
He said the financial problems in the eurozone had led to the Treasury being "ca |
two-thirds of them.
From downtown, supposedly his biggest Achilles’ Heel, Oladipo is shooting 55.2%. Again, not a typo. Neither is this: Victor “Alfordipo” has made 13 of his last 16 three-point attempts, including at least one make in 10 of IU’s last 11 games.
Just to complete the picture, Oladipo is grabbing nearly six rebounds per game, garnering 2.4 assists per, and is getting 2.3 steals per game.
Oh, and he’s doing all of this while drawing the toughest defensive assignment every time out.
In case you want a little proof that the Greg Graham comparison isn’t crazy, here you go.
As a senior, Graham turned in one of the most explosive and efficient offensive seasons in school history. Playing alongside IU immortal Calbert Cheaney, Graham scored 16.5 points per game with these ridiculous shooting percentages: 55.0% overall and 51.% from downtown.
I distinctly remember an article being written after Graham torched Michigan State for 32 points that said Graham was “the best guard in America.” No one argued. That’s how well he was playing.
It is fitting then, on the day Oladipo played like the best guard in America against Michigan State, that we wonder the same thing…
Look at Graham’s shooting percentages. Oladipo still has a ways to go, and plenty of tough competition against whom his shooting efficiency may dip a bit, but he’s actually besting Graham from the field and from downtown.
It’s crazy. Absolutely crazy.
Bobby Wilkerson is one of the best defenders and overall athletes in school history. People who know a thing or two about IU basketball are comparing Oladipo to him.
Greg Graham developed into one of the best offensive guards in school history. I saw every home game he played at IU. And that’s the name I keep thinking of every time I watch Victor play this year.
Yes, somehow Victor Oladipo – 144th-ranked Victor Oladipo – has become a scintillating combination of Bobby Wilkerson and Greg Graham.
Oh, and he’s a charismatic leader, a good student, and an upstanding kid all-round too. So throw a little Chris Reynolds in the mix as well.
Also, he gets the IU crowd jacked up more than anyone since AJ Moye. So mix a little of that in there too.
The point? Victor Oladipo has gone from something of a recruiting afterthought to being not only IU’s undisputed MVP so far this season, but one of the most complete players in school history. It seems ludicrous, I know. But only if you haven’t been paying attention.
Savor This IU Legend in the Making
You know who has been paying attention? NBA scouts.
According to ESPN, Victor is now a mid-first round pick. Coming into the season, a fourth year in Bloomington for Victor was all but certain, as most thought his offensive game had too far to go for him to be an early entrant.
Not anymore.
The improvements Victor Oladipo have made in every facet of his game have been on full display nearly every time out this year. It was Cody Zeller who was on the cover of Sports Illustrated before the season, but it’s been Victor Oladipo who has taken charge and led Indiana to an 18-2 start.
I wrote last year that Oladipo’s stats were showing similarities to Dwyane Wade at a similar point in his career playing for Tom Crean. That comparison is even more apt now, with Oladipo, like Wade, being the best player on a potential Final Four team.
For the record, that’s Dwyane Wade, Bobby Wilkerson, Greg Graham, AJ Moye, and Chris Reynolds that I’ve compared Oladipo too. All in a little over 1,000 words.
And he deserves all the praise.
It takes a lot for me to reshuffle my personal Mount Rushmore of IU players. When he was a freshman, I never thought Oladipo could be a guy who would even sniff it. But you know what? He’s already there.
The irony is that, had IU not been so down in the dumps at the time, maybe Tom Crean never recruits Victor Oladipo. The 144th-ranked player in the class? And he’s not even an Indiana kid? What do we need him for?
What a shame that would have been.
Victor Oladipo was exactly what Indiana needed. A kid with spirit, and energy, and an unyielding belief in himself plus an indefatigable desire to improve. He’s a lot like this coach in that way, which is why they have been such a perfect match.
Yes, Cody Zeller’s commitment to Indiana signaled that IU hoops was back on the right track. But, in hindsight, bringing Oladipo to Bloomington was just as important.
He may not have grown up loving Indiana basketball, and he may not have been an Indiana kid, but he embodies absolutely everything that I love about this program. And it’s no coincidence that his improvement has mirrored Indiana’s improvement.
Why shouldn’t it? Victor is Indiana’s emotional leader, its vocal leader, and its best player.
Let’s enjoy these last two months with him IU fans. They are likely to be all we have left with Victor in the Cream and Crimson before he takes a well-earned next step to the NBA.
As you watch, and enjoy, remember: you’re watching one of the best all-around players in the storied history of IU basketball.
And my goodness is it a dazzling sight to see.The Easter Road club do not wish to sell a prized asset to their Championship rivals.
SNS Group
Hibernian have rejected a third bid from Rangers for midfielder Scott Allan, STV understands.
The Ibrox club made a fresh move to sign the 23-year old on Tuesday, having previously seen offers of £175,000 and £225,000 turned down by Hibs.
However, STV has learned that the new bid has also been declined by the Easter Road club, who continue to assert that Allan will not be sold to their Championship rivals.
Former Scotland Under-21 international Allan informed Hibs last week that he wanted to leave and move to Ibrox but with both sides in direct competition as they aim to win promotion to the top flight, the capital club have not been moved in their position.
Hibs manager Alan Stubbs told STV last week: "Our stance as a football club needs to be respected and the fact is that Scott is not for sale to Rangers. But nobody sells to their biggest rivals. Not when you've got ambitions."
Asked about the state of the relationship between player and coach, Stubbs replied: "Mine is very good with Scott. I don’t see any reason why that should change.
"We’re still professionals, we’re still very good human beings and when you’ve got that you put things to one side, no matter what’s going on.
"It won’t change my opinion of Scott or the way I am towards him, not one bit."There’s a program I like to listen to on CBC Radio on Sunday mornings. It’s called The Sunday Edition which most of the year is hosted by Michael Enright. During the summers there are guest hosts; this week the host was Kevin Sylvester. As I’ve mentioned in the past, the CBC is dedicated to the promulgation of all the alarmist memes, and rarely does any truly investigative reporting on this issue.
So I suppose I should not have been surprised when the first item on today’s edition was heralded as:
Global Warming Climate change is for real. Now, that won’t be news to most of you … everyone from Al Gore to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate, the IPCC, has been trumpeting that from the mountaintops for years. But when Richard Muller says it, people tend to sit up and take notice. That’s because up until he made that statement, Professor Muller had been one of the leading voices in the climate change skeptics camp. He’s a professor of Physics at the University of California at Berkeley, and runs the Berkeley Earth Science Temperature Project. His research is funded by the Charles Koch Foundation, an arm of the billionaire oil industrialists Charles and David Koch. [emphasis added -hro]
Listening to this half-hour interview, Muller seemed to be recycling portions of a recent hour-long interview he gave on Climate One Clearly no one at the CBC had done any “homework” on Muller – beyond reading his latest science-by-press-release Op Ed in the N.Y. Times.
[UPDATE 10/3/2012 06:36 PM PDT: Alex Cull has transcribed the Climate One interview. It is a fascinating read!]
I would have thought that the first thing Muller would have done would be to correct the two items I have bolded in the above CBC intro. On second thoughts, the first would have been somewhat difficult for him since recycled born-again-non-skeptic is his most recent reinvention of himself, as he wrote in the NYT Op Ed:
The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause. My total turnaround, in such a short time, is the result of careful and objective analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which I founded with my daughter Elizabeth. Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases. [emphasis added -hro]
But surely if the man possessed even an ounce of modesty and humility, he would not have let “one of the leading voices in the climate skeptic camp” remain unchallenged – and uncorrected. Surely he would have noted that the Koch brothers were merely one of several funders of BEST:
First Phase The Lee and Juliet Folger Fund ($20,000)
William K. Bowes, Jr. Foundation ($100,000)
Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research (created by Bill Gates) ($100,000)
Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation ($150,000)
The Ann & Gordon Getty Foundation ($50,000) We also received funding from a number of private individuals, totaling $14,500 as of June 2011. Second Phase William K. Bowes, Jr. Foundation ($100,000)
The Ann & Gordon Getty Foundation ($50,000)
Anonymous Foundation ($250,000)
Needless to say, Muller – who strikes me as being very much a do-as-I-say-but-not-as-I-do kind of guy – corrected neither. Further examples of his, well, double-standards can be found in his earlier attempts to grab the spotlight. As I had noted previously, in December 2003, Muller had declared:
It was unfortunate that many scientists endorsed the hockey stick before it could be subjected to the tedious review of time. Ironically, it appears that these scientists skipped the vetting precisely because the results were so important. [and] In most fields of science, researchers who express the most self-doubt and who understate their conclusions are the ones that are most respected. Scientists regard with disdain those who play their conclusions to the press. [emphasis added -hro]
Has Muller’s work been “subjected to the tedious review of time”? Hell, it hasn’t even passed peer-review yet, let alone the “tedious review of time”! And he doesn’t seem to have any qualms whatsoever about “playing [his] conclusions to the press” – not to mention misrepresenting those of others (but that’s another story!) Nor does he mention that at least one of the five BEST papers was actually rejected by the journal to which it had been submitted.
Back in October 2011, Muller was mischaracterizing the skeptic position in a very simplistic and disrespectful way. This time around, contrary to his advice that scientists should “respect” the public, not only does he fail to articulate the skeptic position, he muddies the waters further by suggesting that Al Gore and other extreme alarmists are “deniers” – because they go beyond the conclusions of the IPCC.
Will I buy a copy of Muller’s latest book (he seems to be killing two PR birds with one stone with his latest media blitz)? Based on what I’ve heard from him about Energy for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines so far, it’s not very likely to reach the the top of my must read list in the near or distant future.
I have heard little that would suggest that his conclusions in this book – bolstered by BEST’s not yet “subjected to the tedious review of time” findings – are more than a reworking of views he has held since the early 2000’s. Including his 2009 emphasis on China being the main problem, and his December 2003:
Let me be clear. My own reading of the literature and study of paleoclimate suggests strongly that carbon dioxide from burning of fossil fuels will prove to be the greatest pollutant of human history. It is likely to have severe and detrimental effects on global climate.
In contrast to the “converted” skeptic-who-never-was, consider the case of Dr. Patrick Moore, a Canadian ecologist whose work the CBC in its infinite wisdom chooses to ignore.
Unlike Muller and his “conversions” of PR convenience, Moore really did undergo a “conversion”. He was a co-founder of the original Greenpeace. His Facebook page notes:
Dr. Patrick Moore is a co-founder and former leader of Greenpeace and Chair and Chief Scientist of Greenspirit Strategies Ltd. in Vancouver, Canada. His latest book is “Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist”
Like Muller, Moore has a consultancy, as an “advisor to industry and government” which he founded in 1991: Greenspirit. You can get a strong sense of the man – and the consistency of his thoughtful positions from his long history of articles that (IMHO) deserve circulation at least as wide as (if not wider than) those of Muller. Most recently, he was interviewed by Joseph F. Cotto in a series of two articles (part 1, part 2) in the Washington Times. Some excerpts (my emphases added -hro):
Cotto: Why do you think that contemporary environmentalists have become more hardline in their views? Dr. Moore: By around the mid-1980s, when I left Greenpeace, the public had accepted most of the reasonable things we had been fighting for: stop the bomb, save the whales, stop toxic waste dumping into the earth, water, and air. Some, like myself, realized the job of creating mass awareness of the importance of the environment had been accomplished and it was time to move on from confrontation to sustainable development, seeking solutions. But others seemed bent on lifelong confrontation, “up against the man” “smash capitalism”, “join the world-wide struggle against globalization” (I actually saw this on a cardboard sign at a demo). In order to remain confrontational as society adopted all the reasonable demands, it was necessary for these anti-establishment lifers to adopt ever more extreme positions, eventually abandoning science and logic altogether in zero-tolerance policies. In addition, with the ending of the Peace Movement, which was decidedly left-wing politically and essentially anti-American, many peaceniks moved into the environmental movement brining their far-left agendas with them. This was very unfortunate as environmentalism by nature should be down the middle politically. Nature is not left or right and there are good ideas on both sides of the political spectrum, in particular market-based policies on the right and environmental regulations on the left. A balance of these two approaches would be optimum. The “green” movement has not only become more hard line, they have also become irrational and fanatical. Cotto: In the past, you have said that human activity is not the only cause for climate change. What do you believe is the greatest contributing factor? Dr. Moore: First, we don’t know precisely how the many factors affecting climate contribute and interact in producing the earth’s climate at any given time. The cause of the onset of Ice-Ages, one of which we are presently experiencing, is a puzzle we don’t fully understand. I explain in my presentations that as a scientist who is fully qualified to understand climate change, I seem dumber than the people who say they “know” the answers because I do not profess to know the future, especially of something so complicated as the global climate.
Seems to me that whether or not Moore is familiar with Muller’s “advice”:
In most fields of science, researchers who express the most self-doubt and who understate their conclusions are the ones that are most respected. Scientists regard with disdain those who play their conclusions to the press.
Moore understands – and governs himself by – the principles involved. An interesting excerpt from part 2:
Cotto: In 1977, you were elected the president of the Greenpeace Foundation. Less than ten years later, however, you left the organization. Why did you leave Greenpeace? Do you believe that it currently does beneficial work for the environment?
Dr. Moore: I left Greenpeace because I found myself, after 15 years in the leadership, the only director of six directors of Greenpeace International with any formal science education. I have an Honors BSc in biology and forest biology, a PhD in ecology during which I was the recipient of a Ford Foundation Fellowship, an honorary doctorate of science (North Carolina State), the Einstein Society’s Award for Nuclear Science and History, and have over 40 years experience in all aspects of the environmental movement. Yet at the time one of my fellow director’s said “Oh Pat, we’re all ecologists”. They began to adopt policies, on what were by this time quite complex issues of chemistry and biology, that I could not support with my knowledge of science. The most prominent of these was a policy to “ban chlorine worldwide” (they now publicly deny this even though the media archives provide extensive proof). I tried to convince them that a more nuanced approach to the 11th most common element in the earth’s crust was probably wiser than calling for an outright ban. Especially seeing there is no denying that chlorine is the most important of all the elements for public health and medicine. Adding chlorine to drinking water is the biggest advance in the history of public health, and chlorine chemistry is involved in a majority of our synthetic pharmaceuticals. So I was forced to leave and glad I did (but sad I had to) because I saw the writing on the wall. Since I left, Greenpeace has adopted many positions, including hanging on to the mistake of being against nuclear energy, that I do not agree with from an environmental perspective. The only issue I have changed my opinion on since leaving GP is nuclear energy. […] Cotto: Since leaving Greenpeace, you have continued your environmental activism. How has this come along? Is it easier to accomplish your goals now than it was during your years with Greenpeace? Dr. Moore: I have said many times that the task of successfully incorporating environmental values into the economic and social fabric of civilization is far moe difficult than popularizing those values in the first place. Sustainable development, or sustainability, requires finding solutions for environmental issue that do not compromise our ability to feed ourselves, provide the energy required for transport, industry, and infrastructure, and obtain the materials (minerals and wood) to build the infrastructure. The term “sustainable development” did not come into popular usage until 1987 with the publication of the UNCED book “Our Common Future”. It will take 100 years or more to fully implement this idea. In comparison the highlighting of problems such as the threat of nuclear war and the potential extinction of whales was relatively easy. That said I believe there has been tremendous progress towards sustainability: sustainable forestry, ecosystem restoration (reclamation) of mining sites, protection of wild lands, especially wetlands but also all types of ecosystems, drastic reduction in toxic discharge, at least in the developed countries and as other countries develop they will follow suit, a new surge of nuclear energy with 65 plants under construction today and 100s more planned. My work with Greenspirit Strategies in helping develop sustainability policies for industry and government has contributed to this progress.
U.K. readers who are familiar with Bob Ward’s antics during the course of his tenure with the Royal Society will be pleased to see the recently added 2006 letter I found from Moore in the archives of news releases on the Greenspirit Strategies blog (my emphasis added -hro):
September 21, 2006 Dear Mr. Bob Ward, I am in receipt of a copy of your letter to ExxonMobil in which you accuse them of misleading the public on the science of climate change. I would be pleased to have your qualifications in science and to know how you have decided the question of human causation of global warming has been conclusively determined. While I may agree with certain statements made by the IPCC, surely you and the Royal Society would respect my right to disagree with other statements or at least to call them into question. You cite the IPCC as the authority yet surely you are aware that science does not work by committee or by “consensus.” Certainly the Royal Society would agree there is no scientific proof of causation between the anthropogenic increase in atmospheric CO2 and the recent global warming trend, a trend that has been evident for about 500 years, long before human-caused increase in CO2 was evident. I am sure the Royal Society is aware of the difference between an hypothesis and a theory. It is clear the contention that human-induced CO2 emissions and rising CO2 levels in the global atmosphere are the cause of the present global warming trend is an hypothesis that has not yet been elevated to the level of a proven theory. Causation has not been demonstrated in any conclusive way. This is no doubt why the authors of the IPCC report use the word “likely” in their concluding statement “most of the global warming over the past 50 years is likely due to the increase in greenhouse gases.” Even more important, it is a fundamental precept in science that rigorous objection to “consensus” be encouraged in order to avoid “politically correct” conclusions that stifle dissent and intellectual exploration. I say shame on the Royal Society—one of the world’s top science bodies—for allowing such a political “blame” letter to be sent. The correspondence smacks of a repressive and anti-intellectual attitude that can only harm our efforts to understand the true nature of climate change, both non-human and human in origin. Please retract this letter and instead encourage debate and dialogue on this most important subject for the future of humankind and the environment Sincerely, Patrick Moore, PhD
I have added Moore’s Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist to my must read list. And I regret that I somehow missed the three excerpts that were featured in the National Post last March. Moore has copies of these (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) on his Greenspirit site.
So, Muller or Moore. Who (OK, whom, if you prefer!) will you trust – and whose book will you add to your “must read” list, eh?!
AdvertisementsThe idea that the government of a major advanced country would default on its debt -- that is, tell lenders that it won't repay them all they're owed -- was, until recently, a preposterous proposition. Argentina and Russia have stiffed their creditors, but surely the likes of the United States, Japan or Britain wouldn't. Well, it's still a very, very long shot, but it's no longer entirely unimaginable. Governments of rich countries are borrowing so much that it's conceivable that one day the twin assumptions underlying their burgeoning debt (that lenders will continue to lend and that governments will continue to pay) might collapse. What happens then?
The question is so unfamiliar that the past provides few clues to the future. Psychology is crucial. To take a parallel example: the dollar. The fear is that foreigners (and Americans, too) will lose confidence in its value and dump it for yen, euros, gold or oil. If too many investors do that, a self-fulfilling stampede could trigger sell-offs in U.S. stocks and bonds. People have predicted such a crisis for decades. It hasn't happened yet. The currency's decline has been orderly, because the dollar retains a bedrock confidence based on America's political stability, openness, wealth and low inflation. But something could shatter that confidence -- tomorrow or 10 years from tomorrow.
The same logic applies to exploding government debt. We have moved into uncharted territory and are prisoners of psychology. Consider Japan. In 2009, its budget deficit -- the gap between spending and taxes -- amounts to 10 percent or more of gross domestic product (GDP). The total government debt -- the borrowing to cover all its deficits -- is approaching 200 percent of GDP. That's twice the size of its economy. The mountainous debt reflects years of slow economic growth, many "stimulus" plans, an aging society and the impact of the global recession. By 2019, the debt-to-GDP ratio could hit 300 percent, says a report from JPMorgan Chase.
No one knows how to interpret these numbers. If someone had predicted 20 years ago that Japan's debt would rise so spectacularly, the forecast would doubtlessly have inspired this alarm: Japan will pay crushing interest rates as fearful lenders demand high returns to compensate for the risk that government might default or inflate away its debt. Instead, the opposite has happened. Japanese investors -- households, banks, insurers -- have absorbed 94 percent of the debt, reports JPMorgan. Interest rates on 10-year Japanese government bonds have dropped from 7.1 percent in 1990 to 1.4 percent now.
Superficially, it's possible to explain this. Japan has ample private savings to buy bonds; modest deflation -- falling prices -- makes low interest rates acceptable; and investors remain confident that new and maturing debt will be financed.
The American situation is similar. Despite huge deficits, interest rates on 10-year Treasury bonds have hovered around 3.5 percent. In time of financial crisis, investors have sought the apparent sanctuary of government bonds. But the correct conclusion to draw is not that major governments (such as Japan and the United States) can easily borrow as much as they want. It is that they can easily borrow as much as they want until confidence that they can do so evaporates -- and we don't know when, how or whether that may happen.
Wealthy societies everywhere face a similar dilemma. Debt is ballooning from already high levels. The Congressional Budget Office reckons the Obama administration's planned budgets would increase the debt-to-GDP ratio from 41 percent in 2008 to 82 percent in 2019. Higher interest rates would aggravate the debt burden. Anticipating higher rates, the CBO estimates annual interest payments on the federal debt at $799 billion in 2019, up from $170 billion in 2009. Even the size of exposed debt is unclear; adding Fannie Mae's and Freddie Mac's debts (effectively guaranteed by the government) to Treasury debt would raise the total sharply.
But containing debt by spending cuts or tax increases would involve wrenching and unpopular measures that might, perversely, weaken the economy and worsen deficits. In Japan, the existing value-added tax (national sales tax) of 5 percent would have to go to 12 percent, says JPMorgan, along with deep spending cuts. Against choices like that, some advanced country might decide that a partial or complete default, though dire, would be less damaging economically and politically than the alternatives.
Deprived of international or domestic credit, defaulting countries in the past have suffered deep economic downturns, hyperinflation, or both. The odds may be against a wealthy society tempting that fate, but even the remote possibility underlines the precariousness and the novelty of the present situation. The arguments over whether we need more "stimulus" (and debt) obscure the larger reality that past debt increasingly constricts governments' economic maneuvering room.Apple is said to be working on a new pair of high-end Bluetooth headphones that will be completely wireless, meaning separate earpieces for the left and right side without a wire connecting them, according to a new rumor.
Apple's truly wireless earbuds are expected to be similar to the Bragi Dash.
Apple's current EarPods feature a 3.5mm headphone plug.
Citing anonymous sources, 9to5mac reported on Friday that the "premium" accessory also lacks charging ports. It is said that Apple plans for users to charge the device with a special carrying case, which will also include an integrated battery for recharging on the go.It's expected that the new headphones will debut this fall, alongside an anticipated "iPhone 7." Numerous recent reports have suggested that Apple plans to ditch the 3.5-millimeter headphone jack for this year's redesign, instead requiring that users connect headphones either via the Lightning port or over Bluetooth.If that change does in fact take place, it's highly likely that the EarPods Apple bundles with every new iPhone purchase would change to feature a Lightning connector for compatibility. The new rumored wireless headphones are said to be a premium, optional accessory that will be sold separately.Apple did file a trademark application last October for a product dubbed "AIRPODS," using a naming scheme similar to its current wired EarPods. Given Apple's acquisition of Beats, it's likely that any new wireless earbuds would be marketed under that Brand.With Apple Watch, wireless audio has taken on a more significant role in Apple's product lineup. The company already owns multiple patents for potential hardware iterations, including noise canceling and bone conduction technology, but has yet to bring a wireless headset to market.Currently, most wireless earbuds available on the market still have a cable connecting the left and right earpieces. There are a few "truly" wireless options available, most notably the Bragi Dash, which was shown off in demonstrations at this week's Consumer Electronics Show.PREV NEXT Order Prints
FORT DRUM — The public’s perception of the Army isn’t the best, according to the service’s top enlisted soldier, but that perception can be changed by every soldier.
“You are a billboard, and not only you but me and all the leaders of the Army have a responsibility that while you’re in the Army we help paint the right picture on your billboard,” said Sgt. Maj. of the Army Daniel A. Dailey. “We have millions of billboards around the United States that are going to say something good or bad about the Army.... What does your billboard say when you leave the Army?”
The sergeant major showed word clouds representing the public perception of each service. The Air Force was associated with the terms “educated” and “interesting,” the Navy with “exciting locations” and “good for women” and the Marine Corps with “discipline,” “honor” and “strength.”
The Army’s, he showed, was linked to low skill, ordinary and average. The sergeant major disagreed, and said the force should be credited for its training and leadership development.
“We have more opportunity for promotion, we have more MOS (military jobs) than most of the other services put together, and we provide the care of our families and our children better than any other institution in America,” Sgt. Maj. Dailey said.
The sergeant major was at Fort Drum for a tour of its facilities and training areas, and to meet with soldiers, family members and leaders. Sgt. Maj. Dailey also took part in a question-and-answer session that covered specialized fitness standards, maternity leave and drinking ages.
Prior to that, the sergeant major spoke on his and the Army’s priorities, such as having all of its soldiers ready to deploy, retaining the right people as the Army drops in size and enabling soldiers’ development.
“You could have the best weapon in the world; if there’s not someone to fire it, there’s not someone there to utilize it, there’s not someone there to maneuver it, it doesn’t do a bit of good,” Sgt. Maj. Dailey said.
That investment is key, he argued, given the human touch needed for future conflicts.
“The sharks with laser beams on their heads are not going to win wars,” Sgt. Maj. Dailey said. “They may change wars, influence wars, but wars will start and end with people.”
He also called sexual harassment and assault in the ranks “not acceptable,” due to the negative impact it has on both soldiers and units.
During the question-and-answer session, Sgt. Maj. Dailey said that the Army’s current physical training standards are adequate but not perfect, and that job-specific tests are coming.
He also said the Army was looking at the current amount of paternity leave for soldiers, currently at 10 days, as the military increased maternity leave to 12 weeks.
Asked if he would consider a lower drinking age for soldiers under 21, Sgt. Maj. Dailey said he didn’t foresee the military operating under different laws than civilian society. He did acknowledge enjoying drinks when he was stationed as a younger soldier in Germany, which has a lower drinking age, before falling under the age limit upon returning back to America.It’s hard to imagine that in the football-crazed world we live in- where college football recruiting is tracked on the internet 365 days a year and followed by millions annually- that any player could fly under the radar, or struggle to get the attention of his peers and recruiting experts alike. Especially when that player is in every recruiting service’s consensus Top 30 nationally.
Then again, there is nothing normal about Ohio State football commit and U.S. Army All-American Mike Mitchell. Not in the family he came from, or his path to being labeled as one of the top outside linebackers in the high school class of 2013.
First to his family, and to the reality that whoever created the phrase “everything is bigger in Texas,” must’ve been neighbors with the Mitchell family of Plano, TX. Mike is one of nine children, where he is sandwiched in-between two older brothers, three older sisters and three younger brothers as well.
What makes Mitchell even more unique is that even as he gets set to sign with one of the top college football programs in the country, it’s up for debate whether he’s even the best athlete in his own home (unless you ask Mike of course). For that matter, it’s also up for debate whether Mike is even the best football player living under the Mitchell roof.
That’s because while Mike’s play has landed him on the top of just about every recruiting service’s ranking within the last year, he spent a good chunk of his youth largely overshadowed by his younger brother Mickey, who is widely considered to be the best sophomore basketball player in the country (as well as a highly coveted football recruit as well). Not to mention that Mike’s father Ken actually played in the NFL for four years with the Atlanta Falcons, and that incredibly, the eldest Mitchell’s time in the NFL wasn’t even necessarily Ken’s own greatest athletic accomplishment. Ken played minor league ball in the California Angels organization as a teenager before he eventually walked onto the UNLV football team, where he is still in the Rebels’ record book with the third highest single season sack total in school history (11 in his senior year). Since retiring from the NFL, Ken has run Ironman triathlons and a couple years ago became the first person ever to climb Mt. Everest with a knee replacement.
Yes, that actually happened. And that is the world that Mike Mitchell grew up in.
So how did Mitchell go from overshadowed in his own home, to a name that every college football coach in America knows?
It’s a story with more twists and turns than a Les Miles press conference, with a little happenstance and luck mixed in also.
Oh, and there was a whole lot of hard work involved as well.
The Makings of a World-Class Athlete:
Growing up in a house with nine children, there’s no doubt that Mike Mitchell was born into a competitive environment, yet despite it, his parents Ken and Candy never once pushed he or any of his brothers into the sport of football. Actually, they didn’t push him toward any sport at all.
Instead, the Mitchell’s took an old-school approach to parenting, despite living in a world where most kids seem to specialize in one sport by the time they’re through grade school, and burn out before they hit puberty. Rather than sticking their kids in one sport year round, the Mitchell’s emphasized participation and fun, and let the rest fall into place as it was supposed to.
“All we ever tell our kids is to work hard,” Ken Mitchell said recently. “If it’s baseball, basketball, the tuba, well, we’re going to work at it. Kids want to have a choice in life. The worst thing you can do is to try and force something on a kid.”
And it’s because of that somewhat unique approach, that Mike got a relatively late start to football. Despite his father’s NFL background, Mike didn’t hit the gridiron until his eighth grade year, preferring basketball as a youngster instead. Mike’s early days weren’t littered with football glory, but instead pick-up hoops games at the park with his brothers and sisters.
“That was my first start (in sports) was basketball,” Mike Mitchell said. “I remember we used to go to the park and play pick-up games, until nine, 10 o’clock.”
Despite his late start to the game of football, Mitchell thrived when he did hit the gridiron. Mitchell starred for a local youth team in his eighth grade year and as a freshman in high school in Florida, playing linebacker with ferocity that could only come after competing every day of his life with eight brothers and sisters. By the time his family moved to Texas prior to Mike’s sophomore year, Mitchell was a rising star, one who helped Prestonwood Christian Academy win a state championship in 2010.
“I didn’t know a whole lot about Mike when he moved in at the beginning of his sophomore year,” Prestonwood head coach Chris Cunningham said. “But I knew by the end of the year, man, this kid is special.”
Cunningham tells a story from early in that sophomore season, a story which proved beyond a reasonable doubt just how good of a football Mike Mitchell was and is. Even though he was one of the youngest players on the field, Mitchell showed athletic traits which proved he could compete with anyone, even a future college star.
“Ty Montgomery- the (current) starting receiver at Stanford- was from St. Marks here in Dallas,” Cunningham said. “His senior year we’re scrimmaging them. Mike blitzes- and this is the first time I said to myself ‘This kid is unbelievable’- he blitzes, they throw a short little hitch route to |
just don’t do that to the American flag”
Van Beck was one of the vets that confronted the chairwoman of the Lake County Democratic Party (Nancy Hurlbert) about this flag.
One local news report detailed the tense moment that occurred when the vets asked that the flag be taken down:
‘There are laws against desecrating the flag,’ Van Beck said, right before he read out loud the federal flag code, public law 344, section 4G to Hurlbert: ‘The flag should never have placed upon it or any part of it, any marks, insignia, letters, words, figures, designs, picture or drawings of any nature. We would like to ask you to take it down please.’
Thankfully the Obama flag was eventually taken down because who knows what those vets would have done if it had kept flying. A lot of old vets may have aging bodies, but their spirits are still very much alive.
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Ex-marine John Masterjohn was also incredibly upset when he learned about the Obama flag. He compared this flag to what we have seen from some of the worst totalitarian regimes in history:
Joseph Stalin, pictures of Mao, pictures of Adolph Hitler. The pomp, the ceremony — the flag’s like that
And that is exactly what this Obama flag reminds me of. It reminds me of pictures of Chairman Mao plastered everywhere:
Socialists and communists always love to create a “cult of personality.” They always love to exalt their “dear leaders” to godlike status.
Shockingly, the Democrats in Florida are not even apologizing. In fact, they seem rather proud of the Obama flag.
A statement from the Lake County Democratic Headquarters said the following:
We were given this as a gift. We are proud of our president, we’re proud of the United States, and we felt it was time to display that.
Can you believe that? But that is not even the worst part. What Nancy Hurlbert, the chairwoman of the Lake County Democratic Party, had to say about all of this was absolutely disgraceful:AmiseedBad SeedPoison Point/ChlorophyllLiquid Ooze1'08"Will O' Woods, Route 311 (Night)NoneBereeper (lv. 32)Leech SeedVine WhipFaint AttackGrowthAt night, they invade gardens to destroy crops. Then they will absorb all nutrients from the soil until it goes sour.Name derives from amiss and seed. It based on the seed of the Deadly Nightshade. Appearance wise, it shares traits with devils. It is also inspired on the expression of a bad seed.HP : 60ATK : 60DEF : 20SPA : 15SPD : 25SPE : 28Stat total = 208******************************************************BereeperSinisterPoison Point/ChlorophyllLiquid Ooze3'03"Will O' Woods, Route 311 (Night, Rare)AmiseedStalkedge ( Leaf Stone)Power WhipFoul PlayLeaf BladeIngrainThey stalk their victims at night to tear into them and absorb their bodily fluids. Few trainers have caught wild Bereeper due to fleeing in fear.Name derives from berry and reaper. It is based on the flower and berry of the deadly nightshade, which is a very toxic plant. It was also inspired by Jack the Ripper, who committed many murders in London.Several species of plants were considered for Bereeper's design, including the zinnia, daphne, lily of the valley, belladonna, angel's trumpet, rhododendron, oleander and autumn crocus.HP : 80ATK : 80DEF : 44SPA : 20SPD : 60SPE : 69Stat total = 353******************************************************StalkedgeSinisterPoison Point/ChlorophyllLiquid Ooze6'03"NoneBereeperNoneMoonlightNight SlashFrenzy PlantBlockNightshadeOne may hear they loud footsteps if walking alone in a cemetery. Stalkedge build fences around their dens using the skeletons of their prey kept as trophies.Name derives from stalker and hedge. It also derives from edge, as in the edge of a blade. It is based on a plant hedge, with elements of the deadly nightshade flower and iron fences. It is also inspired by Jack the Ripper, and shares elements with demons. The original design was to have an additional thorn root sprouting to form a tail, but this was removed because it looked like it was defecating.HP : 128ATK : 128DEF : 65SPA : 25SPD : 78SPE : 85Stat total = 509Amiseed & Bereeper 1: www.fanart-central.net/picture… Amiseed & Bereeper 2: www.fanart-central.net/picture… Stalkedge: www.fanart-central.net/picture… Previous: tapejara.deviantart.com/art/Ha… Next: tapejara.deviantart.com/art/Ha…Chevy will now sell you track-ready 1LE versions of its V6- and V8-powered Camaros, but no such package is offered for the four-cylinder model. For SEMA though, Chevy took its 2.0-liter Camaro and turned it into an autocross machine. The appropriately-named Camaro Turbo AutoX is just a concept, but we hope it's a preview of what's to come.
With 275 horsepower on tap, the four-cylinder Camaro is the least powerful in the lineup but it's the lightest version, and the best balanced. That's why Chevy decided to exploit this Camaro's lightness in service of parking-lot racing.
Chevrolet
The Camaro Turbo AutoX Concept's suspension is lowered by 20mm, and comes with stiffer suspension links, larger stabilizer bars, and an under-hood strut tower brace. It also has a Chevrolet Performance front brake kit with six-piston calipers and slotted rotors.
For powertrain upgrades, the Camaro's engine gets a new cold-air intake, an ECU tune that allows for more turbo boost, and a performance exhaust. Chevy also fit a short-shift kit for the six-speed manual because in autocross, nailing a quick 1-2 shift is important.
Chevrolet
Styling, as you can see, is not subtle, with a crazy day-glo paint scheme, and 20-inch ZR1-style wheels. Particularly great is the integrated tow hook under the front grille because, after all, this is a competition car.
While Chevy doesn't have plans to put this exact car into production, expect to see some of these upgrades in your next GM Performance Parts catalog. The four-cylinder Camaro might be the base model, but, it's a legitimate sports car worthy of these track-ready mods.Broward County's tourism bureau has been marketing to the LGBT community since 1996, but results of a survey released Monday show extra effort is needed to attract more transgender travelers.
In August, some 700 members of the transgender community across 48 states participated in the online survey conducted by Community Marketing & Insights, a San Francisco-based specialty marketing and research firm.
Only 10 percent of participants perceived Fort Lauderdale to be very trans-friendly, the study revealed.
Nearly half (48 percent) of respondents polled perceived Fort Lauderdale as not being transgender-friendly, while 43 percent said it was somewhat trans-friendly, according to the study commissioned by the Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention & Visitors Bureau.
"We know a lot about gay and lesbian travelers, but little if anything has been known about the transgender traveler, until now," said Richard Gray, the bureau's managing director of the LGBT market. "Now is the time for the Greater Fort Lauderdale CVB to emphasize the importance of the T in LGBT. The forgotten T, I'm saddened to say."
Despite the less-than-flattering survey results, Fort Lauderdale ranked No. 9 among the top 10 travel destinations for transgender travelers, But officials say the survey's findings is the ammunition they need to boost its ranking. San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Key West were the top five.
In 2013, the county welcomed 1.3 million LGBT visitors who spent about $1.5 billion in the destination, but the transgender portion of that figure is very small.
The tourism bureau approached CMI about a year ago to help develop and conduct its first-ever transgender travel survey study, Gray said.
Among the goals was to better understand what motivates transgender people to travel and select a destination, and also discern whether special training is needed for local hotels and the CVB to better accommodate them, he said.
Survey findings revealed that transgender people tend to be budget-oriented, cultural and urban-core travelers, although some also identified themselves as warm weather and beach travelers.
Of note, roughly 80 percent of respondents said a destination's reputation as being "safe" was the most important motivating factor when selecting a place to visit.
Other key survey findings show a high percentage (62 percent) of transgender travelers tend to travel alone at least sometimes, while 49 percent preferred to travel with a partner or spouse. The totals vary because "check all that apply" was an option on the survey question.
"As a CVB, we want to appropriately communicate with transgender travelers," he said.
These key findings and others were released to an audience of hoteliers and hospitality partners at the Riverside Hotel who came out to learn more about transgender travelers and how best to cater to them.
The study's release comes a little more than a year before Broward hosts the Southern Comfort Transgender Conference, the largest and longest-running transgender conference in the country.
Southern Comfort recently partnered with the tourism bureau to bring its annual conference to town for three years from 2015 through 2017. The 25th transgender conference will run Sept. 28-Oct. 3 at the Bonaventure Resort & Spa in Weston, the host hotel for the three years.
"We're beyond thrilled to be selected as the official host facility and are excited to build this partnership," said Amy Hyde, the resort's senior sales manager.
The 500-room hotel's size and meeting facilities were a big draw, said Alexis Dee, president of Southern Comfort's board of directors.
"We'll take over the entire hotel and we're looking already like we will need a property for overflows," Dee told attendees Monday, noting that the number of speakers and vendors is expected to double in size in 2015.
With Florida still among U.S. states not allowing gay marriage, it's not surprising that survey respondents didn't perceive it as being friendly to the lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender community.
Although survey results show there's more work to be done in Florida, events like Southern Comfort are a "great step forward in changing that perception," said Gina Duncan, transgender inclusion director for Equality Florida, the state's largest LGBT advocacy organization.
Of the conference, Duncan added: "I think it will generate a lot more dialogue and awareness of what it means to be transgender."
asatchell@tribpub.com, 954-356-4209 or Twitter@TheSatchreport.But later this year, Rose's achievements in baseball finally will be acknowledged by his hometown and longtime team. On Tuesday, the organization announced that Rose will be inducted into the Reds Hall of Fame the weekend of June 24-26. Reds CEO Bob Castellini also revealed that Rose's uniform No. 14 will be formally retired and that a statue will be built in his honor in the near future.
CINCINNATI -- Cincinnati native Pete Rose stands virtually alone as the city's sports icon. Major League Baseball's all-time hits leader, Rose is unlikely to gain entry into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown any time soon because of his lifetime ban for betting on the game.
CINCINNATI -- Cincinnati native Pete Rose stands virtually alone as the city's sports icon. Major League Baseball's all-time hits leader, Rose is unlikely to gain entry into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown any time soon because of his lifetime ban for betting on the game.
But later this year, Rose's achievements in baseball finally will be acknowledged by his hometown and longtime team. On Tuesday, the organization announced that Rose will be inducted into the Reds Hall of Fame the weekend of June 24-26. Reds CEO Bob Castellini also revealed that Rose's uniform No. 14 will be formally retired and that a statue will be built in his honor in the near future.
• Reds to retire Rose's No. 14, build statue
"This is an honor where you can't believe how you feel," Rose said. "Growing up here, I've always been a Reds fan, always had respect for all the Reds players that I've rooted for when I was a kid. Most all the guys that are in the Hall of Fame that are living today, either played with me or against me, and a lot of them played for me."
Rose, who will turn 75 on April 14, was selected as the sole inductee for the class of 2016 by the Reds Hall of Fame Board of Directors. To make that happen, the board had to change its bylaws, which previously had mirrored the museum in Cooperstown, which declares ineligible for induction any player banned by Major League Baseball.
Video: Rose honored to be elected to the Reds Hall of Fame
"He is the most prolific hitter ever," Reds Hall Fame executive director Rick Walls said. "His records, accomplishments stand for themselves. With the support of Bob Castellini and the Reds, the board of directors unanimously voted on this decision."
Known as baseball's "Hit King," with 4,256 career hits from 1963-86 for the Reds, Phillies and Expos, Rose was placed on the permanently ineligible list for violating Major League Baseball's rule against betting on baseball on Aug. 23, 1989. Subsequently, the Board of Directors of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum declared that all players on that list would also be ineligible for election.
On Dec. 14, 2015, Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred denied Rose's bid to be reinstated, saying that he had not been presented with any evidence that Rose had reconfigured his life or accepted the wrongdoing of his gambling actions.
However, Manfred did note that the Reds could celebrate Rose's career feats provided that the club seeks his approval in advance.
Video: Mark Sheldon on Rose being inducted into Reds HOF
"This is historic," Castellini said. "This is one of the greatest days in the history of this franchise. Not a day has gone by since taking ownership of this franchise [in 2006] have we lost sight of Pete Rose. His hustle, his style of play and passion for the game are simply unforgettable, not only to our fans in the stands, but to any player privileged to wear the same uniform as the Big Red Machine.
"Commissioner Manfred and Major League Baseball understand the importance of Pete Rose to our city, to our team, and we thank the Commissioner and MLB for their support of the Reds' induction of Pete Rose into our Hall of Fame."
Nineteen of Rose's 24 seasons were played in Cincinnati, where he achieved numerous feats. He was the 1963 National League Rookie of the Year, the 1973 NL Most Valuable Player and a 13-time All-Star for the Reds. He batted.303/.375/.409 over his two stints for the team.
Video: The MLB Tonight crew looks back at Pete Rose's career
Rose was a celebrated member of the Big Red Machine and the World Series-winning clubs of 1975-76. In 1978, he notched the third-longest hitting streak in Major League history at 44 games.
Following his time in Philadelphia and Montreal, Rose was traded back to the Reds in 1984 and served as player-manager. On Sept. 11, 1985, his single off the Padres' Eric Show gave Rose career hit No. 4,192, breaking Ty Cobb's all-time career hits record.
Rose managed until 1989, when allegations of gambling on baseball surfaced and forced his exile from the game. While banned, he has attended several Reds games in recent years as a ticketholder. MLB has allowed Rose to participate in selected on-field acknowledgments for the team in recent years. That included the 2015 All-Star Game at Great American Ball Park, when Rose was named one of the club's "Franchise Four" living legends.
Throughout a Tuesday news conference at Great American Ball Park, Rose appeared happy and relaxed, cracking jokes or one-liners for laughs. He also recognized the teammates and club that helped him be a great player.
Video: 2015 ASG: Reds' Franchise Four announced
"I was thinking the other day about what a garden spot I had in the lineup for the Big Red Machine," Rose said. "I led off and the next three guys up all have statues [now] outside the ballpark. I don't think anybody else has been in that situation. No wonder I scored all those runs."
Hall of Famers Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan and Tony Perez are the other three Big Red Machine members with statues. A date was not set for Rose's.
"Regardless of what anybody thinks, my name is kind of synonymous with the Reds, Rose said. "It's kind of synonymous with baseball."
Mark Sheldon is a reporter for MLB.com. Read his blog, Mark My Word, follow him on Twitter @m_sheldon and Facebook and listen to his podcast.Splatoon and all your Nintendo faves will be playable at MCM London Comic Con!
At the 2015 MCM London Comic Con, Nintendo are offering the chance to get inked with their brand new multiplayer Splatoon, playable one week ahead of general UK release! Nintendo will also host a series of multiplayer matches that showcase Wii U titles, featuring the new 200cc mode for Mario Kart 8 and amiibo competitions on Super Smash Bros. for Wii U,
Guests can also get their hands on exclusive items and limited edition stock as the Official Nintendo UK Online Store! The store will be offering a wide assortment of goods on their stand including; New Nintendo 3DS cover plates, amiibo and the New Nintendo 3DS XL Majora’s Mask 3D bundle, which includes the limited edition Skull Kid figurine.
With Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate also available to play and street passes to collect, Nintendo will be a sure place to visit at this years MCM London Comic Con.I love the GT series on PS2 but they could have done better on GT5. They don't have nearly as much cars as they had in GT4. GT4 had a huge assortment of cars dating back to the late 1800's. GT4 in my opinion had a much better sound track. The sound track in GT5 seems to be random music (mostly alternative rock modern jazz electronic etc. and missing allot of classic rock) The sound track from GT4 had famous artists like Eddy Van Halen and Papa Roach. But enough about the music, back to the cars and game play. They did add a good assortment of modern and classic cars and this time they have an online dealership for cars you can't find in the normal or used car dealership most of the time (please note the GT5 online dealership is now officially permanently closed as of 2014) I hate the fact that they have a premium and standard car category. Basically A premium car is any car you buy and has a detailed interior but a standard car is usually you win in a race or a car bought on the online dealership with no interior detail but I shouldn't be mad at the people behind GT for that because the PS3 has very little RAM (only 256MB) making it harder to add detail to everything. I also hate how some cars require downloadable content from the PlayStation store to be able to buy it. Other than a few flaws, the game play has a good driving simulator style to it and the graphics are very good as usual with the GT series.
Pros:
1) Great graphics
2) Decent game play
3) Great cars
4) Allot of race events to choose from (once unlocked)
5) Good choices of modifications & upgrades for your cars
6) Some crash graphics added for GT5 (when you bump a wall or another car hard enough your car receives minor cosmetic damage)
7) Improved car service center (change oil, clean car, paint car, change & paint rims, engine overhaul, aerodynamics kit options, chassis maintenance and racing modifications)
Cons:
1) Not as many cars as GT4
2) Sound track could be better
5) Go carts are kinda pointlessImage copyright Penny Clarke Image caption The whale, believed to be a fin, was found washed up between the end of the sea wall at Burnham Overy and Holkham in Norfolk
A rare 40ft (12m) fin whale has been found dead on a Norfolk beach.
The whale was discovered by wardens at the Holkham National Nature Reserve on the north Norfolk coast.
The Holkham Estate said it believed the animal was a fin whale and the Cetacean Strandings Investigation Programme (CSIP) would be carrying out a post-mortem to establish the cause of its death.
Plans were under way to remove the whale from the beach.
For more on the whale and other stories, visit the BBC Norfolk Live page
A spokeswoman said the area remained open "but we advise the public not to venture close to the carcass and to keep dogs on leads".
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Penny Clarke photographed the whale on the shore
Images of the whale were taken by bird photographer Penny Clarke, from King's Lynn, who was out walking on the beach when she came across the animal.
"It's really sad. It looked really fresh like it had only just washed up. It's an amazing creature, just so sad to see it like this," said Miss Clarke.
Image copyright Andy Butler Image caption Six whales have washed up on beaches in Lincolnshire and Norfolk
A total of 30 sperm whales have died in the North Sea this year.
Six of the sperm whales and a minke were found dead on beaches in Norfolk and Lincolnshire. The others were found beached in France, Germany and the Netherlands.
Dr Peter Evans, director of the Sea Watch Foundation, said they had probably died due to them straying into shallow waters while hunting squid.
Fin whales
Listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)
Grow to about 26m (85ft) long and can live to about 90 years old
They can weigh up to 74 tonnes and live on a diet of small fish, crustaceans and squid
Dr Ben Garrod, of Anglia Ruskin University said: "If is is a fin that's very, very surprising.
"Fin whales are rarely, if ever, seen in the North Sea and are instead found more regularly, but still not commonly, off the western British Isles.
"Without any more information right now, it's impossible to say why it might have been there or why it died."FILE - Actor Efrem Zimbalist Jr, watches during a ceremony honoring him by the FBI at the Federal building in Los Angeles in this Monday, June 8, 2009 file photo. The 90-year-old, who starred in the TV show,`The FBI'' from 1965 to 1974, was honored for his historic contributions to the FBI. Zimbalist, the son of famous musicians who gained television stardom in the 1950s-60s hit "77 Sunset Strip" and later "The FBI," died Friday at his ranch in Solvang, Calif., at age 95. (AP Photo/Nick Ut, File)
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Handsome, debonair and blessed with a distinguished voice that reflected his real-life prep school upbringing, Efrem Zimbalist Jr. seemed born to play the television roles that made him famous, that of hip Hollywood detective and brilliant G-man.
A prolific actor who also appeared in numerous films and stage productions, Zimbalist became a household name in 1958 as Stu Bailey, the wisecracking private investigator who was a co-partner in a swinging Hollywood detective agency located at the exclusive address of "77 Sunset Strip."
When the show of the same name ended in 1964, Zimbalist became an even bigger star playing the empathetic, methodical G-man Lewis Erskine in "The F.B.I."
The actor, who in recent years had retired to his ranch in Southern California's bucolic horse country, died there Friday at age 95.
"We are heartbroken to announce the passing into peace of our beloved father, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., today at his Solvang ranch," the actor's daughter Stephanie Zimbalist and son Efrem Zimbalist III said in a statement. "He actively enjoyed his life to the last day, showering love on his extended family, playing golf and visiting with close friends."
Zimbalist's stunning good looks and cool, deductive manner made him an instant star when "77 Sunset Strip" began its six-season run in 1958.
He and his partner Jeff Spencer (played by Roger Smith) operated from an office in the center of Hollywood where, aided by their sometime helper, Kookie, a jive-talking beatnik type who doubled as a parking lot attendant, they tracked down miscreants.
Kookie's character, played by Edd Byrnes, helped draw young viewers to the show, and his constant hair combing created the national catchphrase, "Kookie, Lend Me Your Comb."
When the program's run ended in 1964, Zimbalist segued seamlessly into "The F.B.I." the following year and that program aired until 1974.
At the end of each episode, after Zimbalist and his fellow G-men had captured that week's mobsters, subversives, bank robbers or spies, the series would post real photos from the FBI's most-wanted list. Some of them led to arrests, which helped give the show the complete seal of approval of the agency's real-life director, J. Edgar Hoover.
"He never came on the set, but I knew him. A charming man, extremely Virginia formal and an extraordinary command of the language," Zimbalist said of Hoover, who opened the bureau's files to the show's producers and even allowed background shots to be filmed at real FBI offices.
In 2009 the FBI honored Zimbalist with his own special agent's badge, making him an honorary G-man in recognition of the contributions his show and his character made to the agency's reputation.
"We could not have asked for a better character, or a better man, to play his role," FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said at the time.
The son of violin virtuoso Efrem Zimbalist and acclaimed opera singer Alma Gluck, young Efrem initially appeared headed for a musical career himself. He studied violin for seven years under the tutelage of Jascha Heifetz's father, but eventually developed more interest in theater.
After serving in World War II, he made his stage debut in "The Rugged Path," starring Spencer Tracy, and appeared in other plays and a soap opera before being called to Hollywood. Warner Bros. signed him to a contract and cast him in minor film roles.
He also had a recurring role in the hit Western series "Maverick," playing con man Dandy Jim Buckley.
Then "77 Sunset Strip" debuted, starring Zimbalist as a cultured former O.S.S. officer and language expert whose partner was an Ivy League Ph.D.
The program brought Zimbalist an Emmy nomination in 1959, but after a few seasons he tired of the long hours and what he believed were the bad scripts.
"A job like this should pay off in one of two ways: satisfaction or money. The money is not great, and there is no satisfaction," he said.
When the show faltered in 1963, Jack Webb of "Dragnet" fame was hired for an overhaul. He fired the cast except for Zimbalist, whom he made a world-traveling investigator. The repair work failed, and the series ended the following year.
Zimbalist had better luck with "The F.B.I.," which endured for a decade as one of TV's most popular shows.
His daughter Stephanie also took up acting — and small-screen detective work, in the hit 1980s TV series "Remington Steele." Her father had a recurring role in that show, again playing a con man.Australian temperatures unchanged for 20 years: Plus Malcolm Roberts first Senate speech is tomorrow
Malcolm Roberts will give his maiden Senate speech tomorrow (Tuesday) at 5pm at the Australian Parliament House in Canberra. To reserve seating contact Leon Ashby leon.ashby AT aph.gov.au or phone (02) 6277 3151. He has asked for updated graphs of the UAH data for Australia. His speech may be available via the APH website. (h/t Jim S)
Luckily for us the UAH satellite database can be filtered to track temperatures in the lower troposphere over the Australian land mass. Thanks to John Christy for providing an Australian specific dataset.
We’ve put out a third of all the CO2 homosapiens has ever made in the last 20 years, and it apparently has made no meaningful difference to temperatures here. We’ve put out 60% of all our CO2 since the satellite record began.
Here is the full Australian monthly data from 1979 – now for all seasons graphed below. There are breathless news articles hyping every hot month, every hot week, for records in every little region, and even for a single record hot nights, but no press release to say that temperatures in Australia have not really changed in a meaningful way since 1995.
Thanks to KensKingdom for regular updates to the UAH series and calculations of “the pause” in regions all over the world.
The Australian UAH data covers land but not ocean, Tasmania, but not PNG or Indonesia. It’s really quite useful recording that operates continuously day and night, measuring the temperature of the air from the ground to about 8km up. It is not the same as what the BOM measures on the ground, but in theory, according to the climate models, the troposphere should warm faster than the ground. (That’s very central to the amplification of effect of CO2, it is the missing hot spot, the fingerprint of CO2).
The BOM data is below (be aware it covers a different time period starting in 1910.)
Source: The Australian Bureau of Meteorology
The warmists kick up a to-do,
That mankind has increased CO2.
Which can not be the cause,
Of the twenty year Pause,
And the earlier mild warming too.
— Rauiri
..
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obligated to dip shrimp in tartar sauce, leave witches unstoned, and wear mixed fabrics (even though the Gay Bible still forbids that last part).
I don't want to come off as anti-God, because it's hard to argue with anyone talented enough to invent Lynda Carter; I'm just saying even the Bible doesn't agree with the Bible's definition of marriage, so why let any one faith dictate the argument? That's when most opponents fall back to natural law...
Marvel wants you to know it doesn't discriminate.
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Translated into sanity:"Homosexuality only leads to pregnancy in ancient creation myths and certain species of hellbound lizard. If a couple isn't ready for children, they must do like the animals and wait till the time is right. Then, like lions, they should copulate 70 times a day in ten second stints. Two males may also stalk a female and pen her into a rapefest, just like nature's perfect cheetahs. And who are we, in our hubris, to challenge the natural order of black swan threesomes?"
It's true that Mother Nature created woman, like the queen ant, to store sperm in her abdomen for six months, churn out ghastly quantities of eggs and then clone herself parthenogenically. But it's also true you don't have to count any further than five plain ol' everyday ducks to see nature is totally gay for gays. If there's anything funnier than a duck with a lisp I'd like to see it.
Warner Bros. be for hose
The Jones-Blanc Index proved that was the height of comedy
Even though nature made Adam & Eve, not Adam & Steve, the two things I've learned from the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" debate are that gays are limp-wristed silly-billies who think rifles are for planting daisies, and that gays are unstoppable rape-machines with indefatigable erections who will trench a fellow soldier's colon to use as a foxhole. So all we have to do is find those two kinds of gay and make them marry each other. Voila! Balance restored. Thanks, nature!
So while you're in your air-conditioned apartment carefully stranding E-Z-Cheez on your lover's body so as not to smear any on the rayon sheets, won't you please spare a teardrop for the natural order?Have you ever wondered which scientific journal was the first of its kind? Or why there are scientific publications at all? In this post you will learn how far we have come since the first journals, what it means to communicate science today and what the future might hold for traditional journals and publishers.
Probably these issues crossed your mind, but you never found the time to dig deeper. I don’t blame you. It’s tough to be a young and upcoming researcher these days. Today’s advances in scientific literature are so fast-paced that it can be hard to keep up, let alone ask such remote questions.
At the same time I think you will agree that it may be useful (or, just plain interesting) to have a broader perspective on how scientific journals came to be and how this might help us understand today’s publishing landscape. This article will guide you through the different stages of science communication, going back to ancient civilizations, the invention of the printing press, all the way to a present where to “publish or perish” is the name of the game and restrictions in the access to science are an harsh reality.
From the Walls of Babylon to the Medieval Scriptorium
The word ‘science’ itself, coming from the Latin ‘scientia’, means knowledge. So, to communicate science is to communicate knowledge. Today we do this through scientific journals and magazines, but how did we came up with these concepts and how did they evolve over time?
It’s known that civilizations as early as Mesopotamia grounded their worldview on some form of observation and experimentation. The advent of agriculture (c. 5500 BCE) – and the resulting surplus in food – allowed Mesopotamian empires to dedicate their energy to activities besides survival, such as improving technology (with the invention of the wheel and the development of cursive script) and organizing knowledge in the form of mathematics and astronomy.
They were serious about it too. Thousands of annotations in clay tablets, dating to 3500 BCE, include detailed descriptions of motions of stars, planets and the moon. Even today, astronomical periods first identified by Mesopotamian scientists are still widely used in our calendar (e.g., the solar year, the lunar month and even the seven-day week).
As Sumerian towns grew into cities, the people needed a way to keep track of business transactions, ownership rights, and government records. Sumerians thus developed the first form of writing, the first written code of law and the first major piece of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh. However, it’s difficult to know the exact date of the first scientific report with the fragments of ancient papyri and cuneiform clay tablets that remain.
It was only with the Ancient Greeks (c. 500 BCE) that communication took a different course. Communication was mostly oral, but it was thought of as a more integral part of city life. Socrates walked around the streets of Athens looking for flaws in his fellow citizens arguments, Plato used dialogues to express his views on different values and Aristotle formalized all the knowledge about communication in his Rhetoric. In his treatise, Aristotle stresses the role of emotional appeal, logical argumentation and the character (i.e., reputation) of the speaker, which still play a central role in contemporary scientific discourse.
Later, during the Middle Ages (c. 900 CE), trade increased, policy was systematized and citizens were organized in larger administrative units. This led to the foundation of the first universities and with it the systematic collection and distribution of knowledge (which at the time meant Christian doctrine and scholastic philosophy). The ivory tower got its name and although paper was available, all books were copied by hand in monasteries which meant little widespread availability.
The invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg around 1450 quickly changed that. Now the broad access to knowledge was a reality and the medieval road to open access was in place. By 1500, this technology was operating throughout Western Europe and had already produced more than twenty million volumes. In a single generation countless books flooded Europe and, in a flash, the Dark Ages became just a little brighter. Of course, enjoying a good book with the bubonic plague and the Inquisition still around could prove to be difficult, yet standards of living were slowly on the rise.
To the Scientific Revolution… and Beyond!
These advances in standards of living culminated in 17th century Europe and led to the emergence of a literate upper class, mainly in France and England. This period saw the creation of the Royal Society of London, in 1660, and numerous founding texts such as Newton’s Principia (1687) and Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651).
During this time “natural philosophers” began to advocate the use of the scientific method inspired by the writings of Bacon and Descartes. The intellectual interest sparked by this “social movement” (Science!) now encouraged the critical examination of ideas independently of who said them. This resulted in a huge increase in the volume of scientific knowledge and led to the issue of how to best distribute it to all those interested.
To discuss and “open up scientific culture” a pioneering group of scientists started to gather in secret meetings in England (1660). Newton, Oldenburg, Hooke and their “invisible college” soon grew and became known as The Royal Society of London. The adopted format for the exchange of research work was the periodical journal. The idea was rather simple: one experiment or observation per article. And thus the scientific journal was born, in 1665, as the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
Now scientific work could finally reach a larger audience and contribute to the improvement of |
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Metaverse Team Blocked Unblock Follow Following Dec 3, 2017
The Metaverse Foundation has been invited to attend the Cryptospace Conference held in Moscow, Russia on December 8. Hosted by our partner fundraising platform KICKICO, the Cryptospace Conference is the largest Blockchain and Cryptocurrency conference in Eastern Europe and expects a turnout of 3,000 participants from more than 30 countries this year.
With 44 speakers and more than 100 professional journalists in attendance, the Conference will serve as a platform to discuss pertinent topics such as the future of blockchain technology applications, crypto-trading and due diligence for ICOs, and blockchain marketing. The Metaverse Foundation is honored to be the only Chinese blockchain company selected to give a speech at the conference. In the meantime, ZenGold, the first application based on the Metaverse Blockchain, will also be participating in the Conference.
Eric Gu, founder of the Metaverse Foundation, will deliver a speech themed “Digital Identity In Blockchain” at the conference. Eric will elaborate on the crucial role of digital identities in the development of blockchain technology as well as its application in the field.
Should you be interested，you may purchase tickets from the conference website：http://cryptospace.moscow/
For more details, please continue to follow Metaverse on our social media platforms.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mvsofficial/
Twitter：https://twitter.com/mvs_org
Medium：https://medium.com/@mvs_org
Instagram：metaverseofficialThe low-end-loving portion of the music world has been been abuzz in recent months over the news of dubstep don Mala's forthcoming new album, Mala in Cuba, but his Digital Mystikz partner-in-crime, Coki, apparently has a new release of his own on the way. Entitled Don't Get It Twisted Vol. 2, the four-track effort is scheduled for release in late August via DMZ. The artwork, full tracklist, and a pair of preview clips are below, along with a list of upcoming tour dates, as Coki will be bouncing around the US during the next two weeks, first with Mala as Digital Mystikz, followed by a series of solo shows.
Tracklist:
1. Mid June Madness
2. Light years
3. On Board
4. Drop n Run
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Digital Mystikz Tour Dates:
07.12: Cervantes Masterpiece Ballroom, Denver
07.13: Moksha Art Gallery, Miami
07.14: Warehouse Live, Houston
07.15: Los Globos, Los Angeles
Coki Tour Dates:
07.18: Kava Lounge, San Diego
07.19: Temple, San Francisco
07.20: The Fillmore, Charlotte
07.21: The Loft at Barfly, Minneapolis
07.22: Barcelona, Austin
07.25: Belvedere's, Pittsburgh
07.26: The Works, Detroit
07.27: E-Villa, Baltimore
07.28: TBA, New YorkThe flu vaccine isn’t useless and neither is Tamiflu. It’s just that they, like all infection-control measures, are not perfect. Photograph by Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images.
Here’s a common complaint about the annual flu vaccine: “The last time I got the shot, I ended up getting the flu anyway!” Epidemiological data seem to back up such anecdotes. According to an American Lung Association report from 2010, there was no sustained decline in influenza-associated deaths over the past decades. Among those older than 65, according to a New England Journal of Medicine review, flu hospitalization rates rose steadily between 1979 and 2001, despite an increase in vaccination rates among seniors from 32 percent in 1989 to 67 percent in 1997.
Such data make the vaccine seem useless. As a result, skepticism has lately moved beyond the usual anti-vaccine, tinfoil-hat crowd. In 2009, the Atlantic published a breathless piece accusing drug makers and doctors of foisting bad science on an unsuspecting public and asked, “But what if everything we think about fighting influenza is wrong? What if flu vaccine does not protect people from dying—particularly the elderly?” Last month, the New York Times called the flu vaccine a “bonanza” for vaccine manufacturers and gave largely uncritical coverage to a University of Minnesota researcher who claimed the vaccine “does not protect as promoted. It’s all a sales job.” Similarly provocative articles have run in Harper’s (“Viral Marketing”), the Boston Globe (“Flu Shots Are Safe, But Do They Work?”), and the Wall Street Journal (“They Shoot Flu-Shot Skeptics, Don’t They?”).
Critics of flu-control efforts got a boost recently when the British Medical Journal accused Roche, which makes the anti-viral drug Tamiflu, of hiding data about the drug’s supposed impotence against the flu. In anticipation of a possible pandemic in 2009, the U.S. government stockpiled $1.5 billion worth of Tamiflu and other anti-flu drugs. Now the editor of the British Medical Journal is concerned those pills were oversold. Among the conspiracy-minded, flu-control efforts now have less to do with public health and more to do with corporate profits. The true threat to us all, proclaimed Helen Epstein in the New York Review of Books, isn’t the virus at all, but the drug companies.
Informed debate over public health is, well, healthy. But it’s wrong to portray the global medical community as a stooge of greedy drug makers. The flu vaccine isn’t useless and neither is Tamiflu. It’s just that they, like all infection-control measures, are not perfect. There is no question that the vaccine does enhance one’s immune response to flu—and it certainly does not give people the flu. It’s likely the shot hasn’t led yet to a dramatic population-wide decrease in flu deaths. But the proper response isn’t for us to finger-point at drug companies and public health officials and call for repealing vaccine efforts.
What critics of flu-control policies don’t get is that any global effort to stop an infection always goes through a process in which doctors learn more over successive battles and refine their strategies. That is exactly what is now happening in the battle against flu. We are not witnessing the work of industry puppet-masters. This is the scientific process in action.
It’s easy to demonize Big Pharma and just call for more and more studies before taking decisive action. But sometimes we have to move. Consider the chicken-pox vaccine, which was first licensed in the United States in 1995. Preliminary data suggested the vaccine could stop the disease, but the studies included only a few thousand children. Arguments against universal chicken pox vaccination sounded similar to those against flu shots—the illness is harmless, the vaccine doesn’t reliably produce immunity, drug companies are running the show, and so on—but authorities persisted and endorsed universal vaccination. Within a few years, we realized that children needed two separate shots, not one, to get stronger immunity, and national policies were changed. Before vaccines, chicken pox killed 100 children and led to 10,000 hospitalizations annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In school-age children, attack rates fell by almost 80 percent after vaccination began, and deaths were nearly eliminated.
Another example of unfolding science: RotaShield, a vaccine against the leading cause of infant diarrhea, was approved in 1998. When a very rare side effect emerged, the vaccine was pulled in 1999. Two new vaccines were developed and licensed in 2006 (Rotarix and RotaTeq), and those formulations may save hundreds of thousands of lives annually worldwide. Again, more tweaks may be needed over time. In fact, the American Academy of Pediatrics vaccine schedule is constantly changing in small ways—ask any pediatrician who has to keep up—as data filters back about new vaccines against HPV and meningococcus, among others.
Back to flu, which is far more complicated than, say, chicken pox. To begin with, most people who die of the flu aren’t actually tested for it; hospitals and clinics aren’t required to report flu cases to anyone (unless they involve young children); and most severe consequences of the flu are secondary problems like bacterial pneumonia or heart failure, which end up being listed as the cause of death. Thus, the flu’s toll can be estimated only by using complex statistical models. Further, the virus mutates yearly, so the flu’s impact varies hugely year by year and makes longitudinal comparisons impossible. Over the past 30 years, the annual American death toll wandered almost randomly between 3,000 and 50,000.
Now add the following: Vaccine makers have to guess what strains of the flu will predominate, so the vaccine may prevent anywhere from 0 to 50 percent of the flu in a bad-guess year and 70 to 90 percent in a good-guess year. The vaccine works best in school-age children and young adults, and unfortunately it works worst in babies and seniors, who sadly are the ones who get sickest. (In 2003, the CDC began requiring state health department to report child flu deaths and found 153 children died of the flu that season, which is more than any other vaccine-preventable illness.) Even more complicated: The nasal mist vaccine works best in children, but the shot is better for adults.
What about Tamiflu? In the event that a virulent flu pandemic occurred and no vaccine was available, antiviral drugs might be critical. In a key 2009 study during the H1N1 outbreak, stockpiled Tamiflu was given to large groups of contacts of newly-infected Singaporeans and cut the transmission rate by 95 percent. Tamiflu also appears to cut the risk of death in hospitalized flu patients. Critics of Tamiflu allege Roche obscured evidence unfavorable to the drug, but the debate is deep and fascinating. (Roche’s response to them, in my opinion, seemed reasonable.)
Most importantly, what have we learned about flu control? We found that vaccinating the elderly failed to cut hospitalizations; therefore, doctors hypothesized that children are responsible for spreading most flu to older people. In 2010, a large study of elementary-school-based flu vaccine in Bell County, Texas achieved 50 percent vaccination rates of students and protected people of all ages from the flu (the so-called “herd immunity” effect). Similar findings were seen in a Canadian study. Incorporating this information, the CDC recommended in 2010 that all people over 6 months old should be vaccinated. (To guard infants, we now know that vaccinating pregnant women produces immunity in their newborns.) As in chicken pox control, these new flu policies show public health in evolution. In a few years, we will see if this works. In the meantime, the FDA earlier this year approved a new vaccine that includes four flu strains, instead of three, which may bolster effectiveness. It’s another example of science in action.
In the meantime, Americans should learn from the death toll of flu-vaccine skepticism in Japan. It was the only industrialized country to have mandatory universal flu vaccine of children, which helped produce herd immunity, The program fell victim to skeptics and was repealed in 1994. The result? The New England Journal of Medicine reported that flu deaths rose by 40,000 per year—almost as many people as died immediately from the atomic bomb in Hiroshima.
In the end, it’s easy to ascribe sinister motives to flu control efforts, especially if you’re unwilling to tolerate uncertainty. With a slight shift in perspective, however, one can see our evolving flu control programs as a triumph of public health.Today I am tabling an amendment to the Misuse of Drugs Bill 2015 to take Ireland on a more progressive course in terms of our drug policy.
My amendment, if successful, will decriminalise the drug user and so ensure that we have a health based approach to what is a medical issue.
It makes no sense whatever to deal with addiction through the criminal justice system.
Possession of an illegal substance to feed an addiction needs to be addressed with compassion and understanding,
My amendment will allow the criminal justice system to tackle the drug pushers, and not their victims.
The bill will be debated from 12.45pm today.
See amendment below:
_____________________
SEANAD ÉIREANN
____________________
Misuse of Drugs (Amendment) Bill 2016
Committee Stage
Amendment
NEW SECTION
On page 5, line 24, to insert the following new section:
“Possession of controlled drugs for personal use.
Notwithstanding anything in the Misuse of Drugs Acts 1977 to 2015, in any proceedings for an offence under those Acts it shall be a defence to prove that the defendant had in his or her possession a controlled drug for his or her personal use and for no other purpose.”.
Aodhán Ó RiordáinSuper Bowl Prop Bets 2019
Donald Trump Super Bowl Prop Bets
Will Donald Trump take part in pregame interview on CBS?
Yes -200
No +150
Will Donald Trump attend the game?
Yes +800
No -1500
Total times Donald Trump tweets during the game?
Over 1 (-115)
Under 1 (-115)
Will Trump congratulate winning team via Twitter by midnight on 2/3/19?
Yes -150
No +120
Will the U.S. Government shutdown end before Super Bowl LIII (2/3/19)
Yes -180
No +145
Which will be higher?
– Trump approval rating on 2/4/19 (according to Rasmussen Reports) +110
– Yardage of longest made field goal -140
Which will be higher?
– Total days of U.S. Government shutdown +110
– Yardage of longest touchdown -140
Will the Super Bowl LIII winning team visit the White House?
Yes -200
No +150
Gambling Based Props
State with the largest Super Bowl LIII betting handle
Nevada -5000
New Jersey +100
Field (Any other state) +8000
Total amount wagered on Super Bowl LIII in Nevada (as reported by Nevada Gaming Control Board)
Over 165.5 million (-130)
Under 165.5 million (+100)
Total amount of seven-figure wagers on Super Bowl LIII at Nevada sportsbooks (as reported by ESPN Chalk)
Over 6.5 (-110)
Under 6.5 (-120)
Largest wager on Super Bowl LIII by Floyd Mayweather (Must share ticket image on official Instagram account for action)
Over $2 million (-115)
Under $2 million (-115)
Super Bowl Commercial Prop Bets
How many commercials will have a dog in it?
Over 5.5 (-115)
Under 5.5 (-115)
Will “Dilly Dilly” be said during a Bud Light commercial?
Yes -200
No +150
How many 30-second Bud Light commercials will feature the Bud Knight?
Over 1.5 (-115)
Under 1.5 (-115)
How many Clydesdales will be shown in Budweiser commercial?
Over 8.5 (-115)
Under 8.5 (-115)
Will there be an animal besides a horse in the Budweiser Clydesdale commercial?
Yes -130
No +100
Which soft drink brand commercial will air first?
Coca-Cola -170
Pepsi +130
Super Bowl Coin Toss Results History
One of the most popular Super Bowl Prop Bets is the coin toss. Quite frankly, it’s extremely popular due to a quick payout potential and the simplicity of the bet. It is fun to see the history of the Super Bowl coin results. Recently heads hit 5 years in a row, followed by a 4 year on tails winning the toss. The coin toss result for the last Super Bowl between the Eagles vs. Patriots landed on heads.
wdt_ID Super Bowl Date Heads/Tails Toss Winner Toss Loser 1 LIl Heads New England Philadelphia 2 LI Tails Atlanta New England 3 50 Tails Carolina Denver 4 XLIX Tails Seattle New England 5 XLVIII Tails Seattle Denver 6 XLVII Heads Baltimore San Francisco 7 XLVI Heads New England N.Y. Giants 8 XLV Heads Green Bay Pittsburgh 9 XLIV Heads New Orleans Indianapolis 10 XLIII Heads Arizona Pittsburgh Super Bowl Date Heads/Tails Toss Winner Toss Loser
Historical Super Bowl Point Spreads Results
How many favorites or underdogs have covered the spread in Super Bowl History? Millions of Americans bet on the Super Bowl each year. For the first time ever, they will be able to place a legal bet on the big game outside of Las Vegas. 9 states in the U.S. now have regulated sports betting within their borders. They include Nevada, Delaware, New Jersey, Mississippi, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, West Virginia, Washington D.C.
Many of the new sports bettors will be placing a bet on the 2019 Super Bowl matchup. Our table below displays every point spread and over-under total betting line for each Super Bowl. The winning result is included as well.
wdt_ID Super Bowl Year Location Matchup Line (Total) Score ATS Result 1 LII 2018 Minneapolis, MN Philadelphia vs. New England New England -4 (49) Philadelphia 41 New England 33 Underdog-Over 2 LI 2017 Houston, TX Atlanta vs. New Enland New England -3 (57) New England 34 Atlanta 28 (OT) Favorite-Over 3 L 2016 Santa Clara, CA Carolina vs. Denver Carolina -5 (43.5) Denver 24 Carolina 10 Underdog-Under 4 XLIX 2015 Glendale, AZ Seattle vs. New England Pick 'em (47.5) New England 28 Seattle 24 Patriots - Over 5 XLVIIl 2014 East Rutherford,New Jersey Seattle vs Denver Denver -2 (47) Seattle 43 Denver 8 Underdog-Over 6 XLVII 2013 New Orleans, LA SF vs. Baltimore San Francisco -4.5 (48) Baltimore 34 San Francisco 31 Underdog-Over 7 XLVI 2012 Indianapolis, IN NY Giants vs. New England New England -2.5 (53) N.Y. Giants 21 New England 17 Underdog-Under 8 XLV 2011 Arlington, TX Green Bay vs. Pittsburgh Green Bay -3 (45) Green Bay 31 Pittsburgh 25 Favorite-Over 9 XLIV 2010 Miami, FL New Orleans vs. Indianapolis Indianapolis -5 (57) New Orleans 31 Indianapolis 17 Underdog-Under 10 XLIII 2009 Tampa, FL Pittsburgh vs. Arizona Pittsburgh -7 (46) Pittsburgh 27 Arizona 23 Underdog-Over Super Bowl Year Location Matchup Line (Total) Score ATS Result
FanDuel Super Bowl Odds
With legalized sports betting exploding throughout the United States, it is time for us to begin covering Super Bowl Odds from NJ Sportsbooks like FanDuel, DraftKings, and SugarHouse. Nine states have now legalized sports betting: Nevada, Delaware, New Jersey, Mississippi, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, West Virginia, Washington D.C.
Legal online sportsbooks and mobile betting apps have only been launched in NJ and West Virginia so far. That will be changing very soon as Pennsylvania will be launching their online sports betting options very soon. Super Bowl betting activity could be absolutely enormous next year when PA, NJ, NY, MA, DE, and almost every other east coast state has legal sports betting.As the year-in-review lists are churned out around the media landscape, most pundits concur that 2017 was a dismal year — for politics, civil rights, democracy, the environment and income inequality. Yet there was one realm in which 2017 excelled: the production of dystopian literature. I suppose this is the sole upside to a political moment in which totalitarianism twinkles half-obscured in the background like the Cheshire Cat’s smile: the quality and quantity of dystopian film and literature actually improves in dark epochs.
Besides the obvious primary reason — namely, that the future doesn’t bode well right now — there’s another reason I believe this to be the case. When times are bad, the masses turn to escapism to relieve stress and feel better about their lives. For proof, take a look at a partial list of 2017 dystopian cultural production: There was “The Circle,” the film version of Dave Eggers’ novel that predicted a social media nightmare; “The Handmaid’s Tale” and its cultural reverberations; “Blade Runner 2049’s” grim, plant-less future Earth; a new heaping of “Black Mirror”; the second season of alternate-universe, Nazi America thriller “Man in the High Castle” (technically released at the very end of 2016, but we’ll let it slide); the surprisingly dystopian “X-Men” entry “Logan”; Omar El Akkad’s “American War”, set in a U.S. experiencing a civil war; and finally, I would argue, the viral New Yorker short story “Cat Person” — which, like “The Handmaid’s Tale,” depicts a patriarchal dystopia characterized by obscure, oft-coercive rules of relationship praxis and the deadly risks of getting them wrong.
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As with any literary genre, dystopian literature comes and goes in cycles; moreover, the authors who are popular in a given moment generally reflect the anxieties of that era. Sales of “1984” shot up shortly after Trump was elected, perhaps because Trump’s hypnotic (to some) propagandizing is a bit reminiscent of Orwellian Newspeak. Atwood’s dystopian “Handmaid’s Tale” resonated in 2017 for obvious reasons: the unrepentant trauma of patriarchy being persistent, women still suffer sexual abuse, assault and discrimination daily. The rise to power of clear sexists like Trump and Ted Cruz made Atwood’s world feel like it was just a hop and skip away.
And yet there was another dystopian sci-fi author whose rise to popularity in the past half-decade is less easy to account for than Atwood or Orwell’s popularity. That author is Philip K. Dick.
We’re definitely in an Atwood moment, but we may also be in a Philip K. Dick moment. The paranoiac, drug-addled sci-fi author, who wrote in a frenzied and simple style, has had a rebirth of sorts in the past few years, particularly when it comes to adaptations of his works. There was the aforementioned Amazon mini-series “Man in the High Castle,” and the “Blade Runner” sequel, just in the past year-ish. But before that, this decade saw other Dick adaptations including “Total Recall” (2012), “Second Variety” (2009), “A Scanner Darkly” (2006) and “The Adjustment Bureau” (2011). There are also upcoming projects: Dick’s novel “Ubik” is awaiting a green light, and another season of “The Man in the High Castle” is in the works.
The Atwoodian moment is easier to understand. But why are we in a Dickian — Dickish? — moment as well? I reached out to Salon’s favorite resident Philip K. Dick expert, David Gill, a literature teacher at San Francisco State University and a Dick scholar. Gill told me that Dick’s popularity may be because his dystopias “feel accurate… full of environmental problems, global warming, oppressive governments, surveillance technology.” “There’s no sugar coating” in Dick’s books, Gill added. For anyone who’s even briefly encountered a Dick work, you probably recall the dour mood. “A Scanner Darkly,” “Blade Runner,” “Minority Report” — none of these exactly have what you might call happy endings, with the evil regime defeated and the world returned to a prelapsarian state. Gill elaborated further:
“Dick’s other prescient insight was about the seductive nature of technology: you start out using technology to serve your needs, and then before you know it technology is using us to serve its needs. Connective communications technologies are ultimately isolating if we’re stuck using them in isolation. In Dick’s ‘Galactic Pot Healer’ novel, the characters sit around in their rooms and play this strange word game, scrambling and translating the names of famous titles and sayings.”
Then, there’s also Dick’s weird relationship to truth. Many of Dick’s novels and stories feature characters who have difficulty sussing out what truth is, or even what reality is. In “Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said” — whose movie rights were bought in 2004, and which may see a film version soon — the protagonist wakes up in a world where he seems to have never been born, and struggles to figure out why his friends don’t remember him. In “A Scanner Darkly,” the protagonist is addled by a psychoactive drug that confuses his ability to remember who he is or what he is doing. Basic facts seem fleeting.
You can see where I’m going. Whereas in “1984” Orwell depicted a very black-and-white world of truth and lies, Dick’s worlds are more gray. In “1984,” Winston sees five fingers when there are four because the party tells him; whereas in Dick’s worlds, the self might not even exist, let alone the hand. There are more conditions, more schisms in reality, than a question of five or four fingers. “In ‘Blade Runner,’ reality no longer matters,” wrote one film critic of “Blade Runner 2049.” “How long until this happens to us?”
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We do not live in a world where “truth” and “lie” are simple anymore; to Donald Trump, the notion of truth changes day to day. Sometimes things exist merely for convenience and other days they do not exist at all. Obama’s inaugural crowd was smaller than his, or maybe it wasn’t, or maybe it doesn’t matter, or maybe it never happened. Maybe the “grab ’em by the pussy” moment was real last year when Trump apologized, but now he doesn’t think it ever happened.
“Dick is especially relevant in the age of Trump because we are living in a world where the authentic and the artificial have exchanged places,” Gill mused. “We live in a time when it is impossible to know if what we are seeing is real or is being manipulated, ‘photoshopped’ — this idea was terrifying to Dick.”
As Trump and Trump’s supporters build their own media channels, any reality becomes possible, perhaps. Social media has sprouted different reality bubbles, Balkanized universes of fact and fiction. According to Gill, Dick predicted “not that we can’t know what is really real, but that the people in power can manipulate the nature of our reality itself.” Sounds about right.For six years US General Douglas MacArthur was lord of all he surveyed as supreme commander of the Allied forces in occupied Japan, gazing over Tokyo from a building requisitioned from an insurance company.
Now, more than 60 years after Japan began governing itself again, his office is being opened to the public, just as he left it.
The sixth-floor room has the original seats, desk and even an armchair where MacArthur would have sat as he presided over Japan’s rise from the ashes of World War II.
From the office, MacArthur oversaw the transformation of a country that waged a brutal war of acquisition across Asia into a peaceable nation that would become the economic powerhouse of the late 20th century.
And it was from the bureau that he ordered the re-writing of Japan’s constitution, in the process stripping the emperor — in whose name that war was waged — of his divine status and casting him as a figurehead in a democratic nation.
The room was the nerve centre for land reform, voting enfranchisement, and changes to laws about education, labour rights, public health and women’s issues.
Dai-Ichi Life Insurance Company, whose chief executive vacated the space when MacArthur moved in, kept the office as it was when their enforced guest left as US attention shifted to the Korean peninsula.
The company is now planning to open it up for public viewing for a week from Tuesday, keenly aware that many Japanese people have no understanding of the significant role the place played in post-war history.
“I did not know that the office was occupied by Mr MacArthur before I was hired,” a young company spokesman confessed to AFP during a tour.
“But all of us… learned about this place when we arrived,” he added.
The wood-panelled room, with its large windows and translucent curtains, offers a glimpse into history and MacArthur’s driven work style: the desk has no drawers so he could not let papers pile up.
The office overlooks the vast Imperial Palace where Emperor Hirohito lived in luxury in the heart of Tokyo, an area that had been spared the Allied bombs of the aerial campaign.
As well as the fact that the building was intact, the site’s choice would have owed much to the occupiers’ understanding of the importance of symbolism in Japan — something that finds no better expression than a widely-distributed picture of MacArthur standing beside the emperor.
The towering US general strikes a relaxed pose in his open-necked shirt, contrasting sharply with Hirohito, who stands erect — but much shorter — in his tightly-buttoned Western-style suit.
There is little room for doubt about who is in charge.
And MacArthur had a lot to do.
His task between 1945, when he stepped off the aeroplane smoking his trademark pipe, and when he left in 1951 was nothing short of monumental.
Japan’s economy lay in tatters, its people were starving and its broken military was scattered throughout Asia. The cities were in ruins and the countryside was ravaged.
As the Allied commander of the Japanese occupation, MacArthur led the demobilisation of the imperial army and oversaw a series of war crimes trials aimed ostensibly at bringing aggressors to justice.
But the emperor whose home he could see from his window would never face a court.
Hirohito’s own transformation into the leader of a peace-loving nation, a role he fulfilled until his death in 1989 is one of the enduring legacies — and controversies — of MacArthur’s rule.Quote: Morello: I think MR is pretty "good," but agree we're not making it feel very cool or good, especially compared to armor. I think this is a good thing to look at, agreed!
MR is already good enough, just like you said. That's why big MR items shouldn't feel great to build on everyone. It should feel like an investment targeted at the enemy APC. If you do buff big MR items then bring back old values of Mpen for Marks, Quints, Sorc boots and Guise too.Does the full-AD teams meta not make that obvious?It's not even possible to reach 1k AP anymore with the DC and AAS nerfs. 1 AP is roughly equal to 0.5 AD, which shows how much stronger ADC and AD assassins can get in terms of burst: theyreach 500 AD if they want to (easy as fk = 5 BT), and thatimproves their autos. I'm not saying it's a good build, but it gets the point across.The FBI is currently the subject of world ridicule after a widely circulated image of Osama bin-Laden, digitally updated for age, was withdrawn following the revelation by the Spanish newspaper El Mundo that the actual photo was of Spanish lawmaker Gaspar Llamzares. Llamzares is a leader of Spain’s United Left Party and a communist.
The Spanish politician, according to Reuters, found the whole affair quite odd. “In the last few days I have seen the security services involved in some very strange things, some major failures, but I would never have believed they could have affected me so directly,” he said.
Llamzares, a peace activist and critic of U.S. foreign policy is a member of Parliament and spokesperson for the United Left.
“I am stupefied the FBI has used my photo – but it could have been anyone’s – to compose a picture of a terrorist. It affects my honor, my own image and also the security of all us,” Llamazares said.
The FBI had claimed the image was the result of “sophisticated digital profiling technology.” The “sophisticated digital profiling technology” turned out to be an ordinary version of Photoshop, the image-processing software.
The U.S. State Department has issued an apology to the respected Spanish legislator. Llamzares has rejected the apology and demanded an investigation. “Apologies are not enough,” he told a news conference at Parliament after the U.S. ambassador apologized via Spain’s interior minister on Monday, the Huffington Post reported.
“I want a thorough investigation into this disgraceful case, which not only causes concern but also worry and indignation over the behavior of the FBI,” Llamzares said.
Press reports indicate the FBI obtained the photo from Google images, but Llamzares is doubtful about this. “He said he doubted the FBI had found his photo by chance on the Internet,” the Huffington Post article said. The communist leader wants to know if “the FBI has a habit of keeping files on leftist politicians in the U.S., Europe, Latin American or elsewhere.”
Llamazares added, “I am sure that in addition to incompetence, this is the sectarian and ideological use of law-enforcement, the heat of a preventive war.”
The United Left Party is coalition of communist, socialist and workers parties in Spain. It was set up in 1986, as an election coalition consisting of the Spanish Communist Party, Progressive Federation, Party of the Peoples of Spain, Socialist Action Party, Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia, Humanist Party, Carlist Party, Republican Left and a number of independents.
After the United Left suffered electoral losses in 2008, Llamazares resigned as its leader. In 2009 he led a campaign to condemn the Pope for saying using condoms caused more harm than good in the fight against AIDS.
Photo: Spanish lawmaker Gaspar Llamzares (commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gaspar_Llamaz)Four out of five women admit they don't shower every day, and a third say they can go for three days without washing their body.
The personal hygiene of Britain's fairer sex - or the lack thereof - has been laid bare in a survey of 2,021 women aged 18 to 50 for skincare range Flint + Flint.
It also found that almost two thirds can't be bothered removing make-up before they go to bed, and one in eight own up to not brushing their teeth before they sleep.
When it comes to washing in the morning, only 21 per cent of females take the time to shower or have a bath every day, with 33 per cent admitting to leaving it as long as three days from wash to wash.
Sixty three per cent admit to not removing makeup before going to sleep after a night out, with 35 per cent of those citing time as the reason.
The fear of having to get up in the morning means they get straight into bed and don't have time to waste washing off the night's excess.
And a shocking one in three have gone as long as three days without washing or wiping their face or body at all.
Time constraints mean that despite knowing the importance of skin care and general hygiene, 57 per cent of UK women admit to opting for a quick freshen up with wipes before bed.
Despite this, of the 2,000 plus women surveyed, 92 per cent claim to understand the importance of a skin care regime and recognised that life-style factors such as lack of sleep (76 per cent) and dehydration (61 per cent) can impact on their skin.
How often do you take a shower?
Similarly 89 per cent said they would like to improve their body hygiene but blame evening and morning tiredness for their lack of showers or baths.
Flint + Flint owner Maxine Flint said: "I understand the appeal of a lie-in but skipping a morning wash is both anti-social for the people around us and unhealthy.
"We are talking about routines that literally take minutes out of your day. It's true that today's pace of life is fast but surely as a nation we haven't become too busy to wash.
"We were alarmed to hear about the number of women not looking after their skin by following basic skin care regimes.
"It is so important to clean your face daily and moisturise to slow down the ageing process."
"Furthermore, the majority of women know the importance of following a skin care routine but they still aren't doing it."
For more stories, like the Telegraph's Facebook page by clicking on the link below:When Australia’s Transport Safety Board (ATSB) was tasked with finding missing Malaysia Airlines flight 370, it tapped another arm of the government, the Defense Science & Technology Group (DSTG), to tell it where to look. There a team led by Dr. Neil Gordon devised a mathematical approach based on Bayesian analysis to weigh all the possible routes that the Boeing 777-200ER could have flown, given the seven Inmarsat “pings,” the plane’s fuel load, environmental conditions, and the different settings available on the autopilot. From this they derived a probabilistic “heat map” of where the plane might have wound up (Fig 1, above). The results showed that the jet most likely flew fast and straight, at high altitude, before running out of fuel and crashing. It was this analysis that allowed the ASTB to define the search area currently being scoured for traces of seabed wreckage. Yet, with less than 10 percent of the area left to be searched and not a trace found, it now appears they looked in the wrong place. Earlier this summer, the three nations responsible for the investigation—Malaysia, China, and Australia—jointly announced that they would not be extending the search after the last portion is completed this fall. Last month Dr. Gordon went on record for the first time to explain what might have gone wrong and where the next place to look for the plane should be. His answers formed the basis of an article for Popular Mechanics; for the readers of this blog I present a less filtered version of what Dr Gordon had to say.
One of the crucial decisions you had to make was how to treat the 18:22 radar return. In your report, you wrote, “The final reported position from radar was very at very long range from the sensor and there was a long time delay between it and the penultimate radar report. The report is at long range and it is likely to have rather poor accuracy because of the angular errors translates |
Uptown Superheroes March.” Flanked by their parents, kids dressed as their favorite comic book characters tromped down Fort Washington Avenue in a public show of support for Ellie, and everyone else who simply wants to like who they like, irrespective of schoolyard naysaying.
The Daily Beast was on the scene, and captured some of the parade:
The march marks the latest in a long series of efforts to bring some measure of gender equality and tolerance into the predominantly male-centric world of mainstream superheroes. And, to some degree, it seems as if progress is in fact being made: In the months leading up to the release of Marvel Studios’ Avengers: Age Of Ultron, uproar over the sub-par handling of the franchise’s female heroines—particularly Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow—focused a measure of serious scrutiny on the industry’s treatment of its female characters. Meanwhile, on the print side of things, Marvel’s decision to hand the mantle (and hammer) of Nordic hero Thor to a female protagonist reportedly resulted in a 30 percent sales increase over the series’ longstanding male predecessor. And just this week, acclaimed comics author Gail Simone tweeted video of a fan’s young niece declaring, in no uncertain terms, that she wants to be Captain America when she grows up.
@GailSimone isn't my niece super cute during her kindergarten graduation?! pic.twitter.com/fmbISLp4KX — Bontron (@xCinnaBONx) June 8, 2015
So, yes, the world of superheroes seems to be slowly becoming a more tolerant, more accepting place. While there will always be more work that can be done to ensure everyone has the opportunity to aspire to super-heroics, the Uptown Superheroes March is a step—hundreds of them, in fact—in the right direction.
[via themarysue]The Changing Culture of a New Guinea Village
The intriguing country of Papua New Guinea is a remarkable natural wonder that offers great excitement for travelers to explore. The country is made up of a cluster of 600 islands that stretch in one long string along southeastern Asia. These islands are filled with wonderful natural surroundings that include jungles, water and amazing wildlife. Because of this vast offering and sprawling layout, Papua New Guinea is known for its tribal diversity, with some 700 languages being spoken there. While some may believe this overwhelming amount of diversity can be too much, it instead offers one of the most unique opportunities for visitors to examine the amazing culture of the country.
In this release, photos collected for one purpose – to show the uniqueness of the tribe of Papua New Guinea and its traditions, as well as the impact they are experiencing.
(Brent Stirton/Getty Images)RAMALLAH, West Bank — The Sustainable Educational Far'un Park project submitted by student Hoda Jarrar was one of five projects to reach the finals in the international Social Action Project competition organized by the British Council’s Active Citizens program.
Jarrar, an urban planning student at An-Najah National University in Nablus, carried out the project in cooperation with the Ma’an Development Center. This is the first project to establish a sustainable environmental park in a remote village in the province of Tulkarm, located in the northern West Bank.
The park is scheduled to open this summer. “The idea of the park aims to achieve environmental sustainability and involve the community through children who can spread the idea to all members of the community,” Jarrar told Al-Monitor. “An existing park will be developed into the Sustainable Educational Far'un Park in a bid to develop the environmental awareness of children.”
Asked about the location, Jarrar said, “I examined several sites in Nablus, Jenin and Tulkarm, and I chose the latter based on specific criteria. I wanted an existing park located on a government land, not on a private one. I wanted it to have basic services such as water, electricity and other facilities, hence the Far’un choice.”
She said there is an additional reason that led her to choose this park — the park is part of Area C and in the village outskirts where residents refrain from visiting. The ultimate goal, she said, was to encourage citizens to go there.
Jarrar explained that she is interested in spreading sustainable environmental culture through the establishment of educational and recreational activities. In cooperation with the Ministry of Education, she will organize training courses for the village’s 888 students, who are of all ages, to create a generation that embraces the idea of a sustainable environment.
“Our primary goal is to change the community’s environmental behavior with the voluntary help of the community, not the financial help of institutions,” she said.
Ghada Kaddoumi, the director of the Active Citizens program, said that Jarrar’s idea was among several ideas that emerged from a training program that was attended by more than 770 students in Palestinian universities. The program aims to motivate students to revitalize and channel their ideas toward projects that work on bringing about positive change in the community.
Kaddoumi told Al-Monitor that Jarrar and a large number of trainees chose environment-related projects, as they noted the importance of this topic and the need for environmental awareness in the development field.
She said, “Work is underway to provide all of the environmental sustainability elements in the park through the organization of awareness and environment-related education courses.”
Kaddoumi said that the main target of the project is children, the establishment of a theater for the screening of films and success stories, and the organization of summer camps.
She added, “We are seeking to establish a link between the village residents and this park, whose surface area is estimated at 5 acres, by allowing them to plant using environmental and organic farming standards that they would be trained to follow. The fruits will be distributed to the residents.”
Evenings are being planned during the holy month of Ramadan, as a prelude for the opening of the park after Ramadan. Consequently, summer camps will be organized in the park. And when children go back to school, their extracurricular activities will be held in this park, and this will be made possible through cooperation with the Ministry of Education, Kaddoumi said.
“The local community is very cooperative and willing to work, and this will guarantee the success and sustainability of this initiative,” she noted.
Imad Atrash, an expert in environmental development and the head of the Palestine Wildlife Society, said that the concepts of sustainability are modern, and Palestinians, being under siege, still have a long way to go in this regard.
“It is necessary to support any projects that seek to create a sustainable environment as an essential element in any society, and we in Palestine are one of the countries that need such development the most as a result of our slow pace in applying sustainability concepts,” he told Al-Monitor.
Atrash, who implements and spreads this concept through the activities of the Palestine Wildlife Society, which includes the production of renewable energy and organic fertilizers as well as recycling activities, said, “It is important to turn the concept of sustainable environment into a personal behavior and connect it to our everyday life in order to achieve an integrated concept that protects nature, and this has been exemplified by the Far’un Park.”
In addition to the environmental objectives of this park, it will certainly serve as an outlet for the village residents because it is located far from the center of the cities that lie near the separation wall.Connecticut Democrat Rep. Rosa DeLauro is hailing Philadelphia’s new soda tax and urging Congress to pass her own bill that would create a one-cent tax on every teaspoon of sugar or high-fructose corn syrup.
DeLauro discussed her legislation in the video below:
“Congress should follow Philadelphia’s lead and enact the SWEET Act, which would reduce the human and economic costs of health conditions related to these beverages,” DeLauro said in a press statement this week. “And while we continue to pressure Congress to act, more cities should step up and lead on this critical issue. At a time when one-in-three children and adolescents are overweight or obese, with the numbers even worse for adults, we must take action.”
Philadelphia is the second large U.S. city to tax soda and follows Chicago – which has a three percent tax on retail soda sales and a separate tax on fountain beverages. Associated Press (AP) reports that Philadelphia will have a 1.5-cent-per-ounce tax on sugar, which will become effective January 1.
“The tax will be levied on distributors,” AP explains. “If they pass it entirely on to consumers, the cost of a 12-ounce can of soda would go up 18 cents. A six-pack of 16-ounce bottles would go up $1.44.”
As CNSNews.com reports, DeLauro’s SWEET Act states it is:
[I]ntended to discourage excessive consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages by increasing the price of these products and by creating a dedicated revenue source for programs and research designed to reduce the human and economic costs of diabetes, obesity, dental caries, and other diet-related health conditions in priority populations.
Writing at U.S. News & World Report in March of 2012, Patrick Basham of the Cato Institute criticized levying high taxes on sugary beverages as “at best unsuccessful, and at worst economically and socially harmful” in the war on unhealthy consumption. He explained:
Research finds that higher prices don’t reduce soda consumption, for example. No scientific studies demonstrate a difference either in aggregate soda consumption or in child and adolescent Body Mass Index between the two thirds of states with soda taxes and those without such taxes. …. Economic research finds sugar taxes are a futile instrument in influencing the behavior and habits of the overweight and the obese. Why do sugar taxes fail? Those consumers who strongly prefer unhealthy foods continue to eat and drink according to their individual preferences until such time as it becomes prohibitively expensive to do so.
“Such taxes also have perverse, unintended consequences,” Basham adds. “Taxes on sugary snacks lead many consumers to replace the taxed food with equally unhealthy foods. … For instance, taxes levied specifically on sugar content increase saturated fat consumption.”Rot of Ages
A medieval rotted sauce lives again
The sauce I got at the time was pleasant but not exactly exciting. It didn't seem so attractive that I could imagine cooks going to all the trouble to make it, much less overlooking the rather ghastly process by which it's made. I wasn't at all sure I'd got it right.
I'd made my first batch of rotted barley about 10 years earlier. At the time, I asked a medical researcher whether there might be anything dangerous in these rotted barley condiments, and he warned me that they were probably infected with the common mold Aspergillus flavus, which produces dangerous carcinogens called aflatoxins. So after tasting the result of that first experiment, I washed my mouth out about 70 times.
I was just following the medieval Arab recipes for a sauce called murri. Really. Rot some barley, then rot it some more; that's what they tell you to do. You could also mix the rotted barley with milk instead of water and make a sort of relish called ka^makh.
On Nov. 28, I wrapped eight lumps of raw barley dough in fig leaves and put them in loosely lidded plastic containers. Forty days later, I mixed the now-rotted barley with flour, salt and water and set the result in a warm spot to rot for two months more. Then I ate some.
So last year I decided to try another batch of murri. This time, I sent the results of my rotting to a laboratory to find out whether there was indeed anything dangerous in it (see "OK, It's Rotted...," below).
Regular Food section readers have already met my eight lumps of barley dough, which I was rotting in three batches according to the slightly contradictory recipes I'd found in medieval manuscripts. We did the first stage of rotting in the Times Test Kitchen--very far from the food preparation area, you may be sure.
The first of the three batches consisted of five lumps of dough crowded in a single box. In these rather moist conditions, the barley rotted vigorously. After three days, the lumps had greenish spots and were covered with a cloud of translucent threads, indicating that molds of the genus aspergillus had taken up living quarters. We nicknamed these lumps Spot, Whiskers, Einstein, Skinhead and Johnny Rotten, and after 40 days they were mottled all over in black, white, charcoal and about four shades of green.
The second batch was rotted in drier circumstances, only two lumps to the box. Kate Moss and Captain Picard, as we called them, developed a greenish tinge and a few tiny white patches but no cloud of threads.
Finally, one lump was rotted under ashes, as a 10th century recipe suggests. This guy, Pig Pen, also rotted only slightly.
After 40 days, I ground the lumps up and made each batch into a paste with flour, water and salt. The recipes say to rot the paste on your rooftop in the middle of summer, so I put the three batches on a heating pad on the low setting, which kept the mixtures at about 95 degrees. I stirred and moistened them all daily for 40 days. Finally, I added more water and waited another 10 days before extracting a liquid sauce.
Here's what we got.
Kate Moss, Captain Picard and Pig Pen turned pinkish tan (Pig Pen with an ash-gray tinge). The unappealing "liquid" sauce I got from those batches was like salty glue with a sickly-sweet aroma. By contrast, the totally rotten batch (Spot, Whiskers et al.), which started out green, quickly turned a deep mahogany brown. At first it smelled like rotting leaves or a damp basement, but within 10 days it smelled distinctly like...
Soy sauce.
Yes, soy sauce. The sauce extracted from it had a comparatively earthy (some said muddy) texture and flavor, but there was no doubt about it: Murri was a medieval Mediterranean soy sauce.
Big surprise; I had always assumed that soy sauce had to be made from beans. But the usual Japanese soy sauce recipe is 50% wheat, and it turns out that oats, millet, rye and even barley are sometimes added in China and Korea. In fact, there's no reason you have to use any beans at all. All you need is proteins and carbohydrates, which are also found in grain.I don't know that any television product has changed the way we visually consume it more times than professional wrestling. For a majority of its history (which I am counting as the period from "dawn of time" until around 1978 or so), syndicated television was basically a weekly commercial for whatever house shows (wrestling speak for "coming to an arena near you") were going to be in the area over the next couple months. Essentially, wrestling shows on TV were infomercials, only with salespeople that were screaming, sweating, bleeding, and hitting each other. (Not all that different from Sham-Wow guy, really.)
In the '80s, cable television gave Vince McMahon the platform to expand his northeast regional territory (the World Wrestling Federation) nationally on the USA Network (in addition to some late night Saturday stuff on NBC), which meant his infomercials sold not only tickets to house shows, but seats in closed circuit theaters for "super cards". Closed circuit soon begat pay per view in the late '80s as the key revenue stream. Oh, then the Internet came along. There's that.
But this post is about the weekly television, the aforementioned "infomercial." Along the way, in the early '90s, after years of being a weekend based TV product, Monday night became the night for wrestling fans to get their fix. After several years as largely a recap and highlight show called Prime Time Wrestling (skillfully hosted by Gorilla Monsoon and Bobby Heenan), on January 11, 1993, the WWF made a hard left turn and converted their Monday night show to a live, action packed, storyline laden showcase.
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Live from the Manhattan Center in New York City, Monday Night RAW was born.
Nearly twenty years later, after several twists and turns in the road (including but not limited to Vince McMahon nearly going away to prison in 1994 for steroid distribution, nearly being put out of business in 1996, trying to start his own football league in 2000, and buying out his only real competition for pennies on the dollar in 2001), RAW is celebrating its 1000th episode tonight with a three hour celebration of its flagship show past, present, and future.
Personally, I'm hoping it's mostly "past."
I grew up watching the McMahon family's product, going all the way back to the days of Bob Backlund and Superstar Billy Graham battling for the title in 1978 in Madison Square Garden. Compared to the average viewer tonight, my frame of reference is wide and, I think, fairly well informed.
There have been good times and bad times to consume the product, but as far as the Monday night product, its popularity was built on the sweat of the Monday Night Wars with WCW's Monday NItro product in the late 90's. For a guy whose single-mindedness in eliminating his competition has been his lifelong signature, ironically, it was the actual presence of competition that forced McMahon to reevaluate the delivery of his content -- its characters, its feel, its pace, everything.
So as I get ready to send you on this retrospective, a couple points of procedure:
1. Much like the company itself, I as a fan and a viewer had the current company name World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) forced upon me because the World Wildlife Fund got pissed about people calling Vince's company "WWF." Apparently, as they were trying to save panda bears, the World Wildlife Fund received one too many phone calls for Hulk Hogan and decided to drop the hammer and force a name change on the World Wrestling Federation. Since that occurred in 2002, the now WWE has had to take extreme measures to redact the term "WWF" to anything that happened before the name change, including blurring out old logos and muting any mentions of "WWF" on DVD's and online content. It's even to the extent that current superstars refer to things that occurred under the "WWF" banner before 2002 as having happened in "WWE." Well, they may have to follow those rules, but not me. If it happened before the name change, then it happened in the WWF. If it happened after the name change, it happened in WWE. That mindset will be reflected in this post.
2. In my mind, in terms of recapping RAW, the part of history that really, truly matters the most is the period from summer of 1996 through the night that Vince turned the lights out on Nitro in March of 2001, both in terms of historical importance and quality of content. This, I can assure you, will be reflected in the nostalgia that gets trotted out tonight in St. Louis. So if you liked that period, you will love...no wait, this requires all CAPS...you will LOVE this post. Guaranteed.
So without further ado, the story really began on May 19, 1996. It was the final show in Madison Square Garden for Kevin Nash (Diesel) and Scott Hall (Razor Ramon) before heading off to WCW, and both lost their final matches to Shawn Michaels and Hunter Hearst Helmsley (you now know him as Triple H). Michaels and Nash closed the show, Michaels winning with a super kick leaving Nash "unconscious." Shortly after the match, Ramon came out ostensibly to congratulate Michaels. Not a big deal, since script-wise both were "good guys" at the time.
Then, unless you followed the inner workings of the business, it got weird. Michaels decided to come over and "wake up" his "bitter enemy" Diesel and simultaneously out of the locker room came the "hated" Helmsley, who had just beaten Ramon earlier. Story line logic would dictate that we would soon be looking at a two on two brawl -- two babyfaces, two heels. Instead, the four real life friends engaged in a group hug which completely broke the "kayfabe" rules of keeping the "real stuff" behind the curtain.
Not surprisingly, Vince McMahon was furious. Hall and Nash faced no repercussions because they were done with the company the second the ref counted three in their matches that night. Michaels was the champ at the time so there was no real way to punish him. So in a weird twist of irony, McMahon wound up dropping the entire punishment on his future son-in-law Helmsley, who was jobbed out incessantly over the next year.
A week later, Scott Hall showed up on WCW Monday Nitro, and this happened...
...a week later, Nash showed up and this happened...
....then at the next pay per view, they did this to WCW boss Eric Bischoff...
....and then at Bash of the Beach, Hulk Hogan showed up and this happened....
...and then WCW started winning in the ratings. Every week. By lots of viewers.
In the summer of 1996, Vince McMahon was left with a roster that consisted of the Undertaker, Shawn Michaels, some solid pieces like Mick Foley, Steve Austin, Helmsley who had never worked at a main event level for an extended period of time, some older guys who were breaking down or were broken down like Vader and Jake Roberts, and a bunch of cartoon characters seemingly designed to capture that all-important age 4-10 demographic like T.L. Hopper (a wrestling plumber), Duke "The Dumpster" Droese (a wrestling garbageman), and Henry O. Godwinn (a wrestling hog farmer).
Sometimes you choose to change, and sometimes you have change thrust upon you. In 1996, Vince McMahon had change thrust upon him. How he and his company adapted would dictate whether or not they would survive.
So that's where we pick up the story of RAW. At the part where the WWF was trying to survive... September 23, 1996 - Jim Ross turns heel and introduces Fake Diesel and Fake Razor Ramon
Shortly after the formation of the New World Order in WCW, around two months after Hulk Hogan hit the leg drop heard 'round the world on Randy Savage, the WWF "leaked" to their America Online site that Diesel and Razor Ramon would be "returning to the WWF!" This sent all of the wrestling-related chat rooms (Ah 1996...when "wrestling-related chat rooms on AOL" were a thing.) into rampant speculation that Scott Hall and Kevin Nash were actually returning to the WWF. Of course, it wound up being two impostors (one of whom, Glenn Jacobs as the Fake Diesel, would wind up playing the role of Kane a year later.), fans everywhere shit on it, and it was forgotten about a few months later. The best thing I can say about this angle is that Jim Ross' promo leading up to the introduction of these two was killer. So that's the part we choose to remember.
October 21, 1996 - Bret Hart returns to WWF with a "lifetime contract"
On the heels of losing Scott Hall and Kevin Nash to WCW, and with other former WWF personalities showing up in WCW almost weekly at that point, Vince McMahon was under intense pressure to hold onto as many of his stars as he could, and in October 1996 Bret Hart (along with Shawn Michaels) was his biggest star. WCW courted Bret, threw a big money offer at him, but in the end Vince was able to hold onto this free agent, trumping Ted Turner's big money with a lifetime contract. Ironic moment in this one: when Bret confirms he's staying by saying he will be in World Wrestling Federation "forever." Yeah, either forever or for about a year.
November 4, 1996 - Brian Pillman/Steve Austin "gun incident"
One thing the WWF did have going for them in late 1996 was the seeds beginning to sprout on the meteoric rise of "Stone Cold" Steve Austin. In November of 1996, shortly after he had snapped Brian Pillman's ankle with a chair, Austin decided to pay Pillman a visit at his home in Kentucky on Monday night. Naturally, Pillman decided to greet him with gunfire. This blatant attempt to "shock" viewers back over from watching WCW is best remembered for (a) Vince McMahon apologizing profusely to viewers for WWF going a bit over the top (right after re-airing highlights of the angle on the Saturday Live Wire show) and (b) Kevin Kelly's screaming like a seventh grade girl for someone to call the police. (The seeds for the Rock calling Kelly a "hermaphrodite" during every subsequent interview were planted this day, I truly believe this.)
March 17, 1997 - Bret Hart turns heel, berates Vince McMahon
The template for the Austin-McMahon "evil owner" angle which eventually pushed the WWF back on top was formed from Bret Hart's real life frustrations with how he was being handled since returning the previous October, and the first big blow up at Vince McMahon was this one, right after losing a title match to Sid on Monday Night RAW the week before Wrestlemania 13. Hart's ultimate blow up at McMahon came in November after the Montreal Screwjob, and that one was far more real (and far more spit-laden). May 19, 1997 - Mick Foley interveiws w/ JR
Attempts to make the make the key players less cartoonish were a staple of the WWF beginning around 1997. Character development became centered more around taking a superstar's actual personality and "turning the volume up," adding a second and third dimension to what had previously just been various one dimensional "colorful" versions of guys hitting each other. The biggest beneficiary of this trend might have been Mick Foley, who hardcore fans loved during his time in ECW and WCW as Cactus Jack, but many new fans didn't know his background. This sequence of interviews with Jim Ross really moved Foley up a notch in the eyes of many, and -- BONUS! -- introduced the world to Dude Love!
June 1997 - Shawn Michaels hates Bret Hart
The wresting genre is at its most compelling when it delicately straddles the line between realism and show. Weaving the actual into the theater that is pro wrestling is not easy, and when done poorly it can be promotion killing (see: WCW, Vince Russo Era). When done well, it can be promotion saving. WWF didn't pass WCW in the TV ratings until April 1998, but they were putting on consistently better shows for about a year before that, and much of that was jumpstarted by the real life animosity between Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels playing out so well on television. To wit...
August 18, 1997 - Rocky Maivia joins the Nation of Domination
Dwayne Johnson was introduced to the WWF audience at Survivor Series in November 1996, and to say that the audience hated him is putting it lightly. They despised him with the white hot fury of a thousand suns. He was a scruffy headed, third generation star, smiling and pandering to the crowd. Oh, he also won his Survivor Series debut that night. It was the WWF equivalent of force feeding their fans spinach. And nobody likes spinach, even if it is good for you. Well, this promo fixed all that. The Rock told everyone what they could do with their "Die, Rocky, die" chants, and a star was born.
September 22, 1997 - Steve Austin stuns Vince McMahon
There may be no bigger historical event for the United States than the Revolutionary War, and we always hear about the "shot heard 'round the world" that started the revolution. Well, there was no bigger angle in WWF history than "Austin vs McMahon." This was the WWF's equivalent of the "shot heard 'round the world." And it would be far from the last shot fired. October 13, 1997 - DX name themselves
By October 1997, Shawn Michaels had aligned himself with real life friend Triple H in a faction that got off two things -- sophomoric dick jokes and pissing off Bret Hart. Among several things, the significance of DX in this era was that it signaled Triple H's essentially ditching the Hunter Hearts Helmsley blue blood persona and morphing into a character with much more of an edge. (Ironically, this transformation would lead to him becoming a huge star, marrying Vince McMahon's daughter, and becoming ten times the blue blood in real life than Hunter Hearst Helmsley the character ever was.)
October 20, 1997 - Jeff Jarrett returns from WCW and shoots on everyone
In retrospect, the first signs of the chinks in WCW's armor started showing in late 1997, when former WWF stars who'd left for WCW's big paychecks began to return to the WWF, disillusioned with the playground that Scott Hall, Kevin Nash, and Hulk Hogan had set up for themselves in Atlanta. Jeff Jarrett wasn't the biggest star this happened with, but he might have been the first. Also, in the spirit of realism, he goes with the quasi-shoot interview. All the cool kids were doing it.
November 10, 1997 - DX Post Survivor Series Promo
Well, as it turns out Bret Hart's "forever" lasted exactly one year and three weeks. The day after the most talked about day in wrestling history, the Montreal Screwjob, which saw Bret Hart have the WWF title essentially stripped from him in-ring with a phony submission call by referee Earl Hebner (the Joey Crawford of WWF officials) on his way out the door, Shawn Michaels and DX ripped Hart from pillar to post the next night on RAW. Ironic part here: Rick Rude, DX's "insurance policy," would show up on WCW Monday Nitro the next week, the same week RAW would be running a taped show which would include Rick Rude. This made him the first superstar to appear on both shows in the same night. (In the ultimate "last laugh," the final person to pull of that feat would be Vince McMahon, the night he simulcast himself onto both shows after buying WCW in 2001. The lesson, as always, don't fuck with Vince McMahon.)
November 17, 1997 - "Bret screwed Bret"
If the seeds for the evil "Mr. McMahon" character were planted back in March when Bret Hart dog cussed him for screwing him over, the flowers began to fully bloom on this night, when Jim Ross conducted this interview with the WWF owner, his eye still jaundiced from the shiner Bret gave him after the Montreal Screwjob.
December 15, 1997 - Austin throws the IC belt in the river
While Bret and Shawn were winding down their little tizzy, the two stars who would launch the WWF into the stratosphere over the next two years were just getting warmed up. The Rock and "Stone Cold" Steve Austin were battling over the Intercontinental championship, a warm-up for what would be multiple Wrestlemania main events in the next few years. On this night, Austin decided to throw the IC belt into a river and tell Rock to go fetch.
January 19, 1998 - DX barbecue skit after Royal Rumble
Dick jokes, no shirts, taunting the Undertaker, and more dick jokes. This was DX. It was glorious time indeed. January 19, 1998 - Tyson Meets Austin
When the WWF had their first big boom period in the mid-80's, it was spurred on by mainstream media coverage of the "Rock and Wrestling Connection." Cyndi Lauper showing up on WWF television, MTV televising Wendi Richter versus Fabulous Moolah, then televising Piper versus Hogan, then Mr. T getting into the mix. The WWF was all over mainstream television and it made the WWF a global juggernaut. Thirteen years later, Vince decided to sign Mike Tyson to play and "enforcer's" role at Wrestlemania, Steve Austin took exception, came out and picked a fight, and ESPN and CNN took it from there. The confrontation ran on news and highlight shows everywhere. If Twitter had existed, the top three trending topics would have been Tyson, Austin, and Jim Ross. It was no longer IF the WWF would retake the lead in the Monday Night ratings war, but WHEN.
March 30, 1998 - Sean Waltman returns and joins DX
The night after Wrestlemania is historically one of the most intriguing nights of WWF television of the year, as it typically sets in motion some new storylines. The night after Wrestlemania XIV saw the return of Sean Waltman (X-Pac/1-2-3 Kid) to the WWF after a little over a year in WCW. This was significant because, unlike Jarrett, X-Pac was an original "Kliq" member, an F.O.H.A.N (Friend of Hall and Nash) if there ever was one. Despite Nash's and Hall's influence behind the scenes, WCW president Eric Bischoff was not a big fan of Waltman's and let him walk. Waltman, not known for being a craftsman on the microphone, let Bischoff have it in maybe his best promo ever. (Awkward love triangle alert! In this video, Chyna was still dating Triple H, but after Trips left her for Stephanie McMahon, Chyna wound making one of the most disturbing sex tapes in the disturbing history of sex tapes with...SEAN WALTMAN! The creatively titled "One Night In Chyna," which held the crown for nastiest thing on the web until very recently, when the pictures of the guy whose face got eaten by a bath salts zombie were leaked.)
April 13, 1998 - Austin vs McMahon
83 weeks. That's how many consecutive weeks WCW won the Monday Night ratings war. It was finally halted with the promise of an Austin versus McMahon televised main event. For over two years, Vince had been trying every combination on his roster to try and win this thing; who knew that a big part of the solution was staring at him in the mirror.
April 27, 1998 - DX invades WCW
Chest firmly puffed out and knowing the war was beginning to shift their way, the WWF decided it was time to go poke the beast that had been poking so much fun at them the last two years. And who better to do that than the newly formed version of DX. Coincidentally, the two companies were running RAW and Nitro within a few miles of each other, so DX did what any self-respecting competitor would do -- they drove a tank onto the Norfolk Scope grounds (which is where WCW was doing their show) and tried to break into the building. Oh, and they filmed the whole thing. Oh, and Eric Bischoff tried to respond by challenging Vince McMahon to a fight that night on pay per view. Oh, and Vince cackled at his monitor back at his arena and rolled a blunt while watching Bischoff. (I might've made that last part up.)
June 4, 1998 - New and improved Steve Austin
The McMahon-Austin feud would continue for a few years (until an ill-fated heel turn by Austin at Wrestlemania 17 in Houston where he actually aligned with McMahon, we're all trying to forget this), but some of the best work was in the first couple months. This interview is a prime example of the amazing chemistry these two had.
October 5, 1998 - Vince McMahon gets a visit in the hospital
Another seminal Austin and McMahon moment came just after The Undertaker and Kane decided to snap Vince McMahon's ankle with the ring steps. While it was nice to see two brothers putting aside their differences and playing together again, we all wept for Mr. McMahon and the pain he was going through. And by all of us, I mean none of us, especially Steve Austin. (NOTE: Ultimately, the biggest takeaway from this skit was the birth of Mick Foley's hand puppet friend, Mr. Socko.)
December 7, 1998 - Undertaker sacrifices Austin
Winning the TV ratings battle every week and resuscitating a flailing company sent Vince McMahon into a big time phase of random, cavalier "heat checks," a series of questionable programming decisions just to see what the WWF could get away with. I guess he got away with simulating the crucifixion in that he wasn't punished financially. The XFL? Different story. January 4, 1999 - Mankind wins the WWF Title
On my radio show this past weekend, I asked WWE Hall of Fame announcer Jim Ross what he thought was the turning point in the Monday Night wars when he knew that the WWF had seized momentum for good, and he cited January 4, 1999, the night Mick Foley won the world heavyweight title for the first time in his career. The match itself actually was recorded a week before, and because of that it gave WCW Monday Nitro play by play guy Tony Schivaone the chance to get off this little gem:
Schiavone even made sarcastic comments about Foley as a champ not "putting butts in seats." The response from viewers was not what WCW had hoped for. 500,000 of them changed channels to go see Foley, a huge fan favorite, win his first World title.
March 22, 1999 - Steve Austin douses the McMahon's in beer
More Austin-McMahon greatness. Not much more you have to say here.
May 24, 1999 - Owen Hart Tribute show
On the night of May 23, 1999, at the Over The Edge pay per view, Owen Hart, in costume as the Blue Blazer character, fell from over 70 feet in the air as he was making what was supposed to be a "superhero type entrance," and later that night was pronounced dead as a result of the impact of the fall. In the face of much criticism, the WWF not only continued the card that evening but went on with Monday Night RAW the next night. Appropriately, they scrapped whatever script they had that Monday and did a show entirely in tribute to the late Owen Hart.
August 9, 1999 - Chris Jericho debuts in WWE
Millennium countdown clock, distinctive ring entrance music, an immediate verbal spat with one of the two biggest stars in the company -- this was the textbook way to introduce a star into the company. People already knew Chris Jericho from his indy career and his three years in WCW, where he managed to become a huge fan favorite despite WCW seemingly wanting him to barely ascend above mid card status. WWE obviously had bigger plans for him.
September 27, 1999 - The Rock: This Is Your Life
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An exception to this pattern in mammals does exist, however. Wounds in fetal skin heal without forming scars—yielding perfect skin regeneration and indicating that the switch to a fibrotic response arises with the developmental maturation of the skin. Although this difference could reflect a change in the biology of the fibroblasts, it is more likely a result of altered signaling from the extracellular wound environment modulating the behavior of the fibroblasts, which in turn suggests that therapeutically modifying those signals could change the healing response. At the same time, the fact that limb amputations during fetal stages of development do not result in regeneration of the limb reminds us that scar-free wound healing is likely to be necessary but not sufficient for regeneration.
To advance our understanding of what it will take to induce limb regeneration in people, we are continuing our work with mice. Our research group has already described a natural blastema in a mouse amputation injury, and our goal within the next year is to induce a blastema where it would not normally occur. Like the accessory-limb experiments in salamanders, this achievement would establish the minimal requirements for blastema formation. We hope that this line of investigation will also reveal whether, as we suspect, the blastema itself provides critical signaling that prevents fibrosis in the wound site.
If we succeed in generating a blastema in a mammal, the next big hurdle for us would be coaxing the site of a digit amputation to regenerate the entire digit. The complexity of that task is many times greater than regenerating a simple digit tip because a whole digit includes joints, which are among the most complicated skeletal structures formed in the body during embryonic development. Developmental biologists are still trying to understand how joints are made naturally, so building a regenerated mouse digit, joints and all, would be a major milestone in the regeneration field. We hope to reach it in the next few years, and after that, the prospect of regenerating an entire mouse paw, and then an arm, will not seem so remote.
Indeed, when we consider all that we have learned about wound healing and regeneration from studies in various animal models, the surprising conclusion is that we may be only a decade or two away from a day when we can regenerate human body parts. The striking contrast between the behavior of fibroblasts in directing the regeneration response in salamanders versus the fibrotic response leading to scarring in mammals suggests that the road to successful regeneration is lined with these cells. Equally encouraging is the recent discovery by Howard Y. Chang and John L. Rinn of Stanford University that adult human fibroblasts, like salamander fibroblasts, retain a memory of the spatial coordinate system used to establish the body plan early in the embryo’s development. Given that such positional information is re-quired for regeneration in salamanders, its existence in human fibroblasts enhances the feasibility of tapping into and activating developmental programs necessary for regeneration.
Now, as we watch a salamander grow back an arm, we are no longer quite as mystified by how it happens. Soon humans might be able to harness this truly awesome ability ourselves, replacing damaged and diseased body parts at will, perhaps indefinitely.Scareware purveyors’ top target for today: Twilight fans using Google to search for show times, sound tracks and all things related to latest movie about young vampire lovers.
{Safety tip: If you see a suspicious virus scan or alert, the worst thing you can do is click on anything in the alert, even a “cancel” button. That’s because clicking on anything the bad guys present to you usually advances the scam. Instead, do a force quit: type “ctrl-alt-delete” to navigate to your task manager. Locate the application running the fake alert and force-quit it by clicking “end task.”}
Cyber criminals are using Black Hat SEO techniques to cause tainted web links to turn up high in the rankings of search results related to Twilight; the bad links trigger malicious programs that launch promos for fake antivirus protection, says PC Tools researcher Rommel Garcia.
Here’s how the scam works:
A fan uses Google to search for “Twilight Eclipse Release Date”
Tainted web links turn up ranked highly among the search results* The fan clicks on a malicious link
The fan’s web browser gets redirected to web site controlled by the scammers
A fake Windows security alert pops up indicating serious infections
The fan is duped into clicking “prevent attack”
The fan now gets taken down a path to purchase worthless clean up and protection.
Twilight fans should be “vigilant when visiting sites that appear in internet searches” even when the search results appear to point to legitimate web sites, says Garcia.
Scareware attacks like this are so slick because the bad guys make a ton of money. The FTC and FBI busted one gang that made $163 million duping one victim at a time to pay $30 to $70 for worthless cleanup and protection.
By Byron Acohido
June 30th, 2010 | For consumers | Imminent threats | Top StoriesThe month of May overflows with awesome spring events and outdoor festivals, so to help you navigate through them all and find the ones you definitely do not want to miss, we’ve updated our Spring Festivals roundup with a more comprehensive list of all the festivals we could find this month and next.
From blockbuster annual festivals like the Rittenhouse Row Spring Fest and the Italian Market Fest and newcomers like this weekend’s South Street Spring Fest to festivals taking place in neighborhoods around the city like Plazapalooza, the Chestnut Hill Spring Fest, the Pie in the Sky Food Truck Fest and the Trenton Avenue Arts Fest, every weekend this month has multiple options for cool spring festivals for you to add to your must-do list.
And these festivals cover it all: food, drink, music, art, races, water, shopping and more — Philadelphia has a spring festival for pretty much everything.
Look out for additional coverage on a lot of these events and festivals in the days and weeks to come, but for now, start making your plans. Some weekends are going to require careful planning to maximize the number of festivals you’ll be able to attend. (And if you know of another festival coming to your neighborhood, be sure to let us know!)
As always, you can reference our events calendar to see what’s happening on a specific day or weekend.
Check out our updated guide to more than 45 spring festivals coming up in May and June below.
May
• Philadelphia International Children’s Festival: The Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts plays host to a fun festival for the kids. The Philadelphia International Children’s Festival, which is now in its 29th year, offers a week of family-friendly performances, crafts and interactive events. The event is set for April 30 to May 4.
• Equality Forum: Putting the spotlight on LGBT history and culture, Equality Forum brings together people from around the world for panel discussions, parties, art and theater events and a lively community fair from May 2 to 5.
• Plazapalooza: Graduate Hospital hosts yet another awesome festival this Saturday, May 4. From 1 to 7 p.m., the Grays Ferry Triangle at 23rd and South Streets will be abuzz with the festival known as Plazapalooza. It boasts beer from Grace Tavern, food from local eateries and even a visit from the folks from the upcoming Odunde Festival to keep the young entertained.
• Radio 104.5 Summer Block Party: The Piazza hosts a score of great events all spring and summer long including the 104.5 Summer Block Party which welcomes popular bands to Philadelphia. The first show is on Saturday, May 4 and boasts Family of the Year, Atlas Genius and Jackson Kingsley as the musical acts. The concerts continue throughout the summer, the next show is on Saturday, June 8. For the full lineup check here.
• South Street Headhouse District Spring Festival: As the weather warms, expect serious crowds to gather for the inaugural South Street Spring Festival, an open-air party with local eats, drinks and goods from the street’s wide-ranging vendors. This year’s event on May 4 marks the first event.
• Maifest: Brauhaus Schmitz presents a beer-filled daylong festival that purposely coincides with South Street Headhouse District Spring Festival on May 4. Maifest brings a taste of Germany to the 700 block of South Street from noon to 8 p.m. Fill up your stein and get ready to chow down on German food and dance around the Maipole.
• Pie in the Sky Kite and Food Truck Festival: Fishtown’s waterfront spot, Penn Treaty Park, hosts the outdoor festival Pie in the Sky Kite and Food Truck Festival on Saturday, May 4 from noon to 5 p.m. Guests are encouraged to bring their own kite to fly through the sky, or for those who do not own a kite, kite-making will be available at the day’s event. Prizes will be awarded to kites in numerous different categories. Also enjoy fare from favorite food trucks like Vernilicious, Sweet Box Cupcakes and FooTruck.
• Strawberry Festival: Peddler’s Village hosts its annual Strawberry Festival on May 4 and 5 from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Strawberries take the spotlight at this weekend-long event; enjoy chocolate dipped strawberries, strawberry fritters, strawberry shortcake, strawberry butter and even get a peek at a strawberry pie eating contest. Live music also abounds on both days of the festival. Arts and crafts will be available for children.
• Broad Street Run: The annual Broad Street run runs through town on Sunday, May 5 at 8:30 a.m. The 10-mile race spans from Northeast Philly at Broad Street and Somerville Avenue all the way down Broad Street where it finishes at the Navy Yard. Non-participants are encouraged to cheer on the runners all along Broad Street. The race passes by major Philadelphia landmarks like Temple University, the Pennsylvania Convention Center and City Hall.
• Chestnut Hill Home and Garden Festival: Head out to Chestnut Hill on Sunday, May 5 for a day of spring blooms, handmade home accessories, live music and lots of festival fare at the annual Home and Garden Festival. Get your home and garden ready for the summer months by shopping the special collection of items presented by a number of vendors along Germantown Avenue.
• Burger Brawl: The third annual Burger Brawl swoops in to Fleisher Art Memorial in Bella Vista on Sunday, May 5. More than 20 popular restaurants battle it out to create the best burger in Philadelphia. Participating restaurants include Alla Spina, Shake Shack, Barbuzzo and The Dandelion. In addition to burgers, beer from Dogfish Head will be plentiful.
• Aberdeen Dad Vail Regatta: The Schuylkill River is home to a number of world-renowned races including the Aberdeen Dad Vail Regatta which is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year. On May 10 and 11, the river welcomes more than 100 schools to the annual (and free) regatta. Shuttle buses leave the art museum frequently for free trips to and from the race course. Hint: The Grand Stand, located two miles north of Boathouse Row, is the best place to catch the action.
• Fitler Square Spring Fair: On Friday, May 10 and Saturday, May 11, Fitler Square hosts its annual Spring Fair. A silent auction is set to occur and contains items from local restaurants and shops. Booths featuring flowers, baked goods, Fitler Square memorabilia, children’s clothing and games and more also surround the area. Surrounding the square, vendors create an outdoor market full of a variety of items.
• Pennsylvania Guild Fine Craft Fair at Rittenhouse Square: Browse some of the finest pieces of handmade jewelry, furniture, photography, sculptures, clothing and more at Rittenhouse Square’s Pennsylvania Guild Fine Craft Fair. On May 10 and 11, visit the Center City park for unique and handcrafted items. Bonus, this festival falls right before Mother’s Day, browse gifts of all sort at the festival. Live music will fill the air on both days, and even a moon bounce makes an appearance on May 11.
• Sister Cities Park International Festival: Sister Cities Park International Festival celebrates Philadelphia and its 10 sister cities on Saturday, May 11. Learn to speak different tongues at mini-language lessons and get insider tips at how to create delicious food from each of our Sister Cities. Also on schedule, a Cameroonian fashion show, Taiko Drummers from Japan and music from the Italian Consul. The festival runs from noon to 5 p.m.
• Spring Arts Star Craft Bazaar: Lovers of one-of-a-kind finds descend on the annual Spring Art Star Craft Bazaar, where the handmade goods include housewares, ceramics, clothing, art, paper goods and much more. The weekend-long sale on May 11 and 12 at the Great Plaza at Penn’s Landing is punctuated with live music, food and art demonstrations.
• Clark Park May Fair: Head out to Clark Park for its annual May Fair festival. The festival falls on Saturday, May 11 and offers arts and crafts tables for Mother’s Day gift creation (which is the day following the festival), a used book sale, live music, family-friendly games and much more.
• LOVE Your Park Week: From May 11 through May 18, Philadelphia Parks and Recreation and the Fairmount Park Conservancy are encouraging citizens to show their love for all of Philadelphia’s great parks at this weeklong festival featuring volunteer opportunities, clean up days and other events.
• Fairmount Night Market: The Food Trust’s first Night Market of 2013 is coming up and is taking over Fairmount on Thursday, May 16 from 6 to 10 p.m. Some of Philly’s most loved food trucks will be in attendance, and Fairmount restaurants like Alla Spina, Lemon Hill and Urban Saloon will set up shop. Fairmount’s Eastern State Penitentiary will offer discounted admission and free brews to after-hours guests.
• Phillies Phestival: Citizens Bank Park invites children and adults alike down to the stadium for the Phillies Phestival. The annual ALS benefit at the ballpark invites fans to mingle with Phillies players, coaches and broadcasters at the May 16 event. Some lucky fans will even have the opportunity to receive one-of-a-kind autographs from their favorite Phillie. Attendees are also invited to take part in the festival’s silent auction featuring great items for the great cause.
• Rittenhouse Row Spring Festival: Along with the blooming rhododendrons of spring comes the Rittenhouse Row Spring Festival on Saturday, May 18. The event is Walnut Street’s annual fete with food, fashion, music and art, plus a slew of activities for kids.
• Italian Market Festival: On May 18 and 19, the nation’s oldest outdoor market and the already-bustling heart of South Philadelphia welcomes the city for the Italian Market Festival, a foodie’s dream with flavors from its restaurants and shops, along with the Annual Procession of Saints and plenty of activities for kids.
For lots more spring festivals in May and June, see below.
• Brewerytown Spring Festival: Away from the hustle and bustle, Brewerytown hosts a Spring Festival 27th and Girard to 28th and Girard on Saturday, May 18. From noon to 5 p.m., visit the festival for live music, family-friendly activities, art vendors and 15 to 20 tasty food trucks.
• Radnor Hunt Races: On Saturday, May 18, a tradition returns to the Main Line’s Radnor Hunt. Gather with friends at the annual Radnor Hunt Races and watch dozens of horses and horse racers compete to win their race. Spectators pack food and drinks to eat before and during the races. Food vendors are also in attendance.
• Trenton Avenue Arts Festival and Kensington Kinetic Sculpture Derby: Lining the cobblestone street with artists of all stripes and genres, the Trenton Avenue Arts Festival includes the storied Kensington Kinetic Sculpture Derby, a quirky competition for the most creative human-powered vehicles along with food and art galore. This year’s festival is on Saturday, May 18.
• Clemente Fest: It’s all about family fun at Clemente Fest, a fundraiser for the Spring Garden park named for the famed Puerto Rican baseball player. Attractions include local art, music and performance, plus a moon bounce and games for kids. The event is set for Saturday, May 18.
• South Philadelphia Taproom’s Wheat Beer Fest: Indulge in all of the wheat-based beers that your heart desires at the South Philadelphia Taproom Wheat Beer Fest. More than 30 wheat beers will be available for only $3 a brew on Saturday, May 18 from noon to 8 p.m. Pair your beer with smokin’ barbecue at the annual block party and enjoy live music from a number of local bands.
• 40th Street Summer Series: All spring and summer long, University City District, The Rotunda and Penn join forces to present a series of outdoor concerts in the warm weather. The 40th Street Summer Series welcomes acclaimed performers of all types; from jazz to a ukulele orchestra. The first concert is on Saturday, May 25 and features the Brooklyn Qawwali Party, a jazz fusion group that incorporates the sounds of Pakistani folk music. The next concert is on Saturday, June 29 and features the Philadelphia Ukulele Orchestra.
• Devon Horse Show: The Devon Horse Show and Country Fair is a multiday horse-centric event. The Devon Horse show is the largest and oldest multi-breed outdoor horse festival in the country and runs from May 23 to June 2. The Country Fair section of the event incorporates food vendors, super candy offerings, shops, an art gallery and more. A number of events in addition to horse shows occur over the multiday festival. The full schedule of events is available here.
• Hidden City Festival: The Hidden City Festival shines the light on Philadelphia landmarks that are often looked over. The festival, which lasts from May 23 through June 30, welcomes local and national artists who are slated to create visual and performing arts installations at each site. Landmarks range from The Athenaeum of Philadelphia to Congregation Shivtei Yeshurun-Ezras Israel, a South Philadelphia storefront synagogue.
• Memorial Day Weekend at Chaddsford Winery: All weekend long, Chaddsford Winery hosts live music and of course lots of wine in celebration of the holiday weekend. From May 24 to 27, head out to the winery for a number of events.
• Fireworks and Fountains at Longwood Gardens: Just in time for Memorial Day, Longwood Gardens hosts its first Fireworks and Fountains event of the summer. On May 25, watch the attraction’s fountains light up and fireworks erupt to the music of Elton John. The event runs through the summer.
• NCAA Men’s Lacrosse Championship at Lincoln Financial Field: Philadelphia plays host to some of the best college lacrosse players in the country. The NCAA Men’s Lacrosse Championship is coming to town and bringing with it a number of festive events for visitors and locals alike. Lincoln Financial Field will be abuzz with talented athletes and their friends and family to cheer them on from May 25 to 27. Attendees can check out the LaXperience Fan Fest just outside of the field. The area has a place for guests to show off their lacrosse skills, food and drink vendors, live entertainment and a chance to meet some of the championship’s biggest stars.
• PECO Multicultural Series at Penn’s Landing: Penn’s Landing hosts a score of summer events that center around Philadelphia’s diverse cultural scene. The exact dates of the PECO Multicultural Series are still to be announced, so stay tuned. The frequent summer events bring a taste of numerous cultures to Philadelphia through music, food and outdoor celebrations.
June
• The Roots Picnic: The start-of-the-summer event, The Roots Picnic, is set for Saturday, June 1 and boasts an impressive lineup. The Roots, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, Solange, Trinidad James, Naughty By Nature and many more artists are set to grace Festival Pier stage at Penn’s Landing.
• Philly Beer Week: The local obsession with all-things fizzy and fermented comes to new heights during Philly Beer Week, a regional bacchanal with special dinners, tastings, pub crawls and brewery tours from May 31 to June 9. Venues across the city open their doors for tons of events during this festive week.
• Craft Beer Day: During Philly Beer Week, East Passyunk plays up its roots with a daylong Italian Festival and Craft Beer Day. The event encompasses a pub crawl with a distinctly red sauce flavor, offering samples, brewer meet-and-greets and plenty of special deals on Sunday, June 2.
• Manayunk Bike Race: Bikers flock to Manayunk on Sunday, June 2 for the annual Manayunk Bike Race, this year called the Philly Cycling Classic. This year’s course is shorter than previous year’s, but still brings bikers through Manayunk, East Falls, Kelly Drive and Fairmount Park. The women’s race begins at 8:30 a.m., and the men’s race follows shortly after in the early afternoon.
• Rittenhouse Square Fine Arts Show: Rittenhouse Square’s 82nd-annual Fine Arts Show is slated for June 7 to 9. The art-packed festival boats tents all along Rittenhouse Square that showcase unique pieces of art for sale. More than 100 artists come together to present their finest work for this annual festival.
• Vendy Awards: Philadelphia’s food trucks offer some fine food, and on Saturday, June 8, indulge in all the tasty food and beer you want as the food vendors come together for a giant festival known as the Vendy Awards. Now in its third year in Philadelphia, the Penn Treaty Park festival invites some of the most loved food trucks out for a day to determine which food truck is crowned best in Philly. The annual event is also a benefit for the Food Trust. Tickets are expected to sell out, so reserve your spot soon.
• Odunde Festival: Based on Yoruba traditions, the Odunde Festival on June 9 celebrates the coming of another year for African-Americans and African people around the world with a procession, ceremonial offering and African marketplace, along with live music and dance.
• Philadelphia LGBT Pride Parade and Festival: On Sunday, June 9, the 25th-annual Philadelphia’s LGBT Pride Parade and Festival marches around the city and keeps prideful spirits on high. The parade begins at noon in the heart of the gayborhood and makes it way down to Penn’s Landing. Penn’s Landing comes alive at noon with festival events for all.
• Baltimore Avenue Dollar Stroll: The super popular Baltime Avenue Dollar Stroll returns for 2013 on June 13 from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. From 42nd Street to 50th Street on Baltimore Avenue, area vendors will provide discounted items from their shops for just one dollar. Can you say Little Baby’s scoops for $1? We can.
• Awesome Fest: Awesome Fest, the 80s themed film and music festival brings Philadelphia great outdoor and indoor programming all summer long. The festival runs from June 14 to August 19, kicking off with a performance by The Psychedelic Furs at the Trocadero Theatre on June 14 at 8 p.m.
• Bloomsday: James Joyce’s masterwork Ulysses serves as the focal point of Bloomsday, and the Rosenbach Museum and Library hosts the Philadelphia outpost of a worldwide all-day festival for literary enthusiasts on June 16.
• Drexel Park Film Series: As part of the Awesome Fest festival, Drexel Park hosts outdoor movies every Thursday night for the duration of the festival. The first film is the 1980s classic, Revenge Of The Nerds on Thursday, June 20 at 9 p.m. Future (and free) programming includes Adventures in Babysitting and Die Hard.
• Manayunk Arts Festival: Billed as the largest outdoor juried art show in the region, the Manayunk Arts Festival welcomes nearly 200,000 collectors, buyers and designers to peruse fine art and handmade goods along charming Main Street on June 22 and 23.Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Sep. 16, 2013, 1:14 PM GMT By Melissa Dahl and Linda Carroll
Update: The Seattle Seahawks set the Guinness World Record for crowd noise during Sunday's game against rival San Francisco 49ers. The Seahawks fans reached a decibel level of 131.9 during the nationally televised game, roaring by the previous record of 131.7 decibels, set by fans at a 2011 soccer match in Istanbul, Turkey. And the Seahawks beat the 49ers 3-29.
Original:
Seattle Seahawks fans like to boast that theirs is the noisiest stadium in the world. On Sunday, they'll get their chance to prove it: A Guinness World Records representative will be at CenturyLink to measure the decibel level of Seahawks fans as their team plays rivals San Francisco 49ers. It's the end result of a showdown with the Kansas City Chiefs, who have also long claimed bragging rights for their Arrowhead Stadium as the world's loudest sports facility.
While the goal of a roaring crowd may be about whipping fans into a greater frenzy and "intimidating" the opposing teams and players, as a KC Chiefs Facebook fan page claims, it's not only a bad idea for fans' hearing -- it doesn't really help the home team, experts say.
Seattle is going to have to beat the current world record of 131.76 decibels, set by fans at a 2011 soccer match in Istanbul, Turkey. But if Seahawks fans are named World's Loudest on Sunday -- what, even, is the point? Decades of research have looked at the effect of a noisy crowd on athletic performance and there's never been any conclusive, scientific evidence that a boisterous crowd does indeed help the home team win, social and sport psychologists say.
"So the Seattle Seahawks are trying for this crowd record -- is that going to help their players win or play better? I would put a big question mark on that," says Robert Weinberg, who specializes in sport psychology at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. "Maybe it will; maybe it won’t. That’s what the research would say."
A lot of fans think that just because there is a home court advantage, "or you have loud, vociferous fans, it’s going to help your team perform better," Weinberg says. "That’s not necessarily – it can be – but it’s not necessarily the case."
Besides that -- what about your poor ears?
What it is most certainly doing is damaging the hearing of every person in attendance. People don’t recognize how much damage they can do to their hearing, says Alison Grimes, an assistant clinical professor of head/neck surgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, and director of audiology at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center.
“People will say, ‘Oh, it was just for 10 minutes,’” Grimes says. “And what I tell my patients is that noise is cumulative over the lifetime. Each time you use a chain saw or ride a motorcycle or go to a stadium to make the sound meter reach the top, it accumulates."
Before the Sunday game, every Seattle fan should, at the very least, buy the over-the-counter ear plugs, says Dr. Anil Lalwani, professor and vice chair for research, director of the division of otology, neurotology and skull base surgery at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center. “Those will lower the sound level by about 15 to 20 decibels. Wearing those with headphones can bring it down by a total of 40 decibels.”
The thing to keep in mind is that there is a reciprocal relationship between the intensity of the sound and the duration you can be exposed to it, Grimes said.
“If you’re literally talking about 130 decibels – nobody should ever be exposed to that,” Grimes said. “There isn’t a safe amount of time for 130 decibels. It’s physically painful as well as acoustically damaging.”
Remember, “hair cells in your ear don’t grow back. There is no Rogaine for your inner ear," warns Grimes. "While hearing aids work really well, there is no substitute for natural hearing.”
That's why parents should be especially careful about bringing their children to the Sunday game or any other loud stadium without ear protection. Already, tens of millions of kids ages 12 to 19 are showing signs of hearing loss -- nearly one in 5 -- largely because of portable music devices. Hours in a very loud environment -- a sports event or rock concert -- can create a cumulative effect on fragile ears, experts say.
Not everyone’s ears will be hurt the same amount. Some may leave the game unscathed, while others may experience significant hearing loss, Lalwani said.
If the noise is sustained at 130 decibels or louder, “there are going to be some unhappy people leaving that stadium,” Lalwani said. “They may have ringing in their ears, a loss of clarity for a day or so – some may have permanent [damage].”
So while the Seahawks and Chiefs fans battle it out for the loudest stadium title during the 2013 season, they should keep in mind that winning that title might not help them clinch the real championship prize.
In the end, while a loud environment can increase physical arousal -- psychologically speaking, that means a player might be more alert and very reactive to external stimulation -- increased physical arousal has also been shown to negatively effect fine motor skills - like the skills a quarterback might depend on, Weinberg says. (That's one of the reasons behind the hush at golf tournaments as the players try to sink a six-foot putt.)
And what about the impact of all that noise on people’s emotional and physical well-being? Loud noises can make people irritable, says Lalwani. So, if the Seahawks lose the game against San Francisco and fail to clinch the Guinness record, there may be some very cranky Seattle fans Sunday night.Former NSA director Michael Hayden commented on Presisdent Trump's success bringing China and Russia to the table to sanction North Korea over its nuclear missile program.
"After many years of failure, countries are coming together to finally address the dangers posed by North Korea. We must be tough & decisive!," Trump wrote in a post on Twitter.
"Frankly the Obama administration deserves from fair criticism for their policy of strategic patience," Hayden said. "Which was frankly paying this problem forward - not solving it on their watch and passing it forward to the Trump administration."
"Sanctions are slow-moving -- they're like rust as opposed to an explosion, which are identical chemical reactions, but one obviously takes a lot more time," he noted. "The Trump team deserves some credit for getting these sanctions.
He said the sanctions are "very tough" and remarkably have the support of Russia and China: "They've got the Russians on their side and they got the Chinese to agree to them as well. This will be a slow-moving mechanism."Hopefully you’ve spent a good portion of Short Story Month immersing yourself in your old favorites while also finding some new writers whose short works appeal to you as much as any novel. With ten days left in May, we asked a few of our favorite new writers to suggest one story they think everybody should read, in case you’re looking for a little inspiration as we head towards the end of the month.
“The Chase” by Italo Calvino, from his collection t zero
“The Chase” by Italo Calvino is not unlike The Chase, the 1994 film starring Charlie Sheen and Kristy Swanson. Both the film and the story take a single chase as their entire premise, detailing the pursuit of one party by another, in cars, with everything held together by high stakes and the threat of death. “The car that is chasing me is faster than mine,” Calvino starts his story, and this same problem plagues Sheen. Tensions run high. Unlike the 1994 film, however, Calvino’s short story does not feature cameos by Red Hot Chili Peppers members Flea and Anthony Kiedis, nor does the Calvino story offer an impossible highway sex scene at sunset. And obviously, Calvino’s does not star Charlie Sheen. Or Kristy Swanson. In fact, the more you consider them together, the less these two works resemble each other. Where is Calvino’s Henry Rollins cop? Where is Calvino’s candy bar robbery? His clown backstory? One begins to wonder how two things so different from each other can have the same name. In fact, if you actually sit down to read Calvino’s story in full, you’ll notice pretty quickly that his chase is what Calvino describes as “virtually motionless.” The whole thing takes place at a traffic jam. There are a gazillion cars stuck at an intersection, and one of them is “chasing” another. Or really they’re all just sitting there, not moving. What. That’s not a chase. Way to turn a perfectly good premise on its head, Calvino. Hello. And if you keep reading (idiot), you’ll soon be disappointed to find out that Calvino doesn’t even know who is chasing who. Or if anyone is chasing anybody at all. It’s as if one minute Charlie Sheen is pursued by Henry Rollins, and the next it’s Charlie after Henry, and then Charlie is everybody in the whole city, or Charlie thinks he kidnapped Kristy Swanson but really she kidnapped him, and who knows what’s happening. How can you write a story where you don’t even know who the bad guy is? Or the good guy? And nobody is even moving? Or winning? Or losing? What the hell is going on here? I thought this was a simple, fun premise, but it just keeps getting more and more complicated. And now I’m considering who I am and how I got here and stop it. It’s as if Calvino thinks you can literally make anything happen from the most minuscule of starting points. Jerk. In conclusion, “The Chase” by Italo Calvino and The Chase starring Charlie Sheen actually couldn’t be any more different, and I’m not sure if we should even bother comparing the two.
—Dolan Morgan, author of the collection That’s When the Knives Came DownUPDATE, June 25: It's unanimous. In a 9-0 decision that came down this morning, the Supreme Court ruled that police need a warrant to search your cellphone. Here, the background on the case.
Getty Images
Originally published on April 29, 2014.
The police don't need a warrant to look through your wallet for identification when they arrest you, and whatever they find in there—say, addresses of friends—is fair game. They would need a warrant, though, to go through your home computer, which is clearly something different, a place where you probably keep private and personal files. But what is your smartphone? A personal effect that you keep on you at all times? Or a drive full of personal data that should be protected from warrantless searches?
The answer could be "both," and that's why this tricky question of whether warrantless cellphone searches are legal is headed to the United States Supreme Court.
Today SCOTUS is hearing two cases on that theme, Riley v. California and United States v. Wurie, that had opposite outcomes in the lower courts. In the first case, police searched the phone of David Leon Riley after they arrested him but before they had a warrant. That evidence gleaned from the phone suggested Riley was involved in a gang and was admitted in his trial, and the gang involvement evidence led to a longer sentence, according to The Wire.
In the second case, a pre-warrant search of Brima Wurie's phone led police to find his home address. There they found guns, ammunition and drugs, which led to a 20-year sentence. However, an appeals court threw out parts of Wurie's conviction, saying that because the police shouldn't have looked through his phone without a warrant, the rest of the case could not stand up. Unsurprisingly, the Justice Department wants this decision overturned, writing a court brief that concludes: "Although cell phones can contain a great deal of personal information, so can many other items that officers have long had authority to search, and the search of a cell phone is no more intrusive than other actions that the police may take once a person has been lawfully arrested."
Any time digital privacy comes to the Supreme Court, two obvious points come to mind. First, that many of the laws on the books were drawn up by people who could not have foreseen this scenario, leaving the justices (who may or may not understand the technology) grappling with the interpretations of rules written with other technologies in mind. As The Verge points out, Judge Norman Stahl wrote in his decision in the Wurie case that, "The Court, more than thirty-five years ago, could not have envisioned a world in which the vast majority of arrestees would be carrying on their person an item containing not physical evidence but a vast store of intangible data."
Second: If the Snowden revelations didn't make this clear enough, the Justice Department is probably going to insist that whatever data is within reach is critical for law enforcement. To put it another way, don't sit around waiting for its lawyers to say, "nah, we don't need that information." PopMech contributor Glenn Harlan Reynolds argues for putting new laws on the books to protect our privacy rather than waiting for court rulings on laws from yesteryear.
With no protection, we're all going to be left with tough choices. Your phone is now powerful enough to become a pocket-sized extension of your brain, but should you keep it free of any information you might not want law enforcement to see? Lots of people have learned painful lessons about over-sharing over the last decade as social media has conquered the world. But we're not talking about users willingly giving away their information here. We're talking about what has become the gateway to your whole life, and whether officers can walk through it without a warrant.Automation is undoubtedly making a big impact on the workplace, and fears over the impact on jobs is a constant bedfellow of each new tale of automation that emerges.
Alas, a recent study suggests that those fears may well be somewhat overblown, and that rather than destroying jobs, automation actually creates many more jobs than are destroyed.
Here come the jobs
The study saw over 300 occupations examined over a 33 year time-scale from 1980 to try and examine the impact of automation. To put it bluntly, it emerged that employment generally rose fastest in professions with the most automation.
“The idea that automation kills jobs isn’t true historically, and |
—one for boys and one for girls. The girls' school had a resident headmistress from Jerusalem. At that time, Deir Yassin also had a bakery, two guesthouses, and a social club—the "Renaissance Club", a thrift fund, three shops, four wells and a second mosque built by Mahmud Salah, an affluent resident. Many inhabitants were employed outside the village in the nearby British Army camps as waiters, carpenters, and foremen; others as clerks and teachers in the mandatory civil service. By this time, no more than 15% of the population was engaged in agriculture.[16]
Relations between Deir Yassin and its Jewish neighbors had started reasonably well under the Ottomans, particularly early on when Arabic-speaking Sephardic Yemenite Jews comprised much of the surrounding population. Relations rapidly deteriorated with the growth of Zionism in Palestine and reached their apex during the Arab revolt in 1936-1939. Relations picked up again during the economic boom years of full employment of World War II. Thus, in 1948, Deir Yassin was a prosperous, expanding village at relative peace with its Jewish neighbors with whom much business was done.[16]
April 1948 invasion [ edit ]
When hostilities erupted in 1948, the villagers of Deir Yassin and those of the nearby Jewish village of Giv'at Shaul signed a pact, later approved at Haganah headquarters, to maintain their good relations, exchange information on movement of outsiders through village territory, and ensure the safety of vehicles from the village. The inhabitants of Deir Yassin upheld the agreement scrupulously, resisting infiltration by Arab irregulars. Though this was known to the Irgun and Lehi forces, they attacked the village on April 9, 1948. The assault was beaten off initially, with the attackers suffering 40 wounded. Only the intervention of a Palmach unit, using mortars,[16] allowed them to conquer the village. Houses were blown up with people inside and people shot: 107 villagers, including women and children, were killed. The survivors were loaded on trucks that were driven through Jerusalem in a victory parade,[15][17] with some sources describing further violence by Lehi soldiers.[18] Four Irgun or Lehi men were killed.[19] The incident became known as the Deir Yassin massacre.
On April 10, 1948, one day after the Deir Yassin massacre, Albert Einstein wrote a critical letter to the American Friends of Fighters for the Freedom of Israel (the U.S chapter of the Stern gang) refusing to assist them with aid or support to raise money for their cause in Palestine.[20][21] On December 2, 1948, many prominent American Jews signed and published an op-ed article in The New York Times critical of Menachem Begin and the massacre at Deir Yassin.[22]
Following the war, the area was incorporated into the State of Israel. A year later, the Jewish neighborhood of Givat Shaul Bet was built on Deir Yassin's land, despite Israeli scholars' protests to Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion.[23] In 1951, the Kfar Shaul Mental Health Center was built within the village itself, using some abandoned village buildings themselves.[24] In 1980, the remaining ruins of the village were bulldozed to clear the ground for new Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods. In the early 1980s, most of the Deir Yassin cemetery was bulldozed and a new highway to Givat Shaul Bet was paved in its place.
In 1992, Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi wrote:
Many of the village houses on the hill are still standing and have been incorporated into an Israeli hospital for the mentally ill that was established on the site. Some houses outside the fence of the hospital grounds are used for residential and commercial purposes, or as warehouses. Outside the fence, there are carob and almond trees and the stumps of olive trees. Several wells are located at the southwestern edge of the site. The old village cemetery, southeast of the site, is unkempt and threatened by debris from a ring road that has been constructed around the village hill. One tall cypress tree still stands at the center of the cemetery.[25]
The killings at Deir Yassin are regarded as one of two pivotal events that led to the exodus of around 700,000 Palestinians from their towns and villages in 1948, along with the defeat of the Palestinians in Haifa. News of the killings, amplified by Arab media broadcasts of atrocity, triggered fear and panic among Palestinians, who in turn increasingly evacuated their homes.[26]
Geography [ edit ]
Map showing Deir Yassin in relation to Jerusalem in the 1870s
Deir Yassin was built on the eastern slopes of a hill, with an elevation of roughly 800 meters (2,600 ft) above sea level and commanding a wide view all around it. The village faced the western suburbs of Jerusalem which were 1 kilometer (0.62 mi) away. The city center of Jerusalem was about 5 kilometers (3.1 mi) to the east. It was separated from the city by a terraced valley planted with fig, almond, and olive orchards. Along the northern rim of the valley ran a secondary road linking Deir Yassin to the suburbs and to the main Jaffa Road which was about 2 kilometers (1.2 mi) to the north.[4]
The total land area of the village consisted of 2,857 dunams (286 hectares), of which 94.5% was Arab-owned, 5.3% was Jewish-owned and the remainder was public property.[27] Cultivable land amounted to a total of 866 dunams (30%) (87 hectares), all of which was grown with grains and owned mostly by Arabs.[28] The built-up area of the village was 12 dunams.[29]
Map showing Deir Yassin and its surroundings in 1948
Demographics [ edit ]
Khirbet Ayn al-Tut had a population of 39 in 1596, during early Ottoman rule.[4] In the 1922 British Mandate census, Deir Yassin had a population of 254.[30] Its population had increased from 429 in the 1931 census to 750 in 1948 and its houses from 91 in the former year to 144 in the latter.[16][31] Before its ravage in 1948, it is estimated that Deir Yassin had 610 Muslim inhabitants in the 1945 statistics.[27][2] The five hamulas (clans) of Deir Yassin were the Shahada, 'Aql, Hamidad, Jabir and Jundi.[32]
Gallery [ edit ]
References [ edit ]FBI raids solar panel firm Solyndra after bankruptcy filing
Energy Department agents also execute search warrants at the Northern California company, which had received $535 million in federal stimulus loan guarantees.
Republicans have seized on Solyndra's downfall as a sign that President Obama's stimulus and "green jobs" campaign were failures. They have also noted that key Obama backer George Kaiser was a major investor in Solyndra, the first company to receive a Department of Energy loan guarantee to boost alternative energy companies. The program received additional funding under 2009's federal economic stimulus effort.
Last week, Solyndra abruptly announced that it was ceasing operations and laying off 1,100 employees, a move the company attributed to intense foreign competition and a "global oversupply of solar panels." The company filed for bankruptcy Tuesday.
The FBI and Department of Energy's Office of Inspector General confirmed that their agents were involved in the raid Thursday at Solyndra's offices in Fremont but declined to discuss what they were investigating. FBI spokesman Peter D. Lee said documents related to the search had been sealed.
Federal agents executed a search warrant at the Northern California headquarters of solar panel manufacturer Solyndra Inc., which filed for bankruptcy protection this week despite receiving $535 million in federal stimulus loan guarantees.
"The FBI raid further underscores that Solyndra was a bad bet from the beginning and put taxpayers at unnecessary risk," Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) chairman of its Oversight and Investigations subcommittee, said in a joint statement. "President Obama's signature green jobs program went from a darling of the administration to bankruptcy to now the subject of an FBI raid in a matter of days."
Solyndra spokesman Dave Miller said the federal raid came as a surprise but that the company was "fully cooperating" with investigators.
He said he did not know what the federal agents were looking for but speculated it could be related to the $535-million loan guarantee, of which the company drew $527 million.
A skeleton team of about 100 employees is still working at the factory during a "wind-down" process, Miller said.
The raid came about 16 months after Obama visited Solyndra and praised the federal government's investments in clean energy and other sectors.
"We've got to go back to making things," the president said at the May 26, 2010, appearance at Solyndra. "Not only would this spur hiring by businesses, it would create jobs in sectors with incredible potential to propel our economy for years, for decades to come. There is no better example than energy."
Solyndra was one of about 40 alternative energy projects funded over the last two years through an Energy Department loan program that helped companies involved with major wind, solar, nuclear and ethanol projects. The Energy Department had said it expected the combined projects to create about 60,000 jobs.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee had been investigating the Solyndra loans since February and had scheduled a hearing next Wednesday to get additional details about the loan guarantee, even before federal agents arrived at Solyndra on Thursday.
The committee had previously issued subpoenas to obtain documents about the Solyndra loans from the administration's Office of Management and Budget.
Officials from the budget office, the Department of Energy and Solyndra's president and chief executive, Brian Harrison, have been invited to testify at next week's hearing.
Reps. Harry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) and Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) on Thursday encouraged Harrison to testify at Wednesday's hearing.
In a letter to Stearns, they said Harrison told them less than two months ago that Solyndra was "in strong financial position and in no danger of failing" and projected that the company would double its revenue in 2011.Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.
John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936)
Most political observers can trot out Keynes’s remark but it does not follow that political leaders are mere ventriloquists. Even the most unintellectual and anti-intellectual have to decide to which academic scribbler or scribblers they are going to enslave themselves. And how politicians put different ideas together makes a critical difference to the politics they pursue. Just compare varieties of liberalism and conservatism – and communism and fascism – under different leaders.
Moreover, many of the most successful political leaders are not “exempt from any intellectual influence”; on the contrary, for some, intellectualism is a central part of their political personality and appeal. As the Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland once wrote, “People don’t believe in ideas: they believe in people who believe in ideas.”
All of this is prompted by grappling with the career of François Mitterrand, courtesy of Mitterrand: a Study in Ambiguity (Bodley Head, £30), an excellent new book by the former BBC Paris correspondent Philip Short. His previous subjects as a biographer were Pol Pot and Mao Zedong. An odd trio but, as with the other two, Short brings to the former French president great insight without undue sympathy, qualities admired by Mitterrand, who said the most essential attribute in politics is “indifference”.
The reason for grappling with Mitterrand is simple enough: he is the most successful left-wing leader of any of the three leading western European countries (France, Britain and Germany), measured by longevity in power and arguably also by electoral dominance. A front-rank politician by the age of 30 in 1946 and a senior minister in successive governments of the Fourth Republic while in his thirties, he went on to lead today’s Socialist Party in 1971, then to win two presidential elections (in 1981 and 1988) and two parliamentary elections. Having condemned Charles de Gaulle’s strong Fifth Republic presidency as “a permanent coup d’état” when the general assumed power in the late 1950s, he occupied the post in full plenitude for 14 years (1981-95), ruling for longer than de Gaulle – longer indeed than any leader of France since Napoleon III – in a political career spanning half a century.
However, the explanation for Mitterrand’s success is anything but simple; also complex are the lessons for today’s left as it struggles to win and hold power across Europe, not least in France, where François Hollande evinces little of the mastery of Tonton (“Uncle”).
Short’s biography is subtitled A Study in Ambiguity but it could equally be described as “a study in deception”, because there was nothing ambiguous about the massive falsehoods and carefully constructed but entirely bogus images that litter every part of Mitterrand’s career. Short begins the biography with an electric account of the “observatory affair” of 1959, when Mitterrand faked an assassination attempt on himself as a ploy to regain the political initiative the year after de Gaulle buried the Fourth Republic and most of its political inmates. The fake was exposed and it is extraordinary that he ever recovered.
Yet the greatest deceptions were still to come. Throughout his presidency, he lied (and ordered his doctors to lie) about his health. Diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer within months of taking power in 1981 and expected to live for only three more years, he told his urologist: “It’s a state secret; you are bound by this secret.” When the cancer went into remission, he not only stood for re-election while maintaining the secret but struggled on for the full seven years although the cancer returned and, by the end, became undeniable.
His personal life was similarly full of falsehood. While his wife, Danielle, and their two sons were his public family, they coexisted with a secret second family of his mistress (who was 27 years younger than him) and their daughter, with Mitterrand shuttling between the two in Paris and the country, again unknown to the public until the end of his presidency. His daughter, Mazarine, was named after Cardinal Mazarin, Louis XIV’s wily and secretive first minister, whose precepts for the politician were taken deeply to heart by her father: “Be sparing with your gestures, walk with measured steps... Simulate, dissimulate, trust nobody.”
It is no surprise that it is hard to pin down what Mitterrand believed. Partly this is because his ideas changed so much and so often. Starting out as an official of the Vichy regime and an admirer of Philippe Pétain, he was elected in the Fourth Republic for a shifting array of parties of the centre right. As a minister in the mid-1950s, he was a voice not only of conservatism but of outright reaction and repression in respect of Algeria and the French colonies.
Throughout the 1960s, his big idea was anti-Gaullism. He championed liberalism in the face of overweening personal and presidential power. Socialism entered his vocabulary only as he sought a viable anti- and post- Gaullist political grouping, which, as a result of his artful machinations, came together in the Socialist Party in 1971.
Mitterrand then rose to power on the back of an alliance with the still-strong Communists. He fashioned this as the tribune of a leftism that included wholesale nationalisation, a war on the rich and a huge expansion of welfare spending without any regard for conventional economics, which he professed to despise.
This led to the “common programme”, which was put into action in 1981. Elected on the rhetoric of a “complete rupture” with capitalism and the slogan “Change life”, Mitterrand appointed Communist ministers to a pan-left coalition that embarked on the most radical and frenetic programme of nationalisation, state spending and cultural reform attempted by any western European government since the early postwar years.
Barely a year later, Mitterrand put most of this into rapid reverse. With the franc collapsing and the financial markets in revolt, economic orthodoxy returned, state spending was slashed and the Communists were ejected. Nationalisation was rolled back after the right won the parliamentary elections of 1986. Scotching the notion that he should resign in the face of this debacle, Mitterrand instead fashioned a new concept of “cohabitation” between a president of the left and a government of the right. He proceeded to outwit the then prime minister, Jacques Chirac, fighting him on the slogan of “Opening to the centre” in the 1988 presidential and parliamentary elections, while Chirac scrapped with Le Pen and the National Front – whose potency was largely a creation of Mitterrand’s manoeuvre to change the electoral system to proportional representation before the 1986 elections, specifically to strengthen the far right in relation to the centre right.
Re-elected as a centrist, Mitterrand appointed a government under the centrist social democrat Michel Rocard, including a large number of non-aligned ministers and even a handful of centre-right former ministers, before succumbing to another “cohabitation”, this time under Edouard Balladur (who had been the finance minister in the first “cohabitation”), which saw out his final two years of office.
“It was not in my interests to oppose the trend of public opinion,” said Mitterrand, abdicating any role in leading opinion as he drifted, with increasing physical and political infirmity and growing controversy – not least about his Vichy past, coming fully into the open for the first time – to the end of his second term.
Shortly before his replacement as prime minister in 1991, Rocard described his rival and nemesis as “cynicism in its purest sense”. During his 14 years in the Élysée, Mitterrand got through seven prime ministers, each the product of labyrinthine political calculations, the subtlety of which was often lost on the participants.
In all these manoeuvres, over five decades, ideology and political language were as often as not the servants of short-term political advantage. Simulate, dissimulate. Once he became a “socialist” after 1970, for instance, varieties of leftism were deployed to outwit party rivals on all sides and to make possible (and later to destroy) the alliance with the Communists.
The ceaseless shifting of Mitterrand’s ideas is a dominant theme of Short’s biography. Having sought out the essence of Mitterrand’s credo as a lesson for left-wing rejuvenation, I am instead bewildered by the endlessly turning kaleidoscope. I cannot think of a modern democratic leader who has made so successful a career trading rival ideas and policies to suit immediate political convenience. In the British context, over the course of his career, he was Tony Benn, Clement Attlee, Harold Macmillan, Harold Wilson, Tony Blair and Enoch Powell, all rolled into one.
All of this ideological somersaulting was donewith immense intellectual engagement and fine calibration. In Mitterrand, the academic scribbler was more the servant of the practical politician than vice versa. A big part of “brand Mitterrand” was an ostentatious intellectualism giving apparent depth and sincerity to whichever creed he was peddling at any given time, however great the difference with the last one.
Mitterrand said he needed to read for two hours or more a day “to oxygenate the brain”. Many of his major shifts in ideas were accompanied by a book or pamphlet by the maestro – including his remarkable 47-page “Letter to all the French”, written as a manifesto for his “opening to the centre” for his 1988 re-election, advertised with little modesty as covering “all the big subjects which are worth discussing and mulling over between French men and women”. (“The night before it was to be published [he] stayed up till 3am at the printing press correcting the proofs, like a neophyte brooding over a first novel” – a brilliant detail, as are Short’s revelations that during tedious cabinet presentations, Mitterrand annotated antiquarian book catalogues and on presidential flights would sometimes ask the pilot to circle before landing so he could finish a chapter.)
Is Mitterrand’s legacy an object lesson in intellectual manoeuvring, with no inner core, as the method of a politician supreme? It is more than that in four respects. First, however labyrinthine his methods, there is a substantial progressive legacy from which the French left takes inspiration, including the abolition of the death penalty, significantly raising the minimum wage, equal rights for women and minorities, decentralisation and numerous beneficial grands projets.
Second, the 1982-83 reversal had the effect of demonstrating to the European left that “socialism in one country” didn’t work; pragmatic social democracy is the successful face of “Mitterrandism”.
There wasn’t the clear break with the doctrinaire past of the German SPD in the late 1950s and the British Labour Party in the mid-1990s, which is part of François Hollande’s problem as he tries to play the centre and an unreconstructed left together. Yet the post-Mitterrand French Socialist Party is as broad a church as its British and German counterparts and knows how to govern from the centre.
Third, there was a Mitterrand core: peace with Germany and projects to entrench European peace and security, from the European Communities in the 1950s to the single currency in the 1990s. A survivor of European war and its horrors – including time as a prisoner of war – Mitterrand never allowed the central pillars of a pro-German and pro-US foreign policy to become part of the game of “simulate, dissimulate”. Ironically, it was de Gaulle who played dangerously in this arena.
With Communists in his government and the left triumphant, Mitterrand’s first move in 1981 was to assure Ronald Reagan in unequivocal words and actions that France was a reliable ally. He did the same with Margaret Thatcher during the Falklands war a year later and also with Helmut Kohl, after an initial wobble, on German reunification. It was ambiguity at home but clarity abroad – and clarity in the cause of European peace and stability. Hence the most enduring image of Mitterrand: hand in hand with Helmut Kohl before two huge wreaths at Verdun in 1984 at a ceremony to seal Franco-German reconciliation.
Fourth, throughout his life and career, Mitterrand had a patrician sympathy with the underdog. Although he was the son of a stationmaster who inherited a family vinegar business, he served in the ranks in the war, having failed the competition for a commission, and developed a contempt for hierarchy and authority (besides his own) and a social sympathy for the less fortunate that was genuine and lasting. His political initiation – and his early political power base – was in organisations for returning prisoners of war. This need not have led him to the socialist left but it helped him accomplish the transition with an authenticity born to some degree from experience.
No feats of intellectual and political gymnastics can substitute or detract from personal experience. In Mitterrand’s case, it was his intimate experience of a France prostrate, impoverished and divided, that dominated his twenties and shaped him fundamentally.
Philip Short suggests another attribute of Mitterrand the leader: natural authority rooted in an “inner solitude” – “a part of [his] being that was locked, inaccessible to others, which is one of the characteristics of uncommon leaders everywhere” – and which came in part from a long period in the political wilderness (the 23 years from 1958 to 1981). He draws the parallel with de Gaulle in the wilderness in the 1950s; Churchill in the 1930s also comes to mind.
Perhaps. Yet François Mitterrand showed himself to be a notable leader as a prisoner of war and an organiser of fellow returnees long before his wilderness years. Maybe it owed more to Cardinal Mazarin, whose further advice for politicians was to “maintain a posture at all times which is full of dignity... Each day spend a moment studying how you should respond to the events which might befall you.”
In the last months of his life, his doctor told him he was a mixture of Machiavelli, Don Corleone, Casanova and the Little Prince. When Mitterrand enquired, “In what proportions?” the physician replied, “That depends on which day.”Morning light reflects bright off the white granite ledge as my pal Patrick is slowly pushing our rope up pitch 4 of the Muir Wall of El Capitan. A local climber of immortal fame joins me on the large ledge. We each quietly feed and take rope while enjoying the morning view of the Valley down bellow. He asks about the words “North Dakota” painted along the brim of my helmet. I tell him it’s where I come from, the greatest state in the Union.
by Dakota Walz
Of course, as any climber would, he asks if there is anything to climb there. I tell him that it’s the 3rd flattest state in the country, but a desperate climber could probably find something worth their time out there. Living in the Midwest is kind of like living in the golden age of discovery for limestone choss piles, soft sandstone towers, and obscure boulders. There are still all kinds of new territory to be discovered. Untamed and unwanted cliff bands along lakes and rivers and prairies still waiting to be climbed.
Coincidentally, a few months later I find myself driving across North Dakota doing just that. A crew of four flatlanders, our climbing gear, and an oversized canoe strapped to a homemade roof rack. We are out here in search of natural Midwestern beauty in the form of potential first ascents and island adventure. Some Google Maps exploration has lead me to believe that there may be something to climb in the far western side of my home state so, I thought we might go and find it.
Leaving west from Fargo, nearly 5 hours of nonexistence pass before our prairie road cruise ship reaches oil country. The marks of big oil rush over the highway in pipelines. They clog roads with bumper to bumper traffic in the middle of nowhere and detour us around miniscule towns made of only new hotels.
After battling gridlock traffic we pass through tiny New Town, ND and Lake Sakakwea opens up to us on the horizon. With her, comes our first glimpse of landscape and elevation. Hills roll high and low along the flooded reservoir banks while automated oil pumps rotate tirelessly forever across the ancient plains. When our destination finally appears on the horizon I know we are in for a surprise.
At least 1,500 miles away from any ocean, we are utterly landlocked. Yet, a monstrous deep green wave rises up to defy the endless flat horizons of glowing oilrig fires. 200 feet above the prairie, the grassy wave grows, until finally it crests and breaks; forming 45 feet of shear sandstone cliff line. This is Chimney Butte.
We hike to the base fast with the gung-ho enthusiasm of people starved of landscape. My excitement gets the best of me after I find what we now refer to as, “The Duke of Chimney Butte”. Amazing 5.11 splitter fingers cruise up a completely blank headwall. Before today, a feature like this existing in North Dakota couldn’t even form in my wildest dreams. Without wasting time, or much thought, we rope up and get to climbing our first route in our Peace Garden State.
About halfway up is where “The Duke” starts to get serious. I know the sandstone is soft by any standard other than that of a flatlander so, I drive my.4 camalot in until the trigger is nearly hidden. The crack is even thinner than I anticipate but there are a couple pods to gun for. Another body length up and it thins out to barely tips! I drive my.2 in as deep as it’ll go. I’m passed the pods and I can see what looks like a jug a few moves up. Would it hold a desperate lunge? Had anyone yarded on it before? I’m about to find out, but thick lichen under my left foot smear crumbles and I fall.
RIP! There goes the.2…
I keep falling.
RIP! There goes the.4…
I hit a small ledge and begin tumbling. I’m upside down now and am not slowing down much. I see Jasmin, my belayer, and she’s jumping high off the ground. Speaking of the ground, it’s gotta be getting close by now, right? Finally, I receive that violent, but welcome, rush of air exit my lungs as the rope suddenly denies gravity’s blood lust. Inverted I swing at the base of the cliff with tall grass brushing up against my head. Ooftah!
I’m not sure how that horizontal nut placement held, but it’s now earned a place on my “thank god for that piece” rack. We decide to leave “The Duke” for another visit and spend the rest of our day climbing easier looking lines.
At first there are no signs of climbers here before us. No pin scares or anything like the 8 deep tracks my blown-out cam placements left. But then, Matt finds some old tape gloves and sketchy dead-man anchors driven into the earth at the summit. I knew we couldn’t be alone in our need for adventure but it’s still hard to believe anyone else would be looking for it out here. Desperate climbers will always find something to climb.
Later that afternoon we cast off from the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation into Lake Sakakawea. The canoe is overloaded with food and booze but we easily cruise the soft current south. Again, we’re not sure what we’re going to find around the next bend of the river. My Google Earth exploration proved itself useful for rediscovering Chimney Butte, but who knows if that spec of land on the lake was going to be a cool island or just a forgotten sandbar? Either way we’re all in.
For two miles we are swallowed whole by the perfect blues of endlessly smooth waters and clear expansive skies. Suddenly, reds, yellows, and blacks rise high out of the water forming an eroded island butte. On its summit 50 yards of flat inviting grass carpet the island and hover high above the water. This paradise in the sky is Goat Island and it’s twice as large as I could have guessed. Maybe it’s been the hours of driving through flat nonexistent landscapes or maybe it’s just the company I keep, but the beauty of everything out here in North Dakota seems to outstretch my wildest hopes.
We land on the island, hump our gear to the summit, and build camp. We eat. We drink. We scream at the moon all the 90’s pop songs we can remember. If I live forever, surely this day of adventuring in North Dakota will be one of my favorite.
Soon we will be moving to Colorado and often folks ask me if I’m moving to find adventure. The answer is always the same: Yes, BUT adventure is everywhere. Especially in the Midwest! From North Dakota down to Missouri I’ve found adventure to be alive and thoroughly potent.
To find it though, you must be stoked. Your partners gotta be stoked too. You both gotta leave work early on Friday and hit the road immediately. You have to drive for hours. You must camp with your pals in the sticks. Then, you need to crush all day long, all weekend long to make it worth the effort. After all that you gotta spend your whole Sunday afternoon driving home so you can wake up for work Monday morning.
The Midwest rears folks who thrive off the stoke. Out there in Colorado my biggest fear is becoming spoiled and jaded on the couch or sleeping in my soft safe bed more than ever.
Have people explored, named, and claimed these places already? Sure. These rocks are ancient and have been discovered hundreds of years ago by the Natives and later again by the white settlers and pioneers. It’s not easy to be a genuine explorer in an era where nearly everything has been seen and recorded.
As a climber though, there is still the unique opportunity to discover, not uncharted territory, but untapped potential. The moment a climber discovers these forgotten geological forms is when their true purpose ultimately takes shape. This is when true discovery and adventure take form once again as the first ascent.
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As a living breathing namesake, Dakota Walz represents the few unlikely big wall climbers to come from the 3rd flattest state in the union, North Dakota.
About us: The Climbing Zine was started in 2010 by Al Smith III and Luke Mehall. It continues to the day with the mission of representing the true essence of climbing. Our crown jewel is our printed version, but we also do the interweb thing, and Kindle. You can now subscribe to The Climbing Zine as well! We have also published two books: The Great American Dirtbags and Climbing Out of Bed, both written by publisher, Luke Mehall.
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« The Sisterhood of the Rope by Rhiannon Williams Review: Black Diamond Cold Forge Hoody »Museum collections (stock image of the Natural History Museum) are dominated by male animals with their flashy antlers and feathers
They may seem like a harmless place to take the children at the weekend to learn about whales and dinosaurs.
But natural history museums are sexist and colonialist, according to an academic at University College London.
Museum collections are dominated by male animals with their flashy antlers and feathers, leaving females, often described as' mothers', in the minority.
Meanwhile, according to Jack Ashby at UCL, the displays are dominated by animals from countries formerly part of the British Empire, such as India and Australia.
The manager of the Grant Museum of Zoology at UCL believes there are human 'biases' in the way nature is represented.
He said: 'Historically, in many cases, particularly where males and females were different, and males had big horns, antlers, tusks or particularly showy plumage like a peacock, this created a bias in what was collected.'
Australian species dwarf those from China in British museums, he said, adding: 'Collecting is part of the act of colonialism.'
The museum manager spoke out following a University of Manchester study which found one museum's mammal collection was 71 per cent male and 29 per cent female. Two-thirds of birds in the same institution were male.
But his comments have been challenged by Alan Smithers, professor of education at the University of Buckingham, who said: 'Sexism and colonialism are in the eye of the beholder. It has become too fashionable to search these out wherever there might be some hint of a difference.
'I suspect males are over-represented because they are less intelligent and more likely to get caught. When it comes to colonialism, these were the countries most often explored. Why attempt to create a problem where there is none?'
Mr Ashby said he is not critical of museums, while noting that the large blue whale skeleton newly installed in London's Natural History Museum is female (SUBS – PLS KEEP). He said: 'There are 1.5 million species described in the natural world and you can't have one of everything on display. I just want to describe that museums are a product of their own history.'
An academic at University College London (pictured) said natural history museums are sexist and colonialist
But the bias in how we talk about animals is a subject in his book Animal Kingdom: A Natural History in 100 Objects.
Writing on the website The Conversation, he references the Manchester University study showing that female animals are usually described as'mothers', while the males are discussed as hunters or in a role separate to parenthood.
His article states: 'We have to wonder what messages this might give museum visitors about the role of the female.'
Museums have lots more big animals and creatures with backbones than nature does, Mr Ashby notes, while people do not like 'gross' specimens such as the Grant Museum's bisected cat.
He discusses 'political motivation' to increase knowledge of animals from particular countries.
The academic concludes: 'Museums are rightly celebrated as places of wonder and curiosity, and also science and learning. But if we look closely we can see that there are human biases in the way nature is represented. The vast majority of these are harmless foibles, but not all.'Why is it that some brands launch like meteors, captivating our imaginations and our wallets, only to fall spectacularly into marketing oblivion? And perhaps more importantly for marketers today: How can this fate be avoided? The answer lies in the difference between what is required to generate initial trial of a new product, versus building a relevant equity that stimulates ongoing interest and repeat business.
Looking backwards from today’s vantage point, it might be easy to dismiss brands like Listerine Pocketpaks or TiVo, but at the pinnacle of their success they had a Jeremy Lin-like, out-of-nowhere stardom that had consumers all atwitter, brought riches to their corporate owners, and had competitors searching for answers. What is it about these brands that relegated them to eventual irrelevance, while other brands with meteoric success remain on top? And what does the future hold for today’s meteoric brands like UGG boots or Keurig coffee?
First, we need to dispel the myth that there is any long-term “first-mover” advantage in marketing brands. This may be true at the start, but ultimately it is the companies able to adapt to changing conditions that thrive. That is to say, survival of the fittest brands, not the first brands, drives the market. Neither Google, nor Amazon, nor even Gillette was the first brand in its respective category that it now leads. So while some “boom, splat” brands were the first to popularize innovative benefits–such as digital video recording–this distinction alone is insufficient to defend against encroaching competition and a restless consumer.
In 2001, Pfizer’s Listerine brand, then famously known for its antiseptic mouthwash, launched Listerine Pocketpaks breath strips. The product not only helped the brand extend into |
block (the "core"). The larger fireplace-kitchen core seems to be a separate house nesting within the larger glass house. The building is essentially one large room filled with freestanding elements that provide subtle differentiations within an open space, implied but not dictated, zones for sleeping, cooking, dressing, eating, and sitting. Very private areas such as toilets, and mechanical rooms are enclosed within the core. Drawings recently made public by the Museum of Modern Art indicate that the architect provided ceiling details that allow for the addition of curtain tracks that would allow privacy separations of the open spaces into three "rooms". The drapery was never installed.
Mies applied this space concept, with variations, to his later buildings, most notably at Crown Hall, his Illinois Institute of Technology campus masterpiece. The notion of a single room that can be freely used or zoned in any way, with flexibility to accommodate changing uses, free of interior supports, enclosed in glass and supported by a minimum of structural framing located at the exterior, is the architectural ideal that defines Mies' American career. The Farnsworth House is significant as his first complete realization of this ideal, a prototype for his vision of what modern architecture in an era of technology should be.
Architecture as an expression of the times [ edit ]
A winter view of the house in 1971, showing the original insect screening of the porch, and roller shades added by the owner after the curtains were damaged by flood waters
The house in 2006
The Farnsworth House addresses basic issues about the relationship between the individual and his society. Mies viewed the technology-driven modern era in which an ordinary individual exists as largely beyond one's control. But he believed the individual can and should exist in harmony with the culture of one's time for successful fulfillment. His career was a long and patient search for an architecture that would be a true expression of the essential soul of his epoch, the Holy Grail of German Modernism. He perceived our epoch as the era of industrial mass production, a civilization shaped by the forces of rapid technological development. Mies wanted to use architecture as a tool to help reconcile the individual spirit with the new mass society in which the individual exists.
His answer to the issue is to accept the need for an orderly framework as necessary for existence, while making space for the freedom needed by the individual human spirit to flourish. He created buildings with free and open space within a minimal framework, using expressed structural columns. He did not believe in the use of architecture for social engineering of human behavior, as many other modernists did, but his architecture does represent ideals and aspirations. His mature design work is a physical expression of his understanding of the modern epoch. He provides the occupants of his buildings with flexible and unobstructed space in which to fulfill themselves as individuals, despite their anonymous condition in the modern industrial culture. The materials of his buildings, industrial manufactured products such as mill-formed steel and plate glass, certainly represent the character of the modern era, but he counterbalances these with traditional luxuries such as Roman travertine and exotic wood veneers as valid parts of modern life. Mies accepted the problems of industrial society as facts to be dealt with, and offered his idealized vision of how technology may be made beautiful and support the individual as well. He suggests that the downsides of technology decried by late nineteenth century critics such as John Ruskin, can be solved with human creativity, and shows us how in the architecture of this house.
Reconnecting the individual with nature is one of the great challenges of an urbanized society. The 60-acre (24 ha) rural site offered Mies an opportunity to bring the human relationship to nature into the forefront. Here he highlights the individual's connection to nature through the medium of a synthetic shelter. Mies said: "We should attempt to bring nature, houses, and the human being to a higher unity". Glass walls and open interior space are the features that create an intense connection with the outdoor environment, while providing a framework reduces opaque exterior walls to a minimum. The careful site design and integration of the exterior environment represents a concerted effort to achieve an architecture wedded to its natural context.
Mies conceived the building as an indoor-outdoor architectural shelter simultaneously independent of and intertwined with the domain of nature. Mies did not build on the flood-free upland portions of the site, choosing instead to tempt the dangerous forces of nature by building directly on the flood plain near the edge of the river. Philip Johnson referred to this type of experience of nature as "safe danger". The enclosed space and a screened porch are elevated five feet on a raised floor platform, just slightly above the 100-year flood level, with a large intermediate terrace level.[8] Twice, the house has flooded substantially above the living level floor level, in 1956 and 1996 (both in excess of FEMA 500-year flood levels), causing significant damage to utilities, wood veneers, glass, and furnishings.[8] The site experienced heavy rains and floodwaters rising to within two feet of the main floor in August 2007, setting curators scrambling to protect the house and its contents from any further rise in the flood level.[13]
The house has a distinctly independent personality, yet also evokes strong feelings of a connection to the land. The levels of the platforms restate the multiple levels of the site, in a kind of poetic architectural rhyme, not unlike the horizontal balconies and rocks do at Wright's Fallingwater.
The house is anchored to the site in the cooling shadow of a large and majestic black maple tree. As Mies often did, the entrance is located on the sunny side, facing the river instead of the street, moving visitors around corners, and revealing views of the house and site from various angles as they approach the front door. The simple elongated cubic form of the house is parallel to the flow of the river, and the terrace platform is slipped downstream in relation to the elevated porch and living platform. Outdoor living spaces were designed to be extensions of the indoor space, with an open terrace and a screened porch (the screens have been removed). Yet the synthetic element always remains clearly distinct from the natural by its geometric forms that are highlighted by the choice of white as their primary color.
Integration with nature [ edit ]
View from the park
The Farnsworth House sits on a floodplain that faces the Fox River, differentiating the vast meadow and a variety of trees from its white exterior. The isolated, private residence establishes the architect's concept of simple living.
The private residence was created in order to enable its inhabitant to experience the rural silence and the passing of the seasons. Open views from all sides of the building help enlarge the area and aid flow between the living space and its natural surroundings.
The Farnsworth House stands as an independent structure. The house is in perfect harmony with nature – there is no garden architecture, no pathways, or flower beds. A large maple tree shelters the raised travertine marble terrace. The elements of the surrounding nature coincide with the panes of glass and the exterior of the house. The exterior includes materials of steel, natural stone, and glass.[14] The steel, painted white, creates the structure that supports the floor and ceiling slabs. They are composed of concrete, along with radiant coil set in the floor used for heating purposes.[15] The remainder of the exterior consists of the 1/4-inch-thick glass panels that enclose the space.
As Mies stated on his achievement, "If you view nature through the glass walls of the Farnsworth House, it gains a more profound significance than if viewed from the outside. That way more is said about nature—it becomes part of a larger whole." Farnsworth House was created to display nature in a simple and pure form.[16] [17]
One of the many features of the immediate site was a large Black Maple tree, which was integral for the placement and orientation of the house on the site. Incidentally, the same species of tree, which also is quite abundant in the state park to the south, was among the reasons for the land in the immediate vicinity of the house being designated as a state park in the 1960s. Due to disease and old age, the tree died in the early 2000s and subsequently, was removed, as most of the trunk of the tree remained and was being held in place through cables and bracing. The house's close proximity to the tree, some ten feet, led to a feeling of oneness with nature, which was integral to the design aesthetic that Mies sought in designing the house.
Criticism and acclaim [ edit ]
The building design received accolades in the architectural press, resulting in swarms of uninvited visitors trespassing on the property to glimpse this latest Mies building. As a result of the accusations contained in Edith Farnsworth's lawsuit, the house soon became a prop in the larger national social conflicts of the McCarthy era. The weekend house became a lightning rod for anti-modernist publications, exemplified in the April 1953 issue of House Beautiful, which attacked it as a "communist-inspired effort" to supplant traditional American styles. Large areas of glass wall, flat roofs, purging of ornament, and a perceived lack of traditional warmth and coziness were characteristics of the International Style that were particular talking points of attack.
The poor energy efficiency of the Farnsworth House has been widely discussed as well.[18]
Nonetheless, the Farnsworth House has continued to receive wide critical acclaim as a masterpiece of the modernist style, and Mies went on to receive the presidential Medal of Freedom for his contribution to American architecture and culture. Prominent architect and critic, Philip Johnson, was inspired by the design, designing and building his own Glass House in 1947 as his personal residence.
In the twenty-first century, Pulitzer Prize-winning architectural critics Paul Goldberger and Blair Kamin have both declared the house a masterpiece of modern architecture. Its timeless quality is reflected by the reverent fascination in the minimalist house shown by a new generation of design professionals and enthusiasts.
In popular culture [ edit ]
In 2013, Lego Architecture series produced a model of the Farnsworth House as a part of their landmark series.
In 2016, the movie, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, featured a house modelled after the Farnsworth House. The follow-up film Justice League also features the same house in a trailer released at the 2017 San Diego Comic-Con.
Recent developments [ edit ]
In September 2008, the house was flooded by rains from the remnants of Hurricane Ike.[19] Water levels reached approximately 18 inches (46 cm) above the floor and the 5 foot (1.5 m) stilts upon which the house rests.[20] Much of the furniture was saved by elevating it above the flood waters. The house was closed to the public for the remainder of 2008 for repairs and reopened for public visitation in spring 2009.
It was announced in 2011 that the Illinois Institute of Technology, for which Mies restructured and designed its Master Plan was going to build a permanent exhibition space for the huge wardrobe that was formerly in the house. The wardrobe had been extensively damaged in the 1996, 1998, and 2008 floods, with its large size rendering any possible evacuation attempt costly and difficult. In an attempt to protect the wardrobe, curators of the Farnsworth House decided to have the wardrobe put on permanent display near the visitor center on the site, which is well above the 500-year flood plain. Under the direction of Professor Frank Flury, students of the Illinois Institute of Technology have been involved in the design and construction of the structure to contain it so that the wardrobe will be better protected for future visitors.[21] The students have nicknamed the building "Barnsworth".[22] It was scheduled to be completed in September 2012.[22]
Gallery [ edit ]
The exterior
Interior in 2013
interior in 2013
Fireplace
I-beam detail - note the flattened rivets
Underside of house. Note the tube in the center of the house designed as a single point of entry for all the buildings utilities.
House as situated among trees
Patio
Rear of house (kitchen visible)
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
NotesIt continues to be a busy month for Acer, having finally formally launched their new Intel Core i3-based Chromebooks, and seen word of two upcoming portables ‘leak’ online.
It’s one of these latter devices, the Bay Trail toting ‘CB3’, that this week gained a bit more exposure, courtesy of popular German tech website allround-pc.com. Present at an Acer press event in Germany, their bloggers were able to snatch an exclusive, advance hands-on with the upcoming 11.6-inch notebook.
We shared the entire specifications and its European pricing with you earlier in the week, but nothing beats seeing the device, which is rumoured to be marketed as the “Acer Chromebook 11”, in hand.
It features a dual-core Intel Bay Trail processor running at 2.16GHz, an 11.6-inch screen, 2GB RAM (expandable to 8GB) and a 16GB SSD. It’s accompanied by the usual selection of ports, SD card reader and audio jack.
According to the video the Acer Chromebook 11 (CB3-111) will go on sale in Europe sometime this month.
Is the low price worth the trade off in speed? That’s for you to decide.
Source: allround-pc.com, via ChromestoryHistorian and political analyst Sami Moubayed discusses his efforts to preserve the Syrian capital’s archives and cultural history and the war’s impact on the country’s many ancient sites and artifacts.
BEIRUT – Long before Damascus became Syria’s capital, the city was conquered by Alexander the Great, redesigned by ancient Roman architects and established as the capital of the Umayyad caliphate. Each civilization left its mark on the city, giving it an unparalleled cultural, political, social, economic and architectural history that has survived since the third millennium B.C.
However, after six years of war in Syria, many of the city’s ancient palaces, historical homes, museums, artifacts and government documents have fallen into disrepair, been destroyed, stolen or even abandoned as people flee the conflict.
Today, a “high priority” for historians is saving city’s archives from the 19th and 20th centuries, which are “on the verge of extinction,” according to Sami Moubayed, founder of The Damascus History Foundation, a volunteer-based organization dedicated to finding and preserving the capital’s archives – from old scrolls, judicial records, government correspondence and land registry documents to books, newspapers, movie reels and music archives.
However, according to Moubayed, also a historian and political analyst, “Damascus has suffered the least destruction when compared with other ancient cities like Aleppo, al-Raqqa, Deir Ezzor and Palmyra.” All six of Syria’s UNESCO world heritage sites have been damaged or destroyed since 2011, according to the U.N. agency. Among them is Palmyra’s 2,000-year-old Arch of Triumph, “a tourist attraction and source of pride” for the Syrian people that ISIS destroyed last October, he added.
Syria Deeply spoke with Moubayed about the scale of destruction at Syria’s ancient sites and his efforts to find and preserve Damascus’ archives while building a community around the city’s rich history.
Syria Deeply: Palmyra survived two ISIS occupations, the latest one ending following a pro-government offensive earlier this month. Is there any way to measure or quantify the destruction at Palmyra?
Sami Moubayed: There is no final figure on the cost or time it would take to rebuild Palmyra; estimates range between three to 10 years. Five major sites have been destroyed during ISIS’s first 10-month rule: the temples of Bel and Baalshamin, the Arch of Triumph, the Valley of Tombs and the Palmyra Museum. During the second brief siege, from December 2016 to this March, ISIS destroyed parts of Palmyra’s famous amphitheater, which the militants used to film the execution of 280 civilians in May 2015.
The two temples are not beyond repair, but the same cannot be said of the city’s museum that was destroyed by mortars, smashed and looted. It currently stands beneath a pile of garbage and debris and more than 200 artifacts have been completely destroyed with hard tools and sledgehammers. Many of the statues were decapitated and their hands were chopped off. Major damage – the collapse of the staircase to the main entrance and the eastern tower – was also found at the Fakhr al-Din al-Maani Castle, a Mamluk-era fortress overlooking the city that ISIS used in battles because of its high walls.
Two Polish experts from the University of Warsaw are working on reconstruction of the Lion of Lat, a 15-ton statue at the entrance of the Palmyra Museum that ISIS destroyed in June 2015. The tiny fragments and large stone slabs are collected from all over the city, inventoried, boxed and shipped to Damascus for restoration. Much of the statue’s previous shape is restorable, but heavy work will be required around its nostrils.
Syria Deeply: How does this compare to the destruction in other areas of Syria?
Moubayed: Despite the horror of what happened in Palmyra, only 20 percent of the city’s archaeological treasures have been destroyed, according to the Syrian Directorate of Antiquities. The situation is far worse in Aleppo, where the old markets have been torched, the divine eighth-century Grand Umayyad Mosque completely destroyed, as was an ancient Maronite church, located 25 miles (40km) north of the city.
In Deir Ezzor, the bridge crossing the Euphrates has collapsed. It was built by the French in 1927 and destroyed by the fighting in 2014. In September 2014, ISIS shattered the Armenian Genocide Memorial Church in Deir Ezzor. The marvelous Khaled Ibn Al-Walid Mosque of Homs in central Syria has also been ravaged.
The list is long and goes on and on.
Syria Deeply: Can you describe the process of documentation and preservation in Damascus today?
Moubayed: Even before this war started, the process of documentation was horrible in Damascus. For example, the bulk of Syrian television’s black-and-white classics dating between 1960 and 1978, were left in a storehouse in Ghouta, in very poor conditions, exposed to dampness, rain and heat. What survived the negligence was destroyed in battles in Ghouta ongoing since 2012 – 15 black-and-white works survive until present.
The same applies to the archives of the Syrian Parliament, which were bundled into boxes and shipped to Ghouta shortly before the conflict started. They have been lost along with the audio recordings of all sessions from 1947-1967. So have the splendid rugs and ancient chandeliers of the Grand Umayyad Mosque of Damascus. Some were stolen by the Ottoman Turks when they left the city in 1918, others by consecutive governments ever since.
The archives of Damascus are divided chaotically between the National Museum, the Assad Library, the al-Zahiriya Library, the Arab Language Assembly, the Museum of Historical Documents, Damascus University, Damascus Radio and Syrian Television. The al-Zahiriya Library is extremely well-preserved and so are Damascus Radio and the Assad Library. The Damascus Museum of Historical Documents is in bad shape, with ancient manuscripts either stolen or damaged by negligence of mediocre employees.
Government agencies vary with regard to their archives. I have been through those of Syrian Parliament, the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Close to nothing survives until present at all three. There is a wealth of documents at private homes, tucked in attics and basements. Many of those homes are now abandoned because of the ongoing violence, or have been looted if they are located in war-torn territories.
Syria Deeply: Can you walk us through the process of locating and preserving an archive?
Moubayed: Our job is to find and preserve what is left. This is done through field work, personal visits to these sites and agreements to digitize and scan what we come across. We will then be creating an online museum for all that we find, and hopefully transform it into a real-life museum once the guns go silent in Syria.
We also hope to train a new generation of Damascus historians in critical thinking and analysis, rather than an ideological old-school Baathist approach to their contemporary past. We hope to launch Dimashq, an academic peer-reviewed journal, republish out-of-print books, translate classics and put unpublished documents and papers into books.
Syria Deeply: Damascus’ ancient architecture and historical sites are also under threat, what can be done to preserve these larger pieces of history?
Moubayed: When you are as old as Damascus – 11,000 years old – you need daily maintenance of just about everything. Unfortunately, this has not happened since 2011, because government priorities have changed, funds are unavailable and the city has bloated in size, because so many Syrians are coming here for safety and work. Before the war, Damascus’ population was approximately 5 million – today the number is between 9 and 13 million, although there is no official estimate.
This has further drained the city’s resources, which spells out disaster for the Syrian capital and reduced basic services like garbage collection, gardening, water, electricity and the maintenance of sidewalks, gardens and streets. Museums, old palaces and homes, churches and mosques, cobbled streets and schools have all been affected by this shortage of funds and shift in state priorities.
Some of the ancient homes have been abandoned and others are being rented out to tenants fleeing the violence in the Damascus countryside. The task of preserving these old homes and palaces is huge and it cannot be handled by the private individuals or Syrian academics. It needs governments and UNESCO.
Syria Deeply: Is any work being done to preserve the most recent government documents and records that may contain vital information for those living through the current conflict, such as information on detainees, birth and death certificates and medical records?
Moubayed: Our scope starts with 1860, the date of civil disturbances spilling into Damascus from Mount Lebanon, and ends with the late 20th century, where the archives are more endangered than more recent periods of Syrian history. Once we handle what is on the verge of extinction, we will turn to more recent archives.
Syria Deeply: In the brutality of war, the importance of preserving history often gets overlooked by civilians who are struggling just to feed their families and survive. How would you explain the necessity of preserving historical artifacts in Damascus to those who may not understand?
Moubayed: You are absolutely right. When people are dying, when cities are being pounded – or when children go to bed hungry – what we are doing looks cosmetic, niche and very distanced from the agony of day-to-day Syrians. The Damascenes saw what happened to their twin city, Aleppo, and were absolutely horrified. They shivered at the thought of the same nightmare scenario being repeated in their city – which was so close on several occasions of the past five years.
A closer look, however, reveals one very important reality: With the present being so painful and the future so bleak, most people are finding remedy in bygone eras of their city’s history. They are romanticizing how things once were in Damascus – their memories give them a sense of belonging and help solidify roots. Families were close, homes were spacious, pollution was less, good citizenship was high and so was good governance. The more we are able to rescue what remains of that not-too-distant history and remind people of it, the better this serves their defense mechanism and ability to survive – emotionally at least – in wartime Damascus. The era we are preserving reminds people of social peace, economic stability, democracy and nationalistic chapters of Syrian history, related to anti-colonialism and nation-building.
Never miss an update. Sign up here for our Syria Deeply newsletter to receive weekly updates, special reports and featured insights on one of the most critical issues of our time.A reports by BMW Motorcycle Magazine has described what BMW Motorrad USA is offering owners who were affected by the “Do Not Ride” order regarding the BMW R1200RT.
For those that don’t remember BMW Motorrad issued a worldwide statement regarding the 2014 BMW R1200RT, saying that models of the touring bike that were equipped with the Dynamic ESA suspension should not be ridden, as a BMW supplier alerted the German brand that the rear suspension had a defect, which could cause catastrophic failure.
BMW Motorrad hasn’t intimated when a solution could be coming for the affected R1200RT owners, though rumors are a date in August or September. To compensate American riders for this downtime, BMW Motorrad USA has put together three options for RT owners.
Wait for a repair, and receive $2,500 for the downtime until then Receive a loaner BMW from their dealership, and receive $1,000 that is good towards BMW products or finance payments for the RT Sell the motorcycle back to BMW, at the original purchase price, and receive $1,000 that is good towards another BMW motorcycle
We imagine there is a bit of fine print involved with all three of these options, the least of which absolves BMW Motorrad from any sort legal liability.
While it is unknown how many of the 8,000+ motorcycles that were affected are in the United States, the above offer is a massive undertaking for BMW Motorrad USA as it waits for a proper recall later this autumn.
While it is inexcusable to have a situation where a manufacturer has to issue a statement that tells motorcyclists not to ride their product until further notice, the options put forth here do seem like the most consumer-oriented solutions available to BMW Motorrad USA.
Time will tell what the R1200RT fiasco does to BMW brand perception and customer loyalty.
Source: BMW Motorcycle MagazineKanye West has a point. Taylor Swift may have been a hard-working country star steadily making a name for herself in 2009, but prior to their now infamous MTV interaction, most of us hadn’t a clue who she was. To the majority of the public, Taylor Swift came into being during that fateful moment where he stood on the stage beside her and claimed she was unworthy of the music award she’d worked so hard to win. In what must’ve been, initially, a humiliating experience for Swift, a valuable lesson was learned. Controversy is just another word for attention.
By now, everybody with access to a computer is aware of Swift’s pseudo-outrage at Kanye’s song lyrics, her team having released a statement saying "Kanye did not call for approval, but to ask Taylor to release his single 'Famous’ on her Twitter account. She declined and cautioned him about releasing a song with such a strong misogynistic message." Kim Kardashian responded yesterday with a Snapchat video in which Kanye is indeed, politely calling her to ask permission to use the lyric and Swift agrees, imagining how they could turn the situation into a temporary public argument. "You guys wanna call this a feud, you wanna call this throwing shade. But right after the song comes out I'm gonna be on a Grammy red carpet and they're gonna ask me about it and I'm gonna be like, he called me."
To be fair, the Snapchat video is edited. Swift doesn’t appear to give permission to use the phrase “that bitch.” Name calling aside, however, it’s clear that Swift is giving her blessing to Kanye to make fun of her, and planning to allow the public to believe that she is offended, until she corrects the situation. Later, she appears to have decided that a full-blown artificial feud would be more lucrative. This time, playing the victim appears to have blown up in her face.
Taylor Swift is a bit of an anomaly. The twenty-six-year-old country pop star has risen very high, very quickly, and now finds herself on top of FORBES Celebrity 100 list, with the eyes of millions of teenage girls upon her. A master of social media, Swift has managed to connect with her fans in a way that makes her appear not as the sparkling, celebrity goddess on a pedestal, but the cool girl next door. Swift responds to her fans personally on Instagram, Tumblr, and Twitter, and even invites groups of them to her home for album playback sessions. Swift has sent “Swiftmas” gifts to her fans by post and claims that her fans are "the longest and best relationship I have ever had.” Her music manages to capture the emotionally strung essence of teenagehood, highly relatable to her teenage audience and wistfully nostalgic to their parents. There is a connection between her and the public that other stars would kill for.
In her public appearances and music videos, Swift behaves like a blond bundle of positive energy, all sparkling smile, and ruby-red lips. Beneath the sugar-coating, however, is an incredibly shrewd and intelligent businesswoman with a ruthless streak.
After a very public feud with fellow pop star Katy Perry, Swift created the high-budget music video “Bad Blood,” packed with celebrity cameos and elaborate visuals, in which she fights a female adversary believed to represent Katy Perry. With the support of several high-profile female celebrities, Swift sent a clear message to Perry — I have more friends than you do.
Dramatic public feuds with Nicki Minaj, Kanye West, and ex-boyfriend Calvin Harris have ensured that Swift’s place in the headlines is cemented, spreading her influence far beyond her teenage followers. After Kim Kardashian’s revealing Snapchat, it’s beginning to look as though these feuds are nothing more than publicity stunts, created by Swift’s marketing team for her benefit. Whether or not these feuds are coordinated with the opposing parties are unclear.
This latest feud, however, may actually be the real thing. Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, two extremely media-savvy individuals who have created vast media empires out of “unlikeable” personalities, may be attempting to knock Swift off her pedestal. Swift described Kardashian's video as a “character assassination,” and in a way, it is. The sweet and innocent character Swift has been playing is beginning to wear thin. Feud after feud is beginning to make her appear a bit nasty. Her famous “squad” of beautiful, skinny celebrities is evocative of the stereotypical group of popular girls in high school, excluding an air of exclusivity and superiority. Try as she does to conceal it, Swift’s true nature is not a ditzy pop star, but a calculated and clever entrepreneur.
As one of the world’s most influential role models for young women, perhaps it’s time for Taylor Swift to grow up and embrace the pragmatic, powerful woman she actually is. As her fans age, the sickly-sweet sugar coating is bound to rub off eventually, revealing the hard nougat beneath.SAN BERNARDINO (AP) – Southern California authorities say the deaths of a young woman and man who vanished in Joshua Tree National Park last summer were a murder-suicide.
The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department said Friday that the bodies found Sunday were identified as 20-year-old Rachel Nguyen and 22-year-old Joseph Orbeso, both of Orange County.
A department statement says autopsies found both had gunshot wounds and that evidence at the scene led detectives to believe Orbeso shot Nguyen and then himself.
Orbeso’s actions remain under investigation.
The couple was reported missing July 28 when they failed to return to a bed-and-breakfast, whose owner believed they went hiking in the park where temperatures topped 100 degrees. A huge search effort failed to find them.
A small team found the bodies Sunday in a steep canyon.
Copyright 2017 The Associated Press.Thread Forum
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OK, so every few weeks, I get a problem where, often when I am watching TV (though that may be a red herring as I often have it on), the sound becomes completely distorted, and if I try and move the mouse, the cursor will jump rather than move smoothly i.e. as if the framerate has gone down to 1/2... Performance & Maintenance
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Hi there, I am new here so I really hope this is OK. I recently built my first PC and had it running fine for about 2 days until suddenly the windows aero animations have gone into slow motion! I have no idea what it is or how to fix it please could you help? Thank You Thomas Graphic Cards
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Hi, I've been using Windows 7 ultimate x64 since release day and it has always ran great. However, every now and then when i boot into windows the slow motion aero effect keeps being activated automatically, but when i restart, aero goes back to normal. It has never bothered me since it... General Discussion''Why didn't the C.I.A. find this out?'' he asked. ''The question is why don't we learn to read? What's the State Department for? The political leadership in India as much as said they were going to begin testing. There's a tendency at the State Department to say, 'Gee, the C.I.A. never told us.' ''
Administration officials defended their lack of knowledge and action by saying the Indian Government had fooled them into thinking that it would not conduct nuclear testing.
''They didn't just fool the C.I.A., they fooled the entire U.S. Government, and I'm the first to admit they fooled me, too,'' a senior Administration official said. ''We were all just lulled into thinking they wouldn't do anything regarding nuclear weapons. They led us to believe they were not going to do anything precipitous. We made the mistake of assuming they would act rationally.''
He added, ''We had no clue.''
Others said warning signs were everywhere, to be read by diplomats, as well as spies: the announced intentions of the new Hindu nationalist Government to make nuclear weapons part of its arsenal; the published pronouncements of India's Atomic Weapons Commissioner, who said two months ago that he was ready to test if political leaders gave the go-ahead, and recent missile tests by Pakistan that all but dared New Dehli to respond.
A result, Administration officials said, was the biggest breach in the arms-control net in years. United States policy on stopping the spread of nuclear weapons failed to prevent the test, and that could set off a chain reaction.
It is now far more likely that Pakistan, whose arms programs have immeasurably been aided by China, to the bitter resentment of India, will test a nuclear weapon, officials said. They said tonight that they were seeing signs that Pakistan was preparing to conduct a test.
The Indian test also increases the chances, they said, that Pakistan will retest its new medium-range missile, the Ghauri, named after a Muslim warrior who defeated a 12th-century Hindu emperor, Prithvi, which happens to be the name of India's most advanced missile.
Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You will receive emails containing news content, updates and promotions from The New York Times. You may opt-out at any time. You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters.
George Perkovich, an expert on the Indian nuclear program and director of the Secure World program at the W. Alton Jones Foundation, said: ''The Indians have been out there for months at the site. There was activity, but nobody in the United States said, 'Uh-oh, this means something.' ''
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Diplomatic silence played a role. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright was appalled, her spokesman said, that Foreign Secretary Krishnan Raghunath of India met on May 1 with the national security adviser, Samuel R. Berger; Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, and Undersecretary of State Thomas R. Pickering, but gave no hint of tests.
But in hindsight, the evidence was nearly as clear as it was in December 1995. Then United States spy satellites saw thick electric cables being installed at a hole in the Rajasthan desert, evidence that India was preparing its first nuclear test since 1974. Word went out that Washington was watching, and India backed down. The test never took place.
The test site in Pokaran was buzzing again this month. But the spy satellites missed the clues. They were looking, but not closely enough to see clearly. The Indians disguised the activities. Sandstorms obscured the site, and in any case, neither the machines nor the people who analyze their output are infallible.
It takes decisions by policy makers and millions of dollars a day to adjust the satellites' orbits, so that they can focus intently 24 hours a day on a target. It is unclear whether the United States had round-the-clock coverage of the site. The satellites take pictures with high-resolution cameras and eavesdrop on telecommunications. But they do what their human masters tell them, and they failed to focus on what was really occurring in the Indian desert.
The focus was lacking for American policy as well, said Francine Frankel, director of the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania.
''This crisis has been in the works for a long time,'' Ms. Frankel said. ''We assumed that we could separate our common economic interests and our differences on the nuclear issue. That was never realistic. There were many warning signs that it was impossible to bridge that gap. We are now faced with a question of whether we want to have a hostile relationship with India.''
She said, and Mr. Moynihan agreed, that India saw itself as destined to be a global power and that United States policy makers had never understood that vision.
Nor did the Clinton Administration see that its failure to accomplish big cuts in nuclear arms gave India little reason to hold off becoming a nuclear power, Clinton and Bush Administration officials said.
When Pakistan held missile tests last month, the United States completely misread India's fury, Mr. Perkovich said, adding: ''The U.S. mistook the silence for calm. They took it to believe the Indians were O.K. But they were coldly angered at the U.S. for, in their view, not constraining Pakistan.'' On Monday, unnoticed by Washington, that anger reached critical mass.Hello, I am Julin GYS, the founder of the «World of Internet Business» company. My team and I have been telling you about Dash on our channel and site for 19 months already.- On the channel |
mind. Sheet metal, fenders, hood, radiator support, are all new VW OEM parts. The rear body panel is a VW OEM replacement to accept the (new OEM) Euro tail lights, which are a rare sight in the USA. All glass was removed for paint, but the reassembly stalled and this is how the car sits in heated storage.
The engine is a vw factory replacement that still has the stickers on it and was driven less than 5,000 miles so far. The transmission was also replaced at the same time with a VW factory unit, according to the seller.
Parts included:
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2. New Euro head / tail & fog lights
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4.used set of Euro bumpers W/head light washers
5. Reupholstered seats & door cards in OEM fabric
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7.Euro headliner (new in box, very rare part to find)
8.Most new seals for doors, sun roof, hatch and window, some are the originals
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Click here to email the seller directly if you are interested.
Check out the additional photos here in the Flickr album and slide-show below.Mirko Cro Cop knows his MMA career is winding down. But there are a few more things he wants to accomplish before he steps away for good.
The legendary striker was intrigued by the idea of signing with the UFC because of the potential losses he could avenge in rematches. Gabriel Gonzaga was at the top of the list. Cro Cop will get his chance to get Gonzaga back for a stunning knockout in 2007 in the main event of UFC Fight Night 64 on April 11 in Krakow, Poland.
"It was one of the fights I will never forget, and I just want a rematch with him," Cro Cop told Ariel Helwani on Monday's edition of The MMA Hour. "I can't say I will beat him, but I will die trying. That's how I feel. I feel good right now. There are a few things I still want to do and definitely fighting Gabriel Gonzaga is one of them."
Cro Cop (30-11-2, 1 NC), the former PRIDE grand prix winner and K-1 champion, would have gotten a UFC heavyweight title shot with a winner over Gonzaga at UFC 70 on April 21, 2007. Most people know what happened next -- the Croatian star was knocked out with his own trademark move: a left head kick.
After that, Cro Cop, now 40, had a mediocre run in the UFC, going 3-6. He calls the defeat against Gonzaga the worst of his storied career.
"I really believe that I'm a better fighter than Gabriel Gonzaga," Cro Cop said. "I don't want to be a big mouth and I respect him. He's a great fighter. But I will do my best, definitely. He will do his best. We are going to perform a great show and the fans will be happy."
Cro Cop, whose real last name is Filipovic, is coming off two straight TKO wins over Satoshi Ishii in Japan. The latter came via a left head kick as he looked like the Cro Cop of old. Since leaving the UFC in 2011, Cro Cop is 3-1. He said he feels healthier than ever and during his UFC career he was saddled by numerous injuries -- including eight total surgeries.
"I'm training with a smile on my face," Cro Cop said. "This is what I want to do. No big mystery. No big philosophy. This is my job and I love to do it."
Cro Cop said he signed a three-fight deal with the UFC, intending to earn rematches with men who defeated him in the past. Junior dos Santos, Frank Mir, Roy Nelson and Brendan Schaub are all fighters on the UFC's heavyweight roster who have knocked him off. Cro Cop said this will be his final run in combat sports and his kickboxing career is already over.
"Even if I fail, which I don't think I will, I know I tried," Cro Cop said. "That's how I function. That's how I think. That's me. That's my life philosophy."
He feels that way about the fight with Gonzaga, which will take place in the UFC's Poland debut. But Cro Cop is confident.
"I already studied all his fights after we fought," he said. "No big surprises. I know exactly what he's going to do. Things will be different this time."
Cro Cop said he has no trouble watching the first fight now -- it doesn't bother him. And he doesn't spend much time wondering what would have happened if he got that title shot against Randy Couture.
It's water under the bridge for the iconic fighter, but it's a bridge Cro Cop wants very badly to cross again.
"I really want that victory [against Gonzaga] more than anything," he said. "Believe me. More than anything."The U.S. Chamber of Commerce just came out with its preemptive strike against Obama administration regulations on power plants. What the Chamber wanted to do was show that the economic impact of the regulations would be devastating. And I was eager to see how they had fudged the numbers.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the diatribe. The Chamber evidently made a decision that it wanted to preserve credibility, so it outsourced the analysis. And while it tries to spin the results, what it actually found was that dramatic action on greenhouse gases would have surprisingly small economic costs.
The Chamber’s supposed scare headline is that regulations would cost the US economy $50.2 billion per year in constant dollars between now and 2030. That’s for a plan to reduce GHG emissions 40 percent from their 2005 level, so it’s for real action.
So, is $50 billion a lot? Let’s look at the CBO’s long-term projections. These say that average annual US real GDP over the period 2014-2030 will be $21.5 trillion. So the Chamber is telling us that we can achieve major reductions in greenhouse gases at a cost of 0.2 percent of GDP. That’s cheap!
True, the chamber also says that the regulations would cost 224,000 jobs in an average year. That’s bad economics: US employment is determined by the interaction between macroeconomic policy and the underlying tradeoff between inflation and unemployment, and there’s no good reason to think that environmental protection would reduce the number of jobs (as opposed to real wages). But even at face value that’s also a small number in a country with 140 million workers.
So, I was ready to come down hard on the Chamber’s bad economics; but what they’ve actually just shown is that even when they’re paying for the study, the economics of climate protection look quite easy.The Schenectady Legends announced today the signing of another local talent, Brad Sheehan. A 2010 graduate from Georgia Tech, Sheehan graduated from Shaker High School in 2006 and currently resides in Latham, New York.
The 7’0″ 235-pound center played three seasons (2007-10) for Georgia Tech, after redshirting in his freshman year. Averaging just over five minutes per game coming off the bench, Sheehan had his most impressive game on January 30, 2010 scoring seven points, a career-high 10 rebounds and three blocked shots against Kentucky State. Brad will certainly bring an inside dominating presence to an already potent offense and offer some exciting tower defense.
The Legends (3-0) travel to Binghamton for a game this Sunday against the Pioneers (0-2). Schenectady return home to Scotia-Glenville High School on Friday, November 21 at 7 PM to face Toronto 3D, likely to be the biggest test of the year for the Legends. Tickets can be ordered online at SchenectadyLegends.com. Tickets are $12 for adults and $8 for kids 14-and under; under age 5 are free.
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Like this: Like Loading... RelatedWith all the chatter about soaring property assessments, property taxes and people losing their homeowner grants, here’s a fundamental question I’ve been asking without finding a good answer: Why does the homeowner grant even exist?
I’m as happy as the next guy to get money back from the government, but what is the justification for it from a public-policy perspective?
If you search provincial and municipal websites, you’ll find lots of information about what the grant is, who qualifies and so on; but nowhere will you learn about its history or a justification for why the province selectively returns lumps of cash to a generally wealthier group of citizens — homeowners.
As Vancouver Sun columnist Vaughn Palmer noted last week, the grant was introduced in 1957 by then-Social Credit premier W.A.C. Bennett, arguably the most populist leader in B.C. history, in what was then a very thinly veiled vote-buying scheme paid for with our own cash. Look up the word “chutzpah” in the dictionary and you’ll see an accompanying photo of old Wacky B.
A 1969 pamphlet distributed by the Socreds to voters, a Personal Report from the Premier, contained an entire section on the grant, which Bennett crowed was created “to relieve the pressure of rising property taxes on the homeowners of British Columbia and to encourage the buying and building of new homes …”
If you believe that the 1957 grant of $28 — now up to $570 for homes under $1.314 million in most communities (under $1.2 million for the full grant) or up to $770 in northern and rural areas for homes up to $1.354 million — either encouraged “the buying and building of new homes” or reduced taxes, I’ve got a cool new bridge to sell you that will soon replace the George Massey Tunnel.
It’s silly to think that the decision to buy or build a home would hinge on such a small figure or that returning money you had already paid to government was reducing your taxes. Why not just cut provincial taxes directly?
Here’s an even goofier aspect of the grant — almost all homeowners get it. According to the Ministry of Finance, 91 per cent of homeowners received the grant last year, down from 96 per cent in 2014. If nearly everyone gets the money, why go through all the trouble and bureaucratic cost of making people apply, with all that paperwork?
If Victoria wanted to reduce property taxes — why that tax, in particular, is anyone’s guess — why not simply give comparable amounts of money directly to municipalities so they could cut property taxes? Of course, then provincial politicians would have nothing to brag about.
When Bennett introduced the grant, the opposition called it unfair and vowed to axe it if elected. They quickly realized that the grant was popular and nixed the idea of killing the program. Over 60 years, successive provincial governments have done nothing but increase the grant and adjust the property value that determines who gets the cash. Even the cutoff isn’t fair — the value of your home has little connection to your ability to pay taxes.
While the grant is no longer linked to one party, it remains partisan because it can be manipulated for political gain by the party in power.
No one should be surprised, therefore, that the Clark government announced last week plans to review the property value cutoff that determines who gets the grant in the wake of this year’s huge jump in assessments. I’ll be stunned if the Liberals don’t announce just before the provincial election in May that more people are eligible for the grant, spun as some kind of “Putting Families First” initiative.
While Bennett may have been looking out for the “little guy” when he created the homeowner grant in the 1950s to encourage the settled, stable life that comes with home ownership, that’s hardly the case now. Increasingly, buying a home, especially in the Lower Mainland, is beyond many families, which weakens any justification that may have once existed for the grant. More broadly based tax relief would be fairer.
The grant also gives undeserved support to municipal governments, whose chronic overspending has been well documented. Removing the grant would prompt more taxpayers to pressure city halls to control spending.
When governments begin picking winners and losers in an economy, it’s usually not fair. The homeowner grant, while popular, is another example. I can think of no good reason that people rich enough to buy their own homes should be selected over others to receive millions of dollars in government funds that could either be better spent on programs for people more in need or to reduce taxes for everyone.
gclark@postmedia.com
Gordon Clark is a columnist and editorial pages editor for The Province. Letters to the editor can be sent to provletters@theprovince.com.
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Is there more to this story? We’d like to hear from you about this or any other stories you think we should know about. Email vantips@postmedia.com.Odd–even rationing is a method of rationing in which access to some resource is restricted to half the population on any given day. In a common example, private vehicles may be allowed to drive, park, or purchase gasoline on alternating days, according to whether the last digit in their license plate is even or odd. Similarly, during a drought, houses can be restricted from using water outdoors according to the parity of the house number.
Typically a day is "odd" or "even" depending on the day of the month. An issue with this approach is that two "odd" days in a row occur whenever a month ends on an odd-numbered day.[1] Sometimes odd or even may be based on day of the week, with Sundays excluded or included for everyone.
Effectiveness [ edit ]
Motorists with Even Numbered Licenses Line Up For Gasoline on an Even Numbered Day, Portland, OR, 1973.
The efficacy of odd–even rationing is debated. In a case like gasoline, it does not actually reduce consumption, since people prevented from filling up one day will just fill up the day before, and vice versa; the total number of people in line on each day is unchanged.[2][3] Some propose it has psychological effects like reducing panic buying,[4] discouraging people from making small purchases on a daily basis,[5] or emphasizing the shortage and further discouraging unnecessary trips.[6]
Rationing access, rather than gasoline, based on number plate parity can reduce traffic congestion. In some areas, wealthier people purposely own two cars with opposite-parity number plates, to circumvent any restrictions.[7] Vanity plates which do not contain any digits may be arbitrarily classed as odd or even.
Dealing with 0 [ edit ]
Zero is an even number; indeed, half of the numbers in a given range end in 0, 2, 4, 6, 8 and the other half in 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, so it makes sense to include 0 with the other even digits for rationing. However, many people are unaware that zero is even, and this ignorance can cause confusion. The relevant legislation sometimes stipulates that zero is even.[8] In fact, an odd–even restriction on driving in 1977 Paris did lead to confusion when the rules were unclear. On an odd-only day, the police avoided fining drivers whose plates ended in 0, because they did not know whether 0 was even.[9]
U.S. gasoline rationing [ edit ]
Odd–even rationing was instituted in the U.S. as part of the response to the second gasoline crisis in 1979, when turbulent conditions in Iraq and Iran led to worldwide oil price increases, even though a supply shortage did not materialize in the U.S.[10]
After Hurricane Sandy hit the eastern coast in late October 2012, gasoline became scarce and caused lines to extend miles past stations and people to wait for hours to fill cars or gasoline tanks for generators powering houses without electricity.[citation needed] Panic buying and fuel hoarding began to occur within days of the storm. On November 3, 2012, New Jersey governor Chris Christie issued a gas rationing system to follow the odd–even rule to ease lines in 12 counties.[where?][11] A few days later on November 8, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, along with Nassau County Executive Ed Mangano and Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone, instituted an odd–even rationing system due to gasoline shortages from Hurricane Sandy.[12] In New York City, such rationing lasted through November 23 due to the increased travel and gasoline demand during the Thanksgiving week, while it ended more than a week earlier in the other counties.[13] License plates without numbers, such as vanity plates, were considered odd.[14]
India [ edit ]
In Delhi, during the ministry of Arvind Kejriwal, private vehicles could be on the road only on certain days, depending on their license plate number, from January 1, 2016. The scheme aimed to reduce pollution and smog in Delhi.[15] The scheme was ended on November 11, 2017.[16]
See also [ edit ]Image copyright Gennadi Baranov Image caption Side view of the fossil's right eye
An "exceptional" 530-million-year-old fossil contains what could be the oldest eye ever discovered, according to scientists.
The remains of the extinct sea creature include an early form of the eye seen in many of today's animals, including crabs, bees and dragonflies.
Scientists made the find while looking at the well-preserved trilobite fossil.
They lived in seas during the Palaeozoic era, between 541-251 million years ago.
They found the ancient creature had a primitive form of compound eye, an optical organ that consists of arrays of tiny visual cells, called ommatidia, similar to those of present-day bees.
The team, which included a researcher from Edinburgh University, said their findings suggested that compound eyes had changed little over 500 million years.
Image copyright Gennadi Baranov Image caption The fossil was found in Estonia
Prof Euan Clarkson, of Edinburgh University's school of geosciences, said: "This exceptional fossil shows us how early animals saw the world around them hundreds of millions of years ago.
"Remarkably, it also reveals that the structure and function of compound eyes has barely changed in half a billion years."
The right eye of the fossil, which was unearthed in Estonia, was partly worn away, giving researchers a clear view inside the organ.
This revealed details of the eye's structure and function, and how it differs from modern compound eyes.
The species had poor vision compared with many animals today but it could identify predators and obstacles in its path, researchers believe.
Its eye consists of approximately 100 ommatidia, which are situated relatively far apart compared to contemporary compounds eyes, the team have found.
No lens
Unlike modern compound eyes, the fossil's eye does not have a lens.
The team believe this is likely to be because the primitive species, called Schmidtiellus reetae, lacked parts of the shell needed for lens formation.
Prof Brigitte Schoenemann, of Cologne University, who was also involved in the study, said: "This may be the earliest example of an eye that it is possible to find.
"Older specimens in sediment layers below this fossil contain only traces of the original animals, which were too soft to be fossilised and have disintegrated over time."
The team also revealed that only a few million years later, improved compound eyes with higher resolution developed in another trilobite species from the present-day Baltic region.
The study is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
It was carried out in collaboration with the University of Cologne and Tallinn University of Technology in Estonia.Throughout the convention, men arrived to speak out against women’s suffrage. Women, they said, were too weak and helpless to be trusted with the power of the vote. Because “there were very few women in those days who dared to ‘speak in meeting,’ ” as Gage put it, their points went unchallenged until Truth stepped forward. White women hissed, but Truth’s very identity nullified the arguments coming from both men and women in attendance. “That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere,” she said. “Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud puddles, or gives me any best place. And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm!” She rolled up her sleeve to the shoulder. “I have plowed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me. And ain’t I a woman?”
In that moment, Truth shattered an idea of white femininity that had been used to both underpin and undermine the cause of suffrage. As a slave, she had worked in the fields like a man; as a free black woman, she could not rely on the offerings of white male gentility. Gage wrote that Truth’s testimony compelled the white women in attendance to embrace her “with streaming eyes, and hearts beating with gratitude.”
But two years later, Truth still drew jeers from white crowds when she attended women’s meetings. A vision of whiteness was ingrained in the leaders and the arguments of the mainstream movement. Even the suffragists’ signature white clothes were deliberately chosen to signal purity. This ideal of feminine virtue did not extend to black women, or working-class ones. Some suffragists made their racism and classism explicit. In 1894, a white woman at a meeting of the Brooklyn Woman Suffrage Association complained that New York had become an “asylum for the trash of all nations,” arguing that women’s suffrage ought to be restricted. “Think what it means to give it to all women,” she said. “Our criminal and pauper men have wives; there are thousands of female operatives in tobacco factories and similar fields of labor; there are probably two million Negro women in this country who are but little uplifted above the plane of animals.”
One curious point of this history is that so many suffragists came from the antislavery movement. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, whose partnership would come to define the suffrage movement in the United States, started their activist careers as abolitionists. But after the Civil War, as black men and all women agitated for the right to vote, a political battle broke out over who would be enfranchised first. (Either way, black women would be last.) In 1865, Stanton lamented having to “stand aside to see ‘Sambo’ walk into the kingdom first,” as she put it in The National Anti-Slavery Standard.
Over time, these racial contours would harden into lasting institutions. When women’s social clubs spread across the United States at the turn of the century, two models emerged. Whites-only clubs leveraged middle-class women’s leisure time to campaign for social reforms. Black women, who largely worked outside the home, came together around urgent needs. One of the first actions of the black Chicago Women’s Club was to raise money to prosecute a police officer who killed a black man. The main distinction between clubs, the black activist Fannie Barrier Williams wrote, was that for black women, “it is not a fad.”
Black women distinguished themselves not only as suffragists but also as vocal critics of a movement that pushed one kind of justice aside in pursuit of another. In 1913, when thousands of suffragists marched on Washington to agitate for the vote, black women were instructed to march in the back. Ida B. Wells defied the order and marched with the delegation from Illinois, her home state. She wasn’t just protesting for her right to vote. She was protesting the protest too.The Halal Guys have their sights on Toronto. It will be the popular brand's first foray into Canada, with five locations planned around the city. Founded in New York City back in 1990, the bright yellow food carts have become an iconic element of the Manhattan street food scene.
A franchise deal in 2014 led to expansion from food carts to bricks and mortar restaurants across the United States (the rights to over 200 restaurants have been sold south of the border), which has finally brought the brand north of the border via Fransmart, the same company that's managed Five Guys Burgers and Fries expansion into the Canadian Market.
The Halal Guys are apparently often referred to as merely "Chicken and Rice," on account of their most popular platter. The hallmark of the concept is simple, halal-certified food in ample portions. Given the cachet the brand has already built elsewhere, I'm going to bet this will be a popular addition to the Toronto food scene.
Are you excited for the arrival of The Halal Guys? Let us know in the comments.
Photo via the Halal Guys on Facebook.Yes! I have been doing this for years in my home-built dehydrator, based on plans on a great 1970's book, DRY IT, YOU'LL LIKE IT. Here are a few additional tips based on my experience:
1. Should be obvious, but use seedless grapes. Seeded ones are for juice for jelly and syrup.
2. Moving air dries best. Consider making a simple wood frame with window screening, so the warm air can move by the grapes better. I use fiberglass screen, but metal should also work.
3. I wash the grapes while still in a bunch. Then (the tedious part), as you pluck them, give them a little squeeze so they separate from the stem completely, and pop open a little at the attachment point. This allows the moisture to leave. A tight grape takes forever to dry.
4. With your air moving better, you can use lower temperatures. My unit runs at 95-105 F (35-40 C). The book says lower temps retain more of the fruit's vitamins and other good things.
5. One of the best things about this is your choice of grapes. Typical "golden" raisins are from simple green grapes. When you use purple or red, you get nice bold flavors that are great in trail mix, and will have folks wondering why your baked goods taste so good.
6. Don't sweat if they aren't all exactly the same. Some will be really dry, others will be a little soft. When stored airtight, like a sealed plastic bag, they will equalize over time. Check in a few weeks to make sure they are dry enough to keep without spoiling.
7. Finally, when your screen has that sticky syrup left on it, just take it in the shower with you. By the time you're clean, it will be, too!Trump's complaints get validated (sort of).
Donald Trump may not have been entirely wrong when he was speculating about mic issues after the first general-election presidential debate, which took place on Monday.
"Regarding the first debate, there were issues regarding Donald Trump's audio that affected the sound level in the debate hall," the Commission on Presidential Debates said in a tersely worded statement that didn't elaborate on what those issues were.
Following the Sept. 26 debate, the Republican presidential contender appeared to be just stirring up another conspiracy theory when he complained about microphone issues.
"My microphone was terrible. I wonder, was it set up that way on purpose?" Trump said on Fox & Friends Tuesday morning.
Hillary Clinton had responded to that line of speculation with a joke: "Anybody who complains about the microphone is not having a good night."
The showdown between the nominees, held at Hofstra University in New York and aired on 13 networks, was the most watched presidential debate in history, captivating 84 million viewers.At least 86 people have been killed and more than 186 wounded in two suspected suicide bombings in the Turkish capital.
Hundreds of people were gathering for a peace rally outside Ankara’s main train station when the explosions hit the crowd.
Graphic images on social media showed bodies lying in the streets and the wounded sitting in shock, covered in blood.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.
Witnesses at the scene described survivors covering people’s bodies with flags and banners, including those of the pro-Kurdish opposition Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), on roads filled with body parts and blood.
Philip Hammond, the Foreign Secretary, said the UK "stands with the Turkish people" as rescue work continued.
"Appalled by the barbaric attacks in Ankara," he wrote on Twitter. "My thoughts are with the loved ones of those killed and injured."
Turkey’s Interior Ministry said the explosions were a terror attack, although there was no immediate claim of responsibility, and the health minister put the toll at 86 dead and 186 wounded.
There is strong evidence to suggest two suicide bombers carried out the massacre, the Prime Minister said. Ahmet Davutoglu declared three days of national mourning after the attack, which was the deadliest of its kind on Turkish soil.
Thorbjorn Jagland, Secretary General of the Council of Europe, said: ”This is a ruthless and barbaric attack on peaceful demonstrators. Freedom of assembly and freedom of expression are fundamental pillars of democracy.”
Shape Created with Sketch. Ankara explosions - in pictures Show all 15 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. Ankara explosions - in pictures 1/15 Ankara attack 2/15 Ankara attack 3/15 Ankara attack 4/15 Ankara attack 5/15 Ankara attack 6/15 Ankara attack 7/15 Ankara attack Victims lie on the street as the scene of the explosion is cordoned off following an explosion at the main train station in Turkey's capital Ankara, on October 10, 2015. AFP/Getty Images 8/15 Ankara attack An injured man holds another casualty after the blasts in Ankara Reuters 9/15 Ankara attack An injured woman being helped following the explosion on Saturday morning. AFP/Getty Images 10/15 Ankara attack An injured person is comforted as she lies on a rally banner following an explosion at the main train station in Turkey's capital Ankara, on October 10, 2015. AFP/Getty Images 11/15 Ankara attack Bodies of victims are covered with flags and banners as police officers secure the area after an explosion in Ankara, Turkey, Saturday, Oct. 10, 2015. AP 12/15 Ankara attack Blood covered flags are seen at the blast scene after an explosion during a peace march in Ankara, October 10, 2015 Turkey. Getty Images 13/15 Ankara attack An injured person is lifted away using a rally banner following an explosion at the main train station in Turkey's capital Ankara, on October 10, 2015. AFP/Getty Images 14/15 Ankara attack Victims at the blast scene after an explosion during a peace march in Ankara, October 10, 2015 in Ankara, Turkey Getty Images 15/15 Ankara attack Paramedics and police work outside Ankara Central Station after multiple explosions in Turkey, 10 October 2015. EPA 1/15 Ankara attack 2/15 Ankara attack 3/15 Ankara attack 4/15 Ankara attack 5/15 Ankara attack 6/15 Ankara attack 7/15 Ankara attack Victims lie on the street as the scene of the explosion is cordoned off following an explosion at the main train station in Turkey's capital Ankara, on October 10, 2015. AFP/Getty Images 8/15 Ankara attack An injured man holds another casualty after the blasts in Ankara Reuters 9/15 Ankara attack An injured woman being helped following the explosion on Saturday morning. AFP/Getty Images 10/15 Ankara attack An injured person is comforted as she lies on a rally banner following an explosion at the main train station in Turkey's capital Ankara, on October 10, 2015. AFP/Getty Images 11/15 Ankara attack Bodies of victims are covered with flags and banners as police officers secure the area after an explosion in Ankara, Turkey, Saturday, Oct. 10, 2015. AP 12/15 Ankara attack Blood covered flags are seen at the blast scene after an explosion during a peace march in Ankara, October 10, 2015 Turkey. Getty Images 13/15 Ankara attack An injured person is lifted away using a rally banner following an explosion at the main train station in Turkey's capital Ankara, on October 10, 2015. AFP/Getty Images 14/15 Ankara attack Victims at the blast scene after an explosion during a peace march in Ankara, October 10, 2015 in Ankara, Turkey Getty Images 15/15 Ankara attack Paramedics and police work outside Ankara Central Station after multiple explosions in Turkey, 10 October 2015. EPA
The protest, organised by trade unions and supported by left-wing parties and pro-Kurdish groups, was being held to denounce the increased violence between Kurdish rebels and Turkish security forces.
Lami Ozgen, head of the Confederation of Public Sector Trade Unions, which organised the protest, said two bombs “exploded in very short intervals”.
“There was a massacre in the middle of Ankara,” he added.
“We're ready to come together and work sincerely to finish terror,” the leader of the main opposition party, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, told reporters.
Violence between Turkey and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militants has flared in recent months, with Turkey launching operations in response to what it said were rising attacks on security forces in the predominantly Kurdish south-east. Hundreds have since died.
The country has been on high alert since starting its “synchronised war on terror” in July, including air strikes against Isis in Syria and Kurdish fighters with the People’s Defence Force in northern Iraq.
It has also rounded up hundreds of suspected Kurdish and Islamist militants at home.
An HDP rally in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir was bombed on the eve of the last election in June and a suicide bombing blamed on Isis killed 33 mainly pro-Kurdish activists in the town of Suruc, near the Syrian border, in July.
The PKK called on its fighters and supporters to stop guerrilla activities in Turkey and only fight if they were directly attacked in the wake of Saturday’s bombing.
Firat news agency reported the head of the PKK as saying the decision was taken in response to calls from within and outside Turkey and that its fighters would avoid acts which could prevent a “fair and just election” being held on 1 November.
Additional reporting by Reuters and AP
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.
At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.
Subscribe nowLast year, Popslate brought its first E ink iPhone case to market, giving users a second screen to display information on. This year, the company is back with the Popslate 2, which features a larger screen, notifications, and a built-in battery to charge your iPhone.
Although the original Popslate didn't live up to its potential — it needed to be charged via Micro-USB instead of a lightning cable, it could only shuffle through eight images at launch, and despite being a Mophie-sized case, it couldn't charge your iPhone — Popslate has remedied all those issues on the second-generation device. The Popslate 2 now comes with a 4.7-inch display at 200dpi, up from 4 inches and 115dpi. And it now uses the Lightning port to communicate with your iPhone instead of Bluetooth, allowing users to simultaneously charge the case and the phone.
The built-in battery will add nine hours of talk time and five hours of web browsing
Popslate says the built-in battery will add nine hours of talk time and five hours of web browsing to your iPhone, which is less than Apple's battery case offers, but you don't get a nice E ink display with that. The Popslate 2 can multitask as well, allowing you to switch through five different apps using the newly added capacitive buttons at the bottom of the screen. The case can also pull in your notifications, which it says can conserve your iPhone battery by leaving the main screen off.
Popslate is certainly packing a ton of new features into its new case, so we'll see how it actually runs when we get our hands on the device in the coming weeks. The Popslate 2 is available for pre-order on Indiegogo today starting at $69, and will retail for $129 and $149 for the iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus respectively.Kalyan: A 45-year-old Dombivli woman recently approached the Thane cyber police cell alleging she was duped of Rs 1.2 crore by a US resident whom she had befriended on a matrimonial website, and by as many as 36 of his associates, over a span of 15 months.
The main accused introduced himself as a Los Angeles-based businessman who lived in a 4BHK flat—an obvious draw in space-starved Mumbai. The accused, Robert (name changed on police request), approached the woman on the website on May 19, 2014, saying he was looking for an Indian bride as he found the country’s women to be “good-natured”.
In her police complaint, the victim said after declaring his intent to marry her “very soon” and winning her trust, the accused began to ask her for money citing temporary financial difficulty or an emergency. The woman believed him blindly and took several loans and even mortgaged one of her flats to “help him out” by transferring funds into various overseas accounts. Currently, the victim is using most of her earnings to repay the loans.
In one instance, the accused claimed to have met with an accident while headed to the UK for a business deal and required Rs 26 lakh to take a chartered flight back home to the US. He also asked for another Rs 4 lakh for medicines. Another time, he said he was arrested and required money to bribe cops. This pattern continued to play out till September 2015 when she began to refuse him money citing rising debts, and he began to avoid her.
The victim told TOI: “After I got cheated, I looked for and found several fake profiles online. The person who cheated me is once again active on the site with fake details.” She has now appealed to women to not trust online profiles blindly.
The woman told cops that whenever she would get upset about transferring money to the man, she would get in touch with a US-based “priest” who claimed to be |
Because he had changed a lot. He has shown that he has improved a lot.Why did the Young Mens Mutual Improvement Association affiliate with the Boy Scouts of America in 1913, yet the Young Ladies Mutual Improvement Association of the same time period continue developing their own activity and personal progress programs?
Did the Church ever consider partnership with the Camp Fire Girls, Girl Scouts or Girl Guides? And if so, why didn’t they affiliate? Here are a few insights on this question. First, some history highlights.
1869 – The Young Ladies Mutual Improvement Association was organized by Brigham Young to encourage modesty, decorum, and retrenchment. (History of the YLMIA, 1911, p. 9.)
1907 – Robert Baden-Powell founded the Scouting Movement in England. The movement was wildly successful and quickly established in countries around the world.
1910 – The Boy Scouts of America was officially established in the United States.
Girls and Scouting?
Baden-Powell realized early on that young ladies also wanted to join Scouting. As recorded in the book, Two Lives of a Hero, Baden-Powell knew, however, that the “rough and tumble” activities of Scouting were not appropriate activities for the young girls of his era. Additionally, he felt that the Boy Scout program would become too “sissified” if girls were allowed to join and boys could resent their involvement. Baden-Powell also felt that the word Scout belonged to the boys.
Instead, Baden-Powell enlisted the help of his younger sister, Agnes, to organize the Girl Guides, a program tailored more specifically for girls and focused on the needs and virtues of women. Eventually, Baden-Powell’s wife, Olave, became the head of this organization and it experienced great growth as a companion to the Boy Scouts. Today, many Girl Guide groups are involved in the World Organization of the Scout Movement (WOSM), of which the BSA is also an active participant.
1910 – Camp Fire Girls of America, a version of Baden Powell’s Girl Guides, was founded by Luther Gulick, M.D., and his wife, Charlotte Gulick, “to guide young people on their journey to self-discovery.” James E. West, first Chief Scout Executive of the Boy Scouts, was also instrumental in the founding of the Camp Fire Girls. (See their official website: www.campfire.org)
1911 – Juliette Gordon Low, future founder of the Girl Scouts of America, met Baden-Powell in England. He encouraged her to start Girl Guiding in America.
1912 – The Girls Guides of America (changed to Girl Scouts in 1913) was officially organized by Mrs. Low in the United States. Her focus was to provide the identical program for the girls that the boys were receiving.
Was affiliation ever discussed?
The May 1935 Improvement Era celebrates the twentieth anniversary of the Bee-Hive Girls’ Organization. An article titled, “Origin of the Bee-Hive Girls’ Organization,” by Ann M. Cannon, chairman of the original Bee-Hive Committee, sheds some light on the history of the Bee-Hives.
In the article Sister Cannon writes, “About the time that the YMMIA began to talk of Scouting for boys, Mae Taylor Nystrom and Ann M. Cannon of the General Board…began a study of the Girl Guide work in England, which had been started to parallel the Boy Scout work. They followed it by a study of Camp Fire work which had sprung up in the USA as a follower of the Girl Guides.”
The article discusses that the Board studied how these purposes might fit into the MIA plan. The Salt Lake City Ensign Stake used the Camp Fire program for the summer and “the Box Elder Stake asked for the Girl Guide work. These privileges were granted and the programs were tried out that year by several stakes.”
Later a committee wrote to Dr. Luther Gulick, President of the Camp Fire Girls, and asked for the privilege of joining their organization “on a plan similar to that on which the YMMIA had joined the Boy Scouts.” It says that many letters passed back and forth but finally Dr. Gulick said in effect, “I see why you cannot join us under our plan. I hope you see why we cannot let you join under yours.” He suggested the Church form its own organization and gave permission for them to use any of their ideas and even offered assistance.
The Chartered Organization concept was key to the partnership of the YMMIA and the BSA, yet such an agreement could not be reached with the YLMIA and the Camp Fire Girls. It is important to note that as a chartered partner, the Church has the freedom to make significant decisions within their BSA programs, including choosing their own leaders and implementing BSA activities in a way to meet their needs.
While the Church has never officially partnered with the Girl Scouts, Girl Guides, Camp Fire Girls or other programs for young women, they still support the good these organizations do.
Sister Bonnie L. Oscarson, Young Women general president, participated in a panel discussion on faith at the 2014 Girl Scouts Convention held Thursday, October 16, 2014, in Salt Lake City. The session was titled “Faith in Action: Understand the Impact of Faith on Girls’ Lives and on Their Communities.”
“This is a challenging time to live,” said Sister Oscarson, who serves more than a half million young women ages 12–17 around the globe. She told the audience that to help young women meet these challenges; the Church’s Young Women organization emphasizes faith and leadership.
Sister Oscarson said it’s possible to have faith and not belong to a religion, but “[Christ] organized a church, and I think that’s our example.” She shared that gathering and learning together is “a way to strengthen one another.” (See the full article here.)
~Contributed and compiled by Scouting historians Roma Bishop, Kathi Robertson, and Nettie FrancisBoris Johnson returned from the US this week boasting that the UK was now ‘first in line’ for a trade deal with the US. He said that the Trump team and the new Congress ‘want to do it fast’.
But as I write in The Sun this morning, the situation is even more advanced than this. I understand that the Trump team is already working on the outlines of a US / UK trade deal. Interestingly, they want the deal to be pencilled in before the UK leaves the EU, though the UK could not formally sign it until it has left the bloc.
The US’s keenness for a trade deal with the UK strengthens the case for the UK leaving the customs union. Inside the customs union, Britain is not able to do its own comprehensive trade deals. Opinion in government is now leaning towards leaving the customs union and instead seeking a customs arrangement with the EU to try and keep trade as smooth as possible.
Combine the Trump news with The Guardian’s splash this morning that Michel Barnier, the EU’s Brexit negotiator, wants a ‘special’ deal to guarantee EU’s states access to the City of London’s financial markets post-Brexit and May has a strong backdrop for her big Brexit speech on Tuesday.With Hillary Imploding, Now Traveling to Caucus State Iowa Is... Al Gore
Oh, yes.
Okay this isn't really a real story (yet); more just people basically making things up because they need (as I need) something to post.
But it is worth asking: If Hillary goes down,
Everyone forgets Joe Biden. Which is sort of proof that Joe Biden is not a winning ticket. Jim Webb is considered "too conservative," and also, who the hell is he? Martin O'Malley presided over the third worst Obamacare debacle (after No. 1. Obama and No. 2 the Love-Gov of Oregon).
Elizabeth Warren? Well, call me a racist, but I don't think the country is ready for an Indian President, so...
Hey, wait! She'san Indian! She just! So who knows, maybe there's your damn nominee!
Or, of course: Albert Alphonse Gore.Virginia Tech needs your help to choose the design for its next personalized license plate.
BLACKSBURG (WSLS 10) - Virginia Tech needs your help to choose the design for its next personalized license plate.
Voting is open for the three designs: The first features a standing HokieBird with its arm crossed, the second is the university's seal and the third has an up-close HokieBird head.
The winning plate will be offered through the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles. The revenue from the sale of the license plate goes toward university scholarships.
You can vote for your favorite design here.
Currently there are three different plates available through the DMV. One features the University's logo with 'Go Hokies,' another is the Virginia Tech 'VT' and the third is the school seal.
Voting will close on June 13.
Copyright by WSLS - All rights reservedHulu has slowly been rolling out new device support this month. From the new iOS app to the Roku Beta Channel that now anyone can install. Now Hulu has added the ability to stream their live TV beta service on laptops and desktop computers as well.
“To date, we’ve offered Hulu with Live TV on multiple living room and mobile devices, but we know many of you have asked to access our service on your laptops and computers as well. So rather than wait until we’ve finalized our new Web experience, we’re opening up a basic version to Hulu’s live TV plan subscribers so they can stream live TV via their browsers. That means, you can catch the big game, this morning’s news or the premiere of “This is Us” wherever you are.” Said Ben Smith Hulu’s Head of Experience.
Hulu did not disclose any device limitations but as far we can tell Hulu’s lie TV beta will work on most computers and browsers from what we have seen.
Update: according to the Hulu help page Windows and Macs are supported. Supported browsers include Internet Explorer 10 or above, Firefox 15 or above, Safari 5 or above, Chrome, or Edge
Ben Smith went on to say “We’ll be making improvements and adding features continuously as we build the new Hulu experience on the Web.”
Please follow us on Facebook and Twitter for more news, tips, and reviews.
Need cord cutting tech support? Join our new Cord Cutting Tech Support Facebook Group for help.Team Penske has topped the second practice session for this weekend’s Motul Petit Le Mans with Juan Pablo Montoya at the wheel of its Oreca 07 Gibson.
Montoya posted a time of 1:12.445 in the 60-minute session to take the Oreca to the top of the timesheets in the team’s first race of its new program.
Mathias Beche made it an Oreca 1-2 with his Rebellion Racing entry going 0.252 seconds slower than the Colombian while Dane Cameron was the fastest DPi driver in his No. 31 Action Express Racing Cadillac DPi-V.R.
Pipo Derani and Filipe Albuquerque completed the top five in their No. 22 Tequila Patron ESM and No. 5 Action Express cars.
The top seven cars were classified within eight-tenths in the close-fought session.
Alessandro Pier Guidi led the way in GT Le Mans with the Risi Competizione Ferrari 488 GTE while Marcel Fassler and Earl Bamber were second and third.
All five GTLM manufacturers were represented in the top five positions in class.
Michael Shank Racing’s Katherine Legge posted the quickest GT Daytona lap time, a 1:20.308, enough to put the No. 93 Acura NSX GT3 0.584 seconds clear of Colin Braun in the CORE autosport Porsche 911 GT3 R.
Patricio O’Ward set the pace in Prototype Challenge for Performance Tech Motorsports, 1.2 seconds clear of Garett Grist’s BAR1 Motorsports car.
Practice 3 will get started at 7:30 p.m. local time with night-time running.
RESULTS: Practice 23000 4K and 5K RED R3D Clips About to be Released To Everyone Totally Free
18 Terabytes of Raw RED R3D 4K and 5K footage is set to become free to download to anybody.
Frederick Tschernutter Serial Entrepreneur, Filmproducer and Philosopher took 7 years to shoot all the footage, on a Red One and a RED Epic camera, and now he will donate the footage to the filmmaking community.
Enjoy, create and enrich mankind. All clips can be used under Creative Commons V4 for free, in any project private or commercially.
Many clips are 5K resolution. You can download them under a CC license, use them everywhere and anywhere in any feature project or advertising spot you want, even commercially. I include all global distribution rights (ALL FOR FREE), for feature films, Internet, Television, Cable or any other distribution channel. The only restriction: The reselling or visualisation of single or multiple clips on FOOTAGE PLATFORMS is FORBIDDEN. Download will be activated next week.
For more: Watch this space.
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commentsWhen the deal for Verizon to buy AOL was announced last month, executives from both companies said AOL was an appealing acquisition because of its advertising technology. On Monday, AOL showed some of the value in announcing a deal with Microsoft.
Under the agreement, AOL will take over management and sales of display, mobile and video advertising that appears on Xbox, Skype and other Microsoft products in the United States, Canada, Japan, Brazil and five European countries. The move takes Microsoft largely out of the display ad business while giving AOL access to some of the web’s most popular destinations.
In turn, Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, will power search results and search advertising on AOL websites. The arrangement could lift Bing, long a second fiddle to Google, which is being displaced as the search engine of choice on AOL sites.
“For us, it’s another piece of validation for how far we’ve taken Bing in six years,” said Rik van der Kooi, corporate vice president at Microsoft.The scene out of Newark City Hall shook Mayor Cory Booker’s seven league boots, at least in the eyes of some jittery supporters, who interpreted last night’s bedlam as political weakness.
But two sources close to Newark politics said Booker – noted more for twittering than brass knuckle Brick City politicking – made the right play last night.
These are craggy, bar stool veterans of Essex and not Booker fans.
It was a 4-4 lockup on the council.
Booker executed a tiebreaking vote to give his side a majority – a majority he could have used when then Council President Donald Payne, Jr. wobbled away from backing Booker on the mayor’s municipal utilities authority (MUA) proposal.
Booker’s allies say anything they did would have prompted havoc from their detractors, including a deviously regenerating Mayor Sharpe James, who wanted his son to supplant Payne in the vacant council seat.
The group that went berserk after acting Council President Anibal Ramos called for a vote on his and the mayor’s ally, Shanique Speight, is composed of a core group of Booker antagonists, including James, Amri Baraka, Donna Jackson, state Sen. Ronald L. Rice (D-28) and former Councilman Donald Bradley.
They badmouth anything Booker does.
Instead of pushing Booker around, they got pushed around, say the old school vets, who acknowledge that a flash of Frank Hague urbanity doesn’t necessarily help the mayor’s image right now.
The move also recemented Booker’s standing as a North Ward-allied brand – to a fault.
Ramos spun the old school move as progressive politics.
North Ward Councilman Anibal Ramos Jr. issued the following statement regarding the City Council’s vote Wednesday on Councilwoman Shanique Speight.
“This is the time for more qualified African American women to take on leadership roles in the city,” he said. “There is no doubt that Councilwoman Shanique Speight is eminently qualified. She was twice elected to the school board, and elected to a leadership role on the board by her colleagues. My goal is to encourage more qualified women to step forward and help us solve critical issues that will be facing the city in the upcoming years.
“This is not a time to play politics or grandstand. We need leadership in this city and we need to move forward and focus on what residents really care about: the budget, public safety and jobs for our residents. This can only be done when we have a full City Council, focused on issues not politics.”
Others – including allies of the mayor’s – didn’t approve of the way Booker handled the situation, arguing that he didn’t project gravitas by simply breaking the tie then leaving without issuing a commanding statement.
“That’s not leadership,” a source groaned.
Most insiders dismissed the event as a day or weeklong story that next week won’t mean much as Booker trains his sights on a gubernatorial run, according to sources close to the mayor.
The front-page chaotic scenes at City Hall coupled with Gov. Chris Christie’s 67% approval rating among likely voters hardly constitute traction for the statewide-contemplating Booker.
The same sources point to state Senate President Steve Sweeney (D-3) as the likely Democratic Party establishment beneficiary if Booker stands down and opts not to oppose Christie, yet despite the rumble strip evening, all signs still point to a Booker bid.
To the point that four black council people on one side and four Latinos on the other presents the picture of a racially divided city, one source noted the backroom agony of At-Large Councilman Luis Quintana.
Quintana was originally going to join the African American foursome in support of John Sharpe James for the seat, in exchange for the council presidency.
When Quintana heard, however, that his would-be allies planned to withdraw their support for his leadership position once he supplied the vote for James, he changed over to Speight, the source said.
At least one source could not unstick himself from a conspiracy theory, suggesting that Booker was keeping everyone guessing about him so he could ultimately announce he’s not running for governor, leave other Democrats with a truncated runway in their statewide bids, and have a laugh with old pal Christie, who holds the Newark purse strings.
“But that’s just me,” said the insider. “I sit here and think up stuff like that.”WASHINGTON — Potomac Electric Power Company (PEPCO) is being sued by the Environmental Protection Agency, which has accused the utility company of dumping more pollutants into the Anacostia River than allowed. The civil suit, filed…
WASHINGTON — Potomac Electric Power Company (PEPCO) is being sued by the Environmental Protection Agency, which has accused the utility company of dumping more pollutants into the Anacostia River than allowed.
The civil suit, filed Friday in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, wants PEPCO to stop allowing pollutants such as iron, zinc, lead, copper and cadmium (similar to zinc), and total suspended solids — solids in water that can be trapped by a filter — to rise above permitted levels into the Anacostia River.
The EPA alleges the pollutants are coming from stormwater discharge from PEPCO’s service center at 3400 Benning Road in Northeast, D.C.
The federal agency is asking for $37,500 for each day of violation and claims there were 131 incidents since Jan. 12, 2009, according to the lawsuit.
The suit also asks that PEPCO develop and implement a plan that addresses the violation issue.
Matt Likovich, a PEPCO spokesman says the company is cooperating with the EPA and is working on a solution. “PEPCO has made extensive efforts to address the EPA’s concerns,” Likovich says.
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© 2015 WTOP. All Rights Reserved.This property is directly associated with the early twentieth century era (1920-1930) when a significant number of commercial buildings were constructed and the modern downtown commercial district was fully established. In 1923 Seattle adopted its first ordinance that regulated specific geographic areas for specified uses; it allowed the most densely concentrated commercial development to occur in the downtown core. The economic prosperity of the 1920s stimulated the development of numerous major highrise commercial buildings, as well as smaller-scale bank and commercial buildings, major hotels and apartment hotels, club buildings and entertainment facilities, which were typically designed by leading Seattle architects. During this era, the original residential district was entirely absorbed by commercial and other real estate development. By 1930, virtually all of the old residential properties - as well as many of the immediate post-fire era commercial buildings outside of Pioneer Square - had been demolished or removed. From the 1920s until the 1960s, the nearby Belltown neighborhood was the center of the film distribution industry in the Pacific Northwest. Seattle was a major center for film related activity with more that fifty movie theaters in operation in city during the 1920s to 1940s, and more than 400 theaters around the state. All of the major studios, as well as many smaller studios, used distribution centers – known as film exchanges – that were located in Belltown. Films were shipped to Seattle by rail from Los Angeles and then transported by truck, ship, rail or automobile to local theaters in Washington, Alaska, Idaho and Montana. Each distributor had salesmen who would preview the films and then go on the road to distribute e the new releases to theater owners and operators. Many theater operators came to Seattle to personally view the films and select titles that they would feature. While “Film Row” was concentrated near Second Avenue and Battery Street by the mid-1920s, the subject building, which was built in 1922 is Seattle’s earliest extant film exchange building. In 1927, the Film Exchange Building (destroyed, c.1990) was constructed at Second Avenue on the entire half-block between Battery and Wall Streets and housed representatives from MGM, United Artists, Universal, Columbia, RKO, Paramount and Warner Brothers. Another major film exchange building was built in 1928 at First Avenue and Battery Street, now the location of the Belltown Court Condominiums. The McGraw-Kittenger-Case Building (c. 1930) at SW corner of Second and Battery subsequently housed the MGM distribution activities. Other buildings in the immediate vicinity housed theater furnishing suppliers, poster companies, and other film or theater-related businesses. Pathe or Pathé Frères is the name of various businesses founded and originally operated by the Pathé brothers of France. Their movie company was founded in 1896 and by the early 1900s it had become the largest film equipment and movie production company in the world, as well as a major phonograph record producer. By 1909, the company had film production facilities and film distribution system in France, Belgium and London; and had built more than 200 movie theaters, including theaters in New York City Rome and Moscow. Prior to WWI, Pathe dominated the European market in motion picture cameras and projectors. In 1908, the company invented the concept of the newsreel that was shown in theaters prior to the feature film. Newsreels featured the Pathé symbol of a crowing rooster at the beginning of each reel. Beginning in 1914, the company operated film production studios in New Jersey and several extremely successful movies were made there. By 1918, both the record company and the film division were so successful it became necessary to separate the operations; thus, Pathé -Cinema became responsible for film production, distribution and exhibition. In 1923, Pathé sold its U.S. motion picture production arm, which Joseph P. Kennedy merged with two other companies to create RKO Pictures in 1928. In 1927, Pathe sold its British film studios but retained its theaters and film distribution operations. Between 1929 and 1990, the company went through several changes in ownership, business operations and name. Since 1999, it again became know as Pathé and continues to produce and distribute motion pictures and DVDs. A design for a Pathe Film Exchange Building was prepared in 1918 by Gerald C. Field; however, it is not if or where it may have been constructed. The building permit for the subject building was issued to Mary Richardson and Minnie Crawford on May 9, 1922 with construction plans prepared by J.G. Everett. Film exchange buildings included special vaults to store highly flammable nitrate films and often included small theaters in order to screen films. The Pathe Building included office, clerical, inspection and shipping spaces as well as two fireproof and well-ventilated storage vaults, a viewing booth, a rotation room and a large poster storage space. A name plate“Pathe” is inscribed in cast stone on the façade. Of particular note is the inclusion of two Rooster ornaments that flank the name plate; the Rooster is the long-time symbol of the Pathe Company and continues to be used as of this date. Mary E.D. Richardson appears to have continued to own the building until 1962. In 1989, the building interior was altered in order to be used by the YWCA as a community center. The current interior condition is not known. This appears to be a relatively well- preserved example of a unique downtown property type directly associated with the motion picture industry. As a rare and architecturally interesting former film exchange facility this property is worthy of addition examination and research.U.S. Offshore Wind Potential Four Times Total Power Generated
In their technical report, Marc Schwartz, Donna Heimiller, Steve Haymes, and Walt Musial state, "Offshore wind resources have the potential to be a significant domestic renewable energy source for coastal electricity loads."
Issued Friday, the NREL report presents the first draft of a national validated offshore wind resource database needed to understand the magnitude of the U.S. wind resource and to plan the distribution and development of future offshore wind power facilities. No offshore wind farms currently exist in the United States.
Wind availability and distribution is characterized by level of annual average wind speed, water depth, distance from shore, and state administrative areas.
The estimate does not describe actual planned offshore wind development, and the report does not consider that some offshore areas may be excluded from energy development on the basis of environmental, human use, or technical considerations.
The "Assessment of Offshore Wind Energy Resources for the United States" shows that 4,150 gigawatts of potential maximum wind turbine capacity from offshore wind resources are available in the United States.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, in 2008 the nation's total electric generating capacity from all sources was 1,010 gigawatts.
The NREL report's estimate is based on the latest high-resolution maps predicting annual average wind speeds, and shows the gross energy potential of offshore wind resources.
The potential electric generating capacity was calculated from the total offshore area within 50 nautical miles of shore, in areas where average annual wind speeds are at least 16 miles per hour at a height of 295 feet.
The research team assumed that five megawatts of wind turbines could be placed in every square kilometer of water that met these wind characteristics.
Detailed resource maps and tables for the offshore wind resources of 26 coastal states' bordering the oceans and the Great Lakes break down the wind energy potential by wind speed, water depth, and distance from shore.
The offshore transformer station at the Lillgrund wind farm in the Oresund Sound between Malmo and Copenhagen converts the electricity produced by 48 turbines for use by 60,000 households supplied by the Swedish national grid. (Photo courtesy Siemens)
In May 2008, the U.S. Department of Energy released a report detailing a deployment scenario by which the United States could achieve 20 percent of its electric energy supply from wind energy.
Under this scenario, offshore wind was an essential contributor, providing 54 gigawatts of installed electric capacity to the grid.
"When President Obama took office in January 2009, his message clearly reinforced this challenge in a broader context of energy independence, environmental stewardship, and a strengthened economy based on clean renewable energy sources," the authors state.
But many technical and economic challenges remain to be overcome to achieve the deployment levels described in the 20 percent wind report, the authors acknowledge.
"Many coastal areas in the United States have large electricity demand but have limited access to a high-quality land-based wind resource, and these areas are typically limited in their access to interstate grid transmission," they say.
The new database will be periodically revised to reflect better wind resource estimates and to include updated information from other datasets. It is intended to serve as the foundation for future modifications that may include specific exclusion areas for the calculation of the nation's offshore wind resource potential.
Offshore wind projects totaling more than 5,000 megawatts have been proposed and are in the planning or development stages in the United States and interest in offshore wind power development is growing among governments and also in the private sector.
On July 14, the American Wind Energy Association, AWEA, the national wind industry association, announced the formation of the Offshore Wind Development Coalition, called OffshoreWindDC. The new coalition will focus on advocacy and education efforts to promote offshore wind energy.
Founding members and contributors to the Offshore Wind Development Coalition include the corporations Apex Wind, Cape Wind, Deepwater Wind, Fishermen's Energy, NRG Bluewater Wind, OffshoreMW, and Seawind Renewable.
Jim Lanard, president of OffshoreWindDC, said, "We are delighted to join with AWEA to advocate for policies that will support the development of this well-established technology. Our joint efforts will lead to job creation, significant economic development opportunities and environmental and energy security for our country."
"The creation of this coalition demonstrates the growing interest in offshore wind energy in the U.S.," said AWEA CEO Denise Bode. "Offshore wind provides a great opportunity to increase the use of renewable energy, thanks to the strong and steady winds that blow off our shores and proximity to electricity demand centers, particularly along the Eastern Seaboard and in the Great Lakes."
The new coalition will join AWEA in working to secure long-term tax policy for offshore wind and shorten the permitting timeline for projects.
The effort will involve AWEA, offshore wind developers, and other stakeholders in states such as Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Michigan, Illinois and Ohio.
Bode said, "Offshore wind energy is proven in Europe, and will soon be hard at work here in America, powering our economy, protecting our environment, and creating jobs."
In June, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar and the governors of 10 East Coast states signed a Memorandum of Understanding that formally establishes an Atlantic Offshore Wind Energy Consortium to promote the efficient, orderly, and responsible development of wind resources on the Outer Continental Shelf.
On April 21, the federal government approved Cape Wind, a 130-turbine wind power project in Nantucket Sound off the Massachusetts coast that is the nation's first approved offshore wind development.
A public-private partnership in New York State is developing a 350-megawatt offshore wind project. The Long Island - New York City Offshore Wind Project would be located about 13 nautical miles off the Rockaway Peninsula in the New York City borough of Queens.
The New York Power Authority now is reviewing five proposals from wind developers to build offshore wind turbines in lakes Ontario or Erie. Lawmakers in some lakeside counties have expressed opposition.
In addition, NRG Bluewater Wind has proposed wind power projects off the coasts of Delaware, Maryland, and New Jersey; and Deepwater Wind is involved with projects off the coasts of Rhode Island and New Jersey.
On August 19, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie signed into law the most comprehensive legislation yet passed by a state to support the development of offshore wind energy. The Offshore Wind Economic Development Act directs the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities to develop and establish an offshore wind renewable energy certificate program that requires a percentage of electricity sold in the state to be from offshore wind energy.
There have been some setbacks. On August 20, Duke Energy announced the cancellation of plans to develop a three-turbine offshore wind demonstration project in a lagoon in North Carolina's Pamlico Sound. Duke blamed high costs and greater than expected environmental impacts.
Nevertheless, the U.S. Department of Energy estimates that of the 300,000 MW of wind power that could generate 20 percent of U.S. electricity in 20 years, 50,000 MW would likely be offshore.His mummified remains are among the best preserved human bodies in Europe, but the coffin of a 17th century Swedish bishop has been found to have been hiding a dark secret.
Scans of the body of Peder Winstrup, Bishop of Lund, have revealed the churchman was not alone when he was buried, after the remains of a young foetus were found concealed at his feet.
Experts have been left baffled as to who the child may have been but speculate it could have been a relative of the bishop.
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The foetus (shown above) was discovered beneath the feet of Bishop Peder Winstrup in his coffin. It is thought to have been in gestation for around five months and may have been the result of a miscarriage. Experts hope to conduct DNA tests to find out if the foetus was related to the bishop
They added the tiny body could also have been hidden in the Lutheran bishop's coffin by a member of his staff hoping to rid themselves of an embarrassing secret.
Researchers had been conducting CT and x-ray scans of the bishop's body in the hope of finding out more about how he died and how his body had been preserved.
WHO WAS BISHOP WINSTRUP? Bishop Peder Winstrup was born in 1605 and died in 1679. He was the Bishop of Lund in Scania when it was under the control of both the Danish empire and the kingdom of Sweden. He was a leading theologian at the time and is credited with having persuaded the king of Sweden to open a new university in Lund. His body was not embalmed, but instead was dried out in the dry cold climate in his crypt in the cathedral in Lund. It is thought plant material placed in the coffin, the lack of fat on the body after a long period of illness and the burial taking place in the winter months helped ensure the body was well-preserved. The extent of the preservation was revealed using CT scanners at Lund University hospital, which showed individual internal organs could be distinguished still inside the body.
They discovered rather than being removed, the bishop's internal organs were left intact.
Researchers also determined the bishop suffered a series of ailments through his life before dying at the age of 74 years old, including gout, severe arthritis and heart disease.
Dried fluid and mucus in the sinuses also suggest he may have been bed ridden for a long period before dying, while calcifications in the lungs indicate he suffered from tuberculosis and pneumonia.
Scientists said the foetus found in the coffin had only been in gestation for around five months and so may have been the result of a miscarriage.
They now hope to conduct DNA tests on both the foetus and the bishop to see if they can establish if they are related.
Per Karsten, director of Lund University Historical Museum, said: 'One of the main discoveries when we conducted the CT scanning is that Mr Winstrup is not alone in the coffin.
'Actually he has a companion. There is a small child - a foetus of a human child. It has been deliberately concealed under his feet at the bottom of the coffin.
'Maybe there is a connection between Winstrup and this child.
Researchers conducted the scans to learn more about how the body of Bishop Winstrup had been preserved. They found his internal organs were still intact inside his body and the climate of his crypt had dried the body
The scans showed the Swedish bishop had dried fluid in his sinuses and had probably been bed ridden for some time before his death in 1679. The x-ray above shows a scan of Bishop Winstrup's head
'You can only speculate as to whether it was one of Winstrup's next of kin, or whether someone else took the opportunity while preparing the coffin.
'But we hope to be able to clarify any kinship through a DNA test.'
Bishop Winstrup, who was born in 1605 and died in 1679, was the Bishop of Lund in Scania when it was under the control of both the Danish empire and the kingdom of Sweden.
He was a leading theologian at the time and is credited with having persuaded the king of Sweden to open a new university in Lund.
His body was not embalmed, but instead was dried out in the dry cold climate in his crypt in the cathedral in Lund.
It is thought plant material placed in the coffin, the lack of fat on the body after a long period of illness and the burial taking place in the winter months helped ensure the body was well-preserved.
The extent of the preservation was revealed using CT scanners at Lund University hospital, which showed individual internal organs could be distinguished still inside the body.
The remains of Peder Winstrop Bishop of Lund (shown above) are one of the best preserved human bodies in Europe and were mummified by the cold dry conditions in his crypt in Lund Cathedral. When researchers conducted CT scans on the bishop's coffin they discovered the remains of the foetus hidden beneath his feet
Bishop Winstrup, shown in the portrait above, was an influential church figure. Scans of his body revealed details of his life suggesting he had a diet of fatty and sugary food but was crippled with arthritis
Scientists also found the bishop had several gallstones in his gall bladder and his veins were filled with plaque, suggestive of heart disease from an unhealthy lifestyle. Scans of his body (above) showed his lungs suggest he suffered from tuberculosis and pneumonia. He had been bed ridden for a long period before his death
HOW TO CREATE A MUMMY Researchers have used ancient Egyptian techniques to mummify human limbs in an attempt to understand how it was done. They placed a human leg - donated to science - into a pine box on a layer of natron. Natron was originally mined in ancient Egypt at Wadi Natrum and was an essential component of the mummification process. For their study the scientists created 154lbs (70kg) artificial natron by combining sodium carbonate, bicarbonate, sodium choloride and sodium sulfate. They created a natron layer 4-inch (10cm) thick in the pine box and placed the leg on top before covering it with the rest of the natron. This was then kept in a fume hood for 208 days. In ancient Egypt, however, the dry air and heat would also have speeded the process up by helping dehydrate the tissues.
The study also revealed details of the bishop's lifestyle. His gall bladder was found to contain several gallstones indicating Winstrup had a high consumption of fatty foods.
He would probably have had trouble walking with osteoarthritis in his knee and hip joints, and he had lost a number of teeth.
The remaining teeth had traces of dental caries, suggesting he ate a lot of sugary foods.
Caroline Ahlström Arcini, an osteologist at Lund University |
fight for what he thinks is right in Wednesday’s vote.
He voted no.
Seattle Times reporters Coral Garnick, Sanjay Bhatt, Alexa Vaughn and Alisa Reznick contributed to this story.
Dominic Gates: 206-464-2963 or dgates@seattletimes.comFine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty
One hundred and fifty years of mathematics will be proved wrong if a new computer program stops running. Thankfully, it’s unlikely to happen, but the code behind it is testing the limits of the mathematical realm.
The program is a simulated Turing machine, a mathematical model of computation created by codebreaker Alan Turing. In 1936, he showed that the actions of any computer algorithm can be mimicked by a simple machine that reads and writes 0s and 1s on an infinitely long tape by working through a set of states, or instructions. The more complex the algorithm, the more states the machine requires.
Now Scott Aaronson and Adam Yedidia of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created three Turing machines with behaviour that is entwined in deep questions of mathematics. This includes the proof of the 150-year-old Riemann hypothesis – thought to govern the patterns of prime numbers.
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Turing’s machines have long been used to probe such questions. Their origins lie in a series of philosophical revelations that rocked the mathematical world in the 1930s. First, Kurt Gödel proved that some mathematical statements can never be proved true or false – they are undecidable. He essentially created a mathematical version of the sentence “This sentence is false”: a logical brain-twister that contradicts itself.
No proof of everything
Gödel’s assertion has a get-out clause. If you change the base assumptions on which proofs are built – the axioms – you can render a problem decidable. But that will still leave other problems that are undecidable. That means there are no axioms that let you prove everything.
Following Gödel’s arguments, Turing proved that there must be some Turing machines whose behaviour cannot be predicted under the standard axioms – known as Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory with the axiom of choice (C), or more snappily, ZFC – underpinning most of mathematics. But we didn’t know how complex they would have to be.
Now, Yedidia and Aaronson have created a Turing machine with 7918 states that has this property. And they’ve named it “Z”.
“We tried to make it concrete, and say how many states does it take before you get into this abyss of unprovability?” says Aaronson.
The pair simulated Z on a computer, but it is small enough that it could theoretically be built as a physical device, says Terence Tao of the University of California, Los Angeles. “If one were then to turn such a physical machine on, what we believe would happen would be that it would run indefinitely,” he says, assuming you ignore physical wear and tear or energy requirements.
No end in sight
Z is designed to loop through its 7918 instructions forever, but if it did eventually stop, it would prove ZFC inconsistent. Mathematicians wouldn’t be too panicked, though – they could simply shift to a slightly stronger set of axioms. Such axioms already exist, and could be used to prove the behaviour of Z, but there is little to be gained in doing so because there will always be a Turing machine to exceed any axiom.
“One can think of any given axiom system as being like a computer with a certain limited amount of memory or processing power,” says Tao. “One could switch to a computer with even more storage, but no matter how large an amount of storage space the computer has, there will still exist some tasks that are beyond its ability.”
But Aaronson and Yedidia have created two other machines that might give mathematicians more pause. These will stop only if two famous mathematical problems, long believed to be true, are actually false. These are Goldbach’s conjecture, which states that every even whole number greater than 2 is the sum of two prime numbers, and the Riemann hypothesis, which says that all prime numbers follow a certain pattern. The latter forms the basis for parts of modern number theory, and disproving it would be a major, if unlikely, upset.
Practical benefits
Practically, the pair have no intention of running their Turing machines indefinitely in an attempt to prove these problems wrong. It’s not a particularly efficient way to attack that problem, says Lance Fortnow of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.
Expressing mathematical problems as Turing machines has a different practical benefit: it helps to work out how complex they are. The Goldbach machine has 4888 states, the Riemann one has 5372, while Z has 7918, suggesting the ZFC problem is the most complex of the three. “That would match most people’s intuitions about these sorts of things,” Aaronson says.
Yedidia has placed his code online, and mathematicians may now compete to reduce the size of these Turing machines, pushing them to the limit. Already a commenter on Aaronson’s blog claims to have created a 31-state Goldbach machine, although the pair have yet to verify this.
Fortnow says the actual size of the Turing machines are irrelevant. “The paper tells us that we can have very compressed descriptions that already go beyond the power of ZFC, but even if they were more compressed, it wouldn’t give us much pause about the foundations of math,” he says.
But Aaronson says shrinking Z further could say something interesting about the limits of the foundations of maths – something Gödel and Turing are likely to have wanted to know. “They might have said ‘that’s nice, but can you get 800 states? What about 80 states?’” Aaronson says. “I would like to know if there is a 10-state machine whose behaviour is independent of ZFC.”
Reference: http://www.scottaaronson.com/busybeaver.pdf
Correction:Since this article was published, we have updated our description of Gödel's assertion.The BBC have released their annual Price Of Football 2017 report which looks at the cost of following your club and how deep in your pockets you may have to dig being a fan this year.
From season tickets to programmes, the BBC report reveals everything you need to know about the cost of supporting your team. However, there is one piece of data that we all really care about, and that is how much a pie and pint is going to cost us at each stadium.
So, we at OddsMonkey have analysed the data from the BBC and used our own research to find out who tops the premier league table for the cheapest pie and pint.
Burnley top the league for the cheapest pie and pint
The latest 2017 data reveals that Burnley are the true champions when it comes to offering the cheapest pie and pint. Not only do they sell pies at the lowest price of £3.00, but also charge just £3.20 for a pint, costing fans £6.20 in total.
Tottenham is at the bottom of the league, shocking their fans with a costly price of £8.60 for a pie and a pint. That’s a huge £2.40 more than Burnley just to be a Tottenham fan and enjoy something to eat and drink while watching the match.
Chelsea, however, charge their fans the most for a pint at their stadium, with prices set at a whopping £4.80.
How much does your team charge? Take a look at the table below to see where your team sits in the pie and pint league.
Team Pie Pint Total Burnley £3.00 £3.20 £6.20 Stoke £3.20 £3.20 £6.40 Everton £3.30 £3.30 £6.60 Huddersfield £3.40 £3.20 £6.60 Liverpool £3.40 £3.40 £6.80 West Brom £3.40 £3.40 £6.80 Bournemouth £3.50 £3.50 £7.00 Southampton £3.50 £3.50 £7.00 Newcastle £3.60 £3.60 £7.20 Chelsea £2.50 £4.80 £7.30 Arsenal £3.90 £3.90 £7.80 Swansea £3.90 £3.90 £7.80 West Ham £3.90 £3.90 £7.80 Man Utd £3.90 £4.00 £7.90 Crystal Palace £4.00 £4.00 £8.00 Leicester £4.00 £4.00 £8.00 Man City £4.00 £4.00 £8.00 Brighton £4.10 £4.20 £8.30 Watford £4.20 £4.10 £8.30 Tottenham £4.30 £4.30 £8.60
The BBC’s Price of Football report reveals that West Ham has the cheapest season ticket price this year at just £289, whereas a season ticket to watch Arsenal play could set you back £891.
Peter Watton at OddsMonkey says: “Man City might currently be at the top of the table when it comes to the most points this season but Burnley sit at the top for their cheapest pie and pint price.
“It’s also interesting to see that Arsenal have once again come out top of the BBC’s report on the most expensive season tickets. What’s not always clear, though, is that Arsenal include the cost of the first 7 FA Cup and European games in their season ticket price. So, the cheapest Arsenal ticket is actually for 19 home league games and 7 cup/euro games, which makes the price per game £34.27 which is actually cheaper than a Liverpool home season ticket which work out to be just over £36.
“Another interesting point to note is that this is the first year that Arsenal’s season ticket prices have reduced. But don’t get too excited Arsenal fans, we understand that this is purely due to the fact that they did not qualify for the Champions’ League and the only likely scenario that the tickets would reduce again is if they didn’t qualify for even the Europa league next season.”Writing an S-Expression parser in Ruby
S-Expressions are a very versatile syntax for defining data structures and program code that are used by most Lisp-derived programming languages.
When experimenting with new languages S-Expressions are fantastic because they are extremely flexible but only require minimal effort to parse. In this article I am going to cover the basic principles of creating a robust S-Expression parser in Ruby.
Note: if you just want a complete and working S-Expression parser library for Ruby please check out Sexpistol
Note: Since writing this article I have found a more performant and concise parsing method using StringScanner. I will be writing an updated post shortly. If you would like to to have a look at the completed code using the new method check it out at GitHub. The code in this article is still relevant as an introduction.
Our parser
One of the first things we should have a look at is a simple example of some program code written as an S-Expression:
1 (define test (lambda () ( 2 begin 3 (print "test") 4 (print 1) 5 ))) 6 7 (test)
The first step in most parsers is to break the input text up into ‘tokens’, and in order to do that we have to know what the possible tokens are in our target grammar. In our case we have it easy as there are only 5 distinct tokens that we care about initially:
Opening parentheses (
Closing parentheses )
Symbols define begin print etc...
String literals "test" "foo" etc...
Integer literals 2 5 99 etc...
The first thing we should notice is that one of these tokens is a ‘special case’ in that it can contain other sequences of characters that we would normally perceive as tokens in of themselves. This complicated token is the String literal.
In order to simplify the problem for ourselves the first thing we are going to do is find all of the string literals, copy them into an array, and then replace them with a special placeholder string:
1 def extract_string_literals ( string ) 2 string_literal_pattern = /"([^"\\]|\\.)*"/ 3 string_replacement_token = "___+++STRING_LITERAL+++___" 4 # Find and extract all the string literals 5 string_literals = [] 6 string. gsub ( string_literal_pattern ) { | x | string_literals << x } 7 # Replace all the string literals with our special placeholder token 8 string = string. gsub ( string_literal_pattern, string_replacement_token ) 9 # Return the modified string and the array of string literals 10 return [ string, string_literals ] 11 end
After running a string through this method we have a new string in which we do not have to worry about any special cases, there is no possibility a parentheses is going to be detected inside a string literal which makes our life much easier.
Next let’s split up the input into its individual tokens. We can do this quite simply by adding spaces around each opening or closing parentheses and then splitting the string up on whitespace like so:
1 def tokenize_string ( string ) 2 string = string. gsub ( "(", " ( " ) 3 string = string. gsub ( ")", " ) " ) 4 token_array = string. split ( " " ) 5 return token_array 6 end
Now that we have an array of tokens we actually need to add our string literals back into their correct places in the array, we can do this by iterating over our array of tokens and detecting our string replacement token ___+++STRING_LITERAL+++___ :
1 def restore_string_literals ( token_array, string_literals ) 2 return token_array. map do | x | 3 if ( x == '___+++STRING_LITERAL+++___' ) 4 # Since we've detected that a string literal needs to be replaced we 5 # will grab the first available string from the string_literals array 6 string_literals. shift 7 else 8 # This is not a string literal so we need to just return the token as it is 9 x 10 end 11 end 12 end
Finally we have a complete and clean array of tokens from our S-Expression! The next step is parsing these tokens into whatever form we require. In this case what we are going to do is turn each token into an object of it’s relevant Ruby class. Symbols to Symbol, integers to Fixnum, and strings to String. To do this we need to first be able to detect each type of token, we will define four simple methods to help us with this:
1 # A helper method to take care of the repetitive stuff for us 2 def is_match? ( string, pattern ) 3 match = string. match ( pattern ) 4 return false unless match 5 # Make sure that the matched pattern consumes the entire token 6 match [ 0 ]. length == string. length 7 end 8 9 # Detect a symbol 10 def is_symbol? ( string ) 11 # Anything other than parentheses, single or double quote and commas 12 return is_match? ( string, /[^\"\'\,\(\)]+/ ) 13 end 14 15 # Detect an integer literal 16 def is_integer_literal? ( string ) 17 # Any number of numerals optionally preceded by a plus or minus sign 18 return is_match? ( string, /[\-\+]?[0-9]+/ ) 19 end 20 21 # Detect a string literal 22 def is_string_literal? ( string ) 23 # Any characters except double quotes 24 # (except if preceded by a backslash), surrounded by quotes 25 return is_match? ( string, /"([^"\\]|\\.)*"/ ) 26 end
Now we are able to detect all of the tokens in our grammar! Next we need to convert them to our target Ruby objects:
1 def convert_tokens ( token_array ) 2 converted_tokens = [] 3 token_array. each do | t | 4 converted_tokens << "(" and next if ( t == "(" ) 5 converted_tokens << ")" and next if ( t == ")" ) 6 converted_tokens << t. to_i and next if ( is_integer_literal? ( t ) ) 7 converted_tokens << t. to_sym and next if ( is_symbol? ( t ) ) 8 converted_tokens << eval ( t ) and next if ( is_string_literal? ( t ) ) 9 # If we haven't recognized the token by now we need to raise 10 # an exception as there are no more rules left to check against! 11 raise Exception, "Unrecognized token: #{ t } " 12 end 13 return converted_tokens 14 end
Now we have a nice array of tokens that represent our data! Unfortunately it is still a flat array, so our last step needs to be to re-create the structure defined in the input text using arrays. To do this in an elegant way we are going to use a recursive method:
1 def re_structure ( token_array, offset = 0 ) 2 struct = [] 3 while ( offset < token_array. length ) 4 if ( token_array [ offset ] == "(" ) 5 # Multiple assignment from the array that re_structure() returns 6 offset, tmp_array = re_structure ( token_array, offset + 1 ) 7 struct << tmp_array 8 elsif ( token_array [ offset ] == ")" ) 9 break 10 else 11 struct << token_array [ offset ] 12 end 13 offset += 1 14 end 15 return [ offset, struct ] 16 end
Now that we have all the pieces we can parse S-Expressions by simply chaining the methods together!
1 def parse ( string ) 2 string, string_literals = extract_string_literals ( string ) 3 token_array = tokenize_string ( string ) 4 token_array = restore_string_literals ( token_array, string_literals ) 5 token_array = convert_tokens ( token_array ) 6 s_expression = re_structure ( token_array ) [ 1 ] 7 return s_expression 8 end
Feeding in an S-Expression like:
1 (this (is a number 1( example "s-expression")))
produces:
1 [[ :this, [ :is, :a, :number, 1, [ :example, "s-expression" ]]]]
Obviously we would like to encapsulate this code into a class for neatness and convenience, if you don’t want to do this yourself you can check out Sexpistol, a pre-implemented and tested S-Expression parser library for Ruby.
For the full example code please see this GistA foot in the door:
For an individual with autism, landing a first job can be a struggle. Bryan Siravo spent four years in vocational school learning skills such as information technology and repair of casino equipment. Despite at least 15 job interviews, he couldn’t find work. He came to the Dan Marino Foundation in 2011 for a summer internship, and later enrolled in an information technology program there. He learned etiquette and interview skills while doing coursework toward a Microsoft certification. The foundation’s staff helped him land internships with an insurance company and a trophy manufacturer. Finally, in 2014, he got a job working part-time at a storage facility.
Siravo says he didn’t mind the long commute by bus, or the fact that his role was closer to maintenance than information technology, but he notes that there were some difficult adjustments nonetheless. He and his supervisor “sort of had tiffs,” Siravo says. “She thought I was using my disability to make excuses, which I never do.”
Siravo was ready to quit, until Steffen Lue, a career services manager at the foundation, intervened. This issue came down to communication, Lue says: Siravo needed a set schedule, and his manager needed him to report back to her. Not only was the issue resolved, but Lue says the two “became best friends.” (The manager agrees.) When the foundation hired Siravo in 2015 to do tech support for its virtual interview program, people at the storage facility joked that the foundation had “stolen” their employee.
The program Siravo attended has evolved into a school called the Marino Campus, where students pay tuition for 10 months of classes in hospitality, retail or information technology, culminating in national-level certification exams. At the same time, they learn social and workplace skills, practice interviewing with both people and digital avatars, and go through two internships.
Staff members make sure students apply classroom skills during their internships, something people with autism often find difficult to do. Job coaches also help them figure out bus schedules, address family issues and role-play interviews. With clients on the spectrum, Lue says, it can be hard to predict all the topics to cover. He recalls picking up one client to drive him to an interview, only to discover that the young man had dressed in his lucky wizard outfit.
Of the first 16 students, who graduated last year, 9 are employed. This year’s class has 32 students. A second campus is scheduled to open this September at Florida International University in Miami.
Once the graduates get a foot in the door, Lue says, “they’re more motivated to work than a neurotypical. It’s the honest truth.” Even as interns, the students are invaluable, says Rebecca Bratter, shareholder at the law firm Greenspoon Marder in Fort Lauderdale, which has taken on about a dozen Marino interns over the past two years. The students take pride in their work and do tasks none of the employees want to, such as handling a backlog of returned mail, Bratter says. “[We didn’t] know how much we really needed them until we got them.”
Even people with severe autism who might not seem like good candidates for the workplace can do well if given enough initial support, says Paul Wehman, professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. Wehman has been studying ways for people with severe autism and disabilities to transition into employment since the 1980s. Beginning in 2009, he led a randomized controlled trial in which his team placed 31 young adults with autism in a series of three 10-week hospital internships. “Some of these folks were pretty quirky,” Wehman says — nonverbal, or prone to outbursts.
The internships charged the students with tasks such as binding books, sanitizing equipment and checking expiration dates on drugs. The students also had classroom training. Meanwhile, 18 controls continued with their existing high school special education programs. Three months after their internships ended, 90 percent of the participants were employed part-time within the hospital; they had also become significantly more independent in the workplace, as measured by how much physical assistance, verbal instruction or other help they needed. Of the control group participants, only one person had gained employment in the same time period.
Wehman is in the third year of a larger follow-up study at four hospitals, which will have 80 to 90 people in the treatment group and a similar number of controls. He declined to reveal specifics before the study ends, but says that so far, the results echo the earlier study’s finding that supported internships can help adults with autism find and keep jobs. “Their learning trajectory is excellent when given the right training and support,” Wehman says. One participant was asked in a job interview what he liked about the workplace, and he simply answered, “Lunch!” But because the employer had seen the work he could do during his internship, he got the job.
Back at the Dan Marino Foundation, Siravo is finally working in the field he trained for — as support technician for the avatar program, called Virtual Interactive Training Agent.
A hidden human operator controls the virtual experience, moving the avatar to new questions as a student gives answers, says the program’s manager, Robert Ahlness. Instructors score recordings of the virtual interviews and discuss them in class. Six avatars, men and women of different ethnicities, appear in various moods and settings to give the students experience with the many types of interviewers they might encounter. George was set to ‘hostile’ when I met him. For a gentle experience, Ahlness uses an avatar named Kevin set to ‘soft touch,’ who gives encouraging feedback such as “Very cool” and “You’re doing great!” Using avatars is more efficient and consistent than role-playing with people, says Ahlness, and it’s also less stressful for students with autism, who may feel uncomfortable in social situations.
In a pilot study, the foundation found that four sessions with an avatar improved students’ interview scores by 80 percent. “The difference between beginning and end is amazing,” says the foundation’s chief executive officer, Mary Partin. The foundation plans to sell subscriptions to the program to other organizations that help people with autism or other disabilities.Order Shake Shack, Five Guys and More Through Amazon Alexa
Olo, the online food ordering service for restaurants, announced today that it is teaming up with Amazon to bring its customers access to Amazon Alexa users. That means Olo’s current restaurant partners ranging from Five Guys and Shake Shack to Chipotle and sweetgreen can now fulfill orders through Amazon Restaurants meal delivery service. Gus Lopez, general manager of Amazon Restaurants commented:
We are excited to leverage Olo’s digital ordering technology and continue rapidly growing our network of restaurants to give Amazon Prime members more options for fast delivery from their favorite brands.
Alexa Provides Instant Gratification for Everyday Activities
This is another example of Amazon moving quickly to make Alexa-enabled devices more integrated into everyday habits. What do we do everyday? We set alarms and timers. We check the weather. We turn on the lights. We order food. The idea is to put Alexa everywhere in every device so she is always available to fulfill our needs. Then make sure Alexa can provide the services that people need each day. As the saying goes, “You gotta eat.”
A Two-Way Deal for Olo and Amazon
This looks like a two-way deal. Olo gets Amazon as a customer and becomes the new platform for Amazon Restaurants to onboard new restaurants. Olo customers become eligible for Amazon Restaurants delivery service and immediately expand their customer reach. Amazon Restaurants users get access to 200 restaurants with 40,000 locations. Pretty soon you may be ordering Shake Shack delivery from your smart glasses while walking to your home. I’m sure that sounds like paradise to more than a few people.
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3Sleeping, taking days off, eating enough healthy food, managing stress all have huge impacts on our ability to recover.
We hear it all the time: Training doesn't make you bigger, stronger or faster. Recovery from training makes you bigger, stronger and faster.
Read More >>
We hear it all the time: Training doesn't make you bigger, stronger or faster. Recovery from training makes you bigger, stronger and faster.
Sleeping, taking days off, eating enough healthy food, managing stress all have huge impacts on our ability to recover.
When these aren't enough, we look to add other modalities such as ice baths, contrast showers, antioxidants, protein supplements, compression, etc.
But there's one powerful technique very few athletes use: Belly breathing, also known as diaphragmatic breathing. This is where you breathe in deeply through your nose, allowing your belly to expand and collapse with each breath.
Diaphragmatic Breathing Reduces Exercise-Induced Oxidative Stress
A study was done on 16 athletes following an intense training session.
They were separated into two equal groups.
The Diaphragmatic Breathing (DB) group spent one hour post-workout in a quiet place performing diaphragmatic breathing and concentrating on their breath.
The control group spent the same hour relaxing in a similar quiet place, not focusing on diaphragmatic breathing.
Researchers then analyzed oxidative stress, antioxidant defense status, melatonin and cortisol levels and compared them between the groups.
What Happened?
In both groups, the exercise induced a strong oxidative stress response.
In theory, minimizing this stress response post-workout allows for faster recovery from training.
A few cool things happened in the diaphragmatic breathing (DB) group vs. the control group:
Significantly lower oxidative stress levels
Significantly greater "antioxidant defense status"
Lower levels of cortisol (an inhibitor of antioxidant activity)—however the difference was not statistically significant
Significantly higher levels of melatonin (a strong antioxidant)
Taken collectively, we can say that belly breathing post-workout reduces the production of cortisol, increases melatonin levels, increases antioxidant defense status, and reduces oxidative stress.
The researchers concluded diaphragmatic breathing is a useful method to accelerate recovery and improve performance.
If you're struggling to recover from intense training, consider belly breathing for a few minutes post-workout. It could be the simple fix you need to speed up recovery time, allowing you to train harder, longer, and more often.
READ MORE:
Photo Credit: Getty Images // ThinkstockForget nature versus nurture, new research on twins hints at a crack in the conventional view that environment and genes combine to influence our traits.
“Environment makes twins different – that’s part of our traditional paradigm that is pretty well known,” says Art Petronis, a geneticist at the University of Toronto, who led the new study. “Unfortunately, most of the attempts to identify what specific environmental factors make twins different failed.”
Instead, inherited chemical adornments to DNA letters might play a substantial role in shaping individual differences between all people.
Petronis’ team found that “identical” twins, who by definition share DNA, exhibit considerably different patterns of one kind of chemical modification across their genomes. These modifications, known as methylations, can affect gene activation, as well as DNA replication and recombination.
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Functional variations
Dubbed the epigenome, scientists have found increasing evidence that such changes underlie susceptibility to cancer, mental illness and, in mice, coat colour.
Researchers, including Petronis, have noticed individual genes and swathes of DNA that seem to differ between identical twins, but this is the first effort to look across the entire human genome.
Using DNA microarrays designed to measure methylation, Petronis’ team compared the patterns in tissues belonging to 57 pairs of identical twins. This method interrogated just 1 or 2% of the total genome, but at sites peppered across the 22 non-sex chromosomes.
“We detected that epigenetic differences are a universal phenomenon. We see them in various locations across the entire genome,” he says.
What’s more, twins spawned from fertilised eggs that separated after just a few cell divisions differed more than twins who split days later. This suggests that some epigenetic divergence occurs very early in embryo development, Petronis says.
Fraternal or non-identical twins share even fewer methylations than identical twins, Petronis’ team found. He theorises that these epigenetic variations are vestiges of methylation patterns initially present in sperm or egg cells.
Developmental differences
His team did not examine the result of these epigenetic changes, but other scientists have little doubt they contribute to traits such as disease susceptibility. “Some fraction of them I’m sure will lead to functional differences,” says Andrew Chess, a biologist at Harvard Medical School.
Randy Jirtle, a geneticist at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina, thinks meeting twins in person offers ample proof of the epigenome at work. “Behaviourally they are a little different, but not so much in the way they look,” he says.
The importance of epigenetic changes doesn’t stop with twins. Jirtle speculates that developmental differences between organisms lies principally in epigenetic modifications, not DNA sequences: “If we had the same epigenome as a mouse, we’d have a snout and a long tail.”
Journal reference: Nature Genetics (DOI: 10.1038/ng.286)mytest
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Hi Blog. “Embedded Racism: Japan’s Visible Minorities and Racial Discrimination” has been receiving acclaim. Prominent Japan Scholar Tessa Morris-Suzuki calls it “important, courageous and challenging“, the Pacific Affairs journal finds it “a timely and important contribution to social and scholarly debates about racial discrimination in Japan“, the Japan Studies Association of Canada says it is “an important contribution to geography, cultural and area studies“, and the Sociology and Ethnic Studies imprint of the American Sociological Association calls it “a brave critique of Japanese society and its failure to look outward in its demographic and economic development, … as it makes an important contribution for those wishing to understand racism in Japan better… The book would easily suit courses that address global conceptions of race and ethnicity and how these are changing in Japan at both the micro and macro levels because of globalization.”
Dr. Robert Aspinall in a review in Social Science Journal Japan concludes:
“There are important academic contributions to the study of racism in Japan in this book, but it is as a must-read text on the crisis facing the shrinking Japanese population and its leaders that it really leaves its mark. Embedded Racism is highly recommended reading to anyone—whether they self-identify as Japanese or foreign or both—who is interested in Japan’s future.” (read more)
“Embedded Racism” has been discounted 30% for a limited time to $34.99 in paperback and Kindle if bought through my publisher (Lexington Books/Rowman & Littlefield) directly.
Go to https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498513906/Embedded-Racism-Japan’s-Visible-Minorities-and-Racial-Discrimination and use promo code LEX30AUTH16. (Japan residents have reported getting the book in about a week for $40 including quick shipping.)
More information and reviews on the book at http://www.debito.org/embeddedracism.html.
Download a book flyer and order form at http://www.debito.org/EmbeddedRacismPaperbackflyer.pdf
More than 130 of the world’s major research libraries (including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, Cornell, Columbia…) have in its first year of publication made “Embedded Racism” part of their collections (according to WorldCat). Add it to yours!
Thanks very much as always for reading! Dr. Debito ArudouSome would say that Gaz Regan is kind of the Keith Richards of the cocktail world. He’s truly a booze-industry legend; he knows seemingly everyone and possibly even everything having to do with bartending. Among his accomplishments: He’s written more than a dozen books on cocktails (The Bartender’s Bible and The Joy of Mixologyamong them, and most recently, The Negroni: Drinking to La Dolce Vita, with Recipes & Lore). He’s also the founder and host of Cocktails in the Country, which originally ran between 2001 and 2007 and focused on drink-mixing skills; it was revived this past year and will continue next year as well, now teaching how to become a more “mindful” bartender. During it all, Regan has experienced some life: love, loss, cancer of the tongue. He’s also, he says, one of the happiest people on Earth.
He recently gave a talk to a few dozen bar-industry folk at NYC’s The Dead Rabbit, the inaugural NYC installment of The London Sessions. Afterward, he graciously spent a few minutes with us to give his Thoughts on Taste.
Okay, first off: What’s the story with the eyeliner?
Well, “bartender” is a “look at me” profession. So bartenders have handlebar mustaches, huge beards, tattoos. It’s all about “look at me.” So a few years ago, I was coming to an event in Manhattan, and I thought, I’ll do eyeliner. And that’s all it is.
How do people react?
It makes people smile. And that is the primary job of a bartender: to make people smile.
Well said. What do you consider to be your biggest accomplishment so far—what are you most proud of?
You know that guy I mentioned, Quentin Crisp? You know the story I told about when he said, “I’m not going to do that because people wear funny clothes”? He wrote about that in one of his books. So I am in one of Quentin’s books, and that is my biggest accomplishment. [See below for the story.]
That’s fantastic.
It is, it is. Quentin was like major, yeah.
What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned?
God, that’s such a tough question. I think I’ve learned that everybody, every person, on the face of the earth, only wants one thing: Peace, a roof over their heads, a meal, a drink. That’s it. But that’s everybody. We are all exactly the same. And once you know that, you can key in to everybody, once you know that we’re all here, fighting the fight, getting through another lifetime, and making it work.
What’s your drink?
Negronis and Manhattans.
What would you say is your greatest indulgence?
Making cocktails with very, very expensive spirits.
Like what?
Pierre Ferrand Abel Cognac.
And what would you make with it?
A Sidecar!
But of course.
But a lot of people don’t like the idea of using such expensive products in cocktails. But I love it. As long as it’s free [for me], I’ll mix it.
And, finally, how would you define “The good life”? And if you think you’re living it, tell us about that.
It’s all about being happy. It’s about nothing else. This life is about love and being happy. And that is key. I am, I think, one of the happiest people you’ve ever met.
And why is that?
Because I know everything will be okay. When you get hit by things like my cancer, so what? I know that was sent to me for a purpose. I got cancer in order for me to wake up to a spiritual life, as far as I’m concerned.
And here’s that story about Quentin Crisp, as Regan recounted it during his talk:
I was hired as the general manager of the Market Diner and Spotty Dog Bar, on Eleventh Avenue at about 43rd Street. It’s a freestanding diner, and this group of investors bought it; they hired me as GM, and we spent six months putting it together. So there was this diner, a classic diner, and then on the side was the weirdest bar you ever saw. On the wall, there were murals of Dalmation dogs doing circus tricks—jumping through hoops and stuff. The bar was a W shape, very strange, and on the back of it was a cocktail lounge with a unisphere and |
health care, the economy and jobs have brought them down.
The challenge for the Democrats is to suck it up and behave like mature professionals who deserve to be elected. Currently, they chose to remain in the wilderness of confused cognitive entanglement; unable to stretch beyond their narrow view of themselves as morally and intellectually superior. Instead, unable to do any independent thinking, they encourage the party’s rank-and-file to remain in the unproductive throes of an unhinged emotional breakdown that seeks to threaten the constitutional stability of the country.
While Wikileaks can take credit for revealing the DNC’s links with the MSM as now indisputable (a job well done by Operation Mockingbird), the joint Democrat/MSM attacks on the Trump – Russia have inadvertently revealed the potent politicization of the FBI, CIA and NSA as well as the morally bankrupt nature of the Democratic party.
Even the assertion of “no evidence” from multiple intel agencies has not stopped the delusional Democrats from going hog-wild insane; daring to suggest that unproven allegations of electoral interference should be considered as an ‘act of war”. Having sold their souls to the war machine during Obama’s terms in office, Congressional Dems have now linked arms with the appalling former Bush VP Dick Cheney and Senators Lindsay Graham (R-SC) and John McCain (R-Az).
An impeccable example of Democratic neurosis that has identified a conclusion lacking evidence, long time apologist for Israel Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Ca), ranking minority of the House Intel Committee, has set himself up as a moral arbiter of wildly unsubstantiated charges like “notwithstanding an abundance of evidence that Russia hacked our political institutions,” and more recently “there’s more than circumstantial evidence of Trump-Russia collusion.” Schiff has consistently failed to provide one iota of proof supporting his accusations while the MSM takes his fabrications as fact.
In an intensely partisan dispute that is about political control rather than national security, Schiff has demanded that Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Ca) Chair of the House Intel Committee, recuse himself from the Committee investigation citing an inability to conduct an impartial hearing.
In a memorable December 8th interview on FoxNews with Tucker Carlson (which is ‘unavailable’ on YouTube), Schiff met with push-back from Carlson who is perhaps the only iconoclast interviewer on all of commercial TV. Carlson makes a game out of systematically peeling back the layers of any well established, status quo argument, frequently leaving his guest in knots or otherwise looking ridiculous. He is a joy to watch as he ripped the mask off the pompous Schiff.
In a typical response from an inquisitor who has lost control of the narrative, here are a few choice excerpts as Schiff escalates the witch hunt but cannot substantiate his claims as he seeks diversion by accusing Carlson of ‘carrying water for the Kremlin”:
Carlson: “I get it, I get it…Nobody’s for hacking. Let me just make one clear point. You don’t know that Vladimir Putin was behind those hacks?” Schiff: “Well, we do know this…” Carlson: “but you don’t know that so let’s not pretend you do..” Schiff: “Well, let’s not ignore what the Director of National Security and the Secretary of Homeland Security said publicly which is that these hacks were of such seriousness that they could not have taken place without approval of the highest levels of the Kremlin.” Carlson: “That’s speculation. What is speculation… is it a statement of fact” Schiff: “it is not speculation. It is a statement of the intelligence community’s best assessment. Because there’s a political reason to do it.. this is what the intelligence professionals are saying.” Carlson: “Ok.. I remember vividly the massive stockpiles of wmd in Iraq which the intelligence community assured us were there and they weren’t so pardon my skepticism.”
***
Carlson: “I’ve been following this. I get it. There’s been lots of hacking, at the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA Director’s personal email was hacked, we think in some cases by Russia. I don’t remember you holding a press conference and saying, hey, Obama Administration, you’re cyber security is pathetic. In this letter to the President, you don’t mention the fact that American cyber security is inadequate and that the Administration is partly responsible for allowing these hacks to happen. Why don’t you mention that?” Schiff: “You haven’t been watching the opening hearings of the…” Carlson: “I have…” Sciff: “I don’t think you have because if you had, you would see me pressing the Administration on the failures to protect our data …” Carlson: “Then why not mention it in this letter?” Schiff: “Because this letter was about Russian meddling and if you don’t think that’s significant that a power that is an adversary of ours is bombing civilians in Syria right now, that’s invading its neighbor’s and also interfering in our political process as well as our allies…if you don’t think that’s serious, it’s hard for me to imagine that you’re of the same party as Ronald Reagan.” *** Carlson: “What were the means they used? Schiff “…the means they used were hacking into democratic institutions and the leaking of documents designed in the primary process to sow division between Clinton and Sanders camps something we saw actually took place as a result of that because of that and then in general election to attempt to discredit secretary of State Clinton in a way to harm her and would help Donald Trump” Carlson: “How did they do that?” Schiff: “Well it was pretty obvious, wasn’t it? ….they haeked, they released documents that were…” Carlson: “..that were real..” Schiff: “Oh yes they were real and they were ones that were damaging to Secretary Clinton.” *** Carlson: “But they don’t know that the Putin government and neither do you. You don’t know that Putin was behind those hacks. I think it’s irresponsible for you to say that and you don’t know.” Schiff: “You know what is irresponsible Tucker, is that you make that claim without looking at the evidence and more importantly have not seen the Russians…. “ Carlson: “You can’t say that you know the Putin government did that.” Schiff: “..and more importantly for the president elect today to say that he doesn’t know whether the Russians…” Carlson: “You’re dodging. You’re on the Intel Committee. Let me just ask you one final question. Can you look right into the camera and say that you know for a fact that the government of Vladimir Putin was behind the hacks of John Podesta emails. “ Schiff: “Absolutely. The government of Vladimir Putin was behind the hack of our institution, not only in the US but also in Europe” Carlson: “ …of John Podesta’s email. you know that you’re dodging. You can’t say it.. Look and say that they hacked Podesta’s email.” Schiff: “I think Ronald Reagan would be rolling in his grave that you are carrying water for the Kremlin” Carlson: “I am not carrying water for the Kremlin. Look, you are a sitting member of Congress on the [House Intelligence Committee] and you can’t say they hacked..” Schiff “You’re going to have to move your show to RT – Russian television because this is perfectly…” Carlson: “You know what? That’s so beneath your office because it’s so dumb, and you are being duplicitous. I’m asking you did they hack [John] Podesta’s emails and you can’t say it.” Schiff: “You should not resort to personal insults like that Tucker.” Carlson: “You just said I was carrying water for Putin. That’s pretty hilarious.” Schiff: “When you essentially are an apologist for the Kremlin, that’s what you do.” Carlson: “One last time Congressman. Look into the camera and say they hacked John Podesta’s emails. We know for a fact that the Russians hacked John Podesta’s emails. You can’t and you know you can’t and you ae hiding behind weasel words.” Schiff: “I’m not going to be specific….” Carlson: “..because you don’t know it, that’s why. Done. You don’t know it and you’re alleging it without any evidence. “ Schiff: “You’re ignoring the evidence because you don’t care because the fact that it helped the Republican candidate is all you need to know.” Carlson: “That totally false. I just think that if you’re going to make a serious allegation against actual country with an actual government you ought to know what you’re talking about and you don’t.” Schiff: “…ought to accept Republicans on intel committee if you.” Carlson: “..if you could say it, you would have but you didn’t. I got to go. I’m taking cash from Putin, on RT.” Schiff: “If you’re willing to be in denial because it suits a Republican president….”. Carlson: “You can blather on all you want. I gave you a chance to state it clearly and you couldn’t. I need to take a call from Vladimir Putin so I need to put you on hold for one second.”
Meanwhile, as the Dems/MSM continue to waste time and energy on inane investigations of Russian collusion, the Russians have recently opened an office in Beijing to phase-in a gold back standard of trade while the Chinese have opened a new central bank office in Moscow that will allow the Russians to issue federal loan bonds in the yuan – thereby decreasing their dependence on the dollar-based trade.
And if there is going to be an investigation of interference in US elections, let it include Israel.Learn about stun gun laws and possession requirements in Nevada.
A stun gun (popularly also known as a Taser, the main maker of stun guns) is any device, designed to disable a person or animal temporarily or permanently, that emits an electrical charge or current by projectile, physical contact, or other means.
(Nev. Rev. Stat. § 202.357.)
This article describes Nevada laws regarding who may not have a stun gun, and the circumstances or situations when carrying a stun gun is illegal in the state.
To learn more about how stun guns work, and how permitting laws vary by state, see States Requiring a Stun Gun Permit.
People Who May Not Carry a Stun Gun in Nevada
In Nevada, most people may purchase, possess (openly or concealed), or use a nonlethal stun gun for self-defense without obtaining a permit. However, you may not purchase, possess, or use a stun gun if you are:
a convicted felon
a fugitive from justice
a person who has been adjudicated as mentally ill or committed to any mental health facility, or
a person illegally or unlawfully in the United States.
It is also illegal to sell, give, or provide a stun gun to any of the restricted individuals listed above, provided that you are aware of the person’s history. Peace officers are exempt from this rule.
(Nev. Rev. Stat. § 202.357.)
Nevada law also limits minors’ possession of stun guns. Minors under the age of 18 may not possess a stun, and adults may not sell or provide a minor with a stun gun. A child that possesses a stun gun may be detained in the same manner as an adult felon.
(Nev. Rev. Stat. § 202.357.)
Situations or Circumstances Where Carrying a Stun Gun is Illegal
In Nevada, it is illegal to use a stun gun on another person for purposes other than self-defense. Violation of this statute is a Category B felony.
(Nev. Rev. Stat. § 202.357.)
Penalties for Stun Gun Carry Violations
It is a Category B felony to use a stun gun on another person for purposes other than self-defense. Penalties include a fine of up to $5,000, one year (and up to six years) in prison, or both.
(Nev. Rev. Stat. § 202.357.)
It is a Category B felony for a convicted felon or fugitive from justice to possess a stun gun. Penalties include a fine of up to $5,000, one year (and up to six years) in prison, or both.
(Nev. Rev. Stat. § 202.357.)
It is a Category D felony for a person who has been adjudicated as mentally ill, committed to any mental health facility, or is illegally or unlawfully in the United States to possess a stun gun. Penalties include a fine of up to $5,000, one year (and up to four years) in prison, or both.
(Nev. Rev. Stat. § § 202.357, 193.130.)
It is a Category D felony to sell, give, or provide a stun gun to a person who cannot legally possess a stun gun. Penalties include a fine of up to $5,000, one year (and up to four years) in prison, or both.
(Nev. Rev. Stat. § § 202.357, 193.130.)
Getting Legal Help
If you have any questions about whether you are allowed to purchase, carry, or use a gun in Nevada, or if you are facing charges for a stun gun violation, consult a qualified criminal defense lawyer.The following is a guest post by Joseph Rauch
The burden of weight loss surgery is heavier than the discomfort, bodily risks and cost of the procedure itself. People who consider and undergo weight loss surgery cope with issues that impact their mental and, not only their bodies and wallets.
Source: Pixabay
Roughly 25 percent of candidates have a — usually depression — and 17 percent suffer from binge eating disorder, according to an analysis of 68 studies. Compare these numbers to the average 6.7 percent of people who have depression and 2.8 percent with binge eating disorder.
A history of fat shaming,, low and difficulties in usually contribute to depression in candidates for weight loss surgery. There are also some candidates who experience and hopelessness because the diets and exercise routines they tried weren’t enough to reduce their weight. As for binge eating, it is often a method of using food to cope with negative emotions rather than expressing them or finding a healthy treatment such as psychotherapy.
Candidates also tend to deal with anxiety and stress leading up to the surgery. Therapist Louis Carfizzi was afraid he wouldn’t wake up from the surgery and became unsettled at the thought of losing a part of his body or being unable to eat the foods he had enjoyed since.
“Having your body mutilated is a very scary thing,” Carfizzi said.
Like most people who complete weight loss surgery, Carfizzi’s physical and mental health generally improved several months after the procedure. Nonetheless, he had to grapple with regrets about the surgery. The lifestyle changes were difficult.
“Your body changes after the surgery,” he said. “You no longer have an, and the appetite you do have is focused around different food then you're used to eating.”
Carfizzi has not experienced depression following the surgery, but not everyone is so lucky. About 13 percent of bariatric surgery patients experience an increase in depression, according to a study Yale University conducted. It is possible that changes in mindset and lifestyle contribute to this risk of depression.
Source: Pixabay
For about a year after her surgery, therapist Chani Coady was doing well. Then she suddenly became depressed. The struggle to adapt to her new life finally took a toll on her mental health.
“I couldn't eat my emotions, so I had to find new coping skills when I was or,” Coady said.
It was also difficult for her to feel happy consistently. When she lost weight one week, she felt happy. Then she became upset for not losing more weight.
“I felt like my emotions were competing with one another,” she said.
Now that she had lost weight, people were more attracted to her and gave her more. It was a strange transition she wasn’t sure how to feel about. Her self-esteem fluctuated wildly.
“Mentally I went from someone who felt invisible in a crowd to someone people actually wanted to speak to,” she said.
Citing her experience as a therapist, Coady said is another issue people often face before and after weight loss surgery. Sometimes couples disagree about whether the surgery is a good idea. The change in lifestyle and mindset can put strain on relationships as well.
Source: Pixabay
Coady also mentioned transfer after weight loss surgery: the risk of patients substituting food addiction for addiction to something else, usually or. In rarer cases, patients become addicted to exercise because they develop a hypervigilant tendency to reduce weight and maintain their new body.
Even patients who succeed in keeping weight off and developing a healthy lifestyle often deal with shame and low self-esteem. They feel inadequate because they needed to resort to surgery to reduce their weight. Sometimes people they know comment on their surgery and imply they are lazy because they couldn’t succeed or didn’t try using only diets and exercise.
Traditional, in-person is the most popular way of effectively navigating the mental health issues surrounding weight loss surgery. It can reduce symptoms of depression, assist in treating and decrease the risk of transfer addiction.
Candidates can find therapists who, like Carfizzi and Coady, have undergone weight loss surgery and might be able to more easily express. There are even types of therapists who specialize in weight-related issues, including “bariatric psychotherapists” who primarily work with bariatric surgery patients.
Insurance guidelines in many states suggest weight loss surgery candidates see a mental health professional for a pre-surgery psychological assessment. Some doctors encourage patients to take the assessment and work with an in-person therapist before and after the procedure.
The problem is in-person therapy isn’t necessarily a practical option for someone preparing for or recovering from weight loss surgery. If the patient has obesity that affects his or her mobility, commuting to a therapist’s office can be difficult.
Source: Pixabay
In-person therapy is expensive, too, usually costing between $75 and $150 per session. The average cost of weight loss surgery ranges from $14,000 to $23,000, and the insurance coverage varies. Even after dropping that kind of money, no patient is happy about tacking on hundreds of dollars a month for therapy.
If patients want to save money or avoid the commute to an office, online therapy is a great option. It usually costs a fraction of traditional therapy and allows patients to — at any time they want — work with a therapist from home, the hospital and anywhere else.
Therapist Jennifer Reynolds works with a weight loss surgery patient via Talkspace, a service that allows people to anonymously connect with therapists online by using live video or sending text, video and picture messages. Her client has made lots of progress, Reynolds said, and has commented on how the online modality has helped her.
Source: Pixabay
Reynold’s client is one of dozens of weight loss surgery candidates and patients who have relied on Talkspace to provide the kind of therapy they needed. The unlimited texting therapy option is especially helpful for people who are feeling an intense amount of shame and don’t want the therapist to see their face or body. The ability to constantly communicate helps therapists keep these clients accountable for post-surgery lifestyle changes as well.
Weight loss surgery patients experience a harrowing journey full of mental health struggles. Fortunately there are mental health treatments and advances in technology that make it easier for them to find a space where they can overcome shame, avoid judgment and adapt to their new lives.
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Joseph Rauch is the staff writer for Talkspace, a company that provides convenient and affordable online therapy. He is also an aspiring author, freelance writer and identifies as a half white/Jewish, half Lebanese Atheist (not necessarily in that order). You can follow him on Twitter @jrauch64.The Daily Mail reports that Alicia Machado says she’s not going to discuss how Trump “fat-shamed” her anymore.
From the Mail:
A former Miss Universe who says Donald Trump 'fat-shamed' her and called her 'Miss Piggy' says she's done battling the billionaire. Alicia Machado will not give any more interviews on the way Trump treated her, representatives for the Venezuelan-born beauty queen told DailyMail.com. 'We will not be discussing the Trump subject any further,' an email from her reps at Anderson Public Relations Group said. A statement from Machado that accompanied to the message blasted Trump and his campaign for 'launching insults and are attempting to revive slanders and false accusations about my life, in order to humiliate, intimidate, and unbalance me.' These attacks are cheap lies with bad intentions,' she said. Former Miss Universe says she's done giving interviews about 'fat-shaming' after life story unravels: 'We will not be discussing the Trump subject any further' By Francesca Chambers, Daily Mail, October 6, 2016
When you think about it, the whole thing about Trump’s “fat-shaming” Alicia Machado is yet another example of how immature American political discourse has become. It sounds like a junior high complaint and it’s being taken seriously in the political realm.(Ms. Machado is pictured above at her beauty queen winning weight of 118 lbs, and below, something less than 40 pounds heavier.)
And, considering Miss Machado’s Venezuelan beauty industry background, it seems even more ridiculous.
Venezuelan beauty queens have won more international pageants than those of any other nationality, and they are supported (and come up through the ranks of) an enormous infrastructure of beauty academies which process young girls for the good of the few who might win someday.
The Daily Mail, once again, ran an expose in 2014 about the extreme measures taken in Venezuela to produce winning international beauty queens. If you have a strong stomach, click here and check it out. It makes anything Donald Trump might have said to or about Machado pale in comparison. So he made her exercise. Look what they do in the Venezuelan beauty industry.
Young Venezuelan girls, many of whom hail from poor families who can’t really afford this, submit to being processed through the beauty academies, in the distant hope that they might win a pageant someday. They are subjected to all sorts of rigid training regimens and extreme surgeries. Some wear plaster corsets, some have metal mesh placed on their tongues to make eating solid food difficult, some have part of their intestines removed. They submit to various surgeries from young ages, and every year a few girls die from the surgery. Plus, there is constant pressure on the girls and intense competition, all in the hope that they may win someday.
Alicia Machado went through that system. It’s hard to believe that anything Donald Trump said to her or made her do to lose weight was worse than what she’d gone through in Venezuela.
Back in 1997, the Washington Post ran a piece on then Miss Universe Alicia Machado, and the article was entitled, trigger warning, get ready for this, MISS UNIVERSE, SIZING UP HER REIGN [By Lydia Martin, WaPo, May 16, 1997. Isn’t’ that fat-shaming?
The article quotes Alicia in describing the leadup to her Miss Universe coronation:
"I was anorexic and bulimic, but almost all of us are," Machado says without so much as a blink. "When I was preparing for Miss Universe, it was an obsession for me to not gain weight. By the time I won, I was actually recovering. But the year leading to it, I didn't eat at all. And whatever I ate, I threw up. I weighed 116 pounds when I won. I was skeletal." The three weeks of events leading to the Universe pageant were torture, she says, because of all the meals she had to dodge. "There were lunches and dinners and just food and more food. I had to pretend to have headaches and menstrual cramps and anything I could think of to not come down from my hotel room."
Well, she wanted to win, right?
The article also quotes Maureen Reidy, then Miss Universe president, who said Alicia “..said her director in Venezuela had her on an unhealthy diet that did not allow her to eat after noon. She was put under unrealistic restraints." Wouldn’t that be fat-shaming?
The article also quotes Cuban-born Osmel Sosa/Sousa, then (and still) Miss Venezuela organization president who had a different take on it; "She [Alicia Machado] gained weight because she had no discipline. One time when she came to Venezuela, shortly after winning Miss Universe, she ordered a room service that left me crazy — a club sandwich, French fries and ice cream!" Wouldn’t that have been fat-shaming?
And…
Sosa says he never knew Machado to be bulimic. "She came to do Miss Venezuela after she won a beauty contest in her town," says Sosa. "I told her she had to lose about 10 pounds, and she did. She was dieting and exercising; she wasn't throwing up."
By the way, there’s also a racial angle to this whole Venezuelan beauty pageant thing. Girls who compete have to be a minimum of 5’ 9”, which effectively excludes many indigenous girls, who are on average shorter. The previously-mentioned Daily Mail article reports on a particular girl in the program, for whom “it will be harder to achieve than for others, as she has indigenous features, not the pale, European look favoured by beauty pageants…teachers at the Belankazar academy have advised her to consider surgery to reshape her nose.”
As for Alicia Machado, her father was Cuban and her mother was Spanish, making her a hundred percent white European—like Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz.
Well, if Alicia is going to shut up about this, it’s good. We don’t need lectures from a graduate of the Venezuelan beauty industry to tell us who our next president should be.The USNI News Fleet and Marine Tracker is sponsored by CNA.
These are the approximate positions of the U.S. Navy’s deployed carrier strike groups and amphibious ready groups throughout the world as of Nov. 6, 2017, based on Navy and public data. In cases where a CSG or ARG is conducting disaggregated operations, the map reflects the location of the capital ship.
Total U.S. Navy Battle Force:
278
Ships Underway
Deployed Ships Underway Non-deployed Ships Underway Total Ships Underway 54 29 83
Ships Deployed by Fleet
Fleet Forces 3rd Fleet 4th Fleet 5th Fleet 6th Fleet 7th Fleet Total 1 1 2 18 15 67 104
In the Western Pacific
The Theodore Roosevelt Carrier Strike Group entered the U.S. 7th Fleet area of responsibility on Oct. 24. The ship conducted air operations near Wake Island on Oct. 26 and arrived in Guam on Oct. 31. This is the first visit to Guam by USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71).
The Theodore Roosevelt CSG is now underway from Guam and expected to conduct multi-carrier operations off with the Ronald Reagan and Nimitz CSGs later this week.
Ultimately, the Roosevelt CSG is expected to transit to the Persian Gulf and continue U.S. led strikes against ISIS targets in Iraq and Syria.
In the Sea of Japan
The Ronald Reagan Carrier Strike Group is conducting operations in the Sea of Japan. USS Ronald Reagan (CVN-76) is expected to conduct multi-carrier operations with the Theodore Roosevelt and Nimitz CSGs. The U.S. Navy periodically conducts large-scale exercises that involve two carriers. The last time three carriers operated together was off Guam in 2007 during the biennial Valiant Shield exercise.
“These three carriers are not there specifically targeting North Korea… This is a routine demonstration of our commitment to the region,” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford, said last week.
The chairman did acknowledge closer attention is being paid to Pyongyang, in light of its actions. “I think it’s fair to say that all of us,” he said, “have a heightened sense of urgency for the past year and a half, and in particular, in the last couple months.”
In the South China Sea
The Nimitz CSG departed Sri Lanka on Oct. 31. The CSG transited the Strait of Malacca and Singapore Strait and is now in the South China Sea.
The Nimitz CSG, Carrier Strike Group 11, is made up of Destroyer Squadron 9, Carrier Air Wing 11, the USS Princeton (CG-59), USS Howard (DDG-83), USS Shoup (DDG-86), USS Pinckney (DDG-91) and USS Kidd (DDG-100).
The littoral combat ship USS Coronado (LCS-4) departed Singapore on Nov. 4 after completing a 14-month rotational deployment to Southeast Asia.
In the Middle Pacific
Guided-missiles destroyer USS O’Kane (DDG-77) deployed from Pearl Harbor on Nov. 3. She deployed independently to the Western Pacific where she helps fill a gap left by USS John S. McCain (DDG-56) and USS Fitzgerald (DDG-62) that were both damaged in ship collisions this year.
In the Eastern Pacific
The Carl Vinson CSG is underway in the Southern California Operating Areas conducting a Sustainment Training Exercise (SUSTEX). According to a Navy spokesman, SUSTEX “allows all elements of a CSG to regroup in order to maintain their efficiency ahead of a future deployment.” During the training exercise, a sailor was injured by a towed aircraft on the flight deck of USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70).
USS John C. Stennis (CVN-74) left Naval Base Kitsap-Bremerton on Nov. 3 for training.
In the Persian Gulf
The America Amphibious Ready Group (ARG) and the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit are operating in the Persian Gulf.
Other ships in the Amphibious Ready Group (ARG include the amphibious dock landing ship USS Pearl Harbor (LSD-52) and amphibious transport dock ship USS San Diego (LPD-22).
In the Western Atlantic and the Caribbean Sea
USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) is underway conducting underway training. USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78)is underway conducting flight operations and training.
Due to extended time conducting hurricane relief, before continuing her journey to Japan, USS Wasp (LHD-1) stopped at Naval Station Mayport, Fla to conduct some maintenance, repairs, and re-supply before commencing her transit. Wasp is, ultimately, bound for Japan to join the forward-deployed naval forces to be the first amphibious warship to deploy with a squadron of Marine F-35B Lighting II Joint Strike Fighters.
USS Kearsarge (LHD-3) arrived at Naval Station Norfolk, Va. on Monday after two months at sea in support of disaster relief operations.
Hospital ship USNS Comfort (T-AH-20) arrived off Puerto Rico on Oct. 3 and continues to provide full hospital services to support U.S. disaster relief.
In addition to these major formations, not shown are thousands of others serving in submarines, individual surface ships, aircraft squadrons, SEALs, Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Forces, Coast Guard cutters and more serving throughout the globe.Most probably know Domhnall Gleeson for two things: playing Bill Weasley in the "Harry Potter" series, and his back facing the camera in the only photo yet released of the latest "Star Wars" cast together.
Gleeson stopped by HuffPost Live on Thursday to chat about his new movie, "Frank," which co-stars Michael Fassbender and comes out Aug. 15. Gleeson, who has been cast in the upcoming "Star Wars: Episode VII," said all he could about the film -- which isn't much.
"I get sick in my mouth every time someone brings up 'Star Wars.' I'm so nervous I'm going to give something away. I just get a faraway look in my eyes and try to remain calm," Gleeson told host Ricky Camilleri with a laugh. "You sign a massive, big, long contract thing... and then they send you a one-page thing that says, 'Here is what you're allowed to talk about.' And then there's just a big empty page. It says you're allowed to say you're excited to be in the movie. That's it."
J.J. Abrams is set to direct the film, which will hit theaters Dec. 18, 2015.
Catch the rest of Gleeson's precious few "Star Wars" tidbits above, and watch the entire HuffPost Live conversation here.
Sign up here for Live Today, HuffPost Live's new morning email that will let you know the newsmakers, celebrities and politicians joining us that day and give you the best clips from the day before!WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. officials said on Monday 15 inmates from the Guantanamo prison were transferred to the United Arab Emirates, the single largest transfer of Guantanamo detainees during President Barack Obama’s administration.
The transfer of the 12 Yemeni and three Afghan citizens brings the total number of detainees down to 61 at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Most have been held without charge or trial for more than a decade, drawing international condemnation.
Obama, who had hoped to close the prison during his first year in office, rolled out his plan in February aimed at shutting the facility. But he faces opposition from many Republican lawmakers as well as some fellow Democrats.
“In its race to close Gitmo, the Obama administration is doubling down on policies that put American lives at risk,” Republican Representative Ed Royce, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement.
“Once again, hardened terrorists are being released to foreign countries where they will be a threat,” he said.
While Obama’s plan for shuttering the facility calls for bringing the several dozen remaining prisoners to maximum-security prisons in the United States, U.S. law bars such transfers to the mainland. Obama, though, has not ruled out doing so by executive action.
“I think we are at an extremely dangerous point where there is a significant possibility this is going to remain open as a permanent offshore prison to hold people, practically until they die,” said Naureen Shah, Amnesty International’s U.S. director for security and human rights.
Shah said keeping Guantanamo open gave cover to foreign governments to ignore human rights.
“It weakens the U.S. government’s hand in arguing against torture and indefinite detention,” she said.
One of the detainees who was transferred is an Afghan national, identified as Obaidullah, who has spent more than 13 years at Guantanamo. He had been accused of storing mines to be used against American forces in Afghanistan.
Slideshow (4 Images)
“The continued operation of the detention facility weakens our national security by draining resources, damaging our relationships with key allies and partners, and emboldening violent extremists,” Lee Wolosky, the State Department’s special envoy for closing the Guantanamo detention center, said.
“The support of our friends and allies - like the UAE - is critical to our achieving this shared goal,” Wolosky said.
A State Department official speaking on condition of anonymity said the UAE had resettled five detainees transferred in November 2015.Moving a big software project to a new compiler can be a lot of work, and few projects are bigger than Chromium. In addition to the main Chromium repository, which includes all of Blink, there are over a hundred other open-source projects which Chromium incorporates by reference, totaling more than 48,000 C/C++ files and 40,000 header files. Porting Chromium on Windows to VC++ 2015 requires getting all of these projects to build and run.
As of March 11th 2016 Chromium for Windows has switched from VC++ 2013 to VC++ 2015, and it doesn’t look like it’s switching back. This will give us more C++ 11 features, new security options, much faster LTCG/PGO builds, and other advantages.
The tracking bug for this project currently has over 330 comments on it, with contributions from dozens of developers. Writing about all of those changes would require an entire book. So I’m going to focus on my favorite part of this project – compiler bugs. In particular, bugs where the compiler silently generates incorrect code.
Update: another code-gen bug in VS 2015 was found on March 31st, and worked around about two weeks later. A VC++ bug was filed. And another silent-bad-code-gen bug was found in September 2016, and worked around a few days later.
If you throw a diverse enough set of code at a compiler, build it in lots of different ways, run lots of tests, and ship the code to customers, you’re going to find some bugs.
Because Chromium is open source I will include links to Chromium bugs and fixes where possible, in addition to links to the VC++ bug reports.
I didn’t find all of these bugs, but it was my job to investigate them, come up with a minimal repro, and report them to Microsoft. And I have to say that the Microsoft team was amazing. They were very supportive, and helpful, and it was clear that they really wanted VC++ 2015 to be as good as possible, and that includes building Chromium. We had an excellent symbiotic relationship: I fed them high quality bug reports, and they fixed them incredibly quickly.
Anyone can file VC++ bugs at the connect website. Getting your bugs noticed is easier if you work for Google, but anyone who files quality bugs can get help. The VC++ MVP program lets ordinary developers who participate in the VC++ community get privileged access to the VC++ team. Recommended – I enjoyed being a VC++ MVP before joining Google.
Chromium is open source so Microsoft can theoretically reproduce any of these bugs if I just tell them what source file to compile and where to look. But that can be a slow process. If the repro steps for your bug includes “Download 90,000 source files and our custom build system and compile for hours” then you can’t expect priority service.
This is especially true because most reports of bugs in compilers are erroneous – most ‘compiler bugs’ are actually bugs in the code being compiled, such as invoking undefined behavior. So, I always had to prove to myself that these were compiler bugs before reporting them, which usually meant simplifying the repro case to make it trivially obvious that the compiler was at fault. I’ve discussed techniques for doing this before.
Failed Chromium
After getting all of Chromium building the next step was to start running Chromium. It would run fine once, but on subsequent runs I’d hit an assert. I suspected a code-gen bug but it was not the case. The problem ultimately turned out to be this code:
HandleWrapper h(CreateMutex(…));
if (h.HandleIsInvalid() && GetLastError() == SOME_ERROR_CODE) …
It turns out that the HandleWrapper class allocates memory, and the debug version of the VC++ 2015 CRT allocations functions call the FlsGetValue function, and FlsGetValue calls SetLastError(0) because it is so incredibly proud that it succeeded. SetLastError(0) destroys the error code from CreateMutex, and madness ensues. I filed a bug and tweeted about this and it turned into a fun little twitter |
late 1900s. I adore all his books, and Cat’s Cradle is easily in my top three. It’s loosely about a mad scientist’s creation, “ice-nine,” which is capable of freezing the world and ending it all. But it really is so much more than that, so I highly recommend reading it!
But anyways you’re here to see manicures not hear me geek out over my favorite author, so here it is:
My ring finger was inspired by the book cover, and the other nails are modeled after the frozen look of ice-nine.
Here’s what the book cover looks like:
How I did this manicure:
Ring finger: Base color: Polish My Life Pink Sandals… a perfect pastel baby pink creme Taped off the V and used A England Saint George… an amazing almost forest green holo Freehanded the horizontal stripes with Julep Cleopatra… a matte/satin black (PS – it’s difficult using matte polishes in nail art. If it’s not perfect on the first swipe, going over it looks messy!)
Other nails: Base color: Sephora Formula X White Matter… a decent white polish but far from my favorite. I feel like I need to keep all my white polishes in rotation though, so I used it 🙂 Used saran wrap to dab on: Barry M Damson… a goooorgeous cornflower blue creme Barry M Blueberry… a pretty pastel blue creme that’s very similar in color to Essie Bikini So Teeny without the shimmer but with a formula that’s a million times better! A light layer of China Glaze Fairy Dust
So what do you think of this mani? I actually really like the geometric look of my ring finger. Maybe I’ll do that using different colors sometime! Have you read Cat’s Cradle or other Vonnegut books?
Check out more manis inspired by books by the NCC ladies:
AdvertisementsA rift in the Spokane County Republican Party has resulted in a stalemate between two county commissioners who are running out of time to choose a new colleague.
Republican Commissioners Al French and Josh Kerns are seeking to fill a vacancy left by former Commissioner Shelly O’Quinn, who resigned partway through her term eight weeks ago.
French and Kerns must choose one of three people nominated by the county GOP. If they can’t agree on someone by Sept. 15, Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat, will get to pick a new commissioner from the same list of nominees.
Multiple Republican sources said French prefers Mary Kuney, the county’s chief deputy auditor, who served as treasurer on two of his campaigns when he was a Spokane city councilman.
Those sources said Kerns prefers Rob Chase, the county’s elected treasurer. Kerns and Chase have been seen as allies of controversial state Rep. Matt Shea, whose district includes Spokane Valley.
The third GOP nominee is John Guarisco, an executive at a Spokane Valley marketing firm who plans to run for the commission seat next year.
Both of the sitting commissioners said they would vote during a public meeting on Tuesday, but they declined to say who they hoped to appoint. They have discussed the appointment process only a few times since O’Quinn’s resignation, in closed-door executive sessions.
“Unfortunately I can’t really tell you where either of us are at,” Kerns said Thursday. “I can’t really discuss what we talked about in executive session. … I feel comfortable saying all our conversations have been cordial.”
In a phone call Wednesday, French would not say if there’s a disagreement.
“I don’t know where my fellow commissioner stands until we sit down and take a vote,” he said.
A radio ad that aired this week, paid for by a group calling itself the Washington Liberty PAC, called Chase “eminently qualified and a great campaigner.”
The ad also accused French of ignoring the will of party officers, who ranked Chase ahead of Kuney and Guarisco when selecting the nominees in early August. The sitting commissioners are not required to appoint the party favorite, but Chase and others said French has repeatedly promised to do so.
“Commissioner French is on record stating publicly he would always select the Republican PCOs’ favorite candidate,” the radio ad said. “… So, Commissioner French, what’s so difficult?”
French did not respond to a message on Thursday seeking additional comment.
State Rep. Bob McCaslin, who represents the 4th Legislative District along with Shea, also warned French against choosing Kuney in a Sept. 4 email obtained by The Spokesman-Review.
“I’m really concerned about the divisions we already have in our County, and appointing Mary over Rob would definitely widen those divisions,” McCaslin said in the email.
Washington state Rep. Bob McCaslin, R-Spokane Valley, sent this email to Spokane County Commissioner Al French on Sept. 4, 2017.
McCaslin, who did not respond to messages seeking comment Thursday, also seemed to accuse French of hypocrisy, noting that French voted to appoint Nancy McLaughlin to the commission last year after she emerged as the party favorite.
McCaslin wrote to French: “I have heard rumors that there are a few locally elected officials who would run against you in the primary but (they) wouldn’t, if you applied the same logic you explained very well when you appointed Nancy.”
Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich, one of the few elected Republicans willing to publicly criticize Shea, said he was “really, really disappointed that Representative McCaslin would send something like that.”
“I’m really tired of this type of politics,” Knezovich said. “If you don’t do what the Matt Shea group wants you to do, they threaten you, and I just don’t think it’s right that they’re threatening Commissioner French.”
McCaslin also suggested in the email that French was eager to appoint Kuney because he has received large campaign contributions from members of the Inland Northwest Associated General Contractors. Kuney’s husband, Max, is the president of a large construction company, and her brother-in-law is vice president of the Inland Northwest AGC.
Mary Kuney responded: “AGC has contributed to Shelly O’Quinn, Josh Kerns, Al French and numerous other candidates over the years. Not sure what Bob’s issue is.”
Kuney is a certified public accountant with 13 years of experience as a state and county auditor. She’s also worked for a private consulting firm and founded a tea company.
Chase was elected treasurer in 2010 and fended off a challenge from Kuney in 2014. He previously worked as a customer service representative for an insurance company and as a collection agent for U.S. Bank, among other varied jobs. On Thursday, he said that range of experience makes him an ideal commissioner candidate.
Knezovich, meanwhile, accused Chase and his supporters of having a conspiratorial “anti-military, anti-law-enforcement mindset.” The sheriff said Chase would not denounce a recent online post by one of his friends and employees, Finance Deputy John Christina, that called out “the government’s crimes against the citizenry.” The post claimed, among other things, that Americans are “pushed and prodded and watched over by twitchy, hyper-sensitive, easily-spooked armed guards who care little for the rights, humanity or well-being of those in their care.”
“Rob Chase is not qualified to be a commissioner. He’s just not. I’ve seen him at work. I’ve looked at his resume. He’s not the quality candidate for this position,” Knezovich said. “And more importantly, I really don’t want to see a county commissioner that is not willing to stand up against radicalized hate.”Image copyright Twitter - Alexis Gravely Image caption The statue has since been uncovered
Protesters covered a statue of former US President Thomas Jefferson in black at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
Dozens of people staged the protest on Tuesday, reportedly posting a sign reading "TJ is a racist and rapist".
The act happened exactly one month after a far-right rally was held against plans to remove the statue of a Confederate general in the town's park.
Jefferson, one of the US founding father, was known for owning slaves.
The black tarpaulin cover has since been removed, according to US media.
Some 100 students, faculty and community members reportedly took part in the demonstration, which mimicked the decision by Charlottesville's authorities last month to shroud Confederate statues.
The protesters marched and chanted slogans against US President Donald Trump and the Ku Klux Klan, and carried Black Lives Matter posters.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Confederate statues covered in Charlottesville
They read a list of demands, which included a ban on white supremacist hate groups from the campus and an increase in the enrolment of African-American undergraduate students.
The demands also included a call to "remove the Confederate plaques on the Rotunda" and balance the university's "historical landscape."
The list said Jefferson's statue was "an emblem of white supremacy" that should be "re-contextualized with a plaque to include that history".
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Racism in the US: Is there a single step that can bring equality?
Last month, a far-right rally supported by white supremacists and neo-Nazis was held at the university against the planned removal of a statue of General Robert E Lee, who commanded forces of the pro-slavery Confederacy in the US Civil War of 1861-65.
One person was killed when a car rammed a crowd of people who were against the August rally.
Thomas Jefferson was the third US president, the main writer of the 1776 Declaration of Independence and the founder of the University of Virginia. He was also known for owning up to 140 slaves.Readers who follow this blog know how I feel about too much “stuff” and my own struggles with it, and why. I asked my readers for a guest post on hoarding, either their own experiences as a hoarder or their experiences living with a parent who was a hoarder. Dr. Brandi Stupica, of Professor Parenting, bravely volunteered not only to write a guest post, but to put her name on it. Follow her blog, by the way, for more about parenting from the perspective of a developmental psychologist. Also follow her on Facebook, even just to see her adorable baby. This guest post shines a light on this disorder and its terrible impact. Children of hoarders have particularly difficult relationships with their parents, probably because they act like the disorder is so “rational” yet children grow up in shameful squalor, believing that their parents care more about their hoard than they do about their children’s distress. This guest post is honest and moving, and thank you to my reader who shared it.
My mother is a bipolar, narcissistic hoarder. Normally, I would do the politically correct thing and say she is a person with so-and-so disorders, but in this case I know that those three words perfectly describe my mother. This post is about her hoarding, but her other comorbid psychopathologies feed her hoarding and have shaped my experiences with her.
When I turned nine, my mother started a cleaning business (Oh, the irony!) that she ran when she wasn’t working at her a full-time day job. Needless to say, she was barely at home. My father refused to do any housework. Instead, he forced me to take over what he saw as my mother’s duties at home. From the ages of nine to seventeen, I cooked dinner and kept house while I also raised my little sister and little brother. While my parents were still married, my mother’s hoarding wasn’t readily apparent because I took it upon my self to throw away anything I determined to be garbage or junk. Then, my parents separated and her hoarding took off like a rocket into space.
My parents’ separation and divorce set off my mom’s hoarding tendencies for two reasons. One, she no longer had the long shadow of my father’s abusive control looming over her, reigning in her tendency to “collect.” Two, because I chose to live with my father after the separation, I was never in charge of keeping her house running—I was only in charge of running my father’s household. She quickly started collecting Mary Moos, stupid little cow figures engaged in anthropomorphic behavior. She also started hoarding clothes. Her weight ballooned up and down and she bought new clothes for every new size without discarding the old clothes that no longer fit. She neglected housekeeping to the point that there would be six loads of dirty clothes stacked in the hallway with a load in the washer and a load in the dryer. The dirty dishes would build up and fester until she would either buy new dishes or finally break and spend hours doing dishes. As a result, she also, by default, started hoarding dishes and Tupperware. Her hoarding became so bad that I chose to live with my father who beat me with belts and hairbrushes when he wasn’t calling me a slut and a liar. At least at my father’s it was easier to keep house because there was less garbage and I could have my friends over and not be embarrassed by a load of dishes rotting in putrid water.
Then, when I was 15, I started going to therapy, which made me realize that my life was not typical and not okay. I didn’t deserve to be abused and neglected. I started to fight back, which resulted in a huge fight with police presence and me finishing out my last year and a half of high school under the custody of my mother. Her hoarding had been slowly getting worse, but now, with my new view of the world, life with her seemed like an upgrade. She didn’t beat me. She didn’t call me a whore. Instead of dealing with her hoarding, I spent nearly all of my time at my boyfriend’s house.
It wasn’t until I got to college that I finally felt the tethers of her hoarding start to loosen. I didn’t remain unscathed, however. I wasn’t able to go home for breaks and holidays because during my first quarter of college (10 weeks), she had hoarded so much in my room that I couldn’t sleep in it. She had started to collect people’s unwanted furniture. If I went home, I had to sleep on the couch. I spent my breaks with friends and holidays with boyfriends. One of my roommates took me home with her for a long weekend and that was the first time in over 10 years that I had the opportunity to sprawl out on the living room floor to watch television. That one experience touched me deeply. It’s remained my picture of what a good life for my child(ren) should look like ever since.
My mother’s hoarding is greatly influenced by major life changes over that she cannot control. Her hoarding started when she and my father separated. She had to get a storage unit bigger than my first apartment in DC to hold her growing hoard after I left for college. When I was a junior in college, a friend of hers died in Iraq. That Christmas she put up a Marine-themed tree in honor of him. The tree is still up, untouched, 10 years later. Shortly after his death, she upgraded to a larger storage unit. When she had a fall-out with my aunt, she got a second storage unit. When I got married and moved 6 hours away, her basement became unusable. When my sister went to college, her garage became unusable. When her dog died, she replaced him with three dogs and a fleet of 10 vehicles in various stages of disrepair and usability. Buy stocks in storage unit companies if my brother ever moves out. Her hoarding also escalates when she is going through a manic episode because of her wild spending and when she is going through a depressive episode because she doesn’t have the energy or focus to throw anything away.
Her hoarding seems to stem from her relationship with her father. From what she has recounted to me, he was a nasty, brutish man; more cruel than my father. She has many memories of working hard and saving to buy prized possessions and gifts for him as a child only to have her father sell her treasures or outright reject her gifts. For example, she saved her paper delivery money for over a year so she could buy a moped. A few months after she bought it, her father put an ad in the classifieds, sold it, and kept the money. She also tends to hoard things that remind her of happy things from her childhood. Specifically, she hoards vintage toys she had as a child (that her parents sold) and Christmas decorations. I can only imagine that her hoarding stems from such painful memories as a way of coping with her past traumas. She has, of course, made no such connection despite several observations made out loud in her presence that her “collecting” and her father’s theft of her possessions seem like they might be connected. The denial runs quite deep.
Her hoarding has left marks on me. Much like Dr. Psych Mom consciously decided not to be an anxious parent, I have consciously become an anti-hoarder. I revel in donating unused items and throwing things away. It comes at a price, though. I have pangs of anxiety whenever I receive a gift because I might have to keep the present or get rid of it, which will make me feel bad. My mother’s hoarding still affects me directly too. This past summer, my husband and I agreed to stay at her house for a few days while we visited family. We thought that she would de-clutter and clean the areas that we were going to be staying in. She had not. The kitchen, bathroom, living room, and dining room were all uninhabitable and dangerous. There wasn’t a clean, flat surface anywhere in the house that we could change our newborn. We arrived at 10pm. By 2am, we had booked a hotel room for the remainder of our stay. We stayed up all night just like in Hoarders fearful of dying from the hoard that surrounded us. We wouldn’t let our baby touch anything. Because we can’t gather at her house, her hoarding has forced us to endure long visits with her narcissism at our house. Her grandchildren will never be able to spend the night at Grandma’s. Every time she visits, she brings ass-loads of stuff that my husband and I have to donate and throw away. If we let her, she’d hoard our house too. In the end, I’ve managed to salvage what I can of my relationship with my mother and my son’s relationship with his Grandmother by creating clear, firm boundaries for my mother’s “gifting.”
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Thanks again to Brandi, and till we meet again, I remain, The Blogapist Who Says, Parental Hoarding Is One Of The Most Difficult Things To Discuss.
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Order Dr. Rodman’s newest book, 52 Emails to Transform Your Marriage and order her first book: How to Talk to Your Kids about Your Divorce: Healthy, Effective Communication Techniques for Your Changing Family
This blog is not intended as medical advice or diagnosis and should in no way replace consultation with a medical professional. If you try this advice and it does not work for you, you cannot sue me. This is only my opinion, based on my background, training, and experience as a therapist and person
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Dr. Warren Hern, who is one of the last doctors in the United States who performs late terms abortions, was on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, where he said that the American anti-abortion movement is made up fanatics, and the only thing that separates them from the Taliban is 8,000 miles. Check out the video.
Here is the video:
Dr. Hern said about the murder of Dr. Tiller, “This was not the act of an isolated single nutcase guy who decided to go into some church and blow somebody away. This was a political assassination, and it is not isolated. It is the culmination of the inevitable result and product of 35 years of constant, relentless, anti-abortion fanatics offering hate speech, hate rhetoric, violence, intimidation, and assassinations, and a general message that it is okay to kill someone like Dr. Tiller…”
He also compared anti-abortionists to the Taliban, “President Obama made a wonderful speech at Notre Dame and offered an effort to be conciliatory, and to encourage common ground, but there is no common ground with fanatics who want to kill you. The only difference between the American anti-abortion movement and the Taliban is about 8,000 miles.”
I think that it is only fair to point out that not all people who oppose abortion are extremists who become radicalized into action by the rhetoric. He is correct to point out the jihad like mentality of the radical anti-abortion movement. He is also correct that there is no middle ground with someone like Randall Terry. The people who engage in violence against abortion providers are domestic terrorists.
There is a political motive behind their violent actions. Protests are constitutionally protected, but violence isn’t. Hern is was also right to describe the Tiller murder as a political assassination, because if he had been practicing in a different branch of medicine, he would not have been killed. I think the lesson to be learned here is that not all dangerous zealots fly airplanes into buildings. Some are grown right here in the US of A.
If you’re ready to read more from the unbossed and unbought Politicus team, sign up for our newsletter here! Email address: Leave this field empty if you're human:Swedish Bitcoin exchange, Safello, has launched a free service that allows charities to receive Bitcoin for free.
The new donation service is available in limited form and offers charities custom campaign pages that act in a similar way to Kickstarter but use Bitcoin to contribute and are completely free, with 100 percent of proceeds going to the charity.
Initial uses of the service include projects to implement Bitcoin in Africa and give children in Uganda vaccinations as well as a group that is fixing bugs in Bitcoin itself.
Charities can sign up to request for their own customized donation page in advance of the company opening up the preview.
➤ Safello Donate
Image credit: Antana / Flickr
Read next: 10 things you need to know about the Dolby Atmos home theatre systemIn hermit country North Korea, a military occasion was marked with a massive show of strength, but a missile test, which was feared in the region did not happen.
Long-range, live-fire artillery tests were carried out in celebration of the 85th anniversary of the founding of its army, but said the event did not include a nuclear weapons test.
A North Korea defence expert told the South China Morning Post it is because the country fears a radical opposition which it cannot control.
Zhou Chenming, from the Knowfar Institute for Strategic and Defence Studies, said Jong-un is trying to prevent the election of radicals in neighbouring South Korea.
Mr Chenming, said: “Kim would prefer a moderate candidate to be elected because he or she would be easier to deal with.”Oscar the Cat awakens from his nap, opening a single eye to survey his kingdom. From atop the desk in the doctor's charting area, the cat peers down the two wings of the nursing home's advanced dementia unit. All quiet on the western and eastern fronts. Slowly, he rises and extravagantly stretches his 2-year-old frame, first backward and then forward. He sits up and considers his next move.
In the distance, a resident approaches. It is Mrs. P., who has been living on the dementia unit's third floor for 3 years now. She has long forgotten her family, even though they visit her almost daily. Moderately disheveled after eating her lunch, half of which she now wears on her shirt, Mrs. P. is taking one of her many aimless strolls to nowhere. She glides toward Oscar, pushing her walker and muttering to herself with complete disregard for her surroundings. Perturbed, Oscar watches her carefully and, as she walks by, lets out a gentle hiss, a rattlesnake-like warning that says “leave me alone.” She passes him without a glance and continues down the hallway. Oscar is relieved. It is not yet Mrs. P.'s time, and he wants nothing to do with her.
Oscar jumps down off the desk, relieved to be once more alone and in control of his domain. He takes a few moments to drink from his water bowl and grab a quick bite. Satisfied, he enjoys another stretch and sets out on his rounds. Oscar decides to head down the west wing first, along the way sidestepping Mr. S., who is slumped over on a couch in the hallway. With lips slightly pursed, he snores peacefully — perhaps blissfully unaware of where he is now living. Oscar continues down the hallway until he reaches its end and Room 310. The door is closed, so Oscar sits and waits. He has important business here.
Twenty-five minutes later, the door finally opens, and out walks a nurse's aide carrying dirty linens. “Hello, Oscar,” she says. “Are you going inside?” Oscar lets her pass, then makes his way into the room, where there are two people. Lying in a corner bed and facing the wall, Mrs. T. is asleep in a fetal position. Her body is thin and wasted from the breast cancer that has been eating away at her organs. She is mildly jaundiced and has not spoken in several days. Sitting next to her is her daughter, who glances up from her novel to warmly greet the visitor. “Hello, Oscar. How are you today?”
Oscar takes no notice of the woman and leaps up onto the bed. He surveys Mrs. T. She is clearly in the terminal phase of illness, and her breathing is labored. Oscar's examination is interrupted by a nurse, who walks in to ask the daughter whether Mrs. T. is uncomfortable and needs more morphine. The daughter shakes her head, and the nurse retreats. Oscar returns to his work. He sniffs the air, gives Mrs. T. one final look, then jumps off the bed and quickly leaves the room. Not today.
Making his way back up the hallway, Oscar arrives at Room 313. The door is open, and he proceeds inside. Mrs. K. is resting peacefully in her bed, her breathing steady but shallow. She is surrounded by photographs of her grandchildren and one from her wedding day. Despite these keepsakes, she is alone. Oscar jumps onto her bed and again sniffs the air. He pauses to consider the situation, and then turns around twice before curling up beside Mrs. K.
One hour passes. Oscar waits. A nurse walks into the room to check on her patient. She pauses to note Oscar's presence. Concerned, she hurriedly leaves the room and returns to her desk. She grabs Mrs. K.'s chart off the medical-records rack and begins to make phone calls.
Within a half hour the family starts to arrive. Chairs are brought into the room, where the relatives begin their vigil. The priest is called to deliver last rites. And still, Oscar has not budged, instead purring and gently nuzzling Mrs. K. A young grandson asks his mother, “What is the cat doing here?” The mother, fighting back tears, tells him, “He is here to help Grandma get to heaven.” Thirty minutes later, Mrs. K. takes her last earthly breath. With this, Oscar sits up, looks around, then departs the room so quietly that the grieving family barely notices.
On his way back to the charting area, Oscar passes a plaque mounted on the wall. On it is engraved a commendation from a local hospice agency: “For his compassionate hospice care, this plaque is awarded to Oscar the Cat.” Oscar takes a quick drink of water and returns to his desk to curl up for a long rest. His day's work is done. There will be no more deaths today, not in Room 310 or in any other room for that matter. After all, no one dies on the third floor unless Oscar pays a visit and stays awhile.
Note: Since he was adopted by staff members as a kitten, Oscar the Cat has had an uncanny ability to predict when residents are about to die. Thus far, he has presided over the deaths of more than 25 residents on the third floor of Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, Rhode Island. His mere presence at the bedside is viewed by physicians and nursing home staff as an almost absolute indicator of impending death, allowing staff members to adequately notify families. Oscar has also provided companionship to those who would otherwise have died alone. For his work, he is highly regarded by the physicians and staff at Steere House and by the families of the residents whom he serves.A Batman V Superman Extra Just Broke Confidentiality To Drop These Bombs By Sean O'Connell Random Article Blend Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Needless to say, we are going to get into a number of potential spoilers in the following article, so feel free to bail now if you do not want to know more about things that might happen in Snyder’s movie.
Michigan’s WILX has a report (via Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice that drops a number of massive spoilers for the 2016 blockbuster. More on the shoot in a second, but the major reveal in the local news story confirms that Robin is indeed in Snyder’s Batman-Superman movie… and that Robin is female. The reporter revealing this information couches it with "as scripted now," but this backs up the claims we have been hearing that The Dark Knight Returns.
The Michigan news report goes on to say that the scene being filmed over the weekend will take pace at a party (as we
The source agreed to speak to WILX so long as their voice was disguised and their face was hidden. They admit on camera that there potentially could be a $5 million lawsuit for anyone who
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice continues to film in Michigan. It’s aiming for a March 25, 2016 release. It is getting harder and harder to protect massive blockbusters from spoilers leaked by on-set spies. Directors like Christopher Nolan, J.J. Abrams and Joss Whedon attempt to lock down productions with gag orders and clever appeals. But the extras who earn very little cash decide to spill the beans to local media, as when a Michigan man agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity about Zack Snyder’s. Needless to say,Michigan’s WILX has a report (via ComicBook.com ) from the scene of a live shoot on Zack Snyder’sthat drops a number of massive spoilers for the 2016 blockbuster. More on the shoot in a second, but the major reveal in the local news story confirms that Robin is indeed in Snyder’s Batman-Superman movie… and that Robin is female. The reporter revealing this information couches it with "as scripted now," but this backs up the claims we have been hearing that Jena Malone could possibly be playing Carrie Kelley from Frank Miller’s seminal graphic novelThe Michigan news report goes on to say that the scene being filmed over the weekend will take pace at a party (as we reported earlier ), and will involve a physical confrontation between Lex Luthor (played by Jesse Eisenberg) and Bruce Wayne (played by Ben Affleck). They specifically note Bruce Wayne, and not Batman, though it is confirmed that the military will respond because of the conflict, and that there will be fireworks, paparazzi and "heavy special effects."The source agreed to speak to WILX so long as their voice was disguised and their face was hidden. They admit on camera that there potentially could be a $5 million lawsuit for anyone who reveals secrets. You can listen to the full report here continues to film in Michigan. It’s aiming for a March 25, 2016 release. Blended From Around The Web Facebook
Back to top“This is not a particularly good day for the department,” a sullen Bill Bratton said Thursday, as he dropped the hammer on four top commanders who are the targets of an escalating federal corruption probe.
The police commissioner stripped two of the men of their guns and badges and yanked the other two from their commands — a harsh penalty he followed up with a warning to the rest of his officers to keep their noses clean.
Bratton made the announcement hours after The Post exclusively revealed that Deputy Inspector James Grant of the 19th Precinct was caught accepting cash and diamonds from a shady businessman.
Once the revelation hit newsstands, Bratton called in the head of New York’s FBI office, Diego Rodriguez, to get updated on the investigation.
Grant was placed on modified duty and transferred, along with Deputy Housing Chief Michael Harrington. Brooklyn South Deputy Chief Eric Rodriguez and Deputy Chief David Colon were also transferred.
Grant was caught by the feds getting hundreds of dollars from Jeremy Reichberg, a prominent figure in Borough Park, around Christmas, sources have said.
Grant also allegedly accepted diamonds from the jeweler while driving him home from overseas trips to pick up the gems — and was told they were for his wife.
Reichberg and Jona Rechnitz, a real-estate investor, are at the center of the FBI’s probe into whether cops performed favors in exchange for lavish gifts, like trips and Super Bowl tickets.
“The potential violations under investigation include violations of NYPD rules and policies, the city conflicts-of-interest rules and the federal criminal laws,” Bratton said.
“The investigation is examining the conduct of current and former NYPD officers and several others.”
Bratton said he learned of the probe when he was appointed NYPD commissioner for a second stint in December 2013.
“This investigation — our investigation — had been under way a very short period of time,” he said.
As for why it took so long for any high-ranking cops to be placed on modified duty, the commissioner said, “All of you are very familiar with these investigations. They take time.”
“These are not easy press conferences to do,” he said. “We are taking those actions based on what we know at this time.”
Three of the four officers disciplined — Rodriguez, Colon and Grant — had received promotions from Bratton, sources said.
Bratton said he had instructed the Legal Bureau this year to educate all NYPD members ranked captain and above on conflicts of interest. Additional training will provided soon, he added.
It remained unclear where the transferred cops would land.
“They’re all going to end up in a support-type bureau or a purely administrative function within a patrol bureau,” a police official said.
More brass could face disciplinary action.
“We’re going to go wherever the investigation leads us,” said Larry Byrne, the NYPD’s commissioner of legal matters.
But he declined to comment on Philip Banks, who resigned in late 2014 as chief of department while he was being targeted in a federal corruption probe.
Harrington had worked with Banks throughout his career, sources said.
In an open letter to police officers later in the day, Bratton issued a stern warning.
“What I want you, the men and women of the department, officers and civilians alike, to know is this: The people of the city of New York depend on us and expect us to be honest, trustworthy and true — and so do I,” it read.
“We cannot effectively keep people safe if we do not live up to those expectations.”
Mayor de Blasio ducked out of a press briefing before reporters could ask about the scandal. His spokeswoman, Monica Klein, refused to answer questions about his confidence in NYPD brass.
“The mayor and Commissioner Bratton are both committed to ensuring that the NYPD maintains the integrity and trust that the public expects from its Police Department, and the NYPD is conducting a joint investigation with the FBI to discover all the facts,” Klein said.
“The mayor is fully supportive of these investigations.”Reverend Gary LaMoine of the Assumption Church in Barnesville, Minn., denied 17-year-old Lennon Cihak the Eucharist rite of Communion after seeing a picture on Facebook of the teen that went against the church's politics.
The image in question, currently inaccessible due to privacy settings, depicted Cihak holding a modified sign in support of an amendment to the state's constitution that would define marriage as being between a man and a woman. Cihak's modification to the yard sign reflected his support of marriage equality.
Known as Amendment One, the initiative was rejected by Minnesota voters on Nov. 7. One of its most vocal opponents was Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe, who quit blogging for the Twin Cities Pioneer Press after the paper's editorial board ran an opinion piece in support of the legislation.
According to The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead, Rev. LaMoine called in Shana Cihak, Lennon's mother, into a private conversation where he informed her of his decision.
"You kind of know the Catholic beliefs, but I never thought they would deny somebody confirmation because you weren't 100%," Cihak told the paper. "I guess that's what shocks me."
The sanction stemming from the Facebook photo applies to the rest of the Cihak family. Shana Cihak confirmed that they were not allowed to participate in Communion at the Assumption Church.
Despite being shunned by the church, Lennon isn't holding any grudges.
"I don't want the church to be put down. I don't want the Catholic religion to be put down. It's just the way the priest has things running. He's so strict. He won't loosen up about things."
The Daily Dot reached out to the Assumption Church asking to speak with Rev. LaMoine but was denied an interview.
"We're not making any comments on what we feel is an internal matter," the unidentified person who answered the phone told us.
Photo courtesy of Flickr, thaths
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with a narrative that makes it about the individual that makes it about autodidacts that they can find the resources they can even connect to perhaps to powerful networks themselves. But I think that that’s that’s absolutely not the reality for the vast majority of people in this country.
Rose: And what about all that data that’s being collected to create new lessons for the kid? Who has access to that data? Does it go on their permanent record? Is that a good thing?
Jade: I don’t know how much ends up in their permanent school record and it’s a little bit scary to have like kindergarteners and first graders. Adaptive learning things and having all that kept in their records potentially because all of this will keep that data in until the child enters or learning on their own. And if all the algorithms are speaking to each other maybe not knowing what one plus one is will be really bad in the future.
Rose: What this could mean, is that kids who maybe doesn’t get the interface, or starts out on the wrong track, could have a much harder time catching up or switching tracks.
Jade has some experience with his.
Jade: So, how old are my children, they are seven and nine. They are they just finished actually first and third grade and we are and then New York City metro area and we moved here from North Carolina. And when we got here they were both reading below grade level and sort of underperforming which was really bad. But one of the things that was going on in North Carolina is very early on in both of their school careers they switched their homework system for being on paper to being on the computer or tablet.
Rose: So in North Carolina, her kids were using one of these adaptive learning systems that we talked about before. And it wasn’t working for them. But when they moved to New York, and started doing their homework on paper again, instead of in the app, they caught up.
Jade: But as soon as they started reading on paper and having to write on paper as their handwriting is abysmal, it’s really bad. They got up to grade level in like a month and which was pretty average. In terms of writing I think that’s it’s gotten well.
Rose: But if they had stayed in North Carolina, Jade worries that they would have been stuck on the same track.
Jade: Yeah you’re already in a chain reaction right. That’s sort of what algorithms are so if this input at the very beginning was bad and you couldn’t adapt fast enough for whatever reason you might get lost like they legitimately thought my son had a learning disability we had them tested they didn’t know what was going on. And had we not got out of our way to get testing done and had we not sort of worked with especially when we moved to make sure that we repeated testing her and had we not gone out of our way to find things that they wanted to and worked with them on the algorithm that they were on would have said you know this person is behind grade level and they’re behind when they’re behind grade level. Even now because he was behind grade level he has an eye even though he doesn’t necessarily need it anymore with just an individual action plan thing.
Rose: And this made me think about my relationship with school. I was not a great student. Because I was, okay, am still, pretty ornery. And if I didn’t think an assignment was good, I just wouldn’t do it.
Jade: I was the same way with multiple choice tests out there really stupid. And I remember distinctly in third grade being really upset with where all the dots really.So are you raced all of my answers. And did a pattern. And I failed the tests. But the teacher knew that I knew everything so it was fine and my grades were high enough everywhere else that it balance that out. But for students like you and me who are just like “this isn’t my thing” we would be really bad people on the algorithm.
Rose: So, why does it seem like so many people want to “disrupt education” — I’m doing finger quotes right now around disrupt. Why is this idea of a school in the cloud, or a hole in the wall, or a world where students just teach themselves everything they need to know on their own, seem to be so trendy right now?
Audrey says that it’s partially because we don’t value teachers.
Audrey: Teaching is a feminized profession and it’s mostly it’s has been historically mostly women who’ve been teachers and so do we think it’s a value a valid profession. Do we respect this profession that’s dominated by women. I don’t I don’t think we do.
Rose: But it’s also has to do with the rise of tech as this huge and influential sector. So many of the people working as programmers in tech right now didn’t learn programming in school, because nobody taught programming in school. They taught themselves.
Audrey: They didn’t have opportunities to learn computer science in school and so they think here I know this thing I know this thing that everyone is talking about as being absolutely crucial to the future of the economy crucial to the future of education and I did it myself. So schools are you know I think it makes it really easy to believe that schools are somehow irrelevant if the one thing you do. You taught yourself and sure everyone in the world must be an autodidact.
Rose: And it’s true, a lot of the top programmers at these companies are self taught sort of. But does that necessarily mean that that’s what we should all be striving for? I’m not so sure. Besides, even though many of those people taught themselves the programming skills they need for their jobs, they still benefitted immensely from the schools they went to. Yes, you learn things at Harvard and Yale and Princeton, but along with that you get a very, very powerful network of people and connections that get you in the door at powerful companies. Google’s hiring team is notorious for rejecting applications outright from anyone who doesn’t have an Ivy-league degree. Learning oneline, those connections, that degree, that all goes away. You’re no longer a prime candidate at Google. That doesn’t mean you won’t get a job, but the leg up you got from simply having an Ivy League degree, that goes away.
But here’s the thing, when people talk about replacing teachers with algorithms and computers, they’re not talking about replacing the teachers in extremely expensive prep schools or at Harvard or Princeton. They’re talking about replacing the teachers in Africa (the whole continent, usually, a lot of these sites don’t tend to get more specific than that) or in slums in India.
Jade: Yes there’s yes there’s a very long history of education as a tool to advance sort of the missionary objectives of colonization. So a lot of the language if you actually look at it will also sort of map onto the way that people talked about how Christianity was the way to save people as they were sort of expanding colonial empires. So if we educate them there will be less multiple births with this much less poverty it’s going to fix everything. They will enter the world like the rest of us.
Rose: Rich kids aren’t going to be taught by artificial intelligence. It’s going to be the poor kids, the kids who are already left behind, the kids who nobody thinks are worth it.
Audrey: This is this is the future that I fear that this is one of the futures that I fear in which actually being in contact with caring skilled human teacher will become the privilege of the rich. Right so the poor will get computers they’ll get flash cards hopefully you know hopefully the computers will work. Hopefully they’ll have internet access and that that having having attention from a human having a powerful relationship with a teacher will increasingly become something for the privileged.
Rose: This is actually a fear that even the people at education tech companies talked about. Here’s Julia from Coursera.
Julia: I mean I think that that would be the most scary part about it is that essentially you know people’s demographics that will determine to their will determine their will determine who learned what they needed to learn so you would have families who are really who really knew how to play the game and really knew what you needed to do and they would support their students going through it and families who are you know have different circumstances wouldn’t have that
Rose: It’s kind of this weird circle. Educational technology can, according to its proponents, democratize education — make it better and cheaper and more accessible to everybody. But if you democratize it too far, you wind up making everything even less fair than it was before.
KIDS SURPRISE
Robot: Is that your final answer? Or would you like to review your choices?
[[MUSIC UP]]
That’s all for this week’s future. What do you think? Would you let your kid be taught by a robot? Do you think
There’s so much we didn’t get into this episode, so if you go online to flashforwardpod.com you’ll see more on education and technology and robots and all that good stuff that I couldn’t squeeze in here.
Flash Forward is produced by me, Rose Eveleth, and is part of the Boing Boing podcast family. The intro music is by Asura and the outtro music is by Broke for Free. Special thanks this week to listeners who sent in their kiddos for the intro — that’s Ari, David, Kevin, Sharon, Beth, Kim and Nav. The episode art is by Matt Lubchansky.
If you want to suggest a future we should take on, send us a note on Twitter, Facebook or by email at info@flashforwardpod.com. I love hearing your ideas! And if you think you’ve spotted one of the little references I’ve hidden in the episode, email us there too. If you’re right, I’ll send you something cool. Oh and one the survey some of you have asked what these references are that I’m talking about! If you go to flashforwardpod.com/references you’ll see a list of past hidden gems from season one so you can see what you should be looking for.
And if you want to support the show, there are a few ways you can do that too! We have a Patreon page, where you can donate to the show. But if that’s not in the cards for you, you can head to iTunes and leave us a nice review or just tell your friends about us. Those things really do help.
That’s all for this future, come back next week and we’ll travel to a new one.A company founded by an Indiana University graduate to fight payment-card fraud with data analytics, statistical modeling, and machine learning is now backed by the school’s Innovate Indiana Fund. Part of a $2.6 million investment round, the funding will help Chicago-based Rippleshot launch a new product later this year aimed at stopping criminals from scamming online merchants.
The company—founded in 2013 by IU alumus Yueyu Fu, Canh Tran, and Randal Cox, who have a combined 40 years of experience working in financial services and fraud detection—is going after a market expected to total more than $183 billion between 2015 and 2020, according to payments industry newsletter The Nilson Report.
Kaleigh Simmons, Rippleshot’s marketing director, says that a few years ago, the company’s founders noticed a dramatic rise in credit and debit card fraud, and they wanted to try using big data technologies to proactively mitigate the problem.
Tran, the CEO, is a fly-fishing enthusiast who chose the company’s name because it refers to the ripple across the water that a fish makes when it comes to the surface, indicating that it’s going to bite the lure. (He viewed the company’s ability to identify the early ripples of fraud in a similar way, Simmons says.)
Rippleshot’s cloud-based technology can identify in real time where and when payment card information is being stolen by analyzing transaction data submitted to the company by financial institutions, Simmons explains. Once fraud is detected, the company advises its customers (financial institutions and merchants) on strategies to prevent losses.
“Every time we sign a bank up as a customer, we get all of their transaction data including disputed charges,” she adds. “Disputed charges are often an early signal that something is wrong.”
For example, say the Xconomy Detroit/Ann Arbor staff goes out for coffee, and a skimmer at the cash register picks up our credit card information. Even though we all have accounts at different banks, Rippleshot would be able to perform an analysis marking the coffee shop as the point of compromise and, using customer data from the time period during which the theft occurred, assign each customer a risk score. The company can then use that score to predict which individuals would be at especially high risk for fraud—because they’re big spenders or have high credit limits, making bogus purchases harder to notice—and alert the corresponding financial institution.
Rippleshot has already released a product that analyzes payment card data. Later this year, the company expects to launch a new offering that focuses on the merchant’s side of the transaction.
Simmons says when a payment card is used fraudulently, merchants and financial institutions bicker about who’s responsible for “owning” the breach. With the advent of EMVs (chip cards), the liability has shifted to merchants because it’s so hard to replicate and steal chip card information. However, she says, you don’t get the benefit of the chip’s added security protections unless the card is “dipped” at the point of sale—meaning online shopping is still a risky proposition. Rippleshot plans to use the same proprietary big data tools to analyze merchant data to detect and prevent criminal activity.
“Because we have all this [transaction] data, we can sit in the middle and help both parties,” Simmons says. “Our banking market is big, but the merchant problem is huge, especially as more people shop online. Banks and merchants are at each other’s throats over who should do more to prevent fraud, so we’re hoping to fill the gap.”
Simmons says because this is fairly uncharted territory, Rippleshot’s biggest competitor is “honestly, Excel spreadsheets maintained internally by banks.” But many other startups are also tackling fraud from different directions, and large credit card and online payment companies also have their own fraud prevention efforts.
The multi-billion-dollar market for this kind of fraud detection lacks a singular solution, and that’s one reason the Innovate Indiana Fund wanted to jump on board as an investor, according to fund manager Ken Green.
“It’s exciting to connect with Indiana University alumni like Yueyu Fu, whose careers and experiences have brought them to a place to make a significant societal contribution,” Green said in a statement.
The 10-person company closed on a $2.6 million funding round in February, bringing the total invested in Rippleshot since its inception to $4.6 million, Simmons says. Other investors include KDWC Ventures and CUNA Mutual Group.
There are two big partnerships with large payment-card processors in the works for later this year, but Simmons declined to share specifics. The company’s long-term goal is acquisition, she says.
Sarah Schmid Stevenson is the editor of Xconomy Detroit/Ann Arbor. You can reach her at 313-570-9823 or sschmid@xconomy.com. Follow @XconomyDET_AA
Trending on XconomyWhat is Sleep Apnea Doing to Your Sleep?
Written by Anne Winslow with contributions from Kevin Morton, Spring 2010
In 2001 my father fell asleep at the wheel on two separate occasions. Both times his life was saved by alert passengers who recognized the danger of the situation and immediately woke him from his microsleep.
This experience was a wake-up call for my father, an extremely loud and chronic snorer. He checked into a sleep clinic shortly afterwards and his sleep was monitored throughout the night. His diagnosis: severe obstructive sleep apnea. Upon hearing this, my entire family had to ask, "What is sleep apnea?"
Dr. D's Sleep Book Says... Sleep apnea is an unrecognized killer, but it is hiding in plain sight. Every night more than 50 million Americans stop breathing. In a stunning evolutionary failure, nature endowed us with throats that tend to collapse during sleep and block air flow but did not endow our sleeping brains with the ability to start breathing without waking up. What is Dr. D's sleep book?
Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a condition that affects one's ability to breathe while asleep and is, as more and more people are discovering daily, alarmingly common. While statistics are hard to put an exact finger on, varying considerably based on the criteria used, peer-reviewed studies have found sleep-disordered breathing that meets the criterion for sleep apnea syndrome to be present in 24% of adult men and 9% of adult women (Young et al. 1993).
These numbers are simply breathtaking (pun possibly intented here ;). But in all seriousness, think about this. Sleep apnea affects quite a large amount of the population, and, as you will see, is not to be taken lightly in terms of what it can do to you. And yet many people still don't know what sleep apnea is. Taking the time to read this page will put you in a great position to help someone in the future (and quite literally save or extend their life). As the statistics indicate, you are likely to know quite a few people who develop obstructive sleep apnea.
The word "apnea" simply means the absence of breathing. To have sleep apnea thus means to stop breathing during sleep.
Well, that doesn't sound good. At all.
The official definition of a sleep apnea episode that is accepted by sleep specialists is a cessation of airflow at the nose and mouth lasting more than ten seconds despite efforts to breathe (Dement 335). The episodes are often terminated by an abrupt awakening, short enough not to be remembered by the sleeper, but present enough to really compromise the quality of his or her sleep. In severe cases, the sleeper can wake up hundreds of times in a single night.
Differentiating Apneas There are actually 3 different kinds of sleep apneas, the obstructive variety being by far the most common. The other two are central sleep apnea (where there is an absence of even the effort to breathe) and mixed sleep apnea (a combination of obstructive and central).
Diagnosed by a polysomnographic sleep test that includes the monitoring of airflow, sleep apnea is ranked in terms of its severity based on the number of sleep apnea episodes experienced per hour. Though the number of episodes varies night to night, the minimum number to receive a diagnosis of obstructive sleep apnea is 5 episodes per hour. This means that a person with even the mildest form of obstructive sleep apnea is waking every 12 minutes throughout the night!
These constant, brief interruptions of sleep are rarely recalled by their victims. Their body wakes up for a split second in order to take a breath and restore oxygen, then falls right back to sleep with no time for the brain to remember the awakening. The result is an individual waking up thinking they obtained good, continuous sleep when in reality they woke up dozens, if not hundreds of times.
Despite eluding memory, these episodes have incredibly detrimental consequences. As you can imagine, not breathing for long enough while asleep has the potential to bring down an individual's blood oxygen levels. Consistently struggling to breathe like this for long enough can cause a number of complications, including high blood pressure, diabetes, acid reflux, cardiac arrhythmias, stroke, and heart failure (Caples et. al.).
The constant interruption of sleep also makes it difficult for the victim to obtain sleep that is restful and rejuvenating. Obstructive sleep apnea patients often accumulate large amounts of sleep deprivation because of constantly having to wake up throughout the night to breathe. This makes it difficult to get into REM or deep sleep. The result is the individual feeling persistently tired throughout the day, often apathetic or depressed, despite the fact that they think they should have slept long enough (because they can't remember awakening at all).
But no matter how long you sleep, if you're having to wake up constantly to breathe you are not going to feel well rested once you wake up.
How Do I Know If I Have Sleep Apnea?
Loud snoring is THE cardinal sign that something is wrong. No matter how normalized we are to snoring taking place (in us, in our loved ones, in general), snoring is never a normal thing for the body to do. Snoring is a struggle to breathe, and as you can imagine struggling to breathe each and every night puts a large strain on one's body.
The characteristic snoring pattern for OSA is a series of loud snores interrupted by a sudden silence that signals complete obstruction and inability to breathe. During the apnea, the victim's respiratory efforts increase steadily until finally, there is an interruption of sleep and the obstruction is broken, often with a loud choking, gasping, inspiratory snort (Dement). This process is repeated throughout the night, with the effect of severely disturbing the bed-partner as well the victim.
According to a recent study at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, the bed-partner of a sleep apnea patient has sleep as disturbed, fragmented and inefficient as an insomniac. This is referred to as "spousal arousal syndrome" and it indicates that obstructive sleep apnea is significantly detrimental to the victim as well as their loved-ones. It can be said then that if you have a bed partner and seek treatment as outlined below, you are essentially getting two for the price of one.
The second cardinal sign that a victim is suffering from sleep apnea is excessive daytime sleepiness. If loud snoring is coupled with persistent tiredness or low alertness throughout the day, the symptoms must not be ignored and the individual should contact a sleep physician immediately. If this sounds like you, don't put off seeking treatment.
Valuable Resource: SleepQuest is a quickly growing company offering diagnostic tests you can take from the comfort of your own home. If the above sounds like you, they are definitely worth checking out so you can get treated. Start learning about SleepQuest from our interview with founder and CEO Robert Koenigsberg here.
Treatments For Sleep Apnea
Fortunately, there are viable options for treating obstructive sleep apnea.
The most effective and popular treatment is the CPAP machine, a nasal mask that provides c ontinuous p ositive a irway p ressure (what CPAP stands for) to prevent the airway from collapsing during inspiration so that unobstructed breathing can occur. It's a common misconception that CPAP machines actually pump oxygen into you; instead it's more that they create the right pressure to keep your breathing tube open.
When utilized on a nightly basis, this relatively inexpensive treatment is extremely effective at reversing OSA episodes and the accompanying daytime symptoms.
Other treatments include surgeries, radio frequency reduction of tissue volume and dental appliances (Dement 350). These treatments all seek to increase the size of the airway and ease the effort to inhale air.
Why Sleep Apnea Treatment Is Absolutely Vital
Treating obstructive sleep apnea can restore a victim's quality of life, reduce the risk of motor vehicle accidents, decrease the risk of developing cardiovascular disease, and provide relief for the behavioral and psychological symptoms of OSA. It can prevent countless injuries and deaths, increase productivity in the workplace and the classroom, and can significantly improve a victim's mood and energy level.
An Early Death I remember Dr. Dement once remarking that he used to make a practice of asking sleep physicians the age of the oldest person they had ever treated for sleep apnea. They were never very old at all, because people with sleep apnea die before they can reach old age. Heart attacks, blood pressure, traffic accidents, you name it. Such is the nature of a disorder that makes your body battle to breathe each and every night. -Kevin
How is it possible then that only one out of twenty people with obstructive sleep apnea receive treatment (Streich)? There is an incredible lack of knowledge among the general population about sleep disorders. This is due in large part to a failure of the educational system and medical professionals to address the importance of sleep and sleep disorders.
It is estimated that only about one out of ten people with obstructive sleep apnea are ever diagnosed. The other 90% live their lives in a state of persistent drowsiness and fatigue, placing their lives and health in incredible danger.
My father's near accidents served as an extreme wake-up call for my entire family. By recognizing a problem and asking his doctor "What is sleep apnea?" we learned that his daily fatigue and loud snoring were actually symptoms of a very serious illness that could be effectively and easily treated. Only with increased awareness and sleep education will this chronic illness be diagnosed and treated with regularity, so that victims can once again sleep easy and breathe softly at night.
The Importance Of Seeking Treatment A student-made outreach project for Stanford Sleep and Dreams, "Fool's Dream" follows Scrooge in his struggle to come to terms with the dangers of having sleep apnea and not getting treated. Watch and see why sleep apnea treatment is so important as Scrooge is shown his past, present, and future by the Ghosts of Sleep Apnea in a story modeled after Dickens' "A Christmas Carol." Fool's Dream - Based On Dickens' "A Christmas Carol"
Starring Robert Hintz, Santiago Ibarra, Cassie Montoya, Peter Abraham, James Mannion, and Tatum Sohlberg. See More Outreach Projects Starring Robert Hintz, Santiago Ibarra, Cassie Montoya, Peter Abraham, James Mannion, and Tatum Sohlberg.
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Sources used for this article:
Young, et al. "The Occurrence of Sleep-Disordered Breathing among Middle-Aged Adults."
Check it out at www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199304293281704
Kushida, et al. "Symptom-Based Prevalence of Sleep Disorders in an Adult Primary Care Population" Check it out at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11894194
Caples, Sean, Apoor Gami, and Virend Somers. "Obstructive Sleep Apnea." Focus 3 (2005): 557-67. Web.
Dement, William. The Stanford Sleep Book. USA. 2002
Dement, William. "Lecture 17 - OSA I: Breathing is Everything!" Psychiatry 135. Stanford University. Stanford, 10 May 2010
Streich, Elizabeth. "Sleep Apnea Impairs Blood Vessel Function in Obesity".
Check it out at http://insciences.org/article.php?article_id=8757.
More Resources Available
For more information about treating sleep apnea, you can check out Snoring-Solutions-That-Work.com. Regardless of if you have sleep apnea or not, if your snoring disturbs your sleep or that of your bed partner, empower yourself with a number of ways to alleviate it with their Snoring Treatments article.Inspiring greatness is all about leading by example. The best leaders have these habits in common.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
This article is included in Entrepreneur Voices on Effective Leadership, a new book containing insights from more than 20 contributors, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders.
Forget the stereotypical leadership image of a buttoned-up person in a gray suit hauling around a hefty briefcase. Today, standout leaders come in all shapes and sizes. She could be a blue jeans-clad marketing student, running a major ecommerce company out of her dorm room. He might be the next salt-and-pepper-haired, barefoot Steve Jobs, presenting a groundbreaking new device at a major industry conference.
"Our research indicates that what really matters is that leaders are able to create enthusiasm, empower their people, instill confidence and be inspiring to the people around them," says Peter Handal, chief executive of New York City-based Dale Carnegie Training, a leadership-training company.
That's a tall order. However, as different as leaders are today, there are some things great leaders do every day. Here, Handal shares his five keys for effective leadership:
1. Face challenges.
Great leaders are brave enough to face up to challenging situations and deal with them honestly. Whether it's steering through a business downturn or getting struggling employees back on track, effective leaders meet these challenges openly. Regular communications with your staff, informing them of both good news and how the company is reacting to challenges will go a long way toward making employees feel like you trust them and that they're unlikely to be hit with unpleasant surprises.
"The gossip at the coffee machine is usually 10 times worse than reality," Handal says. "Employees need to see their leaders out there, confronting that reality head-on."
Read This: Entrepreneur Voices on Effective Leadership | Amazon | Barnes & Noble
2. Win trust.
Employees are more loyal and enthusiastic when they work in an environment run by people they trust. Building that trust can be done in many ways. The first is to show employees that you care about them, Handal says. Take an interest in your employees beyond the workplace. Don't pry, he advises, but ask about an employee's child's baseball game or college graduation. Let your employees know that you're interested in their success and discuss their career paths with them regularly.
When employees, vendors or others make mistakes, don't reprimand or correct them in anger. Instead, calmly explain the situation and why their behavior or actions weren't correct, as well as what you expect in the future. When people know that you aren't going to berate them and that you have their best interests at heart, they're going to trust you, Handal says.
3. Be authentic.
If you're not a suit, don't try to be one. Employees and others dealing with your company will be able to tell if you're just pretending to be someone you're not, Handal says. That could make them question what else about you might be inauthentic. Have a passion for funky shoes? Wear them. Are you an enthusiastic and hilarious presenter? Get them laughing. Use your strengths and personality traits to develop your personal leadership style, Handal says.
4. Earn respect.
When you conduct yourself in an ethical way and model the traits you want to see in others, you earn the respect of those around you. Leaders who are perceived as not "walking their talk" typically don't get very far, Handal says. This contributes to employees and other stakeholders having pride in the company, which is an essential part of engagement, Handal says. Also, customers are less likely to do business with a company if they don't respect its values or leadership.
5. Stay curious.
Good leaders remain intellectually curious and committed to learning. They're inquisitive and always looking for new ideas, insights and information. Handal says the best leaders understand that innovation and new approaches can come from many places and are always on the lookout for knowledge or people who might inform them and give them an advantage.
"The most successful leaders I know are truly very curious people. They're interested in the things around them and that contributes to their vision," Handal says.
For more info, check out Former Cosmo Editor Kate White: How to Be a Badass Leader »
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What are your keys to inspiring leadership? Share your thoughts in the comments below. The best submissions will be featured with your name.
Here are our favorites:
Jun 28, 2013, Right Now Travel Demonstrate a fair and honest character. Make sure your employees are aware that you can show humility and are not afraid to admit fault. Treat everyone the same. Talk to your employees to get to know their life and do not come off as pompous or condescending. Managers are constantly learning. Your workers will respect you more if you respect them.
Jun 28, 2013, The Gem Project, Inc. #LeadershipKeys Great Leadership: 1. Being able to inspire a shared vision or enable a diverse group of individuals to set aside their differences and unite toward a common goal/interest. 2. Transparency: Good leaders are transparent with their actions and lead by example. 3. Leaders that encourage and empower their teams in such a way that makes everyone feel that all they have stake within the organization's future and present. Leaders empower others to act in ways that benefit not just themselves, but their neighbors.
Jun 28, 2013, tammysoffices I found it interesting that many of the keys to good leadership, fall in line with what it takes to be a good parent. All of these characteristics are important to parenting, as well as, important to instill in our children, in my opinion. I also agree many of the other comments. I've often heard it said that 'To be a good leader, be a good follower first', then you know how it feels to be in the other person's shoes. Respecting other's opinions and listening to real concerns and questions -not barking out orders and expecting people to follow, b/c they may for a day, month or so, but eventually they will leave, as they will not respect you, nor feel that you understand their position. Thanks for the article and for making us think about these things.Release of the JFK Files Is Pointless Due to the Obstruction of Justice by LBJ
It what will be a highly anticipated event, Donad Trump has made a major announcement about the release of the JFK files.
Many of the secret files related to the death of John F. Kennedy, have been held at the National Archives. This inlcudes several thousand “never-before-seen” documents, was ultimately mandated to occur by Oct. 26 under a 1992 law that sought to quell conspiracy theories about the assassination. That just happened to be the year that Oliver Stone released the wildly popular movie, JFK, which rekindled huge interest in the assassination.
President Trump has the executive power to block the release of the documents. In fact, many intelligence agencies, most notably the CIA have pressured him to not release the documents for some time for fear national security would be compromised. The agencies, such as the CIA and the FBI are concerned that information contained in some of the documents could damage national security interests both domestically and abroad.
With regard to the President’s tweet, Mr. Trump did not make it clear what he meant when he said that the release of the documents would be “subject to the receipt of further information.” Trump’s administration has been asked about the phrase and so far, Trump’sofficial did not immediately respond to emails seeking clarification.
The Cover Up Begins and Ends with Lyndon Johnson
Were it not for the duplicity and criminal actions of then, Vice-President Lyndon Johnson, the October 26th scheduled release would not even be needed.
Following the collection of “evidence”, LBJ sequestered all evidence to the National Archives. The action, barely reported on by the mainstream media was highly objectionable. As Jim Marrs once stated on my radio show “the government acts as if the American people are bunch of little children and they must be protected from the truth”.
Johnson’s efforts to conceal what happened to JFK did not begin and end with the sequestration of evidence related to the assassination. Johnson’s role in the cover up began at Parkland Hospital, and it concerned the the Presidential car, as it was parked in front of the hospital.
The Presidential Limo Was a Crime Scene
As the Presidential limo, pictured above, delivered the mortally wounded President to Parkland Hospital, LBJ arrived on the scene and promptly ordered the limo “scrubbed”. This order by LBJ was illegal and constituted with the tampering of a crime scene. Further, LBJ ordered that the damaged car be repaired before being sent to the National Archives. LBJ should have gone to prison for these orders, but who would prosecute him? In this regard LBJ and Hillary are very much alike.
In case you are wondering why this is important, the limo would have contained blood spatter patterns which could have determined the direction of the shot. And there can be no doubt that the bullet fragments would have been present in the car and certainly anything that would point away from Oswald as the lone-nut assassin, could never come to light.
Did I mention that the President’s brain went missing during the autopsy?
Did I mention that over 300 witnesses, with some intimate connection to the assassination ended up being murdered?
Did I mention that the Warren Commission that headed up the assassination’s bogus investigation was put together by LBJ?
Conclusion
As I have indicated in past articles and what should be apparent here, is that LBJ was both a co-conspirator before the fact and after the fact. LBJ’s actions constituted obstruction of justice and he was ever held accountable.
If we could not trust the evidence in the 1964 Warren Report, then how could we trust the relase of this same information now?
As I have stated in past articles, LBJ was at the center of the cover up. JFK, as I have previously stated was murdered on the orders of David Rockefeller which gave this despot the Vietnam War profits, the greatest increase of nuclear arms production in American history, getting rid of the Federal Reserve threatening C-notes, the continuation of the oil-depletion allowance and on and on it goes.
What was LBJ’s reward for this murder and subsequent treason, the Presidency of the United States. LBJ, before his death in 1969, would never allow the potential release of any document which would implicate him in the murder of John Kennedy. The rest of us already know better. You would be better off reading the late Jim Marrs’ book Crossfire about the assassination than waiting the for the release of mythical material.
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PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL AND DON’T FORGET TO “LIKE” USBill Clinton fills in for his wife at a campaign event in Las Vegas. He talks about their critics, saying Hillary has been "so viciously attacked by her opponent and his backers."
"Many of them were even around when I was president," he said. "Gosh, these people accused me of murder -- You wouldn't believe what they said about me. And now they're right at the center of [Trump's] campaign. Just, you know, attack, attack."
"I'm glad to have a chance to stand in for Hillary today," he said. "She did it for me for a along time, it is about time I showed up and did it for her. I just talked to her, she's feeling great."
"It is a crazy time we live in when people think there is something unusual about getting the flu," the former president said about Hillary Clinton's pneumonia diagnosis. "Last time I checked, millions of people were getting it every year."
"Don't treat people the way Trump has treated us," Clinton also said, comparing the GOP nominee's attacks to "road rage."
Watch Clinton's full speech in Las Vegas:This article is from the February 2014 edition of The Progressive magazine. For more great content like this, subscribe today |
paper concludes that, “When administered under supportive conditions, psilocybin occasioned experiences similar to spontaneously occurring mystical experiences.” In a 2009 interview with MAPS, Griffiths stated, “The first study showed that psilocybin can, with high probability, occasion mystical-type experiences that appear virtually identical to naturally-occurring mystical experiences which have been described by mystics and other religious figures throughout the ages.” Essentially, Two-thirds of participants in the sessions described them as being among the most meaningful experiences of their lives.
Griffiths’ lab pressed ahead with its work in a 2014 study on the possibility of treating nicotine addiction with psilocybin. Participants had three psilocybin sessions and three cognitive-behavioral therapy sessions to diminish cravings. Eighty percent of those who received the psilocybin treatments abstained from nicotine for over six months, while less than 7 percent of those who received traditional nicotine-replacement therapy were successful for more than six months. Those who reported a “mystical experience” had the most success in breaking their addiction.
For Goldsmith and other psychedelics advocates, such studies point to the importance of introducing these compounds to the mainstream world. “People think this is the psychedelic renaissance but it is actually the research renaissance,” Goldsmith says. “But the actual renaissance of society will only begin once these substances are rescheduled.” He believes these compounds are synonymous with a spiritual sacrament, calling them “the most powerful psychiatric medicine ever created.” He believes the advocates will succeed for the simple reason that “psychedelics are illuminating.”
It remains to be seen when, and whether, MDMA and psilocybin are rescheduled. For the moment, MAPS, Neal Goldsmith, Shannon Carlin, and millions of other psychedelics supporters are hoping they will soon have the freedom to medicate themselves using various psychedelic compounds.
Top photo: A singel dose of medicinal MDMA is shown. (Photo: MAPS)We were just wondering what Google was doing with that super-fast gigabit network it promised to set up in one lucky city and here's finally a fresh development. The winner has been chosen and it's Kansas City, Kansas. Having the winning community in its own state will be quite the bitter pill for the people of Topeka to swallow, as they actually renamed their town to Google, Kansas, just to try and appease the Mountain View overlords. Hey, we're sure Google knows best! An agreement has now been signed to roll out the fiber goodness in Kansas City, which should result in gigabit service becoming available to locals in 2012. A press event is scheduled for 1PM ET, which will be livestreamed at the YouTube link below, and you can check out the announcement video after the break while you wait.That livestream is rolling, folks! Google's reps just said "this is the beginning and not the end." Kansas City, Kansas, will be just the first market where this 1Gbps goodness will be installed. Guess there's hope for the rest of us yet.Click here for Part 2!
Link to my Spotify Playlist!
A lot of people listen to music while coding, including me. The trick is which music will help to create an environment that encourages calm and productive code. Here’s a list of the music I listen to whilst coding:
Tycho – Extremely calm and mellow. Used for right when I get into the office in the morning. Personally I think his best album is Dive but he’s also coming out with more soon!
Blackmill – I’ve heard it described as “melodic dubstep”, great for late-night coding or if Tycho is too slow for you. I highly encourage you to check out his full album Miracle for his best work.
Boards of Canada – If you’re not into the electric or dubstep kinda music then this is for you. Technically electronic but more ambient rock. My favorite album of theirs is Trans-Canada Highway.
God is an Astronaut – Instrumental rock or “space rock”. Great if you need to get through a lot of boring work.
Explosions in the Sky – A lot like Boards of Canada mixed with God is an Astronaut. Suggested by /u/-entropy.
John Butler Trio – Really only just one song, but holy hell is it fantastic.
Nujabes – I can stress how awesome nujabes is. Jazz/Hip-hop mix, most of it instrumental. Big shoutout to /r/Nujabes.
Vibrasphere – Unfortunately retired band but they left behind a great collection of chill music.
Solar Fields – I love the Solar Fields because there is almost no “rhythm” to their music, making it difficult for my brain to distract me from coding.
Emancipator – Defined as trip hop and down tempo I love this music because it’s calm and very easy on the ears.
Massive Attack – Trip hop and experimental rock, suggested by /u/autra1
edIT – Member of the Glitch Mob but also has some smooth “glitch” music.
The Social Network Soundtrack – Suggested by /u/murdocsvan
Juno Reactor – A lot like Solar Fields but a little quicker. Suggested by /u/thesolitaire
DJ Shadow – A little like Nujabes except more hip-hop
Little People – Downbeat electronic. Extremely chill.
Burial – Dubstep, trip hop. I love his music mostly because it’s perfect “rain” music.
Brookes Brothers – Drum and Bass, a whole lot quicker and really upbeat!
Pretty Lights – Trip hop electronic.
Chillstep Mixes – there are tons of them out there on Youtube, most are more than an hour long, and they’re fantastic!
musicForProgramming(); – A site dedicated to long playlists of music to aid concentraction. Suggested by /u/TheCoryKid
/r/MusicforConcentration – A subreddit dedicated to this kind of music
I only included my top two to three of each artist, however I highly encourage you to explore each artists music.
Click here for Part 2!A leaked government memo, which claims SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon wants the Conservatives to win the general election, initially came from the Scotland Office, Secretary of State for Scotland Alistair Carmichael confirms to Channel 4 News.
Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood ordered an investigation into how the document, published in the Daily Telegraph, got into the public domain.
On Sunday, Mr Carmichael confirmed the memo came from the Scotland Office: “I understand that the memo in question did actually come from the Scotland Office, but these things circulate within government.”
Asked if the buck stops with him, Mr Carmichael added: “Of course as the Secretary of State for Scotland I am responsible for the Scotland Office, but you seem to be making some fairly substantial presumptions about the role of the Scotland office in this, that’s why we’re having a proper inquiry.”
Ms Sturgeon denies the claims.
Update 21 Oct 2015: the full interview with Mr Alistair Carmichael has been published below.The US has been conducting a long-range convoy throughout Europe. This training might be aimed at enabling Canada to do the same in the future
will involve close to 4,500 military personnel from Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom traveling 4,000 km across Canada
A 70 military vehicle convoy is currently moving from Canadian Forces Base (CFB) Valcartier, based in Quebec, to CFB Wainwright in Alberta. According to Lieutenant-General Marquis Hainse, Commander Canadian Army:
“It is important for the Canadian Army to be challenged with the most realistic and dynamic experiences possible in regard to operational situations such as cross-border logistics, driving in inclement weather, navigating unfamiliar roads, and training with our US partners, all to achieve excellence in operations and seamless coordination with our allies.”
More than 70 military vehicles are moving through northeastern Ontario as part of Maple Caravan. The Canadian Armed Forces says it's partnered with the United States Army to move equipment from Quebec to Alberta. (Master Corporal Simon Duchesne/supplied)
The military convoy is a partnership between the US Army and the Canadian Armed Forces under the name of Exercise MAPLE CARAVAN.
“Exercise MAPLE CARAVAN provides an exceptional opportunity for the Canadian Army to practise a joint logistical operation with its American ally, while using a cost-effective way to manage a large equipment movement to a major training exercise site,” according to Major-General Jean-Marc Lanthier, Commander of the Canadian Army Doctrine and Training Centre.
The convoy includes vehicle, mowers, tents and tables, which will be used during Exercise Maple Resolve. The US Army’s expertise in large-scale military convoys is enabling Canada to learn valuable experience in moving a great amount of equipment on such a distance.
The 4,000 km logistical move is possible due to US Army vehicles. No specific routes were given due to privacy reasons—mostly likely for Operational Security (OPSEC).
Exercise MAPLE RESOLVE is a high-readiness exercise that will be conducted from April 20 to May 23, 2015, at the Canadian Manoeuvre Training Centre in Wainwright, Alberta. The exercise will involve close to 4,500 military personnel from Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom.
There is nothing to be alarmed about. In fact, frequent joint exercises are conducted by Canada and the United States and Ex MAPLE CARAVAN is only another routine joint exercise.
However, the United States has been conducting a long-range convoy throughout Europe. This training might be aimed at enabling Canada to do the same in the future.
With Canada involved in Operation REASSURANCE, its soldiers have been doing a number of military manoeuvers throughout Europe.
Operation REASSURANCE:
refers to the military activities undertaken by CAF to support NATO assurance measures through the provision of military capabilities for training, exercises, demonstrations and assigned NATO tasks. Canada is a strong supporter of NATO and is committed to doing its part as a member of the alliance. In coordination with its NATO partners, Canada is continually looking for opportunities to contribute to peace and stability in Central and Eastern Europe and planning is ongoing for future activities related to Op REASSURANCE.
The convoy will return to CFB Valcartier in June, after Ex MAPLE RESOLVE.Senate Democrats want to block President Trump from using personal information collected under an Obama-era program to round up and deport some immigrants.
"The Trump Administration now threatens to use this information against them to break families apart, deport these students or their families, and enact anti-immigrant policies that are contrary to American values,” Heinrich said.
He argued Trump should be focused on coming up with comprehensive immigration reform, rather than pursuing his campaign pledge to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
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The legislation would prohibit John Kelly, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, from disclosing information an undocumented immigrant provided to sign up for DACA to either the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or U.S. Customs and Border Protection unless the two agencies will use it to implement the DACA program.
Kelly would also be prohibited by the legislation from referring any undocumented immigrant who has had their deportation case deferred because of DACA to ICE, Customs and Border Protection or the Department of Justice.HAZEL PARK, MI—In a statement made to reporters earlier this afternoon, local idiot Brandon Mylenek, 26, announced that at approximately 2:30 a.m. tonight, he plans to post an idiotic comment beneath a video on an Internet website.
"Later this evening, I intend to watch the video in question, click the'reply' link above the box reserved for user comments, and draft a response, being careful to put as little thought into it as possible, while making sure to use all capital letters and incorrect punctuation," Mylenek said. "Although I do not yet know exactly what my comment will entail, I can say with a great degree of certainty that it will be incredibly stupid."
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Mylenek, who rarely in his life has been capable of formulating an idea or opinion worth the amount of oxygen required to express it, went on to guarantee that the text of his comment would be misspelled to the point of incomprehension, that it would defy the laws of both logic and grammar, and that it would allege that several elements of the video are homosexual in nature.
"The result will be an astonishing combination of ignorance, offensiveness, and sheer idiocy," Mylenek said.
According to the idiot, he will become incensed at the quality and sentiment of the comments already posted below the video—which will include such replies as "not great, nice try tho," "FIRSTIES!!!" and "wtf?? lol so random." At this point, Mylenek said, he will feel a deep, unwavering desire to offer a dissenting opinion, which he has hinted will include the words "gay" and "reatrd" [sic].
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"It is my moral obligation to alert the Internet community to the fact that this video is totally gay, and furthermore, that the individual who made it is a fag," Mylenek said.
Pressed for further details regarding his intended post, Mylenek, who will comment under the Internet pseudonym "xblingdaddy2005x," revealed that there is a strong possibility he will inadvertently post the comment twice.
"After clicking the'submit' button, I will immediately refresh the page so that I can view my own comment. I will then notice that my comment has not appeared because the server has not yet processed my request, become angry and confused, and re-post the same comment with unintentional variations on the original wording and misspellings, creating two slightly different yet equally moronic comments," he said. "It is my hope that this will illustrate both my childlike level of impatience and my inability to replicate a simple string of letters and symbols 30 seconds after having composed it."
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Mylenek confirmed rumors that he will be momentarily sidetracked by another inane task while drafting his comment. The distraction is scheduled to come at 2:25 a.m. in the form of a "related video" link featuring a man being sodomized by a horse, which Mylenek will re-watch seven times and laugh obnoxiously at with his friend and fellow idiot, Steve Blanchette, 28.
"Once this minor diversion is complete, I will finish posting my comment, then sit there like the worthless human being I am and wait for other commenters to respond," he added. "Because, as I mentioned before, I have nothing better to do with my life."
Mylenek said he fully expects that his comment will spawn a series of replies from other idiots around the world, who will either agree with his stance, disagree with his stance, or call Mylenek himself a "d0uche" and post an irrelevant link to a separate video that they will claim to be "way funnier." According to Mylenek, this is all part of the plan.
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"We are blessed to be living in an age when we have a global communications network in which idiots, assholes, and total and complete wastes of fucking human life alike can come together to give instant feedback in an unfettered and unmonitored online environment," Mylenek said. "What better way to take advantage of this incredible technology than to log onto the Internet and insult a complete stranger?"
According to media critic Judy Turner, this type of behavior is not uncommon among idiots.
"Brandon's comments in particular contain a degree of unoriginality and stupidity that you only see in the most muttonheaded and imbecilic Internet commenters," Turner said. "In fact, I've seen him use at least a dozen variations of the word 'gay.' Suffice it to say, Brandon Mylenek is a truly stupid, stupid idiot."
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Mylenek concluded his press conference with a solemn vow to uphold the awful, unintelligible, anger-inducing quality of his past Internet comments.
"I promise everyone that this post will be exactly what you have come to expect from an idiot like myself," he said, "and that I will check my comment regularly so that I can call everyone who says it's stupid a fag."The Week 15 AT&T MLS Goal of the Week race starts with a clear frontrunner, but has a little bit of everything in the race to challenge him.
The New England Revolution's Diego Fagundez whistled a sidewinding volley from the top of the penalty area past Chicago's Jon Busch on Saturday to celebrate -- spectacularly -- his 100th regular-season game for the Revs, the youngest player (age 20) in MLS history to reach that mark.
But he's got competition. New York City FC Designated Player David Villa finished off a wonderful collective passing move in his team's 3-1 win over Montreal, and is trying to bring NYCFC a second consecutive winner after Thomas McNamara took the award last week.
The Seattle Sounders' versatile Lamar Neagle started at forward late Saturday night and made the most of it, scoring from one of his favorite spots on the field -- outside the penalty area, cutting in from the left -- by curling a low shot that put Seattle in front for good.
Also on Saturday night, though a bit later than planned, Columbus Crew SC's own Designated Player, Federico Higuaín, and new LA Galaxy acquisition Sebastian Lletget traded well-worked team goals in their teams' weather-delayed 1-1 tie, and both have been nominated for this week's award.
Which team put together the best combination? Which goal was your favorite? Vote now – the winner will be announced on Friday.
Voting runs until 11:59 pm PT on Thursdays. For complete coverage of the AT&T MLS Goal of the Week – including an archive of all of this season’s nominees and winners – click here.An Anonymous-affiliated Twitter account is promoting conspiracy theories about the attack on French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, despite a promise from other Anonymous hackers to avenge the attack.
TheAnonMessage linked to a video showing the death of policeman Ahmed Merabet, alongside claims that elements such as the editing of the video indicated misreporting in the mainstream press.
"This is exactly what we’ve been trying to say," TheAnonMessage said.
The tweets contrast with a video posted to Anonymous Belgium over the weekend "declaring war" against Islamic terrorists for the attack, leading to what has been dubbed Operation Charlie Hebdo, or #OpCharlieHebdo.
Though the comments were widely reported by the mainstream press, the Twitter account OpCharlieHebdo dissociated itself from the Anonymous Belgium release, instead promoting a YouTube video on the Anonymous France channel that carried a similar message.
"It’s obvious that some people don’t want, in a free world, this sacrosanct right to express in any way one’s opinions," OpCharlieHebdo said in a statement.
"Anonymous has always fought for the freedom of speech, and will never let this right besmirched by obscurantism and mysticism."
Tweets form the group’s account also claimed that at least one jihadist website had already been taken offline.
Around the same time YourAnonNews, a Twitter account with 1.45m followers which is among the largest Anonymous voices, promoted a report from Mashable that drew attention to the free speech records of many Western leaders attending a march in Paris on Sunday.
Anonymous has a decentralised and non-hierarchical structure allowing anybody to assume the mantle of an "anon" as a means of online political protest known as "hacktivism".Lima Charlie podcasts are LIVE with “The Horse Race” Ep. 03: The Week in Politics. Listen in.
Our readers asked and we delivered – again. Loud and Clear. Time for yet another exciting episode of “The Horse Race,” the week’s wrap-up of U.S. politics. (Available now on iTunes).
Brought to you by Political Correspondents and US Army and USCG veterans Michael Connolly & Brendan McKinnon. This week (Ep. 03), Mike and Brendan bring on a new LC political team member: Political Correspondent USAF veteran Dan Webb. The perfect trifecta.
This week’s episode (“The Tightening Edition”), covers the big story about how last week saw a tightening in the polls between Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump. Why have polls tightened so much? What does that mean to Americans?
The Three Amigos also discuss The Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), Commander-in-Chief Forum that was held on September 7th, drawing a television audience of nearly 15 million. As reported by Lima Charlie News, the forum, held on the deck of the USS Intrepid, forced both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump to discuss national security and military issues before a crowd of veterans, led by IAVA. Did the forum address all the issues? Was the forum fair and balanced? Has Matt Lauer survived the experience? Tune in and read LC’s story:
The team’s final topic asks “Will Hillary Clinton survive overheating and a ‘basket of deplorables'”?
All that, Little Marco, and the shameless promotion of a spotlight article on Brendan McKinnon:
Stream the podcast below, or download for offline enjoyment.
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Please stay tuned for more podcasts from our Lima Charlie news team.
Lima Charlie provides global news, insight & analysis by military veterans and service members Worldwide.
For up-to-date news, please follow us on twitter at @LimaCharlieNews
Michael D. Connolly, Senior Political Correspondent, Lima Charlie News
Michael Connolly is a former Army Staff Sergeant who served in the Infantry, completing two combat tours to Iraq. He currently serves as the Director of Military and Veterans Affairs for the Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland-College Park. Michael is a member of the Truman National Security Project Defense Council. He graduated with an M.S. in Political Science from the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Follow Michael on Twitter: @MConnollyLC
Brendan McKinnon, National Political Correspondent, Lima Charlie News
Brendan McKinnon is a Juris Doctor candidate at Boston College Law School. He previously served for ten years in the U.S. Coast Guard, including three afloat tours and one deployment in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Brendan earned a BS in Government from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy and an MPS in Strategic Public Relations from George Washington University. He interned on the Capitol Hill staff of a Congressman while a Cadet at the Coast Guard Academy, has field and operations experience on additional Congressional campaigns, is a member of the Truman National Security Project Defense Council and a Mentor with Veterans in Global Leadership. Follow Brendan on Twitter: @BMcKinnonLC
Dan Webb, Political Correspondent, Lima Charlie News
Dan Webb is a former U.S. Air Force Airborne Systems Engineer on the RC-135 Rivet Joint aircraft. He completed three deployments to Southwest Asia in support of Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom totaling over 1200 combat flight hours. He currently works as a software engineer for an Omaha based marketing agency. Previously he worked for the Office of Military and Veteran Services at the University of Nebraska Omaha where, as a student, he received his B.S. in Political Science with a minor in Economics. Additionally, as a student he completed internships for Nebraska Senator Deb Fischer and NE-2 Congressman Lee Terry. He also worked on current NE-2 Congressman Brad Ashford’s 2013 independent campaign for Mayor of Omaha, Ne. Dan’s interests include domestic economic policy, veteran’s issues, and national security. Follow Dan on Twitter | @DanWebbLCYou may remember Goat Simulator from the last time you chuckled at one of its expansion trailers. That time it was taking a pop at MMOs; this time, it's survival games. Coffee Stain Studios has announced GoatZ*, a survival-themed DLC add-on that will be released this Thursday, May 7.
*If you don't get the reference, please cherish your innocence.
Here's the add-on's parodic feature list:
Mandatory crafting system because everyone else is doing it
Zombies that bug out. There’s a pun here about actual living bugs, but we’re not going to bother
You can craft anything in the world, as long as it’s one of the half dozen weapons in the game
Zombies, because this is a zombie game, remember?
A pretty big new map with some stuff in it
Completely realistic survival mode where you have to eat every damn five minutes to survive because Dean Hall & Garry Newman said so
Goat Simulator: GoatZ will cost $5.China’s Taiwan Affairs Office has criticised a Taiwanese party for inviting Hong Kong lawmakers who support self-determination to attend a forum next week.
The New Power Party last week announced that lawmakers such as Nathan Law Kwun-chung, Edward Yiu Chung-yim and Eddie Chu Hoi-dick will attend the forum on self-determination between January 7 and 8. They will be joined by their assistants, activist Joshua Wong Chi-fung and the party’s own Taiwanese lawmakers.
The Office’s spokesman An Fengshan told a reporter at the pro-Beijing Ta Kung Pao: “A small group of ‘Taiwan independence’ forces planning to link up with ‘Hong Kong independence [forces]’ to split the country – it is impossible for it to succeed.”
An then cited a poem by Mao Zedong as saying: “In this small world, some flies hit the wall” – he said that they would crash and bleed.
Though some lawmakers of the New Power Party have publicly said they support Taiwanese independence, none of the invited Hong Kong lawmakers have said they support independence for the city.
Huang Kuo-chang, a lawmaker of the New Power Party and a speaker at the forum, questioned the strong reaction from China.
“Of course, any link to democratic forces is a thorn in the eyes of the Chinese Communist Party,” he said on Facebook.
When ousted lawmakers Baggio Leung Chung-hang and Yau Wai-ching visited Taiwan in October to discuss localist social movements, the Office also released a similar statement saying that the collaboration between Hong Kong and Taiwan independence activists to split China will not be successful and will be condemned.UPDATE: The Austin police officer who was reported missing and is believed to have tried to fake his own death was captured in the Dallas-area, two law enforcement sources told KVUE's and the Austin American-Statesman's Tony Plohetski Wednesday morning.
Later on in the day, he was booked into the Travis County Jail.
He was previously believed to be alive in Mexico, according to Plohetski.
APD Interim Chief Brian Manley released a statement Wednesday afternoon that said Martin was taken into custody without incident at the DFW airport. He was coming from Colombia to DFW and then to Austin-Bergstrom International Airport.
Martin was taken into custody and is being transported to APD and will be booked into Travis County jail.
"APD would like to thank everyone for their concerns expressed for Officer Martin’s safe," Manley said in the statement. "I would like to personally thank APD’s Cold Case Unit for their hard work, as well as Val Verde County Sheriff's Office, National Parks Service, Texas Parks and Wildlife Division Game Wardens, U.S. Border Patrol, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Marshals."
Manley said Martin will be placed on restricted duty and the case remains under investigation.
ORIGINAL STORY: Officer Coleman Martin, 29, is facing a Class A misdemeanor charge of "false report," which caused a search for his whereabouts.
KVUE spoke with Martin's wife -- who is asking to remain anonymous -- on Saturday.
"Cole recently received a new prescription medication," she told KVUE. "The side effects were causing him to be depressed and think irrationally. We want him to know his family loves him unconditionally and wants him home safe."
According to an affidavit, Martin's wife called police on Tuesday, April 25, and reported that he was suicidal. She told officers that he left their residence around 10 a.m. that morning, telling her he was leaving for a while to "clear his head." She stated that around 10:15 a.m. he sent her a text message containing a photo of a handwritten note that said he was going to commit suicide and drown himself in a lake near the border of Mexico.
Investigators found that Martin withdrew $300 from the couple's joint bank account around 11 a.m. that morning and purchased gas 15 minutes later. He then bought a raft at an Academy Sports store in Austin, got $50 cash back then got food at a Wendy's in Live Oak, Texas at 3:50 p.m. A transaction showed that he also purchased rope and concrete clocks from a Home Depot store, according to the affidavit.
APD entered Martin and his vehicle into the state and national computer databases for law enforcement to be on the lookout for him. Texas DPS reported that Martin was stopped by a Trooper near Uvalde around 6 p.m. and Martin told the Trooper he was on his way to Mexico for a vacation. The Trooper didn't see any signs of distress and let Martin continue on his way.
The affidavit said that around 7 a.m. on April 26, law enforcement with the Amistad National Recreation Area reported that Martin's vehicle was found near the lake. A "suicide note," the same one Martin to his wife in a text message, was found on the seat of his vehicle.
A raft was found on the shore a few miles from where Martin's vehicle was parked. Martin's date of birth and date of death (4/25/17) along with his initials and his wife's initials were written on the raft. Investigators also found the remnants of a concrete block and scrapes on the raft that indicated that a block had been pushed over the side. Investigators began to search the lake for Martin's body.
Investigators discovered that Martin had a close relationship with a woman other than his wife. On April 27, investigators interviewed the woman and she provided evidence that Martin was still alive and the entire event had been an attempt to fake his own death. She showed investigators an email that Martin sent her after the alleged suicide telling her that it was a success.
Anyone with information on Martin's whereabouts is asked to contact the Austin Police Department Homicide Cold Case/Missing Persons Unit at 512-974-5250 or call 9-1-1.
Updates to follow as more information is released.Congressman Ron Paul of Texas was recently asked how he felt running in the GOP presidential race for the highest office in the land.
The spry 76-year-old smiled and remarked that he felt as happy as a woodpecker in a Popsicle stick factory.
The veteran politician from Texas is no stranger to the harsh world of political mudslinging.
Earlier this year when Michele Bachmann stated that he looked old enough to have fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War he responded by referring to the ditsy dame from Minnesota as "The Paris Hilton of Politics."
During one of the GOP presidential debates he angered Newt Gingrich by calling him the Pillsbury Doughboy of the Republican Party.
But Congressman Paul is really quite a likable sort as evidenced by the fact that 90-year-old actress Betty White recently expressed to Whoopi Goldberg on The View that Ronnie is so darn cute that if he wasn't married she would be all over him like stripes on a zebra.
He was even personally asked by Ian Somerhalder and Nina Dobrev to appear in an episode of their hit television show The Vampire Dairies.
Ron Paul is the only Republican candidate to have refused secret service protection during the GOP presidential race.
He told the news media that he had texted the secret service and informed them that the reason why he does not need their protection is because he is an expert at karate, judo, kung fu, jujitsu, arm wrestling, and fencing.
A LIST OF 10 REASONS WHY CONGRESSMAN RON PAUL SAYS AMERICA SHOULD ELECT HIM TO BE THE NEXT PRESIDENT
He promises that he will only concern himself with the United States and says that he will never invade any foreign country. If China invades Canada, he'll just simply say, "Tough titty said the kitty." Unlike presidents from the past, he will never engage in games of "Spin-The-Bottle" with unmarried White House staff members. The Congressman has stated that if elected president he would immediately do away with those infernal invasive TSA "Pat Downs" or as he calls them "Feel Ups." He will open up trade talks with Cuba, so that the United States can get some decent cigars, some damn good deals on sugar, and some pretty good baseball players. He has vowed to somehow find a way to end the seemingly endless, on-going, childish feud between late night talk show hosts Jay Leno and David Letterman. In order to cut back on the expensive White House food budget, he will make Tuesday's Hot Dog Day, Thursday's Hamburger Day, and Saturday's will be Enchilada Day. He will cut back Rush Limbaugh's radio talk show from three hours down to 15 minutes. He will reroute the tons and tons of free food that is presently going to unappreciative nations and send it to deserving places in the U.S. such as the Ozarks, the Appalachians, East L.A., the delta's of Mississippi, Detroit, and Harlem. In an effort to end sports racism he will immediately change the discriminatory name of the NFL's Washington Redskins to the much nicer and non-insulting sounding name the Washington Native-Americans. He will ban Sarah "Snowflake" Palin from ever setting foot anywhere in the continental United States.
NOTE: Ron Paul has hinted that he would like to have Cameron Diaz on his presidential political ticket.BARRY LYNN does not waste time. Two days after being sacked from the New America Foundation, a think-tank where he had worked for 15 years, he stands calmly directing staffers in an immaculate grey suit in an office just around the corner from his old gig. The trouble began for Mr Lynn and his Open Markets team, a research outfit that advocated anti-monopoly regulations, after he published a statement praising the European Commission for levying a $2.7bn fine on Google—a big donor to the think-tank. Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google’s parent company, was upset. Susan Molinari, Google’s chief lobbyist, spoke to Anne-Marie Slaughter, New America’s president and chief executive.
What transpired next is disputed. A few hours after he published the offending statement, says Mr Lynn, he received a call from Ms Slaughter. In his telling, she said that Mr Schmidt and Google, which had donated more than $21m to the foundation, wanted to cut off all ties—and that Mr Schmidt wanted his name scrubbed from the think-tank’s website, and his name removed from its conference room, the “Eric Schmidt Ideas Lab”. Two days later, Mr Lynn was told that New America and Open Markets would be parting ways, and was given two months to leave. Ms Slaughter said she would not discuss private conversations with either Mr Lynn or Mr Schmidt, but said Google never threatened to pull funding. Google said the same.
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What is certain is that the fight ended with Mr Lynn’s team leaving New America and a black eye for Ms Slaughter, who appears to have folded under pressure and fired a well-respected scholar. The scandal has morphed into an existential crisis for New America, a newcomer in the think-tank world that has nonetheless established itself as a heavyweight. But it is only the latest victim of a common ailment among think-tanks—overly cosy relationships with donors that, when revealed, damage institutional credibility.
A month ago, leaked e-mails showed that the UAE had arranged a secret $20m donation to the Middle East Institute, a respected think-tank, to counter “egregious misperceptions about the region”. Last year, an investigation by the New York Times found that the Brookings Institution, perhaps America’s most prestigious think-tank, had accepted large donations from Lennar Corporation, a home-building firm, and promoted the company’s projects. The Centre for American Progress, a left-leaning think-tank, kept a secret roster of corporate donors and advocated for some of their interests.
Much think-tank wonkery is treated as authoritative by journalists and regulators—the reaped rewards from decades of rigorous work. Companies and foreign governments recognise the advantages this brings over conventional lobbying, which few would mistake as independent and impartial. Laundering lobbying through a think-tank, which offers tax advantages and less onerous disclosure requirements, can seem attractive.
Some think-tanks host sister lobbying organisations, which present their own risks. Witness the sad decline of the Heritage Foundation, once a conservative thought juggernaut and now hard to distinguish from a campaign group. Other thinkers juggle jobs, collecting cash from industries they write about. The Peterson Institute, a prominent economic-policy think-tank, fired three researchers for such conflicts of interest. With enough such stories, the entire enterprise starts to seem suspect—no good thing when dispassionate analysis is already dismissed as elitist.
Such tensions may reflect a fundamental flaw. Unlike other institutions designed to promote free inquiry, such as universities or some publications, think-tanks do not enjoy large endowments, researcher tenure or subscription revenue to insulate thinkers from paymasters. And thinking costs a lot. In its latest tax filing, Brookings reported spending more than $100m in a year. Some big patrons might clumsily seek to influence research directly, and must be politely rebuffed by think-tank bosses. Some take a more subtle approach. “When the king expresses displeasure, everyone knows how to interpret it,” says Zephyr Teachout, a law professor and fellow at the Open Markets programme.
This is the mess in which Ms Slaughter, a respected scholar in her own right, finds herself. Despite her insistence that the sacking had nothing to do with Mr Lynn’s work but was instead forced by his lack of collegiality, the weight of the evidence appears to be on Mr Lynn’s side. E-mails she said had been taken out of context did not, when made public, offer much exculpatory evidence. After initially casting the story about Mr Lynn’s firing as “false”, she has said she regretted that choice of words. To assuage her critics, who say that she has now tainted the work of all of New America’s scholars, the ultimate penalty may be more than contrition.New World Order Definition
Introduction
The following article is extracted from an excellent analysis of the New World Order by author Ken Adachi which can be found at educate-yourself.org.
The term New World Order (NWO) has been used by numerous politicians through the ages, and is a generic term used to refer to a worldwide conspiracy being orchestrated by an extremely powerful and influential group of genetically-related individuals (at least at the highest ech |
urgency following the Wall Street Crash of 1929.[90] Barkley opposed the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act, claiming it would cost Americans both jobs and exports, but Congress approved it, and Hoover signed it on June 17, 1930.[91] When Congress adjourned, Barkley accompanied Sherwood Eddy and fellow senators Burton K. Wheeler and Bronson M. Cutting to the Soviet Union in August 1930.[91] He was impressed by the industrial development brought about by Joseph Stalin's first five-year plan but did not advocate closer diplomatic ties with the Communist nation, as some of his colleagues did.[92]
Barkley maintained that Hoover's response to the continuing depression and the severe drought in 1930 were inadequate and pointed out that the $45 million in loans to farmers that he approved amounted to less than half the losses sustained by Kentucky's farmers alone.[93] He was angered that Hoover refused to call a special legislative session to adopt relief measures after the regular congressional adjourned in early March 1931.[93] He planned a series of speeches condemning Hoover beginning in June but was injured in an automobile accident on June 22, limiting his political activities for the remainder of the year.[94]
Second term and ascension to floor leader [ edit ]
Barkley supported Franklin D. Roosevelt for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1932, but facing a re-election bid himself, he did not announce his support, fearing that his message might not resonate with Kentucky voters.[96] Roosevelt supporters offered Barkley the keynote address and temporary chairmanship of the 1932 Democratic National Convention if he would endorse their candidate.[97] Both opportunities would help Barkley's re-election chances, so he announced his support for Roosevelt on March 22, 1932.[97] In his keynote, Barkley warmly recalled the Wilson administration and denounced more than a decade of Republican dominance.[98] Applause frequently punctuated the speech, with the longest interruption – a 45-minute near-riot – erupting after Barkley called for a platform plank directing Congress to repeal prohibition.[98] According to Libbey, the remark was not a repudiation of his prohibitionist position but a desire for the people to express their will on repeal.[99] Prohibitionist constituents still supported Barkley because, for most of them, the depression trumped all other concerns.[99]
George B. Martin, who had served six months in the Senate in 1918 after being appointed to fill a vacancy, opposed Barkley in the 1932 primary, but Barkley defeated him by a two-to-one margin.[100] In the general election, he defeated Republican Congressman Maurice H. Thatcher by a vote of 575,077 to 393,865, marking the first time in the 20th century that a Kentucky senator won a second consecutive term.[101][102] Democrats gained control of the Senate during the 1932 elections; Joseph Robinson was chosen majority leader, and he appointed Barkley as his assistant.[9] Together, they secured passage of New Deal legislation, including the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the National Industrial Recovery Act, and the Federal Emergency Relief Act.[103] In July 1934, the Democratic National Committee chose Barkley to respond to Republican National Committee chairman Henry P. Fletcher's radio attacks on the New Deal.[104] Later that year, he embarked on a tour of twenty states, defending the New Deal and stumping for Democratic candidates in the 1934 midterm elections.[104]
Barkley was again the keynote speaker at the 1936 Democratic National Convention.[42] During his address, he alluded to the Supreme Court's decision in Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States – which struck down the National Industrial Recovery Act as unconstitutional – asking "Is the court beyond criticism? May it be regarded as too sacred to be disagreed with?"[105] These remarks help set an anti-Supreme Court tone for Roosevelt's second term.[106] On February 5, 1937, Roosevelt proposed legislation authorizing the president to appoint an additional justice for each one over the age of 70.[106] Many saw this proposal as an attempt to avoid further nullification of New Deal provisions as unconstitutional by appointing more sympathetic justices, and they dubbed the measure Roosevelt's "court-packing plan".[106]
Barkley and Mississippi Senator Pat Harrison were the leading candidates to succeed Robinson as Democratic floor leader when he died on July 14, 1937.[9][100] Harrison's tenure in the Senate was eight years longer than Barkley's, and he was supported by conservative Southern Democratic senators opposed to Roosevelt's court-packing plan.[9] Harrison had helped secure Roosevelt's nomination at the 1932 Democratic National Convention by convincing Mississippi Governor Martin Sennet Conner to keep his state's delegation loyal to Roosevelt, but Roosevelt preferred Barkley because of his support of the New Deal.[107] A letter from Roosevelt praising Barkley's legislative accomplishments and addressed to "My Dear Alben" was seen as an endorsement.[108] Although Roosevelt remained publicly neutral, he pressured Illinois' William H. Dieterich and Missouri's Harry S. Truman to support Barkley instead of Harrison; Dieterich acquiesced, but Truman remained loyal to Harrison.[108] Many senators resented Roosevelt's interference in a traditionally legislative prerogative.[108] Ultimately, Barkley was elected by a single vote.[109]
Challenge by Happy Chandler [ edit ]
Happy Chandler unsuccessfully challenged Barkley for his U.S. Senate seat.
Barkley faced a primary challenge in his 1938 re-election bid from A. B. "Happy" Chandler, Kentucky's popular governor who had a strong political organization throughout the state.[110] According to historian James C. Klotter, Chandler was confident of his ascension to the presidency and saw the Senate as a stepping stone.[111] Chandler twice asked Roosevelt to appoint Kentucky's junior Senator, M. M. Logan, to a federal judgeship so he could arrange his own appointment to Logan's Senate seat.[112] On one of these occasions – the retirement of Supreme Court Justice George Sutherland – Barkley advised Roosevelt to appoint Solicitor General Stanley Reed instead.[111] Chandler's mentor, Virginia Senator Harry F. Byrd, and the bloc of Democrats who opposed Roosevelt's New Deal, then encouraged Chandler to announce his candidacy for Barkley's seat.[112][113]
The New York Times saw the primary as "the Gettysburg of the party's internecine strife" over control of the Democratic National Convention in 1940.[114] Early on, Chandler portrayed himself as a supporter of Roosevelt – since Roosevelt was popular in Kentucky – but opposed to the New Deal.[115] He pointed to his fiscal conservatism as governor, including reorganizing and downsizing the executive branch and reducing the state's debt.[111] Polls showing Barkley with a comfortable lead and an overwhelming victory by New Deal supporter Claude Pepper in Florida's May Senate primary convinced Chandler to shift his focus from the New Deal.[114] He criticized Barkley as "a stranger to the state" and obliquely referred to "fat, sleek senators who go to Europe and have forgotten the people of Kentucky except when they run for election".[115] Forty years old – 20 years Barkley's junior – he referred to Barkley as "Old Alben".[116]
Early in the contest, congressional business restricted Barkley's campaign to weekends, so he enlisted allies like Fred Vinson to speak on his behalf.[117][118] Chandler's political enemies such as former governor Ruby Laffoon, whom Chandler had crossed as lieutenant governor, and John Y. Brown, Sr., who felt that Chandler had broken a promise to support him for a seat in the Senate, also supported Barkley.[117] Although labor leaders had backed Chandler's gubernatorial bid, they endorsed Barkley because of Roosevelt's support for labor unions.[119] After the congressional session, Barkley resumed his "Iron Man" campaign style, making between 8 and 15 speeches each day and traveling, on average, 4,500 miles (7,200 km) per week.[22][117] This countered Chandler's implication that Barkley's age was a disadvantage, a charge that was further blunted when the younger Chandler fell ill in July, temporarily halting his campaigning.[117] Chandler indirectly charged that a Barkley supporter had poisoned his ice water, causing the illness.[120] Barkley ridiculed the suggestion, promising to appoint "an ice water guard" for his campaign.[120] During speeches, he would lift a glass of water to his lips, then mockingly inspect it and refuse to drink it.[120] Louisville police dismissed Chandler's claim as "a political bedtime story".[121]
Recognizing that the defeat of his hand-picked floor leader would be a repudiation of his agenda, Roosevelt began a tour of the state in Covington on July 8, 1938.[122] Chandler, the state's chief executive, was invited to welcome the president.[123] Although clearly campaigning for Barkley, Roosevelt made courteous remarks about Chandler in the spirit of party unity, but in Bowling Green, he chastised Chandler for "dragging federal judgeships into a political campaign".[110][124]
As nearly every 20th century Kentucky governor had done, Chandler printed campaign materials with state funds, solicited campaign funds from state employees, and promised new government jobs in exchange for votes.[117] A later investigation determined that Chandler had raised at least $10,000 from state employees.[125] Federal New Deal employees countered by working on Barkley's behalf.[117] Barkley and George H. Goodman, director of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in Kentucky, denied that WPA employees played a role in the campaign, but journalist Thomas Lunsford Stokes concluded that "the WPA... was deep in politics" in Kentucky, winning the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for Reporting for his investigation.[126] A Senate committee investigated Stokes' findings, and WPA administrator Harry Hopkins claimed the committee's report refuted all but two of Stokes' twenty-two charges.[127] Nevertheless, Congress passed the Hatch Act of 1939 which restricted federal employees' participation in political activities.[125]
Barkley won the August 6 election by a vote of 294,391 to 223,149, carrying 74 of Kentucky's 120 counties, with large majorities in western Kentucky, the city of Louisville, and rural areas.[120][125] It was the first loss of Chandler's political career, and the worst suffered by a primary candidate in Kentucky's history to that time.[128] Barkley defeated his Republican opponent, Louisville Judge John P. Haswell, securing 62% of the general election vote.[129] Encouraged by Barkley's success, Roosevelt campaigned against conservative Democratic incumbents in southern states, but all of these candidates won, which damaged Roosevelt's image.[130]
Floor leadership [ edit ]
With his caucus divided between conservatives and liberals, Barkley failed to secure passage for Roosevelt's court-packing plan.[42] After the successive failures of several administration-backed domestic bills, the press dubbed the Senate Majority Leader "bumbling Barkley".[109] He was able to salvage an appropriations bill to cover overspending by the WPA, although it allocated much less funding than Roosevelt had wanted.[129] He helped secure the Hatch Act and The Washington Daily News called a 1940 amendment that prohibited campaigning by federally funded state employees a "monument to Alben Barkley's persistence and parliamentary skill".[123][129] Despite this mixed record, Roosevelt believed some Democratic partisans hoped to nominate Barkley for president at the 1940 Democratic National Convention, but the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, deepened his resolve to seek a third term.[131]
Barkley during his tenure as floor leader
Barkley disagreed with Roosevelt's selection of Agriculture Secretary Henry A. Wallace as his running mate; Libbey felt that "there is enough evidence from Barkley's tortuous private and public statements about the qualifications of Wallace to infer that Barkley wanted the vice presidency for himself", although he did not promote this idea to Roosevelt.[131] Barkley was chosen permanent chairman of the convention; chants of "We want Roosevelt" interrupted his July 16 speech for 20 minutes, indicating that he had created a popular mandate for Roosevelt's renomination, which occurred the next day.[132] Roosevelt went on to win an unprecedented third term in a landslide.[132]
Supporting Roosevelt's provision of aid to Allied Powers during World War II, Barkley sponsored the Lend-Lease Act in the Senate.[133] In November 1943, he helped draft the Connally–Fulbright Resolution for the creation of an international peace-keeping body at the end of the war, an idea he had favored since Woodrow Wilson's support of the League of Nations.[133] Supreme Court Justice and fellow Kentuckian Louis Brandeis influenced Barkley to adopt Zionism; during and after the war, Barkley advocated creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine and introduced a 1943 resolution demanding that the Nazis to be punished for persecuting Jews.[20][133] U.S. entry into the war diverted Roosevelt's attention away from domestic affairs.[109] Vice President Wallace, House Speaker Sam Rayburn, Democratic House Floor Leader John William McCormack, and Barkley – the president's "Big Four" – helped develop and pass the administration's legislative agenda.[109] Barkley regularly met with the chairmen of the Senate's standing committees, forming a sort of legislative cabinet.[133] With their support, he secured passage of the War Powers Act and the Emergency Price Control Act.[134] He also advocated passage of a measure to outlaw poll taxes, but the bill was defeated.[135]
Split with Roosevelt [ edit ]
In April 1943 a confidential analysis by Isaiah Berlin of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for the British Foreign Office described Barkley as "a Democratic party 'wheelhorse' who will pull the Administration wagon through thick and thin. Although he is the Majority Leader in the Senate, he is not an adroit negotiator, but a loyal supporter of the President come hell or high water."[136]
Tension developed between Roosevelt and Barkley during the war, however.[109] In 1943, Roosevelt refused to appoint Barkley to a vacancy on the Supreme Court, and Barkley criticized the War Production Board for awarding contracts for the production of war-related materials to large companies rather than small businesses.[20][135] Their most notable clash occurred in February 1944 when Roosevelt requested that Congress approve tax increases to generate over $10 billion in revenue for the war. Barkley and the Senate Finance Committee negotiated a bill containing only $2.3 billion in tax increases. Feeling the measure was insufficient, Roosevelt convened the "Big Four" on February 21 and told them he would veto it.[135] They urged him not to do so, assuring him that the bill they had drafted was the best one that they could pass.[135] Roosevelt vetoed the bill the next day, marking the first time a U.S. president vetoed a revenue bill.[109]
When Barkley entered the Senate chamber on February 23, word had spread that Roosevelt's veto had angered him.[137] He announced that he would resign as floor leader and encouraged his legislative colleagues to override the veto. He stated that Roosevelt's characterization of the bill as "providing relief not for the needy, but for the greedy" was "a calculated and deliberate assault upon the legislative integrity of every member of the Congress of the United States".[138] Roosevelt sent a letter to Barkley insisting he had not intended to impugn Congress' integrity and urging him not to resign. The next morning, Barkley resigned and left the Democratic Conference Room; minutes later, the caucus unanimously re-elected him. Many members who had seen Barkley as Roosevelt's advocate in Congress now looked upon him as Congress' advocate with Roosevelt.[109] Subsequently, Congress overwhelmingly overrode the veto.[138]
Barkley was among 12 nominated at the 1944 Democratic National Convention to serve as Roosevelt's running mate in the presidential election that year, receiving six votes.[139] Delegates favored dropping vice president Henry Wallace from their ticket in favor of Barkley, but Roosevelt refused to consider him, telling a July 11 meeting of Democratic leaders that he was too old.[109][140] Instead, he took the recommendation of Democratic National Committee chairman Robert E. Hannegan and choose Harry S. Truman.[140] Despite his differences with Roosevelt, Barkley faced no serious challengers in the 1944 Democratic primary and defeated his Republican challenger, Fayette County Commonwealth's Attorney James Park, by a vote of 464,053 to 380,425.[141]
Truman succeeds Roosevelt [ edit ]
Truman ascended to the presidency when Roosevelt died in April 1945, just before the end of World War II.[109][142] In the war's aftermath, Americans wanted to know why the U.S. seemed ill-prepared for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.[142] Barkley sponsored a resolution to create the Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack and was chosen as chairman of the ten-person committee.[143] The committee's report, delivered on July 20, 1946, exonerated Roosevelt of any blame for the attack and highlighted weaknesses in communications between branches of the U.S. armed forces, leading to the creation of the United States Department of Defense.[143] Barkley also helped ensure U.S. participation in the United Nations and advocated approval of billions of dollars in loans to rebuild Europe.[143] Look magazine named him the second most fascinating person in the country behind Dwight D. Eisenhower.[144]
In the 1946 elections, Republicans wrested control of both houses of Congress from the Democrats for the first time since the Great Depression and gained control of the majority of state governments.[109][144] The power of labor unions had expanded under Roosevelt and the Democrats, and when a 1946 railroad worker strike exacerbated a post-war recession the Republican majorities – over Barkley's objection – curbed union power via the Taft–Hartley Act.[145] They also passed the Twenty-second Amendment, limiting the president to two terms, a posthumous slap at Roosevelt.[146]
Barkley's wife, Dorothy, died March 10, 1947, after a long illness.
Barkley's wife became an invalid due to heart disease.[20] Barkley had closed his law practice when he was elected to the Senate, so to pay for his wife's care, he supplemented his $10,000 annual salary with speaking engagements.[140] He was the Democratic Speakers Bureau's most requested orator, surpassing Truman.[144] A Pageant magazine poll of legislators chose Barkley and Republican Robert A. Taft as the hardest-working members of their respective parties.[144] The Barkleys sold their Washington, D.C., home and moved into an apartment to reduce expenses.[142] Marny Clifford, wife of Truman's Naval Advisor Clark Clifford, nicknamed Barkley "Sparkle Barkle" for his care of his wife, who died March 10, 1947.[142] When Barkley won the Collier Award in May 1948, he donated the $10,000 prize to the University of Louisville School of Medicine in his wife's honor.[144]
Civil rights bills, unpopular with Southern Democrats, were central to Truman's Fair Deal.[146] Because Barkley could still appeal to Southern Democrats, Truman asked him to be the keynote speaker at the 1948 Democratic National Convention for an unprecedented third time.[147] Because of the Republican resurgence and Truman's difficulty appealing to some Democrats, Republican presidential nominee Thomas E. Dewey was expected to win the upcoming presidential election.[147] Democrats were energized by Barkley's keynote address, which promoted New Deal accomplishments and called the Republican-controlled Eightieth Congress a "do nothing" Congress.[148] He mentioned Truman only once, leading Truman to suspect that Barkley sought to supplant him as the party's presidential nominee, but no such attempt occurred.[109] Despite these suspicions and his contention that a ticket consisting of a Missourian and a Kentuckian lacked regional geographic balance, convention delegates persuaded Truman to take Barkley as his running mate.[109] Truman had wanted Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, but Douglas declined.[140]
Barkley was disappointed that he was not Truman's first choice as running mate, but over the next six weeks, he crisscrossed the country by plane, making over 250 campaign speeches in 36 states.[148][149] Playing off Barkley's keynote speech, Truman called a special congressional session on July 26, 1948, challenging Republicans to enact their agenda.[150] They were unable to pass any significant legislation, seeming to confirm Barkley's characterization of them as a "do-nothing Congress".[150]
Vice Presidency [ edit ]
In an upset victory, Truman and Barkley were elected over the Republican ticket by over 2 million votes, and Democrats regained majorities in both houses of Congress.[151] Seventy-one years old at the time of his inauguration, he was the oldest man ever elected Vice President, breaking Charles Curtis' record at 69.[42][152] His grandson, Stephen M. Truitt, suggested the nickname "Veep" as an alternative to "Mr. Vice President".[153] The nickname was used by the press, but Barkley's successor, Richard Nixon, discontinued using it, saying it belonged to Barkley.[152]
Despite their personal differences, Truman and Barkley agreed on most issues.[149] Because of Barkley's legislative experience, Truman insisted his vice-president attend cabinet meetings.[42] Barkley chaired the Senate Democratic Policy Committee and attended Truman's weekly legislative conferences.[154] When Congress created the National Security Council, it included the vice president as a member.[155] Barkley acted as the administration's primary spokesperson, making 40 major speeches in his first eight months in office.[155] Truman commissioned the United States Army Institute of Heraldry to create a seal and flag for the vice president, advocated raising his salary, and increased his expense budget.[42][156] Mark O. Hatfield's biographical sketch of Barkley noted that he was "the last [vice president] to preside regularly over the Senate, the last not to have an office in or near the White House, [and] the last to identify more with the legislative than the executive branch".[152]
Despite the Democrats' advantage in the Senate, conservative Democrats united with the Republican minority to oppose much of Truman's agenda, most notably, civil rights legislation.[157] In March 1949, Democratic floor leader Scott W. Lucas introduced an amendment to Senate Rule XXII to make cloture easier to achieve; hoping to end a ten-day filibuster against a civil rights bill.[158] Conservative Republicans and Southern Democrats opposed the rule change and tried to obstruct it.[158] Lucas asked for a cloture vote on the rule change, but opponents contended that the motion was out of order.[158] Barkley studied the original debate on Rule XXII, which governed both cloture motions, before ruling in Lucas' favor.[159] Georgia Senator Richard Russell, Jr. appealed Barkley's decision, and the chamber voted 46–41 to overrule.[159] Sixteen Republicans, mostly from Northeast and West Coast states, voted to sustain the ruling; most Southern Democrats voted with the remaining Republicans to overrule it.[159]
On July 8, 1949, Barkley met Jane (Rucker) Hadley, a St. Louis widow approximately half his age, at a party thrown by Clark Clifford.[152][160] After Hadley's return to St. Louis, Barkley kept contact with her via letters and plane trips.[160] Their courtship received national attention, and on November 18, 1949, they married in the Singleton Memorial Chapel of St. John's Methodist Church in St. Louis.[161] Barkley is the only U.S. vice president to marry while in office.[42]
Barkley's most notable tie-breaking vote as vice president was cast on October 4, 1949, to save the Young–Russell Amendment which set a 90% parity on the price of cotton, wheat, corn, rice, and peanuts.[162] His friends, Scott Lucas and Clint Anderson, opposed the amendment, but Barkley had promised support during the 1948 campaign.[162]
In 1949, Emory University chose Barkley to deliver its commencement address and awarded him an honorary Doctor of Laws.[163] The following year, the university's debating society renamed itself the Barkley Forum.[164] The university also created the Alben W. Barkley Distinguished Chair in its Department of Political Science.[164]
President Truman presents the Congressional Gold Medal to Vice President Barkley honoring his years of legislative service.
Barkley tried to mentor Scott Lucas and Ernest McFarland, his immediate successors as floor leader, by teaching them to work with the vice president as he had during Truman's vice presidency, but Truman's unpopularity made cooperation between the executive branch and the legislature difficult.[157] After the U.S. entered the Korean War, Truman focused on foreign affairs, leaving Barkley to campaign for Democratic candidates in the 1950 midterm elections.[156] He traveled over 19,000 miles (31,000 km) and spoke in almost half of the states during the campaign.[165] He felt ill when he arrived in Paducah on election day, and a doctor diagnosed him with a "tired heart".[166] Returning to Washington, D.C., he spent several days in Naval Hospital, but was able to preside when the Senate opened its session on November 28, 1950.[166] Democrats lost seats in both houses but maintained majorities in each.[156]
On March 1, 1951 – exactly 38 years from his first day in Congress – Barkley's fellow congressmen presented him with the Congressional Gold Medal in honor of his legislative service.[167] Truman surprised Barkley, appearing on the Senate floor to present the medallion and a gavel made of timbers used to renovate the White House after the burning of Washington in 1814.[166]
In November 1951, Barkley and his wife ate Thanksgiving dinner with U.S. troops at Kimpo Air Base in Seoul.[168] On his seventy-fourth birthday, Barkley traveled to the front lines on a fact-finding mission for the president.[168] On June 4, 1952, he cast another notable tie-breaking vote to save the Wage Stabilization Board.[169]
Campaign for president [ edit ]
At the March 29, 1952, Jefferson–Jackson Day fundraiser, Truman announced that he would not seek re-election, although he was exempt from the Twenty-second Amendment's term limits.[170] After the announcement, the District of Columbia Democratic Club formed a Barkley for President Club with Iowa Senator Guy Gillette as chairman.[169] Prominent Kentuckians – including Senator Earle C. Clements, Governor Lawrence Wetherby, and Lieutenant Governor Emerson "Doc" Beauchamp – supported the candidacy.[169] Exactly two months after Truman's announcement, Barkley declared his availability to run for president while maintaining he was not actively seeking the office.[171]
Adlai Stevenson II received the Democratic presidential nomination in 1952 instead of Barkley.
Barkley's distant cousin, Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson II (grandson of former vice president Adlai Stevenson I), was considered his primary competition for the nomination, but had not committed before the convention.[171] Richard Russell, Jr. and Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver were also interested in the nomination.[172] Kentucky's delegation to the 1952 Democratic National Convention announced that they would support Barkley, and Truman encouraged Missouri's delegates to do so.[171] Democratic National Committee chairman Frank E. McKinney, former chairman James Farley, and Senate Secretary Leslie Biffle also supported him.[173] Two weeks before the convention, Stevenson advisor Jacob Arvey told Barkley that Stevenson was not going to be nominated and favored nominating Barkley.[173] Barkley's advisors believed that Kefauver and Russell would knock each other out of the early balloting, allowing Barkley to capture the nomination.[172]
To dispel concerns about his age (74), failing eyesight, and heart problems, Barkley arrived in Chicago for the 1952 Democratic National Convention and briskly walked seven blocks from the bus station to his campaign headquarters.[172][173] The attempt was rendered moot on July 20 when a group of labor leaders, including United Automobile Workers President Walter Reuther, issued a statement calling Barkley too old and requesting that Democrats nominate someone younger like Stevenson.[174] At a meeting with labor leaders the next morning, Barkley failed to persuade them to retract the statement, which caused delegations from large industrial states like Illinois, Indiana, and Pennsylvania to waver on their commitments to Barkley.[174][175] On July 21, he announced his withdrawal from the race.[174] Invited to make a farewell address on July 22, he received a 35-minute ovation when he took the podium and 45-minute one at the speech's end.[156][176] In a show of respect, a Missouri delegate nominated Barkley for president and House Majority Leader McCormack seconded it, but Stevenson was easily nominated.[177] A month after the convention, Barkley hosted a Stevenson picnic and campaign rally at his home in Paducah and later introduced him at a rally in Louisville.[178] Despite Barkley's predictions of a Democratic victory, Stevenson lost in overwhelming fashion to Republican Dwight Eisenhower.[179]
Later life and death [ edit ]
The Angles, Barkley's home in Paducah
Barkley's term as vice president ended on January 20, 1953.[14] After the election, he had surgery to remove his cataracts.[179] He contracted with NBC to create 26 fifteen-minute commentary broadcasts called "Meet the Veep".[179] Low ratings prompted NBC's decision not to renew the series in September 1953.[179] In retirement, Barkley remained a popular speaker and began working on his memoirs with journalist Sidney Shallett.[179] He re-entered politics in 1954, challenging incumbent Republican Senator John Sherman Cooper.[180] In a 1971 study of Barkley's Senate career, historian Glenn Finch argued that Barkley was the only person who could beat Cooper.[181] Few issues differentiated the candidates, and the campaign hinged on party politics; visits to Kentucky by President Eisenhower, Vice President Richard Nixon, and Senator Everett Dirksen on Cooper's behalf reinforced this notion.[179] Barkley resumed his Iron Man campaign style, campaigning for up to sixteen hours a day, countering the "too old" charge that cost him the presidential nomination.[182] He won the general election by a vote of 434,109 to 362,948, giving Democrats a one-vote advantage in the Senate.[156][178]
Veteran West Virginia Senator Harley M. Kilgore offered to exchange seats with Barkley, putting Barkley on the front row with the chamber's senior members and himself on the back row with the freshman legislators, but Barkley declined the offer.[183] In honor of his previous service, he was assigned to the prestigious Committee on Foreign Relations.[42] In this position, he endorsed Eisenhower's appointment of Cooper as U.S. Ambassador to India and Nepal.[183] His relative lack of seniority did not afford him much influence.[183]
In an April 30, 1956, keynote address at the Washington and Lee Mock Convention, Barkley spoke of his willingness to sit with the other freshman senators in Congress, he ended with an allusion to Psalm 84:10, saying "I'm glad to sit on the back row, for I would rather be a servant in the House of the Lord than to sit in the seats of the mighty."[156] He then collapsed onstage and died of a heart attack.[42] He was buried in Mount Kenton Cemetery near Paducah.[14]
Memory [ edit ]
A dam constructed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on the Cumberland River in 1966, and the lake it forms, were named Barkley Dam and Lake Barkley in Barkley's honor.[184] Barkley Regional Airport in Paducah is also named for him.[185] In 1984, the federal government declined to purchase The Angles, his Paducah home, and it was sold at auction.[186] Many personal items owned by Barkley are displayed on the second floor of the historic house Whitehaven in Paducah. In February 2008, Paducah's American Justice School of Law changed owners after failing to secure accreditation from the American Bar Association.[187] It was renamed the Alben W. Barkley School of Law, but remained unaccredited, and closed in December 2008.[187]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Bibliography [ edit ]
Further reading [ edit ]
Primary sources [ edit ]
Secondary sources [ edit ]Media playback is not supported on this device Rangers takeover media conference
Former Sheffield United chief executive Charles Green has agreed a deal to buy Scottish Premier League side Rangers.
Green, 59, whose £8.5m bid is backed by a global consortium, hopes Rangers can exit administration through a Company Voluntary Arrangement, a concern for fans keen to retain the club's history.
Administrator David Whitehouse said that, should creditors reject the CVA, then Green would form a "new company".
No investor will own more than 15%. If we get the CVA through we will release the names. Charles Green
Green watched Rangers beat St Johnstone 4-0 in their final league match.
At Sunday morning's media conference at Murray Park, the club's training base, Green revealed that there are 20 individuals in the consortium from Asia, the Middle East, Far East and the UK.
They first approached the administrators Duff & Phelps five weeks ago.
"We want to develop the brand in these areas where there's an appetite," said Green.
"This is a great football club with a tremendous history and we will preserve that while building a solid platform for the future.
"Rangers supporters have every right to believe their club should be a success on and off the pitch and that is exactly what we will strive to achieve."
CHARLES GREEN DEAL Green bid is binding
Backed by 20 individuals from the UK, Middle East, Far East and Asia
CVA is preferred route out of administration, with £8.5m in the pot for creditors
CVA proposals go to creditors on 21 May; if rejected, Green will seek newco
Green says he has spent £1m already on deal
Green has purchased Craig Whyte's 85% shareholding in Rangers, joking that he paid £2 to give the former chairman "a 100% profit".
A statement from Whitehouse said: "Mr Green has secured, via a substantial financial commitment, a period of exclusivity to complete the purchase of the club and this is expected to be finalised at a creditors' meeting on 6 June.
"The structure and quantum of the offer from Mr Green is such that it is acceptable to us as administrators and, having been in discussions with major creditors throughout the process, we believe this presents the best prospect of financial recovery for creditors.
"If the creditors do not approve the Company Voluntary Arrangement, the agreement obliges Charles Green's purchasing vehicle to acquire the business and assets of the club on agreed terms, through a newco structure. It is Mr Green's strong preference to achieve a CVA."
Green moved to rescue the crisis-hit club last week before previous favourite Bill Miller withdrew his bid citing a worse-than-expected set of financial figures and inhospitable fan reaction.
Since the American tow-truck manufacturer pulled out, the Blue Knights, led by former director Paul Murray, and Sale Sharks owner Brian Kennedy had hoped to be named preferred bidder on Friday.
Kennedy said Whyte had agreed to transfer his shares to him and expected to get the nod from administrators to complete a period of due diligience and to proceed with plans for a CVA.
However, Green's late bid proved to be more attractive to the administrators, whose role is to secure the best deal for the club's creditors, of whom HMRC and Ticketus are the key players.
Ticketus is pursuing Whyte through the courts for almost £27m. The Scottish businessman used the finance company to buy Sir David Murray's shareholding in May 2011 for £1 and to pay the £18m debt owed to Lloyds Bank.
In exchange for the cash injection, Ticketus are due the income of about 100,000 Ibrox season tickets over four years.
Rangers bidding timeline 3 May: US businessman Bill Miller granted preferred bidder status
US businessman Bill Miller granted preferred bidder status 8 May: Miller withdraws bid
Miller withdraws bid 10 May: Duff & Phelps say Whyte is ready to hand over shares to two of four parties interested in a takeover
Duff & Phelps say Whyte is ready to hand over shares to two of four parties interested in a takeover 11 May: Blue Knights set deadline for offer to buy club but bid fails and is withdrawn
Blue Knights set deadline for offer to buy club but bid fails and is withdrawn 13 May: Media conference called to announce Green's plans
Kennedy and the Blue Knights' rejection led to a spat with administrators on Friday.
The unsuccessful Scottish bidders, who had the backing of fans' groups, warned Duff & Phelps that the club would be "at death's door" if the preferred bidder did not follow through with its plans.
In response, the administrators highlighted elements of Kennedy and the Blue Knights' bid that, they felt, showed they could not muster a deal that would appease creditors more than liquidation, a situation in which assets like Ibrox Stadium and Murray Park would be sold.
Green and his backers have their work cut out to effect a CVA that is acceptable to the creditors and to have the club ready to compete in the SPL for next season.
Rangers slid into administration on 14 February and in that time Duff & Phelps have worked to assess bids and establish the true level of debt, which could total £134m if the so-called "Big Tax Case", the subject of a First Tier Tribunal, goes against the club.
A ruling on that is imminent.
The club, which had won the SPL title three years in a row before old rivals Celtic clinched the league this year, had 10 points deducted for entering administration.
They will be given a further points penalty if they have not emerged from administration by the time the 2012-13 season kicks off.
There will be no income from participation in European football next season because Rangers failed to register audited accounts by 31 March.
of a one-year transfer ban and a £160,000 fine.
The SFA's independent tribunal issued these penalties for the club bringing the game into disrepute, failing to pay National Insurance and PAYE contributions during Whyte's tenure and for failing to pay sums owed for tickets to fellow SFA clubs.Producer Jeffrey Seller has announced five new performers to join the principal cast of Broadway's Hamilton.
Saturday Night Live veteran |
told ESPN.
Reached by ESPN's Jayson Stark, Marlins president David Samson declined to comment.
Forbes, citing two sources, first reported Thursday that Samson has said there is a $1.6 billion handshake agreement for a sale.
Loria bought the Marlins from John Henry in 2002 for $158 million, funding the purchase by selling the Montreal Expos to Major League Baseball for $120 million and covering the rest with a $38 million loan from MLB.
Some of the value of the team has been boosted by MLB's Advanced Media business, which is owned equally by all owners.
The Marlins enter 2017 looking for their first winning season since 2009, as a late fade dropped Miami to a 79-82 finish in 2016.
The Associated Press and ESPN's Darren Rovell contributed to this report.Image copyright Reuters Image caption The Germans have already complained about allegations that the NSA tapped Angela Merkel's phone
US and British intelligence services are able to secretly access information from German telecoms operators, according to a German newspaper report.
A programme called Treasure Map gives the NSA and its UK counterpart, GCHQ, data from operators including Deutsche Telekom, Der Spiegel said.
The data is said to include information from networks as well as from individual computers and smart-phones.
Der Spiegel cites documents provided by US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden.
The former Central Intelligence Agency technical worker is the source of some of the biggest information leaks in US history.
Image copyright AFP Image caption Edward Snowden has revealed huge US surveillance operations
A number of US allies, including Germany, have already expressed anger over Snowden-based spying allegations.
'Google Earth of the Internet'
The Spiegel article claims that the NSA ( National Security Agency) and the UK's GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) are able to eavesdrop on telecom companies such as Deutsche Telekom, Netcologne, Stellar and Cetel.
The Treasure Map programme, which the newspaper calls "the Google Earth of the Internet," is said to give the agencies access to data about the network structure and also through individual routers to subscribers' personal devices.
Der Spiegel warns that the information obtained could be used for planning sophisticated cyber-attacks.
The Treasure map was first mentioned last year by the New York Times, which says the programme collects Wifi network and geo-location data, as well as between 30 and 50 million unique internet provider addresses — information that can reveal the owner and location of a computer or mobile device.
Deutsche Telekom and Netcologne both told Der Spiegel they had not identified any evidence of manipulation or external access to their networks.
But Deutsche Telekom's IT security head Thomas Tschersich said: "The access of foreign secret services to our network would be totally unacceptable."
Phone tapping
The Snowden leaks, which began last year, have revealed a massive surveillance operation by the US.
Among the disclosures were allegations that the NSA tapped German Chancellor Angela Merkel's mobile phone.
As a result, Germany asked the top American intelligence officer in Berlin to leave his post in July.
Ms Merkel has publicly asked for an explanation for the alleged spying.Yesterday something amazing happened. I’m perhaps guilty of overusing the word but in this case, I feel it’s warranted. OG DOTA2 won their 4th Major Championship Title.
For those that don’t give a shit or are eager to know what that means… Valve (the makers of DOTA2), at of the close of 2015, begun their 3x a year (now 2x a year) Major events. Each of these events has a total prize pool of around $3 Million USD (used to be $3.1 Mil) with the winning team taking home $1 Million between them. The best teams in the world of DOTA2 qualify for the event, then the main event and then.. someone wins.
OG DOTA2 has won four out of five majors. 80% of Valve’s Majors since 2015 have been won by OG DOTA2. Percentages often impress those looking to appear smart in expressing the simplest of things. Guilty.
So why am I telling you this?
As a select few people know, I was involved with co-founding the OG DOTA2 organisation. I take 0% (yes, I used percent again) credit for their successes but am incredibly proud of what they’ve achieved together. As someone involved with the building of the brand (mostly our agency Level99 but I pretend to take credit), creating the logo, investing $’s and watching the team succeed over and over again.. I felt it a worthy time to share some of the things I’ve witnessed over what will soon be around 2 years of OG DOTA2.
I’ll preface this by saying I am guilty of being a r/dota2 lurker. I’ve waded through that welcome swamp over the last 2 years to see people berate and insult players on the team at every opportunity they get. It’s quite mind-blowing to me that after what this group of people has achieved that there still are special people out there so generous with their salt and flame. I sometimes hear similar criticisms from industry colleagues. Believe me, everyone who has installed DOTA2 thinks they know the game inside out. Even that org owner with his 2,3,4K MMR lifetime achievement believes he is God’s gift to DOTA.
All of that aside, what most people often ask me is How is OG DOTA2 so good? How does a team deliver results so inspiring?
I thought that alongside their most recent achievement and at a time when myself (and our agency Level99) are not actively involved with the team, it’d be an opportune moment to share. I’ve been grateful to see behind the scenes how a core group of pretty phenomenal people grew to achieve legendary status in DOTA2 (come on, this can’t be hyperbole).
The full story behind how OG was formed I’ll save for another time. Instead, I have embraced full retard mode and boil down the reasons for why this team is the best I have ever seen.. in bullet points:
Many aren’t aware that shortly after the formation of Monkey Business, the core of the team Johan and Tal, were offered very competitive salaries at the best esports orgs in the world. Literally, go through a list of names you all admire and I can almost guarantee you there are names on there that offered this group the world. For some of the offers from top tier orgs, Johan and Tal didn’t even ask for salary details because they said to themselves this will be on our terms and we don’t like how you do business. They turned Tier 1 orgs down with no plans for what comes next because they believed in themselves. They decided not to be seen as a short-term gamble by other orgs and took the risk themselves.
with no plans for what comes next because they believed in themselves. They decided not to be seen as a short-term gamble by other orgs and I remember a conversation with Johan very early on after their most recent offer from a North American org. I urged him to take the offer because it was actually pretty decent. Us + Hitbox as a sponsor wouldn’t have been able to match that. Some of the contract clauses were mind bendingly stupid but the overall deal with regards to Salary and conditions were solid for a DOTA2 team that hadn’t yet placed highly at an event (they later placed 2nd at an MLG event). Very few people know this but Johan and Tal actually spent a lot of time discussing contract details and discussing terms themselves. They knew what they didn’t want and weren’t afraid to say so
You will find few truly selfless players in esports. I can count the names on one hand. Johan is one of those people. I remember his exact words on a call when we discussed not being able to pay as high salaries as what was currently being offered by others. He simply said I just want what’s best for my guys. He was even willing to forego his salary so that other players on the team could get regular monthly pay (and even pay money towards their salaries). Finding a person that cared more for his team mates than himself was a quality I noticed in Johan during the time I spent with him before leaving Fnatic (before and during the TI4 Drama.. if only people knew what actually happened back then). For OG he is the selfless, beating heart of a team that doesn’t just care but prioritises the people around him over himself.
. He was even willing to forego his salary so that other players on the team could get regular monthly pay (and even pay money towards their salaries). Finding a person that cared more for his team mates than himself was a quality I noticed in Johan during the time I spent with him before leaving Fnatic (before and during the TI4 Drama.. if only people knew what actually happened back then). For he is the Work-ethic is under rated and under appreciated by all but the highest achievers. On the business side of OG, we initially held weekly meetings to review the progress behind the scenes, discuss how the brand would grow and figure out how it would expand and find stable footing in comparison to so many flaky orgs. Without fail, come rain, shine, practice time, late night, two people would be on these calls every single week. Tal and Evany. I know many people don’t realise what goes in to building an org from the ground up but let me be the first to tell you, there’s a LOT of things you need to do, on a regular basis. Tal and Evany would show up and discuss OG and the business every single week, without fail. Even if it was a week before a Major. While the majority of players I’ve met seem to always make excuses (or don’t at all) for not doing things like sponsor obligations.. OG was the polar opposite. Tal would attending meetings and lead the team while Evany would actually put the meeting agenda together and map out the discussion points OG needed to be talking about. Doing the things that very few people will do and committing to it. How many people do you know that do this in even their daily lives? I am blessed to know two of them and they are both part of the OG core.
Tal and Evany. I know many people don’t realise what goes in to building an org from the ground up but let me be the first to tell you, there’s a LOT of things you need to do, on a regular basis. Tal and Evany would show up and discuss OG and the business every single week, without fail. Even if it was a week before a Major. While the majority of players I’ve met seem to always make excuses (or don’t at all) for not doing things like sponsor obligations.. OG was the polar opposite. Tal would attending meetings and lead the team while Evany would actually put the meeting agenda together and map out the discussion points OG needed to be talking about. How many people do you know that do this in even their daily lives? I am blessed to know two of them and they are both part of the OG core. Sacrifice is something we often talk about but rarely do. After the mutual parting of ways between OG and Hitbox.tv, the players were left without a salary. Other than prize money, there just wasn’t sponsor income that would make up for the loss in that money. I discussed this with Tal, Johan and Evany. The answer from them was simple and unified: We won’t take a salary but let’s work on getting some new money in and make sure we pay back the other players in the team asap. To this day, they haven’t claimed the 2/3 months of salary from back then (and I doubt ever will). The core team members were willing to take on the risk of being majority owners in every sense of the word. All the upside and all the downside. This happened a little while before the Manilla Major so yes, they all went into that event dealing with this first-hand (as owners), having this on their minds and still.. won the event.
is something we often talk about but rarely do. After the mutual parting of ways between OG and Hitbox.tv, the players were left without a salary. Other than prize money, there just wasn’t sponsor income that would make up for the loss in that money. I discussed this with Tal, Johan and Evany. The answer from them was simple and unified: We won’t take a salary but let’s work on getting some new money in and make sure we pay back the other players in the team asap. To this day, they haven’t claimed the 2/3 months of salary from back then (and I doubt ever will). The core team members were willing to take on the risk of being majority owners in every sense of the word. All the upside and all the downside. The trust between this core group is a bond I’ve not seen in nearly any trio. Ever. Not even just when talking about esports people. What may come as a shock to many that weren’t aware is that for nearly 6-9 months into the forming of OG, the players were not under any binding contract. None. There were contract drafts and some argued these were binding as they were signed but they were linked to a company that was never officially formed on paper (prior to the formation of OG). After winning nearly every event they attended, including the Frankfurt Major then the Manilla Major.. there were never even discussions between the core trio (Johan, Tal and Evany) about leaving to go elsewhere. Not for any offer. They were free to do as they pleased and they chose loyalty to one another. I find it challenging myself to name one trio as loyal to one another as they are.
I find it challenging myself to name one trio as loyal to one another as they are. When shit hits the fan… they supported each other instead of seeking out comforting offers from other teams players and org owners offering an easy ‘disband and join us’ solution. This is something I will never forget. When it was clear that Crit was heading to EG, Moon was leaving the team and Miracle was off to Liquid, the group panicked. They’d built something special in the last year and they now had to replace 3 players on their roster and continue what they’d started. Tal was very stressed during this time (we didn’t talk except for whatsapp messages during that phase), Evany was disappointed with certain things that were happening while Johan was frustrated. They were also worried that the soon to be RedBull sponsorship would be impacted by all of this. Knowing the information from the bullet points previous to this one, I think many would have said the same thing I did to everyone that dared ask me about the status of OG (even partners of the brand although RedBull always stood strong ): Johan, Tal and Evany will stay together and OG will continue to win. Even though this transition was by far the most challenging experience any of them had faced together, they stuck together. No one could break them apart. No money, no promises, no deals would make them part ways with one another. They stood by one another even when the world they knew begun to crack.
. They’d built something special in the last year and they now had to replace 3 players on their roster and continue what they’d started. Tal was very stressed during this time (we didn’t talk except for whatsapp messages during that phase), Evany was disappointed with certain things that were happening while Johan was frustrated. They were also worried that the soon to be RedBull sponsorship would be impacted by all of this. Knowing the information from the bullet points previous to this one, I think many would have said the same thing I did to everyone that dared ask me about the status of OG (even partners of the brand although ): Johan, Tal and Evany will stay together and OG will continue to win. Even though this transition was by far the most challenging experience any of them had faced together, Lastly, they deal with criticism constructively instead of personally. There are so many examples of this but I will cite two. 1) After not winning the Shanghai Major then later the TI results, the armchair analysts on the subreddit and other social media platforms made it known that they felt Johan (alongside other players) was making key mistakes as a carry player. They said this in droves. I’ve seen other players deal with that type of criticism and wallow in self-pity. What did Johan do? He jokingly referred to himself as Nobrain in some Skype conversations and with every moment of each day, he was playing more and practising more DOTA. He just focused on what he wanted to achieve regardless of what people said. He went on to win 2x more Majors after that. 2) The OG core was criticised heavily after the departure of Crit, Miracle and Moon. Tal had later discovered Ana and Jerax/S4 were talking to the both him and Johan. Ana eventually went to Israel to stay with Tal because Tal cared for the success of his new team mate so deeply! With the criticism still so prevalent, the trio (Tal, Evany, Johan) just became closer to one another.. a more cohesive, hard-working and empathetic unit of people than any other team out there. By all accounts, this worked well for them.
There was a vocal minority fan-base that knew nothing about what made OG what it was but were happy to hop on the bandwagon when the team were winning events. To those people: Tal, Johan and Evany made this. There are qualities in people you just don’t see when you watch a game of DOTA2. There’s more to their success than in-game prowess, leadership and coaching. Their attitude, devotion and commitment to achieve something great is something you just can’t easily find elsewhere.
Behind the legendary victories are outstanding human beings. I could have written a 100+ page book about the last 2 years and the OG core trio but this is all I’ve got in me for now luckily for the 10 people (I love you Mum) that read my blog!
Perhaps this is the secret that separates a team of ultra-highly skilled players from OG. Humble in Victory, Gracious in Defeat. They have always placed their values first, no matter what happened.By Staff
A toddler lost six of her fingers in an escalator in an harrowing accident that happened in a mall in Beijing, China.
The new CCTV footage showed the one-year child coming down with an older man but seconds later the toddler went back alone to the escalator again.
The moment she stepped on the running escalator, the child lost her balance and fell down. In order to soften her fall, she placed hands on the escalator’s stairs.
By then the child had reached the last step of the escalator and but still trying to balance herself. At the last step of the escalator, her fingers were squeezed in the mechanism. An elder man had approached the child and pulled her back; but unfortunately six of her fingers got stuck in the escalator and separated from the hand.
The escalator also stopped automatically. She was reportedly rushed to the hospital for the treatment.
Of late, there have been reports of accidents of people getting stuck in escalators in shopping centres mostly in China.China has done it again. Alarmed the Indian security establishment. This time round, it has secured a deep sea mining approval from the International Seabed Authority (ISA) to explore an Indian Ocean ridge for undersea polymetallic sulphide deposits. This raises the spectre of Chinese vessels, including military ones, roaming the seas just about a thousand kilometres south of the Indian peninsula.
With its ‘blue sea’ naval ambitions, India has long aspired to holding sway over the Indian Ocean. But China’s winning of an exploratory bid right under India’s nose clearly means two things: one, that New Delhi should have been better prepared for such an outcome; and two, it makes no sense talking endlessly about foiling its northern neighbour’s geo-political gameplan without the wherewithal to pre-empt its moves.
Polymetallic sulphide deposits are a recently discovered source of minerals, found around volcanic springs on the seabed and thought to contain gold, silver, lead, zinc and copper. While India slept, China awoke to their potential quite some time ago. As Wang Fei, deputy director general of the China Oceanic Administration, announced in Beijing last week, the prospecting application was submitted in May 2010 to the ISA, a UN body, and it has allowed China to explore a section of the Southwestern Indian ridge for 15 years. The ridge lies in the southern hemisphere, not far from Madagascar. “It covers an area of about 10,000 sq km,” Fei said, “China will enjoy priority in offshore mining for commercial purposes in the approved area when conditions mature.”
The ISA, which regulates prospecting, exploration and exploitation of marine minerals in international seabed areas, estimates that each polymetallic sulphide deposit could hold as much as 110 million tonnes of metal ore. However, only about 5 per cent of the 60,000 km of oceanic ridges, where most such deposits are believed to lie, have been surveyed in any detail so far. That leaves the field open to other explorers with the requisite expertise.
“Refined metals from the deposits will help China meet its increasing demand for mineral resources for its rapid economic development,” in the words of Jin Jiancai, another Chinese official. The exercise will help China access new mineral resources, learn more about the deep-sea environment, and even enhance technologies for deep-sea mining and exploration, he added.
So, is that the sole aim—to search for minerals? Jabin T Jacob, a Delhi-based China analyst, does not want to ascribe any ulterior motives to this Chinese move. “Ultimately, it is a capability issue,” Jacob says, “The Chinese first received such a deep sea prospecting licence in 2002 (in the Pacific Ocean). Indian planners should have seen this coming. And, India has not even developed the capabilities required to pre-empt such a Chinese move.”
The move speaks of Chinese acumen in more than one way. It takes space surveillance to identify ocean zones worth exploring, and China may well have used its space assets to the hilt to narrow its choice down to the Southwestern Indian ridge. While India’s own Isro is content sending up experimental satellites—a euphemism for low-orbit spy satellites—and surveying the Indian Subcontinent for mineral deposits through remote sensors, China has gone well beyond its littoral with the help of the technology at its disposal.
Under the terms of the 15-year contract that China will sign with the ISA this November, after eight years of prospecting, China will have to give up its exploration rights to half the approved area; and after 10 years, it will be allowed to explore only 2,500 sq km. This places a premium on precision planning. Clarity on exactly where the mineral deposits are located (“the most treasured area”), Jin said, was important.
The average depth of the approved ridge is about 3,000 metres, well within China’s capability; it has already tested its indigenous technology to reach depths of 5,000 metres undersea. Jiaolong, a Chinese submersible vessel, recently plumbed a depth of 5,188 metres on a test mission, and is reputed to be able to reach 7,000 metres under optimum conditions. Last year, it logged as many as 17 dives in the South China Sea, reaching 3,759 metres in its deepest dive. Whether it was a manned mission is not known, but it was impressive all the same. Only four other countries are known to be able to reach depths of 3,500 metres or more: the US, Russia, France and Japan.
What has got heads being scratched in New Delhi, however, are the military implications of China’s deep-sea programme. After all, such a presence can pose a hard-to-monitor threat. With India already unsettled by China’s purported ‘string of pearls’ strategy to encircle the country—as in the Chinese board game Go—oceanic vulnerability is not something to be ignored. An Indian Navy document has already expressed concern that the ISA permission places Chinese hardware much too close for India’s comfort. Also, on the pretext of deep-sea mining, China could access valuable oceanographic and hydrological data that could be used for purposes of military mapping.
Jacob says the Indian Navy needs to be wary of Chinese operations so close to its waters, but feels that the country should not overreact, given that it is already accustomed to Chinese anti-piracy and disaster relief operations in the region. Also, such exploration contracts are routine nowadays. For one, China does have the expertise, acquired during its 2002 ISA-approved exploration of 150,000 sq km of the Pacific seabed. For another, other countries are in the game too. On 19 July, the ISA approved three other deep-sea explorations. Nauru and Tonga were given approval for exploration for polymetallic deposits in the reserved area of the Clarion-Clipperton Fractured Zone in the east Pacific Ocean. Likewise, Russia was given a nod for the same in the mid-Atlantic range.
Moreover, some suggest that China wouldn’t dare anything too aggressive in the Indian Ocean, since the US has it under close watch from its vantage point of Diego Garcia, just south of the equator, supported on two sides by its Navy’s heavily armed Seventh Fleet based in Japan and Fifth Fleet based in the Gulf.
Still, as an independent guardian of its own interests, India has no option but to keep a close watch on Chinese moves in the neighbourhood.
China has signed a string of agreements, including some military ones, with Myanmar, Thailand, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Maldives and Pakistan. Lately, it has been wooing countries like Seychelles and Mauritius, both of which have uninhabited small islands that could serve China’s aim of setting up listening posts.
So far, Mauritius and Seychelles have been friendly to India and have even let Indian military interests operate on their soil. But with China investing heavily in infrastructure and commerce there, the delicate balance in India’s favour could well change.
Notably, China has given a $300,000 grant to the Indian Ocean Islands Games currently underway in Victoria, Seychelles, in which six island countries are participating: Madagascar, Comoros, Mauritius, Reunion Island, Mayotte and Seychelles. China’s grant, routed through the Guangdong People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, was in the form of laptops, timing devices, LCD screens and sports accessories. So, even as India kept this event off its radar, China managed to generate some valuable goodwill for itself.
It doesn’t help that Nepal, to India’s north, may already have made the switch in regional allegiance after Maoists seized partial power three years ago, ending the Himalayan state’s India-friendly monarchy.
New Delhi cannot afford any further loss of influence in the region. India’s Ministry of External Affairs, acting as reactively as ever, is reportedly trying to stop China’s Indian Ocean venture legally, but it is doubtful if such exploration in international waters can be blocked on the basis of mere suspicion.
As Jacob says, China’s capabilities do not necessarily signify hostile intent, let alone hostility. “And where the two come together, China still often has to walk on eggshells on the international stage,” he says, “Chinese military modernisation is under global and regional scanners, and this constrains China, for, as an aspirant to the world No. 1 spot, it cannot afford to worry its neighbours, offend other powers, or overreach itself.”
At this juncture, all India can do is ask the ISA to ensure that the Chinese adhere strictly to the terms of their licence for exploration and mining operations. Such a request would be a signal enough of India’s scepticism of China’s agenda in the Indian Ocean.
However, as the Asian geo-political stakes rise, India will simply have to raise its own game. It must stay alert, and learn to get there first—even if it’s a few thousand metres underwater.The Project Gutenberg EBook of Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka Translated by David Wyllie. This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net ** This is a COPYRIGHTED Project Gutenberg eBook, Details Below ** ** Please follow the copyright guidelines in this file. ** Title: Metamorphosis Author: Franz Kafka Translator: David Wyllie Release Date: August 16, 2005 [EBook #5200] First posted: May 13, 2002 Last updated: May 20, 2012 Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK METAMORPHOSIS *** Copyright (C) 2002 by David Wyllie.
Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka
Translated by David Wyllie
I
One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked.
"What's happened to me?" he thought. It wasn't a dream. His room, a proper human room although a little too small, lay peacefully between its four familiar walls. A collection of textile samples lay spread out on the table - Samsa was a travelling salesman - and above it there hung a picture that he had recently cut out of an illustrated magazine and housed in a nice, gilded frame. It showed a lady fitted out with a fur hat and fur boa who sat upright, raising a heavy fur muff that covered the whole of her lower arm towards the viewer.
Gregor then turned to look out the window at the dull weather. Drops of rain could be heard hitting the pane, which made him feel quite sad. "How about if I sleep a little bit longer and forget all this nonsense", he thought, but that was something he was unable to do because he was used to sleeping on his right, and in his present state couldn't get into that position. However hard he threw himself onto his right, he always rolled back to where he was. He must have tried it a hundred times, shut his eyes so that he wouldn't have to look at the floundering legs, and only stopped when he began to feel a mild, dull pain there that he had never felt before.
"Oh, God", he thought, "what a strenuous career it is that I've chosen! Travelling day in and day out. Doing business like this takes much more effort than doing your own business at home, and on top of that there's the curse of travelling, worries about making train connections, bad and irregular food, contact with different people all the time so that you can never get to know anyone or become friendly with them. It can all go to Hell!" He felt a slight itch up on his belly; pushed himself slowly up on his back towards the headboard so that he could lift his head better; found where the itch was, and saw that it was covered with lots of little white spots which he didn't know what to make of; and when he tried to feel the place with one of his legs he drew it quickly back because as soon as he touched it he was overcome by a cold shudder.
He slid back into his former position. "Getting up early all the time", he thought, "it makes you stupid. You've got to get enough sleep. Other travelling salesmen live a life of luxury. For instance, whenever I go back to the guest house during the morning to copy out the contract, these gentlemen are always still sitting there eating their breakfasts. I ought to just try that with my boss; I'd get kicked out on the spot. But who knows, maybe that would be the best thing for me. If I didn't have my parents to think about I'd have given in my notice a long time ago, I'd have gone up to the boss and told him just what I think, tell him everything I would, let him know just what I feel. He'd fall right off his desk! And it's a funny sort of business to be sitting up there at your desk, talking down at your subordinates from up there, especially when you have to go right up close because the boss is hard of hearing. Well, there's still some hope; once I've got the money together to pay off my parents' debt to him - another five or six years I suppose - that's definitely what I'll do. That's when I'll make the big change. First of all though, I've got to get up, my train leaves at five."
And he looked over at the alarm clock, ticking on the chest of drawers. "God in Heaven!" he thought. It was half past six and the hands were quietly moving forwards, it was even later than half past, more like quarter to seven. Had the alarm clock not rung? He could see from the bed that it had been set for four o'clock as it should have been; it certainly must have rung. Yes, but was it possible to quietly sleep through that furniture-rattling noise? True, he had not slept peacefully, but probably all the more deeply because of that. What should he do now? The next train went at seven; if he were to catch that he would have to rush like mad and the collection of samples was still not packed, and he did not at all feel particularly fresh and lively. And even if he did catch the train he would not avoid his boss's anger as the office assistant would have been there to see the five o'clock train go, he would have put in his report about Gregor's not being there a long time ago. The office assistant was the boss's man, spineless, and with no understanding. What about if he reported sick? But that would be extremely strained and suspicious as in fifteen years of service Gregor had never once yet been ill. His boss would certainly come round with the doctor from the medical insurance company, accuse his parents of having a lazy son, and accept the doctor's recommendation not to make any claim as the doctor believed that no-one was ever ill but that many were workshy. And what's more, would he have been entirely wrong in this case? Gregor did in fact, apart from excessive sleepiness after sleeping for so long, feel completely well and even felt much hungrier than usual.
He was still hurriedly thinking all this through, unable to decide to get out of the bed, when the clock struck quarter to seven. There was a cautious knock at the door near his head. "Gregor", somebody called - it was his mother - "it's quarter to seven. Didn't you want to go somewhere?" That gentle voice! Gregor was shocked when he heard his own voice answering, it could hardly be recognised as the voice he had had before. As if from deep inside him, there was a painful and uncontrollable squeaking mixed in with it, the words could be made out at first but then there was a sort of echo which made them unclear, leaving the hearer unsure whether he had heard properly or not. Gregor had wanted to give a full answer and explain everything, but in the circumstances contented himself with saying: "Yes, mother, yes, thank-you, I'm getting up now." The change in Gregor's voice probably could not be noticed outside through the wooden door, as his mother was satisfied with this explanation and shuffled away. But this short conversation made the other members of the family aware that Gregor, against their expectations was still at home, and soon his father came knocking at one of the side doors, gently, but with his fist. "Gregor, Gregor", he called, "what's wrong?" And after a short while he called again with a warning deepness in his voice: "Gregor! Gregor!" At the other side door his sister came plaintively: "Gregor? Aren't you well? Do you need anything?" Gregor answered to both sides: "I'm ready, now", making an effort to remove all the strangeness from his voice by enunciating very carefully and putting long pauses between each, individual word. His father went back to his breakfast, but his sister whispered: "Gregor, open the door, I beg of you." Gregor, however, had no thought of opening the door, and instead congratulated himself for his cautious habit, acquired from his travelling, of locking all doors at night even when he was at home.
The first thing he wanted to do was to get up in peace without being disturbed, to get dressed, and most of all to have his breakfast. Only then would he consider what to do next, as he was well aware that he would not bring his thoughts to any sensible conclusions by lying in bed. He remembered that he had often felt a slight pain in bed, perhaps caused by lying awkwardly, but that had always turned out to be pure imagination and he wondered how his imaginings would slowly resolve themselves today. He did not have the slightest doubt that the change in his voice was nothing more than the first sign of a serious cold, which was an occupational hazard for travelling salesmen.
It was a simple matter to throw off the covers; he only had to blow himself up a little and they fell off by themselves. But it became difficult after that, especially as he was so exceptionally broad. He would have used his arms and his hands to push himself up; but instead of them he only had all those little legs continuously moving in different directions, and which he was moreover unable to control. If he wanted to bend one of them, then that was the first one that would stretch itself out; and if he finally managed to do what he wanted with that leg, all the others seemed to be set free and would move about painfully. "This is something that can't be done in bed", Gregor said to himself, "so don't keep trying to do it".
The first thing he wanted to do was get the lower part of his body out of the bed, but he had never seen this lower part, and could not imagine what it looked like; it turned out to be too hard to move; it went so slowly; and finally, almost in a frenzy, when he carelessly shoved himself forwards with all the force he could gather, he chose the wrong direction, hit hard against the lower bedpost, and learned from the burning pain he felt that the lower part of his body might well, at present, be the most sensitive.
So then he tried to get the top part of his body out of the bed first, carefully turning his head to the side. This he managed quite easily, and despite its breadth and its weight, the bulk of his body eventually followed slowly in the direction of the head. But when he had at last got his head out of the bed and into the fresh |
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Cheers Tony!McDonald's is selling a lobster roll in several regions, including New England and Canada.
The McLobster costs about $8.99. The meal deal, which includes fries and a fountain drink, costs $13.99, notes Candice Choi at the Associated Press.
The menu item shows that McDonald's is trying to offer more premium options to better compete with fast-casual options like Chick-fil-A, Shake Shack and Chipotle.
Reviews of the McLobster have been largely negative.
"The limp bun holds a bizarrely large amount of lettuce, both shredded and whole-leaf, neither of which is anything more than filler. There's plenty of mayo, liberally mashed in with globs of shredded lobster meat in some awful sort of seafood salad," writes Adam Callagan at Eater.
Lobster roll for $8.99 at McDonald's in New England. $13.99 for meal deal. pic.twitter.com/ZY2IhObgjD — Candice Choi (@candicechoi) July 14, 2015
Callagan also says that the sandwich doesn't taste like lobster.
"It's crowned by a lobster claw, which, when eaten individually, has the faint taste of lobster, but none of the succulence of the best of its kind," he writes. " If you didn't see what you were eating, I don't think you'd guess, and I doubt you'd continue."
Lobster prices have been falling, leading to many restaurants featuring the delicacy on the menu.
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Here are more wild fast food menu items:LONDON — A film about the life of the world’s oldest Holocaust survivor has reached the shortlist of eight films competing for an Oscar in the documentary short subject category, at the 86th Academy Awards next March. The final nominations will be announced in January.
“The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life,” directed by Oscar winner Malcolm Clarke, recently received its UK premiere as part of the UK Jewish Film Festival. It tells the story of 109-year-old Alice Herz-Sommer, a Prague-born concert pianist who was in Theresienstadt. Number 6 refers to the north London apartment where she lives.
In the film — which took approximately two and a half years to make — she shares her views on how to live a long and happy life, about the centrality of music, all the time speaking with candor and optimism despite the traumas she has encountered.
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According to Chris Branch, one of the producers, interest in the film has picked up considerably since its shortlist announcement.
In 1943 Alice was sent to Terezin with both her husband, Leopold Sommer and their six-year-old son, Raphael. She performed in more than 100 concerts in the camp and although she and Raffi survived, she lost both her mother and husband in Auschwitz.
Remarkably she insists that she never hated the Nazis and never will.
“I never hated. Hatred brings only hatred.”
After the war, Alice and Raffi left Europe for Israel where they lived and worked until emigrating to London in 1986. Her son, an accomplished cellist and conductor, died suddenly in 2001.
‘Music saved my life and music saves me still’
The film features photographs and rare old footage, and there are many scenes of Alice playing the piano. It captures her moral strength, modesty and humor and she is unequivocal in stating that music preserved her sanity and brought her hope.
“Music saved my life and music saves me still.”
Branch believes “The Lady in Number 6” should not be thought of as a Holocaust documentary as it is about her love of music and how it enabled her to survive. The film “is a testament to the power of positive thought,” he says.
He describes making the film as a labor of love, primarily as it has been funded entirely by the producers without outside support and with little prospect of financial return. Branch and his fellow producer and long time friend, Nick Reed, have said that in the event of any profit being made, these would go to the Rafael Sommer Music Foundation.
Alice will be 110 on 26 November and the filmmakers are trying to get 110,000 birthday wishes for her via Facebook. Although she still lives at Number 6, Alice can now hardly see or hear.
At the end of the film we are left with her sobering comment that, “Only when we are so old — only — are we aware of the beauty of life.”
Birthday wishes for Alice Herz-Sommer can be posted on Facebook.MURDEROUS, thin-skinned and in possession of nuclear weapons, the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un, has one good deed to his name: he has united America and China. Max Baucus, America’s ambassador to Beijing until January 2017, recalls the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, privately expressing “disgust” at Mr Kim’s reckless pursuit of nukes and missiles to carry them to other continents. Mr Xi’s frustration with North Korea’s hereditary despot stands out as “the strongest statement that I have ever heard Xi make”, says Mr Baucus. China has never sounded as closely aligned with America when it comes to using sanctions and diplomatic pressure, in a last-ditch bid to change how Mr Kim calculates his regime’s interests.
Breaking a long-standing taboo about imagining the Kim regime’s collapse, a well-connected Chinese academic, Jia Qingguo, was allowed to publish an essay in September suggesting that China, America and South Korea should discuss such contingencies as refugee flows and which country’s troops should secure loose nukes in a post-collapse North Korea. Donald Trump hailed China’s role in getting tougher North Korean sanctions through the UN Security Council by unanimous vote. After months of discreet arm-twisting by American Treasury officials with the power to levy huge fines, or exclude them from American markets, Chinese banks are shutting off finance to North Koreans.
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Yet the two powers are still capable of blaming each other. Both claim that a nuclear-free Korean peninsula is their highest priority for that region. But American officials have long accused China of placing still more value on stability in North Korea, and thus approving any level of sanctions on the rogue regime short of those painful enough to actually work, starting with a cut-off of oil and other energy supplies.
China, in turn, declares that America is disingenuous to say that its dearest wish is a nuclear-free Korean peninsula, when in truth it is most worried about American national security—explaining why successive presidents from George H.W. Bush onwards have focused not just on the Kim dynasty’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, but on its development of missiles that could carry those weapons to American soil. Nationalist hardliners accuse America of exaggerating the North Korean threat to pursue its real goal, namely corralling China. Other Chinese officials do not go that far, but even the most internationalist argue that sanctions alone cannot solve the Korean crisis. They chide America for refusing to offer the sort of concessions that might conceivably induce the Kim regime to change course, such as a wholesale scaling-back of American military forces in the region and of exercises with South Korean and Japanese allies.
Unfortunately for relations between the world’s two biggest economies, China will hate the next steps that America is likely to take on North Korea. Evan Medeiros, until 2015 the senior director for Asia in Barack Obama’s National Security Council, says that when the Chinese accuse America of refusing to engage in talks with the regime, this is largely “posturing”. But behind it lies a truth, that “sanctions won’t stop North Korea”. When battling the proliferation of the deadliest weapons, sanctions are always in a race with technology, says Mr Medeiros, now with the Eurasia Group, a consultancy. “Kim Jong Un is close to grasping the brass ring. We have probably lost the race and need to think about deterrence.” This could include deploying new missiles and missile-defence systems in South Korea and Japan, and perhaps another aircraft-carrier in the region.
The South Korean defence minister, Song Young-moo, told his country’s parliament that he had asked America to consider the return of tactical nuclear weapons to the Korean peninsula. Tactical nuclear weapons—often meaning smaller, battlefield weapons or air-dropped bombs not covered by strategic arms treaties—were withdrawn from South Korea by George H.W. Bush in 1991, as a prelude to talks with North Korea two years later. At the height of cold-war tensions in the late 1960s and 1970s, there were over 700 tactical nuclear weapons in South Korea, in missiles, bombs and even nuclear landmines, notes Joel Wit of the US-Korea Institute at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.
Conventional forces will need to be built up if American security guarantees to allies are to remain credible, says Mr Wit. Japan and South Korea must debate their need for everything from anti-missile systems to more offensive weapons, such as missiles and advanced aircraft. That challenges Chinese policy, which is to press America and South Korea to limit the deployment of even defensive weapons, such as the THAAD anti-missile system. THAAD’s powerful radars, installed south-east of Seoul, can see deep into China.
The Senate passed a defence-spending bill in September with $8.5bn to strengthen missile-defence systems. Some of the money would buy 14 new ground-based anti-missile interceptors at Fort Greely, Alaska, taking the arsenal there to 58.
Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, a Republican member of the Senate foreign-relations committee, reports “a lot of appetite” in Congress for funding anti-missile defences. With North Korea seeking the means to hit American territory with nukes, it would be “malpractice” not to do so, says Mr Barrasso. A member of the Republican leadership in the Senate, he would like to “turn down the heat a bit” on some of the pugnacious tweets from Mr Trump aimed at North Korea. Strikingly, there is no war party in Congress banging the drum for unilateral action. Mr Barrasso sees the Senate stressing work with allies.
Still, cold-war theories of deterrence are being dusted off, with such jargon as “second-strike capability”—the certainty that a country attacked with nuclear weapons can retaliate massively. Douglas Paal, a senior Asia hand in the Reagan White House and both Bush administrations, approves of the Senate plan to place more interceptors in Alaska, in part to gain leverage over China. “We need to layer up more missile defence. China needs to see that their second-strike capacity is really deteriorating, which hurts them.” Mr Paal, who runs the Asia programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think-tank, is in frequent contact with envoys of governments including China’s and, recently, North Korea’s. He concedes the need for talks with the Kim regime, alongside containment and deterrence, but notes that in previous negotiations, North Korea wanted an end to American defence alliances in Asia and to America’s troop presence in South Korea: “So we can’t get there.”
A policy of containment would not just strain relations with China as new American weapons bristled in Asia. Global non-proliferation regimes would be tested, not least because a North Korea facing crippling sanctions might see selling nuclear technology as a lifeline. Perhaps China’s greatest nightmare involves Japan feeling compelled to build nuclear weapons (it could quickly develop the technology). A Chinese build-up of warheads in response could result in India and then Pakistan increasing their stockpiles. The unity fostered by Mr Kim may thus prove short-lived. If he builds the arsenal he wants, China and America will be sincere in their shared dismay. But if America then prepares to contain him, a whole new Sino-American stand-off may begin.tefftorbes: Foxey was originally founded by King Alphyn at a point when Pupeh was full, and there seemed to be a desire to create another petco subclan. The original members of Foxey were primarily a group of players from Burdy that were interested in getting into clan wars. In the early days, King Alphyn offered his suggestions on how we do things while we had a bunch of guys new to clan wars and teamplay trying to figure out how to run things.It wasn't long before ADRR became our first commander - and everything else fell in to place quickly after that. One night I was just a soldier that platooned with ADRR on a regular basis, a few days later I was a DC. Leading up to the first campaign, it was the blind leading the blind - we got some advice from outsiders, but we ran the clan ourselves to the best of our knowledge, learning what to do and what not to do along the way. In the early days, we wanted to be better than Pupeh - it was a goal of ours, and we quickly learned how important recruiting would be to our success.
Toomstone357: Since I joined the clan in February 2014, the I've seen Foxey wade through the difficulties of bursting onto the competitive clan scene and accomplish something that all Foxey members can be proud of. Our name carries weight wherever we go, and we have some great bonds with the CW community. Through gross inactivity bouts and caller difficulties, we have soldiered on and solved them, leading us into a very comfortable spot in which we are very satisfied.
LVLAsian: I really can’t speak for the long history FOXEY has had because I am relatively young in FOXEY compared to the other officers like Teff. I can say ever since I joined April of 2014, I have seen and helped this clan grow stronger and more active through campaign 3 and onwards which I am proud of being part of.The IN Tray is somewhere between a sculptural object, a home accessory and an heirloom quality piece of furniture. It's a great place to set things whether they are precious or mundane. The design was inspired by Isamu Noguchi's iconic mid-century table. The outline of the table top was "sampled" then repeated, scaled and rotated to create the form of the design. The tray's elegance derives from the simplicity of it's concept and the complexity of it's form.
How it's made is essential to the character and identity of the IN Tray. Production starts with locally sourced, sustainably harvested American Walnut that is glued up into a solid slab. Each piece of wood is examined for sap wood and grain patterns allowing the beauty and uniqueness of the wood to be expressed in each piece. The design is then carved using a process called flip milling on a CNC router. Once the milling is complete, the piece is attentively sanded. Tool marks and burns are removed and the wood is smooth to the touch. The underside of the tray is laser engraved with Collab’s name, with custom inscriptions available. And finally the piece is finished using pure tung oil that really brings out the color and beauty of the wood. It’s all natural, food safe and it looks great.
What's in it for you is something beautiful that comes with a piece of my heart. Rewards include the IN Tray in three sizes: small, medium, and large, individually and in sets. Also offered are rewards inspired by the project, such as a cool thank you card, a set of four walnut, engraved coasters, and original signed drawings by Albie Mitchell.
Why do I need your help? I brought the IN Tray to Kickstarter to share it with the world. My goal is to reduce production costs through increasing the scale of production. With your support, backers will essentially be pre-ordering a serving tray and helping to offset one-time set up costs to streamline the milling process. This will allow me to create a chain of production that will reduce costs and be scale-able while working exclusively with local suppliers and artisans. This project will also allow me to continue my professional development as a designer and support Collab as it grows.
Thanks for looking and stay gold!
Rewards
IN Tray
Small IN Tray
Medium IN Tray
Large IN Tray
Small - Medium IN Tray Set
Medium - Large IN Tray Set
3 Piece IN Tray Set
Set of four laser etched acrylic coasters
Ortho Blueprint ( small prints 8" x 12" / large prints 16" x 24")
Ortho on White Paper ( small prints 8" x 12" / large prints 16" x 24")
Sketch on Blueprint (small prints 8" x 12" / large prints 16" x 24")
Sketch on White Paper (small prints 8" x 12" / large prints 16" x 24")
Special Thanks to Wesley Law, Lloyd Paul, Ann & Richard Higby, Vincent Schell, Michael Browning, Dan Adelman, Mom, Dad, and Andrea Chiesa. Thanks for your patience, generosity, advice and support!Maggs Bros, the antiquarian booksellers by appointment to the Queen, is moving to spectacular new premises in London this week – a sign that, despite the ongoing march of the digital age, there is a future for the art of collecting rare books.
Maggs has moved to a Georgian townhouse in Bedford Square, Bloomsbury, following its departure in 2015 from its home of almost 80 years in Berkeley Square. In the meantime, a Maggs shop opened in Curzon Street and this will remain open, to complement the new premises. Maggs was founded by the wonderfully named Uriah Maggs back in 1853. Since then successive generations of the Maggs family have owned and worked for the company, and one of the current family members, Benjamin Maggs, who is the son of managing director Ed Maggs and part of a 20-strong team of experts, confirms that antiquarian bookselling is currently enjoying a good moment.
‘I did a degree in the history of books and my dissertation looked at the idea that was prevalent in the 80s and 90s that books were dead and computers were going to take over,’ he says.
‘There was a view that because digital technology was newer and more efficient that it was completely better than paper, but the reality is they are simply different things. I believe strongly there is a reaction to computers. When computers were new people went to them, but because they are now the mainstream, people want to get away from them. As a result the antiquarian book trade is full of young people. There are lots of people just in London between 20 and 30 interested in rare books and we are winning customers over, as well. I see it as part of the same movement as other artisanal things, like craft beer.’
Earlier this year, it was reported that 2016 saw e-book sales drop for the second year in succession – which isn’t something that surprises Benjamin, who specialises in William Morris and the Arts and Craft Movement.
‘Physical book sales have gone up, while e-book sales have gone down, and it’s because people like owning things. You buy a 100 Kindle books and you read them, but you’ve spent money on nothing and are left with an empty feeling,’ he says.
Maggs’ new premises can barely be described as a shop, considering the fact it is a large and very grand townhouse. Benjamin describes it as an ‘imposing showroom that feels like a club’ and which treads a fine line between ‘exclusivity and accessibility’. The house comprises three departments (modern, early British and early European and travel) and an exhibition space, with a series of displays set to start in July. Benjamin’s fellow experts include specialists in the history of voyages and exploration, early printing, literary and historical manuscripts and literature of all periods, including classical literature, modern first editions and Irish literature.
If you are an old hand in the rare books trade then you’ll probably want to head straight to the new Maggs Bros to find exactly what you’re looking for, but, if you are keen to become part of the youthful throng of new collectors, then Benjamin suggests a visit to the Curzon Street shop would be a good introduction for anyone starting out. What other advice can he give? He says that the best thing to do is go to your local second hand bookshop and embrace the ‘joy of discovery’, rather simply logging on to an online store.
‘The fun is in going to a bookshop and searching for your book. If you just go online it’s no fun at all,’ he says. ‘There are books by people I collect that I could find online, but I don’t because it’s like reading the end of a story before you’ve read the rest of it.’
To find out more about Maggs Bros, including it’s programme of exhibitions, visit www.maggs.comA/N: I'll try to keep this short please read me! Rewrite a piece using a different ship. I decided on Glynder! If you've read In Just A Few Words by me, you'll know like that fic this one's timeline is also out-of-order. I did that because the events that happen go over a short period of time, making the fic seem shorter/rushed than it was. It all ties together at the end though. Also, this is a Delinquent Cinderella A/U I created, haven't really written about it in detail yet but if you've read Maybe I'll See You Around by ARMV7 (Cinderruby ship) it's pretty similar in ideas. Mine was basically a compilation of different ships for Cinder growing up as a delinquent. So yeah, you'll notice that, a bit of Rock!AU as well. Enjoy!
Cinder ran down the hall, her uniform disheveled with her hair in a slight mess. She clapped her hands together and parted them to reveal the heat radiating from her palms. The glowing skin served as an iron as she fixed her uniform coming around the corner, brushing her hands together as if dusting them off, the unnatural light dimmed to normalize back to her unscathed hands. As if done a million times, she tied her long hair into a braid and rolled it up into a bun, her bangs hung loose without a care.
"Of all damn days to be late. This academy's huge..." she muttered, her eyes lighting up in delight and running to a full sprint when the large dome came into view.
"The Vytal Festival Tournament is about to begin, fighters prepare your scrolls for the roulette."
Glynda walked through the burning city, the grip on her riding crop tight enough to turn her knuckles white. "Please...someone..." The young huntress murmured. She'd never seen anything like this in her life. The Grimm burned the same way this poor village did. Scattering figures were briefly visible where she turned her head to search for survivors. Her scroll buzzed with Ozpin paging her, quickly she lifted it, panic in her voice.
"Ozpin, i-it's terrible. The people here-"
"Calm down, Glynda. As far as I know the defense barrier is still keeping us out, we're trying to get you out of there. You may need to try finding the source. Whoever did this, must be after the shrine in the cave, you know where that is, right?"
Glynda nodded, turning her head towards the said direction. "Now go, proceed with caution."
Her fringed cape flowed behind her as she approached the cave ahead, noting the marks around the entrance were glowing a bright gold. Inside, a silhouette on the wall glowed bright and dim with the red light inside. Her first mission, already a failure...
"Welcome to Vale, my name is Glynda Goodwitch, student body represen-"
"Tch, nerd."
Green eyes narrowed and gave a piercing glare from behind her glasses, she pushed them up by the frames and grabbed the delinquent's arm. Her blank, bored look already didn't sit well with Glynda, along with the burning cigarette between the offender's lips.
"Haven Student Body President, huh...? Shouldn't you be a little more...respectful?"
The young woman took a drag, blowing smoke into Goodwitch's face, causing her to withdraw her arm and subsequently get the cigarette taken from her mouth. Crushing the butt under her shoe, Glynda growled and waved the smoke away. "Let's try this again...what's your name?" She asked, a little impatiently.
With a smirk, the dark haired girl humored the other representative. "Cinder Fall."
"Well, Cinder. I suppose I'll see you in the tournament."
Bringing her face close, the Cheshire grin reflected the slight purr in her voice. "Ooh, is that a challenge? Do humor me, nerd..." Glynda wouldn't be fazed by the closeness of the other woman, even if it made her slightly uncomfortable. "Of course." She hissed. "Let's get into the spirit of tradition, shall we?"
"Please follow me, students." The guide instructed.
"Our village is small, but well respected for our traditions. We don't associate much with the kingdoms, but we appreciate the help against Grimm whenever possible. We'll have you all roomed here, with two to a room."
"As tradition of Haven, your room mate will be one of the other team, team leaders remain together." Their huntress guide explained.
Cinder and Glynda walked side by side up the stairs, setting down their bags.
"Alright, delinquent." The blonde finally sighed as they unpacked in silence, their team moving in and out past them. "Temporary truce, until the tournament."
The brunette ceased her movements, turning her head. "...deal."
They shook hands on it, simple and quick.
The next morning, the two teams fought side by side against several waves of Grimm as their Huntress guide observed. Cinder scorched an Ursa, turning to the man guiding them. "Why are they so drawn to this village? Why live here if it's isolated and dangerous?"
The Huntress closed her book and removed her white hood.
"This village believes in coexistence with the Grimm. But their methods to create that balance have been less than fruitful. Their most recent find is the shrine over in that cave. It contains a dangerous type of dust..." The woman dodged a Beowulf and swung her fist back, flipping the beast and killing it. "Not an element based one, strangely enough. But perhaps the missing gap between us."
"But Grimm are soulless versions of normal creatures, aren't they?" Glynda inquired curiously, blasting several with debris from the broken barrier.
"Yes. But they could also be interpreted as...spirits of the dead. The people here have tried using the mined dust. Just by touching it, a person can go mad. Only once have they attempted fusion...that poor man did not live."
The teams fell silent, only the sounds of their battle filled the pause.
"Thank you, Mrs. Rose." Cinder gave a small smile. "For informing us, not keeping us in the dark, you know?"
"Hm, you can call me Summer. I'd feel old with the missus term."
"Glynda. Psst. Wake up." Her vision in a blur and adjusting to the dark, Glynda stared up at the delinquent.
"Let's go see the shrine!" Cinder said excitedly.
"...hmph, go by yourself." She rolled over, turning away.
"I wouldn't have invited you if I thought I could go alone, come on!"
"What do you need me for?"
"I don't know, if it's that scary, maybe you can perform an exorcism on me?"
Glynda sighed, sitting up and placing her glasses on. "...I can't tell if you're sarcastic. Alright, sure."
Cinder lit the way when necessary, they occasionally hid from guards, moving towards the signs leading to a clearing in front of the dark opening. The delinquent's fingertips brushed against the carved markings of the opening curiously. "This looks familiar to me, but I can't seem to remember..." whispered Cinder. Glynda walked by her, taking cover behind a rock and using a hand mirror to check for anyone inside. Cinder hid behind the student representative and watched behind them. She caught a glimpse of the crystal and saw a woman just barely turning around. Glynda drew in a quick breath of air and pulled back her arm, using the other to pat Cinder's shoulder as a sign to keep quiet. But there were no footsteps for at least five minutes.
Perhaps the woman there was waiting to catch them the second they moved?
"I think they found us Cinder. We have to give up..." she whispered back. The both of them stood with their hands up, only to find the cave empty minus the red glowing dust.
Cinder glanced around, then dropped her arms and approached the crystal. "Haha..." she rolled her eyes."Very funny, Goodwitch."
"But-" Glynda shook her head, excusing it as tiredness with a sigh. "My bad."
They watched the crystal, looking into it and seeing a strange reflection. Behind them was a crowd of people with solid red eyes, but when they turned, they weren't really there.
Glynda turned to Cinder who was completely entranced.
"D...do you hear that?" She asked, her eyebrows knitted.
"...Now come on, Fall. I wasn't trying to play a joke, it won't work-"
"I'm serious. They want me to...I'm drawn..." Cinder's hand reached for the gem, only to be grabbed by a furious Summer Rose.
The cave seemed alive, somehow. Glynda took cover after confirming the footsteps inside to be heading out. She quietly clicked the hand mirror open, discreetly peeking in from behind the boulder. Her eyes widened when she saw the person she expected standing there. The mirror shattered in her palm...
"C-Cinder!" Glynda stammered, tossing the shards aside and backing up. "I...you..."
The amber eyes she saw now were different. Not in color, not in shape...but in emotion.
They lacked a shine.
"You were...serious..."
Cinder balled a flame into her right hand, flinging it at the woman in front of her, her eyes glowing gold. Goodwitch rolled out of the way, getting to her feet and sprinting from the cave. She wasn't far from the entrance when the entire structure blew to pieces, the brunette emerging from the rubble.
"How did you find me?" Cinder asked, her voice almost faint.
Glynda held her riding crop at the ready. "I was assigned here... What have you done, Cinder?"
"It's as I thought, Glynda...I was...chosen."
"Chosen?"
"I'm...the first to be...Queen." Cinder seemed oddly pleased with herself. Her speech was light, clear, like an epiphany was reached, with her direct stare, it was almost hypnotizing...
Glynda's earpiece snapped her back with the voice of James Ironwood.
"KILL HER, GLYNDA. She cannot leave the barrier alive!"
Instantaneously, Glynda charged the grimmspawn, flinging boulders and dodging the returned fire spells. "Cinder! You killed so many by awakening the dust! Listen to me! Stop thi-"
A fist slammed into her stomach, knocking the wind out of her effortlessly. Lying stunned, Glynda found herself pinned as Cinder pulled out a cursed crystal from her pocket, activating it with the intention to fuse Glynda too.
"Even if you die..." she said softly. "Better now than when you find me later-"
Cinder froze, her eyes widening when her opposite arm held back the crystal wielding wrist. "I...?"
The huntress did not hesitate to kick her off, getting to her feet and noticing briefly something reflected in the gem. Using a blast of aura to the sky, the barrier broke for Cinder, but sent Glynda into rubble. She blinked back tears as she watched her go.
"I don't love you anymore...right?" Her final words then.
Glynda settled into her favorite class of the day, Grimm Theory. She opened her books and began work for other classes. If anything, this was a free-period class with simple lectures of different hypothesis discussions to understand the dark creatures. Multitasking was little of a problem. The scent of smoke triggered an annoyed reaction and a glance around by the young huntress.
"'Sup, nerd."
Her instant reaction to the delinquent was to toss the cigarette out the window. Cinder didn't even flinch. In fact, she seemed quite amused.
"...miss me?"
"Not your cigarettes, no."
Taking a seat beside her, Cinder dumped her books obnoxiously onto their table, humming a song.
The blond sighed and pushed up her glasses, unable to focus properly. "Can I help you?"
"Ouch, Goodwitch. Can't I saturate in the glory that I annoy you easily by being in your presence?"
"I think your lack of nicotine is getting to you."
"Or maybe I found something better."
Glynda snapped her head towards Cinder, who wore a lopsided smile.
"You're...being friendly with me."
She shrugged, facing the front with the smile ever present.
The ball was dying down with a single teacher on duty. Students remaining weren't dancing, but chatting. Among them was Glynda Goodwitch playing wallflower, she had danced her fill, with comrades and new friends alike, but she wasn't the most sociable. After all, her actual date hadn't arrived yet.
But the huntress wasn't stood up, in fact, she had no idea what Cinder was thinking.
One night of studying in the library, the delinquent had approached with a single white lily. "Glynda Goodwitch~" that playful voice beckoned. "It's been a fateful two weeks, of back breaking student body work, nights of hall duty, and keeping up the basics."
Glynda rolled her eyes. "Those 'basics' are to graduate, Cinder."
"Shut up, I'm being serious." Cinder laughed, earning a smile. "Would you like to be with me, Sunday night?"
"...sure, idiot."
"Hey nerd."
Cinder took her arm, smiling up at her date. The leather jacket she wore over her dress was the first thing Glynda noticed. "Going somewhere, Fall?"
Taking her hand, the fire mage led her out into the night. "Can you honestly say you've had a night out, Goodwitch?"
"No, but..."
The guitar solo rang through the air as they entered the pub, occupying a booth facing the stage. Surprisingly despite the prom attire, they didn't stand out as much as the huntress thought. "Really?" She yelled over the music. "This was your idea of a date?"
Cinder averted her eyes, biting her lip. "Uuuh kind of? If it's not your thing..."
"Are you kidding? This is amazing! I love this band!" Glynda said almost over enthusiastically. The brunette looked stunned, frozen on the spot as she tried to process the phrase.
"M...me too..." she murmured, but wasn't exactly heard. A waitress set odd colored beer steins in front of them. "Thanks for your help Cindy, on the house." She winked.
Upon closer inspection, the beer steins weren't discolored, the liquid inside was changing to different hues right before her eyes. "Is this...?" Glynda began.
"Yeah, Liquid Dust. Had it before?"
"We're not old-"
She held up a hand to silence the blonde.
"A-and furthermore-"
Cinder shook her head. "I...Glynda. I'm... in a band. I played tonight, and that's why I was late."
The huntress blinked twice. "W...wow. That's a little stereotypical. So drinking came with the cigarettes?"
Cinder rolled her eyes. "Ha-ha," she took a swig. "You don't have to drink, though. Letting loose doesn't require alcohol."
Glynda actually thought of the disciplined lifestyle she grew up in. The extra assignments, pushing to become the best she could be for someone else. But every time Cinder was around, bothering her, studying beside her with the enthusiasm of a rock, it all was to say that that delinquent thought of her as an actual person.
"...Bottoms up." Glynda tilted the mug up, but the second a drop hit her tongue, she spat it across the table, coughing disgustedly. Cinder burst out laughing so hard, she held onto her sides, nearly toppling over in the booth. She patted the back of her date. Once settled, Glynda tried to gain composure despite her red face, pushing her glasses up and clearing her throat. "Well. That's never happening ever again."
Eventually, it seemed that Cinder had over done it just a bit. The brunette was pretty drunk...
And close...
She was warm and smelled lightly of cinnamon.
"Glyn, what're doin' that close to me?"
Glynda flinched and backed up slightly. "C...can I ask why you picked me?"
"If...you think I have heaps of actual friends, you're kinda wrong. I...get called Grimmspawn, aaaall the time. For the first time, I was scolded by you, fearlessly."
Cinder rolled her head onto Glynda's shoulder lazily, her speech slurred. "I honestly wanted to tease you by bringing you here...watch you hate it and stuff. I guess I just don't get people."
She couldn't describe it, really, but Glynda could honestly relate to the delinquent beside her. Their rivalry had been the closest connection she'd ever had to a real friend, if that made any sense. "Cinder..." Leaning in, the huntress noted the flushed face of the one she fell for. Glynda gently pressed her lips against hers, pulling away quickly when she realized what she had just done. A blush crept up on her cheeks as her mind raced to process what drove her to kiss the delinquent. Cinder stared in awe at the blonde, but smirked through her drunken state.
"I-I..." Glynda began, only to be silenced by a hug.
"Fufu...you're scary, Glynda."
"Grimmspawn." The boy hissed into her ear as he walked off the stage. Cinder disabled her weapons, gripping onto her skirt and storming away despite the teacher's congratulations. The prequalification rounds were done in class, she only had to bear these 2 hours and then settle beside Glynda again.
"Guess no matter where we go, people are shit." Adam remarked, scratching the back of his head and catching up to her. "Don't take it personally. I never do."
"It can't always be like this, though, Adam. There has to be more to our lives..."
Glynda rushed through the |
in on the unusual face-to-face visit, he could not help but be moved as Randy looked the Riches in the eye and choked out a few words of apology before breaking down and asking for their forgiveness.
“At one time, I could have killed all three of [you] with my bare hands,” Duane told the teenager who sat before him, his voice shaking with emotion. He thanked Randy for testifying against Josh and for meeting with them. “Being a Christian,” Duane added, “I can’t have hate in my heart for you.” Gail agreed, telling him that she could see his remorse was sincere and that it would help her and her husband to heal. She said that she wanted to write to him and asked if she could send him Heather’s photo and a Bible.
Randy’s repentance did not change the fact that Cole still had to prosecute him. The DA did not pull any punches once The State of Texas v. Randy Lee Wood began. “You know what the defense really boils down to in this case?” he asked jurors. “They want you to say, ‘He testified against Josh Bagwell, he said he was sorry, he’s not such a bad guy—let him go.’ ” But his acts of contrition, Cole told them, were irrelevant. “This is not television,” he reminded them. “This is not something where we wake up the next morning and we can say, ‘I wish I hadn’t done that,’ and it goes away. It’s real. Heather Rich was a real sixteen-year-old girl, and he helped take her life. And no matter how bad he feels about that, he is still responsible for it.”
According to the law, Cole continued, it did not matter that Randy had not fired the gun or had not wished Heather dead. In Texas, the “law of parties” erases the distinction between killers and accomplices, finding that a person can be held criminally responsible for the conduct of another if he participated in the crime. By virtue of the fact that Randy had assisted Curtis, he was guilty of capital murder. “He could stand here all day long and tell you that his intent was not to assist in the commission of this crime, and his actions cry out differently,” Cole insisted. “He’s guilty. He must pay the consequences of his choice.”
The jury agreed, and on August 25, 1998, Randy was convicted of capital murder and handed an automatic life sentence. Cole watched as Randy, then nineteen, was led from the courtroom in handcuffs and leg irons. As the DA gathered the papers at his table, he was relieved that the trial was over. Yet he hardly felt triumphant. “It was not a moment of celebration,” Cole told me. “There was no joy or happiness. I had a deep, deep sense that another young life had been senselessly wasted.”
After Randy went off to prison, Cole moved on to the next case. He prosecuted a serial killer, a motorist who had intentionally killed a police officer with his car, and a man who had murdered his mother on Mother’s Day, as well as a motley crew of cattle rustlers, child molesters, and meth cooks. He won reelection for his third term in 2000 and again for a fourth term in 2004. In 2005 he raised his profile statewide when he began serving as president of the Texas District and County Attorneys Association, a position for which he frequently traveled to Austin to testify before state lawmakers. He also began preparing for yet another high-profile murder trial—that of Vickie Dawn Jackson, a nurse who had spent years quietly killing her friends and neighbors at the public hospital in Nocona.
Despite his success, however, Cole’s personal life was coming apart. Early in his career, he had moved his family to the Dallas suburb of Lewisville, where his youngest son, Bryant, who is severely autistic, could receive superior services from the local school district. Ever since then, Cole had divided his time between Lewisville and St. Jo, an hour’s drive away, so that he could fulfill his legal obligation as DA to maintain residency in his district. His worry for his son was overwhelming; Bryant, who was then fourteen, had never spoken a word. The strain of Cole’s family responsibilities, along with his crushing workload, had accelerated a drinking problem that had dogged him since he was a teenager. More than once, local law enforcement officers pulled him over, only to let him go with a friendly admonition that he should probably head home. In early 2006, he and his wife of 28 years filed for divorce.
On the night of July 4, 2006, a Lake Texoma park ranger shone his flashlight into a pickup truck parked by the side of the road and spotted the DA sitting in the driver’s seat, drinking a beer. The discovery followed a report that an erratic driver had been spotted in the area. Cole consented to a Breathalyzer test, which showed his blood-alcohol level to be.15, nearly twice the legal limit. District attorneys who are arrested on drunk-driving charges are not legally obligated to step down, and a number of DAs, as well as judges and other elected officials, have chosen to remain in office after similar arrests. But Cole’s arrest was front-page news, and as the area’s chief law enforcement official, he felt that it would be hypocritical for him to stay. Three days after his arrest, he announced that he would be resigning that fall. “The last year has been one of great personal hardship for me, but there is no excuse for this behavior,” he told reporters inside the Montague County courthouse. “It is in violation of the public trust in my office.”
Cole pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor drunk-driving charge, agreeing to pay a fine and serve probation. And just like that, his marriage, his career as a prosecutor, and his vaunted status as DA were over. “I won’t tell you that I never contemplated suicide,” Cole told me. “I did many times.” Needing to earn a living, he went into private practice, briefly partnering with a defense attorney he knew before opening his own practice in Nocona. In his office on the corner of the two-stoplight town’s main intersection, he took whatever work came through the door. He drafted wills, filed divorce papers, and defended people on small-time drug possession charges, but the particulars of small-town lawyering were hardly challenging. Each night he went home to his house at Nocona Lake, where he lived alone.
It was not until he began dating a woman who worked in the county attorney’s office, Sherry Nobile, that he started feeling “like there was a reason to live,” he told me. He began attending a twelve-step program, and there were times when he stopped drinking for months, even a year at one stretch, though he continued to falter. “I came to see how people—good people—could make terrible mistakes,” Cole said. “And how maybe they shouldn’t have to pay for them for the rest of their lives.”
In the fall of 2009, thirteen years after Randy’s arrest, Cole received a phone call from an attorney in Dallas who had been hired by a cousin of Randy’s named Denise Horner. A retired financial analyst living in the Dallas suburbs, Horner had taken a recent interest in her cousin’s case, and she had set her mind to getting Randy’s sentence reduced.
Commutations, or “time cuts,” can be granted when an inmate’s punishment is deemed to be unduly harsh; President Barack Obama recently did this for eight federal inmates serving lengthy sentences for nonviolent crack-cocaine offenses. But for Randy, who was convicted of capital murder, the odds of winning a commutation were slim. Governor Rick Perry has commuted sentences in capital murder cases when he was mandated to do so by law. (When the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed the execution of the mentally disabled in 2002, for example, he commuted eligible inmates’ sentences to life in prison.) Yet in his more than thirteen years in office, the governor has granted a time cut to only one other inmate convicted of capital murder. In 2007 he commuted the death sentence of a man named Kenneth Foster to life over concerns that Foster, the getaway driver in a botched San Antonio robbery, had not received a fair trial.
Horner knew that getting Randy a time cut was a long shot at best. To have his sentence reduced, at least two of Montague County’s three elected officials—the sitting DA, the district judge, and the sheriff—would have to sign off on the idea, as would the Board of Pardons and Paroles and then Governor Perry. Still, Horner had her attorney, Danny Clancy, contact Cole to see if he would be willing to support the effort.
It is not every day that a former DA pledges to try to get the sentence reduced of someone he once prosecuted for murder, but Cole agreed to do what he could on Randy’s behalf. In truth, Cole wished he had not tried Randy for capital murder at all but had instead prosecuted him for a lesser charge: conspiracy to commit capital murder. Doing so would likely have earned Randy a 25- or 30-year sentence, which Cole now believed was an equitable punishment. But it would also have created an intractable problem: the perception that he and Randy had always had a secret deal, which Curtis and Josh could have raised on appeal. And it would have cost Cole with his constituents. “I was still a politician—I was an elected official—and DAs are reluctant to do things that make them look weak,” he said. “That’s the evolution I’ve had: now I don’t necessarily see a lighter sentence as a weaker sentence. Sometimes it’s a better sentence.”
The Supreme Court had taken a similarly thoughtful stance in 2005, when it banned the death penalty for defendants who were younger than eighteen at the time of their crimes. Just as it had found with regard to the mentally disabled, the court held that juveniles had “diminished culpability” for their crimes. Its ruling was based, in part, on science: brain-imaging technology had revealed that the adolescent brain is not fully formed, particularly in the regions that govern impulse control, risk assessment, and moral reasoning. Cole had studied the court’s ruling and others that followed, which established that defendants like Randy were fundamentally different from their adult counterparts. The court would later strike down another penalty for seventeen-year-olds: life without the possibility of parole. Such a harsh sentence, the court noted, did not allow for the possibility of rehabilitation, which was “at odds with a child’s capacity for change.”
Randy had been handed a life sentence with the possibility of parole, which he would be eligible for after serving forty years. But given the heinousness of the crime, there were no guarantees that he would ever be released. “No matter how this plays out, his life is gone,” Cole said. “And I’m not sure anymore what that really accomplishes.” Gail Rich had expressed a similar sentiment after Randy’s trial, saying that a life sentence was too harsh for him.
Cole did not feel the same way about Josh, who was also seventeen years old at the time of the crime. Cole had always believed that Josh, like Curtis, posed a threat to public safety—a view that had only been confirmed in 2002, when the two friends escaped from the Montague County jail while awaiting a transfer back to prison after a court date. They had attacked a guard with a homemade knife and then stolen another guard’s car, leading hundreds of law enforcement officers on a ten-day manhunt. They finally surrendered in Ardmore, Oklahoma, after a six-hour standoff at a convenience store, where they held a man hostage at gunpoint. Their escape marked the first time in Cole’s life that he had armed himself, keeping a.40-caliber pistol with him while they were on the loose.
In 2010 Cole visited with the new DA of Montague County, Jack McGaughey, a dignified, silver-haired prosecutor who had plans to run for district judge. The two lawyers had a long and friendly history, but when Cole tried to argue that Randy deserved a sentence reduction, McGaughey said he was reluctant to support a commutation in such a brutal case. The following year, Horner also won an audience with McGaughey. A warm, upbeat woman, Horner told the DA of her frequent visits to see Randy in prison, where she saw someone transformed. “This is a boy who deserves a chance,” she implored him. “He’s not a violent person. He’s not someone a community would fear. I think he would be a productive citizen. I think he has something to offer this world.” McGaughey listened attentively but was not persuaded. “I am unwilling to recommend this,” he subsequently wrote to her attorney. “After consultation with the Sheriff and District Judge, it is my understanding from them that they are also unwilling to recommend a reduction of sentence.”
Cole had his last drink just a few months later, on November 23, 2011. He had been busy rebuilding his life, marrying Nobile in 2009 and joining the Wise County DA’s office the following year, where he went to work as an assistant prosecutor. He threw himself into his new job, trying every kind of case except for DWIs. From time to time, he thought about Randy.
Though Cole had always been fatalistic about Randy’s chances of getting a commutation, the certainty that he would have to spend decades in prison left the lawyer unsettled. Cole believed that Randy deserved a severe punishment for his crime, but a life sentence seemed like a great waste. Horner had told Cole about her visits to the Allred Unit, the razor-wire-ringed prison where she and her husband, James, were Randy’s only regular visitors besides his mother. The reticent 17-year-old whom Cole remembered had, Horner told him, turned into a reflective, articulate young man. Cole, who was 54, wondered what it would be like to visit him. He wanted to know who Randy had become in prison and what he would say about the murder after all those years.
One blustery North Texas morning last October, Cole found himself sitting at a conference table in a small, unadorned room, waiting to see the now 34-year-old inmate. A guard led Randy in, and Cole watched as he shuffled to his seat, constrained by leg irons. He was startled to see Randy in person. The slim teenager he had sent off to prison was broad-shouldered and muscular, his expression unsentimental. Randy sat down, and the two men looked each other in the eyes.
“It’s been a long time,” Cole said.
“Yes, it has,” Randy replied, sucking in his breath.
Cole assured Randy that he had no agenda and only wanted to have a dialogue. “I really just want to know how you’re doing,” Cole said. Randy, who was aware of the prosecutor’s recent work on his behalf, soon relaxed, and they settled into a comfortable conversation. “I’ve heard thousands of stories about what prison is like, but I don’t really know,” Cole said.
“It’s probably not as bad as they say,” Randy said. “I can’t lie—it was bad when I first got locked up. I had a lot of anger. But it’s just like anything else. You get used to it. I try to stay busy. I go to class twice a week. I obey the rules because it makes my life easier. We have a good chaplain, and he has a lot of programs going on.”
“Good,” Cole said.
“It’s still hard to accept being here, but there comes a point when there’s no use fighting it anymore, no use being hardheaded,” he said. “So you make the best of it.”
Cole nodded. “I was going to say, ‘I know what you mean,’ but I don’t,” he said. “I really don’t. I used to say that to people whose family members had been murdered: ‘I know how you feel.’ I stopped saying that because I don’t really know. It was insincere.”
“Truth is always the best approach,” Randy said. “I found that out.”
“I don’t know that that did you a lot of good,” Cole said with a halfhearted smile.
Randy shook his head. “No, it sure didn’t,” he said.
Cole seemed chastened by this. “Looking back on it now, I can say that I would have done things differently,” he said, shifting his weight in his chair. “I know that doesn’t change anything. I know that doesn’t help you now, but I would have done things differently. You would have gotten some credit for doing the right thing.”
“Can’t go back,” Randy said matter-of-factly.
“That’s the truth,” Cole said. He studied the young man in front of him. “If you could go back, though, what would you do differently?”
“The main thing I regret is not having done something once we got out to the bridge,” Randy said. “I’ve thought about that every day for seventeen years. The self-preservation kicked in, and my only goal was to get out of there. It would have been a whole lot better on everyone if I had tried to do something.”
“You and Curtis told such different stories about what happened out there,” Cole said. “I had to pick a story. I had to decide who I thought was telling the truth, and I made that decision and believe it was the right one. But I’ve always wondered if there was anything you never talked about.”
Randy stopped and thought for a moment. “I can’t think of anything that I’ve ever left out,” he said.
“The one thing I’ve always wondered—” Cole said. “I’ve always wondered if she was completely unaware, once you got to the bridge, what was about to happen.”
“She was passed out.”
“She never woke up and resisted?” Cole asked. “She never begged for her life?”
“No,” Randy said, shaking his head. “Never.”
The two men sat in silence until Randy spoke again. “There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about her,” he said. “It happens first thing every morning, when I see my surroundings.”
Cole took this in and was quiet for a moment. “Have you ever heard from Josh?” he finally asked.
“He sent me two or three letters when I first got to prison, back in ’98.”
“Did he ever admit anything to you?”
“Man, would you believe he was trying to get me to help him on his appeal and he offered me a lawyer?”
“Yeah, I would believe that, actually,” Cole said. “I don’t think he or Curtis are doing real well these days.”
“Oh, no, they’re both in seg, as far as I know,” Randy said, referring to “administrative segregation” cells, where inmates who are considered particularly dangerous are relegated to solitary confinement. “Matter of fact, I know Curtis is at Eastham and Josh is at Hughes. Amazing how many people you’ll find here that know people from other units.”
“Do you still hear from Gail?” Cole asked.
“It’s been a long time,” Randy said.
“I think if it had been all up to her, then we might have had something different for you,” Cole said. “Duane—I don’t know that Duane would ever have agreed to a lesser sentence.”
“The man lost his child,” Randy said. “I can’t begin to even comprehend what that might be like.”
“They say it’s the worst kind of pain you can have,” Cole said. “I don’t know, and I hope I never find out.”
Their conversation spanned two hours. They talked about Randy’s life—how he had not had a disciplinary case in more than a decade. How he regularly attended Bible study. How he enjoyed his job mopping floors, which he did late at night, when the cell block was quiet.
“If you got out, what do you think you’d do?” Cole asked.
“If I was to get out right now, I’d be lost,” Randy said. “I don’t have any life skills. I’ve never paid rent or made a regular paycheck. I haven’t driven a car in seventeen years. I’ve never been on the Internet.”
“So you don’t even know what that’s all about,” Cole said, floored.
“Denise tells me about it,” Randy said. “She says she does her banking on her phone.” He shrugged, as if to say he wasn’t quite sure what that meant. “I mean, I’ve developed intellectually, I guess, but not personally.”
“Have you been able to develop any friendships?”
“Oh, yeah, I got a few good friends,” Randy said. “I mean, I live in a dorm with eighty people.”
“Like an army dormitory?” Cole asked.
“We each have a little cubicle—it’s about six feet by ten feet—and a wall about four and a half feet high,” Randy said. “So there’s a little privacy. We have a communal shower and toilets. In my dorm, at the security level I’m at, a lot of people are getting ready to go home. So I watch people make parole and leave. Some of my good friends have left.”
“You’re almost halfway through your sentence?”
“I’m three years from being at the halfway point,” Randy said. “And mentally I think I’ve developed to the point where I can move on. I don’t have any expectations, really. All in all, man, for being locked up for seventeen years and having a whole lot more to go, I’m doing really good. I’ve got some unconventional circumstances here, but it doesn’t have to all be gloomy.”
“Not everyone has that outlook,” Cole said.
“Believe it or not, people come to me for advice,” Randy said. “They know I’ve been in here since I was seventeen and I’ve made it this far, so they come to me. If they’re struggling, I use my experience to try to help them cope. I like to teach people to play chess. You watch them win their first game—huge smile.”
“That’s not an easy game,” Cole said. “I play it with one of my sons.”
“No, it’s not,” Randy agreed. “But the first time he won a game, he smiled, didn’t he?”
Finally, when their time was over, Cole rose from his seat. He was satisfied, or as satisfied as he would ever be, that Randy had been deserving of mercy. He was also struck, once again, by the thought that more than one life had been taken on the Belknap Creek bridge that night.
Randy could not shake Cole’s hand because his own hands were shackled, but he nodded his head in parting. “Thanks for being human,” Randy said. “Thanks for having enough—I don’t know what to call it—personality of your own to come back and say there’s things that you could have done different.”
“I wish you luck,” Cole said.
“Yes, sir,” Randy replied.
“Maybe we’ll see each other again,” Cole said. Then he turned and walked away.
Randy, who will become eligible for parole in 2036, when he is 57 years old, was escorted back to his cell.A Texas mother is accused of intentionally leaving her two young daughters inside a car for more than 15 hours, leading to their deaths, authorities said.
Amanda Hawkins, 19, was arrested in San Antonio on Thursday and faces two counts of abandoning or endangering a child, according to the Kerr County Sheriff's Office. Bond has been set at $35,000 for each count. Hawkins is being held at the Bexar County Adult Detention Center in San Antonio while awaiting transfer to Kerr County, the sheriff's office said.
"This is by far the most horrific case of child endangerment that I have seen in the 37 years I have been in law enforcement," Kerr County Sheriff Rusty Hierholzer said in a statement Friday.
According to Hierholzer, Hawkins and a 16-year-old male friend showed up at Peterson Regional Medical Center in Kerrville on Wednesday with her two daughters, 1-year-old Brynn Hawkins and 2-year-old Addyson Overgard-Eddy. Hawkins allegedly told medical personnel her daughters had collapsed after visiting Flat Rock Lake where they smelled flowers. The toddlers were transferred to University Hospital in San Antonio in "grave condition," Hierholzer said.
A joint investigation by the Kerr County Sheriff's Office, the Kerrville Police Department, the Texas Rangers Division and Texas Child Protective Services later determined that the two little girls had actually been left in their mother's car overnight "intentionally," from Tuesday night until about noon Wednesday, while Hawkins and her friends were inside a residence, according to Hierholzer.
"Upon discovering the girls, the mother attempted to bathe them and did not immediately want to take the girls to the hospital because she didn't want to get into trouble," the sheriff said in his statement Friday.
Brynn and Addyson died at the hospital Thursday night, Hierholzer said. The investigation is ongoing, and autopsies were scheduled for Friday at the Bexar County Medical Examiner's Office.
With the death of the girls, Hierholzer said Hawkins could face upgraded charges after the case is presented to a grand jury.
Hierholzer said the case will be handled by district attorney Lucy Wilke, who did not immediately respond to ABC News' request for comment Saturday.My love of deadlifts has been well documented. Fact is, were it legal in my state, I'd have married deadlifts long ago and retired to a small farmhouse in rural Massachusetts to raise our pair of glute and hamstring-dominant rugrats, Eleiko and Ivanko.
But if deadlifts are my greatest love, then squats are the hot bridesmaid I keep winking at by the punch bowl. Whether the goal is to improve performance in your chosen sport, build legs the size of Kansas, shed those last few (or thirty) pounds of fat off your frame, or make members of the opposite sex want to see you naked with the lights on, squats are an integral component of any well-rounded program.
This article will discuss some of the different squat variations we use at Cressey Performance given individual's goals, needs, and contraindications. Because not all squats are created equal, but when performed correctly, they all kick ass.
Goblet Squats
Popularized by the great Dan John, goblet squats are typically the squat variation I choose first when teaching beginners the basics of how to squat correctly. For lack of a better term, they're idiot proof, and I defy anyone – whether an un-trained teenager, a mid-20s muscle head, or a desk jockey with the mobility of a pool table – not to be able to perform a crisp goblet squat within ten minutes of proper coaching or cueing.
A proper (full) squat demonstrates good ankle dorsiflexion, hip flexion, thoracic extension, and glute activation, all of which are crucial when it comes to overall movement quality, and quality of life.
Given their importance, I'm not opposed to people squatting everyday, especially considering the amount of time we spend sitting in front of computers. (Mobility-wise, many of us are massive balls of walking fail.) Stealing from Dan John again, "If it's important, do it every day."
Now, this doesn't mean you should perform loaded squats every day – that's over-kill. But you can grab a light dumbbell and toss in a few sets of goblet squats daily to not only improve tissue length and quality, but also help groove rock solid squatting technique.
Points to Consider Regarding Goblet Squats
• This is a fantastic variation to help groove picture perfect squat technique, so while I'm always interested in using the concept of progressive overload, it's not the main emphasis here.
• You'll learn to sit back when you squat and initiate the movement with hips, not knees.
• It's imperative to "push the knees out."
• Maintain a "proud" chest, with the shoulder blades together and depressed (place them in your back pocket).
• Descend to the point where your elbows can push your knees out, trying to maintain an arch in your lower back the entire time.
• Hang out there for a few seconds. "Pry" around a little bit, moving side to side, back and forth, and in a figure-eight fashion to help "un-glue" the hips.
• Finish with the glutes. Many will compensate hip extension with lumbar hyperextension, so it's important to "stand tall," and not use the back too much.
Squats to Box versus Box Squats
Before I get into the difference between the two, let's take a minute to discuss how to properly set up to squat with a barbell on your back as it's a little more complicated than people make it out to be.
Squatting starts and ends with the setup. How you set up to squat can make or break the entire set, and it's something many trainees take far too lightly.
• Walk up to the bar, grab it, and shake the shit out of it. Get angry. Intimidate the weight. Trust me, it works. Having a little attitude plays huge dividends in the long run.
• While still gripping the bar (a little past shoulder width apart for most, a little wider for those with limited shoulder mobility – you need to work on that), duck underneath and squeeze your shoulder blades together like you mean it. By doing so, you create a "shelf" on your upper back that the bar can rest on.
• From there, you want to rip the bar apart while simultaneously pulling down as hard as you can across your back, as if you were trying to bend it. It's going to feel awkward at first, but it's important as this will help engage your lats, and in turn, the thoraco-lumbar fascia, which will provide stability to the spine.
• I often see trainees taking way too many steps to get set up and wasting a lot of energy in the process. Unrack the bar and take two steps back (one with your left and one with your right foot). We're squatting, Frodo, not trekking to the depths of Mordor.
• At this point you should be straddling the box, which is located between your feet. Looking straight ahead and with your neck packed, take a deep breath and fill your tummy (not your chest) with air.
• Okay, you're ready to squat. Keep reading.
Squat to Box (continued)
Most people don't know how to squat for shit. Their posterior chains are weak as hell so they can't sit back and they can't keep their knees out.
The typical individual wants to shift forward too much, initiating the movement at the knees rather than their hips. Ninety percent of people initiate the squatting motion by leaning forward at the trunk, flexing the lumbar spine, and then plopping downward.
Now, just to cover my own butt here: In no way am I saying that having your knees migrate past the toes is dangerous or wrong. In fact, a study published in 2003 by the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research ["Effect of Knee Position on Hip and Knee Torques During the Barbell Squat," Fry, et al] laid this once sacred cow to rest for good.
In it, the researchers noted that letting the knee come forward did result in greater shear stress and torque on the knee joint. However, when they restricted said movement (not allowing the knees to shift anteriorly), there was much more torque recorded in the hips and lumbar spine!
So I'm not opposed to the knees coming forward, slightly. I'm just opposed to people not using their posterior chain and making their squats look like a max-effort knee break ankle mobilization!
A funny thing happens on an almost weekly basis. I can't tell you how many times someone has walked into our facility claiming to squat 400+ lbs, only to get stapled by 185 because we actually make him squat to proper depth.
I love when this happens, and it just goes to show that there are a lot of people out there who aren't as strong as they think they are – they're just really good at cheating.
Squatting to a box differs from box squats in the sense that the main objective is to assure that someone "feels" what it's like to actually squat to proper depth. It's more of a tap-n-go than anything else.
I'll still coach them on proper squatting technique, but my concern is enforcing proper depth – which is why I'm a huge proponent of this variation for beginners.
Box Squats
Conversely, the main objective with a box squat is to teach trainees to use their posterior chain.
Rather than just getting to depth, the box squat emphasizes sitting back and engaging the hamstrings and glutes.
Here's what I highlight:
• Initiate with the hips. Unlike squatting to a box where I'll allow a little more of a knee break, with box squats, push your hips back as if I had a rope tied around your waist and I was pulling you back. Moreover, push your knees out (to the left and right) to help open up the hips as you descend towards the box.
Note: For those who have a really hard time grasping the knees out concept, I'll take a mini-band and wrap it above their knees and tell them to go through the same squat motion while resisting the band from pushing the knees in. Sometimes people just need a little kinesthetic feedback to "feel" what I want them to do, and I find a band around the knees is the perfect solution.
• I'll be a little more meticulous with making them maintain a vertical shin angle as they perform the lift. This is especially true when I'm working with trainees who suffer from anterior knee pain. It's amazing how much relief people get from otherwise chronic knee pain when they actually learn to squat with proper mechanics!
• Land softly on the box! Many like to just plop themselves down, which isn't the smartest thing to do when you've got a loaded barbell on top of your spine. Instead, I like to tell people to pretend like they're sitting on broken glass.
• Another mistake I see trainees make is rocking off the box. Ideally, as you land, you should maintain your stiffness and come to a slight pause on the box. By doing so, not only are you taking the stretch shortening cycle out of the equation, you're also learning to develop more starting strength.
• From there, fire through your heels, drive the hips up, and snap them through at the top to finish.
And While We're At It
Back squatting isn't for everyone, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Although I've personally helped plenty of people with chronically bad backs learn to squat pain-free in a matter of months (if not weeks), those with a history of lower back issues should probably refrain from back squatting, at least temporarily.
Secondly, those with limited t-spine mobility (particularly in extension) are going to have a hard time back squatting. Trying to crank someone into maximal abduction and external rotation – especially for someone who doesn't have it – is a recipe for disaster, and can often manifest into a plethora of other issues in the neck, back, and even the elbow.
If that's the case, using specialty bars like the safety squat bar or giant cambered bar – both of which are much more "shoulder friendly" – would be an ideal substitution.
For most, however, the likelihood of your gym having access to those kinds of bars is somewhere between not-a-chance-in-hell and Lindsay Lohan winning a Pulitzer.
If that's the case, it's time to get your front squat on.
Front Squats
Compared to back squats – which, due to the bar placement and torso angle, produces a higher bending torque on the spine, and as a result, increased levels of shear force – front squats are a more "back-friendly" variation.
In addition, front squats challenge the abdominals more than back squats due to the bar placement and ensuing recruitment of the abdominals (rectus abdominus and obliques) to prevent buckling.
Taking it a step further, because the anterior core is engaged while performing front squats, it's not uncommon to find it easier to actually get to depth compared to back squats. Simply put, many people are unable to squat to depth because they're weak and unstable.
When the core musculature is engaged (and hence, we provide the body with the stability it normally lacks), the body's protective mechanism is told to "take a chill pill" and good things begin to happen.
Collectively, with the decrease in spinal loading, in addition to an increase in core engagement, front squats are a staple at Cressey Performance. Still, they're not immune to their own set of pitfalls, namely, which grip to use – clean grip or cross bar-grip?
Given that we train a lot of baseball players, we tend to lean more towards the cross-grip, due in no small part to it being a lot less stressful on the elbows.
Likewise, unless someone demonstrates remarkable wrist flexibility and is able to maintain a proper posture throughout the set, we advocate the cross bar-grip with our general population clients as well.
Again, the set-up is key. Some things to consider:
• The bar should rest on the "meaty" part of your shoulders up against your Adam's apple. Grab the bar tight!
• No matter what, think chest up, elbows up.
• Pack your neck (make a double chin), and find a spot on the wall right in front of you at eye level. Keep your eyes on that spot.
• Get your air, brace your abs, and let er' rip.
Dead Start Anderson Front Squats
When I really want to make a client or athlete hate life, I throw some Anderson front squats into the mix, starting from the bottom position.
Because there's no eccentric "pre-loading," it's an excellent exercise to develop starting strength, but more importantly it has a general sense of badassery to it. So for those who are a little more masochistic, this could be up your alley like Carson Kressley.
Starting from the bottom position (the bar will be resting on the pins of a power rack), squat underneath the bar at a point where your upper thighs are at or just below the parallel position.
Much like the front squat, place the bar on the meaty part of your shoulders and up against your neck. You'll most likely have to fidget around to get into proper position, but the key is to make sure you sit back a bit so that the bulk of your weight is on your heels and not your toes.
Get your air, and try to explode off the pins through your heels. Make sure that when you finish at the top, you get your hips all the way through (stand tall) by squeezing your glutes.
From there, lower the bar under control back to the pins and make sure you come to a dead stop. No bouncing!
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cocktail. The tale is immortalized by Stanley Clisby Arthur in his lively 1937 book, “Famous New Orleans Drinks & How to Mix ’Em”: In the first half of the 19th century, Antoine Amédée Peychaud began to mix his spicy, neon-red bitters — which still bear his name — with spirits. “Peychaud had a unique way of serving his spiced drink of brandy,” Arthur wrote: He poured it into a coquetier, a double-ended egg cup. Coquetier (pronounced ko-kay-TAY) became “cock-tay,” then cocktail. “Presently, all New Orleans was drinking brandy-cocktails,” Arthur wrote. “In such fashion did the inconspicuous little crockery coquetier or egg-cup become the christening font of the cocktail.”
It’s a fun story — but it’s not the real origin of the cocktail. (The indefatigable historian David Wondrich has traced the word a few decades further back, probably to upstate New York, or possibly England, depending on how you define a cocktail.)
No matter. If New Orleans wasn’t the birthplace of the cocktail, it is certainly its spiritual center — where it is most passionately celebrated and where some of its most wondrous and varied iterations were invented: the Sazerac, the Ramos gin fizz, the Vieux Carré. “The quality of mixed drinks as served in New Orleans has always appealed to the sophisticated taste,” Arthur wrote, “but the drinks and their histories are forever linked with the past of this pleasure-loving city.”
Over a few winter evenings in New Orleans, I sought out some of those classic versions at decades-old bars and more recent additions, where bartenders are reinvigorating the cocktail scene amid a broader post-Katrina revival.
The links to the past that Arthur described are evident everywhere. At Compère Lapin, a restaurant and bar in the Warehouse District and the newest spot I visited on my crawl, I chatted with the charming and gregarious bartender Abigail Gullo. She made me, upon request, a De La Louisiane, one of the city’s lesser-known inventions — a rye-based drink punched up with Peychaud’s bitters and absinthe.
I asked Ms. Gullo why Compère Lapin doesn’t have classic drinks on its menu. “Because we can make them,” she said, and everyone knows it. “And then if they have a Sazerac, what do they have next? I can guide them.”Copyright 2019 Nexstar Broadcasting, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
BAKERSFIELD, Calif. - Four people died in a medical helicopter crash east of McFarland near Sherwood Ave. and Highway 65 Thursday night.
Fresno County officials said the Sky Life helicopter left Porterville Airport with a critical patient at 6:52 p.m. PST. The chopper was headed to San Joaquin Community Hospital according to Fresno County.
At approximately 7:05 PST the Fresno County EMS dispatch center was unable to make radio contact with Sky Life 4, while making a routine safety check which Fresno County said they do every 10 minutes when the helicopters are in the air.
According to Fresno County, when the dispatch center was unable to make contact with the chopper the contacted the airport towers in Fresno and Bakersfield.
At the same time, the dispatch center contacted Kern County Fire and Kern County Sheriff's Office because the last known position of the chopper was in Kern County, Fresno County officials said.
The pilot, a flight nurse, a flight paramedic and the patient all died in the crash.
An FAA website states the helicopter is owned by American Airborne EMS in Fresno.
Based on the tail number confirmed by the FAA, the photo above is the chopper that crashed.
The FAA said in a statement: "The pilot was not communicating with air traffic controllers.The aircraft is a Bell 407. Last known position was reported at 6:50 p.m."
San Joaquin Community Hospital released this statement: "This evening, we received word that a Sky Life helicopter in route to San Joaquin Community Hospital did not arrive as expected. As we anxiously await further updates, we continue to pray vigilantly for our first responders and everyone involved." -Doug Duffield, SJCH President and CEO.”
KCFD said the helicopter was last heard from in the area of Sherwood Ave. and Highway 65.
The helicopter had not been heard from for over 30 minutes at the time a search was started, according to KCFD.
The following is from the Sky Life web page:
SkyLife utilizes Bell 407 and Bell 430 helicopters with California bases at Fresno Yosemite International Airport and Visalia Airport. Our aircraft are available 24 hours/day and staffed with a flight nurse, flight paramedic and EMS pilot. Additionally, SkyLife utilizes a King Air airplane (fixed wing air ambulance) for long distance hospital-to-hospital transfers during inclement weather. Being centrally located, SkyLife is available for response throughout California.
SkyLife is accredited by the Commission on Accreditation of Medical Transport Systems (CAMTS) and aircraft are operated under Roger's Helicopters FAA Part 135 Air Carrier Certificate.
Air ambulances provide critical time savings as well as high levels of patient care while inflight, reserved for the most critical patients. Medical helicopters are part of a team dedicated to provide that extra measure of support when it is needed most, when life is dependent upon quick, effective medical response.Another Twitter account bites the dust this week, but not for the reasons many would have you think.
Comic author Chelsea Cain deleted her Twitter account on Wednesday, and the media was quick to treat it as if Cain herself died and left the world behind. Looks like South Park was right when they said people treated quitting Twitter like literal death.
Cain was the writer of the now cancelled Mockingbird comic series, which drew ire from some on the Internet for its “social justice” messaging and an alternative cover art with the words “ask me about my feminist agenda.”
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Many journalists claimed it was a campaign of targetted harassment against Cain that led to her Twitter departure, but in fact in Many journalists claimed it was a campaign of targetted harassment against Cain that led to her Twitter departure, but in fact in Cain’s own blog post she claimed otherwhise. Despite the media’s hyperbolic claims of what drove Cain off social media, Cain herself says she quit because a few jerks made her realize Twitter is simply a waste of time.
this latest case of “harassment” that drove Cain from Twitter was much like that Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones faced. Jones was barraged with racist threats for weeks and even had her nude images leaked online. He even brought up past instances with Gamergate’s Zoe Quinn, saying “in Cain’s case, there doesn’t appear to be one central agitator. But it’s yet another example of the volatility women in entertainment are exposed to on a regular basis, the most infamous of which was the claimed Eder Campuzano of The Oregonian this latest case of “harassment” that drove Cain from Twitter was much like thatGhostbustersstar Leslie Jones faced. Jones was barraged with racist threats for weeks and even had her nude images leaked online. He even brought up past instances with Gamergate’s Zoe Quinn, saying “in Cain’s case, there doesn’t appear to be one central agitator. But it’s yet another example of the volatility women in entertainment are exposed to on a regular basis, the most infamous of which was the campaign mounted against video game developer Zoe Quinn in 2014.”
Comicsbeat author Comicsbeatauthor Heidi Macdonald says went as far as to say that “the harassment problem isn’t a woman’s problem, it’s a MAN’S problem,” and men need to “make it clear they do not support or tolerate hate, abuse and misogyny. This isn’t a borderline case. It’s clear, indisputable harassment.”
The Washington Post ‘s David Betancourt TheWashington Post‘s David Betancourt came out swinging, blaming this all on the “cult of cavemen-like comic-book readers” that he says “can be so vitriolic online that the industry now stands to lose the talent of a writer such as Chelsea Cain” and that it is “disheartening.” Mind you that in his piece, Betancourt does not present a single example of harassment, he just shows people that came out in support of Cain.
There is just one thing none of these writers, and many others on the Internet, didn’t do: wait to hear from Cain herself. See, Cain posted a There is just one thing none of these writers, and many others on the Internet, didn’t do: wait to hear from Cain herself. See, Cain posted a blog update on her website that made it very clear that she didn’t leave because of some sort of targeted harassment campaign. In fact, the worst thing sent to her that she references was a tweet that said “Thanks, @chelseacain for ruining my favorite character with your feminist crap.”
Her reason for leaving was simple, people on Twitter can be shitty and she didn’t want to deal with that anymore. “But know that I did not leave Twitter because of rape threats or because someone had posted my address, or any of the truly vile tactics you hear about,” she said. “I left Twitter because of the ordinary daily abuse that I decided I didn’t want to live with anymore.”
Again, she makes it very clear why she left, in case people still don’t get it: “Let me be clear: I did not leave Twitter because I was trolled; I was trolled because I said I was going to leave Twitter. I left Twitter because, in the end, all the good stuff about Twitter didn’t make up for all the bad stuff.”
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Now, we can argue the semantics of what constitutes “abuse” all day, but chances are we won’t get anywhere with that. What we can do, however, is point out that the media rushed to declare this the next Gamergate, when it’s really just another person leaving Twitter, because of the site’s general shittiness problem.
Cain faced criticism, that happens. She didn’t like it, she found some of it sexist, so she decided to leave Twitter. She wasn’t told to kill herself, she wasn’t doxxed, but the media blew it way out of proportion in an effort to blame a larger set of the internet community. Criticism is not harassment, a lesson many in the media should probably learn.Boko Haram, a jihadi group seeking to establish a sharia-based state in northern Nigeria, has made little secret of the fact that it regards itself not only at war with the Nigerian state, and its security forces, but its people too. It has bombed churches, mosques, carried out assassinations, kidnapping, and mass assaults. On a single day in January last year, it killed 185 people across Kano. As the years have gone by, the ferocity, ambition and scale of its attacks have increased. In Bama, earlier this month, a group of about 200 men in armoured vehicles mounted with machine guns stormed military barracks, a police station and government buildings, killing 55 people and freeing 105 prisoners. Any government would have to respond to this.
The question behind the state of emergency declared by President Goodluck Jonathan in the three northern states this week is not why – it is how. States of emergency have been declared before, and troops have been deployed. The announcement this week represents Nigeria's version of the US surge in Afghanistan. It is therefore critically important that it should have a different outcome. It is difficult to talk about the trail of destruction Boko Haram has left without mentioning the military's indiscriminate response. As Human Rights Watch has chronicled, a military raid on Baga in April left 2,000 burned homes and 183 bodies. The Nigerian military not only denies the figures, and refuses to investigate, but says if there were atrocities they were carried out by insurgents. No one is denying that it has a brutal enemy to fight. But the terrified civilians caught in the middle have to be able to distinguish the actions of terrorists and the actions of government. As things stand, that is hard to do.
In Maiduguri, the town where Boko Haram first emerged, you have a choice: to be gunned down by Boko Haram or by the military. What you cannot do is seek the military's protection, without being considered one of the enemy it is fighting. Its a well known catch-22 of anti-insurgency warfare. Either you are an insurgent, in which case you are summarily executed, or you are not one, but deemed to be sheltering them, in which case the same fate awaits. Boko Haram, which has used poor students enrolled for religious studies from Chad and Niger as soldiers, has had few problems with recruitment. And there is sympathy in the north with a state based on sharia law.
With an election coming, Mr Jonathan has to respond to the security threat. But he has to do so discriminately, proportionately and within the law of the land. Soldiers have to be subject to it, too. Otherwise they are merely feeding the insurgency they are there to suppress.The Anaheim Ducks finally ended their contract squabble with restricted free agent defenseman Hampus Lindholm Thursday, locking him up for six years and $31.5 million. The minute the transaction became official, you could just feel the hockey community’s collective neck craning toward the Winnipeg Jets and blueliner Jacob Trouba’s camp. You’re up, fellas.
Like Lindholm, Trouba was having trouble agreeing on money. Like Lindholm, Trouba is a restricted free agent. Like Lindholm, Trouba was chosen in the first round of the 2012 draft and has a promising career ahead of him. The similarities end there, however. The negotiations between Trouba and the Jets became far more contentions than we saw with Lindholm. Trouba isn’t happy with his usage on the team, and the two sides were struggling to agree on term. He and agent Kurt Overhardt requested a trade in late September. So while the Ducks always had hope to resolve their Lindholm situation, it’s all but assured Jacob Trouba plays his next NHL game with a new club.
The question is: when will that be? Will it be in 2016-17 or 2017-18? If Trouba hasn’t inked a new deal by Dec. 1, he’s ineligible to play in the NHL this season. He’ll have to just keep pumping iron back home in Michigan or try his hand in Europe for half a year if he wants to get some game reps in.
Jets GM Kevin Cheveldayoff has offers on the table. Teams reportedly linked to Trouba trade talks include the Boston Bruins, New York Rangers and Detroit Red Wings, just to name a few. But Cheveldayoff has been publicly adamant about not rushing things. First off, the trade isn’t the easiest to pull off given how much money Trouba wants. Reports of the official asking price have varied, but it’s safe to say Trouba expects to at least land in the Lindholm/Seth Jones/Morgan Rielly/Rasmus Ristolainen range with a cap hit north of $5 million should Trouba ink a long-term contract. It’s debatable whether Trouba has earned that kind of term and money, but we know his camp believes he deserves it, especially when it feels his conservative usage by coach Paul Maurice suppressed Trouba’s numbers. That means the team landing Trouba must possess a solid chunk of cap space. Still, much tougher contracts have been moved. David Clarkson got moved. A desirable young player like Trouba? Piece of cake. Plenty of teams likely have a solution. Dustin Byfuglien and Tyler Myers clog Winnipeg’s depth chart with expensive top-four righty shooters, so Cheveldayoff wants a left-handed defenseman of equal value to Trouba as an ideal return. A player of that caliber would likely carry a decent price tag, liberating the trading team of enough cap space to fit Trouba in.
Still, Cheveldayoff doesn’t want to rush a deal. But how long can he maintain that position? His Jets have a ton of potential in the Central Division this season. Mark Scheifele has carried last season’s sizzling finish into 2016-17. He’s a bona fide stud first-line center. Patrik Laine has justified his status as the 2016 draft’s No. 2 overall pick, showing an Alex Ovechkin-like release. The Jets have speed to burn with the likes of Kyle Connor and Nikolaj Ehlers up front, too. But not everything has gone their way. It seemed waiving Ondrej Pavelec finally freed up a superior goaltending tandem of Connor Hellebuyck and Michael Hutchinson. It’s very early, but both stoppers have struggled so far, combining for an.883 save percentage. Center Bryan Little’s lower-body injury creates an irreplaceable depth chart hole, too. This team has started a disappointing 2-4-0, and that mark could easily be 1-5-0 if not for a miraculous comeback from a 4-0 third-period deficit versus Toronto last week. The Jets’ health woes – Drew Stafford joins Little on the shelf for Thursday’s game – threaten to dig them a deeper standings hole going forward.
Most of all, the Jets need, well, Trouba, or Cheveldayoff’s desired Trouba equivalent. They aren’t the same defensively without him. They rank 27th in goals-against average at 3.67, they’re killing penalties at an ugly 72.7 percent clip. They’ve been average in shots allowed and Corsi Against, so a lot of their problems can be blamed on goaltending, but part of the Jets’ woes has been allowing too many grade-A chances. Our in-house analytics writer and general whiz kid Dom Luszczyszyn crunched the league-wide 5-on-5 numbers for high-danger scoring chances so far in 2016-17, and the Jets allow 8.0 per 60 minutes, the eighth-most in the NHL. Last season with Trouba in the lineup: 6.8 per 60. So they’re allowing at least one extra high-quality chance per contest. The sample size is obviously tiny, but that makes it no less true that (a) they are allowing more high-danger chances than they did last year so far and (b) Jacob Trouba is missing from the lineup. A circumstantial argument for his importance? Maybe. But no one can deny the Jets badly need him or his analog.
So while it’s probable the Jets never get Trouba back, Cheveldayoff might feel some heat to trade Trouba for help sooner rather than later. No team can sleep in the mighty Central. If 2-4-0 becomes 2-6-0 or 4-8-0, will the Jets have to buck up and take the best Trouba offer on the table? Crazy as it sounds, it may be worth losing a couple games early if that expedites a Trouba trade and prevents losses in bigger bunches later this season.
Matt Larkin is a writer and editor at The Hockey News and a regular contributor to thn.com. For more great profiles, news and views from the world of hockey, subscribe to The Hockey News magazine. Follow Matt Larkin on Twitter at @THNMattLarkinNow that the previously reported "fine" of $400 million which the firm just got slapped with following its manipulation of various energy markets, is fact...
JPMORGAN AGREES TO PAY $410 MLN TO SETTLE U.S. ENERGY PROBE
... One may say JPM has just admitted it is the next Enron. One would be wrong: "JPMVEC admits the facts set forth in the agreement, but neither admits nor denies the violations." In other words, JPM is a Schrodinger Enron: it admits the facts that the company best known for manipulating electricity - a charge which in 2000 was enough to crush the company, and which is now a fine equal to 0.4% of the firm's $99.5 billion in revenues - but neither admits nor denies this.
But the biggest question plaguing Jamie Dimon this morning, is whether he will pay the $410 million FERC find with a personal check... or petty cash.
Full FERC release:The ongoing run-up to the American presidential elections later this year is already quite colourful, for lack of a better word. While nominee race for the Democrats seems to be fairly in favour of Hillary Clinton now, it is the unexpected juggernaut of one Donald Trump from the Republican camp that has caught everyone by surprise.
Whoever replaces Barack Obama in the White House later this year will have his or her plate full as far as foreign policy is concerned. The Syrian crisis, which currently is in midst of a laughable ceasefire loosely brokered by the international community, will need most of the new president’s bandwidth.
But there have been some long-lingering questions of US foreign policy as well that no one seems to have many answers to, and this includes Washington’s bend towards Pakistan. This relationship between the two countries is often perplexing at best, and seems to be on autopilot with no one sure how to disengage it.
The recent decision by the US to sell eight F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan brought back the central question that policy makers, particularly from India, have been asking for years. Why does Washington keep arming the Pakistan military complex despite knowing very well that the very same complex is also responsible for creating terror strikes against American interests, and India?
The answer to this is as opaque as the Pakistan–US relationship itself. Analysts believe that the US is always on the brink of paranoia, expecting another military coup in Pakistan and death of another civilian government there. Secondly, the US also is under constant pressure over Pakistan’s nuclear weapons arsenal and the hypothesis of them falling into the ‘wrong hands’ clearly keeps the US State Department up at night.
However, the above concerns exist at the very end of two varied spectrums of debate. Republican Senator Rand Paul had recently invoked the Arms Control Act of 1976 combined with a resolution raised in the senate in an effort to block the sale of the jets.
"The US and Pakistani relationship has been a troubled one. Though the government of Pakistan has been considered America’s ally in the fight on terrorism, Pakistan’s behavior would suggest otherwise. While we give them billions of dollars in aid, we are simultaneously aware of their intelligence and military apparatus assisting the Afghan Taliban," said Senator Paul.
"In addition to Pakistan's duplicitous nature, it also has a deplorable human rights record. Pakistan often isolates and unjustly jails religious minorities and Christians to include Pakistani Christian Asa Bibi. Only after an international outcry did Pakistan commute Asa Bibi’s death sentence. In addition to Pakistan’s support of terrorism and deplorable human rights record, it continues to imprison Dr. Shakil Afridi, who helped the US locate and kill Osama Bin Laden."
Even after his efforts and an ensuing "dogfight" in the US senate, the sale was cleared. This saw the Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Corker, whose committee has jurisdiction over foreign arms sales, to maintain a "hold" on US subsidies being provided for the sale of the jets. Corker cited Pakistan’s "duplicity" in America’s fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan for his committee’s actions.
India has lobbied against the sale of the F-16s openly, and made its displeasure known over Washington’s go ahead. It is, in fact, not about the eight units of the aircraft, but the larger principle of the aid being predominantly used as deterrence building capability against India instead of exclusive anti-terror work. "I am not sure who runs the American policy on Pakistan at times," an Indian government official close to these matters told me recently. "The US presidency itself most of the time seems to be detached on how to deal with Islamabad, and this condition surpasses just individuals as presidents being a problem."
In Jeffery Goldberg’s recent article for The Atlantic titled ‘The Obama Doctrine’, the author gives a small but significant section to Obama on Pakistan via the president’s views on "long-standing assumptions" that riddle American foreign policy processes. Goldberg writes vicariously via many people who have worked with the president and states that Obama "questions why the US should avoid sending its forces into Pakistan to kill Al Qaeda leaders, and he privately questions why Pakistan, which he believes is a disastrously dysfunctional country, should be considered an ally of the US at all."
When I talked with some US officials personally over the years on the issue, which one has to prod around tactfully as it is a topic not many in the US State Department’s middle-ring like to talk about, one finds very little clarity on how exactly the US wants to deal with Pakistan’s well known use of terror as a state policy. While there seems to be unanimous consideration that engagement with Pakistan is critical for American foreign policy overtures, there is also significant confusion. The fact that they know the Pakistani military complex more than often works to undermine American interests in the region, specifically in Afghanistan, in a crude way allows it to keep asking the US for increased aid under the guise of fighting terrorism seems to be well accepted, but Washington as yet has not figured out on how to call this bluff by Pakistan.
Despite the power of the US presidency, however, the chair in itself seems to be kept in captivity by certain policy ruses orchestrated by sections of bureaucracy within the US State Department and perhaps the Pentagon as well. This is not a condition prevailing just under Obama, but has been so since the 9/11 attacks. However, if Goldberg’s sources are to be believed, Obama questioning the very roots of US–Pakistan alliance through his eight-year presidency but not being able to forcefully challenge it speaks volumes.
The way the current presidential race is going in the US, it is likely, as many polls have also predicted, that Democrat front-runner Hillary Clinton could well become the next US president if her Republican challenger turns out to be Donald Trump (which is also highly likely). Under Clinton, who is part of the traditional spinal column of Washington’s ‘establishment’, it may become harder for the American policy machinery to adjust its engagement with Pakistan to a more appropriate bend, which is to call out Islamabad for using its double-edged sword in milking Washington on funds, and undermining it and New Delhi’s security severely in the region via non-state actors.On a bright April morning, Daniel Scheidt awoke in the shadowy darkness of his mobile home and decided to do something he had not done in over three years. He asked his wife to open the curtains, then told her he wanted to go out.
"What?" Carollyne Scheidt said, barely believing her ears.
For over three years, Mr. Scheidt had lived as a near recluse, seeing no one, venturing nowhere. Laid off from his electrical engineering job, he sank into a depression and cursed the pain that came from being born maimed by the drug thalidomide.
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But that morning last year in West Kelowna, B.C., something transformative was under way. A day earlier, Mr. Scheidt received a $125,000 cheque from the federal government as part of its historic settlement with the country's nearly 100 thalidomide survivors.
With a single gesture, Mr. Scheidt felt his country was recognizing him, and he was ready to face his country again.
"I was dragged out from a very deep, dark hole I was going into," the 54-year-old said. "I'd been worried about how we were going to survive. [The settlement] brought me back to do things, enjoy things again."
The turnaround illustrates the life-altering impact of Ottawa's $180-million agreement with members of the Thalidomide Victims Association of Canada, who gather in the National Capital region starting Friday to mark the success of the group's compensation campaign.
Before the federal deal was announced, Mr. Scheidt had cashed in his savings and was so worried about his financial future, he believed he'd soon be "living under a bridge somewhere." But as the curtains of his home parted, Mr. Scheidt looked out at the birdbath in the yard and the cottonwood trees and Mount Boucherie beyond, and saw possibilities again.
"It was like a rebirth. His whole life opened up," Ms. Scheidt said. "Before, he had shut the door on the world. He fell through the cracks and felt nobody cared. When the [cheque] arrived, he could see the light at the end of the tunnel. Now, he laughs every day. He's got a future. The government gave him his life back."
The effect of Ottawa's package is being felt across Canada, where survivors are investing in everything from home care to new homes. In La Pocatière, Que., the deal let Nelson Emond dream about a life beyond the walls of his semi-basement apartment that had limited him for eight years.
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Mr. Emond's mother took thalidomide after Ottawa approved the drug in 1961 on the faith of the manufacturer's pitch that it was safe for pregnant women. Mr. Emond was among the babies born with rare and severe deformities, including missing limbs and internal organ damage. It was Canada's most notorious drug scandal, and last year, Ottawa agreed to pay its victims single lump-sum payments of $125,000, along with pensions of $25,000 to $100,000 a year.
Mr. Emond, born with most of his legs missing, had been living in a 4 1/2-room rental apartment too cramped to accommodate his wheelchair. A positive, amiable man who worked in various jobs as long as he was able, had to manoeuvre around his apartment on his leg stumps, so worn that their tips had become dark and calloused. Every time Mr. Emond wanted to go outside – even to take out the garbage or pick up his mail – he had to pull on his artificial legs to climb the five steps out of his apartment.
In mid-May, Mr. Emond left the semi-basement for the last time. With the help of friends and family, he moved his belongings into a new single-family house a short drive away. It has a garage so Mr. Emond won't have to depend on the goodwill of a stranger to dig out his car in winter, and a deck where he can breathe the outdoor air. Mr. Emond could not hide his excitement.
"I had always dreamed of having a house," said Mr. Emond, who has also suffered thalidomide-induced damage to his eyes and partial paralysis to his face that gives it a mask-like appearance. "But if I could buy one now, it's because of the federal funds. It's changed the stakes completely. It's giving me the freedom to do things I couldn't before."
His father, Albert, watched his son in the kitchen of the new home with a pinch of emotion. The parents of thalidomide babies saw their children overcome obstacle after obstacle through the years. Aging themselves, the parents view the federal settlement with a sense of deep relief.
"I'm 72 years old. Maybe I won't have many years left to live," the elder Mr. Emond said as a contractor took measurements of the bathtub to adapt it to his son's needs. "I won't die worrying whether or not he'll have the money to look after himself. I know he'll be protected for the rest of his life."
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The pain and confusion of the birth of Canada's thalidomide babies in the early 1960s remains vivid for their parents, who had little support or information about what was, then, a shocking event. Until then, many never imagined that medicine could cause so much harm to an unborn child.
Mr. Emond gets tears in his eyes recalling the sacrifices to get his son cared for, how he sold his car to buy him prosthetics in the days before Medicare. In 1963, Canada's health minister, Jay Waldo Monteith, vowed that Ottawa would care for the country's thalidomide victims "in the best possible manner." That promise was unfulfilled until last year. "Why did it take 50 years to recognize their mistakes?" Albert Emond asked.
In 1961, Paula Finlayson was a nurse in her early 20s working the night shift in an Edmonton hospital when, exhausted, she felt desperate to get some sleep. An intern offered her a new drug. "Take this, it's a good sedative," he said. Ms. Finlayson took a single tablet of thalidomide on each of the two nights remaining in her shift. She had no idea she was pregnant.
Her son, Brian, was born with shortened arms. "If I hadn't done it, Brian would still have arms," Ms. Finlayson, 76, said recently from Edmonton. "I still take personal responsibility for swallowing those two pills." Like many other parents, she, too, survived the thalidomide tragedy in history's shadow, carrying a lifelong burden for a fiasco caused by drug makers and government.
She plans to travel to the Ottawa-area gathering to meet other families touched by the tragedy, and mark the milestone of the government settlement, which she admits she never thought would come to pass. "It's going to make such a difference in their lives," she said.
No amount of compensation will rewrite the years of neglect for Canadians like Mr. Scheidt or Mr. Emond, but the new funds have offered a measure of comfort as they face an uncertain medical future. "It gave people peace of mind, a sense of security," said Mercédes Benegbi, head of TVAC.
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Nowadays, the Scheidts allow themselves occasional luxuries, such as ice cream or Genoa sausage, that they had denied themselves for years. They bought a second-hand camper, leaving their mobile-home enclave to travel again. Earlier this month, after they realized that Mr. Scheidt could no longer manage getting in and out of the bathtub in their mobile home, they put a down-payment on a new house with walk-in showers. It's in the town of Hope, B.C.
The couple has made one other, permanent, change to their home. They keep the curtains open, every day.Note From the Editor: WE NEED VOLUNTEERS!!! If you like this post, please come over to https://gitter.im/The_Etherian/Lobby and cover a dapp.
Weekly Update 2.19.2017-2.26.2017
AKASHA – Social Media Network
Slack: https://akasha-slack.herokuapp.com/
2.19.2017-2.26.2017
Over 1000 entries published on Akasha
Blog Post: http://blog.akasha.world/2017/02/23/seeking-whispers/
Bugs fixed you can now post copied links and formatted text.
Updates including anonymous search, being able to post gifs and more.
Download links can be found at the bottom of the blog.
Augur – Prediction Market
Slack: http://invite.augur.net/
2.19.2017-2.26.2017
A new landing page for the app has been deployed.
Blog Post: http://blog.augur.net/augur-front-end-update-february-22nd/
Bug fixes and updates including Google translate.
Decision not to use IPC and to use their own UTF-8 compliant streaming JSON parse.
Casper (Dev Channel) – Proof of Stake Protocol
Gitter: https://gitter.im/ethereum/casper-scaling-and-protocol-economics
2.19.2017-2.26.2017
Draft of the Viper code for the Casper contract: https://github.com/ethereum/research/blob/master/casper4/simple_casper.v.py Missing: Figuring out how it checks block hashes.
Discussion on the ‘fork choice rule’.
Simulation: https://github.com/ethereum/research/blob/master/casper4/simulator.py Working in extreme conditions: 1 block per epoch & high latency.
Colony – Decentralized Collaboration Network
Slack: https://colonyslack.herokuapp.com/
2.19.2017-2.26.2017
Open call to potential users for usability research was filled in a matter of minutes. The research will be conducted this coming week and will involve a 15-30 minute video chat with user completing tasks such as “invite new users to your Colony” on the prototype build.
Digix – Asset (Gold) Backed Tokens
Slack: https://dgx-public.slack.com/signup
2.19.2017-2.26.2017
Ethereum Singapore DigixGlobal Live-Stream (Dr Loi Luu & Chris Hitchcott): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGSRLMMN4lo
Much conversation on the new competition from CodeTract
Testnet DGX is now on Ropsten. Token address is 0x1e83ddddc7826f8804630af70935f68090295d38. Reply to aeufemio’s pinned thread in the slack channel with your Ropsten address to get some.
Blog Post: https://medium.com/@Digix/updates-from-the-cto-23rd-feb-2017-9026b4aaa912#.v643syx7t
Chris Hitchcott’s response to the CodeTract news/Reddit user criticism of Spectrum: https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/5vx84g/gold_is_now_live_on_mainnet/de5peef/
FirstBlood – Decentralized E-Sports Rewards Platform
Slack: https://firstbloodio.slack.com/signup
2.19.2017-2.26.2017
Blog Post: https://blog.firstblood.io/fighting-games-are-failing-as-esports-21655ac1da06#.vf0a532k9
Blog Post: https://blog.firstblood.io/top-tips-for-your-next-dota-2-in-house-23b32cba7ab4#.yri4792l7
It was noted in the slack that a small dev update is usually given at the bottom of each blog post.
mattius459 suggests “What about a small fee that taxed every game played which fed into a public pool, and the public pool replenished all users who have a zero balance with a very small but bet-able balance so they could continue playing. Basically, it would mean that no user would ever be unable to make a bet.” It received a positive reception from Auryn.
Golem – Distributed Computing Power
Slack: http://golemproject.org |
interpretation of the Symposium.1
Vlastos attributes to Plato the view that ‘what we are to love in persons is the ‘image’ of the Idea in them’ (Vlastos 1981: 31). We love them, that is, only to the extent that they are good and beautiful but since none of us is perfectly good or beautiful, love cannot be directed at us, blemishes and all: ‘The individual, in the uniqueness and integrity of his or her individuality, will never be the object of our love’ (Vlastos 1981: 31). Human imperfection, though, would imply that if I love you for your virtues I cannot love you for yourself only if Plato also believed that if I love you for your goodness, your beauty or, for that matter, for your yellow hair what I really love is not you but your goodness, your beauty or your yellow hair instead. Plato may well have thought so, but we cannot just assume that he did: many people, and even some philosophers, believe that we love people for particular reasons without feeling that we do not therefore love them for themselves.1 The issue is complex and the question remains open: we may love the image of the Form in a person without, for that reason, loving the Form of which it is the image and not the person who bears it.
Perhaps, though, that reason is inherent in Plato's conception of the philosopher's ascent, which Vlastos describes as follows:
Persons evoke erōs if they have beautiful bodies, minds, or dispositions. But so do quite impersonal objects—social or political programs, literary compositions, scientific theories, philosophical systems and, best of all, the Idea of Beauty itself. As objects of Platonic love all these are not only as good as persons, but distinctly better. Plato signifies their superiority by placing them in the higher reaches of that escalated figure that marks the lover's progress, relegating love of persons to its lower levels. (Vlastos 1981: 26)
That is true: Plato considers the love of individuals inferior to the love of abstract programs or theories and their love, in turn, inferior to the love of beauty itself. But that is not to say that those who stop at the lower reaches of the scala amoris do not love the person or the institution that inspires them. Even if the love of ‘impersonal objects’ cancels attachments to particular individuals, all that follows is that a life devoted to politics (nomoi kai epitēdeumata) or learning (mathēmata) is better, more valuable and, in the end, happier and more fulfilled than the private lives of most of the people in the world. That would not have been news to Plato's Greek audience (although his reasons for thinking so certainly were). Nor is Plato the only philosopher, in Greece or anywhere else, to have thought that purely private lives of no distinction are of little value, and to rank the value of different human lives on a hierarchical scale, with private lives at its lowest end. Nietzsche was after something similar when he wrote, ‘To live alone one must be a beast or a god, says Aristotle. Leaving out the third case: one must be both—a philosopher’.1 Plato may consider love of the individual as the lowest level in the philosopher's ascent to the Form, but does not, just for that reason, deny that individuals can be truly loved. He only claims, rightly or wrongly, that life is at its best when it is devoted to something else instead.
The Form of Beauty, then, may be more beautiful than everything else and the intensity of the true philosopher's love may dwarf our everyday feelings, but since erōs is essentially the desire for beauty, and erōs is certainly felt by everyone, beauty is not the exclusive property of the Form. It is, as both everyday experience and the Symposium itself tell us, a feature of the world around us. The philosophic lover does not reject the beauty of what he leaves behind as he rises toward the Form. Although he discovers beauties that exceed anything he has already seen, the beauty of what he leaves behind does not disappear; only its brilliance diminishes, as the moon's radiance wanes in the light of the sun.
When, having first been attracted by the beauty of a particular boy, the lover first discerns the beauty that is common to all bodies, Diotima says, he must ‘look down’ on his passion for one and think little of it.1 Doesn't he then cease to find the boy that started him on his way beautiful? No—because it is, without a doubt, the intensity of his passion for the boy and not the boy (nor perhaps even the passion) itself, from which he must turn away.1 That is, in fact, exactly what an important passage in the Republic (474c–475e), whose relevance to this issue has not been sufficiently noticed, suggests. Socrates here is trying to explain what a philosopher—a notion that is being introduced here for the first time—is and why philosophers are ideally suited to rule in the perfect city. He begins by describing Glaucon, with whom he is talking at this time, as ‘a lover of boys, an erotic man’ (philopais kai erōtikos). Men like Glaucon, he continues, always have a reason for finding every boy of the right age attractive: a snub nose is pert, a hooked nose regal, one that falls in‐between is perfectly proportioned; dark boys are manly, pale ones are children of the gods and as for being ‘honey‐yellow’, the word speaks for itself. Socrates may be speaking tongue‐in‐cheek here, but his point is serious: those who love the beauty of boys in general love the beauty of every individual beautiful boy; whether ‘true’ love is or is not exclusive in the manner that is canonical in our days is simply not an issue. And his point is serious because it allows him to introduce the idea that a lover of boys, like a lover of wine, of honour, of sights and sounds or a lover of wisdom (especially wisdom)—a philopais, a philoinos, a philotimos, a philotheamōn, a philēkoos or, finally and most important, a philosophos—is in love with everything, and neglects nothing, that belongs, so to speak, to the ‘field’ to which his desire is directed: the philosopher is a lover of all wisdom.
The lover of bodily beauty, then, does not abandon the boy who first sparked his desire—he loves all boys, as much as … Don Giovanni, who also has a different reason in each case, loves every woman! Nothing could be more surprising than this extraordinary convergence between Mozart's rogue and Plato's philosopher, unless it is the fact that Socrates' introduction of philosophy in the Republic and perhaps into Western thought as well is the actual source of Leporello's Catalogue of his master's conquests in Don Giovanni! The connection is established through Lucretius' De Rerum Natura, where Socrates' joke has already been given a heterosexual spin, through Molière, who translated Lucretius into Latin and inserted it in The Misanthrope, and Lorenzo da Ponte, Mozart's librettist, who derived the text for Don Giovanni from Molière.1
We should not allow this connection, however, to mislead us into thinking that Socrates is advocating a betrayal of the boy with whom the philosophic lover begins his ascent. Here I must disagree with A.W. Price, who thinks that at this stage the lover ‘is at least unfaithful to [the boy] and may desert him altogether’—although Price does not believe that the betrayal is sexual: ‘What is envisaged is not precisely sexual promiscuity: the lover was aim‐inhibited (as Freud would say) from the beginning, for his attachment to one body only produced words (210a7–8). Hence the only Don Juanism in question is one of attraction, not of gratification’.1 Price finds such ‘promiscuity’ in Socrates' own susceptibility to beauty as Alcibiades describes it in his own speech in the Symposium: ‘He's crazy about beautiful boys; he constantly follows them around in a perpetual daze’ (216d2–3). Yet even if we could describe Socrates as a lover of all bodies, his passion has nothing of infidelity: he never abandons one youth for another.1 The fact is that the second stage of the ascent makes contemporary readers uneasy, for we assume that people who love more than one ‘body’ must do so for selfish and exploitative reasons: so strongly are our intuitions shaped through the values of monogamy. There is then a strong temptation either to minimise the sexual contact involved or to convince ourselves that the lover is no longer interested in any particular body but only in body in the abstract—not a promising sexual object.1 But instead of thinking of the lover seducing as many beautiful boys as possible, we would do better to imagine him ‘giving birth to beautiful logoi’ with as many beautiful boys as possible. Instead of suspecting that seeing the beauty of the body leads him to betray his rightful lover (and, of course all the others as well), we would do better to insist that as long as he is wrapped up in one boy only he is depriving others of his advice. Unlike its modern readers, the Symposium pays no serious attention to the question whether the lover has sex with some, with most or even with all of them. Nothing, in any case, prevents a lover from continuing to have a favorite while seeking the company of other young men; Socrates is constantly in pursuit of the young (though in his case, as we have seen, sex is not what he is after) but Alcibiades—we know from the Symposium (213b–d), the Protagoras (309a–b) and the Gorgias (481d)—continues to have a special place in his life.
Nothing Plato has said so far implies that the philosophic lover discards the objects he meets on his way as he continues his ascent. That is as it should be. Although, for example, I consider Dostoevsky a far greater writer than Ian Rankin, I do not for that reason dislike Rankin's mysteries—nor did I, once I read Dostoevsky, stop reading mystery novels altogether. Although at moments Plato may have believed that it was wrong of me not to have done so, nowhere in the Symposium does he even suggest that it is wrong to love the lesser mysteries—only that those who do are not as happy as those who are devoted, say, to Crime and Punishment. As the Phaedo might have put it, the beauty the lover leaves behind neither withdraws nor is annihilated when a greater one emerges beyond it (102d–e).
Plato never even suggests that the lover who realises that the beauty of soul is ‘more valuable’ (210b7) than the body's also realises that he was wrong to have valued bodily beauty in the first place. Vlastos implies that he does: ‘At the next level, higher in value and still more energizing, [Plato] puts the love of mind for mind, expecting it to prove so much more intense than skin‐love that merely physical beauty will now strike the lover as a “small”, contemptible, thing’.1‘Contemptible’, though, is in my opinion much too strong as a translation of ‘smikron’, which is much closer to ‘negligible’ or ‘unimportant’.1 I know what it is to feel that to have loved some particular person was a mistake: that is not the feeling Plato attributes to the philosophic lover. In any case, the passage 210c5–6, to which Vlastos refers here, applies not to ‘the love of mind’ (the soul) but only to a higher stage of the ascent—to lovers who have already discerned the beauty of laws and institutions. Only then does sex become at most of secondary importance to the philosophic lover (though it is not yet completely abandoned—that, as we shall see, occurs only at a still higher level of the ascent). The ‘love of mind for mind’ is much more intimately tied to what Vlastos contemptuously dismisses as ‘skin‐love’.
More generally, the Symposium does not distinguish between the ‘physical’ and the ‘spiritual’ or the ‘mental’ nearly as starkly as we are often tempted to think. It is not even clear whether the desire to have children is absent from anyone, even from the most perfect philosopher. We can see this from the way in which Socrates tells us Diotima showed him that, however different their particular focus, all lovers are united by their desire to possess the beautiful (that is how erōs has been defined; see, e.g., 204d3) or, more precisely, by their desire ‘to give birth in beauty’ (206b, 207e). Every human being, she said, is pregnant both in body and in soul and wanting to give birth is part of our nature. It is important that Plato uses that expression, because it allows him to hold that neither pursuing fame (‘the lower mysteries’ of erōs) nor pursuing wisdom (‘the higher mysteries’) excludes the desire to have children of the most ordinary sort. How could he have thought that it does when Socrates, his model of the philosopher in the Symposium, was known to have had two sons with Xanthippe (and perhaps, if Diogenes Laertius is to be trusted, another son with Myrto, the daughter of Aristides the Just)?1 Giving birth, Diotima continues, is only possible in the presence of beauty and it is the only way in which mortal beings, which are in continuous change both in body and soul, unlike immortal things, which remain forever unchangingly the same, can approach immortality: for in giving birth they leave behind something that, being like them, perpetuates them. Biological reproduction is the easiest and least admirable way of self‐perpetuation and clearly the most common path to it.
Some people, though, are pregnant in their soul even more than in their body.1 Their desire for immortality manifests itself as a thirst for ‘immortal virtue and fame’ (208d). These people turn to paederasty1 and, in the company of a beautiful boy (beautiful, Plato implies, in both body and soul), produce beautiful logoi concerning virtue, especially the wisdom and temperance that are necessary for life in society. These are the children they are happiest to leave behind—‘more beautiful and more divine’, than any biological offspring and clearly preferable to them. The greatest instances of such logoi are the legacies of the great poets and legislators, which serve to improve both cities and citizens and win immortal fame and glory for their creators (209d). And above them, as we shall see in more detail in a moment, there are those who, striving directly for wisdom with no concern for fame or reputation and in the presence of Beauty itself, give birth to the most beautiful and most virtuous achievement of which human beings are capable.
Plato is not thinking in a vacuum. The motives of the three kinds lovers he introduces in the Symposium are the motives he distinguishes when he ‘divides’ the human soul in the Republic (434d ff.). Lovers of the beauty of the body are primarily motivated, like the class of artisans in the Republic, by their souls' appetitive desires. These are desires for, among other things, food, sex and shelter and they are common to, though not primary in, every human being—Plato does not believe that philosophers, say, leave them behind.1 Other desires, though, are not as widely shared and they are definitely not as strong in all as they are in some. In the Republic, these are, on the one hand, the desires of the thumos, the second (sometimes called the ‘spirited’) part of the soul, which loves victory and honor.1 These are just the motives that emerge in Socrates' description of the ‘lower mysteries’ in the Symposium, aiming at glory and fame. The third class of desires, on the other hand, belong to that part of the soul that aims at knowledge of the truth and loves learning and wisdom.1 These, of course, are the desires that move the philosophic lover, who is enthralled by the beauty of knowledge and virtue. Each part of the soul, the Republic tells us, has its own appropriate pleasure (581c) and each, we learn from the Symposium, has its own appropriate erōs. But since the pleasures of the soul, despite the fact that they differ immensely in degree, are still for all that pleasures, so the beauty of the objects of erōs, however humble in comparison to the beauty of the Form of Beauty itself, is still the same sort of beauty and, however dimly, a reflection the Form's light.1
The Form of beauty, then, may be the final, the highest, the purest and the most beautiful object of erōs, but that does not imply that nothing else is beautiful. Every lover loves beauty and secures some sort of immortality through it. The difference is one of degree, the philosophers' vision imparting beauty and goodness to every one of their actions and, by permeating every single aspect of their life, imbuing it completely with happiness.
Plato establishes the connection between beauty, goodness and happiness by means of one of the most radical and difficult steps in his gradual but startling transformation of erōs from an urge for reproduction to the practice of philosophy: his shift from considering erōs as a desire to possess beautiful things to the desire to create them. The transformation comes when Socrates introduces the idea that erōs is primarily a desire to give birth and reproduce in beauty, which we have already discussed. It is that idea which allows Plato eventually to argue that the philosopher, who gives birth in beauty itself‘does not give birth to images, since he is not in touch with an image, but to true virtue, since he is in touch with the truth’. And it such offspring that make the philosopher truly dear to the gods and bring him as close to immortality as it is possible for a human being to come (212a). Needless to say, difficult questions surround the connection between beauty and goodness—the conviction that if you love someone you will never do them (or yourself) harm, which is so crucial to Plato (204d–205b); but his transformation of erōs from possession to production, from desiring something external to bringing forth something from within, is no less baffling and obscure.1
To begin with, the very idea of possessing the object of one's love, with which Socrates begins his account of erõs (200a ff.) is suspect. It calls to mind a wish to dominate, exploit and manipulate, a lack of respect and regard that reinforces commonplaces about the ‘acquisitiveness’ and ‘egocentricity’ of Greek ethical thought. The desire to possess, one might say more generally, belongs to the consumer, not the lover; it reveals not love but its absence. How can we possibly want to own, and thus be free to use, what we value (as we say) for itself, not as a means but as an end? What would in that case distinguish us from the perverse character whose anatomy is given in John Fowles' novel, The Collector?
Possession, though, is not identical with ownership—or, if it is, it is ownership of a different kind: I may possess something as a detachable piece of property, losing which will have no effect on who I am, or as a genuine part of myself, which I can't lose without undergoing a serious change of my own.1 To possess something as love requires—a person or a work of art I want to treat not merely as a means but also as an end in itself—I must want possession to be a mutual affair: I want it to be mine as much as I want to be its own as well. To treat something as a means is to take my desires as given and expect it to satisfy them: I don't expect that what I want and value will change as a result of our interaction except accidentally—certainly not as a result of any desires or values it happens to have. But when I treat something as an end, I am willing to reconsider my desires and values as a result of taking its own desires and values into account. I treat it with respect. And I also make myself vulnerable to it—vulnerable in that I am allowing it to steer me in new directions I might not even have conceived without it. That is an essentially prospective commitment—a guess at the future and it expresses a desire not only to spend part of my life in the company of the object of my love but also an urge to get to know it better and see how it is likely to affect me (and how, in turn, I can affect it) best. And so the pursuit of knowledge is always an element of love and an attendant of beauty. For the god Erōs, Plato says, was conceived the day Aphrodite was born, and was himself born to follow and serve her; that's why he is ‘by nature’ a lover of beauty (203c). Erōs is always of beauty, never of ugliness (201a); no one can ever give birth in anything ugly, only in things of beauty (206c). It is, in fact, impossible to love something that strikes one as ugly (though others may find it so). I only know of one instance where such a case is possibly being envisaged: Shakespeare's Dark Lady sonnets, which just for that reason have caused no end of trouble to their readers.1
To love someone—not as a Christian loves God's children1—is inseparable from finding them beautiful. Love has already died when one day I am no longer moved by my lover's beauty, when I can look at her face dispassionately and measure, so to speak, the quality of her features. Love can survive the most bitter hatred—Catullus knew that1—but cannot live a moment with ugliness: hate is not its opposite; indifference is.1 I don't have in mind what is often called ‘inner’ beauty, assumed to be separate from the ‘external’ or the ‘physical’. Beauty is always manifested in a lover's appearance, and we are only making things easy for ourselves when we say that some people love each other not for their looks but for their kindness, their sensitivity or their intelligence instead. If, indeed, we love people on account of their features, the psychological, mental and moral qualities that may attract us to them are always apparent in their face and bearing, literally in how they look to us. The ‘inner’ cannot be separated from the ‘outer’, as Isabel Allende's memoir, Paula, so powerfully illustrates.1 It is the same with Emma Bovary. When she finds herself interested once again in her sad and mediocre husband because he expects to perform an operation that will make him famous and give them the life she has always dreamed of, she notices, ‘with some surprise, that his teeth were not at all unsightly’. When, naturally, Charles botches the operation, Emma is bitterly disappointed and as a result ‘everything about him exasperated her now, his face, his clothes, what he did not say, his entire being, his very existence’.1
It was one of Plato's most startling and original insights to see that love impels forward while beauty beckons—in space, toward another object, in time, toward the future.
But since it is impossible to know in advance what beauty promises to yield, when I act on what is no more than a promise of something valuable but still unknown I am taking a serious risk, for I don't now know how I will change as a result and whether the change will be for the better or for the worse. And so part of what I undertake when I try to make something mine is to come to know it as well as I can, in order to understand what it is and see how it will affect me and what it will be able to give me. To love something is always, in part, to try to understand what makes it beautiful, what drew me and, as long as I still love it, continues to draw me toward it.
Consider, in the first instance, a work of art. To be overwhelmed by the beauty of In Search of Lost Time, as I am, is not simply to experience certain feelings in reading it. It is also to be willing, literally, to devote part of my life to it—not just to read it (although that will certainly be part of it) but also to come to know it better, to understand it, to see what Proust accomplishes in this work. For that, I need to learn (as I have tried to do) about Proust more generally, about the social, cultural and political situation in Paris between the end of the 19th century and the first years of the 20th, to improve my French, to understand more about the Dreyfus affair, antisemitism and homosexuality, about the history of the French novel and the novel more generally, including its social origins, to look at Vermeer, to listen to Debussy and much else besides. That, in turn, is not only a matter of sitting alone in my study. It involves meeting people I would have not met before, learning things I would not have otherwise learnt, traveling to new places—spending part of my life in ways I couldn't have imagined without having been led to them by Proust. All that belongs to my love for the novel, which is inseparable from my effort to understand it and, in fact, to see it as no one else has ever seen it before—that is what ‘making it mine’ finally comes to. In other words, my love for the novel is necessarily expressed in an urge to interpret it and to continue to do so as long as it attracts me, as long as I still feel that there is more to it than I have seen so far. And as long as I am still trying to interpret it, the more various the things to which I will relate it in order to understand it, to see how it accomplishes something that nothing else had accomplished before.
There is, in other words, no difference between delving more deeply into the novel and wandering more widely into the rest of the world—the more I bring to my understanding of the novel, the more the things in the world to which I relate it, the better I can see how it is different from and how it resembles them and recognise its specific accomplishment, the features that distinguish it from everything else. The better, that is, I come to see how it is in itself, in its own right. To the extent that being involved with it has changed my life, that book has come to possess me; to the extent that I have found something new and unusual in it, I have made it mine; and, to that extent, I have become new and unusual myself.
The same is true of love for persons. When I want to make someone I love mine I also want her to want to make me her own as well. I am willing to allow her characteristics, many of which I don't yet know, influence who I will be and I want her to let features of mine help shape her future. More important—and here the risk seems greatest—I am willing for us to influence each other by means of characteristics that do not yet exist but will come into being only as a result of our interaction. How can anyone know where such a process is likely to lead?
The kinds of things we love—persons and objects both—and our reasons for loving them and finding them beautiful determine and, express, a large part of our character. To find something beautiful, I have been saying, involves the sense that life will be more worthwhile if that beautiful object were to become part of it. But I have said nothing about what makes life worthwhile and unlike Plato, who thinks that this is in all cases moral virtue, I don't even think that there is anything both general and informative to say about it. The best I can do, which is also to beg every question, is to say that in the ideal case the various paths we have followed through life on account of the things we have loved and what we have come to understand about them will gradually transform us too into something that no one has seen before and that is itself worthy of love, attention and admiration in its own right—into something beautiful.
The possibility that the pursuit of beauty may lead to its creation is one of the most important truths that motivate Plato's identification of erõs with the desire to give birth in beauty—both with a reaction to something that already exists and with the urge to bring something new into the world. And since he thinks that beauty and goodness are so closely connected, he is not nearly as troubled by the risks inherent in that pursuit as I am. For me, though, there is no guarantee that the things I find beautiful will lead me either to a good or a successful life. And even if they do, it will always be possible to say that instead of immersing myself in Plato or Proust I should have worked for Oxfam instead. Yet here, too, the problems persist: how do I know what that would have led to in the long run—what, for example, if I had ended up embezzling their funds?
In any event, wherever love and beauty are present there is also the effort to understand what we love or, what comes to the same thing, to understand why we love it. As long as love persists, no answer will ever be complete; as long as something still strikes me as beautiful, the sense that there is something about it that is still worth coming to know and celebrate—that there is more to love—remains. That is why judgments of beauty are always at least partly prospective and why the most beautiful things always seem inexhaustible.
This forward‐looking element in the perception of beauty, the sense that beautiful things are constantly drawing us further, is one of the great revelations of the Symposium. I have described the movement—the beckoning of beauty, the impetus of love—both as an absorbed immersion in the beautiful object itself and, simultaneously, as an expanding vision of the world to which it belongs. Plato describes it as an ascent. Does that ascent leave the object with which it begins behind? Does beauty, in drawing us further, also draw us away from what sparked its pursuit?
The path to the Form, Socrates says, begins with the beauty of a particular boy in whose company a man gives birth to beautiful logoi (210a4–9). These logoi—to repeat: pieces of advice, accounts, arguments, poems, laws, and their results—are to Plato's scheme what new understandings and interpretations as well as their consequences are to mine, except that Plato is convinced that as a result of their interaction both lovers change for the better. If the lover has a bent for philosophy, there comes a point when he realises ‘that the beauty of any one body is sibling to the beauty of any other and that … the beauty of all bodies is one and the same’ (210a8–b3). How he comes to that realisation is not something Plato explains—we can only guess. One guess, then, is the following. Pressed forward by erōs, which, like every desire, is directed at what is not already possessed (199e–201c), the philosophic lover tries to make the boy's beauty more completely his. But what distinguishes the philosophic lover from the lovers of the lower mysteries, who desire glory and fame, is that for him the desire to possess beauty is inseparable from the desire to understand it, to understand, that is, why he loves it, what makes it beautiful. And what he finds, for Platonic reasons we may leave aside for now, is that what makes this boy's body beautiful, and explains why he loves him, is what makes all beautiful bodies beautiful, what they all have in common. He now becomes a lover of all beautiful bodies (210b)—he surrounds himself with beautiful boys, though he remains, as far as I can tell, in the company of the first: his contempt for the ‘wild gaping after just one’ may be prompted simply by the realisation that being concerned with the first boy does not exclude being concerned with others as well, not that being concerned with others excludes being concerned with the first. The image of an older man surrounded by and always in pursuit of beautiful boys—recall what we know of Socrates in this connection!—is much more satisfying than the image of one who, after spending time with a particular boy, abandons boys altogether for the impersonal feature their bodies have in common.1
The process continues. A still more philosophic lover will now understand that the beauty of the soul is superior to the beauty of the body (210b–c). Two things are worth noting here. First, since the lover is still focused on an individual, it is reasonable to think that his focus was also on individuals when, at the previous stage, he turned to the beauty of the body in general. Second, bodily beauty remains relevant. The lover will be happy with a boy whose soul is beautiful ‘even if he is only slightly blooming in his body’. The qualification is concessive but positive. Plato has no sympathy for the commonplace of the beautiful soul trapped in a wizened body: the external and the internal interact. Like everything else in the world, he writes in the Republic (401a), bodies can be graceful or inelegant, shapely or unshapely; inelegance and lack of rhythm or harmony are indications of an evil character while their opposites are indications of a character that is temperate and good.
Once again, Plato does not say what leads the lover to that realisation. We must guess once again. My own tentative guess, which takes a cue from the connection between bodily and psychic beauty we were just discussing, is that since the beauty of soul or character, as I suggested earlier, is manifested in the body, it affects the lover's perception and allows him to find the person he loves not only, say, wise, sensitive or kind but also good‐looking. In addition to the passage above, a view of that sort may be suggested by the statement that while a good body does not affect the quality of the soul a good soul renders the body as good as it can be (Rep. 403d) and an aside to the effect that it is not possible to cure the body if something is wrong with it without curing the soul (156e–157a). Although the evidence for that guess is slight, it has one great advantage: it allows the same reasoning to apply to the soul that earlier applied to the body. Just as the lover was led to the beauty of body in general by asking what makes one body beautiful, so now he is led to the soul by asking what makes the body in general beautiful, the soul providing an explanation for the beauty of body in general. That, incidentally, is also Plotinus' view of the relationship between the beauty of the body and the beauty of the soul: ‘It is the soul’, he writes, ‘that makes every body that is called ‘beautiful’ what it is’.1 The questions continue: What makes the soul beautiful? The lover, in the company of the boys his love aims to improve, realises that the greatest effect is due to law and custom, to occupations and institutions—in a word, to the culture within which human beings are born and grow. Beautiful souls are the products of beautiful cultures, whose own beauty, too, is all of one and the same kind (210c). At that point—and at that point only—the lover comes to think that the beauty of the body is not only inferior to the beauty of the soul but of little importance overall. And now the philosophical question can be asked again: when are laws and institutions beautiful? What makes them so? When, as Plato sees it, do they lead unerringly to virtue and the good life? The answer is, when they have been established not haphazardly and as tradition would have them but on the basis of knowledge (or science: epistēmē, 210c–d)—precisely the knowledge for which Socrates had been searching in Plato's elenctic dialogues and the structure of which the Republic articulates in such grand detail.
It is now, as the lover is looking at the beauty of the sciences, that he sees a great expanse, a great ‘sea of beauty’ and stops caring for the beauty that is present in one thing only. Is Plato here, in marking a turn toward the Forms, which are the objects of knowledge and responsible for its own beauty, also turning away from any attachment to individuals? Yes, but only in part. He writes that the lover is no longer moved by ‘the beauty of a single thing, satisfied like a menial servant (oiketēs) with the beauty of a boy, a man or a single kind of behavior, contemptible like a slave (douleuōn) and of no consequence’ (210d). His language, which recalls Pausanias' earlier description of the lover's imploring for a boy's favors, eager ‘to provide services (douleias) even a slave (doulos) would refuse’ (183a), seems to me to suggest at least that at this stage (but no earlier) the lover is no longer interested in sex and perhaps that he no longer has a special relationship with any particular boy. But we have no reason for thinking that the lover is no longer interested in interacting with the beautiful boys who have become his companions or in expanding his circle—exactly like Socrates, who, Alcibiades will soon be telling the company, ‘is crazy (erōtikōs diakeitai) about beautiful boys and constantly follows them around in a perpetual daze’ (216d). The ‘gloriously beautiful’logoi to which this truly philosophical lover gives birth (210d) are not first reached by him in isolation and only then (contingently, so to speak) communicated to others. Although, like everyone else, the philosopher needs time alone for his studies, surely part of his activity consists of his dialectical interaction with his circle. Becoming aware that they are beautiful for the same reason that so many other things in the world are beautiful, allowing his love to encompass everything that manifests, to some degree, the intelligible order of the Forms, need not in any way interfere with his concern for them. The philosopher does not pay for the expansion of his vision with a countervailing blindness.1
On the contrary, he finally grasps the cause of the beauty of the Forms—the Form of beauty itself—which is also the ultimate cause of the beauty of absolutely everything in the world; in a serious sense, as the philosopher gains a vision of the Form of beauty, he falls in love with the world itself. That is the beauty the contemplation of which is the only thing that makes human life worth living, if anything does |
.S. military doctrine. A “first strike” attack has always been central to U.S. military planning, until recently, however, there was no guarantee that such an attack would so cripple an opponent that it would be unable—or unwilling, given the consequences of total annihilation— to retaliate.
The strategy behind a first strike—sometimes called a “counter force” attack—is not to destroy an opponent’s population centers, but to eliminate the other sides’ nuclear weapons, or at least most of them. Anti-missile systems would then intercept a weakened retaliatory strike.
The technical breakthrough that suddenly makes this a possibility is something called the “super-fuze”, which allows for a much more precise ignition of a warhead. If the aim is to blow up a city, such precision is superfluous, but taking out a reinforced missile silo requires a warhead to exert a force of at least 10,000 pounds per square inch on the target.
Up until the 2009 modernization program, the only way to do that was to use the much more powerful—but limited in numbers—W88 warhead. Fitted with the super-fuze, however, the smaller W76 can now do the job, freeing the W88 for other targets.
Traditionally, land-based missiles are more accurate than sea-based missiles, but the former are more vulnerable to a first-strike than the latter, because submarines are good at hiding. The new super-fuze does not increase the accuracy of Trident II submarine missiles, but it makes up for that with the precision of where the weapon detonates. “In the case of the 100-kt Trident II warhead,” write the three scientists, “the super-fuze triples the killing power of the nuclear force it is applied to.”
Before the super-fuze was deployed, only 20 percent of U.S. subs had the ability to destroy re-enforced missile silos. Today, all have that capacity.
Trident II missiles typically carry from four to five warheads, but can expand that up to eight. While the missile is capable of hosting as many as 12 warheads, that configuration would violate current nuclear treaties. U.S. submarines currently deploy about 890 warheads, of which 506 are W76s and 384 are W88s.
The land-based ICBMs are Minuteman III, each armed with three warheads—400 in total—ranging from 300 kt to 500 kt apiece. There are also air and sea-launched nuclear tipped missiles and bombs. The Tomahawk cruise missiles that recently struck Syria can be configured to carry a nuclear warhead.
The super-fuze also increases the possibility of an accidental nuclear conflict.
So far, the world has managed to avoid a nuclear war, although during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis it came distressingly close. There have also been several scary incidents when U.S. and Soviet forces went to full alert because of faulty radar images or a test tape that someone thought was real. While the military downplays these events, former Secretary of Defense William Perry argues that it is pure luck that we have avoided a nuclear exchange, and that the possibility of nuclear war is greater today than it was at the height of the Cold War.
In part, this is because of a technology gap between the U.S. and Russia.
In January 1995, Russian early warning radar on the Kola Peninsula picked up a rocket launch from a Norwegian island that looked as if it was targeting Russia. In fact, the rocket was headed toward the North Pole, but Russian radar tagged it as a Trident II missile coming in from the North Atlantic. The scenario was plausible. While some first strike attacks envision launching a massive number of missiles, others call for detonating a large warhead over a target at about 800 miles altitude. The massive pulse of electro-magnetic radiation that such an explosion generates would blind or cripple radar systems over a broad area. That would be followed with a first strike.
At the time, calmer heads prevailed,, and the Russians called off their alert, but for a few minutes the doomsday clock moved very close to midnight.
According to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the 1995 crisis suggests that Russia does not have “a reliable and working global space-based satellite early warning system.” Instead, Moscow has focused on building ground-based systems that give the Russians less warning time than satellite-based ones do. What that means is that while the U.S. would have about 30 minutes warning time to investigate whether an attack was really taking place, the Russians would have 15 minutes or less.
That, according to the magazine, would likely mean that “Russian leadership would have little choice but to pre-delegate nuclear launch authority to lower levels of command,” hardly a situation that would be in the national security interests of either country.
Or, for that matter, the world.
A recent study found that a nuclear war between India and Pakistan using Hiroshima-sized weapons would generate a nuclear winter that would make it impossible to grow wheat in Russia and Canada and cut the Asian Monsoon’s rainfall by 10 percent. The result would be up to 100 million deaths by starvation. Imagine what the outcome would be if the weapons were the size used by Russia, China or the U.S.
For the Russians, the upgrading of U.S. sea-based missiles with the super-fuze would be an ominous development. By “shifting the capacity to submarines that can move to missile launch positions much closer to their targets than land-based missiles,” the three scientists conclude, “the U.S. military has achieved a significantly greater capacity to conduct a surprise first strike against Russian ICBM silos.”
The U.S. Ohio class submarine is armed with 24 Trident II missiles, carrying as many as 192 warheads. The missiles can be launched in less than a minute.
The Russians and Chinese have missile-firing submarines as well, but not as many and some are close to obsolete. The U.S. has also seeded the world’s oceans and seas with networks of sensors to keep track of those subs. In any case, would the Russians or Chinese retaliate if they knew that the U.S. still retained most of its nuclear strike force? Faced with a choice committing national suicide or holding their fire, they may well choose the former.
The other element in this modernization program that has Russia and China uneasy is the decision by the Obama administration to place anti-missile systems in Europe and Asia, and to deploy Aegis ship-based anti missile systems off the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. From Moscow’s perspective—and Beijing’s as well—those interceptors are there to absorb the few missiles that a first strike might miss.
In reality, anti-missile systems are pretty iffy. Once they migrate off the drawing boards, their lethal efficiency drops rather sharply. Indeed, most of them can’t hit the broad side of a barn. But that is not a chance the Chinese and the Russians can afford to take.
Speaking at the St. Petersburg International Forum in June 2016, Russian President Valdimir Putin charged that U.S. anti-missile systems in Poland and Rumania were not aimed at Iran, but Russia and China. “The Iranian threat does not exist, but missile defense systems continue to be positioned—a missile defense system is one element of the whole system of offensive military potential.”
The danger here is that arms agreements will begin to unravel if countries decide that they are suddenly vulnerable. For the Russians and the Chinese, the easiest solution to the American breakthrough is to build a lot more missiles and warheads, and treaties be dammed.
The new Russian cruise missile may indeed strain the Intermediate Nuclear Force Treaty, but it is also a natural response to what are, from Moscow’s view, alarming technological advances by the U.S. Had the Obama administration reversed the 2002 decision by George W. Bush’s administration to unilaterally withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the new cruise might never have been deployed.
There are a number of immediate steps that the U.S. and the Russians could take to de-escalate the current tensions. First, taking nuclear weapons off their hair-trigger status, which would immediately reduce the possibility of accidental nuclear war. That could be followed by a pledge of “no first use” of nuclear weapons.
If this does not happen, it will almost certainly result in an accelerated nuclear arms race. “I don’t know how this is all going to end,” Putin told the St. Petersburg delegates. “What I do know is that we will need to defend ourselves.”Description
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CONTAINS: Eggs (Soy Free & GMO Free). Made In A Facility That Processed Tree Nuts.TORONTO – With the benefit of hindsight, Anthony Johnson is able to admit he wasn’t mentally prepared for his first venture into a UFC championship fight. He’s been granted a second chance, though, and he said he intends on making the most of it.
When Johnson (22-5 MMA, 13-5 UFC) first clashed with Daniel Cormier (18-1 MMA, 7-1 UFC) for the UFC light heavyweight title at UFC 187 in May 2015, “Rumble” said his focus and hunger wasn’t all there. He was originally supposed to fight Jon Jones at the event, but when the fight fell apart, he ended up fighting Cormier for the then-vacant belt.
The bout didn’t go Johnson’s way. Despite hurting Cormier with strikes more than once, he was unable to finish the fight and ended up succumbing to a third-round submission. He gets a shot at redemption at UFC 206 later this year, though, and Johnson said he’s not going to let anything distract or deter him from leaving with the title.
“I’m hungry,” Johnson told MMAjunkie. “I wasn’t as hungry the first time because the opponent got changed up at the last minute, so it kind of threw me for a loop. This time I just plan on going out there and fighting. Why worry about who it is? Why worry about the crowd? Why worry about all the hype? I just want to fight.”
UFC 206 takes place Dec. 10 at Air Canada Centre in Toronto. The main card airs on pay-per-view following prelims on FS1 and UFC Fight Pass, though the bout order hasn’t been finalized.
Johnson, No. 3 in the latest USA TODAY Sports/MMAjunkie MMA light heavyweight rankings, wanted his rematch with No. 2-ranked Cormier to take place at UFC 205 next month in New York City. The timing didn’t work out for champ “DC,” though, and it was set for a later date. Johnson wasn’t thrilled about that, he said, but understands there’s upside in headlining his own card rather than his fight being lost in the shuffle of the insanely stacked UFC 205 lineup.
“Daniel wasn’t pushing for the New York card either, so I kind of knew it wasn’t going to happen,” Johnson said. “He kept talking about Dec. 30, so I was down for fighting whenever after New York. It really didn’t matter. At this point, I just want to fight for the title – it doesn’t matter if it’s in somebody’s backyard.”
Johnson and Cormier have a respectful yet tension-filled relationship. They embraced at the post-fight news conference following their first meeting, but once Johnson delivered a 13-second knockout of Glover Teixeira at UFC 202 in August and it became obvious a rematch was going to happen, attitudes started to flare.
From Johnson’s perspective, there’s no real hard feelings toward Cormier outside of the fact he simply has an item in his possession that Johnson wants for himself.
“We talk a lot,” Johnson said. “He’s a talker. I’m not much of a talker, but I can talk it. It was fun. It’s all love and respect, but Dec. 10 I have to hate him. I have to beat him up. I have to take what he has.”
One of the things Cormier has talked about in regards to his UFC 206 rematch with Johnson is how he is looking to end the fight with a knockout.
Let's bang then! Let's see how you handle getting hit as much as ur hitting someone. Ima fold you up! https://t.co/LtAB2eQ3Ii — Daniel Cormier (@dc_mma) October 6, 2016
Cormier was victorious by submission in their first clash, but searching for a different result could be costly, especially because Johnson is one of the most devastating power strikers in MMA history.
“I believe he is a man of his word; I believe he’s going to try and trade with me, but at the end of the day he is a wrestler,” Johnson said. “I’m going to make him have to wrestle me. Because if I hit him with a better shot than I hit him with last time, he’s in for a long night.
“I look forward to seeing what Daniel can do. I look forward to seeing what I can do against Daniel. It’ll be very interesting.”
Johnson said it’s going to take a complete performance to take the belt from Cormier. Of course there’s the chance he could connect with an early blow that shuts the champion’s lights off, but he said he can’t rely on his power and must be prepared for the worst-case scenario, which would be a grueling 25-minute fight. He said he hopes Cormier is doing the same.
“We’ll see what happens,” Johnson said. “Daniel’s smart. If he stays out of the way of my fists and my feet, he might live.”
For more on UFC 206, check out the UFC Rumors section of the site.The former DC Republican Party chairman Ron Phillips has told Britain’s Sky News that U.S. Republican frontrunner Donald Trump is “almost Churchillian”, claiming that not everyone in the establishment wing of the party is anti-Trump. He said: “I think there’s many of us who want to embrace Trump”.
Speaking to Sky’s Jeremy Thompson, Mr. Phillips said: “You know, Donald Trump is a first time candidate running for office and one of the things you’re seeing that’s a great occurrence in American politics in 2016 is that Americans are turning more towards the non-politicians. Somebody who isn’t a professional speaker or a professional politician such as a governor or a U.S. senator. So there’s a large vast reservoir of goodwill towards any candidate who’s out for the first time trying to make a difference.
He went on: “I’ve said it many times before – Donald Trump’s more than a candidate, he’s an actual movement. So there is going to be the ability for him to make a mis-step and be forgiven, and we’ve seen that time and time again.”
Smashing apart the narrative being peddled on UK news stations, Mr. Phillips said of Mr. Trump’s comments on abortion: “[W]ho did Donald Trump upset? Donald Trump upset women who support abortion rights, which he was already opposed to. So his statements today, although I think he is re-couching them and trying to clarify them, he didn’t make a statement to upset a new group who once supported him and will now not support him. He made another bold statement to a group that’s already opposed to him. So it’s just another case where, I know the media wants to say: ‘This is it! He’s almost done!’”
Mr. Phillips called the Trump movement the “new American French revolution”, stating “there is a tremendous grassroots movement across the country that cannot be accurately polled, it cannot be accurately gauged. There are people who are not honestly telling people how they are voting. There’s just an unseemly sense of anger that is in the political electorate today. And you’re having an extraordinary moment in American politics where it’s just literally a grassroots uprising. From the standpoint of those of us who actually are in Washington DC, we do want change, we do want a better government, but this is very unconventional in how it’s happening.”
Mr Thompson, the interviewer, insisted that the establishment Republican Party doesn’t want Mr. Trump as the candidate, a view held by most, but one which Mr. Phillips was keen to stress does not apply absolutely to all members of the political establishment.
“I disagree,” he said.
“I think there’s many of us who want to embrace Trump. I think he’s bringing a new level of excitement to the Republican Party. He has a tremendous cross-over appeal to non-traditional voters as well as Democrat voters like no-one else we’ve seen in the last 20 years.
“I want to be able to say, that would be of interest to your [British] viewers, it’s almost Churchillian, on how he’s basically able to go into both political parties and pull people together towards him.
“Again, Trump is more about a movement, a change than he is about an individual candidate.”
WATCH:When allegations of plagiarism exploded in early 2013, Chris Spence lost his sterling reputation and his job leading Canada’s largest school board. Last year, he was stripped of his teaching licence, and in June, a University of Toronto tribunal recommended his PhD be revoked.
Former TDSB education director Chris Spence is fighting back against a U of T ruling that would rescind his PhD thesis for plagiarism. ( STEVE RUSSELL / TORONTO STAR FILE PHOTO )
But Spence, disgraced former director of the Toronto District School Board, continues to fight back. On Thursday, his lawyers will appeal the June decision by an independent tribunal at U of T, which found him guilty of plagiarism in his dissertation, and recommended he lose his PhD and be expelled. That ruling was made after the tribunal was presented with 67 examples of passages in Spence’s paper that were not properly credited to others or cited as sources.
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But Spence’s notice of appeal argues the tribunal erred by failing to grant an adjournment when he was unable to attend the proceedings for medical reasons. As a result, Spence was “denied the opportunity to present a full defence,” says the notice. It alleges potential bias on the part of the tribunal chair, a conflict of interest by the university’s law firm and concludes the penalty recommended “was excessive” and didn’t properly consider Spence’s circumstances or less severe options. Spence, currently living in Chicago, is not required or expected to attend the Thursday appeal, his lawyer Darryl Singer said in an email. The U of T hearing in June came after years of procedural delays by Spence’s previous lawyers. When Spence did not appear, his lawyer at the time, Carol Shirtliff-Hinds, requested yet another postponement, arguing she was concerned for his mental state and was unable to get clear instructions from him about his defence. That request was denied. Spence also cited medical reasons last year when he didn’t appear in front of the Ontario College of Teachers disciplinary committee, which later imposed its harshest penalty by revoking his teaching licence.
Spence has filed an appeal of that decision through Ontario divisional court. The fallout has been going on for almost five years since the first allegations in January 2013 that Spence had lifted passages of other writers’ work without crediting them in newspaper articles, including in the Star, as well as blogs and books.
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Spence has had some loyal supporters who cite his dedication to students, particularly at-risk youth, and argue the penalty imposed by the college was too harsh. However, a crowdfunding website launched last spring as part of what was dubbed “the Spence Defence” to help cover legal costs fell far short of its goal. “I’m not involved any more,” said Bruce Davis, a former TDSB chair who conducted an interview posted online last May as part of the “Let Spence Teach” campaign. “I still believe the (Ontario College of Teachers) punishment was disproportionate. Really, Chris has got to take the lead to defend his reputation.”CLOSE Led by the same organization that created the Women's March on Washington, this time the group is urging women to refrain from any kind of labor or spending to show the value of women on March 8, 2017. USA TODAY NETWORK
Marchers make their way through the Capital South Metro Station with hundreds of other marchers as they make their way to the Women's March on Washington in January. (Photo: Kyle Grantham, The News Journal)
The Women's March on Washington galvanized women across the globe and gave voice to a rising political force on a history-making day. More than 2 million people took to the streets in Washington, D.C., and cities small and large on Jan. 21 to protest a new administration they fear will roll back civil, human and reproductive rights.
Will that voice thunder again?
On Wednesday, International Women's Day, the organizers behind the January march are planning a showing of economic solidarity in walkouts, rallies and marches dubbed A Day Without a Woman.
Here's what you need to know:
What is International Women's Day?
International Women's Day, March 8, is a day meant to tout the social, economic, cultural and political successes of women while urging more gender equality. The first women's day was in 1909 (but in February) when 15,000 women marched through the streets of New York demanding improved pay, shorter hours and voting rights.
What is the International Women's Strike?
The strike is planned and organized by women in more than 50 countries to promote issues facing women who are marginalized. Among them: gender violence, reproductive freedom, labor rights, environmental protections
What is A Day Without a Woman?
The organizers behind January's March on Washington are using Wednesday as a day of action to spotlight the economic power and value of women and their contributions to society in paid and unpaid labor. Organizers hope to call attention to economic injustices women face such as lower wages, gender discrimination, sexual harassment and job insecurities. The day is also intended to push for gender justice, recognizing that trans and gender non-conforming people face equally compelling issues of discrimination and marginalization.
Are the Women's Strike and A Day Without a Woman the same thing?
Organizers of the January Women's march and A Day Without a Woman are working in solidarity with activists behind the International Women's Strike.
How can you participate?
Women are encouraged to not work, whether your job is paid or unpaid.
Women are being asked to avoid shopping in stores and online — except for local small businesses and women-owned companies that support A Day Without a Woman.
Women are urged to wear the color red.
Why wear red?
Organizers say they selected the color red to represent "revolutionary love and sacrifice." Red also has a history with the labor movement.
Can men participate?
Yes. Men are being asked to help with caregiving and other domestic chores on Wednesday. They are also being encouraged to rally for equal pay and other workplace issues for women.
What if you can't take the day off?
"Many women in our most vulnerable communities will not have the ability to join the strike, due to economic insecurity. We strike for them," organizers note on their website. If women can't strike, they are encouraged to wear something red in a show of solidarity.
Can businesses have a role?
Companies can participate by closing for the day or letting female workers have the day off. Business are also being asked to examine policies regarding pay equity and paid leave.
What about private households?
Heads of households are being encouraged to give a paid day off to caregivers, nannies and housekeepers.
Are there any rallies you can attend?
There are many rallies planned across the country, including: New York; San Francisco; Philadelphia; Pittsburgh; Washington, D.C.; Ann Arbor, Mich.; St. Petersburg, Fla.; Raleigh, N.C.; ; Portland, Ore. Some colleges, such as Rutgers University in New Jersey, are also staging walkouts and marches.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2n6OUcHThe woman said she was having contractions (Archive picture: Getty)
A man has been cleared of raping his pregnant girlfriend while she was in labour.
He had been accused of attacking his partner while she was on all fours in pain from contractions, justifying it by saying he ‘felt horny’.
But the man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, has been found not guilty after a jury at Hull Crown Court took half an hour to return their verdict.
Prosecutors had argued that the woman went into the advanced stages of labour around 11.30pm, but when her partner woke up he said seeing her on hands and knees trying to relieve the pain was turning him on.
Michael Greenhalgh told the court: ‘He saw her naked on all fours and said “I feel horny”, to which she replied “are you serious?”. The defendant then got behind her and started having sex with her.’
The case was heard at Hull Crown Court Picture: Google)
Despite her shouting for him to stop, he said the man ignored this and carried on.
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After the alleged attack, prosecutors said he offered to run her a bath before she was taken to hospital to give birth four hours later.
The couple had been together for seven years at the time of the allegations.
Following the baby’s birth, the man’s partner went to stay with her mother because the heating at the couple’s property was broken. After returning home to him, though, she decided to report the alleged rape to her family and police.
Mr Greenhalgh said initial texts between the pair after their baby’s birth were of affection and excitement because of their child and trying to look to the future, but that the tone soon changed when she went back home.
‘Firstly, she was back in the bedroom where this happened, which is a stark and uncomfortable reminder to her,’ Mr Greenhalgh said.
‘And, he behaved in an inappropriate way with the new baby.
‘The child is crying and he wouldn’t let her pick the child up and refers to it as a “spoilt little sh*t”. It was at that point she decided she couldn’t forget what has happened.’
The man denied the pair had sex throughout the trial.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Speaking in 2013, she told the BBC's Rob Smith about her role in Doctor Who
Former Dynasty star Kate O'Mara has died at the age of 74, her agent said.
The British actress was best known for her role as sister to Joan Collins' Alexis Colby in the US soap.
She also had prominent roles in the '80s series Howards' Way and Triangle, and in Doctor Who.
Her agent said she died in a Sussex nursing home following a short illness.
He praised her "energy and vitality" and her "love for theatre and acting".
Image copyright Getty Images
"A shining star has gone out and Kate will be dearly missed by all who knew and have worked with her," said agent Phil Belfield, who labelled the actress "extraordinary".
O'Mara's first television roles were in the 1960s, but she came to public attention playing the manipulative Cassandra "Caress" Morrell in Dynasty.
Co-star Joan Collins tweeted: "Tragic news about Kate O'Mara, we had great fun on Dynasty when she played my sister Caress... RIP."
O'Mara played a ruthless businesswoman in BBC drama Howards' Way and was briefly a regular on the North Sea ferry drama Triangle.
She also appeared in Doctor Who, opposite both Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy, as renegade Time Lord The Rani - a role she said she would love to return to.
"If you put a much older woman in Doctor Who, they can identify with it," she told Digital Spy ahead of the 50th anniversary celebrations for the show, where she tweeted images of herself with former co-stars.
"I think it's quite an interesting concept and if you remember things like Grimm's Fairytales, the older woman is often the villainess, often the terrifying figure - why I do not know, but often she is. I think it's an idea to be exploited."
Image copyright PA Image caption In 1976, she joined Ernie Wise and Eric Morecambe on their long-running show
Image copyright PA Image caption Speaking at the 50th anniversary celebrations, O'Mara said she would love to return as Doctor Who villain The Rani
Image copyright Other Image caption The actress played Lady Windermere in Lord Arthur Savile's Crime alongside Lee Mead in 2010
Image copyright Getty Images Image caption O'Mara and fellow Dynasty star Joan Collins met the Queen at a Diamond Jubilee event celebrating the arts in 2012
On hearing the news of her death, Doctor Who co-star Baker tweeted: "Oh my goodness. Kate O'Mara is no longer with us. Sad sad news. A delightful, committed and talented lady and actress. We are the poorer."
In the 1990s, O'Mara starred in BBC comedy Absolutely Fabulous as Joanna Lumley's on-screen sister Jackie, and in 2001, she made a string of appearances in ITV drama Bad Girls.
More recently she had appeared in ITV soap Benidorm and a 2012 stage adaptation of Agatha Christie's Death On The Nile.
One of her final public appearances saw her hosting An Evening With Kate O'Mara in London last October.
She published two autobiographies and two novels, When She Was Bad and Good Time Girl.
She was married to actors Richard Willis and Jeremy Young and leaves a sister, actress Belinda Carroll. Her son Dickon died last year.
The actress last posted a message on Twitter on 17 March.
"Thank you so much for your kind tweets," she wrote.
"It's both humbling and completely overwhelming to read all of your messages. Much Love x."The current model of selling commercial enterprise software is broken, charged the CEO for Red Hat. It is too expensive, doesn't address user needs and, worst of all, it leaves chief information officers holding all the risk of implementing new systems.
"The business models between customer and vendors are fundamentally broken," said Jim Whitehurst, speaking Wednesday at the Interop conference in New York. "Vendors have to guess at what [customers] want, and there is a mismatch of what customers want and what they get. Creating feature wars is not what the customer is looking for."
Of course, being an executive of an open-source software company, Whitehurst would naturally be critical of the standard model of software sales, and he has spoken critically of the model in the past. In his presentation at Interop, however, he also discussed how cloud computing could offer a break from this routine, depending on how it is implemented.
"People say [they are interested in the] cloud but what they are really espousing are frustrations with existing IT business models," Whitehurst said in an interview with IDG News Service after the presentation.
Whitehurst kicked off his talk by asking a seemingly simple question: "Why are costs of IT going up when the underlying costs to deliver those services halves every 18 months?" The cost of computing should come down, he reasoned, thanks to improving processing speeds and storage capacities. New, more powerful development tools and frameworks should also ease the cost of deployment. Yet IT expenditures continue to go up by about 3 percent to 5 percent a year.
The answer to his question is that "it's the vendors and how we are delivering [IT] for our customers," he said.
Whitehurst estimated that the total global IT market, not including telecommunications, is about US$1.4 trillion a year. Factor in the rough estimates that half of all IT projects fail or are significantly downgraded, and that only half of all features in software packages are actually used, then it would follow that "easily $500 billion of that $1.4 trillion is fundamentally wasted every year," he said.
Whitehurst took aim at the "typical software sales model" for this state of affairs. To develop software, a vendor may spend years interviewing customers, estimate what they need and build a set of features to meet these demands. For the customer, this work translates into yearly maintenance fees and the necessity of buying an upgraded version of the product every few years. Also, because of the great amount of work involved in changing to another software package, the vendor can price its offerings at an artificially high rate. He noted that Red Hat still runs Oracle's financial systems "because it would be a nightmare to move" to another platform, he said.
"With software, you are renting the ability to use features, and then every few years you have to rebuy the same thing," he said. "The cost to provide and the pricing that has been changed has nothing to do with one another."
And despite the vendor's iterative process of improving software, "there has been no change in product quality demonstrated in the past 30 years," he said.
Naturally, during his talk, Whitehurst touted the open-source model as an alternative. "Open source represents a fundamental change to the model," he said, arguing that open source, thanks to customer participation in the maintenance of the code, has a lower bug density, as well as more useful feature functionality. "With open source, you are not buying functionality. You are buying services and support," he said.
Whitehurst reflected on his time at Delta Air Lines, where, prior to joining Red Hat, he worked as the chief operating officer while the airline was going through bankruptcy. At the time, he was asking all of Delta's suppliers for a break in billing, and most companies cut the then-troubled airline some slack, except for its IT vendors.
"We beat up on vendors in every area -- airframe manufacturers, our catering supply -- we got cost out of everywhere, except IT. We couldn't get money out of IT. The business models were so fundamentally broken, that even at death's door, we couldn't take costs out of IT," he said.
While the vendors are selling functionality, IT departments take on the risk of turning that functionality into something beneficial for their organizations. The software and hardware are already paid for before the service they are running is actually offered.
This is why cloud computing is so appealing to CIOs, Whitehurst said. CIOs are not so much interested in the ability to move workloads off to external data centers as they are in not paying system costs until those show some business value.
Currently, the cloud computing model stands at a crossroads between the software sales approach and one based on open standards, Whitehurst argued.
"How cloud computing evolves will determine how powerful it is," he said. One route would be to "devolve into a walled-garden cloud." The other approach would resemble the evolution of the Internet, where a group of common standards is developed and vendor innovation happens at the edges.
"That will ultimately determine the success of cloud computing and how IT will be used in the next generation," he said.
Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab's e-mail address is Joab_Jackson@idg.comAll right folks, here is another Takumi Warriors support. So long as I get no other requests, I will continue translating Takumi’s supports (his wsupport with Lyn already being line up) before moving on to Sakura. We’ll see where I go from there.
Anyway, so this support is something I always wanted to see, which is why it’s a bit sad it’s so similar to Takumi‘s support with Ryouma. At least we get more background fluff on Marx. Also, an important thing to note that I tried (but probably failed) to get across here:
Takumi is being extra polite to Marx here. He essentially switches to standard, text-book Japanese here, something I don’t recall him doing any other time. Guess he is just nervous haha.
Takumi: Out of 100, only 70 arrows hit the mark… Damn it, I still haven’t trained enough. So long as I don’t get stronger, no one is going to recognize me.
Marx: Prince Takumi. You certainly show a lot of enthusiasm, training here until dusk. Still, you shouldn’t overdo it. Can you not continue this tomorrow? How about getting some rest?
Takumi: No, I simply have to get stronger. I realize you are only concerned for me, but please let it go.
Marx: If you continue any longer, you won’t be able to concentrate. It would be best if accept that and go to sleep.
Takumi: Of course, you are already so strong, so it’s easy for you to say that. I have to reach your level as soon as I can. There is simply no way I can afford to rest.
Marx: Hm, so you are saying I am strong, Prince Takumi? I see, that’s how I appear to be now. However, when I was your age, I also went about my training quite recklessly.
Takumi: Eh, you too? That’s quite a surprise…
Marx: Yes. The excessive training put a huge strain on my body… I became unable to even hold up my sword, and so my skills naturally regressed. In time, my body was covered in bandages, which |
of the most likeable and popular entertainers in the business. He asked for my number and I gave it to him.
We began hanging out, took in a movie, watched television and ate pizza and hot dogs in my apartment with my roommate. He was married to his current wife, and he acted like a perfect gentleman who didn't come on to either of us, which, I have to admit, made me wonder what his objective was.
One night we were going out to a movie. We agreed to meet at an apartment that he said belonged to a friend of his. I had a terrible headache but didn't want to cancel the evening. He told me he had a miracle cure his doctor had given him that would get rid of the headache. He went into another room and came back with a capsule. I asked a couple of times what it was. Each time he reassured me, asking, "Don't you trust me?" Of course I did. This was Bill Cosby.
For more than 45 years I have tried to recall exactly what happened that night. To this day it remains a blur. I have a vague recollection of feeling like I was floating while walking through Times Square and watching some kind of Japanese samurai movie with him. I don't remember where the theater was nor very much of the evening.
What I do recall, vividly and clearly, is waking up the next morning nude in the bed of his friend's apartment and seeing Cosby wearing a white terrycloth bathrobe and acting as if there was nothing unusual. It was obvious to me that he had had sex with me. I was horrified, embarrassed and ashamed. There was a mirror above the bed, which shocked me further.
After some awkward small talk, I got out of there as fast as I could. Once in the elevator, I broke down crying, which I continued to do as I walked home to my apartment in the east 70s. It never occurred to me to go to the police. It was a different time and "date rape" was a concept that didn't exist. I just kept asking myself over and over in disbelief why this had happened to me. Other than my roommate, I did not discuss that night with anyone for 36 years.
Like millions of people, I watched The Cosby Show at its zenith and was a fan. But as I watched Dr. Cliff Huxtable, so compassionate and kind, so honorable and wise, I could never reconcile that image with the Bill Cosby I encountered so many years ago.
Those who suffer from these types of assaults know the prison of shame, bewilderment and disbelief. Like so many victims, my way of coping was to shove the memory into the back of my mind. I only revealed nine years ago, to my husband of nearly 30 years, what happened that night, after another woman went public with similar allegations and sued Cosby. I always thought I was the only one. I couldn't believe he had done this to others. I told my story to our attorney, who is also a good friend, because I was considering going public then, but eventually chose not to because the case was settled.
This is the first time I have chosen to speak out about that night. It is also the last time I intend to address it publicly. I have no plans to sue, I don't want or need money. I have no plans for a press conference or for doing any interviews.
So why speak out at all and why now? The simple answer is that it's the right thing to do. The truth deserves to be known. As I write this, more than 20 women have come forward, many with stories that are remarkably similar to mine. In response to these brave women, I have read comments like, "What took them so long?" and "What are they after now"? I would ask these people to remember that up until relatively recently, prosecuting rape was a "he said/she said" proposition where the victim was blamed for having worn "suggestive clothing" or questioned as to why she went somewhere with her rapist.
When this happened to me, the idea of drugging someone and raping her was almost fantastical. It was years before "date rape" drugs made the news, but it was a perfect modus operandi for a predator, rendering his victim unconscious or so incapacitated as to be unable to clearly answer police questions about the incident. After having done a lot of work on myself, I realize that we are only as sick as the secrets we keep. Once those secrets are spoken aloud, even if to just one person, they lose their power. I no longer feel the shame that kept me silent. Yes, I could have told my story years ago, and in hindsight I probably should have. It's time now that my voice be added and to finally pull the curtain back from this dark moment in my life.
Having come of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s before marrying in the mid 1980s, at 37, I certainly have a history. The difference is that any other relationships were consensual... my encounter with Bill Cosby was most certainly not.
In the years since that night I have crossed paths with Cosby only once, when my husband, a highly successful Oscar-winning film executive and producer, introduced me to him. I was shaking, wondering if he would recognize me by my unusual first name. His reaction spoke volumes. To Bill Cosby, I was just another stranger.
______________________________While questions continue to swirl about the expense claims of three Tory senators, Conservatives attending this weekend's national party convention in Calgary will be paying their own costs.
"Conservative MPs will be paying their own way to attend the Conservative Party National Convention in Calgary," a spokesperson for government whip John Duncan confirmed in an email to CBC News.
According to House of Commons rules, members of Parliament are allowed to be reimbursed for expenses related to national caucus meetings that occur at national conventions. But the Tories are not holding a national caucus meeting in Calgary.
Tory senators will also be paying their own way to the national convention. But with costs for admission up to $900, and Calgary considered an expensive city, some may be having second thoughts about attending.
Kick off the convention with @Kady Wednesdays with Kady has moved to a new day - and city. But just this once. Join Kady O'Malley at noon ET Thursday live from Calgary, where Conservative delegates, MPs and supporters will be gathering for their weekend convention. Bring your questions and comments and join us for the live chat at cbc.ca/politics
"At this particular time from a financial perspective, the way it's set up this year, I have financial responsibilities in terms of my life and my family and I think my time would be best served doing what I should be doing as a senator," said Conservative Senator Larry Smith, who told CBC News that he hadn't planned on going.
It's also unclear whether the bad press from the Senate scandal may have senators reconsidering their attendance. But former government leader in the Senate Marjory LeBreton insisted that senators have not been told to stay home from the convention.
“No one has been told not to go. That is false,” LeBreton wrote in an email to Global News. “The only concern is whether we will be wrapped up in time in the Senate to catch our flights.”
The various procedural wranglings over debate motions on whether to suspend senators Mike Duffy, Pamela Wallin and Patrick Brazeau over their Senate expense claims could mean some Conservative senators will miss the convention.
But Conservative Party president John Walsh told The Canadian Press that approximately 3,000 members are expected to attend Prime Minister Stephen Harper's speech Friday evening — a record turnout for the movement, particularly considering the event was postponed by spring flooding in Alberta.
"Our party is pretty dedicated at our conventions to talking about policy and constitutional amendments, we spend a lot of time in our agenda doing that, and our people are very eager to do that," Walsh said in an interview.
"Our membership is a very loyal membership, they want to come and hear from the prime minister, they want to come and meet caucus members to be able to talk about the issues."If you needed to convince someone that Girl Scout cookies are delicious or that rainbows were really beautiful, you’d have to first know what the cookies taste like and what rainbows look like – right?
Related: 7 Things All Interviewers Want To Know About Your Brand
The same applies when it’s time for you to sell yourself in an interview to strangers. You need to know where you’ve been, what you’ve accomplished, and where you’re headed. On the one hand, that might sound really simple. They are your experiences, so you would be the best one to know how far you’ve come.
Yet, how many times do we easily forget by Monday what we just did on Saturday and Sunday? How often do we make the same mistakes over and over because we failed to assess our experiences and extract the lessons learned so we don’t repeat those mistakes?
These things happen often, only to leave us stumped and running in circles. The same thing can happen in an interview if we don’t take the time beforehand to really understand our past and know what we have to offer in the future.
Preparing for an interview is crucial to ensuring that you come across as a competent, potential employee. You need to be able to recount your previous work experiences as if they were yesterday. You need to be able to tell a future employer what you’re good at; they aren’t going to know yet, so you need to be able to tell them. You need to be able to show them that you think about the future and have goals and aspirations you’re working towards. All of this requires you, the applicant, the interviewee, to know yourself first.
Below are some simple steps every job seeker should take before each interview to ensure they present their best self in the most confident way:
1. Review your past.
Where have you worked?
What positions did you hold?
How long were you in those positions?
What unique responsibilities, experiences or opportunities were you given from these positions?
…and ultimately, what did you learn from all of these?
2. Assess your present.
What is your current position?
What are your current responsibilities?
What are you doing now to improve yourself?
If you were laid off or took a voluntary hiatus, how are you utilizing that time to your advantage?
3. Envision your future.
What are your goals?
Do you plan to pursue more education?
Would you ultimately like to achieve a leadership role in the new organization?
What ideas might you have to propel the industry forward?
4. Know who you are.
In addition to steps 1-3, know what you are good at and where you could stand to use improvement. Be confident (not cocky) when you tell the interviewers what your strengths and weaknesses are. What current skills do you have that would easily crossover into a new role or industry?
5. Practice.
Practice telling your stories. Which words sound good when you say them? Which words don’t? What key elements do you want the employer to know and which are irrelevant?
Be able to tell a story, hit all the key points and don’t bore the interviewer(s) in the process. Have a friend conduct a mock interview with you so you get practice in front of another person.
One caveat: Don’t memorize anything. Just know what information you’d like to share and how you’d like to share it when the opportunity arises.
Remember, in the end, you are the one that needs or wants the job. As special as you are, the employer can easily find another person who will perform the same tasks. By knowing who you are, you will be more readily able to express to the interviewer what you as a unique individual have to offer and why they need to hire you.
By embracing all of who you are before the interview, you will have the tools you need to settle into a place of more confidence. When you exude this confidence and sense of knowing who you are, you’ll present the image of an articulate, focused and self-aware individual that employers will want to have on their team.
Now, who are you?
This post was originally published at an earlier date.
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Photo Credit: ShutterstockMegyn Kelly's NBC show continues to tank
The ratings for the latest episode of Megyn Kelly's prime-time Sunday-night NBC program are in, and the bad news continues for the former Fox News channel star. Kelly's June 25 show, her fourth outing on NBC, was the lowest rated one yet. The program came in third in the ratings, beaten by an ABC rerun of America's Funniest Home Videos and by CBS's 60 Minutes. Kelly had only 400,000 viewers in the preferred demographic (viewers 18-49), while ABC and CBS each had 700,000. (On a typical night – June 22, 2016 – when she was on Fox News at 9 P.M. E.T./P.T., Kelly had almost that many viewers in the news demo – ages 25-54 – 384,000.) The total viewers of the three top broadcast channels during Kelly's hour on June 25, 2017, 7-8 P.M. E.T./P.T., were CBS 7.2 million, ABC 3.9 million, and NBC 3.4 million.
Megyn Kelly Kelly's interview guest on Sunday June 25 was J.D. Vance, the author of the New York Times bestselling nonfiction book (47 weeks and counting on the list) Hillbilly Elegy. The book has put Vance, a native of Appalachia and a graduate of Yale Law School, on the trendy map for his ability to explain the beliefs of Americans in flyover country (aka Trump supporters) – who have been variously described elsewhere as "deplorables" who "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them" – to the cognoscenti on the coasts.
J. D. Vance on Sunday Night with Megyn Kelly A number of mainstream media outlets increasingly appear to be lying in wait for Kelly to fail. An article in Breitbart links to a selection of them. Kelly's terrible ratings have led to many questions about her marketability and competence. A network executive reportedly told CNN that NBC's "fundamental mistake" was thinking Kelly was a "superstar" while Variety noted that Kelly's star is "dimmer than ever." The Boston Globe eviscerated Kelly for being a "poseur" who lacks the "acumen" and "magnetism" to succeed at NBC News. Variety also pointed out that Kelly has pretty much alienated everyone in just three weeks at NBC. NBC News has reportedly been "freaking out" over the"ratings disaster" that Kelly is turning out to be. Her ratings have been so terrible a New York radio host said NBC may be looking to unload Kelly and even ask Fox News to take her back. But a high-ranking Fox News official told Breitbart News last week that there would be "no way" Kelly could crawl back to the network if such a scenario occurred and emphasized that Kelly simply would "not be welcomed back."
"Come hither": Megyn Kelly interviews Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg, Russia, June 2017 Kelly's first NBC show, on June 4 with Vladimir Putin, was her highest rated program to date, but it lost one million viewers – over 15 percent of its total audience – in its second half hour after the Putin interview ended. That episode came in second to ABC's broadcast of an NBA Finals basketball game. Kelly's third show, on June 18 with Alex Jones, was also a ratings disappointment and a full-blown public relations disaster. Any positive critiques of that episode, according to Newsmax, were accountable more to the efforts of the show's editors (to make Alex Jones look bad and salvage the show's reputation among liberal elitists) than to "Kelly's performance in the interview."Give tropical forests back to the people who live in them – and the trees will soak up your carbon for you. Above all, keep the forests out of the hands of government. So concludes a study that has tracked the fate of 80 forests worldwide over 15 years.
Most tropical forests – from Himalayan hill forests to the Madagascan jungle – are controlled by local and national governments. Forest communities own and manage little more than a tenth. They have a reputation for trashing their trees – cutting them for timber or burning them to clear land for farming. In reality the opposite is true, according to Ashwini Chhatre of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Hand it over
In the first study of its kind, Chhatre and Arun Agrawal of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor compared forest ownership with data on carbon sequestration, which is estimated from the size and number of trees in a forest. Hectare-for-hectare, they found that tropical forest under local management stored more carbon than government-owned forests. There are exceptions, says Chhatre, “but our findings show that we can increase carbon sequestration simply by transferring ownership of forests from governments to communities”.
One reason may be that locals protect forests best if they own them, because they have a long-term interest in ensuring the forests’ survival. While governments, whatever their intentions, usually license destructive logging, or preside over a free-for-all in which everyone grabs what they can because nobody believes the forest will last.
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The authors suggest that locals would also make a better job of managing common pastures, coastal fisheries and water supplies. They argue that their findings contradict a long-standing environmental idea, called the “tragedy of the commons”, which says that natural resources left to communal control get trashed. In fact, says Agrawal, “communities are perfectly capable of managing their resources sustainably”.
Flawed plans
The research calls into question UN plans to pay governments to protect forests. The climate change meeting in Copenhagen in December is likely to agree on a formula for a programme called Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation. “There is a real fear that REDD will lead to dispossession of local communities [as] governments stake their claim on emissions reduction credits,” says Chhatre.
Simon Counsell of the Rainforest Foundation UK is not surprised by the findings. “In Brazil and elsewhere, we know the most enduring forests are in indigenous reserves, like that run by the Kayapo in the eastern Amazon – the largest protected forest in the world.”
Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0905308106IBD also performed badly in 2008, suggesting Republican nominee John McCain had a large lead among younger voters. Obama won this group handily. As late as Nov. 2, 2008, IBD had Obama up just 2 points over McCain. He won by 7 points and carried 365 electoral votes, a landslide in the current highly partisan era.
So leave the outlier polls alone and focus on the average of all high-quality polls. And leave the "oversampling" of Democrats nonsense to the Bill Mitchell's of the world who spend a good part of their lives trying to "unskew" surveys showing Clinton with big leads.
There is a simple reason polls include more Democrats. Because more people identify as Democrat than Republican. High-quality surveys"oversample" certain groups to get a better picture of what the actual electorate looks like.
So barring a catastrophic collapse, Hillary Clinton is going to win. Even without including any of the "toss-up" states, Clinton right now is at 262 electoral votes. Eliminating toss-ups, Clinton is currently leading in enough states for 333 electoral votes, which would be a resounding victory, just short of Obama's 2008 numbers.
In order for Trump to win he would have to run the table in swing states, including Nevada, Florida and North Carolina. He trails in all three. Even winning all those would put Trump at 266. He would then need to flip at least one state leaning heavily toward Clinton, such as Pennsylvania, Virginia or Colorado.
It's more likely that Trump winds up losing states he has to win. He trails Clinton in Arizona and independent conservative Evan McMullin in Utah. He is only barely ahead in Texas and Alaska.
Clinton and Obama, meanwhile, are turning their attention to down-ballot races trying to deliver a mandate and possibly a friendly Congress to the Democratic nominee.
Taking over the House remains an unlikely scenario unless a very large wave develops to deliver Democrats the 30 seats they need. The Senate, however, remains a strong possibility. The party needs Clinton to win and at least four pickups to take the upper chamber. They appear certain to take seats in Illinois and Wisconsin. They could lose a seat in Nevada though the race for Harry Reid's seat remains deadlocked. Democrats lead in currently Republican-held seats in Missouri, New Hampshire and Indiana.
A big Clinton win at the national level will probably deliver very narrow Senate control to Democrats. The House will probably remain Republican. The question will then be how Republicans react to defeat and what approach they take to Clinton when she takes office in January.
A resounding rejection of Trumpism would likely lead to at least some willingness among Republicans to work with a Clinton White House in its early days with infrastructure spending and a simplification of the corporate tax code — including repatriation — high on the list of possibilities.
But Clinton's window for legislative movement will be extremely limited, even if she wins big. Republicans have a very friendly Senate map in 2018 and will be heavily favored to regain control should they lose it in November.
That means Republicans will want to try and draw sharp lines with Clinton early and avoid alienating an activist base that loathes the Democratic nominee. Even if Trump loses big, the hardcore base of the Republican Party, which turns out in midterms, will like punish Republicans seen as collaborators with the opposition.
So unless Clinton delivers a wipeout of historic proportions, Washington in 2017 will likely look much like Washington of the last few years, a gridlocked mess incapable of agreement on tax reform, infrastructure spending or immigration reform, leaving a softening economy to fend for itself.
—Ben White is Politico's chief economic correspondent and a CNBC contributor. He also authors the daily tip sheet Politico Morning Money [politico.com/morningmoney]. Follow him on Twitter @morningmoneyben.2016 was a big year for eSports here in the Philippines. With ESL One Manila and the Manila Majors happening months within each other, the hype for Dota 2 was fever pitch and coming into 2017, the anticipation for the next big event is at an all time high. After months of waiting, the silence has finally been broken as we are treated to the first big Dota 2 event this 2017, the Manila Masters!
There are a few things we know about the Manila Masters for now and that it is the first in a series of events that the Mineski Events Team and ESL Gaming Team are cooking up for 2017. The MOA Arena will be witness once again to 3 days of intense Dota 2 action with 8 of the best teams battling it out to be champions once again. As of yesterday, the first direct invite team was unveiled and it is no less than TI5 champions, Evil Geniuses! The team of Crit-, Suma1l, Universe, Arteezy, and Zai will travel to Manila and will treat their Filipino fans once again to championship caliber Dota only the boys in blue can deliver. And PLDT, continuing their effort of championing gaming and eSports, will be on board to support the Manila Masters like what they did during ESL One Manila.
Save the date, ladies and gentlemen, as the Manila Masters will happen on the 26th-28th of May, 2017, over at the MOA Arena. With a 250,000$ prize pool, expect only the best teams in the world to participate in this prestigious tournament. I’m guessing OG and Digital Chaos will be part of the magic 8 to be invited over and since there are a total of 8 invites, we can only assume who the other teams will be.
Tickets go on sale in 6 days and based on past ticket sales, these will sell out in record time so make sure to set your alarms and log in to SM Tickets to gain access to one of the biggest eSports events to grace this side of the world! For more information about the event, check out the Manila Masters 2017 site as well!"We can't," Matheny explained, "bring him into a tie-game situation when we're on the road."
MILWAUKEE -- Left to justify his decision to turn to a rusty Michael Wacha instead of a ready Trevor Rosenthal in the bottom of the ninth of a tied National League Championship Series contest two Octobers ago, manager Mike Matheny stuck to a script that had long been accepted.
MILWAUKEE -- Left to justify his decision to turn to a rusty Michael Wacha instead of a ready Trevor Rosenthal in the bottom of the ninth of a tied National League Championship Series contest two Octobers ago, manager Mike Matheny stuck to a script that had long been accepted.
"We can't," Matheny explained, "bring him into a tie-game situation when we're on the road."
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Rosenthal, of course, never got to pitch that night in San Francisco as Travis Ishikawa sent the Giants to the World Series the minute he crushed one of Wacha's fastballs.
But what Matheny was so hesitant to do then has become his preference now. Tuesday marked the third time in the team's last four road series that he summoned closer Seung Hwan Oh in to pitch the bottom of the ninth in a tie game on the road. In Tuesday's case, Oh's scoreless appearance set up a 2-1, 10-inning win.
It's part of what Matheny described as "an evolving philosophy."
"You say, OK, we have our best pitcher … and do we get to that next inning if we don't pitch him in that inning?" Matheny explained. "You have, statistically, your best arm down there ready to go and their best part of the lineup. I think there are a lot of arguments, at least that I have in my own mind, that lead me toward giving [Oh] a chance to get us through that. When the game ends and you still have him sitting down there and he could have pitched, those are things you look back and learn from."
Also a factor, Matheny said, is not wanting his closer to have to warm up multiple times in a game while he waits for a lead. That can add unwanted stress on his arm over the course of the season.
"It goes against how I remember bullpens being run, where you hold onto your closer and you get him hot eight times if you need to and then finally, if you get that lead, you throw him in there," Matheny said. "That seems kind of bizarre to me, because he's worked too hard and we have other guys who can pitch that last inning."
Though Matheny has always been intrigued by the possibility of managing his bullpen more unconventionally, he hasn't committed to it until recently. He sought input from the Cardinals' baseball-operations staff and from his coaching staff while reconsidering his former stance. Matheny described bench coach David Bell as especially creative with such in-game decisions.
Matheny tried the new approach for the first time on April 5, when he brought then-closer Rosenthal in to pitch the ninth inning of a 5-5 game in Pittsburgh. Rosenthal got through it unscathed.
In the next three such opportunities, however, Matheny reverted back and held onto his closer. It happened June 7 in Cincinnati, July 8 in Milwaukee and July 31 in Miami. In all three instances, the reliever asked to preserve a tie game lost it in the ninth and the Cardinals' closer -- Rosenthal until late June, Oh since then -- never appeared.
But the approach has changed since that blow-up in Miami. Beginning with the team's Aug. 11 game in Chicago, Matheny has repeatedly turned to Oh in those spots. In that game and in another in Philadelphia eight days later, Oh entered in the ninth and covered two scoreless innings.
And while the Cardinals may not have won all four games in which Matheny had his closer pitch the ninth in a tied road game, there has been one key and consistent outcome -- each time, the closer successfully pushed the game into extra innings. That was counted as a success.
"I think those tie games on the road," Matheny said, "those have changed how we handle our closer."Atlus registers Persona domains P3D, P5AG, P5D, P5R, P5U, Persona Dance, and PQ2
A hint at what's to come?
Ryu’s Office, the games business marketing solution company that registered the RPG.jp domain name for Atlus for its upcoming Project Re: Fantasy, registered several Persona-related domain names on April 18.
The list of newly registered domains include:
P3D.jp (Persona 3 Dancing?)
P5AG.jp (Persona 5 A…fter Golden?)
P5D.jp (Persona 5 Dancing?)
P5R.jp (Persona 5 R…acing?)
P5U.jp (Persona 5 Ultimax / Persona 5 Arena?)
Persona-Dance.jp (Persona Dancing portal site?)
PQ2.jp (Persona Q: Shadows of the Labyrinth 2?)
The following three domains were also registered on April 4, likely to sit on for the future:
Atlus is planning a large-scale Persona concert for August 2 at the Yokohama Arena. The previous major concert hosted the gameplay reveal trailer for Persona 5. With the recent survey and at least one new Persona title set to be announced this year, could the concert be our next venue for Persona news?
Thanks, @MysticDistance.McGinn, 27, skated in 21 games with the Syracuse Crunch of the American Hockey League last season, posting 10 goals and 19 points to go along with 16 penalty minutes. McGinn missed most of the regular season due to injury. Four of his 10 goals came while on the power play. McGinn also skated in 22 Calder Cup playoff games with the Crunch, recording five goals and 16 points. The 6-foot-3, 218-pound forward has appeared in 256 career AHL games over five seasons, collecting 76 goals and 142 points.
The Fergus, Ontario native has skated in 89 career NHL games, including two with the Lightning during the 2015-16 season. McGinn has notched nine goals and 17 points to go along with 44 penalty minutes in his NHL career. He made his Lightning debut on November 1, 2015 against the Carolina Hurricanes.
McGinn was originally drafted by the Philadelphia Flyers in the fourth round, 119th overall, at the 2010 NHL Draft.David Cameron and George Osborne were handed an economic boost today as figures showed that Britain had bounced strongly out of recession over the summer.
The best set of economic figures since Mr Cameron became Prime Minister showed the nation's output jumped by one per cent in the three months to the end of September - far faster than City economists had forecast.
They also showed the best quarterly growth since the Northern Rock disaster in 2007.
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view. From 15p €0.18 $0.18 $0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.
The PM, who hinted yesterday in the Commons of “good news” to come, said economy was on “the right track”.
He welcomed the robust return of recovery but played down hopes that Britain's long slump was at an end.
Economists warned today that if “one-off” factors such as the Olympics and the Jubilee were stripped out, underlying growth in GDP - the official measure of the size of the economy - was still slow.
Chief economist at foreign exchange company, World First, Jeremy Cook, said: “While this is undoubtedly a welcome surprise, upon breaking down the numbers we should not get caught up in a flurry of champagne corks and party poppers. Overall underlying true growth is only 0.3 per cent at the moment - very much in the 'bouncing along the bottom' region.”
The Office for National Statistics said hotel bookings, ticket sales and other Olympic related activity contributed to third quarter GDP.
The extra Diamond Jubilee bank holiday in June, which meant the loss of a day's production in the previous quarter, also flattered today's figure.
The ONS said “the underlying pattern is one of subdued economic expansion” and said GDP is no bigger than it was a year ago after nine months of “double dip” recession.
Speaking during a trip to a business in Wandsworth in south west London Mr Cameron said “There's still a long way to go but these figures show we are on right track with the right approach.”
Manufacturing and other productive sectors grew by 1.1 per cent but construction output slumped again, by 2.5 per cent, although this was smaller than in the two previous quarters.
The recovery was in the main driven by a 1.3 per cent surge in the dominant service sector.
Today's announcement completes a week of far more encouraging data with unemployment, inflation and the deficit all falling and retail sales rising.
Chancellor George Osborne said “By continuing to take the tough decisions needed to deal with our debts and equip our economy for the global race we're in, this Government is laying the foundations for lasting prosperity.”
But Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls said while the emergence from recession was “good news” it came after a year of “damaging flatlining.”
He added: “With living standards falling, more tax rises on the way, small business lending down and the eurozone still in crisis, it would be very unwise of David Cameron and George Osborne to just sit back, cross their fingers and hope for the best.
“The complacent thing to do now is simply to wait and hope things will get better. The cautious thing to do is to act now to secure and strengthen growth in our economy.”
Business leaders gave a cautious welcome to the surprise 1 per cent jump. David Kern, Chief Economist at the British Chambers of Commerce, said: “While the news is positive, the estimate must be put in context. The 1 per cent GDP figure for Q3 is affected by distortions in the second quarter due to the Jubilee and Olympic ticket sales.
“Compared to a year earlier, the figures show that the economy is stagnant, with growth for 2012 currently at 0.3%, three percent below the level seen at the beginning of 2008, when the recession started.”
TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber said: “The economy is barely any bigger than it was two years ago and we are still on course for the slowest recovery this century.
“Austerity has already set us back at least two years. It's time to change course so we can make up for lost time and secure the strong sustained growth we desperately need to create good quality jobs and ensure real wage rises for hard-pressed families.”
We’ll tell you what’s true. You can form your own view.
At The Independent, no one tells us what to write. That’s why, in an era of political lies and Brexit bias, more readers are turning to an independent source. Subscribe from just 15p a day for extra exclusives, events and ebooks – all with no ads.
Subscribe nowShare. Thank your lucky stars that these things never made it into Sanctuary. Thank your lucky stars that these things never made it into Sanctuary.
Everyone likes to be an armchair game designer, blasting at developers on forums or via email so they can detail all the ways their version of whatever game would have been better. Imagine, though, if you had a direct link to your favorite developer, and they had to listen. We've secured these leaked documents from former designers on Blizzard's Diablo III art team and are revealing them, exclusively, for the first time today. Let's just say that if you were pissed off when Diablo III's art direction was originally revealed, these designs would've caused riots. Maybe this is why Diablo III is taking so long?A commission comprising Armenia’s top state officials and Diaspora leaders has yet to decide what it will demand from Turkey apart from the recognition of the 1915 Armenian genocide, a senior official in Yerevan said on Friday.
The commission planning the upcoming commemorations of the centenary of the genocide issued a landmark declaration on behalf of the Armenian people on Thursday. It reaffirmed the Armenian government’s and the Diaspora’s intention to seek greater international recognition of the genocide. They will also strive to “overcome consequences” of the mass killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, said the body headed by President Serzh Sarkisian.
In that regard, the “pan-Armenian declaration” said commission experts are now working on a “package of legal demands” to be addressed to modern-day Turkey. It did not elaborate.
Vigen Sargsian, the chief of Sarkisian’s staff coordinating the planned events, would not be drawn on their likely recommendations. “We have set no concrete time frames as to when that group should come up with its final package because work on that package also requires very serious internal agreements with all interested beneficiaries,” he said. “If we were prepared to go into details at this point, that would have been reflected in the declaration.”
Sargsian declined to clarify whether the Armenian government favors only a formal Turkish recognition of the genocide or also material and even territorial compensation for the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians and loss of their properties. He said only that the commission represents the views of most Armenians scattered around the world, rather than the authorities in Yerevan.
The idea of such sweeping compensation claims is advocated by some political groups in Armenia and many Diaspora Armenian activists. Harut Sassounian, a prominent U.S.-Armenian columnist who took part in Thursday’s commission meeting in Yerevan, is one of them.
“They should compensate us just like Germany has compensated the Jewish people,” Sassounian told RFE/RL’s Armenian service (Azatutyun.am). “We do have the right to such compensation. It must not be only monetary. It must also include the lost church property and everything else that we had, including Western Armenia.”
“Those lands belong to the Armenian people,” he said, referring to areas in what is now eastern Turkey, which were mostly populated by Armenians until 1915.
Successive Armenian governments have avoided any territorial claims to Ankara. The Sarkisian administration went further in 2009, signing Turkish-Armenian protocols that commit Yerevan to explicitly recognizing Armenia’s existing border with Turkey.
The U.S.-brokered protocols never went into effect due to Ankara’s failure to have them unconditionally ratified by the Turkish parliament. Sarkisian has until now ignored domestic opposition and Diaspora calls for Yerevan to annul them.Pro-abortion and anti-abortion protestors rally outside the Supreme Court in Washington, Wednesday, Jan |
is unique in that it is nearly 14 minutes long, in which Game criticizes all members of G-Unit, amongst many others. 50 Cent responded through his "Piggy Bank" music video, which features Game as a Mr. Potato Head doll and also parodies other rivals.[34] Since then, both groups continued to attack each other. Game released two more mixtapes, Ghost Unit and a mixtape/DVD called Stop Snitchin, Stop Lyin. 50 Cent's rebuttal was "Not Rich, Still Lyin'" where he mocks Game.[35] In addition, G-Unit started to respond on numerous mixtapes and then-new G-Unit member Spider Loc began dissing Game. Game responded with "240 Bars (Spider Joke)",[35] a song mainly aimed at Spider Loc, but also addressing Tony Yayo and rap group M.O.P.,[35] and on the song "The Funeral 100 Bars".
The feud between Game and Roc-A-Fella Records grew out of an earlier rivalry with Memphis Bleek over the name of his label (Get Low Records), which was similar to the one Game was previously signed to (Get Low Recordz). On the single "Westside Story", Game raps that "I don't do button-up shirts or drive Maybachs", which was perceived as being directed towards Jay-Z, though Game stated it was directed toward Ja Rule. Later Jay-Z performed a freestyle on Funkmaster Flex's radio show on Hot 97 and in it, he repeatedly used the word game, which some hip hop fans[who?] believed was directed towards Game. Game responded with "My Bitch" in which the first verse is directed at G-Unit, the second verse is directed at Jay-Z and the third verse at Suge Knight.[36]
Game performing at the 2007 Hip Hop Jam festival in the Czech Republic
Due to his disputes with 50 Cent, Game left Aftermath Entertainment and signed with Geffen Records another label under Universal Music Group's Interscope-Geffen-A&M division to terminate his contractual obligations with G-Unit in the summer of 2006. The rapper's second major-label album Doctor's Advocate was released on November 14, 2006. This album was set out by Game to prove that he was still able to make good music and be a successful artist without the help of Dr. Dre or 50 Cent. While Game originally claimed Dr. Dre would still do production on the album in the November issue of XXL magazine,[37] he admitted in September after the XXL interview was conducted during an interview on radio station Power 105 that Dr. Dre would not be producing any tracks[38] although four previously unreleased tracks produced by Dr. Dre were released on the Internet, but no reason was given as to why they were not included on the album. The album debuted at number one on the Billboard 200, selling over 358,000 copies its first week.[39]
In October 2006, Game extended a peace treaty to 50 Cent, which was not immediately replied to.[40] However, a couple days later on Power 106, he stated that the treaty was only offered for one day. On Game's album Doctor's Advocate, he says the feud is over on a few of the songs. The feud seemed to have gained steam after Tony Yayo allegedly slapped the fourteen-year-old son of Czar Entertainment CEO Jimmy Rosemond. Game responded with "Body Bags" on You Know What It Is Vol. 4.[41] Since Young Buck was dismissed from G-Unit by 50 Cent, there have been interviews from both Game and Young Buck stating they never had a problem with each other. In an interview Young Buck said he was aware of Game's support and that Lloyd Banks and Tony Yayo did not reach out to him.[42]
LAX and The R.E.D. Album (2007–12)
Game appeared on 106 & Park on May 16, where he confirmed LAX would be the last studio album he records. He had originally announced that Dr. Dre would be producing for the album, but neither Dr. Dre nor Aftermath Entertainment had confirmed. The album went head to head with heavy metal band Slipknot's All Hope Is Gone on the Billboard 200 albums chart, seeing that both albums were released on August 22, 2008, therefore both albums were competing for the number one spot on the Billboard 200. LAX ended up debuting at number two on the Billboard 200, at first, it looked like LAX had debuted ahead of All Hope Is Gone by 13 copies. Initially, Billboard published an article stating that The Game had secured the top spot with a margin of 13 units, in what was described as the "closest race for number one since Nielsen SoundScan began tracking Data in 1991".[43] Slipknot's labels Warner Music Group and Roadrunner Records asked for a SoundScan recount, a historic first. Nielsen proceeded to the recount, which placed LAX at number two with 238,382 copies, and Slipknot in the first position with 239,516 copies scanned, a margin of 1,134 copies. After the recount 12 hours later, the article was rewritten and Slipknot was awarded the number one spot.[43] LAX spawned four singles: "Game's Pain" with R&B singer Keyshia Cole, "Dope Boys" with Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker, "My Life" with rapper Lil Wayne and "Camera Phone" with R&B singer Ne-Yo. In the United States, the album has sold over 660,100 copies.[44]
It was confirmed in May 2009, that Game began working on a new album, titled The R.E.D. Album[45][46] On June 26, 2009 Game released a song titled "Better on the Other Side" a Michael Jackson tribute, the day after Jackson's death. It features Diddy, Mario Winans, Chris Brown, Usher & Boyz II Men.[47] On October 3, 2009, Snoop Dogg posted a picture on his Twitter of himself, Dr. Dre and Game in the studio working together,[48][49] The picture was taken a day earlier and it marked the first time Game had worked with Dr. Dre for some years since the beef with former fellow G-Unit labelmate 50 Cent caused him to release his two following albums on Geffen Records. Later in early January 2010 Game posted a twitpic of him wearing a lot of Aftermath chains with a caption saying "It's funny how things come Full Circle". Later he confirmed that he had returned to Aftermath Entertainment.[50] He traveled to Prishtinë, Kosovo for a concert, that according to him would be the greatest of his life. In an interview there, Game stated: "I love Albanians, If I could be reborn, I'd be reborn Albanian".[51] On June 3, 2011, Pitchfork Media announced that Game was working with Odd Future leader Tyler, The Creator on a track called "Martians vs. Goblins".[52] Finally released on August 23, 2011, The R.E.D. Album reached number one on the Billboard 200 with first-week sales of 98,000 units.[53]
Jesus Piece and OKE (2012–13)
Shortly after the release of the long-delayed eighth studio album, Game announced he had begun work on his ninth album. At the time titled Soundtrack to Chaos, he said the album would not feature him "name-dropping" or feature any artists as guests for vocals.[54] In March 2012, Game announced the album name had been changed to F.I.V.E.: Fear Is Victory's Evolution and that it could be his last album released under Interscope,[54] but in August 28 the rapper published a new title: Jesus Piece.
In an interview with MTV on November 8, Game revealed that as Jesus Piece is his last album before his deal with Interscope comes to a close, he has had talks with both Maybach Music Group and Cash Money Records for a possible new record deal. He also stated that he would consider releasing music independently.[55]
The Game performing in 2011
The album was released on December 11, 2012, with features from Lil Wayne, Big Sean, J. Cole, Jamie Foxx, Wiz Khalifa, Tyga and Chris Brown among others. In promotion for the album Game started a free weekly music giveaway titled "Sunday Service". All the tracks are leftovers from Jesus Piece. Game also showed interest in making a future collaboration LP with Chris Brown.[56] Game explained the concept of Jesus Piece does not have a spiritual theme, but it would have a "Gangster" theme of enjoying life while also having faith in God.[57][58] Jesus Piece became Game's first album since the multi-platinum selling and critically acclaimed The Documentary, to feature production from Dr. Dre. Game announced on social media that every Sunday leading up to the album that he would be dropping new music, which failed to make the album's final cut. Game compared the album's quality of production and high number of guests to his mentor Dr. Dre's The Chronic 2001.[59] Upon release the album received generally positive reviews by music critics. Most reviewers have praised the production and guests and the album.[60] Jesus Piece debuted at number six on the Billboard 200 with first-week sales of 86,000 copies in the United States.[61] As of July 26, 2013, it has sold 281,000 copies according to Nielsen SoundScan.[62]
On November 30, 2012, Game announced that he and fellow rapper Stat Quo were starting a new record label titled Rolex Records. Both artists would use the label to release new music and sign other artists.[63] On October 1, 2013, Game announced he was officially leaving Interscope Records, and that he was now a free agent.[64] The following day he told Artistdirect that him signing to Cash Money Records was likely, and that a final announcement of a signing would probably come in January 2014. He also stated he had talked to Kendrick Lamar, Nipsey Hussle, and Snoop Dogg about possibly doing collaboration albums in the future.[65]
On October 8, The Game released his first project since leaving Interscope, a mixtape titled Operation Kill Everything.[66] The mixtape featured guest appearances by Too Short, Schoolboy Q, Chris Brown, Lil Wayne, Problem, Nipsey Hussle, Juicy J, Young Jeezy, Stat Quo, and Ty$ among others.[67] The day after the mixtape's release, The Game spoke to XXL where he said, he had begun working on his ninth studio album, which will be executive produced by Cool & Dre. He mentioned he had also talked to Warner Bros. Records about a record deal, and was still possible that he would re-sign with Interscope.[68] Then the following day, The Game released a deluxe edition of OKE to iTunes, featuring two bonus tracks, including "Hollywood" a song with Scarface.[69]
The Documentary 2 and 1992 & Born To Rap (2013–present)
On October 12, 2013, Birdman announced that he had signed The Game to Cash Money Records, which Game later seemingly confirmed that same day.[70] On December 11, 2013 Game stated that he was not officially signed to Cash Money Records stating "It's just trying to figure out what's the best for Cash Money, what's the best for Game at this point in his career. That's pretty much family and that's where I'm at, at this point," he said. "Nothing's written in stone, but that's where I'm leaning."[71][72]
On June 16, 2014, The Game released the compilation album, Blood Moon: Year of the Wolf's first single "Bigger than Me".[73][74] The song heavily samples rock group Poliça's 2013 single "Warrior Lord". The following day, The Game announced that his sixth studio album, a sequel to his debut album The Documentary, would be arriving in January 2015, with Dr. Dre returning as producer along with Just Blaze and Scott Storch.[75] He also expressed interest in getting Nicki Minaj featured on the album.[76] The second single from Year of the Wolf, titled "Or Nah" was released on July 1, 2014.[77][78]
On March 18, 2015, The Game announced that The Documentary 2 would be released June 30, 2015.[79] The album was pushed back to August 7.[80] On June 23, Game released the first single, titled "100" featuring Drake. Target began displaying the original artwork for The Documentary 2 July 13, 2015. However, the release date was pushed back again, to August 28, then eventually to October 9.[81][82]
The Game and Skrillex collaborated on a song named "El Chapo", which was released on October 9, 2015.[83]
On August 1, 2016, the Game ended his twelve-year feud with 50 Cent when the two were in the Ace of Diamonds Strip Club and he said "What happened, that shit was 12 years ago."[84]
On September 16, 2016, The Game released "92 Bars", a five-minute freestyle, used to promote his upcoming seventh studio album, but was also rumored to have been a diss towards rapper Meek Mill.[85][86] Previously, Mill and Game collaborated on 2015's "The Soundtrack".[87] Hours after the release of "92 Bars", Game admitted that the freestyle was specifically a diss towards Mill. The next day, the two rappers ended up in a Instagram exchange, with The Game cyber-flirting with Meek Mill's girlfriend, Nicki Minaj, as well as accusing him of calling the police, informing the authorities about a robbery involving Sean Kingston.[88] On September 18, Meek Mill released a diss track towards Game,a remix to Young M.A.'s "OOOUUU" with Omelly and Beanie Sigel. Two days later, The Game responded with "Pest Control", using the same beat and sending shots at Meek Mill, Omelly, Beanie Sigel and Sean Kingston.[89][90] In 2018 the two reconciled after Mill's incarceration and subsequent release from prison. On October 27, 2017 The Game released his first single Oh I ft Jeremih Young Thug & Sevyn Streeter from his upcoming album Westside Story
From his 1992 album, he released "True Colors/It's On", "All Eyez", "What Your Life Like", and "Baby You" feat. Jason Derulo.
Other ventures
In 2000, The Game appeared on the dating television show Change of Heart;[91] in the segment his partner criticized him for "acting macho when in reality is said to be sensitive." The episode came to an end where a mutual friend of The Game and his partner suggested in them staying together, The Game decided to stay together but was rebuffed by the offer when his partner agreed to a change of heart and The Game was subsequently dumped on TV.[92]
The Game also ventured into acting. In 2004, he had a minor role voicing the character "B-Dup" in the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. He also voiced himself in the video game Def Jam: Icon. In 2006, he made his film debut in Waist Deep as a character named "Big Meat" and is currently[when?] filming two more movies.[93]
The Game was chosen to play and bought a large amount of shares for the Inglewood Cobras, established in 2005 and playing in the American Basketball Association basketball franchise team.[94] The team folded after playing fewer than five games in the ABA in the league's 2005–2006 season. The team was coached by former NBA player Sean Higgins.[95]
The Game has also partnered with 310 Motoring to create his own shoe, The Hurricanes. A portion of the proceeds of the shoe were donated to the victims of Hurricane Katrina.[96]
In 2012–2013, he promoted his 60 Days of Fitness challenge, a rigorous fitness and nutrition regime with his brother and trainer Byrd.[97][98]
The Game has, on several occasions, honored the memory of those who died during the Armenian Genocide and has expressed his sympathy towards the events.[99] The Game is also an avid supporter of Black Lives Matter.
Blood Money Entertainment
Blood Money Entertainment is an American independent record label. In December 2012, The Game founded a new record label, Rolex Records, along with rapper Stat Quo.[100] Following its founding, he bought his entire team at the record label Rolex watches. After a six-month legal battle with Rolex, he changed the name and logo of the record label to The Firm,[101] which then became Blood Money Entertainment.[76] The label has signed West Coast rappers Skeme, King Marie, Pharaoh Jackson and Dubb.[102]
Current artists
Dubb
Skeme
Personal life
Family and relationships
Game has two sons and one daughter, Harlem Caron Taylor (born 2003), King Justice Taylor (born 2007) and California "Cali" Dream Taylor (born 2010).
Game announced that he was engaged to actress and model Valeisha Butterfield, the daughter of US Congressman G. K. Butterfield. The couple were set to marry in March 2007, but the engagement was called off in June 2006.[103]
After the couple broke off their engagement, Game became involved in a relationship with Tiffney Cambridge, a sixth-grade teacher. VH1 broadcast two seasons of Marrying The Game, a reality television series about The Game and Cambridge, as they prepared to walk down the aisle. The relationship was "love at first sight" when Cambridge met Jayceon. Despite reservations regarding Game's career, the relationship lasted eight years, but no marriage plans materialized despite the series.[104]
Legal issues
Game, Snoop Dogg, and Tha Dogg Pound, were sued for assaulting a fan on stage at a May 2005 concert at the White River Amphitheatre in Auburn, Washington. The accuser, Richard Monroe, Jr., claimed he was beaten by the artists' entourage while mounting the stage.[105] He alleged that he reacted to an "open invite" to come on stage. Before he could, Snoop's bodyguards grabbed him and he was beaten unconscious by crewmembers, including the rapper and producer Soopafly; Snoop and Game were included in the suit for not intervening. The lawsuit focuses on a pecuniary claim of $22 million in punitive and compensatory damages, battery, negligence, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.[106] The concerned parties appeared in court in April 2009.[needs update]
On October 28, 2005, Game was charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest in Greensboro, North Carolina. At one point, police said his companions were pepper sprayed when they surrounded officers in a threatening manner.[107] Mall security officers said the rapper was wearing a full-face Halloween mask, filming shoppers, cursed loudly, and refused to leave when asked. Game continued to act up and was arrested, a police statement said. Game claimed that officers overreacted and that he did nothing wrong when he was pepper-sprayed by the mall security.[107] The five officers involved in the incident ended up suing Game for defamation.[108] The officers were awarded $5 million in compensatory damages, which was upheld on appeal by the North Carolina Court of Appeals in February 2012.[109]
On May 11, 2007, Game was arrested at his home reportedly in connection with an incident at a basketball game in South Los Angeles in February 2007. He is alleged to have threatened a person with a gun. The arrest took place after his home was searched for three hours. Game was released early the next day after posting $50,000 bail.[110] On January 9, 2008, a Los Angeles judge scheduled February 4 as the beginning date for Game's trial on assault and weapons charges.[111] After pleading no contest to a felony weapons charge on February 11, Game was sentenced to 60 days in jail, 150 hours of community service, and three years probation.[112]
In 2011, Game was refused entry to Canada for alleged gang ties in Los Angeles; concert organisers said he was associated with the Bloods.[113]
On August 12, 2011, The Game decided to tweet his search for a supposed internship opening. In the message sent to his over 580,000 followers, he posted the number to call as the emergency line for the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department. The Game's fans jammed the line for hours. Initially, The Game denied any wrongdoing saying the tweet was "a mistake". The Game then posted a message saying the sheriff's department can "track a tweet down but you can't solve murders!" A criminal investigation was launched stating that The Game could be charged for obstruction of justice. Despite all of this, the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department issued this statement: "Based upon our investigation, as well as consultation with the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office, the LASD considers the criminal investigation into this matter closed. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department will not be seeking criminal charges." The Game issued an apology on CNN saying, "My sincerest apologies to the Sheriff's Department, it was a joke gone wrong."
On July 8, 2012, 40 Glocc got into an altercation with The Game. In a video clip, allegedly shot by The Game via Game's iPhone during the fight, 40 Glocc is seen running into a bush after being beaten up by the fellow West Coast rapper.[114][115] Game defended what he did by saying he was retaliating for Glocc going up to rappers Lil Wayne and Plies in the past with large entourages.[116] In October 2012, 40 Glocc filed a lawsuit for $4.54 million for assault and battery, as well as damaging his reputation. This included $500,000 in pain and suffering; $500,000 in emotional distress; $750,000 in lost earnings; $2 million for punitive damages; $25,000 in medical expenses; and various other reasons. Since then, Glocc has gone on a smear campaign against The Game, releasing his diss "The Full Edit" in December 2012. Game has similarly addressed the situation in several interviews, claiming that filing a lawsuit of this nature "disintegrates your street cred".[117] In December 2012, 40 Glocc assaulted Game's manager Dontay "Taydoe" Kidd in Las Vegas, Nevada.[118] Glocc won the lawsuit and was awarded $3000.
In 2016, a judge ruled that The Game was liable for sexually assaulting She Got Game contestant Priscilla Rainey.[119]
In 2017, Game pleaded no contest to assaulting an off-duty police officer on March 29, 2015 during a basketball game at a Hollywood high school. Jayceon Terrell Taylor, then 37, entered a no contest plea to one misdemeanor count each of criminal threats and battery, and also pleaded no contest to one felony count of grand theft, according to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office. He was immediately sentenced to three years of formal probation, 120 hours of community service and 26 anger management counseling sessions, and a 6 month suspended sentence.
Taylor and an off-duty Los Angeles police officer were on opposing teams in a basketball game when the defendant intentionally fouled, then sucker-punched the victim who had just stolen the ball from the defendant and scored a basket. Taylor threatened to kill the victim once the defendant was ejected as a result of the punch, and on April 11, 2015, Taylor grabbed and threatened a man filming him being served with legal papers outside of his house and kept the victim’s camera, according to the prosecutor.[120] [121]
Tattoos
Game has many tattoos on his body. He has deceased rapper Eazy-E on his right forearm and has a graveyard under it in which the headstones say 2Pac, Jam Master Jay & Eazy-E. Under his left eye he has a teardrop and behind his left ear has a tattoo that says "HCT 630 03", which is a reference to his son Harlem Caron Taylor who was born on June 30, 2003.
On the left side of his neck he has his The Game logo and under it, he has the Black Wallstreet logo. Under his right eye he had a tattoo of a Butterfly (symbolizing rebirth) but covered it with the L.A. Dodgers logo and a red star around it. Under his right ear, he has the Converse All-Star logo and under it he has CBP which stands for Cedar Block Piru. On his upper chest he has Hate It or Love It. On the right side of his chest, he has a tattoo that says N.W.A. On the left side of his chest, he has a bandana.
On the left side of his ribs he has a Dia De Los Muertos version tattoo of rapper Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes and on the right side of his ribs he has a similar version of R&B singer Aaliyah.[122]
On his stomach, he has "Stretch", which used to be his nickname because he was tall. On his right shoulder he has KJ and under it he has Tupac Shakur as an Angel. On his lower right forearm, he has "Wallstreet" while on his other one has "The Black". On his right arm, he has a tribute to his deceased friend "Billboard". On his right hand he has Chuck while his other hand has Taylor ("Chuck" is Game's nickname[123]), though he later covered them up with portraits of Mike Tyson and Muhammad Ali respectively by artist Nikko Hurtado. On his lower left forearm he has a pigeon and above it a clown. On his left elbow he has his Hurricane shoes logo and under it has G-Unot a reference to his feud with 50 Cent and G-Unit.[citation needed]
Across his stomach he also has his hometown of "Compton" over his original "Stretch" tattoo and above that he has a tattoo of Barack Obama's face with his suit on. He also recently got the album covers of Dr. Dre's The Chronic and his major label debut album The Documentary tattooed on his lower stomach by Kat Von D.[124][125] He also had plans to get portraits of Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X tattooed on him soon.[126] On August 19, 2013, he got Trayvon Martin in his hoodie, and late rapper Nate Dogg tattooed on separate parts of his legs.[127]
Discography
Studio albums
Filmography
Film Year Title Role Notes 2006 Waist Deep Big Meat Main role Belly 2: Millionaire Boyz Club G Main role 2007 Tournament of Dreams Troy Main role 2008 Street Kings Grill Supporting role Bigg Snoop Dogg Presents: The Adventures of tha Blue Carpet Treatment Himself Voice role and likeness 2012 House Arrest DeAndre Main role 2019 All-Star Weekend Tanner Supporting role
Documentaries Year Film Role Notes 2005 Beef III Himself Supporting role 2006 Stop Snitchin', Stop Lyin' Himself Main role Rap Sheet: Hip Hop and the Cops Himself Supporting role Death Before Dishonor Himself Supporting role Black and Blue: Legends of the Hip Hop Cop Himself Supporting role 2007 Life After the Math Himself Main role Beef IV Himself Supporting role 2008 Bridging the Gap Himself Supporting role
Video games Year Title Role Notes 2004 Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Mark "B-Dup" Wayne Voice role 2007 Def Jam: Icon Himself Voice role and likeness
Awards and nominationsCiro Benedettini said on Tuesday that no date has been set yet, but the visit is likely to take place towards the end of the month, AFP reported.
Rouhani had been scheduled to visit Vatican in November as part of a tour which would have taken him to Italy and France. But the trip was cancelled following the Paris terrorist attacks that left 130 people dead.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif also said at the time that, after coordination with the European sides, it was agreed that the Iranian president’s trip to the two countries (Italy and France) be postponed to some other time.
On December 18, French President Francois Hollande said he would host his Iranian counterpart Hassan Rouhani at the end of January.
One day later on December 19, President of the French Senate Gerard Larcher also announced that President Rouhani will make his planned visit to France on January 27.Cops and prosecutors said Cathy Woods was a lesbian and that it had driven her to murder.
Woods killed college student Michelle Mitchell in Reno, Nevada, in 1976 after the 19-year-old rebuffed her sexual advances, prosecutors claimed. Despite the lack of physical evidence, witness statements saying the victim was with a man, and Woods’s diagnosed schizophrenia, she was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
Woods spent the next 35 years in prison before a DNA test in 2014 placing a suspected serial killer at the scene of the crime set her free.
The case against her was cooked, Woods’s lawyers claim in a federal lawsuit filed against Reno law enforcement on Monday. Seeking damages for civil rights violations, malicious prosecution, and emotional distress, Woods’s lawyers say she was the victim of a homophobic prosecution and police force that preyed on her mental illness to force a confession for a crime she didn’t commit—all while Mitchell’s real killer walked free.
Woods was the “longest-serving wrongfully convicted woman to be exonerated in United States history,” her lawyers wrote in the lawsuit. The city of Reno, named in Woods’s lawsuit, said it was still reviewing the suit when contacted by The Daily Beast on Tuesday.
“All I can say right now is we’ll defend the city,” Karl Hall, attorney for the city of Reno, said.
Mitchell, a nursing student at the University of Nevada’s Reno campus, was found dead in a garage in February 1976 with her hands bound and her throat slit. Witnesses said they had seen Mitchell with a man shortly before her disappearance, and large footprints, as though from a man’s shoe, were found near her body. Physical evidence in the case was scant save for a cigarette discovered nearby. With forensic DNA testing a decade away, police were stumped: The case went cold for three years.
Then, in 1979, in the Louisiana mental facility where she had been committed involuntarily for psychiatric treatment, Woods started talking about Mitchell’s killing. The details Woods gave were public knowledge, her lawyers say: Woods had lived in Reno at the time of Mitchell’s murder, and the story had been highly publicized.
Still, Woods’s counselor contacted Reno police, in what her lawyers say was a violation of physician-patient confidentiality.
“The hospital staff should have known she was hearing voices at the time,” Woods’s lawyer Elizabeth Wang told The Daily Beast. Woods was being treated for schizophrenia, thought disorder, and auditory hallucinations. “She was doing all kinds of things that indicated she was saying things that were not at all true.”
Woods did not match the profile Reno police had assembled of their suspect. Witnesses described seeing a strange man with Mitchell before her death and leaving the area of the crime, but he was large, nearly 6 feet tall. Woods was considerably shorter, with feet too small to match the shoe prints found near Mitchell’s body.
“Nevertheless, the Law Enforcement Defendants decided that the Defendants from Reno should travel to Shreveport, Louisiana to interrogate Ms. Woods,” her lawyers wrote. “At the time of the interrogations, the Law Enforcement Defendants were eager to solve a highly-publicized murder case that had become a cold case.”
Already detained in the hospital against her will, Woods was highly susceptible to giving a false confession, Woods’s lawyers say. Police investigators did not read her Miranda rights, ignored her plea for an attorney, did not allow her to leave the hospital room where she was held, and otherwise ignored her signs of mental illness and distress, the lawyers say.
Eventually, Woods confessed to murdering Mitchell. Or at least, police say she did.
There’s no record of Woods’s confession like a recording, her lawyers say. Nor did police ask her to write her confession, or sign a sworn affidavit. Instead, police memorialized a confession after Woods’s interrogation, feeding Woods non-public information about the crime in order to make her appear complicit, her lawyers say.
The state’s case rested on a story of scorned affections, accusing Woods of killing Mitchell after Mitchell rejected her. But the narrative was a fiction, the lawyers say.
“I’m not sure the origins of why they said she was a homosexual,” Wang said of Woods, who is heterosexual. “I think part of it had to do with the fact that many witnesses identified a male suspect running from the scene… Our belief is that they tried to reconcile the fact that Woods is a woman with the other evidence from witnesses, by saying, ‘Oh, well, she’s a lesbian. She’s butch. She dressed like a man.’
“They talked a lot at the trial about the way she dressed, the way she acted. A lot of it was stuff that would not be brought up at a trial today, but even by the standards of that time, it was really quite homophobic.”
By casting Woods as a lesbian, prosecutors hoped to malign her character, her lawyers say. At a time when homosexuality was broadly considered immoral, less than a decade after homosexuality was de-listed as a psychiatric illness, accusing a woman of murdering another over unrequited advances was no doubt helpful to the state’s case.
Woods lost her trial and her subsequent appeal, and spent the next 35 years in jail, where she attempted suicide, survived an assault, and was subjected to electroshock therapy.
All the while, Mitchell’s real killer went unaccused. In 2014, 38 years after Mitchell’s slaying, police tested the DNA on a cigarette found at the scene of the murder. The DNA matched that of Rodney Halbower, the suspected “Gypsy Hill Killer” or “San Mateo Slasher” accused of murdering up to seven women and girls in early 1976.
Since Mitchell’s murder, Halbower had been in and out of prison. In November 1975, just months before the murders of seven women and girls in California and Nevada, he had been jailed for rape. After the murders, for which he was not originally investigated, he was booked again on rape charges, this time escaping during a softball game and kidnapping his 7-year-old daughter in Michigan. Recaptured and returned to a Nevada prison, he escaped a second time in 1986 and fled to Oregon, where he stabbed a woman in a parking lot.
Halbower was convicted of attempted murder and was serving a life sentence when DNA tests linked him to Mitchell’s murder and those of two other women killed in early 1976. When the results of the DNA test were made public, Woods was released, and Halbower was extradited to California, where he has been charged with two 1976 murders.
The first thing Woods did after her September 2014 release from prison was to eat a cheeseburger and onion rings with her brother.
“She is delighted,” Woods’s criminal attorney Maizie Pusich said upon her release. “She is having probably the best day of her life because she knows that this is all over.”
Woods is free now, and living with family. But her lawyers say no settlement can win back the years she lost in prison.
“Ms. Woods will never get 35 years of her life back,” they wrote. “Nothing about being mentally vulnerable could ever justify being wrongfully convicted for over three decades.”Whose cars? Our cars!
An economy putting the pinch on pocketbooks, rising gas prices, foreign oil imported from terrorist havens, a bankrupt federal infrastructure budget — all of these factors (and others) are creating a perfect political storm that could lead to a significant change in U.S. energy policy.
With about 2/3 of our country’s oil consumption used for transportation, the energy policy proposals coming out of Washington D.C. correctly focus on how we power our vehicles. Unfortunately, they completely ignore the ability of the American people to power themselves.
There’s a huge disconnect in the White House and on Capitol Hill on this issue.
The bottom line is this: By various estimates, about 40% of trips made in our cities are two miles or less and right now almost all of those trips are made by car.
Switch a good percentage of those short trips to bicycling and we’d use a lot less oil and have a more stable economy (more money in our pockets) and a more resilient energy outlook.
Sounds simple, but because bicycling lacks real political respect and is still seen as an “enhancement” by many, it is left out of major policy proposals. Here are two such proposals I’ve seen recently. The first is from President Obama (as shared on May 6th):
Obama’s plan is to find more oil here in the states to use in cars, improve gas mileage in cars, invest in electric cars, invest in biofuels research for cars, and so on. No mention of investments or initiatives that might increase the use of the most energy-efficient, lowest-cost form of transportation ever invented (bicycles). That’s disappointing because we all know President Obama is keenly aware of bicycling.
Different forms of energy.
(Photo © J. Maus)
And today I read Oregon Senator Ron Wyden’s approach to the problem. Wyden says he’ll, “increase energy security and reduce dependence on foreign oil by integrating many types of cutting edge alternative fuel sources into our transportation infrastructure.”
And by “cutting edge alternative fuel sources” he doesn’t mean muscle power.
I played a game while reading Wyden’s quotes in his press release. I imagined he was pushing for new bike policies..
“The price of oil wouldn’t matter as much if Americans had more ways to get from point A to point B without oil… “The technology exists [bicycles]. There are already ways to use electricity and other clean fuels to power cars, trucks, buses, and off-road vehicles [bicycles]. This bill makes these technologies [bicycles] more accessible, giving Americans alternatives to energy while letting the market decide which of these new fuels will work best for different types of vehicles and for different parts of the country.”
So, while electric cars and better gas mileage get the spotlight in the form of major policy proposals, all bicycling gets is a bit of cheerleading in a measly blog post.
Bicycling as a political issue is funny that way. When it comes to green-leaning speeches and photo-ops, bicycling is welcome to the table with |
shape.
The particular phase above came after Dortmund had overloaded the left side of the pitch, which they look to do often under Tuchel. Aubameyang, Kagawa, and Mkhitaryan had all drifted over while Hofmann took up a central striker role. Dortmund overloaded the left constantly throughout the match, opening up the right side for a quick switch, but the combination play on the left, through the half space and centrally, particularly between Kagawa and Mkhitaryan, was excellent and dragged the Leverkusen back line out of their shape consistently.
A year ago, Mkhitaryan was looking down and out at Dortmund. He struggled to find the form that earned him a move from Shakhtar Donetsk, but under Tuchel, he has looked fantastic. As mentioned above, Mkhitaryan’s movement through the half space on the left was fantastic. He would drift inside and his combination play with Kagawa, Aubameyang, and Schmelzer was excellent. The Armenian international was excellent with the ball at his feet as well. He would pick up the ball in the left half space and go on diagonal runs with the ball, evading defenders, while creating space for his teammates. It was not as explosive as Messi’s runs, but against Leverkusen, it was just as effective in getting away from defenders and creating space.
Schmidt’s Changes
At halftime, Schmidt took off Kiessling and Kramer. Neither performed particularly well. Kiessling was unable to really help Javier Hernandez press either Hummels or Sokratis and the German striker was unable to keep up with the movement of the ball to take away the central passing lanes. He was also meant to be an aerial outlet for Leverkusen when Dortmund pressed, but he struggled to win his duals against Sokratis and Hummels. With that, it made sense for Schmidt to replace him with a more energetic forward option in Julian Brandt. The thought behind the youngster’s introduction was to allow more pressing, but also an another counter attacking option. With Brandt, Bellarabi partnered Hernandez up top.
Schmidt also brought Mehmedi on at halftime for Kramer. This moved Calhanoglu into the middle with Kampl, which gave Leverkusen an energetic midfield duo, but meant they lacked some a real ball winner in the centre of the pitch.
Conclusion
Tuchel’s side got the best of Leverkusen in every part of the match. While Leverkusen’s pressing seemed difficult to break down at times, Dortmund were able to adjust in order to break the lines. With this win, it gives Dortmund 11 wins in 11 matches under Tuchel. The movement of the midfield was key to opening up Leverkusen and going forward, Dortmund’s combination play was too much for Leverkusen.
Schmidt has struggled to find the form of last year and now has just six points from their opening five matches. Tuchel tactically got much the better of Schmidt with the latter never really adjusting his side once Dortmund were able to pass through the midfield.Training camp is underway for the World Champion Baltimore Ravens, and there has been a lot of good news coming out of the Under Armour Performance Center in Owings Mills. The revamped defense has been dominant, and there have been rave reviews for veterans like Terrell Suggs and Lardarius Webb, newcomers such as Elvis Dumervil and Chris Canty, and important rookies like Matt Elam and Brandon Williams. On the other side of the ball, one of the best backfields in football (Ray Rice, Bernard Pierce, and Vonta Leach) is off to a running start. And Joe Flacco has been sharp with both his arm and his mouth, spewing trash talk at the defense and showing as much swagger as a tall, lanky white guy from New Jersey can be reasonably expected to demonstrate.
With the good, however, always comes some bad. And for the Ravens, the bad came in the form of Dennis Pitta’s fractured hip. While Pitta hasn’t been in the “elite” level of tight ends, he has been a reliable target for Joe Flacco, and he was expected to pick up a lot of the slack left by Anquan Boldin’s departure. Pitta’s injury will move that burden to fellow tight end Ed Dickson and a wide receiver corps of Torrey Smith, Jacoby Jones, and a whole bunch of unknowns.
It can’t be disputed that the Ravens’ young receivers have a ton of potential and athletic ability. Yet the question still remains: can any of these guys prove that they are the one to fill the void left by Boldin and Pitta? They’ll each get the chance to make their case during the upcoming preseason games. Here’s a look at each of the contenders:
Tandon Doss – 3rd Year – 6’2, 205 – 2012 Stats: 7/123 yards, 1 TD
Tandon Doss came out of 2011 draft with the title “Flacco’s Favorite,” but don’t confuse that with the quarterback’s horrible Pizza Hut commercials. Flacco was given tape on several mid-to-late-round receivers and asked to pick one, and he chose Doss. He came out of college with a reputation as a sharp route runner with strong hands who could make physical plays across the middle, and he’s demonstrated those attributes in practice. However, his limited in-game experience has been a mixed bag. He scored his first NFL touchdown in a Week 7 loss to Houston last year, but he also had a few drops in the end zone against the Colts on Wild Card Weekend. If he can show the hands and toughness during the preseason that he does in practice, he’s probably the favorite to win the starting job.
Deonte Thompson – 2nd Year – 6’, 200 – 2012 Stats: 5/51 yards
Deonte Thompson came into the 2012 Ravens training camp as an undrafted free agent and came out with a spot on the 53-man roster. That’s a tough task, and it shows what the coaches see in him. Thompson was mainly used on special teams his rookie year, achieving modest success as a returner before giving way to Jacoby Jones in that area. The team obviously likes what they see in the young speedster, listing alongside Doss and just behind Smith and Jones on the first depth chart. But he needs to perform in the preseason games to lock down a spot on the roster. He has the benefit of incumbency on the roster, but that doesn’t usually go far in the NFL.
David Reed – 4th Year – 6’, 190 – 2012 Stats: 5/66 yards
Oh, David Reed. Never has a player earned such enmity from a fan base for doing so little. Reed has spent most of his time on the team as a special teamer and kick returner, where he had some success. But if you bring his name up to Ravens fans, the first things they think of are that he’s always hurt and that he lost two fumbles in Week 10 of the 2011 season to cost us a game against Seattle. And those are definitely fair critiques. That being said, the team obviously sees something in the guy. They signed him to a moderate extension in the offseason despite an injury history that included missing the first 12 weeks of the 2012 season. Reed likely won’t get a shot at returner with Jacoby Jones on the roster, but he’s got an experience edge on most of his competition for wide receiver. He absolutely has an opportunity to win the spot, but he’ll likely have to make his impact in the preseason games. His name hasn’t been mentioned much in training camp reports, which means that he’s not messing up but also hasn’t done much to separate himself from the competition.
LaQuan Williams – 3rd Year – 6’, 200 – 2012 Stats: N/A
LaQuan Williams earned his way onto the 53-man roster in 2011 with a strong camp and preseason that had fans clamoring for the undrafted rookie. Since then, he has distinguished himself with strong play on special teams and done a whole lot of nothing as a receiver. He was active for 11 games in 2012 and had no receptions. Williams has shown flashes of brilliance in the preseason before, and he’ll need to do the same this month to earn playing time with the offense. He has a better shot than some to make the squad due to his special teams play, but that may not be enough if he doesn’t show consistency as a wide out.
Tommy Streeter – 2nd Year – 6’5, 220 – 2012 Stats: N/A
“Touchdown” Tommy Streeter, as he was known at the University of Miami, looks like your prototypical wide receiver. He’s tall, he’s long, and he’s got speed. He was initially considered one of the hottest prospects coming out of college, but he dropped to the sixth round in the 2012 draft because he was viewed as a project who needed to work on his route running and ball skills. That proved to be accurate in the 2012 camp. He spent the season on injured reserve last year and is trying to make his mark in the 2013 receiver competition. Part of me thinks that he has the best chance to pull a Victor Cruz and come out of nowhere this preseason. He has so much pure talent that you’d think it has to come through sooner rather than later. The other part of me thinks he’s Justin Harper, Part Deuce. We’ll have to see who he really is.
Aaron Mellette – Rookie – 6’2, 217 – 2012 Stats: N/A
Mellette was the seventh-round draft pick for the Ravens in 2013, and he comes with an impressive college resume. In 45 games at Elon, he totaled 304 receptions, 4,254 yards, and a whopping 44 TDs. He had a number of honors, including being named a first-round All American by the Associated Press in 2011 and 2012, and he was nominated for the 2012 Walter Payton Award, which goes to the top player in the FCS. Elon and the NFL are different animals entirely, but Mellette will certainly get the chance to carry over his impressive college productivity to the pros.
Marcus Rivers – 1st Year – 6’3, 218 – 2012 Stats: N/A
Rivers signed with the Ravens in the offseason after spending time with the Packers and in the CFL and never catching on to a roster. He was a standout at Buffalo, but he’s a long shot to make the team. He’d likely need a strong preseason and a solid impact on special teams to stand a chance.
Marlon Brown – Rookie – 6’5, 205 – 2012 Stats: N/A
Marlon Brown is a Georgia product, where he started 11 games and appeared in 40. He had 55 receptions for 851 yards and 8 TDs, and he’s got the receiver build and speed. Like Rivers, he’s likely going to need to make his case on special teams.
Gerrard Sheppard – Rookie – 6’2, 211 – 2012 Stats: N/A
Sheppard has a chance to be the “local kid makes it” story at Ravens camp. The Towson alum is a Baltimore native who played his high school ball at McDonough. He’s had some moments at camp, but he’s got quite a ladder to climb to make the 53-man roster. His local connections could make him an ideal practice squad candidate.
Rashaad Carter – Rookie – 6’3, 205 – 2012 Stats: N/A
Carter finds himself at the bottom of the depth chart and looks to be an early camp casualty unless he distinguishes himself during preseason play. The Tusculum alum holds the school record for receiving yards. He was away from football in the 2012 season.
AdvertisementsDoc Rivers on being introduced as the Clippers head coach: 'I couldn't have asked for a better day.' (Photo11: Jayne Kamin-Oncea, USA TODAY Sports) Story Highlights 'I couldn't have asked for a better day,' Rivers says of being introduced as Clipper coach
Blake Griffin 'puts in hard minutes and hard time in the summer,' Rivers says
'I had nine wonderful years in Boston,' Rivers says
Doc Rivers has heard all the hype, the chatter about how his addition as Los Angeles Clippers coach turns them into instant title contenders and may be the most impactful move of the offseason.
But after his stunning exit from Boston that left so many Celtics fans feeling spurned as they enter a rebuilding stage, Rivers doesn't need a reminder that he can't do this alone. He remembers the 2004-05 and 2005-06 seasons in Beantown, when his teams went a combined 78-86 and no one was deeming him coaching royalty as they so often do now.
And he certainly remembers that July day in 2007 when he took part in an even splashier news conference than the one had by the Clippers on Wednesday: Kevin Garnett was introduced as a member of the Celtics after he was traded from Minnesota, the original Big Three was born with Paul Pierce and Ray Allen, and their run that included the 2008 title and constant contention would follow soon thereafter. As Rivers begins this challenge of turning these Clippers players into champions, he spoke with USA TODAY Sports on Wednesday about his new life in Los Angeles that he's so thrilled about, how this team compares to his old one, whether he's at peace with the way his departure from Boston was perceived and his thoughts on his replacement, new Celtics coach Brad Stevens.
Q: Doc, you've been a part of big splashes before, and I have to imagine that as Chris (Paul) and those guys were introduced (at the Wednesday press conference in Los Angeles) that the presser with KG crossed your mind at some point. Does this experience remind you of that one at all in terms of the major makeover and instant expectation?
A: "Well, Chris is going to be a Hall of Famer, and so should Blake (Griffin) and DJ (DeAndre Jordan), hopefully, but we were getting (surefire future Hall of Famers). Paul was and Ray and Kevin are, so in that terms, that day is bigger just because of those three guys. You just don't bring those three guys together very often. This was neater in one way in that it was more about the key guys, signing Chris back, bringing Matt back, and getting Darren Collison and JJ Redick and Jared Dudley, it's more that we're building this team, and that was a great message … I couldn't have asked for a better day."
Q: So let's talk about this new team of yours. We're all so guilty of over-hyping teams so often, so what's realistic about what folks should expect the Clippers to accomplish and what's fair in terms of where you set that bar?
A: "You know, I don't yet. I know what I think we can be, and I think we have a realistic chance of being the winner at the end of the year. But what I don't know yet, and one of the things that I found that was interesting when we got Kevin, Paul and Ray together, was that they were over themselves. It was time for them to focus on one aspect of their career, and only one, and that was winning. This is a younger team. This is a younger group. And so I think it will be really interesting to find out, 'Do you want to stand out, or do you want to win?' For young guys, that's hard to understand that if you win, you do stand out. Or, you can stand out alone and you'll get a lot of accolades, but you won't win and that's an individual thing. For us, and I don't know our guys yet, but for the young ones – that's DeAndre, Blake, and Chris – that'll be the key is sacrificing even some of their games for the good of the win. And that's what – if we can get that right, then I think we're going to be really good. That's why Matt (Barnes) signed back. And I think that's why JJ Redick wanted to join the team. That's why (Jared) Dudley was so excited, because they've been through it. JJ Redick was in the Finals his second year, and he probably assumed he'd be there every year. And now he realizes how hard it is to just get to the Finals. Forget winning it, to just get there is hard. I know the guys on this team who haven't been there don't understand how hard that is, but having JJ and a couple of other guys, they know how hard it is and that's important."
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Q: For all the talk of the new additions, there are plenty of folks who feel like Blake's ability to keep improving will be as big a factor as there is for you guys. What's your early read on him and do you have much of a relationship with him?
A: "I don't have a relationship with any of them. I'm having relationships with them now. I'm taking DJ out to dinner tonight, I'm going to meet Blake tomorrow, so my impressions of them so far have been fantastic. I met with Blake and DJ yesterday, and they've come in and worked every day. Just talking to people around the organization, you find out about Blake that his work ethic is just unbelievable. It's incredible. And to me, that only goes one way and that's a positive way. You have a worker, and he's talented, then it's going to work out. That's what you know."
Q: I've heard the same thing about Blake's habits for a while, but to hear you say it puts that on a different level.
A: "No, I watched him through my window yesterday with a couple of our coaches, and I mean he puts in hard minutes and hard time in the summer, and that was really nice to watch."
Q: Is that the important stuff right now, just connecting with guys?
A: "Yeah, my job the rest of the summer is just communication – get the message across, get guys to understand what we're in this for and get them ready for it."
Q: I know you're not looking to look backward, but I am wondering: are you comfortable and OK with the way things ended in Boston, the way people look at it and whether people understand the situation? (Rivers had three years and $21 million left on his Celtics contract, but was allowed to leave and sign with the Clippers on a three-year, $21 million deal in exchange for Boston receiving a 2015 first-round draft pick)
A: "I think some people do, and some people don't. But listen, I'm here now, and there's nothing I can do about it. I think it obviously was a very good fit for me being here. My daughter lives here, it was just good for me. I know for a fact that (Celtics general manager) Danny (Ainge) got exactly out of this deal what he wanted to get out of it when he went into it. How it went down will be debated, and I know the truth, you know what I mean? But other than that, I think for the most part the people in Boston know what I gave them. I gave them everything I had and that's all you can do. And then when you make a change, you make a change, and you've got to live with it. Listen, I live by Chuck Daly's famous words, that every decision you make has a 50-50 chance of working. You make it, and you just live on with it. I had nine wonderful years in Boston, from more than just the basketball standpoint.
"Some of my better friends, for the rest of my life now, will be – two or three of my best friends now – are guys who I met since I've been there and who I've probably talked to every day since I've been in LA. … Those are relationships that never go away. Danny and I, we talk – he's playing at my golf club today in Orlando. Listen, fan-wise, I hope they understand. And if they don't, there's nothing I can do with it. Some do, some won't. You know how that works. It was just a wonderful time for me. They treated me like everyone should be treated. I got great treatment there, and that's all I can ask for."
Clippers coach Doc Rivers is joined by other newcomers and players who re-signed. (Photo11: Jayne Kamin-Oncea, USA TODAY Sports)
Q: I've heard you say a couple of times that there are parts of the truth that aren't out there. So what, specifically, do you feel like people don't see?
A: "You know, I don't get into it, and I won't. I think the only thing I keep hearing is that I initiated this, and I really didn't. That's where I think the miscommunication has been in that. But once it was initiated, I definitely pursued it. I thought it was a good thing to pursue for me. But the one thing I didn't do was initiate it. That's not true, so whoever says that – that not true. But once it was communicated to me, I thought, 'Wow, this is a great opportunity. I think I'm going to go for it.' "
Q: There was a win-win component here, it seems, with Danny being able to turn you into an asset to speed up the rebuilding process and then they obviously bring (former Butler coach) Brad (Stevens) in.
A: "I think (the Celtics) have done a hell of a job. I'm a big Stevens fan, have always been. It's funny, I talked to him about a month ago about another (NBA head coaching) job where somebody else was thinking about hiring him and the GM from there called me to talk to Brad to get a feel if he wanted to coach in the NBA."
Q: A head job, or an assistant job?
A: "No, a head job. And then the way it works out, four weeks later, he takes my job (laughs). It's funny. I told him that he'd be an excellent NBA coach, and he's ready for it. Whether you want to leave Butler or not, now that's up to you. I said that's a personal situation, and it's funny because I told him, I said, 'I'm going through that right now, and I don't know what I'm going to do.' Maybe the fact he saw me leave, he thinks, 'Well (expletive), I'm leaving too.'"
Q: You inspired Brad Stevens to leave Butler. So there it is.
A: "Yeah, I hope not. I hope not. I hope he inspires me somehow."
Q: You know I'm dying to know which team it was now, right?
A: "No, no, I can't say. They hired someone else, and it would've be smart to share."Here's an incredible chart that shows how rapidly solar power is being installed in America.
In 2006, just 7 years ago, there was one new installation of a solar unit every 80 minutes.
Today? There's one installation every four minutes.
The U.S. is on pace to see one new solar installation every 83 seconds by 2016, renewable energy research group Greentech Media says.
GreenTechMedia
Perhaps even more amazing: two-thirds of all "distributed," or localized, solar in the U.S. has been installed in the past 2 1/2 years.
Greentech VP Shayle Kann told us that by 2016, New Jersey will have surged to the No. 2 solar producer in the country, leapfrogging Arizona.
Meanwhile, New York will surge from 10th to 5th, thanks to its renewable portfolio standard that dictates 29% of all the state's energy needs must be renewably sourced by 2015.The Morning Shift All your daily car news in one convenient place. Isn't your time more important?
Good morning! Welcome to The Morning Shift, your roundup of the auto news you crave, all in one place every weekday morning. Here are the important stories you need to know.
1st Gear: VOLKSWAGEN SALES BLOWOUT, SATURDAY SATURDAY SATURDAY
“Now must be a great time to buy a Volkswagen, what with the diesel crisis and all,” many car buyers have suggested to me over the past year, believing the discounts and incentives run deep with desperation.
Not so! Despite the ongoing diesel mess, VW never really lowered prices or offered strong incentives to move more metal, except very early on in the scandal.
That is apparently about to change. As VW negotiates a settlement with its dealers, the automaker promises them “a wider model range and lower pricing” in order to aim for volume. Via Bloomberg:
“We are getting the product we’ve been asking for,” Alan Brown, chairman of VW’s U.S. dealer council, said in a phone interview. Volkswagen is also planning to cut the sticker price on cars to boost sales and “is looking at this with a volume mindset,” Brown said. VW told dealerships about the shift to a more mass-market strategy for the brand as part of a settlement to compensate them for losses incurred from the emissions cheating. VW on Thursday agreed to pay 652 dealers about $1.2 billion, a person familiar with the matter said. The German automaker said it will make cash payments and provide additional benefits to dealers to resolve their claims, without providing any details.
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VW’s U.S. market share is just 1.7 percent and sales slid 14 percent in July.
2nd Gear: But The Product Delays Are Coming
Price cuts and volume may be the only way Volkswagen can survive for a little bit. Automotive News reports that thanks to the monumental costs of Dieselgate, the company is “reviewing its broad portfolio of more than 300 models for fat to trim, with CEO Matthias Mueller pledging last year to cancel or postpone ‘anything that is not absolutely necessary.’”
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We knew that was happening, but here’s one example:
That review could determine the fate of the U.S.-market Passat sedan. It was slated for a redesign in 2018, when it would move onto VW’s modular platform for vehicles with transverse-mounted engines, known as MQB. Those plans are now up in the air amid internal scrutiny over whether it makes sense to build two distinct Passat sedans on the MQB platform — one for the U.S. and China, and another for Europe and the rest of the world. According to a source with knowledge of the plans, the leading option is to delay the U.S. launch of the next-generation Passat sedan, likely until 2020 or 2021, to align it with the redesigned global Passat.
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Meanwhile, the future is coming:
In July, Woebcken said a plan for the VW brand in 2025 in the U.S. is largely complete and will be announced in greater detail this fall. He said VW will focus on competing with mainstream players in key, high-volume segments, namely midsize and compact cars and crossovers.
3rd Gear: Cadillac Won’t Back Down... On Its Dealers
Cadillac is trying to make its dealers stop acting like glorified Chevy dealers. Or, if you ask them, it’s squeezing smaller and more rural dealers with less compensation based on anticipated sales targets. But bossman Johan de Nysschen insists the program is legal under franchise laws, and basically told dealers to deal with it. (Pun very much intended.) Via Automotive News:
Grumbling about the program began as soon as de Nysschen announced it in February, but opposition grew in recent weeks, when two groups of state and metro dealer associations sent letters urging Cadillac to reconsider. They said the program would disproportionately aid large stores in desirable locations at the expense of smaller retailers, which would be competitively disadvantaged and could be run out of business. “I dispute that entirely,” de Nysschen said in the Pebble Beach interview. “We are introducing the principle of brand standards, which is not unknown in the auto industry. And our brand standards recognize the very diverse nature of the Cadillac dealer body.” He said the program makes it easier for smaller dealers to meet standards and earn more money.
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4th Gear: Muscle Cars Keep Their Value
Muscle car sales might be cooling a bit, but one area where they’re still strong is holding their value. Via The Detroit Free Press:
The three muscle cars now retain 48%-49% of their value after three years, Ibara said. “Typically, three-year-old vehicles hover between 40% and the high 30s.” Ibara’s analysis flies counter to recent questions about muscle cars’ appeal. Sales are down this year, though generally less than sales of all types of cars. “The incentives on them are generally lower, and that leads to higher residual values,” Ibara said. “Cars that have natural demand do better as used cars.”
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5th Gear: Canada’s Auto Workers OK Potential Strikes
Canada’s auto workers union, Unifor, considers itself in a fight for the survival of that country’s car industry. As union members enter negotiations with the Big Three, there is concern over long-term investment in Canada as more and more production shifts to Mexico.
As The Detroit News reports, workers have made clear that they’re prepared to strike:
Workers at GM voted 97.1 percent in favor of strike action; Ford workers voted 98.9 percent in favor; and at Fiat Chrysler workers voted 99.0 percent in favor, the union said in a release, setting up the potential for contentious bargaining. Bargaining began this month. The strike authorization vote is largely procedural and often passes by wide margins, but Sunday’s vote reaffirms the union’s seriousness about winning new investment at plants across Canada. Unifor President Jerry Dias has vowed there will be no deal without guarantees from Ford, GM and FCA to bring new product and jobs to a number of plants at risk of closing. “With this clear mandate our members have demonstrated they are in full support of their bargaining committees, and our direction in this set of negotiations,” Dias said in a statement. “The push for new investments in Canada got a lot stronger today.”
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Reverse: Kettering
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Neutral: Will Price Cuts Save VW?
Or at least help with sales?The official Dutch inquiry into the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, released last week, contains one of the most sensational reports on western intelligence ever published. Officials have been staggered by its findings and the Dutch government has resigned. One of its many volumes is devoted to clandestine activities during the Bosnian war of the early 1990s. For five years, Professor Cees Wiebes of Amsterdam University has had unrestricted access to Dutch intelligence files and has stalked the corridors of secret service headquarters in western capitals, as well as in Bosnia, asking questions.
His findings are set out in "Intelligence and the war in Bosnia, 1992-1995". It includes remarkable material on covert operations, signals interception, human agents and double-crossing by dozens of agencies in one of dirtiest wars of the new world disorder. Now we have the full story of the secret alliance between the Pentagon and radical Islamist groups from the Middle East designed to assist the Bosnian Muslims - some of the same groups that the Pentagon is now fighting in "the war against terrorism". Pentagon operations in Bosnia have delivered their own "blowback".
In the 1980s Washington's secret services had assisted Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran. Then, in 1990, the US fought him in the Gulf. In both Afghanistan and the Gulf, the Pentagon had incurred debts to Islamist groups and their Middle Eastern sponsors. By 1993 these groups, many supported by Iran and Saudi Arabia, were anxious to help Bosnian Muslims fighting in the former Yugoslavia and called in their debts with the Americans. Bill Clinton and the Pentagon were keen to be seen as creditworthy and repaid in the form of an Iran-Contra style operation - in flagrant violation of the UN security council arms embargo against all combatants in the former Yugoslavia.
The result was a vast secret conduit of weapons smuggling though Croatia. This was arranged by the clandestine agencies of the US, Turkey and Iran, together with a range of radical Islamist groups, including Afghan mojahedin and the pro-Iranian Hizbullah. Wiebes reveals that the British intelligence services obtained documents early on in the Bosnian war proving that Iran was making direct deliveries.
Arms purchased by Iran and Turkey with the financial backing of Saudi Arabia made their way by night from the Middle East. Initially aircraft from Iran Air were used, but as the volume increased they were joined by a mysterious fleet of black C-130 Hercules aircraft. The report stresses that the US was "very closely involved" in the airlift. Mojahedin fighters were also flown in, but they were reserved as shock troops for especially hazardous operations.
Light weapons are the familiar currency of secret services seeking to influence such conflicts. The volume of weapons flown into Croatia was enormous, partly because of a steep Croatian "transit tax". Croatian forces creamed off between 20% and 50% of the arms. The report stresses that this entire trade was clearly illicit. The Croats themselves also obtained massive quantities of illegal weapons from Germany, Belgium and Argentina - again in contravention of the UN arms embargo. The German secret services were fully aware of the trade.
Rather than the CIA, the Pentagon's own secret service was the hidden force behind these operations. The UN protection force, UNPROFOR, was dependent on its troop-contributing nations for intelligence, and above all on the sophisticated monitoring capabilities of the US to police the arms embargo. This gave the Pentagon the ability to manipulate the embargo at will: ensuring that American Awacs aircraft covered crucial areas and were able to turn a blind eye to the frequent nightime comings and goings at Tuzla.
Weapons flown in during the spring of 1995 were to turn up only a fortnight later in the besieged and demilitarised enclave at Srebrenica. When these shipments were noticed, Americans pressured UNPROFOR to rewrite reports, and when Norwegian officials protested about the flights, they were reportedly threatened into silence.
Both the CIA and British SIS had a more sophisticated perspective on the conflict than the Pentagon, insisting that no side had clean hands and arguing for caution. James Woolsey, director of the CIA until May 1995, had increasingly found himself out of step with the Clinton White House over his reluctance to develop close relations with the Islamists. The sentiments were reciprocated. In the spring of 1995, when the CIA sent its first head of station to Sarajevo to liaise with Bosnia's security authorities, the Bosnians tipped off Iranian intelligence. The CIA learned that the Iranians had targeted him for liquidation and quickly withdrew him.
Iranian and Afghan veterans' training camps had also been identified in Bosnia. Later, in the Dayton Accords of November 1995, the stipulation appeared that all foreign forces be withdrawn. This was a deliberate attempt to cleanse Bosnia of Iranian-run training camps. The CIA's main opponents in Bosnia were now the mojahedin fighters and their Iranian trainers - whom the Pentagon had been helping to supply months earlier.
Meanwhile, the secret services of Ukraine, Greece and Israel were busy arming the Bosnian Serbs. Mossad was especially active and concluded a deal with the Bosnian Serbs at Pale involving a substantial supply of artillery shells and mortar bombs. In return they secured safe passage for the Jewish population out of the besieged town of Sarajevo. Subsequently, the remaining population was perplexed to find that unexploded mortar bombs landing in Sarajevo sometimes had Hebrew markings.
The broader lessons of the intelligence report on Srebrenica are clear. Those who were able to deploy intelligence power, including the Americans and their enemies, the Bosnian Serbs, were both able to get their way. Conversely, the UN and the Dutch government were "deprived of the means and capacity for obtaining intelligence" for the Srebrenica deployment, helping to explain why they blundered in, and contributed to the terrible events there.
Secret intelligence techniques can be war-winning and life-saving. But they are not being properly applied. How the UN can have good intelligence in the context of multinational peace operations is a vexing question. Removing light weapons from a conflict can be crucial to drawing it down. But the secret services of some states - including Israel and Iran - continue to be a major source of covert supply, pouring petrol on the flames of already bitter conflicts.
· Richard J Aldrich is Professor of Politics at the University of Nottingham. His 'The Hidden Hand: Britain, America and Cold War Secret Intelligence' is published in paperback by John Murray in August.
richard.aldrich@nottingham.ac.ukEditor's note: This is the second in a series of posts profiling artists and chronicling unexpected Jewish mystical experience. Read the first post on transcendent song.
For Phish fans, New Year's Eve is a High Holy Day. And in Phish lore, Madison Square Garden is a sacred temple -- perhaps the most sacred.
So what happens if you're diehard for both Phish and Judaism and one never-miss-it concert falls on the Sabbath? Do you skip synagogue? God forbid.
Yerachmiel Altizio, 35, is a devout Jew who has seen Phish perform more than 200 times, but because a live concert on the Sabbath presents a number of Jewish legal issues (traveling, carrying and listening to live music are prohibited) he was not able to attend the New Year's Eve extravaganza in Manhattan.
Perhaps now I should give full disclosure: I've seen Phish 12 times and though my standards for observance aren't exactly the strictest, I would also call myself a devout Jew.
It's in this context that I raise the question: Is the mind-altering environment of a Phish concert an appropriate place for a devoted Jewish seeker? And further: Is it, even on the holy Sabbath, perhaps the ideal environment?
The Duality of Phish
"The thing with Phish, why they're so unbelievable, is because everything about them has two sides. It's like a duality," Altizio says. "For a righteous person, it's a completely uplifting spiritual positive experience.... For someone that's done something bad, it can be the worst trip."
Altizio has spent a lot of time thinking about what goes on inside a venue while Phish plays. After hundreds of shows and thousands of hours, he thinks he has an inkling of an answer: it has something to do with intentional ecstatic dance, pervasive communal joy and the unknown destination of Phish's improvisation. But most certainly, the fact that the rhythm section of |
View Full Caption Cook County Sheriff
A bus driver pulled Bailey off of her, and a police officer later subdued him with a stun gun, police said. Bailey has been charged with three felonies and is being held without bail, according to court records.
READ: Bus Driver Saves Pregnant Woman Beaten In Unprovoked Attack, Witnesses Say
Robles-Favela, 33, who works at an assisted living facility in Beverly, was on the bus and witnessed the attack. She immediately after went to Torres' aid, she said. In an effort to calm the woman's nerves, Robles-Favela tried to make small talk, asking Torres about herself and her unborn baby.
"It was just the two of us left on the bus," Robles-Favela said. "It was quiet. I had to break the ice."
Eventually, she learned that Torres had no plans for a baby shower, and didn't really have any baby supplies or even a registry. And though the two went through quite a bit Monday — an ambulance ride, hospitalization and hours at a police station — that fact stuck with Robles-Favela.
Her husband, David Favela, met his wife and Torres at the hospital, bringing them food and helping to call Torres' relatives.
"We were there for hours," Robles-Favela said of the police station visit. "We talked about what she needs [for the baby], which is basically everything. We asked her if she wanted to have a baby shower and she said yes.'"
Torres is due in late October. After a scare in the hospital, doctors were able to detect the baby's heartbeat, and soon after she felt the baby kick, she said.
"I'm so thankful," Torres said of the baby's prognosis.
The husband and wife even offered a place for the woman and her baby to stay in their new Little Village home. Torres, who lives with her boyfriend and is now out of the hospital, is still considering the offer.
"She's so young. [The attack] can definitely make or break a person," Robles-Favela said. "There's more than enough room here. We talked and said, 'Let's do it."
Favela, 32, said the incident came at the right time, just as they bought a new house with plenty of room.
"We're not even completely moved in yet," he said. "We're in the position to help and so we're going to."
A room has been set aside for Torres. Robles-Favela said the outpouring from friends and strangers has been overwhelming, so much so that they couldn't keep enough items on Torres' registry to keep up with demand.
"Extreme couponers" have even offered to drop off some of their coupons, and another person donated a large amount of laundry detergent, Robles-Favela said.
The baby shower will be the childless couple's first go at such an event. Robles-Favela's brother is a chef and a sign painter, and has agreed to help cook and decorate.
Torres is still suffering from the shock and injuries sustained in the attack, but she said she is blown away by the help and support the couple has provided.
"I think that's so kind of her," Torres said. "I'm so thankful she was there."
Robles-Favela and her husband have been called everything from good Samaritans to heroes since the incident. Both have tried to shrug the praise off — saying there was a reason they were put in this position to help and that they intend to take full advantage of it.
"I feel I was there for a reason," Robles-Favela said. "I told her, 'I will be in your life for as long as you want.'"
"I told [Torres], 'People are nice. What you witnessed is a bad lot in society,'" she said. "For one bad person, there's 10 good ones."
To make a donation to the victim, click here.Eurozone finance ministers have favoured giving bailed-out Ireland and Portugal an extra seven years to repay the loans they received to save them from collapse, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the 17-member Eurogroup head, has said.
Ministers "want to make a definitive and positive" decision on the extension, designed to ease the pressure on both countries, when they meet their European Union colleagues later in the day, Dijsselbloem said on Friday.
The decision to extend the loan repayment schedules for Ireland and Portugal proved uncontroversial and was expected to be backed by the finance ministers of all 27 EU ministers, who were meeting on Friday in the Ireland's capital, Dublin.
The loan repayment extensions are intended to ease financial pressure on the countries, helping them resume long-term bond sales when their bailout loans run dry. Ireland's loans run out later this year and Portugal's in 2014.
The situation in Portugal was complicated last week when the country's constitutional court struck down parts of the government's austerity programme that was agreed to in return for an international 78 billion euros bailout from EU and IMF.
Ireland received a 67.5 billion euros loan package in 2010 after its banking sector collapsed in the wake of the 2008-2009 global financial crisis.
In their attempts to make progress to stabilise the economy of the 17 nations sharing the single euro currency, the ministers, also approved a 10 billion euro ($13bn) rescue loan package to stop Cyprus from sliding into bankruptcy.
But the amount Cyprus will have to pay towards a bailout has ballooned. Instead of the $9bn Cyprus was originally asked to find - it must now come up with $17bn.
Supervisory body for banks
They have also agreed to create a single supervising body to watch over eurozone banks. That task, they said, was urgent given the situation in Cyprus.
"(The) banking union will reinforce financial stability by assuring more uniform and high quality arrangements for supervision and resolution of banks. It will further enforce financial stability by diluting the link between banks and their national sovereigns," Olli Rehn, EU Commissioner for monetary affairs, said.
Dijsselbloem noted that the Portuguese government was "addressing this challenge", and said the troika of EU, IMF and European Central Bank lenders was expected to approve the adjustments.
Vitor Gaspar, the Portuguese finance minister, is trying to identify new cuts to plug a 1.3-billion-euro gap.
The Portuguese government said on Thursday it would provide guarantees to EU partners that it would meet the deficit cutting targets.
Extending the loan repayment period would in turn provide a big boost for Lisbon and help ensure the sustainability of Portugal's public finances.
In particular, it would reduce the amount of money that Portugal needs to borrow in the future, and therefore make it easier for the country to fund itself exclusively on sovereign bond markets when the rescue programme ends in June 2014.Anonymous goes by the name xPsych0path has accuse Masonichip for unwillingness to accept the forced chipping of children they are working toward mitigating it by disrupting the chipping operation. They have built their own operation, in opposition to this issue. In A group of computer hackersgoes by the namehas accuse Masonichip for unwillingness to accept the forced chipping of children they are working toward mitigating it by disrupting the chipping operation. They have built their own operation, in opposition to this issue. In #OpMasonChip is designed to express publicly their anger. He had the following to say about this operation;
We are fighting against putting RFID chips inside children by masons they have plan to put chips in all of us and those who don't want it won't be able to buy and sell. So I down all those site's for them” on pastebin. ” on
But In actual there is no "chip" in Masonichip as it stands for Masonic Child Identification Program and includes Abduction Awareness and "Safe Kids" Education benefits to all children and parents attend events and participate." Masonichip explained on their site.." Masonichip explained on
They DDOSing following sites related to them: 1. http://masonichip.org/ 2. http://mychip.org/
3. http://www.masonichip.ca/
4. http://www.mainemason.org/
5. http://www.illinoisfreemason.org/ilchip.html
6. http://www.keywestmason.com/child_id.htm
7. http://www.mdchip.org/ 8. http://www.kschip.org/Looking for a safe, middle of the road position on tankbusters? No, me neither, says Nathan Hill...
I can’t be the only one to notice that big fish are reappearing everywhere right now. I don’t mean the occasional, one-off Giant gourami, either. I mean rows and rows of shovelnose, Goliath tigers, Hydrolycus and so on.
Who am I to say what’s right or wrong in fishkeeping? Nobody beyond an individual concerned for the welfare of fish and the future of the hobby. Plus, fish can’t speak for themselves. We are their voices.
I believe there are good and bad venues for big fish. If you own a five-mile stretch of Mekong delta, then by all means knock yourself out and buy some Pangasius catfish. If all you’ve got is some 80cm/32in Clearseal tank from 1981, wobbling precariously on a bookcase, then how about you don’t?
Who is to blame for the big fish resurgence? Loads of people. There are cultural influences coming in from all around the world, fed to us via the likes of YouTube. Some countries don’t encourage or hold dear the same ethical standards as we tend to in the UK. Brits are a nation of animal lovers. From abroad, I can find endless videos of tanks crammed with more big fish than the cargo hold of a John West trawler.
Boomerang fish
People wanting to mimic things creates a buying audience. Let’s not pretend there’s nothing endearing about owning a big fish. My first tropical fish was a piranha. Because it was cool. Neons were not cool. Big, dangerous fish have wow factor.
A lot of retailers have spent the last decade or so trying to weedle out tankbusters. Big fish are like boomerangs. They go away, they make a big loop, they come back. I had a retailer slip up a while ago. He was trying to downplay the giants he had in his sumps as rescued fish, not his problem. I quickly asked if he’d originally sold them as young fish in the first place. He went pale and coughed an evasive answer.
With any purge comes a void. The more retailers avoid big fish, the likelier someone will see that void as a gap in the market, rather than a deliberate and manufactured attempt to get the things out of the industry once and for all.
To be clear, there are responsible — expensive — sellers out there. If I buy a £500 migratory pimelodid for a 60cm tank, completely off the cuff, something has gone very wrong. At five hundred smackers, you’d expect me to know what I was getting in to. You’d expect the seller to be pretty thorough with me about where it was going, too.The inaugural ESPN.com NFL Nation "All-AFC East Team" is finalized, and as one would expect, the Patriots are well represented as the division winner.
Makeup of the team: For context, it is important to note that the team is comprised of 12 defensive players. Instead of picking a 3-4 or 4-3, the choice was made to pick a 12th player so those worthy of recognition, regardless of scheme, had as fair a chance as possible. Also, the offensive makeup of the team was based on the three-receiver set because of the NFL's increasing emphasis on the passing game (e.g. the Patriots have run 57 percent of their snaps with three or more receivers on the field).
Patriots picks: QB Tom Brady, WR Julian Edelman, LT Nate Solder, LG Logan Mankins, DE Chandler Jones, CB Aqib Talib, S Devin McCourty, K Stephen Gostkowski, PR Julian Edelman
Highlighting all those solid defensive ends: No arguments on any of the Patriots' selections. In fact, one could make a case that Jones, even with 11.5 sacks, is a generous pick based on the high level of competition at the position. It's hard for me to imagine this team being comprised without Jets defensive end Muhammad Wilkerson on it. That looks like our biggest omission. Should it be Jones and Wilkerson, with Mario Williams left out? Or is a Wilkerson-Williams combination the right choice, with Jones on the outside looking in? What about Cameron Wake and Olivier Vernon in Miami? Rob Ninkovich in New England is also a top player. That's probably the biggest takeaway from this perspective -- a lot of good defensive ends in this division.
Edelman's fine season yields recognition: If there was one other takeaway from the team, it was Edelman earning two spots -- as a receiver and punt returner. And to think, in the offseason, any team could have signed him to a modest deal. Only the Patriots and Giants showed legitimate interest and Edelman returned to New England on a one-year deal. He's now in position to cash in in 2014.TEMPE, Ariz. – Rookie quarterback Logan Thomas will back up starter Drew Stanton on Sunday, Cardinals coach Bruce Arians said Friday.
Ryan Lindley, who was signed Tuesday, will be the Cardinals’ third-string quarterback.
In his only appearance of the season, Thomas went 1-for-8 with an 81-yard touchdown pass to Andre Ellington while replacing Stanton in the third quarter at Denver. Thomas has been inactive for the past three games but was active for the five previous games.
Defensive tackle Ed Stinson will miss Sunday’s game against the Lions with a toe injury, Arians also said.
Without Stinson, the defensive line rotation shrinks, but for the second straight game, Arizona will be prepared to compensate heading into the weekend. The rookie out of Alabama played just 12 snaps Sunday against the Rams because of a groin injury.
Expect Kareem Martin’s snaps to increase even more than from the 25 he played last weekend after playing just about eight per game for the four weeks prior. Stinson has 13 tackles this season with three quarterback hits. Martin had eight tackles this year.
Linebacker Desmond Bishop (hamstring) is questionable for Sunday.
Everyone else is probable. Linebacker Lorenzo Alexander (knee) and running back Stepfan Taylor (calf) were upgraded to full participation Friday.A coupled ocean-atmosphere phenomenon that is the counterpart of El Niño
For the ship, see Niña
Sea surface skin temperature anomalies in November 2007, showing La Niña conditions
La Niña (, Spanish pronunciation: [la ˈniɲa]) is a coupled ocean-atmosphere phenomenon that is the counterpart of El Niño as part of the broader El Niño–Southern Oscillation climate pattern. The name La Niña originates from Spanish, meaning "the little girl", analogous to El Niño meaning "the little boy". It has also in the past been called anti-El Niño,[1] and El Viejo (meaning "the old man").[2] During a period of La Niña, the sea surface temperature across the equatorial Eastern Central Pacific Ocean will be lower than normal by 3 to 5 °C (37 to 41 °F). In the United States, an appearance of La Niña persists for at least five months. It has extensive effects on the weather in North America, even affecting the Atlantic and Pacific hurricane seasons.
Definition [ edit ]
La Niña is the positive phase of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation and is associated with cooler-than-average sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean.[3] However, each country and island nation has a different threshold for what constitutes a La Niña event, which is tailored to their specific interests.[4] For example, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology looks at the trade winds, SOI, weather models and sea surface temperatures in the Niño 3 and 3.4 regions before declaring that a La Niña event has started.[5] However, the Japan Meteorological Agency declares that a La Niña event has started when the average five-month sea surface temperature deviation for the NINO.3 region is more than 0.5 °C (0.90 °F) cooler for six consecutive months or longer.[6]
Occurrences [ edit ]
A timeline of all La Niña episodes between 1900 and 2019.[7][8]
There was a relatively strong La Niña episode during 1988–1989. La Niña also formed in late 1983,[9] in 1995, and a protracted La Niña event that lasted from mid-1998 through early 2001. This was followed by a neutral period between 2001 and 2002. The La Niña which developed in mid-2007, and lasted until almost 2009, was a moderate one. The strength of La Niña made the 2008 Atlantic hurricane season one of the five most active since 1944; sixteen named storms had winds of at least 39 miles per hour (63 km/h), eight of which became 74-mile-per-hour (119 km/h) or greater hurricanes.[10]
A new La Niña episode developed quite quickly in the eastern and central tropical Pacific in mid-2010,[11] and lasted until early 2011.[12] It intensified again in mid-2011 and lasted until early 2012.[13] This La Niña, combined with record-high ocean temperatures in the north-eastern Indian Ocean, was a large factor in the 2010–2011 Queensland floods,[14] and the quartet of recent heavy snowstorms in North America starting with the December 2010 North American blizzard. The same La Niña event was also a likely cause of a series of tornadoes of above-average severity that struck the Midwestern and Southern United States in the spring of 2011, and drought conditions in the South Central states including Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas.[15] Meanwhile, a series of major storms caused extensive flooding in California in December 2010, with seven consecutive days of non-stop rainfall, leading to one of the wettest Decembers in over 120 years of records. This is in contrast to the drier-than-normal conditions typically associated with La Niña in California, especially in the south.[16]
In 2011, on a global scale, La Niña events helped keep the average global temperature below recent trends. As a result, 2011 tied with 1997 for the eleventh-warmest year on record. It was the second-coolest year of the 21st century to date, and tied with the second-warmest year of the 20th century. A relatively strong phase of La Niña opened the year, dissipated in the spring before re-emerging in October and lasted through the end of the year. When compared to previous La Niña years, the 2011 global surface temperature was the warmest observed. The 2011 globally-averaged precipitation over land was the second-wettest year on record, behind 2010. Precipitation varied greatly across the globe. This La Niña contributed to severe drought in East Africa and to Australia's third-wettest year in its 112-year period of records.[17]
La Niñas occurred in 1904, 1908, 1910, 1916, 1924, 1928, 1938, 1949–51,[18] 1954–56, 1964, 1970–72, 1973–76, 1983–85,[9] 1988–89, 1995–96, 1998–2001, 2007–08, 2008–09, 2010–12, 2016–17, and 2017–18.[11][19][20]
Impacts on the global climate [ edit ]
La Niña impacts the global climate and disrupts normal weather patterns, which as a result can lead to intense storms in some places and droughts in others.[21]
Regional impacts [ edit ]
Observations of La Niña events since 1950, show that impacts associated with La Niña events depend on what season it is.[22] However, while certain events and impacts are expected to occur during events, it is not certain or guaranteed that they will occur.[22]
Africa [ edit ]
La Niña results in wetter-than-normal conditions in Southern Africa from December to February, and drier-than-normal conditions over equatorial East Africa over the same period.[24]
Asia [ edit ]
During La Niña years, the formation of tropical cyclones, along with the subtropical ridge position, shifts westward across the western Pacific Ocean, which increases the landfall threat to China.[25] In March 2008, La Niña caused a drop in sea surface temperatures over Southeast Asia by 2 °C (36 °F). It also caused heavy rains over Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia.[26]
North America [ edit ]
Regional impacts of La Niña.
La Niña causes mostly the opposite effects of El Niño, above-average precipitation across the northern Midwest, the northern Rockies, Northern California, and the Pacific Northwest's southern and eastern regions. Meanwhile, precipitation in the southwestern and southeastern states, as well as Southern California, is below average.[27] This also allows for the development of many stronger-than-average hurricanes in the Atlantic and fewer in the Pacific.
The synoptic condition for Tehuantepecer winds is associated with high-pressure system forming in Sierra Madre of Mexico in the wake of an advancing cold front, which causes winds to accelerate through the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Tehuantepecers primarily occur during the cold season months for the region in the wake of cold fronts, between October and February, with a summer maximum in July caused by the westward extension of the Azores-Bermuda high pressure system. Wind magnitude is weaker during La Niña years than El Niño years, due to the less frequent cold frontal incursions during La Niña winters,[28] with its effects can last from a few hours to six days.[29] Between 1942 and 1957, La Niña had an impact that caused isotope changes in the plants of Baja California.[30]
In Canada, La Niña will, in general, cause a cooler, snowier winter, such as the near-record-breaking amounts of snow recorded in La Niña winter of 2007/2008 in Eastern Canada.[31][32]
South America [ edit ]
During a time of La Niña, drought plagues the coastal regions of Peru and Chile.[33] From December to February, northern Brazil is wetter than normal.[33] La Niña causes higher than normal rainfall in the central Andes, which in turn causes catastrophic flooding on the Llanos de Mojos of Beni Department, Bolivia. Such flooding is documented from 1853, 1865, 1872, 1873, 1886, 1895, 1896, 1907, 1921, 1928, 1929 and 1931.[34]
Diversity [ edit ]
Map showing Niño3.4 and other index regions
The traditional La Niña, also called Eastern Pacific (EP) La Niña,[35] involves temperature anomalies in the Eastern Pacific. However, in the last two decades, nontraditional La Niña were observed, in which the usual place of the temperature anomaly (Niño 1 and 2) is not affected, but an anomaly arises in the central Pacific (Niño 3.4).[36] The phenomenon is called Central Pacific (CP) La Niña,[35] "dateline" La Niña (because the anomaly arises near the dateline), or La Niña "Modoki" (Modoki is Japanese for "similar, but different").[37][38] There are flavors of ENSO additional to EP and CP types and some scientists argue that ENSO exists as a continuum often with hybrid types.[39]
The effects of the CP La Niña are different from those of the traditional EP La Niña—e.g., the recently discovered La Niña leads to a rainfall increase over northwestern Australia and northern Murray-Darling basin, rather than over the east as in a conventional La Niña.[38] Also, La Niña Modoki increases the frequency of cyclonic storms over Bay of Bengal, but decreases the occurrence of severe storms in the Indian Ocean overall, with the Arabian Sea becoming severely non-conductive to tropical cyclone formation.[40][41]
The recent discovery of ENSO Modoki has some scientists believing it to be linked to global warming.[42] However, comprehensive satellite data go back only to 1979. Generally, there is no scientific consensus on how/if climate change may affect ENSO.[43]
There is also a scientific debate on the very existence of this "new" ENSO. A number of studies dispute the reality of this statistical distinction or its increasing occurrence, or both, either arguing the reliable record is too short to detect such a distinction,[44][45] finding no distinction or trend using other statistical approaches,[46][47][48][49][50] or that other types should be distinguished, such as standard and extreme ENSO.[51][52]
Recent years when La Niña Modoki events occurred include 1973–74, 1975–76, 1983–84, 1988–89, 1998–99, 2000–01, 2008–09, 2010–11 and 2016–17.[37][53][54][55][56][57]
See also [ edit ]Extremists and Islamophobes alike have attempted to paint violent factions within Islam as the true expression of the faith. But a new study gives credence to what countless Muslim leaders, activists and scholars have argued: that groups like the self-proclaimed Islamic State are Muslim in name alone.
A group of German scholars at the Universities of Bielefeld and Osnabrück analyzed 5,757 WhatsApp messages found on a phone seized by police following a terrorist attack in the spring of 2016. The messages were exchanged among 12 young men involved in the attack. The attack itself was not identified in the report.
Deutsche Welle noted that the timeframe suggested it may have been a bombing at a Sikh temple in Essen carried out in April of that year by a group of German teens with reported links to Islamic extremism.
Researchers conducting the study said the young men’s conversations demonstrated little understanding of their professed faith and that the group constructed a “Lego Islam” to suit their purposes.
Bacem Dziri, a researcher at the University of Osnabrück and co-author on the report, examined the messages from an Islamic studies perspective and concluded: “The group had no basic knowledge about Islam.”
The scholars published their study as a book exploring the “violent Salafist youth scene in Germany,” according to the Amazon blurb, referencing an ultraconservative strain of Islam with which the young men were allegedly affiliated.
The Brookings Institute defines Salafism as “the idea that the most authentic and true Islam is found in the lived example of the early, righteous generations of Muslims, known as the Salaf, who were closest in both time and proximity to the Prophet Muhammad.” The movement has historically been apolitical and nonviolent, wrote researcher Mohammed Alyahya in a column on The New York Times. But Brookings notes that a smaller offshoot faction, called Salafi-jihadists, do promote violence as a “divine imperative” and include groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda.
As one case study, the Amazon blurb highlights, the WhatsApp chats offer “insight into the group-internal dynamics of young Salafists” and their “radicalization processes.”
One thing that stood out, Dziri said in an email to HuffPost, was the extent to which the men had distanced themselves from local mosques and seemed confused about things as simple as how to go about conducting Friday prayers.
At one point in the exchange a young man asked if the faith permits cheating in school, the researcher said. “The answer was, that it is allowed to do everything with the unbelievers. And since nearly all other people are unbelievers, you can do everything with everyone,” Dziri said.
Another man admitted in the messages he didn’t have a copy of the Quran, Islam’s holy text. And the others agreed that they needed to purchase one. Dr. Rauf Ceylan, a professor at the University of Osnabrück and one of the study’s co-authors, said it was “striking” that the discussion about obtaining a Quran occurred well after the group had been established.
“All religious conversations conducted up to this time were only content that has been learned from hearsay and rumors,” Ceylan told HuffPost.
When the group’s self-appointed leader called for a meeting, one participant fretted that he didn’t have any Islamic clothing. The leader responded: “You can also wear sweatpants or something like that. If you want I can loan you something for the day.”
The report is just a case study from one group of individuals, and its conclusions might not apply in all circumstances. But it echoes the conclusions of many Muslim scholars and activists who see little resemblance to their religion in such militant groups.
Ceylan and Dziri also noted that the 12 men involved in the WhatsApp chat appeared to have received little “religious socialization” and isolated themselves from other Muslims in their community.Authorities are searching for the shark and the man's missing limbs in the Bunker Bay area near Dunsborough
A bodyboarder has died after a shark bit off his legs at a popular surfing spot in Western Australia. Authorities were reportedly searching for the shark as well as the man's missing limbs.
The man in his early 20s was bodyboarding with five friends when the shark attacked, a police spokesman said.
He died at the scene in the surfing haven known as the Farm, off Bunker Bay near the town of Dunsborough. The beach was closed after the attack.
About 30 surfers were in the water when the shark attacked on Sunday, according to a beachside cafe employee, Deb Pickett, who called police and an ambulance after hearing the disturbance.
"We had some sharks spotted far out at sea a few months ago, but they never come this close to the shore," Pickett said.
She added that helicopters were still searching the area for the shark late on Sunday, while rescue staff searched for the man's arms and legs, which she believed had been taken by the shark.
Local official Ian Stubbs said it was the first shark attack in the area for more than 20 years.Abdul Rashid Dostum has not faced justice over allegations of kidnapping and torture, despite government’s promises of justice
Afghanistan’s vice-president has left the country after a six-month standoff following allegations that he illegally detained a political rival and had him raped with an assault rifle.
Abdul Rashid Dostum flew to Turkey on Friday evening reportedly for medical treatment, according to sources in the Afghan government. Dostum is believed to have alcohol problems and claims to suffer from diabetes.
His departure for Turkey makes it unlikely that he will face trial, calling into question more than a decade of western efforts to instil the rule of law in Afghanistan and help build public trust in the government.
The allegations against the vice-president triggered a political crisis that has engulfed Afghanistan since last November when Dostum abducted Ahmad Ishchi, a politician from Dostum’s home province of Jowzjan, from a stadium in the northern part of the country. Ishchi was held for five days, during which time he says he was severely beaten and raped with the barrel of a rifle by nine of Dostum’s bodyguards.
Afghanistan orders arrest of vice-president's guards amid rape claims Read more
Dostum has evaded punishment by taking refuge in his mansion in central Kabul, guarded by armed militiamen. Nobody has been arrested or indicted, despite medical evidence backing up Ishchi’s claims.
Human rights defenders have called for Dostum and his guards to be prosecuted, but the Afghan government reportedly put him under pressure to leave the country instead. It was unclear who chartered the plane that took him on Friday.
After Ishchi’s allegations in November, the Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani, framed the case as his make-or-break moment to show that not even powerful warlords were above the law. Ghani told western diplomats he was fed up with Afghan strongmen breaking the law with impunity. “Rule of law and accountability begins in the government itself and we are committed to it,” his spokesman said publicly.
Donors promised Ghani their support if he took Dostum on. The EU called for an investigation into “reports of gross human rights violations”. In private, diplomats said the credibility of the Afghan government hinged on bringing Dostum to justice.
Now, some admit, their own credibility is at stake as well. “President Ghani climbed up the highest tree, and we climbed with him,” one European ambassador said.
Dislodging the Taliban from power was meant to create a safer country for Afghans. Instead, the country now sees strongmen, including top government officials, perpetrate violence and corruption with impunity.
Ishchi, a former governor of the northern Jowzjan province, was kidnapped in November while he was attending a traditional game of buzkashi, a type of polo where horse riders fight over a headless goat carcass.
He said that on his first day in captivity, Dostum and nine security guards beat him before stripping off his trousers. Dostum then attempted to rape him before commanding the bodyguards to sodomise him with a rifle, while a cameraman filmed the abuse.
“Make sure he doesn’t have any honour left,” Ishchi recalled Dostum saying, in a recent interview with the Guardian. He was held for a total of five days.
Bashir Ahmad Tayanj, a spokesman for Dostum, denied all allegations, saying the men had in fact arrested Ishchi for collaborating with the Taliban. However, forensic evidence from medical treatment showed injuries corresponding to Ishchi’s allegations.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ahmad Ishchi, who accuses the Afghan vice-president of abduction, torture and rape. Photograph: Sune Engel Rasmussen for the Guardian
Dostum remained free, in loose house arrest at his mansion. He refused to appear for questioning, and police ignored an arrest order from the attorney general, probably out of fear of unrest from militiamen loyal to Dostum who commands large parts of the country’s 2 million ethnic Uzbeks.
The attorney general’s office said it was investigating the case seriously but declined to say whether Dostum was personally under investigation.
To some, the standoff was proof of the reality of Afghan politics: since 2001, some Afghan powerbrokers have simply become too mighty to prosecute. Hussein Hasrat, an activist with the Afghan Civil Society and Human Rights Network, said: “They know if they want to investigate properly, it could lead to ethnic divisions, and the conflict could get worse.”
The Afghan government and donors are now “caught up in the fundamental contradiction of these past 16 years”, said Patricia Gossman, Afghanistan researcher with Human Rights Watch. “You can’t build a state that respects the rule of law while at the same time effectively endorsing impunity and turning a blind eye to rampant abuse.”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Former president Hamid Karzai, right. Photograph: Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP
Dostum is part of a roster of warlords who have never been formally indicted for alleged crimes. Earlier this month, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who shelled Kabul ferociously during the civil war, returned to Kabul as part of a peace deal granting him immunity. Last week, the UN committee against torture called for the notorious Kandahar police chief Abdul Raziq to be prosecuted for torture and disappearances. In Afghanistan, few believe that will happen.
A veteran of three decades of conflict, Dostum has a long list of alleged atrocities to his name. In the 1990s, he ran his own mini state in the north where he printed money, drove an armoured Cadillac and indulged in a hedonistic lifestyle with alcohol.
At 63, he is believed to be ill and has regularly travelled to Turkey, a long-time patron, for treatment.
When Ghani included him on his election ticket in 2014, after previously calling him “a known killer”, he made Dostum apologise “to the people who suffered from the violence and civil war in the country”.
The former president Hamid Karzai, who also co-opted the Uzbek warlord, faced problems reminiscent of recent events.
In 2008, Dostum, then the army chief of staff, abducted another political rival, Akbar Bay, who had allegedly plotted to assassinate him and whom he allegedly also had raped. After a year-long standoff, Dostum went into exile in Turkey until Karzai called him back to tap into his voter base. According to cables released by WikiLeaks, the US ambassador leaned on the Turks, saying: “Arresting him would cause problems.”
Additional reporting by Mokhtar AmiriWith the 2013 NFL Draft complete, the Minnesota Vikings will be contacting the agents for undrafted players to add depth and competition for Training Camp—and possibly even find a diamond in the rough.
Current starting linebacker Erin Henderson was an undrafted free-agent signing in 2008, so it is possible the team could find a future starter.
This is a running list that will be updated as soon as we hear any news on signings and agreements.
4/27 6:54 PM – Nicholas Edwards – WR, Eastern Washington
Edwards was a walk-on when he first came to Eastern Washington after receiving no college scholarship offers. He quickly became a big-time receiver with six performances with at least 10 catches in his career, and seven with at least 100 yards. He lead the FCS in 2011 with 19 touchdowns and lead the team with 95 catches for 1,250 yards. Hindered by a left knee injury, his numbers dropped off significantly in 2012. School newspaper confirmed 7:30 PM.
4/27 7:18 PM – Brandan Bishop – S, North Carolina St.
Former teammate of Vikings middle linebacker Audie Cole. Bishop is officially listed as a free safety but has played at strong safety as well. Scouting reports say he plays well against the run and in pass defense.
4/27 7:18 PM – Camden Wentz – C, North Carolina St.
Like Bishop, another former teammate of Cole. In fact, Cole broke the news of the signings. Wentz was three-year starter at center. Scouting reports |
the loss of their organic market.
We have seen examples in the past of unapproved experimental GMO crops escape containment and spread into the environment, such as GMO rice, and GMO wheat. When a farmer in Oregon unexpectedly found GMO wheat in his field, after the last known experimental GMO wheat crop was planted more than 10 years ago, it harmed U.S. exports of wheat from the Northwest, as countries with a strong stance against GMO crops immediately stopped buying wheat from the U.S. Oregon responded by trying to map where all the GMO crops were being grown in their state, but the biotech companies and Big Ag refused to reveal where their GMO fields were located.
As a result, several communities have since enacted local ordinances to protect their livelihood and ban GMO crops. They don’t want them labeled, they want them banned!
In 2014, citizens of Jackson County Oregon passed a bill banning GMO crops in their county. Jackson County was immediately sued by GMO farmers, but so far the law has withstood legal challenges, and goes into effect this year (2016).
Communities in Hawaii, a GMO battle ground, also enacted bans on GMO crops, which have also been challenged by Big Ag and lawmakers.
A Federal Mandatory GMO Labeling Program Would Eliminate Stricter GMO Standards Some Companies Have Already Implemented
Federal lawmakers favoring Big Ag and biotech companies have tried repeatedly to enact federal legislation that would over-ride these local ordinances banning GMO crops, or requiring labeling of GMO foods. We should be very skeptical of U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack’s comments that Congress needs to pass mandatory nationwide GMO labeling legislation. This would most assuredly NOT benefit consumers, but the biotech industry.
In addition, many companies have already implemented GMO labeling on their products volunatarily. There are several GMO labeling organizations available to verify GMO claims.
Healthy Traditions, the national brand of Tropical Traditions, for example, has implemented a GMO-tested program as well as a glyphosate-tested program to test every batch of products sold for the presence of GMOs or glyphosate. They have a zero tolerance level for the presence of GMOs or glyphosate. Even USDA Organic standards, however, allow for residue amounts of non-organic material. A national GMO labeling bill would most assuredly make it illegal for companies to develop their own GMO labeling standards, and the national standards would be far less strict, favoring Big Ag and the biotech industry.
Case Study: Federally Mandated USDA Organic Labeling
To get an idea of what federal labeling requirements would look like, one has to simply look at what happened to organic certification labeling after the federal government implemented legislation mandating organic certification requirements. Prior to the implementation of the National Organic Program (NOP), each state had their own definition and requirements for the definition of “organic.” Some states and some certifying bodies were more strict than others.
But when the federal government took over, and made it illegal to use the word “organic” on a food label without USDA approval, the standards for “organic” were seriously depleted to allow Big Ag and Big Food to get a bigger share of the booming organic market.
Federal Mandates Versus Local Community Food Sovereignty Ordinances
Expecting the federal government to police the multi-national food companies that control most of the nation’s food supply, when that same government is acting to protect them, is foolish.
The most powerful force in the market place to enact change is the American consumer. Unfortunately, Americans are also among the world’s most uneducated consumers when it comes to food. Americans spend far last of their income on food than any other country in the world.
See:
Citizens need to enact change with their food purchases, and if laws are needed, they are needed at the local level to protect the rights of citizens to grow and purchase the food of their choice.
I can sympathize with those who support federal GMO labeling laws. I think they’re motives are good, but that they are mistaken in their belief that the federal government will actually protect the rights of consumers over the biotech industry, Big Ag, and Big Food. That is a false hope.
Farmer Joel Salatin debated Dr. Joe Mercola on this issue back in 2013, and his argument against federal GMO labeling is well worth listening to:Former acting Attorney General Sally Yates testified to the Senate about her warning to the White House that then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was compromised and could be subject to Russian blackmail. The day she invited the White House to review such evidence was her last day at the Department of Justice.
Former acting Attorney General Sally Yates testified to a Senate subcommittee Monday that she had evidence that Michael Flynn was compromised and “could be blackmailed” by Russia.
That information has been previously reported in the course of multiple investigations into the Trump team’s ties to Russia. What was not known until now is that on the very day Yates invited the White House to review the evidence she had on Flynn, she was removed from her position at the Department of Justice.
YATES: We told them that we were inclined to allow them to look at that underlying evidence, that we wanted to go back to DOJ and be able to make the logistical arrangements for that. This second meeting on the 27th [of January] occurred late in the afternoon, this is Friday the 27th. So, we told them that we would work with the FBI over the weekend on this issue and get back with him on Monday morning. And I called him first thing Monday morning to let him know that we would allow them to come over and to review the underlying evidence. WHITEHOUSE: And was that the phone call, or was there a separate phone call? YATES: There was the phone call initially to let him know I needed to come see him — WHITEHOUSE: Yup. YATES: — two meetings, and then a phone call at the end to let him know — WHITEHOUSE: That the material was available if he wanted to see it? YATES: — that the material was available. He had to call me back, he was not available then, and I did not hear back from him until that afternoon of Monday the 30th. WHITEHOUSE: And that was the end of this episode? Nobody came over to look the at the material? YATES: I don’t know what happened after that because that was my last day with DOJ. WHITEHOUSE: Got it.
Yates’ firing also occurred on the same day she sent a letter to Justice Department lawyers saying Trump’s Muslim ban was unlawful.
The Trump administration initially tried to prevent Yates’ testimony, arguing that executive privilege barred her from testifying to Congress, but the public outcry for her views led to Yates agreeing to testify.
Yates raised her concerns with the Trump team via two meetings with White House Counsel Don McGahn and a phone call with him as well.
Yates first warned the Trump team about Flynn’s problems on January 26, but Flynn was not fired until 18 days later, after news reports revealed that Flynn had made contact with Russian elements.Like the other holidays, Thanksgiving is filled with traditions. Music? Not so much.
So why don’t we sing Thanksgiving carols?
Maybe because we're exhausted from all that cooking and eating and drinking and visiting and, yes, all that arguing.
Or maybe because there isn’t a cornucopia of Thanksgiving songs.
When we asked readers to name some for us, many mentioned three.
What came as a surprise -- beyond the fact that “Jingle Bells” was written as a Thanksgiving song -- is that Thanksgiving has many more tunes than you might think. Here are the top 12.
One is "The Thanksgiving Song" by Adam Sandler.
The song, which debuted on Saturday Night Live in 1992, includes lyrics about loving turkey and gravy and cranberries and mentions Sammy Davis Jr., corduroy pants, the Mets and masturbation. Rolling Stone called it a “holiday classic.”
'The Thanksgiving Song'
Another song, which mentions exactly none of the above, is “Over the River and Through the Woods.” It originated from a poem written in 1844 titled "A Boy's Thanksgiving Day,” and includes the phrase “Hurrah for Thanksgiving Day," according to “Hymns and Carols of Christmas."
Modern versions of the song change the references to Christmas. One version recorded by Danny Kaye and the Andrew Sisters was renamed "A Merry Christmas at Grandmother's House (Over the River and Through the Woods)."
'Over the River and Through the Woods'
The third most popular turkey day song? The lengthy Arlo Guthrie song “Alice’s Restaurant.”
It stemmed from Guthrie’s arrest in a 1965 Thanksgiving trash dumping incident that ultimately kept him out of the Vietnam war and is traditionally played nationwide on public radio every year.
'Alice's Restaurant'
For those who can't stand that standard, Jimmy Kimmel came to the rescue by having “All About That Bass” singer Meghan Trainor record new holiday songs that Kimmel said capture "the true spirit of Thanksgiving.” His list includes “Uncle Dan Hates Obama and He Won’t Shut Up About Benghazi” and “I’m Not Bringing Leftovers On The Plane, Mom.”
'The turkey is frozen in the middle'
Kimmel joked that before Trainor's effort, the closest thing we had to a traditional Thanksgiving song was the theme from "The Golden Girls."
Not true, Jimmy. Our list includes these eight other songs.
'Food, Glorious Food.' This heartwarming song done to the tune of the William Tell Overture mentions something we are all grateful for on Thanksgiving. Green bean casserole you say? No, stretchy pants.
Then we have the world famous "Turkey Song" by Dickie Stickhead that includes a nifty dance and the line "Wouldn't you rather have a steak?"
You've got this sweet Thanksgiving prayer that
And this lovely 2008 song from Mary Chapin Carpenter.
Let us not forget "The Turkey Song" by Bryant Oden that says "We're all thankful for this day except for the turkey, la la la la la la la la la la."
And this offering from Animation Domination sung to the tune of "Jingle Bells," that features the line, "Grandma wants to watch the news and complain about your uncle."
Then there's the latest from the Holderness family of Internet videos fame, singing about a very important Thanksgiving tradition, namely, basting with butter, with some butter on the side.
Last but not least, here is a song from the musical "Oliver," included in a Thanksgiving song list by the This heartwarming song done to the tune of the William Tell Overture mentions something we are all grateful for on Thanksgiving. Green bean casserole you say? No, stretchy pants.Then we have the world famous "Turkey Song" by Dickie Stickhead that includes a nifty dance and the line "Wouldn't you rather have a steak?"You've got this sweet Thanksgiving prayer that Johnny Cash sang to his wife June Carter Cash in a 1994 episode of "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman."And this lovely 2008 song from Mary Chapin Carpenter.Let us not forget "The Turkey Song" by Bryant Oden that says "We're all thankful for this day except for the turkey, la la la la la la la la la la."And this offering from Animation Domination sung to the tune of "Jingle Bells," that features the line, "Grandma wants to watch the news and complain about your uncle."Then there's the latest from the Holderness family of Internet videos fame, singing about a very important Thanksgiving tradition, namely, basting with butter, with some butter on the side.Last but not least, here is a song from the musical "Oliver," included in a Thanksgiving song list by the Daily Herald because "Nothing makes you more grateful for your impending feast than a bunch of starved orphans who get nothing more than gruel for each meal."
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.Bitcoin anonymity advocates ignore a darker truth
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Buried in the rhetoric of any security conversation is a dark truth. Be it about hacking, fraud, international terrorism or any “bad guys” related subject, security is usually presented as, “Here’s a problem, so what’s the solution?” In this particular case, the potential for cryptocurrencies to be misused has led to proposals that they should be better controlled.
While it might appear quite a leap to go from questions about the anonymity risks of bitcoin to the deepest recesses of our collective psyche, bear with me. First, let’s be clear — Bitcoin was never designed to be anonymous. “Bitcoin is probably the most transparent payment network in the world,” explains Bitcoin.org.
To explain briefly, each Bitcoin transaction contains a ‘hash’, a 25-byte address directly traceable to its instigator. It has to be, otherwise it wouldn’t be provably correct. For those wanting to cover their virtual tracks, the general advice is to create a new address every time. While this can prevent a series of transactions being linked to a single source, it’s still public.
Once independently verified, each transaction is then stored in what is, to all intents and purposes, a globally, publicly accessible database — the Blockchain. While it might take some digging, if we all used Bitcoin, it would be like having access to each other’s account details.
So what precisely do the authorities mean when they say they want to make it ‘less’ anonymous? The issue is whether transactions can go under the radar, as says a recent EU report on the topic: “Highly versatile criminals are quick to switch to new channels if existing ones become too risky.” So, just as water finds its way through rock, so does criminality seek the easiest route.
Equally, so we probably have laws already in place to deal with it. For example, Bitcoin ’tumbling’ services (essentially virtual coin-for-coin currency exchanges) could potentially be used for money laundering or fraud. Both of which are already illegal.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand the concerns, given that cryptocurrencies are themselves evolving. Bitcoin is one of many potential cryptocurrencies, and indeed, the Blockchain model is a model among many. While the idea of an untraceable transaction does not yet exist, it remains technologically possible.
The dark truth, however, is that humans have an equal propensity for good and evil, an eternal battle which has been fought throughout our histories, across our stories and indeed, within our daily lives. We are all corruptible, should sufficient opportunity come our way, or circumstance drive our behaviour.
Trying to suppress this reality plays to the dark side, inadvertently creating more problems. We can see it in the ongoing encryption debate, which pitches civil liberties and personal privacy against the institutional desire to keep bad things from happening. And in the case of Bitcoin, attempts to control a transparent currency mechanism will drive less transparency, not more.
Thinking more broadly, currency itself is already under the cosh. While it has served a useful purpose as a mechanism to simplify trading for everything between goats and timber, there’s no philosophical reason why near-frictionless data transfers shouldn’t enable us to dispense with such intermediate steps. Of course, practicalities make this harder, but again, criminality seeks the easiest route.
Bitcoin and its alternatives may create challenges but will come to be seen as the latest development in the eternal game of cat-and-mouse. If the authorities want to protect their citizens against the sometimes downright nasty vagaries of human behaviour, they need to think way beyond what will become a mere blip in our technologically augmented evolution.
Additional research by Ben Collins.
Related reading:
VideoShot: the many names of Satoshi Nakamoto
Are we overdue a bitcoin unicorn?
The rise, fall and rise again of CNET founder Halsey minorRagol Memory Campaign
In part of the celebration of Phantasy Star Online’s 15th anniversary, Sega will be launching a new campaign where players can trade in “Ragol Memories” to obtain PSO1 related costumes, Mag devices, stickers, and more!
Ragol Memory Acquirement Procedures
Added a new Ragol Memory Campaign (March 2016)
Ragol Memories can be obtained through a variety of means, from participating in various events across Japan, to purchasing Arks Cash items.
The methods of obtaining Ragol Memories are as follows:
By participating in specific scratches.
You’ll have to check the individual scratch page if Ragol Memories are listed.
Exchange Item Lineup (Vol. 8)
※ Releasing Early March ※
Icon Details Icon Details PSO Poster A
ＰＳＯポスターＡ PSO Poster B
ＰＳＯポスターＢ
Cost 2 Cost 2 Tradeable Tradeable
PSO Poster C
ＰＳＯポスターＣ PSO Poster D
ＰＳＯポスターＤ Cost 2 Cost 2 Tradeable Tradeable
PSO Poster E
ＰＳＯポスターＥ PSO Poster F
ＰＳＯポスターＦ Cost 2 Cost 2 Tradeable Tradeable
PSO Poster G
ＰＳＯポスターＧ PSO Poster H
ＰＳＯポスターＨ Cost 2 Cost 2 Tradeable Tradeable
PSO BB Poster A
ＰＳＯ ＢＢポスターＡ PSO BB Poster B
ＰＳＯ ＢＢポスターＢ Cost 2 Cost 2 Tradeable Tradeable
P-SPEC Poster A
Ｐ－ＳＰＥＣポスターＡ +150% Tribooster
トライブースト＋１５０％ Cost 2 Cost 2 Tradeable Tradeable
Exchange Item Lineup (Vol. 7)
※ Releasing Late January ※
Icon Details Icon Details Flowen Repca
フロウウェン・レプカ Rico Repca
リコ・レプカ
Cost 5 Cost 5 Tradeable Tradeable
Flowen Hair
フロウウェンヘアー Rico Hair
リコヘアー Cost 2 Cost 2 Tradeable Tradeable
Flowen’s Mustache
フロウウェンのヒゲ Rico’s Glasses
リコのメガネ Cost 2 Cost 2 Tradeable Tradeable
Flowen’s Shield
フロウウェンの盾 Red Ring
レッドリング Cost 2 Cost 2 Tradeable Tradeable
Rico’s Earrings
リコのイヤリング ＊C.A.R.D Cost 2 Cost 3 Tradeable Tradeable
Saint Million
サンテミリオン戦 Shambertin
シャンベルタン戦 Cost 1 Cost 1 Tradeable Tradeable
PSO-Forest
PSO-森林 PSO-Caves
PSO-洞窟 Cost 1 Cost 1 Tradeable Tradeable
PSO-Mines
PSO-坑道 PSO-Ruins
PSO-遺跡 Cost 1 Cost 1 Tradeable Tradeable
PSO-VR Temple
PSO-ＶＲ神殿 PSO-VR Spaceship
PSO-ＶＲ宇宙船 Cost 1 Cost 1 Tradeable Tradeable
PSO-Central Control Area
PSO-中央管理区 PSO-Seabed
PSO-海底プラント Cost 1 Cost 1 Tradeable Tradeable
PSO-Crater Outskirts
PSO-クレーター周辺 PSO-
Subterranean
Desert
PSO-地下砂漠 Cost 1 Cost 1 Tradeable Tradeable
Exchange Item Lineup (Vol. 6)
※ Releasing Late December ※
Icon Details Icon Details FOnewm Repca
フォニューム・レプカ FOnewearl Repca
フォニュエール・レプカ
Cost 5 Cost 5 Tradeable Tradeable
FOnewm Repca C
フォニューム・レプカＣ FOnewearl Repca C
フォニュエール・レプカＣ Cost 5 Cost 5 Tradeable Tradeable
FOnewm Hat
フォニュームハット FOnewearl Hat
フォニュエールハット Cost 2 Cost 2 Tradeable Tradeable
FOnewm Glasses
フォニュームグラス FOnewearl Paint
フォニュエールペイント Cost 2 Cost 1 Tradeable Tradeable
Evo. Device / Rukmin
進化デバイス／ルクミン World with me -EP4- Cost 3 Cost 1 Tradeable Tradeable
Exchange Item Lineup (Vol. 5)
※ Releasing Late November ※
Icon Details Icon Details RAmar Repca
レイマー・レプカ RAmarl Repca
レイマール・レプカ
Cost 5 Cost 5 Tradeable Tradeable
RAmar Repca C
レイマー・レプカＣ RAmarl Repca C
レイマール・レプカＣ Cost 5 Cost 5 Tradeable Tradeable
RAmar Headgear
レイマーヘッドギア RAmarl Hat
レイマールハット Cost 2 Cost 2 Tradeable Tradeable
Evo. Device / Opa-Opa
進化デバイス／オパオパ Cost 3 Tradeable
Exchange Item Lineup (Vol. 4)
This time the HUcast and HUcaseal are up at bat with a discounted price of four Ragol Memories. The sale will end on November 25th, which will raise the price to its regular rate.
※ Releasing Late October ※
Icon Details Icon Details HUcast Repca
ヒューキャスト・レプカ HUcaseal Repca
ヒューキャシール・レプカ
Cost 5 Cost 5 Tradeable Tradeable
HUcast Repca C
ヒューキャスト・レプカＣ HUcaseal Repca C
ヒューキャシール・レプカＣ Cost 5 Cost 5 Tradeable Tradeable
HUcast Head
ヒューキャストヘッド HUcaseal Head
ヒューキャシールヘッド Cost 2 Cost 2 Tradeable Tradeable
Evo. Device / Sonichi
進化デバイス／ソニチ IDOLA:immortal feather Cost 3 Cost 1 Tradeable Tradeable
IDOLA:divine blade LET THE WINDS BLOW Cost 1 Cost 1 Tradeable Tradeable
Underworld -Equilibrium- Cost 1 Tradeable
Exchange Item Lineup (Vol. 3)
Some of the items in the ｢Badge&Memory Exchange Shop｣ will be available at a discounted price. A limited-time offer for the FOmar and FOmarl costumes will last until October 28th. After this discount ends, the price will jump up to its regular rate.
Icon Details Icon Details FOmar Repca FOmarl Repca
Cost 5 Cost 5 Tradeable Tradeable
FOmar Repca C FOmarl Repca C Cost 5 Cost 5 Tradeable Tradeable
FOmar Hat FOmarl Hat Cost 2 Cost 2 Tradeable Tradeable
Day light Can still see the light 2 Cost 1 Cost 1 Tradeable Tradeable
Exchange Item Lineup (Vol. 2)
Icon Details Icon Details RAcast Repca RAcaseal Repca
Cost 5 Cost 5 Tradeable Tradeable
RAcast Repca C RAcaseal Repca C Cost 5 Cost 5 Tradeable Tradeable
RAcast Head RAcaseal Head Cost 2 Cost 2 Tradeable Tradeable
Evo. Device / Sato Head Riding Aqua Sato Cost 3 Cost 2 Tradeable Tradeable
Head Riding White Sato Head Riding Black Sato Cost 2 Cost 2 Tradeable Tradeable
Sato Hat A Song for Eternal Story Cost 2 Cost 1 Tradeable Tradeable
Exchange Item Lineup (Vol. 1)
Icon Details Icon Details HUmar Repca HUnewearl Repca
Cost 5 Cost 5 Tradeable Tradeable
HUmar Repca C HUnewearl Repca C Cost 5 Cost 5 Tradeable Tradeable
Evo Device / Pushan Evo Device / Nidra Cost 3 Cost 3 Tradeable Tradeable
The whole new world EP2 Viridia Cost 1 Cost 1 Tradeable Tradeable
Greennill Skyly Cost 1 Cost 1 Tradeable Tradeable
Bluefull Purplenum Cost 1 Cost 1 Tradeable Tradeable
Pinkal Redria Cost 1 Cost 1 Tradeable Tradeable
Oran Yellowboze Cost 1 Cost 1 Tradeable TradeableUtah continues to climb on a national list that ranks U.S. states by the prevalence of environmental hazards, but that rise has more to do with a single company than the state as a whole.
Salt Lake City-based Kennecott Utah Copper’s emissions of potentially harmful materials — toxic heavy metals such as lead and zinc in particular — rose by nearly 20 percent in 2016, according to the national Toxic Release Inventory (TRI), issued by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
A spokesman for mining, smelting, and refining company said the increase was due to its mining of a vein of ore last year that was especially heavy with lead, considered an emission under TRI’s definition. The copper mine and its related operations account for more than 90 percent of all TRI-listed emissions in Utah.
So when Kennecott’s emissions go up, Utah as a whole also jumps up the list of “most toxic” states. The Beehive state currently ranks as the TRI’s third-largest for toxic releases. It ranked fourth in 2015, and 17th in 2005.
Kennecott has long led the TRI’s list of top-polluting companies nationwide, surpassed only by a similar but larger mining operation in Alaska.
The Toxic Release Inventory, maintained and updated regularly by the EPA, requires industries to report their emissions of certain substances that pose a potential risk to human health or to the environment. The materials in question are diverse and difficult to classify as a whole — ranging from heavy metals such as lead and zinc to gaseous chemical pollutants such as chlorine. All three of those are common hazardous materials in Utah, according to the TRI.
Materials on the TRI are said to be “released” when the company that produced or processed them emits them into the air or water, or disposes of them in a landfill or similar holding facility.
Kennecott’s reported releases are predominantly metals-laden waste rock that is deposited in Bingham Canyon or in the company’s tailings piles near Magna. Lead, which is known to cause developmental delays in young children who consume or inhale it, accounted for more than three-fourths of the company’s reported emissions last year.
The TRI has been criticized for over-representing the potential hazards of mining operations, in part because emissions are reported by weight, as opposed to toxicity, which would be difficult to compare directly. A mine, which has heavy waste products like lead, ranks higher on the TRI than a chemical refinery, for example, which might have mostly gaseous emissions.
And the TRI can’t tell you whether you have, in fact, been exposed to these materials, said April Nowak, a regional TRI coordinator for the EPA. The list is intended as public disclosure of potential environmental hazards.
Meanwhile, the increase in Kennecott’s emissions appears to be a temporary blip. Both the company and the state of Utah overall have remained relatively steady in their production of hazardous materials, against a backdrop of such emissions decreasing across the nation as a whole.
But this past year, Kennecott miners ran into a vein of ore that contained significant higher levels of useful metals such as copper, but also of potentially harmful heavy metals, such as lead, that the mine disposed of as waste product. So even though the mine’s output actually decreased slightly in 2016, the company reported an increase in emissions to the TRI.First off, a warning: This is probably going to be hard to watch. But if you eat meat — even the humanely raised, locally butchered, lullabied-to-sleep-at-night kind — you probably should watch it anyway.
Out in the far North Atlantic, in the tiny Faroe Islands, an isolated population of 50,000 subsists largely on what it can eke from the steep, uncharitable land (mostly sheep) as well as what they can haul from the sea. And for hundreds of years, that has included pilot whales — to the horror of marine conservation group Sea Shepherd, who recently sicced hundreds of volunteers and a half-million-strong social media following on the people of the Faroes, in an attempt to put an end to this practice once and for all.
Every year, the Faroese hunt and butcher an average of 838 whales. The grind (pronounced grinned), as the whale-slaughter is called, is not a commercial harvest — the meat is divvied up amongst the community, and largely eaten for special occasions. It is, however, pretty gruesome if you’re not used to slaughter: Faroese fishermen drive a pod of whales onto one of a handful of approved landing beaches, where a crowd waits to sever their spinal cords and cut their throats. There is so much blood that the water turns red. The bodies are dragged onto shore, where they are cleaned and butchered by the families who will share the harvest.
It’s gnarly, but that’s the thing about eating meat: There will always be blood. Regardless of whether you’re buying shrink-wrapped boneless chicken breasts at the grocery store or slaughtering a pig you raised, death is always part of the deal.
Motherboard producers Elise Coker and Ed Ou went to the Faroe Islands last summer to document the grind, and the controversy surrounding it. In the opening lines of the documentary, a Faroese man explains why the whale hunt is an especially easy target for public outrage: “We have an outdoor slaughterhouse. In other countries, the slaughterhouses are indoors. There the blood runs into the sewers. Here it runs into the sea.”
As Coker pointed out to Grist, this is about more than just whales: “The Faroese are very in touch with where their food comes from. Violence is not an abstract concept to them — it’s very much a part of their life.”
And so we watch a fisherman net a seabird and twist its head off, and a family stun and bleed a sheep. This may showcase the darker side of eating animals, but it’s a portrait of how a very local food system functions — and it’s arguably about as sustainable as eating can get in such a remote place.
But that lifestyle is under threat from more than just concerned animal-rights activists. Pilot whale meat contains so much mercury from decades of industrial pollution that it is no longer safe to eat in any significant quantity. Meanwhile, pollution, fishing, and ship strikes kill hundreds of thousands of whales a year, and rarely make the news. The Faroese, for whom a literal whale bloodbath is almost mundane, know that it’s the intimacy of the violence in the grind that shocks outsiders — but, they suggest, it’s our distance from the violence underpinning the rest of our lives that’s truly dangerous.Oh this is just rich.
Certified letters have been sent to major businesses supporting No On 8, demanding that they make a matching donation to the Protect Marriage campaign or risk having their “opposition to traditional marriage” exposed.
ProtectMarriage.com, the umbrella group behind a ballot initiative that would overturn the California Supreme Court decision that legalized gay marriage, sent a certified letter this week asking companies to withdraw their support of Equality California, a nonprofit organization that is helping lead the campaign against Proposition 8. “Make a donation of a like amount to ProtectMarriage.com which will help us correct this error,” reads the letter. “Were you to elect not to donate comparably, it would be a clear indication that you are in opposition to traditional marriage. … The names of any companies and organizations that choose not to donate in like manner to ProtectMarriage.com but have given to Equality California will be published.” The letter was signed by four members of the group’s executive committee: campaign chairman Ron Prentice; Edward Dolejsi, executive director of the California Catholic Conference; Mark Jansson, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; and Andrew Pugno, the lawyer for ProtectMarriage.com. A donation form was attached. The letter did not say where the names would be published.
Some companies have already started receiving letters, and the people behind the Protect Marriage campaign have vouched for their authenticity.
Equality California executive director Geoffrey Kors responded to the letters, “It’s truly an outrageous attempt to extort people. They are going after our long-term funding and trying to intimidate Equality California donors from giving any more to the No on 8 campaign and from giving to Equality California ever again.”
Like I needed another reason to hate organized religion. That’s it. There go the gloves. Any concept of civil discourse is officially off the table. These people will not be truly happy until all of our rights are taken away and we are kept in cages.
I’m sorry to be a broken record here but please DONATE today! Anything you can. Please, talk to your friends and neighbors. Get them involved. We can and will win this thing. We have to.
Update (10/24/08): Here is a copy of the letter. (PDF reader required)
A note to my regular readers: It’s going to be a bumpy ride through Nov 4, so hold on tight!
Post by ILO on 10/23/08 at 11:50 pmSometimes, you should be reasonable and respect aggro. Sometimes, the ladder is full of midrange decks trying to out-midrange one another. Sometimes, the arms race has reached its zenith and the time for being reasonable has passed and you just need to go bigger. You need to go GREEDIER. If your deck doesn’t require at least 9 influence, you’re doing it wrong.
The inspiration for this first deck comes from TheSkeeJay, a purveyor of fine memes. I came up with the name, though, so we all know where the credit should lie. 😉
DragonHeart
4 Permafrost (Set1 #193)
4 Seek Power (Set1 #408)
4 Torch (Set1 #8)
4 Friendly Wisp (Set1 #82)
4 Temple Scribe (Set1 #502)
4 Amber Acolyte (Set1 #93)
4 False Prince (Set1 #356)
2 Purify (Set2 #176)
2 Diogo Málaga (Set2 #179)
4 Sandstorm Titan (Set1 #99)
4 Cirso, the Great Glutton (Set1 #362)
1 Crystallize (Set1 #232)
2 Shatterglass Mage (Set2 #181)
4 Heart of the Vault (Set2 #183)
2 Molot & Nakova (Set2 #199)
3 Fire Sigil (Set1 #1)
4 Time Sigil (Set1 #63)
1 Amber Monument (Set1 #420)
3 Primal Sigil (Set1 #187)
1 Praxis Banner (Set2 #171)
4 Seat of Impulse (Set0 #54)
1 Elysian Banner (Set1 #421)
4 Seat of Wisdom (Set0 #63)
4 Seat of Fury (Set0 #53)
1 Skycrag Banner (Set2 #186)
We take Elysian midrange’s False Prince-Sandstorm Titan-Cirso, curve, smash in Heart of the Vault, and add some Molot & Nakova for spice. I don’t try to understand the mind that such madness came from, but it’s undeniably fun. Take this nonsense, for example: https://clips.twitch.tv/EndearingPoorAnacondaLitty
DragonHeart doesn’t have much removal for large units, so you want to be the aggressor. It isn’t hard to be the aggressor with cards like False Prince and Cirso, but keep in mind when the decisions are close to err towards offense. Heart of the Vault and Torch are not much reach if your opponent stabilizes. If the board gets bogged down, only a single Crystallize is available to push through. Molot & Nakova can also break a board stall when combined with Torch at 9 power, and a Diogo ultimate can also give you the power to push through, but those can’t be relied on. The deck also run a little high on power to hit the difficult influence requirements, so if you’re super greedy you can cut an Amber Acolyte for another threat, or add another Amber Monument in place of a sigil.
Basically all of these greed piles exist because Heart of the Vault is the best card in the game, but what about just adding a little splash to his first home?
Dark Praxis
4 Dark Return (Set1 #250)
4 Seek Power (Set1 #408)
4 Torch (Set1 #8)
3 Annihilate (Set1 #269)
4 Quarry (Set1001 #15)
3 Sand Viper (Set2 #42)
2 Xenan Initiation (Set2 #44)
3 Amber Acolyte (Set1 #93)
4 Dawnwalker (Set1 #86)
2 Diogo Málaga (Set2 #179)
4 Sandstorm Titan (Set1 #99)
4 Obliterate (Set1 #48)
2 Shatterglass Mage (Set2 #181)
4 Heart of the Vault (Set2 #183)
3 Predatory Carnosaur (Set1 #118)
4 Fire Sigil (Set1 #1)
5 Time Sigil (Set1 #63)
1 Shadow Sigil (Set1 #249)
3 Praxis Banner (Set2 #171)
4 Seat of Impulse (Set0 #54)
4 Seat of Chaos (Set0 #60)
4 Seat of Mystery (Set0 #61)
Playing Heart of the Vault is awesome, so how about adding some Dark Returns to cast Heart even more, and adding Quarry to dig for them? Bonus for dumping a Dawnwalker into the void with Quarry and bringing it back on turn 3 with the Sandstorm Titan you selected.
Sand Viper is a strange one, but it’s solid anti-aggro tech that’s easier to play than Blistersting Wasp in a deck only lightly splashing Shadow. It can be Dark Returned after using its Ultimate and be Ultimat-ed again to get a respectable 6/7 Deadly beatstick, as well. If you aren’t seeing as much aggro, the Vipers can easily become some Banishes or more units.
Adding Shadow makes you vulnerable to void hate and makes your power base slower, but the increase in power is significant, and having removal for large units like Sandstorm Titan and Mystic Ascendant for cheaper than 5 power is nice for double-spell turns in the midgame. This is probably the most competitive list in this article if you’re looking for a greedy midrange deck to actually climb the ladder.
So where else can you smash Heart of the Vault? It’s a powerful card advantage tool and a big body. If you can fit some removal in your deck for larger units, his card advantage can win the long game, and longer games |
37. Tarzan (1999 film) No opinion 37. Tarzan (1999 film) Good 37. Tarzan (1999 film) Excellent
38. Dinosaur 38. Dinosaur Terrible 38. Dinosaur Bad 38. Dinosaur No opinion 38. Dinosaur Good 38. Dinosaur Excellent
39. The Emperor's New Groove 39. The Emperor's New Groove Terrible 39. The Emperor's New Groove Bad 39. The Emperor's New Groove No opinion 39. The Emperor's New Groove Good 39. The Emperor's New Groove Excellent
40. Fantasia 2000 40. Fantasia 2000 Terrible 40. Fantasia 2000 Bad 40. Fantasia 2000 No opinion 40. Fantasia 2000 Good 40. Fantasia 2000 Excellent
41. Atlantis: The Lost Empire 41. Atlantis: The Lost Empire Terrible 41. Atlantis: The Lost Empire Bad 41. Atlantis: The Lost Empire No opinion 41. Atlantis: The Lost Empire Good 41. Atlantis: The Lost Empire Excellent
42. Lilo & Stitch 42. Lilo & Stitch Terrible 42. Lilo & Stitch Bad 42. Lilo & Stitch No opinion 42. Lilo & Stitch Good 42. Lilo & Stitch Excellent
43. Treasure Planet 43. Treasure Planet Terrible 43. Treasure Planet Bad 43. Treasure Planet No opinion 43. Treasure Planet Good 43. Treasure Planet Excellent
44. Brother Bear 44. Brother Bear Terrible 44. Brother Bear Bad 44. Brother Bear No opinion 44. Brother Bear Good 44. Brother Bear Excellent
45. Home on the Range 45. Home on the Range Terrible 45. Home on the Range Bad 45. Home on the Range No opinion 45. Home on the Range Good 45. Home on the Range Excellent
46. Chicken Little 46. Chicken Little Terrible 46. Chicken Little Bad 46. Chicken Little No opinion 46. Chicken Little Good 46. Chicken Little Excellent
47. Meet the Robinsons 47. Meet the Robinsons Terrible 47. Meet the Robinsons Bad 47. Meet the Robinsons No opinion 47. Meet the Robinsons Good 47. Meet the Robinsons Excellent
48. Bolt 48. Bolt Terrible 48. Bolt Bad 48. Bolt No opinion 48. Bolt Good 48. Bolt Excellent
49. The Princess and the Frog 49. The Princess and the Frog Terrible 49. The Princess and the Frog Bad 49. The Princess and the Frog No opinion 49. The Princess and the Frog Good 49. The Princess and the Frog Excellent
50. Tangled 50. Tangled Terrible 50. Tangled Bad 50. Tangled No opinion 50. Tangled Good 50. Tangled Excellent
51. Winnie the Pooh (2011 film) 51. Winnie the Pooh (2011 film) Terrible 51. Winnie the Pooh (2011 film) Bad 51. Winnie the Pooh (2011 film) No opinion 51. Winnie the Pooh (2011 film) Good 51. Winnie the Pooh (2011 film) Excellent
52. Wreck-It Ralph 52. Wreck-It Ralph Terrible 52. Wreck-It Ralph Bad 52. Wreck-It Ralph No opinion 52. Wreck-It Ralph Good 52. Wreck-It Ralph Excellent
53. Frozen 53. Frozen Terrible 53. Frozen Bad 53. Frozen No opinion 53. Frozen Good 53. Frozen Excellent
54. Big Hero 6 54. Big Hero 6 Terrible 54. Big Hero 6 Bad 54. Big Hero 6 No opinion 54. Big Hero 6 Good 54. Big Hero 6 Excellent
55. Zootopia 55. Zootopia Terrible 55. Zootopia Bad 55. Zootopia No opinion 55. Zootopia Good 55. Zootopia ExcellentNew York Times Cairo reporter David Kirkpatrick tweets the following image of the Muslim Brotherhood headquarters in Cairo, where protesters are pushing for the ouster of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi.
Sunday's protests, reportedly the largest in Egypt's 5,000 year history, were mostly peaceful in Cairo until the clashes erupted near MB HQ. Armed Morsi supporters barricaded inside the building faced off against protesters pelting it with firebombs and rocks.
The Associated Press reports that eight people died at the Brotherhood's headquarters.
From the AP:
After clashes raged overnight, protesters managed to breach the compound's defenses and storm the six-story building early Monday, carting off furniture, files, rugs, blankets, air conditioning units and portraits of Morsi, according to an Associated Press journalist at the scene.
At one point an explosion occurred in front of the building:Simplified Printer Eats its Way Through Stacks of Paper
Printers have shrunken dramatically in size since the days of the first inkjets, but they are still unattractive boxes that we have to deal with. To add insult to injury, there are so many things that can go wrong with a printing job – paper jams, ink smears, a total refusal to do the one thing it’s supposed to do – that office workers genuinely hate having to use this unfriendly piece of office equipment.
Design graduate Mugi Yamamoto came up with a simpler and more fun design for his diploma project. It’s called Stack, and instead of feeding paper into a little tray over and over, you set the whole machine on top of a big stack of paper. As you print, the Stack feeds paper through the bottom and spits out your finished projects onto the top, creating a new stack.
While Yamamoto’s goal was to create a functional and less ugly printer, the machine is also surprisingly entertaining. As it eats its way through papers, you have to wonder whether the stack of paper is going to tip over and spill printer guts everywhere. For those of us who have ever felt the need to go all Office Space on an inkjet printer, this new idea could prevent a lot of appliance-based violence.favorite favorite favorite favorite favorite
There's nothing better than a show like this where the band is firing on all six cylinders. The vocals are a tad low but it hardly matters for these songs (Death Don't is missing).
This show is right smack in the middle of that period where Bobby and Pigpen were allegedly getting heat from Jerry (and the rest of the band?) for failing to bring the goods on a regular basis, not practicing enough, not being serious enough... or something. I've listened to everything in the Archive from the summer of '68 and for the life of me I can't detect any problem. On the contrary, just listen to Bobby and Pig at this show! Crazy stuff. IMHO, the next shows that most consistently reach the heights heard here are the Avalon 10-12-68 and the Silver Dollar Faire in Chico 11-1-68 (with the Chico being the most "hairy" of the three).
- August 26, 2014100% Pure AcidBreaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Sep. 23, 2015, 3:16 PM GMT / Updated Sep. 23, 2015, 3:16 PM GMT By Andy Eckardt and Sarah Burke
MAINZ, Germany — A German army chief in the U.S.-led coalition fighting ISIS in Iraq was found dead in his hotel room there Wednesday, officials said.
Colonel Stephan Spoettel was found dead at 8:50 a.m. local time (1:50 a.m. ET) in the Cristal Erbil Hotel in the northern Kurdish city of Irbil, the German armed forces said in a statement.
Spoettel was the head of the coalition's German training contingent in northern Iraq. There was no information to suggest suicide or "third-party involvement," the statement added.
Operation Inherent Resolve, the U.S. name for the coalition fighting the extremists across Iraq and Syria, said in a statement that a member of the coalition had died in Irbil on Wednesday, without providing further details.
"This incident is under investigation and further information will be released as appropriate," the statement added.The ICC arrest warrant has been flouted by Sudan's leader Arab leaders have concluded their annual summit by showing their support for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir who is wanted for war crimes. The Arab League said it rejected the International Criminal Court's decision to issue a warrant for his arrest. President Bashir had earlier spoken at the summit in Qatar, and won strong support from his Syrian counterpart Bashar al-Assad. They were among 17 heads of state in Qatar, but some seats remained empty. The most notable absentee was President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. Correspondents say he is unhappy with Qatar's stance during the recent Gaza conflict. SUMMIT FACTS 17 out of 22 heads of state attending President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt is absent Sudan's president is flouting an ICC arrest warrant to attend UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is attending Iran is not a member of the organisation
Regional rifts stymie Arab summit African Union's eventful year with Gaddafi Meanwhile, the BBC's Katya Adler, in Qatar, says earlier reports that Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi had stormed out of the Arab League summit were incorrect. But, our correspondent says, Mr Gaddafi used the floor to settle old scores, criticising Saudi King Abdullah and appearing to reignite a public spat he had at the 2003 Arab summit. At Monday's opening session he called the king a British product and an American ally. But he added that he now considered their "problem" over and was ready to reconcile, drawing applause from the other delegates. The two leaders appeared to bury the hatchet with a 30 minute face-to-face meeting on the sidelines of the summit, reports said. 'Massacres and atrocities' At the end of the summit a joint statement by the Arab League said: "We stress our solidarity with Sudan and our rejection of the ICC (International Criminal Court) decision." Earlier in the day, Syrian President Assad said those who had "committed massacres and atrocities in Palestine, Iraq and Lebanon" should be arrested first. Many African states, along with Sudan's key ally China, have called for the ICC proceedings to be suspended, arguing they will hamper efforts to bring peace to Darfur. President Bashir attended the summit to thank the leaders for their support. Qatar has not signed the ICC charter, which obliges a member state to arrest those indicted by the court when they enter its territory. In his opening remarks, Syria's President Assad also spoke about Israel - saying the Arab world had no "real partner in the peace process". He said this had been demonstrated by the recent Israeli election, with Benjamin Netanyahu due to become prime minister at the head of a right-wing coalition.
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StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable versionWhen Charlie Kratzer started on the basement art project in his south Lexington home, he was surrounded by walls painted a classic cream. Ten dollars of Magic Marker and Sharpie later, the place was black and cream and drawn all over.
There are fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes, Winston Churchill lounging with George Bernard Shaw — and the TV squirrel Rocky and his less adroit moose pal Bullwinkle.
Says Kratzer of his cartoon of a cartoon: "You appreciate the cleverness more as an adult."
There's Georges Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. There is Blenheim Palace, the birthplace of Winston Churchill, and the Cornell Law School, of which Kratzer is an alumnus. There is Kratzer's dad. There is the harlequin pattern — alluded to in culinary culture today by the Panera bread bag — and a fake fireplace facing a real one.
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There are both The Walrus and the Carpenter (from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There), and William Shakespeare. The Marx Brothers peer around a corner. A flip-top garbage can is transformed via marker art into Star Wars' plucky little beeper R2D2.
Says Kratzer, 53, the associate general counsel for Lexmark: "People are amazed that with something as simple and inexpensive as a Sharpie, you can decorate a whole basement."
How did this Sharpie world start? With a single swipe of the marker.
Kratzer started mid-wall, with the Salon by Picasso. Then he thought, well, taking a design out to the edge of the wall wouldn't be overwhelming.
Then the rest of the basement flared off that first wall.
Kratzer's basement suggests that the great cultural influences wandered out of college humanities class — here a Churchill for eloquence during harsh times, a Joan Crawford for cinematic vampiness, Holmes and Poirot for great literary characterization — and set up shop together in the carefully hand-drawn markings of an educated imagination come to life.
Kratzer might be a lawyer by day, but in his off hours he is a man who has taken the artistic influences and heroes of his life and imagined them onto his walls, that he might keep company with them while he uses the pool table.
Look carefully in this basement o' dreams and you'll see a drawing of the Kratzers' upstairs library — with Claude Monet, the greatest of the Impressionists, at the doorway. It's a tribute to Monet, but it's also a way of living with cultural influences: Kratzer and his wife, Deb, don't just keep them within book covers or admire them in museums. Their Picasso spends each day close to their pinball machine. Agatha Christie's shrewd little Belgian detective and his carefully pruned mustache hover over the deck door.
From the main floor leading down to the basement, there is a color mural inspired by Picasso's The Dream.
But through most of the spacious basement there is black line-drawing — around the pinball machine and the pool table and over the bathtub and toilet.
Why the black marker theme? Says Kratzer: "You can do a lot with it."
Indeed, Sharpie art has its own little corner of the Internet: Artist Justine Ashbee, at www.justineashbee.com, features a gallery of intricate Sharpie art.
Kratzer likes the Impressionists, but he's also inspired by Picasso — in particular the artist's ability to convey a lot of information with just a few lines. A gathering at Picasso's Paris salon in 1919 dominates a far wall, featuring a pantheon of artistic greats including Jean Cocteau, Erik Satie, Clive Bell and Olga Picasso, striking a kind of Sharpie synthesis of marker art between film, music, dance, literature and the muse.
While Kratzer's basement mural art might have started with one mark, he had decided in his 30s that he wanted Impressionist art in his house, quite a lot of it, and that to afford such a stunning variety he'd best produce it himself.
He began to paint, and now there are paintings all over the house — created by Charlie and critiqued and guided by Deb. The two met at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania. Deb, now an at-home mom, formerly taught deaf students.
The couple has two sons, one at a Massachusetts engineering college, the other in the pre-engineering program at Lafayette High School.
Says Deb: "I have the coolest husband. He's so bright, and artistic on top of it."HARIDWAR: In one of the first instances of action against a prominent commercial establishment for allegedly violating pollution norms as laid down by the National Green Tribunal (NGT), Radisson Blu, a five-star hotel in the city, was sealed by a team of the State Pollution Control Board (SPCB) on Saturday."During an inspection in April, it was found that the hotel had not set up its waste water treatment plant and untreated water was flowing into the drains near the hotel and onto the Ganga. Notices were issued to the hotel earlier as well to have its waste water treated but they were not heeded. Therefore, action was initiated to have the property sealed," said Ankur Kansal, regional officer, SPCB, Roorkee unit.Sources told TOI that the hotel's kitchen and laundry were sealed and the power connection severed. However, guests were allowed to stay till their check-out time so as not to cause them inconvenience. Efforts were made to reach the hotel authorities for their comment but they could not be contacted.Meanwhile, Vinod Singhal, member secretary, SPCB, said that orders for the hotel's closures were issued almost 10 days back, on the basis of a report submitted to the NGT on May 12, and the NGT was also informed about it.SPCB has reportedly put hotels in three categories on the basis of the pollution they cause. Those causing maximum pollution are in the red category. These include hotels with three or more stars or with 70 or more rooms. Radisson Blu fell in this category. "All of them have been ordered to install their waste water treatment plants. If they can't do it, they have the option to get connected to the central effluent treatment plant of the Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited. We have made it very clear to them that untreated water flowing into the Ganga will not be tolerated," said Kansal.JayPower Profile Joined March 2011 Netherlands 171 Posts Last Edited: 2014-08-16 21:06:15 #1
Introduction
The WCS Europe season 3 premier league is about to begin, but before the ro32 matches start we take a look at the two Protoss champions of season 1 and 2. MC and StarDust won season 1 and season 2 respectively and are now looking to win their 2nd WCS title in arguably the most stacked season of WCS Europe this year. First we will be looking at how these two were able to end up with a 65%+ map win rate across both seasons with completely different play styles.
As they are sitting at number 2 and 3 in WCS points, awaiting the global finals, we look at how they were able to gain the majority of their points.
Clash of styles: Macro vs All in
It would not be a surprised to anyone if I said MC’s play style is aggressive, unorthodox or unpredictable. This is the MC you either love or hate for many years. Whether it is immortal heavy pressure against Zerg, the cannon rush versus Protoss or the immense variety of all in build orders against Terran, it can’t be stressed enough how frustrating it must be to play against MC.
A fallen Terran warrior at the hands of MC
StarDust, as not many people would dare to admit, is in fact one of the most solid macro players you will come across in Europe. Having given the nickname “CheeseDust” many times it would surprise many people to see how successful StarDust has been relying on taking the game to the later stages. With his defensive play and lack of difference in build order choice there is no doubt that many players have taken his nickname to heart and were not prepared for his play style.
Both are undefeated in the matchup as far as matches in WCS EU go and are Zerg slayers in their own way. MC’s tore through players like Golden and Nerchio with 2 base all in that often times included immortals and lots of sentries. Also infamous for his use of the Sangate which he gives a spin of his own to it. The only two maps that MC lost versus Zerg players were against sLivko and Nerchio in 20 and 37 minute macro games, showing that stargate openers aren’t the Bosstoss’ best suit and macro games something is that he struggles with.
StarDust is on the other end of the spectrum, with an average game length of 19 minutes in PvZ he shows that his comfort lies with the macro style. Playing defensively and reactively, Stardust does what MC failed to do with stargate openers and late-game transitions. While only losing 1 map to a roach ling rush from Bly, he lets all the Zerg players in WCS EU bite the dust with a 8 – 1 record.
This onslaught on Zerg players is not unexpected as both players have both stated in multiple interviews how they prefer playing against Zerg, even Europe’s best.
"I really want a Zerg because my PvZ is not bad. I want vortix or snute" - MC
The difference between the two is even bigger in PvT. Even though StarDust has only played 2 PvT series, it is notable that he went for a macro opener in all 6 games. Solid robotics opener to ravage Happy in season 1 and some tricky openers against ForGG to make sure he was in the driver’s seat in all of the games from the start. MC has a whole arsenal of PvT build orders, to predict which one he will pull out to devastate a poor Terran challenging.
MC's average game length in won games: 15:38
StarDust's average game length in won games: 19:15
MC's average game length in lost games: 20:52
StarDust's average game length in lost games: 12:33
If we look at Habitation station over the time it has circulated in tournament map pools, more specifically in the PvT matchup, the voidray bust after taking the gold base as natural is one of the most used all in builds prior to popularity of gold-lifts by terran. MC was very fond of that build, not only in WCS EU. Jjakji was the first victim in WCS Europe and with MC’s control he was also able to pull it off on Alterzim Stronghold against MMA. With 3 bunkers and 8 Widow Mines MMA was able to return the favor immediately on Habitation Station, which was the next map.
Perfect defense
Face off: MC vs Stardust in season 1
I don’t think we can get a more iconic series than the one played out in the ro8 of WCS Europe season 1. It highlights perfectly what this paragraph is about. StarDust showed some great decision to take game 1 with a well timed attack off 3 bases. He made the crucial mistake of taunting the Bosstoss by dancing his colossi moments before winning the game. This unleashed an untamable beast who would lay down the cheese hammer upon StarDust. With a powerful cannonrush-proxy2gate-blinkimmortalallin 1-2-3 punch MC closed out the series with a 3 – 1 score in less than 34 in-game minutes. MC then went on to defeat Jjakji and MMA to claim the WCS Europe season 1 title.
"I'm really happy and maybe I will never forget this time" - MC
Stardust after training in the CJ house
After WCS Europe season 1 StarDust’s visa expired and had to head back to South Korea to renew it. This gave him the opportunity to spend some time in the CJ Entus and learn from the likes of herO, Hush, Sora and Trust. When he returned to play his ro16 matches for WCS season 2, we saw a new StarDust. It’s fair to say that after his 2013 Dreamhack Summer win StarDust fell off for a while placing relatively low in some of the tournaments he attended. Those times were over as StarDust aimed for more than just a high placing in season 3.
He also added
"I hate MC because MC was the best (best player in WCS Europe), but I hate the best player because I want to become the best, so he is my enemy" He also added
StarDust vs First
The WCS Europe season 3 premier league is about to begin, but before the ro32 matches start we take a look at the two Protoss champions of season 1 and 2. MC and StarDust won season 1 and season 2 respectively and are now looking to win their 2nd WCS title in arguably the most stacked season of WCS Europe this year. First we will be looking at how these two were able to end up with a 65%+ map win rate across both seasons with completely different play styles.As they are sitting at number 2 and 3 in WCS points, awaiting the global finals, we look at how they were able to gain the majority of their points.It would not be a surprised to anyone if I said MC’s play style is aggressive, unorthodox or unpredictable. This is the MC you either love or hate for many years. Whether it is immortal heavy pressure against Zerg, the cannon rush versus Protoss or the immense variety of all in build orders against Terran, it can’t be stressed enough how frustrating it must be to play against MC.StarDust, as not many people would dare to admit, is in fact one of the most solid macro players you will come across in Europe. Having given the nickname “CheeseDust” many times it would surprise many people to see how successful StarDust has been relying on taking the game to the later stages. With his defensive play and lack of difference in build order choice there is no doubt that many players have taken his nickname to heart and were not prepared for his play style.Both are undefeated in the matchup as far as matches in WCS EU go and are Zerg slayers in their own way. MC’s tore through players like Golden and Nerchio with 2 base all in that often times included immortals and lots of sentries. Also infamous for his use of the Sangate which he gives a spin of his own to it. The only two maps that MC lost versus Zerg players were against sLivko and Nerchio in 20 and 37 minute macro games, showing that stargate openers aren’t the Bosstoss’ best suit and macro games something is that he struggles with.StarDust is on the other end of the spectrum, with an average game length of 19 minutes in PvZ he shows that his comfort lies with the macro style. Playing defensively and reactively, Stardust does what MC failed to do with stargate openers and late-game transitions. While only losing 1 map to a roach ling rush from Bly, he lets all the Zerg players in WCS EU bite the dust with a 8 – 1 record.This onslaught on Zerg players is not unexpected as both players have both stated in multiple interviews how they prefer playing against Zerg, even Europe’s best.The difference between the two is even bigger in PvT. Even though StarDust has only played 2 PvT series, it is notable that he went for a macro opener in all 6 games. Solid robotics opener to ravage Happy in season 1 and some tricky openers against ForGG to make sure he was in the driver’s seat in all of the games from the start. MC has a whole arsenal of PvT build orders, to predict which one he will pull out to devastate a poor Terran challenging.If we look at Habitation station over the time it has circulated in tournament map pools, more specifically in the PvT matchup, the voidray bust after taking the gold base as natural is one of the most used all in builds prior to popularity of gold-lifts by terran. MC was very fond of that build, not only in WCS EU. Jjakji was the first victim in WCS Europe and with MC’s control he was also able to pull it off on Alterzim Stronghold against MMA. With 3 bunkers and 8 Widow Mines MMA was able to return the favor immediately on Habitation Station, which was the next map.I don’t think we can get a more iconic series than the one played out in the ro8 of WCS Europe season 1. It highlights perfectly what this paragraph is about. StarDust showed some great decision to take game 1 with a well timed attack off 3 bases. He made the crucial mistake of taunting the Bosstoss by dancing his colossi moments before winning the game. This unleashed an untamable beast who would lay down the cheese hammer upon StarDust. With a powerful cannonrush-proxy2gate-blinkimmortalallin 1-2-3 punch MC closed out the series with a 3 – 1 score in less than 34 in-game minutes. MC then went on to defeat Jjakji and MMA to claim the WCS Europe season 1 title.After WCS Europe season 1 StarDust’s visa expired and had to head back to South Korea to renew it. This gave him the opportunity to spend some time in the CJ Entus and learn from the likes of herO, Hush, Sora and Trust. When he returned to play his ro16 matches for WCS season 2, we saw a new StarDust. It’s fair to say that after his 2013 Dreamhack Summer win StarDust fell off for a while placing relatively low in some of the tournaments he attended. Those times were over as StarDust aimed for more than just a high placing in season 3. 11 Gateway
14 2x gas (2/3)
16 Cybercore
17 Pylon
19 Stalker + Warpgate (chrono on both)
23 Stalker
25 2x Gateway
25/26 Proxy pylon 4:40
26 Stalker
5:45 3x Stalker
This was the prepared build order with which StarDust was able to take 2 quick map wins over First. The quick stalker was able to deny scouting and get a proxy pylon up fast. First’s responds was to go for a safe blink opener in the first map, as StarDust may have predicted. Blink couldn’t complete fast enough though and StarDust was able to overwhelm him with stalkers. In the second game First tried a DT rush but StarDust’s stalkers killed all his probes and made a proxy robo to prevent any crazy baserace scenarios.
On map 3 StarDust went for a clever deviation of the build by going for a 3 Gateway expand with a Robotics. This backfired since First opened with an oracle which killed 2 sentries, several probes and was an annoyance for most of the early-game. Later in the game when StarDust moved out of his base without his Mothership Core and got caught out of position, First was able to kill most of his army and win the game from there on.
This was the prepared build order with which StarDust was able to take 2 quick map wins over First. The quick stalker was able to deny scouting and get a proxy pylon up fast. First’s responds was to go for a safe blink opener in the first map, as StarDust may have predicted. Blink couldn’t complete fast enough though and StarDust was able to overwhelm him with stalkers. In the second game First tried a DT rush but StarDust’s stalkers killed all his probes and made a proxy robo to prevent any crazy baserace scenarios.On map 3 StarDust went for a clever deviation of the build by going for a 3 Gateway expand with a Robotics. This backfired since First opened with an oracle which killed 2 sentries, several probes and was an annoyance for most of the early-game. Later in the game when StarDust moved out of his base without his Mothership Core and got caught out of position, First was able to kill most of his army and win the game from there on. 11 Gateway
14 2x gas (2/3 & 3/3)
16 Cybercore
17 Pylon
19 Stalker + Warpgate
24 Sentry
26 Pylon
26 2x Gateway (4:45)
27 Robotics (5:08)
29 Nexus (5:45)
29 Mothership Core (5:50)
31 Pylon
31 Sentry
Game 3 was dynamic from the start. Both players did significant damage to each other’s economy, First with blink Stalkers and StarDust with phoenix’ and an oracle, making every decision onwards ever so important. While First tried to do damage with his Stalkers, even resorting to Dark Templar later, StarDust’s defense was too solid giving him a big lead and the opportunity to close out the game and move on to the semifinals with very little resistance.
Stardust 2.0
Stardust vs San is a matchup that is a mini-rivalry which has been played out across many tournaments. The two most recent results before these finals had been played were San defeating StarDust 2-0 in the ro16 and San defeating StarDust 3-0 at ASUS ROG Winter 2014. This should tell you enough about how much San was the favorite going into these finals.
Game 1 was played out as a very normal macro PvP game with neither player having a significant advantage from the start. From 18 minutes and on is when StarDust turns on the heat. As San takes his 4th base StarDust maneuvers all over the map catching San out of position. No matter how defensively San played he was unable to keep up and with every move StarDust made he took the short end of the stick and got even more behind.
StarDust is the red player StarDust is the red player
Game 2 is one of the only times you’ve seen these two play on Waystation as it was the most vetoed map for both players. The game involved all kind of interesting responses from both sides. Island base, proxy double Stargate and one of the greatest defenses at StarDust’s island and natural expansion is what made this game the most interesting out of the 4.
Game 3 is the game where San fell apart. This must have been one of the only times I haven’t seen an Oracle 3gate opener that didn’t end the game immediately against a 2gateway expand into a Robotics. Even with StarDust initially scouting a Twilight Council which then had been canceled by San was not enough. San destroyed the Nexus and then backed off being content with playing out the game with only a slight advantage. What San did not know is that StarDust never turned off the heat. With some light Immortal Stalker pressure, the 2 Phoenix harass squad and a zealot drop StarDust bought himself enough time to get his 3rd up way earlier than San could have. Slowly getting behind step by step over the course of only a couple of minutes, San had enough and wanted to end this game now. Then it happened.
2 Colossi lost at the cost of only a couple Stalkers 2 Colossi lost at the cost of only a couple Stalkers
In game 4 StarDust went for the 11gate 3warpgate rush again. This time he was more aware of a Dark Templar treat and got the robotics before warping in Stalker aggressively. This limited his aggression but also warrant a solid defense against the Dark Templar counter attack. The game then had turned into a macro game. Even with StarDust committing to heavy blink Stalker aggression, I would say the two were about even with StarDust slightly in the lead which would reflect later on the supply and upgrade lead. San was playing like we were used from him again. Not extremely defense, not getting pulled all over the map and solid defense from any blink attacks StarDust tried. Even when San was ready to attack it was looking great for him. He was ahead in upgrades (+2/+1 against +2/+0 with +3 being halfway done) and had the slightly better army. Right as he hit the 3rd base the counter attack of StarDust was there. By getting rid of his blink Stalker to make more supply for better late-game units, StarDust destroyed San’s economy at his 3rd base and made him unable to reinforce his attack. With this counterattack StarDust wrecked San in one of the most one-sided finals of a premier tournament.
StarDust also explained in his post-game interview:
"First game I realised San has a defensive mind. So I try to use that mind and played very risky, but San only defenses, so I'm very far ahead. When won the first game I realised I won [the series]" StarDust also explained in his post-game interview:
Season 3
As we get closer to Blizzcon there is one more season of WCS Europe to go. Both champions are guaranteed a slot at Blizzcon so for them the WCS points are not on the line anymore. Will either be able to claim 2 WCS Europe championships this year? StarDust has quite the ambition to go to Blizzcon and perform well at the biggest tournament of the year.
"I think I'm maybe 99% in blizzcon already. From now I'm preparing for blizzcon. Showing nice skill at biggest tournament, thats my dream" - StarDust after advancing to the finals.
Or could it be San’s turn this time? This is a very real possibility since he is the only player that has defeated both champions in WCS Europe. In the following weeks we shall witness who will become the champion of Europe in the 3rd and finals WCS season this year with StarDust playing in the opening match for the premier league.
Written by @JayPowerSC2 Game 3 was dynamic from the start. Both players did significant damage to each other’s economy, First with blink Stalkers and StarDust with phoenix’ and an oracle, making every decision onwards ever so important. While First tried to do damage with his Stalkers, even resorting to Dark Templar later, StarDust’s defense was too solid giving him a big lead and the opportunity to close out the game and move on to the semifinals with very little resistance.Stardust vs San is a matchup that is a mini-rivalry which has been played out across many tournaments. The two most recent results before these finals had been played were San defeating StarDust 2-0 in the ro16 and San defeating StarDust 3-0 at ASUS ROG Winter 2014. This should tell you enough about how much San was the favorite going into these finals.Game 1 was played out as a very normal macro PvP game with neither player having a significant advantage from the start. From 18 minutes and on is when StarDust turns on the heat. As San takes his 4th base StarDust maneuvers all over the map catching San out of position. No matter how defensively San played he was unable to keep up and with every move Star |
have shared notes and tips each day, looking for weaknesses they can each exploit.
“The first couple of days, we had high hopes,” Chou said. “But every time we find a weakness, it learns from us and the weakness disappears the next day.”
The change from day to day is not unexpected, Sandholm said. Each night after poker play ends, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center’s Bridges computer performs computations to sharpen the AI’s strategy. During the day’s game play, Bridges is used to compute end-game strategies for each hand.
“The people at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center have done a great job,” Sandholm said, noting the staff has moved workloads around to enable the computer to be used in the competition. Since the beginning of the contest, the center has increased the number of Bridges’ computer nodes assigned to the poker tournament.
Play begins at 11 a.m. each day and ends after 8 p.m. The public is welcome to observe game play, which is in Rivers’ Poker Room.
Brains Vs. AI is sponsored by GreatPoint Ventures, Avenue4Analytics, TNG Technology Consulting GmbH, the journal Artificial Intelligence, Intel and Optimized Markets, Inc. Carnegie Mellon’s School of Computer Science has partnered with Rivers Casino, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) through a peer-reviewed XSEDE allocation, and Sandholm’s Electronic Marketplaces Laboratory for this event.Under the Radar Blog Archives Select Date… January, 2019 December, 2018 November, 2018 October, 2018 September, 2018 August, 2018 July, 2018 June, 2018 May, 2018 April, 2018 March, 2018 February, 2018
State Dept. shutters Guantanamo closure office
The State Department has reassigned its top diplomat charged with emptying out the prison for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay and effectively shuttered the office responsible for handling that issue.
In an internal personnel bulletin on Monday, the State Department said Ambassador Daniel Fried has been named as coordinator for sanctions policy and will leave his current post as special envoy in charge of resettling Guantanamo Bay prisoners.
In the first couple years of President Barack Obama's administration, Fried was very active in diplomatic efforts to persuade other countries to accept Guantanamo prisoners.
When Obama took office, 242 prisoners were at the facility. There are now 166 at Guantanamo. Three have died in custody since 2009 and the remainder were transferred to foreign countries on terms Fried often negotiated.
However, the pace of transfers has slowed to a trickle. Just four took place in 2012. The reduction is due to limits Congress imposed in legislation and Obama signed, while saying that he objected to those provisions. The slowdown is also attributable to a moratorium Obama imposed on transfers to Yemen in early 2010. A total of 86 of the men currently at Guantanamo are Yemeni nationals.
White House officials insist Obama still wants to close the prison at Guantanamo. However, as recently as earlier this month, Obama again signed legislation continuing the restrictions that effectively make it impossible to close the facility.
"The department will continue to work on these matters in coordination with other departments and agencies," said Ian Moss, an aide to Fried. "Our work with regard to Guantanamo will not stop. "
When Fried was given the job, the Obama Administration emphasized the need for full-time attention to the task.
"In order to carry out President Obama’s commitment to close the detention facility at Guantanamo within one year, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has determined we need to intensify our efforts to facilitate the transfer of detainees. Secretary Clinton therefore has asked Ambassador Daniel Fried, a seasoned diplomat with a strong record of accomplishment, to lead a dedicated team to address this issue full-time," State Department spokesman Robert Wood said in March 2009.
Two months later, Fried was formally named Special Envoy for the Closure of the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility.
Moss didn't say directly if the office would continue as a distinct entity, but he acknowledged that the position of special envoy will be vacant for now. "As of right now there isn’t one," he said. "There will be full-time attention to this."
The announcement Monday is to some degree bureaucratic formality catching up with reality. Detainee issues had become a declining portion of Fried's work in recent months. He had become the State Department's point person on issues relating to the Mujahideen-e Khalq, an Iranian dissident group that the U.S. long considered a terrorist organization but formally removed from the U.S. list of terrorist groups in September.
UPDATE (Monday, 6:00 P.M.): This post has been updated with Moss's comments.Posted in Features on July 9, 2008
Who hasn’t dreamed of living on a private island, away from the hustle and bustle of city life? But, how often have you dismissed this dream with thoughts that you couldn’t possibly afford this luxury? Well, you may need to rethink your dreams, because many private islands now are listed for less than $500,000 USD. In fact, you can find islands for less than $100,000. All you need to do is spend a little time searching online for your dream environment.
The point to remember in this situation is that you get what you pay for. Cheaper islands, on the whole, tend to be undeveloped. This means that you may need to acquire electricity, plumbing and land suitable for building to complete your dream of living on said island. Additionally, it may be tough to obtain a mortgage for island purchases, because most islands lack ‘comparables’ for valuation purposes. So, you’ll either need cash on hand or a solid business plan for development that could add valuation to your island (such as a resort).
On the other hand, you can employ such amenities as prefabricated homes, easy-to-install solar power, reverse-osmosis water filtration systems and composting toilets. All these items, which are perfect for island living, are within reach for an island dweller’s average budget. So, keep these plus-side items in mind when you tackle your search. The ten islands listed below will give you a head start, as they lead to real estate businesses that can help you realize your private island dream.
The list below is organized by price, with the least expensive listed first, and the most expensive at the end.
West Bank Lighthouse: The U.S. General Services Administration actually is auctioning two lighthouses/islands in New York. The one shown here, the West Bank Lighthouse, and the Old Orchard Shoal Lighthouse both are for sale. Both properties are open for bids starting at $10,000, and – as of this writing – no bids have been offered. On the plus side, both lighthouses offer 360-degree water views and both lighthouses retain basic integrity despite neglect. Plus, the new owners will claim a bit of history with either purchase. But, both lighthouses have been neglected, and they will be sold “as is” without warranties. Additionally, both properties require an easement to legally occupy the submerged land, and the properties must be maintained in accordance with the Secretary of Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation and in consultation with the New York State Historic Preservation Office. The Old Orchard Shoal Lighthouse is located approximately 3.5 miles south of New Drop Beach on Staten Island, Richmond County, New York. The keeper’s quarters consist of approximately 1000 square feet of space with porthole-styled windows. The interior is brick-lined in the first three stories. The West Bank Lighthouse is located in Lower New York Bay and is situated approximately 3.2 miles east of Staten Island, Richmond County, New York. This property sits on a man-made island and includes a riprap breakwater which extends westward approximately 100 feet from the lighthouse. There are two pilings which serve as moorings, and the interior is accessed by a metal platform and ladder. Both properties are accessible only by boat. Current price: Starting at $10,000 USD. Dolphin Bay Island: This is a small island that consists of 6,000 sq. ft., but it is located in a very nice area near Bocatorito, Panama, with views of Dolphin Bay. Plus, access to the island is easy, with a connection to San Cristobal Island via a strip of mangrove and access by boat within twenty minutes from Bocas. You’ll find a few large trees and some pineapple plants, and the island sits in protected waters with deep water nearby. The island displays elevation, and it is perfect for a single-family home. Current price: $40,000 USD. Bereck Island: Canadian islands remain a relative bargain, with several available for less than $100,000. Bereck Island, located on Stuart Lake in British Columbia, Canada, represents one of these bargains. Stuart Lake is the seventh largest lake in B.C., and it is a fisherman’s paradise stocked with rainbow trout, lake trout and kokanee. The island is approximately one acre, and it is surrounded by a shallow rocky shelf on its south side that is exposed during low water level and that is visible during winter. The island is accessible by boat or by floatplane. Bereck Island is zoned as residential, so there should not be any problems building a dwelling. Nearby towns include Fort St. James, which is accessible by paved road and is located about 60 km north of Vanderhoof and 160 km northwest of Prince George. Current price: CAD $65,000 ($64,327.21 USD). David Island: Settle down on approximately five forested acres in Guysborough County, Nova Scotia. David Island lies in the bay of Port Felix, about 30km from the city of Canso and near the town of Whitehead. The existing simple 12′ x 16′ cabin was built in 2003, and it does not support a septic system. But, it will provide a roof over your head as you plan for your future residence (which is, in principal, possible). This island could serve as a great fishing camp, provided you bring potable water. The view includes the mainland and other islands, which lie in the Tor Bay direction. Current price: CAD $75,000 ($74,474.55 USD). Chris Pinnacle: This sale consists of two islands, which comprise an area of approximately 2.47 acres or one hectare located in Jordan, on the western side of Guimaras, Philippines. One island contains a small bamboo hut with an outside seating area and a concrete pier. While no electricity runs to the islands, it is possible to transport power and water across from the mainland via underwater pipe. The mainland is only a few hundred meters, or a five-minute boat ride, from the island. The larger of the two islands holds a large area at the peak where a house could be situated. This view is magnificent, as you can enjoy the sunset to the west and unusual rock formations along the coastline to the east. The smaller island is in ‘virgin condition,’ and it also contains a flat top. Both islands are within viewing distance of a resort situated a mere 200 meters away on the mainland. This location and ease of access, in addition to the unusual stone formations, the potential for sea-kayaking and diving and snorkeling (yes, coral formations are abundant here) make these islands ideal for resort development. Current price: $100,000 USD. Cockroach Caye: If you want to start from scratch, Cockroach Caye (shaped like a cockroach), located fifteen miles east of Belize City, Belize, Central America, is a great place to begin. This unspoiled, undeveloped virgin swamp-free ten-acre property features 500 feet of Caribbean sea front in Cockroach Bay with approximately 300 yards to the eighteen-mile-long reef. The island sits on top of the reef that extends from Turneffe Island, located a mere 300 feet west of this island. The island will need to be cleared for development, as it is packed with coconut trees and mangrove. But, you’ll discover beautiful white sand along its beaches. If you are into fishing, you’ll discover tarpon and bonefish in the nearby flats and in the deep blue you can fish for Marlin, Sail Fish, Tuna, Wahoo and more. Cockroach Caye is part of the Turneffe Atoll, which is about thirty miles long and about eight miles wide, and is the largest of the three atolls in the area. Turneffe is the closest to the mainland and is home to a number of world-class dive sites. The atoll has a scattering of fishing camps, some of which are permanently occupied, and some of which are used only on a seasonal basis. At peak times, when combined with tourists and researchers, the atoll is inhabited by approximately 300 people. If you arrive by air to Belize City, it will take you about one hour to get to your island by boat. The seller is eager, and will consider all offers and can offer some financing as well. Current price: $189,900 USD. Lenur Island: Lenur Island is a beautiful and unspoiled thirty-seven acre island, situated in the crystal clear waters of South Malakula, Republic of Vanuatu, Oceania. The archipelago is some 1,090 miles east of northern Australia, 310 miles north-east of New Caledonia, west of Fiji, and south of the Solomon Islands. The archipelago is of volcanic origin, and maintains a tropical or sub-tropical climate. The island is surrounded by small trees and a few coconut palms and there is about three fresh water streams that run from the mainland to the island’s harbor. From all claims, this island is the best site for a fishing stop for people who decided to come for game fishing in Vanuatu. It claims the best harbor and beautiful sunset views. Current price: $400,000 USD. Eagle’s Nest Island: Who would have thought that an affordable island could be found in the heart of the U.S.? Eagle’s Nest Island, located in Bath Springs, Decatur County, Tennessee, offers over 167 acres of undisturbed hardwoods, stone and sand in the middle of the Tennessee River. The island holds some Civil War history, as Union troops searched for Confederate troops here in 1863. Decatur County and its cities and communities (including Parsons and Decaturville) boasts an active and progressive Chamber of Commerce, fine medical facilities, one of the best paramedic and emergency response teams in the State of Tennessee, a host of volunteer fire departments, an all volunteer, highly professional rescue squad and an excellent education system. The county borders fifty miles of undeveloped river property, a tourism card that brings many visitors to this area to enjoy fishing, camping, swimming and river recreation, sports and hunting. The island is approachable only by boat. Current Price: $350,000 USD. Carrington Cay: If you’ve been to Great Abaco Island and fell in love with this Bahamian island, then this treat is right up your alley. This island is located just 300 feet offshore from Great Abaco Island, but it provides the seclusion that only a 1.4-acre private island can offer. Still, you would be located within minutes of shopping and other urban conveniences at Leisure Lee, an exclusive canal community filled with quality homes. Carrington Cay also is located just three miles from the more cosmopolitan Treasure Cay, a thriving luxury resort with a full-service marina, golf course, shopping and every amenity imaginable. The island has good deep water for dockage at western end (eight-foot depth at mean low water), and spectacular views of nearby Great Guana Cay and Treasure Cay. A rare bonus is that due to the prevailing winds, the island is essentially insect-free, and with cable, electricity and potable water available for hook-up from the mainland, it will be easy to establish all the comforts of home on your private island paradise as soon as you sign the papers. Current price: $455,000 USD. Katunayake Island: Located a mere two-minute speed boat ride from the west coast of Sri Lanka, this ten-acre Asian tropical island begs for an eco-tourism resort development. Why? For one reason, the buyer is required to divest in an Eco-Friendly operation. Secondly, the convenience of the nearby Bandaranayake International Airport and the short distance to Colombo, Sri Lanka, makes it easy for visitors to gain access to your property. Finally, the island is a beauty, with deciduous woods on the west side and green grasses and swaying trees on the eastern shores. The lagoon is peaceful, and you’ll enjoy birds that nest on the island, great sunsets and sunrises, swimming and fishing from the beaches or rocks, caving and shell collecting. Although the island lacks electricity and phone service (cell signal is available), you can develop connectivity easily from the main road. Current price: $500,000 USD.
Did you enjoy this article?Both the Nexus S and Galaxy Nexus were released in white variants, so it wouldn't be too surprising if LG decides to follow suit with the Nexus 4. That may very well happen if an image provided to Phone Arena is any indication. The photo reveals the backside of what's purportedly the white Nexus 4. Other than the white casing, a chrome LED flash ring appears to be the only difference between it and the standard black model. The device's unique holographic stipple pattern can be made out near the bottom, but it's still hard to say whether we're seeing the real deal here. It could easily be a custom third-party backplate, for example.
Even so, EXIF data suggests the photo was taken by a Korean Optimus G, so it's at least feasible that this could have been snapped by a sly LG employee. There's already a white-clad Optimus G, after all. But considering the overwhelming popularity of Google's flagship handset, it seems not many people are waiting around for a new color.
Update: An entire gallery of photos detailing the alleged phone has leaked over at Vietnamese site Tinhte, which has a solid record of acquiring products before their official announcement. As you'll see, it looks like the white coloring only extends to the back and sides of the phone, with the front bezel remaining the same glossy black we know from the existing Nexus 4.So, "f--k yeah," says one AFC lineman who claims he has seen fellow players get addicted to painkillers. "You'll know when someone gets hurt, they'll be texting or calling: 'You just had surgery. Can I get some Percocets?'"
While Toradol helped former NFL quarterback Matt Hasselbeck play through his 160 starts in 17 seasons, concerns that it might make him more susceptible to brain injury gave him pause. At a traumatic brain injury symposium in 2011 with NFL Players Association Executive Director DeMaurice Smith, one doctor said he did not know the long-term effects of Toradol. "They hadn't studied it," Hasselbeck says. Several doctors in the room had a theory: Toradol might put players at greater risk of a concussion because of its blood-thinning properties.
Akin Ayodele (No. 51) hits Matt Hasselbeck during a game at Alltell Stadium on Sept. 11, 2005 in Jacksonville, Florida. (Getty Images)
"And that was the first time I thought, 'If I don't need a Toradol shot, I shouldn't take a Toradol shot,'" says Hasselbeck, who retired after the 2015 season. "That was the only time I felt the need to pump the brakes."
Otherwise, he took Toradol before every game. Hasselbeck suffered broken ribs, a torn MCL, a torn labrum and broken fingers.
"I do wish there was more research going on as far as what they give us and what we're allowed to take," an AFC tight end says. "But I definitely understand the risk that goes with it."
As the NFL told B/R Mag in a statement, Toradol is issued to players on a team-to-team basis; there's no league-wide policy.
However, the NFL Physicians Society (NFLPS) did release a 2012 paper detailing the effects of Toradol in the journal Sports Health. The study noted that NFL players are "superbly fit and healthy with little risk of experiencing any of the known complications associated with the use of ketorolac," and it offered recommendations for how physicians should deliver it. It said ketorolac should be administered only under the direct supervision (and order) of a team physician, should be limited to players diagnosed with an injury or condition and listed on his team's latest injury report, should be given in its lowest effective dose and not be used in any form for more than five consecutive days.
Further, the NFLPS said ketorolac should be given orally under "typical circumstances," because that has a "faster onset of action" than an injection. According to the study, intramuscular and intravenous injections "should not be used," and ketorolac must not be taken concurrently with other non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs.
As the players explain, the use of waivers and prescriptions for Toradol use varies from team to team.
Many players describe to B/R Mag how NFL teams have banned injections of Toradol entirely, only offering ketorolac in pill form.
"When the team started hearing that some people in the medical field wanted to look at what possible side effects Toradol would have," Hasselbeck says, "they made you sign a waiver all of a sudden. … The young players were like, 'OK, I'll sign the waiver, I just won't take it.' And the older players who had taken Toradol their whole life were like, 'Whoa! Whoa! Whoa! I need Toradol!' So some guys were pushing back. Some guys were begging for it."
The use of Toradol is policed by teams more closely than in the past. Still, Hasselbeck remembers one "powerful-enough player" convincing a team doctor—he would not reveal on which franchise—to give him an injection even though his team had banned it.
Says Hasselbeck, "They were like, 'OK, OK, listen. We'll give you the shot. Just don't say anything. We don't want a line of 20 people in here getting shots. It looks bad.'"
Geier says the Rams handled Toradol responsibly when he worked with the team. One AFC wide receiver suggests to B/R Mag that Toradol was forced upon players—"You think that they have your best interest in mind, which may or may not be true"—but other players say Toradol's popularity is driven by players whose jobs are in constant jeopardy.
"Look at Tony Romo," Geier says of the Dallas Cowboys quarterback who was sidelined this season with a back injury, without suggesting he had taken Toradol. "He lost his starting job and can't get it back. Guys see that. They don't want to miss games. So if Toradol helps them play through pain, that may be something they're willing to try."
So many scientific advancements help players' bodies stay finely tuned—sleep monitoring, massage therapies, hyperbaric oxygen chambers. Geier lists them all. But so often, he says, the question on Sunday remains: What can I do to get through this game?
And yet, 15 other players contacted for the survey say they have never taken Toradol. "From what people say about it," says a Pro Bowl defensive lineman, "it's not something I want to ever deal with." These players emphasize they're wary of putting something into their body that hasn't yet been fully understood. To them, a little extra pain is worth that peace of mind.
For everyone else surveyed, a couple of Toradol pills continue to do the trick.
As one NFC safety who describes "shocking" pain on Mondays after Toradol masks his pain on Sundays says, the sacrifice is worth it.
"It gets so bad that Toradol is the only thing that gets you to go," he tells B/R Mag. "So if you're hurting? You're going to have to play. You're going to have to play through it.
"You have to do whatever it takes."Michael Luwoye Returns to Broadway's Hamilton as New Title Player
Luwoye steps into the role of Founding Father Alexander Hamilton at the Richard Rodgers Theatre after playing the role on tour.
Michael Luwoye, who recently originated the title role of the national tour of Lin-Manuel Miranda's Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning musical Hamilton, takes center stage on Broadway beginning January 16.
Luwoye succeeds Javier Muñoz, who played his final performance January 14 at the Richard Rodgers Theatre.
Luwoye made his Broadway debut as the Hamilton alternate to Muñoz and the understudy for the role of Aaron Burr. He made his New York stage debut in the Off-Broadway transfer of Invisible Thread.
Read: HE AUDITIONED FOR MULLIGAN AND WAS CAST AS HAMILTON
The current Broadway cast of Hamilton also includes Daniel Breaker as Aaron Burr, Lexi Lawson as Eliza Hamilton, Tony winner James Monroe Iglehart as Thomas Jefferson and Marquis de Lafayette, Tony nominee Euan Morton as King George, Mandy Gonzalez as Angelica Schuyler, Joanna A. Jones as Peggy Schuyler and Maria Reynolds, Bryan Terrell Clark as George Washington, J. Quinton Johnson as Hercules Mulligan and James Madison, and Anthony Lee Medina as John Laurens and Philip Hamilton.
To the Revolution: Take a Look at the Hamilton National Tour To the Revolution: Take a Look at the Hamilton National Tour 16 PHOTOS
SHOP HAMILTON MERCHANDISE AT THE PLAYBILL STORE!
(Updated December 13, 2017)About 1,000 people affiliated with Neo-Nazi and extreme right groups march through Berlin's Spandau district in commemoration of 30 years to Rudolf Hess's death, on Aug. 19, 2017. Hess, who served as Adolf Hitler's deputy, committed suicide on Aug. 17, 1987 at Spandau Prison. (Photo11: Omer Messinger, Getty Images)
BERLIN — When telecommunications manager Mikhail Tanaev emigrated to Germany in 1998 from his native Russia as a teen, his Jewish faith didn't matter to classmates or neighbors.
That's because Germany has taken extraordinary steps since the end of World War II to atone for the Holocaust and prevent anti-Semitism from taking hold again. The country has paid reparations to Jewish victims of Nazi persecution, erected dozens of memorials to those murdered and turned anti-Semitic speech into a crime.
Yet Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision in 2015 to open the nation's arms to 1 million mostly Muslim refugees has created a double threat for Germany's roughly 120,000 Jews: rising anti-Semitism from the newcomers and a resurgent right-wing nationalist movement spawned by the arrival of so many immigrants.
The anti-Semitic sentiment has become more pubic and virulent, said Tanaev, 32. "When I arrived in Germany... I never saw such displays."
Last week, thousands of protesters in Berlin burned Israeli flags to protest President Trump's decision on Dec. 7 to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital. The flag-burning prompted a national outcry.
"I never thought that could happen in the middle of Berlin. That's something you see in other parts of the world. It's really disturbing," Tanaev said. "It feels like we're being threatened because you never know how people will react further when something like this occurs."
Other instances of anti-Semitism in Germany have become more common and brazen recently. Last month, thieves in Berlin made off with more than a dozen cobblestone-sized plaques embedded in sidewalks memorializing victims of the Holocaust. And the German military found Nazi memorabilia in soldiers' barracks over the summer.
In 2016, Germany recorded 1,468 anti-Semitic incidents, an increase from previous years that has put Germany's Jewish community on edge, According to a recent survey by the Bielefeld University in western Germany, 62% of Jewish respondents said they experience anti-Semitism in their everyday lives, while 28% said they were victims of verbal attacks or harassment in the past year.
The survey points to increased anti-Semitism by Muslim newcomers and a strengthened right-wing nativist movement, said Andreas Zick, who led the study.
A far-right rally in Berlin commemorates the 30th anniversary of the death of leading Nazi figure Rudolf Hess, on Aug. 19, 2017. (Photo11: Frank Jordans, AP)
Underscoring that trend is the rise of the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD), now the third-largest political party in Parliament four years after its founding. The AfD drums up support with nationalist and anti-Semitic rhetoric.
"Germans are the only people in the world who plant a monument of shame in the heart of the capital," senior AfD member Björn Höcke said this year about the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin.
Other party members want Nazi soldiers remembered as patriots.
Zick also noted anti-Semitic remarks posted on social media by right-wing groups. The comments fuel misconceptions among new immigrants that Germany tolerates such behavior, despite strict laws requiring social media giants such as Facebook to delete posts categorized as hate speech, he said.
"There's a lot of evidence from our studies that the Internet and young Muslim men in public are threatening (Jews),” Zick said. “Refugees coming in don't perceive that there's a strong norm against anti-Semitism.”
Such sentiments prompted a Jewish community center in Berlin to launch an initiative to combat anti-Semitism.
More: Anti-Semitic chants, images soil Serie A soccer match, reading from Anne Frank's diary
More: Giant swastika unearthed under German sports field
"Here, we put in concrete terms that 'the Jew' is actually a normal person — that he looks like you and is someone you can have a normal conversation with," said Rabbi Daniel Fabian of the Kahal Adass Jisroel Jewish community center and synagogue.
Members of the community center have been spit on and harassed in predominately Muslim neighborhoods since 2014, Fabian said. And his synagogue recently received a bomb threat from right-wing radicals. The compound housing the synagogue and community center are now under 24-hour police surveillance.
Jewish leaders are pushing for changes in the education system to head off anti-Semitism, including history lessons with visits to concentration camps. Bavaria is the only German state that now requires such visits.
"We are looking for modern means to convey what has happened and to keep the memory alive," said Josef Schuster, president of Germany's Central Council of Jews.
Tanaev said it also is important to draw parallels between the history of Jewish immigration and the current influx of newcomers. "That's the history of our people, and it's important to show others that fact," he said.
Fabian, whose grandmother was in the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II, called for support from Muslim groups as well as the government to fight anti-Semitism.
“We can't be the only ones who are constantly reminding everyone else to look at what's happening right under your noses," he said.
Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2BVxt9GSAN FRANCISCO — Zenefits, the troubled HR software startup, is laying off nearly half its employees as it continues to cut costs.
The layoffs, which will affect 430 workers, or 45 percent of the company’s workforce, are just the latest round of job cuts for the company, whose well-known problems have included fudging licensing requirements for selling health insurance and the ousting of its founding CEO. The company’s San Francisco headquarters will lose 250 employees.
A Zenefits spokesman confirmed the numbers, which were first reported by BuzzFeed, in an email to this newspaper.
The layoffs come days after a new CEO and chairman, Jay Fulcher, came on board, but a company spokesman said they were planned “for some time” by previous CEO David Sacks — who took the helm after Parker Conrad was forced to step down — plus other executives and the board of directors. Sacks, who said in December he would become chairman, remains on the board.
The company is centralizing operations in Arizona; “partnering with third parties for some of the seasonal work”; and “building out” its product and engineering teams in Vancouver and Bangalore.
The cuts will help “dramatically” reduce costs, the company said, and allow it to have “enough cash to fund our operations for years to come.”
Last year, Zenefits shed about 350 jobs after Parker’s departure. The company also cut its valuation by about half, from $4.5 billion to $2 billion.The National Jukebox, the new digital musical player of the Library of Congress, features more than 10,000 songs released by the Victor Talking Machine Company between 1901 and 1925 (with the promise of more to come). You can build your own playlist from the many genres of music available, which include some extremely rare recordings from different genres including 0pera, blues, yodeling, jazz, and much, much more.
We also love the disclaimer on the website's front page: WARNING: Historical recordings may contain offensive language. It's quite easy to see why the warning is necessary, especially after some time spent listening to the comedy section.
If you want to see a Victor Talking Machine in action, you can watch one getting demoed here.
via @kirstinbutler
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerlyHey Folks,
I’ve finally finished my first RHPS font, “The Drip”. I wanted to expand on the work that Coda did with Double Feature by allowing there to be significantly more options for the drip pattern for each number and letter. With my font I’ve created at least four alternates for each, allowing more variation to give a more authentic hand drawn feel like the original credits.
This font is set up so that both the uppercase and the lowercase letters are identical. This is the same as the numbers. For this font you can consider the normal numbers to be ‘lowercase’ and the symbols above them to be ‘capital’. (Thus leading you to realize that Capital One bank is really just!!!! BANK!)
As you type a letter or number you can repeatedly type the same letter to rotate through all the alternate versions. This is accomplished through extensive misuse of the ligature function. On the occasion that you repeat a letter you MUST switch between upper and lowercase or you’ll find that you merely set the letter once in the second drip option. The rotation for the number keys will first access the alternate versions of the number, and then access the symbol.
Alternate symbols and additional alternate letters and numbers are planned for an eventual update. If you encounter any bugs with the file please let me know and I can fix them for an update as well.
The font is available at https://gumroad.com/l/TheDrip
Check out more of my Rocky Horror designs.
Cheers,
Shawn HallNintendo's handheld 3DS console has sold over 4.5 million units in the U.S. during its first year on sale, the company confirmed today.The Nintendo 3DS launched in the U.S. on March 27, 2011, and has managed to surpass the 4.5 million sold figure in just less than 12 months -- nearly twice as many units as the original Nintendo DS managed in its first year on sale.The stereoscopic 3D console got off to a rocky start when it was first released, but a price cut during the summer, along with a string of big-name releases such asand, helped sales of the console rocket.It eventually went on to surpass first-year sales of the Nintendo DS -- currently the best-selling video game console ever -- in just eight months.Nintendo also noted that over 9 million 3DS software units have been sold in the U.S. to date, while overall sales from 3DS hardware, software and accessories have now surpassed $1.2 billion in the U.S..The company already revealed last month that the 3DS has sold 5 million units in Japan, taking exactly 52 weeks to do so.Guests: Guy Branum Guy Branum Guests: Oliver Wang Oliver Wang Guests: Margaret Wappler Margaret Wappler
Game of Thrones is back so we talk about “learning to Cersei”, ask whether a TV show can ever have enough incest and get into the wonders of sexposition. Plus we name the pieces of culture we initially disliked but then came to love.
With Guy Branum, Oliver Wang and Margaret Wappler.
That’s My Jam:
Oliver Wang - Warm and Tender Love by Percy Sledge
Margaret Wappler - Fourth of July by Sufjan Stevens
Each week we’ll add everyone’s jams to this handy Spotify playlist.
Other useful links this week…
Guy was all about Parul Sehgal’s TED Talk about Envy.
Oliver recommended the EMP Pop Conference in Seattle.
You can find more info on Oliver’s new book at LegionsOfBoom.com and buy Guy’s album
here.
You can let us know what you think of Pop Rocket and suggest topics on the MaxFun forum, our Facebook group or via @PopRocket on Twitter.Tracing a packet journey using Linux tracepoints, perf and eBPF
I’ve been looking for a low level Linux network debugging tool for quite some time. Linux allows to build complex networks running directly on the host, using a combination of virtual interfaces and network namespaces. When something goes wrong, troubleshooting is rather tedious. If this is a L3 routing issue, mtr has a good chance of being of some help. But if this is a lower level issue, I typically end up manually checking each interface / bridge / network namespace / iptables and firing up a couple of tcpdumps as an attempt to get a sense of what’s going on. If you have no prior knowledge of the network setup, this may feel like a maze.
What I’d need is a tool which could tell me “Hey, I’ve seen your packet: It’s gone this way, on this interface, in this network namespace”.
Basically, what I’d need is a mtr for L2.
Does not exist? Let’s build one!
At the end of this post, we’ll have a simple and easy to use low level packet tracer. If you ping a local Docker container, it will show something like:
# ping -4 172.17.0.2 [ 4026531957] docker0 request #17146.001 172.17.0.1 -> 172.17.0.2 [ 4026531957] vetha373ab6 request #17146.001 172.17.0.1 -> 172.17.0.2 [ 4026532258] eth0 request #17146.001 172.17.0.1 -> 172.17.0.2 [ 4026532258] eth0 reply #17146 |
for something that science disproves. Faith is actuality. Faith is substance. Faith is conviction.The Christian does not need to understand religious epistemology in order to have trustworthy assurance of these things. They are objectively true without his full understanding. They are subjectively true based on the internal confirmation of the Holy Spirit. Thus, when the Christian believes in the existence of God and the truth of Scripture, he believes in something just as reliable and even more certain as those things verified by the scientific method.When an atheist rejects belief in God, he rejects any source of confidence beyond his own level of reasoning or understanding. The thinking atheist will forever be questioning the origin of the universe, will be perplexed regarding morality, and will be unsure of his own destiny and purpose in life.I know a Christian who had a friend who was an atheist. As the two discussed the issue of atheism vs. Christianity, the Christian man showed the atheist a passage in Romans 1. Romans 1 explains that so-called atheists, among others, actually “by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them” (Rom. 1:18-19). How has God shown Himself to them? “His invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew god, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools.” The Christian told the atheist, “The reason you don’t believe in God is that you don’t want to.” The man replied, “You know, I never thought about it, but you’re right!”The atheist uses faith, too. He puts his faith in science or self. He presupposes that science or self are trustworthy places for his confidence, and finds corroboration for this presupposition in the evidences that he can comprehend. He believes in his own testimony. The Bible, however, confronts this tenuous belief system; “If we receive the testimony of men, the testimony of God is greater” (1 John 5:9). God’s testimony is found in Jesus--an indisputable historical figure. As C. S. Lewis summarized, Jesus was one of three things. Either he was a 1) subversive liar, 2) or a raving lunatic, or 3) He was actually who He claimed to be--the Son of God. Which one was he? The passage cited above goes on to say, “Whoever does not believe God has made him a liar, because he has not believed in the testimony that God has borne concerning his Son” (1 John 5:10).The atheist finds himself in the difficult position of denying all of those things that speak to God’s existence and the validity of the Christian faith. He rejects God. He rejects the creation of the world by God. He rejects the deity of Christ. He rejects God’s Word. He suppresses the inner testimony that he has concerning the reality of God. All that he is left with his a feeble self-confidence. This is the atheist’s confidence.The Christian’s source of confidence--his faith--is an unshakable faith in God, revealed in His Word, manifested in Jesus Christ, and confirmed by His Spirit. This is not only a more defensible belief system than the atheist’s; it is a far better way to live. In fact, it is the only way to really live. “Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life” (1 John 5:6).Atheism declares that there is no god. Christianity teaches that there is a God. Both cannot be true. So which one is correct, the atheist or the Christian? How you respond depends upon faith. It depends on the source of your faith. Will you have faith in self? Or in God?To offer your comments, please visit the Sharefaith Blog Sharefaith excels at providing powerful media solutions for the modern church. Visit the Sharefaith site, explore the media, and see how a membership with Sharefaith can improve your ministry.Published online 11 May 2011 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2011.283
News
Proof-of-principle study could point the way to averting the need for liver transplants.
Reprogrammed cells have helped repair damaged livers in mice. Photolibrary.com
Cells taken from the tips of mouse tails and genetically reprogrammed to mimic mature liver cells can repair damaged livers.
The ultimate goal of such studies is to use the same technique to reprogram human cells, reducing the need for liver transplants in patients with end-stage liver disease. Although the study in mice, published online today in Nature1, is still far removed from the clinic, it does provide an important proof of concept: it is thought to be the first time that cells reprogrammed using a process called transdifferentiation – produced without passing through a stem-cell stage – have been shown to fix a damaged organ.
"It's really exciting," says Paul Gadue, a stem-cell biologist at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania who was not involved in the study. "If this work could be translated to humans, it could be very powerful."
New identity
Transdifferentiation has been used to generate blood cells, cardiac muscle cells and neurons from adult cells called fibroblasts. But liver cells pose a particular challenge to cellular reprogrammers, says Ira Fox, a paediatric transplant surgeon and stem-cell researcher at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, who was also not involved in the work.
Mature liver cells have many functions, from breaking down toxins to producing many of the body's proteins. "There's no such thing as an artificial liver," says Fox. "It's an incredibly complex organ and it's basically impossible to replace."
Cell biologist Lijian Hui of the Shanghai Institute for Biological Sciences in China and his team tackled this problem by sifting through 14 proteins known to be important for activating genes in liver cells. The expression of three such proteins and the suppression of another called p19 was all that it took to persuade fibroblasts isolated from mouse tails to behave like liver cells.
The researchers then took these cells and transplanted them into mice lacking a gene needed to detoxify certain metabolic intermediates. Control animals that did not receive the transplants died within weeks, but 5 of the 12 animals that received the engineered cells survived.
The cells created by Hui's team were not exact replicas of mature liver cells. The expression of several genes, including at least one involved in breaking down toxins, differed between normal liver cells and Hui's reprogrammed cells. Hui believes that the transplants saved only some of the mice because the cells did not fully mimic mature liver cells.
"The cells aren't perfect," concedes Gadue, but he notes that researchers have struggled with liver cells derived from other methods as well.
Tough target
Those alternative methods include generating liver cells from adult skin cells by first converting them into a type of stem cell called an induced pluripotent stem cell, and then coaxing those stem cells into behaving like liver cells. A paper published today in Science Translational Medicine2 reports that human cells derived in this way repaired damaged mouse livers just as well as normal human liver cells.
Researchers have long struggled to get such cells to function like fully fledged liver cells, says Gadue. Although liver cells are well known for their ability to proliferate in the body — slice out two-thirds of a liver and the remaining third will quickly regenerate a normal organ – the cells do not fare well in laboratory cultures. "It is possible that since we're culturing them in an inappropriate environment, they may be losing their function," says Gadue.
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Liver cells derived directly from stem cells may also behave more like fetal liver cells than adult liver cells, he notes. Transdifferentiation could, in theory, produce more mature cells.
Hui says that the next step for his team will be to translate the work to human cells. To do this, the researchers may have to find a way around the need to suppress the p19 protein. Although Hui saw no signs of tumours in his mice, p19 suppresses tumours, and eliminating it could promote cancer.
"This current method is not the ultimate solution for the clinic," says Fox. "But it's an important proof of principle."South Korea's Park Tae-hwan (L) looks on after he was disqualified from the men's 400m freestyle heats at the London 2012 Olympic Games at the Aquatics Centre July 28, 2012. REUTERS/David Gray
LONDON (Reuters) - World and Olympic 400 meters freestyle champion Park Tae-hwan of South Korea was disqualified on Saturday in the first big shock of the swimming competition at the London Games.
Park, a national hero to his compatriots after winning gold in Beijing four years ago, paid the price for a schoolboy error in a heat he should never have lost.
Officials at the Olympic Park’s wave-shaped Aquatics Centre ruled that he had made a false start and scrubbed him from the times.
“That’s the Olympics,” said Canadian Ryan Cochrane, who qualified at Park’s expense in the eighth place slot with China’s Sun Yang now the clear favorite for gold in the absence of his big Asian rival.
Park, who became South Korea’s first Olympic swimming champion in Beijing when he was quickest off the block in the final to win ahead of China’s Zhang Lin, appeared baffled by the decision.
Had he hesitated only a fraction of a second, he would have been in the clear in a distance where such a delay can easily be made up.
The setback was the latest in the career of a swimmer who had been expected to take on the mantle of retired Australian Ian Thorpe as the dominant swimmer in the men’s 400 but has struggled to do so.
After Beijing, the Korean failed to qualify for the final at the 2009 world championships in Rome but won the title in Shanghai last July despite scraping into the final with only the seventh best time.FILE - This June 19, 2015, file photo, shows the Federal Communications Commission building in Washington. Republicans in the House have followed the Senate in overturning an Obama-era broadband privacy regulation that set tough restrictions on what companies like Comcast, Verizon and AT&T could do with customers’ personal information. It still needs President Donald Trump’s signature. Consumer advocates and Democrats have slammed Republicans for gutting the Federal Communications Commission’s regulation, saying it will leave Americans online unprotected; Republicans and industry groups counter that spiking the rule just maintains the status quo. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)
NEW YORK (AP) — Now that both houses of Congress have voted to block Obama-era broadband privacy rules, what does that mean for you?
In the short term, not so much. The rules, which would have put tough restrictions on what companies like Comcast, Verizon and AT&T can do with information such as your internet history, hadn’t yet gone into effect. So if President Donald Trump signs the measure, as the White House has indicated he will, the status quo will remain.
But the absence of clear privacy rules means that the companies supplying your internet service — and who can see a great deal of what you do with it — can continue to mine that information for use in their own advertising businesses. And consumer advocates worry that the companies will be an enticing target for hackers.
Here’s how that could play out and what it means.
___
WHAT CHANGES NOW
Not much, at least immediately. For now, phone and cable companies remain subject to federal law that imposes on broadband providers a “duty to protect the confidentiality” of customer information and restricts them from using some customer data without “approval.”
But it doesn’t spell out how companies must get permission, how they must protect your data, or whether and how they have to tell you if it’s been hacked.
___
WHAT THE RULES WOULD HAVE CHANGED
Under the Federal Communications Commission’s rules, Comcast and its ilk would have needed your permission before offering marketers a wealth of information about you, including health and financial details, your geographic location and lists of websites you’ve visited and apps you’ve used.
Republicans and industry officials complained that the browsing and app history restrictions would have unfairly burdened internet providers, since other companies such as Google and Facebook don’t have to abide by them.
That’s important because the biggest broadband companies want to build ad businesses to rival those tech giants. This rule would have made that more difficult.
These rules also required broadband providers to take reasonable measures to protect customer information, although those weren’t spelled out. They also required these companies to tell you if your information had been hacked.
___
CAN YOU STOP PROVIDERS FROM COLLECTING YOUR DATA?
Yes, but it’s not easy. Broadband providers today let you “opt out” of using their data, although figuring out how to do that can be difficult.
Instead, the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation suggests you might pay to use a virtual private network, which funnels your internet traffic through a secure connection that your provider can’t see into. But good VPNs aren’t free, you have to figure out which ones you can trust, and unless you go to the trouble of setting one up on your home router — not a straightforward task — you would need to set them up on every phone, tablet and computer in your home.
The EFF and other supporters of the privacy rules also point out that in many markets consumer choices are limited when it comes to home broadband, so you often can’t just switch providers if you don’t like their privacy policies.
___
DOES MY STATE HAVE MY BACK?
Maybe. Many state laws bar unfair or deceptive practices, which they can use against privacy violations. Other state and federal regulations aim to protect medical and financial records, but may not apply to internet service providers.
Only a few states regulate specific practices by broadband providers, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, which tracks state laws. Minnesota, for instance, requires internet service providers to get customer permission before sharing their web-browsing histories.
The vast majority of states do require business and government to tell their residents when their information has been hacked, according to the NCSL, but they have different approaches. At least 13 states require businesses to have reasonable security practices.The Saskatchewan Roughriders conducted their first practice Wednesday at Mosaic Stadium in preparation for Sunday’s CFL contest against the visiting Edmonton Eskimos. Here are some of the things seen and heard by the Leader-Post’s Ian Hamilton.
Nerves of Steele
Tailback Curtis Steele practised with the Roughriders last week, but he was still on the six-game injured list. Now that he’s eligible to be activated off that list, he appears set to return to the lineup.
Steele, who played in the Roughriders’ first four games before suffering a leg injury, admitted he was “kind of down” in the early stages of his absence. But he got through it with the help of other injured players and the Roughriders’ training staff.
“It’s been a long process,” Steele said. “(It’s been) frustrating sitting back watching. Our guys and team are a step away (and) so close to winning. It’s been a humbling process. (I just had to) continue to work and have the patience to be able to come back 100 per cent.”
The Roughriders have used Kendial Lawrence, Michael Ford, Michael Dyer, Matt Walter and Greg Morris at tailback in Steele’s absence. Head coach-GM Chris Jones hopes Steele can add some stability to the position.
“He’s a veteran who’s been in our system for quite some time,” Jones said. “He was our starter at the first of the year and we look forward to having his power and quickness back in there.”
This Ford Won’t Run
Ford and receiver Joshua Stanford were cut by the Roughriders on Wednesday, when non-import receiver Archelaus Jack and import tailback Josh Robinson were added to the practice roster.
Ford dressed for three games, rushing eight times for 39 yards and catching eight passes for 64 yards. Stanford appeared in two games and caught one pass for 13 yards.
Robinson, a 5-foot-8, 217-pound product of Mississippi State University, was a sixth-round pick of the Indianapolis Colts in the 2015 NFL draft. He played in five games for the Colts last season, rushing 17 times for 39 yards.
Jack, who hails from Mississauga, Ont., originally signed with Saskatchewan in July before being released.
Moving On
The Roughriders announced Monday they had released defensive tackle Khalif Mitchell, who had been signed to the practice roster on Aug. 31.
Jones addressed the transaction Wednesday, saying it had nothing to do with off-field issues. It was simply related to Mitchell’s conditioning.
“He didn’t feel like he could get prepared to play, especially this late in the year,” Jones said.
The signing was greeted negatively by many CFL observers, given Mitchell’s history of on-field incidents and anti-Semitic tweets. When Jones was asked if he paid any attention to that reaction, he replied: “Not really.”
Also …
Receiver Naaman Roosevelt, who limped off the field during Saturday’s Banjo Bowl in Winnipeg before returning later in the game, didn’t practise Wednesday. Jones said Roosevelt was “bunged up just a little bit” and was being evaluated to see if he’d be available for Sunday’s game … Defensive end Eric Norwood hasn’t played at all this season while rehabbing a knee injury that required surgery. Norwood was on the field Wednesday and could be getting closer to playing. “Now that he’s been cleared, we’re going to put him back out there, let him practise and just see exactly where he’s at,” Jones said … CFL teams soon will be expanding their practice rosters, which gives clubs a chance to take a look at NFL cuts and see if they can help this season or in the future. Jones said that could be happening in Regina in the coming days … The CFL announced Wednesday that Roughriders defensive end Ese Mrabure had been fined for a high hit on Winnipeg Blue Bombers quarterback Matt Nichols in Saturday’s contest. The amount of the fine wasn’t disclosed.
ihamilton@postmedia.com
twitter.com/IanHamiltonLP1700 words
How do whites and blacks differ by muscle fiber and what does it mean for certain health outcomes? This is something I’ve touched on in the past, albeit briefly, and decided to go in depth on it today. The characteristics of skeletal muscle fibers dictate whether one has a higher or lower chance of being affected by cardiometabolic disease/cancer. Those with more type I fibers have less of a chance of acquiring diabetes while those with type II fibers have a higher chance of acquiring debilitating diseases. This has direct implications for health disparities between the two races.
Muscle fiber typing by race
Racial differences in muscle fiber typing explain differences in strength and mortality. I have, without a shadow of a doubt, proven this. So since blacks have higher rates of type II fibers while whites have higher rates of type I fibers (41 percent type I for white Americans, 33 percent type I for black Americans, Ama et al, 1985) while West Africans have 75 percent fast twitch and East Africans have 25 percent fast twitch (Hobchachka, 1988). Further, East and West Africans differ in typing composition, 75 percent fast for WAs and 25 percent fast for EAs, which has to do with what type of environment they evolved in (Hochhachka, 1998). What Hochhachka (1998) also shows is that high latitude populations (Quechua, Aymara, Sherpa, Tibetan and Kenyan) “show numerous similarities in physiological hypoxia defence mechanisms.” Clearly, slow-twitch fibers co-evolved here.
Clearly, slow-twitch fibers co-evolved with hypoxia. Since hypoxia is the deficiency in the amount of oxygen that reaches the tissues, populations in higher elevations will evolve hypoxia defense mechanisms, and with it, the ability to use the oxygen they do get more efficiently. This plays a critical role in the fiber typing of these populations. Since they can use oxygen more efficiently, they then can become more efficient runners. Of course, these populations have evolved to be great distance runners and their morphology followed suit.
Caesar and Henry (2015) also show that whites have more type I fibers than blacks who have more type II fibers. When coupled with physical inactivity, this causes higher rates of cancer and cardiometabolic disease. Indeed, blacks have higher rates of cancer and mortality than whites (American Cancer Society, 2016), both of which are due, in part, to muscle fiber typing. This could explain a lot of the variation in disease acquisition in America between blacks and whites. Physiologic differences between the races clearly need to be better studied. But we first must acknowledge physical differences between the races.
Disease and muscle fiber typing
Now that we know the distribution of fiber types by race, we need to see what type of evidence there is that differing muscle fiber typing causes differences in disease acquisition.
Those with fast twitch fibers are more likely to acquire type II diabetes and COPD (Hagiwara, 2013); cardiometabolic disease and cancer (Caesar and Henry, 2015); a higher risk of cardiovascular events (Andersen et al, 2015, Hernelahti et al, 2006); high blood pressure, high heart rate, and unfavorable left ventricle geometry leading to higher heart disease rates and obesity (Karjalainen et al, 2006) etc. Knowing what we know about muscle fiber typing and its role in disease, it makes sense that we should take this knowledge and acknowledge physical racial differences. However, once that is done then we would need to acknowledge more uncomfortable truths, such as the black-white IQ gap.
One hypothesis for why fast twitch fibers are correlated with higher disease acquisition is as follows: fast twitch fibers fire faster, so due to mechanical stress from rapid and forceful contraction, this leads the fibers to be more susceptible to damage and thus the individual will have higher rates of disease. Once this simple physiologic fact is acknowledged by the general public, better measures can be taken for disease prevention.
Due to differences in fiber typing, both whites and blacks must do differing types of cardio to stay healthy. Due to whites’ abundance of slow twitch fibers, aerobic training is best (not too intense). However, on the other hand, due to blacks’ abundance of fast twitch fibers, they should do more anaerobic type exercises to attempt to mitigate the diseases that they are more susceptible due to their fiber typing.
Black men with more type II fibers and less type I fibers are more likely to be obese than ‘Caucasian‘ men are to be obese (Tanner et al, 2001). More amazingly, Tanner et al showed that there was a positive correlation (.72) between weight loss and percentage of type I fibers in obese patients. This has important implications for African-American obesity rates, as they are the most obese ethny in America (Ogden et al, 2016) and have higher rates of metabolic syndrome (a lot of the variation in obesity does come down food insecurity, however). Leaner subjects had higher proportions of type I fibers compared to type II. Blacks have a lower amount of type I fibers compared to whites without adiposity even being taken into account. Not surprisingly, when the amount of type I fibers was compared by ethnicity, there was a “significant interaction” with ethnicity and obesity status when type I fibers were compared (Tanner et al, 2001). Since we know that blacks have a lower amount of type I fibers, they are more likely to be obese.
In Tanner et al’s sample, both lean blacks and whites had a similar amount of type I fibers, whereas the lean blacks possessed more type I fibers than the obese black sample. Just like there was a “significant interaction” between ethnicity, obesity, and type I fibers, the same was found for type IIb fibers (which, as I’ve covered, black Americans have more of these fibers). There was, again, no difference between lean black and whites in terms of type I fibers. However, there was a difference in type IIb fibers when obese blacks and lean blacks were compared, with obese blacks having more IIb fibers. Obese whites also had more type IIb fibers than lean whites. Put simply (and I know people here don’t want to hear this), it is easier for people with type I fibers to lose weight than those with type II fibers. This data is some of the best out there showing the relationship between muscle fiber typing and obesity—and it also has great explanatory power for black American obesity rates.
Conclusion
Muscle fiber differences between blacks and whites explain disease acquisition rates, mortality rates (Araujo et al, 2010), and differences in elite sporting competition between the races. I’ve proven that whites are stronger than blacks based on the available scientific data/strength competitions (click here for an in-depth discussion). One of the most surprising things that muscle fibers dictate is weight loss/obesity acquisition. Clearly, we need to acknowledge these differences and have differing physical activity protocols for each racial group based on their muscle fiber typing. However, I can’t help but think about the correlation between strength and mortality now. This obesity/fiber type study puts it into a whole new perspective. Those with type I fibers are more likely to be physically stronger, which is a cardioprotectant, which then protects against all-cause mortality in men (Ruiz et al, 2008; Volaklis, Halle, and Meisenger, 2015). So the fact that black Americans have a lower life expectancy as well as lower physical strength and more tpe II fibers than type I fibers shows why blacks are more obese, why blacks are not represented in strength competitions, and why blacks have higher rates of disease than other populations.The study by Tanner et al (2001) shows that there obese people are more likely to have type II fibers, no matter the race. Since we know that blacks have more type II fibers on average, this explains a part of the variance in the black American obesity rates and further disease acquisition/mortality.
The study by Tanner et al (2001) shows that there obese people are more likely to have type II fibers, no matter the race. Since we know that blacks have more type II fibers on average, this explains a part of the variance in the black American obesity rates and further disease acquisition/mortality.
Differences in muscle fiber typing do not explain all of the variance in disease acquisition/strength differences, however, understanding what the differing fiber typings do, metabolically speaking, along with how they affect disease acquisition will only lead to higher qualities of life for everyone involved.
References
Araujo, A. B., Chiu, G. R., Kupelian, V., Hall, S. A., Williams, R. E., Clark, R. V., & Mckinlay, J. B. (2010). Lean mass, muscle strength, and physical function in a diverse population of men: a population-based cross-sectional study. BMC Public Health,10(1). doi:10.1186/1471-2458-10-508
Andersen K, Lind L, Ingelsson E, Amlov J, Byberg L, Miachelsson K, Sundstrom J. Skeletal muscle morphology and risk of cardiovascular disease in elderly men. Eur J Prev Cardiol 2013.
Ama PFM, Simoneau JA, Boulay MR, Serresse Q Thériault G, Bouchard C. Skeletal muscle characteristics in sedentary Black and Caucasian males. J Appl Physiol 1986: 6l:1758-1761.
American Cancer Society. Cancer Facts & Figures for African Americans 2016-2018. Atlanta: American Cancer Society, 2016.
Ceaser, T., & Hunter, G. (2015). Black and White Race Differences in Aerobic Capacity, Muscle Fiber Type, and Their Influence on Metabolic Processes. Sports Medicine,45(5), 615-623. doi:10.1007/s40279-015-0318-7
Hagiwara N. Muscle fibre types: their role in health, disease and as therapeutic targets. OA Biology 2013 Nov 01;1(1):2.
Hernelahti, M., Tikkanen, H. O., Karjalainen, J., & Kujala, U. M. (2005). Muscle Fiber-Type Distribution as a Predictor of Blood Pressure: A 19-Year Follow-Up Study. Hypertension,45(5), 1019-1023. doi:10.1161/01.hyp.0000165023.09921.34
Hochachka, P.W. (1998) Mechanism and evolution of hypoxia-tolerance in humans. J. Exp. Biol. 201, 1243–1254
Karjalainen, J., Tikkanen, H., Hernelahti, M., & Kujala, U. M. (2006). Muscle fiber-type distribution predicts weight gain and unfavorable left ventricular geometry: a 19 year follow-up study. BMC Cardiovascular Disorders,6(1). doi:10.1186/1471-2261-6-2
Ogden C. L., Carroll, M. D., Lawman, H. G., Fryar, C. D., Kruszon-Moran, D., Kit, B.K., & Flegal K. M. (2016). Trends in obesity prevalence among children and adolescents in the United States, 1988-1994 through 2013-2014. JAMA, 315(21), 2292-2299.
Ruiz, J. R., Sui, X., Lobelo, F., Morrow, J. R., Jackson, A. W., Sjostrom, M., & Blair, S. N. (2008). Association between muscular strength and mortality in men: prospective cohort study. Bmj,337(Jul01 2). doi:10.1136/bmj.a439
Tanner, C. J., Barakat, H. A., Dohm, G. L., Pories, W. J., Macdonald, K. G., Cunningham, P. R.,... Houmard, J. A. (2001). Muscle fiber type is associated with obesity and weight loss. American Journal of Physiology – Endocrinology And Metabolism,282(6). doi:10.1152/ajpendo.00416.2001
Volaklis, K. A., Halle, M., & Meisinger, C. (2015). Muscular strength as a strong predictor of mortality: A narrative review. European Journal of Internal Medicine,26(5), 303-310. doi:10.1016/j.ejim.2015.04.013
AdvertisementsJournalist Barrett Brown is once again in police custody after being arrested Thursday. Alex Emmons of The Intercept — a publication for which Brown, a prominent figure in the fight for press freedom, recently wrote dispatches from prison — reported that Brown had been taken into custody again one day prior to a scheduled interview with PBS. Brown’s mother, Karen Lancaster, relayed to Emmons that Brown believes he was arrested because he did not file the correct paperwork requesting permission to give interviews to the press. Neither his mother nor his attorney, Jay Leiderman, know where he is being held.
Brown was released from prison in November after serving a term related to disclosure of emails involving a global intelligence company named Stratfor.
Here’s more from The Intercept:
Brown quickly became a symbol of the attack on press freedom after he was arrested in 2012 for reporting he did on the hacked emails of intelligence-contracting firms. Brown wrote about hacked emails that showed the firm Stratfor spying on activists on behalf of corporations. Brown also helped uncover a proposal by intelligence contractors to hack and smear WikiLeaks defenders and progressive activists. Faced with the possibility of 100 years in prison, Brown pleaded guilty in 2014 to two charges related to obstruction of justice and threatening an FBI agent, and was sentenced to five years and 3 months. In 2016, Brown won a National Magazine Award for his scathing and often hilarious columns in The Intercept, which focused on his life in prison. He was released in November. Jay Leiderman, Brown’s lawyer, told The Intercept Brown was arrested Thursday during a check-in. According to his mother, Brown had not missed a check-in or failed a drug test since he was released to a halfway house in November. … Since his release, Brown has given numerous interviews, on camera and by phone. But according to his mother, Brown said that the Bureau of Prisons never informed him about a paperwork requirement. When he followed up with his check-in officer, he was given a different form: a liability form for media entering prisons.
So once again, First Amendment concerns are directly implicated in the reasons for Brown’s detainment. Read more about Brown’s case in this 2013 Truthdig report this 2015 Truthdigger of the Week piece.TORONTO – The conversation between Jose Bautista and home-plate umpire Bill Welke after the Toronto Blue Jays slugger was called out looking Sunday pretty much went down like this:
Bautista: "They were both down. They were both down. It’s a one-run game."
Welke: "You gotta go."
Bautista: "I’m not cursing you."
Welke then ejects the all-star right-fielder.
Bautista: "What did I say? What did I say? What did I say?"
Little wonder then that Bautista stood his ground Monday, repeating that he was calm, polite and didn’t curse in his post-strikeout conversation with Welke. The exchange, reconstructed from various online feeds and audio, appears to prove just that.
"I don’t think what I did warranted an ejection," Bautista told reporters.
He recalled the discussion this way: "I said something, he said something, I started turning around, he said something else, and at that point I think he said, ‘You better go to the dugout,’ I didn’t know if he was done talking or not, I turned around to look at him, at what he was saying, and just by turning around, I was gone."
As for Welke’s thoughts, who knows, but an interesting element to consider when apportioning blame here is that there’s some history between him and Bautista.
On Aug. 26, 2011 in Toronto, Welke was behind the plate for another game between the Blue Jays and Tampa Bay Rays, and called a second strike in Bautista’s third at-bat that he didn’t like. A few pitches later Bautista struck out for the third time against James Shields, and when he returned to the dugout began smashing the wall with his bat and cursed out, earning an ejection from Welke. Once tossed, Bautista proceeded to throw his bat, helmet, elbow pads and other accoutrements onto the field.
Might that previous incident have lessened Welke’s tolerance for any questions from Bautista? There’s probably a good chance.
Put all together, Bautista became an undeserving lightning rod Monday, with his leadership debated and criticized on talk radio, and assertions made that he was selfish.
That end of the public conversation was nonsensical, as any player willing to crash into an outfield wall to try and make a play, the way Bautista did in the first inning Sunday trying to catch a Ben Zobrist drive, is clearly doing everything in his power to try and help his club win.
Every team would sign up for that kind of selfish.
Now, should Bautista have known to walk away sooner given his past with Welke?
Probably, especially given how his past run-ins with the men in black have earned him a reputation for dissing umpires.
Should a player of his stature deserve more leeway given the stakes at this point of the season?
Absolutely.
The unfortunate part for Bautista is that even though he’s been completely different with umpires this year, eliminating many of the public rebukes and exaggerated gestures that got him into so much trouble the previous few campaigns, rehabilitating that perception won’t be easy.
"I feel what I said and what I did didn’t warrant an ejection, but I did get ejected and I don’t have anybody else to blame for that, that’s my fault," said Bautista. "But I also wanted to say what I wanted to say … without cursing, without raising my voice, without being animated, without showing him up, and I don’t think that when you do that in a polite manner you should get ejected."
Neither does Blue Jays manager John Gibbons, who sounded critical of his player in the aftermath of Sunday’s 2-1 loss in 10 innings to the Rays, but noted that, "I’ve got no problem with players arguing with umpires, I’ve got no problem at all with that."
"I don’t know exactly what was said, this and that," Gibbons added. "To be honest, I think he’s handled himself very well this year. My point is, we need him, he doesn’t do us any good sitting on the bench."
That’s where things get really complicated for Bautista now.
Seeking explanations and stating a case to umpires is an important piece of gamesmanship that players engage in, partly to understand why a certain call was made and partly in the hopes of influencing future calls.
Bautista admits he’s walked the line before in conversations with umpires, but on Sunday, once Welke told him to leave, there was far less leeway than usual.
"I didn’t want to get ejected, that’s why I thought the way I handled the situation was not a way to get ejected," said Bautista. "I’ve gotten into arguments before, I’ve complained after plays, I’ve made claims to umpires after plays that I knew I was putting myself at risk of getting ejected, not that time.
"I’m very well aware of the importance of each game when we’re getting to the ballpark each day, let alone in the middle of one."
Bautista’s ejection led to a series of unfortunate events that led to the loss, with Nolan Reimold, who took over in right field, missing a catch that eventually led to the winning run, and later striking out with men on the corners to seal the loss.
Still, had Jose Reyes or Melky Cabrera delivered earlier in the 10th inning, when the Blue Jays put men on the corners with none out, Bautista’s ejection is likely a footnote in the contest.
Those who think he’s selfish?
"I know my motives," he said. "I know the things |
177 people were removed from analysis based on a single discordant answer to one of these questions. Overall, a total of only 0.72% of participants answered any pair of these questions inconsistently. One source of bias unique to our replication studies was the fact that participants were shown their genetic data along with analyses of their data for approximately 100 traits and diseases. In some cases, this led to a severe bias. For example, a survey examining perceived performance in sprint versus long-distance races was placed on a web page within 23andme.com where customers were shown their genotype for rs1815739 (a SNP in ACTN3 [14]). If they logged on before their genotype data had been processed, they saw the survey question alongside sample data. If their data was available, they were predicted to fall in a category including either world-class sprinters (carriers of the C allele) or endurance athletes (T homozygotes). The response distribution differed significantly ( ) between respondents who had seen their genotypes with the suggested outcome versus those who hadn't. The results (Supplementary Table 1 in Text S5) of this comparison are consistent with large fractions (24.2% of C carriers, 41.2% of T homozygotes) of respondents answering differently than they would have if they had not seen their genotype data and interpretation. Six of the 13 surveys were posted on pages where customers were shown their genotypes and predictions for related conditions. Due to the possibility of bias from this prediction, primary analysis of these six surveys considered only those participants who took the surveys before receiving their genetic data (so they only saw a sample prediction for the phenotype). As a result, none of these traits made our sample size cutoff. For the 22 phenotypes considered here, participants were shown predictions for hair color, eye color, and freckling, although they were on separate pages from the surveys for these phenotypes. There was no evidence that for any of these traits participants who saw their genotypes gave different responses from those who did not (Methods). Therefore, we did not restrict attention to only those who hadn't seen their genotypes. Survey response rates correlated with sex, age and the first (north-to-south) principal component of population structure. That is, women, people of northern European ancestry, and older people were more likely to answer more surveys than men, people of central European ancestry, and younger people (p-values,, and ), respectively. A genome-wide association study (GWAS) using the number of surveys answered as the trait analyzed did not show any significant associations (with p-values under ) when these covariates were taken into account.
Freckling We find one new association for freckling and replicate two known regions. The novel association is at rs2153271, in an intron of BNC2 (Zinc finger protein basonuclin-2), with a score of 9.4 and an estimated of −0.4 (on a 17 point scale). See Supplementary Table 2 in Text S6 for details. Our most significant association, rs12203592, with score 90.7, lies in an intron in IRF4 (Figure 10). This SNP was previously associated with hair color, eye color, and tanning response to sunlight [5]. A more mildly associated SNP, rs1540771 (with score 13.2), in this region has previously been associated with freckling (as well as eye color, sensitivity to sun, and hair color) [4], however rs12203592 (60kb away) was not typed in that analysis. For eye and hair color and tanning ability it was suggested [5] that in fact rs12203592 was in closer LD with the causal SNP. Here we confirm this finding for hair and eye color and establish the same for freckling. PPT PowerPoint slide
PowerPoint slide PNG larger image
larger image TIFF original image Download: Figure 10. Bayes factors for genotyped and imputed SNPs for freckling around BNC2. For details, see Figure 5. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1000993.g010 The other loci we associate with freckling are MC1R, ASIP, and TYR, all known associations [2], [22]. Although the SNPs selected by the regression procedure as most influential are slightly different than those for red hair, the sets are quite similar for these highly correlated phenotypes.
Hair color We confirm known associations for hair color, both blond to brown and non-red to red. For blond to brown, excluding red, we find hits in five regions: OCA2/HERC2, IRF4, SLC24A4, SLC45A2, and MC1R (aside from MC1R, the same set of regions as [5] in their analysis excluding red hair). A multiple regression using the seven SNPs in Table 3 (with sex and five principal components) estimates that these five regions together explain about 28.1% of the variance in hair color (blond to brown) within northern Europe. In the OCA2/HERC2 region, rs12913832, first found by [3], has a score of and of, explaining % of the variance. These numbers (as well as those for the other SNPs) concord well with those in [5] (which estimated % of the variance was explained by this SNP and using a five point scale from dark to light as compared to our eight point scale from light to dark). For IRF4, rs12203592 has an estimated of 0.59 and explains 3.9% of the variance. For SLC24A4, rs12896399 has an estimated of and explains 1.7% of the variance. In SLC45A2, rs16891982 has and explains % of the variance. Finally, rs12931267 near MC1R has of and explains % of the variance. Sulem et al. [4] found associations for hair color in four of these five regions (excluding SLC45A2) as well as KITLG. The SNP rs12821256 in KITLG showed a mild but significant association with hair color in our study, with a score of 4.2 and of (95% CI from to ). This is similar to the relatively weak effect for this SNP found in [5]. For the other direction of variation in hair color (red versus non-red hair) we found many associated SNPs in the MC1R region, long known to be associated with this phenotype [2]. Although some of the SNPs contributing to the model in this region lie far from MC1R, some of the biggest effects are from rs1805008 and rs1805009, non-synonymous changes in the MC1R gene. This region is strongly associated with common variation in red hair [4], [5]. We also replicated the claim that a large haplotype containing the pigmentation gene ASIP is associated with red hair (also associated with burning and freckling in [22]). While rs291671 is about 900kb away from ASIP, it appears to be tagging the same haplotype found there.When the head of Rwanda's Senate hosted a luncheon for Vice President Hamid Ansari atop Kigali's oldest luxury hotel offering a stunning view of the picturesque hills, the moment was more than coincidental.
'Remarkable Rwanda', as the country pitches its tourism attractions to the world, is now wooing 'Incredible India' to shoot films in the salubrious surroundings of this East African country.
During Ansari's recent visit to Kigali, first high-level visit from India, he held bilateral talks with President Paul Kagame and Senate President Bernard Makuza, and Rwanda, among other areas of cooperation, proposed to India to shoot Bollywood films in that country.
Makuza hosted a luncheon for Ansari on the rooftop of Hotel des Mille Collines, now an iconic landmark thanks to the famous and critically acclaimed film 'Hotel Rwanda'.
The Hollywood movie was inspired by an episode in the 1994 genocide during which the hotel and its manager at that time, Paul Rusesabagina, had sheltered over 1,200 people.
"The choice of a famous hotel (Hotel des Mille Collines) and setting up the lunch on its rooftop that overlook the breathtaking view of the hills, this wasn't a mere coincidence, I believe. It was to subtly tell India, what Rwanda can offer to tourists and filmmakers," an official told PTI.
Endowed with natural beauty, landlocked Rwanda is nicknamed as the 'land of thousand hills and million smiles'.
Amar Sinha, Secretary, Economic Relations in the MEA, who accompanied Ansari during the visit from February 19-21, said, "Another area where they have sought cooperation is production and shooting of Bollywood films.
"After a Hrithik Roshan-starrer film was shot in New Zealand, it pushed tourism in a big way in that country. We hope we can find models to replicate it in Rwanda," he said.
Rwandan capital Kigali perhaps epitomises the cleanliness and beauty of the country, as the city has well-manicured roundabouts, squeaky-clean streets lined with trees and a stunning golf-course that attracts the rich and the famous.
Delhi-born Aniket, 21, who spent part of his childhood in Rwanda and India, but now lives in Kigali, says, the hotel is a tourist attraction, and "everyone visiting Kigali asks for it." "Also, many people here watch Bollywood films with English subtitles, and they include native Rwandans too. The city is clean and situated on rolling hills, it would be a perfect backdrop for Bollywood films.
"People here celebrate beautiful Kigali and Indian filmmakers can showcase this in movies. America and Europe has been shown too many a time, this city and the country would bring in freshness for the audience back home," he said.
Rwanda's enthusiasm towards India can be gauged from the fact that Rwandan Parliament tweeted in Hindi to welcome Ansari in Kigali: "Aapaka svaagat hai, H.E Shri M Hamid Ansari & Smt. Salma Ansari in #Rwanda".Guangzhou won't allow Paulinho to join Barcelona
The CSL club will block the former Tottenham midfielder from joining the Catalan giants, insisting that a potential sale is "out of the question"
Guangzhou Evergrande have told Paulinho that they will not allow him to leave the club to join in the current transfer window.
The Catalans had reportedly made an improved bid of €25 million for the former man as they look to seal a deal for the international.
The latest Barcelona transfer rumours
But Guangzhou, who signed Paulinho from Spurs back in 2015, are adamant they will not allow the midfielder to leave at what is the halfway stage of the Chinese Super League season.
"We need to not only consider the financial account of the corporation, but also the specific situation of our current campaign," said Xu Jiayin, chairman of Evergrande Group in his annual mid-season meeting with the players.
"Paulinho has a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity [to join Barcelona] and we attach great importance to this matter. But we won’t let him leave mid-season.
"The club have just reached the half-way point of the season, it is out of the question that we let go such a key player.
"I understand the feelings of Paulinho but hopefully he will understand the club. Despite receiving the offer from Barcelona, he still play each game to the best of his ability.
"I call on every player to learn from Paulinho’s professionalism."
Neymar delighted with Messi deal
Paulinho revealed on Sunday that he hoped Guangzhou would not stand in his way over his desire to join Ernesto Valverde's side.
But with Guangzhou, who are currently top of the CSL with 37 points from their opening 16 matches, reluctant to sell, he looks set to miss out on a switch to Camp Nou.5k SHARES Facebook Twitter Google Reddit Tumblr Digg Linkedin Stumbleupon Mail Print
What is going on here? How can you expect to be trusted when this is what we see from you? Nine cops in eight days charged with sex crimes against minors. From all over. Its not like one place did a raid. These are all separate incidents. How can we put trust in the police when this is what is happening?
The police will then try to put the blame on the people reporting whats going on. Just like the cop in the Eastside traffic stop video. “All you guys see is the bad cops” he says. Because that’s what is happening! We didn’t go out there and make the cops we film do the dumb shit they do! We just happen to capture it on video! And then we get to see how the system supports these “Bad apples” which seem to be more than just a few spoiling the buschel!
The website Don’t Comply.com did this report on this story. Even if they are only half right it’s too much!
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$800.0Robert Wilcoxson, right, is embraced by his father in 2011 after being proclaimed innocent in the murder of Walter Bowman. Wilcoxson now lives near Detroit. (Photo: Citizen-Times file photo)
ASHEVILLE – Buncombe County taxpayers will pay at least $5 million to settle with five men who say they were wrongfully accused in a 15-year-old murder case after county commissioners approved the agreements Tuesday evening.
Between the settlement amounts and attorney fees to defend former Sheriff Bobby Medford and several investigators, the cost of civil litigation relating to the 2000 shooting death of Walter Bowman totaled about $7.9 million, with insurance picking up $2.9 million.
Some attorney fees and insurance claims have yet to be tallied, but taxpayers can expect to pick up $5 million — about the same level of funding the library system receives. The county, this past fiscal year, was running on a $368 million operating budget.
The settlement and fees were approved in a 6-0 vote by commissioners, after the agreement was presented by County Manager Wanda Greene.
"The circumstances that led to their guilty pleas raised many questions about the practices and interview techniques used by former Sheriff Bobby Medford," she said. "After hundreds of hours of interviews and depositions, it's clear the actions were inappropriate and a disservice to the defendants and the criminal justice system has failed these five men."
At $5,125,000, the biggest payout went to Robert Wilcoxson, who spent 11 years of a 15-year sentence in prison for Bowman's death and was later exonerated by the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission, in part on DNA evidence.
Teddy Isbell Sr. (Photo: Tonya Maxwell/tmaxwell@citizen-times.com)
Wilcoxson filed a federal lawsuit against the county two years ago, one that settled in July, the sum undisclosed until the amount could be approved by commissioners on Tuesday.
His case was viewed as the most damaging to Buncombe County. Not only had he won exoneration, but he received the harshest sentence for Bowman's murder and had no other criminal convictions.
Wilcoxson had also hired David Rudolf, a widely respected Charlotte attorney, known as a bulldoggish litigator whose trial strategy included expert testimony on mishandled criminal investigations, false confessions and false guilty pleas.
Wilcoxson did not confess to Bowman's homicide, but did plead guilty to his death. He did so, he later told the Innocence Commission, because he feared greater repercussions and a longer prison sentence had he gone to trial.
That rationale is much the same as the county's reason for settling. Had the case gone to trial, Buncombe County officials were concerned a jury might have awarded each man $1 million for every year they spent behind bars, according to a document summarizing the settlement amounts.
Damian Mills (Photo: Special to the Citizen-Times)
Following guilty pleas, Teddy Isbell spent six years in prison; Damian Mills was incarcerated for 10 years and Larry Williams, who was 16 years old when he was charged, spent nine years behind bars.
Those men respectively received $240,000, $512,250 and $750,000 in settlements that came on the heels of the Wilcoxson resolution.
That group, however, remains guilty in Bowman's death. They are appealing to have their convictions overturned by a superior court judge through a motion for appropriate relief, a matter that will likely resolve late next month.
Larry Williams (Photo: Special to the Citizen-Times)
Brad Searson, attorney for Williams, said his client is pleased with the settlement, but moreover, hopes to have his criminal conviction erased, a move that would aid him on a host of fronts, from restoring voting rights to leaving the "felon" box unchecked on applications.
"From the beginning and through all of this, he has said his primary goal is to have his name cleared. We are convinced that the resolution of civil claim allows him a fresh shot," Searson said. "We are continuing to press forward though the (motion for appropriate)relief process so he can be restored to full citizenship."
Williams, he added, is married with one child and he and his wife are expecting another.
As he and his co-defendants look toward criminal resolution, a favorable settlement with one government body — the county — likely can only help their standing in the eyes of the criminal court.
The county opted to settle with the men ahead of criminal court proceedings because the underlying facts of their cases are much the same as those of the Wilcoxson case, said Curt Euler, a county attorney.
Documentation he provided also indicates officials believed the value of claims by Isbell, Mills and Williams would have doubled if the convictions are overturned and the county then started settlement proceedings.
While it's unusual that a civil resolution outpaces criminal proceedings, that course has been trod before. In Charlotte, a police officer is on trial for shooting an unarmed black man, but the city has already settled with the victim's family for $2.25 million in a wrongful death lawsuit.
A fifth man in the Bowman case, Kenneth Kagonyera, settled with the county in April for $515,000. Like Wilcoxson, he also was exonerated by the Innocence Commission after initially pleading guilty and receiving a 15-year sentence. That sentence, however, included criminal charges unrelated to Bowman's death, meaning his settlement amount was not as lucrative as Wilcoxson's payout.
The five men had all pleaded guilty in the death of Bowman, who was shot in his Fairview home in 2000. Three men, each wearing bandanas over their faces and gloves, burst into his home, one firing a shotgun round through Bowman's bedroom door, killing him.
Read or Share this story: http://avlne.ws/1N9v3QSJon Matonis
Is Bitcoin in fact the greatest revolution in computing since the Internet itself?
VIDEO OF THE EVENT
It’s a much deeper concept than currency. It’s the idea of distributed trust. In 20 years, we’ll talk about Bitcoin like we talk about the Internet today, We just need time for it to play it out. – Marc Andreessen (VC and founder of Netscape)
As VCs rush to fund start-ups that use Bitcoin’s Blockchain technology, we asked: will Bitcoin’s real innovation, its platform, really build completely new ways of interacting online? What are the next generation of apps?
Advocates argue that the Blockchain has the capacity to address not simply money issuance but other crucial questions of trust, financial privacy, transparency, and freedom of expression.
Tuesday June 24th 2014.
SUMMARY
What have we learnt from Bitcoin and where is it heading?
Despite massive fines for Libor and gold price manipulation, poor quality flotations and constant shortcomings of honest trading practices, means the top 4 UK banks are still carrying on paying large bonuses but not lending to SMEs. Competition by new banks is stifled by large capital requirements skewed towards large banks. This is what stops the incoming new banks from making any inroads into efficient and wide-spread lending.
Cybersalon invited a number of thought leaders on alternative finance to explore our options to improve the flow of finance and support innovators bottom-up.
We called the event ‘The Future of Bitcoin 2.0’ and Jon Matonis, who heads up the Bitcoin Foundation was quick to correct us. He noted that Bitcoin is still in the early stages of pre 1.0 release and his time horizons for upgrade are certainly much longer than we estimated.
He noted that Bitcoin is the biggest distributed computing project in the world, its combined power reaching 5000 supercomputers. To just explain the process, he said that the blockchain is the underlying technology that powers Bitcoin, a decentralised ledger, where every transaction is recorded on every full node.
If you are running Bitcoin, you will have a record of every transaction, which will be held in sync with those of everyone else in the network. The blockchain is the glue that keeps the whole network coordinated and in consensus.
The Bitcoin network allows the transfer of value between two trusted parties who don’t need an intermediary like a bank to validate the transaction. It opens up the opportunities for a global currency that can support global peer-to-peer exchange of goods as well as services.
Jon Matonis described his first encounter with the cryptocurrency when Satoshi send him an email in 2009, inviting him to test it and to get into mining. Previously an author of Monetary Futures blog, Matonis has spend a few years in payments technology like Visa, and focuses on engaging the banks to recognise Bitcoin as a “foreign currency”.
The problem he notes is the excessive holdings of Bitpay and CoinDesk, who are therefore large net sellers. To improve the fluidity, the Bitcoin Foundation is aiming to enhance standardised protocols, quality assurance and testing, focus on enhanced banking for the unbanked. He noted the key attraction of the Bitcoin is still the ability to send funds cross-border without charges.
One of the main roles of the Foundation is to raise money to pay developers to develop Bitcoin and to be a respectable face to Bitcoin. They try to enable standards and gain acceptance amongst third parties and legal entities to accept and understand Bitcoin.
For Jon, Bitcoin is way ahead of its time and the guys building Blockchain apps that will be talking after him (dubbed Bitcoin 2.0) are even further ahead. Although they sound sexy, are a long way off being ready for market or the market being able to understand them.
Niki Wiles from Counterparty focused on how the blockchain can disrupt centralised systems, and which industries are most likely to ‘fall’ first. Bitcoin’s eco system works where each peer on the network can be a bank. Instead of using the third party validators like Banks, blockchain protocol can open innovation in any area where trust can be built without mediators as the network is validating it as a whole.
The industries ripe for innovation are also where coordination of the trust implementation is difficult or expensive. Examples of potential decentralised models could be replacing today’s centralised organisations like Uber, AirBnb, eBay as well as Facebook and Dropbox.
As storage, memory and processing power become cheaper, the block chain will allow decentralisation of increasing amount of services that today need centralised organisation.
Most organisations are centralised and therefore they have high propensities for failure in the form of for fraud, corruption, invasion of privacy, price rigging, preferential treatment for “insiders” (see IPO process where large investors get a bite at lower prices), closed platforms and many others. Post Satoshi’s invention of the Blockchain, the costs and ease-of-use of decentralised organisation models are falling rapidly.
He also noted in a slide titled ‘Evil Blockchain’ that there are risks to distributed computing, when they can be used negatively. We should be putting in place frameworks that can pre-empt them and prevent hi-jacking of computer-mediated trust platforms falling in the wrong hands.
Counterparty offers a layer on top of the Blockchain protocol, and a suite of tools to balance the excessive demand, allowing hedging as long as data is available. Counterparty offers the tools to open peer-to-peer marketplaces by putting financial tools into the hands of everyone with an internet connection. Power to the people!
Niki suggested Satoshi’s invention is of enough importance to win the Nobel prize as it gives us an option to self-organise ourselves. We can now use the network as the validator of our actions and decentralisation as the primary form of self-organisation.
We should be looking at decentralisation models for voting and ID/Reputation not just finance and currencies. The current Decentralisation Heroes are DNS (Namecoin), Notary (Proof of Existence), Messaging (BitMessage), Social Networks (Twister), Finance/Markets (Counterparty), Contracts (Ethereum), Gambling (ChanceCoin), Storage (Storj), the last one having a lot of potential as privacy concerns increase in regard to Dropbox and similar centralised models.
The targets for decentralised organisations are travel (autonomous vehicles), telcos (to be replaced with meshnets owned by the users and not by the central supplier), manufacturing (3D printers and people making their own products). Where infrastructure can be owned by large number of people, Blockchain is the solution.
Stephan Tual from Ethereum noted that decentralised apps technology are hard for people to build themselves and so he is offering a solution to address it. Ethereum is an open source platform to write and distributed next generation applications that are decentralised. These so-called ‘trustless’ operations are expensive, and applications developed on Ethereum will not require their users to trust the developers to take care and secure their personal information or funds. Instead they will provide trust through the algorithm and the network who will verify the transactions for us.
On Ethereum, what’s yours- this can be funds, your personal data or your photos – stays yours.
Therefore you can create apps with no middlemen, enabling users to interact with social networks, financial systems, voting mechanisms and games in a completely peer-to-peer fashion. Ethereum will be distributed on computers all around the world, all of this taking place on a censorship-proof system. Just like Bitcoin leverages this technology to keep your funds safe, it will be easy to make applications, and leverage common languages such as HTML, Javascript, to build interfaces, and Python, Lisp or Go to write the business logic.
He also noted the potential uses of it, as a hotel booked on Ethereum will automatically unlock the room once the payment has been received by sending a code to the user.
Time to market – estimated end of 2014. Stephan showed some new images of the Ethereum interface, not previously seen.
He recommended using Ethereum to build alt coins, which may have zero value but at this early stages it is the gaining the experience and educating the public as its main focus. For example, digital artists can issue their own alt coins, so people own part of the work. He compares it to Swarm, a decentralised Kickstarter, but for individuals.
The next speaker was Ben Ingram from Swarm who has just raised $1m through crowdfunding for their initiative. Ben is a seasoned entrepreneur and says he is fed up of the VC and IPO ‘flipping company’ model. He is trying to build a new form of entrepreneurship through crowdfunding. But unlike Kickstarter and IndieGogo, investors actually own a part of the company. VCs are however starting to invest in Blockchain companies, so Swarm offers an alternative to this.
Some members of the audience questioned the fact that Bitcoin is democratic, saying that it is a hardware arms race and those with the biggest machines win, as they can mine Bitcoin successfully. Others say that Bitcoin is actually centralised due to The Foundation ‘running things’. There was a discussion amongst the panel as to whether Bitcoin was more useful than simply providing Blockchain technology, and whether the currency was actually sustainable. They thought it was something that will be here to stay due to its network effect, despite many more digital currencies being launched.
The event sponsor, hydro 66, talked about their new data centre as being fully sustainable and based in the Arctic Circle in Sweden, thereby needing minimal cooling. All the electricity is generated through hydro-electric power by a river, making both their collaborative Bitcoin mining and hosting solutions totally green.
The Internet as currently is, is not fit for purpose for what we want to use it for today. It was built for sharing academic files. Bitcoin is going through what the Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web went through in the early 1990s. It was considered over simplistic but spread due to its ease of use. Blockchain technology is filling in the gaps left by the early Web by providing peer to peer transactions and a decentralised trust platform.
Speakers:
Jon Matonis- Executive Director, The Bitcoin Foundation
A money researcher and crypto economist from George Washington University, Jon advises startups in Bitcoin, gaming, mobile and prepaid organizations. A tech contributor to Forbes Magazine and editor of The Monetary Future, Jon serves on the editorial board of Bitcoin Magazine. Previously CEO of Hushmail and Chief Forex Trader at VISA and held senior posts at Sumitomo Bank and VeriSign.
Stephan Tual- Chief Communications Officer, Ethereum
Ethereum is “Cryptocurrency 2.0″. It’s a decentralized mining network and software development platform rolled into one, and it will allow people to create their own altcoins, and other types of crypto.
Niki Wiles -Community Relations, Counterparty
Counterparty is a peer-to-peer finance platform and decentralized exchange built on Bitcoin. He has been involved with distributed finance since the early days of Bitcoin, and has an eclectic background in IT, finance and marketing.
Ben Ingram, COO, SWARM– decentralised crowdfunding
Ben is a mainstream entrepreneur. Post sale of his strategic consulting and system integration company (named the most recognised brand in Cloud software services), Ben had the opportunity to once again look for the ‘next big thing’. His startup Swarm is a revolutionary approach to enterprise capital & their new model for distributed crowd funding is the talk of the internet. “This, right now, is the moment, when crypto equities emerge as the most profoundly impactful technology of this century. In 2014, progressive VC portfolios will be built on the blockchain.” SWARM is a new approach to crowd funding that uses Blockchain technology to outpace traditional platforms like Kickstarter and which aims to accelerate the evolution of the crypto-currency community and explore the possibilities of issuing new crypto-tokens. They recently launched to a warm reception, raising close to £1m in a week.
Chair: Richard Boase, Cybersalon/UK Digital Currency Association
There is no reason on earth for anybody to be on the Internet today to be typing in a credit card number to buy something. But we didn’t have the better way of doing it. So we didn’t know what else to do…now we have the better way of doing it. Bitcoin. – Andreessen
However critics claim that the anonymity inherent in the Bitcoin system means it encourages money laundering, gambling and drug dealing. They also point to its wild volatility as evidence that it functions as a poor store of value that will make economic activity ultimately less productive.
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Background
Bitcoin (which is now known as a “Crypto currency” or Hidden Currency) has fluctuated from $0.0001 to US $1,200 in the span of 5 years. Advocates cite its capacity to be a truly global, digital currency- to lower remittance and cross border transfer costs particularly with regards to developing economies and its power to remove politics from the money supply. Its main attraction, they claim, is that all other banking and monetary systems are ‘pre-internet’ technologies but Bitcoin offers us the potential to build an entirely new system of global financial consensus, even acting as a global reserve currency.
About Bitcoin 2.0
The value of the Bitcoin platform is that it can be used for other means than as a currency: for instance to transfer goods directly from person to person around the planet securely without third party verification. The way Bitcoin does this is through what is known as a peer to peer network, with these transactions being verified automatically by thousands of so called ‘Miners’. Bitcoin is not a company, and whilst Miners might act like employees, it was designed as an open standard protocol similar to http (web pages) or smtp (email), allowing anyone who wishes to to build companies, services and software to interact with it, and because Bitcoin functions a little bit like TCP/IP, owning a Bitcoin is akin to owning real-estate on the new internet, similar in some ways to owning name brand dot coms in the ‘90s.
Essential Reading
Bitcoin 2.0- opening the pathway to decentralised trust and the democratisation of power – by Ami H. commissioned for Cybersalon
Swarm: The Facebook of Crowdfunding – Richard Boase published on CoinDesk
Understanding Eris: The Bitcoin Foundation Proposal – Clay Micahel Gillespie published on Crypto Coins News
The Coming Digital Anarchy– Matthew Sparkes published in The Telegraph
Tomorrow’s Apps Will Come From Brilliant (And Risky) Bitcoin Code – Primavera De Filippi published on Wired
Why The Bitcoin Fad Won’t Fade Away– Jeffrey Tucker published on The Daily Reckoning
Visions of a Techno- Leviathan:The Politics of the Bitcoin Blockchain– Brett Scott published on E-International Relations
Warren Buffett versus Marc Andreessen on Bitcoin– Kashmir Hill published on Forbes
FXCM has created this informative visual.
Tuesday June 24th 2014, 7pm, Digitas LBi, 146 Brick Lane, London E1 6RU
We now accept Bitcoin!
SUMMARY: Where is Bitcoin 2.0 Heading?
Jon Matonis Is Bitcoin in fact the greatest revolution in computing since the Internet itself? VIDEO OF THE EVENT It's a much deeper concept than currency. It's the idea of distributed trust. In 20 years, we’ll talk about Bitcoin like we talk about the Internet today, We just need time for it to play it out. - Marc Andreessen (VC and founder of Netscape) As VCs rush to fund start-ups that use Bitcoin's Blockchain technology, we asked: will Bitcoin's real innovation, its platform, really build completely new ways of interacting online? What are the next generation of apps? Advocates argue that the Blockchain…RECORD companies and film studios have had to learn to live with internet piracy. Despite their best attempts to close sites or co-opt them, pirated copies of their wares are easily available. Increasingly, the same is true of scientific papers. On June 21st a court in New York awarded Elsevier, a big scientific publisher, $15m in damages for copyright infringement by Sci-Hub and the Library of Genesis, two websites that offer tens of millions of scientific papers and books for anyone to download.
Both sites are increasingly popular with scientists, who use them to dodge pricey paywalls and subscriptions. Alexandra Elbakyan, who founded Sci-Hub in 2011, did not turn up for the trial (nor did the people behind LibGen). But she did send a letter outlining her reasons for starting the site. While at university in Kazakhstan she needed access to hundreds of papers for her studies. But the only way to get them, she said, was to pay $32 per paper, which she described as “just insane”. Having discovered other academics using the internet to trade copies of papers they could not pay for, she set up Sci-Hub to streamline the process.
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An analysis of Sci-Hub’s server logs, published in Science in 2016, found its biggest users were people in Iran, India and China. Such middle-income countries do not qualify for the subsidies big publishers provide to users in the poorest nations, but their universities nevertheless may not be able to afford subscriptions. Not every downloader was cash-strapped, though. Americans were the fifth-biggest users.
Ms Elbakyan sees the website as a way to make the fruits of science available to researchers whose institutions cannot afford steep fees as well as to anyone else interested. She thinks of it as a radical version of “open access”, the idea that research—which is, after all, mostly funded through taxes—should be published in a way that makes it available to everyone. Unsurprisingly, publishers have little patience for such arguments. Elsevier argues that there is more to publishing than simply shovelling papers online and that work such as editing and arranging for reviews has to be paid for.
Both Sci-Hub and LibGen are based in Russia, beyond the reach of America’s courts. Nonetheless, the American Chemical Society, which publishes several journals, announced on June 28th that it had launched a lawsuit of its own. Provided Ms Elbakyan does not travel to America, that lawsuit seems equally unlikely to succeed.
Ms Elbakyan, though, may soon receive an invitation to visit America that does not come through legal channels: she has been tipped as a possible inaugural winner of the Disobedience Award, run by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The award was founded partly to commemorate Aaron Swartz, a former MIT student who also believed that academic papers should be freely available. After downloading millions of them from JSTOR, a paywalled repository, he was charged with hacking. He killed himself in 2013, shortly before his trial. If she does win, Ms Elbakyan would presumably not attend the ceremony, although the magic of the internet might allow her to accept the gong remotely.The Supreme Court has refused to overturn a ban on “gay conversion” therapy, and Democratic lawmakers recently introduced a bill that attempts to ban the practice at the national level — both legal moves that have advocates cheering.
The Supreme Court declined to hear a case Monday challenging California’s ban on gay conversion therapy. Because a lower court ruled in California’s favor, the ban will remain in place.
The decision comes after years of legal proceedings against California’s 2012 law, which outlawed state-licensed medical professionals from performing “gay conversion” therapy to change a minor’s sexual orientation.
The Supreme Court previously refused to hear an appeal in 2014, rejecting claims that the law infringed on free speech. In a 2012 challenge, conversion therapy supporters challenged the law on the grounds of religious freedom. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the state in both cases.
LGBTQ advocates hailed the Supreme Court’s decision on Monday a victory, but opponents of the law vowed to bring new court challenges.
“We are deeply disappointed by today’s announcement |
2,3].
You could also call it a conjecture—with the current definitions in force—that the two expressions amount to the same thing.
Now, it isn’t the same as the code we wrote for assert_1. That code will return the constant True if the two operands compute to the same list (and this has to run the code in full to determine whether it is True or not).
It will also depend on how == has been defined: it might do something strange like treat all odd numbers as equal, e.g., 2 == 4 could be True. So, it’s something we have to compute inside the language.
In contrast, propositions like X = Y are something we can reason about and don’t always have to run the code. For example, we know foo [1,2,3] will expand to case_one [1,2,3] and this in turn expands to List.reverse [1,2,3]. At this point, the inference mechanism will accept the two sides as being the same. Also, there’s no sense of True or False here: the system either has a proof or it does not, and if it does have one, it can use it to prove something else, otherwise it is stuck.
This distinction may seem strange at first, but please perservere with a few more examples, and it might get a bit clearer!
Anyway, what do we do with conjectures? Prove them, that’s what.
Start the proof mode with :p proof_of_assert_1, and you will be asked for a proof. There’s a useful tactic for situations like this: trivial. This tries a few standard proof techniques on the current goal, and in this case it is able to confirm the proposition by computing both sides to the same thing.
After qed, you’ll see a very short proof.
It’s useful to know what’s happening under the hood, so evaluate proof_of_assert_1 and you will see the term refl. For now, you can understand refl x as the proof that x = x, or the proof that equality is reflexive.
Tests into proofs
Now, we’ve proved our assertion and because of type checking, the assertion will be checked whenever the file is reloaded, so it guarantees the assertion still holds after any code changes. This is what conventional test frameworks give us.
So here’s something that tests can’t do. Start with this type signature:
case_one_proof : (l : List Int) -> (length l < 4) = True -> foo l = reverse l
The type represents the proposition: “for all lists l, where the length of l is less than 4, then foo on l is the same as reversing l.” This says precisely how we want foo to behave on short lists, for all possible inputs. Compare this to a set of tests which are aimed at capturing the same requirement. The tests are a collection of examples, and additional reasoning will be required if we want confidence that they are representative of the wider picture—whereas the statement above covers all possibilities. All of them. It’s the difference between “there exists” and “for all.”
Let’s do the proof. Basically, we’re going to use the hypothesis or assumption about the length of input to push some computation through the definitions, until we get to a point where the sameness is obvious. The first two steps are intro l and intro H. This moves the function’s two inputs into the proof context as assumptions, leaving a proof state like this:
---------- Assumptions: ---------- l : List Int H : length l < 4 = True ---------- Goal: ---------- { hole 2 }: foo l = reverse l
What H represents deserves some explanation. It’s an assumption of a proof of length l < 4 = True, not an actual proof of it. We often speak of terms like this being hypotheses—which we will use to prove the required conclusion. Likewise, l represents an arbitrary list. Notice that H gives us some extra info about what l is. It’s a bit like how mocks are used in several test frameworks, where you have some minimal object equipped with predictable behaviour, and the associated tests examine the consequences. For example, l could be some anonymous thing such that l.length returns a value less than 4.
Next, we need to use H to simplify the goal foo l = reverse l, aiming for a point where the goal is trivially satisfied with refl. So we’re going to use H to rewrite part of the goal and see what comes out. In this case, we want the term if length l < 4 then... to change to if True then....
One useful property of equality is substitution, which says if A = B then if we have P(A) then we have P(B) for all properties P. Put another way, it we know A = B and that we have some P that holds for A, then we can infer that P holds for B too, and can’t be used to distinguish them. (A related idea is that if A and B are really equal, then all properties of A hold for B too, if that helps.)
It’s a common inference step, so Idris has a special tactic for it: rewrite. One slight niggle though—we need the operands of H in the other order, but this is ok since equality is symmetric (another requirement of equality).
(I could have cheated and used True = length l < 4 as the hypothesis, but it’s useful to know about symmetry.) This means the next proof step is rewrite (sym H). The result might not be too comprehensible but you can use the tactic compute to force a bit more of the computation, and so get this—which even if we don’t know what it means, we can see it’s the same for both sides.
{ hole 3 }: Prelude.List.reverse.0#reverse' Int (Prelude.ListNil) l = Prelude.List.reverse.0#reverse' Int (Prelude.ListNil) l
So, we can finish the proof with trivial. Notice that we don’t have to compute any further, either. It doesn’t matter what l turns out to be, because the logic ensures the result has the required properties. The completed proof sequence is shown below. I’ve omitted the compute steps because they are really just for cosmetic purposes, so we can see what’s going on. They make no difference to the proof.
Main.case_one_proof = proof { intro l; intro H; rewrite (sym H); trivial; }
Filling in the rest
We’ve covered just one case, but for this we have a rock-solid statement of what it should do and a proof that it does what it should. If subsequent changes to the code alter its behavior then the proofs will not type check. We won’t be able to ignore it.
I’ll let you think up some functionality and properties for the second case. Have a go at proving things yourself! If you get stuck, post your code to the magazine’s forum and I’ll try to help you out.
As a final point, what does case_one_proof [1,2,3] refl produce? Yes, our proof is a function (with a dependent type) and we can apply it to things. What does it mean to use the proof like this? And what about case_one_proof [1,2,3,4,5]?
The wider picture
You’ve seen now how to do a very simple development in a type theory setting. The code and proof were quite basic, but I deliberately chose a straightforward example so we could cover the key ideas without too much distraction.
We’ve barely scratched the surface of what this paradigm offers, so tune in next month. I’ll cover topics like dependently typed data structures, including vectors (sized lists) and dependent tuples. We’ll use vectors to code up size constraints on words that are being packed into lines, and to provide guarantees about the splitting of long words. Dependent tuples allow data and proofs to be packaged up and manipulated in a convenient way. And as the types become more interesting, then the proof tools will be able to do more interesting and useful things for us.
There’s much more to explore on the tool support side too. Several proof assistants have more powerful tactics which can automate straightforward proofs like the ones we saw here.
It’s not magic though: all they do is a bit of search through various combinations of the basic tactics we’ve just seen, maybe guided by some heuristics on the form of available assumptions and hypotheses, plus any relevant theorems that we’ve already proved. Idris will probably support this kind of automation in the near future. So, don’t conclude that working in this way means a lot of drudge work!
Nor are these tools limited to simple examples either. In the past two decades, such tools have been used to provide mechanical verification of complex protocols and many important results from maths. The four color theorem for map coloring is a good example.
But notice where the human fits into this process. The proof assistant manages the fine detail and the checking, and provides basic tools for standard reasoning steps, possibly with some limited automation for the relatively obvious things. The human does the creative part, of guiding the high-level operation of the proof assistant, the bit that is currently too hard for mechanization. (That’s why we call them proof assistants.)
A similar idea applies to programming! The human sketches out the high-level details and lets the machine fill in the obvious things. We should try to program like this. Why not?Today Bahrain Grand Prix is a milestone in Formula 1 history as it is the nine hundredth Grand Prix since the World Championship began back in 1950. Particularly Bahrain International Circuit celebrating its landmark 10th anniversary all weekend.
Also the first course drivers will be Jenson Button, who celebrates his 250th Grand Prix races in his Formula 1 career, most of it only Barrichello (323), Schumacher (307), Patrese (256), Trulli (252).
For the Red Bull’s sisters team Scuderia Toro Rosso too, as this will be their one hundred and fiftieth races, since they started Formula 1 battle.
Podium Drivers in Bahrain Grand Prix
1. Fernando Alonso (SPA) 3-0-0
2. Sebastian Vettel (GER) 2-1-0
= Felipe Massa (BRA) 2-1-0
3. Jenson Button (GBR) 1-1 – 0
4. Kimi Raikkonen (FIN) 0-3-3
5. Lewis Hamilton (GBR) 0-1-1
6. Romain Grosjean (FRA) 0-0-2
Point hunters Drivers in Bahrain Grand Prix
1. Fernando Alonso (SPA) 108 points
2. Kimi Raikkonen (FIN) 107 points
3. Sebastian Vettel ( GER) 80 points
4. Felipe Massa (BRA), 78 points
5. Lewis Hamilton (GBR) 59 points
6. Jenson Button (GBR) 59 points
# 7 Nico Rosberg (GER) 35 points
8. Romain Grosjean ( FRA) 30 points
9. Sergio Perez (MEX) 8 pointsSays Paul Manafort’s alleged crimes were "years ago, before Paul Manafort was part of the Trump campaign."
President Donald Trump reacted via his favorite platform -- Twitter -- to indictments against his former campaign manager Paul Manafort, a business associate of Manafort’s, and a guilty plea from a former campaign policy adviser.
"Sorry, but this is years ago, before Paul Manafort was part of the Trump campaign. But why aren't Crooked Hillary & the Dems the focus," Trump tweeted.
Sorry, but this is years ago, before Paul Manafort was part of the Trump campaign. But why aren't Crooked Hillary & the Dems the focus????? — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 30, 2017
The Justice Department indicted Manafort on 12 counts, primarily money laundering and false statements, none of which involved his work for Trump. The oldest of the allegations date back to activities that began in 2006, but three occurred in 2016 and 2017.
Manafort’s more recent actions undercut Trump’s statement. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Manafort’s campaign role
In March 2016, then-candidate Trump tapped Manafort to manage the Republican National Convention. In a press release announcing the hiring, Trump praised Manafort as "a great asset and an important addition" in consolidating the support Trump won during the primary season.
On May 19, Trump promoted Manafort to campaign chairman and chief strategist.
On Aug. 19, as Trump’s poll numbers tumbled, Manafort resigned. His time with the Trump campaign had lasted six months.
The indictments
From 2006 to 2014, according to the indictment, Manafort and his business partner Rick Gates made tens of millions of dollars lobbying on behalf of a pro-Russia political party in Ukraine and the man who led it into power, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. The work continued briefly after Yanukovych was forced from office.
The grand jury indictment alleges that in order to hide the money from the U.S. government, Manafort and Gates "laundered the money through scores of United States and foreign corporations, partnerships and back accounts." Manafort used "his hidden overseas wealth to enjoy a lavish lifestyle in the United States." He bought "multi-million dollar properties" and then "borrowed millions of dollars in loans using these properties as collateral, thereby obtaining cash in the United States without reporting and paying taxes on the income."
The money-laundering conspiracy is the second count in the indictment.
The government documented a large number of transactions between 2008 and 2014. But they continued into March 2016, the very beginning of Manafort’s work with the Trump campaign.
In 2012, Manafort used an offshore account to buy a $2.8 million condominium in New York City, which he rented out using, among other services, Airbnb. In late 2015, he applied to get a mortgage on the property. To get a lower interest rate, he and Gates invented documents to say it was a second-home for his daughter and son-in-law.
Based on that assurance, in March 2016, government prosecutors said, a bank gave Manafort a $1.185 million loan on the property.
Also in early 2016, Manafort misled another bank to secure a loan on a second New York property.
In addition, the indictment said for many years Manafort had hidden his control over multiple foreign accounts in places such as Cyprus and the United Kingdom. That deception continued as late as October 2016.
There are two other charges that occurred in 2016 and 2017, and both involve making false statements. The government said that in November 2016 and February 2017 Manafort and Gates failed to make a full disclosure of their overseas work under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. They denied that their work for Ukrainian parties included meetings or outreach within the United States. The government also said they tried to bury the paper trail that would reveal their full activities.
Manafort's attorney Kevin Downing said in a statement that the Special Counsel was using a "very novel theory" of the foreign agents registration law, and that since 1966, the government has won just one conviction for failure to file under it.
Our ruling
Trump said the allegations against Manafort involved crimes committed years ago. Most of the counts in the indictment detail Manafort’s money laundering efforts dating back to 2006. But that deception involving foreign bank accounts and misleading lenders, prosecutors said, extended until as late as October 2016.
By March of that year, Trump had named Manafort to oversee the Republican National Convention.
The charges that Manafort made false statements took place after Manafort stepped down from the Trump campaign, but they did take place within the past year.
Trump’s claim puts more of a cushion between him and Manafort than was actually the case. We rate this statement Mostly False.This article is over 3 years old
Marko Markovich also fined US$2000 for what defence lawyers described as ‘well planned and not reckless’ jumps by three men in New York
Parachutist gets 300 hours' community work for One World Trade Center jump
A man convicted of parachute-jumping from the top of the One World Trade Center in New York with two other men was sentenced on Monday to 300 hours of community service.
Marko Markovich was also ordered to pay a $2000 fine.
James Brady and Andrew Rossig had to pay similar fines but they were given lesser community service sentences earlier this month.
World Trade Center parachutists fined $2,000 for jumping off building Read more
The men were convicted in June of reckless endangerment and other misdemeanours.
Prosecutors say the men jumped from the building when it was under construction early on 30 September 2013. They were arrested six months later.
The jumps caused considerable embarrassment to authorities over security at the building, the tallest in the US.
Defence lawyers argued the jumps were well planned and were not reckless.Airline says it lost contact with flight MH370 – which was destined for Beijing from Kuala Lumpur – two hours after takeoff
A search and rescue operation is under way after Malaysia Airlines said a plane carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew on board went missing en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
The company said that it lost contact with the aircraft two hours after takeoff and it was now working with authorities who had deployed search and rescue teams to locate the aircraft. The plane left Kuala Lumpur at 12.41am local time on Saturday (6.41pm GMT on Friday).
A statement from the airline said it was contacting the next-of-kin of passengers and crew.
"Our thoughts and prayers are with all affected passengers and crew and their family members," it said.
Radar contact with the aircraft, flight MH370, was lost in airspace controlled by Vietnam in the early hours of Saturday morning, China's Xinhua news agency said. The aircraft did not enter airspace controlled by China and did not make contact with Chinese controllers, Xinhua added.
Xinhua said 160 of the passengers on board were Chinese nationals, citing Chinese aviation officials. A Malaysian Airlines spokesman said Australians were believed to be among the other nationalities on board, News Corp reported.
China's foreign minister, Wang Yi, told a scheduled press conference China was doing all it could to confirm details of the incident and said he was "very worried", state media reported.
The flight had been expected to land at Beijing at 6.30am local time. The passengers on board included two infants, according to the airline, which also released a telephone number which members of the public could call to seek information.
The last major accident involving a Malaysia Airlines flight was in September 1995, when one of its aircraft crashed in the Malaysian city of Tawau, killing 34 people on board and injuring nine on the ground.
The initial statement published on Facebook by the airline said: "Malaysia Airlines confirms that flight MH370 has lost contact with Subang air traffic control at 2.40am, today (8 March 2014).
"Flight MH370, operated on the B777-200 aircraft, departed Kuala Lumpur at 12.41am on 8 March 2014. MH370 was expected to land in Beijing at 6.30am the same day. The flight was carrying a total number of 227 passengers (including 2 infants), 12 crew members. Malaysia Airlines is currently working with the authorities who have activated their Search and Rescue team to locate the aircraft.
"The airline will provide regular updates on the situation. Meanwhile, the public may contact +603 7884 1234 for further info."
A Boeing 777, part of Boeing's most popular family of large twin-engine jets, was involved in a crash in July last year in San Francisco in which three people died. One of the passengers who died was hit by a fire truck in the aftermath of the crash. Despite the deaths and injuries suffered by many of the plane's 291 passengers, safety experts subsequently said that the safety features of the aircraft "helped to prevent" a much worse disaster.
One of the planes also crash-landed short of a runway at Heathrow airport in January 2008, ripping off part of its undercarriage. All 136 passengers and 16 crew escaped from the British Airways flight from Beijing. It crashed after losing power because of a restricted fuel flow to both engines, the Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) said afterwards. It concluded that the crash-landing was probably caused by a buildup of ice in the fuel system on the plane.
Malaysia Airlines was last year voted was voted Asia's leading airline at the World Travel Awards 2013, beating 11 other big name full service carriers.
But it has been struggling financially. Earlier this year, it posted its fourth consecutive loss. It announced last month that it was waiting for government approval to place a multibillion dollar order for up to 100 Airbus and Boeing passenger aircraft, two people familiar with the negotiations told Reuters, a move aimed at boosting its profitability.
The new aircraft will lower the airline's operating costs by allowing it to retire its older, less fuel-efficient aircraft. That may help it cope with intense competition at home and within Southeast Asia, the people said.
The airline has 88 aircraft in its fleet, including Airbus A330s and A380s, and Boeing 777-200s and 737s, according to its website.The rusty old canister had been buried for 40 years, but there was something about it that caught the eye of Larry Wright, a 69-year-old resident of Oakland, Calif.
Hiking near Milestone Mountain in Sequoia National Park with his son Aaron and grandson, Skyler, Wright came across what appeared to be a film canister buried in the soil on Sept. 8, reports the Los Angeles Times. Inside was a perfectly preserved hand-written note, dated Aug. 17, 1972. In part, it read:
Tim Taylor climbed to this peak, Thursday, August 17, 1972. Age 13 years. Anyone finding this note please write.
Photo via KTLA
Charmed by the optimism of the note, Wright began a month-long quest to find Taylor.
"I had my 14-year-old grandson with me," explained Wright to the Times. "If he wrote a note like that, he'd be interested to have somebody respond decades later."
Wright started his search by visiting the home listed on the note and met current owner Koichi Uyemura, who explained that his family had been living in the home for 18 years, reports the Times. Uyemura estimated that his was the third family to buy the property after the Taylors left.
He also tried searching voter registration records and Google, but it wasn't until he reached out to La Cañada's local paper, the La Cañada Valley Sun, that he struck gold. The newspaper published a story about Wright's discovery last weekend, and the calls from family and friends started pouring in to Taylor, now a San Diego County Superior Court Judge.
In a Valley Sun story published Monday, Taylor explained he was hiking with his Boy Scout troop on the day that he buried the message. He had set out solo to climb the unnamed 12,000 foot peak because it wasn't included in his official Boy Scout map.
He also revealed that his father got him into the habit of leaving messages in bottles for strangers to find.
“Whenever [my family] would go to Catalina, my dad would have us put a note in a bottle,” Taylor said to the Valley Sun. “It’s kind of the same idea.”
Taylor also proposed naming the peak the Taylor-Wright Peak.
Becky Satnat, a park ranger for 22 years, said Wright's discovery was surprising and unprecedented, given how small Taylor's note was. "I've never heard of anything like it," she said to the Times. "This does not happen."
The oldest message in a bottle was discovered April of this year, when Scottish skipper Andrew Leaper hauled in his fishing nets. The Guinness Book of World Records confirmed that the bottle had spent 97 years and 309 days at sea. It had been released by Captain CH Brown of the Glasgow School of Navigation on June 19, 1914, and the note inside the bottle promised six pence to whoever found it.Americans have seen the photo of the chief of staff whispering the news of 9/11 into George W. Bush's ear the morning of the attack in an elementary school classroom, and they know the iconic images of the former president speaking into a bullhorn amid the rubble at Ground Zero three days later. But now new photos have been released that shed light on what was going on behind the scenes in the wake of the attack.
A Freedom of Information Act request from a Frontline producer has turned up a collection of images from the National Archives taken by former Vice President Dick Cheney's staff photographer in the aftermath of the attack, as Cheney and others gathered in the President’s Emergency Operations Center underneath the White House. Then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State Colin Powell, First Lady Laura Bush, Second Lady Lynne Cheney and other prominent officials feature in the photos. See the full gallery of photos here.NEW DELHI: The Digital India project that aims to offer a one-stop shop for government services would use the mobile phone as the backbone of its delivery mechanism. The government hopes the Rs 1.13-lakh crore initiative that seeks to transform India into a connected economy to also attract investment in electronics manufacturing, create millions of jobs and support trade.In an interview with ET, telecom minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi wants to ensure a smartphone in the hands of every citizen by 2019. Currently, nearly 74% of the population has mobile phones, most of which though is in the hands of urban India.“We want to ensure that all the services can be provided through a mobile handset, especially, health, education, various government services and retail,” Prasad said. “We want it (handset) to be used as a tool for empowerment. We will need to incentivise its usage in order to promote the social and the economic objectives of the government.”In order to use the mobile phone to help achieve financial inclusion, the government will need to structure the delivery of financial services in a manner that encourages a villager to go for mobile banking, the minister said. For instance, the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana, a financial inclusion plan the Prime Minister announced on August 15, can be effectively rolled out through mobile handsets. The programme seeks to give every household in rural India access to bank account, along with a RuPay debit card and insurance cover of Rs 1 lakh. At present, nearly 60% of the nation’s population doesn’t have access to financial services.Digital India promises to transform India into a connected knowledge economy offering world-class services at the click of a mouse and will be implemented in a phased manner, according to information released by the government last week.Plans to digitally connect the entire country will be supported by 20- and 40-hour modules on digital literacy in regional languages, which the government plans to run over the next few years. “During a presentation, the PM remarked IT+IT equals IT. This means India Today plus Information Technology (through Digital India) will yield India Tomorrow,” said Prasad.The government feels that open access to “broadband highways” across cities, towns and villages would give a fillip to trade across the country. “The other important benefit we see is surge in e-commerce. If we can bring broadband to the remotest corners of the country it will give rise to trade and warehousing,” Prasad said.Supporting the initiatives will be 6-7 manufacturing clusters for electronic goods which have been approved to be set up in Jharkhand, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh for products such as mobile handsets, microchip and chip-less designs and set-top boxes, he said.CLOSE Tennessee interim head coach Brady Hoke talks after the Vols lost 30-10 to LSU Mike Wilson/News Sentinel
A long pass from Tennessee quarterback Justin Worley (14) falls beyond the reach of Tennessee tight end Daniel Helm (80) as Chattanooga defensive back Cedric Nettles (35) gives chase during the first half at Neyland Stadium, Saturday, Oct.11, 2014 in Knoxville, Tenn. (ADAM LAU/NEWS SENTINEL) (Photo: Adam Lau, ADAM LAU/NEWS SENTINEL)
Daniel Helm had been gone from Tennessee for almost a year when his father sent an email to then-UT chancellor Jimmy Cheek.
The last paragraph of Steve Helm’s message read: “I made sure we got Daniel out of there before (Butch) Jones put him in a place where Daniel might have knocked him out. Then, my great straight A kid would have an assault charge. If a member of that football team does finally lose it with Jones and an assault charge is filed, we will provide authorities with everything we know as we will not let that man ruin a young kid’s life.”
'I made sure we got Daniel out'
Helm said Cheek never responded.
Daniel Helm, of Chatham, Ill., was the No. 1-rated tight end in the country, according to Rivals, when he signed with UT in 2014. He was one of 16 four-star recruits in a seventh-ranked, 32-man class.
More than half that class is long gone. As its remaining seniors prepare for their final game Saturday against Vanderbilt, the coach is gone, too.
Athletic director John Currie fired Jones on Nov. 12, the day after a 50-17 loss to Missouri dropped the Vols to 4-6 in Jones’ fifth season.
More: UT Vols: Email Daniel Helm's father sent to Jimmy Cheek complaining about Butch Jones
More: Tennessee football coach Butch Jones accused of 'bullying and mental abuse' in Antone Davis resignation letter
The outcome might have been different
The outcome might have been different if that 2014 signing class had stayed close to intact, or if UT had Helm at tight end, Dewayne Hendrix in the defensive line, Vic Wharton at wide receiver and D’Andre Payne at cornerback.
All four transferred from UT after their freshman season. And all four are starting as redshirt juniors at other Power 5 programs.
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Wharton has 60 catches for 810 yards at Cal, Hendrix starts for Pittsburgh, and Payne is a second-year starter at Iowa State. Helm is starting in his second season at Duke and hopes to play in the NFL one day.
Why would four players leave in one season?
There has been speculation about why the four players would leave UT after just one season. The speculation came up again after Jones was fired. When local talk-show host Tony Basilio addressed the topic last week, he received an email from Steve Helm, who further discussed the matter in a phone interview.
Helm said his son wouldn’t comment on the subject, that he had moved on and loved playing at Duke for coach David Cutcliffe, Tennessee’s former offensive coordinator. But Daniel also was fond of UT, as his father explained in his email to Cheek three years ago.
“When my son, Daniel Helm, left UT, we said nothing to anyone as we knew as long as Butch was winning nobody would care or listen,” Helm’s email read. “Daniel also loved the team and the school and didn’t want to cause trouble.”
(Photo: The Associated Press)
Trouble came screaming Helm’s way
Trouble came screaming Helm’s way in a team meeting the day after Florida beat Tennessee 10-9 in his freshman season.
On one play, the freshman tight end was blindsided by a Florida defender. Jones highlighted that in a team meeting during which he repeatedly berated Helm, using slang terms for female genitalia to describe Helm’s play. Steve said Jones told his son that if he had been blindsided like that, “he would have taken out the player’s knees.”
“What angered Daniel the most was that he later blocked that same defender, driving him downfield and out of bounds,” Steve said. “But Jones didn’t show that play.”
Helm wrote a prayer in his notebook
As Jones continued to assail Helm in the meeting, the player wrote a prayer in his notebook to help defuse his anger, admitting to this father that he wanted to hit Jones.
Steve knew then his son had to leave Tennessee. Two months later, Helm was headed for Duke, where he sat out the 2015 season before becoming eligible.
You can only wonder how many other players who transferred from UT did so because of Jones. Former Tennessee running back Marlin Lane was asked about Jones’ treatment of players last week in a “4th And Truth” podcast.
“I have seen a lot of (abuse),” Lane said. “Whether it was physical or mental.
“I haven’t seen him with my own eyesight physically abuse somebody. I saw him say some things to players when they couldn’t defend themselves.”
High attrition didn't raise red flags
The high attrition in the 2014 class apparently didn’t raise a red flag with UT administrators. Maybe, they were too pleased with the program’s progress – thanks, in part, to Jones’ exceptional recruiting. The Vols went 7-6 in 2014 and followed that with back-to-back 9-4 records.
But this season veered terribly off course.
The Vols are one loss away from becoming the first Tennessee team to lose as many as eight games. The program might not be in this predicament if Jones had kept more of the highly touted players he successfully recruited.
Jones pulled out 'well worn Bible' on recruiting visit
Steve Helm remembers when Daniel met with Jones in his office on his recruiting visit. He said Jones pulled out a “well worn Bible” and quoted what he said was his favorite verse.
“Daniel wasn’t so naïeve to think that just because someone quoted the Bible, he was a great Christian,” Helm said. “But he thought he was going to play for a guy with integrity.
“And it was nowhere to be found.”
John Adams is a senior columnist. He may be reached at 865-342-6284 or john.adams@knoxnews.com. Follow him at: Twitter.com/johnadamskns.
More from John Adams:
UT Vols don't need Butch Jones to lose, but at least Brady Hoke takes chances vs LSU
SEC football predictions: How will UT Vols respond to losing coach Butch Jones?
UT Vols football vs LSU prediction: Who has the edge
How marketable is Butch Jones as a head football coach now?
What if Lane Kiffin, Ed Orgeron hadn't left Tennessee?
Tennessee football looks as bad as LSU remembers it
Why not Jon Gruden? Or Dan Mullen? Or Scott Frost?
Butch Jones fired at Tennessee: Coach a great Vols football salesman with too thin skin, not enough wins
Has Tennessee AD John Currie seen enough to fire Vols coach Butch Jones now?
Vols should find motivation in possible Birmingham, Liberty bowl tripYou must enter the characters with black color that stand out from the other characters
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— One of two men convicted in the 2008 shooting death of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill student body president Eve Carson lost his second appeal with the state on Tuesday.
The North Carolina Court of Appeals ruled that there was no error by a lower court when it sentenced Laurence Alvin Lovette Jr. to life in prison without the possibility of parole for a second time in June 2013.
Lovette, 23, automatically received the sentence when he was convicted of first-degree murder on Dec. 20, 2011.
The sentence was reconsidered last year because of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that offenders under age 18 at the time of a crime – Lovette was 17 years old when Carson was killed on March 5, 2008 – can't receive life sentences without parole unless mitigating circumstances are weighed.
Carson, 22, was a UNC senior when Lovette and Demario Atwater kidnapped her from her Chapel Hill home and drove her to ATMs, where Lovette withdrew money from her bank account. The pair then drove Carson to a neighborhood about a mile from UNC's campus, where she was shot five times.
Lovette's also scheduled to go to trial in July for the January 2008 shooting death of Duke University graduate student Abhijit Mahato, a mechanical engineering student from India who was found shot to death inside his Durham apartment.Eric Boullier has told Sky Sports News HQ's Craig Slater that McLaren are considering all future engine options, including a temporary split from Honda. Eric Boullier has told Sky Sports News HQ's Craig Slater that McLaren are considering all future engine options, including a temporary split from Honda.
McLaren could return to Honda again, even if they divorce their engine partners at the end of the season, the team have confirmed to Sky Sports.
A temporary separation - already dubbed a'soft Hoexit' in the paddock - is one of the options available to the team, Eric Boullier told Sky Sports News HQ's Craig Slater in Baku.
The Formula 1 Gossip Column
"On paper it's a good strategy," Boullier said when asked about a short-term move to another engine provider. "If you can run an engine for the time being until Honda is competitive, then why not? This is one of the various scenarios we may have considered."
The McLaren-Honda outfit are yet to score a point this season and, after slumping to a new low in qualifying for the Azerbaijan GP, team chief Boullier described the weekend as the "most painful I have ever had."
Earlier, McLaren shareholder Mansour Ojjeh said Honda had "completely underestimated the job," adding: "we've never been so uncompetitive in F1".
Pressed on just when an announcement on their 2018 engine plans could be, Boullier said: "We don't have a date yet, but we say now it is a question of weeks."
Were McLaren to divorce Honda, the team are likely to reunite with Mercedes, but Mercedes have stressed they will only consider a deal with McLaren once their ties with Honda have been severed.
Fernando Alonso, meanwhile, claims McLaren's decision makes no difference to him as he insists he will be racing for a winning team in 2018 regardless of the power unit they have.
"Zak [Brown], Jonathan [Neale] and I are talking to [shareholders] Sheikh Mohamed and Mans |
trade into his bank account in Liechtenstein."
Mr Chawla said the shipment required permission from the relevant government authority because it had been partly arranged and organised from the UK by Mr Hyde.
The prosecutor told the jury Mr Hyde had made a statement through his solicitor in November 2009 which said: "I do not believe that I engaged in any activity in the UK which I understood required a licence but where instead I decided to ignore that obligation."
Middle men
Mr Chawla said: "The prosecution case is that the claim that he made in November 2009 is palpably false and that Mr Hyde deliberately engaged in activity within the UK which required a licence."
Mr Hyde carried out his part in the deals with his business partner Karl Kleber, a German national based in Germany, the court was told.
The pair acted as middle men between two Polish companies acting for the Nigerian buyers and Chinese companies, the court heard.
Mr Chawla said commission payments for the deals totalled around $1.3m (£840,000).
The trial continues.Ranchi, May 19: At least six people were beaten to death in Jharkhand on Thursday by mobs amid rumours of child stealing gangs. Three Muslim cattle traders were lynched to death by an angry mob over child-lifting rumours in a Jharkhand village near Jamshedpur on Thursday night. Another incident of mob lynching took place in east Singbhum district, where three men, Vikas Kumar Verma, Gautam Kumar verna and Gangesh Gupta, were dragged out of a house and beaten to death. A woman was brutally assaulted by the angry mob.
The mob also attacked the Muslim-dominated Shobhapur village, assaulted three cops and set their jeep on fire. No FIR has been lodged and no one arrested so far, with police ruling out any communal angle attached to the incident. Four Muslim cattle traders, identified as Sheikh Naim (35), Sheikh Sajju (25), Sheikh Siraj (26) and Sheikh Halim (28) were on their way from Haldipokar to Rajnagar to buy cattle, when a mob consisting of over 100 people intercepted and thrashed them, reported The Telegraph. After being brutally beaten up, three of them died, while the fate of Sheikh Halim is yet to be known.
According to police, a mob of self-appointed child-thief vigilantes intercepted the car, but the men did not stop. This apparently provoked the crowd, which chased them and forced them to stop at Daru village. The mob caught hold of Naim while the other three escaped. The mob beat him to death. By knowing Naim was a Muslim, they thought his three friends fled to nearby Muslim-dominated Shobhapur village, and went there.
When confronted by a team of cops, the mob assaulted them too and torched their jeep. The mob managed to trace Sajju and Siraj, who had been given refuge by one Sunil Mahto and lynched the duo. “Though victims are Muslims, there is no communal colour to the incident. Villagers gripped by fear of child-lifters have committed the crime,” Kolhan DIG Prabhat Kumar was quoted as saying.Months after the events took place, Pulitzer prize winning journalists and others are finally reporting about the lies and manipulations of the US government regarding the recent chemical weapons attack in Syria. Far from shining a light on the true situation in the country, however, these reports continue to avoid the underlying causes and explanations for what is happening in Syria, and the forces that are behind it. This is the GRTV Backgrounder on Global Research TV.
The architects of our modern system of manufactured consent and official propaganda have long known the importance of the mass media in framing public opinion on any given event. To the pathocrats who blazed the trail toward our modern era of information warfare and opinion control, facts themselves were malleable, subject not to objective reality but to the way they were perceived and internalized by a credulous public. As Ivy Lee, the man that the Rockefellers hired to invent the modern PR industry after the Ludlow massacre, put it:
“It is not the facts alone that strike the popular mind, but the way in which they take place and in which they are published that kindle the imagination…Besides, what is a fact? The effort to state an absolute fact is simply an attempt to…give you my interpretation of the facts.”
This disdain for the public and the psychopathic ease with which elected officials lie to their electorate is nowhere more apparent than when a democracy attempts to rally its citizens to support a war of aggression abroad. If truth is the first casualty of war, the battlefield where that casualty takes place is in the mind of the liars’ own citizenry.
Sadly, recent events have provided no shortage of examples of this phenomenon. In the early days of the Iraq War, media analyst Andrew Tyndall examined 414 news stories aired by ABC, CBS, and NBC about the build up to the war, finding that 380 of them, a staggering 92%, sourced back to one of three U.S. government agencies: the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon. A further study found that of 574 stories aired between Bush’s speech to the UN in September 2002 and the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, only 12 stories, just 2%, dealt with the possible aftermath of the invasion.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, a remarkably similar pattern has played out in the years-long propaganda campaign to convince the American, British and Western public in general of the need for armed intervention in Syria. A September 2013 study from Pew Research found that in the wake of the chemical weapons attack in Ghouta in August, the coverage of the Syrian war debate on cable news networks from supposedly different viewpoints was almost identical. The study found that Al Jazeera America, CNN, and BBC America all framed their reports in substantially similar ways and relied on substantially similar sources, including by far their most common three sources: the White House, the congress, and the military. A further study in October of this year by the Public Accountability Initiative found that many of the so-called Syria “experts” relied on by the western media to provide commentary on the Syrian conflict had direct financial ties to the defense industry, exactly as had been previously exposed in coverage of the Iraq war.
None of this is surprising to those who have been following the media coverage of the Syrian conflict from the beginning. Indeed, alternative media pundits have been pointing out the obviously biased coverage of the conflict since its very inception.
The beginning of the campaign to frame public opinion on Syria can be traced back at least as far as 2006, when the Bush administration first approved US government funding and training for opposition forces in the country, but began in earnest after the conflict broke out in 2011.
From the early days of the Syrian conflict, Western media outlets including CNN relied on dubious activist Danny Dayem, known as “Syria Danny,” for coverage on the ground in the war-torn country. However, after Syria Danny was exposed staging his reports, Anderson Cooper invited him on his program, not to explain why he was staging fictitious reports, but how the evidence of that fakery made its way onto the internet.
In March 2012, several key staff from Al Jazeera’s Beirut bureau, including the bureau’s managing director, a correspondent and a producer, all resigned in protest of the network’s bias in its coverage of the Syria conflict.
In August of 2012, the BBC released a video report showing members of the Syrian terrorist insurgency planning to trick a prisoner into becoming an unwitting suicide bomber, a war crime under the Geneva Conventions. After independent media started to draw attention to the clip, it was quickly removed from the BBC website and copyright violations were posted on YouTube copies of the footage.
And in the wake of the recent Syrian chemical weapons attack, the BBC aired an interview with a dubious medical expert that appeared to have had its soundtrack drastically altered in two different versions of the interview broadcast in separate reports.
As Michel Chossudovsky, director of The Centre for Research on Globalization in Montreal, points out, however, as egregious as these manipulations are, even the more “balanced” critiques such as Seymour Hersh’s recent reporting on the US government’s manipulation of its intelligence over the chemical weapons attack in Ghouta, still exclude the key information which would help the public understand what is really happening in Syria.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Syrian war coverage of the mainstream media is not its underlying bias—that was always to be expected—but how remarkably ineffective that coverage has been in convincing the public of the need for military intervention in the country. After nearly three years of relentless propaganda attempting to convince the public of the virtue of the terrorist insurgency and the incomparable evil of Assad, the seemingly inevitable march toward war in the wake of the Ghouta chemical weapons attack faltered after public opinion overwhelmingly came down on the side of non-interventionist policies.
Perhaps reading public sentiment, many mainstream outlets even took to pointing out the media bias on the war and trying to retroactively position themselves against military intervention. This has to be credited to a remarkable, global, grassroots phenomenon of independent citizen media breaking through the layers of propaganda to provide true, cogent analysis of the situation on the ground in Syria. In the face of generations swayed by the mass media manipulation of Ivy Lee and his ideological progeny, this alternative media movement is setting the foundation for an alternative paradigm in which Lee’s cynical rhetorical question “What is a fact?” has a very different answer than that which the ruling classes would want us to believe.Mathematical equations aren't just useful — many are quite beautiful. And many scientists admit they are often fond of particular formulas not just for their function, but for their form, and the simple, poetic truths they contain.
While certain famous equations, such as Albert Einstein's E = mc^2, hog most of the public glory, many less familiar formulas have their champions among scientists. LiveScience asked physicists, astronomers and mathematicians for their favorite equations; here's what we found:
General relativity
The equation above was formulated by Einstein as part of his groundbreaking general theory of relativity in 1915. The theory revolutionized how scientists understood gravity by describing the force as a warping of the fabric of space and time.
"It is still amazing to me that one such mathematical equation can describe what space-time is all about," said Space Telescope Science Institute astrophysicist Mario Livio, who nominated the equation as his favorite. "All of Einstein's true genius is embodied in this equation." [Einstein Quiz: Test Your Knowledge of the Genius]
"The right-hand side of this equation describes the energy contents of our universe (including the 'dark energy' that propels the current cosmic acceleration)," Livio explained. "The left-hand side describes the geometry of space-time. The equality reflects the fact that in Einstein's general relativity, mass and energy determine the geometry, and concomitantly the curvature, which is a manifestation of what we call gravity." [6 Weird Facts About Gravity]
"It's a very elegant equation," said Kyle Cranmer, a physicist at New York University, adding that the equation reveals the relationship between space-time and matter and energy. "This equation tells you how they are related — how the presence of the sun warps space-time so that the Earth moves around it in orbit, etc. It also tells you how the universe evolved since the Big Bang and predicts that there should be black holes."
Standard model
Another of physics' reigning theories, the standard model describes the collection of fundamental particles currently thought to make up our universe.
The theory can be encapsulated in a main equation called the standard model Lagrangian (named after the 18th-century French mathematician and astronomer Joseph Louis Lagrange), which was chosen by theoretical physicist Lance Dixon of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California as his favorite formula.
"It has successfully described all elementary particles and forces that we've observed in the laboratory to date — except gravity," Dixon told LiveScience. "That includes, of course, the recently discovered Higgs(like) boson, phi in the formula. It is fully self-consistent with quantum mechanics and special relativity."
The standard model theory has not yet, however, been united with general relativity, which is why it cannot describe gravity. [Infographic: The Standard Model Explained]
Calculus
While the first two equations describe particular aspects of our universe, another favorite equation can be applied to all manner of situations. The fundamental theorem of calculus forms the backbone of the mathematical method known as calculus, and links its two main ideas, the concept of the integral and the concept of the derivative.
"In simple words, [it] says that the net change of a smooth and continuous quantity, such as a distance travelled, over a given time interval (i.e. the difference in the values of the quantity at the end points of the time interval) is equal to the integral of the rate of change of that quantity, i.e. the integral of the velocity," said Melkana Brakalova-Trevithick, chair of the math department at Fordham University, who chose this equation as her favorite. "The fundamental theorem of calculus (FTC) allows us to determine the net change over an interval based on the rate of change over the entire interval."
The seeds of calculus began in ancient times, but much of it was put together in the 17th century by Isaac Newton, who used calculus to describe the motions of the planets around the sun.
Pythagorean theorem
An "oldie but goodie" equation is the famous Pythagorean theorem, which every beginning geometry student learns.ANAHEIM – For the first time in a decade, Disneyland is opening up new memberships to its exclusive Club 33 – the famous, secretive restaurant tucked inside the park.
Watch video here.
Disney also is adding a private lounge for club members at Disney California Adventure.
Starting today, Disney will begin sending embossed invitations to the first 100 people on its 800-name waiting list, asking if they want to join the club. Individual initiation fees are $25,000, with annual dues at $10,000.
The openings come with new perks. The 1901 private lounge (named after Walt Disney’s birth year) will open June 15 in Disney California Adventure as part of its $1 billion makeover project. Also, new memberships will include valet parking, VIP tours and other perks.
Walt Disney was inspired to create the club after seeing the VIP lounges for corporate sponsors at the New York World’s Fair, said Kim Irvine, Disneyland’s art director who headed up a recent renovation of Club 33. Dining rooms and a lounge alley wind around the top floors of New Orleans Square buildings. Disney died before the club opened, in June 1967.
Only club members and their guests are allowed behind the door next to a “33” plaque, marking the address of 33 Royal Street. Club 33 is the only place in Disneyland where alcohol is regularly served. The lure is the fact it is exclusive, its fine food and top-drawer service. Once diners gets in, they still pay for their meals.
Disney remains very closed about many aspects of the club: Employees won’t divulge how many members there are. They won’t name any members or guests. And they won’t say how many new members will be added, only noting that all 800 on the list won’t get in.
A 2007 Los Angeles Times story said the club had less than 500 members. Celebrities who have gone to Club 33 reportedly include Tom Hanks, Michael Jackson, Christina Aguilera and Elton John.
For new members, Disney will ask interested parties questions and set up individual meetings with a member-services employee, said George Kalogridis, Disneyland Resort’s president.
(Disney also will start adding names to the list. Interested parties can email club33interest@disneyland.com.)
The new 1901 lounge space allows Disney to add more members, Kalogridis said.
The lounge sits on the bottom floor of the Carthay Circle Theatre building along the hub of the entrance corridor of California Adventure. The lounge will serve drinks and appetizers, but no full meals. Disney describes it as a den with plaster arches and woodwork, overstuffed leather chairs and a bar with accessories, including some of Walt Disney’s personal art and photos.
Annual dues used to be $3,600 annually. Current members are grandfathered in under the previous prices, if they want to keep the former plan, which excludes the new lounge and VIP services.
Each individual club member gets four annual passes that are valid at both California and Florida Disney parks, as well as 50 day passes that can be given to guests.
With the itinerary planning, members can call a special number and have an employee set up a customized visit, like a four-hour morning with two mothers and two toddlers to go on kids’ rides or a night out with adults that includes a sit-down dinner and “World of Color” viewing. Fastpasses would be given on rides that offer them.
“If you are coming to the resort, it’s a great deal,” Kalogridis said.
Contact the writer: 714-704-3793 or stully@ocregister.comCompared to our barely clad, spaghetti-strapped swimsuit styles, the bathing costumes of the 18th and 19th century seem laughably prudish. But those days, people worried that glimpsing more than a sliver of a woman’s ankle might give onlookers the vapors. This was such a concern, in Georgian and Victorian times (roughly 1714 to 1901), that entire fleets of bathing machines were designed to prevent anyone from seeing a woman in her swimsuit before she slipped into the waves.
European beaches began filling up with bathing machines starting in the 1750s, and those machines stuck around, remarkably, until the 1920s. They resembled wooden changing booths, with wheels and wooden steps that led inside. In a nutshell: A woman walks into the booth, changes, and when she’s ready a horse gets hitched to the machine and drags her out to sea, at which point the machine becomes a floating changing buoy. Once the machine plunged far enough out into the ocean waves, the woman could quickly dive off the float. And so it went. Thanks to these boxy hideaways, no one got scandalized by said woman’s (decidedly unsexy) bathing tarpaulin.
An account written in 1847 describes the rather plush interior of one of these machines:
The interior is all done in snow-white enamel paint, and one-half of the floor is pierced with many holes, to allow of free drainage from wet flannels. The other half of the little room is covered with a pretty green Japanese rug. In one corner is a big-mouthed green silk bag lined with rubber. Into this the wet bathing-togs are tossed out of the way. There are large bevel-edged mirrors let into either side of the room, and below one juts out a toilet shelf, on which is every appliance. There are pegs for towels and the bathrobe, and fixed in one corner is a little square seat that when turned up reveals a locker where clean towels, soap, perfumery, etc. are stowed. Ruffles of white muslin trimmed with lace and narrow green ribbons decorate every available space.
To be fair, when they originally debuted in the 1750s, bathing machines weren’t quite as prudish as they ultimately became: In their earliest days, it was still common for men and women alike to swim nude. But by the time Victorian mores took hold (1837, per Queen Victoria’s reign), bathing machines were horrifyingly ubiquitous on European and American beaches despite the fact that the swimsuits of the time revealed barely anything at all.
By the 1920s (whew), bathing machine were all but extinct. Yet even today, you can sometimes see bathing machines on the beach. Horses may not drag the carriages to sea anymore, with women shunted inside, but some of these bathing machines survive as beachside huts.
For more information on Victorian bathing machines, read this great post on Messy Nessy Chic.Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)
David Ortiz is not the only Sox player who will see his number retired this week. In Chicago, retired White Sox starter Mark Buehrle will have his 56 retired as well.
He definitely earned it. He won 161 games in 12 seasons with the White Sox, defining what it meant to be a workhorse starter in the 21st century, tossing 200+ innings in every full season he pitched on the South Side. And, of course, he helped lead the White Sox to a World Series victory in 2005, starting the Chisox’ Game 2 victory, tossing seven innings.
He also got a save in that series. That came in Game 3, which went 14 innings, thus necessitating Buehrle’s services after Ozzie Guillen went through eight other pitchers. Buehrle only had to toss three pitches in a third of an inning to get that save, but he got it.
And, as he writes in The Players’ Tribune today, he did it with a slight handicap:
The thing a lot of people talk about with that one is this rumor that I drank a few beers before I got the save in our Game 3 victory. There’s been some stuff that’s come out on that topic, but I feel like you all should really hear it straight from the horse’s mouth. So, here goes…. In short: Yeah, sure, O.K. fine, so I had a few. I can admit to that. But you gotta let me explain.
He explains that he didn’t think he’d be pitching that night, which was a fair guess at the time. And that he got his drinking done pretty early, checking in with the coaches a lot. So, fine. But how many beers did he have?
And it was just like one or two beers...... It was only like three beers…. Max. Definitely no more than three, though. I swear.
Mmhmm.
All of this, of course, makes one think about the whole Chicken and Beer incident in Boston. And how that became so overblown that it cost people their jobs and stuff. The only difference there is that (a) the guys drinking the beer were in no way coming into any games; and (b) the Red Sox lost. Change (b) and Josh Beckett and company become legends.
Anyway, congratulations on your honor, Mark. You earned it. Have a beer on us.
Follow @craigcalcaterraThe U.S. Senate, (meanwhile) says it wants a report on political prison camps in North Korea to be submitted to *both intelligence committees of Congress.The U.S. Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2015 states the Director of National Intelligence should show how Washington is supporting implementation of the recommendations made by the UN Commission of Inquiry on human rights in North Korea.The bill says this should include the eventual establishment of a tribunal to hold individuals accountable for abuses.It should also cover the estimated prisoner population, the geographical location, reasons for confinement of the prisoners *and the conditions of each and every political prison camp in North Korea.In February, the UN commission said. the leadership in Pyongyang is responsible for "widespread, systematic and gross" violations of human rights.Synchronised swimming, referred to by international governeing body FINA as artistic swimming since 2017, is a hybrid form of swimming, dance, and gymnastics, consisting of swimmers performing a synchronised routine (either solo, duet, trio, mixed duet, free team, free combination, and highlight) of elaborate moves in the water, accompanied by music. Artistic swimming is governed internationally by FINA, and has been part of the Summer Olympics programme since 1984.
Synchronised swimming demands advanced water skills, requires great strength, endurance, flexibility, grace, artistry and precise timing, as well as exceptional breath control when upside down underwater. Competitors show off their strength, flexibility, and aerobic endurance required to perform difficult routines. Swimmers perform two routines for judges, one technical and one free, as well as age group routines and figures. Synchronized swimming is both an individual and team sport. Swimmers compete individually during figures, and then as a team during the routine. Figures are made up of a combination of skills and positions that often require control, strength, and flexibility. Swimmers are ranked individually for this part of the competition. The routine involves teamwork and synchronisation. It is choreographed to music and often has a theme.
Since the 20th century, synchronised swimming has predominantly been considered a women's sport, with the Summer Olympics only featuring women's duet and team events. However, international, national and regional competitions may allow men to compete, and FINA introduced a new mixed duet competition at the 2015 World Aquatics Championships. FINA officially renamed the sport from "synchronized swimming" to "artistic swimming" in 2017—a decision that has faced mixed reception.
History [ edit ]
At the turn of the 20th century, synchronised swimming was known as water ballet. The first recorded competition was in 1891 in Berlin, Germany. Many swim clubs were formed around that time, and the sport simultaneously developed in Canada. As well as existing as a sport, it often constituted a popular addition to Music Hall evenings, in the larger variety theatres of London or Glasgow which were equipped with on-stage water tanks for the purpose.
In 1907, Australian Annette Kellerman popularised the sport when she performed in a glass tank as an underwater ballerina (the first water ballet in a glass tank) in the New York Hippodrome.[1] After experimenting with various diving actions and stunts in the water, Katherine Curtis started one of the first water ballet clubs at the University of Chicago, where the team began executing strokes, "tricks," and floating formations. On May 27, 1939, the first U.S. synchronised swimming competition took place at Wright Junior College between Wright and the Chicago Teachers' College.[1]
In 1924, the first competition in North America was in Montreal, with Peg Seller as the first champion.
Other important pioneers for the sport are Beulah Gundling, Käthe Jacobi, Marion Kane Elston, Dawn Bean, Billie MacKellar, Teresa Anderson, Gail Johnson, Gail Emery, Charlotte Davis, Mary Derosier, Norma Olsen and Clark Leach.[2] Charlotte Davis coached Tracie Ruiz and Candy Costie, who won the gold medal in duet synchronised swimming at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.
In 1933 and 1934, Katherine Whitney Curtis organised a show, "The Kay Curtis Modern Mermaids", for the World Exhibition in Chicago. The announcer, Norman Ross, introduced the sport as "synchronised swimming" for the first time. The term eventually became standardised through the AAU, but Curtis still used the term "rhythmic swimming" in her book, Rhythmic Swimming: A Source Book of Synchronised Swimming and Water Pageantry (Minneapolis: Burgess Publishing Co., 1936).
Curtis persuaded the AAU to make synchronised swimming an officially recognised sport in December 1941, but she herself transferred overseas in 1943. She served as the Recreation Director of the Red Cross under Generals Patton and Eisenhower, during which time she produced the first international aquacade in Caserta, Italy. She was the Director of Travel in post-war Europe until 1962. In 1959 the Helms Hall of Fame officially recognised Curtis (along with Annette Kellerman) – ascribing to her the primary development of synchronised swimming. In 1979 the International Swimming Hall of Fame inducted Curtis with similar accolades.[3]
The first Official National Team Championships were held in Chicago at Riis Pool on August 11, 1946. The Town Club 'C' team were the first national champions. The team was composed of: Polly Wesner, Nancy Hanna, Doris Dieskow, Marion Mittlacher, Shirley Brown, Audrey Huettenrauch, Phyllis Burrell and Priscilla Hirsch.[4]
Esther Williams, a national AAU champion swimmer, popularized synchronised swimming during WWII and after, through (often elaborately staged) scenes in Hollywood films such as Bathing Beauty (1944), Million Dollar Mermaid (1952), and Jupiter's Darling (1955). In the 1970s and 1980s, Ft. Lauderdale swimming champion Charkie Phillips revived water ballet on television with The Krofftettes in The Brady Bunch Hour (1976–1977), NBC's The Big Show (1980), and then on screen with Miss Piggy in The Great Muppet Caper (1981).
Margaret Swan Forbes published Coaching Synchronized Swimming Effectively in 1984; it was the first official teaching manual for synchronized swimming.[5]
In the late 19th century, synchronised swimming was a male-only event.[6] However, in the 20th century it became a women's sport, with men banned from many competitions. In the U.S., men were allowed to participate with women until 1941, when synchronised swimming became part of the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU).[7] The AAU required men and women to compete separately, which resulted in a decline of male participants. In the 1940s and 1950s, Bert Hubbard and Donn Squire were among the top US male competitors.[8]
In 1978, the U.S. changed their rules to allow men to once again compete with women. Rules in other countries varied; in the UK, men were prohibited from competing until 2014, while in France, Benoît Beaufils was allowed to competed at national events in the 1990s. American Bill May was a top competitor in the late-1990s and early-2000s. He medalled in several international events, including the 1998 Goodwill Games. However, male competitors were barred from top competitions, including the World Aquatics Championships and the Olympics. In 2014, FINA announced that men would be allowed to compete at the 2015 World Aquatics Championships in two mixed-pair events. Both May and Beaufils returned from decade-long retirements to represent their countries.[7] Among their competitors were Russian Aleksandr Maltsev and Italian Giorgio Minisini, both over 15 years younger than May and Beaufils. Pairs from ten countries competed in the inaugural events.[9] The 2016 European Aquatics Championships was the first time men were allowed to compete at the European Championships. While men are allowed in more events, they were still barred from competing in the 2016 Summer Olympics. FINA did propose adding the mixed duet competition to the 2020 Summer Olympics.[10]
In July 2017, following a request by the IOC, FINA approved changes to its constitution that renames synchronised swimming to artistic swimming. FINA justified the change by stating that it would help to clarify the nature of the sport (with the new name being similar to artistic gymnastics), and would help "enhance its popularity". The changes received criticism, with some swimmers and coaches arguing that the name "artistic swimming" diminishes the athleticism of the sport, and that rebranding federations and other groups involved in the sport would be costly. Deputy Prime Minister of Russia Vitaly Mutko vowed that the country would still refer to the sport as synchronised swimming, stating that "to keep the name synchronised swimming is our right, and if the Federation itself, the coaches will want it, we will do it".[11][12][13][14]
Olympics [ edit ]
The first Olympic demonstration was at the 1952 Olympic Games, where the Helsinki officials welcomed Kay Curtis and lit a torch in her honor. Curtis died in 1980, but synchronised swimming did not become an official Olympic sport until the 1984 Summer Olympic Games.[15] It was not until 1968 that synchronised swimming became officially recognized by FINA as the fourth water sport next to swimming, platform diving and water polo.
From 1984 through 1992, the Summer Olympic Games featured solo and duet competitions, but they were both dropped in 1996 in favor of team competition. At the 2000 Olympic Games, however, the duet competition was restored and is now featured alongside the team competition.
Event 1984 1988 1992 1996 2000 2004 2008 2012 2016 Years Women's team • • • • • • 5 Women's duet • • • • • • • • 7 Women's solo • • • 3 Total Events 2 2 2 1 2 2 2 2
World Aquatics Championships [ edit ]
Artistic swimming has been part of the World Aquatics Championships since the beginning. From 1973 through 2001, the World Aquatics Championships featured solo, duet and team competitions. In 2003, a free routine combination, comprising elements of solo, duet and team, was added. In 2005, it was renamed free combination. In 2007, solo, duet and team events were split between technical and free routines. Since 2007, seven World championship titles are at stake. In 2015, the mixed duet (technical and free) were added to the competition program.
Event 1973 1975 1978 1982 1986 1991 1994 1998 2001 2003 2005 2007 2009 2011 2013 2015 2017 Years Women's combination • • • • • • • • 8 Women's free team • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 17 Women's technical team • • • • • • 6 Women's free duet • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 17 Women's technical duet • • • • • • 6 Women's free solo • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 17 Women's technical solo • • • • • • 6 Mixed free duet • • 2 Mixed technical duet • • 2 Total Events 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 4 4 7 7 7 7 9 9
Basic skills [ edit ]
Sculls [ edit ]
Sculls (hand movements used to propel the body) are the most essential part to synchronised swimming. Commonly used sculls include support scull, stationary scull, propeller scull, alligator scull, torpedo scull, split scull, barrel scull, spinning scull and paddle scull. The support scull is used most often to support the body while a swimmer is performing upside down.
The support scull or "American Scull" was invented by Marion Kane Elston and propelled the sport to new heights. The sport was transformed from water ballet to the athleticism of modern-day synchronized swimming. See the International Swimming Hall of Fame as a reference.
Support scull is performed by holding the upper arms against the sides of the body and the fore arms at 90-degree angles to the body, with hands facing the bottom of the pool. The fore arms are then moved back and forth while maintaining the right angle. The resulting pressure against the hands allows the swimmer to hold their legs above water while upside down.
Eggbeater [ edit ]
The "eggbeater kick" is another important skill of synchronised swimming. It is a form of treading water that allows for stability and height above the water while leaving the hands free to perform arm motions. An average eggbeater height is usually around collarbone level. Eggbeater is used in all "arm" sections, a piece of choreography in which the swimmer is upright, often with one or both arms in the air. Another variation is a body boost, which is executed through an eggbeater buildup and a strong whip kick, propelling the swimmer out of the water vertically. A body boost can raise a swimmer out of the water to hip level.
Lifts [ edit ]
A member of the Japanese team is thrown up in the air during the team's free routine at the 2013 French Open.
A lift is when members of the team propel another teammate relatively high out of the water. They are quite common in routines of older age groups and higher skill levels. There are many variations on lifts, often dubbed "highlights". These can include partner lifts, float patterns or other areas of unique, artistic choreography intended to impress the judges and audience.
Parts of a successful lift [ edit ]
There are three parts to every lift in artistic swimming: The top (or "flyer"), the base, and the pushers.
The Flyer is usually the smallest member of the team. Flyers must be agile and flexible, with a preferable gymnastics background if they are jumping off the lift.
is usually the smallest member of the team. Flyers must be agile and flexible, with a preferable gymnastics background if they are jumping off the lift. The Base tends to be of average size. She should have good leg strength and a solid core (when performing a platform lift, a strong core and length is essential).
tends to be of average size. She should have good leg strength and a solid core (when performing a platform lift, a strong core and length is essential). The rest of the team will be underneath the chair or plank. They are usually strong and powerful, as their job is to support the Chair/Plank and supply the force needed for the flyer to execute her job.
Types of lifts [ edit ]
The Platform Lift is the oldest form. In a platform, the base lays out in a back layout position underwater. The top sets in a squatting position on her torso and stands once the lift reaches the surface. The remaining teammates use eggbeater to hold the platform and the top out of the water.
is the oldest form. In a platform, the base lays out in a back layout position underwater. The top sets in a squatting position on her torso and stands once the lift reaches the surface. The remaining teammates use eggbeater to hold the platform and the top out of the water. The Stack Lift is a more modern version of the platform. The base sets up in a squatting position a few feet underwater, with the pushers holding her legs and feet. The top then climbs onto the shoulders of the base. As the lift rises, pushers extend their arms while the base and top extend their legs to achieve maximum height. A common addition to a stack lift is a rotation while it descends.
is a more modern version of the platform. The base sets up in a squatting position a few feet underwater, with the pushers holding her legs and feet. The top then climbs onto the shoulders |
whales. Later this week, ECOCEAN expects to release a generic, open-source 1.0 version of its of software, which Holmberg hopes will be customized for use by researchers using mark and recapture for any distinctively patterned animal.
With their free software package doing the dirty work of data management, "We want to link computer vision scientists who only want to write algorithms with biologists who are technophobes with statisticians who will use the data to make projections," said Holmberg. "It will be a a framework for studying any species."
Holmberg also hopes that other programmers will follow his lead and lend their coding skills to worthy projects. "Pick the species or concern you're most passionate about, pick the researchers who are working on it, and identify their technical needs," he said. "I'm not even a great programmer. I'm underqualified but highly productive."
Images: Top) A whale shark at the Georgia Aquarium (Mike Johnston/Flickr). Bottom) A portion of the Extended Groth Strip (Wikipedia).
See Also:View the video
In fishes as familiar as tunas, humans have managed to find some unknown anatomy: a hydraulic system based on lymph.
Often the underdogs of body parts, vertebrate lymph systems can do vital chores such as fight disease but rarely get the attention that blood systems do. Yet it turns out to be lymph, not blood, that rushes into two sickle-shaped tuna fins and fans them wide during complex swimming maneuvers, says Barbara Block of Stanford University.
Tuna bodies are relatively “stiff and only wag at the tail,” she says. That’s efficient for long-distance cruising. For zigs and zags, Pacific bluefin and yellowfin tunas get extra control from muscles, bones and lymph tweaking the shape of a fin on the back and its counterpart underneath, Block and colleagues report in the July 21 Science.
Among other tests,Joe Hockey correct on Australia's debt, spending
Updated
As Joe Hockey prepares to deliver his first federal budget in May, the Treasurer has foreshadowed cuts to government spending to rein in Australia's debt.
As new governments often do, he's laying the blame squarely at the feet of his predecessors.
"Of the 17 top surveyed IMF countries, Labor left us with the fastest growth in spending of anyone in the world... and they left us with the third highest growth in debt of anyone in the top 17," Mr Hockey told RN Breakfast on March 6.
"So, the fact of the matter is they've left a whole lot of landmines in the budget. We need to carefully remove those landmines and put us back on a path that gets us away from $123 billion of deficit, and starts to pay down the logjam of $667 billion of debt."
ABC Fact Check investigates Mr Hockey's claims about Australia's level of spending and debt.
The claim: Joe Hockey says Australia has the fastest growth in spending and third highest growth in debt among 17 countries surveyed by the International Monetary Fund.
Joe Hockey says Australia has the fastest growth in spending and third highest growth in debt among 17 countries surveyed by the International Monetary Fund. The verdict: Mr Hockey's comments on growth in spending and debt compared check out, although he fails to mention the fact that Australia's overall debt as a proportion of GDP remains at comparatively low levels.
The 'logjam' of deficit and debt
Mr Hockey's $123 billion deficit figure comes from last year's Mid Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO), delivered by Mr Hockey in December.
It is the total of projected deficits over the forward estimates through to 2016-17.
That represented a significant upward revision from the 2013-14 federal budget handed down in May, which forecast combined deficits over the same period of just over $23 billion.
Gross debt is measured by the face value of Commonwealth Government Securities (CGS) on issue, which according to the Australian Office of Financial Management, is currently around $300 billion.
Mr Hockey's $667 billion debt figure comes from Treasury projections for 2023-24, which also appeared in last year's MYEFO.
Key terms: Deficit and debt Deficit is the amount a government spends annually in excess of how much it takes in – usually in the form of tax. Think of it like this, if you earn $50,000 a year, but spend $55,000, your deficit is $5,000.
the amount a government spends annually in excess of how much it takes in – usually in the form of tax. Think of it like this, if you earn $50,000 a year, but spend $55,000, your deficit is $5,000. Debt is the total amount a government owes, and is made up of all borrowing, including borrowing to cover a deficit. Or put another way, after running a deficit of $5,000 a year for 10 years, your debt is $50,000 (plus interest!)
Dr Shane Oliver, chief economist at AMP capital, says it's worth noting the growth in net public debt figures in MYEFO "contained more pessimistic assumptions than the previous government likely would have adopted".
Dr Oliver also says after the biggest boom in Australia's history, public finances should be in better shape. "The projected growth rate of spending going forward is unsustainably strong," he said.
He says the Government is right to focus on cutting the deficit and eventually debt.
International comparisons
Asked for the source of his claim about Australia's comparative spending and debt growth, Mr Hockey's office cited two graphs in a February 2014 "staff report" from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
The first graph, titled 'Change in Real Expenditure', supports Mr Hockey's claim that Australia's spending rate is the highest among the 17 nations surveyed. Those countries include Denmark, The Netherlands, Belgium, Japan, France, The Czech Republic, Germany, Austria, Iceland, New Zealand, Finland, Sweden, Switzerland, Canada, USA, South Korea and Australia.
The IMF report notes that Australia's spending was "somewhat higher than anticipated".
The second IMF graph, titled 'Change in Net Debt', is the basis of the Treasurer's other claim - that growth in Australia's net debt is the third highest among the 17 nations surveyed. On this point, he's also correct.
However, the Treasurer did not mention the next graph in the IMF report, which shows where Australia sits in terms of general government net debt.
This graph paints a very different picture. Unlike the first two, which show the rate of change, this graph shows where Australia's current debt of $300 billion sits internatioanlly as a proportion of GDP.
On that measure, Australia's general government debt, including state governments, remains at comparatively low levels internationally.
Saul Eslake, chief economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, says Mr Hockey's comments "represent only a partial summary of what the IMF actually says in this section of it its report". He says Mr Hockey omits one important conclusion, "namely that Australia would still have the second-lowest general government net debt as a per cent of GDP among the countries shown by 2018".
In its generally upbeat assessment of Australia's economic position, the IMF says "gross debt is expected to peak at around 32 percent of GDP in 2015 and is among the lowest in advanced nations".
Elsewhere, in the fund's recommendations for Australia's fiscal policy, it says "Australia's modest public debt gives the authorities scope to delay their planned return to surpluses in the event of a sharp deterioration in the economic outlook".
The verdict
Mr Hockey's claims about Australia's forecast levels of debt and deficits may be "pessimistic", but they are consistent with Treasury modelling.
His comments on growth in spending and debt compared to the 17 nations surveyed by the IMF check out.
He fails to mention the fact that Australia's overall debt as a proportion of GDP remains at comparatively low levels internationally.
Overall, Mr Hockey's claim is correct.
Sources
Topics: hockey-joe, federal-government, liberals, economic-trends, business-economics-and-finance, australia
First postedHello developers!
As we anxiously await for Windows 10's official release in 29 July, we started ramping-up on the developer material to help us bring our app experiences to Windows 10 and the Universal Windows Platform. The new operating system will have a new enhanced store to distribute your apps and have users download and review them. The end users will experience the new store but as developers in the background we will mostly interact with the Dev Center and the dashboard to manage the apps and publish them. Currently, we have 2 dashboards, one for Windows Phone and another for Windows 8/8.1. Microsoft has been making a lot of progress at unifying the dev center resources and documentation and access to these dashboards but now with Windows 10 we will have a fully unified Dev Center.
Thew new dashboard has already been made available in "Preview mode" for developers and app publishers who will need to starting preparing for the upcoming migration of their accounts and apps so that they can target Windows 10. Once you navigate to the Dev Center you will notice a prompt to choose a dashboard until the accounts and metadata have been migrated, as the following image shows:
If you navigate to the new dashboard, one of the most important difference that you will notice is that there is now one unified dashboard. From this dashboard we will be able to submit and manage new and existing apps with Windows 8.x packages, Windows Phone 7.x and 8.x packages, as well as Windows 10 packages; all from a single dashboard. Moreover, we will be able to manage Microsoft ads and app promotions will to move from pubCenter to the new Dev Center. Eventually, there will be a single place to manage apps.
The unified dashboard will also allow the reporting and payments to be integrated and hence we will no longer need to enter the app’s description and other metadata in two separate places. If the developer has linked apps that share identity in both Windows and Windows Phone Stores today, these will be managed as a single app with multiple packages (for example, one app with a package for Windows Phone 8.1 and a package for Windows 8.1).
For the time being, "preview mode", the ability to create a new app on the new dashboard is disable while the work is completed but nevertheless, you can view new reports there that are available for read-only preview.
PS: Microsoft will be transitioning the accounts to the new unified dashboard experience in waves over the coming months and developer/app publishers will receive an email communication for that matter to guide them through the process and a notification when their accounts have beeb migrated.
In the meantime, changes are happening for all Windows and Windows Phone apps that app developers need to be aware of:
Apps that are not linked yet, and developers would like to display these as one app on the Windows 10 store should start linking them now before the account is migrated. By linking these apps, app publishers will have the opportunity to upload a Windows 10 package for the same app that can be distributed to all Windows 10 devices – PCs, tablets, and phones.
, and developers would like to display these as one app on the Windows 10 store should start linking them now before the account is migrated. Desktop app listings will no longer be supported in the unified Dev Center. The desktop app listings previously submitted will remain published in Windows Store for customers on Windows 8 and 8.1. These will not appear in the new dashboard preview, but developers can still access them from the current dashboard. It is recommended that these Desktop app listings are reviewed and updated now. Because, once the account migrates to the new Dev Center, developers cannot modify the listing. However, they will be able to file a support ticket to have the listing removed by Microsoft after migration
Payout information will be unified, so if the payout information is different in Windows Dev Center and Windows Phone Dev Center, when the account is migrated to the new dashboard, the data used for your payout payment instrument will be from the Windows Dev Center. If the account only has Windows Phone payout information, that will be used. So it is recommended that app publishers review their payout information to confirm it has the values they want to use once your account is migrated.
App count view is updated and the total app count in the unified dashboard preview could be different from what you see in the current Windows dashboard and Windows Phone dashboard: Only published apps and in-app purchase products will appear Most Windows Phone beta apps have not been migrated Updates published in the current Windows and Windows Phone dashboards take about a day to appear in the unified dashboard
total app count in the unified dashboard preview could be different from what you see in the current Windows dashboard and Windows Phone dashboard: New app categories will appear with Windows 10 and existing ones will be adjusted and expanded to accommodate new user types and associated content types. As a result, current app categories will be mapped to the new Windows 10 category list. Developers might want to take a moment to review the mappings listed here on a single page to understand where the apps will appear in the Dev Center and ultimately in the Store on Windows 10.
will appear with Windows 10 and existing ones will be adjusted and expanded to accommodate new user types and associated content types. As a result, current app categories will be mapped to the new Windows 10 category list. Developers might want to take a moment to review the mappings listed here on a single page to understand where the apps will appear in the Dev Center and ultimately in the Store on Windows 10. The indicator (‘Get once, download on compatible Windows devices too’) used for Linked apps that are published in both Windows Store and Windows Phone Store and designated to share the same identity will no longer exist in Windows 10. Alternatively, these apps will be managed as one single app in the Dev Center. If there are packages for both Windows and Windows Phone today, these will be combined into a single app with device-specific packages.
used for Linked apps App descriptions from the Windows Store app will be shown to the Windows 10 Insider Preview customers, when descriptions are available from both the Windows and Windows Phone Store in the same language.
to the Windows 10 Insider Preview customers, when descriptions are available from both the Windows and Windows Phone Store in the same language. App Screenshots will be migrated. Moreover, the appropriate screenshots are displayed to the user based on the Windows 10 device they are using. However, all Windows 10 devices will see the app descriptions that were provided for the Windows app. The only exception being if app descriptions were not provided for a specific language for the Windows app. In this case, the Windows Phone descriptions will be used on all Windows 10 devices.
These are some of the changes that are happening and loads are coming, you can check the full list here on the Windows Blog. Additional features and capabilities are planned; some will launch with the release of Windows 10, while others will be available at a later date.
Will update you with these down the road. Stay tuned!
As for now happy migration 🙂Jonathan Toews, a center, has performed with numerous linemates, as has Kane. No. 19 is strong of body and mind, always conscious of the risk-reward element endemic to his pedigree, which is based on monitoring the entire rink. Whether that has affected his offensive possibilities is an issue he will not duck. As a baseball manager says on a trip to the mound to counsel a pitcher who wants to strike out every batter, there's a reason you have eight teammates wearing gloves.
If you think bobblehead giveaways attract attention, watch the ice when Patrick Kane is present on the right wing. Opponents gather around whether he has the puck or not. He can thread a pass through a keyhole with those magical hands, and can score from anywhere -- even while horizontal, as he did against the Montreal Canadiens last November. Bobby Hull cites Kane as among the best ever at handling the puck while speed-skating.
The following is excerpted from the October 2017 issue of Blackhawks Magazine, which celebrates 10 years of Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane. Pick up a copy at the next Blackhawks home game, or by calling the Blackhawks Store at 312-759-0079.
"Could I score more than I do?" said Toews, whose stats last season (21 goals, 37 assists) bothered him. "I'd like to think so. Part of my problem is that I spread myself too thin in certain ways. My personality is that I feel I need to be involved all the time so that I don't really disappear and trust our other guys. That doesn't mean you become less responsible as a two-way forward, but it means playing a little smarter, seeing the game differently, not being too cautious and over-worrying. Have more fun.
"I look at guys like Kaner and Sharpy. They are so good at zoning in, finding open ice and letting the play come to them. Let things happen. You don't have to cheat, either. Just let the process play out by maybe seeing the game a little differently. There's more there, and I have to find ways to let it out and find those scoring areas. Plus, on top of all that, after we got knocked out in the first round by St. Louis two years ago, we had a longer offseason than we wanted. So I trained really hard and might have overdone it. The game is so fast now, and I came into last season feeling slow. I wasn't moving like I wanted to."
Toews and Kane basically grew up as Blackhawks. That they did so together enhanced their journey.
"We were fortunate to be drafted by Chicago, for sure," Kane said. "And fortunate to come up at the same time. Especially at the start, when we were 19 or 20, still feeling things out, reading off each other, bouncing things off one another. Jonny brings things to the franchise that I don't, and maybe there are things I bring that he doesn't. We have different roles. He deserves to be captain, for sure. He controls the room. I think I've become a better leader, but sometimes it's nice just to prepare yourself. Would I ever want to wear the 'C'? Nope."Singer Katy Perry performing in Rio De Janeiro (Shutterstock)
Decrying the collapse of popular culture, and saying it is being taken over by “the occult,” a Christian radio broadcaster warned that pop singer Katy Perry’s upcoming Super Bowl halftime show “will be complete maximum evil,” according to The Column.
Speaking by phone with Jan Markel — host of Understanding the Times, Twin Cities radio host Paul Ridgeway brought up Markel’s Christian newsletter where she claimed that Perry is influenced by writers who claim to “channel demonic forces,” teaching us “we can realize our own inner divinity through occult knowledge.”
Markel warned about this weekend’s performance — expected to be seen by over 112 million viewers in the U.S. — saying Perry will be bringing “complete maximum evil” to the midfield stage.
“It was sort of a head’s up that if you’re going to be watching the Super Bowl this coming weekend,” Markel warned. “Katy Perry will be doing the halftime and it will be complete maximum evil which is nothing new, and Paul, you of all people know more than anybody with some of the halftime stuff.”
Ridgeway agreed by referring to popular singer Beyoncé’s 2013 half-time show in New Orleans, noting Markel had called it “satanic.”
“I’ll tell you it got more raunchy and its getting more raunchy. On your website you talked about Beyoncé’s satanic half-time sex show but now this Perry says she has some tricks up her sleeve for the coming show this weekend.,” Ridgeway said.
Ridgeway went on to add perky pop singer Miley Cyrus to the list of female recording artists who have turned their backs on God, saying Perry — like Cyrus — was brought up in a Christian home only to have fallen.
“Katy Perry going to be in the half-time show and I want to fill you in a little bit with what Jan’s email newsletter tells us about her because like Miley Cyrus, Perry grew up in a Christian home and made references to God in her early career, ” Ridgeway explained. “But now admits she has left the faith. In fact she said she sold her soul to the devil. She said, ‘I think when the universe gives you these things,’ she’s talking about being on the Super Bowl half-time show, ‘it’s just asking you if you are ready to the next level and I’m getting ready’.”
Listen to the the interview below:Dozens Killed In Egypt’s North Sinai
At least 30 soldiers have been killed and dozens injured as militants waged a series of attacks on military checkpoints in Egypt’s North Sinai, reported state radio, citing a government official. Meanwhile, the Egyptian Armed Forces has stated that 10 soldiers were killed. The Military added that 22 militants were eliminated and that five checkpoints had been attacked by more than 70 militants.
In an official statement released in the evening by the Egyptian Armed Forces, 17 Egyptian soldiers were reported killed, in addition to 13 more who were injured. The statement added that 100 militants have been killed, in addition to destroying 20 of the militants’ vehicles.
However, sources on the ground told Al-Qahera Al-Youm and Sky News Arabia that up to 60 may have been killed.
According to Al-Ahram, five military checkpoints were attacked by heavily armed militants. In an official statement, the Sinai Province militant group, previously known as Ansar Bait Al-Maqdis, a Sinai-based group that pledged allegiance to ISIS in 2014, has claimed responsibility for the attacks.
The attacks, which centered around a checkpoint in Sheikh Zuweid, have reportedly also killed a number of militants, reported Youm7.
Meanwhile, Al-Qahera Al-Youm reports that 10 civilians have been killed or injured in the attacks which were waged by up to 250 militants.
As Egyptians begun fasting, massive explosions and gunfire erupted in the Sheikh Zuweid area. At approximately 9:30AM, a large explosion rocked the area, reportedly the result of a suicide truck bomb, according to Youm7.
Unverified reports from Al-Masrsad Al-Sinawi, a Sinai-based news outlet, states that an Apache helicopter was hit by a militant missile and was forced to withdraw from the battlefield.
Hours after the massive attacks erupted in North Sinai, Israel closed off the Nitzana and Kerem Shalom border crossings into Egypt, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported.
Egypt’s North Sinai has witnessed a wave of attacks since the ouster of Morsi in July 2013. On Tuesday, two children were killed when a rocket reportedly fired by militants struck their home.
This story is developing.
Subscribe to our newsletterOn the reverse of an awesome "God Forgive Us" Walking Dead Poster, My Santa left me a note that reads.
Happy Halloween Casinojay! I did not draw this. I stole it off the Internet! I also stalked you on Facebook to get some ideas! There is something wrapped in those plastic bags, So don't forget to look inside! Yes, I made it for you! I Hope you like your gifts and have a great Halloween! Trick-or-Treat!! Bengy465 Inside my Present I found; 1. (1) SSSSSssssssuper Creepy Creeper! 2. (2) Durex Beer Cozies! 3. (2) Budweiser Beer Cozies! 4. (2) Super Silly Swirly Straws! [Say that five times fast] 5. (1) Light Up Duck "Canard Lumineux" 6. (1) Small Green GLOW IN THE DARK Skelington Rubber Duckie 7. (1) Tube Of Mini M&M's Halloween Style. 8. (12) Reese's Peanut butter cups 9. (39) Milky Way Caramel Apple Bars "Fun Size" 10.(1) Cadbury Scream Egg 11.(1) Walking Dead Poster
Thank you Bengy465, I Love the Creeper Canvas! Although I may have to find three more fiends to use my Beer Cozies for, I think We can Figure that one out! The walking Dead starts tomorrow I hope you'll Be watching it. I hope you had a-lot of fun trying to stalk me, And I hope you have a Happy Halloween. Thanks so much! You are awesome! This was my first exchange and I was Really looking forward to everything! I couldn't have asked for a better match!
CasinojayThis is truly the best ever vegan creamy broccoli cheese soup. Honest to goodness. It’s one of my all-time favorite recipes ever, and it’s won the praises of vegans and non-vegans alike. It’s made with all pure, whole foods, plant-powered ingredients, yet it’s just as savory, luxuriously creamy, buttery, salty, cheddar-y, and cheesy as the “original”. Seriously, we’re talking Panera-level delicious.
This post is sponsored by Manitoba Harvest. All thoughts, opinions, and love for their products are genuine and 100% my own.
I’ve been looking forward to sharing this recipe all week! But between book edits, work, and a healthy dose of downtime, it’s taken me a few days of chipping away at it to get it from recipe and photos to fully-formed post. You know that feeling when you finally sit down to do something you’ve been wanting to do and then you remember that you’re supposed to be doing 2-3 other things or it’s 11 pm which means you’re up past your bedtime? Well that’s what’s happened with this post on three separate occasions this week. Yikes!
But you know what? It’s completely okay because 1) balance (gimme all that work-life balance) and 2) this recipe is worth the wait. Plus, I now have half a week worth of soup noshing under my belt, so I can attest to the fact that this is one of those lovely soups that’s even tastier on days two and three than it is on the first.
This creamy broccoli cheese soup is far and away my favorite recipe of 2016 (thus far) as well as my favorite soup ever. Big, bold statements, I know.
What began as a determined attempt to make a great vegan broccoli cheese soup resulted in a great broccoli cheese soup period. And this opinion is guided by the wisdom of several dozen broccoli-cheddar-soup-in-a-bread-bowl experiences at Panera between the ages 16 and 18 (because that was the cool thing to do from ’00-’02). I think that might be enough contact hours to qualify me as an expert in broccoli cheese soup.
But truly, this soup is an absolute dream, and it’s everything a broccoli cheese soup should be and more. It’s savory, luxuriously creamy, buttery, salty, cheddar-y, cheesy, packed with broccoli, soul-satisfying (especially on a chilly winter’s day), and reheats like a charm. Plus, it’s made with all pure, plant-based ingredients that are 100% free from funny business (e.g., unwanted additives, preservatives, etc.). Less funny business = more room for the good stuff, like vitamins, minerals, etc. Long story short, this delectable, slurp-worthy vegan soup brings all of the flavor and way more good-for-your-bod vitamins and minerals without the undesirable junk.
Pretty soup-er, huh? So cheesy it hurts.
This pot of dreamy goodness comes together in a few simple steps + some occasionally stirring.
A base of sautéed onion and shallots is sprinkled with smoked paprika, sea salt, and pepper. Then, in goes the broccoli (lots of it), vegetable broth, and filtered water. You’ll bring everything to a boil and then reduce the heat, cover, and simmer for about 25 minutes.
While your soup base is simmering, you’ll prepare a velvety cheddar cheese sauce. Bring a separate pan of water to a boil, toss in 2 cups of cauliflower florets, and cook until they’re fork-tender. Strain off the water and add the tender cauliflower florets to a high-speed blender along with a 1/2 cup of Manitoba Harvest Hemp Hearts (i.e., shelled hemp seeds), roasted red peppers, nutritional yeast, arrowroot powder (to thicken), apple cider vinegar, and sea salt. Then, blend until you have a silky-smooth sauce. The cauliflower and hemp seeds offer a rich, buttery creaminess to the sauce as well as a vitamin, mineral, and protein boost (1/2 cup of Hemp Hearts offers nearly 27 grams of plant-based protein).
Once the soup has finished simmering and the broccoli florets are tender, you’ll stir the cheddar cheese sauce into the soup and continue to simmer for another 3-5 minutes to thicken. Then, you’ll stir in a splash of fresh lemon juice and low-sodium tamari. I cannot emphasize the importance of these two ingredients enough as they simultaneously balance, deepen, brighten, and intensify the flavors of the soup.
And that it’s. Ladle your soup into bowls, sprinkle with Hemp Hearts if you’d like, and sink your spoon (or your bread) into this creamy, cheesy soup.Hear a song “Where Does Time Go” taken from William Shatner’s album “Ponder the Mystery”, featuring George Duke and Billy Sherwood below (courtesy of Something Else! Reviews).
William Shatner is a film and TV icon with an intense passion for music which has yielded several solo records including the critically acclaimed Seeking Major Tom. This most recent solo record, Ponder the Mystery, which includes guest artists from the prog and fusion genres such as Rick Wakeman, Al DiMeola, Steve Vai, Robbie Krieger, Vince Gill, Edgar Winter, George Duke, Zoot Horn Rollo and Dave Koz to name a few), expands Shatner’s musical horizons due to the fact that all of the songs are original, written by Shatner and his musical partner in the project Billy Sherwood. The album will be released on both CD and vinyl on October 8, 2013.
This partnership of Shatner and Sherwood has created a vast and expansive artistic landscape for Shatner’s amazing gift of poetry while Sherwood composed the musical backdrop. The record is conceptual in nature: following a man in despair through the setting sun, twilight and finally darkness, and in the process, regains his joy of life.
Both Bills had a vision of taking the record to the stage and performing it live. When it came time to form the band for this event, Circa: was the obvious choice, Sherwood and Kaye have had a long running musical relationship playing on stage together with YES and forming Circa: in 2006. Circa: recently released a new album Live From Here There and Everywhere.
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PrintImage copyright Getty Images Image caption Dogan Akhanli's lawyer said it was ""unbelievable" that Turkey was "chasing critics abroad"
A German-Turkish writer who is a known critic of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been arrested in Spain.
Dogan Akhanli, who has written extensively on human rights in Turkey, was detained at the request of Turkish authorities in the city of Granada.
German Green MP Volker Beck said the move was politically motivated and that he had requested that Mr Akhanli should not be extradited to Turkey.
It is unclear on what grounds the arrest warrant was issued.
The move, Mr Beck said, showed that President Erdogan was prepared to "extend his power beyond his country's borders" to "intimidate and pursue [his critics] around the world".
Since a failed coup in July last year, tens of thousands of people have been arrested in Turkey - including officials, academics and journalists. Opposition media outlets have been closed down.
Mr Akhanli, 60, has written about the killing in 2007 of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink and the 1915 killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks, which was labelled as genocide by the German parliament last year.
His lawyer, Ilias Uyar, told Der Spiegel magazine that it was "unbelievable that Turkey is now simply chasing critical minds abroad".
In February Deniz Yucel, a German-Turkish journalist who works for Germany's Die Welt newspaper, was detained in Turkey over allegations of producing terrorist propaganda. He remains in police custody.
German-Turkish relations dipped to a new low on Friday when Germany accused Mr Erdogan of interference after he urged Turkish voters in Germany not to vote for the country's main parties.
Relations soured in March after Mr Erdogan accused German officials of acting like Nazis following Germany's cancellation of rallies among ethnic Turks ahead of a referendum on greater powers for the Turkish president.
Despite these tensions, the two countries remain major trade partners and allies in Nato.Get the biggest daily 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
IMAGINE, if you will, a real-life Earth-2 in which The Flash pilot is set to air yet instead of Candice Patton starring as Iris West, it’s someone else.
This unthinkable situation could have been a reality as the star of CW’s smash TV superhero series revealed she almost quit acting.
The 28-year-old Mississippi native admits things came perilously close to unfolding that way during the early days in her fledgling career. But she insists her love of the craft and the support of her parents helped her realise her dreams. And she’s not looking back.
Candice said: “I’m quite dramatic and emotional, so this was the only job where I wouldn’t get fired or be thought of as crazy.
“My parents have always advocated doing what I love to do. My dad has always said, ‘Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life’. It’s important for them to see me go fiercely after something I love. Even when I thought of quitting, they were vehemently against it.”
So what was it that sparked the thoughts of giving it up? Candice said: “After enough rejection, you get disheartened. I was certainly at a point where I was seriously thinking about doing something else. However, my parents were the voice of reason. I also didn’t have a plan B, so maybe that’s also why I didn’t quit.”
Thankfully, for everyone invested in the show of superheroes, meta-humans and the impact they have on the mortals of the world, Candice has made the role of Iris her own. A strong, intelligent African-American woman who knows when to after what she wants, or let things happen organically, the last we saw of Iris in season two, she was telling the Flash aka Barry Allen (played wonderfully by Grant Gustin) how she feels about him but lets him go off to fight his biggest battle.
Candice, who admits she didn’t read comics as a kid, insists it’s a dream to have been cast in the show and she’s relishing the story as it unfolds.
She said: “Iris is the Lois Lane of The Flash. It’s a really special role. Knowing they were willing to offer it to an African American – Iris is traditionally white – I knew how important this would be for so many people.
“The world in which we live is diverse and I think television and film should reflect that. It has been slow to do that but we’re lucky enough to have executive producers like Greg Berlanti, Andrew Kreisberg and Geoff Johns who are fearless in creating diverse TV. Fans really respond to that because our show looks like the world they live in.
“It’s been a dream. We have a really great cast and enjoy what we do. On top of all that, for it to be the success it has been has been quite magical. I’m really lucky that we’re going into the third season and that for two seasons we’ve been able to keep our fan-base.”
It’s evident while watching the show, which airs on Sky1 in the UK, that the cast are having a blast. There’s the funny and sweet tech guy Cisco Ramon (Carlos Valdes), the smart Caitlin Snow (Danielle Panabaker), protective father and cop Joe West (Jesse L Martin) and the mysterious Dr Harrison Wells (Tom Cavanagh). Even the introduction of Wally West aka Kid Flash (Kenyan Lonsdale) has been seamlessly executed.
During her audition to play Iris, Candice admits she set herself and Grant at ease by tickling him. That relaxed chemistry is reflected on screen and she says it also extends to their lives away from the set?
Candice said: “We have a lot of fun. We don’t take ourselves too seriously. When the cameras cut off, we’re all just joking around and playing card games, playing hackey sack. We see each other outside of work and keep up with what each other’s doing during the hiatus between seasons as well.”
In a universe full of people with bizarre and dangerous powers, is there any sign of Iris becoming a meta-human? Candice isn’t sure, but she’s delighted to be the human heart of the story.
She said: “I enjoy Iris being the human heart of the story. Her and Joe are the voice of the audience, who don’t have superpowers. I’m not in a rush to suit up. I wouldn’t turn it down, but it’s important to have the human heart element on a show like ours. Legends of Tomorrow is about the all-star team but ours is about living in a world full of superheroes when you’re a mere mortal.”
And what about the burgeoning relationship between Iris and Barry?
“I enjoy the will they-won’t they aspect of the story,” says Candice. “Whether they can drag that out, I don’t know. But we see that Grant and Iris are destined to be together. They always find each other. It’s important we didn’t rush the relationship. I’ve enjoyed watching that develop over time.”
The Flash season two is out on DVD and Blu-ray now.The beauty of Twitter is that even we don’t have to reward Gawker with a click to find out just what garbage it’s serving its readers that has them so appalled tonight. Journalists in particular are calling out the site for going well beyond the line, and even Gawker senior writer Adam Weinstein has tweeted that he had no part in the piece, nor would he have run it.
I had no part in this. I would not have chosen to run it as is. http://t.co/kHOz1YA87S — Adam Weinstein (@AdamWeinstein) July 17, 2015
@AdamWeinstein And yet you still work at Gawker and report to the guy who ran this story. — Ken Archer (@kenarchersf) July 17, 2015
@AdamWeinstein did you ask them not to run it? I mean, it has absolutely |
35; heterogeneity p=0·9).
For study-specific details and references, see appendix pp 7–10. Dotted lines represent totals for all prospective studies and, separately, for all retrospective studies. Study-specific results are arranged by study design and region; results are given for individual studies with the most statistical information (ie, with variance of log relative risk <0·03). Results for the remaining studies are grouped together here (and given separately for every study in appendix p 14 ). In comparisons of relative risks in prospective versus retrospective studies, overall heterogeneity p<0·0001; for European studies, heterogeneity p=0·4; and for North American studies, heterogeneity p=0·002. In a comparison of relative risks in prospective studies, Europe versus North American heterogeneity p=0·9; for retrospective studies, Europe versus North American heterogeneity p=0·04. References provided in the appendix. *Risk relative to never-users of hormone therapy, stratified by age at diagnosis, study, and body-mass index, and adjusted for age at menopause, hysterectomy, oral contraceptive use, and parity.
Risk was, however, also significantly increased in women who had been recent ex-users and would at the time of diagnosis have still have been within 5 years of last use (RR 1·23, 95% CI 1·09–1·37; p=0·0006 in prospective studies). Risk decreased the longer ago hormone therapy had last been used, although women who had used hormone therapy for at least 5 years (median duration 9 years) and then stopped were still at significantly increased risk more than 5 years (median time since last use 10 years) later (RR 1·10, 95% CI 1·01–1·20; p=0·02). For prospective and retrospective studies combined, the risks were similar to those in prospective studies alone, except that the risks in current users seemed to be somewhat smaller ( figure 2 appendix p 17 ).
Risk was strongly related to recency of use ( figure 2 ). In prospective studies, risk was greatest in women who when last asked had been current users (RR 1·41, 95% CI 1·32–1·50; p<0·0001). Among them, risk was substantial even in those who, at diagnosis, had less than 5 years (median duration 3 years) of hormone therapy use (RR 1·43, 95% CI 1·31–1·56; p<0·0001).
*Risk relative to never-users of hormone therapy, stratified by age at diagnosis, study, and body-mass index, and adjusted for age at menopause, hysterectomy, oral contraceptive use, and parity. p values are two-sided and include the effects of the group-specific variance in never-users.
Ovarian cancer risk was significantly greater in ever-users than in never-users of hormone therapy (RR 1·20, 95% CI 1·15–1·26, p<0·0001 for prospective studies; 1·14, 1·10–1·19, p<0·0001 for all studies combined; every study-specific result is provided in appendix p 12 ). Subsequent analyses were restricted to women with information both on duration of use and on time since last use of hormone therapy; this exclusion of studies without information on duration of use or time since last use slightly increased these RRs ( appendix p 13 ).
Overall information was provided for 21 488 postmenopausal women with ovarian cancer (cases) from 52 studies (17 prospective and 35 retrospective; appendix pp 7–10 ). The prospective studies contributed more than half of the cases (12 110), with mean diagnosis year 2001 (SD 6), 55% (6601) of whom had used hormone therapy, with median duration 6 years (IQR 2–10). By contrast, in the retrospective studies only 29% (2702) of the women had used hormone therapy, with median duration 4 years (IQR 1–10), and the mean diagnosis year was 1992 (SD 8), well before peak hormone therapy use ( figure 1 ).
Discussion
This collaboration brought together and analysed centrally individual data from 52 epidemiological studies, in which about half the postmenopausal women with ovarian cancer had used hormone therapy. Ovarian cancer risk was significantly increased in current users, even in those with less than 5 years hormone therapy use. In ex-users, risks decreased the longer ago hormone therapy use had ceased, but risks during the first few years after stopping remained appreciable. Furthermore, about a decade after ceasing long-duration hormone therapy use, there still seemed to be a small excess risk.
In current-or-recent users (all of whom had used hormone therapy within the past 5 years), the RRs did not differ significantly between users of oestrogen-only and of oestrogen-progestagen preparations, or between women who had started hormone therapy before the age of 50 years or during their 50s. The RR did, however, vary substantially by tumour type, being increased only for the two most common histological types, serous and endometrioid tumours. In analyses restricted to these two types, the excess risk about a decade after ceasing long duration hormone therapy use became more definite.
An important strength of prospective studies is that recruitment takes place and information about hormone therapy use is recorded before women know whether they will develop ovarian cancer. The robustness of prospective data is demonstrated by the stability of the findings in various sensitivity analyses, and by the similarity of the findings in Europe and North America. Prospective studies provided more than half the statistical information, so results for all studies (prospective and retrospective combined) were broadly similar to those for the prospective studies alone.
14 Collaborative Group on Epidemiological Studies of Ovarian Cancer Ovarian cancer and smoking: individual participant meta-analysis including 28 114 women with ovarian cancer from 51 epidemiological studies. 15 Collaborative Group on Epidemiological Studies of Ovarian Cancer Ovarian cancer and body size: individual participant meta-analysis including 25 157 women with ovarian cancer from 47 epidemiological studies. When the retrospective studies were assessed in isolation, their aggregate findings differed from those of the prospective studies, however, perhaps because of biases in some retrospective studies. Many retrospective study results could have been somewhat biased by selective participation of hormone therapy users, and in all retrospective studies information about hormone therapy use was recorded after cancer diagnosis, so there might have been differential recall of hormone therapy use. Moreover, some retrospective datasets in this collaboration have yielded apparently discrepant findings on the association of ovarian cancer risk with smokingand with body-mass index.
Almost all the worldwide evidence from eligible epidemiological studies was included in this meta-analysis. The three eligible studies that had published results but did not contribute data were all retrospective and North American, and had all reported increased risks of ovarian cancer associated with some aspect of hormone therapy use ( appendix p 5 ). Had they been included, the findings in North American retrospective studies might not have been as different from those in other groups of studies.
As long as current users and recent ex-users are combined together as current-or-recent users, there are fewer potential sources of bias in prospective than in retrospective studies, and there is now for the first time sufficient evidence from prospective studies alone for statistically stable meta-analyses. Hence, it is now possible to base the main conclusions on prospective study results.
16 Kurman RJ
Shih IeM Molecular pathogenesis and extra-ovarian origin of epithelial ovarian cancer—shifting the paradigm. 17 Collaborative Group on Epidemiological Studies of Ovarian Cancer Ovarian cancer and oral contraceptives: collaborative reanalysis of data from 45 epidemiological studies including 23 257 women with ovarian cancer and 87 303 controls. 14 Collaborative Group on Epidemiological Studies of Ovarian Cancer Ovarian cancer and smoking: individual participant meta-analysis including 28 114 women with ovarian cancer from 51 epidemiological studies. The overall relative risk for any type of ovarian cancer is the key public health outcome. There are, however, four main types of ovarian cancer, and in the prospective studies risk was definitely increased only for the two most common types, serous and endometrioid. Risk was possibly, although not definitely, decreased for the least common type, clear-cell tumours. Although tumour histology could have been classified in slightly different ways in different studies, any misclassification would tend to blur differences by tumour type, yet we noted distinctly heterogeneous RRs. This heterogeneity argues strongly for causality, because it implies that the hormone-therapy-associated risks were not due just to confounding and that different ovarian cancer types have differing causes. The reasons for this heterogeneity are unclear, partly because the sites of origin of the four main tumour types are uncertain.The dependence of risk on ovarian tumour type is quite different for other exposures; oral contraceptives decrease serous, endometrioid, and clear-cell but not mucinous tumours,whereas smoking decreases endometrioid and clear-cell but increases mucinous tumours.A new retro-styled puzzle game that can be played using the mind is on its way to the Ubuntu Software Center.
The 52-level strong puzzle game ‘Mind Labyrinth‘ is the first game on Linux to make use of the wireless Mindwave EEG headset from Neurosky.
With the headset connected and the game open, you will need to put your mind to work inorder to move obstacles, make gears work, and recover health points.
Although the makers of Mindwave don’t provide any ‘official’ support for Linux (or any software demos) the developers of MindLabyrinth, indie game studio ThinkSlow, tell me that the headset does work ‘out of the box’ in Ubuntu.
The Mindwave retails for $99/£99.
Playing Without Headset
If you don’t have a brain-powered controller (and there’s only a slim chance that you do) you don’t have to miss out as Mind Labyrinth can be played using a bog-standard mouse.
In this mode the game feels a little too simplistic; you simply walk a character to a ‘goal’ point by clicking. Admittedly as you progress through levels this becomes a tad tricker, but overall it presents nothing that would tax – or entertain – ardent gamers.
Download a Demo
Although I’ve no word on price the game has already been submitted to the Ubuntu Software Center, so expect to see it available to buy/install shortly.
A demo version of the game can be downloaded by hitting the link below, and further information on the game and the team behind it can be found on the ThinkSlow website.
Download Mind Labyrinth DemoIn 2008, when Barack Obama was elected to be America's first black president, there was an enormous wave of self-congratulatory rhetoric—rhetoric which ignored a mounting body of evidence of growing barriers to black voting rights. The viciousness of the backlash to Obama's presidency was something this rhetoric of progress was not prepared to make sense of. Indeed, in 2013, in Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court struck down a key part of the Voting Rights Act, first passed in 1965, without which Obama could never even had dreamed of running for president.
Although Black Americans were first promised the vote by the 15th Amendment, ratified in 1870, that promise had been effectively nullified by a combination of racial terrorism and political oppression until the passage of the Voting Rights Act first began to create the real possibility of a multi-racial democracy in America. The story of that promise—how the VRA came to be, the struggle to expand its effectiveness, and the mounting backlash against—is the subject of "Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America," a new book by Ari Berman, a political correspondent for The Nation.
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Berman has spent years reporting from the front lines of the ongoing voting rights struggle. His book incorporates much of that frontline detail into a historical framework that helps makes sense of it -- but only to a limited extent, since the history involved is still being written, and Berman's readers may well play a significant role in shaping how it ultimately turns out. More than a passive history, this is a book which takes readers inside the living struggles that are still being fought out, as intensely now as at any other time in our history. To understand the stakes, you must understand the history. As an introduction to that history, Salon sat down for an interview with Berman, to begin exploring what he's found.
History is often told with a sense of inevitability, with a strong tendency, particularly in American history, to tell it is a story of progress. But your book, "Give Us the Ballot," makes clear that that's not really the pattern with the history of the right to vote, even after the election of our first black president. How should the story you tell be understood, and why should it be understood that way?
I think it's a story of remarkable progress, but one that's always followed by a very significant backlash. And that's not only the history of [the expansion of] voting rights in our country, but it's the history of the 50 years since the passage of the Voting Rights Act. Whenever there is a remarkable achievement -- the Supreme Court upholding the constitutionality of the VRA, or the election of the first black president—it's always met by a backlash that's even more significant than the previous backlash. So what I've realized from my research is that as the reach of the VRA has expanded, and the impact of the law has expanded, the backlash to it has grown.
The Voting Rights Act is central to the story you tell. What's the most important thing for us to know about initial passage? And what's least understood about it?
I think what's most important to understand about its passage is that the law worked -- that it really did significantly deal with the problem of voting discrimination in the South. It got rid of literacy tests. It led to the abolition of the poll tax. It led to the registration of millions of African American voters and then millions of voters more broadly.
We're always being told of cases where laws don't work, right? The health care law for example. [But] this law really worked. It was a remarkably complex undertaking that I think represented government and the country at its best, and one that had an impact not only in 1965, but it had an impact five decades later. So it really should be thought of in the pantheon of the most important laws passed by Congress. What's least understood about the act is its relevance today, and how persistent the backlash to the law was, and remains.
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While the VRA forms the spine of your story, the story begins before that, with the March from Selma to Montgomery, and it ends with the ongoing Moral Mondays movement in North Carolina, and the prospect of that movement spreading further. What can you tell us about those organizing efforts and their significance?
The Selma organizing efforts were remarkable, because after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, many were pessimistic [about the prospects for] a Voting Rights Act. And indeed, LBJ... even though he wanted to do the VRA, he had told Martin Luther King that he was going to have to wait, that other issues in Congress were more pressing. What the organizing in Selma did, most notably the march on Bloody Sunday, was dramatically hasten the passage of the VRA, and also rally the public that there needed to be this law ASAP.
People who were saying, “Well, this is great, but it doesn't need to happen now,” or any number of arguments for why there couldn't a Voting Rights Act -- all those arguments were essentially obliterated by the violence in Selma. Everyone knew that there had to be a VRA, and there had to be one as soon as possible, or else there was going to be more violence, and more death, and more discrimination.
[In the present day,] the organizing I think in North Carolina around Moral Mondays was so important because there had been, since the 2010 election, a widespread effort to make it harder to vote, and those efforts intensified after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. And what people in North Carolina did, more significantly than anywhere else, is they stood up and said, “We're not going to take it anymore. We're not going to take this lying down. You can't just taking away our voting right and think that were not going to do anything about it.” Whereas the laws had been challenged in other states, primarily in the courts, here they were challenged on the streets, like had been done in the '60s. They were trying to dramatize to the public what these laws meant.
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Even though the situation in North Carolina was significantly better than the situation in Selma, there was a similar need to go to the street to do civil disobedience, so that people could know the stakes of the issue, and understand that something had to change.
After the voting rights act was passed, it was renewed in 1970, 1975, 1982 and 2006 -- each time with a Republican president, and the GOP administration initially opposed it to some degree or another. Yet in each case, the law ended up being strengthened. What happened?
That's a great point, and that might be the least understood part of the VRA right there, you just mentioned. I don't think people realize just how bipartisan this law really was, and how many attempts there were to gut it, and how those attempts didn't succeed until 2013. Basically what happened was there was incredibly strong bipartisan consensus in Congress for the VRA, and there were always Republicans who were willing to battle their own party to get this thing passed. You see that with Congress standing up to Richard Nixon in 1970, and they stood up to Gerald Ford in 1975, they stood up to Ronald Reagan in 1982, and to some extent they stood up to the George W. Bush in 2006. And I think that's because -- well Antonin Scalia will tell you that's because the law led to a perpetuation of racial entitlement -- but I think that there was strong bipartisan consensus because there were Republicans that understood how important this law was, and they were proud of the fact that Congress had passed it. And they realize that if they didn't do something, it was going to hurt their party -- hurt their party with black voters and other voters -- but it was also going to hurt a law that they were part of. Republicans were an integral part of this law from the very beginning, and that they were going to turn their back on one of the better parts of their history.
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Now Republicans don't seem to care that they're turning their back on that historic law that they helped pass and reauthorize. And they don't seem to care that they'll be hurt with black voters, because they don't believe that black voters are going to vote for them to begin with.
There are a lot of heroes in your book, both well-known and obscure, but the most pervasive presence in the story is that of civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis. What should people know about him and the role he played?
I think John Lewis is such an important character because he been in the struggle since 1965. So many people in the civil rights movement either passed away, or went on to other things. or lost interest in the voting rights fight. But John Lewis has been involved ever since 1965, And I think that's what makes him such a compelling character, that he's lived this in the late '60s, in the '70s, in the '80 and the '90s; he's been there for the darkest days of the country's history, and he's been there for the best moments in the country's history, and he has played an integral role all throughout the process. I really don't think there would be a Voting Rights Act without John Lewis, and I don't think it would've been reauthorized four times, and understood to be so powerful, without him. I think he is the most powerful living testimony to what the act did.
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The contested 2000 election in Florida had a great many flaws but you point out that black voter disenfranchisement was one of the biggest stories involved, and one of the least reported. What happened there? And why is so important for us to understand?
There was a voter purge in Florida. The state told county supervisors to purge felons who were supposedly on the voting rolls. The purge list that was given to the county supervisors ended up being disproportionately African-American, and it was littered with errors, which means that African-Americans were disproportionately wrongly removed from the voting rolls.
That is the key impact for two reasons: Number one, it could have cost Al Gore the election. There were thousands of potential voters who were turned away from the polls. They were overwhelmingly Gore voters, so just in the grand scheme of things, that voter purge led to George W. Bush's election. The second huge impact of it was that I think Republicans realized after Florida that small manipulations in the electoral process could make a big difference. So Florida inspired similar efforts in Ohio in 2004, and across the country once the Tea Party took over the states post-2010.
It wasn't just voter purging, it was drastically expanded efforts to require government-issued ID, to cut early voting, to eliminate same-day registration, all of which was done to try to shape an electorate that was more conservative, more Republican, then before. Florida [in 2000] was pivotal in changing the direction of voting rights in this country. Had Gore won, we wouldn't have had the Supreme Court that gutted the Voting Rights Act; we probably wouldn't have had all this voter disenfranchisement after going forward. So I think it represented, in the modern history of our country, a really disturbing turning point.
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There was also, at the same time, an election controversy in Missouri that fed into a subsequent history of struggle in the Civil Rights Division of the Bush Justice Department. What can you tell us about that?
Missouri was similar to what happened in Florida, but even less understood. In St. Louis, the board of election, before the election, sent out voter registration cards to all these people [whose] addresses that came back as undeliverable; or, for one reason or another, people didn't get their mail, and those voters were just removed from the voting rolls, without actually being notified that they were being removed from the voting rolls. In a lot of cases, just like the voter purge in Florida, the addresses were wrong. So I would have a voter registration card sent somewhere where I didn't live, and I would be taken off the rolls, and I wouldn't be notified about it. So what happened was all these voters on election day showed up at their polling places, to find out that they weren't on the rolls. They were sent down to the board of election, it was total chaos, and a lot of people weren't able to vote.
The Gore campaign, on election day, filed a petition for the polls to stay open three hours later in St. Louis. That order was initially granted, and then rescinded by the Court of Appeal shortly after that. The Bush campaign and Missouri Republicans were furious that the polls have been kept open, and they viewed it as an attempt to oust Missouri Senator John Ashcroft who was running for reelection. Ashcroft was running against Mel Carnahan, who died in a plane crash three weeks earlier, and Carnahan's wife ran against Ashcroft instead, and Ashcroft lost. So Missouri Republicans said, “Wait, John Ashcroft's lost to a dead man? How can this be? There must be rampant voter fraud. It must be related to the polls being kept open.”
There was a lot of talk about voter fraud among the St. Louis Republicans, and what happened was two months after the election Ashcroft was nominated to be Bush's attorney general, and he did a radical restructuring of the Civil Rights Division, which had enforced the VRA since its passage. People who were very hostile to the VRA were suddenly put in very high positions in the Civil Rights Division in the Bush Justice Department, and they made a systematic effort to try and gut the act.
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Could you talk about that effort in terms of how that played out? Like one or two examples that would be easy for people to understand more concretely?
I think the most prominent example was Georgia's voter ID law.
Georgia was one of those states that had to approve its voting changes with the federal government, based on the history of voter discrimination dating back to the '60s and '70s, and obviously well before that. So Georgia had to submit its voter ID law, which was one of the first of its kind, for federal approval. And there was clear data that African-Americans were more likely than whites to not have a government-issued ID, and there was also internal review done by the Justice Department where four of five lawyers objected to the law being approved. But what happened was the political appointees in the Justice Department who served under John Ashcroft pushed very hard for the voter-ID law to be approved, and it was subsequently approved, even though there was all this clear evidence—both internally and based on the data—that it should of been blocked.
That really set a chilling precedent for voting rights, because here you have the federal government, which had this special authority clearing a law that was discriminatory, and that was going to lead to more laws in the future. So it set a precedent for more the laws to be passed, and I think it represented the politicization and corruption of this process. The civil rights division had always been viewed as an honest broker when it came to enforcing the Voting Rights Act; and now instead, its reputation was that it had become an instrument, a partisan instrument for the Republicans.
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In the book you talk about Lani Guinier. She had, I think, one of the most insightful analyses of the voting rights struggle in terms of the three different levels on which that struggle plays out. Could you go that a little bit and the light it throws onto the nature of the struggle involved with the voting rights act overall?
Lani had been a civil rights lawyer for many years, and she was nominated to be Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights by Bill Clinton in 1993, and Lani after she was civil rights lawyer became a professor at Penn, and she started writing a lot of articles that dealt with that next phase of the voting rights.
Basically she argued that the first phase of the Voting Rights Act knocked down the barrier that had prevented African-American and others groups from being able to register to vote. The second phase of the voting rights struggle had knocked down the discriminatory electoral systems that prevented African-American and other minority groups from actually being able to win elected office, and that was the major fight in the '70s and '80s and '90s. And then, Guinier said, there needs to be a new phase, and the new phase has to be giving people a fair share of political power.
It's not enough to have someone elected, you actually have to create mechanisms so that they can actually have real power once they're elected. For example, say you have a five person counsel and you elected two African-Americans. Well, if the white majority always voted 3-2 against the African-American members, the African-American members didn't have a lot of power. So that's what Lani was trying to get at. Instead of the Congress engaging with her ideas, she was demonized by the right as a "quota queen." So there was not a serious discussion of the remedies that she was proposing, because people were so concerned that she was going to mandate affirmative action in the electoral sphere. That was really a low point, I think for Congress in the broader public engagement with voting right and the VRA.
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Turning to John Roberts: He was involved in fighting the VRA in 1982, but when he was confirmed for Chief Justice he pretended to accept it. How do his words and deeds compare?
Roberts was a very important foot soldier, in the Reagan Justice Department, in fighting the 1982 re-authorization of the VRA. There was a culture at that time of hostility towards the VRA and civil rights laws more broadly, and Roberts was at the forefront of that as a very influential special assistant to the Attorney General in the early 1980s. He'd also clerked before that for Justice William Rehnquist, who was, I think, the foremost opponent at the time on the Supreme Court of civil rights laws, and the Voting Rights Act in particular. So, Roberts had a history here.
When he was nominated as a Supreme Court justice, basically what Roberts told the Congress was that he had no agenda, that he believed the vote was preservative of all other rights, and that he didn't have a problem with constitutionality of the VRA in 1982, which he fought, and that if the law came up again, he would address it with an open mind. And I think it became very clear when the Voting Rights Act came before the court, first in the 2009 challenge, and then in the 2013 challenge, that Roberts definitely had an agenda. That he was still very hostile to this voting rights law, and he was going to do anything he could find to find a way to gut it.
I think he is someone who is extremely ideological when it comes to the voting rights act and civil rights laws more broadly. I think he wants to overturn the civil rights laws of the 1960s as much as we can. I think that is [one of his] foremost agendas on the court. So I think he was very dishonest in his testimony to the Congress on this.
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One of the major talking points to emerge out of the election in Florida in 2000 was that military service members were being disenfranchised, and it was something Republicans put a lot of energy into publicize and railing against but you provide several striking example of veterans and active-duty military being denied the right to vote. How common is this and what are we to make of that?
I think what we're seeing is that new restrictions are affecting everyone, I think their intended effect is at the core of Obama's coalition, and I think in particular younger voters, minority voters, women voters. What we're also seeing is that it's hitting some of the GOP's coalition—elderly voters, military voters.
Military voters move around a lot, so when voting laws change, they can be caught in the crosshairs. For example in North Carolina, you have people who move from where they're stationed at a base, to where they live afterwards; they go to the polls to update their registration, like they could have done previously, and now they can't update the registration anymore, and they can't vote. So we've seen this story repeatedly in North Carolina, where military veterans were disenfranchised by the process.
I think people should realize from these stories that these laws are more widespread than you think, they really can affect everybody, and it's not just a small percentage of the voters that are potentially affected by these changes.
History books, even of books of the contemporaneous, usually have a strong sense of closure, but your book most definitely does not. Why is that and what does it tell us?
Well, I wish that it had a sense of closure, but unfortunately the period that I'm writing about, at the end, remains very unsettled. So I tried to do two things with the book: I tried to write about the documented history as much as possible, in the decades after the VRA, while saying at the end that there's a big fight about voting rights happening now, and we don't know how it's going to play out.
For now we have to accept this uncertainty, and I realize that's an unsatisfying ending. But that's the only ending there could have been.Finally, pitchers and catchers are set to report this week to spring training. The wait for baseball season is nearly over, and with that comes projections for the 2016 season.
Using a series of variables for its projections, USA Today is pegging the Cubs as baseball’s best team, with 101 wins in 2016. Tied for the best record in the American League are the White Sox, posted to win 90 wins for the season.
The article believes that the Cubs are baseball’s most complete team, following a run to 97 wins and the NLCS in 2015. The White Sox are coming off a disappointing 2015 season in which a roster built to win faltered. The one-two punch of pitchers Chris Sale and Jose Quintana can carry the White Sox and a revamped lineup with All-Star third baseman Todd Frazier, according to USA Today.
The Cardinals are projected to have the second-best record at 97 wins. The other division winners include the Red Sox, Astros, Nationals and Giants, with Houston and San Francisco tied with the White Sox for baseball’s third-best record at 90-72.“Was this attack evidence of how vicious American politics has become? Probably. In 2011, when Jared Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords (D-Arizona) and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl, the link to political incitement was clear. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under a picture of stylized crosshairs. Conservatives and right-wing media were quick on Wednesday [note: in the aftermath of the shooting of Congressman Steve Scalise (R-La.)] to demand forceful condemnation of hate speech and crimes by anti-Trump liberals. They’re right. Though there’s no sign of incitement as direct as in the Giffords attack, liberals should of course hold themselves to the same standard of decency that they ask for of the right.” (Emphasis added.) — New York Times
These are the words published by the New York Times that precipitated a defamation lawsuit by former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, and they vividly illustrate how the Left regularly uses a double standard in order to trash conservatives, though saying in an editorial that liberals should “hold themselves to the same standard of decency that they ask for of the right.”
The comments about Palin are part of a pattern of left-wing invective against her, in particular, and against conservative women or minorities in general, that tends to go beyond the usual character assassination often employed against conservative personalities. For example, David Letterman opened his Late Show a few years ago with a “joke” that Palin’s 14-year-old daughter had been raped at Yankee Stadium. No one believes that any such “joke” would have been told by Letterman or any other liberal comedian about a liberal female politician, or one of the daughters of President Barack Obama.
But the Left saw a conservative political woman as a threat to their political base, and therefore her reputation had to be shredded. And, for instance, a similar effort was made against a man — Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas — for the same reason.
The Times’ editorial is the latest incarnation of this pattern of antagonism from the Left against Palin. In the aftermath of the clear political assault on Republican members of Congress who were at baseball practice in Alexandria, Virginia, for the upcoming charity congressional baseball game against their Democratic Party colleagues, the Left was understandably concerned about the negative public-relations implications. The shooter was a known activist for socialist Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who had set out to assassinate Republican members of Congress as a political act.
In response, the Times resurrected the 2011 shooting of Giffords so as to compare with the shooting of Scalise by a Bernie Sanders supporter, with the effect of diminishing those negative effects upon the Left. It would be unfair to blame Sanders for what one of his supporters did (although Sanders was among those on the Left back in 2011 to accuse the Tea Party of inciting Loughner’s rampage). And of course, the Times did not blame Sanders.
On the other hand, the Times asserted a “clear” and “direct” link between the political action committee of Sarah Palin and the shooting of Giffords by Loughner. The newspaper cited a map put out by the Palin camp of “targeted” electoral districts that put Giffords and 19 other Democrats under “stylized cross hairs.” A reader could reasonably infer from reading the Times editorial that Loughner was inspired by those “cross hairs” to shoot one of the Democrat members of Congress — in this case, Giffords.
The evidence, however, is actually clear that Loughner did not even know about what Palin’s political action committee had posted. As the Washington Post wrote, “Loughner had no clear political views. Instead he was a troubled man who abused alcohol and drugs, and whose mental illness was apparent to his classmates and family.” People who knew him described him as either “apolitical,” or “quite liberal.”
In the legal filing by Palin’s lawyers, they argue, “The defamatory statements in the Palin article constitute defamation per se because they tended to injure Mrs. Palin in her trade, business, profession and directly implicated Mrs. Palin in a horrific crime; specifically, that she incited a politically motivated attack and murder of innocent victims.”
Defamation per se occurs when someone falsely states or writes something about another person that is already an established criteria as damaging to the person’s reputation — accusing someone of having been convicted of a crime when they have not, for example, would constitute defamation per se. In other cases, the plaintiff also has to prove that the words were damaging to his or her reputation, not just that the defendant said them, knowing that they were false.
Showing damage is one of the elements in being able to win a monetary judgment in a defamation case. For example, just because one person says something demonstrably false about another person does not make it defamatory — called slander if spoken and libel if written. If someone mistakenly stated that an actor won an Oscar in 1987, when they were only nominated for the award, that, of course, would not be defamatory.
Another hurdle that Palin must clear to win against the Times is proving actual malice — that is, that the newspaper knew that what they wrote about Palin was false. In the lawsuit filing, Palin's attorneys wrote, “The Times['] conduct was committed knowingly, intentionally, willfully, wantonly and maliciously with the intent to harm Mrs. Palin, or in blatant disregard of the substantial likelihood of causing her harm.”
The reason that Palin will have to prove either malice or “reckless disregard for the truth” is due to the 1964 Supreme Court ruling New York Times v. Sullivan. In that ruling, the court held that, as a public figure, a person claiming defamation must prove not only that the statements were false and damaging, but that the person making the statements knew they were false, or had a reckless disregard for the |
and assembled on, fairly remote mountain tops. OWL’s components were designed to be shipped in standard shipping containers, which simplified that aspect of its construction.
In fact, OWL could have begun operation before all of its mirrors were in place, and would have grown in power as more mirror segments were built and integrated. (Other telescopes, like the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) will be in operation before all of the mirrors are installed.)
In the end, OWL’s cost became too great, and the project was cancelled. The ESO moved on to the 39.3 meter European Extremely Large Telescope. But all of the work done on the design of OWL was not lost.
Everything that we learn about telescope design trickles down to our next-generation of telescopes. That’s true whether designs like OWL get built or not. We’ll just keep building on our success, and keep building larger and more powerful telescopes.
The adaptive optics that OWL required were a challenge. But huge advances have been made on that front. And in the way of things, the manufacturing costs have likely come down as well.
OWL itself may never be built, but other ‘scopes are on the way. Telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope, the Giant Magellan Telescope, and the European Extremely Large Telescope hold the same promise that OWL did.
And in the end, the contributions of those and other ‘scopes might surpass those promised by OWL.OxyContin pills are arranged for a photo at a pharmacy in Montpelier, Vt. on Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2013. (Photo11: Toby Talbot, AP)
The Food and Drug Administration has approved the powerful narcotic painkiller OxyContin for children as young as 11. While doctors who treat young cancer patients hailed the approval, others expressed concern that prescribing OxyContin to children could put them at risk for addiction.
OxyContin, an extended-release version of the painkiller oxycodone, has gained notoriety in recent years because of its frequent abuse. People addicted to painkillers crush the pills so that they can be snorted or injected, producing a powerful high.
In 2010, Purdue Pharma reformulated OxyContin to make it more difficult to abuse.
The FDA notes that children generally have many fewer options for pain relief than adults. Because of that problem, the FDA asked Purdue to perform studies to see if the drug could be used safely in children ages 11 to 16 with pain caused by cancer, trauma or major surgery, said Sharon Hertz, a physician with the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, in an interview on the agency's website.
The FDA approved OxyContin for children this age who need "daily, round-the-clock, long-term" pain relief for which there is no alternative, Hertz said. Doctors should only prescribe OxyContin in children who have already been treated with opiate painkillers and who can tolerate at least 20 milligrams a day of oxycodone.
Other than OxyContin, the only other long-acting painkiller approved for children is Duragesic, also known as fentanyl, Hertz said.
"Children are not treated with opioids very often and usually it's only for a limited period of time with close supervision by health care professionals," Hertz said. "Fewer daily doses may free patients for physical therapy appointments, allow them to go home from the hospital sooner and may help them to sleep through the night without waking up."
Doctors who treat pediatric cancer patients hailed the approval as a way to ease children's suffering. Children at the end of life aren't at risk of addiction.
Having additional long-acting painkillers "is going to be tremendously helpful for treating children with cancer pain or pain at the end of life," said Justin Baker, pediatric oncologist and hospice and palliative medicine doctor at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Long-acting medications prevent breakthrough pain, so that youngsters can feel comfortable and "focus their energy on being a kid instead of fighting their pain," Baker said.
But prescribing OxyContin to youngsters with short-term medical needs could be put them at risk for developing an addiction that haunts them long after they leave the hospital, said Andrew Kolodny, director of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing. Teens are at higher risk of addiction than adults because the brain doesn't mature until about age 25. Studies show that about one in 25 high school seniors has abused OxyContin, said Scott Hadland, a specialist in adolescent medicine and substance abuse treatment at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
"Among adolescents who are prescribed OxyContin, a small but significant number are going to become addicted," Hadland said.
The number of prescription painkillers sold in the USA has quadrupled since 1999, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than 44,000 Americans die of drug overdoses each year. Some people who become addicted to prescription painkillers switch to using heroin, which has become cheaper and easier to access than OxyContin.
Kolodny said it's concerning that the FDA approved OxyContin for children without appointing an advisory panel to discuss the risks and benefits, a process traditionally used when the agency faces a controversial decision.
Hadland said doctors need to take special precautions when dispensing painkillers, such as prescribing limited amounts, so that people don't end up with extra pills that they don't need. Doctors should screen patients for drug and alcohol abuse before prescribing OxyContin, Hadland said. And doctors should check their state's prescription drug monitoring program, which allows them to see if patients have already received painkillers from other doctors.
Parents should be in charge of giving children the medication, instead of allowing teens to administer their own painkillers, Hadland said. Parents should keep painkillers locked away at all other time.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1NuMZFNSplit Stack Development Model
Split stack development is an architecture pattern that separates front-end and back-end development into two separate “stacks” which function independently and communicate through an API.
Independent Stacks
By decoupling front-end and back-end development you eliminate any restraints on technology choices that each may have imposed on the other. This results in completely independent stacks used on the client and the server. For example, you could build the back-end using PHP or JAVA whilst the front-end could be built using Angular or React, a stack that was difficult to achieve previously.
Simultaneous Development
With front-end and back-end split we not only allow both layers to be developed independently, but also simultaneously. Because neither stack is reliant on the other, they can be developed at the same time. At the beginning of a project the API structure is outlined giving clear visibility on how both the front-end and back-end will communicate.
“Content can be driven into the front-end application without any back-end framework in place”
Once this is defined, the front-end can be populated using ‘mock data’ to simulate the API. This means that content can be driven into the front-end application without any back-end framework in place.
The same benefits are also true for the back-end. As requirements won’t consist of any presentation elements, development can be started and completed without actually being bound to a view layer.
Once both the front-end and back-end have been built, the API endpoints are married up and live data is passed between the two.
Skilled Working Environments
As a front-end developer, one of my biggest pain points when joining a project is setting up the development environment. This can be be for a hundred different reasons, but more too often than not, it involves database setups or server configurations, a domain which is not part of my expertise. These are back-end development issues, which a front-end developer shouldn’t have to deal with or try to resolve.
Front-end and back-end developers are different beasts with completely different skill-sets and they shouldn’t have to setup or work within each other’s environments.
By having seperate stacks, you eliminate this problem and allow developers to work solely with code and configurations that they are accustomed to, thus allowing them to understand problems, resolve issues and focus on their part of the development project. This allows back-end developers to get on with using server-side technologies to build high performance, robust architectures, whilst front-end developers can focus solely on user experience and visual design.By Captain Pyke | July 21, 2012 - 10:45 pm
It blows my mind to think that Star Trek: The Next Generation's pilot episode "Encounter at Farpoint" debuted nearly 25 years ago. I can vividly remember watching it Saturday night on a console TV in our game room. Everyone else in my family wanted to watch 227 or some other 80's sitcom abomination, so I was relegated to our old TV next to the ping pong table. I was fascinated by "Farpoint" and was quickly hooked on the new series. Sure, it was a little rough the first few seasons, but there were still gem episodes that captured my young imagination.
Jonathan Frakes recently talked to Newsday.com and recalls the cast as being green: "We were so green and tentative in terms of our interrelationships.... I was told by "Star Trek" creator Gene] Roddenberry that he wanted Riker to be like Gary Cooper -- a Midwestern glint, no smiling, all about honor and duty. That was fine for the character, but it was a strange, limiting box for me as an actor because I'm a little more flamboyant "
He also vividly remembers the fan reaction to TNG: "Oh, the incredible skepticism. I was not aware of the cultural phenomenon that "Star Trek" was when I first got the job. I quickly learned because the Kirk-Spock-and-Bones "Star Trek," and that triangle, the magic of that ironic, sarcastic relationship that developed on that show" Jonathan continues: " When we were finally on our third or fourth season, when we'd found our rhythm, the audience began to find room in their hearts for both shows."
We're looking forward to hearing more about the launch of TNG from the rest of the cast at Austin Comic Con later this year. Hopefully the 25th anniversary will jog memories and reveal unheard stories of the early days on the Enterprise-D. In the meantime, you can check out Jonathan's full interview over at Newsday.com.
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For the purposes of this graph, the Center for Economic and Policy Research defines a “good job” as one that includes health insurance and retirement benefits and pays at least as much as the median wage, adjusted for inflation, earned by a male worker in 1979. ($12,300 per year back then and $37,000 per year today.) Kind of sad, isn’t it?
Note that there is a conspicuous partisan trend in the graph: The number of good jobs fell during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush years, rebounded during the Clinton years, and fell again during the administration of George W. Bush. Good jobs haven’t made much of a comeback during the Obama administration, but he inherited an economy from his predecessor that’s still fighting it’s way out of a catastrophic meltdown.
Democrats and Republicans tend to agree that creating more good jobs requires building a more educated workforce. Unfortunately, the fortunes of college-educated workers haven’t really improved over the past 30 years either; they’ve just eroded more slowly:
So what’s going on here? As we’ve often pointed out on Mother Jones, the travails of the American middle class hinge on a variety of interrelated factors, including automation, the decline of labor unions, globalization, and the Federal Reserve‘s monetary policy, to name a few. The Center for Economic and Policy Research also points out out that the minimum wage today, adjusted for inflation, is 15 percent below what it was in 1979. Who ever thought that the era of bell bottoms and the Bee Gees would be considered the good old days?The province’s police watchdog is investigating after a 45-year-old man was found dead outside a Woodstock, Ont. hospital after a police officer spoke to him over the phone. The Special Investigations Unit looks into cases involving police where there’s been death, sexual assault or serious injury. The agency didn’t reveal details about the circumstances of the man’s death, nor did it explain how police may have allegedly played a role.
The SIU is investigating after a man was found dead in Woodstock, Ont. on Friday. ( Rene Johnston / Toronto Star file photo )
The Ontario Provincial Police asked Woodstock police for help finding the man on Wednesday, said the SIU in a press release Friday. A Woodstock Police Service officer was able to reach the man by phone, the SIU said. The press release didn’t clarify when the phone call happened, and the SIU wasn’t immediately available for comment. The man was found inside a parked car outside Woodstock General Hospital at about 7:30 a.m. Friday. He was pronounced dead at the scene, said the SIU.
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The unit said it was investigating one subject officer and speaking with four witness officers. All are from the Woodstock Police Service. The agency has assigned three investigators and two forensic investigators to the case. Investigators are asking anyone with information to contact them at 1-800-787-8529, or to upload any video of the incident through the SIU website.
Read more about:Lloyd Blankfein is North America's best-paid bank CEO -- and also one of its most overpaid, according to a new report.
The bearded Goldman Sachs chieftain made $26 million last year, a 73 percent pay raise from a year earlier, putting him atop the list of CEOs of the 20 biggest North American banks, according to a report that will be in the July issue of Bloomberg Markets magazine.
That's a lot of calamari! But Blankfein is also the second-most overpaid bank CEO on the magazine's list, after Capital One Financial's Richard Fairbank, who made $17.5 million last year.
The pinpoint accuracy of the "overpaid/underpaid" ranking is up for debate, certainly. Bloomberg Markets judges how over- or underpaid bank CEOs are by comparing their ranking on the pay list to their ranking in returns and profitability. The results are sometimes unclear. For example, there is actually not that much difference between the pay and performance of Capital One's Fairbank and the list's only perfectly paid CEO, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase. Dimon, it is worth noting, might have been considered more overpaid had he not taken a 50 percent pay cut to $11.5 million last year because of his bank's embarrassing London Whale losses. Bank of America's Brian Moynihan, who made $12 million, was rated "overpaid" even though his bank returned 110 percent to shareholders last year (though the bank's return on equity was thin).
Some would argue that all of these bank CEOs are overpaid. The saddest banker on the list, M&T Bank's Robert Wilmers, raked in $4 million last year, a significant raise for 99.9 percent of Americans.
The counter-argument is that these bankers deserve their pay because they contribute to society by providing capital to the economy, when they are not fleecing the muppets. Goldman Sachs, in particular, has started awarding its jaw-droppingly huge bonuses based partly on how well bankers protect the firm's reputation, Bloomberg reported recently. Muppet-fleecing is out, muppet-pampering is in.
But even from this non-communist viewpoint, the pay of some of these bankers doesn't always make sense. Blankfein's pay, for example, got the stinkeye earlier this month from shareholder advisory firm Glass Lewis, which said Goldman paid its CEO in a random way that "failed to link pay with performance."
Of course, shareholders ignored this advice, just as JPMorgan shareholders ignored Glass Lewis' advice that they strip Dimon of his chairmanship there. As long as the stock prices of these banks are going up -- and they were the best-performing stocks in the market last year, despite wave after wave of scandals -- shareholders are going to be just fine with CEO pay.LONDON (Reuters) - Sedatives and sleeping pills prescribed to ease depression, anxiety and sleep problems appear to increase the risk of suicide four-fold among the elderly, Swedish researchers said on Wednesday.
A young carer holds the hands of an elderly woman in a residential home for the elderly in Planegg near Munich June 19, 2007. REUTERS/Michaela Rehle
A review of elderly Suicides in the Swedish city of Gothenburg and two nearby counties showed that antidepressants, antipsychotics, sedatives and hypnotics appeared to make it more likely an older person would commit suicide.
While research has linked use of these drugs to suicides among younger people, there had also been evidence the pills may reduce the risk in the elderly, Anders Carlsten and Margda Waern of Gothenburg University reported in the BioMed Centraljournal BMC Geriatrics.
They reviewed the records of 85 men and women older than 65 who had committed suicide and compared them with a group of elderly people from among the general population who did not kill themselves.
After adjusting for psychiatric conditions, the patients who took sedatives and hypnotics for sleeping problems were four times more likely to commit suicide, Carlsten’s team found.
“Clinicians need to be aware of this as these drugs are widely prescribed to the elderly,” they wrote.
According to the World Health Organization, 877,000 people worldwide kill themselves each year. For every suicide death, anywhere from 10 to 40 attempts are made, the U.N. agency estimates.
Scientists have linked sleep disturbances to increased suicidal risk in people with psychiatric disorders and in adolescents but it is unclear whether the association also exists in the general population.
“A careful evaluation of the suicide risk should be carried out when an elderly person presents with symptoms of anxiety and sleep disturbance,” the researchers wrote.
While they do not know exactly why, Carlsten and Waern suggested that the drugs somehow trigger aggressive or impulsive behavior or provide the means for people to take an overdose.
Disabilities or sleep problems may make people more likely to commit suicide, they added.
“Persons with these problems might be more likely to seek health care and perhaps more likely to receive prescriptions for psychotropic drugs,” they wrote.Many people die as they live. There are the Reinhard Heydrichs who go out feeling the same pain they caused in their lives run through their urethras before the light flickers out, the King Fahds who sit in luxury as their hearts murmur then finally flatline, and the Michael Jacksons who perish in circumstances as weird and inconclusive as the latter parts of their lives were. Rich Piana, who died earlier today at 46, was not one of those cases.
He did not go with the largeness that marked his life. That he’d been placed in a medically induced coma only went public well after the fact. For someone who documented so much of his life, and responded to all the positive and negative charges leveled at him, the silence was eerie. This lack of Piana was unprecedented in his life, apart from a blackout period last year, when many speculated he was hospitalized. We always saw what Piana wanted to show us, but he offered more than most of his ilk. In his last days, the absence of his voice was confirmation that he was not long for our world.
Piana was outsized in every way. His death makes sense from a logical standpoint: He was a leviathan of a man whose heart strained just from waking up in the morning. His organs were bloated and fatigued from his unusually heavy steroid cycles, which he famously posted for all to see. Bodybuilders, even ones much smaller than Piana, don’t typically make it long enough to become AARP members.
His passing is shocking anyway. Maybe it’s because Keith Richards types—people who defy the odds of their lifestyle to outlive those who do boring stuff like jog and eat boiled chicken breast—are so lionized. The few pickled humans who roll lucky on the longevity odds get so much attention that the mean outcome can be shocking.
Though anybody could have seen it coming, this one is particuarly shocking because Piana’s entire being was the exaggeration of his marginal physical and personality qualities. There was the way his triceps flared out like wings on a bat trying to frighten a predator; the way he started every video with a self confident “ALLLLRIGHT” or “it’s MOTHERFUCKING [insert action] time!” but spent the next hour showing you the minutiae of his daily routine, speaking of every habit and ritual with the excitement of a child being asked about themselves by someone they admire; and the unseemly extravagance of his food orders, as much a part of his personality as his gregariousness and candor. Piana offered up his margins at their most inflated as his self. It’s jarring to see the failing of his core, even if it was the logical conclusion.
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He was far from a perfect man. Months before his death, a decade-old recording of a virulently racist rage-filled tirade to an ex-girlfriend surfaced. In the year before, he slap-boxed a learning-disabled Youtuber who had ordered a massive harassment campaign on Piana and his then-wife. In short, he had done some things you may expect from a SoCal guy who looked like he did.
Much about him defied logic: his eight-hour arm workouts, his often dramatic personal life, and, most of all, his celebrity on the fitness side of Youtube. On the surface, Piana’s videos weren’t all that exciting. Yes, there was the divorce, the fight, and other scattered kinetic moments, but those things weren’t in 99 percent of his content. An hourlong Piana vlog usually followed a staid formula: Rich wakes up, talks about a new trick for burning fat or making the bis pop while swilling a milk carton full of amino acids, makes the exact same shake, yammers on the phone about nonspecific business deals, goes to the gym and works out on machines to music that sounds like it was lifted from a loading screen (lovingly called “the natty anthem” by Rich’s viewers), eats a horrifying amount of food, and finally closes things out as he lazes around some part of his McMansion while ruminating about his past day.
There’s no obvious reason why these videos racked up hundreds of thousands (and sometimes millions) of views, but I do have a theory.
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Those who dedicate a lot of time to the gym are different from those who go because they’re trying to finish the latest Malcolm Gladwell audiobook on becoming a brain genius while using the elliptical. If you’re one of the latter, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, and good on you for not avoiding family and friends so you can shred your obliques or do snatches until you’re not mad that you woke up anymore.
But for gymgoers who have made this a larger part of their life, there is an isolation to their time among the clanging plates and terrible looping gym music. Even if you have a workout buddy, you’re spending a lot of time in total silent solitude. You wait between your sets, trying to look like you’re not just some slack-jawed dullard gawking at him- or herself in the mirror, alternately examining your own imperfections and the features you like. All the pertinent numbers to your routine and current fitness dart around your head in Rain Man-like fashion. But most of all you compare yourself either to an idealized state you’ve been in or to those around you.
Most people live in a state of fear that they’ll be humiliated in some way, and no matter how strong or sculpted you get, it’s still at least lurking somewhere. Unless you’re among a handful of people on earth, there’s always going to be someone better than you at something at your gym. While it’s mostly a great type of loneliness you have there, the fear that someone will think you’re a bitch because you’re weaker than they are can animate your thoughts on a particularly bad day.
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This changes with time, and not always the way you’d expect. In the gym and in life, we will change around the margins at a constant rate, not noticing the overall shift because it amounts to adopting minor behaviors and traits we barely notice from our own perspective, but are the only thing others see in us. Maybe you start hitting accessory workouts that target your disproportionately weak hamstrings, or run hills until you don’t get winded on sets like you used to. These seem like small changes on the side, but after months and years, they reorient the central focus of what you do, and what you are. Now you’re the one with massive, bulging calves. You barely noticed it happening, but to the people in the gym you always compare yourself to, you’re in their grouping.
Even if you felt like you were a weak pussy some of those days along the way, no one probably knew you were thinking that, as they were too concerned about looking like a weak pussy about something either on the bar or in their lives. Now you’re just one of them, and they ask you to spot them, or they open up to you about having trouble with some lift, or they confess their steroid use to you in a very long, involved conversation you had no clue was going to happen. I’ve had all of these things happen at various parts of my gymgoing life and I’m not even that strong. Maybe it’s just a break people require in their loneliness, or it’s the only way some men can communicate as strangers. Whatever it is, it makes a place where people barely ever talk to each other seem more human than anywhere else.
In most gyms he entered later in his life, Rich Piana was the guy most people compared themselves to. In actual bodybuilding competition, he was very good but not the elite of the elite. On Youtube, it was a different story. Piana swelled in size through a completely singular focus on becoming the absolute biggest his body would allow. He would give the viewer his version of self-help prattle that other similar internet fitness stars would give, claiming that it’s about doing whatever it takes, working hard, and all the other stuff you’ve probably heard. But that’s not why people liked him so much. What resonated with people was that Piana was their nightmare caricature of that one guy at the gym, but he gave you the flattering openness it takes years to earn in person.
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In every video, Piana would tell the viewer his true fears, inadequacies, and struggles. He had as much tough-guy bravado as any tattooed sphere of muscle in Southern California, but unlike them, he would look directly at the camera and say that he wished he had someone else’s body or that he felt like a child training next to a particular person. Often, he’d say something that was explicitly ridiculous, but you could tell it was part of a gnawing anxiety.
Piana motivated hundreds of thousands of people to do whatever it took in whatever sense they took that to mean, but he also gave parts of himself to the same audience. Any out-of-shape adolescent or former football hero with an injury could see this enormous man give them the parts of themselves that they hid in the gym, and for as much as people (myself included) made fun of him for his more absurd aspects, it was something he did not have to do.
He will be memorialized by friends and many fans, and in true bodybuilding Youtube fashion, several former foes will release videos with titles like “FORMER THOUGHTS ON RICH PIANA RIP” with some cookie-cutter shit about letting grudges go and a link to their merchandise. Some will talk about what a poor role model he was. Many will just miss their friend.
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But his absence will leave a gaping hole in the scene. Other stars will rise up, getting similar or better metrics than what Piana got, but they will feel empty. The looks into their inner lives will feel stilted, or worse yet, boring. They won’t be able to combine Rob Liefeld-esque proportions with the almost ASMR-like quality Piana ordering fast food could have. There simply won’t be another like him. And no matter whether people watched his videos to brighten their day or to shit on him, they will feel a withdrawal pang at the back of their mind, a pit the size of Piana that will be felt in the world at large.
Rest in peace, Rich Piana. You gave us more than we ever deserved.In one of the more brazen and fraudulent "fact checks" one will ever see, The Washington Post's Nicole Lewis told readers on Tuesday that Vice President Mike Pence's absolutely true mid-November statement that "There are more Americans working today than ever before in American history" deserved "Three Pinocchios," and that the audience which applauded this statement should be ashamed of themselves.
The bogus nature of Lewis's "fact check" is only exceeded by the seething anger which virtually drips down readers' screens.
There is no point in disputing the truth of Pence's statement, whether one looks at the government's Establishment Survey, which estimates the number of workers collecting paychecks, or the Household Survey which estimates the number of Americans employed in some form, including self-employment and non-payroll contract work:
According to The Post's fact-checking evaluation framework, Lewis had five choices in evaluating Pence's statement:
Decide that it was true, see that it would be a complete waste of time to quibble over it, and get on with checking genuinely questionable statements made by others. In the context of when and where Pence delivered his remarks, this was the obviously correct choice. Give it "One Pinocchio," meaning "Some shading of the facts. Selective telling of the truth. Some omissions and exaggerations, but no outright falsehoods. (You could view this as “mostly true.”)" Give it "Two Pinocchios," meaning "Significant omissions and/or exaggerations. Some factual error may be involved but not necessarily. A politician can create a false, misleading impression by playing with words and using legalistic language that means little to ordinary people. (Similar to “half true”)." Give it "Three Pinocchios," meaning "Significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions. This gets into the realm of “mostly false.” But it could include statements which are technically correct (such as based on official government data) but are so taken out of context as to be very misleading." Give it "Four Pinocchios," meaning "Whoppers."
Lewis got so unhinged over Pence's absolutely true remark that she wrote that she was "tempted to say that Pence earns Four Pinocchios," because it is "so devoid of meaning that Pence and the people who applauded his statement should be ashamed."
So who were these crazy people who applauded such an "almost-whopper" of a statement? They were the attendees at the Tax Foundation's Annual Dinner in Washington on November 16. I daresay that many, if not most, attendees at this event know far more about economics than Nicole Lewis. This was a speech, and not an economic dissertation. Instead of ridiculing the Tax Foundation and its members, the Post should consider referring to its thorough research more often.
Naturally, Lewis misrepresented the context of Pence's remarks:
We’ve grown accustomed to the Trump administration making grand statements about the president’s purported impact on the economy. Typically, it goes a little something like this: An official will bemoan the economic stagnation of the past eight years before running through a list of ways President Trump has (allegedly) already made great progress by cutting regulations, creating jobs and sending the stock market soaring. Since 2009, the economy has been recovering from the effects of the Great Recession, but that doesn’t stop the Trump administration from taking credit for a few modest economic gains since taking office. During a speech at the Tax Foundation’s annual dinner, Pence made a claim that tops them all. After rattling off a series of Trump’s initiatives to “get the economy moving again,” Pence declared, “There are more Americans working today than ever before in American history.” Amazingly, the statement was met with applause. At first, we thought the claim wasn’t worthy of a full fact check as employment is clearly a reflection of the overall population. But we kept wondering: How can Pence get away with making such a grand statement? Let’s take a look.... It is a claim President Barack Obama could have made in 2014, 2015 and 2016 as people regained jobs following the recession, but as far as we can tell he did not.
How's that for defensiveness over the pathetic record of the previous administration?
The reason Barack Obama and his economic team didn't prominently tout the economy's total employment as highest ever during their last 2-1/2 years in office is because, based on detailed information seen at the government's Bureau of Labor Statistics, Obama was in office for 5-1/2 years before the jobs recovery from the recession took place (64 months in the Establishment Survey, 68 months in the Household Survey).
The amounts of time it took to achieve full jobs recovery in those two surveys (76 months and 82 months, respectively) are, by far, the longest it has taken the economy to recover employment losses since the Great Depression of the 1930s. That's because the recovery itself was the worst-ever since the Great Depression. Any attempt by Team Obama to brag about total employment would merely have reminded everyone of those sad truths.
A review of the transcript of Pence's speech, which Lewis did not otherwise quote, did mention a series of Trump administration initiatives. But when it came to job growth, the Vice President gave credit to the people who deserved it — employers who have actually done the hiring:
This President will never punish the prosperity of our people. He will only promote it. And already, the American economy is responding to the President's leadership and our agenda. The truth is, optimism is sweeping all across America as we speak for consumers and job creators alike. Manufacturers haven’t been this confident in more than two decades. Businesses large and small have actually created 1.5 million new jobs since January of this year, and there are more Americans working today than ever before in American history.
(The table seen earlier in this post is for seasonally adjusted total nonfarm employment. Total private-sector employment growth through the first ten months of 2017, which was known at the time of his speech but is subject to revision, has actually been 1.623 million.)
Pence was effectively congratulating businesses for hiring people. He was not taking credit himself or on behalf of the Trump administration for that job growth, except very indirectly by citing "optimism," or for the fact the more Americans are working than ever before.
If Pence had been presenting an economic dissertation, Lewis's points that he should have considered mentioning less-then acceptable labor participation rates and the fact that the U.S population has continued to grow might have some merit. But in the context of an after-dinner speech — Give, me, a, break.
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And here's one more point for those who think we shouldn't be impressed with this year's job growth.
After Donald Trump's victory in the general election, the conventional wisdom, as expressed by Mark Zandi of Moody's Analytics in an early February conference call, was that monthly job growth would decline to about 100,000 in "not too many" months because "the workers to hire just aren’t out there."
Defying conventional wisdom, the economy, public and private sector combined, has added an average of 168,000 jobs per month. I should also add that through ten months, for reasons I haven't heard anyone satisfactorily explain, ADP's private-sector payroll additions of roughly 2.1 million have been almost a half-million greater than the government's official figure cited earlier. If BLS "catches up" to ADP, we'll find that the economy has added an average of about 210,000 jobs per month.
Lewis's "fact check," and the Washington Post's publication of it, are the actions of extremely bitter sore losers.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.Butler and Sorter seem like an unlikely pair. One is unassuming, small, and squat, though it has a talent for lifting weighty shelves and whirring around with them. The other is loud, long, and immobile, with a conveyor belt for a spine and pneumatic arms that swing with unerring precision.
Yet, they are a match made in robotic heaven with a bright future, especially now that the Goods and Services Tax (GST) promises to transform their homestead: The Indian warehouse. And there is no one more invested in this mechanical love story than a 27-year-old engineer called Akash Gupta.
Gupta is the chief technology officer (CTO) of GreyOrange, a robotics company that he founded with a senior from college, Samay Kohli, in 2011. The venture, which began as a way to formalise a collegiate obsession with robotics, has grown to become one of the rising stars of India’s startup ecosystem.
Having raised at least $38 million from the likes of Tiger Global and Blume Ventures, GreyOrange now sells its warehouse automation solutions (featuring Butler and Sorter) across the world. The company, headquartered in Singapore, has a massive research & development facility in Gurugram, near Delhi, and offices in Japan, Hong Kong, Germany, and Dubai, with a total workforce of over 650 people.
For two years in a row, it has also been voted among the world’s top 50 robotics companies to watch by trade publication Robotics Business Review, where its peers include Alphabet (Google), Boston Dynamics, and DJI.
So, it’s a little hard to imagine that less than a decade ago, GreyOrange’s CTO scarcely knew anything about robotics.
BITS by bit
Gupta spent most of his school years in Kanpur, a large industrial city in Uttar Pradesh once known for its thriving textile mills. “I was deep into computer programming, computer animation, and stuff like that,” he said in a telephone interview during a business trip to Santiago, Chile, last month. “But, of course, nothing close to robotics.”
GreyOrange Gupta: “I was always the person who went super deep into technology.”
It was only after he arrived at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) in Pilani, Rajasthan, in 2008, that he was introduced to what would eventually become a passion and a career. All it took was a presentation by a team led by Kohli, two years his senior, that was working on a humanoid robot. “I became really, really inspired by the fact that there’s a physical things that they are working on,” Gupta explained. After years |
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